Physicists
Created a model of the atom in which electrons resided in specific energy levels at specific stable radii. He and his son fled to the U.S. in World War II under the pseudonym “Baker,” and contributed to the Manhattan Project.
Niels Bohr
explained the implications of the big bang theory of cosmology; correctly predicted abundance of hydrogen and helium in the early universe; theorized heat from the Big Bang would still be visible as the cosmic microwave background radiation.
George Gamow
generalizing the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents; doing the first rigorous manipulation with power series; and creating his method for finding roots of differentiable functions; invented calculus
Isaac Newton
known for contributions to number theory, his little theorem, which states that if p is a prime number and a is any number at all, then (a^p) – a will be divisible by p; most famous for his “last theorem,” which he wrote in the margin of Arithmetica by the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus
Pierre de Fermat
Posited a constant, finite speed of light; stated that the energy of a body is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared; theory of general relativity
Albert Einstein
correctly modeled how an object radiates heat, solving the ultraviolet catastrophe; suggested that electromagnetic energy could only be emitted in specific packages, called quanta, positing that the energy of this photon was equal to its frequency times a fixed value h, now known as his constant
Max Planck
known for the Elements, a textbook that has been used for over 2,000 years and which grounds essentially all of what is taught in modern high school geometry classes; Elements has 5 postulates; includes a proof of infinite prime numbers
Euclid
did important work even after going blind; invented graph theory by solving the Seven Bridges of Königsberg problem;
Leonhard Euler
a main contributor to the Manhattan project; laid the groundwork for modern electronics and solid-state technologies; accurately predicted the low-temperature behavior of electrons
Enrico Fermi
gold foil experiment provided the first evidence that each atom is made up of a positively-charged nucleus, surrounded by a cloud of negatively-charged electrons; won the 1908 Nobel Prize; discovered the decay of carbon-14 and providing the impetus for modern carbon dating
Ernest Rutherford
considered the “Prince of Mathematicians”; Disquisitiones Arithmeticae systematized number theory and stated the fundamental theorem of arithmetic; proved the fundamental theorem of algebra; proved the law of quadratic reciprocity, and the prime number theorem
Carl Friedrich Gauss
was a logician best known for his two incompleteness theorems, which state that if a formal logical system is powerful enough to express ordinary arithmetic, it must contain statements that are true but unprovable
Kurt Gödel
developed the path integral formulation of quantum theory. This constituted the creation of quantum electrodynamics and earned him the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Also played bongos
Richard Feynman
criticized Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; formulated the time-independent and time-dependent namesake equations, which are partial differential equations that describe how quantum systems behave
Erwin Schrödinger
found the ratios between the surface areas and volumes of a sphere and a circumscribed cylinder; accurately estimated pi; and developed a calculus-like technique to find the area of a circle, his method of exhaustion.
Archimedes
best known for proving the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that all rational semi-stable elliptic curves are modular forms. When combined with work already done by other mathematicians, this immediately implied Fermat’s last theorem
Andrew Wiles
proposed that all particles have a characteristic wavelength dependent on their momentum, quantifying the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics
Louis de Broglie
His uncertainty principle states that the more accurately an object's position can be measured, the less accurately the momentum can be measured. 1932 Nobel Prize
Werner Heisenberg
known for independent invention of calculus and the ensuing priority dispute with Isaac Newton; Most modern calculus notation originated with him; did work with the binary number system and did fundamental work in establishing Boolean algebra and symbolic logic
Gottfried Leibniz
known for a four-dimensional extension of complex numbers, with six square roots of –1 (±i, ±j, and ±k), called the quaternions
William Rowan Hamilton