Archimedes

Famous quote:

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

Eureka!  Supposedly, it was in the bath tub that this person figured out the solution to the problem posed to him by the king of Syracuse: was a crown (or wreath) supposedly made of pure gold in fact entirely gold? He measured the amount of water displaced by the crown and by an equal weight of gold, and found that the crown displaced more water. Its specific gravity* was thus less than that of gold, and therefore it had been adulterated with another metal.

Initiated fields of Hydrostatics, static mechanics, pycnometry (the measurement of the volume or density of an object). He is called the "father of integral calculus."

(287 BC – 211 BC)

Aristotle
(384-322 B.C.)

  "Wit is educated insolence."

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”

Isaac Asimov

Famous quotes:

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

"Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome."

Famous Quote:

“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'

(1920 – 1992)

Although most of his books and articles are non-fiction, he is most well known for his science fiction books and stories, such as the Foundation Trilogy.

Niels Bohr

Famous Quotes:

“If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.”

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Famous quotes:

“We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?”

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.”

“Humanity will be confronted with dangers of unprecedented character unless, in due time, measures can be taken to forestall a disastrous competition in such formidable armaments and to establish an international control of the manufacture and use of powerful materials.”

(1885 – 1962)

In Manchester this physicist worked with Rutherford's group on the structure of the atom. Using quantum ideas due to Planck and Einstein, Bohr conjectured that an atom could exist only in a discrete set of stable energy states.

Robert Boyle

“Under conditions of constant temperature and quantity, there is an inverse relationship between the volume and pressure for an ideal gas.”

P1V1 = P2V2

(1627 – 1691)

George Washington Carver

Former Slave, Educator, Scientist, Businessperson, Service Industry Employee, Agriculturist, Medical Worker, Artist, Author, Lecturer, Domestic, Reformer, Performing Artist.

His work with agricultural products developed industrial applications from farm products, called chemurgy in technical literature in the early 1900s. His research developed 325 products from peanuts, 108 applications for sweet potatoes, and 75 products derived from pecans.

(1865 – 1943)

Nicolaus Copernicus

Famous Quote:

Let no one expect anything of certainty from astronomy, lest if anyone take as true that which has been constructed for another use, he go away ... a bigger fool than when he came to it.”

This Polish astronomer is said to be the founder of modern astronomy.

Famous Quote:

“Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe.  All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, 'with both eyes open'.”

(1473 - 1543)

Seymour Cray

Famous quote:

"I just bought a Mac to help me design the next Cray." when was informed that Apple Inc. had recently bought a Cray supercomputer to help them design the next Mac.”

This electrical engineer was a pioneer in supercomputing. His innovations include vector register technology, cooling technologies, and magnetic amplifiers

(1925 – 1996)

Marie Curie

This chemist invented the word “radioactivity.”

This Polish-French chemist is best known as the discoverer of the radioactive elements polonium and radium and as the first person to win two Nobel prizes.

(1867 - 1934)

Leonardo da Vinci
(1452 - 1519)

That mental discourse that originates in first principles is termed science. Nothing can be found in nature that is not part of science, like continuous quantity, that is to say, geometry, which, commencing with the surfaces of bodies, is found to have its origins in lines, the boundary of these surfaces. Yet we do not remain satisfied with this, in that we know that line has its conclusion in a point, and nothing can be smaller than that which is a point. Therefore the point is the first principle of geometry, and no other thing can be found either in nature or in the human mind that can give rise to the point.... No human investigation may claim to be a true science if it has not passed through mathematical demonstrations... The principle of the science of painting is the point; second is the line; third is the surface; fourth is the body which is enclosed by these surfaces. And that is just what is to be represented...since in truth the scope of painting does not extend beyond the representation of the solid body or the shape of all the things that are visible.

Leonardo da Vinci

He had a keen eye and quick mind that led him to make important scientific discoveries, yet he never published his ideas.

He was a gentle vegetarian who loved animals and despised war, yet he worked as a military engineer to invent advanced and deadly weapons.

