The World Famous Scientists of Various Disciplines
- Taha
- Mar 11, 2019
- 11 min read
Here are some of the most famous scientists in world history. They are the men and women whose crucial discoveries and innovations has changed the world.
For you convenience, the data has been split by fields of expertise. They are —
Luis Alvarez
Luis Alvarez (1911 – 1988) was a Nobel Prize winning physicist, probably most famous for the discovery of the iridium layer and his theory that the mass extinction of dinosaurs was caused by an asteroid or comet colliding with Earth. Besides doing the normal work you might expect of a physics professor, Alvarez took on more unusual projects, like making use of cosmic rays to search for hidden chambers in an Egyptian pyramid.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910 – 1995) was an astrophysicist. He discovered that massive stars can collapse under their own gravity to reach enormous or even infinite densities. Today we call these collapsed stars neutron stars and black holes. In 1983, Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics “for his theoretical studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and evolution of the stars.” He shared the prize with William Fowler.
Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (1564 – 1642) was one of the most significant people in the history of science. He lived at a crucial crossroads in time, when different strands of thought met and clashed. These were natural philosophy based on Aristotle’s incorrect ideas. The beliefs of the Catholic Church and evidence-based scientific research. In the end, the ideas of Galileo and other scientists triumphed, because they were able to prove them to be true. Although his ideas triumphed, Galileo paid a high price for his science as he spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest, and the Catholic Church banned the publication of anything written by him.
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) is perhaps the greatest physicist who has ever lived. He and Albert Einstein are almost equally matched contenders for this title. Each of these great scientists produced dramatic and startling transformations in the physical laws we believe our universe obeys, changing the way we understand and relate to the world around us. Newton’s ideas were spread by the small number of people who understood the Principia, and who were able to develop and convey its message in more accessible ways: people including Colin Maclaurin, Leonhard Euler, Joseph Louis Lagrange, Pierre Simon de Laplace, Willem Jacob’s Gravesande, William Whiston, John Theophilus Desaguliers, and David Gregory.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) is often cited as the greatest biologist in history. His most famous work, On the Origin of Species, explains the theory of evolution by natural selection, providing numerous supporting examples. Darwin believed that all of life on earth had descended from a common ancestor, whose offspring could vary slightly from the previous generation. Successive generations of life took part in a struggle for existence in which the best adapted variations survived to seed new generations. Less well adapted variations became extinct.
Alexander Fleming
Alexander Fleming (1881 – 1955) discovered penicillin, whose use as an antibiotic has saved untold millions of lives. Less well-known is that before making this world-changing discovery, he had already made significant life-saving contributions to medical science. In 1945 Alexander Fleming shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology with Florey and Chain. The award was made for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.
Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958) worked on X-ray and played a crucial role in the discovery of DNA’s structure. Furthermore, Franklin discovered that DNA molecules can exist in more than one form, recognizing the previously unsuspected B type DNA. We now know that B type DNA is DNA’s usual structure within living cells. As a consequence of her discovery, Franklin realized that earlier X-ray studies of DNA were less helpful than they might have been – the DNA had contained a mixture of A and B types, causing blurring in the X-ray diffraction photos.
Hippocrates
Hippocrates (c. 460 BC – c. 370 BC) is regarded as the father of Western medicine. He systematized medical treatments, disentangling them from religion and superstitions. He trained physicians in his methods and, with his followers, is responsible for authoring a large body of medical textbooks. The famous Hippocratic Oath binds physicians to following good ethical practices. Not all of the medical books attributed to Hippocrates were actually written by him – indeed there is no direct proof that he personally wrote any of them. Some or all of the body of 60 Hippocratic works were definitely written by followers of his doctrines, such as his son-in-law Polybus. Many of the works have been lost. Hippocratic medicine dominated the field for 500 years until it was it was absorbed and surpassed by Galen’s works.
Marie Curie
Marie Curie (1867 – 1934) discovered two new chemical elements – radium and polonium. She carried out the first research into the treatment of tumors with radiation, and she was the founder of the Curie Institutes, which are important medical research centers. She is the only person who has ever won Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry. Marie Curie died aged 66 on July 4, 1934, killed by aplastic anemia, a disease of the bone marrow. The radioactivity she was exposed to during her career probably caused the disease. Scientists are now much more cautious in their handling of radioactive elements and X-rays than they were in the first few decades after their discovery. Marie Curie’s own books and papers are so radioactive that they are now stored in lead boxes, which may only be opened by people wearing protective suits.
Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel (1833 – 1896) is famous for the annual prizes in science, literature, and peace awarded in his name. Although he was born into poverty, his family members were creative and entrepreneurial; they worked hard and became successful. Alfred was the scientist of the family, inventing and manufacturing dynamite, the blasting cap, gelignite, and ballistite. He grew fantastically rich on the proceeds of his explosives businesses. In his last will and testament, he bequeathed over ninety percent of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes.
