PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: sciences
Greek philosopher
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist, one of the greatest intellectual figures of Classical antiquity and Western history. He was the author of a philosophical and scientific system...
Italian artist, engineer, and scientist
Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal....
Austrian psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis. (Read Sigmund Freud’s 1926 Britannica essay on psychoanalysis.) Freud may justly be called the most influential intellectual...
British author, philosopher, and statesman
Francis Bacon was the lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher, and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for the sharp worldly wisdom of a few...
Italian explorer
Christopher Columbus was a master navigator and admiral whose four transatlantic voyages (1492–93, 1493–96, 1498–1500, and 1502–04) opened the way for European exploration, exploitation, and colonization...
British naturalist
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. An affable country gentleman, Darwin at first shocked...
English physicist and mathematician
Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated...
American linguist
Noam Chomsky is an American theoretical linguist whose work from the 1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. Through...
German-American physicist
Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein...
British physicist and chemist
Michael Faraday was an English physicist and chemist whose many experiments contributed greatly to the understanding of electromagnetism. Faraday, who became one of the greatest scientists of the 19th...
British logician and philosopher
Bertrand Russell was a British philosopher, logician, and social reformer, a founding figure in the analytic movement in Anglo-American philosophy, and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950....
German astronomer
Johannes Kepler German astronomer who discovered three major laws of planetary motion, conventionally designated as follows: (1) the planets move in elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus; (2) the...
British biologist
Thomas Henry Huxley was an English biologist, educator, and advocate of agnosticism (he coined the word). Huxley’s vigorous public support of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary naturalism earned him the nickname...
Polish astronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus Polish astronomer who proposed that the planets have the Sun as the fixed point to which their motions are to be referred; that Earth is a planet which, besides orbiting the Sun annually,...
French chemist and microbiologist
Louis Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist who was one of the most important founders of medical microbiology. Pasteur’s contributions to science, technology, and medicine are nearly without...
British mathematician and philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and, from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and developed...
German philosopher and mathematician
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher, mathematician, and political adviser, important both as a metaphysician and as a logician and distinguished also for his independent invention of the...
German scientist and philosopher
Hermann von Helmholtz was a German scientist and philosopher who made fundamental contributions to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology. He is best known for his statement...
Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician
Galileo was an Italian natural philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who made fundamental contributions to the sciences of motion, astronomy, and strength of materials and to the development of the...
German explorer and naturalist
Alexander von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer who was a major figure in the classical period of physical geography and biogeography—areas of science now included in the Earth sciences and...
French philosopher and scientist
Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities, formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s...
Italian explorer
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant and adventurer who traveled from Europe to Asia in 1271–95, remaining in China for 17 of those years. His Il milione (“The Million”), known in English as the Travels...
American psychologist and philosopher
William James was an American philosopher and psychologist, a leader of the philosophical movement of pragmatism and a founder of the psychological movement of functionalism. James was the eldest son of...
Portuguese explorer
Ferdinand Magellan was a Portuguese navigator and explorer who sailed under the flags of both Portugal (1505–13) and Spain (1519–21). From Spain, he sailed around South America, discovering the Strait...
British physicist
Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist considered the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). Rutherford was the central figure in the study of radioactivity, and...
French chemist
Antoine Lavoisier was a prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored...
German physicist and philosopher
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist and philosopher who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics...
Italian architect and author
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian humanist, architect, and principal initiator of Renaissance art theory. In his personality, works, and breadth of learning, he is considered the prototype of the Renaissance...
Greek mathematician
Archimedes was the most famous mathematician and inventor in ancient Greece. He is especially important for his discovery of the relation between the surface and volume of a sphere and its circumscribing...
Scottish explorer and missionary
David Livingstone was a Scottish missionary and explorer who exercised a formative influence on Western attitudes toward Africa. Livingstone grew up in a distinctively Scottish family environment of personal...
Swedish botanist
Carolus Linnaeus was a Swedish naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial...
Danish physicist
Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who is generally regarded as one of the foremost physicists of the 20th century. He was the first to apply the quantum concept, which restricts the energy of a system...
Scottish engineer, mathematician, and physicist
William Thomson, Baron Kelvin was a Scottish engineer, mathematician, and physicist who profoundly influenced the scientific thought of his generation. Thomson, who was knighted and raised to the peerage...
German physicist
Max Planck was a German theoretical physicist who originated quantum theory, which won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. Planck made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests...
American mathematician
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-born American mathematician. As an adult, he appended von to his surname; the hereditary title had been granted his father in 1913. Von Neumann grew from child prodigy...
Persian philosopher and scientist
Avicenna was a Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian...
Swedish chemist
Jöns Jacob Berzelius was one of the founders of modern chemistry. He is especially noted for his determination of atomic weights, the development of modern chemical symbols, his electrochemical theory,...
Muslim explorer and writer
Ibn Battuta was the greatest medieval Muslim traveler and the author of one of the most famous travel books, the Riḥlah (Travels). His great work describes his extensive travels covering some 75,000 miles...
English physician
William Harvey was an English physician who was the first to recognize the full circulation of the blood in the human body and to provide experiments and arguments to support this idea. Harvey had seven...
Swedish philosopher
Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish scientist, Christian mystic, philosopher, and theologian who wrote voluminously in interpreting the Scriptures as the immediate word of God. Soon after his death, devoted...
Italian philosopher
Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, and occultist whose theories anticipated modern science. The most notable of these were his theories of the infinite universe and the...
German chemist
Justus, baron von Liebig was a German chemist who made significant contributions to the analysis of organic compounds, the organization of laboratory-based chemistry education, and the application of chemistry...
English admiral
Sir Francis Drake was an English admiral who circumnavigated the globe (1577–80) and was the most renowned seaman of the Elizabethan Age. Born on the Crowndale estate of Lord Francis Russell, 2nd earl...
French mathematician and philosopher
Jean Le Rond d’Alembert was a French mathematician, philosopher, and writer, who achieved fame as a mathematician and scientist before acquiring a considerable reputation as a contributor to and editor...
botanist
Gregor Mendel was a botanist, teacher, and Augustinian prelate, the first person to lay the mathematical foundation of the science of genetics, in what came to be called Mendelism. Born to a family with...
British scientist
Joseph Black was a British chemist and physicist best known for the rediscovery of “fixed air” (carbon dioxide), the concept of latent heat, and the discovery of the bicarbonates (such as bicarbonate of...
Scottish geologist
Charles Lyell was a Scottish geologist largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth’s surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through...
Greek mathematician
Euclid was the most prominent mathematician of Greco-Roman antiquity, best known for his treatise on geometry, the Elements. Of Euclid’s life nothing is known except what the Greek philosopher Proclus...
English clergyman and scientist
Joseph Priestley was an English clergyman, political theorist, and physical scientist whose work contributed to advances in liberal political and religious thought and in experimental chemistry. He is...
Russian scientist
Dmitri Mendeleev was a Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic...
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