Physical and mathematical scientists

Richard R. Schrock

Richard R. Schrock, born in 1945, is an American organometallic chemist who shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing olefin metathesis catalysts at MIT.

Richard Rado

Richard Rado (1906–1989) was a German-born British mathematician who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, worked with Paul Erdős on partition calculus, and is known for the Rado graph and Rado's theorem.

Richard Robson (chemist)

Richard Robson, born 1937, is an Australian coordination chemist at the University of Melbourne who founded coordination polymers and won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Richard Rotunno is an American meteorologist and Senior Scientist at NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, known for research on tornadoes, supercells, and squall lines; he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2023.

Richard S. Hamilton

Richard S. Hamilton, full name Richard Streit Hamilton (1943–2024), was an American mathematician at Columbia University who introduced the Ricci flow, the tool behind the proof of the Poincaré conjecture.

Richard S. Pierce

Richard S. Pierce, full name Richard Scott Pierce, was an American algebraist in ring and module theory who taught at Washington, Hawaii, and Arizona and wrote Associative Algebras.

Richard Schoen

Richard Schoen, born 1950, is an American mathematician who co-founded geometric analysis, proved the positive mass theorem with Shing-Tung Yau, and resolved the Yamabe problem.

Richard Seager

Richard Seager is a climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory known for work on drought and hydroclimate, including his 2007 projection of a drier American Southwest.

Richard Sears (geophysicist)

Richard A. Sears is an American geophysicist who spent 33 years at Shell, rising to vice president for global deepwater technical services, before advising the Deepwater Horizon commission.

Richard Smalley

Richard Errett Smalley (1943–2005) was an American chemist at Rice University who co-discovered the fullerenes, sharing the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and pioneering carbon nanotechnology.

Sep 20, 2026

Richard Smith (chemist)

Richard D. Smith is an American chemist and mass spectrometry researcher who spent 1976 to 2024 at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, becoming a Battelle Fellow.

Richard Strachey

Sir Richard Strachey (1817–1908) was a British army officer and geologist who surveyed Kumaon and Tibet, directed irrigation in India, chaired the East Indian Railway, and won the Royal Medal in 1897.

Richard Swan

Richard Swan was a mathematician at the University of Chicago known for the Serre–Swan theorem, identifying vector bundles with projective modules, and for work in algebraic K-theory.

Richard T. Wetherald

Richard T. Wetherald was an American meteorologist at NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, co-author of the 1967 paper giving the first sound estimate of warming from doubled CO2.

Richard Taylor (mathematician)

Richard Lawrence Taylor, born 1962, is a British-American number theorist at Stanford University who helped complete the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem and proved the Sato-Tate conjecture.

Richard Thomas (mathematician)

Richard Thomas is a British algebraic geometer at Imperial College London, best known as co-inventor, with his supervisor Simon Donaldson, of the Donaldson–Thomas invariants of Calabi–Yau threefolds.

Richard Threlkeld Cox

Richard Threlkeld Cox (1898–1991) was an American physicist at Johns Hopkins University, known for Cox's theorem and his 1946 paper deriving probability from consistent plausible reasoning.

Richard Tousey

Richard Tousey (1908–1997) was an American physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory who pioneered the study of the Sun from space, recording the first solar ultraviolet spectrum.

Richard V. Southwell

Sir Richard Vynne Southwell (1888–1970) was an English engineer-mathematician known for the relaxation method for solving structural equations, and Rector of Imperial College London from 1942 to 1948.

Richard van der Riet Woolley

Sir Richard van der Riet Woolley (1906–1986) was an astronomer who directed Mount Stromlo Observatory in Australia, then served as Astronomer Royal from 1956 to 1971.

Richard von Mises

Richard von Mises (1883–1953) was an Austrian-born applied mathematician and engineer who gave the first university course on powered flight and formulated the von Mises yield criterion.

Richard W. Carlson

Richard W. Carlson is an American isotope geochemist who spent his career at the Carnegie Institution for Science, using rock and meteorite isotopes to date the Moon and early Solar System.

Richard Warren Shorthill

Richard Warren Shorthill (1928–2012) was an American physicist and University of Utah professor who mapped the Moon's infrared heat, helped select Apollo landing sites, and co-demonstrated the fiber optic gyroscope.

Richard Wilker Korsmeyer

Richard Wilker Korsmeyer is an American pharmaceutical scientist and drug-delivery researcher who spent about 31 years at Pfizer and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Richard Willstätter

Richard Martin Willstätter was a German chemist who won the 1915 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll, showing it is a mixture of two components.

Richard Woo

Richard Woo is a radio-science researcher and senior research scientist emeritus at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, known for revealing kilometer-scale filamentary structure in the Sun's corona.

Richard Zsigmondy

Richard Adolf Zsigmondy (1865–1929) was an Austrian-born chemist who won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on colloid solutions, and co-invented the ultramicroscope.

RichardJ. Hickey

Richard J. Hickey was an American statistician and environmental-health researcher at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, who studied air pollution, smoking, and carbon monoxide in chronic disease.

Sep 20, 2026

Richmond Sarpong

Richmond Sarpong, born in Ghana in 1974, is an American synthetic organic chemist at UC Berkeley known for total synthesis and single-atom skeletal editing of molecules.