‘Leaders,’ ‘successors,’ and ‘toilers’: Mathematicians classify physicists and other scientists

As of 2013, there were 7.8 million researchers globally, according to UNESCO. This means that 0.1 percent of the people in the world professionally do science. Their work is largely financed by governments, yet public officials are not themselves researchers. To help governments make sense of the scientific community, mathematicians from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Trapeznikov Institute of Control Sciences have devised a researcher typology. Their paper, in Russian, was published in the journal Large-Scale Systems Control. It is available for download from MathNet.Ru, a Russian math research repository.