-
#1 Theoretical Physics
Edward Witten
born 1951
Widely called the greatest living physicist. Built string theory and M-theory, and solved open problems in pure mathematics with physical intuition
Wrestling with right now
How supersymmetry emerges at particular mass values in adjoint QCD with one spatial dimension and time.
How they are going at it
His co-authored study constructs conserved supercurrents and extends the analysis to models with additional massless fermions, clarifying when supersymmetry applies to only part of the system. This is not a full solution of the model or of four-dimensional QCD.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1990) — the only physicist ever to receive it
- Proposed M-theory (1995), unifying the five string theories
- Decisive contributions to AdS/CFT and topological quantum field theory
Links
-
#2 Mathematics
Terence Tao
born 1975
The “Mozart of mathematics.” Youngest-ever IMO medalist at age 10, now solving problems from prime numbers to fluid equations
Wrestling with right now
The prime number theorem is right on average, but nobody has fully counted how often it fails over short intervals.
How they are going at it
Sharpens analytic bounds on those exceptional intervals, while experimenting with AI-assisted formal proofs in Lean on the side.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (2006), Royal Medal and many more
- Green–Tao theorem — the primes contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions
- Co-founded the mathematical foundations of compressed sensing
Books
- Solving Mathematical Problems
Links
-
#3 Artificial Intelligence
Geoffrey Hinton
born 1947
The “Godfather of AI.” Revived neural network learning, overturned computer vision with AlexNet, and directly ignited the deep learning revolution
Wrestling with right now
Can the deep learning he built be controlled once it outsmarts us? He says publicly that it might not be.
How they are going at it
Has shifted from research to advocacy on existential AI risk toward governments and companies, while voicing interest in brain-like learning rules such as forward-forward.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2024) — foundational discoveries for neural networks
- Turing Award (2018), with Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio
- Invented backpropagation in practice, AlexNet (2012), knowledge distillation
-
#4 Mathematical Physics
Roger Penrose
born 1931
Proved mathematically that black holes exist, then attacked computationalism head-on with the bold claim that consciousness is a quantum process
Wrestling with right now
How precisely can satellite orbits reveal frame-dragging, the effect of Earth's rotation on spacetime?
How they are going at it
A July 2026 paper he co-authored combines LARES-2 and LAGEOS laser ranging with GRACE gravity information, reporting about 0.1% relative uncertainty. Penrose jointly supervised the theoretical and general-relativity work. This tests gravity in Earth's weak-field environment; it does not test quantum state reduction.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2020) — showing black hole formation is a robust consequence of general relativity
- Singularity theorems (1965, extended with Hawking)
- Penrose triangles, twistors, and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC)
Books
- The Emperor's New Mind
- The Road to Reality
-
#5 AI & Molecular Biology
Demis Hassabis
born 1976
Chess prodigy at 4, game developer at 17. Founded DeepMind and proved “AI accelerates science” with AlphaGo and AlphaFold
Wrestling with right now
Can AI become a scientist itself — forming hypotheses, designing experiments, attacking open problems in mathematics on its own?
How they are going at it
Published Co-Scientist and a paper on autonomous mathematics research, treating automated discovery as the step after AlphaFold.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024) — AlphaFold protein structure prediction
- AlphaGo (2016) — defeated the world champion at Go
- AlphaFold2 (2020) — predicted the structures of ~200 million proteins
Links
-
#6 Geometry
Grigori Perelman
born 1966
Solved the century-old Poincaré conjecture, then declined both the Fields Medal and the $1 million prize — mathematics' hermit
Wrestling with right now
He has withdrawn from public life; there is no public information about what he works on.
How they are going at it
No papers or talks since the Poincaré proof. The only honest entry here is that nobody knows.
Achievements
- Proof of the Poincaré conjecture (2002-03) via Ricci flow with surgery
- Declined the Fields Medal (2006): “the prize was completely irrelevant”
- Also declined the Clay Millennium Prize money (2010)
-
#7 Theoretical Physics
Juan Maldacena
born 1968
“A world with gravity is written on its boundary” — AdS/CFT created the new grammar of quantum gravity
Wrestling with right now
Euclidean path integrals with gravity look unstable and their phase is ambiguous. Real instability, or a flaw in the calculation?
