Gerald Edward Brown was an American theoretical physicist who worked on nuclear physics and astrophysics. Since 1968 he had been a professor at the Stony Brook University. He was a distinguished professor emeritus of the C. N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University.

Sir Rudolf Ernst Peierls, was a German-born British physicist who played a major role in Tube Alloys, Britain's nuclear weapon programme, as well as the subsequent Manhattan Project, the combined Allied nuclear bomb programme. His 1996 obituary in Physics Today described him as "a major player in the drama of the eruption of nuclear physics into world affairs".