~ Famous Scientists ~

[MysteRy]

James Watson



James Dewey Watson was an American geneticist and biophysicist. Noted for his decisive work in the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA, the hereditary material associated with the transmission of genetic information. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins in 1962.

Early Life and Education:

James Watson was born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois and his father was a tax collector of Scottish ancestry. He attended the University of Chicago, Indiana University and the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge with Francis Crick. He was appointed a faculty member at Harvard University, and a few years later, the director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Contributions and Achievements:

James Watson gained worldwide fame and prominence as the joint author of the four scientific papers between 1953 and 1954 (which he co-wrote with fellow scientist Francis Crick) that laid down the double helical structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a megamolecule that is the fundamental substance in the process of genetic replication. This discovery won Watson and Crick (with Maurice Wilkins) the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1962.

During the 1960s, Watson became one of the most celebrated science writers, as he published his textbook “Molendor Biology of the Gene” in 1965, and his best-selling autobiographical book “The Double Helix” in 1968. Watson became the undisputed leading voice in the whole of American science. He epitomized the scientific creativity in 20th century science, giving rise to molecular biology and its two applied offsets; biotechnology and the “Human Genome Project”.

[MysteRy]

Jane Goodall



“Every individual matters. Every individual has a role to play. Every individual makes a difference.”

This famous quote is by a lady who has been interested in animals all of her life. Dame Valerie Jane Goodall was born in London in 1934. Jane Goodall 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 as in one of her project she said that:

“Chimpanzees have given me so much. The long hours spent with them in the forest have enriched my life beyond measure. What I have learned from them has shaped my understanding of human behavior, of our place in nature.”

Early Life and Education:

As a child she was given a lifelike chimpanzee toy named Jubilee by her mother. Jubilee started her early love of animals. Today, the toy still sits on her dresser in London. As she writes in her book, Reason For Hope: “My mother’s friends were horrified by this toy, thinking it would frighten me and give me nightmares.” Jane was a bright student as she is the one of only nine people to receive a PhD degree in Ethology without first obtaining a BA or B.Sc.

Were it not for fate, Goodall may have ended up being a secretary instead of the champion of animals she now is as went to secretarial school and then had a series of jobs at Oxford University and for a film studio that made documentary films until by chance a friend invited her to travel to Kenya. She saved her money by working as a waitress until she could afford to travel by boat to Kenya. She sailed from London to Africa on the passenger liner The Kenya Castle. Two months after arriving there she met Louis Leakey, a famous anthropologist and his wife, Mary.

After a period of working with the Leakeys in the Uvalde Gorge, Leakey recognized in Goodall the right qualities to do an in depth study of chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania.

Contributions and Achievements:

Dr. Goodall’s research at Gombe Stream is best known to the scientific community for challenging two long-standing beliefs of the day: that only humans could construct and use tools, and that chimpanzees were passive vegetarians. While observing one chimpanzee feeding at a termite mound, she watched him repeatedly place stalks of grass into termite holes, then remove them from the hole covered with clinging termites, effectively “fishing” for termites. The chimps would also take twigs from trees and strip off the leaves to make the twig more effective, a form of object modification which is the rudimentary beginnings of tool making.

Humans had long distinguished us from the rest of the animal kingdom as “Man the Toolmaker”. In response to Goodall’s revolutionary findings, Louis Leakey wrote, “We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!” Over the course of her study, Goodall found evidence of mental traits in chimpanzees such as reasoned thought, abstraction, generalization, symbolic representation, and even the concept of self, all previously thought to be uniquely human abilities.

But the most disturbing thing was the tendency for aggression and violence within chimpanzee troops. Goodall observed dominant females deliberately killing the young of other females in the troop in order to maintain their dominance, sometimes going as far as cannibalism. These findings revolutionized contemporary knowledge of chimpanzee behaviour, and were further evidence of the social similarities between humans and chimpanzees, albeit it in a much darker manner.

Goodall also set herself apart from the traditional conventions of the time by naming the animals in her studies of primates, instead of assigning each a number. Numbering was a nearly universal practice at the time, and thought to be important in the removal of one’s self from the potential for emotional attachment to the subject being studied.

