https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Girona7 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A physical chemist, born Jerome Karfunkle, who worked out mathematical methods for determining a crystal's atomic structure directly from X-ray scattering patterns, sparing researchers years of trial-and-error analysis. Developed jointly with Herbert Hauptman over several decades, the technique became a standard tool across chemistry, biology and materials science for figuring out what a molecule actually looks like. The pair shared the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the work.