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Curated playlist

Members of the French Academy of Sciences

  • Carl LinnaeusCarl Linnaeus exposed a mayor's prized seven-headed hydra as a fake. He and his student had to flee Hamburg in a hurry.
  • Jacob BernoulliJacob Bernoulli's tombstone in Basel shows the wrong spiral.
  • Francis CrickFrancis Crick was editing a manuscript on his death bed. He co-deciphered the DNA double helix in 1953.
  • Joseph-Louis LagrangeAt seventeen, mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange read a paper by Edmond Halley and was seized by mathematics.
  • Claude Louis BertholletClaude Louis Berthollet argued for decades against every other leading chemist, and was partly right.
  • Leonhard EulerLeonhard Euler kept producing math after going almost totally blind. In 1775 he wrote about one paper a week.
  • Christiaan HuygensChristiaan Huygens spotted Saturn's largest moon, Titan, in 1655. A probe that landed there in 2005 bears his name.
  • Louis PasteurIn 1885, Louis Pasteur treated a boy mauled by a rabid dog despite holding no medical license.
  • Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt climbed Chimborazo in 1802, gasping and bleeding from his gums.
  • Auguste de MarmontA French marshal's name became a French verb meaning to betray. Marmont's 1814 deal with the Allies led to "raguser."
  • Antoine LavoisierAntoine Lavoisier, who named oxygen, was guillotined in Paris in 1794. He was also a tax collector.
  • Peter the GreatAfter Russia's army was routed at Narva in 1700, Peter the Great had church bells melted into cannons.
  • Michael FaradayMichael Faraday turned down a knighthood to stay plain Mr Faraday. He also twice declined to lead the Royal Society.
  • Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier's heat research led to the first scientific proposal of the greenhouse effect.
  • Henry BessemerA sixteen-year-old confronted Henry Bessemer in London over her father's unpaid work.
  • Pierre-Simon LaplaceJupiter and Saturn seemed to be drifting off course until Laplace solved it. Newton, Euler and Lagrange had all failed.
  • Ivan PavlovIvan Pavlov spent his early career studying how a dog's stomach works. His famous discovery came almost by accident.
  • Pafnuty ChebyshevA limp kept Pafnuty Chebyshev off the playing fields and steered him toward mathematics.
  • Donald KnuthDonald Knuth, an American computer scientist born in 1938, pays $2.56 to anyone who finds a mistake in one of his books. The number is deliberate. As he explains it, 256 pennies make one hexadecimal dollar. A smaller reward of $0.32 goes…
  • Linus PaulingLinus Pauling left high school without a diploma. He later won two unshared Nobel Prizes, a first in history.
  • Louis de BroglieCould matter behave like a wave, as light can behave like a particle? Louis de Broglie asked this in 1924.

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