The people behind the discoveries, in the order they were born, from ancient times to today. Under each one, see who else was alive at the same time.
Numbers in music and shapes
Pythagoras led a school in southern Italy that believed numbers explain everything. They found that strings whose lengths have simple ratios, like 2 to 1, sound good together. He never wrote anything down, so we know little for sure about what he himself found.
Medicine based on looking carefully
Born on the Greek island of Kos, Hippocrates is called the father of medicine. He and his followers wrote down patients’ illnesses day by day and taught that the body can often heal itself with rest, food and cleanliness.
The first biologist
Aristotle studied everything from logic to the stars, but he spent most time on animals: he described hundreds of kinds, cut them open, and noticed that dolphins breathe air and feed their young milk like land mammals. He also taught Alexander the Great. Some of his ideas, like heavy things falling faster, were wrong, and they held science back for centuries.
Floating, levers and π
Archimedes of Syracuse, in Sicily, worked out how levers work (“Give me a place to stand, and I will move the Earth”), why things float, and how to calculate π closely. He also built machines to defend his city. He was killed by a Roman soldier when the city fell, reportedly while drawing circles in the sand.
The size of the Earth
Eratosthenes ran the great library of Alexandria, in Egypt. Besides measuring the Earth, he drew one of the first maps with lines of latitude and longitude, and found a simple way to list prime numbers that students still learn, the “sieve of Eratosthenes.”
An earthquake detector and a globe of the stars
Zhang Heng was the chief astronomer of China’s Han court, and also a poet and painter. He built a water-powered globe of the stars that turned with the sky, recorded 2,500 stars, and explained that the Moon shines with light from the Sun.
The Earth at the center, worked out in detail
Ptolemy, in Alexandria, wrote the Almagest, a book that predicted where the Sun, Moon and planets would be, with the Earth at the center and the planets moving on circles upon circles. It was wrong, but it worked well enough to be used for 1,400 years. He also wrote a famous book of maps.
Teacher of math and astronomy
Hypatia was a mathematician and astronomer in Alexandria, Egypt, and the most famous teacher of her city. She wrote commentaries on the great math books of her time, helping to keep them alive. She was murdered by a mob during a political and religious conflict.
The spinning Earth and the shadows behind eclipses
Aryabhata wrote his book of mathematics and astronomy, the Aryabhatiya, at just 23, probably near today’s Patna, in India. India’s first satellite, launched in 1975, was named after him.
Rules for zero and negative numbers
Brahmagupta led the astronomical observatory at Ujjain, in India. He wrote rules for adding, subtracting and multiplying with zero and with negative numbers, which he called “debts,” and found ways to solve hard equations that European mathematicians only found a thousand years later.
Algebra
Al-Khwarizmi worked at the House of Wisdom, a great library and center of learning in Baghdad. His book on calculating with Indian numerals brought the digits 0 to 9 to the Arab world and, through translations into Latin, to Europe.
Light and the scientific method
Ibn al-Haytham, born in Basra, in today’s Iraq, worked in Cairo. He studied light in a dark room with a tiny hole, a camera obscura, and insisted that every idea be tested with experiments that others could repeat. He is often called the first true scientist.
Measuring the Earth and describing India
Al-Biruni, from Khwarazm in Central Asia, measured the size of the Earth from the top of a mountain, getting within about 1% of the real figure. He learned Sanskrit and wrote a long book about India: its sciences, religions and customs.
The Canon of Medicine
Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, grew up near Bukhara, in today’s Uzbekistan. He is said to have been a practicing doctor at 18. He wrote around 450 works on medicine, philosophy and science.
The compass, fossils and changing land
Shen Kuo was a Chinese official who wrote about everything he saw. Finding fossil shells in mountains far from the sea, he reasoned that the land had once been under water and was slowly built up and worn away, centuries before geologists in Europe.
Mathematics in verse
Bhaskara headed the observatory at Ujjain, in India. His book Lilavati teaches arithmetic through puzzles written as poems, some about bees and peacocks. He also worked with ideas close to calculus, more than 500 years before Newton and Leibniz.
Bringing Indian numerals to Europe
Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, learned Hindu-Arabic numerals as a boy in North Africa, where his father was a trader. His book of 1202 showed Europeans how much easier they were than Roman numerals. A famous puzzle in it, about breeding rabbits, gives the Fibonacci numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…
Endless sums
Madhava founded the Kerala school of mathematics and astronomy in southern India, which flourished for 300 years. Almost none of his own writing survives; we know his work from his students, who credited him.