Later Life:

Jane was the international recipient of the 1996 Caring Award for Scientific Achievement. She also received the National Geographic Society’s prestigious Hubbard Medal ‘for her extraordinary study of wild chimpanzees and for tirelessly defending the natural world we share. She has also appeared in an episode of Nickelodeon’s animated series and is also a character in Irregular Web comic Steve and Terry theme. A parody of Goodall featured as a diamond-hoarding chimpanzee slave driver in an episode of The Simpsons.

Today, Jane Goodall spends much of her time lecturing, sharing her message of hope for the future and encouraging young people to make a difference in their world.

[MysteRy]

Jean Piaget



Jean Piaget was a Swiss psychologist who is known for conducting a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children. He is widely considered to be the most important figure in the 20th-century developmental psychology.

Early Life and Education:

Born in 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, Jean Piaget’s father, Arthur Piaget, taught medieval literature at the University of Neuchâtel. Piaget showed an early interest in biology and the natural world. He attended the University of Neuchâtel, and later, the University of Zürich.

Even as a young student, Piaget wrote two philosophical papers that were unfortunately rejected as adolescent thoughts.

Contributions and Achievements:

It has been believed that no theoretical framework has had a bigger influence on developmental psychology than that of Jean Piaget. He founded the International Centre of Genetic Epistemology at Geneva and became its director. He made extraordinary contributions in various areas, including sociology, experimental psychology and scientific thought.

Piaget took ideas from biology, psychology and philosophy and investiagted the method by which children learn about the world. He based his conclusions about child development on his observations and conversations with his own, as well as other children. By asking them ingenious and revealing questions about simple problems he had devised, he shaped a picture of their way of viewing the world by analyzing their mistaken responses. He forumalted a outstandingly well-articulated and integrated theory of cognitive development.

Piaget was a highly prolific author who wrote about 70 books and more than 100 articles about human psychology. His theoretical conceptualizations have induced a vast amount of research.

Later Life and Death:

Jean Piaget was honored with the Balzan Prize for Social and Political Sciences in 1979. The following year, he died on September 16, 1980. He was 84 years old.

[MysteRy]

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck



Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, more commonly known as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, was a legendary French biologist who advocated that acquired characters are inheritable. Though his theory of heredity has been refuted by modern genetics and evolutionary theory, nevertheless Lamarck is widely regarded as one of the most influential naturalists and an important forerunner of evolution.

Early Life and Career:

Born in Bazentin, Picardy, France in 1768 to an aristocrat father, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck started studying botany, and issued his first work, “la Flore Française”, in 1778. The book gained him fame and with his good friend and naturalist Georges Buffon, he was made a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1779.

Lamarck was apppointed an associate botanist in 1783. He soon gained worldwide acclaim after beginning a career in 1788 at the prestigious botanical garden, Jardin du Roi, Paris (now Jardin des Plantes). As the garden was reorganized in 1793, he gave some great ideas to setup the structure of the new Museum of Natural History. The same same year, Lamarck was selected as the professor of the Chair of Invertebrate Zoology.

Lamarck’s brilliant contributions to science comprise of extraordinary work in botany, paleontology, geology, meteorology and chemistry. A few of his famous publications include “Système des Animaux sans vertèbres” (1801) and “Recherche sur l’organisation des espèces” (1802). He was appointed a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1779.

Later Life and Death:

Lamarck went blind and died a poor man in Paris on December 18, 1829.

[MysteRy]

Jim Al-Khalili



Jim Al-Khalili is a famous British physicist and author of Iraqi descent. A professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Surrey, Al-Khalili gained fame for writing a popular science book named “Blackholes, Wormholes and Time Machines”. He often appears on several television shows to explain scientific ideas.

Early Life and Education:

Jim Al-Khalili was born in Baghdad in 1962. He had Iraqi father and an English mother. After studying physics at the University of Surrey, he acquired a B.Sc. degree in 1986. He did his Ph.D. in nuclear reaction theory in 1989. In the same year, he was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at University College London.

Contributions and Achievements:

After returning to Surrey in 1991, Jim Al-Khalili became an expert and notable author on mathematical models of exotic atomic nuclei. As a prominent broadcaster, he frequently appears on television and radio. He has written countless articles for the British press.

Al-Khalili was honored with the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for science communication in 2007. He is also a member of the British Council Science and Engineering Advisory Group as well as the Royal Society Equality and Diversity Panel. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2008.

