Physical World/Scientists

A

Alhazen (c. 965 – c. 1040) made significant contributions to the principles of optics, astronomy, mathematics, and meteorology. Alhazen's most famous work is Book of Optics

Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC) is considered the greatest mathematician of antiquity. He invented a machine (Archimedes’ screw) to pump water uphill. During the siege of Syracuse, a device (Archimedes’ heat ray) was used to focus sunlight onto approaching ships, causing them to catch fire. The most widely known anecdote about Archimedes tells of how he invented a method for determining the volume of an object with an irregular shape (Archimedes’ principle) – while taking a bath, he noticed that the level of the water in the tub rose as he got in, and when he got out he cried “Eureka!”

Aristarchus (310 – 230 BC) was an astronomer and mathematician, born on the island of Samos, in Greece. He is the first known person to present a heliocentric model of the solar system

B

Joseph Banks (1743 – 1820) took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage, from 1768 to 1771. Banks is credited with the introduction to the Western world of eucalyptus, acacia, and mimosa. Approximately 80 species of plants bear Banks's name. Banks was also the leading founder of the African Association, and a member of the Society of Dilettanti, which helped to establish the Royal Academy. Banks went on Endeavour to Brazil, then to observe transit of Venus from Tahiti

Henry Walter Bates (1825 – 1892) is most famous for his expedition to the Amazon with Alfred Russel Wallace in 1848. Wallace returned in 1852, but lost his collection in a shipwreck. When Bates arrived home seven years later he had sent back over 14,000 specimens (mostly insects) of which 8,000 were new to science. Bates' work on Amazonian butterflies led him to develop the first scientific account of mimicry, especially the kind of mimicry which bears his name: Batesian mimicry

Alexander Graham Bell (1847 – 1922) was awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. On March 10, 1876, three days after his patent was issued, Bell succeeded in getting his telephone to work. When Bell spoke the famous sentence "Mr. Watson – Come here – I want to see you" into the liquid transmitter, Watson, listening at the receiving end in an adjoining room, heard the words clearly. Bell also did groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications, hydrofoils and aeronautics

Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962) was a Danish physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom. He made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. In 1943 he fled to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project

Norman Borlaug (1914 – 2009) has been called “the father of the Green Revolution”. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties

Max Born (1882 – 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics. Worked at the University of Gottingen before moving to Britain in 1933

Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691) was the fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. He is one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, at a constant temperature. Wrote The Sceptical Chymist

Tycho Brahe (1546 – 1601) was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations. While studying at University of Rostock in Germany Tycho lost part of his nose in a duel with fellow Danish nobleman Manderup Parsbjerg. For the rest of his life, he was said to have worn a realistic replacement made of silver and gold. In his De nova stella (‘On the new star’) of 1573, Tycho Brahe refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise measurements indicated that ‘new stars’ (stella novae, now known as supernovae), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sub-lunar phenomena

Robert Brown (1773 – 1858) was a Scottish botanist who made important contributions to botany largely through his pioneering use of the microscope. His contributions include the discovery of the cell nucleus and cytoplasmic streaming; the first observation of Brownian motion; early work on plant pollination and fertilisation, including being the first to recognise the fundamental difference between gymnosperms and angiosperms; and some of the earliest studies in palynology. Worked on orchids at Kew Gardens

William Speirs Bruce (1867 – 1921) was a Scottish naturalist, polar scientist and oceanographer who organized and led the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition (1902–1904) to the South Orkney Islands and the Weddell Sea. Among other achievements, the expedition established the first permanent weather station in Antarctica

Comte de Buffon (1707 – 1788) is best remembered for his great work Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. It included everything known about the natural world up until that date. He noted that despite similar environments, different regions have distinct plants and animals, a concept later known as Buffon's Law, widely considered the first principle of Biogeography. Basing his figures on the cooling rate of iron, he calculated that the age of the earth was 75,000 years

Robert Bunsen (1811 – 1899) was born in Germany. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium and rubidium with Gustav Kirchhoff. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, and was a pioneer in photochemistry. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner

Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb as a primary organizer of the Manhattan Project, and the idea of the memex, an adjustable microfilm-viewer which is somewhat analogous to the structure of the World Wide Web. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush coordinated the activities leading American scientists in the application of science to warfare

C

Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852 – 1934) was a Spanish histologist, psychologist, and Nobel laureate. His pioneering investigations of the microscopic structure of the brain were original: he was considered by many to be the greatest neuroscientists of all time