How they are going at it
Separates the phase of the path integral from genuine physical instabilities, rereading black-hole thermodynamics through holography.
Achievements
- AdS/CFT correspondence (1997) — among the most cited papers in modern physics (20,000+)
- The most concrete realization of the holographic principle
- Key contributions to the black hole information problem and the ER=EPR conjecture
-
#8 Quantum Information
David Deutsch
born 1953
The father of quantum computing. Invented the quantum Turing machine and rebuilt quantum mechanics on the many-worlds interpretation
Wrestling with right now
Constructor theory — his attempt to unify quantum theory, computation, evolution and epistemology — is not yet a testable physical theory.
How they are going at it
Continues applying it to information and thermodynamics with collaborators, and spreads the philosophy of good explanations through books and talks.
Achievements
- Proposed the quantum Turing machine (1985) — the birth of quantum computation
- Proved universal quantum computation; contributions to decoherence theory
- Grounded quantum computation in the many-worlds interpretation
Books
- The Fabric of Reality
- The Beginning of Infinity
-
#9 Number Theory
Andrew Wiles
born 1953
Met Fermat's Last Theorem at age 10 and proved it after seven years of secret work in his attic — a 358-year-old problem solved
Wrestling with right now
After Fermat, the big one: the BSD conjecture linking ranks of elliptic curves to L-functions. He recently wrote the memoir of his long-time colleague John Coates.
How they are going at it
Appears to keep working on elliptic curves along Iwasawa-theoretic lines, but publishes little; public information is thin.
Achievements
- Proof of Fermat's Last Theorem (1995) — the great epic of 20th-century mathematics
- Established the modularity theorem (semistable case), the path to the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture
- Abel Prize (2016) among many honors
-
#10 Artificial Intelligence
Yann LeCun
born 1960
Invented convolutional neural networks and gave machines sight; now charts AI's next act with the world-model program
Wrestling with right now
Large language models do not understand the world. How do you build AI that learns a world model from video and can plan?
How they are going at it
Pushes the JEPA (joint-embedding predictive) architecture, co-authors applied work such as medical imaging, and is reported to have left Meta in late 2025 to start a world-model company.
Achievements
- Turing Award (2018) — one of the three godfathers of deep learning
- LeNet (1998) — made handwritten digit recognition real with CNNs
- VP & Chief AI Scientist at Meta, professor at NYU
Links
-
#11 Artificial Intelligence
Yoshua Bengio
born 1964
One of the three godfathers of deep learning. Laid the groundwork for attention mechanisms, and is now the field's loudest voice on AI safety
Wrestling with right now
AI systems are showing early signs of deception and self-preservation. How do you design one that is safe?
How they are going at it
Proposes a non-agentic 'Scientist AI', founded the nonprofit LawZero, and chairs the International AI Safety Report.
Achievements
- Turing Award (2018)
- Attention-mechanism research — the direct ancestor of Transformers
- Pivoted to AI safety; proposed international AI safety institutions
Links
-
#12 Physics & Neuroscience
John Hopfield
born 1933
A physicist's model of the brain — the Hopfield network became the bridge between modern neural networks and biology
Wrestling with right now
Past ninety and a Nobel laureate, he keeps asking what physics can say about memory and computation in today's giant models.
How they are going at it
No new papers, but in talks he relates associative-memory models to modern transformers.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2024) — foundational discoveries enabling machine learning
- Hopfield network (1982) — memory as valleys in an energy landscape
- Pioneered precision biophysics of electron transfer in living cells
-
#13 Geometric Analysis
Shing-Tung Yau
born 1949
Calabi–Yau manifolds — the shape of string theory's hidden dimensions, and the foundation of modern geometric analysis
Wrestling with right now
The geometry of moduli spaces of Calabi–Yau manifolds and what it implies for string theory — plus rebuilding mathematics education in China.