[MysteRy]

Jocelyn Bell Burnell



Entering the professional world as a woman has never been easy. It is not because women are inefficient or lack quick learning power, but simply because she is not a man. For ages women have stayed and worked at their homes. Although today things have modernized to a great extent, the world still carries over some of these inferior feelings towards women. Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an exception to these feelings, setting a great example for other women. She is a bright and talented woman in one of the most male-dominated fields, Science. She is a British astrophysicist who is famous for her discovery of the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle.

Early life, Education and Career:

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born on July 15, 1943 in Belfast, Northen Island. Her father was an architect for the Armagh Observatory, where Jocelyn spent much time as a child. At a young age she read a number of books on astronomy and her interest in the subject was encouraged by the staff of the Armagh Observatory. She attended Lurgan College and went on to earn a Physics degree at Glasgow University, Scotland in 1965. In 1969 completed her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where under the supervision of Antony Hewish, she also constructed and operated a 81.5 megahertz radio telescope. She studied interplanetary scintillation of compact radio sources.

In 1967 Bell, while analyzing literally miles of print-outs from the telescope, noted a few unusual signals which she termed as “scruff”. These “bits of scruff” seemed to indicate radio signals too fast and regular to come from quasars. Both Jocelyn and Hewish ruled out orbiting satellites, French television signals, radar, finally even “little green men.” Looking back at some papers in theoretical physics, they determined that these signals must have emerged from rapidly spinning, super-dense, collapsed stars. The media named these as collapsed stars pulsars and published the story.

In 1968, soon after her discovery, Bell married Martin Burnell (divorced 1993). Her husband was a government worker, and his career took them to various parts of England. She worked part-time for many years while raising her son, Gavin Burnell. During that period she began studying almost every wave spectrum in astronomy and gained an extraordinary breadth of experience. She held a junior teaching fellowship from 1970 to 1973 at the University of Southampton where she developed and calibrated a 1-10 million electron volt gamma-ray telescope. She also held research and teaching positions in x-ray astronomy at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in London, and studied infrared astronomy in Edinburgh.

Jocelyn did not share the Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish for the discovery of pulsars, but has received numerous awards for her professional contributions. She was first chosen as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969 and has served as its Vice President. Among many of her awards she received the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1987 and the Herschel Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1989. She also won the Oppenheimer Prize and The Michelson Medal.

She is currently a Visiting Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Mansfield College. Also Jocelyn is the current President of the Institute of Physics.

[MysteRy]

Johannes Kepler



Johannes Kepler is one name that will always be remembered in the field of astronomy. He was the chief founder of contemporary astronomy and also a great mathematician and astrologer. The German astronomer was the first person to explain planetary motion. His three laws on planetary motion were codified by later astronomers based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. They also served as the basis for Isaac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Moreover his publication Stereometrica Doliorum formed the foundation of integral calculus, and he also made imperative advances in geometry.

Early Life:

Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571 in Weil der Stadt in Swabia, in southwest Germany. He had six siblings, three of which died already at an early age. His father, Heinrich Kepler was a soldier and mother, Katharina Guldenmann was a healer and herbalist. His Grandfather Sebald Kepler, had been Lord Mayor of the town but by the time Kepler was born, the family had become very poor. As a child Kepler led a very unfortunate life; recovering from smallpox at the age of four with crippled hands and eyesight permanently weakened. He also lost his father when he was just five years old.

In 1576 the family moved to Leonberg where Johannes began his schooling first in the German School and then the Latin School. In 1583 he passed the exam in Stuttgart and the following year he went to seminar Adelberg, a convent school. After two years he was accepted at a higher seminar in Maulbronn, also a convent school. Upon achieving a scholarship he joined the University of Tuebingen in 1589 where he studied philosophy under Vitus Müller and theology under Jacob Heerbrand.

Contributions and Achievements:

Johannes excelled in mathematics and proved himself as a skilled astrologer, casting horoscopes for fellow students. Under the guidance of Michael Maestlin, Tübingen’s professor of mathematics, he gained knowledge about both the Ptolemaic system and the Copernican system of planetary motion. He became a Copernican at that time. In 1594 shortly before finishing his studies, he went to Graz as teacher of mathematics and astronomy and remained there until 1600.

In 1600 he met the great mathematician and court astronomer, Tycho Brahe in Prague. Tycho Brahe was working for Emperor Rudolf II and had the most accurate empiric data and precise measuring instruments of his time. Kepler became his assistant and saw the opportunity to test his astronomical theories empirically. The team work of the two men was disturbed because of differing point of views; Brahe was more convinced of the geocentric world view and Kepler more of the heliocentric one. Both of them worked together on planets and Brahe also gave Kepler the task to define the motion of the planet Mars.

