Physical and mathematical scientists

Nikolai Luzin

Nikolai Luzin, also known as Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin, was a Russian and Soviet mathematician who founded the Moscow school of function theory and descriptive set theory.

Nikolai Makarov is a Russian mathematician, the Richard Merkin Professor of Mathematics at Caltech, known for his 1985 theorem that harmonic measure on simply connected planar domains has Hausdorff dimension 1.

Nikolai Mnev

Nikolai Mnev (Николай Евгеньевич Мнёв, born 1957) is a Russian mathematician at the Steklov Institute's St. Petersburg branch, known for the universality theorem and winning the Fulkerson Prize.

Nikolai P. Lavyorov

Nikolai P. Lavyorov (Николай Павлович Лавёров) was a Soviet and Russian geologist who founded uranium deposit research and served as vice president of the Academy of Sciences for 25 years.

Nikolai Sobolev (Николай Владимирович Соболев)

Nikolai Sobolev (Николай Владимирович Соболев) was a Russian mineralogist and petrologist in Novosibirsk, an Academician best known for proving diamond inclusions are syngenetic and opening ultrahigh-pressure metamorphic diamond study.

Nikolaos V. Sahinidis (Νικόλαος Β. Σαχινίδης)

Nikolaos V. Sahinidis (Νικόλαος Β. Σαχινίδης) is a Greek-American chemical engineer and optimization scientist at Georgia Tech, known for the BARON global optimization solver and ALAMO.

Nikolay Belov (geochemist)

Nikolay Vasilyevich Belov (Николай Васильевич Белов; 1891–1982) was a Soviet crystallographer and geochemist who founded the Soviet school of structural crystallography and determined the structures of more than 500 compounds.

Nikolay Chentsov

Nikolay Chentsov, also Nikolay Nikolaevich Chentsov (1930 to 1992), was a Russian mathematician who proved that the Fisher metric is the unique Markov-invariant metric on a probability simplex.

Nikolay Chetaev

Nikolay Chetaev (Николай Гурьевич Четаев, 1902–1959) was a Soviet mathematician and mechanician known for Chetaev's instability theorem and for founding the Kazan school of stability theory.

Nikolay Kornienko

Nikolay Kornienko is a chemist working on renewable-energy electrocatalysis and semi-artificial photosynthesis, a Full Professor at the University of Bonn since 2023 who won the 2025 EuChemS Lecture Award.

Nikolay Krylov (mathematician)

Nikolai Vladimirovich Krylov (Николай Владимирович Крылов) is a mathematician at the University of Minnesota known for the Krylov–Safonov estimates and the theory of controlled diffusion processes.

Nikolay P. Laverov

Nikolay Pavlovich Laverov (1930–2016) was a Russian geologist who served as vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences from 1988 to 2013 and pioneered uranium geology.

Nikolay Semenov

Nikolay Nikolaevich Semenov (Николай Семёнов, 1896–1986) was a Soviet physical chemist who discovered branched chain reactions, founded the Institute of Chemical Physics, and won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Nikolay Sergeyevich Krylov

Nikolay Sergeyevich Krylov (1917–1947) was a Russian theoretical physicist who showed that mixing is a sufficient condition for relaxation to equilibrium; his posthumous 1950 book anticipated dynamical chaos.

Nikolay Sobolev

Nikolay Vladimirovich Sobolev (Соболев Николай Владимирович; 1935–2022) was a Soviet and Russian mineralogist and petrologist in Novosibirsk known for work on diamonds, kimberlites, and ultrahigh-pressure metamorphism.

Nikolay V. Vitanov

Nikolay V. Vitanov is a Bulgarian theoretical physicist and full professor of theoretical physics at Sofia University, known for composite pulses and composite STIRAP, robust techniques for high-fidelity quantum control.

Sep 20, 2026

Nikolay Zheludev

Nikolay I. Zheludev, born 1955, is a physicist known as a founding member of nanophotonics and metamaterials, deputy director at Southampton's Zepler Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Nikoloz Muskhelishvili

Nikoloz (Niko) Ivanovich Muskhelishvili (1891–1976) was a Georgian mathematician who built the theory of singular integral equations and complex-potential methods for plane elasticity, a turning point in elasticity theory.

Sep 20, 2026

Nikos Hadjichristidis

Nikos Hadjichristidis is a Greek polymer chemist, a distinguished professor at KAUST in Saudi Arabia since 2011, known for building star, comb, and cyclic polymers by anionic polymerization.

Nils Christoffer Dunér

Nils Christoffer Dunér (1839–1914) was a Swedish astronomer who introduced astrophysics to Sweden and, as Uppsala's professor of astronomy, spectroscopically measured the Sun's differential rotation to near its poles.

Nima Arkani-Hamed

Nima Arkani-Hamed, born 1972, is a Canadian-American theoretical particle physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, known for large extra dimensions, split supersymmetry, and the amplituhedron.

Nimrod Moiseyev

Nimrod Moiseyev (N. Moiseyev) is an Israeli theoretical chemist and Professor Emeritus at Technion who developed non-Hermitian quantum mechanics and authored the first textbook on the subject.

Ning Zeng

Ning Zeng is a climate and carbon-cycle scientist at the University of Maryland, known for proposing wood vaulting, a carbon removal method based on burying wood.

Nirit Dudovich

Nirit Dudovich (נירית דודוביץ) is an Israeli physicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science who studies attosecond science, measuring electron motion with ultra-short laser pulses.

Niveen M. Khashab

Niveen M. Khashab is a Lebanese supramolecular chemist and founding professor at KAUST in Saudi Arabia since 2009, known for smart hybrid nanomaterials for drug delivery and porous materials for separations.

Niyazi Serdar Sariçiftçi

Niyazi Serdar Sariçiftçi, born 1961 in Konya, Turkey, is an Austrian-Turkish chemist at Johannes Kepler University Linz credited with inventing bulk heterojunction plastic solar cells.

Noah Diffenbaugh

Noah Diffenbaugh is an American climate scientist at Stanford University, where he is the William Wrigley Professor, known for his work on how climate change influences extreme weather events.

Noah Planavsky

Noah Planavsky is an isotope geochemist and professor at Yale University known for using chromium isotopes to reconstruct Earth's oxygenation and for applying weathering chemistry to carbon removal.

Noam Agmon

Noam Agmon (נועם אגמון) is an Israeli theoretical and physical chemist, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem known for work on proton transfer and proton mobility in water.