Al-Khwarizmi was born in the epicentre of an Islamic empire which then stretched from the Mediterranean to India. This was a very fortuitous time for Arabic learning. The rulers of the Abbasid dynasty who were leading this huge empire, founded an academy in Baghdad called the House of Wisdom where the learned men collected and translated all the scientific works that they could get hold of. House of Wisdom had a large library – first famous library established after the library of Alexandria was destroyed.
Al-Khwarizmi was one of the learned men who worked in the House of Wisdom. His interests lied in the fields of algebra, geometry, astronomy and geography. His now most famous work is that from which we got the name for algebra itself – Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala.
Abū Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī (c. 780, Khwārizm – c. 850) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and geographer, who worked most of his life as a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.
His Algebra was the first book on the systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. Consequently he is considered to be the father of algebra, a title he shares with Diophantus. Latin translations of his Arithmetic, on the Indian numerals, introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world in the twelfth century. He revised and updated Ptolemy’s Geography as well as writing several works on astronomy and astrology.
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Italian mathematician and philosopher, considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (May 16, 1718 – January 9, 1799) was an Italian linguist, mathematician, and philosopher. Agnesi is credited with writing the first book discussing both differential and integral calculus. She was an honorary member of the faculty at the University of Bologna. According to Dirk Jan Struik, Agnesi is “the first important woman mathematician since Hypatia (fifth century A.D.)”.
Early life
Her father, Pietro, was a wealthy man of business and a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna who desired to elevate his family into the Milanese nobility.
Having been born in Milan, Maria was recognized as a child prodigy very early; she could speak both French and Italian at five years of age. By her eleventh birthday she had acquired Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, German, Latin, and was referred to as the “Walking Polyglot”. She even educated her younger brothers. When she was 9 years old, she composed and delivered an hour-long speech in Latin to an academic gathering. The subject was women’s right to be educated. When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna, before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses’ Lettres sur l’Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had published in 1738. These displays, being probably not altogether congenial to Maria (who wanted to retire) ceased by her twentieth year because she strongly desired to enter a convent at that time. Although her father refused to grant this wish, he agreed to let her live from that time on in an almost conventual semi-retirement, avoiding all interactions with society and devoting herself entirely to the study of mathematics. During that time, Maria studied both differential and integral calculus. Pietro Agnesi also married twice more after Maria’s mother died, so that Maria Agnesi ended up the eldest of 21 children. In addition to her performances and lessons, her responsibility was to teach her siblings. This task kept her from her own goal of entering a convent. Scholars thought she was dazzingly beautiful and hers was recognized as one of the richest noble families in Milan.
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She has achieved international acclaim for her work in growth factor research, having discovered and characterized, together with Dr Sporn, the cytokine transforming growth factor-β (TGF-β).
Anita B. Roberts (Born: April 3, 1942 ; Died: May 26, 2006) was a molecular biologist who made pioneering observations of a protein, TGF-β, that is critical in healing wounds and bone fractures and that has a dual role in blocking or stimulating cancers. Roberts was the 49th most-cited scientist in the world and the second most-cited female scientist as of 2005.
Roberts was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she grew up. She attended Oberlin College and earned her doctorate in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1968. After postdoctoral work at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Roberts joined the National Cancer Institute in 1976. From 1995 to 2004, she served as Chief of the institute’s, and continued her research until her death in 2006.
In the early-1980s, Dr. Roberts and her colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland began to experiment with the protein, called TGF-β, short for transforming growth factor beta.
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Original news from www.informationweek.com. Science development in robotics is very fast in growth, just like the growth of computer science.
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A Toronto-based researcher has built what he claims is the world’s first fully functional female robot — a lifelike android named Aiko that is capable of recognizing faces, identifying medication, and even buttering toast.
33-year-old researcher Le Trung, a graduate of York University, built Aiko with silicon and computer parts. Programming her internal software took over a year.
To date, Trung has spent $24,000 building his robo-girl.
Aiko sports delicate, Geisha-like features and is armed with sensors that allow her to respond to touch and voice commands. A camera in her neck provides her with visual input. All told, the robot weighs in at about 70 pounds.
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French chemist who, through a conscious revolution, became the father of modern chemistry. As a student, he stated “I am young and avid for glory.” He was educated in a radical tradition, a friend of Condillac and read Maquois’s dictionary. He won a prize on lighting the streets of Paris, and designed a new method for preparing saltpeter. He also married a young, beautiful 13-year-old girl named Marie-Anne, who translated from English for him and illustrated his books. Lavoisier demonstrated with careful measurements that transmutation of water to earth was not possible, but that the sediment observed from boiling water came from the container. He burnt phosphorus and sulfur in air, and proved that the products weighed more than he original. Nevertheless, the weight gained was lost from the air. Thus he established the Law of Conservation of Mass.
