Curated playlist
American fellows of the Royal Society
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer gripped a post to steady himself as the first nuclear bomb went off.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades calling a dying star a "gravitationally completely collapsed object."
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz explained why wages stay high in recessions even when workers are desperate for jobs.
- Richard FeynmanRichard Feynman's last words, spoken after a long coma, were "This dying is boring." The remark suited an American theoretical physicist who never lost his taste for blunt, irreverent honesty. He was a man who treated authority, ceremony…
- Yang Chen-NingYang Chen-Ning, the theoretical physicist also known as C.N. Yang and Franklin Yang, died in Beijing on the 18th of October 2025. He was 103 years old. The day after his death was announced, people gathered at Tsinghua University and…
- Benjamin FranklinIn 1728, a 22-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin sat down and wrote his own epitaph. He pictured his body as the cover of an old book, its contents torn out and its lettering and gilding stripped away. It would lie in the earth as…
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
- Kurt GödelIn 1931, Kurt Gödel proved that any sufficiently powerful math system contains true statements it cannot prove.
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl gave computers a way to reason when facts are incomplete.
- Linus PaulingLinus Pauling left high school without a diploma. He later won two unshared Nobel Prizes, a first in history.
- Peter DebyeA unit of measurement, a lunar crater and a minor planet all carry Peter Debye's name.
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky went from collecting butterflies in Kiev to writing a landmark book on evolution.
- Terence TaoTerence Tao scored 760 on the math section of the SAT when he was only eight years old. Only two other children in the Johns Hopkins Study of Exceptional Talent program have ever reached 700 or more at that age. That boy grew up to be an…
- Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar sailed from India to England in 1930, and on that first sea voyage he worked out a number that would outlive him. The number was 1.44. It is the greatest mass, counted in suns, that a white dwarf star can have. A…