Annie Jump Cannon (1863 – 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures

Giovanni Cassini (1625 – 1712) was the first person to observe four of Saturn's moons. In addition he discovered the Cassini Division in the rings of Saturn (1675). He measured for the first time the true dimensions of the solar system. Cassini's method of determining longitude was used to measure the size of France accurately for the first time. Carte de Cassini – topographic map of France completed in 1789

Henry Cavendish (1731 – 1810) is noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called ‘inflammable air’. Known for his researches into the composition of atmospheric air, the properties of different gases, the synthesis of water, the law governing electrical attraction and repulsion, a mechanical theory of heat, and calculations of the density (and hence the mass) of the Earth

Anders Celsius (1701 – 1744) was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which takes his name

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was born in Torun, Poland. He was the first astronomer to formulate a modern heliocentric theory of the solar system in opposition to Ptolemy's earlier geocentric theory. His epochal book, On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, is often conceived as the starting point of modern astronomy. In 1517, he derived a quantity theory of money and, in 1519, formulated a version of what later became known as Gresham's law. Rheticus was Nicolaus Copernicus' sole pupil, who facilitated the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres’) in 1543

Archibald Scott Couper (1831 – 1892) was a Scottish chemist who proposed an early theory of chemical structure and bonding. Couper's idea that carbon atoms can link to each other following valence regularities was independent of a paper by August Kekule proposing the same concept

Francis Crick (1916 – 2004) was a co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953 with James Watson at Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. He, Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Crick went into The Eagle pub in Cambridge on 28 February 1953 to announce that he and James Watson had "discovered the secret of life". Crick discovered that DNA was a triplet code. Francis Crick’s wife, Odile, created the drawing of DNA in the article in Nature in 1953

Marie Curie (1867 – 1934) was born Maria Skłodowska in Warsaw. In 1891 she followed her older sister to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris (La Sorbonne), and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in Paris' Pantheon. In 1921, US President Warren G. Harding received her at the White House to present her with the 1 gram of radium collected in the United States. Early research in magnetism. Had an affair with Paul Langevin. Marie Curie experimented with pitchblende and discovered radium

Pierre Curie (1859 – 1906) was a French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity. Married to Marie Curie. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He died in a street accident in Paris, when he slipped and fell under a heavy horse drawn cart. He died instantly when one of the wheels ran over his head

Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1832) was instrumental in establishing the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology by comparing living animals with fossils. He is well known for establishing that extinction was a fact, being the most influential proponent of catastrophism in geology in the early 19th century, and opposing early evolutionary theories. His most famous work is The Animal Kingdom

D

John Dalton (1766 – 1844) was an English chemist and physicist, born at Eaglesfield in Cumberland. He is most well known for his advocacy of the atomic theory and his research into colour blindness, sometimes called Daltonism in his honour. Dalton was also a meteorologist and instrument maker

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) was a naturalist and geologist. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle (1831 to 1836) established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell’s uniformitarian ideas. Darwin investigated the transmutation of species and conceived his theory of natural selection in 1838. Darwin’s last book was about worms. Emma Wedgwood was the wife of Charles Darwin. Darwin dropped out of University of Edinburgh Medical School. Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859. Darwin visited Brazil in Beagle in 1831. Reached the Galapagos Islands in 1835 where he studied mockingbirds. Born the same day as Abraham Lincoln in 1809

Richard Dawkins (born 1941) came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Dawkins is known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. He describes himself as “Darwin’s Rottweiler”. Born in Nairobi

Humphry Davy (1778 – 1829) discovered several alkali and alkaline earth metals, and made contributions to the discoveries of the elemental nature of chlorine and iodine. In 1815 he invented the Davy lamp, which allowed miners to work safely in the presence of flammable gases. Humphry Davy discovered sodium, potassium, barium, calcium, magnesium , nitrous oxide and acetylene. He melted potash and passed an electric current through it, producing a lilac flame of potassium

Frank Drake (born 1930) is most notable as one of the pioneers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, including the founding of SETI, mounting the first observational attempts at detecting extraterrestrial communications in 1960 in Project Ozma. The Drake equation is a probabilistic argument used to estimate the number of active, communicative extraterrestrial civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy. The equation was written in 1961 by Frank Drake not for purposes of quantifying the number of civilizations, but intended as a way to stimulate scientific dialogue at the world's first SETI meeting

