Thales of Miletus was a Greek mathematician, astronomer and pre-Socratic philosopher from Miletus in Ionia, Asia Minor. He was one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regarded him as the first philosopher in the Gree...

Archimedes of Syracuse was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Generally consider...

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was a Roman writer, architect and engineer active in the 1st century BC. Vitruvius is the author of De architectura, known today as The Ten Books on Architecture, a treatise written of Latin and Greek on architecture...

Heron of Alexandria was an ancient Greek mathematician who was a resident of a Roman province (Ptolemaic Egypt); he was also an engineer who was active in his hometown of Alexandria. He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity a...

Villard de Honnecourt was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio or "sketchbook" containing about 250 drawings and designs of a wide variety of subjects. The so-ca...

Filippo Brunelleschi was one of the foremost architects and engineers of the Italian Renaissance. He is perhaps most famous for his development of linear perspective and for engineering the dome of the Florence Cathedral, but his accomplish...

Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figu...

Michelangelo Buonarroti was an Italian sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer of the High Renaissance who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatil...

Juan Bautista de Toledo, Spanish architect educated in Italy, in the Italian High Renaissance. As many Italian renaissance architects, he had experience in both architecture and military and civil public works. Perhaps he started his caree...

William Gilbert, also known as Gilberd, was an English physician, physicist and natural philosopher. He was an early Copernican, and passionately rejected both the prevailing Aristotelian philosophy and the Scholastic method of university t...

Born at Bruges in 1548; died at Leyden in 1620. He was for some years book-keeper in a business house at Antwerp; later he secured employment in the administration of the Franc of Bruges. After visiting Prussia, Poland, Sweden, and Norway h...

Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater (De Rijp, The Netherlands) was a Dutch mill builder and hydraulic engineer. He was involved in the reclamation of the Beemster polder, the first polder in the world created from a lake by draining the water using...

Sébastien Le Prestre, Seigneur de Vauban and later Marquis de Vauban, commonly referred to as Vauban, was a Marshal of France and the foremost military engineer of his age, famed for his skill in both designing fortifications and breaking t...

Robert Hooke, natural philosopher, inventor, architect, chemist, mathematician, physicist, engineer. Robert Hooke is one of the most neglected natural philosophers of all time. The inventor of, amongst other things, the iris diaphragm in ca...

Menno, Baron van Coehoorn was a Dutch soldier and military engineer of Swedish extraction. He made a number of influential weaponry innovations in siege warfare and fortification techniques. He was also known as the "Hollandish Vauban" (Hol...