Rights NRAO/AUI/NSF Photographer Woodruff T. Sullivan III Photo Credit NRAO/AUI Archives, Sullivan Collection · CC BY 4.0

A self-taught Soviet physicist who helped design his country's nuclear weapons program from 1943, Zeldovich later turned to pure science and became one of the founders of modern physical cosmology, working out fundamental results on the thermodynamics of black holes and the physics of the early universe. His work bridging combustion, hydrodynamics, and cosmology influenced physicists on both sides of the Cold War despite decades of Soviet secrecy around his earlier weapons work.