Physical and mathematical scientists

Isaac F. Silvera

Isaac F. Silvera is a physicist and Thomas D. Cabot Professor at Harvard, known for stabilizing the first cold-atom gas and reporting the contested 2017 observation of metallic hydrogen.

Isaac Held

Isaac Held (Isaac M. Held) is an American atmospheric scientist who spent four decades at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, known for the Held–Suarez model test.

Isaac Khalatnikov, or Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov (1919–2021), was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist, a student of Lev Landau, founding director of the Landau Institute, and co-discoverer of the Landau pole and the BKL singularity.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) was an English mathematician and physicist who formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation in his Principia Mathematica of 1687.

Isaac Roberts

Isaac Roberts (1829–1904) was a Welsh-born builder and engineer who became a pioneer of long-exposure astrophotography, taking the first photograph to show the Andromeda Nebula as a spiral.

Isaak Bacharach

Isaak Bacharach (1854–1942) was a German mathematician and secondary-school teacher in Erlangen and Nürnberg whose 1886 correction of Cayley's intersection theorem became known as the Cayley–Bacharach theorem.

Isaak Khalatnikov

Isaak Markovich Khalatnikov (1919–2021) was a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist who co-discovered the chaotic BKL singularity and founded and directed the Landau Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Isaak Pomeranchuk

Isaak Yakovlevich Pomeranchuk (Исаа́к Я́ковлевич Померанчу́к) was a Soviet theoretical physicist, born in Warsaw in 1913, known for the Pomeranchuk effect, the Pomeranchuk theorem, and the pomeron.

Isabel P. Montañez

Isabel P. Montañez is a sedimentary geochemist and paleoclimatologist at UC Davis who reconstructs late Paleozoic climates, studying Earth's transition from ice age to greenhouse world.

Isabella Karle

Isabella Karle was an American X-ray crystallographer who spent 63 years at the US Naval Research Laboratory, turning direct methods into a working procedure for solving molecular structures.

Isabelle Boutron

Isabelle Boutron (born 1971) is a French epidemiologist and professor at Université Paris Cité who directs Cochrane France and co-led the 2025 CONSORT and SPIRIT reporting guidelines.

Isadore Perlman

Isadore Perlman (1915–1991) was an American nuclear chemist who developed plutonium extraction for the Manhattan Project, first isolated curium, and later pioneered archaeological provenance studies.

Isadore Rudnick

Isadore Rudnick was an American physicist who spent 39 years on the UCLA faculty, discovered third sound in superfluid helium films, and won the Acoustical Society's Gold Medal.

Isadore Singer

Isadore Singer (1924–2021) was an American mathematician at MIT best known for the Atiyah–Singer index theorem, proved with Michael Atiyah, which won the 2004 Abel Prize.

Isaiah Bowman

Isaiah Bowman (1878–1950) was a Canadian-American geographer, director of the American Geographical Society from 1915 to 1935 and fifth president of Johns Hopkins University from 1935 to 1948.

Isamu Akasaki

Isamu Akasaki (赤崎勇) was a Japanese physicist and electrical engineer who pioneered the gallium nitride blue LED and shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics; he died in 2021.

Isidor Isaac Rabi

Isidor Isaac Rabi was an American physicist who won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Physics for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei.

Isidor Traube

Isidor Traube (1860–1943) was a German physical chemist, born in Hildesheim, who founded capillary chemistry, formulated Traube's rule, became a Berlin professor, and later settled in Edinburgh.

Israel E. Wachs

Israel E. Wachs is an American chemical engineer at Lehigh University known for pioneering operando spectroscopy of catalysts and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2026.

Israel Gelfand

Israel Gelfand (1913–2009) was a Soviet and American mathematician who founded the theory of commutative Banach algebras and built one of the twentieth century's most influential mathematical schools.

Issai Schur

Issai Schur (1875–1941) was a German mathematician and founder of the Berlin School of algebra, a pioneer of group representation theory known for Schur's lemma and the Schur multiplier.

István Fáry

István Fáry (1922–1984) was a Hungarian mathematician and UC Berkeley professor of geometry and topology, known for Fáry's theorem on straight-line drawings of planar graphs and the Fáry–Milnor theorem on knots.

Itai Cohen

Itai Cohen is a soft-matter physicist and Professor of Physics at Cornell University whose group studies shear-thickening suspensions, origami metamaterials, insect flight, and micrometer-scale robots, holding the record for the smallest walking robot.