Earle Hesse Kennard (August 2, 1885 – January 31, 1968) was a theoretical physicist and professor at Cornell University.
Kennard was born in Columbus, Ohio and studied at Pomona College and Oxford University as part of a Rhodes Scholarship.
During a 1926 sabbatical spent at the University of Göttingen, he learned the newly developing quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan.
With this knowledge, he derived the first rigorous form of the uncertainty principle and fully solved several simple quantum mechanics problems for the first time.
Much of his research for the Navy focussed on hydrodynamics and elasticity, in particular on the theory of potential flow, the physics of underwater explosions and structural vibrations.