How they are going at it
Advances shifted-potential theory for moduli stacks of sheaves, dabbles in numerical electromagnetics, and trains young mathematicians at Tsinghua.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1982) — proof of the positive mass theorem and the Calabi conjecture
- Calabi–Yau manifolds — the standard internal spaces of string theory
- Wolf Prize (2010); major contributions to mathematics education in China
Books
- The Shape of a Life
-
#14 Theoretical Physics
Gerard 't Hooft
born 1946
Proved gauge theories are mathematically well-behaved, putting the Standard Model on solid ground — then predicted “the world is a hologram”
Wrestling with right now
Is quantum mechanics really probabilistic? Completing his claim that a cellular automaton can reproduce it.
How they are going at it
Has spent decades polishing a deterministic (superdeterministic) foundation and keeps arguing for it in talks and books, far from the mainstream and unmoved.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (1999) — renormalizability of electroweak theory
- Pioneering proposal of the holographic principle (1993)
- Founder of lattice gauge theory and the large-N expansion
Links
-
#15 Biochemistry
Katalin Karikó
born 1955
In an era when mRNA was considered toxic, devised modified nucleosides — and after decades of obscurity, triggered the vaccine revolution
Wrestling with right now
Taking mRNA medicine beyond infectious-disease vaccines — cancer, genetic and autoimmune disease. The next move after modified nucleosides.
How they are going at it
Runs labs at Penn and Szeged, and uses her talks to teach young researchers to keep going after rejection.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2023), with Drew Weissman
- Nucleoside-modified mRNA (2005) — the technological core of COVID-19 vaccines
- The story of the most “late-blooming” Nobel Prize, begun in a demoted lab
-
#16 Molecular Biology
Jennifer Doudna
born 1964
Invented CRISPR-Cas9, the “genetic scissors,” making the rewriting of life's DNA a practical technology
Wrestling with right now
Turning CRISPR from a lab tool into therapy anyone can use safely: delivery to the right cells, and AI that can read RNA structure.
How they are going at it
Works on virus-like particles for targeted delivery and on expanding training data for RNA secondary-structure prediction at the same time.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2020), with Emmanuelle Charpentier
- CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing (2012)
- Leads the international debate on the ethics of gene editing
Books
- A Crack in Creation
-
#17 Computer Science
Donald Knuth
born 1938
Created the discipline of algorithm analysis, and has been writing The Art of Computer Programming — the bible of programming — for 60 years
Wrestling with right now
Finishing The Art of Computer Programming from Volume 4B onward (satisfiability, backtracking). At 88, still at it.
How they are going at it
Gives his annual Christmas lecture and posts pre-fascicles online so readers can find the errors while he writes.
Achievements
- Turing Award (1974) — then the youngest ever
- The Art of Computer Programming — “if you've read it all, send me a résumé” (Bill Gates)
- Created the TeX typesetting system — the foundation of academic publishing
Books
- The Art of Computer Programming
-
#18 Mathematics & Mathematical Physics
Maxim Kontsevich
born 1964
Turned physics' mirror symmetry into rigorous theorems, and keeps straddling geometry and physics with deformation quantization
Wrestling with right now
A non-commutative extension of the homological framework for mirror symmetry.
How they are going at it
Just published a definition of Lagrangians on non-commutative cluster varieties and tied it to quantization.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1998) — mathematical formulation of mirror symmetry
- Crafoord Prize (2008), Breakthrough Prize (2012)
- Deformation quantization, homological mirror symmetry, motivic multiple zeta values
-
#19 Number Theory & Geometry
Peter Scholze
born 1987
Full professor at 24, Fields Medal at 30. Invented “perfectoid spaces,” a new world that rewrote p-adic geometry
Wrestling with right now
Constructing the local Langlands correspondence — the bridge between number theory and representation theory — fully geometrically.
How they are going at it
On the Fargues–Fontaine curve born from perfectoid spaces, he is writing a series on geometric Eisenstein series and the geometrization of local Langlands.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (2018) — perfectoid spaces and perfectoid fields
- Prismatic cohomology (2018) — unifying p-adic cohomology theories
- Built Berlin–Bonn into a world center of arithmetic geometry
-
#20 Noncommutative Geometry
Alain Connes
born 1947
Created noncommutative geometry — “spaces without points” — and is rewriting the Standard Model as geometry itself
Wrestling with right now
The Riemann hypothesis, and a spectral understanding of the primes through non-commutative geometry.