C. V. Raman
C. V. Raman (1888 – 1970) discovered that when light interacts with a molecule the light can donate a small amount of energy to the molecule. As a result of this, the light changes its color and the molecule vibrates. The change of color can act as a ‘fingerprint’ for the molecule. Today, Raman spectroscopy, which relies on these ‘fingerprints,’ is used in laboratories all over the world to identify molecules and to analyze living cells and tissues to detect diseases such as cancer. Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman died, aged 82, of heart disease on November 21, 1970 in Bangalore, India.
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Volta (1745 – 1827) was a physicist, chemist and a pioneer of electrical science. He is most famous for his invention of the electric battery. In brief he:
Invented the first electric battery – which people then called the “voltaic pile” – in 1800. Using his invention, scientists were able to produce steady flows of electric current for the first time, unleashing a wave of new discoveries and technologies.
Was the first person to isolate methane.
Discovered methane mixed with air could be exploded using an electric spark: this is the basis of the internal combustion engine.
Discovered “contact electricity” resulting from contact between different metals.
Recognized two types of electric conduction.
Wrote the first electromotive series. This showed, from highest to lowest, the voltages that different metals can produce in a battery. (We now talk of standard electrode potentials, meaning roughly the same thing.)
Discovered that electric potential in a capacitor is directly proportional to electric charge.
In recognition of Alessandro Volta’s contributions to science, the unit of electric potential is called the volt.
James Croll
James Croll (1821 – 1890) linked climate change, our planet’s ice ages, and astronomy, proposing that climate change is caused by periodic changes in the amount of energy our planet receives from the sun. With little schooling and entirely self-taught in physics, celestial mechanics, and philosophy, he formulated his visionary ideas and began publishing them while working as a janitor. Croll said the solar energy reaching our planet’s southern and northern hemispheres varies, rising or falling depending on Earth’s location and orientation in space versus the sun. Our planet’s ice ages are caused by solar energy variations altering the trade winds, and hence the strength of ocean currents, such as the Gulf Stream, that carry warmth from tropical regions to polar regions.
Eratosthenes
Eratosthenes (c. 276 BC – c. 194 BC) was an Ancient Greek scientist born in the town of Cyrene in about 276 BC. Cyrene, then a Greek city, is now the town of Shahhat in Libya. Eratosthenes was educated in philosophy and mathematics in Athens. We do not know what he looked like. The image above is from a painting by Bernardo Strozzi in the year 1635, nineteen centuries after the era of Eratosthenes. It shows Eratosthenes teaching geography, the academic discipline he founded.
Jack Horner
Jack Horner (born 1946) discovered that dinosaurs cared for their young, and some were social animals nesting in colonies. A paleontologist, he specializes in researching dinosaur behavior and growth; he has accumulated evidence that many named species of dinosaur are actually immature versions of other dinosaur species: he believes up to a third of named dinosaur species could ‘disappear’ when the area is fully researched. His research is now focused on reactivating dormant dinosaur DNA in birds to hatch modern-day dinosaurs. Horner’s face is familiar to millions from his appearances in many television documentaries about dinosaurs.
Harold Urey
Harold Urey (1893 – 1981) discovered deuterium, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Urey’s work made a significant impact in an unusually wide range of scientific fields:
he discovered how our planet’s previous climates can be found from the ratio of oxygen’s isotopes in carbonate rocks
he was in charge of a team of 700 scientists in the Manhattan Project working on isotope separation
he coined the term cosmochemistry and founded modern planetary science
he deduced that Earth’s early atmosphere consisted mainly of hydrogen, ammonia, methane, and water and that these would react with one another when lightning passed through them. His graduate student, Stanley Miller, performed the famous Miller-Urey experiment which demonstrated that when electric sparks pass through a mixture of these simple gases the products are amino acids – the building blocks of life.
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887 – 1920) was a largely self-taught pure mathematician. Hindered by poverty and ill-health, his highly original work has considerably enriched number theory. More recently his discoveries have been applied to physics, where his theta function lies at the heart of string theory.
For his first three years in Cambridge, Ramanujan was very happy. His health, however, had always been rather poor. The winter weather in England, much colder than anything he had ever imagined, made him ill for a time.
In 1917, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and worryingly low vitamin levels. He spent months being cared for in sanitariums and nursing homes.
In February 1919, his health seemed to have recovered sufficiently for him to return to India, but sadly he lived for only one more year.
Srinivasa Ramanujan died aged 32 in Madras on April 26, 1920. His death was most likely caused by hepatic amoebiasis caused by liver parasites common in Madras.
