Curated category
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Albert EinsteinWhen Albert Einstein was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. The trembling needle, always pointing the same way, convinced the boy that…
- Arthur E. BrysonArthur Earl Bryson Jr. was born on the 7th of October 1925, and he would come to be called the father of modern optimal control theory.
- Robert Lucas Jr.Robert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born on the 15th of September 1937 in Yakima, Washington, the eldest child of a family that ran an ice creamery.
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Lee Thorndike built one of the most influential theories in the history of psychology by watching cats try to escape from wooden boxes.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi paced off the distance that strips of paper were blown by a blast wave on the 16th of July 1945, and from that simple measurement he calculated…
- Charles David KeelingCharles David Keeling stood on the slopes of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, two miles above sea level, and began counting molecules. The year was 1958.
- 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…
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg grew up in a household where mathematics and computing were simply the texture of daily life. His father Eugene was a mathematics professor at…
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz grew up in Gary, Indiana, a steel town whose economic fortunes would later give shape to many of the questions he spent a career trying to…
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at the age of 10, absorbed by the fall of Barcelona and the destruction of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
- George AkerlofGeorge Akerlof walked into a used car lot and saw the entire economy differently. The year was 1970, and the article he published that year, "The Market for…
- Allen NewellAllen Newell stood at Stanford University in 1949 holding a bachelor's degree in physics. He moved to Princeton University that same year to study…
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann once told a colleague that the second incompleteness theorem had struck a harder blow to mathematics than even its discoverer believed.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day.
- David LandesDavid Saul Landes spent decades at Harvard asking a question that made many scholars uncomfortable: why did some nations grow rich while others stayed poor?
- Robert R. GilruthRobert Rowe Gilruth was born on the 8th of October 1913 in Nashwauk, Minnesota. He moved to Duluth when he was nine years old and graduated from Duluth…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and…
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson stood at a lectern in a University of Chicago classroom on the 2nd of January, 1932, and later said that was the exact moment he was born as…
- James TobinJames Tobin was born on the 5th of March, 1918, in Champaign, Illinois, the son of a journalist credited with inventing "Homecoming" at the University of…
- Mark GranovetterMark Granovetter stood at the front of Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City, New Jersey, on a day in January 1961. He was the valedictorian of his class…
- Hans SuessHans Eduard Suess entered the world on the 16th of December 1909 in Austria. He carried a significant family name as the grandson of geologist Eduard Suess.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller watched the Trinity nuclear test in July 1945 while almost everyone else lay face-down on the ground with their backs turned.
- Carl WiemanCarl Wieman grew up in Corvallis, Oregon, in a family with an unusual range of intellectual passions. His paternal grandfather, Henry Nelson Wieman, was a…
- Eric Allin CornellEric Allin Cornell was born on the 19th of December, 1961, in Palo Alto, California, to parents who were finishing graduate degrees at Stanford University.
- Eugene WignerEugene Paul Wigner once quipped that he never expected to see his name in the newspapers "without doing something wicked" - yet in 1963, the Nobel Committee…
- Claude ShannonClaude Elwood Shannon was born on the 30th of April 1916, in a hospital in Petoskey, Michigan, and by the time he died on the 24th of February 2001, he had…
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert Alexander Simon was born on the 15th of June 1916 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of an electrical engineer who had crossed the Atlantic from…
- Yann LeCunYann LeCun was born on the 8th of July 1960 in Soisy-sous-Montmorency, a suburb of Paris, and his surname carries the fingerprints of a culture older than…
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman was born on the 5th of March, 1934, in Tel Aviv, while it was still the British Mandate of Palestine. He would go on to win the Nobel…
- Oliver Hart (economist)Oliver Hart walked into a courtroom not to give testimony about a crime, but to explain what it means to truly own something.
- James HansenJames Hansen stood before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the 23rd of June 1988, and told the assembled lawmakers that…
- Gilbert N. LewisGilbert Newton Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 41 times, and he never won it once. On the 23rd of March 1946, a graduate student found…
- Hermann WeylWhenever Michael Atiyah turned his attention to a mathematical topic, he kept running into the same name. He found that Hermann Weyl had already been there…
- Michael E. BrownMichael E. Brown grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, in the shadow of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and went on to become the astronomer who dismantled…
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner died on the 18th of August 1990 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just ten days after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the American…
- Gary BeckerGary Stanley Becker was born on the 2nd of December 1930 in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and by the time he died in Chicago on the 3rd of May 2014, he had done…
- Susan AtheySusan Athey grew up watching her father, Whit Athey, work as a physics scholar, while her mother Elizabeth Johansen edited texts and taught English.
- James HeckmanJames Joseph Heckman was born on the 19th of April 1944, and he would go on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000 for a statistical…
- Edwin HubbleEdwin Hubble grew up in Marshfield, Missouri, known more for his athletic prowess than his intellect, a boy who won seven first places and a third in a…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956, and spent the rest of his life trying to build exactly what that phrase…
- Cynthia DworkCynthia Dwork holds a black belt in taekwondo, and it turns out that discipline maps neatly onto her scientific career. Born on the 27th of June, 1958, Dwork…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl entered the world on the 4th of September 1936 in Tel Aviv. This city sat within the British Mandate for Palestine at that time.
- Elinor OstromElinor Ostrom was born in Los Angeles in 1933, and she died on the 12th of June 2012, the same day her last article was published.
- 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.
- Lawrence KleinLawrence Robert Klein was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on the 14th of September 1920, and he would go on to reshape how governments and central banks understand…
- Francis Amasa WalkerFrancis Amasa Walker died on the 5th of January 1897 after returning from a dedication ceremony deep in the wilderness of Northern New York.
- 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…
- William BaumolWilliam Jack Baumol was born on the 26th of February 1922 in the South Bronx, to immigrant parents who had come from Eastern Europe.