List of Famous people named William

William Thomas Bridges was a lawyer and public servant in British Hong Kong, where he held the post of Acting Colonial Secretary from 1857 to 1858. He was born in 1820 or 1821 in Blackheath, Kent. Having studied at Winchester College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Bridges was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1847. He emigrated to Hong Kong in April 1851 and rose rapidly in local society owing to his special status as a qualified barrister in a colony short of legal experts, becoming Acting Attorney General within a year of his arrival. After a sojourn in England in 1856, where he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law, Bridges became a provisional member of the Executive and Legislative Councils upon his return to Hong Kong, and was appointed Acting Colonial Secretary while the incumbent secretary, William Thomas Mercer, was on leave in 1857.

Sir William Petty FRS was an English economist, physician, scientist and philosopher. He first became prominent serving Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth in Ireland. He developed efficient methods to survey the land that was to be confiscated and given to Cromwell's soldiers. He also remained a significant figure under King Charles II and King James II, as did many others who had served Cromwell.

William Caxton was an English merchant, diplomat, and writer. He is thought to be the first person to introduce a printing press into England, in 1476, and as a printer was the first English retailer of printed books.

William Alfred Fowler (August 9, 1911 – March 14, 1995) was an American nuclear physicist, later astrophysicist, who, with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is known for his theoretical and experimental research into nuclear reactions within stars and the energy elements produced in the process. and was one of the authors of the influential B²FH paper.

William Jones, FRS was a Welsh mathematician, most noted for his use of the symbol π to represent the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. He was a close friend of Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Edmund Halley. In November 1711 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was later its vice-president.

William Esco Moerner is an American physical chemist and chemical physicist with current work in the biophysics and imaging of single molecules. He is credited with achieving the first optical detection and spectroscopy of a single molecule in condensed phases, along with his postdoc, Lothar Kador. Optical study of single molecules has subsequently become a widely used single-molecule experiment in chemistry, physics and biology. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.