Browse the index

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The uncertainty principle.

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

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.

Chemist whose Auschwitz testimony is the standard of moral witness.

Photographed the shape of the molecule that makes us.

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

Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.

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