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Physical world and mathematics

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George K. H. Shimizu

George K. H. Shimizu is a Canadian inorganic materials chemist and University of Calgary professor known for CALF-20, a metal-organic framework for industrial-scale carbon dioxide capture.

George Karniadakis

George Em Karniadakis is a Cretan-born applied mathematician who joined Brown University in 1994, pioneered physics-informed neural networks in 2018, and won the 2021 SIAM/ACM Prize.

George Kempf

George Kempf was an American algebraic geometer who earned his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1970, proved the instability and Kempf–Ness theorems, and completed Mumford's geometric invariant theory program.

George Kingsley Zipf

George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950) was a Harvard linguist who formulated Zipf's law, the inverse rank–frequency pattern of word use, and spent his career explaining it through the principle of least effort.

George Kistiakowsky

George Kistiakowsky was a Ukrainian-born American physical chemist, a Harvard professor from 1930, who designed the explosive lenses for the first atomic bomb and later advised President Eisenhower.

George Lusztig

George Lusztig, born Gheorghe Lusztig, is a Romanian-born American mathematician and MIT professor emeritus known for the Kazhdan–Lusztig polynomials, Deligne–Lusztig theory, and canonical bases, winning the 2014 Shaw Prize and 2022 Wolf Prize.

George M. Homsy

George M. "Bud" Homsy (1943–2024) was an American fluid mechanician known for research on viscous fingering and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

George M. Hornberger

George M. Hornberger is an American hydrologist elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1996, known for connecting watershed science with water and energy decisions.

George M. Sheldrick

George M. Sheldrick (1942–2025) was a chemist and Fellow of the Royal Society, professor of structural chemistry at Göttingen, and author of the SHELX programs that refined most small-molecule structures.

George M. Whitesides

George M. Whitesides, born 1939, is an American chemist at Harvard known for molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, and microfluidics, and a winner of the Kavli Prize.

George M. Zaslavsky

George M. Zaslavsky (Заславский Георгий Моисеевич; 1935–2008) was a Soviet and American physicist, one of three founders of Hamiltonian chaos theory, known for the Zaslavsky map and fractional kinetics.

George Mackey

George Whitelaw Mackey (1916–2006) was an American mathematician at Harvard whose work joined group representation theory, ergodic theory, and the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics.

George Malcolm Dyson

George Malcolm Dyson (1902–1978) was a British organic chemist and information scientist who developed Dyson Notation, a linear coding system for organic compounds adopted by IUPAC in 1961.

George Marsaglia

George Marsaglia (1924–2011) was an American mathematician and statistician who shaped modern random number generation through the 1968 planes theorem, the xorshift and multiply-with-carry generators, and the Diehard battery of randomness tests.

George Michael Morris

G. Michael Morris is an American optical engineer who spent 19 years as Professor of Optics at Rochester and founded three photonics companies, including RPC Photonics.

George Mostow

George Mostow (1923–2017) was an American mathematician at Yale University known for the strong rigidity theorems, which show certain symmetric spaces are determined by their fundamental groups.

George Murphy (American chemist)

George Moseley Murphy (1903–1968) was an American chemist who codiscovered deuterium, the heavy isotope of hydrogen, with Harold Urey and Ferdinand Brickwedde at Columbia University in 1931.

George Nemhauser

George Nemhauser (born 1937) is an American operations researcher and Institute Emeritus Professor at Georgia Tech whose work spans integer optimization, airline scheduling, and Major League Baseball scheduling.

George O. Curme, Jr.

George O. Curme, Jr. (1888–1976) was an American industrial chemist at Union Carbide, called the father of ethylene for building the commercial chemistry that launched the petrochemical industry.

George Oliver Curme

George Oliver Curme was an American industrial chemist, research chief at Union Carbide, known as the father of ethylene for building a chemical industry on petroleum-derived ethylene.

George Osborn (mathematician)

George Osborn (1864–1932) was an English schoolmaster and mathematician, Senior Physics Master at The Leys School in Cambridge, whose 1902 Mathematical Gazette note gave his name to Osborn's rule.

George P. L. Walker

George P. L. Walker, born George Patrick Leonard Walker (1926–2005), was a British volcanologist who made volcanology quantitative, best known for his 1973 lava-flow and pyroclastic-deposit methods.

George P. Merrill

George P. Merrill (1854–1929) was an American geologist and meteoriticist who spent nearly fifty years at the United States National Museum, becoming head curator of geology.

George P. Smith (chemist)

George P. Smith, born 1941 in Connecticut, is an American molecular biologist who invented phage display at the University of Missouri, sharing the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

George Paget Thomson

George Paget Thomson (1892–1975) was a British physicist who shared the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering electron diffraction, and later chaired the MAUD atomic bomb committee.

George Pake

George Pake was an American condensed matter physicist who founded and led Xerox PARC from 1970, and whose 1948 NMR work became a cornerstone of MRI research.

George Parshall

George Parshall (1929–2019) was an American organometallic chemist at DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware, known for homogeneous catalysis, catalytic hydrocarbon activation, and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984.

George Plafker

George Plafker was an American geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who showed that the world's largest earthquakes result from huge slip on subduction megathrusts.

George Pólya

George Pólya (György Pólya, 1887–1985) was a Hungarian-born mathematician at ETH Zürich and Stanford who proved the random walk theorem and wrote How to Solve It.

George Pólya Prize

The George Pólya Prize is a family of mathematics awards given by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, established in 1969 and named for George Pólya.