Wiki famous scientists biography

Sir Isaac Newton Getty Images. Charles Darwin Getty Images. Biologist Growing up in Great Britain, Darwin was raised in a Christian family and held creationist beliefs. Ada Lovelace Getty Images. Mathematician and computer scientist A computer scientist in the s? Gregor Mendel Getty Images. Louis Pasteur Getty Images. Chemist and microbiologist Pasteur used his observations of microorganisms to suggest hygienic methods we take for granted today, like sterilizing linens, dressings, and surgical instruments.

Sigmund Freud Getty Images. Psychologist Although his research initially focused on neurobiology, Freud—who was born in what is now the Czech Republic but grew up in Austria—became known for his psychoanalytic theory that past traumatic experiences caused neuroses in patients. Nikola Tesla Getty Images. George Washington Carver Getty Images.

Botanist and agricultural scientist Circa Washington Carver is best known for his work with the peanut plant. Marie Curie Getty Images. Physicist and chemist Curie, originally from modern-day Poland, was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize —in physics—and also became the first person to win two Nobel prizes. Albert Einstein Getty Images. Physicist In addition to his frizzy hair and reported distaste for wearing socks, Einstein became famous for his theory of relativity , suggesting that space and time are intertwined.

Niels Bohr Getty Images. Rachel Carson Getty Images. Biologist Carson penned the famous book Silent Spring in Alan Turing Getty Images. Computer scientist and mathematician A skilled cryptanalyst, Turing helped decipher coded messages from the German military during World War II. Gertrude B. Elion Getty Images. Biochemist and pharmacologist Elion, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in , developed 45 patents in medicine throughout her remarkable career.

Katherine Johnson Getty Images. Rosalind Franklin Getty Images. Jane Goodall Getty Images. Watch Next. Newton had been reluctant to publish his calculus because he feared controversy and criticism. In , Duillier started to write a new version of Newton's Principia , and corresponded with Leibniz. Thus began the bitter controversy which marred the lives of both men until Leibniz's death in Newton is credited with the generalised binomial theorem , valid for any exponent.

He discovered Newton's identities , Newton's method , classified cubic plane curves polynomials of degree three in two variables , made substantial contributions to the theory of finite differences , with Newton regarded as "the single most significant contributor to finite difference interpolation ", with many formulas created by Newton.

He approximated partial sums of the harmonic series by logarithms a precursor to Euler's summation formula and was the first to use power series with confidence and to revert power series. His work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin 's decimals. In , Newton observed that the spectrum of colours exiting a prism in the position of minimum deviation is oblong, even when the light ray entering the prism is circular, which is to say, the prism refracts different colours by different angles.

From to , Newton lectured on optics. In his work on Newton's rings in , he used a method that was unprecedented in the 17th century, as "he averaged all of the differences, and he then calculated the difference between the average and the value for the first ring", in effect introducing a now standard method for reducing noise in measurements, and which does not appear elsewhere at the time.

He also "distinguished between two inhomogeneous sets of data and might have thought of an optimal solution in terms of bias, though not in terms of effectiveness". He showed that coloured light does not change its properties by separating out a coloured beam and shining it on various objects, and that regardless of whether reflected, scattered, or transmitted, the light remains the same colour.

Thus, he observed that colour is the result of objects interacting with already-coloured light rather than objects generating the colour themselves. This is known as Newton's theory of colour. From this work, he concluded that the lens of any refracting telescope would suffer from the dispersion of light into colours chromatic aberration.

As a proof of the concept, he constructed a telescope using reflective mirrors instead of lenses as the objective to bypass that problem. Building the design, the first known functional reflecting telescope, today known as a Newtonian telescope , involved solving the problem of a suitable mirror material and shaping technique. In late , [ 84 ] he was able to produce this first reflecting telescope.

It was about eight inches long and it gave a clearer and larger image. In , he was asked for a demonstration of his reflecting telescope by the Royal Society. When Robert Hooke criticised some of Newton's ideas, Newton was so offended that he withdrew from public debate. However, the two had brief exchanges in —80, when Hooke, who had been appointed Secretary of the Royal Society, [ 87 ] opened a correspondence intended to elicit contributions from Newton to Royal Society transactions, [ 88 ] which had the effect of stimulating Newton to work out a proof that the elliptical form of planetary orbits would result from a centripetal force inversely proportional to the square of the radius vector.

The two men remained generally on poor terms until Hooke's death. Newton argued that light is composed of particles or corpuscles, which were refracted by accelerating into a denser medium. He verged on soundlike waves to explain the repeated pattern of reflection and transmission by thin films Opticks Bk. II, Props. Physicists later favoured a purely wavelike explanation of light to account for the interference patterns and the general phenomenon of diffraction.

