Physical and mathematical scientists

Michael Artin

Michael Artin, born in 1934, is an American mathematician at MIT who helped found modern algebraic geometry with Grothendieck and won the National Medal of Science.

Michael Aschbacher

Michael George Aschbacher, born 1944 in Little Rock, Arkansas, is an American mathematician at Caltech whose work was central to the classification of finite simple groups.

Michael Atiyah

Sir Michael Francis Atiyah was a British mathematician known for the Atiyah–Singer index theorem and topological K-theory, who won the Fields Medal in 1966 and the Abel Prize in 2004.

Michael B. Hall

Michael B. Hall is an American theoretical and computational inorganic chemist who joined Texas A&M University in 1975 and is known for the Fenske-Hall molecular orbital method.

Michael B. McElroy (1939–2026) was an Irish-born American atmospheric scientist at Harvard who explained the Antarctic ozone hole, founded the Harvard-China Project in 1993, and studied China's path to carbon neutrality.

Michael Baer

Michael Baer is an Israeli theoretical chemist and physicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known for wave-packet scattering methods and diabatization after nearly 40 years at Soreq.

Oct 10, 2026

Michael Barnsley

Michael Barnsley is a mathematician who introduced iterated function systems with Steven Demko, proved fractals arise as their attractors, and commercialized fractal image compression through Iterated Systems, Inc., founded in 1987.

Michael Bell (atmospheric scientist)

Michael M. Bell is an American atmospheric scientist and professor at Colorado State University known for the VORTRAC hurricane tracking tool and Hurricane Patricia rapid-intensification research.

Michael C. Coniglio

Michael C. Coniglio is an American research meteorologist at NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, who studies severe mesoscale convective systems and derechos.

Michael C. Willis

Michael C. Willis is a British organic chemist and professor at the University of Oxford whose research develops catalytic methods for building sulfur- and nitrogen-containing groups.

Michael Cates

Michael E. Cates is a British theoretical physicist who has been the 19th Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge since 2015, working on soft matter and active matter.

Michael Chabinyc

Michael Chabinyc is an American materials scientist who chairs the Materials Department at UC Santa Barbara, where he studies how conjugated polymer semiconductors conduct charge in transistors, solar cells, and thermoelectrics.

Michael Coey

Michael Coey (1945–2025) was a Belfast-born experimental physicist at Trinity College Dublin, a world leader in magnetism and spintronics who discovered the first interstitial permanent magnet, Sm₂Fe₁₇N₃.

Michael Crommie

Michael F. Crommie is an American condensed matter physicist, professor at UC Berkeley and senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, known for quantum corrals and graphene nanoribbons.

Michael D. Burkart

Michael D. Burkart is an American chemical biologist at UC San Diego who studies fatty acid, polyketide, and non-ribosomal peptide synthases and co-founded four biotech companies.

Michael D. Dettinger

Michael D. Dettinger is an American hydrologist who showed that atmospheric rivers fuel California's largest storms and supply 20–50% of its precipitation and streamflow, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2022.

Michael D. Dickey

Michael D. Dickey is a chemical engineer at North Carolina State University who works on liquid metals, soft materials, and glassy gels introduced in 2024.

Michael D. Fayer

Michael D. Fayer, also known as M. D. Fayer, is an American physical chemist at Stanford University who pioneered ultrafast 2D IR spectroscopy to study molecular dynamics.

Michael D. King

Michael D. King is an American atmospheric scientist known for satellite remote sensing of clouds and aerosols and for his leading role in NASA's MODIS instrument on Terra and Aqua.

Oct 10, 2026

Michael D. Morley

Michael D. Morley, born Michael Darwin Morley (1930–2020), was an American mathematical logician at Cornell University who proved the 1965 categoricity theorem that opened modern model theory, introduced Morley rank, and won the 2003 Steele Prize.

Michael D. Morse

Michael D. Morse is an American physical chemist at the University of Utah who measures metal–ligand bond dissociation energies by laser spectroscopy to about 0.004 eV accuracy.

Michael D. Pluth

Michael D. Pluth is an American chemist and professor at the University of Oregon since 2011, known for hydrogen sulfide donor molecules and fluorescent probes for reactive sulfur species.

Michael D. Ward

Michael D. Ward is an American materials chemist and crystal engineer known for the electrochemical quartz crystal microbalance, imaging crystal growth with atomic force microscopy, and molecular imposter inhibitors of cystine kidney stones.

Michael Dine

Michael Dine is an American theoretical particle physicist at UC Santa Cruz, known for the invisible axion, dynamical supersymmetry breaking, and work on string theory and cosmology.

Oct 10, 2026

Michael Duff (theoretical physicist)

Michael James Duff is a British theoretical physicist at Imperial College London who coined the term p-brane and whose work on supergravity and duality helped lay the groundwork for M-theory.

Michael E. Brown

Michael E. Brown, born 1965, is an American planetary astronomer at Caltech best known for discovering Eris and other large Kuiper belt objects, which led to Pluto's 2006 reclassification.

Michael E. Fisher

Michael E. Fisher (1931–2021) was a British theoretical physicist best known for his work on critical phenomena and phase transitions, including the epsilon expansion and finite-size scaling theory.

Michael E. Mann

Michael E. Mann is an American climate scientist, professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 2022, known for the 1999 "hockey stick" temperature reconstruction showing human-caused warming.

Michael Elliott (chemist)

Michael Elliott (1924–2007) was a British chemist at Rothamsted Experimental Station who led the team that invented the major synthetic pyrethroid insecticides, including permethrin, cypermethrin, and deltamethrin.