Scientists who invented

It was mathematical obsession at first sight. The Analytical Engine was more than a calculator — its intricate mechanisms and the fact that the user fed it commands via a punch card meant the engine could perform nearly any mathematical task ordered.

Lovelace even wrote instructions for solving a complex math problem, should the machine ever see the light of day. Many historians would later deem those instructions the first computer program, and Lovelace the first programmer. Memories of middle or high school geometry invariably include an instructor drawing right triangles on a blackboard to explain the Pythagorean theorem. The lesson was that the square of the hypotenuse, or longest side, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides.

A proof followed, adding a level of certainty rare in other high school classes, like social studies and English. Pythagoras, a sixth-century B. Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem and various proofs. But forget about the certainty. Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians used the equation centuries before Pythagoras, says Karen Eva Carr, a retired historian at Portland State University, though many scholars leave open the possibility he developed the first proof.

Even so, we know enough to suspect Pythagoras was one of the great mathematicians of antiquity. His influence was widespread and lasting. Read More: Hey, I know that name. Meet the scientists behind the measurement units you use in your daily life. It started in Sweden: a functional, user-friendly innovation that took over the world, bringing order to chaos.

No, not an Ikea closet organizer. He lived at a time when formal scientific training was scant and there was no system for referring to living things.

The 18th century was also a time when European explorers were fanning out across the globe, finding ever more plants and animals new to science. He intended the simple Latin two-word construction for each plant as a kind of shorthand, an easy way to remember what it was. The names moved quickly from the margins of a single book to the center of botany, and then all of biology. Linnaeus started a revolution, but it was an unintentional one.

Today we regard Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, which is used to sort the entire living world into evolutionary hierarchies, or family trees. But the systematic Swede was mostly interested in naming things rather than ordering them, an emphasis that arrived the next century with Charles Darwin.

But his naming system, so simple and adaptable, remains. Linnaeus gave us a system so we could talk about the natural world. But no one mentioned Rosalind Franklin — arguably the greatest snub of the 20th century.

The British-born Franklin was a firebrand, a perfectionist who worked in isolation. Franklin was also a brilliant chemist and a master of X-ray crystallography, an imaging technique that reveals the molecular structure of matter based on the pattern of scattered X-ray beams. Her early research into the microstructures of carbon and graphite are still cited, but her work with DNA was the most significant — and it may have won three men a Nobel.

But in , in the prime of her career, she developed ovarian cancer — perhaps due to her extensive X-ray work. Franklin continued working in the lab until her death in at age Read More: Check out some of the lesser known science heroes. Isaac Asimov — Asimov was my gateway into science fiction, then science, then everything else. A trained biochemist, the Russian-born New Yorker wrote prolifically, producing over books, not all science-related: Of the 10 Dewey Decimal categories, he has books in nine.

Richard Feynman — Feynman played a part in most of the highlights of 20th-century physics. In , he joined the Manhattan Project. As part of the space shuttle Challenger disaster investigation, he explained the problems to the public in easily understandable terms, his trademark. Feynman was also famously irreverent, and his books pack lessons I live by.

FitzRoy founded the U. But after losing his fortunes, suffering from depression and poor health, and facing fierce criticism of his forecasting system, he slit his throat in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck — Lamarck may be remembered as a failure today, but to me, he represents an important step forward for evolutionary thinking.

Before he suggested that species could change over time in the early 19th century, no one took the concept of evolution seriously. Lucretius 99 B. My path to the first-century B. Instead, she married rich. She also fought to make her alma mater more accessible to women, leading to an all-female dormitory, allowing more women to enroll. A champion of the national parks enough right there to make him a hero to me!

Rolf O. As the wolf population has nearly disappeared and moose numbers have climbed, patience and emotional investment like his are crucial in the quest to learn how nature works. Marie Tharp — I love maps. So did geologist and cartographer Tharp. In the midth century, before women were permitted aboard research vessels, Tharp explored the oceans from her desk at Columbia University. With the seafloor — then thought to be nearly flat — her canvas, and raw data her inks, she revealed a landscape of mountain ranges and deep trenches.

Her keen eye also spotted the first hints of plate tectonics at work beneath the waves. Science needs to get out of the lab and into the public eye. Over the past hundred years or so, these scientists have made it their mission. Sean M. Carroll — : The physicist and one-time Discover blogger has developed a following among space enthusiasts through his lectures, television appearances and books, including The Particle at the End of the Universe, on the Higgs boson.

