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90.  Leopold Ruzicka studied under [[Hermann Staudinger]], and received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1939 (shared with [[Adolf Butenandt]]) for work showing that terpenes and some other large organic molecules are comprised of multiple units of isoprene. His position at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich was unpaid until 1925, so until then he supported himself by working in the chemistry laboratory of a perfume company. While working with odors and essences he discovered in 1916 that muscone and civetone contain rings of 15 and 17 carbon atoms, respectively. Prior to this finding, it had been generally accepted that rings of more than eight atoms would be too unstable to exist.

His father was Croatian, his mother German, and he became a Swiss citizen in 1917. In the 1930s he unraveled the molecular structure discovered the molecular structure of the sex hormones androsterone (1934), progesterone (1934), and testosterone (1935). During World War II he was a founding member of the Swiss-Yugoslav Relief Society, and worked to rescue Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany. He was later politically active in protests against the accumulation of atomic weapons. According to his biography at the Nobel Prize website, his last name is approximately pronounced "Rougitchka".

89.  German chemist Adolf Butenandt studied under [[Adolf Windaus]], and isolated and synthesized numerous sexual hormones. This greatly increased the scientific understanding of human sexuality and reproduction, and earned Butenandt the 1939 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (shared with [[Leopold Ruzicka]]). In 1929 he isolated oestrone, a form of estrogen, a hormone crucial to female sexual development also discovered by [[Edward A. Doisy]] at about the same time. In 1931 he isolated androsterone, a male hormone, and in 1934 he isolated progesterone and testosterone. His work with hormones made possible the development of contraceptive pills and the creation of cortisone, a synthetic medication used to treat arthritis.

In 1959 he discovered Bombyx mori, a sexual attractant in silkworm moth and the first proven pheromone (chemical released by an animal that influences the behavior of others in its species). He also studied cancer and viruses. Evidence suggests that blood samples used in his research came from the victims at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and that Butenandt was aware of this as he conducted his research.

88.  Austrian-born German biochemist Richard Kuhn studied under [[Richard Willstätter]], and determined the chemical structure of plant pigments and vitamins. He synthesized vitamin B2 (riboflavin) in 1935 and vitamin B6 (pyridoxine) in 1938. discovered at least eight carotenoids (red and yellow biological pigments). He discovered the deadly nerve toxin Soman in 1944, and also studied enzymes, the influenza virus, and the acidity of hydrocarbons. He won the 1938 Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but because [[Adolf Hitler]] forbade Germans from accepting Nobels, Kuhn could not accept his honor until after World War II. He was a high school classmate of another Nobel laureate, [[Wolfgang Pauli]]. During the Nazi regime Kuhn denounced Jewish colleagues and cooperated with their expulsion from scientific work under German law.

87.  George Paget Thomson discovered the wave-like diffraction of electrons in 1927, for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics ten years later. His Nobel honor was shared with [[Clinton Davisson]], who made the same discovery independently. During World War II he chaired Britain's MAUD Committee, which determined that construction of atomic weapons was feasible. His father, [[J. J. Thomson]], discovered the electron and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1906.

86.  Swiss chemist Paul Karrer studied under [[Alfred Werner]], and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937 for his work showing the constitution of carotenoids (yellow plant pigments), flavins, and vitamins A (retinol) and B2 (riboflavin). He synthesized vitamin A in 1931, vitamin B2 in 1935, vitamin E (tocopherol) in 1938, and vitamin K (phytonadione) in 1939. Though born in Moscow Karrer was Swiss, as were both his parents. He never drove or owned a car, and never seriously considered any of the numerous offers to leave the University of Zürich, where he earned his PhD and worked for almost all his career.

Not to be confused with the Greek composer Paul Karrer (1829-96).

85.  British chemist Norman Haworth won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1937 for his numerous contributions to carbohydrate chemistry. He synthesized sylvestrene in 1912, determined the correct cyclic model for glucose (starch sugar) in 1925, and in collaboration with Edmund Hirst (1898–1975) in 1933 he became the first scientist to synthesize vitamin C, which Haworth named ascorbic (meaning anti-scorbutic or anti-scurvy) acid. This was the first synthesis of any vitamin, and allowed the manufacture of vitamin pills that provided an effective and inexpensive way to treat and prevent scurvy.

His parents had disapproved of his interest in chemistry, and though his father made a comfortable living manufacturing linoleum he refused to pay for Haworth's education past the age of 14. With scholarships he was able to attend the University of Manchester, and he later studied under [[Otto Wallach]]. He also determined the structures of the monosaccharides fructose, galactose, and mannose; the disaccharides cellobiose, lactose, and maltose; and the polysaccharides cellulose, glycogen, inulin, starch, and xylan. His method for determining the formula of glucose and other carbohydrates is still known to organic chemists as the Haworth formula or Haworth projection. He was knighted in 1947, and died in 1950.

84.  Through intuition, study, and what now seems like simple common sense, Dr William Stewart Halsted was an early advocate and practitioner of sanitary surgical practice. Nineteenth century surgery was inherently dangerous, undertaken in only the most dire situations, because most surgical patients promptly developed infections and never recovered. Halsted's patients fared markedly better, because he insisted on meticulous cleanliness in the operating room and pioneered antiseptic procedures including the sterilization of all medical equipment.

He was born into a wealthy family, and had all the advantages of an elite private education before attending Yale. He earned his medical degree at Columbia University, spent two years studying in Europe, and established a respected practice in New York. His father, William Mills Halsted, Jr., was a principal of Halsted, Haines & Company, a leading dry goods supplier in New York, and evidence strongly suggests that the elder Halsted augmented his income by embezzling from the firm, which ensured the younger Halsted's education, overseas study, and personal fortune, and hastened the 1884 collapse into insolvency of Halsted, Haines & Company.

In 1877, while working at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he tried to convince hospital administrators to construct a sterile operating room. The hospital refused, as the proposal was wildly innovative and seriously expensive, so Halsted used $10,000 of his own funds to erect a tent on hospital grounds, equipped with maple floors, gas lights, and sterilization facilities — the first sterile operating environment in medical history.

In 1881, while visiting the family home in Albany, New York, he performed the first emergency blood transfusion, drawing his own blood and injecting it into his sister's bloodstream when he found her passed out from a postpartum hemorrhage. The next year he performed emergency gall bladder surgery on his mother, performing the operation on her kitchen table — administering ether to knock her out, sanitizing his hands and equipment by dipping them in carbolic acid, then slicing into her abdomen and gall bladder, draining vast amounts of pus and removing seven stones — the first recorded surgery to remove gallstones.

In 1882 he introduced the radical mastectomy as a surgical treatment for breast cancer. In 1884 he became the first surgeon to use cocaine as an injected anesthetic in the trunk of a sensory nerve, but in the course of developing this technique he became addicted to cocaine himself. In a subsequent but failed attempt to wean himself from cocaine he became addicted to morphine as well, and remained a regular user of both drugs for the rest of his life.

In 1886 he came to Baltimore at the invitation of Dr [[William H. Welch]], and there he spent several years experimenting on dogs to improve surgical technique for intestinal suture and wound healing. In 1889 he was appointed chief of surgery at the newly established Johns Hopkins Hospital. In the same year, when his nurse complained that the antiseptic mercuric bichloride had caused dermatitis on her hands, he contracted with a rubber manufacturer to make the first surgical gloves. Within a few years he had introduced surgical gowns and hats. In 1892 he became professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins University, and performed the first successful subclavian artery ligation.

In his long career at Hopkins, Halsted introduced improved surgical techniques for aneurysms, goiters, hernia repair, intestinal sutures, thyroid surgery, and treatment of tuberculosis, and established the residency training system, as well an increased emphasis on limiting blood loss and minimizing tissue damage. He was also renowned as a teacher, and as his fame and success grew, virtually all of the next generation of American surgeons were taught either by Halsted, by his students, or by his methodology. Perhaps most remarkably, Halsted accomplished all this while maintaining a dark, delicate balance between his drug addictions and the pressures of academia and surgery.

His character was described as abrupt, eccentric, and introverted. He insisted on wearing only shoes and boots made by a particular leather craftsman in Europe, his suits were all tailored in London, and all his shirts came from a single tailor in Paris. He did not trust American laundries, and had his clothes shipped to Europe for cleaning. He married the head nurse at Johns Hopkins — the same woman whose skin problems inspired surgical gloves, she was a niece of Confederate General [[Wade Hampton]]. For decades Dr and Mrs Halsted lived on separate floors of a Baltimore mansion. They had no children but did own several dachshunds. Though raised a Presbyterian, by adulthood he proclaimed agnosticism. He died in 1922, of pneumonia ironically aggravated by complications from surgery for obstructive jaundice.

83.  American physicist Sheldon Glashow (pronounced GLASH-oh) studied under [[Julian Schwinger]] at Harvard, and developed important theories of electromagnetic and nuclear particle interaction, which laid the groundwork for the next generation of research on quarks and leptons. In 1961, he published a theory extending electroweak unification models, a concept which was later developed further by [[Abdus Salam]] and a former high school classmate of Glashow's, [[Steven Weinberg]]. For this work these three men shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1979.

In 1964 with James Bjorken, he predicted the existence of the charm quark, an important idea in the theory of quarks, and in 1973 with physicist Howard Georgi, he proposed the first grand unified theory. He is among the most outspoken opponents of string theory, which he has called "a new version of medieval theology". He continues his work at Boston University, where he is studying problems of the breakdown ofelectroweak and flavor symmetries.

82.  In 1932 American physicist Carl David Anderson discovered the positron (positive electron), sometimes called the anti-electron, as it was the first known antiparticle and confirmed [[Paul Dirac]]'s prediction of anti-matter. Until Anderson's discovery, it was widely assumed that electrons and protons were the basis of all matter, but alongside [[James Chadick]]'s discovery of the neutron (also in 1932), Anderson's finding threw the scientific understanding of nature at its most basic level into disarray. He also discovered the meson (a particle made of quark-antiquark pairs) in 1936, and in the same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Since [[Cecil Powell]]'s 1947 discovery of a more active meson called the pi-meson or pion, Anderson's meson has been generally referred to as the mu-meson or muon.

Anderson entered CalTech intending to study electrical engineering, and changed his major to physics after attending an inspiring lecture by [[Ira S. Bowen]]. He studied under [[Robert A. Millikan]], and used and improved [[C. T. R. Wilson]]'s cloud chambers to study the cosmic rays discovered by [[Victor Francis Hess]]. He also studied electrons ejected from gases by x-rays, and Compton scattering of cosmic rays. Prior to the start of World War II, [[Arthur H. Compton]] (of scattering fame) asked Anderson to take a leading position in what became the Manhattan Project, the American effort to build an atomic weapon, but Anderson declined. During the war he instead worked on developing a solid propellant rocket for the US Navy, technology used in the storming of Normandy Beach, which Anderson was dispatched to observe in 1944.

81.  The 1912 discovery of cosmic rays by physicist Victor Francis Hess showed that radiation of extraterrestrial origin permeates the Earth's atmosphere. After determining that ground-based radiation would fade to negligible amounts of measurable ionization at about 500 feet above the Earth's surface, Hess conducted his experiments by ascending into the sky tethered to a helium balloon. He made a total of ten daring ascents to heights of about three miles, accompanied by instruments he had designed to withstand the rigors of temperature and pressure changes in the upper atmosphere. His experiments showed that after ionization's expected decline as the ground receded into the distance, it began rising again, reaching levels that increased with the balloon's height to several multiples of the ionization measured at the surface. An ascent made during a solar eclipse showed the same findings, so Hess concluded that the atmospheric radiation was not being broadcast from the Sun, but from outer space itself. Most experts in the field scoffed at his findings until after World War I, when additional research backed Hess's conclusions. In a 1925 paper written by [[Robert A. Millikan]], the radiation Hess had discovered was given its present name, cosmic rays, and in 1936 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

Because he was Catholic and, doubly worrisome to the Nazis, his wife was of Jewish ancestry, Hess was banished from scientific work in 1938. While he pondered what to do next, a sympathetic Gestapo officer came to his home to warn that the names of Hess and his wife were on a list of Austrians to be rounded up and taken to the concentration camps. TheHesses escaped to Switzerland but were forced to leave their worldly possessions behind, and came to America with the equivalent of $10 to their names. Hess worked at Fordham University for the rest of his career, and became a US citizen in 1944. In 1947 Hess and geologist William T. McNiff developed an "integrating gamma-ray method" for detection of radium in the human body.

80.  Dutch-American physicist Peter Debye (pronounced de-BYE) studied under [[Arnold Sommerfeld]], and developed methods using induced dipole moments and x-ray diffraction to investigate molecular structures. In 1912 he demonstrated the Debye equation for dipole moments, a means to determine bond angles and the degree of polarity of covalent bonds, which allows the spatial configuration of molecules to be deduced with far greater specificity than had previously been possible. In the same year he advanced [[Albert Einstein]]'s theory of specific heat, by factoring low-frequency phonons into Einstein's methodology. In 1915 he showed how temperature alters x-ray diffraction patterns in crystalline solids. In 1923, working with Erich Hückel (1896-1980), he introduced the Debye-Hückel equation, a key finding in the modern understanding of electrolytic solutions and the basis for the general theory of strong electrolytes. Though he was inarguably a physicist by training and career, he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1936, for "his contributions to the study of molecular structure through his investigations on dipole moments and on the diffraction of X-rays and electrons in gases.”

Working at the University of Berlin, he cooperated with Germany's Nazi regime in demanding that Jews resign academic posts, but drew the line when he was ordered to renounce his Dutch citizenship. Instead he fled to America, where he spent the remainder of his career at Cornell University, and became a US citizen in 1946. He also studied electric conductivity in salt solutions, the heat capacity of solids, the theory of polar molecules, and the [[Johannes Diderik van der Waals|van der Waals]] forces between molecules. He is the namesake of the Peter Debye Award in Physical Chemistry, presented annually by the American Chemical Society since 1962.

79.  American theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann developed the concept of strangeness for particles in 1953, explaining with a quantum number why some hadrons decay rapidly by the strong nuclear force while others decay more slowly by the weak force, contrary to previous theories (this curious difference in decay rates amounts to about one hundred-millionth of a second). In 1961 he proposed the Eightfold way, a new classification system for baryons (heavy subatomic particles) to explain the almost infinitely complex kinds of particles in collisions involving atomic nuclei. In 1964, he discovered the quark, omega-minus particles believed to be fundamental building blocks of neutrons, protons, and matter itself. This discovery strengthened evidence for the Eightfold Way, brought that theory into widespread acceptance, and brought Gell-Mann the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1969.

He has said that the word quark was borrowed from a fanciful word coined by [[James Joyce]] in Finnegans Wake. His discovery of the quark was concurrent but independent of the work of with George Zweig (1937-), and his elucidation of the Eightfold way was also explained independently by Yuval Ne'eman (1925-2006). As a young man he studied under [[Robert Oppenheimer]] and [[Enrico Fermi]]. At CalTech he worked down the hall from [[Richard Feynman]] and arguably made greater contributions to physics, as their early friendship faded to frustration and a feud (at least on Gell-Mann's part) by the 1980s. In 1984 he was a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute, a center for theoretical research.

78.  Tween dream Justin Bieber says he took some drum lessons, but taught himself to play the guitar, piano, and trumpet. He sang in his church, earned spare change working as a busker in front of the Avon Theatre in his home town of Stratford, Ontario, and took second place in a local talent show in when he was 12. His mother started posting his videos on YouTube in July 2007, when he was 13, and the videos were hugely and instantly popular. Within six months he was signed to a contract with Island Records.

Evidence suggests that Bieber is best buddies with [[Usher]], who sang back-up vocals and appeared in the video for Bieber's first single, "One Time", and apparently owns a piece of Bieber's recording contract. To pursue his career, Bieber and his mother have moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where they live near Usher's home. In November 2009, Bieber told the Toronto Star that at Usher's suggestion a “swagger coach" had been hired, who "helps me and teaches me differentswaggerific things to do”.

77.  In 1932, while working under [[Ernest Rutherford]] at Cambridge, James Chadwick proved the existence of neutrons, the elementary particle without any electrical charge and a fundamental building block of the atom's nucleus. One of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century, it effectively solved the jigsaw puzzle of the atom, and earned Chadwick the 1935 Nobel Prize for Physics. Following Chadwick's breakthrough, he and other scientists began experimenting on all types of materials with neutrons, leading to the discovery of nuclear fission when uranium is bombarded with neutrons, and the eventual development of nuclear weapons and nuclear power production.

He studied under [[Hans Geiger]], and at the outbreak of World War I he was working in Germany, where he was imprisoned by for the duration of that war. At his 1925 wedding, his best man was [[Pyotr Kapitsa]]. During World War II he came to America, where he contributed to the Manhattan Project that developed the world's first atomic weapons. He was knighted in 1945, and passed away in 1974.

76.  French physicist Irčne Joliot-Curie had little formal schooling as a young child, but what teachers she had for home schooling — her mother, two-time Nobel laureate [[Marie Curie]], and father, Nobel winner [[Pierre Curie]], with chemistry lessons taught by family friend [[JeanPerrin]] and mathematics taught by her mother's paramour [[Paul Langevin]]. She later attended Collčge Sévigné for the equivalent of high school, but her college education at the Sorbonne was interrupted by the advent of World War I.

She was several years older than [[Frédéric Joliot]], and when he came to work at the family's Curie Institute she was at first put off by his unfamiliarity with the laboratory's equipment, but they soon fell in love and married. They worked together frequently and co-authored much of their research, most notably their 1934 production of synthesized radioactive elements, transforming boron into radioactive nitrogen, magnesium into silicon, and building radioactive isotopes of phosphorus from aluminium. For this they shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. They also discovered in 1932 that beryllium emits radiation when bombarded with alpha rays.

Despite her Nobel Prize and accomplished resume, she was rejected for membership in the American Chemical Society and numerous other prestigious groups, due to her gender and politics. Like her mother, she died of leukemia brought on by a lifetime of work with radioactive elements, including a 1946 lab accident in which a sealed capsule of polonium exploded in front of her, causing extensive radioactive scalding. In her obituary in the scientific journal Nature, [[James Chadwick|Sir James Chadwick]] wrote, "She knew her mind and spoke it, sometimes perhaps with devastating frankness; but her remarks were informed with such regard for scientific truth and with such conspicuous sincerity that they commanded the greatest respect in all circumstances. In all her work, whether in the laboratory, in discussion, or in committee, she set herself the highest standards and she was most conscientious in the fulfillment of any duties she undertook."

Joliot-Curie and her husband were active in the French underground during World War II, and she was an advocate for peace, socialism, and equal rights for women. She served briefly as Undersecretary of State for Scientific Research in the administration of French Prime Minister [[LéonBlum]]. Her daughter Helene Joliot-Curie married Michel Langevin, whose grandfather Paul had been among Irčne Joliot-Curie's childhood teachers. Her sister Čve Curie wrote Madame Curie, the best-known biography of Curie's mother, and married Henry Labouisse (1904-1987), who was the Director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) for fifteen years. In addition to the five Nobel Prizes won in Curie's immediate family, Labouisse accepted a sixth when UNICEF won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1965.

75.  French chemist Frédéric Joliot studied under [[Paul Langevin]] and [[Marie Curie]], and married her daughter [[Irčne Joliot-Curie|Irene Curie]] in 1926. Working as a team, Frédéric and Irčne Joliot-Curie researched production of energy from nuclear fission, showed in 1932 that beryllium emits penetrating radiation when bombarded with alpha rays, and shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their 1934 production of synthesized radioactive elements.

He was a leader with the French Resistance after the Nazi occupation of 1940, and cognizant of the dangers of nuclear chain reactions he and his wife ceased their nuclear research and had their papers sealed and smuggled to England until after the war. During the liberation of Paris, his laboratory served as a key weapons arsenal for allied forces. He was a co-founder of the French Atomic Energy Commission (FAEC) in 1946, and oversaw construction of France's first nuclear reactor in 1948. He served as the FAEC's High Commissioner until 1950, when he was forced out because of his peace and socialist activism, including his 1949 co-founding of the World Peace Council.

After his marriage, Joliot signed his papers Frederick Joliot-Curie, though his unconventional merging of their names was frequently disregarded in the media. Their daughter Helene Joliot-Curie married Michel Langevin, whose grandfather Paul Langevin had been Marie Curie's colleague and lover.

74.  American chemist and physicist Harold C. Urey studied under [[Niels Bohr]] at Copenhagen, and is best known for his 1931 discovery of deuterium (heavy hydrogen, the isotope of hydrogen, with one proton and one neutron in its nucleus). He later said he had hoped that this discovery "might have the practical value of, say, neon in neon signs", but its principle use has proven to be in nuclear fusion reactions. Urey won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1934, and also isolated heavy isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, conducted respected research in astronomy, geology, and biology.

During World War I he worked as for the Barrett Chemical Company, preparing toluene for the manufacture of trinitrotoluene (TNT). In 1930 he was co-author of Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta, the first widely-used English-language textbook on quantum mechanics and atomic and molecular systems. He was conducting classified research into development of atomic weapons even before World War II, and became a key figure in the Manhattan Project. Working with a team of scientists, he developed the Urey diffusion method to separate uranium-235 from uranium-238.

Within months of the atomic bombing of two cities in Japan, however, Urey authored "I'm A Frightened Man" in the widely-read Collier's magazine, outlining the dangers posed by this new technology. He became a more politically controversial figure in 1952, when he wrote a letter to President [[Harry S. Truman]] in support of his colleagues, [[Morton Sobell]] and [[Julius Rosenberg|Julius]] and [[Ethel Rosenberg]], who had been accused of espionage. He later became active with the Union of Concerned Scientists, expressing concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the safety of nuclear power generators.

The Miller-Urey experiment, conducted by Urey's graduate student [[Stanley Miller]] in 1953, showed that numerous amino acids necessary for life can be easily produced by heating and agitating ammonia, hydrogen, methane, and water in an airtight container. This "primordial soup" experiment contributed to now-widely accepted theories explaining the origins of the Earth and other planets.

The son of a Christian minister, Urey became an atheist early in his adulthood. He is the namesake of an asteroid, a lunar crater, and the Urey Prize of the American Astronomical Society, awarded annually since 1984 to honor outstanding achievements in planetary science by a young scientist. He was outspoken in his belief that life on other planets is probable, and that humans cannot possibly be the most intelligent species in the universe.

73.  Akio Toyoda is the eleventh man to be president of Toyota Motor Corporation, and the sixth to be named Toyoda (the spelling of the company's name was altered in 1936, for easier pronunciation). He is the great-grandson of [[Sakichi Toyoda]], founder of Toyota Industries Corporation; grandson of [[Kiichiro Toyoda]], founder of Toyota Motor Corporation; and son of Shoichiro Toyoda, who was president of Toyota Motor Corporation from 1982-92. The family still controls about 2% of Toyota's voting stock.

He earned a law degree in Japan and an MBA in America before joining the family business in 1984. He briefly worked on the factory floor, but it was very briefly. Always expected to become president of the company, he was groomed with quick promotions across a variety of executive positions in production, marketing, web design, and product development. From 1998 to 2000 he was executive vice president of New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI), the joint manufacturing venture with General Motors in California. He was named president of Toyota Motor Corporation in June 2009.

Mere months after becoming president, he became the face of Toyota's public apologies amidst a massive recall of the company's vehicles in 2010 over "sticky" accelerators, and the revelation that Toyota had known of the dangerous manufacturing defect for years. At least 16 people were killed in hundreds of accidents involving eight models of Toyotas, related to the accelerator problems. "Toyota vehicles bear my name," he said in his apology. "For me, when the cars are damaged, it is as though I am as well. I, more than anyone, wish for Toyota's cars to be safe, and for our customers to feel safe when they use our vehicles."

72.  Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933, for his 1926 introduction of Schrödinger's wave, the mathematical equation of wave mechanics that is still the most widely used piece of mathematics in modern quantum theory. It posits a non-relativistic wave equation that governs how electrons behave within the hydrogen atom. He worked on analytical mechanics, applications of partial differential equations to dynamics, atomic spectroscopy, color theory, cosmology, counter (or detector) statistics, eigenvalue problems, electromagnetic theory, general relativity, [[James Clerk Maxwell]]'s equations, meson physics, optics, radiation theory, solid-state physics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and the unified field theory. He also wrote extensively on the history of science, and existential questions of life.

He introduced his famous "Schroedinger's cat" paradox in a 1935 paper, "The present situation in quantum mechanics". The cat quandary was intended to illustrate the absurdity of quantum physics, which must deal in probabilities rather than observable certainties. The scenario varies, but generally "Schroedinger's cat" tells the story of a cat sharing a closed box with an elaborate booby trap consisting of a vial of cyanide gas, a small but deadly quantity of radioactive material, and a radiation detector. If the radiation detector senses decay in the radioactive material at the atomic level it triggers the release of the poison gas and the cat is killed; but if radioactive decay is not detected then the cat enjoys a quiet nap and no harm is done. So long as the box remains closed scientists cannot observe whether the cat is dead, but until the box is opened and the cat is observed, the cat exists in an indeterminate state and must be assumed to be both dead and alive. Beyond this odd conundrum lies an odder paradox of quantum physics, that quantum level observations of position with regard to momentum are indeed as indeterminate as the cat's state of life or death.

Though Catholic by faith Schroedinger was infuriated by Germany's anti-Jewish laws. In 1933, when an English scientist visited the University of Berlin to try to arrange safe exit from Germany for several of the school's Jewish scientists, Schrödinger — one of the world's most famous scientists — startled the visitor by asking if he could arrange passage for himself and his family. After leaving Germany he spent a few years at Cambridge, then relocated to Austria's University of Graz — which became [[Adolf Hitler]] University after the Nazis invaded Austria, leading Schrödinger to flee another nation. He eventually took residence at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, where he worked for seventeen years, by far his longest stint at any one institution.

Schrödinger had a long, happy, and very open marriage with Annemarie Bertel, daughter of a respected chemist. He kept a detailed log of his numerous sexual escapades, included a teen-aged girl he seduced and impregnated while acting as her math tutor. He had children by at least three of his mistresses, including a daughter by Hilde March, the wife of his colleague Arthur March, who was himself a lover of Schrödinger's wife.

71.  German physicist Werner Heisenberg studied under [[Max Born]], [[David Hilbert]], and [[Arnold Sommerfeld]], and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932. His 1925 theory of quantum mechanics offered a matrix method to explain stationary discrete energy states, and was soon superseded by [[Erwin Schrödinger]]'s more intuitive wave equation. Of more lasting impact was his 1927 uncertainty principle, which states that it is impossible to accurately measure both position and momentum (energy and time) concurrently, and that the more precisely we know an object's position the less precisely we can know its momentum, and vice versa.

In 1932 he explained the principle of isotopic spin (isospin), a quantum number which arises from regarding different members of a charge multiplet as different states of a single particle. During World War II he led Germany's failed efforts to develop an atomic bomb, though his group never came close to achieving this goal and Heisenberg himself doubted it was possible. After the war he was briefly imprisoned in England, before resuming his academic work in Germany. His other areas of research included cosmic rays, ferromagnetism, the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, and subatomic particles. He was a co-founder of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN).

70.  American chemist and physicist Irving Langmuir was nearly blind for the first eleven years of his life, until his vision problems were diagnosed and he was fitted with glasses at the age of 11. He soon showed a remarkable affinity for science, and as a young man he attended the University of Göttingen and studied under [[Walther Nernst]]. He taught for several years at a small college in Hoboken, New Jersey, until 1909, when he took summer work at General Electric's research labs. He quickly came to the attention of the unit's manager, who offered a permanent position at a higher wage than Langmuir's teaching job paid. In his long career at GE, Langmuir was given extraordinarily wide latitude to explore whatever intrigued him. In 1932 he became the first industrial chemist to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, for his 1919 concentric theory of atomic structure, detailing the chemical forces at the boundaries between different substances.

His other career landmarks include the 1912 invention of the high-vacuum electron tube, later used extensively in broadcasting, and his 1913 study of the high-temperature surface chemistry of tungsten, which led to his invention of a gas-filled incandescent lamp that was much longer-lasting than previous tungsten-filament bulbs. He coined the term covalence in about 1915, a reference to the number of electron pairs an atom can share with other atoms. In 1927 he became the first scientist to use the term plasma to describe an ionized gas, and in the same year he invented a hydrogen blowtorch for welding metals at extreme high temperatures. In 1946, with Vincent Schaefer, he discovered that clouds can be seeded with dry ice and iodide to trigger a reaction producing rain or snow. He also conducted respected research into aircraft de-icing techniques, chemical bond formation, filtration, heat transfer, incandescent lamps, low-pressure phenomena, non-reflecting glass, octet atomic theory, thermionic phenomena, smokescreen generators, and submarine sonar.

He is the namesake of the Langmuir isotherm (sometimes called the Langmuir adsorption equation), a mathematical expression of the relationship between gas pressure at constant temperatures and the amount of adsorption on a surface, and of Langmuir cells, long, rotating "cells" of water predicted by Langmuir many years before their actual discovery. An accomplished mountain-climber, he is also the namesake of an Alaskan peak, Mount Langmuir. He was an uncle to epidemiologist and Centers for Disease Control co-founder Alexander D. Langmuir (1910-93), and a friend and frequent flying companion of [[Charles Lindbergh]]. [[Kurt Vonnegut]] worked briefly in Langmuir's lab at GE, and years later said that Langmuir had been the inspiration for Dr Felix Hoenikker, the central character in Vonnegut's satirical science-fiction novel Cat's Cradle.

69.  American physicist Richard Feynman (pronounced fine-man) predicted the future of nanotechnology, and improved the scientific understanding of the nature of waves and particles and the interactions of light and matter. Most of his career was dedicated to unraveling quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics (QED). He found a way to sidestep "divergent integrals", quantum calculations that lead to meaningless answers, and his Feynman diagrams presented innovative graphic analogues to the mathematics that describe how systems of interacting particles behave.

In the early 1940s he worked on the super-secret American effort to develop the first atomic weapons, the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos he impressed [[Hans Bethe]] by challenging Bethe's mathematics, for which the 24-year-old Feynman was given responsibility over far more seasoned physicists working on the project. At the first test explosion of an atomic bomb, Feynman was the only scientist who eschewed protective goggles and watched the blast with unshielded eyes — he wanted to see the explosion clearly, and had researched the danger and confidently concluded that the risk to his vision was negligible.

In 1959 he gave a lecture to the American Physical Society, titled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which forecast the future of nanotachnology in remarkable detail, describing among other marvels of the future machinery capable of encoding and reading the Encyclopedia Britanica on the head of a pin. For most of the 1960s he focused on problems regarding the extreme high energy of heavy particles. In 1969 he devised a theory of "partons" for analyzing high-energy hadron collisions; his "partons" were later recognized as quarks and gluons, but his theory remains fundamental to the current understanding of particle physics. His work contributed to the analysis of [[Arthur H. Compton|Compton]] scattering, pair production, and many other problems of QED, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1965, sharing the honor with [[Julian Schwinger]] and [[Sin-Itiro Tomonaga]].

He was one of twelve members appointed to a commission tasked with investigating the 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, and Feynman's experiments showed that the tragedy was caused by a failure of the craft's rubber-like O-rings. Made of material with reduced resilience at temperatures below freezing, the rings were cracked by freezing weather, cracks which led to the escape of hot gasses leading to the fatal explosion. Much to the annoyance of commission chair [[William P. Rogers]], Feynman repeated the experiment with an O-ring and a glass of ice water, conclusively showing the seal's vulnerability — at a press conference in front of live television cameras.

Always curious, he taught himself calculus when high school math bored him, switched to physics when he found college-level math unchallenging, and researched quantum physics on his own because Princeton offered no courses on the topic. Throughout his career he amused himself with hobbies from picking locks to deciphering Mayan hieroglyphics to exploring altered states of consciousness in a sensory-deprivation tank. He was also a great popularizer of science, and became famous beyond academic circles for his insightful and infectiously enthusiastic 1985 best-seller, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, and for his thoughtful interviews and bongo performances which still circulate on video.

In the late 1970s he underwent successful surgery for stomach cancer, and a decade later the illness returned. He continued his work at Cal Tech through an eight-year battle against the disease, teaching his last class only two weeks before his death in 1988. His final lecture, according to students present, was on the topic of curved spacetime. His sister Joan Feynman is an astrophysicist, retired after a long career at NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

68.  Pathologist and immunologist Karl Landsteiner studied under [[Emil Fischer]], discovered the different human blood types in 1901, and introduced a system for typing the first three blood groups. At the time of his research, blood transfusions was considered risky and experimental, as more often than not transfusions led to potentially fatal blood clotting in the recipient's body. In research designed to understand the cause of this reaction, Landsteiner collected a large number of blood samples, separated the blood's serum from its cells and suspended the red blood cells in a saline solution. Each individual's blood serum was then mixed a sample from every cell suspension, allowing Landsteiner to note which blood samples caused the clotting reaction and which did not. He proposed the existence of agglutinogens (antigens), which he called A and B, in blood corpuscles, and agglutinins (antibodies) called anti-a and anti-b in blood serum.

The first three blood types he identified were named A, B, and C (later renamed type O; the ABO-system of blood group identification is still called Landsteiner's classification), and he soon discovered a fourth blood type, AB. His discovery allowed blood types of donors and recipients to be matched before transfusions, which made blood transfusions a routine medical procedure, saved countless lives, and earned Landsteiner the 1930 Nobel Prize for Medicine. In 1909, with biologist Erwin Popper (1879-1955), he discovered the infectious nature of poliomyelitis (the polio virus). In 1927, with pathologist Philip Levine (1900-1987), he discovered the M and N agglutinogens. In 1940, with pathologist Alexander Wiener (1907-1976), he discovered the rhesus (Rh) factor in blood. While working in his laboratory on 24 June 1943, Landsteiner suffered a heart attack, and died from its aftereffects two days later.

67.  German organic chemist Hans Fischer studied under [[Emil Fischer]] (no relation), and conducted decades of intensive research into the biological pigmentshemin (one of the two components of hemoglobin, the protein which provides the red color in blood) and chlorophyll (source of the green in plants). In a 1915 study he showed that the disease congenital porphyria can be detected in feces and urine. He explained the molecular makeup of hemin and the construction of pyrrols (molecular compounds which give color to numerous biological substances), and synthesized hemin in 1929, proving that its ring had a central atom of iron. He unraveled the bile pigments biliverdin (which causes the yellowish color characteristic of bruised skin) and bilirubin (which yellows skin in jaundice cases), and synthesized them in 1942 and 1944, respectively. He conducted microanalyses of more than 60,000 chemical substances, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1930.

Though he married in his 50s, Fischer was always a man dedicated almost exclusively to his work. He continued his scientific research during Germany's Nazi era, and killed himself on Easter Sunday in 1945, after his laboratory and life's work was destroyed by bombing in the last days of World War II. The lunar crater Fischer is named for both Hans Fischer and Emil Fischer.

66.  Euclid was a Greek mathematician three centuries before Christ, who taught at the ancient Library of Alexandria and laid out the principles that came to define Euclidean geometry. His masterwork, Stoicheia (Elements), is a 13-volume exploration all corners of mathematics, based on the works of [[Aristotle]], [[Eudoxus of Cnidus]], [[Plato]], [[Pythagoras]], and others who came before him. Little is known about his life, and what little is recounted is often in error, as the name Euclid was fairly common in his time and place.

He is sometimes credited with one original theory, a method of exhaustion through which the area of a circle and volume of a sphere can be calculated, but he left a much greater mark as a teacher. He presented the theorems and problems with great clarity, showed the solutions concisely and logically, and his Elements has remained a standard geometry text for more than two thousand years since his death.

65.  Swedish chemist Per Theodore Cleve was the 13th child of a Swedish merchant. In 1874 he showed that didymium, then considered an element, was actually comprised of two elements, neodymium and praseodymium. In 1879 he discovered two previously unknown elements, which he named holmium (from the Latin for his home town, Stockholm), and thulium (from Thule, an ancient name for Scandinavia). In the same year his research showed that the properties and position in the periodic table of the element scandium matched the hypothetical element "eka­boron" predicted by [[Dmitri Mendeleev]]. In 1883 he provided the first scientific description of Nitzschia seriata, a species of plankton. He also studied botany, geology, and hydrography; developed a system for dating glacial and post-glacial deposits from the fossils record; and was the namesake (but not discoverer) of the radioactive mineral cleveite.

A strong believer in women's equality, Cleve's students included the historian Ellen Fries, who became Sweden's first female PhD in 1883. Eleven years later his daughter, botanist Astrid Cleve (1875-1968), became the first Swedish woman to earn a doctorate in science. His son-in-law and grandson were the Nobel laureates [[Hansvon Euler-Chelpin]] and [[Ulf von Euler]]. Another of his students was the Nobel Prizewinner, [[Svante Arrhenius]].

64.  Swedish chemist Hans von Euler-Chelpin studied under [[Max Planck]], [[Walther Nernst]] and [[Svante Arrhenius]], and described the crucial role of enzymes in fermentation, work which earned the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929. He authored more than a thousand scientific papers, on topics ranging fromco-enzymes, nucleic acids in tumours, and vitamins to the chemistry of plants, fungi, and enzymes.

He was born in Augsburg, Germany when it was part of the Kingdom of Bavaria, and became a Swedish citizen in 1902, but served in the German Army during World War I. On his mother's side he was a descendant of Swiss mathematician and physicist [[Leonhard Euler]]. His father-in-law, chemist Per Teodor Cleve, discovered the elements holmium and thulium. His son, pharmacologist [[Ulf von Euler]], won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1970.

63.  British chemist Arthur Harden made fundamental discoveries in the chemistry of sugar and fermentative enzymes?, including the requirement that phosphates be present for fermentation. He was honored with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1929. He was raised in a non-religion and nonconformist family, and also studied how carbon dioxide and chlorine react to light.

62.  British physicist Owen Willans Richardson made advancements in the scientific understanding of emission of electrons from hot surfaces, and coined the term thermionics for this work. In 1901 he presented Richardson's law, which mathematically describes the relation between increases in the temperature of a hot surface and the amount of electric current released. In a 1911 study he proved that electrons are emitted from metal as it is heated, not from the surrounding air, as had previously been assumed. In 1928 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics. His work was vital in the development of vacuum or electron tubes used in 20th century electronic devices.

He also explained that a body's magnetism is caused by its electrons' movements, a phenomenon now termed the Richardson-[[Albert Einstein|Einstein]]-de Haas effect. His other areas of study included the emission of electrons by chemical action, electron theory, quantum theory, photoelectric action, radar, soft X-rays, and the spectrum of molecular hydrogen. His sister, Charlotte Sara Richardson, married Nobel laureate [[ClintonDavisson]].

61.  In his 1842 paper Über das farbige Licht der Doppelsterne (“Concerning the Colored Light of Double Stars”), Austrian mathematician Christian Doppler showed that the velocity of the source relative to the position of the observer can cause perceived changes in light and sound waves. The following year Dutch meteorologist Christoph Buys Ballot (1817-1890) conducted an experiment that demonstrated the principle plainly, by having perfectly-tuned music instruments played on a moving train as stationary musicians documented the notes they heard. Now called the Doppler effect or Doppler shift, this laid the groundwork for sonar and radar, and for the eventual acceptance of the idea that the universe is expanding (the "big bang"). The Doppler shift in visual spectra allows scientists to measure the rate of recession or approach of celestial objects relative to the Earth. He also published work on astronomy, electricity, magnetism, and optics.

60.  German chemist Adolf Windaus studied the structure of cholesterol, and showed the relationship between steroids and vitamins. In 1919 his laboratory transformed cholesterol intocholanic acid (steroids comprising the bile acids, generally in conjugated form), and in 1926 he proved that the precursor of vitamin D is present in cholesterol, and is converted into vitamin D by exposure to sunlight. In 1928 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and in 1932 he explained the chemical structure of thesterol ring common to all sterols. He also studied the structures of colchicine (an analgesic derived from saffron and used to treat gout) and thiamine (a B-complex vitamin that acts as a coenzyme necessary for the conversion of carbohydrates into glucose).

59.  Cardiologist Conrad Murray was reportedly paid $150,000 per month to act as [[22533|Michael Jackson]]'s personal physician. He prescribed inordinately high levels of propofol to Jackson, allegedly causing the singer's death, and he is pleading not guilty to charges of involuntary manslaughter. ?Propofol, marketed under the brand name Diprivan, is a very strong hypnotic agent that is administered intravenously and is widely used in surgical anesthesia. Reports have suggested that Jackson's sleep cycle was entirely controlled by Conrad's nightly administration of the drug, and that Jackson was also taking up to twenty other prescription drugs including dilaudid, fentanyl, methadone, percocet, and vicodin.

Murray has told investigators that when he arrived at Jackson's home on the night of the singer's death, Jackson was already unconscious, and that he performed cardiopulmonaryresuscitation in an attempt to save his life. He says he called paramedics within ten minutes; investigators claim the wait was an hour and twenty-two minutes. Prosecutors also say that Murray did not inform paramedics or admissions personnel at UCLA Medical Center that Jackson had been given propofol. For his part, Murray has proclaimed his innocence in a YouTube post, saying "I told the truth, and I have faith the truth will prevail."

He was born in Grenada, raised for his first seven years by his maternal grandparents who were farmers there, then lived with his mother in Trinidad and Tobago. He first met his father when he came to America in 1978, and he earned his medical degree at Nashville'sMeharry Medical College in 1989. He operated private practices in Las Vegas and Houston, and first met Jackson in 2006 when he provided medical treatment for one of Jackson's children in Las Vegas.

58.  Named Georges-Louis Leclerc at birth, he became Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon when he was about ten years old, as his mother inherited a sizable estate and his father became Lord of Buffon and Montbard. The family had already been modestly wealthy and Buffon's education was never lacking, but after receiving their inheritance they moved into a mansion in Dijon and Buffon's father became an advisor to the Burgundian parliament.

He studied law and mathematics at the College des Godrans, a Jesuit institute in Dijon, where in 1727 he discovered the binomial theorem, the formula for finding any power of a binomial (two terms connected by + or -) without needing to multiply numbers at length. He proposed a theory postulating that the planets of our solar system were created when a comet collided with the Sun. While this seems nonsensical now, it is important historically, as the first theory of creation stated scientifically, without an omnipotent God to set things in motion, and obedient to the laws of physics as understood at the time. From 1739 until his death he was the administrator of the Jardin des Plantes, France's finest botanical garden. In 1777 he conducted a famous experiment on probability, now called Buffon's Needle, wherein a needle is dropped on a lined floor or paper — the probability of the needle crossing one of the lines is directly related to the value of pi.

He studied astronomy, physics, plant physiology, and ship construction, and questioned the dogma of his era in almost every area of science. His writings spanned from South American bats to the cause of strabismus (crossed eyes) to an elaborate albeit erronious inter-species genealogical tree. From 1749 to 1786 he wrote 36 volumes of Histoire Naturelle, Générale et Particuličre (Natural History, General and Particular), intended as an encyclopedia of all knowledge.

Though undoubtedly among the greatest scientists of his time Buffon was not held in high regard among his peers, for in attempting to summarize all scientific knowledge he challenged the authority of biologists, chemists, geologists, other mathematicians, and especially the theologians. He felt it beneath his dignity to respond to criticisms, explaining in a letter to a friend, "I shall keep absolute silence ... and let their attacks fall upon themselves". He also translated [[Isaac Newton]]'s Fluxions and [[Stephen Hales]]'s Vegetable Staticks into French.

57.  Meteorological physicist Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, better known as C. T. R. Wilson, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927, for his 1895 invention of the cloud chamber. In studying cloud formation, he had sought to recreate cloud formation in his laboratory, surmising that clouds would form is saturated air was allowed to expand and cool. To his surprise, he found that dust particles are required, to trigger the process of forming water droplets, and that firing x-rays through the dust would speed the process. He constructed a more advanced cloud chamber in 1910, proving that water droplets can be formed by charged subatomic particles traveling through supersaturated air. In 1911 he became the first scientist to observe and photograph the paths of particles through a gas, adding compelling visual evidence to support theories of atomic structure.

The Wilson cloud chamber was used for decades for studying cosmic rays, radioactivity, x-rays, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear weapons. Among other important research, Wilson cloud chambers were used to prove the reality of the Compton effect postulated by [[Arthur H. Compton]], the discovery of the positron by [[Carl David Anderson]], and the transmutation of atomic nuclei by [[JohnCockcroft ]] and [[Ernest T. S. Walton]]. The Wilson condensation cloud, which forms in the shape of smoke rings and is characteristically caused by a nuclear detonation over water, is named for Wilson.

56.  American scientist Arthur H. Compton was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1927, for his 1923 explanation of what is now called the Compton effect, the manner in which the wavelength of x-rays and other forms of electromagnetic radiation are altered as they collide with electrons. In coining the new term photon, Compton theorized that as a photon of light strikes an electron, the electron recoils and seizes some energy from the photon, thereby increasing its length. His formula accurately predicts the change of wavelength produced in secondary x-rays, and helped confirm the wave-particle duality as theorized by [[Louis de Broglie]].

He was later a driving force in establishment of the Manhattan Project to develop nuclear weapons, and played a key role in planning and supervision of early nuclear power generators. As chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis in the 1940s and '50s, he ended athletic scholarships and resisted racial integration at that institution. His brother, [[Karl Taylor Compton]], was the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

55.  French quantum physicist Louis de Broglie introduced his theory of particle-wave duality in 1924. In his time, the wave and particle interpretations of light and matter were seen as being at odds with one another, but de Broglie suggested that these seemingly different characteristics were instead the same behavior observed from different perspectives — that particles can behave like waves, and waves (radiation) can behave like particles. It was originally written as his doctoral thesis, but his advisors at the Sorbonne concluded that they could not fully assess its merit, and suggested that he send [[Albert Einstein]] a copy for evaluation. Einstein wrote back almost immediately, and stated that de Broglie had unraveled one of the secrets of the universe. His theory helps explain much of how atoms, molecules, and protons behave, inspired [[Erwin Schrödinger]] in the formulation of wave mechanics, and earned de Broglie the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1929.

He also studied atomic energy, cybernetics, gamma rays, optics, particle accelerators, x-rays, wave-guides. In 1949 de Broglie became the first high-level scientist to call for establishment of a multi-national laboratory, a proposal that led to the establishment of the European Organization for Nuclear Research ([[@lorg::cern]]). His brother was physicist [[Maurice de Broglie]], and by heredity they were both French dukes and German princes.

54.  German chemist Heinrich Wieland studied bile acids, work that won him the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1927. In 1911 he showed that three principle ingredients in liver secretions (cholic acid, deoxycholic acid, and lithocholic acid) are chemically similar, and all three are steroids. He showed that nitrogen, which is found in different forms in organic compounds, can be detected and identified as distinct from other forms of nitrogen, and detailed the close relationship between bile acids and cholesterol. He is perhaps best remembered for his theory that oxidation in living tissues is more a matter of hydrogen atoms being removed than of the addition of oxygen. In 1941 he isolated alpha-amanitin, the toxin that makes the poisonous mushroom Amanita phalloides so deadly. His students included future Nobel laureate [[Feodor Lynen]], who married Wieland's daughter.

53.  Keith B. Alexander, NSA Director

52.  Botanist and physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Mymensingh, India (now in Bangladesh), and studied under [[Lord Rayleigh]] at Cambridge, who considered him among his most brilliant students. With a recommendation from Rayleigh endorsed by higher-ups including the Viceroy of India and the Secretary of State for India, Bose was promptly posted as a professor at Presidency College in Calcutta, in 1885. He was the first Indian to hold that title, at what was then a colonial institution staffed by British teachers, but his appointment was strongly opposed by the school's British administrators. He was offered one-third the salary of the school's white professors, and in protest at this slight he took no salary at all for several years.

He remained at Presidency for his entire career, where he assembled the first modern scientific research facilities in Indian academia. He conducted landmark research of the response of plant and animal life to stimuli including electricity, light, sound, and touch, and showed how water and sap is elevated from roots to trees due to capillary action. He invented thecrescograph , an early oscillating recorder using clockwork gears to measure the growth and movements of plants in increments as small as 1/100,000 of an inch. His 1902 paper "Responses in the Living and Non-living" showed that plant and animal tissues share asimilar electric-impulse response to all forms of stimulation, a finding which challenged conventional science of the time, and also showed that even inanimate objects — certain rocks and metals — have similar responses. In a 1907 paper Bose established the electrotransmission of excitation in plant and animal tissues, and showed that plants respond to sound, by growing more quickly in an environment of gentle speech or soft music, and growing more poorly when subjected to harsh speech or loud music.

Prior to his plant and animal experiments, Bose spent several years experimenting with electromagnetic waves, and conducted successful wireless signaling experiments in Calcutta in 1895. The invention of radio is usually credited to [[Guglielmo Marconi]], but a comparison of their records suggests that at certain points of Bose's radio research he was about a year ahead of the Italian scientist. In Marconi's first wireless trans-oceanic transmission in 1901 a mercuryautocoherer was a key component of the receiving device, and while Marconi made no acknowledgment of Bose at the time, subsequent research has shown that Marconi'sautocoherer was a near-exact replica of a mechanism invented by Bose, who explained it in detail in a demonstration at the Royal Society of London two years earlier.

Bose was the first Indian scientist to be widely respected as an equal in the halls of western science. When he demonstrated his mechanisms for generating and detecting radio waves in a January 1897 lecture before the Royal Institution in London, it was the first such lecture given by an Indian. He was elevated to knighthood in 1917, and in 1920 he became the first Indian elected to membership in the prestigious Royal Society. Bose, who came from a fairly affluent family, had no particular interest in the profit potential of his work, and refused to file patent claims. A patent was filed by friends in Bose's name for his 1901 invention of a solid-state diode detector to detect electromagnetic waves.

He founded the Bose Research Institute in Calcutta in 1917, which continues to conduct scientific research. He was a contemporary and friend of the poet [[Rabindranath Tagore]]. His students included [[Satyendra Nath Bose]] (no relation), co-creator of the Bose-[[Albert Einstein|Einstein]] statistics. His father-in-law was Durga Mohan Das (1841-97), a well-known Indian activist for women's rights, and his brother-in-law was Ananda Mohan Bose (1847-1906), a prominent legal and religious leader in India.

51.  Physicist Max Born is best known for his statistical analysis of how subatomic particles behave. His studies of the wave function led to a reassessment of the original quantum theory, replacing the explanation of electrons as particles with a more accurate mathematical and statistical interpretation of the observed behavior of electrons. His work added to the scientific understanding of the inherently probabilistic nature of the basic laws of quantum mechanics, and earned the highest honor in science, the Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1954.

In 1921 he offered the first mathematically precise statement of the First Law of Thermodynamics. In 1925, Born and [[Werner Heisenberg]] formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. In 1926 he published a groundbreaking clarification of the probability density function in [[Erwin Schrödinger]]'s equation of quantum mechanics. In 1927, with [[Robert Oppenheimer]], he formulated the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, a calculation in quantum chemistry for determining the energy and wave function of an average-size molecule. He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and was Lutheran by faith, but he was Jewish by heredity and thus was forced to flee for his life after the Nazis took power. He became a British citizen in 1939, and spent the last years of his career teaching and writing at the University of Edinburgh.

Both formally and informally, he had a long-running debate with his friend [[Albert Einstein]] on the quantum nature of the universe. It was in a letter to Born that Einstein wrote his oft-misquoted line "God does not play dice", though what Einstein wrote is more completely and accurately translated as, "The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the Old One. I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice". In this conceptual battle of determinism versus indeterminism, Born argued the opposite position from Einstein, now increasingly accepted — that even systems obeying precise laws can and do behave in a random way, a randomness of nature at its tiniest level suggesting that whatever the Old One or God might be, in a sense He She or It does play dice. He is the maternal grandfather of actress and pop singer [[Olivia Newton-John]].

50.  Swedish physical chemist Theodor "The" Svedberg studied the chemistry, distribution, light absorption and sedimentation of colloids and molecular compounds. In 1923 he invented the analyticalultracentrifuge , a high-speed centrifuge used to determine the relative molecular masses of large molecules in high polymers and proteins, and with this machine he determines the molecular weights of numerous highly complex proteins. In his 1908 doctoral thesis, laid out a new way to produce colloid particles, offered evidence supporting [[Albert Einstein]]'s theory on [[100747|Brown]]ian movements and the existence of molecules. He won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926.

Working with his research assistant [[Arne Tiselius]], Svedberg developed electrophoresis (a method of separating substances, especially proteins, and analyzing molecular structure) between 1930-37. He also studied nuclear chemistry, photographic processing, and radiation biology, and he is the namesake of the Svedberg unit (S), a measure of sedimentation coefficients.

Beyond the realm of his specific scientific work, he is also remembered as a leading proponent for a notion then still considered controversial, that government should financially support scientific research, in order to protect the state's interests and remain independent from industry control and demands. In the 1940s he was a co-founder of the first Swedish governmental research councils for technology and natural science.

49.  German physicist Gustav Hertz won the Nobel Prize in 1925, for the Franck-Hertz Experiment conducted in 1914 with [[James Franck]], who shared the Nobel honor. Their work helped explain the quantized nature of energy transfer, confirmed [[Neils Bohr]]'s quantum theory about the existence of the stationary energy states, and laid the foundation for nuclear physics. Jewish by heredity, Hertz was forced out of German academia by the Nazi regime, and he worked on the Soviet Union's atomic weapons program from the close of World War II until 1955. He also studied the infrared absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide, and separation of neon isotopes. His uncle, [[Heinrich Hertz]], discovered electromagnetic radiation.

48.  Though his name is not familiar to most people outside of technical circles, few scientists have matched the accomplishments and impact of American physicist and inventor John Bardeen. He studied under [[John H. van Vleck]] and [[Eugene Wigner]], and came to work at Bell Labs in 1945, where in collaboration with [[Walter H. Brattain]] and [[William Shockley]] he invented the electrical transistor two years later. The transistor, of course, brought the electronics industry into the modern era, led to the development of virtually every electronic device in the modern world, and earned Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley the Nobel Prize in 1956.

Even as he accepted his Nobel honors in Stockholm, Bardeen had already begun work that would lead to his next major accomplishment, the microscopic theory of superconductivity (increased electrical conductivity in some metals when chilled to temperatures approaching absolute zero). In 1957, with post-doctoral student [[Leon N. Cooper]] and graduate student [[Robert Schrieffer]], he developed the first workable scientific elucidation of this phenomenon. Now commonly called the BCS theory (for the trio's last names), it has had profound implications for nearly every discipline of physics, and won its authors the Nobel Prize in 1972.

He was the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics. He also conducted extensive research in geophysics, the cohesion and conductivity of metals, diffusion of atoms in crystals, mine-sweeping, quasi-one-dimensional metals, radio waves, surface properties of semiconductors.

47.  German-American physicist James Franck spent his career exploring the interaction of light with matter, with major research into photosynthesis in green plants and the behavior of atoms. With his colleague and collaborator, [[Gustav Hertz]], he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925, for their description of laws governing what happens when electrons bombard the atom.

Their best-known experiment, which is referred to as the Franck-Hertz Experiment of 1914, measured the kinetic energy lost by electrons in inelastic collisions with atoms, and showed the existence of excited states in mercury atoms. This provided the first experimental evidence to support the existence of stationary energy states, and other aspects of [[Niels Bohr]]'s atomic theory. Also in 1925, Franck proposed what is now called the Franck-[[Edward Condon|Condon]] principle, which states that that in any molecular system the transition from one energy state to another is so rapid that the nuclei of the atoms involved can be considered to be stationary during the transition.

While serving in the German Army during World War I he was awarded the Iron Cross for heroism, on two occasions. His WWI military service made him immune to the Nazi regime's racial purity laws banning Jews from public employment, yet he publicly protested the passage of these laws and, in 1933, quit his post at the University of Göttingen and fled Germany. After spending a year working with Bohr at Copenhagen, Franck came to America, where he became a citizen and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop atomic weapons.

In 1945, with [[Leo Szilard]] and numerous other scientists, he co-authored what is now called the "Franck Report" to the War Department in 1945, urging his adopted nation to demonstrate its new weapon at some uninhabited location, as a demonstration to compel Japan's surrender, instead of dropping these new bombs on Japanese cities. The report, famously ignored, also warned that use of atomic weapons could trigger an arms race that could cause wasteful military spending in numerous nations, and lead to dangerous atomic-armed confrontations between nation-states.

When Franck fled Germany he left his Nobel Prize locked in a safe. To keep the medal (made of gold) from being seized, melted and sold to support the German effort during World War II, Franck's colleague [[George de Hevesy]] had the Nobel Prizes of Franck and Bohr reduced to powder and stored without a label. After the war, the dust that had been Franck and Bohr's Nobel Prizes was shipped to the Nobel Foundation in Sweden to be recast, and in 1951 the Nobels were re-presented to both men, who were close friends.

46.  German scientist Richard Zsigmondy won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1925, "for his demonstration of the heterogeneous nature of colloid solutions (substances consisting of particles larger than atoms but too small to be visible to the naked eye or through conventional microscopes) and for the methods he used, which have since then become fundamental in modern colloid chemistry." As a cornerstone of his work, in 1903 he invented the ultramicroscope (also called a black-backdrop microscope), which projects high-intensity illumination at right angles, using scattered light to indicate the presence of particles. This allows quantification, measurement, and tracking of colloidal particles, smoke particles, and other extremely small objects.

After attending college Zsigmondy worked for a glass manufacturing company for several years, then quit to pursue his own research in a laboratory at his home, where he designed theultramicroscope and did much of his early research into colloids. He entered academia in 1907, and introduced an improved immersion ultramicroscope in 1913. His brother, mathematician Karl Zsigmondy (1867-1925), devised Zsigmondy's theorem in 1882, a calculation used in group theory.

45.  Alfred Wegener studied astronomy but pursued a career in meteorology, and at a 1912 meeting of the German Geological Society he because the first scientist to propose a theory of continental drift, which he detailed in a book four years later. The accepted scientific theory at the time held that land bridges, long since sunk, had once connected the continents, but Wegener proposed instead that the continents had once been connected in a single, much larger land mass. He called the protocontinent Pangaea, drawn from the Greek pan (all or entire) and Gaia (Earth), and theorized that it had started breaking into pieces in the Mesozoic Era and drifted apart through the ages.

His evidence included identical fossils of plants and animals found in the Americas and in Europe, fossils of some tropical species found in regions now frigidly cold, geological features of the Scottish Highlands that are similar to those of the American Appalachians, and peculiar rock formations in South Africa that are startlingly similar to those found in parts of Brazil. What he lacked, however, was a plausible description of the force that could move continents, and thus Wegener's theory was widely considered crackpottery until long after his death, as paleomagnetic evidence came to light in the mid-1950s. It is now understood that "continental drift" is not a precisely accurate term, since both the continents and the underlying oceanic crust are moving, and the speed of movement calculated by Wegener was substantially faster than now measured by science, but Wegener is remembered in scientific circles as the father of continental drift.

He was among the first meteorologists to use balloons to track air circulation, and the first to trace storm tracks over the polar ice cap. He was famous for his expeditions to the frozen North (1906-08, 1912-13, 1929, and 1930) gathering data on polar air circulation, and he was last seen alive on his 50th birthday, 1 November 1830, during a 1930 scientific expedition to the Greenland ice sheet. His body was discovered under the ice the next summer, and colleagues re-buried his remains in an area that has been renamed the Wegener Peninsula in his memory. The precise location of his grave has been lost, however, as it was not marked well enough to withstand the elements and accumulation of ice.

44.  Swedish physicist Manne Siegbahn discovered a new group of wavelengths, the ‘M’ series of x-rays, in 1916. He also developed new apparatus and techniques to determine the wavelengths of x-rays, and improved the accuracy of Bragg's equation for x-ray diffraction. In 1924 he won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and in 1925 he showed that x-rays are refracted as they pass through prisms. His son, [[Kai M. Siegbahn]], was also a Nobel laureate.

43.  American physicist Robert A. Millikan studied in Europe under [[Walther Nernst]] and [[Max Planck]], and first came to prominence with his elegant oil-drop experiments of 1909, in which he measured the electric charges on tiny falling water (and later oil) droplets. His study established that any particular droplet's electrical charge is a multiple of a definite, fundamental value — the electron's charge. Beginning in 1912, he spent several years investigating and finally proving [[Albert Einstein]]'s proposed linear relationship between energy and frequency, and providing the first direct photoelectric support for Planck’s constant. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.

During World War I he served on the National Research Council (NRC), conducting emergency research into submarine detection. He was also a leading proponent of NRC fellowships, which have since provided grants to especially promising PhD graduates in scientific fields. In 1921 he relocated from the University of Chicago to the California Institute of Technology, where he served as professor and President and spent the remainder of his career studying cosmic rays (a term coined by Millikan).

42.  Austrian physiologist and medical chemist Fritz Pregl was trained as a physician and embarked on a career in medical research, but grew frustrated in his early attempts to conduct research into bile acids. The scientific equipment of his time required specimens weighing up to one gram, and he was only able to obtain very small quantities of the materials he was studying. He spent several years redesigning and rebuilding his lab equipment to allow quantitative analysis of much smaller material samples, and rethinking research procedures to obtain more comprehensive results with smaller and smaller specimens. With introduction of his new mechanism and methodology in about 1912, Pregl provided precise analysis of carbon, halogen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulphur, and other elements using as little as one milligram of material.

Pregl was honored with the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1923, and for years afterward he welcomed the world's leading chemists at his laboratory at the University ofGraz, explaining his new techniques and spurring far more efficient research. He was born in Laibach, Austria-Hungary (now Ljubljana, Slovenia), and never married. His name has been largely forgotten, but his technique still forms the underlying basis of biochemistry and organic chemistry.

41.  As a woman in science, Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner was a rarity in the early 20th century. She studied under [[Ludwig Boltzmann]], but after becoming the second woman to earn a PhD in Physics at the University of Vienna, she could only find scientific work as an unpaid assistant to an assistant in the university's laboratory. Later, in her first years at the University of Berlin, her lab was in the basement and she was literally not permitted to climb the stairs to the building's higher levels, where the male scientists worked in their labs.

For decades she collaborated closely with [[Otto Hahn]], with whom she co-discovered protactinium in 1917. In 1923 she discovered a two-electron radiationless transition now called the Auger effect for [[Pierre Auger]], who made the same discovery two years later. In 1938, working with her nephew [[Otto Robert Frisch]], she explained the splitting of the atom (nuclear fission). When Hahn won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 she did named as a co-recipient, despite co-authoring much of Hahn's pertinent work.

Meitner was born Jewish, for which (despite her 1908 conversion to Christianity) she was forced to flee Austria in 1938. She resettled in Sweden, where she became a citizen in 1949. She never married, and was whispered to have been romantically involved with her long-time colleague Hahn, who was married. She is the namesake of the radioactivetransuranic element Meitnerium (Mt).

40.  Filmmaker and conservative activist known for embarrassing and politically-loaded hidden-camera videos. He made a series of videos inside [[@org::planned-parenthood]] offices in 2006 and 2007, with activist Lila Rose, who was then 20 but pretended to be 13 and pregnant by a 31-year-old man. Instead of reporting the cases to police, as required by law, the tapes show that some Planned Parenthood staffers advised Rose about how to get an abortion.

