Khufu (in Greek known as Cheops) was a Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom. He reigned from around 2589 to 2566 B.C. Khufu was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty. He is generally accepted as being the builder of the Great Pyramid o...

Democritus ("chosen of the people") was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos. His exact contributions are difficult to dis...

Aristarchus of Samos was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it. He was influenced by Phi...

Eratosthenes of Cyrene was a Greek mathematician, geographer, poet, astronomer, and music theorist. He was a man of learning, becoming the chief librarian at the Library of Alexandria. He invented the discipline of geography, including the...

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...

Aryabhata is the first of the great astronomers of the classical age of India. He was born in 476 AD in Ashmaka but later lived in Kusumapura, which his commentator Bhaskara I (629 AD) identifies with Patilputra (modern Patna). Aryabhata...

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo or simply Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician, considered by some "the most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages." Fibonacci is best known to the modern world for the spreading of the Hindu-Arabic nu...

Nicolaus Copernicus: The Ptolemaic system of the universe, with the earth at the center, had held sway since antiquity as authoritative in philosophy, science, and church teaching. Following his precise observations of the heavenly bodies,...

In 1577 begint op de leeftijd van 63 jaar de Scheveninger Adriaen Coenensz aan zijn Visboek. In drie jaar tijd verzamelt hij daarin allerlei wetenswaardigheden over de zee, de kusten en kustwateren, de visgronden en de zeedieren. Hij schrij...

Napier's bones are an abacus invented by John Napier for calculation of products and quotients of numbers. Also called Rabdologia. Napier published his invention of the rods in a work printed in Edinburgh at the end of 1617 also entitle...

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (described in his own day as a "natural philosopher") who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific...

Jacob Bernoulli was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He was an early proponent of Leibnizian calculus and had sided with Leibniz during the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy. He is known for his numerous c...

The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. Founded on 28 November 1660, it was granted a royal charter by King Charles...

Henry Cavendish was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine La...

In 1795 Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre was admitted to the Bureau des Longitudes, becoming President in 1800. In 1801 he was appointed secretary to the Académie des Sciences making him the most powerful figure in science in France. In 17...