Curated playlist
Corresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
- Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky stood before a firing squad in 1849, and a letter from the tsar arrived.
- Louis de La Vallée-PoussinLouis Étienne Joseph Marie de La Vallée-Poussin earned his doctorate at the age of nineteen. He grew up to be a Belgian Indologist, a scholar who studied the cultures and texts of India, and a specialist in Buddhist Studies. His path ran…
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent his last hours on a train, preaching non-violence to strangers.
- Marie CurieMarie Curie's cookbooks are still highly radioactive. They are sealed in lead-lined boxes.
- Hendrik LorentzWhen Hendrik Lorentz was buried in 1928, the Dutch phone network fell silent. It stayed quiet for three minutes.
- Max PlanckMax Planck called his quantum idea "an act of despair." The cautious physicist launched quantum physics reluctantly.
- Carl Friedrich GaussAt nineteen, Carl Friedrich Gauss proved a 17-sided polygon could be drawn with just a compass and straightedge.
- Charles BabbageCharles Babbage died on the 18th of October 1871 at 1 Dorset Street in Marylebone, London, where he had lived and worked for over forty years. He was 79. Among his papers were designs for engines of brass and iron that could calculate,…
- Henri PoincaréHenri Poincaré won a royal prize for a problem he did not solve. His entry still revealed the first chaotic system.
- Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol and was jailed for a month. Censors had banned it in Saint Petersburg.
- Dmitri MendeleevDmitri Mendeleev missed a Nobel Prize in 1906 by a single vote. The Swedish academy chose Henri Moissan instead.
- Svante ArrheniusSvante Arrhenius nearly failed his doctorate, then won a Nobel Prize for it.
- Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Tolstoy co-created Kozma Prutkov, a fake poet many readers thought was real.
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev called his poems trifles and often lost the scraps of paper they were written on.