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794), the father of modern chemistry, was a French noble prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, recognized and named oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783), abolished the phlogiston theory, introduced the metric system, wrote the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. The concept of the finite nature of matter was first introduced by Antoine Lavoisier during the 18th century. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same. Thus, for instance, if water is heated to steam, if salt is dissolved in water or if a piece of wood is burned to ashes, the total mass remains unchanged. The principles of this discovery were elaborated centuries before by Islamic Persia’s great scholar, Abu Rayhan Biruni. Lavoisier was a disciple of the Muslim chemists and physicists and referred to their books frequently. He was also an investor and administrator of the “Ferme Générale” a private tax collection company; chairman of the board of the Discount Bank (later the Banque de France); and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic administrative councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. Because of his prominence in the pre-revolutionary government in France, he was beheaded at the height of the French Revolution.
English physicist and mathematician who was born into a poor farming family. Luckily for humanity, Newton was not a good farmer, and was sent to Cambridge to study to become a preacher. At Cambridge, Newton studied mathematics, being especially strongly influenced by Euclid, although he was also influenced by Baconian and Cartesian philosophies. Newton was forced to leave Cambridge when it was closed because of the plague, and it was during this period that he made some of his most significant discoveries. With the reticence he was to show later in life, Newton did not, however, publish his results.
Sir Isaac Newton, FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, theologian and one of the most influential men in human history. His Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. 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 and advancing the scientific revolution.
In mechanics, Newton enunciated the principles of conservation of momentum and angular momentum. In optics, he built the first “practical” reflecting telescope[6] and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into a 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 generalised binomial theorem, developed the so-called “Newton’s method” for approximating the zeroes of a function, and contributed to the study of power series.
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Euclid, also known as Euclid of Alexandria, was a Greek mathematician and is often referred to as the Father of Geometry. He was active in Alexandria during the reign of Ptolemy I (323 BC–283 BC). He is the author of Elements which gives the principles of what is now called Euclidean geometry deduced from a small set of axioms. Euclid also wrote works on perspective, conic sections, spherical geometry, number theory, and rigor.
Biographical knowledge
Little is known about Euclid other than his writings. What biographical information we do have comes largely from commentaries by Proclus and Pappus of Alexandria. Euclid was active at the great Library of Alexandria and may have studied at Plato’s Academy in Greece. The date and place of Euclid’s birth and the date and circumstances of his death are unknown.
Some writers in the Middle Ages confused him with Euclid of Megara, a Greek Socratic philosopher who lived approximately one century earlier.
German-American physicist who, in 1905, published three papers, each of which had a profound effect on the development of physics. In one paper, he proposed the theory of special relativity, Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics which provides a correct description for particles traveling at high speeds. The two postulates of the special theory of relativity were that the speed of light Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics in a vacuum is constant and that the laws of physics are the same for all inertial reference frames. Einstein did know about the Michelson-Morley experiment Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics null result, but was not familiar with Lorentz’s work after 1895, so he reinvented the Lorentz transformation Eric Weisstein’s World of Math for himself (Pais 1982, p. 133).
Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence, expressed by the equation E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
Einstein’s many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which was intended to extend the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion and to provide a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include advances in the fields of relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.
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Italian scientist and philosopher. Galileo was a true Renaissance man, excelling at many different endeavors, including lute playing and painting. He attended medical school in Padua. While in a cathedral, he noticed that a chandelier was swinging with the same period as timed by his pulse, regardless of its amplitude. He began to study the isochronism of the pendulum Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics in 1581, as well as the motion of bodies. Using an inclined plane, he showed that all bodies fall at the same rate. He also investigated cohesion, Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics and concluded that a waterfall breaks when the weight of the water Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics becomes too great, the same reason that water Eric Weisstein’s World of Physics pumps could only raise water by 34 feet.
Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the “father of modern observational astronomy”, the “father of modern physics“, the “father of science“, and “the Father of Modern Science.” The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, named the Galilean moons in his honour, and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, improving compass design.
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English economist who believed that progress towards a better society was impossible, because human population would always increase faster than the methods of supporting them could be developed. He published his views anonymously in Essay on Population (1798). His work inspired both Charles Darwin and Wallace.
The English political economist and demographer Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (13 February 1766 – 23 December 1834) analyzed population growth and noted the potential for populations to increase rapidly, often faster than the food supply available to them. Commentators may refer to such a runaway scenario, as outlined in Malthus’s treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, as a “Malthusian catastrophe”.
Modern commentators generally refer to him as Thomas Malthus, but during his lifetime he went by his middle name, Robert.
Biography
Thomas Robert Malthus, the second son of eight children (six of them girls) born to Daniel and Henrietta Malthus near Guildford, Surrey, came into a prosperous family, with his father a personal friend of the philosopher David Hume and an acquaintance of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The young Malthus received his education at home in Bramcote, Nottinghamshire and at the Dissenting Academy, Warrington until his admission to Jesus College, Cambridge in 1784. There he studied many subjects and took prizes in English declamation, Latin and Greek, but he majored in mathematics. He earned a masters degree in 1791 and won election as a fellow of Jesus College two years later. In 1797, he took orders and became an Anglican country parson at Albury Church, near Guildford in Surrey.
Malthus married his cousin, Harriet, on April 12, 1804, and had three children: Henry, Emily and Lucy. In 1805 he became Britain’s first professor in political economy at the East India Company College (now known as Haileybury) in Hertfordshire. His students affectionately referred to him as “Pop” or “Population” Malthus. In 1818 Malthus became a Fellow of the Royal Society.
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