Scientists

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

Cognitive scientist and designer; author of The Design of Everyday Things; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group; former vice president at Apple; founding director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

Writer and researcher on open source, author of "Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software" and, as Nadia Eghbal, of the 2016 Ford Foundation report "Roads and Bridges" on the digital infrastructure the economy runs on. She worked on community programmes at GitHub from 2016 to 2018 and writes at nadia.xyz.

Robotics researcher, emeritus professor at MIT and former director of its Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-founder of iRobot and Rethink Robotics, now at Robust.AI. Since January 2018 he has published dated predictions about self-driving cars, robotics and human spaceflight and scored them in public every New Year's Day, a commitment he made through 2050.

Statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. Writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, where he prints corrections to his own posts as posts of their own.

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

Historian of the Renaissance and of the history of ideas, professor at the University of Chicago, author of Inventing the Renaissance and the Terra Ignota novels, and writer of the blog Ex Urbe.

Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist (1905 to 1997) and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that treats the search for meaning as the central human motivation.

Ukrainian-American historian, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Psychologist and Nobel laureate (1934 to 2024); shared the 2002 Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences for integrating psychological research into economics; with Amos Tversky, developed prospect theory and the study of heuristics and biases.

Geneticist at Harvard Medical School, whose laboratory studies human history and biological change through ancient DNA.

Physicist, writer and researcher, co-author of the standard textbook on quantum computation and quantum information.

Professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, who works on star and planet formation, the search for technosignatures, and the astrobiology of civilisations.

Theoretical cosmologist, professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, and chief science officer of Pioneer Works.

Professor of Neurology at the University of Oxford, whose research covers apathy, motivation, attention and Alzheimer's disease.

Austrian-British economist and political philosopher (1899 to 1992) who shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and argued that central economic planning destroys political freedom.

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

Assistant professor of computer science at Stanford, and co-founder of the robot foundation-model company Physical Intelligence.

Anthropologist and author of Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, and DeWitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology emeritus at Macalester College.

Biochemist at University College London, Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry and author of The Vital Question and Transformer.

French psychiatrist and political philosopher from Martinique (1925 to 1961), a founding thinker of postcolonial studies, best known for The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks.

Historian of ideas at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, and the biographer of both Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.

American marine biologist, writer and conservationist (1907 to 1964) whose sea trilogy and 1962 book Silent Spring are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement.

Theoretical physicist at Johns Hopkins University, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy, host of the Mindscape podcast and author of Something Deeply Hidden.

Founder of psychoanalysis (1856 to 1939); physician and psychologist who lived and worked in Vienna until 1938; author of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and The Ego and the Id (1923).

Physician and founder of Early Medical, a practice built around what he calls Medicine 3.0. Writes a weekly newsletter on exercise, lipids, sleep and longevity at peterattiamd.com and hosts The Peter Attia Drive; author of Outlive.

Researcher of software delivery performance, co-author of "Accelerate" and of the DORA, SPACE and DevEx frameworks, and author of "Frictionless".

Research scientist at OpenAI, who built the poker AIs Libratus and Pluribus and helped pioneer test-time compute and reasoning in language models.

Economic historian, Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University, and author of Wages of Destruction, Crashed and Shutdown. Writes the Chartbook newsletter.

Alignment researcher. Co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024 and has led alignment work at Anthropic since; writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.

Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, creator of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha, and author of A New Kind of Science.

Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London and official historian of the Falklands campaign; writes on strategy at Comment is Freed.

Economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago, who runs randomised trials on poverty, employment and violence in Uganda, Liberia and Colombia, and is one of the researchers whose work made cash transfers a mainstream aid instrument.

Interpretability researcher at Anthropic, which he co-founded; before that at OpenAI and Google Brain.

German-born American political theorist (1906 to 1975); author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), her report on the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.

Greek philosopher (384 to 322 BCE); studied in Plato's Academy until 347 BCE; founded the Lyceum in Athens in 335 BCE.

Security technologist and author, lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School and a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He has written about the economics and politics of security at schneier.com since 2004, and coined much of the vocabulary the encryption debate is argued in.

Psychologist at Stanford University, where she holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology; known for research on motivation and mindset and the book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

English social reformer and statistician (1820 to 1910), the founder of modern nursing; she managed and trained nurses caring for wounded soldiers in the Crimean War.

Ecologist, author of "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1915 to 2003); American ecologist and microbiologist who focused his career on human overpopulation; the paper appeared in Science in 1968.

American political scientist, sociologist and economist (1928 to 2018); professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business and Graduate School of Education; co-author with Richard Cyert of A Behavioral Theory of the Firm and of the garbage can model of organizational choice.

Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.

English theoretical physicist and cosmologist (1942 to 2018), Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009, known for his work on black holes and for A Brief History of Time.

Irish writer who spent his twenties travelling and speaking; he now speaks about a dozen languages and none of them from a classroom. Founded Fluent in 3 Months, whose one instruction is to start speaking on the first day rather than waiting until you are ready.

American psychologist; William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, researching memory, amnesia, memory distortion and future simulation; author of The Seven Sins of Memory (2001).

German philosopher (1724 to 1804), born in Königsberg, where he taught at the university; author of the three Critiques and the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Hungarian-American psychologist (1934 to 2021) who named and studied 'flow'; headed the University of Chicago's psychology department and later was Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University.

Evolutionary biologist and author; writes The Poetry of Reality newsletter on Substack.

Theoretical physicist (1918 to 1988); shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics; at the California Institute of Technology at the time of the award.

Cognitive scientist and author at Harvard; writes on rationality, language and human progress.

American historian and philosopher (1885 to 1981); author of The Story of Philosophy (1926) and, with Ariel Durant, the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, published from 1935 to 1975.

English mathematician and writer (1815 to 1852), chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed analytical engine; she translated Luigi Menabrea's paper on it and added seven explanatory notes.

Social scientist who writes about happiness; president of the American Enterprise Institute from 2009 to 2019, professor at Harvard from 2019 to 2026, and a Vanderbilt professor from July 2026; author of From Strength to Strength.

Professor of medicine and epidemiology at Stanford, best known for the 2005 essay arguing that most published research findings are false.

French philosopher and mathematician (1596 to 1650); author of the Discourse on the Method (1637), the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) and the Principles of Philosophy (1644).

Social psychologist who researches what leads people to say yes to requests; author of Influence and Pre-Suasion, which have sold more than 10 million copies in 48 languages.

Historian of Central and Eastern Europe, Chair in Modern European History at the University of Toronto and formerly Levin Professor of History at Yale; author of Bloodlands, On Tyranny and On Freedom.

Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.

Chief AI scientist at Databricks, and the author of the lottery ticket hypothesis. His MIT doctorate was on why the sparse networks pruning produces are so hard to train from scratch.

Social psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, who studies whether happiness can be lastingly increased; author of The How of Happiness (2008) and The Myths of Happiness (2013).

Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.

Statistician and professor emeritus at Yale; author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach.

Associate professor at MIT and first author of the residual networks paper, the most cited paper in modern computer vision. Previously at Meta AI Research and Microsoft Research Asia.

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.

President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.