Eugene Dubois (1858 – 1940) was a Dutch anatomist, and earned world-wide fame with his discovery of the first specimens of early hominid remains to be found outside of Europe. These discoveries, made on the Indonesian island of Java from 1891, would later be classified as specimens of Homo erectus

Guillaume Dupuytren (1777 – 1835) was a French anatomist and military surgeon. Although he gained much esteem for treating Napoleon Bonaparte's hemorrhoids, he is best known today for Dupuytren's contracture which is named after him

E

Thomas Edison (1847 – 1931) developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park”. Edison was a prolific inventor, holding 1,093 US patents in his name

Paul Ehrlich (1854 – 1915) was a German scientist who won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He coined the term chemotherapy, and popularized the concept of a “magic bullet”. He is credited with the first empirical observation of the blood-brain barrier and the development of the first antibiotic drug in modern medicine

Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) was born in Ulm, Germany. Worked as a patent clerk in Bern. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his "services to theoretical physics", in particular his discovery of the photoelectric effect. Special relativity is concerned with the relationship between space and time and was introduced by Einstein in 1905. It predicts the equivalence of mass and energy, as expressed in the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc². General relativity is the theory of gravitation and was introduced by Einstein in 1905. Einstein turned down the presidency of Israel in 1952

Agner Erlang (1878 – 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory. Erlang created the field of telephone networks analysis

Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783) was born in Switzerland. Euler introduced and popularized several notational conventions. Most notably, he introduced the concept of a function and was the first to write f(x) to denote the function f applied to the argument x. He also introduced the modern notation for the trigonometric functions, the letter e for the base of the natural logarithm (now also known as Euler's number), the Greek letter Σ for summations and the letter i to denote the imaginary unit

F

Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867) was born in London. He contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include those of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. As a chemist, Faraday discovered benzene, invented an early form of the Bunsen burner and the system of oxidation numbers, and popularised terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion. He was Humphrey Davy’s scientific assistant

Richard Feynman (1918 – 1988) was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work on quantum electrodynamics. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology

Alexander Fleming (1881 – 1955) discovered the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicllium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945

Enrico Fermi (1901 – 1954) best known for his work on Chicago Pile-1 (the first nuclear reactor, and site of the first nuclear chain reaction), and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and particle physics, and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics. Fermi worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II

Dian Fossey (1932 – 1985) was an American zoologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by famous anthropologist Louis Leakey. She was murdered in 1985; the case remains open. Subject of the film Gorillas in the Mist

Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958) made critical contributions to the understanding of the fine molecular structures of DNA and RNA. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA while at King's College, London. Photo 51 is the nickname given to an X-ray diffraction image of DNA taken by Rosalind Franklin in 1952 (using X-ray crystallography) that was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA. The photo was taken by Franklin while working at King's College London. James D Watson was shown the photo by Maurice Wilkins

Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925) was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy

Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788 – 1827) was a French engineer who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally. He is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses. The Fresnel lens reduces the amount of material required compared to a conventional lens by dividing the lens into a set of concentric annular sections

Klaus Fuchs (1911 – 1988) was a German-born theoretical physicist and atomic spy who was convicted of surreptitiously supplying information on the British and American atomic bomb research to the USSR during, and shortly after, World War II. He was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the first fission weapons and early models of the hydrogen bomb while a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory

G

Johan Gadolin (1760 – 1852) was a Finnish chemist, physicist and mineralogist. Gadolin discovered the chemical element yttrium. The element gadolinium is named in his honour

Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was born in Pisa in the same year as Shakespeare was born. Galileo died in the same year Newton was born. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems compared the Copernican system, and the traditional Ptolemaic system. In 1633, Galileo was convicted of “grave suspicion of heresy” based on the book, which was then placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, from which it was not removed until 1835. Galileo discovered the principle of the pendulum when looking at a swinging lamp in Pisa cathedral. Galileo discovered craters on the moon and sunspots in 1607

Galen (129 – c. 200) was the most accomplished medical researcher of the Roman period. His theories dominated and influenced Western medical science for well over a millennium. His account of medical anatomy was based on monkeys as human dissection was not permitted in his time, but it was unsurpassed until the printed description and illustrations of human dissections by Andreas Vesalius in 1543

Francis Galton (1822 – 1911), half-cousin of Charles Darwin, created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities. He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term and the phrase ‘nature versus nurture.’ He founded psychometrics and devised a method for classifying fingerprints that proved useful in forensic science. As the initiator of scientific meteorology, he devised the first weather map

George Gamow (1904 – 1968) was a Russian-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered alpha decay via quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background, and genetics