Despite his known preference of a particle theory, Newton in fact noted that light had both particle-like and wave-like properties in Opticks , and was the first to attempt to reconcile the two theories, thereby anticipating later developments of wave-particle duality , which is the modern understanding of light. In his Hypothesis of Light of , Newton posited the existence of the ether to transmit forces between particles.

The contact with the Cambridge Platonist philosopher Henry More revived his interest in alchemy. His contributions to science cannot be isolated from his interest in alchemy. In , Newton published Opticks , in which he expounded his corpuscular theory of light, and included a set of queries at the end. In line with his corpuscle theory, he thought that ordinary matter was made of grosser corpuscles and speculated that through a kind of alchemical transmutation "Are not gross Bodies and Light convertible into one another, In Opticks , he was the first to show a diagram using a prism as a beam expander, and also the use of multiple-prism arrays.

Some years after Newton's discussion, multiple-prism beam expanders became central to the development of narrow-linewidth tunable lasers. The use of these prismatic beam expanders led to the multiple-prism dispersion theory. Subsequent to Newton, much has been amended. Thomas Young and Augustin-Jean Fresnel discarded Newton's particle theory in favour of Christiaan Huygens ' wave theory to show that colour is the visible manifestation of light's wavelength.

Science also slowly came to realise the difference between perception of colour and mathematisable optics. The German poet and scientist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , could not shake the Newtonian foundation but "one hole Goethe did find in Newton's armour, Newton had committed himself to the doctrine that refraction without colour was impossible.

He, therefore, thought that the object-glasses of telescopes must forever remain imperfect, achromatism and refraction being incompatible. This inference was proved by Dollond to be wrong. Newton had been developing his theory of gravitation as far back as Newton's reawakening interest in astronomical matters received further stimulus by the appearance of a comet in the winter of —, on which he corresponded with John Flamsteed.

He communicated his results to Edmond Halley and to the Royal Society in De motu corporum in gyrum , a tract written on about nine sheets which was copied into the Royal Society's Register Book in December The Principia was published on 5 July with encouragement and financial help from Halley. In this work, Newton stated the three universal laws of motion.

Together, these laws describe the relationship between any object, the forces acting upon it and the resulting motion, laying the foundation for classical mechanics. They contributed to many advances during the Industrial Revolution which soon followed and were not improved upon for more than years. Many of these advances continue to be the underpinnings of non-relativistic technologies in the modern world.

He used the Latin word gravitas weight for the effect that would become known as gravity , and defined the law of universal gravitation. In the same work, Newton presented a calculus-like method of geometrical analysis using 'first and last ratios', gave the first analytical determination based on Boyle's law of the speed of sound in air, inferred the oblateness of Earth's spheroidal figure, accounted for the precession of the equinoxes as a result of the Moon's gravitational attraction on the Earth's oblateness, initiated the gravitational study of the irregularities in the motion of the Moon , provided a theory for the determination of the orbits of comets, and much more.

According to Brewster, Halley also told John Conduitt that when pressed to complete his analysis Newton "always replied that it made his head ache, and kept him awake so often, that he would think of it no more ". Newton made clear his heliocentric view of the Solar System—developed in a somewhat modern way because already in the mids he recognised the "deviation of the Sun" from the centre of gravity of the Solar System.

Newton adopted the "at rest" alternative in view of common consent that the centre, wherever it was, was at rest. Newton was criticised for introducing " occult agencies" into science because of his postulate of an invisible force able to act over vast distances. Here he used what became his famous expression " Hypotheses non fingo ". With the Principia , Newton became internationally recognised.

In , Newton found 72 of the 78 "species" of cubic curves and categorised them into four types. Newton also claimed that the four types could be obtained by plane projection from one of them, and this was proved in , four years after his death. Starting with the second edition of his Principia , Newton included a final section on science philosophy or method.

It was here that he wrote his famous line, in Latin, "hypotheses non fingo", which can be translated as "I don't make hypotheses," the direct translation of "fingo" is "frame", but in context he was advocating against the use of hypotheses in science. He went on to posit that if there is no data to explain a finding, one should simply wait for that data, rather than guessing at an explanation.

The quote in part as translated is, "Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses, for whatever is not deduced from the phenomena is to be called an hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy.

In this philosophy particular propositions are inferred from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Thus it was that the impenetrability, the mobility, and the impulsive force of bodies, and the laws of motion and of gravitation, were discovered. And to us it is enough that gravity does really exist, and act according to the laws which we have explained, and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea.