How they are going at it
With Consani, keeps pursuing the adele class space and a spectral realization of the primes; mostly talks in recent years.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1982), Crafoord Prize (2001)
- Founder of noncommutative geometry
- Geometric formulation of the Standard Model via noncommutative geometry
-
#21 Theoretical Physics
David Gross
born 1941
Discovered “asymptotic freedom” — quarks get weaker the closer they are — completing the theory of the strong force (QCD)
Wrestling with right now
The man who found asymptotic freedom in QCD still faces unsolved confinement and the slow experimental progress of string theory.
How they are going at it
From KITP, focuses on long-range direction for fundamental physics and support for young researchers.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2004), with Wilczek and Politzer
- Asymptotic freedom (1973) — the establishment of QCD
- Leading advocate of string theory and quantum gravity research (longtime KITP director)
-
#22 Theoretical Physics
Frank Wilczek
born 1951
From asymptotic freedom to axions, anyons and time crystals — a believer in the beauty of physics, still predicting new forms of matter
Wrestling with right now
Can the vacuum itself be engineered — vacuum fluctuations to boost superconductivity, time crystals put to work?
How they are going at it
Reported evidence of vacuum-enhanced superconductivity in NbSe2, theorized enhanced condensation through rotation, and remains involved in axion searches.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2004) — the discovery of asymptotic freedom
- Proposed axions (dark-matter candidates), anyons, and time crystals
- A wellspring of new concepts including generalized symmetries
Books
- A Beautiful Question
Links
-
#23 Theoretical Physics
Cumrun Vafa
born 1960
Counted black hole entropy with strings, and with the Swampland program asks “why is the universe this shape and not another?”
Wrestling with right now
Narrowing string theory down to our actual universe: why dark energy is so small, why neutrino masses are what they are.
How they are going at it
Within the Swampland program, proposes the 'dark dimension' scenario and constrains it via neutrinos, B−L symmetry and the finiteness of 6d supergravity.
Achievements
- Breakthrough Prize (2017), Dirac Medal
- String-theoretic derivation of black hole macroscopic entropy (1996)
- The Swampland program — mapping the landscape of string vacua
Books
- Puzzles to Unfold the Universe
-
#24 Theoretical Physics
Nima Arkani-Hamed
born 1972
“Throw away the Lagrangian” — through scattering amplitudes and the amplituhedron, he searches for the structure from which spacetime itself emerges
Wrestling with right now
Deriving scattering amplitudes from combinatorial geometry without assuming spacetime — rebuilding quantum field theory.
How they are going at it
The latest in the amplituhedron line, 'the cut equation', reconstructs amplitudes from their cut structure.
Achievements
- Large extra dimensions (1998) — a pillar of beyond-Standard-Model physics
- The amplituhedron (2013) — a geometric encoding of scattering amplitudes
- The cosmological collider — setting the agenda for the next generation
-
#25 Theoretical Physics
Kip Thorne
born 1940
Caught gravitational waves with laser interferometers — a 50-year dream — turning Einstein's prediction into observed reality
Wrestling with right now
The next stage of gravitational-wave astronomy: listening to neutron-star interiors and the nonlinear regime of black-hole mergers.
How they are going at it
Retired from the front line; supports next-generation detectors such as Cosmic Explorer and works at the boundary of science and art.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2017) — direct detection of gravitational waves by LIGO
- Co-founder of the LIGO project (1984)
- Science advisor and originator of the film Interstellar
Books
- Black Holes and Time Warps
-
#26 Quantum Physics
Anton Zeilinger
born 1945
Took quantum entanglement from the lab bench to real technology — actually teleporting photons
Wrestling with right now
Is 'which path' information observer-dependent — subjective? A foundational question in quantum information.
How they are going at it
Published on the subjective nature of path information, translating interpretation debates into testable questions.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2022) — experimental verification of entanglement
- Quantum teleportation realized (1997)
- Pioneer of practical quantum cryptography and quantum communication experiments
-
#27 Quantum Physics
Alain Aspect
born 1947
Broke Bell's inequality in the lab — the first to show that “spooky action at a distance” is real
Wrestling with right now
Seeing the Anderson localization transition — waves trapped by disorder — energy by energy, with ultracold atoms.
