Rodney James Baxter FRS FAA (born 8 February 1940 in London, United Kingdom) is an Australian physicist, specialising in statistical mechanics.

Baxter was educated at Bancroft's School and Trinity College, Cambridge (BA, MA), before relocating to the Australian National University in Canberra to complete his PhD.

He also developed the corner transfer matrix method for calculating the order parameters of the eight-vertex and similar models.

In 2005 he used the method of Michio Jimbo, Tetsuji Miwa and Nakayashiki to verify Albertini, McCoy, Perk and Tang's conjecture for the order parameter of the chiral Potts model.

His use of the Yang–Baxter equation led to the formulation and the study of representations of the quantum group by Vladimir Drinfeld in the 1980s, and quantum generalisations of affine algebras, and they are quasi-triangular Hopf algebras which yield solutions of the Yang–Baxter equation and provide insight into the properties of corresponding statistical models.