# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/hannes-alfven
# Generated: 2026-08-31T13:51:08.155Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/hannes-alfven"
name: "Hannes Alfvén"
slug: "hannes-alfven"
description: "He gave plasma physics its mathematics. Alfvén waves — the ripples that carry energy through magnetized gas — bear his name because he saw what others missed: that the glowing arcs of the aurora and the invisible belts trapping radiation around Earth were governed by the same physics."
tagline: "Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and science fiction author (1908–1995), winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize for Physics"
image: "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/YoungAlfven.jpg?width=1200"
gender: "male"
country:
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  isoCode: "SE"
category:
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  slug: "scientists"
profileType:
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1908-05-30"
deathDate: "1995-04-02"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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  historical:           24.098172
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  sourceConfidence:     60
  profileCompleteness:  70
  trendDirection:       "FALLING"
ranks:
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  country:  null
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was born in Sweden on 30 May 1908 and trained first as an electrical power engineer before crossing into plasma physics and research. His work on magnetohydrodynamics — the study of electrically conducting fluids in magnetic fields — won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970. He developed theories explaining the aurora, the Van Allen radiation belts, magnetic storms' effect on Earth's magnetic field, and the terrestrial magnetosphere, extending his thinking outward to plasma dynamics in the Milky Way. He died on 2 April 1995, having spent decades teaching that space was not empty but threaded with charged matter in motion.