Curated playlist
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- 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. That title points to mathematics that helps machines steer, settle, and decide. But the same mind…
- 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. When that business collapsed during the Great Depression, the family moved to Seattle, and Lucas…
- 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. Born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts in 1874, Thorndike would spend nearly his entire career at…
- 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 the yield of the first nuclear bomb explosion. He estimated ten kilotons of TNT.…
- 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. What he measured that day, and every day for the next 47 years, would become one of the most…
- 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…
- 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 SUNY Buffalo. His mother Evelyn was a computer science researcher. Even his…
- 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 answer. His mother Charlotte was a schoolteacher. His father Nathaniel sold…
- 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. That detail carries a kind of compressed prophecy: here was a child in Philadelphia,…
- 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 Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism," asked a deceptively simple…
- Allen NewellAllen Newell was born on the 19th of March 1927, and by the time he died on the 19th of July 1992, he had helped build the intellectual foundations of an entirely new science. What that science would eventually become is something most…
- 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. He was born in Budapest in 1903 and died at age 53 in 1957, and in those years he…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day. He was still a working economist at 94. That detail alone tells you something about the man. Born in Brooklyn on the…
- 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? Born on the 29th of April 1924, he lived long enough to watch that question travel…
- Robert R. GilruthRobert Rowe Gilruth was born on the 8th of October 1913, in Nashwauk, Minnesota, a town so small that most Americans have never heard of it. He died on the 17th of August 2000, in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the age of 86. Between those…
- Marvin MinskyMarvin Minsky once described intelligence as the possible product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. That idea alone reshaped how scientists and engineers think about minds, both human and machine. But the man who proposed it was…
- 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 an economist. He was sixteen years old. The lecture that morning was on Thomas…
- 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 Illinois. He died on the 11th of March, 2002, in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age…
- Mark GranovetterMark Granovetter submitted the paper that would define his career to the American Sociological Review in 1969, and the editors rejected it. When the American Journal of Sociology published it in 1973, "The Strength of Weak Ties" began…
- Hans SuessDuring the Second World War, a chemist named Hans Suess advised the production of heavy water at a plant in Norway. Allied commandos would later target that exact facility in Operation Gunnerside. Suess was born on the 16th of December…
- 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. He stood and looked. He later described the flash as being like pulling open the curtain in a dark…
- 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 religious philosopher of German descent. His mother came from a white Anglo-Saxon…
- 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. Within two years, the family had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where his…
- 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 put it there for contributions that had reshaped physics over three decades. Born…
- 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 done something almost no individual in history can claim: he invented an entirely…
- 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 Germany and a mother who was an accomplished pianist. He died on the 9th of February…
- 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 France itself. Le Cun derives from the old Breton form Le Cunff, rooted in the…
- 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 Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002 despite never having taken a single economics…
- 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. The question sounds philosophical. In his hands, it became a legal weapon against two of America's largest…
- 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 NASA was ninety-nine percent certain the Earth was warmer than at any point in the…
- 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 his lifeless body under a laboratory workbench at the University of California,…
- 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 before him. Freeman Dyson placed Weyl in a category almost no one else could enter.…
- 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 one of the most beloved facts in science education. For decades, every schoolchild…
- 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 Psychological Association and delivering what amounted to a final lecture on his life's…
- 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 something that few economists ever manage: he had changed the questions his field…
- 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. Neither parent was an economist. Yet a summer job preparing bids for a company selling…
- 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 technique so fundamental that it now bears his name. The question at the heart of…
- 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 single high school track meet in 1906. He earned good grades in every subject except…
- 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 promised. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the 4th of September 1927, to an Irish…
- 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 became one of the most consequential figures in modern computer science by…
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl is an Israeli-American computer scientist, electrical engineer, and philosopher, born in Tel Aviv on the 4th of September, 1936. In 2011, the Association for Computing Machinery gave Pearl the Turing Award, computing's highest…
- 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. The two events arriving together say something true about her. "Green from the Grassroots" appeared in…
- 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.…
- 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 their own economies. At the heart of his life's work was a deceptively simple…
- 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. He was exhausted and ill, and apoplexy took him within days. His funeral was held at Trinity…
- 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…
- 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. His father Solomon and mother Lillian could not have predicted that their son would one day become one of…