List of Famous people who born in 1921

Nicolaas 'Nico' Godfried van Kampen was a Dutch theoretical physicist, who worked mainly on statistical mechanics and non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Vernon Willard Hughes was an American physicist specializing in research of subatomic particles. Hughes was born in Kankakee, Illinois. During World War II, he worked at the M.I.T. Radiation Lab. He earned his PhD under I. I. Rabi at Columbia University in 1950. Hughes was notable for his research of muons which showed the existence of previously undetected matter. He was also noted for research that showed that protons have gluons and quarks. Hughes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Sterling Professor at Yale University, and a recipient of Rumford Prize, and a recipient of Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic Physics and the Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics, both from the American Physical Society.

Wesley Lau was an American film and television actor.

Petter Hugsted was a Norwegian ski jumper who won the gold medal in the individual large hill event at the 1948 Olympics.

András Szőllősy was the creator of the Szőllősy index, a frequently used index of the works of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók.

Ralph Asher Alpher was an American cosmologist, who carried out pioneering work in the early 1950s on the Big Bang model, including Big Bang nucleosynthesis and predictions of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Robert Bruce Merrifield was an American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1984 for the invention of solid phase peptide synthesis.

Admiral Sir David Williams, was a senior officer in the Royal Navy and Governor of Gibraltar.

Shunpei Ueyama was a Japanese philosopher associated with the postwar Kyoto School. He graduated in philosophy from Kyoto University in 1943, and trained in a kamikaze human torpedo (gyorai:魚雷) squad. His main professional interest in philosophy were in the fields of logic, and American pragmatism, especially with its founding fathers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James and John Dewey. He was emeritus professor at Kyoto University.