Carl Gauss (1777 – 1855) was a German mathematician who contributed significantly to many fields. The normal distribution in statistics is named after Gauss (Gaussian distribution). One of Gauss's most important contributions to astronomy stemmed from using conic equations to track the dwarf planet Ceres

William Gilbert (1544 – 1603) is remembered today largely for his book De Magnete (1600) in which he concludes that the Earth is itself magnetic and that this was the reason compasses point north. He is credited as one of the originators of the term “electricity”, and is regarded by some as the father of electrical engineering or electricity and magnetism

Robert Goddard (1882 – 1945) was a pioneer of controlled, liquid-fueled rocketry. He launched the world's first liquid-fueled rocket (‘Nell’) in 1926. From 1930 to 1935 he launched rockets that attained speeds of up to 550 miles an hour. The Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland is named in his honour

Kurt Godel (1906 – 1978) made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century. Godel published his two incompleteness theorems in 1931 when he was 25 years old, one year after finishing his doctorate at the University of Vienna

Stephen Jay Gould (1941 – 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of science. His greatest contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution

H

Fritz Haber (1868 – 1934) received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development of the Haber process for synthesizing ammonia. He is also credited as the “father of chemical warfare” for his work developing and deploying chlorine and other poison gases during World War I. His wife, Clara Immerwahr, opposed his work on poison gas and committed suicide with his service weapon

Waldemar Haffkine (1860 – 1930) is recognized as the first microbiologist who developed and used vaccines against cholera and bubonic plague in the 1890s

Gunther von Hagens (born 1945) is a controversial German anatomist who invented the plastination technique to preserve specimens and is heavily involved in its promotion. He developed the Body Worlds exhibition of human bodies and body parts

Otto Hahn (1879 – 1968) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission. He is known as the “father of nuclear chemistry”. After World War II he became a campaigner against the use of nuclear energy as a weapon

Edmund Halley (1656 – 1742) published papers on the solar system and sunspots while an undergraduate. On leaving Oxford, in 1676, Halley visited the south Atlantic island of St. Helena and set up an observatory with a 24 foot long aerial telescope with the intention of studying stars from the Southern Hemisphere. Halley succeeded John Flamsteed in 1720 as Astronomer Royal. He correctly predicted the return of the comet named after him (in 1758)

Bill Hamilton (1936 – 2000) became famous through his theoretical work expounding a rigorous genetic basis for the existence of altruism, an insight that was a key part of the development of a gene-centric view of evolution. He can therefore be seen as one of the forerunners of sociobiology

William Harvey (1578 – 1657) was the first to describe correctly and in exact detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart, in 1628. It had previously thought that blood was made in the liver

Stephen Hawking (born 1942) is Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009. His scientific works include a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often called Hawking radiation. Hawking suffers from a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neurone disease or Lou Gehrig's disease

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821 – 1894) was a German physician and physicist who made significant contributions to several widely varied areas of modern science. In physiology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, and ideas on the visual perception of space. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics. As a philosopher, he is known for his philosophy of science, ideas on the relation between the laws of perception and the laws of nature

Hero of Alexandria (c. 10 – c. 70) published a well recognized description of a steam-powered device called an aeolipile (hence sometimes called a “Hero engine”). Among his most famous inventions was a windwheel, constituting the earliest instance of wind harnessing on land. He is said to have been a follower of the Atomists, who theorized that the natural world consists of two fundamental parts: indivisible ‘atoms’ and empty ‘void’

William Herschel (1738 – 1822) was born in Hanover. He composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos, as well as some church music. He discovered Uranus in 1781, and also discovered Titania and Oberon (moons of Uranus) and Enceladus and Mimas (moons of Saturn). Caroline Herschel was the sister of William Herschel. Her most significant contribution to astronomy was the discovery of several comets. She also reviewed a catalogue of nebulae produced by William

Hippocrates (c. 460 – c. 370 BC) is known as the “father of medicine”. Apart from the Hippocratic Oath, he collected together a body of works known as the Hippocratic Corpus, which contained all the medical knowledge at that time. He thought the four elements were associated with the four humours, which were thought to be the primary seats of diseases

Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703) was a natural philosopher, architect and polymath. Hooke is known for his law of elasticity (Hooke's law), his book, Micrographia, and for first applying the word ‘cell’ to describe the basic unit of life after examining cork under a microscope. Hooke had a number of heated conflicts with Isaac Newton. Robert Hooke came near to an experimental proof that gravity follows an inverse square law, and hypothesized that such a relation governs the motions of the planets, an idea which was subsequently developed by Newton. He built the vacuum pumps used in Boyle's gas law experiments

