Curated playlist
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
- Carl LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus, born on the 23rd of May 1707 in the village of Råshult, in the countryside of Småland, southern Sweden, gave the living world a name for every creature in it. He built the system that scientists still use today: a two-part…
- Jacob BernoulliJacob Bernoulli died on the 16th of August 1705, and was buried in Basel with a spiral engraved on his tombstone. There was just one problem: the stonemasons carved the wrong spiral. Bernoulli had wanted a logarithmic spiral, the…
- 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…
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeJoseph-Louis Lagrange was born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia in Turin on the 25th of January 1736, the firstborn of eleven children. At seventeen, he stumbled across a paper by Edmond Halley from 1693 and was immediately seized by…
- Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet spent decades arguing a point that every other leading chemist of his era believed was wrong. He was born on the 9th of December 1748 in Talloires, a small town near Annecy in the Duchy of Savoy, and he would…
- 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 Basel on the 15th of April 1707, active not only as a mathematician but as a…
- Christiaan HuygensChristiaan Huygens was born on the 14th of April 1629 into one of the most connected families in the Dutch Republic. His father, Constantijn, exchanged letters with Galileo Galilei, Marin Mersenne, and René Descartes. By the time…
- 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…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements.…
- Auguste de MarmontAuguste Frédéric Louis Viesse de Marmont was a man the French came to despise, not for losing battles, but for ending one. Born on the 20th of July 1774 in Châtillon-sur-Seine, he rose from the son of a minor nobleman to become one of…
- Antoine LavoisierOn the 8th of May 1794, in Paris, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier was guillotined alongside 27 co-defendants, at the age of 50. According to popular legend, an appeal to spare his life so he could continue his experiments was cut short by the…
- Peter the GreatPeter the Great stood over six feet tall in an era when most men barely reached his shoulder. Saint-Simon, who met him in 1717, described him as "tall, well-formed and slim... with a look both bewildered and fierce." Sophia of Hanover saw…
- 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…
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier fell down a flight of stairs on the 4th of May 1830. He had been living with a heart condition since his days in Egypt and Grenoble, but that fall aggravated the malady beyond what anyone had feared. Twelve days later, he…
- 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…
- Pierre-Simon LaplacePierre-Simon Laplace stood before Napoleon Bonaparte in the early years of the nineteenth century and handed him a copy of his book on the universe. Napoleon, who enjoyed putting embarrassing questions to learned men, looked up and said:…
- 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…
- Pafnuty ChebyshevPafnuty Chebyshev limped through his entire life, leaning on a stick because of a condition called Trendelenburg's gait. As a child in the village of Okatovo, in the province of Kaluga, that limp kept him off the playing fields where other…
- Linus PaulingLinus Carl Pauling stands alone in the history of Nobel Prizes. He is the only person ever to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for Chemistry in 1954 and one for Peace in 1962. Scientific American named him one of the twenty…
- 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…