98 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?

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 scientist spent his last three decades running the Royal Mint and 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 missed the joint reading on 1 July 1858, grieving his baby son, who had died of scarlet fever just days before.

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

It took until 1992 for Pope John Paul II to acknowledge 'the error of the theologians of the time' who opposed Galileo Galilei.

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

Nikola Tesla had once worked for Edison himself, before George Westinghouse acquired his alternating-current patents.

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, so treating Joseph Meister was technically practising without a licence, yet the boy never developed rabies.

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

Alexander Fleming's penicillin became a medicine only after Howard Florey and Ernst Chain's Oxford team showed in 1940 that it could treat infections.

Which physicist, diagnosed with motor neurone disease at 21, went on to write A Brief History of Time?

Stephen Hawking lived for more than 50 years after that diagnosis, dying in 2018 at the age of 76.

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

Ada Lovelace was taught mathematics from an early age because her mother wanted to keep her from taking after Lord Byron.

Whose DNA image, known as Photo 51, was shown to James Watson?

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 paper went largely unappreciated until scientists 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 pardon led to the 2017 'Alan Turing law', which pardoned men convicted under the same old laws against homosexual acts.

Which physicist dunked a clamped sample of O-ring material in ice water at a televised Challenger hearing?

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 had left Germany in 1933, refusing to live where persecution of Jews had become national policy.

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

Jonas Salk vaccinated his own children before the 1954 national field trial.

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

Edward Jenner had been elected to the Royal Society not for medicine but for showing that a cuckoo chick pushes its foster siblings out of the nest.

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

Archimedes's bath story was first written down by Vitruvius some two centuries later, and some scholars doubt it happened.

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

Nicolaus Copernicus's book opened with an unsigned preface, added without his authorisation by Andreas Osiander, calling the Sun-centred model a mere aid to calculation.

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 and twice refused to be President of the Royal Society.

Which Scottish physicist unified electricity and magnetism and demonstrated the first durable 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 naturalist formalised the two-word Latin naming system that labels humans Homo sapiens?

Carl Linnaeus's own remains were chosen by botanist William Stearn in 1959 as the type specimen of Homo sapiens, so the man who named the species is its reference individual.

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, after meeting some scepticism about her research, stopped publishing her data in journals.

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

Lise Meitner refused to work on the Manhattan Project, declaring, 'I will have nothing to do with a bomb!'

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

Jane Goodall had no university degree, yet Cambridge let her study for a PhD on the strength of her Gombe work.

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

Rachel Carson was already being treated for breast cancer when Silent Spring came out, and she died in 1964, eight years before the United States banned DDT.

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

Carl Sagan also designed the gold-anodized Pioneer plaques with Frank Drake, a pictorial message for any alien who finds Pioneer 10 or 11.

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 later completely exonerated him.

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 after studying a slice of cork?

Cell: Hooke wrote that cork looked 'much like a Honey-comb', and the word, meaning 'small room', is often linked to monks' cells.

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

Edwin Hubble's result settled the Great Debate, in which Harlow Shapley had argued that spiral nebulae lay within the Milky Way.

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

Ernest Rutherford said seeing particles bounce back off the foil was as incredible as firing a 15-inch shell at tissue paper and having it come back and hit you.

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

Niels Bohr fled occupied Denmark for Sweden in 1943 and later worked at Los Alamos under the alias Nicholas Baker.

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

Max Planck's son Erwin was executed in January 1945 after the plot against Hitler, though Planck had written to Hitler pleading for his life.

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

Werner Heisenberg was among the 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 a Swedish mathematician later tried to nominate her for a Nobel, only to learn she had died.

Which mathematician tied continuous symmetries in physics to conservation laws 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 astronaut Glenn ask to hand-check the computer's orbit numbers before his 1962 flight?

Katherine Johnson later calculated the rendezvous paths that let Apollo's Lunar Module meet the orbiting Command Module.

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?

X-rays first showed Anna Bertha Röntgen the bones of her own hand, and Röntgen refused to patent them, holding that discoveries belong to everyone.