He was one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, yet he left only a handful of completed paintings.

(1452 - 1519)

The “flying machine”

Charles Darwin

Famous Quote:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Books:

The Voyage of the Beagle

The Origin of Species

The Descent of Man

(1809 – 1882)

Famous quote:

“In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.”

Famous quote:

"An abominable mystery" is how this nineteenth-century naturalist referred to the origin of flowering plants.

James B. Eads
(1820 – 1887)

This engineer is known for the a triple-arch steel bridge over the Mississippi River (bearing his name) that connects East St. Louis, Illinois to St.. Louis, Missouri.  He also worked to create a channel into New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico that would be navigable year round by means of jetties.

Thomas Alva Edison

Famous quote:

“I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.”

Famous quote:

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

Famous quote:

"Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. As a result, a genius is often a talented person who has simply done all of his homework."

(1847 – 1931)

Albert Einstein

Famous quote:

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity.”

(1879 – 1955)

Famous quotes:

“I shall never believe that God plays dice with the world.”

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

E = mc2

Michael Faraday

This English physicist/chemist is known for his pioneering experiments in electricity and magnetism. Many consider him the greatest experimentalist who ever lived. Several concepts that he derived directly from experiments, such as lines of magnetic force, have become common ideas in modern physics.

Famous quote:

I do not feel that I possess anything extraordinary.  If I do have the pleasure of a special talent, it must certainly be perseverance.”

(1791 - 1867)

Richard Feynman

Framous quote:

“The fact that I beat a drum has nothing to do with the fact that I do theoretical physics.”

The Jimmi Hendrix of physics.

Famous quote:

“I find that teaching and the students keep life going, and I would never accept any position in which somebody has invented a happy situation for me where I don't have to teach. Never.”

This physicistwon theNobel Prize in Physics, 1965, for fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.

(1918 – 1988)

Benjamin Franklin

He invented bifocals and the iron furnace stove.

Famous quotes: 
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."  
"The only things of certainty are Death and Taxes.”

(1706 – 1790)

Sigmund Freud

Famous Quote:

“A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.”

Famous Quote:

“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

Famous for The Interpretation of Dreams, published in 1900.

(1856-1939)

R. Buckminster Fuller

“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons. “

“Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.”

“Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.”

Galileo Galilei

This Italian mathematician’s support for the heliocentric theory (Copernicus’ sun-centered theory that the Earth revolves around the sun) got him into trouble with the Roman Catholic Church. In 1633 the Inquisition convicted him of heresy and forced him to recant (publicly withdraw) his support of Copernicus. They sentenced him to life imprisonment, but because of his advanced age allowed him serve his term under house arrest at his villa outside of Florence, Italy.

Italian mathematician, astronomer, physicist, philosopher.

Famous Quote:

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

(1564–1642)

Bill Gates

Famous Quote:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody."

This software developer never graduated from college, but authored Business @ the Speed of Thought and The Road Ahead.

(1955 - )

Jane Goodall

This conservationist is the world's foremost authority on chimpanzees, having closely observed their behavior for the past quarter century in the jungles of the Gombe Game Reserve in Africa, living in the chimps' environment and gaining their confidence.

(1934 – )

“It can be exhausting climbing high, far and fast. Around 3 pm you feel very weary because of spending a lot of the day on your tummy, crawling, with vines catching your hair. Living under the skies, the forest is for me a temple, a cathedral made of tree canopies and dancing light, especially when it's raining and quiet. That's heaven on earth for me. I can't imagine going through life without being tuned into the mystical side of nature. People are too busy nowadays.”

Stephen Hawking

Famous quote:
“Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?”

Famous quote:

“God not only plays dice. He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen. “

English physicist, educator, author

(1942 – )

Werner Karl Heisenberg
(1901 - 1976)

Even for the physicist the description in plain language will be a criterion of the degree of understanding that has been reached.

