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Category
Era
Countries (85)
13 figures
James Clerk Maxwell
1831 – 1879Four equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light — hence radio and Wi-Fi.
Nikola Tesla
1856 – 1943Alternating current, induction motors and radio principles.
Max Planck
1858 – 1947Quantised energy and started quantum theory.
Marie Skłodowska-Curie
1867 – 1934The only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences.
Ernest Rutherford
1871 – 1937Found the atomic nucleus and split the atom.
Guglielmo Marconi
1874 – 1937Made radio a transatlantic reality.
Lise Meitner
1878 – 1968Explained nuclear fission; passed over by the Nobel committee. Element 109 is meitnerium.
Albert Einstein
1879 – 1955Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.
Emmy Noether
1882 – 1935Noether's theorem links symmetry to conservation laws — the backbone of modern physics.
Niels Bohr
1885 – 1962Quantum atom and the Copenhagen interpretation.
Erwin Schrödinger
1887 – 1961Wave mechanics and What Is Life?, which inspired the DNA hunters.
C. V. Raman
1888 – 1970Raman scattering, now the basis of a ubiquitous laboratory spectroscopy.
Satyendra Nath Bose
1894 – 1974Bose–Einstein statistics; the boson is named after him.