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Scientists

8 in the library.

7 Nov 1867
Marie Curie
Physicist and chemist who discovered polonium and radium, coined the term radioactivity, and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. She refused to patent the isolation of radium.
Xno birth time
12 Feb 1809
Charles Darwin
Naturalist whose five years aboard the Beagle produced the observations behind On the Origin of Species, published in 1859 after two decades of deliberate delay.
Xno birth time
14 Mar 1879
Albert Einstein
Physicist whose 1905 papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity each would have made a career, and whose general relativity of 1915 replaced Newton’s account of gravity with the curvature of spacetime.
AAtimed
10 Dec 1815
Ada Lovelace
Mathematician who, in notes appended to a translation about Babbage’s Analytical Engine, described how such a machine might act on symbols rather than numbers — and wrote what is generally counted the first algorithm intended for a machine.
Xno birth time
4 Jan 1643
Isaac Newton
Set out the laws of motion and universal gravitation in the Principia of 1687, invented calculus in parallel with Leibniz, and spent rather more of his life on alchemy and biblical chronology than on either.
Xno birth time
22 Dec 1887
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Mathematician who arrived at thousands of results in number theory and infinite series with almost no formal training, working largely alone in Kumbakonam before Hardy brought him to Cambridge in 1914. He attributed his formulae to the goddess Namagiri. Notebooks he left at his death were still yielding new mathematics seventy years later.
Xno birth time
9 Nov 1934
Carl Sagan
Astronomer who worked on the Mariner, Viking and Voyager missions and then explained them to everybody else, through Cosmos and a shelf of books. Assembled the Voyager Golden Record.
Xno birth time
10 Jul 1856
Nikola Tesla
Engineer whose alternating-current induction motor and polyphase system settled how electricity would be distributed, and who filed some three hundred patents while dying nearly penniless in a New York hotel.
Xno birth time