A great observatory in Samarkand
Ulugh Beg, a ruler in Central Asia, built a huge observatory in Samarkand, in today’s Uzbekistan, with a curved wall 40 meters long for measuring stars. His catalogue of about 1,000 stars was the most accurate in the world for 200 years. He was killed in a fight over the throne.
Painter, engineer and anatomist
Leonardo, the painter of the Mona Lisa, filled thousands of notebook pages with careful drawings of the human body, birds in flight, flowing water and machines, many far ahead of their time. He wrote them in mirror writing, right to left. Most were not published, so his discoveries did not help other scientists.
The Sun at the center
Copernicus was a church official, doctor and astronomer in Poland. He worked on his idea for decades but was afraid of being laughed at, and only agreed to publish it as an old man. He is said to have been handed the first printed copy on the day he died.
The human body as it really is
Vesalius, from Brussels, was a professor of surgery in Padua, Italy, at 23. Instead of reading from old books while an assistant did the work, he cut up bodies himself in front of his students. He was 28 when his great book of anatomy was published.
The most careful measurements before the telescope
Tycho, a Danish nobleman, built an observatory on an island and measured the positions of stars and planets more accurately than anyone before, all by eye. He wore a metal nose after losing his in a sword fight. His measurements let Kepler find the laws of planetary motion.
The telescope, falling objects and the moving Earth
Galileo, in Italy, showed by experiment that heavy and light objects fall at the same speed (if air doesn’t slow them), and used his telescope to support the idea that the Earth goes around the Sun. For that, the Church put him on trial in 1633 and kept him under house arrest for the rest of his life.
The laws of the planets
Kepler, in Germany, had poor eyesight from a childhood illness, so he relied on Tycho Brahe’s measurements. He spent years on the orbit of Mars before finding it was an oval. He also explained how lenses and the eye work, and had to defend his mother when she was accused of witchcraft.
The circulation of the blood
Harvey was a doctor in London, including to King Charles I. He spent years studying hearts and blood in many animals before publishing his discovery. Many doctors mocked it, and he lost patients, but by the time he died it was widely accepted.
Graphs and “I think, therefore I am”
Descartes was a French philosopher and mathematician who liked to stay in bed thinking until late morning. He wanted to build all knowledge from things that could not be doubted, starting with “I think, therefore I am.” The x and y of graphs, and writing x for an unknown, come from him.
Chemistry by experiment
Boyle, born in Ireland, helped turn alchemy into chemistry. In his book The Sceptical Chymist he argued that substances are made of tiny particles and that ideas must be tested by experiment. He was one of the founders of the Royal Society in London.
Light as a wave, and the rings of Saturn
Huygens, in the Netherlands, ground his own telescope lenses and found Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and saw that Saturn has a ring. He proposed that light travels as a wave, and invented the pendulum clock. The probe that landed on Titan in 2005 is named after him.
The first person to see microbes
Leeuwenhoek sold cloth in Delft, in the Netherlands, and had no university education. He made more than 500 tiny lenses, some magnifying over 250 times, and kept his methods secret. He wrote about 190 letters to the Royal Society in London describing what he saw: bacteria, blood cells and sperm.
Cells, springs and fossils
Hooke was the Royal Society’s curator of experiments, and showed it a new experiment almost every week. Besides naming cells, he found the law of springs (stretch is proportional to force), argued that fossils are remains of living things, and helped rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666. No portrait of him survives.
Reading the layers of rock
Steno, a Danish doctor, saw that the “tongue stones” found in rocks were fossil sharks’ teeth. He set out the rules for reading rock layers: lower layers are older, and layers were laid down flat. Geologists still use them to read the history of places like the Himalaya.
Gravity, motion and light
Newton grew up on a farm in England. When the plague closed his university in 1665, he went home and, in about two years, began calculus, his work on light, and his ideas about gravity. Later he ran England’s money-making Mint and chased counterfeiters. He was famous for quarrels with other scientists.
Calculus and binary numbers
Leibniz, in Germany, invented calculus independently of Newton, and the symbols we use for it are his. He also built a calculating machine that could multiply and studied binary numbers, written with only 0 and 1, which every computer uses today.
How caterpillars become butterflies
Merian, a German artist, raised caterpillars and painted every stage of their lives, from egg to butterfly, with the plants they eat. Many people still thought insects came from mud. At 52 she sailed to Suriname, in South America, to study insects there, and her book of paintings is still admired.