More famously, O'Keefe played the role of a pimp in a 2009 series of videos recorded inside the offices of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with 20-year-old Hannah Giles (daughter of conservative minister [[Doug Giles]]) playing a prostitute. Traveling across America and visiting ACORN offices in numerous cities, the pair portrayed themselves as involved in sometimes-absurd but always illegal activity. When edited versions of the video were released through [[Andrew Breitbart]]'s right-wing website biggovernment.com, the calm or cooperative response of ACORN workers was deemed scandalous, and the US Congress responded with legislation intended to cut millions of dollars in funding for ACORN.

O'Keefe was arrested in New Orleans on 25 January 2010 with three other men for allegedly trying to wiretap the office of Democratic Senator [[Mary Landrieu]]. Two of the men arrested with him were disguised as telephone repair workers.

39.  British scientist Francis W. Aston won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1922, for his 1919 invention of the mass spectrograph, a new type of positive-ray apparatus which uses magnetic and electrostatic fields producing opposite deflections in the same plane to convert molecules into ions, then sorts the ions by to their mass-to-charge ratio. The mass spectroscope proved the existence of isotopes, allowed study of nuclear masses with great precision, and helped lay the foundation for the atomic energy and weaponry. Aston himself used the device to identify 212 isotopes. In 1920 he formulated the "whole number rule", using the existence of isotopes to revive a hypothesis by WilliamProut (1785-1850), that all atoms are aggregations of hydrogen atoms.

After earning his degree in Chemistry at the University of Birmingham in 1898, he worked for several years at a local brewery and pursued chemistry experiments in a small laboratory in his home. He later worked as an assistant to [[J. J. Thomson]], who discovered the electron. He also studied the cause of a dark region visible in glow-discharge tubes under cathode glow, which has come to be known as the Aston Dark Space since publication of his findings in 1911. Aston never married, and for most of his adult life his closest companion was his sister Helen.

38.  English chemist Frederick Soddy proposed in 1912 that the same elements exist in different forms, with nuclei having the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons. His theory of isotopes (a word he coined from the Greek, meaning "in the same place") explains that different elements can be chemically indistinguishable but have different atomic weights and characteristics. As an example, uranium 235 and uranium 238 are two different isotopes of the same element, uranium, one with 235 protons and neutrons in its nucleus, and the other with 238. In 1920 he showed the importance of isotopes in calculating geologic age, which led to development of carbon-14 dating. Soddy's theory of isotopes (now known to be true) was controversial among scientists until [[James Chadwick]]'s discovery of the neutron in 1932.

His other work was also of importance in early 20th century chemistry. In collaboration with [[Ernest Rutherford]] in 1903 he showed how radioactive elements disintegrate, in a study that introduced the concept of "half-life" for radioactive decay. With [[Sir William Ramsay]] in the same year, he demonstrated that decaying radium produces helium. He is also credited for discovering the element protactinium in 1917.

Soddy gradually quit science in frustration after winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1921, and turned his attention to economics, arguing in papers and books that ethics and morality should be as fundamental as supply and demand in economics. He maintained that science had progressed enough to provide food and health care for all the world's inhabitants, but that the monetary system effectively prevents distribution of this abundance by peaceful means. In 1936 he retired, after the sudden death of his wife. They had no children, a factor Soddy attributed to exposure he had endured before the risk of radiation was fully understood.

37.  Swiss physicist and metrologist Charles Édouard Guillaume spent his career at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, where he worked on setting scientifically precise standards for the metric system of measurement. To establish exact international standards it was necessary to send meter-length bars to agencies in every civilized nation, but due to the expansion and contraction of metals in heat or cold, the same meter-bars would be of different lengths in warmer nations than in cooler nations. In studying the way numerous metals expand and contract, Guillaume developed a new nickel-steel alloy in 1896, which was named invar for its invariability under extremes of heat or cold — its coefficient of expansion is 15 times lower than that of steel. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1920.

In 1922 he developed a second valuable alloy, called elinvar (for elasticity invariable), with even less thermoelasticity, and less affected by magnetism and oxidation. Invar and elinvar are still used in the design of watches, precision scientific instruments, and devices subject to great heat or cold, including toasters and freezers. Guillaume also studied the physics and chemistry of mercury thermometers, and corrected the precise measurement of the volume of the liter. He frequently used a shortened version of his name, Ch-Ed Guillaume, in authoring his many papers and books.

36.  His father, Antoine Lumičre (1840-1911), was a painter of portraits who had a studio in Besançon, and added the relatively new technique called photography to his services in 1861. At this shop in 1882 Louis Lumičre and his brother [[Auguste Lumičre|Auguste]] developed a new apparatus for the mechanized production of photographic gelatin dry-plates, which had been introduced several years earlier, eliminating the need for plates to be stored in a darkroom before and after exposure. The Lumičres' method of mass-producing these dry-plates made the hobby and profession of picture-taking far more convenient, and took the brothers' business from a struggling stop to a minor industrial concern. By 1900 Lumičre & Sons was one of Europe's largest photographic firms.

In 1894, their father returned from a trip to America excited about a new technology he had seen demonstrated, [[Thomas Edison]]'s kinetoscope, and the elder Lumičre's impassioned description of the device inspired his sons' imagination. Kinetoscopes, however, could only be viewed by one person at a time, by peering through a peephole into a mechanized box. Louis Lumičre envisioned something different — a projected image that could be shared by an audience, in the same way that audiences share a play. With his brother's assistance, Lumičre designed the Cinematograph, a self-contained camera and projector which used a clawed-gear to advance sprocketed film, a principle used in movie cameras and projectors for more than a century since. The machine was constructed by their colleague, engineer Charles Moisson, and was lightweight enough to be effectively portable, allowing the capture of motion at almost any location.

The Cinematograph was patented in both brothers' names on 13 February 1895, though Auguste Lumičre generally conceded that his brother was its primary inventor. It was the first apparatus for making and showing films to audiences in a way that would be recognizable today as "going to the movies", and the Lumičre brothers are often credited as inventors of the motion picture. They presented the first public screening of a movie, La Sortie des Usines Lumičre (Workers Leaving the Lumičre Factory), at the Société d'Encouragement de l'Industrie Nationale in Paris on 22 March 1895. Nine months later, on 28 December 1895, they held the first motion picture exhibition for a paying audience, presenting a twenty-minute program of ten of their short films (though the adjective "short" was not yet applicable) in a rented room at the Grand Cafe on Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. According to legend, when a clip of a train advancing toward the camera and crowd was projected on the screen, men screamed, women fainted, and much of the audience ran toward the back of the auditorium.

The Lumičres, however, saw motion pictures more as a curiosity than a business venture, and they withdrew from motion picture production in about 1901, as other technology soon superseded the Cinematograph. They continued in the photography business with great success, however, introducing the popular Autochrome system of color photography in 1904, and the Lumičre brand remained a stalwart of European photography for decades. After Auguste Lumičre stepped away from the business in 1910, Louis Lumičre introduced a stereoscopic photography system in 1920, and a three-dimensional motion picture system in 1930. In a fitting coincidence, their surname, Lumičre, translates to English as the word "light".

35.  Auguste Lumičre and his brother [[Louis Lumičre]] invented a new machine to manufacture photographic gelatin dry-plates in 1882, which made them wealthy. They invented the Cinematograph, a machine which made and projected what were arguably the first modern-day motion pictures, in 1895. They made many movies over the next several years, most of which were a minute or less in length and consisted of one shot from a stationary camera, but Louis and Auguste Lumičre's films established the basics of cinematography, camera-angle, composition, and directorial technique. Seeing little business future in the Cinematograph, they stopped making movies in 1901.

Lumičre's primary interest was in medical matters, and he left the film shop in 1910, using the proceeds of the brothers' photography business to establish a large-scale research laboratory in Lyon. Over the last several decades of his life, Auguste Lumičre was more famous for his medical research than for his work in motion pictures. He owned and operated the first x-ray machinery in France, and with his substantial albeit self-taught knowledge of chemistry and radiology he managed the radiology department at the famed Hôtel-Dieu de Lyon Hospital. He conducted investigations into cancer, pharmacology, senility, tuberculosis, and other medical matters, and wrote more than a dozen books documenting his research.

34.  German chemist and physicist Walther Nernst studied under [[Ludwig Boltzmann]] and [[Wilhelm Ostwald]], won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1920, and is generally credited as a founding father of modern physical chemistry.

In 1888 he first reported the concept of the solubility product (concentrations of different types of ions in a single saturated solution), and devised the Nernst Equation, a mathematical formula used to determine the equilibrium reduction potential of a half-cell in an electrochemical cell. In 1891 he proposed what is now termed the Nernst Distribution Law, which governs the behavior of liquids or solids which are partially incapable of being mixed. In 1893 he introduced a theory to describe the disintegration of ionic compounds into water. He also conducted important research in electro-acoustics and astrophysics, and made a fortune with his 1897 invention of the "Nernst Glower", an electric metallic-filament lamp that produced more efficient and natural light than [[Thomas Edison]]'s bulbs.

In 1903 he suggested use of buffer solutions (mixtures of weak acids and salts), valuable for resistance to changes in acidity or alkalinity. In 1906 he made his most noted contribution to science, with the first formulation of what is now termed the Third Law of Thermodynamics — vastly oversimplified, that all molecular movement stops at absolute zero (0° Kelvin or -273.15 Celsius). In 1911 he was a key organizer of the Solvay Conference in Brussels, the world's first major conference for physicists. In 1918 he explained the photo-induced chain reaction that causes a mixture of hydrogen and chlorine gases to explode when exposed to light.

His two sons were both killed while fighting for Germany in World War I. He was opposed to the racial policies of his nation's Nazi regime, both on principle and because two of his three daughters had married Jewish men. In 1933, he quit his academic post at the University of Berlin in protest at the Nazification of science, and he died at his home eight years later.

34.  German physicist Johannes Stark studied chemical valency, electric currents in gases, and spectroscopic analysis. In 1905 he reported a Doppler effect in the radiation released by rapidly-moving charged particles, and in 1919 he detailed the splitting of spectral lines in an electric field, a phenomenon now termed the Stark effect. He won the Nobel Prize in the same year, but quit physics in 1922 to start his own porcelain-making business, which soon failed. He subsequently tried to re-enter academia, but a dour personality and his increasing denunciation of "Jewish physics" (i.e., [[Albert Einstein]]) make him unpopular, as even in the anti-Semitic environment ofpre -Nazi Germany it was clear to most leading physicists that Einstein's theories were correct. He was rejected for membership in the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, but became President of the government-aligned Berlin Institute of Physics and Technology and used this position to further denounce quantum physics and suppress Jews in German science.

33.  German physicist Max Planck proposed the quantum of action, now known as Planck’s constant h, explaining the pattern of light intensity emitted from a black body at any given frequency. His work appeared in its earliest form in a 1900 paper titled Zur Theorie der Gesetzes der Energieverteilung im Normal-Spektrum (On The Theory of the Law of Energy Distribution in the Continuous Spectrum), which formed the baseline for a new field of physics, quantum mechanics. In oversimplified terms, Planck explained that energy is not a continuous, flowing entity, but is carried in tiny, discontinuous units, which he named quanta and described as "the pennies of the atomic world". Each quantum's energy is equal to the frequency of radiation multiplied by the universal constant which Planck defined.

His conclusion was in fundamental conflict with all previous physical theory, and was originally baffling or befuddling to other scientists, but provided a new understanding of the structure of light and radiation, phenomena that could not be adequately explained using classical Newtonian physics. Planck's work gained acceptance after [[Albert Einstein]] used Planck's constant h to determine the photoelectric effect, and [[Niels Bohr]] applied the principle to the atom (superseding [[Ernest Rutherford]]'s atomic model).

He studied under [[Gustav Robert Kirchhoff]] and [[Hermann von Helmholtz]], and his students included [[Walther Bothe]], [[Gustav Hertz]], and [[Max von Laue]]. His other work included research into chemical bonding, dispersion, kinetic theory, molecular rotational spectra, the optical properties of metals, and white light.

Planck remained loyal to the German government during its Nazi era, and Allied bombing of Berlin during World War II destroyed his home in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald, along with many of the papers documenting his work. His son Edwin was found guilty of involvement in [[Clausvon Stauffenberg ]]'s "July plot" of 1944, an attempt to assassinate [[Adolf Hitler]], for which the younger Planck was executed in 1945. After the war, Germany's leading scientific organization, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science, was reorganized as the Max Planck Society.

32.  German chemist Fritz Haber was born in Breslau, Prussia (now Wroclaw, Poland), studied under [[Robert Wilhelm Bunsen]], and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. He is best known for one of the Twentieth Century's landmark scientific achievements, the 1908 development of a process for synthesizing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen, achieved by Haber and his brother-in-law, chemist [[Carl Bosch]]. Now called the Haber-Bosch process, this allowed the mass production of nitrogen-based fertilizers and explosives. Prior to this, ammonia could only be obtained naturally, with much of the world's supply extracted by mining a 220-mile long deposit of encrusted seabird droppings on the coast of Chile. Without nitrogen-based fertilizers the earth's present population probably could not be supported, but the same nitrates are the main source of oceanic pollution, and are a key component of atmospheric smog and haze.

Haber was perhaps the most outspoken proponent of the German effort to engineer chemical weaponry during World War I, proposing that chemical attacks would enable Germany to win the war with fewer casualties among its own troops, and testing various chemical recipes for their lethalities. He was at the front lines to oversee proper handling of the chemicals for the first large-scale use of chlorine gas in warfare, which released about 165 tons of the deadly agent against Algerian, French, and Moroccan forces at the Second Battle of Ypres, in France on 22 April 1915. The attack went very well for the Germans — the chlorine gas destroyed the enemy soldiers' respiratory organs, causing slow and agonizing death by asphyxiation, a process which took up to two days depending on the quantity of fumes inhaled. Estimated deaths range into the tens of thousands. At least a thousand German soldiers were killed by blowback, as the winds shifted, but Haber was hailed as a hero and promoted to Captain by imperial decree. Within days of his triumphant return to Germany his wife, herself a chemist, took her own life.

In the 1920s Haber's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem was prominently involved in development of a new cyanide-based insecticide called Zyklon B, a gas which was later used to kill millions of people in Germany's Nazi-era concentration camps. His other work involved autoxidation and pyrolysis, free radical research, applying thermodynamic theory on the behavior of gases, and a failed attempt to extract gold from seawater. In 1933, when Nazi race laws compelled Haber to fire twelve Jews on his staff, he was assured that his own position and life were not in danger despite his Jewish ancestry, due to a conversion to Christianity in his twenties and his own work for the German military. Haber, however, quit his academic post in protest and fled to England, where he briefly stayed with academic colleagues at Cmbridge. He suffered a fatal heart attack on 30 January 1935 in Basel, Switzerland.

His parents were first cousins, but his mother died from complications of his birth. He was the godfather of historian [[Fritz Stern]], whose parents were family friends. Nearly two decades after his death, the Berlin facility where he last worked was renamed in his honor, the Fritz Haber Institute. He is also the namesake of Haber's Law, a mathematical formula for calculating the incidence and/or severity of a chemical's toxicity. He is not known to be related to the German-American physicist Fritz Haber (1912-98), who conducted pioneering experiments with weightlessness.

31.  British physicist Charles Glover Barkla studied under [[J. J. Thomson]], and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1917. In 1903 he proved that molecular weight determines how a gas scatters radiation, in 1904 he proved that x-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, and in 1906 he used x-ray scattering to ascertain the number of electrons in a carbon atom. His work showed that there are two types of secondary radiations emitted by substances after exposure to x-rays ("scattered" and "characteristic" radiations), helped define the laws governing x-ray scattering and the excitation of secondary rays, and made possible the subsequent study of atomic structures. He also studied x-ray fluorescence, other short-wave emissions, and the velocity of electric waves. Devoutly religious, he considered his scientific endeavors "part of the quest for God, the Creator".