During 1601 the emperor Rudolph II appointed him to succeed his patron as imperial mathematician. The first works completed by him at Prague were, nevertheless homage to the astrological proclivities of the emperor. In De fundamentis astrologiae certioribus (1602) he declared his purpose of preserving and purifying the grain of truth which he believed the science to contain. In 1604 Astronomia pars Optica appeared, in which he treated both atmospheric refraction and lenses. In 1606 he published De Stella Nova which was about the new star that had appeared in 1604.

Five years later, in 1609 he published Astronomia Nova, which contained his first two laws on planetary motion. In 1612 he moved to Linz where he served as a teacher at the district school and provided astrological and astronomical services. In 1619 he published Harmonice Mundi where we find his third law besides his derivation of the heliocentric distances of the planets and their periods from considerations of musical harmony.

Kepler married twice in his life. His first marriage was to Barbara Müller on April 27, 1597. Later after the death of his wife he remarried On October 30, 1613 to Susanna Reuttinger.

Death:

He died in Regensburg, Germany on November 15, 1630. Like many geniuses, Kepler has never known fame or fortune, but his determination and persistence led to many discoveries that enable us to understand the universe today.

[MysteRy]

John Bardeen



John Bardeen was an eminent American physicist, who won the Nobel Prize twice. In 1956, with fellow scientists William B. Shockley and Walter H. Brattainhe, Bardeen shared the award for the invention of the transistor. He received the award for the second time in 1972, with Leon N. Cooper and John R. Schrieffer, for formulating the theory of superconductivity. Bardeen thus revolutionized the fields of electronics and magnetic resonance imaging.

Early Life and Education:

Born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1908, John Bardeen’s father was a Professor of Anatomy and the first Dean of the Medical School at the University of Wisconsin. He acquired a BS degree in electrical engineering from the same university in 1928, and after one year, his MS degree in 1929.

Following a few years of research work in geophysics, Bardeen took another degree in mathematical physics from Princeton University, receiving a Ph.D. in 1936.

Contributions and Achievements:

After years of research work at the universities of Minnesota and Harvard, in addition to the Naval Ordonnance Lab in Washington DC, John Bardeen finally joined the solid state physics group at Bell Labs in New Jersey in 1945. He developed an interest in semiconductor research and collaborated with Brattain and Shockley to discover the transistor effect in semiconductors in 1947. His efforts laid the foundation for the modern age of electronics and computers.

Bardeen left Bell Labs and accepted a teaching position at University of Illinois in 1951. At this place, he worked with with Cooper and Schrieffer to formulate the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity, which was later termed as the BCS theory. Bardeen was awarded the Nobel Prize twice for his efforts, and he remains the only person in history to have two prizes in the same domain.

He revolutionized the fields of electrical engineering and solid slate physics. The transistor is often recognized as the most influential invention of the twentieth century.

Later Life and Death:

Bardeen died of heart disease on January 30, 1991 in Boston, Massachusetts, where he had come to Brigham and Women’s Hospital for medical treatment. He was buried in Forest Hill Cemetery. John Bardeen was named by Life Magazine among the 100 most influential people of the twentieth century.

[MysteRy]

John Dalton



The scientific field has witnessed the emergence of many great physicists and chemists; but it is incomplete without the mention of the great British chemist, meteorologist and physicist John Dalton. His tremendous efforts led to the evolution of modern atomic theory. He was the first person to record color blindness. He also carried out his research to explain the shortage of color perception.

Early Life:

Dalton was born into a modest Quaker family in Cumberland, England around 5th September 1766. He got his early education from his father and his teacher, John Fletcher of the Quakers’ school at Eaglesfield, on whose retirement in 1778 he himself began teaching. He spent most of his life teaching and giving public lectures. After serving ten years at a Quaker boarding school in Kendal, in 1793 he took another teaching position in the rapidly increasing city of Manchester. There he taught math and natural philosophy at the “New College” until 1800, when he resigned due to worsening financial condition of the college. Afterwards he gave private tuitions for mathematics and natural philosophy.