The comet that comes back
Halley, in England, mapped the stars of the southern sky from the island of St Helena, and made one of the first weather maps, showing the trade winds. He paid to publish Newton’s Principia when the Royal Society ran out of money.
Bringing Newton to France
Du Châtelet, a French noblewoman, studied math and physics at a time when women were kept out of universities. She translated Newton’s Principia into French with her own explanations; it is still the standard French version. She also argued that a moving object’s energy depends on the square of its speed, which turned out to be right.
Electricity and lightning
Franklin was a printer, writer, scientist and one of the founders of the United States. He named positive and negative electric charge, invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses, and mapped the Gulf Stream, a warm current in the Atlantic.
Naming all living things
Linnaeus, in Sweden, named about 12,000 kinds of plants and animals himself. He sent his students around the world, including to India and Japan, to collect more. He put humans among the animals, next to the apes, which upset many people.
The most productive mathematician
Euler, from Switzerland, wrote more math than almost anyone in history, about 800 papers and books, and kept working after he went blind, doing huge calculations in his head. He gave us the symbols π, e and i, and the name f(x) for a function.
The Earth is very old
Hutton, a Scottish farmer and doctor, saw that the slow processes he watched on his farm, soil washing away and rivers carrying mud, could make whole landscapes if given enough time. He is called the father of modern geology.
Hydrogen and the weight of the Earth
Cavendish, a very shy and very rich Englishman, found hydrogen, which he called “inflammable air,” and showed that burning it makes water. He left many discoveries about electricity unpublished; they were found in his notes a century later.
Oxygen and fizzy water
Priestley, an English minister and teacher, found oxygen and several other gases, and invented soda water by bubbling carbon dioxide through water. He also showed that plants “restore” air that animals have used up. A mob burned his house for his political views, and he moved to America.
Uranus and infrared light
Herschel moved from Germany to England as a musician, and built the best telescopes of his time, grinding the mirrors himself. With his sister Caroline he counted stars in different directions to work out the shape of the Milky Way.
The father of modern chemistry
Lavoisier, in France, showed that burning is a joining with oxygen, made the first modern list of elements, and gave chemicals the system of names still used. His wife, Marie-Anne, translated papers and drew his apparatus. He was also a tax collector, and was executed during the French Revolution.
The first battery
Volta, a professor in Italy, argued with Luigi Galvani, who thought frogs’ legs twitched because of “animal electricity.” Volta believed the metals were making the electricity, and built his battery to prove it. He also found methane gas bubbling from a lake.
The first vaccine
Jenner was a country doctor in England who also studied cuckoos and hedgehogs. He gave his smallpox vaccine away freely. Smallpox, which once killed about one in ten people, was wiped out worldwide in 1980.
The first woman paid as a scientist
Caroline Herschel came to England to sing, but became her brother William’s partner in astronomy. She found eight comets and many nebulae on her own, and in 1787 the king gave her a salary as William’s assistant, making her the first woman paid for scientific work.
Atoms, and color blindness
Dalton, a teacher in Manchester, England, also kept a weather diary every day for 57 years. He and his brother could not tell red from green, and he wrote the first scientific description of color blindness, which is sometimes called Daltonism.
Nature as one connected web
Humboldt, a German explorer, spent five years traveling in South America, climbing volcanoes and measuring everything. He saw how plants change with height on a mountain, as from Nepal’s Terai to the Himalaya, and warned that cutting forests changes the climate. More places and living things are named after him than after anyone else.
Extinction
Cuvier, in Paris, knew animal bodies so well that he could say what animal a fossil came from from a single bone. He proved extinction was real and named the flying reptile pterodactyl. But he did not believe that species change, and opposed early ideas of evolution.
Mathematics under a man’s name
As a girl in Paris, Germain studied math secretly at night, against her parents’ wishes. Women were not allowed in the university, so she got lecture notes and sent her work to famous mathematicians under a man’s name. She won a prize for the math of vibrating surfaces and made progress on Fermat’s Last Theorem.
The prince of mathematicians
Gauss, the son of poor parents in Germany, is said to have added up the numbers 1 to 100 in seconds as a schoolboy. He made huge contributions to number theory, geometry, magnetism and astronomy, found the lost asteroid Ceres by calculation, and helped build an early electric telegraph.
Electricity and magnetism
Faraday, the son of a blacksmith, left school at 13 to work for a bookbinder, and read the science books he bound. He got a job washing bottles for the chemist Humphry Davy and became one of the greatest experimenters ever. He started Christmas science lectures for children in London that still happen every year.
