Curated category
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".
- 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…
- 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…
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeJoseph-Louis Lagrange was born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia in Turin on the 25th of January 1736, the firstborn of eleven children.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- Viktor RydbergAbraham Viktor Rydberg entered the world on the 18th of December 1828 in Gothenburg, Sweden. His father Johan worked as a soldier before becoming a prison…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…