German physicist

Hippocrates

Famous quote:

“There are in fact two things, science and opinion; the former begets knowledge, the latter ignorance. “

This early mathematician showed that a cube can be doubled if two mean proportionals can be determined between a number and its double. This had a major influence on attempts to duplicate the cube, all efforts after this being directed towards the mean proportionals problem.

(460 BC - 377 BC)

His book included geometrical solutions to quadratic equations and included early methods of integration.

Grace Hopper

She was the first woman to receive the National Medal of Technology (1991). The award recognises her as a computer pioneer, who spent a half century helping keep America on the leading edge of high technology.

In 1951 this early computer scientist discovered the first computer "bug." It was a real moth, and was pasted into the UNIVAC I logbook.

In 1952 she had an operational compiler. "Nobody believed that," she said. "I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic."

(1906 – 1992)

Mary Leakey

Richard:  It has taken biologists some 230 years to identify and describe three quarters of a million insects; if there are indeed at least thirty million, as Erwin (Terry Erwin, the Smithsonian Institute) estimates, then, working as they have in the past, insect taxonomists have ten thousand years of employment ahead of them. Ghilean Prance, director of the Botanical Gardens in Kew, estimates that a complete list of plants in the Americas would occupy taxonomists for four centuries, again working at historical rates.

It was this anthropologist’s 1959 discovery of the Zinjanthropus cranium at Olduvai that captured worldwide attention and made this family a household name. Building on this find, the husband and wife team attracted a multidisciplinary team of specialists to work at Olduvai and launched the modern science of paleoanthropology, the study of human origins.

(1913 – 1996)

This anthropologist discovered three trails of fossilised hominid footprints 3.6 million years old at Laetoli in Tanzania in 1978. These showed that man's ancestors were already walking upright at a much earlier period than most anthropologists had believed.

Margaret Mead

Famous quote:

“Anthropology demands the open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess.”

Most famous for The Coming of Age in Somoa, first published in 1928.

(1901 – 1987)

Gregor Mendel

Best known for his research on heredity, using pea plants.

This biologist’s work became the foundation for modern genetics.

(1823 – 1884)

Sir Isaac Newton

Famous quote:

“If I have seen further [than certain other men], it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”

Every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it.

F = ma

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

This physicist/mathematician’s greatest achievement was his work in physics and celestial mechanics, which culminated in the theory of universal gravitation.

(1642 – 1727)

Alfred Nobel

This industrialist was very interested in social and peace-related issues and held what were considered radical views in his era. He had a great interest in literature and wrote his own poetry and dramatic works.

(1833-1896)

This person invented dynamite and endowed a $9 million fund in his will. The interest on this endowment was to be used as awards for people whose work most benefited humanity.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

This physicist’s name has become almost synonymous with the atomic bomb, and also with the dilemma facing scientists when the interests of the nation and their own conscience collide.

He established the Manhattan Project in 1941.

(1904 – 1967)

Blaise Pascal

This future mathematician’s father decided that he was not to study mathematics before the age of 15 and all mathematics texts were removed from their house. However, his curiosity raised by this, the son started to work on geometry himself at the age of 12. He discovered that the sum of the angles of a triangle are two right angles and, when his father found out, he relented and allowed him a copy of Euclid.

Famous Quote:
“Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”

(1623 – 1662)

Jean Piaget

His researches in developmental psychology and genetic epistemology had one unique goal: how does knowledge grow? His answer is that the growth of knowledge is a progressive construction of logically embedded structures superseding one another by a process of inclusion of lower less powerful logical means into higher and more powerful ones up to adulthood.

(1896-1980)

sensorimotor,
preoperations,
concrete operations, and
formal operations

Carl Sagan

Famous quotes:

"If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."

"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers".

He published Cosmos in 1980, the novel Contact in 1985, and Billions and Billions : Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium in 1997.

(1934 – 1996)

“I never said it. Honest.  Oh I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars.  It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers.  I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people.  But I never said “billions and billions.”