Fossil hunter
Anning, from a poor family in Lyme Regis, England, searched the dangerous crumbling cliffs for fossils to sell. At about 12 she and her brother found the first complete ichthyosaur, a giant sea reptile, and later she found the first plesiosaur. As a woman she could not join the Geological Society, and men often published her finds without naming her.
Evolution by natural selection
At 22, Darwin sailed around the world on the Beagle for five years, collecting animals, plants and fossils. Finches and tortoises that differed from island to island in the Galápagos helped give him his idea. He worked on it for 20 years before publishing, and also wrote books on earthworms, orchids and barnacles.
Finding the highest mountain
Sikdar, a mathematician from Kolkata, joined the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India at 19 as a “computer,” the job title for people who did calculations. His careful work identified Peak XV, Mount Everest, as the highest mountain on Earth. He also campaigned against cruelty to workers.
The first computer program
Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, was taught math by her mother to keep her away from poetry. In notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine she wrote out a set of instructions for it, often called the first computer program, and saw that such machines could one day handle music and pictures, not just numbers.
Washing hands
Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, cut deaths of mothers in his hospital ward sharply by making doctors wash their hands. But he could not explain why it worked, germs were not yet known, and most doctors rejected him. He died in an asylum; the germ theory proved him right soon after.
The first to link carbon dioxide and warming
Foote was an American scientist, inventor and campaigner for women’s rights; she signed the first declaration of women’s rights in 1848. Her experiment of 1856 was the first to show that carbon dioxide traps the Sun’s heat, but her name was forgotten for more than 150 years.
Nursing and statistics
Nightingale led nurses in the Crimean War, where she found that far more soldiers died of disease from dirt than of wounds. She used charts of her own design to persuade the government to make hospitals clean. She founded the first modern nursing school, and was the first woman in the Royal Statistical Society.
The rules of inheritance
Mendel was a monk in Brno, in today’s Czech Republic. Over eight years he grew about 28,000 pea plants in the monastery garden and counted their traits. He became abbot and had little time for science afterwards, and died without knowing he had founded genetics.
Germs and vaccines
Pasteur, a French chemist, showed that microbes make wine sour and milk go bad, and that they cause disease. He made vaccines for chicken cholera, anthrax and rabies; in 1885 he saved a boy bitten by a rabid dog. Three of his own children died of typhoid, which drove his work.
Evolution, and the line between Asia and Australia’s animals
Wallace collected animals in the Amazon and in the islands of today’s Indonesia and Malaysia to earn a living. Sick with fever, he worked out natural selection on his own and wrote to Darwin, which pushed Darwin to publish. He also found the “Wallace Line,” where Asian animals give way to Australian ones.
Light, electricity and color photography
Maxwell, from Scotland, brought electricity, magnetism and light together in four equations. He also made the first color photograph, of a tartan ribbon, and worked out that Saturn’s rings must be made of countless small pieces. Einstein kept a picture of him on his wall.
The periodic table
Mendeleev was the youngest of many children in Siberia. To write a chemistry textbook he wrote each element on a card and arranged them, and saw the pattern. He also worked on oil, cheese making and setting up a system of weights and measures for Russia. Element 101, mendelevium, is named after him.
Finding the germs behind diseases
Koch was a country doctor in Germany who studied bacteria in a home laboratory. He found the germs that cause anthrax, tuberculosis and cholera, and developed ways of growing bacteria on plates of jelly that labs still use. His assistant’s wife, Fanny Hesse, suggested using agar, a jelly from seaweed.
X-rays
Röntgen, in Germany, won the very first Nobel Prize in Physics, in 1901, for X-rays. He refused to patent them, so that everyone could benefit, and gave his prize money to his university. Element 111, roentgenium, is named after him.
Neurons
As a boy in Spain, Cajal wanted to be an artist. Using a stain that colors only some nerve cells, he showed that the brain is made of separate cells, neurons, which pass signals in one direction. His beautiful drawings of neurons are still used in textbooks.
Radio waves and the lives of plants
Bose, in Kolkata, sent very short radio waves across a room in 1895, ringing a bell and setting off a small explosion at a distance, and built new detectors for them. He did not patent his work. He later built very sensitive instruments to show how plants respond to light, heat and injury. He also wrote one of the first Bengali science-fiction stories.
The start of quantum physics
Planck, in Germany, was told as a student that physics was almost finished, with nothing left to find. His idea that energy comes in small packets began quantum physics. He was also a fine pianist. His son was executed for taking part in a plot against Hitler.
