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Category
Era
10 figures
Leonardo da Vinci
1452 – 1519Proved that art and science are one act of looking.
Copernicus
1473 – 1543Moved the Earth from the centre of the universe.
Galileo Galilei
1564 – 1642Pointed a telescope upward and broke the authority of the ancients.
Johannes Kepler
1571 – 1630Three laws of planetary motion; every satellite orbit obeys them.
Christiaan Huygens
1629 – 1695Wave theory of light, the pendulum clock, Saturn's rings.
Isaac Newton
1643 – 1727Showed that one law governs the apple and the Moon alike.
Ruđer Bošković
1711 – 1787Proposed an atomic force theory two centuries early.
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.
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018Hawking radiation and A Brief History of Time.