Famous people named Schmidt

Politics and business

Helmut Schmidt (1918–2015) was Chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982 and earlier, as a Hamburg senator, led the city's response to the 1962 North Sea flood. In technology, Eric Schmidt (born 1955) was chief executive of Google from 2001 to 2011 and later its executive chairman.

Science

• Bernhard Schmidt (1879–1935), the Estonian-German optician who designed the wide-field Schmidt telescope.
• Maarten Schmidt (1929–2022), Dutch-American astronomer who first identified a quasar, in 1963.
• Eduard Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886), German zoologist who worked on sponges.

Literature and the arts

• Annie M. G. Schmidt (1911–1995), the Netherlands' best-loved children's writer, author of Jip and Janneke.
• Arno Schmidt (1914–1979), German novelist and translator famous for his experimental Zettel's Traum.
• Kendall Schmidt (born 1990), American actor and singer.

Writers, mathematicians and athletes

As Germany's second most common surname, Schmidt fills every field. Arno Schmidt (1914–1979) wrote experimental novels such as Zettel's Traum. The mathematician Erhard Schmidt (1876–1959) helped found functional analysis; the Gram–Schmidt process carries his name. In sport, East German swimmer Carmela Schmidt (born 1962) won Olympic bronze in 1980, and Brazilian beach volleyball player Bruno Oscar Schmidt (born 1986) won Olympic gold at Rio in 2016. Baseball has New York Yankees pitcher Clarke Schmidt (born 1996), and computer science has Douglas C. Schmidt (born 1962), a researcher in software patterns and distributed systems.

Sport

Runner Alica Schmidt (born 1998) competed for Germany at the Olympics, and footballer Aki Schmidt (1935–2016) was a Borussia Dortmund stalwart and West German international.

Schmidt means "smith", and smithies stood in every village, so most of these families have nothing in common but the trade of a distant ancestor. Heraldic arms likewise belonged to particular lines. Our Schmidt coat of arms page covers meaning and spellings, and Schmidt family history and genealogy explains how to find your own branch.