One of India’s first women doctors
Married at nine, Anandibai Joshi lost her baby son at 14 because there was no proper medical care, and decided to become a doctor. She traveled alone to the USA and graduated in medicine in 1886, one of the first Indian women to do so. She died of tuberculosis at 21, soon after coming home.
Radioactivity
Marie Curie, born Maria Skłodowska in Poland, studied in Paris because women could not attend university at home. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to win in two sciences, physics and chemistry. During World War I she drove X-ray vans to the front to help wounded soldiers. Her notebooks are still radioactive.
Measuring distances to the stars
Leavitt worked at Harvard as a “computer,” measuring stars on photographs for low pay. She found that some flashing stars, Cepheids, flash more slowly the brighter they really are, so they can be used to measure distances. Hubble used her discovery to show there are other galaxies.
The nucleus
Rutherford, from a farm in New Zealand, found that atoms have a tiny nucleus and that radioactive elements change into other elements. His team was the first to split the nucleus of an atom on purpose. Many of his students won Nobel Prizes of their own.
Splitting the atom
Meitner, from Austria, worked for 30 years in Berlin with Otto Hahn. Forced to flee the Nazis in 1938 because she was Jewish, she worked out, with her nephew Otto Frisch, that Hahn’s experiments had split uranium atoms in two. Hahn alone won the Nobel Prize. Element 109, meitnerium, honors her.
Relativity and light
Einstein was a slow talker as a child in Germany and did not get on with strict teachers. He could not find a university job, and did his greatest work while checking patents in Switzerland. He won the Nobel Prize for explaining how light knocks electrons out of metal. He left Germany when Hitler came to power and spent the rest of his life in the USA.
Moving continents
Wegener was a German weather scientist and polar explorer who set records in a hot-air balloon. Most geologists mocked his idea that continents move. He died on an expedition across the Greenland ice sheet, 30 years before he was proved right.
Penicillin
Fleming, a Scottish doctor, had an untidy laboratory, which is how mold got onto his dish of bacteria. He was among the first to warn that bacteria could become resistant to antibiotics if they are misused, which is a big problem today.
Symmetry and the laws of physics
Noether, in Germany, at first taught at the university without pay, under a male colleague’s name, because she was a woman. She proved that every symmetry in nature goes with something that is conserved, such as energy, one of the most important ideas in physics, and founded much of modern algebra. Einstein called her a genius.
Inside the atom
Bohr, in Denmark, explained how electrons move around the nucleus in fixed levels, and why each element gives off its own colors of light. His institute in Copenhagen became the center of quantum physics. In 1943 he escaped the Nazis in a fishing boat to Sweden.
Formulas from nowhere
Ramanujan, a clerk in Chennai with almost no formal training, filled notebooks with thousands of new results about numbers. He wrote to the English mathematician G. H. Hardy, who invited him to Cambridge. He died at 32, and mathematicians are still proving the formulas in his notebooks today.
Earth’s solid inner core
Lehmann, in Denmark, studied earthquake waves using notes on cardboard cards kept in oatmeal boxes. In 1936 she showed that the Earth’s core has a solid inner part. She kept doing research into her 90s and lived to 104.
The Raman effect
Raman worked as an accountant for the government in Kolkata and did experiments in his spare time. On a ship to England, he wondered why the sea is blue. He was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize in science, in 1930, for work done with simple equipment in India.
Galaxies and the expanding universe
Hubble was a lawyer and a boxer before becoming an astronomer in California. Using the largest telescope of his day, he showed that there are other galaxies and that they are moving away from us. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him.
How hot the stars are
Saha, from a poor family in today’s Bangladesh, was thrown out of school for a protest against British rule. His equation explained the lines in starlight from how hot a star is, so astronomers could measure stars’ temperatures. He also planned river dams in India and founded institutes of science.
Bosons
Bose, a teacher in Dhaka, found a new way to count particles of light and sent it to Einstein, who translated it into German and had it published. One whole family of particles, including the Higgs, is called bosons after him. Bose and Einstein predicted a new state of matter, made in a lab in 1995.
The Big Bang idea
Lemaître, a Belgian priest and physicist, proposed in 1927 that the universe is expanding, two years before Hubble’s measurements, and later that it began from a single “primeval atom.” This idea became the Big Bang. Einstein at first told him, “Your math is correct, but your physics is abominable.”
Sweeter sugarcane and saving forests
Janaki Ammal, from Kerala, was one of the first Indian women to earn a doctorate in plant science. She bred sugarcane varieties that grew well in India, so it no longer had to be imported, and later worked to save the forests of the Western Ghats. A magnolia she grew in England is named after her.
