Petr Vaníček (born 18 July 1935) is a Czech Canadian geodesist and theoretical geophysicist who has made important breakthroughs in theory of spectrum analysis and geoid computation.

He was the first chairperson of the United Nations committee for Geodetic Aspects of the Law of the Sea (GALOS), founded in Edinburgh, Scotland, by the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) in 1989.

[19] Over the course of his career, he taught or performed research at universities and labs across six continents, including the Royal Institute of Technology and the USGS.

[22] Since he was born into a typical bourgeois family, Petr Vaníček's wife and children requested to leave Communist Czechoslovakia during the brief but liberal times of Prague Spring.

The family reunited in England where he was staying on a 1967 Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Liverpool.