Physical and mathematical scientists

Neil Ashcroft

Neil Ashcroft (1938–2021) was a British-born condensed matter theorist at Cornell University, known for his 1968 prediction that metallic hydrogen would be a high-temperature superconductor and for the standard textbook Solid State Physics with David Mermin.

Neil B. McKeown

Neil B. McKeown is a materials chemist who holds the Crawford Tercentenary Chair of Chemistry at the University of Edinburgh and co-invented Polymers of Intrinsic Microporosity (PIMs).

Neil Bartlett (chemist)

Neil Bartlett (1932–2008) was a British-born inorganic chemist who in 1962 made the first noble gas compound from xenon and platinum hexafluoride, then spent most of his career at UC Berkeley.

Neil C. Sturchio

Neil C. Sturchio is an American geochemist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware whose research applies isotope tracers to hydrology and synchrotron X-ray methods to mineral–water interfaces.

Neil Calkin

Neil J. Calkin is a professor of mathematical sciences at Clemson University who joined in 1997 and co-authored the Calkin–Wilf tree, which lists every positive rational number exactly once.

Sep 17, 2026

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, author, and science communicator who has directed New York City's Hayden Planetarium since 1996 and hosted the 2014 series Cosmos.

Neil F. Johnson

Neil F. Johnson is a British-trained physicist and professor at George Washington University since 2018 who applies many-body physics to online hate, extremism, insurgency, and finance.

Neil Gehrels

Neil Gehrels (1952–2017) was an American astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center who led the Swift gamma-ray burst mission and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Neil Gershenfeld

Neil Gershenfeld is an MIT physicist who directs the Center for Bits and Atoms and originated the global fab lab network, community workshops offering public access to digital fabrication tools.

Neil Greenham

Neil C. Greenham is a Professor of Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, known for polymer LEDs and hybrid solar cells, and received the Royal Society Kavli Medal in 2013.

Neil Immerman

Neil Immerman is a theoretical computer scientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a key developer of descriptive complexity, which applies logic to computational complexity.

Neil K. Garg

Neil K. Garg (Neil Garg) is an American organic chemist and Distinguished Professor at UCLA known for cross-coupling of amides, strained intermediates, and total synthesis, and co-founded ElectraTect.

Neil Kelleher

Neil L. Kelleher is an American chemist and mass spectrometrist at Northwestern University known for pioneering top-down proteomics and the proteoform concept, and for leading the Human Proteoform Project.

Neil M. Donahue

Neil M. Donahue is an American atmospheric chemist at Carnegie Mellon University who created the Volatility Basis Set and co-leads the CLOUD experiment at CERN.

Neil R. Branda

Neil R. Branda is a Canadian materials chemist at Simon Fraser University known for molecular switches triggered by light, and for founding 4D LABS and SWITCH Materials.

Neil Robertson (graph theorist)

Neil Robertson (George Neil Robertson) is a graph theorist, Faculty Emeritus at Ohio State University, known for the 23-paper Graph Minors series with Paul Seymour proving Wagner's conjecture.

Neil Trudinger

Neil Sidney Trudinger (born 1942) is an Australian mathematician at the Australian National University, known for the Trudinger inequality and the standard monograph on elliptic partial differential equations.

Sep 17, 2026

Neil Turok

Neil Turok is a South African theoretical physicist known for the cyclic model of cosmology and for founding the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in 2003.

Nels Edlefsen

Nels Edlefsen, born 1893, was an American physicist who built the first crude cyclotron chambers in 1930 as Ernest Lawrence's first Ph.D. student at Berkeley, co-announced the method, and later worked in soil science.

Nelson Dunford

Nelson Dunford was a mathematician at Yale University known for functional analysis, who defined spectral operators and co-wrote the three-volume treatise Linear Operators with Jacob Schwartz.

Nelson Horatio Darton

Nelson Horatio Darton was an American geologist with the United States Geological Survey who mapped the Great Plains and Black Hills and named the Ogallala formation.

Nelson James Terrell

Nelson James Terrell, born 1923, was an American physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory who showed in 1959 that a fast-moving object appears rotated, not contracted, in photographs.

Nenad Markovic

Nenad M. Marković is a Serbian electrochemist at Argonne National Laboratory, a Distinguished Fellow and JCESR chief scientist known for electrocatalysis and fuel-cell catalysts; he received the Electrochemical Society's Faraday Medal in 2013.

Sep 17, 2026

Nergis Mavalvala

Nergis Mavalvala is a Pakistani-American astrophysicist at MIT, born in Karachi, who worked on LIGO's first direct detection of gravitational waves and serves as Dean of the MIT School of Science.

Nesmith Ankeny

Nesmith Cornett Ankeny (1927–1993) was an American analytic number theorist and MIT professor, known for his 1952 bound on the least quadratic non-residue and the Ankeny–Artin–Chowla conjecture.

Neta Bahcall

Neta Bahcall is an Israeli-born astrophysicist, the Eugene Higgins Professor at Princeton University, known for measuring the universe's mass density with galaxy clusters and the cosmic triangle framework.

Netta Engelhardt

Netta Engelhardt is an Associate Professor of Physics at MIT who works on quantum gravity and the black hole information paradox, winning the 2021 New Horizons Prize.

Nevil Sidgwick

Nevil Vincent Sidgwick (1873–1952) was an English theoretical chemist at Oxford who systematized the dative bond, proposed the effective atomic number rule, and shaped VSEPR theory.

Ngô Bảo Châu

Ngô Bảo Châu, born in Hanoi in 1972, is a Vietnamese mathematician who proved the fundamental lemma in automorphic forms, winning the 2010 Fields Medal.