Aristotle

Aristotle (384 BC - March 7, 322 BC) was an

ancient Greek philosopher, student of Plato
and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote
many books about physics, poetry, zoology,
logic, rhetoric, government, and biology.
Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, are
generally
considered
the
three
most
influential ancient Greek philosophers in
Western
thought.
Among
them
they
transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy
into the foundations of Western philosophy as
we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle
form the core of Ancient philosophy.

Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei was an Italian natural philosopher,
astronomer, and mathematician who made
fundamental contributions to the sciences of
motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and
to the development of the scientific method.
His formulation of (circular) inertia, the law of falling
bodies, and parabolic trajectories marked the
beginning of a fundamental change in the study of
motion.
His insistence that the book of nature was written in
the language of mathematics changed natural philosophy from a
verbal, qualitative account to a mathematical one in which
experimentation became a recognized method for discovering the facts
of nature.
Finally, his discoveries with the telescope revolutionized astronomy
and paved the way for the acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric
system, but his advocacy of that system eventually resulted in an
Inquisition process against him.

Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton, President of the
Royal Society,] was an English
mathematician, physicist, astronomer,
alchemist, and natural philosopher
who is generally regarded as one of
the
greatest
scientists
and
mathematicians in history.
Newton
wrote
the
Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in
which
he
described
universal
gravitation and the three laws of
motion, laying the groundwork for
classical mechanics. By deriving
Kepler's laws of planetary motion from
this system, he was the first to show
that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are
governed by the same set of natural laws. The unifying and
deterministic power of his laws was integral to the scientific revolution
and the advancement of heliocentrism.
Among other scientific discoveries, Newton realised that the spectrum
of colours observed when white light passes through a prism is
inherent in the white light and not added by the prism (as Roger Bacon
had claimed in the thirteenth century), and notably argued that light is
composed of particles.

Maria Curie
Maria Curie, one of the most famous scientists
in the world, dedicated her life to physics and
chemistry. Maria Curie was born on November
7, 1867, in Warsaw, Poland.

Maria discovered radioactivity, she was the first woman to win the
Nobel prize for physics. She was the first female lecturer and professor
at the Sorbonne University in Paris. She received another Nobel award,
this time for chemistry, becoming the first person ever to win 2 Nobel
awards. She also received 15 gold medals, 19 degrees, and many other
honors.

James Clerk Maxwell

Maxwell was a physicist who lived in the last
century. He was particularly interested in
how electricity and magnetism worked. One
of his major accomplishments was providing
the mathematical equations that describe
how these two separate natural phenomena
work together to make light and radio
waves. The equations he discovered allowed
other scientists to understand several facts
about light:

light is made of electric and magnetic

fields that change very, very rapidly
as the electric field in a light wave
changes, it changes the magnetic field; as the magnetic field
changes, it changes the electric field; both fields work together
to make up the light wave
if we know the electric and magnetic properties of space, we can
calculate the speed of light

Max Planck
Max Planck was a German physicist who lived
between 1858-1947. His theories changed
our understanding of atomic processes and
started the field of quantum physics, which
studies energy inside atoms. Many of Planck's
ideas were later used by Einstein when he
developed his theory of relativity.

Planck believed that the physical universe exists independently of

humans and that we have no control over the laws of nature. He
claimed that we can observe and try to understand such laws, but we
can't change them.

Schwarzschild, Karl
German astronomer and physicist who
developed the use of photography for
measuring
variable
stars.
He
also
investigated the geometrical aberrations of
optical systems using ray optics by
introducing a perturbation equation which
he called the Seidel eikonal. Schwarzschild
volunteered for military service and, while
on the Russian front, completed the first two
exact solutions of the Einstein field
equations of general relativity, one in static
isotropic empty space surrounding a
massive body (such as a black hole), and
one inside a spherically symmetric body of
constant density. Shortly after this work, Schwarzschild died of a rare
metabolic disorder.

Benjamin Franklin
An extraordinary man who started his
working career as a printer. He retired at
about thirty five to devote his life to
improving the lives of the people around him.
He was world famous as a scientist, inventor,
and diplomat. The "Franklin stove" that he

invented worked by improving the flow of radiation from the stove

throughout the room.
Benjamin Franklin became interested in what people wore and if they
were comfortable in their clothes. In his autobiography, Franklin
describes an experiment using different colored pieces of cloth that he
placed on top of snow in the sunlight. Franklin observed which colors
penetrated into the snow more quickly than other colors.

