Curated category
National Medal of Science laureates
- John Archibald WheelerJohn Archibald Wheeler spent decades trying to describe a dying star in plain language, and the best he could manage was "gravitationally completely…
- 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.
- 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…
- Milton FriedmanMilton Friedman died on the 16th of November 2006, and his last column ran in The Wall Street Journal the very next day.
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- George LowGeorg Michael Löw was born near Vienna, Austria, on the 10th of June 1926. His parents Artur and Gertrude Löw ran a prosperous manufacturing business before…
- 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…
- 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…
- Igor SikorskyIgor Sikorsky built a small rubber band-powered helicopter at age 12, long before the world had any reason to believe such machines could carry a person.
- Kurt GödelKurt Friedrich Gödel, born on the 28th of April 1906 in Brünn, Austria-Hungary, died in Princeton Hospital on the 14th of January 1978, weighing so little…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it.
- 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…
- Roger RevelleRoger Randall Dougan Revelle was, by his own account, the grandfather of the greenhouse effect. That was how he described himself to a reporter after…
- 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…
- Peter DebyePeter Debye was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands on the 24th of March 1884, and by the time he died on the 2nd of November 1966, his name had been…
- 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…