Most of the credit of Dalton’s interests in mathematics and meteorology goes to Elihu Robinson, an experienced meteorologist and instrument maker who greatly influenced his initial years of life. At Kendal, Dalton proposed solutions of problems and questions on various subjects to the Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Diaries, and starting in 1787 he maintained a meteorological diary in which during the succeeding fifty-seven years he entered over 200,000 observations.

His first separate publication was Meteorological Observations and Essays (1793), which explained many of his later discoveries; but in spite of the originality of its content, the book met with only a limited attention. Another work by him was published in 1801 as Elements of English Grammar.

Contributions and Achievements:

In 1794 John joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which provided him with an exciting academic environment and laboratory services. After few weeks he presented his first paper on “Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colors” before the society. In this paper he explained that the shortage in color perception was caused by discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball. He himself was a victim of color blindness and was the first one to discover the concept. As a result ‘Daltonism’ became synonymous with color blindness.

Dalton’s greatest interest was in meteorology and he maintained daily records of local temperature, wind, humidity and atmospheric pressure using instruments that he devised himself. By 1800 he was appointed the secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and published a series of papers entitled “Experimental Essays on the constitution of mixed gases; on the force of steam or vapor of water and other liquids in different temperatures, both in Torricellian vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the expansion of gases by heat.”

In 1803, he published his gas law which is now known as ‘Dalton’s law.’ In this law he basically stated that the total pressure exerted by a gaseous mixture is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of each individual component in a gas mixture.

He calculated atomic weights of elements and assembled them in a table which consisted of six elements namely hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, and phosphorus. He calculated these weights from percentage compositions of compounds using an arbitrary system to determine the probable atomic structure of each compound.

John Dalton’s Atomic theory has three principles that remain relatively unchanged. First, Elements are made of the smallest particles called atoms. Second, all atoms for a particular element are identical. Third, atoms of different elements can be told apart by their atomic weight. Fourth, atoms of different elements can combine in a chemical reaction to form chemical compounds in fixed ratios. Finally, atoms can not be created, destroyed, or divided as they are the smallest particles of matter. Even though some of its postulates were opposed by many scholars and scientists, Dalton’s Atomic Theory stills holds a lot of significance as it created a basis for current science.

Death:

Dalton died of a stroke on 27 July, 1844 and was buried in Manchester in Ardwick cemetery.

[MysteRy]

John Locke



John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, often considered as one of the greatest and most influential Enlightenment thinkers in history.

Early Life and Education:

Born in Somerset, England in 1932, John Locke’s father was a prominent country lawyer. He was raised in a rural house in Belluton. Locke attended the famous Westminster School in London, and was later admitted to Christ Church, Oxford. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in 1656 and a master’s degree in 1658. He also obtained a bachelor of medicine in 1674.

Contributions and Achievements:

John Locke is widely considered to be one of the greatest English philosophers and a leading figure in the fields of epistemology, metaphysics, and political philosophy. He also made crucial contributions to education, theology, medicine, physics, economics, and politics. Locke’s empiricist epistemology (he was the founder of empiricist theory of knowledge) inspired Berkeley, Hume, and the later years of empiricism.

Locke’s political philosophy is often noted with shaping both the American Constitution and the French Revolution and laid the groundwork for liberal political thought. He was the first person to explain the self through a continuity of consciousness. He proposed that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Some of the Locke’s most noted works are “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding”, “Two Treatises of Government”, and “A Letter Concerning Toleration”.

Later Life and Death:

Locke never married in his lifetime. He died in 1704 at the age of 72. He was buried in the churchyard of the village of High Laver, Essex.

[MysteRy]

John Logie Baird



Early Life:

John Logie Baird is a very famous Scottish inventor who was born in 1888 in Scotland. He played a vital role in the invention of the television and it was his invention of photomechanical television that broadcasted the transmission live for the first time ever. He studied at the University of Glasgow and also at Royal Technical College. It was due to his unstable health that he could not participate in World War I and he was enforced to give up his electric engineering post. After that he tried out many activities and tried to figure out his areas of interest as he had declared himself as a “Professional Amateur”.

Contributions and Achievements:

It was after his nervous breakdown that he started paying attention to electronics. Marconi’s explanation about the travelling of radio waves was his area of concentration. He was almost sure that visual signals could also be transmitted through the same process. With his firm believe he started working on his project. The basic design of Baird contained a scanning disk named Nipkow disk after its German inventor, Paul Nipkow, which was developed in 1884. This device was made up of a disk made out of cardboard that had square holes in it in series, spirally placed. The Nipkow disk scanned light and dark areas when it spun with the photoelectric cell. This process converted into electrical signals. When two such disks worked in synchronization, the signals were again translated into visual images.

