Curated playlist
Members of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry". Under the case for marriage he wrote that a wife would be a "constant companion and a friend in old…
- Peter Hedström (sociologist)Peter Hedström was born on the 14th of July 1955 in Norsjö, a small town in northern Sweden. Few would have predicted that this particular sociologist would spend decades reshaping how the discipline thinks about explanation itself. The…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison kept his own deafness a mystery, inventing elaborate false stories about how he lost his hearing. He was completely deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other. To enjoy a piano or a music player, he clamped his teeth…
- Joseph PriestleyJoseph Priestley was born on the 24th of March 1733 in Birstall, near Batley, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of English Dissenters who refused to conform to the Church of England. By the time he died on the 6th of February…
- Erik Gustaf GeijerErik Gustaf Geijer was a Swedish writer, historian, poet, philosopher and composer whose work helped shape Sweden's romantic idea of its own past. Later historians have puzzled over one verdict on his career. One commentator suggested his…
- Marc Isambard BrunelMarc Isambard Brunel arrived into the world on the 25th of April 1769. He was born on a family farm in Hacqueville, Normandy. His father Jean Charles Brunel was a prosperous farmer who expected his second son to enter the priesthood. The…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- 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.…
- Charles XIV JohnCharles XIV John of Sweden was born Jean-Baptiste Jules Bernadotte on the 26th of January 1763 in Pau, a small city in the southwestern province of Béarn. He was the son of a local prosecutor, the youngest of five siblings, and a boy who…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Thomas TelfordThomas Telford was born on the 9th of August 1757 on a hill farm called Glendinning, three miles east of Eskdalemuir Kirk in the rural parish of Westerkirk, Dumfriesshire. His father, a shepherd named John Telford, died shortly after…
- 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:…
- Viktor RydbergViktor Rydberg died at sixty-six on the 21st of September 1895, and Sweden declared a national day of mourning. The New York Times published his obituary. Its title read: "Death of Prof. A.V. Rydberg, Career and Remarkable works of one of…
- James Samuel ColemanJames Samuel Coleman walked into a whites-only amusement park outside of Baltimore with his wife, their three children, and a Black family. He was arrested, along with roughly 300 other demonstrators. This was not a sideshow in his life.…
- Jean-Baptiste SayJean-Baptiste Say was born in Lyon on the 5th of January 1767, into a Protestant family whose roots had been uprooted by religious persecution a generation earlier. His grandfather's family had fled from Nîmes to Geneva after the…
- Esaias TegnérEsaias Tegnér spent his final twenty-two years as Bishop of Växjö, a position he accepted not from faith but from financial necessity and a desperate wish to leave Lund. That tension between the man he was and the role he was made to play…
- Alfred NobelAlfred Nobel signed his last will on the 27th of November 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris. He allocated 94% of his total assets to establish prizes that would annually recognize those who had "conferred the greatest benefit to…
- 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…
- Mikhail LomonosovMikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born in a small village on an island in the frozen north of Russia, the son of a peasant fisherman who hauled cargo to places like Solovki and Lapland. He died as a State Councillor of Rank V in the…
- Theodosius DobzhanskyTheodosius Dobzhansky was born on the 25th of January 1900 in Nemirov, a small town in what was then the Russian Empire, to a mathematics teacher and his wife who had prayed to St. Theodosius of Chernigov for a child. That unusual name…