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

Dynamite tamed nitroglycerin, which was so unstable that an 1864 explosion killed Nobel's younger brother Emil.

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

Ivan Pavlov's writings record metronomes, whistles, tuning forks and even electric shocks as signals, not just the bell of popular legend.

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 Hollywood star co-patented a frequency-hopping radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes in 1942?

Hedy Lamarr worked out the jam-proof system with avant-garde composer George Antheil, and the patent was granted under her legal name, Hedy Kiesler Markey.

Which rock guitarist earned a PhD in astrophysics in 2007 for research he had begun in 1971?

Brian May shelved his study of zodiacal dust when Queen found international success in 1974, then returned to Imperial College London to finish the thesis three decades later.

Which nickname from a Beatles song did Donald Johanson's team give a 3.2-million-year-old skeleton found in Ethiopia?

Lucy got her name because the Beatles track 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' played loudly and repeatedly on a tape recorder in camp on the evening of the find.

Which insect flaps its wings in Brazil in the title of a 1972 talk by chaos pioneer Edward Lorenz?

A butterfly replaced the seagull Lorenz had used in earlier versions of the image, and the talk's title asked whether one wingbeat could set off a tornado in Texas.

Which country singer did Ian Wilmut's team honour when naming the sheep cloned at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996?

Dolly Parton was the pick because the first mammal cloned from an adult grew from mammary-gland tissue, a cheeky nod from Wilmut to the singer's figure.

Which Swedish astronomer's 1742 temperature scale first put water's boiling point at 0 and freezing at 100?

Anders Celsius had his scale turned upside down within a few years by others, including his countryman Carl Linnaeus, giving the familiar version in which water freezes at 0.

Which world, found by Clyde Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in 1930, was named by an 11-year-old Oxford schoolgirl?

Pluto was the idea of Venetia Burney, a fan of classical mythology who suggested the Roman underworld god at breakfast; her grandfather, a retired Oxford librarian, passed it on to astronomers.

Which planet did musician William Herschel spot in 1781 and try to name after King George III?

Uranus began as the 'Georgian star', a flattering tribute to the royal patron who had made Herschel the King's Astronomer, and Britain's Nautical Almanac kept that name until 1850.

Which Victorian reformer, the first woman in the Royal Statistical Society, charted army deaths on a 'rose' diagram?

Florence Nightingale drew the chart to show that disease killed far more Crimean War soldiers than battle wounds, an argument that drove sanitary reform in army hospitals.

Which French naval officer co-invented the Aqua-Lung diving gear and explored the seas aboard the research ship Calypso?

Jacques Cousteau leased Calypso for a symbolic one franc a year, and his film The Silent World won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1956.

Which Greek physician, born on the island of Kos around 460 BC, gives his name to the oath taken by new doctors?

Hippocrates is no longer thought to have written the oath himself, and its supposed motto, 'first, do no harm', appears nowhere in the original text.

Which Greek mathematician, famed for a theorem on right-angled triangles, reportedly forbade followers to eat beans?

Pythagoras, in one legend, was caught and killed by his enemies because he refused to escape across a field of fava beans.

Which Viennese neurologist, who had patients talk freely from a couch, fled to London in 1938 to escape the Nazis?

Sigmund Freud had seen his books burned by the Nazis in 1933 yet refused to leave Vienna until after the Anschluss, and he died in London the following year.

Which American primatologist studied Rwanda's mountain gorillas from her Karisoke camp, where she was murdered in 1985?

Dian Fossey trained as an occupational therapist, not a zoologist, and was buried at the camp beside Digit, the favourite gorilla whose killing by poachers led her to set up the Digit Fund.

Which Caltech seismologist first used his famous earthquake magnitude scale in 1935?

Charles Richter developed the scale with his colleague and mentor Beno Gutenberg, though only one of the two men's names stuck to it.

Which German psychiatrist described a new form of dementia in 1906 after studying the brain of patient Auguste Deter?

