Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, whose world-renowned scientific career spans over 40 years. His books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and he is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.
Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a Distinguished Research Chair at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario. He is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes. He has also achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include the runaway best seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times bestsellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Hawking’s key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation).
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is best known for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of disease. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. Pasteur also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals. His body lies beneath the Institute Pasteur in Paris in a spectacular vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.
Early life and biography
Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole in the Jura region of France, into the family of a poor tanner. He grew up in the nearby town of Arbois, where he later had his house and laboratory, these are now a Pasteur museum. He gained degrees in Letters and in Mathematical Sciences before entering the École Normale Supérieure, an elite college. After serving briefly as professor of physics at Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university’s rector, in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849, and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood, two died of typhoid and one of a brain tumor. These personal tragedies inspired Pasteur to try to find cures for diseases such as typhoid.
Ibn Zuhr was one of the greatest physicians and clinicians of the Muslim golden era and has rather been held by some historians of science as the greatest of them. Contrary to the general practice of the Muslim scholars of that era, he confined his work to only one field : medicine. This enabled him to produce works of everlasting fame.
As a physician, he made several discoveries and breakthroughs. He described correctly, for the first time, scabies, the itch mite and may thus be regarded as the first parasitologist. Likewise, he prescribed tracheotomy and direct feeding through the gullet and rectum in the cases where normal feeding was not possible. He also gave clinical descriptions of mediastinal tumors, intestinal phthisis, inflammation of the middle ear, pericarditis, etc.
Abu Marwan Abd al-Malik ibn Zuhr (Arabic: أبو مروان عبد الملك بن زهر) (also known as Ibn Zuhr, Avenzoar, Abumeron or Ibn-Zohr) (1091-1161) was an Arab Muslim physician, pharmacist, surgeon, parasitologist, Islamic scholar, and teacher.
Early life
He was born in Seville, and studied at the University of Cordoba. He belonged to the Banu Zuhr family, which produced five generations of physicians, including two female physicians who served the Almohad ruler Abu Yusuf Ya’qub al-Mansur. Ibn Zuhr was also the teacher of Averroes. He began his medical practice and training under his father, Abu’l-Ala Zuhr (d. 1131).
Flight from Seville
Around 1130, he fell out of favour of with the Almoravid ruler, Ali bin Yusuf bin Tashufin, and fled from Seville. He was however, apprehended and jailed in Marrakesh. Later in 1147 when the Almohad dynasty conquered Seville, he returned and devoted himself to medical practice and teaching. He died at Seville in 1161.
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.
Abu Ja’far Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780, Khwarizm – 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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Tagged algebra, algoritm, arab scientists, Arithmetic, astronomer, geographer, mathematician, Moslem Scientists
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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.
