Physical world and mathematics

John Chaput

John C. Chaput is an American chemical biologist and professor at UC Irvine whose laboratory engineers polymerases for xeno-nucleic acids and evolved the TNA-synthesizing enzyme 10-92.

John Charles Fields

John Charles Fields (1863–1932) was a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto who organized the 1924 International Congress of Mathematicians and established the Fields Medal.

John Church (Australian oceanographer)

John Church, born 1951, is an Australian oceanographer known for measuring and explaining global sea-level rise during a long career at CSIRO and later UNSW.

John Clarke (physicist)

John Clarke, born 1942, is a British-born condensed matter physicist at UC Berkeley known for pioneering SQUIDs and for one third of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics.

John Clauser

John F. Clauser, born 1942 in Pasadena, California, is an American physicist who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments with entangled photons that violated Bell inequalities.

John Clive Ward

John Clive Ward (1924–2000) was a British theoretical physicist who proved the 1950 Ward identity, a foundation of renormalization theory, and co-developed electroweak theory with Abdus Salam.

John Cockcroft, also known as Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, was a British nuclear physicist who shared the 1951 Nobel Prize for splitting the atom and directed Britain's Harwell atomic research establishment.

John Coleman Moore

John Coleman Moore (1923–2016) was an American algebraic topologist who spent his career at Princeton University and is known for the Eilenberg–Moore spectral sequence and the Milnor–Moore theorem.

John Corbett (chemist)

John Corbett (1926–2013) was an American inorganic chemist and Distinguished Professor at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory, known for six decades of work on metal-rich solid-state compounds, Zintl phases, and metal clusters.

John Cornforth

John Cornforth, also known as Sir John Warcup Cornforth, was an Australian organic chemist who won half of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work on enzyme stereochemistry.

John Couch Adams

John Couch Adams (1819–1892) was a British mathematician and astronomer at Cambridge who independently predicted Neptune's position and worked on the Moon's motion and the Leonid meteors.

John Cunningham McLennan

John Cunningham McLennan (1867–1935) was a Canadian physicist who led the University of Toronto physics laboratory and identified the auroral green line as emission from atomic oxygen.

John D. Baldeschwieler

John D. Baldeschwieler, born 1933 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, is an American chemist and emeritus Caltech professor known for spectroscopic methods, entrepreneurship, and the 2000 National Medal of Science.

John D. Barrow

John D. Barrow, also known as John David Barrow, was a British cosmologist and Cambridge professor who won the 2006 Templeton Prize for popularizing science.

John D. Bredehoeft

John D. Bredehoeft (1933–2023) was an American groundwater hydrologist who spent 32 years at the U.S. Geological Survey, pioneering digital simulation of groundwater flow and contaminant transport.

John D. Corbett

John D. Corbett (1926–2013) was an American inorganic chemist, Distinguished Professor at Iowa State University and Ames Laboratory scientist, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992.

John D. Ferry

John D. Ferry (1912–2002) was a Canadian-born American polymer chemist and professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, known for the Williams-Landel-Ferry equation and viscoelasticity research.

John D. Hoffman

John D. Hoffman (1922–2004) was an American polymer physicist who co-developed the Lauritzen–Hoffman theory of polymer crystallization, a standard model, during a career at the National Bureau of Standards.

John D. Joannopoulos

John D. Joannopoulos (1947–2025) was an MIT condensed-matter theoretical physicist who helped create photonic crystals, materials that control light the way semiconductors control electrons, and co-founded six startups.

John D. Roberts

John D. Roberts (1918–2016) was an American physical organic chemist at Caltech who used carbon-14 tracers and NMR spectroscopy to work out how organic reactions proceed.

John D. Storey

John D. Storey is a statistician and genomicist, professor at Princeton University, known for the q-value and direct approach to false discovery rates in multiple testing.

John Dalton

John Dalton (1766–1844) was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist who introduced atomic theory into chemistry, published the first table of atomic weights, and first described color blindness.

John David Jackson

John David Jackson (1925–2016) was a Canadian-born theoretical physicist who worked in particle, nuclear, and atomic physics at UC Berkeley, best known for the graduate textbook Classical Electrodynamics.

John Dougall (mathematician)

John Dougall (1867–1960) was a Scottish mathematician, born in Kippen and trained at Glasgow, remembered for Dougall's theorem on hypergeometric series, prize-winning elasticity work, and mathematical publishing.

John Dove Isaacs

John Dove Isaacs III (1913–1980) was an American oceanographer and engineer at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, known for deep-sea moorings, the Isaacs-Kidd midwater trawl, and wave-powered machines.

John E. Bercaw

John E. Bercaw (born 1944, Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American inorganic chemist at Caltech, Centennial Professor Emeritus, known for organometallic chemistry, homogeneous catalysis, and C–H bond activation.

John E. Bortle

John E. Bortle is an American amateur astronomer in Stormville, New York, best known for creating the nine-level Bortle Dark-Sky Scale and for decades of comet and variable-star observing.

John E. Hilliard

John E. Hilliard (1926–1987) was a British-born metallurgist and stereologist who co-developed the Cahn-Hilliard equation for phase separation and spent 25 years as a materials science professor at Northwestern University.

John E. Kunzler

John E. Kunzler, often called Gene Kunzler, was a Bell Labs physicist whose 1961 niobium-tin discovery showed superconductors could carry huge currents in strong magnetic fields.