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817 – 1911) was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend. He was Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, for twenty years

Alexander Von Humboldt (1769 – 1859) produced foundational to the field of biogeography. Between 1799 and 1804, von Humboldt traveled to Latin America, exploring and describing it from a scientific point of view for the first time. In his five-volume work Kosmos, he attempted to unify the various branches involved in knowledge of the world

John Hunter (1728 – 1793) was a Scottish surgeon regarded as one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day. He was commissioned as an Army surgeon in 1760. He was an early advocate of careful observation and scientific method in medicine. Hunter became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767. The Hunterian Society of London was named in his honour, and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons preserves his name and his collection of anatomical specimens

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 – 1895) was an English biologist, known as “Darwin's Bulldog” for his defence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous debate in 1860 with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution. He coined the term ‘agnostic’

Hypatia (c. 350 – 415) was a Greek scholar from Alexandria, Egypt, who is considered the first notable woman mathematician; she also taught philosophy and astronomy. As a Neoplatonist philosopher, she belonged to the mathematic tradition of the Academy of Athens. She was murdered by a group of Christian monks

J

Karl Guthe Jansky (1905 – 1950) was an engineer with Bell Telephone Laboratories. The first radio antenna used to identify an astronomical radio source was one built by Jansky in 1931. Used in the first discovery of radio waves emanating from the Milky Way. He is considered one of the founding figures of radio astronomy. In honour of Jansky, the unit used by radio astronomers for the strength (or flux density) of radio sources is the jansky

K

Johannes Kepler (1571 – 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. He served as an assistant to Tycho Brahe. The Rudolphine Tables consist of a star catalogue and planetary tables published by Johannes Kepler in 1627 using data from Tycho Brahe's observations. Kepler published the first description of the hexagonal symmetry of snowflakes. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion

Robert Koch (1843 – 1910) became famous for isolating the Anthrax bacillus (1877), the Tuberculosis bacillus (1882) and discovered the bacterium that causes cholera. Koch is known as the founder of modern bacteriology

Gerard Kuiper (1905 – 1973) was a Netherlands-born American astronomer after whom the Kuiper belt was named. Gerard Kuiper discovered Uranus's satellite Miranda and Neptune's satellite Nereid. In addition, he discovered carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Mars and the existence of a methane-laced atmosphere above Saturn's satellite Titan in 1944. Kuiper also pioneered airborne infrared observing using a Convair 990 aircraft in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Kuiper helped identify landing sites on the moon for the Apollo program

L

Pierre-Simon Laplace, marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827) was a French mathematician and astronomer who wrote Celestial Mechanics. This masterpiece translated the geometrical study of mechanics used by Isaac Newton to one based on calculus, known as physical mechanics. He is also the discoverer of Laplace's equation. Although the Laplace transform is named in honor of Laplace, who used the transform in his work on probability theory, the transform was discovered originally by Leonhard Euler

Antoine Lavoisier (1743 – 1794) stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, helped construct the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. Lavoisier grouped the 33 known elements, but made some mistakes. Joseph Priestley is credited with the discovery of oxygen, known as ‘dephlogisticated air’. Priestley met Lavoisier in Paris and described his experiments. Lavoisier found that mercury calx weighed more after heating, as oxygen has been absorbed. Priestley discovered oxygen, but Lavoisier realized its importance. He was an investor and administrator of the ‘Ferme Générale’ a private tax collection company. At the height of the French Revolution he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling watered-down tobacco, and of other crimes, and was guillotined

Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek (1632 – 1723) used his handcrafted microscopes to become the first person to observe and describe single celled organisms, which he originally referred to as animalcules. He was the first person to record microscopic observations of muscle fibres, bacteria, spermatozoa (which he thought contained a tiny man) and blood flow in capillaries. He is best known for his work on the improvement of the microscope and for his contributions towards the establishment of microbiology

Gilbert Lewis (1875 – 1946) was an American physical chemist known for the discovery of the covalent bond, his purification of heavy water, his theory of Lewis acids and bases, and his photochemical experiments. In 1926, Lewis coined the term ‘photon’ for the smallest unit of radiant energy

Willard Libby (1908 – 1980) was an American physical chemist, famous for his role in the 1949 development of radiocarbon dating, a process which revolutionized archaeology. Radiocarbon dating, or carbon dating, is a radiometric dating method that uses the naturally occurring radioisotope carbon-14 (¹⁴C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years

