Science & Academia

Abraham Maslow

Psychologist of the hierarchy of needs and a founder of humanistic psychology; son of Jewish immigrants from Kiev

Ada Yonath

Crystallographer who mapped the structure of the ribosome; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009, the first Israeli woman Nobel laureate (1939–2026)

Albert Sabin

Developer of the oral polio vaccine, born in Białystok; first mass-produced in the USSR

Alexander Polyakov

The Soviet mind that rewired string theory

Alexei Abrikosov

Soviet theorist who mapped the invisible architecture of superconductors.

Alexei Kitaev

Architect of topological quantum computing

Andre Geim

Born in Sochi in 1958; shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for experiments on graphene

Andrei Linde

The physicist who inflated the universe

Andrei Okounkov

Moscow-born mathematician who reshaped probability and geometry

Andrei Sakharov

Physicist and Nobel Peace laureate (1975), born in Moscow

Artem Oganov

The algorithmist who maps matter's future

Arthur Kornberg

Biochemist who first synthesised DNA in a test tube; Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959

Avram Hershko

Biochemist who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation.

Carl Sagan

Astronomer and science communicator; son of an emigrant from Kamianets-Podilskyi

Cesar Milstein

Argentine-British Nobel laureate from a Russian-immigrant family who invented monoclonal antibodies

Dan Shechtman

Materials scientist who discovered quasicrystals; sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2011; grandson of Second Aliyah pioneers from Russia

Daniel Kahneman

Psychologist who founded behavioural economics with Amos Tversky; Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 2002; son of Lithuanian Jews

Dennis Gabor

Budapest-born British physicist who invented holography and won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics

Efim Zelmanov

Soviet-born mathematician who solved a century-old problem and won the Fields Medal

Elie Metchnikoff

Zoologist born near Kharkov; discoverer of phagocytosis, Nobel Prize 1908

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda

Lexicographer born Eliezer Perlman in Luzhki in 1858; principal reviver of Hebrew as a spoken language and author of the Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew

Elon Lindenstrauss

Israeli mathematician with Russian roots who won the Fields Medal for work in ergodic theory

Eugene Dynkin

Soviet mathematician who pioneered probability theory and Dynkin diagrams before emigrating to Cornell

Evsey Domar

Russian Empire-born economist who co-created the Harrod-Domar growth model

George Gamow

Physicist and cosmologist born in Odessa; theory of alpha decay and the hot Big Bang

Georges Charpak

French physicist born in Dąbrowica (now Dubrovytsia, Ukraine), 1992 Nobel laureate for particle detectors

Gleb Wataghin

Born in Ukraine, founded Brazil's greatest physics school and discovered cosmic ray muons

Gregory Breit

Mykolaiv-born nuclear physicist who co-discovered the ionosphere and helped build the atomic bomb

Gregory Goodwin Pincus

Son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who co-invented the contraceptive pill and changed the world

Grigory Margulis

Moscow mathematician who won the Fields Medal for revolutionising the theory of Lie groups

Harold E. Edgerton

Nebraska engineer with Russian-German immigrant parents who invented the electronic flash and made bullets visible

Harold Pinter

Nobel laureate playwright whose grandparents came from Poland and Odesa

Herman Muller

Nobel Prize-winning American geneticist who showed that X-rays cause mutations; worked in the USSR 1933–1937

Hermann Minkowski

Born in Kaunas (Russian Empire) — the mathematician who gave Einstein's relativity its geometry

Ilya Prigogine

Physical chemist of irreversible processes and dissipative structures, born in Moscow in January 1917; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1977

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Yiddish writer born in Congress Poland; Nobel Prize in Literature (1978)

Israel Gelfand

Okny-born mathematician known for representation theory and functional analysis

Ivan Bunin

Writer born in Voronezh; the first Russian Nobel laureate in literature (1933)

Jacob Marschak

Kyiv-born economist who directed research at the Cowles Commission and pioneered information economics

