50 Fun Facts About Famous Scientists

Which scientist alone has won Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, physics and chemistry?

Marie Curie left notebooks so radioactive that they are kept in lead-lined boxes, and anyone consulting them must wear protective clothing.

Which physicist's Nobel Prize cited the photoelectric effect rather than his theory of relativity?

Albert Einstein had already promised the prize money to his ex-wife Mileva Marić in their divorce settlement, two years before he won it.

Which Principia author spent his last decades at the Royal Mint prosecuting counterfeiters?

Isaac Newton gathered evidence disguised as a bar-room regular and successfully prosecuted 28 coiners, including William Chaloner, who was hanged.

Which naturalist rushed to publish once Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay with the same idea?

Charles Darwin and Wallace had their papers read jointly to the Linnean Society on 1 July 1858, while Darwin was attending his son's funeral.

Which astronomer did the Inquisition find 'vehemently suspect of heresy' and keep under house arrest?

Galileo Galilei was rehabilitated only in 1992, when Pope John Paul II admitted that the theologians of the day had been in error.

Which inventor's alternating current fought Thomas Edison's direct current in the 'war of currents'?

Nikola Tesla died alone in Room 3327 of the Hotel New Yorker in 1943, and the SI unit of magnetic flux density was named the tesla only in 1960.

Which chemist tested his rabies vaccine in 1885 on a nine-year-old boy mauled by a rabid dog?

Louis Pasteur was not a licensed physician and risked prosecution by treating Joseph Meister, who was in good health three months later.

Which bacteriologist found mould killing bacteria on a culture plate left out during a 1928 holiday?

Alexander Fleming muttered 'That's funny' at the plate, and shared the 1945 Nobel Prize with Howard Florey and Ernst Chain.

Which physicist, given about two years to live at 21, went on to write A Brief History of Time?

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time sat on the Sunday Times bestseller list for a record 237 weeks.

Which daughter of Lord Byron wrote an algorithm for Charles Babbage's unbuilt Analytical Engine?

Ada Lovelace's notes on the engine, published in 1843, ran about three times longer than the paper she was translating.

Whose DNA image, known as Photo 51, was shown to James Watson without her knowledge or permission?

Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer at 37 in 1958, four years before Watson, Crick and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize.

Which friar found the laws of inheritance by growing some 28,000 plants, mostly peas, at his abbey?

Gregor Mendel's 1866 paper was cited only about three times in 35 years, until botanists rediscovered his laws in 1900.

Which chemist left gaps in his 1869 periodic table for elements that had not yet been discovered?

Dmitri Mendeleev's predicted 'eka-aluminium' turned up as gallium in 1875, with almost exactly the properties he had forecast.

Which Bletchley codebreaker, prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, received a royal pardon in 2013?

Alan Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers defined the Turing machine, still the model of a general-purpose computer.

Which physicist dropped an O-ring into ice water at a televised hearing into the 1986 Challenger disaster?

Richard Feynman, a bongo player who cracked safes at Los Alamos, shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for quantum electrodynamics.

Which physicist's 1935 thought experiment left a boxed cat both alive and dead to mock quantum orthodoxy?

Erwin Schrödinger meant the cat as a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen view, not as a serious possibility.

Which virologist, asked who owned the patent on his polio vaccine, replied 'Could you patent the sun?'

Jonas Salk vaccinated his own children in 1953, a year before a field trial that enrolled over 1.8 million schoolchildren.

Which doctor gave his gardener's eight-year-old son cowpox in 1796, then exposed the boy to smallpox?

Edward Jenner's term Variolae vaccinae, 'pustules of the cow', is where the word vaccine comes from.

Which Greek ran naked through Syracuse crying 'Eureka' after his bath showed how to test a gold crown?

Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier during the sack of Syracuse in 212 BC, reputedly while drawing figures in the dust.

Which astronomer's Sun-centred model appeared in De revolutionibus just before his death in 1543?

Nicolaus Copernicus, legend has it, was handed the final printed pages on the very day he died, waking from a stroke-induced coma to see them.

Which astronomer, whose mother stood trial for witchcraft, showed planets orbit in ellipses, not circles?

Johannes Kepler found the ellipse by wrestling for years with the orbit of Mars, publishing the result in Astronomia nova in 1609.

Which bookbinder's apprentice became Humphry Davy's lab assistant and discovered electromagnetic induction?

Michael Faraday turned down a knighthood, preferring to stay 'plain Mr Faraday to the end', and twice refused to be President of the Royal Society.

Which Scottish physicist unified electricity and magnetism and demonstrated the first colour photograph?

James Clerk Maxwell had a tartan ribbon photographed three times through red, green and blue filters for an 1861 Royal Institution lecture.

Which Swedish naturalist formalised the two-word Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?

Carl Linnaeus is himself the official type specimen of Homo sapiens, the reference individual for the whole species.

Which German meteorologist proposed continental drift in 1912 and died on the Greenland ice in 1930?

Alfred Wegener was buried where he fell, with his skis stuck upright in the snow; geologists dismissed him as an outsider until plate tectonics emerged.

Which geneticist found genes that jump position in maize, decades before her 1983 Nobel Prize in Medicine?

