Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937)

c.1920, Lord Ernest Rutherford © Rutherford was a New Zealand born physicist, who won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in nuclear physicsErnest Rutherford was born on 30 August 1871 in Nelson, New Zealand, the son of a farmer. In 1894 he won a scholarship to Cambridge University and worked as a research student under Sir Joseph Thomson. In 1898 he became Professor of Physics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. There, working with chemist Frederick Soddy, he investigated the newly-discovered phenomenon of radioactivity. Rutherford and Soddy proposed that radioactivity results from the disintegration of atoms.

Erwin Schrodinger

born Aug. 12, 1887, Vienna, Austria died Jan. 4, 1961, Vienna

Austrian theoretical physicist who contributed to the wave theory of matter and to other fundamentals of quantum mechanics. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics with the British physicist P.A.M. Dirac.

Michael Faraday

Michael Faraday (1791-1867)

Michael Faraday

Faraday was a British chemist and physicist who contributed significantly to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry.

Michael Faraday was born on 22 September 1791 in south London. His family was not well off and Faraday received only a basic formal education. When he was 14, he was apprenticed to a local bookbinder and during the next seven years, educated himself by reading books on a wide range of scientific subjects. In 1812, Faraday attended four lectures given by the chemist Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. Faraday subsequently wrote to Davy asking for a job as his assistant. Davy turned him down but in 1813 appointed him to the job of chemical assistant at the Royal Institution.

Copernicus, Nicholaus (1473-1543)

Polish name: Mikolaj Kopernik. Polish astronomer and mathematician who, as a student, studied canon law, mathematics, and medicine at Cracow, Bologna, Rome, Padua, and Ferrara. Copernicus became interested in astronomy and published an early description of his “heliocentric” model of the solar system in Commentariolus (1512).

Johannes Kepler

Four centuries ago, an evening’s entertainment was as simple as stepping out to gaze at the night sky. But among the world’s many star watchers, one man stood apart. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) was a mathematician and physicist who not only observed, but also sought to explain the celestial dance above.

Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier

The son of a wealthy Parisian lawyer, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743–1794) completed a law degree in accordance with family wishes. His real interest, however, was in science, which he pursued with passion while leading a full public life. On the basis of his earliest scientific work, mostly in geology, he was elected in 1768—at the early age of 25—to the Academy of Sciences, France’s most elite scientific society. In the same year he bought into the Ferme Générale, the private corporation that collected taxes for the Crown on a profit-and-loss basis. A few years later he married the daughter of another tax farmer, Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze, who was not quite 14 at the time. Madame Lavoisier prepared herself to be her husband’s scientific collaborator by learning English to translate the work of British chemists like Joseph Priestley and by studying art and engraving to illustrate Antoine-Laurent’s scientific experiments.

Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882)

Darwin died on 19 April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Throughout 2009, the BBC is celebrating the life and work of Charles Darwin with a variety of special programmes. Find out more at bbc.co.uk/darwin.

Charles Darwin ©

Darwin was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world.Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire into a wealthy and well-connected family. His maternal grandfather was china manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood, while his paternal grandfather was Erasmus Darwin, one of the leading intellectuals of 18th century England.

Niels Bohr

Niels Bohr
Physicist, 1885 – 1962

Niels Bohr was born on October 7, 1885 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Bohr made numerous contributions to our understanding of the structure of properties

 

of atoms. He won the 1922 Nobel Prize for physics, chiefly for his work on atomic structure.

Bohr received his doctorate in physics from the University of Copenhagen in 1911. He then traveled to Manchester, England to study under Ernest Rutherford.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Einstein died on 18 April 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Undated portrait of German-born Swiss-US physicist Albert Einstein. ©

Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the most famous scientist of the 20th century.Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in southwest Germany on 14 March 1879. His family later moved to Italy after his father’s electrical equipment business failed. Einstein studied at the Institute of Technology in Zurich and received his doctorate in 1905 from the University of Zurich. In the same year he published four groundbreaking scientific papers. One introduced his special theory of relativity and another his equation E = mc2 which related mass and energy.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) Image of Sir Isaac Newton Sir Isaac Newton © Newton was an English physicist and mathematician and the greatest scientist of his era. Isaac Newton was born on 4 January 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire.