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...

James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Pri...

John Stewart Bell FRS was a British physicist from Northern Ireland (Ulster), and the originator of Bell's theorem, a significant theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories. In 1964, after a year's leave from CERN that he...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. Nash's work has provided insight into the factors that govern chan...

The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations; in most countries, it started in 1929 and las...

After receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1958, Amitai Etzioni served as a Professor of Sociology at Columbia University for 20 years; part of that time as the Chairman of the department. He was a...

Peter Ware Higgs is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism predict...

Gordon Earle Moore is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article 19 April 1965 in Electronics Magazine). Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computi...

Edsger Wybe Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Te...

Dian Fossey was an American zoologist, primatologist, and anthropologist who undertook an extensive study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work th...

Steven Weinberg (is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles...

Lynn Margulis was an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She developed a theory of the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and contributed to the endosymbioti...

Stephen William Hawking is an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge. His scientific works include a collaboration with Roger Pe...