List of Famous people born in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Friedrich-Karl "Friedel“ Thielemann is a German-Swiss theoretical astrophysicist.

Martin Grötschel is a German mathematician known for his research on combinatorial optimization, polyhedral combinatorics, and operations research. From 1991 to 2012 he was Vice President of the Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and served from 2012 to 2015 as ZIB's President. From 2015 to 2020 he was President of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BBAW).

Klaus Peter Richard Otto Zumwinkel was Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of Deutsche Post between 1990 and 2008. Being under suspicion of tax fraud, he resigned from office on February 15, 2008. He was convicted in January 2009, and given a suspended sentence of two years imprisonment and fined one million euros.

Johannes Georg Bednorz is a German physicist who, together with K. Alex Müller, discovered high-temperature superconductivity in ceramics, for which they shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Michael C. F. Wiescher is a German-American experimental nuclear physicist and astrophysicist, known for his laboratory research in nuclear physics connected with various astrophysical phenomena such as stellar evolution and explosion environments.