- May 15, 1618 - Johannes Kepler confirms his third law of planetary motion. Kepler had initially made the discovery a week earlier, but the initial calculations had caused him to briefly believe that he was mistaken.
- May 15, 1859 - French physicist Pierre Curie is born. Together with his wife Marie and associate Henri Becquerel, Curie won the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics for his early work in analyzing radiation.
- May 17, 1916 - Russian physicist Boris Borisovich Galitzine dies. Galitzine invented the electromagnetic seismograph in 1906.
- May 16, 1950 - German physicist Johannes Georg Bednorz is born. He received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in high-temperature superconductivity, which included work in the electrical properties of ceramics.
- May 15, 1951 - American theoretical physicist Frank Anthony Wilczek is born. Wilczek received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for work in the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the strong nuclear interaction.
- May 18, 2007 - French physicist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes dies. De Gennes received the 1991 Nobel Prize in Physics "for discovering that methods developed for studying order phenomena in simple systems can be generalized to more complex forms of matter, in particular to liquid crystals and polymers" (from the official Nobel Prize announcement).
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