Machgielis "Max" Euwe was a Dutch chess Grandmaster, mathematician, author, and chess administrator. He was the fifth player to become World Chess Champion (1935–37). Euwe served as President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 1970 t...

The most important philosopher of science since Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Sir Karl Popper finally solved the puzzle of scientific method, which in practice had never seemed to conform to the principles or logic described by Bacon -- see Th...

John von Neumann was a Hungarian American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, co...

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is among the persons who are often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan...

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made...

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German and American nuclear physicist who, in addition to making important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the the...

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U...

Edwin Herbert Land was a American scientist, inventor, and industrialist. While studying physics at Harvard in the 1920s he became interested in the polarization of light. He developed a new polarizing material, which he called Polaroid, an...

Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a for...

Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr. was an American physicist. In 1949, while working at Harvard, Ramsey applied a key insight to improve Columbia University physicist Isidor Rabi's method of studying atoms and molecules. In 1937, Rabi used alternati...

Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electronic engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But...

Francis Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson. He, Watson and Maurice Wilki...

James Ephraim Lovelock is an independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist who lives in Dorset, England. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the cap...

Henrietta Lacks was the unwitting donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were cultured by George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. This is now known as the HeLa cell line....

Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a Franco-American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child. Mandelbrot spent much of his life living and working in the United States, acquiring dual French and American...