What the stars are made of
Payne, born in England, left because she was not allowed a degree as a woman at Cambridge, and went to Harvard. Her doctoral thesis showed that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium. She later became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.
The chemical bond, and peace
Pauling, in the USA, explained how atoms hold together in molecules and found the shapes of proteins. He won two Nobel Prizes on his own: chemistry in 1954, and peace in 1962 for campaigning against nuclear weapons tests.
Jumping genes
Studying the colored kernels of maize, McClintock found that some genes can move from one place to another on the chromosomes. Most scientists did not understand or accept it for decades. She finally won a Nobel Prize in 1983, at 81.
Silent Spring
Carson, a marine biologist in the USA, wrote Silent Spring in 1962, showing how pesticides like DDT were poisoning birds, fish and people. Chemical companies attacked her, but her book led to a ban on DDT in the USA and helped start the environmental movement.
Building science in India
Bhabha, from Mumbai, studied cosmic rays in Cambridge and returned to India, where he founded the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and India’s atomic energy program. He was also a painter. He died in a plane crash on Mont Blanc in the Alps.
How stars die
On a ship from India to England at 19, Chandrasekhar worked out that a dead star heavier than about 1.4 Suns cannot become a quiet white dwarf; it must collapse further. A famous astronomer mocked the idea, but it was right: such stars become neutron stars or black holes. NASA’s Chandra X-ray telescope is named after him.
The shapes of molecules
Hodgkin, born in Cairo and working in England, used X-rays to find the shapes of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin, atom by atom. She worked on insulin for 35 years. She is still the only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science.
Computers and codebreaking
Turing, in England, described the idea of a computer before any were built. In World War II he helped break the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park, which shortened the war. He was punished by the law for being gay and died at 41. In 2013 the British government pardoned him.
The first lady of physics
Wu, from China, moved to the USA and became one of the best experimenters of her time. In 1956 her experiment showed that nature can tell left from right in some radioactive decays, overturning a law everyone believed. The two men who proposed the idea won the Nobel Prize; she did not.
Instruments for India’s weather
Anna Mani, from Kerala, studied with C. V. Raman. At India’s weather service she designed and built instruments to measure sunlight, wind and ozone, so India no longer had to buy them abroad, and set up a network of solar and wind measuring stations across the country.
Calculating the way to space
Johnson, a Black American mathematician, worked at NASA as a “computer” when Black people were kept apart by law in the USA. She calculated the paths of early spaceflights, and the astronaut John Glenn asked her to check the computer’s numbers before his flight in 1962. Her story was told in the film Hidden Figures.
Light, electrons and curiosity
Feynman, in the USA, found how light and electrons interact and drew simple diagrams to describe particles that physicists still use. He loved playing drums and picking locks, and was famous for explaining physics clearly. Investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster, he showed the cause with a rubber ring and a glass of ice water.
India’s space program
Sarabhai, from Ahmedabad, founded India’s space research, starting with small rockets launched from a church by the sea in Thumba, Kerala, in 1963. He wanted satellites to bring education and weather forecasts to villages. India’s Moon lander on Chandrayaan-2 and Chandrayaan-3 is named Vikram after him.
The X-ray picture of DNA
Franklin, in London, took X-ray pictures of DNA, including the famous Photo 51, which showed it was a helix. James Watson and Francis Crick used her data, without her knowing, to build their model. She died of cancer at 37, four years before they won the Nobel Prize; prizes are not given after death.
Mapping the ocean floor
Women were not allowed on research ships when Tharp started, so she drew maps of the ocean floor from the depth measurements men brought back. She found a deep valley running down the middle of the Atlantic, where the seafloor splits apart. Her partner Bruce Heezen at first called it “girl talk.”
Reading the genetic code
Khorana, born in a village in Punjab, in today’s Pakistan, helped work out how the letters of DNA spell out the building blocks of proteins, and won a Nobel Prize in 1968. He was later the first to make an artificial gene.
Uniting the forces of nature
Salam, from Pakistan, showed with others that electricity and magnetism and the weak force, which causes some radioactivity, are two sides of one force. He won a Nobel Prize in 1979, the first Pakistani to do so. He founded a center in Italy where scientists from poorer countries could do research.
The invisible matter in galaxies
As a girl, Rubin watched the stars from her bedroom window. Princeton would not let her study astronomy because she was a woman. Measuring how fast stars go around their galaxies, she found evidence for dark matter. A big new telescope in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, is named after her.