Carl Linnaeus (1707 – 1778) is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology. He introduced the system of giving all living things a two-part Latin name. In Linnaeus' original scheme, the animals were one of three kingdoms, divided into the classes of Vermes (worms), Insecta, Pisces, Amphibia, Aves, and Mammalia. Since then the last four have all been subsumed into a single phylum, the Chordata.  Founded the botanic garden in Uppsala

Joseph Lister (1827 – 1912) was a British surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery, who promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister used carbolic acid (phenol) to sterilize surgical instruments and to clean wounds, in 1867. Lister also noticed that midwife-delivered babies had a lower mortality rate than surgeon-delivered babies, correctly attributing this difference to the fact that midwives tended to wash their hands more often than surgeons

Konrad Lorenz (1903 – 1989) was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, and ornithologist. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation, including his teacher Oskar Heinroth. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he rediscovered the principle of imprinting, which was originally described by Douglas Spalding in the 19th century

Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875) was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by the same processes still in operation today. Lyell was a close and influential friend of Charles Darwin

M

Marcello Malpighi (1628 – 1694) is regarded as the founder of microscopic anatomy and the first histologist. Many microscopic anatomical structures are named after him, including a skin layer (Malpighi layer) and two different Malpighian corpuscles in the kidneys and the spleen, as well as the Malpighian tubules in the excretory system of insects

Guglielmo Marconi (1874 – 1937) was an Italian inventor, known as the father of long distance radio transmission and for his development of Marconi's law and a radio telegraph system. Marconi is often credited as the inventor of radio, and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun. Much of Marconi's work in radio transmission was built upon previous experimentation and the commercial exploitation of ideas by others. Founded the The Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in 1897

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879) was a Scottish physicist who formulated the classic theory of electromagnetic radiation. Maxwell's equations are a set of four partial differential equations that relate the electric and magnetic fields to their sources, charge density and current density. These equations can be combined to show that light is an electromagnetic wave. Maxwell helped develop the Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution, a statistical means of describing aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. He is also known for presenting the first durable colour photograph in 1861

Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968) was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. In 1997, element 109 was named Meitnerium in her honor

Gregor Mendel (1822 – 1884) was an Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of genetics. Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the start of the 20th century

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) worked in St Petersburg and was a polymath. In 1869, Mendeleev made a formal presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, entitled The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, which described elements according to both atomic weight and valence. Periodic table had gaps for elements that had not been discovered. For his predicted eight elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri (Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming. Mendeleev did not know about helium or noble gases

Stanley Miller (1930 – 2007), working in his laboratory at the University of Chicago, demonstrated that when exposed to an energy source such as ultraviolet radiation, compounds such as ammonia, methane and hydrogen, and water can react to produce amino acids essential for the formation of living matter. Considered to be the classic experiment on the origin of life, it was conducted in 1952 and published in 1953 by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey at the University of Chicago. After Miller's death in 2007, scientists examining sealed vials preserved from the original experiments were able to show that there were actually well over 20 different amino acids produced in Miller's original experiments

Jacques Monod (1910 – 1976) was a French biologist, who (along with François Jacob) is famous for his work on the Lac operon. Study of the control of expression of genes in the Lac operon provided the first example of a transcriptional regulation system. He also suggested the existence of mRNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins

N

John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) was born in Hungary. He was a pioneer of the modern digital computer and the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, a member of the Manhattan Project Team, and creator of game theory and the concept of cellular automata

Isaac Newton (1642 – 1726) was born at Woolsthorpe Manor in  Lincolnshire. At the time of Newton's birth, England had not adopted the Gregorian calendar and therefore his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, 25 December 1642. His 1687 publication of the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (usually called the Principia) is considered to be among the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized binomial theorem, developed Newton's method for approximating the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series. He became MP for Cambridge University, warden of the Royal Mint, and President of the Royal Society. Buried in Westminster Abbey

Alfred Nobel (1833 – 1896) found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and more convenient to handle and this mixture he patented in 1867 as 'dynamite'. Nobel introduced the first Pyrotechnic Fuse blasting cap, using mercury fulminate to detonate dynamite

O

Richard Owen (1804 – 1892) coined the term ‘dinosaur’. He is also remembered for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Owen is also known for his campaign for the natural specimens in the British Museum to be given a new home. This resulted in the establishment, in 1881, of the Natural History Museum in London

