Curated category
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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl entered the world on the 4th of September 1936 in Tel Aviv. This city sat within the British Mandate for Palestine at that time.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…