Browse the index

Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.

The Almagest ruled astronomy for 1,400 years; his Geography guided Columbus.

Physician to gladiators and emperors whose anatomy ruled medicine for 1,400 years.

Mathematician and astronomer murdered by a mob; symbol of learning against zealotry.

Gave place-value, an accurate π, and a rotating Earth in 499 CE.

Gave the world algebra and, through his own name, the algorithm.

Distinguished smallpox from measles and pioneered clinical case records.

Founded optics and the experimental method in the Book of Optics.

Measured Earth's radius to within 1% and wrote the first comparative anthropology of India.

Wrote the medical textbook that trained Europe's doctors until 1650.

Built an astronomical clock tower with the first known escapement chain drive.

Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.

Solved cubics geometrically, reformed the calendar, wrote the Rubaiyat.

Tusi couple; his planetary models likely reached Copernicus.

Sultan-astronomer whose star catalogue stood unmatched for two centuries.

Proved that art and science are one act of looking.

Moved the Earth from the centre of the universe.

Dissected humans himself and corrected Galen; founded modern anatomy.

Pointed a telescope upward and broke the authority of the ancients.

Three laws of planetary motion; every satellite orbit obeys them.

Coined 'gas' and ran the first quantitative plant-growth experiment.

Probability theory, hydrostatics, and a mechanical calculator at nineteen.

Wave theory of light, the pendulum clock, Saturn's rings.

Ground lenses in a draper's shop and discovered the microbial world.

Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.

Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².

Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.

Binomial nomenclature: every species on Earth still carries his two-name system.

Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.

Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.

Built the first battery; the volt is his.

A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.

Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.

The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.

A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.

Explained the whole of life with one mechanism: descent with modification.

Proved that invisible organisms cause disease — and that we can beat them.

Pea plants in a monastery garden gave the world genetics.

Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.

Invented dynamite, then endowed the prizes to redeem the legacy.

Arranged the elements so precisely that he could describe ones nobody had found.

The silver stain that made neurons visible.

Founded neuroscience by drawing the neuron doctrine.

Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.

Quantised energy and started quantum theory.

Crop rotation and peanut science that rescued Southern soil and farmers.

The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.

Ammonia synthesis feeds around half of humanity; also weaponised chlorine gas.

Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.

Made radio a transatlantic reality.

Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Described a disease, its parasite and its vector single-handedly.

Opened Britain's first birth-control clinic; the charity still operates in 37 countries.

Penicillin; antibiotics have saved an estimated 200 million lives.

Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.

Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.

Built the world's first seed bank; starved to death in Stalin's prison.

Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.

Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.

Discovered pantothenic acid and argued for biochemical individuality — the idea beneath functional medicine.

Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.

Acquired immune tolerance, the basis of transplantation.

The uncertainty principle.

Discovered jumping genes decades before the field caught up.

Predicted the meson and the nuclear strong force.

Silent Spring launched the environmental movement and got DDT banned.

Discovered nerve growth factor in a bedroom lab under fascist persecution.

Worked out at nineteen why some stars must collapse into black holes.

Solved the structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin by X-ray.

Defined what a computer is, then was destroyed by the country he saved.

Explained the nerve impulse in mathematical terms.

Co-described the double helix and the central dogma of molecular biology.

Shared the DNA structure Nobel.

QED, nanotechnology's founding lecture, and the Challenger diagnosis.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

Mapped the ocean floor and proved continental drift.

Unified the electromagnetic and weak forces; first Muslim science laureate.

Monoclonal antibodies — now a $200bn class of medicines.

Conductive polymers — flexible screens and printed electronics.

Predicted the boson that gives particles mass, found 48 years later.

Extracted artemisinin from ancient texts; millions of malaria deaths averted.

Mapped the ribosome, the cell's protein factory and antibiotic target.

Green Belt Movement founder; 51 million trees and a democracy campaign.

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.

Proved CFCs destroy ozone; his work produced the Montreal Protocol.

Founded femtochemistry, filming chemical bonds as they break.

Coined and codified functional medicine; founded the Institute for Functional Medicine in 1991.

Discovered the opiate receptor and argued the body is a single emotional-molecular network.

Discovered telomerase, central to ageing and cancer research.

Neurologist who put diet, glycemia and the microbiome at the centre of brain health.

Demoted, defunded, and right: her mRNA work produced the COVID vaccines.

Biologist-novelist who reinvented Portuguese in Mozambican terms.

Reprogrammed adult cells into stem cells, remaking regenerative medicine.

CRISPR gene editing, now in approved sickle-cell therapy.