Wilhelm Eduard Weber was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph. In 1856 with Rudolf Kohlrausch (1809–1858) he demonstrated that the ratio of electrostatic to electroma...

Johann Benedict Listing was a German mathematician. J. B. Listing was born in Frankfurt and died in Göttingen. He first introduced the term "topology", in a famous article published in 1847, although he had used the term in correspondence s...

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution o...

Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier was a French mathematician who, beginning in 1838, studied the causes of perturbations in the Solar System. His work led to improved knowledge of the masses of the planets, the scale of the Solar System, and th...

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...

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the An...

George Boole was an English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought (1854) which contains Boolean algeb...

Buys Ballot was a Dutch chemist and meteorologist after whom Buys-Ballot's law and the Buys Ballot table are named. Buys Ballot tested the Doppler effect for sound waves in 1845 by using a group of musicians playing a calibrated note on...

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...

Léon Foucault was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, invented the gyroscope, and disc...

John Adams was an English mathematician and astronomer who predicted the existence of Neptune. While a student at Cambridge he wrote this note (found only after his death) dated Jul. 3, 1841: Formed a design at the beginning of this week of...

Sir George Gabriel Stokes, 1st Baronet, was an Anglo-Irish physicist and mathematician. Born in County Sligo, Ireland, Stokes spent all of his career at the University of Cambridge, where he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 18...

John Henry "Professor" Pepper was a British scientist and inventor who toured the English-speaking world with his scientific demonstrations. He entertained the public, royalty, and fellow scientists with a wide range of technological innova...

Heinrich Louis d'Arrest was a German astronomer, born in Berlin. While still a student at the University of Berlin, d'Arrest was party to Johann Gottfried Galle's search for Neptune. On September 23, 1846, he suggested that a recently drawn...

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...