John Dalton was an English chemist, meteorologist and physicist. He is best known for his pioneering work in the development of modern atomic theory, and his research into colour blindness. He developed the first useful atomic theory of...

Among the young men whom Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier deeply influenced was Eleuthère Irénée du Pont (1771–1834), the founder of the DuPont Company. His father, Pierre Samuel du Pont—an economist, government official, and publicist—was among t...

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was a founder (with Dwarkanath Tagore and other Bengali Brahmins) of the Brahmo Samaj in 1828 which engendered the Brahmo Samaj, an influential Indian socio-religious reform movement. His influence was apparent in the fie...

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific vie...

Rear-Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, was a hydrographer and officer in Britain's Royal Navy. Beaufort was the creator of the Beaufort scale for indicating wind force. Sir Francis Beaufort's father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, was a Protestant c...

Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss was a German mathematician, who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, algebra, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy, Matrix theo...

Sir Humphry Davy, 1st Baronet FRS MRIA was a British chemist and inventor. He is probably best remembered today for his discoveries of several alkali and alkaline earth metals, as well as contributions to the discoveries of the elemental n...

Jöns Jacob Berzelius was a Swedish chemist. He worked out the modern technique of chemical formula notation, and is together with John Dalton, Antoine Lavoisier, and Robert Boyle considered a father of modern chemistry. He began his career...

August Ferdinand Möbius was a German mathematician and theoretical astronomer. He is best known for his discovery of the Möbius strip, a non-orientable two-dimensional surface with only one side when embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean...

Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew...

Charles Babbage was an English mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and (proto-) computer scientist who originated the idea of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London S...

Gabriel Lamé was a French mathematician who contributed to the theory of partial differential equations by the use of curvilinear coordinates, and the mathematical theory of elasticity. He became well known for his general theory of curv...

Sir Charles Lyell was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by sl...

Sir George Biddell Airy was an English mathematician and astronomer, Astronomer Royal from 1835 to 1881. His many achievements include work on planetary orbits, measuring the mean density of the Earth, a method of solution of two-dimensiona...

Christian Andreas Doppler was an Austrian mathematician and physicist. He is celebrated for his principle — known as the Doppler effect — that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer. He...