Physical world and mathematics

Paul Chaikin

Paul Chaikin is an American condensed matter physicist, the Silver Professor of Physics at New York University, known for soft matter physics, ellipsoid packing, and colloidal self-assembly.

Paul Cohen

Paul Joseph Cohen (1934–2007) was an American mathematician at Stanford University who proved in 1963 that the continuum hypothesis is independent of set theory, inventing forcing.

Paul D. Beer, born 1958 in Totnes, Devon, is a British supramolecular chemist and professor at Oxford known for anion recognition and sensing and for using anions as templates to build rotaxanes and catenanes.

Paul D. Foote

Paul D. Foote was an American physicist known for experimental work on alkali metal vapor spectra and for directing research at Gulf Oil's Gulf Research & Development Company in Pittsburgh.

Paul David Bates

Paul David Bates is a British hydrologist and Professor of Hydrology at the University of Bristol whose global flood models reshaped flood risk estimation; he co-founded Fathom and is a Royal Society Fellow.

Paul Dirac

Paul Dirac was a British theoretical physicist whose 1928 equation reconciled quantum mechanics with relativity, predicted antimatter, and won him a share of the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Paul Doughty Bartlett

Paul Doughty Bartlett (1907–1997) was an American physical organic chemist at Harvard, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1947 and known for showing that reaction mechanisms can be determined experimentally.

Paul Drude

Paul Karl Ludwig Drude (1863–1906) was a German physicist who in 1900 formulated the Drude model, the first quantitative theory of metallic conduction, and edited the Annalen der Physik.

Paul Dyson (chemist)

Paul J. Dyson is an inorganic and organometallic chemist, professor at EPFL in Switzerland since 2002, known for RAPTA ruthenium anticancer compounds and sustainable catalysis, and EPFL Dean of Basic Sciences since 2021.

Paul E. Olsen

Paul E. Olsen, born 1953 in New York City, is an American paleontologist at Columbia University known for Newark Basin drilling cores that recorded Milankovitch-paced Triassic climate cycles.

Paul E. Tapponnier

Paul E. Tapponnier (1947–2023) was a French geologist and geophysicist who mapped Asia's active faults from satellite imagery and modeled India's collision with Asia as an indentation.

Paul Ehrenfest

Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933) was an Austrian-born Dutch theoretical physicist who succeeded Lorentz at Leiden in 1912, known for the Ehrenfest theorem, the adiabatic principle, and his students.

Paul Epstein

Paul Epstein (1871–1939) was a German mathematician at the universities of Strasbourg and Frankfurt, best known for the Epstein zeta function, which generalizes the Riemann zeta function.

Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős (Pál Erdős, 1913–1996) was a Hungarian mathematician who traveled the world posing and solving problems, publishing about 1,500 papers with more than 450 coauthors.

Paul F. Barbara

Paul F. Barbara (1953–2010) was an American physical chemist known for ultrafast spectroscopy of electron and proton transfer reactions and single-molecule spectroscopy of conjugated polymers, elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

Paul F. Hoffman

Paul F. Hoffman (born 1941, Toronto) is a Canadian geologist, emeritus professor at Harvard and leading advocate of the Snowball Earth hypothesis, awarded the 2024 Kyoto Prize.

Paul F. McMillan

Paul F. McMillan (1956–2022) was a Scottish-born British materials chemist who studied matter at high pressures, working at Arizona State University and later University College London.

Sep 20, 2026

Paul F. Nealey

Paul F. Nealey is an American chemical engineer, the Brady W. Dougan Professor at the University of Chicago, known for directed self-assembly of block copolymers for nanolithography.

Paul Fenter

Paul Fenter is a physicist and Argonne Distinguished Fellow who leads the Interfacial Processes Group at Argonne National Laboratory, pioneering synchrotron X-ray studies of mineral-water interfaces.

Paul Finsler

Paul Finsler (1894–1970) was a German-born mathematician who worked in Switzerland, known for the 1918 dissertation that named Finsler geometry and for his Platonist set theory.

Paul Fourmarier

Paul Fourmarier (1877–1970) was a Belgian geologist and professor at the University of Liège whose 1905 discovery of the Theux tectonic window made the tectonics of Belgium classical.

Paul G. Silver

Paul G. Silver, also known as Paul Silver, was an American geophysicist and seismologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., known for applying seismic observations to infer mantle flow.

Paul Garabedian

Paul Garabedian (1927–2010) was an American mathematician and numerical analyst at NYU's Courant Institute, known for shockless transonic airfoil design and stellarator computations for fusion.

Paul Glansdorff

Paul Gustave Glansdorff (1904–1999) was a Belgian thermodynamicist and university teacher at the Université Libre de Bruxelles who, with Ilya Prigogine, discovered the 1954 general evolution criterion for non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

Paul Gordan

Paul Albert Gordan was a German mathematician, known as the king of invariant theory, who proved the finiteness theorem for binary forms in 1868 and co-created the Clebsch–Gordan coefficients.

Paul Halmos

Paul Halmos (1916–2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who worked in probability and operator theory on Hilbert space, and became a famous expositor through textbooks like Naive Set Theory.

Paul Harnik

Paul Harnik is an American paleobiologist and Associate Professor at Colgate University who studies what makes marine organisms vulnerable to extinction, and a 2025 PECASE recipient.

Paul Harteck

Paul Harteck (1902–1985) was an Austrian-German physical chemist who co-produced tritium in the first fusion reaction and pioneered uranium centrifuge enrichment in Germany's nuclear project.

Paul Heinrich von Groth

Paul Heinrich von Groth (1843–1927) was a German mineralogist and crystallographer who founded Zeitschrift für Kristallographie in 1877 and explained how chemical composition relates to crystal structure.