This idea that Newton became anti-hypothesis has been disputed, since earlier editions of the Principia were in fact divided in sections headed by hypotheses. However, he seems to have gone away from that, as evidenced from his famous line in his "Opticks", where he wrote, in English, "Hypotheses have no place in experimental science.

In the s, Newton wrote a number of religious tracts dealing with the literal and symbolic interpretation of the Bible. A manuscript Newton sent to John Locke in which he disputed the fidelity of 1 John —the Johannine Comma —and its fidelity to the original manuscripts of the New Testament, remained unpublished until Newton was also a member of the Parliament of England for Cambridge University in and , but according to some accounts his only comments were to complain about a cold draught in the chamber and request that the window be closed.

He took charge of England's great recoining, trod on the toes of Lord Lucas, Governor of the Tower, and secured the job of deputy comptroller of the temporary Chester branch for Edmond Halley. Newton became perhaps the best-known Master of the Mint upon the death of Thomas Neale in , a position he held for the last 30 years of his life. He retired from his Cambridge duties in , and exercised his authority to reform the currency and punish clippers and counterfeiters.

As Warden, and afterwards as Master, of the Royal Mint, Newton estimated that 20 percent of the coins taken in during the Great Recoinage of were counterfeit. Counterfeiting was high treason , punishable by the felon being hanged, drawn and quartered. Despite this, convicting even the most flagrant criminals could be extremely difficult, but Newton proved equal to the task.

Newton had himself made a justice of the peace in all the home counties. He successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including serial counterfeiter William Chaloner , who was subsequently hanged. Beyond prosecuting counterfeiters, he improved minting technology and reduced the standard deviation of the weight of guineas from 1. Starting in , Newton introduced the practice of testing a small sample of coins, a pound in weight, in the trial of the pyx , which helped to reduce the size of admissible error.

The knighthood is likely to have been motivated by political considerations connected with the parliamentary election in May , rather than any recognition of Newton's scientific work or services as Master of the Mint. As a result of a report written by Newton on 21 September to the Lords Commissioners of His Majesty's Treasury, the bimetallic relationship between gold coins and silver coins was changed by royal proclamation on 22 December , forbidding the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings.

It is a matter of debate as to whether he intended to do this or not. Toward the end of his life, Newton took up residence at Cranbury Park , near Winchester , with his niece and her husband, until his death. He was the first scientist to be buried in the abbey. Shortly after his death, a plaster death mask was moulded of Newton. Newton's hair was posthumously examined and found to contain mercury , probably resulting from his alchemical pursuits.

Mercury poisoning could explain Newton's eccentricity in late life. Although it was claimed that he was once engaged, [ b ] Newton never married. The French writer and philosopher Voltaire , who was in London at the time of Newton's funeral, said that he "was never sensible to any passion, was not subject to the common frailties of mankind, nor had any commerce with women—a circumstance which was assured me by the physician and surgeon who attended him in his last moments.

Newton had a close friendship with the Swiss mathematician Nicolas Fatio de Duillier , whom he met in London around ; [ ] some of their correspondence has survived. Newton appeared to be relatively modest about his achievements, writing in a later memoir, "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Although born into an Anglican family, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christianity, [ ] with historian Stephen Snobelen labelling him a heretic. By , he had started to record his theological researches in notebooks which he showed to no one and which have only been available for public examination since Newton "recognized Christ as a divine mediator between God and man, who was subordinate to the Father who created him.

Newton tried unsuccessfully to obtain one of the two fellowships that exempted the holder from the ordination requirement. At the last moment in he received a dispensation from the government that excused him and all future holders of the Lucasian chair. Worshipping Jesus Christ as God was, in Newton's eyes, idolatry , an act he believed to be the fundamental sin.

He hid his faith so well that scholars are still unraveling his personal beliefs. Although the laws of motion and universal gravitation became Newton's best-known discoveries, he warned against using them to view the Universe as a mere machine, as if akin to a great clock. He said, "So then gravity may put the planets into motion, but without the Divine Power it could never put them into such a circulating motion, as they have about the sun".

Along with his scientific fame, Newton's studies of the Bible and of the early Church Fathers were also noteworthy. He believed in a rationally immanent world, but he rejected the hylozoism implicit in Leibniz and Baruch Spinoza. The ordered and dynamically informed Universe could be understood, and must be understood, by an active reason. In his correspondence, Newton claimed that in writing the Principia "I had an eye upon such Principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity".

