This glorious eikonostasis is supposed to represent the proud theoretical tradition humbly followed and, according as talents permit, upheld by the results listed elsewhere on this site. The tradition does not encompass all of theoretical physics (Cartesian vortices, superstrings, extra space-time dimensions, the BFKL theory, etc., etc., come to mind) — not even all of the good theoretical physics (Einstein's portrait would normally be stuck somewhere in such a gallery). Anyhow.

Left to right:

Nabu-rimanni — the earliest (~600 BC) Babilonian/Chaldean priest-astronomer known by name. He constructed (assuming he is the author of the results on the cuneiforms signed by his name, which, of course, need not be quite true as anyone familiar with the ways of theoretical community would readily admit) a piecewise-linear approximation for Sun's visible trajectory.

However, Nabu-rimanni's name having been usurped by astronomers, his tables' deeper significance is being missed: actually, he is the earliest theorist known by name, who performed a quintessential theoretical act of constructing an accurate symbolic model of a regular natural phenomenon from carefully measured data. In doing so he was followed by Kepler, Newton, Linnaeus, Heisenberg, to name a few.

The picture shows a Babilonian cuneiform with a (non-trivial) mathematical calculation. The cuneiform belongs to the Yale University (which is located in the modern USA; Babilonia is located in the modern Iraq; strange thoughts, though; but strange thoughts are worth thinking sometimes, for variety's sake).

Isaac Newton, who was loath, as everybody knows, to invent hypotheses. The mathematical methods he used to invent instead and his formidable Principia... allowed those after him who were/are/will be so inclined, to happily specialize in the study of theoretical physics formalisms by mathematical methods — and never, ever touch experimental apparatus. (Alas, the fact is, experimentalists' picnics remain, on the average, quite a bit more protein-rich than theorists' ...)

Shown is Newton's deathmask (after L.F. Roubiliac; photo from the Hunterian Museum).

Jules Henri Poincare — the theorist who, among many other wonderful accomplishments (the most stunning of which is, of course, his invention of Analysis Situs), demystified the concept of asymptotic expansions, put it on a firm mathematical foundation, and applied it with great effect to celestial mechanics.

Nikolai Nikolaevich Bogoliubov — the theorist who, among many other wonderful accomplishments, demystified the infamous ultra-violet divergences by correctly interpreting the mathematical formalism of perturbative quantum field theory in terms of generalized functions and provided the calculational algorithm of R-operation.

So great were Bogoliubov's contributions that even the illustrious Stephen Weinberg in his deeply original (as manifest e.g. in his choice of the Pauli metrics) treatise could not improve upon Bogoliubov's construction of perturbative QFT except by replacing Bogoliubov's microcausality axiom (1952) with Bogoliubov's clustering axiom (1947; the latter, of course, was first mentioned in the context of quantum field theory in a Phys. Rev. paper in the early 60s. So says Professor Weinberg, and it is true.)

Incidentally: asymptotic operation, roughly, = asymptotic expansions Ä R-operation.