A malaria medicine from an old herbal remedy
Tu Youyou, in China, searched more than 2,000 old herbal recipes for a malaria cure, and tested the first medicine on herself. Without a doctorate or study abroad, she won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015, the first woman from China to win one in science.
Living with chimpanzees
Goodall went to Tanzania at 26 with no university degree and spent decades living among wild chimpanzees. She saw them make and use tools, which people had thought only humans did, and gave them names instead of numbers. She spent her later life traveling to speak for animals and forests.
Planting trees
Maathai was the first woman in East Africa to earn a doctorate, in biology. She started the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, which paid women to plant trees, more than 50 million so far. She was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Black holes
Hawking, in England, learned at 21 that he had a disease that would slowly paralyze him. He lived 55 more years, speaking through a computer, and showed that black holes should slowly give off heat. His book A Brief History of Time sold millions of copies.
Pulsars
As a student in Northern Ireland, Bell Burnell helped build a radio telescope and checked 100 meters of its paper chart every day. She spotted a tiny, regular signal that turned out to be a pulsar. Her supervisor shared the Nobel Prize; she did not. In 2018 she gave a prize she won to help students from groups left out of physics.
Bringing back sight
Ruit grew up in Olangchung Gola, a remote village in eastern Nepal, and lost a sister to tuberculosis because there was no doctor nearby. As an eye surgeon, he developed a quick, cheap way to remove cataracts, the cloudy lenses that blind millions, and set up a lab in Kathmandu to make artificial lenses cheaply. He and his teams have restored the sight of more than 250,000 people.
mRNA vaccines
Karikó, from Hungary, worked for decades on mRNA in the USA, often without money for her research; she was even demoted. With Drew Weissman she found how to change mRNA so the body would not attack it. Their work made the COVID-19 vaccines possible and won them the Nobel Prize in 2023.
CRISPR gene editing
Doudna grew up in Hawaii and decided to become a scientist after reading a book about DNA. With Emmanuelle Charpentier she turned CRISPR, a defense that bacteria use against viruses, into a tool for editing genes. She speaks often about using it carefully.
CRISPR gene editing
Charpentier, from France, studied how bacteria cause disease, moving between labs in seven countries. She found a key part of how CRISPR works in bacteria. In 2020 she and Doudna became the first two women to share a Nobel Prize in science.
The geometry of curved surfaces
As a girl in Tehran, Iran, Mirzakhani wanted to be a writer, but fell in love with math. She won gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad and, in 2014, became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the top prize in math. She died of cancer at 40.
Scientists from many countries whose work changed what everyone knows, including people who were left out of the credit in their own time. Each one links to where you can read more.
Pythagoras: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Hippocrates: Unidentified engraver, Public domain · Aristotle: After Lysippos, Public domain · Archimedes: Domenico Fetti, Public domain · Eratosthenes: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain · Ptolemy: Justus van Gent / Pedro Berruguete, Public domain · Aryabhata: Cpjha13, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: Zarateman, CC0 · Ibn al-Haytham: Adolph Boÿ, engraved by Jeremias Falck. Used as the frontispiece to Johannes Hevelius,…, Public domain · Al-Biruni: The original uploader was Romanm at Slovenian Wikipedia ., Public domain · Shen Kuo: Hans A. Rosbach, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Fibonacci: Taty2007, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ulugh Beg: Unknown artist Unknown artist, Public domain · Leonardo da Vinci: Attributed to Francesco Melzi, Public domain · Nicolaus Copernicus: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Andreas Vesalius: Jan van Calcar, Public domain · Tycho Brahe: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Galileo Galilei: Justus Sustermans, Public domain · Johannes Kepler: August Köhler [1], Public domain · William Harvey: After Daniël Mijtens, Public domain · René Descartes: After Frans Hals, Public domain · Robert Boyle: Johann Kerseboom, Public domain · Christiaan Huygens: Caspar Netscher, Public domain · Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: Jan Verkolje, Public domain · Nicolas Steno: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Isaac Newton: Godfrey Kneller, Public domain · Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: Christoph Bernhard Francke, Public domain · Maria Sibylla Merian: Jacob Marrel, Public domain · Edmond Halley: Thomas Murray, Public domain · Émilie du Châtelet: Maurice Quentin de La Tour, Public domain · Benjamin