Jule Gregory Charney

JULE CHARNEY WAS ONE of the dominant
figures in atmo-spheric science in the
three decades following World War II.
Much of the change in meteorology from
an art to a science is due to his scientific
vision and his thorough commitment to
people and programs in this field.
In 1946 he married Elinor Kesting Frye, a
student of logic and semantics with H.
Reichenbach at the University of
California at Los Angeles. They had two
children, Nora and Peter. Nicolas, Elinor's
son from her previous marriage, assumed
the last name of Charney. Their marriage
lasted almost twenty-one years. In 1967
Jule married Lois Swirnoff. Lois is a
painter and color theorist and was a
professor at UCLA and Harvard. Their
marriage lasted almost ten years. Jule shared the last years of his life
with Patricia Peck, a photographic artist with roots in New York City and
Venice. His last illness was lung cancer, from which he died in Boston
on June 16, 1981.

Samuel Pierpont Langley

Langley started his scientific career as an
astronomer in Ohio, where he became
interested in measuring how much energy the
Sun was radiating. He built instruments,
called
calorimeters,
to
make
these
measurements. He built others, called
bolometers, designed to make similar
measurements on stars. Interestingly, the
bolometers Langley built are very similar to
the detectors scientists at NASA's Langley
Research Center use to measure the Earth's
radiation budget.
Langley also became interested in heavierthan-air flight. He convinced the United
States Navy to sponsor airplane building and
testing, using his design. He competed with the Wright Brothers to
build the first manned airplane that could fly under its own power.
Unfortunately, Langley lost this contest.

Rene Descartes
While the great philosophical distinction
between mind and body in western thought can
be traced to the Greeks, it is to the seminal
work of Rene Descartes (1596-1650) , French
mathematician, philosopher, and physiologist,
that we owe the first systematic account of the
mind/body relationship. Descartes was born in
Touraine, in the small town of La Haye and
educated from the age of eight at the Jesuit
college of La Fleche.
At La Flche, Descartes formed the habit of
spending the morning in bed, engaged in
systematic meditation. During his meditations,
he was struck by the sharp contrast between
the certainty of mathematics and the
controversial nature of philosophy, and came to believe that the
sciences could be made to yield results as certain as those of
mathematics.

Benjamin Franklin
Ben Franklin - born Jan.17 [Jan. 6, Old Style], 1706,
Boston d. April 17, 1790, Philadelphia pseudonym Richrd Saunders - American printer
and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and
diplomat.
Franklin, next to George Washington possibly the
most famous 18th-century American, by 1757 had
made a small fortune, established the Poor
Richard of his almanacs (written under his
pseudonym) as an oracle on how to get ahead in
the world, and become widely known in European scientific circles for
his reports of electrical experiments and theories.

Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was born on Feb. 12, 1809, The
Mount, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, Eng. d. April 19,
1882, Down House, Downe, Kent. His full name is
Charles Robert Darwin.
Darwin was an English naturalist renowned for his
documentation of evolution and for his theory of
its
operation,
known
as
Darwinism.
His
evolutionary theories, propounded chiefly in two
works--On the Origin of Species by Means of
Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man,
and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)--have had
a profound influence on subsequent scientific thought.

Darwin was the son of Robert Waring Darwin, who had one of the
largest medical practices outside of London, and the grandson of the
physician Erasmus Darwin, the author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of
Organic Life, and of the artisan-entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin
thus enjoyed a secure position in the professional upper middle class
that provided him with considerable social and professional
advantages.

Thomas Alva Edison

Thomas Alva Edison - born February 11, 1847,
Milan, Ohio, U.S. d. Oct. 18, 1931, West
Orange, N.J. American inventor who, singly or
jointly, held a world record 1,093 patents. In
addition, he created the world's first industrial
research laboratory.
Edison was the quintessential American
inventor in the era of Yankee ingenuity.
He began his career in 1863, in the
adolescence of the telegraph industry, when
virtually the only source of electricity was
primitive batteries putting out a low-voltage
current.

Leonardo da Vinci
It may seem unusual to include Leonardo da
Vinci in a list of paleontologists and
evolutionary biologists. Leonardo was and is
best known as an artist, the creator of such
masterpieces as the Mona Lisa, Madonna of
the Rocks, and The Last Supper. Yet

Leonardo was far more than a great artist: he had one of the best
scientific minds of his time. He made painstaking observations and
carried out research in fields ranging from architecture and civil
engineering to astronomy to anatomy and zoology to geography,
geology and paleontology. In the words of his biographer Giorgio
Vasari:
Leonardo knew well the rocks and fossils (mostly Cenozoic mollusks)
found in his native north Italy. No doubt he had ample opportunity to
observe them during his service as an engineer and artist at the court
of Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, from 1482 to 1499: Vasari wrote that
"Leonardo was frequently occupied in the preparation of plans to
remove mountains or to pierce them with tunnels from plain to plain."
He made many observations on mountains and rivers, and he grasped
the principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by
water, while at the same time the rivers erode rocks and carry their
sediments to the sea, in a continuous grand cycle.