Browse the index
Filter by category and discipline, then by continent, country and century of birth. Countries not yet represented can be drafted at the research desk.
Category
Disciplines in Natural Sciences
Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy and the sciences of the earth and brain.
Era
Countries (85)
10 figures
Émilie du Châtelet
1706 – 1749Translated Newton into French and established kinetic energy as mv².
Benjamin Franklin
1706 – 1790Electricity, bifocals, and the American public sphere.
Carl Linnaeus
1707 – 1778Binomial nomenclature: every species on Earth still carries his two-name system.
Ruđer Bošković
1711 – 1787Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.
Antoine Lavoisier
1743 – 1794Named oxygen, killed phlogiston, founded modern chemistry; guillotined at 50.
Alessandro Volta
1745 – 1827Built the first battery; the volt is his.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 – 1832A poet who also did serious science, and defined what a modern European is.
Alexander von Humboldt
1769 – 1859Invented the idea that nature is a single connected web — and that we can wreck it.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
1777 – 1855The Prince of Mathematicians; number theory, geodesy, magnetism.
Michael Faraday
1791 – 1867A bookbinder's apprentice who gave humanity electricity on demand.