How they are going at it
Leads quantum-simulation experiments that resolve the transition in energy using cold atoms.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2022)
- The Aspect experiment (1982) — decisive violation of Bell's inequality
- Contributions to atom lasers and cold-atom physics
-
#28 Quantum Physics
John Clauser
born 1942
A young man who doubted quantum mechanics built an experiment to refute it — and ended up proving it
Wrestling with right now
The first to violate Bell's inequality now publicly disputes the climate-science consensus.
How they are going at it
Has moved away from physics research toward climate-policy criticism. Opinions differ sharply; only the fact is recorded here.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physics (2022)
- The first Bell-inequality-violating experiment (1972)
- Elevated entanglement from paradox to experimental science
-
#29 Genetics
Svante Pääbo
born 1955
Read DNA out of fossil bones, revealing the truth of human history — that we carry Neanderthal blood
Wrestling with right now
What do the genes we inherited from Neanderthals do in modern bodies, and how do you read low-quality ancient genomes?
How they are going at it
Published a method for low-quality archaic genomes alongside a functional study of the Neanderthal growth-hormone receptor.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2022) — founder of paleogenomics
- Decoded the Neanderthal genome (2010)
- Discovered a new human species, the Denisovans
Books
- Neanderthal Man
-
#30 Biochemistry
David Baker
born 1962
Computes how amino-acid chains fold, then designs and builds proteins that have never existed in nature
Wrestling with right now
From designing proteins to testing designs at scale and closing the loop — and building molecules that assemble autocatalytically.
How they are going at it
Reported a framework that scales experimental characterization to speed up design, and de novo design of autocatalytically forming bonds.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024) — computational protein design
- Developed the Rosetta software suite
- Designed novel proteins now used in drugs, vaccines and catalysts
-
#31 Biochemistry & AI
John Jumper
born 1985
The brain of AlphaFold. Turned protein folding from a 50-year grand challenge into a solved problem with machine learning
Wrestling with right now
After AlphaFold: predicting not just structure but molecular motion and interactions as a whole.
How they are going at it
Appears to lead successor models to AlphaFold 3 at DeepMind; few papers under his own name, so public information is limited.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2024)
- AlphaFold2 (2020) — the runaway CASP14 win that transformed structural biology
- One of the youngest ever to receive a science Nobel, at 37
-
#32 Cell Biology
Yoshinori Ohsumi
born 1945
Found the genes of autophagy — how a cell eats itself — in yeast, mapping life's recycling machinery
Wrestling with right now
A structural explanation of how autophagy recognizes membranes and gets started.
How they are going at it
Published the structural and mechanistic basis of membrane recognition and activation, while speaking out on shrinking basic-research funding in Japan.
Achievements
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2016) — Japan's second solo laureate
- Identified the autophagy gene family (1990s)
- Laid the foundation for research linking autophagy to cancer and neurodegeneration
-
#33 Cosmology
Alan Guth
born 1947
Imagined a fleeting runaway expansion — cosmic inflation — in the universe's first unimaginable fraction of a second
Wrestling with right now
In the very large (or infinite) universe inflation predicts, how do you even define probability? The measure problem.
How they are going at it
A run of papers on probabilistic inference in very large universes and the look-elsewhere effect in statistical isotropy.
Achievements
- Proposed cosmic inflation (1981)
- Dissolved the flatness, horizon and magnetic-monopole problems
- Formed the foundation of today's standard model of cosmology
Books
- The Inflationary Universe
-
#34 Cosmology
Andrei Linde
born 1948
Extended inflation from a one-off event to an eternal process that forever spawns new universes
Wrestling with right now
Pinning inflation models down with observation (CMB B-modes and the like). What comes after α-attractors.
How they are going at it
Keeps proposing new model families: exponential and polynomial ξ-attractors, singular α-attractors.
