Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707[note 1] – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming organisms. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy". Many of his writings were in Latin; his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus and, after his 1761 ennoblement, as Carolus a Linné.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958)[1] was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. Her work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, Franklin's contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognised during her life, for which Franklin has been variously referred to as the "wronged heroine", the "dark lady of DNA", the "forgotten heroine", a "feminist icon", and the "Sylvia Plath of molecular biology".
Dmitri Mendeleev
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev (/ˌmɛndəlˈeɪəf/ MEN-dəl-AY-əf; 8 February [O.S. 27 January] 1834 – 2 February [O.S. 20 January] 1907) was a Russian chemist known for formulating the periodic law and creating a version of the periodic table of elements. He used the periodic law not only to correct the then-accepted properties of some known elements, such as the valence and atomic weight of uranium, but also to predict the properties of three elements that were yet to be discovered (germanium, gallium and scandium).
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (/ˈtjʊərɪŋ/; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist.[5] He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer.Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science.
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher, and Catholic writer.
Pascal was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. His earliest mathematical work was on projective geometry; he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of conic sections at the age of 16.
Hypatia
Hypatia[a] (born c. 350–370 – March 415 AD)[1][4] was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt: at that time a major city of the Eastern Roman Empire. In Alexandria, Hypatia was a prominent thinker who taught subjects including philosophy and astronomy,[5] and in her lifetime was renowned as a great teacher and a wise counselor. Not the only fourth century Alexandrian female mathematician, Hypatia was preceded by Pandrosion.However, Hypatia is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's Almagest, based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the Almagest.
Wilhelm Röntgen
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁœntɡən] ; 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923), sometimes transliterated as Roentgen (/ˈrɛntɡən/ RENT-guhn or /ˈrʌntdʒən/ RUHNT-juhn), was a German physicist who produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays. As a result of this discovery, he became the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.
Niels Bohr
Niels Henrik David Bohr (US: /boʊr/, UK: /bɔː/; Danish: [ˈne̝ls ˈhenʁek ˈtæːvið ˈpoɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish theoretical physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
Marie Curie
Maria Salomea Skłodowska-Curie (Polish: [ˈmarja salɔˈmɛa skwɔˈdɔfska kʲiˈri] née Skłodowska; 7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934), known simply as Marie Curie (/ˈkjʊəri/ KURE-ee; French: [maʁi kyʁi]), was a Polish and naturalised-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe (/ˈtaɪkoʊ ˈbrɑː(h)i, - ˈbrɑː(hə)/ TY-koh BRAH-(h)ee, - BRAH(-hə); Danish: [ˈtsʰykʰo ˈpʁɑːə] ; born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, Danish: [ˈtsʰyːjə ˈʌtəsn̩ ˈpʁɑːə] 14 December 1546 – 24 October 1601), generally called Tycho for short, was a Danish astronomer of the Renaissance, known for his comprehensive and unprecedentedly accurate astronomical observations. He was known during his lifetime as an astronomer, astrologer, and alchemist. He was the last major astronomer before the invention of the telescope. Tycho Brahe has also been described as the greatest pre-telescopic astronomer.
Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson (May 27, 1907 – April 14, 1964) was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose sea trilogy (1941–1955) and book Silent Spring (1962) are credited with advancing marine conservation and the global environmental movement.
Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s.
Edward Jenner
Edward Jenner (17 May 1749 – 26 January 1823) was an English physician and scientist who pioneered the concept of vaccines and created the smallpox vaccine, the world's first vaccine.The terms vaccine and vaccination are derived from Variolae vaccinae ('pustules of the cow'), the term devised by Jenner to denote cowpox. He used it in 1798 in the title of his Inquiry into the Variolae vaccinae known as the Cow Pox, in which he described the protective effect of cowpox against smallpox.
Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke FRS (/hʊk/; 18 July 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English polymath who was active as a physicist ("natural philosopher"), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist and architect. He is credited as one of the first scientists to investigate living things at microscopic scale in 1665, using a compound microscope that he designed.Hooke was an impoverished scientific inquirer in young adulthood who went on to become one of the most important scientists of his time.[8] After the Great Fire of London in 1666, Hooke (as a surveyor and architect) attained wealth and esteem by performing more than half of the property line surveys and assisting with the city's rapid reconstruction.[9][8] Often vilified by writers in the centuries after his death, his reputation was restored at the end of the twentieth century and he has been called "England's Leonardo [da Vinci]".