Pythagoras
Pythagoras (c. 570 BC – c. 497 BC) is a name most have us have heard of, but he is an enigma. The trouble is trust. Can we trust what we read about him? Sadly, the answer is no. We can’t trust a lot of it, because if we did, we would have to believe he had god-like powers.We DO know about the beliefs of a religious-mathematical cult called the Pythagoreans, and we DO know that the Pythagoreans made great advances in mathematics. When the Pythagorean cult started, it was very secretive. After Pythagoras died, the secrets began to be revealed.
Pythagoreans believed that everything could be reduced to numbers: the whole universe had been built using mathematics. They said the truth behind the everyday reality we experience lies in numbers. Modern physicists seeking the ‘theory of everything’ or the ‘grand unification’ are Pythagoreans. They believe that the universe can be completely understood through mathematical equations, and they are engaged in a quest to find these equations.
Archimedes
Archimedes (c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was, arguably, the world’s greatest scientist – certainly the greatest scientist of the classical age. He was a mathematician, physicist, astronomer, engineer, inventor, and weapons-designer. As we’ll see, he was a man who was both of his time and far ahead of his time.
Archimedes was born in the Greek city-state of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in approximately 287 BC. His father, Phidias, was an astronomer. Archimedes may also have been related to Hiero II, King of Syracuse.
Fibonacci
Fibonacci (c. 1170 – c. 1245) was the greatest Western mathematician of the Middle Ages. In the absence of his contributions, the scientific revolution started by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 would not have been possible. Fibonacci introduced the modern number system to the West, which ultimately allowed science and mathematics to flourish. Fibonacci did not merely copy the works of the Greeks, Indians, and Arabs. He was a brilliant mathematician in his own right.
His fame spread to Frederick II, the Holy Roman emperor, whose own mathematicians were unable to solve a number of problems, so he challenged Fibonacci. Fibonacci published his solutions to the challenges in his 1225 book Flos (Flower).
Aristotle
Aristotle, (384 – 322 BC), whose influence on western culture and science, has been enormous. His writings, many of which survived great periods of turmoil in the millennia separating us from him, show him to be a man of tremendous intellect who thought deeply about the world.
The volume, extent and depth of his work is humbling. Speaking from our privileged place in time, it is evident that much of his work actually weakened the progress of science. There are, however, exceptions to this: for example, some of his works on biology and geology. He also founded the study of formal logic. Aristotle’s philosophy is still studied today, but his science is not.
S. N. Bose
S. N. Bose (1894 – 1974) founded quantum statistics in 1924 when he discovered a new way to derive Planck’s radiation law. Bose’s method was based on the argument that one photon of light is not distinguishable from another of the same color, which meant that a new way of counting particles was needed – Bose’s statistics. Albert Einstein extended Bose’s argument to a wider range of phenomena. Nowadays, any particle that behaves in accordance with Bose’s statistics is classed as a boson, named in honor of Bose.
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) rewrote the laws of nature. He completely changed the way we understand the behavior of things as basic as light, gravity, and time.
Although scientists today are comfortable with Einstein’s ideas, in his time, they were completely revolutionary. Most people did not even begin to understand them.
If you’re new to science, you’ll probably find that some of his ideas take time to get used to!
Einstein made his greatest discoveries when he was a relatively young man. In his later years he continued with science, but made no further groundbreaking discoveries. He became interested in politics and the state of the world. Einstein had been born German and a Jew. He died an American citizen in 1955. Einstein was in America when Hitler came to power. He decided it would be a bad idea to return to Germany and renounced his German citizenship. Einstein did not practice Judaism, but strongly identified with the Jewish people persecuted by the Nazi Party, favoring a Jewish homeland in Palestine with the rights of Arabs protected. It was Einstein’s wish that people should be respected for their humanity and not for their country of origin or religion. Expressing his cynicism for nationalistic pride, he once said:
“If relativity is proved right the Germans will call me a German, the Swiss will call me a Swiss citizen, and the French will call me a great scientist. If relativity is proved wrong, the French will call me Swiss, the Swiss will call me a German, and the Germans will call me a Jew.”
Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790) lived his life in the spirit of a renaissance man: he was deeply interested in the world around him, and he excelled in several widely differing fields of human endeavor. He had a profound effect on our understanding of electricity and shaped the language we use when we talk about it, even today. Here we shall concentrate on his life as a scientist and an inventor, only briefly touching on his other achievements.
Benjamin Franklin died on April 17, 1790, at the age of 84. He was killed by pleurisy – a lung inflammation. His wife, Deborah, had died sixteen years earlier. Franklin was survived by his daughter, Sarah, who looked after him in his later years and his son, William. William left America to live in Britain in 1782. Today, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, named in Franklin’s honor, is one of the most prestigious awards in science. Its winners include Alexander Graham Bell, Marie and Pierre Curie, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking.
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