Achievements
- Chaotic inflation (1983)
- Eternal inflation and the multiverse (1986)
- Built the main modern forms of inflationary theory
-
#35 Theoretical Physics
Leonard Susskind
born 1940
Challenged Hawking — “black holes do not destroy information” — and co-built the holographic principle
Wrestling with right now
Holography for de Sitter space — our universe. Spontaneous breaking of time-reversal may be the key.
How they are going at it
Back-to-back papers on 'Holograms and Standard Models' and time-reversal breaking in de Sitter, with quantum complexity as the organizing idea.
Achievements
- Co-proposer of the holographic principle (1995)
- One of the founders of string theory (1969-70)
- The ER=EPR conjecture (2013, with Maldacena)
Books
- The Black Hole War
Links
-
#36 Theoretical Physics
Gabriele Veneziano
born 1942
In 1968 a formula written in search of the strong force turned out, by accident, to be the founding paper of string theory
Wrestling with right now
Can the father of string theory describe 'before the Big Bang' with string cosmology?
How they are going at it
Has nurtured the pre-Big-Bang scenario for decades; recent activity is mostly talks and retrospectives.
Achievements
- The Veneziano amplitude (1968) — the origin of string theory
- Half a century of contributions to string theory's development
- Research leadership at CERN's theory division and the Collège de France
-
#37 Theoretical Physics
Carlo Rovelli
born 1956
“Time does not flow” — questions the reality of time through loop quantum gravity, and carries readers into philosophy
Wrestling with right now
Experimental footholds for loop quantum gravity, and the charge that bad philosophy is holding physics back.
How they are going at it
Publishes on circuit locality from relativistic locality in scalar-field-mediated interactions alongside essays in philosophy of science.
Achievements
- Co-founder of loop quantum gravity (1990s)
- The thermal-time hypothesis — time as a thermodynamic phenomenon
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics — millions of copies worldwide
Books
- Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
- The Order of Time
Links
-
#38 Theoretical Physics
Lee Smolin
born 1955
“Time is real, and even the laws evolve” — the physicist who keeps dissenting from mainstream string theory
Wrestling with right now
Is time real? Do the laws of physics evolve? Can quantum gravity be reached on a road other than string theory?
How they are going at it
From Perimeter Institute, pursues his own approaches such as causal sets and energetic causal sets.
Achievements
- Co-founder of loop quantum gravity
- Cosmological natural selection — universes evolving by Darwinian means
- Sharp critiques of modern physics methodology (The Trouble with Physics)
Books
- Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Links
-
#39 Algebraic Geometry
Pierre Deligne
born 1944
Solved the final piece of the Weil conjectures and modernized the very language of algebraic geometry
Wrestling with right now
Having proved the Weil conjectures, he still pursues the finished form of the theory of motives.
How they are going at it
Publishes little but shapes mathematics through mentoring at IAS and through letters and private notes.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1978), Abel Prize (2013), Crafoord Prize (2008)
- Proof of the Weil conjectures (Weil I, 1974) — the bedrock of later arithmetic geometry
- Standardized the modern vocabulary: l-adic sheaves, Weil representations
-
#40 Mathematics
Maryna Viazovska
born 1984
Solved sphere packing in 8 dimensions — a 400-year-old problem — with a 24-page “magic formula”
Wrestling with right now
Sphere packing is solved in 8 and 24 dimensions and untouched in the rest. Is there a general theory of universal optimality?
How they are going at it
Extends the theory of modular forms and interpolation formulas and explores new uncertainty principles in Fourier analysis.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (2022) — the first ever from Ukraine
- Solved sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24 (2016)
- New techniques connecting modular forms and Fourier interpolation
-
#41 Combinatorics
June Huh
born 1983
An aspiring poet until 23 — then switched to mathematics and has been flattening long-standing combinatorics conjectures ever since
Wrestling with right now
Why does log-concavity in combinatorics share the structure of Hodge theory in algebraic geometry? The general theory.
How they are going at it
Tries to extend the combinatorial Kähler package beyond matroids.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (2022)
- Solved the Read conjecture and the Rota conjecture
- Established bringing Hodge theory into combinatorics
-
#42 Number Theory
Akshay Venkatesh
born 1981
Moves freely across number theory, dynamics and representation theory — an IMO bronze medalist at 13
Wrestling with right now
How does mathematical research change when AI becomes a mathematician?
