Physical and mathematical scientists

Jack van Lint

Jack van Lint (1932–2004) was an Indonesian-born Dutch mathematician, professor at Eindhoven University of Technology, known for proving which perfect codes exist, the van Lint–MacWilliams conjecture, and influential textbooks.

Jack W. Szostak

Jack W. Szostak is a chemical biologist at the University of Chicago who studies the origin of life and shared the 2009 Nobel Prize for telomere research.

Jack Wisdom

Jack Wisdom is an American planetary scientist, professor at MIT since 1984, known for proving Pluto's motion is chaotic and for the 2022 Chrysalis hypothesis.

Jacklyn Gates

Jacklyn M. Gates is an American nuclear chemist who leads the Heavy Element Nuclear and Radiochemistry Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, studying the heaviest chemical elements.

Jacob B. Khurgin

Jacob B. Khurgin, also published as J. B. Khurgin, is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University, known for work on optics, plasmonics, and nonlinear optical materials.

Jacob Bekenstein

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) was a Mexican-born Israeli theoretical physicist who proposed in his 1972 Princeton thesis that black holes carry entropy proportional to their event-horizon area, founding black hole thermodynamics.

Jacob Bigeleisen

Jacob Bigeleisen (1919–2010) was an American chemist who founded the field of isotope chemistry, known for the Bigeleisen–Mayer theory and his 1947 paper on isotopic exchange reactions.

Jacob Bjerknes

Jacob Bjerknes (1897–1975) was a Norwegian American meteorologist who discovered the structure of extratropical cyclones at age twenty and later made the first link between El Niño and the Southern Oscillation.

Jacob Böeseken

Jacob Böeseken (1868–1949) was a Dutch chemist who held the chair of organic chemistry at Delft from 1907 to 1938 and determined the structure of the six-membered carbon ring.

Jacob Clay

Jacob Clay (1882–1955) was a Dutch experimental physicist and philosopher who discovered the cosmic-ray latitude effect on voyages between Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1927–1928.

Jacob G. Wacker

Jacob G. Wacker is a theoretical particle physicist who taught at SLAC and Stanford, known for SIMP dark matter and simplified models for LHC new-particle searches.

Jacob Klein (physicist)

Jacob Klein, born 1949 in Tel Aviv, is a soft matter physicist at the Weizmann Institute known for discovering hydration lubrication and showing water stays fluid in subnanometer films.

Jacob L. Roberts

Jacob L. Roberts is an American atomic physicist and professor at Colorado State University known for the first stable rubidium-85 Bose-Einstein condensates and a 2006 PECASE award.

Jacob Levitzki

Jacob Levitzki (1904–1956) was an Israeli mathematician, born in Ukraine, who founded algebra research in Israel, proved central nilpotence theorems in ring theory, and won the first Israel Prize for Exact Sciences in 1954.

Jacob Lurie

Jacob Lurie is an American mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study known for derived algebraic geometry, infinity-category theory, and his proof of the cobordism hypothesis.

Jacob Lüroth

Jacob Lüroth (1844–1910) was a German mathematician and professor at Freiburg known for Lüroth's theorem, the Lüroth quartic, and the Lüroth problem on unirational varieties.

Jacob M. Taylor

Jacob M. Taylor is a theoretical quantum physicist at NIST, a NIST Fellow and co-founder of QuICS, who received the 2010 PECASE and helped implement the National Quantum Initiative.

Jacob N. Israelachvili

Jacob N. Israelachvili, also known as Jacob Israelachvili, was an Israeli-born chemical engineer and physicist at UC Santa Barbara who developed the Surface Forces Apparatus.

Jacob Palis

Jacob Palis (1940–2025) was a Brazilian mathematician at IMPA in Rio de Janeiro, known for work on dynamical systems, the Palis–Smale stability conjecture, and the 2010 Balzan Prize.

Jacob Sagiv

Jacob Sagiv is an Israeli chemist at the Weizmann Institute of Science, best known for founding the field of self-assembled monolayers between 1978 and 1980.

Jacob T. Schwartz

Jacob T. Schwartz (1930–2009) was an American mathematician and computer scientist at NYU's Courant Institute, known for the treatise Linear Operators, the Dunford–Schwartz theorem, and the SETL programming language.

Jacob Tsimerman

Jacob Tsimerman (born 1988) is a Canadian number theorist at the University of Toronto, known for proving the André–Oort conjecture and winning the 2026 Fields Medal.

Jacob Volhard

Jacob Volhard (1834–1910) was a German chemist at Halle known for the Volhard titration, the first synthesis of sarcosine, the synthesis of creatine, and the Hell-Volhard-Zelinsky reaction.

Jacobus H. van 't Hoff

Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff was a Dutch physical chemist who received the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1901 for chemical dynamics and osmotic pressure.

Jacobus Kapteyn

Jacobus Kapteyn (1851–1922) was a Dutch astronomer at the University of Groningen who used photography and star counts to found statistical astronomy, cataloging 454,875 southern stars and discovering the star streams.

Jacqueline Bloch

Jacqueline Bloch, born in 1967, is a French experimental physicist at CNRS who studies polaritons and quantum fluids of light, winning the 2026 CNRS Gold Medal.

Jacqueline K. Barton

Jacqueline K. Barton (born 1952) is an American inorganic chemist at Caltech who pioneered DNA-mediated charge transport, winning the National Medal of Science in 2011.

Jacques Blamont

Jacques-Émile Blamont (1926–2020) was a French astrophysicist who founded France's first space laboratory, the Service d'aéronomie, and became the first scientific and technical director of CNES.

Jacques Cousteau

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) was a French naval officer who co-invented the Aqua-Lung, explored the oceans aboard the Calypso, and won three Academy Awards for his films.