Nathan Myhrvold
Nathan Myhrvold, recently featured in The New York Times, allowing them into his kitchen. An unusual kitchen to the normal. It is almost a testing place for his new cook book, which started as a 300 page discussion book, and has now blown into a 1,500 paged book.
Myhrvold is an ex Microsoft employee and founder of a company called Intellectual Ventures. The book is based on the science of cooking, with features on sous vide, a popular restaurant cooking technique using vacuum sealed bags in warm water baths. It also talks about microbiology, food safety and the physics of heat transfer on the stove and the oven. While also giving you formulas for turning vegetables and fruit into gels.
He even has found the flaw in the shape and color of Weber Grills in culinary heat transfer physics sayin that the inside of the grill should be vertical and shiny to reflect the heat, which can be fixed by adding an aluminum insert into the grill, to achieve even cooking temperatures across the cooking grate.
So they even have directions for that in his new book.
Myhrvold and IV was featured in a Malcolm Gladwell piece on the nature of invention just last year.