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Members of the French Academy of Sciences

  • Carl LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus was born on the 23rd of May 1707 in the village of Råshult. His father Nicolaus Ingemarsson taught him Latin as a small child.
  • Jacob BernoulliJacob Bernoulli entered the world in 1655 within the Swiss Confederation. His father and grandfather had worked as Protestant spice merchants.
  • Francis CrickFrancis Harry Compton Crick was born on the 8th of June 1916 in Weston Favell, a small village near the English town of Northampton.
  • Joseph-Louis LagrangeGiuseppe Luigi Lagrangia was born in Turin on the 25th of January 1736. He grew up as the firstborn of eleven children in a family that had lost most of its…
  • Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet entered the world on the 9th of December 1748 in Talloires. This small town sat near Annecy within the Duchy of Savoy.
  • Leonhard EulerPierre-Simon Laplace told his colleagues to read Leonhard Euler, calling him the master of us all. The man he was describing was a Swiss polymath born in…
  • Christiaan HuygensChristiaan Huygens was born on the 14th of April 1629 in The Hague. He entered a world of privilege as the second son of Constantijn Huygens, a diplomat 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…
  • Alexander von HumboldtOn the 14th of September 1769, a boy named Alexander von Humboldt drew his first breath in Berlin. His father held the rank of major in the Prussian Army and…
  • Auguste de MarmontAuguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont was born on the 20th of July 1774 in Châtillon-sur-Seine. His father served as an ex-officer within the petite…
  • Antoine LavoisierOn the 8th of May 1794, in Paris, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was guillotined alongside 27 co-defendants, at the age of 50.
  • Peter the GreatPeter grew up at Izmaylovo Estate, where his education began under tutors commissioned by his father. Nikita Zotov, Patrick Gordon, and Paul Menesius taught…
  • Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
  • Joseph FourierJean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier was born on the 21st of March 1768 in Auxerre, Burgundy. His father worked as a tailor and died when Fourier was only nine years…
  • Henry BessemerHenry Bessemer entered the world on the 19th of January 1813 in London. His father Anthony was a member of a Huguenot family that had fled Paris during the…
  • Pierre-Simon LaplacePierre-Simon Laplace was born on the 23rd of March 1749 in Beaumont-en-Auge, a small village four miles west of Pont l'Évêque.
  • Ivan PavlovIvan Petrovich Pavlov entered the world on the 26th of September 1849 in the town of Ryazan. He was the first child among ten siblings born to a village…
  • Pafnuty ChebyshevPafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev was born in the village of Okatovo, located within the district of Borovsk and the province of Kaluga.
  • Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling was born on the 28th of February 1901, in Portland, Oregon. His father Herman Henry William Pauling worked as a traveling salesman for the…
  • Louis de BroglieLouis Victor Pierre Raymond, 7th Duc de Broglie, entered the world on the 15th of August 1892 in Dieppe, France. He belonged to a noble family that had held…