Although professors aren’t often seen as celebrities, there are some that are remarkable enough to achieve such status. These professors are winners of Nobel, Pulitzer, and other prestigious awards, subjects of books and movies, and all very well known and respected as experts in their fields. In no particular order, these are 10 of the hottest celebrity professors in recent memory.

1. Randy Pausch: Randy Pausch was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, teaching computer science and human-computer interaction and design. He is best known for his popular YouTube video, The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, which led to media appearances and a New York Times bestselling book called The Last Lecture. Pausch died from complications due to pancreatic cancer in 2008.
2. Toni Morrison: Toni Morrison is an American author, editor, and professor. She has won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, and was listed as one of the 100 Greatest African Americans in 2002. She was a professor of Humanities at Princeton University for nearly 20 years, and previously taught at the State University of New York. She holds an honorary Doctor of Letters from Oxford University and received the Barnard Medal of Distinction, Barnard College’s highest honor.
3. Lawrence Lessig: Lawrence Lessig is known well as an academic and political activist, primarily concerned with copyright and related matters, although he has shifted his focus to political corruption. Lessig is a professor at Stanford Law School, formerly of University of Chicago and Harvard as well. He is the founder of Creative Commons and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, as well as a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center and a former board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
4. John Nash: John Nash is the subject of the novel and movie A Beautiful Mind, which won four Academy Awards. He is an American mathematician and economist who works as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for game theory work in 1994.
5. Paul Krugman: Paul Krugman is a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton, as well as a centenary professor at the London School of Economics. Krugman is also a columnist for the New York Times. He recently won the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, and is known for his work in international economics.
6. Cornel West: Cornel Ronald West is famous Western philosopher, author, civil rights activist, and professor. He currently works a University Professor at Princeton, and has contributed greatly to the post-1960s civil rights movement. Cornel West has appeared and been referenced in a variety of popular culture. He has appeared in both The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions as an elder of Zion, also providing philosophical commentary on all three Matrix films.
7. Stephen Hawking: Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist and professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. Hawking has been very successful with popular science works including the bestseller A Brief History of Time. He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Science. Hawking is frequently appearing or portrayed in popular culture.
8. Steven Pinker: Steven Pinker was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2004, has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist twice, and has received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, and Tromso. He is currently the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard, although he has also taught at Stanford, University of California, and MIT. He has visited The Colbert Report twice.
9. Milton Friedman: Milton Friedman was an American economist, known well for research in consumption analysis, stabilization policy, and monetary history and theory. He was a leader of the Chicago School of Economics at the University of Chicago. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Sciences in 1976. He also served on the President’s Economic Policy Advisory Board for the Reagan Administration, and received the National Medal of Science as well as the Presidential Medal of freedom. Friedman’s name is used by the Cato Institute for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.
10. Noam Chomsky: Noam Chomsky is well known as a Western philosopher and one of the fathers of modern linguistics. He is also known as an anarchist, political dissident, and libertarian socialist. He is currently a professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and an Institute Professor. He has received numerous honorary degrees from universities throughout the world, and has delivered remarkable lectures at a variety of universities as well.