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, which include the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and early versions of the electric light bulb, have had a widespread impact on the modern industrialized world. He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of organized science and teamwork to the process of invention, working with many researchers and employees. He established the first industrial research laboratory.
Guglielmo Marconi
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquess of Marconi (/mɑːrˈkoʊni/ mahr-KOH-nee; Italian: [ɡuʎˈʎɛlmo dʒoˈvanni maˈriːa marˈkoːni]; 25 April 1874 – 20 July 1937) was an Italian electrical engineer, inventor, and politician known for his creation of a practical radio wave-based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi being credited as the inventor of radio and sharing the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".His work laid the foundation for the development of radio, television, and all modern wireless communication systems.
Antoine Lavoisier
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (/ləˈvwɑːzieɪ/ lə-VWAH-zee-ay; French: [ɑ̃twan lɔʁɑ̃ də lavwazje]; 26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794), also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution, was a French nobleman and chemist who was central to the 18th-century chemical revolution and who had a large influence on both the history of chemistry and the history of biology.
It is generally accepted that Lavoisier's great accomplishments in chemistry stem largely from his changing the science from a qualitative to a quantitative one.
Max Planck
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (/ˈplæŋk/; German: [maks ˈplaŋk] ; 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
Planck made many substantial contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of quantum theory and one of the founders of modern physics, which revolutionized understanding of atomic and subatomic processes. He is known for the Planck constant, which is of foundational importance for quantum physics, and which he used to derive a set of units, today called Planck units, expressed only in terms of fundamental physical constants.
Dalton
John Dalton FRS (/ˈdɔːltən/; 5 or 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist. He introduced the atomic theory into chemistry. He also researched colour blindness; as a result, the umbrella term for red-green congenital colour blindness disorders is Daltonism in several languages.
Joseph Priestley
Joseph Priestley FRS (/ˈpriːstli/; 24 March 1733 – 6 February 1804) was an English chemist, Unitarian, natural philosopher, separatist theologian, grammarian, multi-subject educator and classical liberal political theorist. He published over 150 works, and conducted experiments in several areas of science.
Priestley is credited with his independent discovery of oxygen by the thermal decomposition of mercuric oxide, having isolated it in 1774.
Hans Bethe
Hans Albrecht Eduard Bethe (/ˈbɛθə/; German: [ˈhans ˈbeːtə] ; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967 for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
Aristarchus of Samos
Aristarchus of Samos (/ˌærəˈstɑːrkəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος ὁ Σάμιος, Aristarkhos ho Samios; c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the universe, with the Earth revolving around the Sun once a year and rotating about its axis once a day. He also supported the theory of Anaxagoras according to which the Sun was just another star.
Theophrastus
Theophrastus (/ˌθiː.əˈfræstəs/; Ancient Greek: Θεόφραστος, romanized: Theophrastos, lit. 'godly phrased'; c. 371 – c. 287 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and naturalist. A native of Eresos in Lesbos, he was Aristotle's close colleague and successor as head of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy in Athens. Theophrastus wrote numerous treatises across all areas of philosophy, working to support, improve, expand, and develop the Aristotelian system. He made significant contributions to various fields, including ethics, metaphysics, botany, and natural history.
Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré[1] (UK: /ˈpwæ̃kɑːreɪ/, US: /ˌpwæ̃kɑːˈreɪ/; French: [ɑ̃ʁi pwɛ̃kaʁe] ; 29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as "The Last Universalist", since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime. He has further been called "the Gauss of modern mathematics".Due to his success in science, along with his influence and philosophy, he has been called "the philosopher par excellence of modern science."
Neumann
John von Neumann (/vɒn ˈnɔɪmən/ von NOY-mən; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian and American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist and engineer. Von Neumann had perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time, integrating pure and applied sciences and making major contributions to many fields, including mathematics, physics, economics, computing, and statistics. He was a pioneer in building the mathematical framework of quantum physics, in the development of functional analysis, and in game theory, introducing or codifying concepts including cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA.