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.
Isaac Newton was born on 4 January 1643 at Woolsthorpe Manor in Woolsthorpe-by-Colsterworth, a hamlet in the county of Lincolnshire. At the time of Newton’s birth, England had not adopted the latest papal calendar and therefore his date of birth was recorded as Christmas Day, 25 December 1642. Newton was born three months after the death of his father. Born prematurely, he was a small child; his mother Hannah Ayscough reportedly said that he could have fit inside a quart mug. When Newton was three, his mother remarried and went to live with her new husband, the Reverend Barnabus Smith, leaving her son in the care of his maternal grandmother, Margery Ayscough. The young Isaac disliked his stepfather and held some enmity towards his mother for marrying him, as revealed by this entry in a list of sins committed up to the age of 19
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.
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 [...]
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Tagged atomic transition probabilities, capillary action, critical opalescence, famous scientics, geometrization of physics, physician, physics, relativistic cosmology, relativity theory, the conception of a unified field theory, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas
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Galileo was born in Pisa (then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), the first of six children of Vincenzo Galilei, a famous lutenist and music theorist, and Giulia Ammannati. Of the six children four survived infancy, and the youngest Michelangelo (or Michelagnolo) became a noted lutenist and composer. Galileo’s full name was Galileo Bonaiuti de’ Galilei.
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.
German archaeologist and scholar who taught himself thirteen languages. He was a highly successful businessman, and used his accumulated wealth to finance an expedition to find ancient Troy. He managed to locate the city, but his unsystematic excavation methods unfortunately destroyed and jumbled the remains of the ancient city. Nevertheless, the developments arising from his [...]
Boucher de Perthes displayed activity in many other directions. For more than thirty years he filled the presidential chair of the Société d’Emulation at Abbeville, to the publications of which he contributed articles on a wide range of subjects. He was the author of several tragedies, two books of fiction, several works of travel, and a number of books on economic and philanthropic questions.
James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information [...]
American geneticist who studied the Neurospora red bread mold. By subjecting the mold to X-rays, he caused it to mutate. He then observed that some mold lost the ability to produce a particular organic compound in needed to survive. By adding different but similar compounds and seeing if the mold used it, he could unravel [...]
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