How they are going at it
Leads discussions at IAS on the future of mathematics in the age of AI and reports on the NSF math institutes.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (2018)
- Fused ergodic theory with number theory
- Built new bridges, including topological automorphic forms
-
#43 Combinatorics
Timothy Gowers
born 1963
Turned combinatorics into a weapon with the idea of “removing the loss of generality” — and changed how mathematics is done together
Wrestling with right now
Can the way human mathematicians discover proofs be captured in a program?
How they are going at it
A long-running project to make automated theorem proving think more like a human, practised in the open through blog and video.
Achievements
- Fields Medal (1998) — Banach space theory and combinatorics
- Founded the Polymath Project — mass-participation mathematics
- Developed additive combinatorics underpinning the Green–Tao theorem
Books
- Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction
-
#44 Computer Science
Judea Pearl
born 1936
Wants to give AI the power to reason about causes, not just correlations — he created the science of causal inference
Wrestling with right now
Can causal inference be built into drug approval? The limits of evidence made of correlation alone.
How they are going at it
Argues that the FDA's evidence framework should be modernized in causal terms. At ninety, still writing.
Achievements
- Turing Award (2011) — Bayesian networks
- The mathematical framework of causal inference (do-calculus, counterfactuals)
- Proposed causal models as the shared language of AI and humans
Books
- The Book of Why
Links
-
#45 Artificial Intelligence
Richard Sutton
“Give it reward, and intelligence will grow” — established reinforcement learning as a discipline and speaks most bluntly about AI research with The Bitter Lesson
Wrestling with right now
How to build AI that keeps learning from experience. In his view, LLMs merely imitate what humans wrote.
How they are going at it
Drives continual learning and the Alberta Plan at the University of Alberta, and builds 'era of experience' AI at Keen Technologies.
Achievements
- Established reinforcement learning (TD learning and more)
- The Bitter Lesson (2019) — “general methods that leverage computation win”
- Turing Award (2024), with Andrew Barto
Books
- Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
Links
-
#46 Cosmology
Sean Carroll
born 1966
The arrow of time, many worlds, the foundations of the universe — restates the hardest problems of physics in the most honest, clearest words
Wrestling with right now
Can spacetime itself emerge from the many-worlds structure of quantum mechanics?
How they are going at it
Studies gravity emerging from the structure of Hilbert space while running a podcast and writing books.
Achievements
- Research on the arrow of time, eternal inflation, and many-worlds quantum mechanics
- The Mindscape podcast — dialogues across the academy
- The most prominent public advocate of the many-worlds interpretation
Books
- The Big Picture
- Something Deeply Hidden
Links
-
#47 Theoretical Physics
Sabine Hossenfelder
born 1976
“A beautiful theory need not be true” — the popular contrarian physicist who argues head-on against supersymmetry and multiverse claims
Wrestling with right now
Fundamental physics is lost in beauty — where does that critique go next?
How they are going at it
Proposes a superdeterministic reconstruction of quantum mechanics and critiques the state of science on YouTube and in books.
Achievements
- Research on experimental constraints on supersymmetry and extra dimensions
- Exploring testable phenomenology of quantum gravity
- 3M+ YouTube subscribers — among the most-read physicists alive
Books
- Lost in Math
Links
-
#48 Theoretical Physics
Brian Greene
born 1963
Made string theory a world bestseller with The Elegant Universe — physics' great evangelist
Wrestling with right now
Can the global shape (topology) of the universe be determined by observation?
How they are going at it
Published on a Klein-bottle cosmological model and keeps up public outreach such as the World Science Festival.
Achievements
- Pioneering research on mirror symmetry and Calabi–Yau manifolds
- The Elegant Universe — Pulitzer finalist (2000)
- Co-founder of the World Science Festival
Books
- The Elegant Universe
-
#49 Theoretical Physics
Michio Kaku
born 1947
Co-founder of string field theory, and a Japanese-American science evangelist who captivates the world with predictions of the future
Wrestling with right now
A co-founder of string field theory who sees his role as explaining the unified theory to everyone.