P

Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) was born Philip von Hohenheim in Switzerland. He was an alchemist, physician, astrologer, and general occultist. He is sometimes called the “father of toxicology” and developed many techniques which became standard laboratory practice. Paracelsus thought that the world was made of salt, sulphur and mercury. He is also credited for giving zinc its name

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum. In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. Following a religious experience in late 1654, he began writing influential works on philosophy and theology

Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895) is renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization. He reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. Pasteur also made significant discoveries in chemistry, most notably on the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals. Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast causes fermentation. Pasteur swan-neck bottle helped to disprove spontaneous generation, as it stopped microbes getting in

Linus Pauling (1901 – 1944) was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. In 1962, for his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He thought that vitamin C could control a cold

William Penney (1909 – 1991) was responsible for the development of British nuclear technology following World War II. He was one of the worlds leading authorities on the effects of nuclear weapons, and is generally credited as the ‘father’ of the British atomic bomb

Max Planck (1858 – 1947) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his work on quantum theory. Planck was among the few who immediately recognized the significance of Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. Planck constant is a physical constant reflecting the sizes of quanta. Planck's law describes the electromagnetic radiation emitted by a black body in thermal equilibrium

Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804) had a considerable scientific reputation which rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several ‘airs’ (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed ‘dephlogisticated air’ (oxygen). However, Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the Chemical Revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community. Hired by Earl of Shelburne. Worked at Bowood House. Priestley made the first publically acclaimed glass of drinkable carbonated water in 1767 by pouring water back and forth over a brewery vat where the liquid could absorb carbon dioxide from the rising fumes. He thought soda water might be a cure for scurvy

Pythagoras (c. 570 – c. 495 BC) of Samos was a mathematician, astronomer, scientist and philosopher, founder of the mathematical, mystic, religious, and scientific society called Pythagoreans. Pythagoras thought that the soul was immortal and believed in reincarnation

R

John Ray (1627 – 1705) was sometimes referred to as the father of English natural history. He published important works on botany, zoology, and natural theology. His classification of plants in his Historia Plantarum, was an important step towards modern taxonomy. He was the first to give a biological definition of the term ‘species’

Muhammad al-Razi (854 – 925) was a Persian scientist. Numerous ‘firsts’ in medical research, clinical care, and chemistry are attributed to him, including being the first to differentiate smallpox from measles, and the discovery of numerous compounds and chemicals including kerosene

Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) was born in New Zealand. Moved to the UK in 1907, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton. Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered by James Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton

S

Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996) was an American astronomer and astrochemist who died in 1996. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He co-wrote and presented the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage

Andrei Sakharov (1921 – 1989) was known as the “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb”. In 1980 he was sent to internal exile in the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod. Sakharov later became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union, for which he faced state persecution; these efforts earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, established in 1988 and awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, was named in his honour. Married to Yelena Bonner

Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742 – 1784) made a number of chemical discoveries before others who are generally given the credit. For example, Scheele discovered oxygen (although Joseph Priestley published his findings first), and identified molybdenum, tungsten, barium, hydrogen, and chlorine before Humphry Davy, among others. Scheele also discovered a number of acids

Erwin Schrodinger (1887 – 1961) was an Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mechanics. Won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933. Best known for his thought experiment known as Schrodinger’s cat, in which a cat which may be simultaneously both alive and dead. a state known as a quantum superposition, as a result of being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur

Theodor Schwann (1810 – 1882) was a German physiologist. His many contributions to biology include the development of cell theory, the discovery of Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system, the discovery and study of pepsin, the discovery of the organic nature of yeast, and the invention of the term metabolism

Glenn Seaborg (1912 – 1999) was an American scientist who contributed to the discovery and isolation of ten elements, and developed the actinide concept, which led to the current arrangement of the actinoid series in the periodic table of the elements. Seaborg was the principal or co-discoverer (with Albert Ghiorso) of ten elements: plutonium, americium, curium, berkelium, californium, einsteinium, fermium, mendelevium, nobelium and element 106, which was named seaborgium in his honor

Adam Sedgwick (1785 – 1873) proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale. Later, he proposed the Cambrian period, based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata. Though he had guided the young Charles Darwin in his early study of geology, Sedgwick was an outspoken opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818 – 1865) was a Hungarian physician described as the ”savior of mothers”, who discovered by 1847 that the incidence of puerperal fever (childbed fever) could be drastically cut by the use of hand disinfection

