Curated category
Corresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
- Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky stood in Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of December 1849, waiting to be shot. He had been split into a three-man group with…
- Louis de La Vallée-PoussinLouis de La Vallée-Poussin was born on the 1st of January 1869 in Liège. He began his university studies at the University of Liège in 1884.
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a…
- Marie CurieMarie Curie carried test tubes of radioactive isotopes loose in her pocket and stored them in her desk drawer, charmed by the faint light they gave off in…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem.
- Max PlanckMax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel, and he would go on to crack open one of the most stubborn problems in all of physics…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years.
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré was born on the 29th of April 1854 in the Cité Ducale neighborhood of Nancy, and by the time he died on the 17th of July 1912, he had touched…
- Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev had a brain that weighed 2,012 grams, one of the largest ever recorded. The man who carried it was tall and broad-shouldered, yet timid…
- Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev claimed he saw the answer in a dream. "I saw in a dream a table where all elements fell into place as required," he recalled.
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius taught himself to read at age three, not because anyone encouraged him, but because he decided to. By watching his father add numbers in…
- Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on the 28th of September 1875 at his Krasny Rog estate, having administered a lethal dose of morphine to himself.
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev wrote roughly 400 short poems across his entire life, yet he rarely bothered to write them down. When he did, he frequently lost the scraps…