Baird made innovations in this idea of Nipkow and added a feature to it which could transmit signals through electromagnetic waves instead of cable wires. The innovation was not appreciated and financed much by the investors. Throughout this time, Baird took odd jobs such salesman for razor blade and a shoe shiner just to earn enough money to support himself and buy his tools. Many of his inventions involved the use of household items like string, bicycle lamps, cake tin and knitting needles etc. Finally on October 2, 1925 he accomplished in transmitting the picture of the dummy of ventriloquist from his attic’s one end to another. He got really excited and ran to the nearest shop to convince a boy to be a part of his television transmission. This invention gave fame to Baird in a jiffy also arouse interest of the investors. A television signal was sent by him from London to Glasgow in 1927 and from London to New York later in 1928. The only problem was this design produced poor quality image. Vladimir Zworykin’s design of cathode ray tube substituted Baird’s design. Baird still helped in developing improved designs of televisions. He also helped with the colored television and large and wide screen projection which he thought would later be used for movie projection for public. Baird passed away in 1946 when he was 58.

[MysteRy]

John Napier



Early Life and Education:

John Napier was a very famous mathematician of his time and he was born in 1550 in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was Sir Archibald Napier. Logarithms and the decimals’ modern notations were introduced by him. He was very bright and he got admitted in the University of St. Andrews only when he was thirteen years old. It is also said that he had probably also studied at some universities in France and Italy etc.

Napier came back to his homeland by 1571 and got married to Elizabeth Stirling the very next year. At the castle of Gartnes, Napier had enough time to explore his interests in the field of religious politics, agriculture and mathematics.

Contributions and Achievements:

A Calvinist was set to drive away Catholicism from Scotland at any cost. There was a scheme named as Spanish Blanks against which Napier revolted with a certain book called A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1594). Napier set up four new kinds of weapons to make the struggle more powerful. The weapons included an artillery piece, a kind of battle vehicle that was covered with plates of metal and had tiny opening for emitting odious smoke and firepower and two kinds of burning mirrors. The vehicle was driven by men inside.

Soon the Catholic or Spanish conquest was over and that led Napier to get back to his work. He promoted the use of common salt and manure for soil improvement in agriculture. In math, he made remarkable discoveries that were accurate and were accepted all over the world. His technique of calculation of log got published in 1614 Mirifici logarithmorum canonis description. The technique was found to be really accurate that his work was translated into different languages and also widely printed. It helped in the trigonometric calculations in astronomy and navigation. His work about the computation of logarithm in 1920 Mirifici logarithmorum canonis constructio was published even after his death.

A copy of Napier’s work of 1614 was sent to a professor of Gresham College, Henry Briggs. Briggs made Napier’s method even easier by setting log of 1 at zero. Napier agreed with it but left the responsibility of setting up the new logarithm table by Briggs’ plan on Briggs. It was published in 1624 and was called table of common logarithms.

For more than twenty years, Napier worked on a very complex that held a great value to physical science. A device named Napier’s rods or bones shows creativeness of his mind in the field of mathematics. Many mathematical functions like multiplication and division could be done mechanically. This device helped in analog computers and slide rules. Rabdologiae; seu Numerationes per Virgulas libri duo is the work published about his work in two volumes in 1617. He passed away the same year on the 4th of April.

[MysteRy]

John Needham



John Turberville Needham, more commonly known as John Needham, was an English naturalist and Roman Catholic cleric. He was the first clergyman to be appointed a fellow of the Royal Society of London. He is also noted for his theory of spontaneous generation and the scientific evidence he had presented to support it.

Early Life:

Born in London in 1713, John Turbeville Needham was a Catholic and but he did become a priest. He was in fact ordained in 1738, however he preferred to spend his time as a teacher and tutor.

Contributions and Achievements:

John Needham established Académie impériale et royale des Sciences et Belles-Lettres de Bruxelles in 1773 and remained its director until 1780. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1768. He carried out microscopical observations with Buffon in 1748. Needham later conducted a learned correspondence with Bonnet and Spallanzani on the issue of generation.