Jerzy Neyman

Statistician born in Bendery in 1894 and educated in Kharkov; co-author of the Neyman–Pearson theory of testing, inventor of confidence intervals, founder of Berkeley's statistics department

Jonas Salk

Developer of the first successful polio vaccine; son of an emigrant from Minsk

Joseph Brodsky

Poet born in Leningrad; Nobel Prize in Literature (1987)

Joshua Jortner

Tarnów-born Israeli physical chemist; Israel Prize (1982) and Wolf Prize (1988) laureate

Kenneth Arrow

American economist of Romanian-Jewish descent, 1972 Nobel laureate and author of the impossibility theorem

Kira Radinsky

Kyiv-born Israeli computer scientist, co-founder of SalesPredict and Diagnostic Robotics

Konstantin Novoselov

Born in Nizhny Tagil, won the Nobel Prize for isolating graphene with Scotch tape

Leonid Hurwicz

Moscow-born economist; Nobel Prize in Economics (2007) at 90 for mechanism design theory

Lev Landau

Theoretical physicist born in Baku; Nobel Prize in Physics (1962)

Lou Andreas-Salomé

Writer and psychoanalyst born in St Petersburg, author of the first book on Nietzsche and a member of Freud's circle in Vienna

Ludwig Faddeev

Leningrad mathematical physicist who solved the three-body problem and transformed quantum field theory

Marcos Moshinsky

Kyiv-born Mexican physicist; Prince of Asturias Award laureate (1988)

Maxim Kontsevich

Khimki-born mathematician who won both the Fields Medal and the Breakthrough Prize

Melvin Calvin

Chemist who mapped the path of carbon in photosynthesis (the Calvin cycle); Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1961; son of emigrants from the Russian Empire

Mesrovb Seth

Russian-educated Armenian scholar who became the father of modern Armenian studies in India

Michael Levitt

Pretoria-born biophysicist whose father came from Plungė; Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013

Mikhail Gromov

Boksitogorsk-born mathematician; Abel Prize laureate (2009)

Milton Friedman

American economist and 1976 Nobel laureate, son of Jewish immigrants from Beregszász in the Kingdom of Hungary

Nadine Gordimer

South African novelist, Nobel Prize in Literature 1991; her father was a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania/Latvia, then the Russian Empire

Noam Chomsky

Linguist; son of emigrants from Volhynia and Belarus

Oscar Zariski

Mathematician born in Kobrin in 1899; rebuilt the foundations of algebraic geometry on commutative algebra; Wolf Prize 1981

Otto Struve

Astronomer born in Kharkov in 1897, great-grandson of the founder of Pulkovo Observatory; director of Yerkes and McDonald observatories and first director of the NRAO

Otto Wallach

Born in Königsberg, Prussia, in 1847; 1910 Nobel laureate in chemistry for work on alicyclic compounds

Paul Samuelson

Economist, author of Foundations of Economic Analysis and the first American Nobel laureate in economics; son of Russian-born Jewish parents

Petr Badmaev

Born a Buryat Buddhist in Siberia — became Tsar's personal physician, geopolitical adviser, and Russia's most exotic figure

Pitirim Sorokin

Sociologist born in the Komi lands, secretary to Kerensky in 1917, sent abroad in 1922; founder of Harvard's department of sociology

Rashid Sunyaev

Born in Tashkent, USSR; the Sunyaev–Zeldovich effect bears his name

Richard Feynman

Nobel physicist; son of an emigrant from Minsk

Roald Hoffmann

Born Roald Safran in Złoczów, Poland, in 1937; Holocaust survivor and 1981 Nobel laureate in chemistry

Robert Aumann

Frankfurt-born Israeli-American mathematician and economist; Nobel Prize for game theory (2005)

Robert Solow

American economist, 1987 Nobel laureate for his analysis of economic growth

Roman Jakobson

Linguist born in Moscow, co-founder of the Moscow and Prague linguistic circles and a founder of structural linguistics

Rosalyn Yalow

Medical physicist, co-developer of radioimmunoassay, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977

Saul Bellow

Son of Jewish immigrants from Saint Petersburg; Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