How they are going at it
Away from front-line research; explains quantum computing and future technology through books, TV and radio.
Achievements
- Co-founder of string field theory (1970s)
- Many bestsellers on the future of science and technology
- Extensive radio and television science outreach
Books
- Physics of the Impossible
Links
-
#50 Linguistics & Cognitive Science
Noam Chomsky
born 1928
Argued language is innate, and in doing so created the starting point of linguistics, cognitive science — and computer science
Wrestling with right now
Can the essence of language be explained by the 'minimal computation' of generative grammar? He is 97.
How they are going at it
Activity has been limited by health in recent years; no new research has been published. Recorded here as a fact.
Achievements
- The Chomsky hierarchy — the bedrock of computation theory and formal languages
- Generative grammar and the language-acquisition-device (LAD) hypothesis
- Central figure of the cognitive revolution; among the most-cited living scholars
Books
- Syntactic Structures
The fifty at a glance — five currents of 2026
Lay the fifty "wrestling with right now" entries side by side and the story stops being about individuals and starts being about the moment. As of September 2026, five lines can be drawn across fields, regardless of rank.
1. AI is moving from the scientist's tool to the scientist
Hassabis published Co-Scientist, which forms hypotheses and designs experiments, and then a paper on AI doing autonomous mathematics. Tao has AI assist his formal proofs in Lean, Gowers keeps trying to capture human discovery in a program, and Venkatesh has made "mathematics in the age of AI" a theme at IAS. Hinton and Bengio, meanwhile, see the controllability of that same technology as the biggest problem there is. — Hassabis, Tao, Gowers, Venkatesh, Hinton, Bengio, Sutton
2. The "interpretation" of quantum mechanics has become an experimental fight
Penrose is trying to make gravity-induced collapse testable; Zeilinger asks in experimental terms whether which-path information is observer-dependent. 't Hooft and Hossenfelder polish superdeterminism away from the mainstream, and the XENONnT result described in the Multiverse Guide tightened collapse models a hundredfold. What used to be philosophy is now apparatus. — Penrose, Zeilinger, Aspect, 't Hooft, Hossenfelder, Deutsch
3. The centre of gravity has shifted to "spacetime is not the starting point"
Arkani-Hamed derived an equation that builds scattering amplitudes from combinatorial geometry with no spacetime; Susskind organizes de Sitter holography around broken time-reversal; Maldacena separates real instabilities from artefacts in the gravitational path integral; Carroll looks for spacetime emerging from Hilbert space. Vafa's Swampland program runs the other way — narrowing string theory down to our universe. — Arkani-Hamed, Susskind, Maldacena, Carroll, Rovelli, Vafa, Witten
4. Life science has gone from reading to designing and testing at scale
Baker reported a framework for scaling experimental characterization of designed proteins; Doudna pursues particles that deliver CRISPR to the right cells and AI that reads RNA structure at the same time; Karikó pushes mRNA beyond infectious disease. Pääbo built a method for low-quality ancient genomes and Ohsumi explained how autophagy starts, structurally. What they share is building machines that mass-produce discoveries rather than making one. — Baker, Doudna, Karikó, Jumper, Pääbo, Ohsumi
5. Still writing at eighty and ninety
Knuth (88) is writing the next part of The Art of Computer Programming; Pearl (90) argues causal inference belongs in drug approval; Penrose (95) has not given up testing his theory; Hopfield (93) lectures on modern models from physics. If June Huh is the counterexample to "you must be precocious", these four are the counterexample to "you retire". — Knuth, Pearl, Penrose, Hopfield, Gross, Chomsky
How to keep following them
- Read arXiv directly. For anyone with the "arXiv" chip, a new submission shows up here within hours — before any journal.
- Read their own pages. Bellard, Lamport and Mochizuki publish on their own sites before anywhere else (collected in the Shadow Genius Ranking).
- Watch the talks. Ideas that never become papers show up in lectures. Each card's talk link goes straight to a YouTube search.
The "wrestling with right now" entries are as of September 2026. They will be rewritten, with new sources, as things move.