Curated playlist
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
- Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein once spent his days examining patents for gravel sorters.
- Arthur E. BrysonArthur E. Bryson and Henry J. Kelley developed an early version of backpropagation.
- Robert Lucas Jr.Robert Lucas's divorce deal gave his ex-wife half of any Nobel Prize awarded before October 31, 1995.
- Edward ThorndikeEdward Thorndike timed hungry cats escaping from puzzle boxes. It led to his law of effect.
- Enrico FermiEnrico Fermi won a Nobel Prize partly for new elements that were really fission products.
- Charles David KeelingA chemist who nearly became a concert pianist created the Keeling Curve, a graph of rising carbon dioxide.
- Thomas EdisonThomas Edison clamped his teeth into a piano to hear it. He was deaf in one ear and barely heard from the other.
- Jon KleinbergJon Kleinberg found that a web page can matter because of where it sends you.
- Joseph StiglitzJoseph Stiglitz explained why wages stay high in recessions even when workers are desperate for jobs.
- Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10, about the fall of Barcelona.
- George AkerlofGeorge Akerlof showed why good used cars can vanish from a market.
- Allen NewellAllen Newell helped build what is widely regarded as the first true AI program, the Logic Theorist.
- John von NeumannJohn von Neumann's father asked Theodore von Kármán to talk his son out of mathematics.
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman argued the Federal Reserve let the money supply shrink by one-third between 1929 and 1933.
- David LandesBefore he taught at Harvard, David Landes decoded Japanese messages.
- Robert R. GilruthWhen Kennedy promised a Moon landing, Robert Gilruth was aghast.
- Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell was honored after his death in an unusual way. When his funeral ended, for one minute at 6:25 p.m. Eastern Time, every telephone on the continent of North America was silenced. The man being remembered is credited…
- Marvin MinskyIn 1951, Marvin Minsky built the first randomly wired neural network learning machine. He called it SNARC.
- Paul SamuelsonPaul Samuelson said he was born as an economist at age sixteen. It happened in a 1932 Chicago lecture on Malthus.
- James TobinJames Tobin proposed a tax on currency trading to throw sand in the wheels of speculation.
- Mark GranovetterSociologist Mark Granovetter argued that casual acquaintances carry more new information than close friends do.
- Hans SuessHans Suess's mail kept getting mixed up with Dr. Seuss's. Both men lived in La Jolla, California.
- Edward TellerEdward Teller stood and watched the Trinity test while nearly everyone else lay face-down.
- Carl WiemanAfter a Nobel Prize in physics, Carl Wieman turned to why students learn so little in science class.
- Eric Allin CornellIn 1995, Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman made the first Bose-Einstein condensate. It is a new state of matter.
- Eugene WignerPhysicist Eugene Wigner found that neutron radiation could make the graphite in a reactor swell.
- John Forbes Nash Jr.John Forbes Nash Jr., an American mathematician, once mailed letters to embassies in Washington, D.C., announcing that he was founding a government. He signed them John Nash, Emperor of Antarctica, a title he believed he was in line to…
- James WatsonJames Watson put his name to a scientific paper that fills just two pages of the journal Nature, pages 737 and 738 of volume 171. Watson, an American molecular biologist, wrote it with Francis Crick in 1953. Its subject was DNA, and its…
- Larry SummersLarry Summers, born Lawrence Henry Summers, was 28 years old in 1983 when Harvard gave him tenure, making him one of the youngest tenured professors in the university's history. Soon afterward, doctors diagnosed him with late-stage…
- Claude ShannonClaude Shannon built a mechanical mouse that learned its way through a maze. He named the 1950 machine Theseus.
- Herbert A. SimonHerbert Simon argued that people don't pick the best option, they settle for good enough. He called it satisficing.
- Yann LeCunYann LeCun spent a postdoc year under Geoffrey Hinton, then shared a Turing Award with him.
- Daniel KahnemanDaniel Kahneman won the 2002 economics Nobel without ever taking an economics course.
- Oliver Hart (economist)Economist Oliver Hart was called as a government expert witness in two tax cases.
- James HansenOn June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate global warming had already been detected.
- Gilbert N. LewisChemist Gilbert N. Lewis was nominated for the Nobel Prize 41 times and never won. He discovered the covalent bond.
- Hermann WeylMathematician Hermann Weyl fled Germany in 1933 after once refusing to leave. His wife was Jewish.
- Michael E. BrownMichael E. Brown found Eris, the distant world that cost Pluto its planet status.
- B. F. SkinnerB. F. Skinner proposed steering missiles with pigeons. The birds pecked at a screen showing the target.
- Gary BeckerEconomist Gary Becker argued that criminals are not irrational. He said they weigh the risks and rewards of a crime.
- Susan AtheyA summer job preparing computer sales bids set Susan Athey on the path to economics.
- James HeckmanAre people who join a program different from those who don't? James Heckman won a Nobel Prize for fixing that problem.
- Edwin HubbleEdwin Hubble studied law at Oxford because of a promise to his dying father. He still became an astronomer.
- Anthony FauciAnthony Fauci, pronounced FOW-chee, once summed up his working life in a single sentence. In a 2020 interview with The Guardian, he said, "My career and my identity has really been defined by HIV." That is a striking claim from a man whose…
- Jim SimonsJim Simons, born James Harris Simons, once explained his dislike of publicity by borrowing a line from Benjamin the Donkey in Animal Farm. "God gave me a tail to keep off the flies. But I'd rather have had no tail and no flies. That's kind…
- John McCarthy (computer scientist)John McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence" in the summer of 1956. He also created the language Lisp.
- Cynthia DworkA technique built to make junk email costly later helped make bitcoin possible. Cynthia Dwork co-created it.
- Judea PearlJudea Pearl gave computers a way to reason when facts are incomplete.
- Elinor OstromUCLA rejected Elinor Ostrom's economics application for lacking math. She later won a Nobel Prize in economics.
- James Samuel ColemanJames Coleman was arrested at a whites-only amusement park outside Baltimore with his family and a Black family.