Claude Shannon (1916 – 2001) has been called the “father of information theory” and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory. Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. He wrote Programming a Computer for Playing Chess in 1950

James Young Simpson (1811 – 1870) was a Scottish doctor. Discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform and successfully introduced it for general medical use

Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729 – 1799) discovered and described animal (mammal) reproduction, showing that it requires both semen and an ovum. He was the first to perform in vitro fertilization, with frogs, and an artificial insemination, using a dog. His research of biogenesis paved the way for the downfall of preformationism theory (the idea that organisms develop from miniature versions of themselves)

T

Edward Teller (1908 – 2003) was born in Budapest. Known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb”. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Nikola Tesla (1856 – 1943) was born in modern-day Croatia. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla's patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753 – 1814) was an Anglo-American physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Colonel in the Loyalist forces in America during the American Revolutionary War. After the end of the war he moved to London where his administrative talents were recognized when he was appointed a junior minister in the British government, and in 1784 received a knighthood from King George III. A prolific designer, he also drew designs for warships. He later moved to Bavaria and entered government service there, being appointed Bavarian Army Minister and reorganizing the army, and, in 1791, was made a Count of the Holy Roman Empire. Rumford Medal is awarded by the Royal Society every alternating year for “an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe”

J. J. Thomson (1856 – 1940) is credited with the discovery and identification of the electron; and, in a broader sense, with the discovery of the first subatomic particle. Thomson is also credited with finding the first evidence for isotopes of a stable (non-radioactive) element in 1913. He invented the mass spectrometer

William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (1824 – 1907) was born in Belfast. At the University of Glasgow he did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second Laws of Thermodynamics, and did much to unify the emerging discipline of physics in its modern form. He also had a career as an electric telegraph engineer and inventor. For his work on the transatlantic telegraph project he was knighted by Queen Victoria. He had extensive maritime interests and was most noted for his work on the mariner's compass. Lord Kelvin was Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Glasgow

Alan Turing (1912 – 1954) was influential in the development of computer science and providing a formalization of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, playing a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine. After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE (Automatic Computing Engine). Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952 – homosexual acts were illegal in the United Kingdom at that time, and he accepted treatment with female hormones, chemical castration, as an alternative to prison. Turing worked from 1952 until his death on mathematical biology, specifically morphogenesisl He died from an apparently self-administered cyanide poisoning from an apple

V

Nikolai Vavilov (1887 – 1943) was a prominent Russian geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population

Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) was born in Brussels. He was an anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the “founder of modern human anatomy”

Alessandro Volta (1745 – 1827) invented the first electrical battery, the Voltaic pile, in 1799. This proved that electricity could be generated chemically. In honour of his work, Volta was made a count by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1810. The SI unit of electric potential is named in his honour as the volt. Volta discovered methane

Hugo de Vries (1848 – 1935) is known chiefly for suggesting the concept of genes, rediscovering the laws of heredity in the 1890s while unaware of Gregor Mendel's work, for introducing the term “mutation”, and for developing a mutation theory of evolution

W

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 – 1913) was born in Usk. Charted the Rio Negro in Brazil. Wallace did extensive fieldwork, first in the Amazon River basin and then in the Malay Archipelago, where he identified the Wallace Line that divides the Indonesian archipelago into two distinct parts. Wallace collected more than 126,000 specimens in the Malay Archipelago. One of his better-known species descriptions during this trip is that of the gliding tree frog Rhacophorus nigropalmatus, known as Wallace's flying frog. While he was exploring the archipelago, he refined his thoughts about evolution and had his famous insight on natural selection. In 1858 he sent an article outlining his theory to Darwin; it was published, along with a description of Darwin's own theory, in the same year. Accounts of his studies and adventures there were eventually published in 1869 as The Malay Archipelago, which became one of the most popular books of scientific exploration of the 19th century

James Watson (born 1928) was a co-discoverer of DNA. Studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University before moving to Cambridge. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was on the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology. Wrote The Double Helix in 1968

E.O. Wilson (born 1929) is an American biologist, conservationist, and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants. Wilson is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. Coined the terms “sociobiology” and “epic of evolution”

William Hyde Wollaston (1766 – 1828) discovered palladium in 1802 and rhodium in 1804. The Wollaston Medal is an award for geology, the highest award granted by the Geological Society of London. It is named after William Hyde Wollaston, and was first awarded in 1831. It was originally made of palladium

Y

Thomas Young (1773 – 1829) is known for his wave theory of light, and for Young’s modulus. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs (specifically the Rosetta Stone) before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work