Curated playlist
Foreign associates of the National Academy of Sciences
- J. J. ThomsonJ. J. Thomson, born on the 18th of December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, grew up in a household shaped by antiquarian books and a mother rooted in the local textile trade. He never became the locomotive engineer his parents once…
- James Prescott JouleJames Prescott Joule was born on the 24th of December 1818, the son of a wealthy brewer, in Salford. The unit of energy that powers every calculation in modern physics, every kilowatt-hour on an electricity bill, and every equation in…
- Francis CrickOn his death bed, Francis Crick was editing a manuscript. "He was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end," said his colleague Christof Koch. Crick died of colon cancer on the morning of the 28th of July…
- Ernest RutherfordErnest Rutherford was born on the 30th of August 1871 in Brightwater, New Zealand, the fourth of twelve children, and he died with a burial spot beside Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey. That journey from a farm in rural…
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis before the German Physiological Society in Berlin on the 24th of March 1882. There was no particular reaction. Eminent scientists like Rudolf Virchow stayed skeptical, clinging to the idea…
- Jean PiagetJean Piaget was born on the 9th of August 1896 in Neuchâtel, in the Francophone region of Switzerland, and by the age of 15 he had already published several articles on mollusks that earned him a genuine reputation among zoologists. That…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem. At the stroke of noon, the entire State telegraph and telephone network of the Netherlands fell silent…
- 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 by proposing an idea that, at the time, he himself could barely believe. That…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Louis PasteurOn the 6th of July 1885, Louis Pasteur faced a choice that could have ended in his prosecution. A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly mauled by a rabid dog. Pasteur held a rabies vaccine he had tested in dogs, but he held no…
- Claude Lévi-StraussClaude Lévi-Strauss died on the 30th of October 2009, at the age of 100, and for four days the world did not know. When French President Nicolas Sarkozy finally spoke, he called Lévi-Strauss "one of the greatest ethnologists of all time."…
- Paul DiracPaul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born on the 8th of August 1902 in Bristol, England, and died on the 20th of October 1984 in Tallahassee, Florida. In the eighty-two years between those dates, he wrote an equation that predicted the existence…
- Stephen HawkingStephen Hawking spent his final years communicating at roughly one word per minute, twitching a single cheek muscle to select letters from a screen. Yet from that near-total stillness he produced papers on black hole entropy, co-developed…
- John HicksJohn Richard Hicks was born on the 8th of April 1904 in Warwick, England, and by the time he died on the 20th of May 1989, he had reshaped the way economists understand markets, welfare, and money itself. His father edited and part-owned…
- 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 nearly every branch of mathematics that existed in his lifetime. His peers called…
- Max BornMax Born shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for work he had completed nearly three decades earlier. The delay was not an oversight. It was a slow reckoning with just how much he had changed the way science thought about reality. Born…
- 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. "Awakening, I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper, only in one place did a correction…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned his findings into equations, called him a mathematician of a very high order, one…
- Amos TverskyAmos Nathan Tversky was born on the 16th of March 1937 in Haifa, British Palestine, and by the time he died in 1996, he had helped overturn one of the most confident assumptions in modern economics: that human beings, when making…
- 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 account books, he became an arithmetical prodigy before most children can tie their…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth. It was a conflict he never entirely resolved, and it drove him to build an entirely new picture of…
- Arthur EddingtonArthur Stanley Eddington stood at the center of one of the most dramatic moments in twentieth-century science. On the 29th of May 1919, during a total solar eclipse observed from the island of Príncipe off the west coast of Africa, he…
- Lev LandauLev Davidovich Landau was born on the 22nd of January 1908, in Baku, then part of the Russian Empire, and before he was old enough to attend university he had already taught himself both differential and integral calculus. What kind of…
- Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov was born on the 26th of September 1849 in Ryazan, a city in the Russian Empire, the eldest of ten children born to a village Orthodox priest. The name Pavlov is today shorthand for an automatic, almost mechanical…
- Louis de BroglieLouis de Broglie was born on the 15th of August 1892 in Dieppe, France, into a noble family that had sent soldiers and statesmen to French courts for centuries. He arrived in the world as the youngest son of the 5th duc de Broglie, heir to…
- Santiago Ramón y CajalSantiago Ramón y Cajal was once imprisoned at the age of eleven for destroying a neighbor's yard gate with a homemade cannon. That was 1863, in the small Spanish town of Petilla de Aragón, Navarre. His father responded by apprenticing the…