Physical and mathematical scientists

Myron Mathisson

Myron Mathisson (1897–1940) was a Polish physicist who derived the Mathisson–Papapetrou equations for spinning bodies in general relativity and proved a special case of Hadamard's conjecture.

Myung-Hwan Whangbo, also published as M.-H. Whangbo, is an American theoretical and computational chemist at North Carolina State University known for band structures of low-dimensional solids and spin exchange analysis.

N. Bruce Hannay

N. Bruce Hannay, born Norman Bruce Hannay, was an American physical chemist at Bell Telephone Laboratories whose research on silicon contributed to the silicon transistor program.

N. Gabriel Lemcoff

N. Gabriel Lemcoff, born in Buenos Aires in 1969, is an Israeli organic chemist and dean at Ben-Gurion University known for sulfur-chelated ruthenium metathesis catalysts activated by heat or light.

N. Peter Armitage

N. Peter Armitage, also published as N. P. Armitage, is a professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University known for terahertz spectroscopy of quantum materials.

Nachman Aronszajn

Nachman Aronszajn (1907–1980) was a mathematician who worked in functional analysis and logic, taught at the University of Kansas from 1951 to 1977, and gave reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces their systematic form.

Nader Engheta

Nader Engheta is an Iranian-American electrical engineer and physicist, the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a pioneer of metamaterials, optical nanocircuits, and near-zero-index optics.

Nadir Jeevanjee

Nadir Jeevanjee is a climate physicist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, known for analytical theories of CO2 radiative forcing and global mean precipitation, and for the 2025 PECASE award.

Nadya Mason

Nadya Mason is an American experimental condensed matter physicist studying quantum materials, superconductivity, and nanoscale systems; she is dean of the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering.

Nagao Kobayashi

Nagao Kobayashi (小林長夫) is a Japanese chemist known for his work on phthalocyanines, porphyrinoids, and magnetic circular dichroism spectroscopy, spending most of his career at Tohoku University.

Nagayoshi Iwahori

Nagayoshi Iwahori (岩堀長慶, 1926–2011) was a Japanese mathematician at the University of Tokyo whose 1964 and 1965 papers founded the theory of Iwahori–Hecke algebras in representation theory.

Nai Phuan Ong

Nai Phuan Ong is an American condensed matter physicist, the Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton University, known for cuprate superconductor research and evidence of the chiral anomaly.

Nail Akhmediev

Nail Akhmediev (Наил Ахмедиев) is a physicist and Emeritus Professor in theoretical nonlinear optics at the Australian National University, known for Akhmediev breathers, rogue-wave theory, and dissipative solitons.

Nam-Joon Cho

Nam-Joon Cho is a materials scientist and bioengineer at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, known for QCM-D studies of lipid membranes and membrane-targeting antiviral peptides against Zika virus.

Nancy N. Rabalais

Nancy N. Rabalais is an American oceanographer who has mapped the Gulf of Mexico's seasonal low-oxygen dead zone every year since 1985, and is a MacArthur Fellow.

Nancy R. Sottos

Nancy R. Sottos is an American materials scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, known for self-healing polymers that repair cracks and reveal damage by changing color.

Nancy Reid

Nancy Reid is a Canadian statistician and University Professor at the University of Toronto, known for likelihood-based inference and higher-order asymptotics and elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Naohiko Yoshikai

Naohiko Yoshikai (吉戒直彦, born 1978) is a Japanese organic chemist and professor at Tohoku University known for low-valent cobalt-catalyzed C–H functionalization using inexpensive cobalt instead of precious metals.

Naohiro Yoshida

Naohiro Yoshida (吉田尚弘) is a Japanese biogeochemist known for stable-isotope methods that trace nitrous oxide sources, and is a professor at the Earth-Life Science Institute in Tokyo.

Naomi J. Halas

Naomi J. Halas, also known as Naomi Halas, is an American scientist and engineer at Rice University who pioneered plasmonics and invented the tunable plasmon and nanoshell nanoparticles.

Naoto Chatani

Naoto Chatani (茶谷直人) is a Japanese organic chemist known for transition-metal-catalyzed activation of unreactive bonds, especially C–H bonds, and has been Vice President of Hiroshima University since 2024.

Naoto Nagaosa

Naoto Nagaosa is a Japanese theoretical condensed matter physicist, a University of Tokyo professor and RIKEN group director known for the theory of magnetic skyrmions.

Naotoshi Nakashima

Naotoshi Nakashima (中嶋直敏) is a Japanese chemist and Specially Appointed Professor at Kyushu University's I2CNER known for carbon nanotube solubilization and polymer-wrapped nanotube fuel-cell electrocatalysts.

Napier Shaw

Napier Shaw, or Sir William Napier Shaw, was a British meteorologist who directed the UK Meteorological Office from 1905 to 1920, introduced the millibar, and devised the tephigram.

Narayan Pradhan

Narayan Pradhan (born 1972) is an Indian nanomaterials scientist, School Chair and Senior Professor at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Kolkata, working on semiconductor nanocrystals and halide perovskites.

Narendra Karmarkar

Narendra Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician who proposed the 1984 interior-point algorithm for linear programming at AT&T Bell Laboratories, reported as far faster than the simplex method.

Narinder Singh Kapany (ਨਰਿੰਦਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਕਪਾਨੀ)

Narinder Singh Kapany, also known as Narinder Kapany, was an Indian-American physicist known as the father of fiber optics who demonstrated image transmission through fiber bundles in 1954.

Naruki Hiranuma

Naruki Hiranuma is a Japanese-born atmospheric scientist and associate professor at West Texas A&M University who studies ice nucleation and aerosol-cloud-climate interactions and received a 2025 PECASE.

Nasser Peyghambarian

Nasser Peyghambarian is an optical scientist at the University of Arizona known for photorefractive polymers, updatable holographic 3-D telepresence displays, and fiber lasers, elected a National Academy of Inventors Fellow in 2016.