Lothar[note 1] Wolfgang Nordheim (November 7, 1899, Munich – October 5, 1985, La Jolla, California) was a German-born Jewish American theoretical physicist.

[3] As a "physical assistant" to David Hilbert (like his teacher Born before him), he worked with him John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner on the mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics in 1928.

He married German physicist Gertrud Pöschl in 1935, and together worked on structure and spectra of polyatomic molecules.

In 1956 he became a scientist at the John L. Hopkins Laboratory of Pure and Applied Science of General Atomics in San Diego and later chairman of the theoretical physics department.

[9] The Fowler-Nordheim paper also established the physical basis for a unified treatment of field-induced and thermally induced electron emission.

[9] The ideas of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Fowler and Nordheim were also an important stimulus to the development, by George Gamow,[10] and Ronald W. Gurney and Edward Condon,[11][12] later in 1928, for the theory of the radioactive decay of nuclei (by alpha particle tunneling).