Curated playlist
International members of the American Philosophical Society
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- 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 ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title: "Possible Existence of a Neutron." Three months later, the hedging was gone. His…
- 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…
- John Baines (Egyptologist)John Robert Baines was born on the 17th of March 1946, and by the time he was thirty years old, he had already become one of the youngest professors at the University of Oxford. That is a striking fact about a field not known for rapid…
- 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 the dark. She did not know the substances were slowly killing her. Today her papers…
- John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill was reading Greek at the age of three. By eight he had worked through Aesop's Fables, Xenophon's Anabasis, the whole of Herodotus, and six dialogues of Plato. This was not an accident. His father, James Mill, set out with…
- 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…
- 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…
- Jacob GrimmJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
- Joseph BonaparteJoseph Bonaparte arrived in the United States in the summer of 1815, hiding aboard a merchant vessel called the Commerce under the false name M. Bouchard. British naval officers searched the ship three times during the crossing. They never…
- Humphry DavyIn 1799, Humphry Davy breathed sixteen quarts of a gas for nearly seven minutes, and it absolutely intoxicated him. He called it laughing gas, and he laughed. He was a chemist working at a medical research facility in Bristol, and he was…
- 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…
- 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…
- Arthur EvansArthur Evans knelt in a flower-covered hill on the Greek island of Crete in March 1900, and within a few months he had uncovered one of the most complex structures the ancient world had ever produced. The site at Knossos contained more…
- Lionel RobbinsLionel Robbins is remembered today for a single line: "Humans want what they can't have." That quote made him famous. But it also compresses a career spent asking what economics is actually for. Robbins led the economics department at the…
- 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…
- Henry BessemerHenry Bessemer was born on the 19th of January 1813 in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, into a family already fluent in the language of invention. His father, Anthony, had built machines for the Paris Mint, been…
- Jean-Léon GérômeJean-Léon Gérôme was born on the 11th of May 1824 in Vesoul, a small town in the Haute-Saône region of France, and by 1880 he had become arguably the most famous living artist in the world. That rise was not built on one triumphant canvas…
- Alexis de TocquevilleAlexis de Tocqueville sailed to the United States in 1831 on a narrow assignment. The July Monarchy had sent him to examine American prisons and penitentiaries. He went with his lifelong friend Gustave de Beaumont, and the two did visit…
- 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…
- 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…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards'…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing before it. It argued that Augustus, Rome's first emperor, was not a restorer of…
- John TyndallJohn Tyndall died on the 4th of December 1893 from an accidental overdose of chloral hydrate, administered by his own wife. As he realized what had happened, he turned to Louisa and said: "My darling, you have killed your John." It was the…
- Lucien BonaparteLucien Bonaparte swore, during the Coup of 18 Brumaire, that he would personally stab Napoleon in the chest. The pledge was conditional: if Napoleon ever betrayed Liberté, égalité, fraternité, Lucien would stop him himself. This was…
- Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-PérigordCharles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was born on the 2nd of February 1754, and he died on the 17th of May 1838, having served every major French government that existed in between. He was a bishop who voted to strip the Church of its…
- Quentin SkinnerQuentin Skinner refused a knighthood. When Cambridge made him Regius Professor of History in 1996, one of the most prestigious academic appointments in Britain, the honor came with an offer of that title. He turned it down. His…