He faced harsh criticism from Voltaire, because he had tried to establish that tiny microscopic animals, or “anguilles” in his own words, can be developed spontaneously by natural forces, yet in a sealed container. Voltaire, who firmly believed in pre-existing germs, thought that Needham’s ideas could possibly create much controversy as they appeared to endorse materialism and atheism.

Needham also made important contributions to botany and explained the mechanics of pollen.

Later Life and Death:

John Needham died on December 30, 1781. He was 68 years old.

[MysteRy]

John Ray



John Ray was a highly influential English naturalist and botanist whose contributions to taxonomy are considered groundbreaking and historic. He is also well-known in the world of botany for the establishment of species as the ultimate unit of taxonomy.

Early Life and Education:

Born in 1627 in a small village of Black Notley, Essex, John Ray’s father was a blacksmith. Ray entered the Cambridge University at the young age of sixteen.

Contributions and Achievements:

John Ray was selected a Fellow of Trinity College in 1649. However, he lost the position thirteen years later when, in 1662, he declined to take the oath to the Act of Uniformity after the Restoration. With full support of his former stundent and fellow naturalist, Francis Willoughby, Ray made several trips throughout Europe with him, carrying out research in the fields of botany and zoology.

Ray formulated the fundamental principles of plant classification into cryptogams, monocotyledons and dicotyledons in his landmark works “Catalogus plantarum Angliae” (1670) and “Methodus plantarum nova” (1682). Other major publications of Ray include “Historia generalis plantarum” (3 volumes, 1686-1704) and “The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation” (1691), both of which became quite influential during the time.

The zoological contributions of Ray include the developement of the most natural pre-Linnaean classification of the animal kingdom. He was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1667. Ray endorsed scientific empiricism as compared to the deductive rationalism of the scholastics.

Later Life and Death:

In his later years, Ray moved to his native village, where he remained until his death in 1705. He was 77 years old. The Ray Society was established in his honor in 1844.

[MysteRy]

John von Neumann



Von Neumann was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics, in the development of functional analysis. Along with Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann worked out key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb. Von Neumann wrote 150 published papers in his life; 60 in pure mathematics, 20 in physics, and 60 in applied mathematics. His last work, published in book form as The Computer and the Brain, gives an indication of the direction of his interests at the time of his death.

Early life and Career:

John von Neumann was born on December 28, 1903. He was a Hungarian-American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields. The eldest of three brothers, von Neumann was born Neumann Janos Lajos. Von Neumann’s ancestors had originally immigrated to Hungary from Russia. John was a child prodigy who showed an aptitude for languages, memorization, and mathematics. By the age of six, he could exchange jokes in Classical Greek, memorize telephone directories, and displayed prodigious mental calculation abilities. He received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Pázmány Peter University in Budapest. That time he was 22 years of age. At the same time, he earned his diploma in chemical engineering from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland. John Neumann married twice. He married Mariette Kövesi in 1930, just before emigrating to the United States. They had one daughter. He then divorced her in 1937 and married Klari Dan in 1938.

In 1937, von Neumann became a naturalized citizen of the US. This was after migrating with his mother and brothers. In 1938, von Neumann was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize for his work in analysis.

Von Neumann also created the field of cellular automata without the aid of computers, constructing the first self-replicating automata with pencil and graph paper. Throughout his life von Neumann had a respect and admiration for business and government leaders; something which was often at variance with the inclinations of his scientific colleagues.
Von Neumann’s interest in meteorological prediction led him to manipulating the environment by spreading colorants on the polar ice caps to enhance absorption of solar radiation, thereby raising global temperatures.

Von Neumann’s principal contribution to the atomic bomb itself was in the concept and design of the explosive lenses needed to compress the plutonium core of the Trinity test device. Von Neumann’s hydrogen bomb work was also played out in the realm of computing, where he and Stanislaw Ulam developed simulations on von Neumann’s digital computers for the hydrodynamic computations. During this time he contributed to the development of the Monte Carlo method, which allowed complicated problems to be approximated using random numbers.

Von Neumann’s first significant contribution to economics was the minimax theorem of 1928. This theorem establishes that in certain zero sum games with perfect information, there exists a strategy for each player which allows both players to minimize their maximum losses.

An astoundingly creative mathematician, John von Neumann has played a rather important role in post-war economic theory.

Death:

John Neumann died in February 8, 1957 (aged 53) in Washington, D.C., United States.