Selman Waksman

Nobel laureate for streptomycin, born in Nova Pryluka; coined the word 'antibiotic'

Simon Kuznets

Economist born in Pinsk who built the first official US national income accounts; Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences 1971

Stanislav Smirnov

St. Petersburg-born mathematician who won the Fields Medal and teaches in Geneva

Stephen Timoshenko

Engineer born in the Chernigov Governorate in 1878, regarded as the father of modern engineering mechanics; co-founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, later at Michigan and Stanford

Svetlana Alexievich

Born in Stanislav, Ukrainian SSR — Belarusian writer, 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature

Tatiana Proskouriakoff

Mayanist born in Tomsk in 1909; showed in 1960 that Maya inscriptions record the histories of real rulers, opening the way to the decipherment of Maya writing

Theodosius Dobzhansky

Born in Nemyriv, Ukraine — the geneticist who unified Darwin and Mendel and founded modern evolutionary biology

Vladimir Arnold

Born in Odessa — one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century who solved Hilbert's 13th problem at 19

Vladimir Ipatieff

Chemist born in Moscow in 1867, pioneer of high-pressure catalysis; academician in Russia, then at Universal Oil Products and Northwestern, where his processes made high-octane aviation fuel

Vladimir Voevodsky

Born in Moscow — won the Fields Medal for work so abstract it reshaped the foundations of mathematics

Waldemar Haffkine

Born in Odessa — developed the world's first cholera and plague vaccines, saving millions in India

Wassily Leontief

Born in St. Petersburg — won the Nobel Prize for input-output analysis, the model governments use to run economies

Yakov Sinai

Moscow-born mathematician; Abel Prize laureate for work on dynamical systems and ergodic theory

Yulii Borisovich Khariton

Yuri Denisyuk

Yuri Manin

Sergey Guriev

Russia's most prominent economist in exile — Sciences Po Paris professor and EBRD chief economist

Viatcheslav Mukhanov

The man who explained why the universe looks the way it does — father of cosmological inflation theory

Nikita Zhivotovskiy

Russian-born mathematics professor at TU Munich — one of Europe's leading combinatorists

Mikhail Lukin

Moscow-born Harvard physics professor — one of the world's leading quantum computing scientists

Carl Albrecht

Physician and philosopher of mystical consciousness

Alfred Nobel

Raised in Saint Petersburg, financed Baku oil, endowed the Nobel Prize

Leonhard Euler

The greatest mathematician of the age spent most of his life in Saint Petersburg

Daniel Bernoulli

Wrote Hydrodynamica in Saint Petersburg

Georg Wilhelm Steller

The naturalist whose name is on half the North Pacific's wildlife

Vitus Bering

The Dane who mapped the gap between Asia and America for Russia

Moritz Hermann von Jacobi

Invented electrotyping and the electric boat, in Russia

Lily Golden

Soviet historian of Africa born in Tashkent to an African-American agronomist and a Jewish mother; mother of Yelena Khanga

Esteban Boltovskoy

Oceanographer and micropalaeontologist born in the Russian Empire in 1912; from 1948 in Argentina, an authority on foraminifera and on the water masses of the South Atlantic

Ignacy Domeyko

Geologist and mineralogist born in 1802 near Novogrudok, then in the Russian Empire; Chile's 'apostle of science and education' and rector of the University of Chile (1867–83)

Nikolai Bernstein

Physiologist born in Moscow in 1896 who founded the modern study of motor control and biomechanics, posing the 'degrees-of-freedom problem'

Valery Soyfer

Molecular geneticist and historian of science born in Gorky in 1936; author of Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, professor at George Mason University

Vladimir Tchernavin

Ichthyologist born in Tsarskoye Selo in 1887 who, with his wife and son, crossed from a Soviet labour camp into Finland in 1932 and later worked at the Natural History Museum in London

Yuri Knorozov

Soviet linguist born in Kharkov in 1922 whose phonetic reading of Maya hieroglyphs, published in 1952, opened the way to their decipherment