George Washington Pierce

George Washington Pierce (11 January 1872 - 25 August 1956) was an American physicist. He earned his Harvard AM in 1899. He taught physics and communication engineering at Harvard as an Instructor in Physics (1902-1907), Assistant Professor of Physics (1907-1917), Professor of Physics (1917-1921), and Rumford Professor of Physics. He was also the first director of Harvard's Cruft Memorial Laboratory in 1914.

Pierce carried out a long series of quantitative experiments on various minerals used as crystal rectifiers and was later interested in piezoelectric crystals.

In 1918-1919, George W. Pierce was the President of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which today considers him to be "one of the founding fathers of communication engineering."