30.  John Maynard Keynes (properly pronounced "canes") is widely held to be the most influential economist of the Twentieth Century, and his theories are still given great consideration in the governments of Australia, Britain, Canada, parts of Europe, and of course in the United States. His father was John Neville Keynes (1852-1949), who was at the time a famous and respected economist, though largely forgotten today. His mother, Florence Ada Brown Keynes, was a lifelong activist for causes generally described as "liberal", and became the first woman to serve as Mayor of Cambridge. His brother was a renowned surgeon, knighted Sir Geoffrey Keynes, and married Margaret Darwin, the granddaughter of [[Charles Darwin]]. His sister married future Nobel laureate [[Archibald V. Hill]], who researched the mechanical function of muscle and nerve. Keynes himself had numerous lovers of both genders, and married a dancer from the Diaghilev Russian ballet who had been his lover before divorcing her first husband.

He studied under influential economist [[Alfred Marshall]], attending and later teaching at Cambridge. In a college letter to his friend and lover [[Lytton Strachey]], Keynes wrote, "I find economics increasingly satisfactory, and I think I am rather good at it. I want to manage a railway or organize a Trust, or at least swindle the investing public." He critiqued the classical theory of probability and argued instead for a "logical-relationist" theory, was active in the British Eugenics Society, and supported equal opportunities for women in business.

After several years in civil service for the British Government, he was assigned to represent the British Treasury Department at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, helping to negotiate the international settlements which ended the first World War. He resigned from this position in disgust on 5 June 1919, before the treaty was signed, and first came to public prominence with his outspoken denunciation of the economic terms in the resulting Treaty of Versailles. He wrote a best-selling book on the topic, arguing that the treaty was far too harsh on the Germans, and that demanding severe economic reparations from Germany would cripple that nation's economy and prevent Germany from recovering and rejoining world trade. It was an accurate prediction of an element of the Versailles agreement now almost unanimously understood as contributing to the rise of the Nazi movement and culminating in the Second World War.

This book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, was popular and is now seen as prescient, but was considered radical and considered a counterculture screed in its time. It was an obstacle to any high-level position for Keynes in academia or business, at least for the few years it took for the book's predictions to begin coming true. From about 1920 he worked as a columnist for The Manchester Guardian, a left-leaning newspaper where his perspectives were welcome and well-received, and from 1925 he was also a frequent contributor to The Nation, America's long-running leftist magazine. His masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, was released in 1935 and greeted with widespread acclaim, at least in academic and governmental circles.

By the arrival of World War II Keynes was no longer an outsider; quite the contrary, he was a celebrity and acknowledged expert on economics. From 1942 to 1944 he took a leading role in the negotiations leading to the Bretton Woods Monetary Agreement, which laid the foundations for what has became the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and he negotiated the terms of the American post-war loan to Britain in 1945. He strongly endorsed [[William Beveridge]]'s proposal for a major expansion of social services, which led to establishment of the UK's National Health Service. In the same year he was elevated to the peerage by [[King George VI]], becoming Baron Keynes of Tilton and taking a seat in the House of Lords as a member of the Liberal Party.

For what he called his "life outside economics", his circle of friends included novelists [[E. M. Forster]] and [[David Garnett]], artist Duncan Grant (1885-1978), philosopher [[Bertrand Russell]], playwright [[George Bernard Shaw]], and author [[Virginia Woolf]]. He was a very successful investor, and made himself a wealthy man with his stock trades. He collected books, endowed the Cambridge Arts Theatre, and was a generous supporter of numerous charities. He suffered several heart attacks in his last years, he a final cardiac arrest took his life on 21 April 1946. In his last days he said that his greatest regret in life was that he had not consumed more champagne.

In an abruptly truncated telling of his economic theory, Keynes was a strong advocate of free markets driven by private self-interest, but he believed that it is foolhardy to allow markets the freedom to ravage an entire economy. Instead he held that governments should intervene as prudent and necessary to ward off recessions, curb excessive inflation, or restore economic vitality. The Keynesian response to a recession or depression is government action designed to encourage spending and discourage saving, and a key component is that the government’s central bank should lower interest rates when prices are too high and raise interest rates when prices fall. His advice to the British and American governments called for a massive public works program to emerge from the depths of the Depression, and he endorsed deficit spending as a response to recessions, a stance that still aggravates fiscal conservatives.

29.  British scientist William Bragg pioneered solid-state physics, and conducted early and principle research on the determination of crystal structures. In 1912 his son, physicist [[Lawrence Bragg]], discovered the Bragg law of X-ray diffraction, and after this theBraggs, father and son, worked together to design the first ionization spectrometer, predecessor of modern x-ray and neutron diffractometers . With this device they observed and analyzed the molecular structure of crystals, establishing the new field of X-ray analysis of crystal structure, and in 1915 they became the first and only parent andoffspring to share a Nobel Prize for the same work. The elder Bragg's other research focused on alpha radiation, hydrophones for military applications, and the structure of diamonds. His father-in-law was the astronomer Sir Charles Todd (1826-1910).

28.  Physicist Lawrence Bragg studied under [[J. J. Thomson]] and was the son of physicist [[William Bragg]]. Building on [[Max von Laue]]'s pioneering work in x-ray crystallography, he proposed in 1912 what is now called Bragg's law of diffraction, which explains how crystals diffract X-ray beams at specific angles of incidence. They theorized that the molecular structure of a crystal could be ascertained from observing and analysing the x-ray interference pattern, and to prove their assertion they designed an X-ray spectrometer and devised a mathematical system for analyzing its data. For this work and their landmark 1915 book on the topic, X-rays and Crystal Structure, the father-and-son team shared the 1915 Nobel Prize for Physics.

25 years of age when he won the honor, Bragg was and remains the youngest Nobel laureate in history. He was also awarded the Military Cross for his work on defensive weaponry during World War I, and he later studied metallurgy, silicates, and the structure of proteins. At the start of his career atomic theory had only recently been accepted, and examining the behavior of individual atoms seemed like science fiction; toward the end of his career he was the director of Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in the 1950s, as [[Francis Crick]] and [[James Watson]] used technology largely built on x-ray methodology developed by Bragg and his father to unravel the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

27.  German chemist Richard Willstätter studied the structure of alkaloids (colorless, complex, and bitter organic compounds), anthocyanins (red, blue, and violet plant pigments), and chlorophyll (the green, light-absorbing catalyst in plants). He also corrected mistakes in the scientific understanding of cocaine's atomic structure and synthesized that drug, and pioneered the technique of chromatography ("color-writing"), invented by Mikhail Semenovich Tsvett (1872-1919) in 1906 and developed independently by Willstätter and his student Arthur Stoll (1887-1971) in the 1920s.

He was Jewish, and bristled and refused the 1902 suggestion of [[Adolf von Baeyer]] that Willstätter should be baptized into the Christian faith to remove career obstacles caused by Germany's increasing anti-Semitism. Instead Willstätter accepted a professorship outside of Germany, in Zürich, but he returned to Germany in the build-up to World War I. He won the Iron Cross (Second Class) for his work designing a charcoal-and-urotropin gas mask used to protect German soldiers from WWI chemical warfare attacks, and won the 1915 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his studies revealing the chemical composition of chlorophyll and other plant pigments (though he was not allowed to accept the honor until the end of World War I).

Willstätter also studied how carbonic acids are assimilated in plants and the chemical composition of enzymes. In his own time much of his fame came from his experiment showing that certain active enzymes show no trace of protein, a finding disputed and finally disproven by [[John H. Northrop]] in 1930. In protest of growing restrictions on Jews in Germany he resigned his post at the University of Munich and retired in 1924. With the help of his former student Stoll he fled the country in 1938, resettling in Switzerland, where he died in 1942.

26.  German physicist Max von Laue won the Nobel Prize in 1914, for his work measuring the wavelength of x-rays by their diffraction through the atoms of a crystal. His studies showed that x-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation similar to light, and that crystals have a molecular structure that regularly repeats its arrangement. He studied or worked under [[David Hilbert]], [[ArnoldSommerfeld]], [[Albert Einstein]], and [[Max Planck]], and made significant contributions to the scientific understanding of how applied magnetic fields affect superconductivity.

As the Nazis came to power in Germany, von Laue openly criticized the governmental stance against "Jewish physics" (i.e., Einstein), and remained in contact with otherwise-isolated Jewish colleagues. During World War II he refused to work on the Nazi program to develop nuclear weapons, and instead wrote a respected book on the history of physics. Still, as one of the leading physicists in Germany, he was among the scientists taken into custody after the war, and was imprisoned for almost a year at Farm Hill in England. During his incarceration he wrote a paper on the absorption of X-rays.

He was an early and enthusiastic adapter of the automobile, and had a reputation for driving at fast speeds. He was seriously injured in a collision with a motorcycle in Berlin on 7 April 1960 in which the cyclist was killed, and von Laue died of his injuries about two weeks later.

25.  Theodore W. Richards was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, receiving the honor in 1914 for his work determining the atomic weights of cesium, cobalt, iron, nickel, uranium, and some twenty more elements. Toward this purpose he designed a nephelometer (cloud measurer) to detect traces of moisture by measuring the turbidity of the filtrate, and a bottling apparatus to further ensure that the materials handled in his laboratory were absolutely dry. He also invented an adiabatic calorimeter to prevent absorption or dissipation of heat from or to materials, and in 1913 he conducted experiments that provided strong support for [[Frederick Soddy]]'s concept of isotopes.

He was home-educated until entering Haverford College at the age of 15, and after earning a degree there he pursued further education at Harvard, where he spent his career. His father, William Trost Richards (1833-1905), was an artist known for landscape paintings and seascapes. His mother, Anna Matlack Richards (1835-1900), was an author and poet of some renown in her time. His sister, Anna Richards Brewster (1870-1952), was a successful impressionist painter. His daughter, Patty Thayer Reynolds, married author and educator [[James B. Conant]].

24.  Mathematical logician Kurt Gödel's work suggests that some mathematical statements are true even if they cannot be proven through internal logic, that every statement of even elementary logic can be both proved and disproved, and that the totality of mathematics cannot be perfectly and completely explained with the correct set of axioms. In vastly simplified terms, Gödel's completeness theorem (1929) states that every universally valid formula in first-order predicate calculus can be proved. This is not to be confused withGödel's incompleteness theorem (1931), which states that no consistent system can be used to prove its own consistency.

Gödel was born in Brünn, Austria-Hungary (now Brno, Czech Republic), studied in Vienna, but fled Austria during the Nazi era and later refused all honors offered by the Viennese scientific community. He emigrated to the United States in 1940 and became an American citizen in 1948, though he stated that he had found logical inconsistencies in the US Constitution. He worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he became best friends with [[Albert Einstein]], who consideredGödel an intellectual equal and whose theories Gödel reformulated into a mathematical framework. The two men saw each other almost every day from the early 1940s until Einstein's death in 1955.

Gödel's effect on upper-echelon mathematics has been compared to that of [[René Descartes]] and [[Gottfried Leibniz]], though remarkably, most of Gödel's work in mathematics was finished by the time he was in his mid-thirties. After that he published little, and his interest shifted to the deepest of philosophical questions.

It is perhaps an odd conundrum that despite his ability to hold, juggle, and rejigger the most complex and abstract mathematical and philosophical concepts, Gödel had a difficult time with more ordinary matters. After a bout of rheumatic fever in childhood he developed intense fears about his own health — hypochondria, some surmise — which grew worse in adulthood. He suffered at least two nervous breakdowns, and he was isolated from almost all aspects of life beyond the academic realm, except for a fascination with [[Walt Disney]]'s film Snow White. He eventually grew concerned about germs or poisons in his food, to the point that he stopped eating and effectively starved himself to death.

23.  Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes was the first scientist to liquefy helium, the coldest gaseous coolant, accomplishing this in his low-temperature physics lab in 1908. This set the stage for his best-known work, the discovery of superconductivity three years later. Superconductivity is the phenomenon in which certain metals including lead and mercury show decreasing and finally no electrical resistance as temperatures approach absolute zero (0° Kelvin or -273.15° Celsius).

Kamerlingh Onnes also conducted research that added evidence for the atomic theory of matter, and his doctoral thesis (1879) provided a new and simplified proof of the earth's rotation. He studied under [[Robert Wilhelm Bunsen]] and [[Gustav Robert Kirchhoff]], worked closely with [[JohannesDiderik van der Waals ]], and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1913. In press accounts of his time he was commonly called "The gentleman of absolute zero".

22.  Swiss chemist Alfred Werner is regarded as a founding father of modern inorganic stereochemistry. In 1893 he proposed a theory of variable valence, describing the molecular structure of inorganic compounds as consisting of a central atom surrounded by a three-dimensional arrangement of a specific number of other atoms, molecules, ions, or radicals, all governed by simple geometrical principles. He said that he had woken in the middle of the night with a sudden realization of the answer to the riddle of molecular structure, began writing at once, and continued writing until dawn, providing the first correct analysis of the structures for coordination compounds containing complex ions.

He introduced the more fully-realized Coordination theory of chemistry in 1901, and published an influential book on the subject in 1904. Though widely rejected by scientists for several years, his theory led to better explanations of the properties of observed compounds, and it gained acceptance as Warner and his students were able to identify dozens of previously unknown compounds and synthesize dozens more. In 1905 he offered a reorganization of the periodic table, moving the lanthanide elements ("rare earths" with atomic numbers 58-71) to a separate place in the table, where they remain today. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1913.

Werner was born in the the French region of Alsace, which came under German control through the Franco-Prussian war while he was still a child. His family considered themselves French, and he spoke and was educated in both the French and German languages. He became a naturalized Swiss citizen in his 20s, and spent his career in Zürich, where he died at the age of 53 in 1919.

21.  French chemist Victor Grignard won the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his doctoral thesis at the University of Lyon, a study of organic magnesium compounds. The paper explained what is now called the Grignard Reagent, a class of extremely reactive and unstable chemical compounds used to synthesize alcohols, carboxylic acids, hydrocarbons, and other compounds, and allowed a broad swathe of subsequent developments in organic synthesis. He engineered dichloroethyl sulfide (mustard gas) for use as chemical weaponry during World War I, and later studied ketone splitting of tertiary alcohols, ozonization of unsaturated compounds, and condensation of aldehydes and ketones.

20.  Serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps during World War I, Scottish bacteriologist Alexander Fleming was troubled by his inability to care for infections in deep wounds, where bacteria could thrive beyond the reach of the era's antiseptics. After the war he began searching for a better antibacterial agent, and in 1921 he made a significant breakthrough with the discovery of lysozyme, so named because it lyses (dissolves) microbes. Lysozyme occurs in white blood cells, egg whites, milk, pus, saliva, and tears, and engulfs and digests bacteria, forming a key component in the body's defense system. Though this alone would be enough to secure Fleming's place in medical history, he is far more famous for his second significant breakthrough in September 1928 — the accidental discovery of penicillin.

Growing bacteria cultures for experiments he hoped would lead to a flu vaccine, Fleming mistakenly left several petri dishes uncovered for several days, and mold began growing, ruining his experiment. He noticed that the bacteria nearest the growing mold had been destroyed. He incorrectly classified the mold as being of the species Penicillium rubrum, but correctly noted that the presence of the mold prevented growth of Staphylococcus aureus, a parasitic bacteria that can cause a wide variety of infections. Originally calling his discovery "mold juice", Fleming renamed it "penicillin" for the paper he wrote, which was published in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology, but neither he nor the readers of his work seemed to have seriously understood the discovery's implications.

Eleven years later two Oxford researchers, [[Ernst B. Chain]] and [[Howard Florey]], read Fleming's paper and re-opened his line of inquiry, ascertaining that the mold was P. notatum, not P. rubrum, and isolating, purifying, and synthesizing the drug. The first naturally-occurring antibiotic to be discovered, penicillin gave humanity the first effective treatments for diphtheria, gonorrhea, pneumonia, scarlet fever, syphilis, and other diseases, saved countless millions of lives, and led to shared Nobel Prizes for Medicine in 1945 for Chain, Florey, and Fleming.