Rachel Carson — : With her book Silent Spring , the biologist energized a nascent environmental movement. In , Discover named Silent Spring among the top 25 science books of all time. Richard Dawkins — : The biologist, a charismatic speaker, first gained public notoriety in with his book The Selfish Gene , one of his many works on evolution. Stephen Jay Gould — : In , the paleontologist Gould was a guest on The Simpson s, a testament to his broad appeal. Among scientists, Gould was controversial for his idea of evolution unfolding in fits and starts rather than in a continuum.

His posthumously published A Sand County Almanac is a cornerstone of modern environmentalism. Bill Nye — : What should an engineer and part-time stand-up comedian do with his life? For Nye, the answer was to become a science communicator.

Oliver Sacks — : The neurologist began as a medical researcher, but found his calling in clinical practice and as a chronicler of strange medical maladies, most famously in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Sagan brought the wonder of the universe to the public in a way that had never happened before. His subsequent works have filled many a bookshelf with provocative discussions of biodiversity, philosophy and the animals he has studied most closely: ants.

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Roberto Lo Presti applauds a brilliant reappraisal of Aristotle as the father of observational biology. Aristotle is considered by many to be the first scientist, although the term postdates him by more than two millennia. In Greece in the fourth century BC , he pioneered the techniques of logic, observation, inquiry and demonstration.

These would shape Western philosophical and scientific culture through the Middle Ages and the early modern era, and would influence some aspects of the natural sciences even up to the eighteenth century. Armand Marie Leroi's reappraisal of this colossus, The Lagoon , is one of the most inspired and inspiring I have read.

It combines a serious, accessible overview of Aristotle's methods, ideas, mistakes and influence with a contextualizing travelogue that also found expression in Leroi's BBC television documentary Aristotle's Lagoon. Leroi's ambitious aim is to return Aristotle to the pantheon of biology's greats, alongside Charles Darwin and Carl Linnaeus.

He has achieved it. Leroi, an evolutionary developmental biologist, visits the Greek island of Lesvos — where Aristotle made observations of natural phenomena and anatomical structures — and puts his own observations in dialogue with those of the philosopher.

It was in the island's lagoon of Kolpos Kalloni that Aristotle was struck by the anatomy of fish and molluscs, and started trying to account for the function of their parts. Leroi's vivid descriptions of the elements that inspired Aristotle's biological doctrines — places, colours, smells, marine landscapes and animals, and local lore — enjoin the reader to grasp them viscerally as well as intellectually.

Aristotle's time on Lesvos was only a chapter in a life of discoveries, and Leroi covers those signal achievements with breadth and depth. He details the theoretical and methodological principles governing the functional anatomy of species from pigeons to tortoises, discussed by Aristotle in On the Parts of Animals , as well as the descriptive zoology expounded in his History of Animals.

For instance, Leroi explores Aristotle's theory of causation, based on the distinction between material, efficient, formal and final causes. He looks at the philosopher's views on the directedness of natural phenomena and the role played by necessity and hazard. He sketches out the theory of four elements fire, air, water and earth as the prime constituents of natural bodies. And he looks at the theory of soul and its relationship to the body — through which Aristotle accounted for aspects of physiology and psychology, from nutrition to rational thinking.

Fascinating chapters are devoted to Aristotle's gradualist conception of the natural world and living things — perhaps best expressed in the saying natura non facit saltum , or 'nature does not make jumps'. Also covered is his theory of sexual generation and transmission of hereditary traits, which he expounded in the masterful On the Generation of Animals.

They go together because they were both pioneers of modern medicine and the first scientists to declare all-out war on viruses and bacteria! We all know about Pegasus and Icarus in ancient Greece. Ader's contraption was the first piloted aircraft to take off under its own steam literally and make a brief uncontrolled hop across a field near Paris. No, he didn't invent the world's coolest electric car.

But Nikola Tesla was arguably the greatest geek who ever lived, always fixing things that weren't broken and coming up with amazing inventions in the process. We have him to thank for alternating current, the modern electric motor, remote controlled boats and, rumour has it, radar technology and wireless communications. He didn't get credit for much of it in his lifetime and died alone in poverty. They patented the cinematograph, and their first movie, released in , is considered the first real motion picture in history.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee is known as the man who invented the Internet, the biggest breakthrough of the late 20 th century. But it's a bit more complicated than that. The Internet started life at the Pentagon as a distributed computer network designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Sir Tim took the idea and added the concept of hypertext as a way for researchers at the CERN, where he worked, to share resources more efficiently.

He and his team went on to develop HTML, web servers and browsers, making the World Wide Web a reality in and opening it up to the public in You are here : Home. TOP 10 inventors of all time.