Physical world and mathematics

Michael P. Brenner

Michael P. Brenner is an American applied mathematician and physicist, Catalyst Professor at Harvard SEAS since 2001, known for sonoluminescence theory, droplet breakup, and machine learning for science.

Michael P. Lamb

Michael P. Lamb is a geomorphologist and professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, where he has led the Earth Surface Dynamics Laboratory since 2009.

Michael Pepper

Sir Michael Pepper is a British condensed-matter physicist who pioneered research on semiconductor nanostructures. He turned low-dimensional electron systems into a working laboratory for quantum physics.

Michael Perryman

Michael Perryman is a British astronomer, born 1954 in Luton, who led the European Space Agency's Hipparcos and Gaia astrometry missions and shared the 2022 Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

Sep 17, 2026

Michael Polanyi

Michael Polanyi (Polányi Mihály; 1891–1976) was a Hungarian-born British physical chemist who pioneered potential-energy surfaces and transition-state theory, then turned philosopher of science known for tacit knowing.

Michael R. Buchmeiser

Michael R. Buchmeiser (born 1967) is an Austrian polymer chemist, professor at the University of Stuttgart since 2009, working on metathesis catalysis, carbon fibers, and battery cathodes.

Michael R. Hoffmann

Michael R. Hoffmann is an environmental chemist at Caltech, known for identifying hyperacidic urban fogs and for applying semiconductor photocatalysis and electrochemistry to water treatment.

Michael R. Rampino

Michael Rampino is an earth and planetary scientist at New York University, on its faculty since 1985, known for the Shiva hypothesis of cyclic comet-impact extinctions.

Michael R. Wasielewski

Michael R. Wasielewski is an American photochemist and Northwestern University chemistry professor, trained at the University of Chicago, known for artificial photosynthesis, molecular electronics, and quantum information science.

Michael Radermacher

Michael Radermacher is a German-trained physicist who co-credited with Joachim Frank the Random Conical Tilt method in electron microscopy, cited in the 2017 Nobel Prize background.

Michael Romalis

Michael V. Romalis is a professor of physics at Princeton University working in atomic physics and quantum sensing, best known for the spin-exchange-relaxation-free magnetometer he introduced in 2002.

Michael Rowan-Robinson

Michael Rowan-Robinson, born 1942, is a British astronomer at Imperial College London known for his work on the 1983 IRAS infrared satellite mission and cosmology.

Michael S. Longuet-Higgins

Michael S. Longuet-Higgins (1925–2016) was a British oceanographer and applied mathematician known for the theory of ocean waves, microseisms, and radiation stress, and a Royal Society Research Professor at Cambridge.

Michael S. McLachlan

Michael S. McLachlan is an environmental chemist who has been Professor of Organic Environmental Chemistry at Stockholm University since 2003, known for the forest filter effect model.

Michael S. Turner

Michael S. Turner is an American theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, a founder of particle astrophysics who coined the term "dark energy" in 1998.

Michael Saks (mathematician)

Michael Saks, born around 1956, is an American mathematician and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Rutgers University, known for work in combinatorics and theoretical computer science.

Michael Schlessinger

Michael Schlessinger was an American algebraic geometer at UNC Chapel Hill, Princeton, and Berkeley, known for Schlessinger's theorem and the Lichtenbaum–Schlessinger functors; he died in 2025 at 88.

Michael Schmittel

Michael Schmittel (born 1956) is a German organic chemist who works on molecular nanoswitches, nanomachines, and metallosupramolecular self-sorting, and was a professor at the University of Siegen.

Sep 17, 2026

Michael Scot

Michael Scot, also known as Michael the Scot, was a Scottish translator and astrologer who served Emperor Frederick II and translated Aristotle from Arabic into Latin.

Michael Sheetz

Michael Patrick Sheetz (1946–2025) was an American cell biologist who co-discovered the motor protein kinesin, pioneered mechanobiology, founded Singapore's Mechanobiology Institute, and won the Lasker, Wiley, and Massry Prizes.

Michael Shelley (applied mathematician)

Michael J. Shelley is an American applied mathematician at NYU's Courant Institute who studies complex and active fluids, biophysics, and the fluid mechanics of living cells.

Michael Shub

Michael Shub is an American mathematician who trained in Stephen Smale's school at Berkeley, introduced expanding maps, formulated the entropy conjecture, and with Lenore Blum and Smale founded the Blum–Shub–Smale model of computation over the reals.

Michael Somos

Michael Somos is an American mathematician who discovered the Somos-k integer sequences in the 1980s while studying elliptic functions, and has authored over 2000 sequences in the OEIS.

Michael Spivak

Michael Spivak (1940–2020) was an American mathematician who wrote Calculus and Calculus on Manifolds, founded Publish or Perish, and won the 1985 Steele Prize for his five-volume differential geometry series.

Michael Stewart Witherell

Michael Stewart Witherell is an American experimental particle physicist who is a professor at UC Berkeley and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Michael Szwarc

Michael Szwarc (1909–2000) was a Polish-born polymer chemist who worked in England and the United States and discovered living polymerization, the anionic polymerization of styrene in which growing chains never terminate, winning the 1991 Kyoto Prize.