Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov. He played a key role in deciphering Mayan script. He conducted his Mayan research in near total academic isolation behind the Iron Curtain. I first found out about him, and this awesome photograph, from PBS’ “Nova: Cracking the Maya Code” It’s available on Netflix’s Watch Instantly, BTW. So was this incredibly stern-looking man way into cats, or what? Apparently so. Dmitri Minaev writes:

“In 1973, he published an article “On the questions of the classification of signal systems” and insisted that it was co-authored by his cat, Asya (full name is Aspid, Russian for “asp”) and her kitten, Fat Kys. He was a great cat lover and sometimes even confused his interlocutors by expressing his emotions with mewing :).”