Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices which greatly influenced life in the 20th century. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park" by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply...

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen was a German physicist, of the University of Würzburg, who, on November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as x-rays or Röntgen Rays. Röntgen's discovery of x-ra...

Alfred Bernhard Nobel was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, businessman, and philanthropist. Known for inventing dynamite, Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel produc...

Gregor Johann Mendel was a Austrian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were...

James Prescott Joule was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work. This led to the law of conservation of energy, which led to the dev...

Johann Gottfried Galle was a German astronomer at the Berlin Observatory who, with the assistance of student Heinrich Louis d'Arrest, was the first person to view the planet Neptune, and know what he was looking at, on 23 September, 1846. H...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...