19.  French chemist Paul Sabatier studied under [[Marcellin Berthelot]] and conducted key research into catalysis (the alteration of a chemical reaction by adding a substance which itself is not changed or consumed in the process). He explained the process of hydrogenation, and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1912, for his explanation of the use of nickel as a catalyst for hydrogenation. His work in catalysis made posible the subsequent development of margarine, hydrogenated oils, and the synthetic methanol industry. He is the namesake of the Sabatier principle, which governs chemical interactions between catalyst and substrate. He is not to be confused with another Paul Sabatier (1858-1928), who authored a well-known biography of [[St. Francis of Assisi]].

18.  Self-taught American physicist and inventor Philo "Phil" Farnsworth was born in a log cabin alongside Indian Creek, a few miles outside the tiny town of Beaver, Utah. He was raised on a farm, where at about 14 years of age he conceived of a way to transmit images electronically. As he later described it, he was tilling a potato field with a horse-drawn plow, crossing the same field time after time and leaving lines of turned dirt, when it occurred to him that electron beams could do the same thing with images, leaving a trail of data line-by-line. He first described and diagrammed television in 1921, in a science paper turned in to his 9th-grade science teacher, Justin Tolman, whom Farnsworth always credited as inspiring him to a life in science.

At Brigham Young University, Farnsworth was considered something of a hick by his teachers, and he was rebuffed when he asked for access to advanced classes and laboratories. He signed up for correspondence courses with a technical college, National Radio Institute, and earned his electrician's license and top-level certification as a "radiotrician" by mail, in 1925. After a brief stint at the US Naval Academy and a return to BYU he was forced to drop out of college due to lack of funds. He then spent several years working various short-term jobs, including time as a laborer on a Salt Lake City road crew, a door-to-door salesman, a lumberjack, a radio repairman, and a railroad electrician.

In 1926 he came to San Francisco, where he rented an apartment at 202 Green Street, set up a small laboratory, and resumed his scientific work. There Farnsworth built his first television camera and receiving apparatus, and on 7 September 1927 he made the first electronic transmission of television, using a carbon arc projector to send a single smoky line to a receiver in the next room of his apartment. This was not the first television system, but earlier experimental systems including those devised by [[John Logie Baird]] and [[Herbert E. Ives]] had been mechanical in conception, using a spinning disk with spiral perforations to scan the imagery. Farnsworth's system was entirely electronic, and was the basis for 20th-century television.

Over the next several years Farnsworth was able to broadcast recognizable images up to eight blocks. His first public demonstration of television was in Philadelphia on 25 August 1934, broadcasting an image of the moon. Unfortunately for Farnsworth, several other inventors had invented similar devices, and the competing patents of [[Vladimir Zworykin]] were owned by Radio Corporation of America ([[@company::rca]]), which had no interest in paying royalties. As a result, Farnsworth spent years of his life embroiled in lawsuits, defending himself from infringement lawsuits and seeking to guard his own patent rights.

In 1934, Farnsworth's high school teacher, Mr Tolman, appeared in court on his behalf, introducing as evidence the paper the teenaged Farnsworth had turned in 13 years earlier describing television. In 1935 the court found in Farnsworth's favor and enforced his patent rights, a ruling which was later upheld on appeal. In 1939, RCA finally licensed Farnsworth's patents, reportedly paying $1-million. That summer, some five years after Farnsworth's Philadelphia demonstration of TV, RCA made headlines with its better-publicized unveiling of television at the Chicago World's Fair.

Farnsworth founded Crocker Research Laboratories in 1926, named for its key financial backer, William W. Crocker of the [[@company::crocker-national-bank]]. The company's subsequent names included Farnsworth Television Inc. (or FTI), the rather understated Television Inc., and finally the Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporation. The business was purchased by International Telephone & Telegraph Corporation ([[@company::itt]]) in 1951, and Farnsworth worked in research for ITT for the next 17 years. He contributed research into radar and nuclear energy, and at his death in 1971 he held more than 160 patents, including inventions that were instrumental in the development of astronomical telescopes, baby incubators, electrical scanners, electron microscopes, and infrared lights.

Of his wife Elma, nicknamed "Pem", Farnsworth wrote, "you can't write about me without writing about us — we are one person." Her face was the first human image transmitted via television, on 19 October 1929. She helped make the first tubes for their company, drew virtually all of the company's technical sketches during its early years, and wrote a biography of Farnsworth after his death. He frequently stated that they had basically invented television together.

Something of an idealist, Farnsworth envisioned television as a means to bring education, news, and the finest arts and music into the living rooms of ordinary Americans. By the 1950s he was disenchanted with the quality and commercial control of television, describing it as "a way for people to waste a lot of their lives" and forbidding its use in his own family household.

17.  German physicist Wilhelm Wien was born in Gaffken, Prussia (now Parusnoye, Russia), and studied under [[Hermann von Helmholtz]]. He is best known for Wien's displacement law of blackbody radiation (1893), and the Wien approximation (1896). Wien's displacement law describes the pattern of radiation emission from the efficient blackbody (a surface that absorbs all radiant energy striking it). Radiation from a blackbody varies over a wide range of wavelengths, but Wien's distribution law (1896; sometimes called the Wien approximation) noted an intermediate wavelength where radiation reaches a maximum, and calculated that this extreme wavelength is inversely proportional to the temperature of the material.

Wien's distribution law applies only at short wavelengths, becoming less reliable as wavelengths grow longer, a curiosity which was investigated by Wien's colleague [[Max Planck]], leading to Planck's development of a quantum theory of radiation. Wien discovered the proton in 1898, and studied canal rays (beams of positive ions), cathode rays (electron beam), and x-rays. Friends and family called him "Willy". He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physics.

16.  German chemist Otto Wallach was born in Königsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), and conducted early research into aniline dyes and his pioneer work in organic chemistry. Often conducting his early research under candlelight, he studied the molecular structure of essential oils (aromatic liquids extracted from flowers, grasses, fruits, leaves, roots, or trees). In 1887 he showed that terpenes (monocyclic hydrocarbons found in plants, such as basil, camphor, lemon, menthol, and orange) share a fundamental unit of five carbon atoms, and can be derived biosynthetically from isoprene. In 1895 he wrote what is now called Wallach's rule, which states that racemic crystals are more dense than the crystals of pure enantiomers. He wrote more than 150 papers on the topic of terpenes, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1910. He never married.

15.  As was typical in his time, Johannes Diderik van der Waals became an apprentice teacher as soon as he finished high school, and by his 24th year he was certified as a teacher. Forever curious about science, he also attended night and summer school at University of Leiden, where he earned his doctorate in 1873 at the age of 35. He studied the behavior of gases, and showed that the liquid and gas phases of a substance are of the same nature, and that the substance's behavior and transition between states could be accurately predicted. His work was predicated on the existence of molecules, still a disputed concept at the time, and the (correct) assumption that molecules are of finite size and attract each other.

The van der Waals equation describes the relation between pressure, volume, temperature, and gas. His Theorem of Corresponding States concludes that after scaling temperature, pressure, and volume according to their respective critical values, all fluids have generally the same compressibility factor and show about the same variation from ideal gas behavior.

His work soon came to the attention of [[James Clerk Maxwell]], who recognized its importance and wrote in Nature that van der Waals' work belongs "among the foremost in science". Two years later he was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, and two years after that he was named a full professor at the University of Amsterdam. Van der Waals won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1910, and taught at Amsterdam until 1908, when he was succeeded by his son, the theoretical physicist JohannesDiderik van der Waals, Jr.

14.  Rachel Carson studied biology and zoology, and worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Beginning in the 1940s she wrote several books about marine biology, and her 1952 book The Sea Around Us was successful enough to allow her to quit her government job. A new pesticide,dichloro diphenyl trichloroethane (DDT), had been introduced in the early 1940s, and for years she chronicled the compound's adverse effects on marine life, but her 1962 book Silent Spring was the first book to detail the dangers of pesticides and pollution to a large audience. The book explained in literate butlayperson's terms how the chemicals and toxins in DDT and other insecticides such as dieldrin, heptachlor , malathion, and parathion travel through the food chain, contaminate the environment, remain for many years in soils and waters, and accumulate in the human body.

Even before it was published the book drew threats of lawsuits and was deemed controversial. In 1963, the anthology series CBS Reports produced an episode about the issues raised in the book, but could find no sponsors to buy commercial time. The pesticide and chemical industries mounted an intense publicity campaign challenging myriad aspects of her book's science, akin to the tobacco industry's claims that smoking is safe, or the coal and oil industries' present-day claims that global climate change is faulty science. She was also smeared as a communist, a lesbian, and an atheist, though the evidence for any of these claims is scant. Contrary to another common misconception, she was not opposed to the use of insecticides and chemicals, only their indiscriminate, widespread use. Neither Carson nor her book called for the complete banning of DDT; she always maintained thatDDT was a vital tool in the fight against malaria.

President [[John F. Kennedy]]'s Science Advisory Committee researched and confirmed the science of Silent Spring, and she testified before Congress in 1963, setting the stage for the first legislation regulating pesticides. Carson was battling breast cancer as she wrote the book, and succumbed to the disease in 1964, two years after the book became a best-seller. Her book remains popular and influential, and her name was frequently mentioned in the debate leading to establishment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. She is the namesake of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge near Wells, Maine.

13.  German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald was born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), and was the son of a cooper. He studied chemical affinity (the attractions between elements and compounds that lead to reactions), and won the Nobel Prize in 1909 for his work on chemicalequilibria , reaction velocities, and catalysis (altering a chemical reaction by adding a substance which itself is not changed or consumed in the process). In 1893 with [[Jacobus H. van 't Hoff]] he co-founded the Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie (Journal of Physical Chemistry), and Ostwald was the journal's principle editor until 1922. In 1894 he founded the German Electrochemical Society (now the German Bunsen Society for Applied Physical Chemistry).

He patented what is still called the Ostwald process, a methodology used widely in industry to convert ammonia to nitric acid through oxidation, though evidence suggests that Ostwald's work was a rediscovery of forgotten technology from decades earlier. In 1888 he wrote what is now termed Ostwald's Law of Dilution and Conductivity, defining the relationship between the dissociation constant and the degree of dissociation of weak electrolytes. Toward the end of his career he shifted his attention to the study of shapes and tried to establish a scientific standardization scheme for colors.

After his 1906 retirement from academics, he became active in Germany's monistic movement, challenging the church with "Sunday sermons" on a unified science of nature called Energetics, a generalized form of thermodynamics which included Ostwald's "happiness formula" presented in scientific terms. Until about 1908 he was an avid disbeliever in the reality of atoms. His son Wolfgang Ostwald (1883-1943) was also a chemist of some renown, who described the electrical and optical properties of colloids.

12.  German physicist Ferdinand Braun discovered the principle of crystal diode rectification in 1874, as he invented the lead sulfide-based point contact rectifier. Originally envisioned by Braun as a method to establish electrical contact with minerals to further his investigation of electrolysis, his point-contact rectifier effect formed the foundation of modern solid-state electronics, but he did not patent this work until decades later, as the potential of its adaptations became more clear.

In 1897 he invented the Braun tube, a cathode-ray canister that deflects electron beams by changing the voltage, as part of his cathode-ray oscillograph, which later became a basic component of the television receiver. Beginning in 1898 he worked on wireless telegraphy, trying to improve [[Guglielmo Marconi]]'s transmitter for sending Morse code signals through air and water. He patented the crystal rectifier in 1899, which led to Jagdish Chandra Bose's work with crystals in radio detection and the advent of "cat's whisker" crystal radio sets. In 1902 he successfully used closed circuit oscillation to send and receive directionally-targeted wireless telegraphy. For their work in electronics and radio, Braun and Marconi shared the 1909 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Braun, who never used either his first name or first initial, also investigated the oscillations of elastic rods and strings, deviations from [[Georg Simon Ohm|Ohm]]'s law, and studied magnetic compounds and the thermodynamic principles governing the pressure and solubility of solids. He spent more than twenty years teaching at the University of Strassburg, where his students included the future physician and humanitarian [[Albert Schweitzer]].

In 1917 Braun came to America to provide testimony in a court case involving radio patents. While he was in New York seven American merchant ships were sunk, US President [[Woodrow Wilson]] called for a declaration of war, and on 6 April 1917 Congress complied, putting the United States into the thick of the Great War, now called World War I. Braun was already in his mid-60s and effectively retired, but he was deemed an enemy alien and prohibited from returning to Germany. He lived the last year of his life under house arrest at his son's Brooklyn apartment, where he died on 20 April 1918.

11.  German bacteriologist Paul Ehrlich was a pioneer in the fields of chemotherapy (treatment of disease with chemical agents) and hematology (the study of blood). He was born in Strehlen, Germany (now Strzelin, Poland), worked for several years under under [[Robert Koch]], and shared the 1908 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with [[Ilya Mechnikov]]. He worked with [[Emil von Behring]] to develop a diphtheria antitoxin, released in 1892, and worked with Sahachiro Hata (1873-1938) to develop salversan, an arsenic derivative that proved the first effective treatment for syphilis, and was introduced in 1910.

Ehrlich was among the first researchers to use of dye reactions on red and white blood cells, exploring which types of tissue are susceptible to particular chemicals and dyes. He established several fundamental principles of immunology, and spent much of his career searching for new synthetic compounds that might attack microorganisms that carried specific diseases. He also developed the Side-Chain Theory (Seitenkettentheorie) in 1897, proposing that animal cells and bacteria act like dye, with complex molecules reacting with each another through side chains when these side chains have corresponding structure.

He was a cousin and close friend of German pathologist Karl Weigert (1845-1904), and his daughter married mathematician Edmund Landau (1877-1938). In Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet, a 1940 Hollywood movie that dramatized the search for a cure for syphilis, Ehrlich was played by [[Edward G. Robinson]].

10.  Danish physicist Niels Bohr studied under [[J. J. Thomson]], who discouraged his ideas, and under [[Ernest Rutherford]], whose work was expanded by Bohr into a new theory on the structure of the atom in 1913. Bohr postulated that electrons travel in fixed orbits around the atom's nucleus, and further explained how electrons emit or absorb energy, work that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr's atomic diagram held that the outer orbits hold more electrons than inner orbits, that atoms traveling from one orbit to another emit tiny amounts of radiation, and that these orbits determine chemical properties of an atom.

Bohr's theory, elaborated and expanded by other physicists, formed the basis for the developing science of quantum mechanics. He is best known for two concepts — the correspondence principle, and the complementarity principle. The former holds that to untangle the contradictions between "old" and "new" physics, new theories must both describe atomic phenomena correctly and be applicable to conventional phenomena; the latter holds that wave and particle aspects of nature are complementary and can never both be true simultaneously.

Bohr's brother, mathematician Harald August Bohr (1887-1951), developed a theory of "almost periodic" functions, and won a Silver Medal playing soccer for the Danish national team in the 1908 Olympics. His son, [[Aage N. Bohr]], won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1975 for describing the collective model of the atomic nucleus. Though raised and baptized a Christian, his mother was Jewish, and Bohr fled Denmark during World War II, coming to America, where he worked on the Manhattan Project. After the war he became an outspoken activist against nuclear weapons and for the peaceful use of atomic energy. He was also a co-founder of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

9.  British physicist Ernest Rutherford was the son of a man who fixed wheels on horse-drawn carriages, and he became the most prominent experimental physicist of his era. He was at the forefront of early studies of radioactivity, humanity's increasing understanding of the atom, and the dawn of nuclear physics. He coined the terms alpha ray, beta ray, gamma ray, and half-life for radioactive decay, and he was widely credited in his time as the first scientist to split the atom.

He studied under [[J. J. Thomson]], and in 1896 he designed what was then the world's most sensitive electromagnetic wave detector, capable of identifying waves at a distance of several hundred meters. In the same year he showed that x-rays cause air molecules to split into equal numbers of positively and negatively charged particles (ions). In 1899 he noted two distinct radiations, which he termed alpha rays and beta rays (high speed electrons), and discovered the radioactive gas radon.

