Physical world and mathematics

Rainer K. Sachs

Rainer K. Sachs (1932–2024) was a German-American mathematical physicist at Berkeley, known for the Sachs–Wolfe effect in cosmology and models of radiation damage to DNA.

Rainer Lohmann

Rainer Lohmann is a German-trained marine chemist, professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island since 2004, known for passive sampling of pollutants and PFAS.

Rainer Ludwig Claisen (1851–1930) was a German organic chemist, trained under Kekulé, known for the Claisen condensation and the Claisen rearrangement, the first recorded [3,3]-sigmatropic rearrangement.

Rainer Schödel

Rainer Schödel is a German astronomer who, as a PhD student at MPE Garching, was first author of the 2002 Nature paper tracing star S2's orbit around the Milky Way's central black hole.

Rainer Weiss

Rainer Weiss (1932–2025) was an American experimental physicist at MIT who conceived the laser interferometer that became LIGO and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting gravitational waves.

Rainer Zahn

Rainer Zahn is a paleoceanographer at ICREA and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona who studies how past ocean circulation shaped climate, leading a 2010 Nature study on reversed glacial Atlantic flow.

Rainmaking

Rainmaking, also called artificial rain or pluviculture, is the attempt to produce or increase rainfall, practiced historically as ritual and today as cloud seeding, which began in 1946.

Oct 15, 2026

Raised bog

A raised bog is an ombrotrophic peatland, a dome of peat raised above the groundwater by its own growth, fed only by rain, acidic, and dominated by Sphagnum peat mosses.

Raj Chandra Bose (রাজ চন্দ্র বসু)

Raj Chandra Bose (রাজ চন্দ্র বসু) was an Indian mathematician and statistician, active mainly in the United States, known for design theory, finite geometry, and the BCH error-correcting codes.

Rajab (رجب)

Rajab (رجب) is the seventh month of the Islamic calendar, between Jumada al-Thani and Sha'ban, and one of four sacred months in which fighting was prohibited.

Rajamani Gounder

Rajamani Gounder is a chemical engineer at Purdue University who studies zeolite catalysis, including how copper ions move through zeolite pores during emissions control reactions.

Rajeev Ahuja

Rajeev Ahuja is a computational materials scientist who uses density functional theory to study energy materials and high-pressure physics, professor at Uppsala University and Director of IIT Ropar since 2021.

Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani was an Indian-born American computer scientist and Stanford professor known for randomized algorithms, the 2001 Gödel Prize, and advising Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Rajendra Bhatia

Rajendra Bhatia, born 1952, is an Indian mathematician known for matrix analysis, the Bhatia–Davis inequality, and the book Matrix Analysis; he won the 1995 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize.

Rajendra K. Pachauri

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, known as R.K. Pachauri, was an Indian engineer and economist who led TERI in New Delhi and chaired the IPCC from 2002 to 2015.

Rajendra Singh (राजेन्द्र सिंह)

Rajendra Singh (राजेन्द्र सिंह), born 1959, is an Indian water conservationist known as the "Waterman of India" who leads rainwater harvesting and river rejuvenation in rural Rajasthan.

Oct 15, 2026

Raking

Raking, also known as raking ratio estimation or iterative proportional fitting, is a survey weighting method that iteratively adjusts weights so each variable's weighted total matches known population totals.

Sep 20, 2026

Ralf I. Kaiser

Ralf I. Kaiser, born 1966 in Germany, is a physical chemist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who directs the W. M. Keck Research Laboratory in Astrochemistry.

Ralf Ludwig

Ralf Ludwig is a German physical chemist and professor at the University of Rostock, known for his 2001 review "Water: From Clusters to the Bulk".

Ralf S. Klessen

Ralf S. Klessen, born 1968, is a German theoretical astrophysicist and professor at Heidelberg University known for his gravo-turbulent theory of how supersonic turbulence controls star formation.

Ralph A. Bradley

Ralph A. Bradley, also known as Ralph Allan Bradley, was a Canadian-born statistician who co-created the Bradley–Terry model for paired comparisons and led the American Statistical Association in 1981.

Ralph A. Logan

Ralph A. Logan was a semiconductor device researcher at Bell Laboratories who held at least 21 US patents on semiconductor lasers and integrated optics from 1976 to 1991.

Ralph Alger Bagnold

Ralph Alger Bagnold (1896–1990) was an English soldier and physicist who founded the Long Range Desert Group and wrote The Physics of Blown Sand and Desert Dunes.

Ralph Allen Sampson

Ralph Allen Sampson (1866–1939) was an Irish-born British astronomer, Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1910 to 1937, known for his theory of Jupiter's four great satellites.

Ralph Alpher

Ralph Alpher (1921–2007) was an American physicist who in 1948, with Robert Herman, predicted the cosmic microwave background and formulated the first quantitative Big Bang nucleosynthesis model.

Ralph Asher Alpher

Ralph Asher Alpher was an American cosmologist who predicted the cosmic microwave background with Robert Herman in 1948 and was omitted from the 1978 Nobel Prize.

Ralph Beebe Blackman

Ralph Beebe Blackman (1904–1990) was a Bell Telephone Laboratories researcher known for Blackman's formula on feedback and impedance, published in 1943, and the Blackman–Tukey method.

Ralph Dorfman

Ralph Dorfman (1911–1985) was an American biochemist who studied steroid hormone synthesis, directed the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, and helped develop the first oral contraceptive.

Ralph E. Gomory

Ralph E. Gomory, born 1929, is an American applied mathematician who founded the field of integer programming and led IBM's Research Division from 1970 to 1986.