Barbara McClintock was the first woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 35 years after she first saw maize genes transpose in 1948.

Which physicist explained nuclear fission with her nephew but was left out of Otto Hahn's Nobel Prize?

Lise Meitner was nominated 49 times across the chemistry and physics prizes without winning; element 109, meitnerium, was named for her in 1997.

Which primatologist first saw Gombe chimpanzees strip leaves from twigs to fish for termites in 1960?

Jane Goodall's mentor Louis Leakey replied, 'We must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as human!'

Which marine biologist's book Silent Spring turned the pesticide DDT into a national scandal in 1962?

Rachel Carson died of a heart attack in 1964, weakened by breast cancer, eight years before the United States phased out DDT.

Which astronomer proposed the 'Pale Blue Dot' photograph of Earth that Voyager 1 took in 1990?

Carl Sagan also assembled the gold-plated plaque on Pioneer 10 in 1972, the first physical message sent into space.

Which chemist, who named oxygen and hydrogen and toppled the phlogiston theory, was guillotined in 1794?

Antoine Lavoisier was executed as a hated tax farmer, and the French government completely exonerated him a year and a half later.

Which Italian physicist ran the first controlled nuclear chain reaction in a Chicago squash court in 1942?

Enrico Fermi collected his 1938 Nobel in Stockholm and sailed straight on to New York, escaping Italy's racial laws with his Jewish wife Laura.

Which word did Robert Hooke coin in 1665 when cork under his microscope recalled rooms in a monastery?

Cell comes from the Latin cellula, 'small room', and Hooke's Micrographia also holds the earliest recorded observation of a microorganism.

Which German polymath was declared a calculus plagiarist by a Royal Society report his rival secretly wrote?

Gottfried Leibniz's dy/dx and elongated-S integral sign are the notation calculus students still use today.

Which astronomer proved in 1924 that Andromeda lies far outside the Milky Way and is a galaxy of its own?

Edwin Hubble campaigned for astronomy to count as physics for the Nobel Prize; the committee agreed only shortly after his death in 1953.

Which physicist's gold-foil experiment revealed the atomic nucleus, yet his Nobel Prize came in chemistry?

Ernest Rutherford, 'the father of nuclear physics', took the 1908 chemistry prize for his work on the disintegration of the elements.

Which Danish physicist put electrons in quantised orbits in 1913, 62 years before his son Aage won the same Nobel Prize?

Niels Bohr's son Aage shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physics, 53 years after his father's own.

Which German physicist called his 1900 introduction of energy quanta 'an act of despair'?

Max Planck's son Erwin was hanged in January 1945 for his part in the plot against Hitler, a loss that destroyed much of his will to live.

Which physicist formulated the uncertainty principle and led research for Nazi Germany's nuclear programme?

Werner Heisenberg was among ten German scientists secretly recorded at Farm Hall in England when news of the Hiroshima bomb arrived.

Which Harvard 'computer' found that the brighter a Cepheid variable star, the longer its pulsation period?

Henrietta Leavitt earned 30 cents an hour, and in 1924 a Swedish mathematician tried to nominate her for a Nobel, only to learn she had died three years earlier.

Which mathematician linked every symmetry in physics to a conservation law but taught at Göttingen unpaid?

Emmy Noether's lectures were advertised under David Hilbert's name, with her listed as merely providing 'assistance'.

Which self-taught Indian mathematician told G. H. Hardy that taxi number 1729 was 'very interesting'?

Srinivasa Ramanujan saw at once that 1729 is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.

Which NASA mathematician did John Glenn refuse to fly in 1962 until she had verified the computer's numbers?

Katherine Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, a year before Hidden Figures reached cinemas.

Which Los Alamos director recalled the Bhagavad Gita line 'Now I am become Death' at the Trinity test?

Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in 1954, a decision the US Energy Secretary formally vacated only in December 2022.

What did Wilhelm Röntgen discover in 1895, showing his wife the bones of her own hand?

X-rays showed Anna Bertha Röntgen her own skeleton, and she exclaimed 'I have seen my death!'; Röntgen refused to patent the discovery.

Which explosive did Alfred Nobel create in 1866 by stabilising nitroglycerin with diatomaceous earth?

Dynamite was nearly sold as 'Nobel's Safety Powder' before Nobel renamed it after the Greek dynamis, meaning 'power'.

Which chemist is the only person to hold two unshared Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and one for peace?

Linus Pauling took 3 grams of vitamin C a day to ward off colds and published Vitamin C and the Common Cold in 1970.

Which Russian physiologist, a 1904 Nobel laureate for digestion research, made dogs salivate at a signal?

Ivan Pavlov did not rely on a bell: his writings record metronomes, whistles, tuning forks and even electric shocks as signals.

Which CERN computer scientist proposed the World Wide Web in 1989 and published the first website in 1990?

Tim Berners-Lee gave the web away with no patent and no royalties due, and was knighted in 2004 for services to the Internet's global development.

Which Danish astronomer wore a prosthetic nose after losing part of his own in a duel with his third cousin?

Tycho Brahe also kept a tame elk, which died after drinking a lot of beer at a dinner and falling down the stairs.