In 1902 he showed that radioactivity is a manifestation of sub-atomic change. In 1903 he collaborated with [[Frederick Soddy]] on the disintegration theory of radioactivity, showing that certain heavy atoms spontaneously decay into lighter atoms, and coining the term "half-life" for radioactive decay. In 1905 Rutherford proposed a measure of the relative rate of decay of uranium atoms that would allow minerals to be accurately dated, a radioactive dating system that, when applied, greatly reduced the scientific estimate of the age of the Earth, and formed the basis of dating technology still used in geology. In 1906 he proposed that the atom's structure is nuclear. In 1907 his research showed that the alpha particle is a helium atom without its electrons.

He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908, and in the same year, working with his student [[Hans Geiger]], he developed the Rutherford-Geiger detector, capable of detecting single particles emitted by radioactive atoms. In 1911 he described in detail the nuclear model of the atom. In 1913, working with [[Henry Gwyn Jeffreys Moseley]], he used cathode ray bombardment to show that the inner structures of atoms can be used to assign an atomic number to each element. In 1914 he described the proton, and in 1917 he effectively created the field of nuclear physics by beginning a series of experiments showing that the nuclei of some light elements could be disintegrated by radioactivity, and that fast protons were emitted during this process.

In 1917 he became the first scientist to split the atom (though not by entirely artificial means), changing nitrogen into oxygen. In 1932 two of his students, [[John Cockcroft]] and [[Ernest T. S. Walton]], used an accelerator to split the nucleus of the atom in a fully-controlled manner. In 1934 Rutherford and another of his students, [[Mark Oliphant]], discovered tritium. The list of scientists who studied under Rutherford is a veritable Who's Who of 20th Century science — [[Niels Bohr]], [[James Chadwick]], [[Otto Hahn]], [[Edward Victor Appleton]], [[Patrick M. S. Blackett]], [[Edward Bullard]], [[Pyotr Kapitsa]], [[Cecil Powell]], and numerous others.

At his laboratories, Rutherford was known for singing "Onward Christian Soldiers", performances which grew more spirited when as the lab's findings grew more promising. As a college student in New Zealand, he stayed at a boarding house operated by widowed suffragette Mary Newton, and married her daughter. Years later Rutherford spoke out for gender-neutral admissions at Cambridge, and in the last years of his life he served as President of the Academic Assistance Council, a group that sought to assist Jewish scientists escaping Nazi Germany. The only child from his marriage, a daughter named Eileen, married the physicist Ralph Fowler (1889-1944).

8.  Leo Baekeland was born and raised in Belgium, and studied chemistry at the University of Ghent. He fell in love with his professor's daughter, eloped with her against his mentor's wishes, and came to America in 1889. For two years he worked for a manufacturer of photographic dry plates and bromide paper, quitting in 1891 when he invented Velox photographic paper, a paper coated with gelatin silver chloride which allowed prints to be developed under artificial light. He established the Nepera Chemical Company to manufacture the papers, but sold the patent and company to [[@company::kodak]] eight years later, reportedly for one-million dollars — an enormous sum at the time.

Freed from the pressures of work, Baekeland constructed a modern private laboratory, intending to develop a synthetic substitute for shellac. As his experiments progressed, however, he learned about more and more resilient materials and eventually turned his attention toward creating a solvent-resistant, heat- and water-resistant, non-conductive, and reasonably affordable new material. In 1907 he invented Bakelite, the first industrial thermoset plastic (meaning that its shape remains constant after being mixed and molded). Made from carbolic acid and formaldehyde, Bakelite was the first completely synthetic plastic, and proved a key manufacturing breakthrough as it became ubiquitous in construction, electronic switches, engine parts, jewelry, pipe stems, radio cases, furniture, billiard balls, and all manner of industrial products.

In 1912 Baekeland developed a phenol-formaldehyde resin that served for many years as a basic compound in the adhesives industry. In 1939 he sold his business to [[@company::union-carbide]] and retired, and five years later he passed away. His name was briefly in the headlines some decades later, when his grandson's wife, socialite Barbara DalyBaekeland, was murdered by her son in 1972.

7.  French inventor and physicist Gabriel Lippmann created the first color photographs. He conceived of his system in 1886, and spent the next several years explaining and refining the complex physics of his theory, based on the interference phenomenon, involving the merging of different light waves and requiring a coating of mercury behind the photographic plate's emulsion. In 1891 he presented the first color photograph, although the quality was poor, and in 1893 he presented several nearly-perfect color photographs taken by Auguste and Louis Lumičre. The process, however, was time-consuming, not practical beyond the most advanced laboratories, and the resulting color photographs could not be reproduced. His work served as an important landmark in the future of photography and earned Lippmann the Nobel Prize in 1908, but his system of color photography was never widely used.

Lippmann had no formal education beyond high school, and failed his examination for teaching credentials. At the age of 28 he invented the Lippmann capillary electrometer, which allowed precise measurements of extremely small electrical voltages and was the basis for early electrocardiographs. He was then appointed to a French academic mission to explore better methods for teaching science, which brought him to Germany, where he worked with famed scientists [[Hermann von Helmholtz]] and [[Gustav Robert Kirchhoff]]. Upon returning to Paris he had no difficulty securing a teaching post at the Sorbonne, and five years later he was promoted to full professor. His students included [[Marie Curie|Marie]] and [[Pierre Curie]], and his father-in-law was the novelist Victor Cherbuliez (1829-1899). He also invented the coleostat, a device that compensates for the Earth's rotation and allows long-exposure photographs of the sky. His other work included studies of the behavior of pendulums, and improvements to the seismograph. He died at sea in 1921, while returning to France from a vitsit to Canada.

6.  German chemist Eduard Buchner worked at preserving and canning facility to earn his college tuition, and then spent several years as [[Adolf von Baeyer]]'s assistant, and studied the rupture of yeast cells. He conducted baseline research into the chemistry of diazoalkanes, and in 1889 he became the first chemist to successfully synthesize pyrazole, a heterocyclic organic compound containing three carbon and two nitrogen atoms, using a process still called the Buchner reaction.

His brother, Hans Buchner (1850-1902), was a physician who conducted important early research into gamma globulins, blood proteins that can destroy bacteria. Assisting in his brother's research by preserving protein extract from yeast cells, Eduard Buchner made his most well-known discovery in 1897. He added sugar to the protein extract, believing that this might aid in preservation, as it did in a sugar crystallization technique he had first seen making marmalade at the canning factory years earlier. Instead the protein extract and sugar mixture started bubbling as the sugar was transformed into alcohol by a process now called glycolysis.

This finding, confirmed and expanded through subsequent experiments, helped challenge and eventually refute [[Louis Pasteur]]'s theory that like growth, reproduction, and respiration, fermentation could only occur in living cells. Instead it supported [[Justus Liebig ]]'s opposing belief that certain biochemical reactions could occur outside living cells. With his brother Buchner discovered zymase, a complex of enzymes that cause glycolysis, in 1903. His accidental discovery of cell-free fermentation earned Buchner the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1907, and helped establish the new science of biochemistry.

With the advent of World War I, Buchner was drafted into the German Army and assigned to a military hospital near Focsani on the Romanian front, about 20 kilometers north of Bucharest. He was mortally wounded by a grenade attack on 3 August 1917, and succumbed to his injuries at the same hospital nine days later.

5.  One of the Twentieth Century's most influential economists, Paul Samuelson improved the quality of mathematical analysis in his field, formalized several branches of economic science, and helped popularize Keynesian economics in America. He studied at the University of Chicago, and said he was "born as an economist" there in 1932, when he heard a lecture on [[Thomas Malthus]]. In 1938 he introduced the concept of “revealed preference”, his theory that a consumer's preferences and satisfaction are revealed in his/her choices. His 1947 book Foundations of Economic Analysis proposed a universal nature of consumer behavior as a cornerstone of economic theory, and his 1948 textbook Economics has sold over ten-million copies and remains the all-time best-selling book on the subject. In 1954 he provided the first rigorous definition of public goods, materials that all of society benefits from but that cannot practically be charged to individuals.

He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Economics, honored in 1970 “for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science”. He conducted work now considered fundamental in fields including capital theory, dynamics and general equilibrium of economic systems, finance theory, general equilibrium theory, the interaction of multiplier and accelerator effects, international trade, public expenditure, trade cycles, and welfare economics. He said that the economic motivation for writing his text Economics was the expense of having triplets in the 1940s. He wrote a column on economics at Newsweek from 1966-81, and he was critical of the Nixon administration's economic policies to the point that he earned a spot on the famed "enemies' list". He was an uncle of former Treasury Secretary [[Lawrence H. Summers]].

4.  American inventor and physicist Albert A. Michelson was born in Strelno, Prussia (now Strzelno, Poland) in 1852, and immigrated to America with his family when he was three years of age. He grew up amidst the wilds of the California Gold Rush, became fascinated with physics at an early age, and studied and then taught at the U.S. Naval Academy. While still at Annapolis he first repeated and improved upon [[Léon Foucault]]'s measurement of the speed of light, calculating the speed at 300,140 kilometers per second.

In the 1880s he sought to measure the ether drift, the movement of the Earth through the luminiferous ether thought to comprise the universal substratum of space. He designed and built the Michelson interferometer, a mirrored beam-splitter capable of measuring almost unfathomably small distances using the length of light waves. To his own surprise, however, though the machine worked well its finding was null, and Michelson thought he had failed. In 1887 he improved his equipment and calculations in collaboration with noted physical chemist Edward Morley (1838-1923), and they conducted their famous Michelson-Morley ether drift experiment, which again came to a null result. Their finding — or non-finding — was widely interpreted as disproving the theory of luminiferous aether and thus challenging the fundamentals of classical Newtonian physics, a challenge that was further clarified with [[Albert Einstein]]'s 1905 theory of special relativity.

Michelson was the first American scientist to win a Nobel Prize, claiming the Physics honor of 1907 for his invention of the Michelson interferometer. In 1920 he made the first substantially accurate measurement of a star, using a six-meter interferometer attached to telescope to measure the diameter of Betelgeuse. In the 1920s he re-measured the speed of light using a more advanced eight-sided revolving mirror, finding the speed to be 299,774 km/sec, remarkably close to the now-known speed of 299,792 km/sec. He was also among the first scientists to advocate redefining the meter based on wavelengths of light.

3.  Inventor, industrialist, and engineer George Westinghouse was the eighth of ten children born to an American toolmaker and his wife. He served in the Union Army and Navy during the American Civil War, then attended Union College but only for about three months. He dropped out in 1865, after filing a patent for his first invention, a rotary steam engine that was only modestly successful. He then spent several years working in his father's machine shop, making slight improvements in various areas of railroad technology, and inventing a machine that put derailed rail cars back on their tracks.

He found great success with the air brake, invented in 1868, using compressed air as the operating medium and slowing the wheels all along a train's length. This was a revolutionary improvement over the earlier system of train braking, which required a brakeman's manual pressure and physical presence in each car. The air brake allowed longer trains to be run at faster speeds, and greatly improved safety with a fail-safe mechanism that brought the train to a tidy stop if the brake-lines were depressurized or broken. He founded Westinghouse Air Brake Company (now [[@company::wabtec]]) in 1869, and within a few years he was a millionaire.

Now a full-time inventor and businessman, Westinghouse made numerous improvements to railroad track, switch, and circuitry and signalling systems, and founded the Union Switch and Signal Company in 1881 (which was absorbed into Wabtec in 1917). He drilled four natural gas wells on the sprawling grounds of his Pittsburgh estate, as much to familiarize himself with the technology as to extract gas. He soon invented a pressure-adjustment mechanism that allowed gas to be transmitted at great pressure over long distances, and then reduced to low pressure near distribution points. Curiously, this was analogous to Westinghouse's subsequent success with alternating current (A/C) electricity.

In 1886 he formed Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company (now [[@company::cbs]] and [[@company::viacom]]) and soon licensed the related patents of [[Nikola Tesla]], the inventor of A/C. Westinghouse developed A/C while [[Thomas Edison]] developed and promoted the rival direct current (D/C) system, and their competition became known as "the war of currents". Each methodology had its strong and weak points, but D/C had been better publicized before Westinghouse got into the business, and while electricity was new to most Americans it was synonymous with D/C. On the other hand, A/C had a key technological advantage — its voltage could be transmitted at a low power, then amplified to a higher level by means of a transformer at or near the user's location. In simplified terms, this meant that an A/C infrastructure would require fewer and larger power plants, while D/C would need more and smaller generating facilities, located closer to the customers' homes and factories.

In Westinghouse's mind, A/C was the system that made economic sense, but the battle between Westinghouse and Edison took more than a decade to play out. A deciding factor came with the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, an enormous short-term tourist attraction and scientific and commercial showcase in Chicago, lit largely and to glorious visual effect by Westinghouse. After the World's Fair, his company was granted a contract to build three hydroelectric power plants at Niagara Falls, New York. After opening in 1895 these plants soon supplied power to Buffalo, a city some twenty miles away — a distance that would have been nearly impossible for D/C transmission. With that success A/C became America's dominant power source, though Edison spent many more years trying to discredit Westinghouse and A/C.

Though he lost control of his electric company and much of his vast fortune in the economic Panic of 1907, Westinghouse probably deserves as much credit for his business skills as his engineering and inventing accomplishments. At one point he was the President of 34 firms concurrently, with some 50,000 employees and offices and factories across America, Europe, and the civilized world. The scope of his financial empire was easy to overlook, as he named many of his companies not for himself but for his employees, the inventors and engineers who designed the assorted dynamos, meters, voltage regulators, and transformers that kept electricity humming. He offered employees a pension plan and relatively good wages, with sick leave and paid recuperation time after on-the-job accidents when neither was required by law. [[Andrew Carnegie]] once said that "Westinghouse could have made a lot more money during his lifetime if he hadn’t treated his workers so well".

He officially retired in 1909 but continued working in the private laboratory on his estate, and remained a familiar presence at his numerous businesses until about 1911, when his health began to fail. He was confined to a wheelchair with a weakened heart for the last few years of his life, and died in 1914 with some 360 patents in his name. His Pittsburgh mansion and estate, dubbed "Solitude" by Westinghouse and his wife, was bequeathed to their only son, who sold the property to the Engineers Society of Western Pennsylvania four years later. The group then demolished the house and created what is now Westinghouse Park, between Thomas Boulevard and the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks. His descendants still joke that Edison's body is buried somewhere on the grounds.

2.  French pharmacist and chemist Henri Moissan studied under [[Edmond Frémy]] at the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle, and pioneered chemistry under extremes of temperature. In 1885 he became the first scientist to isolate the pale yellow reactive gas fluorine. To accomplish this he employed two new strategies, chilling the electrolytic solution to -185° Celsius to reduce the element's reactivity, and coating his equipment with a highly resilient platinum-iridium alloy. Following this breakthrough he designed and constructed an electric-arc furnace in 1892, often called the Moissan furnace. Using it to subject materials to temperatures of up to 1925°, he produced numerous uncommon metals including chromium, manganese, molybdenum, titanium, tungsten, uranium, and vanadium. In 1893 he reported that he had synthesized diamonds in his furnace, though this is doubtful and could not be replicated. Moissan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1906, but died of acute appendicitis shortly after returning from Stockholm.

1.  Vint Cerf was the co-designer with [[Robert E. Kahn]] of the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP), first tested in 1977, which still provides the packet-switching backbone for the internet. In the late 1980s Cerf was the lead engineer in designing MCI Mail, the first service to transmit email over the internet — a crucial project, since it was one of the first uses of the internet to have profit potential for business, instead of merely adding cost to what was then largely a government-funded project. As a boy he was fascinated by the science fiction of [[Ray Bradbury]] and [[Hal Clement]], and he has worn hearing aids since childhood. He is a cousin of Random House founder [[Bennett Cerf]].