Curated playlist
American fellows of the Royal Society
- J. Robert OppenheimerJ. Robert Oppenheimer stood in a control bunker near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in the early morning hours of the 16th of July, 1945, holding a post to steady himself. Brigadier General Thomas Farrell watched him grow tenser as the final…
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades trying to describe a dying star in plain language, and the best he could manage was "gravitationally completely collapsed object." Then, during a lecture in 1967, someone in the audience grew tired of…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little that his death certificate listed the cause as "malnutrition and inanition caused by…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. Scientific American named him one of the twenty…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been attached to a unit of measurement, a lunar crater, a minor planet, and more than a…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…