But Newton insisted that divine intervention would eventually be required to reform the system, due to the slow growth of instabilities. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Newton's position was defended by his follower Samuel Clarke in a famous correspondence. A century later, Pierre-Simon Laplace 's work Celestial Mechanics had a natural explanation for why the planet orbits do not require periodic divine intervention.

Scholars long debated whether Newton disputed the doctrine of the Trinity. His first biographer, David Brewster , who compiled his manuscripts, interpreted Newton as questioning the veracity of some passages used to support the Trinity, but never denying the doctrine of the Trinity as such. Newton and Robert Boyle 's approach to the mechanical philosophy was promoted by rationalist pamphleteers as a viable alternative to the pantheists and enthusiasts , and was accepted hesitantly by orthodox preachers as well as dissident preachers like the latitudinarians.

The attacks made against pre- Enlightenment " magical thinking ", and the mystical elements of Christianity , were given their foundation with Boyle's mechanical conception of the universe. Newton gave Boyle's ideas their completion through mathematical proofs and, perhaps more importantly, was very successful in popularising them. Newton was not the first of the age of reason.

He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10, years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, , was the last wonderchild to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy. Many of Newton's writings on alchemy are copies of other manuscripts, with his own annotations. In , after spending sixteen years cataloguing Newton's papers, Cambridge University kept a small number and returned the rest to the Earl of Portsmouth.

In , a descendant offered the papers for sale at Sotheby's. Keynes went on to reassemble an estimated half of Newton's collection of papers on alchemy before donating his collection to Cambridge University in All of Newton's known writings on alchemy are currently being put online in a project undertaken by Indiana University : "The Chymistry of Isaac Newton" [ ] and has been summarised in a book.

Newton's fundamental contributions to science include the quantification of gravitational attraction, the discovery that white light is actually a mixture of immutable spectral colors, and the formulation of the calculus. Yet there is another, more mysterious side to Newton that is imperfectly known, a realm of activity that spanned some thirty years of his life, although he kept it largely hidden from his contemporaries and colleagues.

We refer to Newton's involvement in the discipline of alchemy, or as it was often called in seventeenth-century England, "chymistry. In June , two unpublished pages of Newton's notes on Jan Baptist van Helmont 's book on plague, De Peste , [ ] were being auctioned online by Bonhams. Newton's analysis of this book, which he made in Cambridge while protecting himself from London's — infection , is the most substantial written statement he is known to have made about the plague, according to Bonhams.

As far as the therapy is concerned, Newton writes that "the best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison".

The mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange frequently asserted that Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, [ ] and once added that Newton was also "the most fortunate, for we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish. Nature, and Nature's laws lay hid in night. God said, Let Newton be! But this was not allowed to be inscribed in Newton's monument at Westminster.

The epitaph added is as follows: [ ]. Here is buried Isaac Newton, Knight, who by a strength of mind almost divine, and mathematical principles peculiarly his own, explored the course and figures of the planets, the paths of comets, the tides of the sea, the dissimilarities in rays of light, and, what no other scholar has previously imagined, the properties of the colours thus produced.

Diligent, sagacious and faithful, in his expositions of nature, antiquity and the holy Scriptures, he vindicated by his philosophy the majesty of God mighty and good, and expressed the simplicity of the Gospel in his manners. Mortals rejoice that there has existed such and so great an ornament of the human race! He was born on 25th December , and died on 20th March Newton has been called "the most influential figure in the history of Western science", [ ] and has been regarded as "the central figure in the history of science", who "more than anyone else is the source of our great confidence in the power of science.

Newton has further been called "the towering figure of the Scientific Revolution " and that "In a period rich with outstanding thinkers, Newton was simply the most outstanding. The physicist Ludwig Boltzmann called Newton's Principia "the first and greatest work ever written about theoretical physics ". Physicist Edward Andrade stated that Newton "was capable of greater sustained mental effort than any man, before or since", and noted earlier the place of Isaac Newton in history, stating: [ ].

From time to time in the history of mankind a man arises who is of universal significance, whose work changes the current of human thought or of human experience, so that all that comes after him bears evidence of his spirit. Such a man was Shakespeare , such a man was Beethoven , such a man was Newton, and, of the three, his kingdom is the most widespread.

The French physicist and mathematician Jean-Baptiste Biot praised Newton's genius, stating that: [ ]. Never was the supremacy of intellect so justly established and so fully confessed. In mathematical and in experimental science without an equal and without an example; combining the genius for both in its highest degree. Despite his rivalry with Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz , Leibniz still praised the work of Newton, with him responding to a question at a dinner in from Sophia Charlotte , the Queen of Prussia, about his view of Newton with: [ ] [ ].