Franklin: Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, Public domain · Carl Linnaeus: Alexander Roslin, Public domain · Leonhard Euler: Jakob Emanuel Handmann, Public domain · James Hutton: Henry Raeburn, Public domain · Henry Cavendish: George Wilson, Public domain · Joseph Priestley: James Sharples, Public domain · William Herschel: Lemuel Francis Abbott, Public domain · Antoine Lavoisier: Jacques-Louis David, Public domain · Alessandro Volta: Wikimedia Commons, Public domain · Edward Jenner: John Raphael Smith, Public domain · Caroline Herschel: Ölgemälde: Melchior Gommar Tieleman ; Foto des gemeinfreien Gemäldes: unbekannt, Public domain · John Dalton: Thomas Phillips, Public domain · Alexander von Humboldt: Joseph Karl Stieler, Public domain · Georges Cuvier: Georges_Cuvier.jpg : Unknown derivative work: Bea o, Public domain · Sophie Germain: s:fr:Auteur:Sophie Germain, Public domain · Carl Friedrich Gauss: Christian Albrecht Jensen, Public domain · Michael Faraday: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Mary Anning: Credited to 'Mr. Grey' in Crispin Tickell's book 'Mary Anning of Lyme Regis' (1996), Public domain · Charles Darwin: Charles_Darwin_seated.jpg : Henry Maull (1829–1914) and John Fox (1832–1907) (Maull &…, Public domain · Radhanath Sikdar: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Ada Lovelace: Antoine Claudet, Public domain · Ignaz Semmelweis: József Borsos / Albert Doctor, Public domain · Florence Nightingale: Henry Hering (1814-1893), Public domain · Gregor Mendel: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Louis Pasteur: Paul Nadar, Public domain · Alfred Russel Wallace: London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company (active 1855-1922), Public domain · James Clerk Maxwell: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Dmitri Mendeleev: Original: Unknown author Unknown author Upload: Germansociety2014, Public domain · Robert Koch: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Wilhelm Röntgen: Erwin Hanfstaengl, Public domain · Santiago Ramón y Cajal: Original photo is anonymous although published by Clark University in 1899.…, Public domain · Jagadish Chandra Bose: The Birth Centenary Committee, printed by P.C. Ray, Public domain · Max Planck: Hugo Erfurth, Public domain · Anandibai Joshi: Dall, Caroline Wells Healey, 1822-1912, Public domain · Marie Curie: Henri Manuel, Public domain · Henrietta Swan Leavitt: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Ernest Rutherford: Bain News Service, publisher Restored by: Bammesk, Public domain · Lise Meitner: Harris & Ewing, Public domain · Albert Einstein: Oren Jack Turner, Public domain · Alfred Wegener: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Alexander Fleming: Official photographer, Public domain · Emmy Noether: Unknown author Unknown author Publisher: Mathematical Association of America [3] ,…, Public domain · Niels Bohr: The American Institute of Physics credits the photo [1] to AB Lagrelius & Westphal ,…, Public domain · Srinivasa Ramanujan: Unknown author Unknown author, CC BY 4.0 · Inge Lehmann: Even Neuhaus (6.2.1863-20.4.1946), Public domain · C. V. Raman: Nobel Foundation, Public domain · Edwin Hubble: Johan Hagemeyer, Public domain · Meghnad Saha: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Satyendra Nath Bose: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Georges Lemaître: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Janaki Ammal: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: Smithsonian Institution/Science Service, restored by Adam Cuerden, Public domain · Linus Pauling: Unknown author Unknown author, CC BY-SA 2.0 · Barbara McClintock: Smithsonian Institution /Science Service; Restored by Adam Cuerden, Public domain · Rachel Carson: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Public domain · Homi J. Bhabha: Unknown (Mondadori Publishers), Public domain · Alan Turing: Elliott & Fry, Public domain · Katherine Johnson: NASA, Public domain · Vikram Sarabhai: Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), GODL-India · Rosalind Franklin: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Marie Tharp: Credit Line: AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Gift of Bill Woodward, USNS Kane Collection, CC0 · Har Gobind Khorana: Unknown author Unknown author, Public domain · Tu Youyou: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden, CC BY 2.0 · Jane Goodall: U.S. Department of State from United States, Public domain · Wangari Maathai: Kingkongphoto & www.celebrity-photos.com from Laurel Maryland, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0 · Stephen Hawking: NASA, Public domain · Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Launch_of_IYA_2009,_Paris_-_Grygar,_Bell_Burnell.jpg : Astronomical Institute, Academy…, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Sanduk Ruit: Aasemsj, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Katalin Karikó: Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jennifer Doudna: Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Emmanuelle Charpentier: Bianca Fioretti, Hallbauer & Fioretti, CC BY-SA 4.0