Taking mathematics from the beginning of the world to the time of when Newton lived, what he had done was much the better half. Mathematician E. Bell ranked Newton alongside Carl Friedrich Gauss and Archimedes as the three greatest mathematicians of all time. Gauss, and among the best experimentalists ever, thereby "putting Newton in a class by himself among empirical scientists, for one has trouble in thinking of any other candidate who was in the first rank of even two of these categories.

The whole evolution of our ideas about the processes of nature, with which we have been concerned so far, might be regarded as an organic development of Newton's ideas. In , an opinion poll of of the day's leading physicists voted Einstein the "greatest physicist ever," with Newton the runner-up, while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists ranked Newton as the greatest.

In , Time named Newton the Person of the Century for the 17th century. Physicist Lev Landau ranked physicists on a logarithmic scale of productivity and genius ranging from 0 to 5. The highest ranking, 0, was assigned to Newton. Einstein was ranked 0. A rank of 1 was awarded to the fathers of quantum mechanics , such as Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac.

Landau, a Nobel prize winner and the discoverer of superfluidity , ranked himself as 2. The SI derived unit of force is named the Newton in his honour. Newton himself often told the story that he was inspired to formulate his theory of gravitation by watching the fall of an apple from a tree. Although it has been said that the apple story is a myth and that he did not arrive at his theory of gravity at any single moment, [ ] acquaintances of Newton such as William Stukeley , whose manuscript account of has been made available by the Royal Society do in fact confirm the incident, though not the apocryphal version that the apple actually hit Newton's head.

John Conduitt , Newton's assistant at the Royal Mint and husband of Newton's niece, also described the event when he wrote about Newton's life: [ ]. In the year he retired again from Cambridge to his mother in Lincolnshire. Whilst he was pensively meandering in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity which brought an apple from a tree to the ground was not limited to a certain distance from earth, but that this power must extend much further than was usually thought.

It is known from his notebooks that Newton was grappling in the late s with the idea that terrestrial gravity extends, in an inverse-square proportion, to the Moon; however, it took him two decades to develop the full-fledged theory. Newton showed that if the force decreased as the inverse square of the distance, one could indeed calculate the Moon's orbital period, and get good agreement.

He guessed the same force was responsible for other orbital motions, and hence named it "universal gravitation". Various trees are claimed to be "the" apple tree which Newton describes. The King's School, Grantham claims that the tree was purchased by the school, uprooted and transported to the headmaster's garden some years later.

Fischer was the outstanding chemist of the modern age. He synthesised many products to show their constituent parts. Won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in for his research into the chemical composition of purines and sugars. Alfred Nobel — Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. Nobel invented dynamite and held other patents, including for a gas meter.

Wiki famous scientists biography

Perhaps most famous for his legacy of Nobel awards. Dmitri Mendeleev — Russian Chemist. Formulated the Periodic Law and standardised the Periodic Table of Elements, which is still used today. Mendeleev wrote Principles of Chemistry — a classic textbook for many decades. Alexander Bell — — Scottish inventor of the telephone and developments in understanding hearing.

Sigmund Freud — Austrian physician — the leading figure in the new science of psychoanalysis. Freud made an extensive study of dreams and the subconscious to try and understand better human emotions. Marie Curie — Polish physicist and chemist. Discovered radiation and helped to apply it in the field of X-ray. She won Nobel Prize in both Chemistry and Physics.

Einstein revolutionised modern physics with his general theory of relativity. Won Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the Photoelectric effect, which formed the basis of Quantum Theory. Alexander Fleming Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin. Otto Hahn — German chemist who discovered nuclear fission Pioneering scientist in the field of radiochemistry.

Discovered radio-active elements and nuclear isomerism Awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Credited with many patents from electricity to radio transmission. Bose took an interest in a wide range of sciences. He made contributions to plant physiology, microwave optics and radio waves. In his Principia Mathematica , published in , he laid the foundations for classical mechanics, explaining the law of gravity and the laws of motion.

Louis Pasteur — Pasteur contributed greatly towards the advancement of medical sciences developing cures for rabies, anthrax and other infectious diseases. Also invented the process of pasteurisation to make milk safer to drink. He probably saved more lives than any other person. Galileo — Creating one of the first modern telescopes, Galileo revolutionised our understanding of the world, successfully proving the Earth revolves around the Sun and not the other way around.

His work Two New Sciences laid the groundwork for the science of Kinetics and strength of materials. Marie Curie — Polish physicist and chemist. Discovered radiation and helped to apply it in the field of X-ray. She won the Nobel Prize in both Chemistry and Physics.