Alois Alzheimer did not name the illness himself: his colleague Emil Kraepelin later put the label Alzheimer's disease on the condition.

Which mathematician, the subject of the film A Beautiful Mind, shared the 1994 Nobel economics prize for game theory?

John Nash added the Abel Prize for mathematics in 2015, then died with his wife in a taxi crash on the way home from collecting it in Norway.

Which Edinburgh physicist predicted in 1964 a mass-giving particle that CERN finally detected in 2012?

Peter Higgs had his paper describing the idea rejected by a journal edited at CERN, whose editors judged it of no obvious relevance to physics.

Which English astronomer predicted that a comet seen in 1682 would return in 1758, a comeback he never lived to see?

Edmond Halley argued that the comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were one returning visitor, and it took his name once it reappeared on schedule.

Which physicist became the first American woman in space when she flew aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983?

Sally Ride later became the only person to sit on the panels that investigated both the Challenger and the Columbia shuttle disasters.

Which Tuskegee scientist, born into slavery, urged cotton farmers to rotate crops with peanuts and sweet potatoes?

George Washington Carver wanted poor farmers to revive soil worn out by cotton and to feed themselves, so he issued dozens of practical bulletins full of advice and recipes.

Which radio pioneer reported hearing the Morse letter S sent across the Atlantic to Newfoundland in December 1901?

Guglielmo Marconi's company employed the two wireless operators aboard the Titanic, and the rescue of its survivors showed the public what radio could do at sea.

Which German engineer built V-2 rockets for the Nazis, then designed the Saturn V that sent Apollo crews to the Moon?

Wernher von Braun chose to surrender to the Americans in 1945 and was secretly moved to the US with about 1,600 other German specialists under Operation Paperclip.

Which US Navy rear admiral and programming pioneer's team found a moth jamming a Harvard computer in 1947?

Grace Hopper's crew taped the insect into the logbook as the first actual case of a bug being found, and she went on to champion programming in English-like words.

Which medieval mathematician from Pisa posed a rabbit-breeding puzzle whose answer is a number sequence named after him?

Fibonacci set the puzzle in his 1202 book Liber Abaci, whose larger legacy was persuading Europe to trade Roman numerals for Hindu-Arabic digits.

Which Yale psychologist's 1961 obedience study had volunteers believe they were giving a stranger electric shocks?

Stanley Milgram, influenced by the Holocaust, began the study three months after the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann opened in Jerusalem.

Which Belgian Catholic priest proposed in 1931 that the universe grew from a single 'primeval atom'?

Georges Lemaître's hypothesis is regarded as the first formulation of the Big Bang theory, and he was first to argue that receding galaxies are evidence of an expanding universe.

Which British astronomer coined the term 'Big Bang' on BBC radio in 1949 while backing a rival steady-state universe?

Fred Hoyle argued that new matter keeps appearing between the galaxies as they drift apart, a theory his own catchy label for the opposing view long outlived.

Which Hungarian doctor cut maternity-ward deaths in 1847 Vienna by making staff wash their hands in chlorinated lime?

Ignaz Semmelweis saw his ideas rejected by the medical community, was committed to an asylum by colleagues in 1865 and died there 14 days later.

Which London physician traced an 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump on Broad Street and had its handle removed?

John Snow was also a pioneer of anaesthesia, trusted to give Queen Victoria chloroform during the birth of her eighth child in 1853.

Which Glasgow surgeon pioneered antiseptic surgery in the 1860s by treating wounds and tools with carbolic acid?

Joseph Lister is honoured in every bathroom cabinet: the American inventor of Listerine, first sold as a surgical antiseptic, named it after him in 1879.

Which Delft draper became the first person to observe bacteria, using tiny single-lens microscopes he made himself?

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek never wrote a book: he reported his finds in rambling letters to London's Royal Society, which printed many of them in its journal.

Which chief librarian at Alexandria worked out Earth's circumference from the Sun's shadows there and at Syene?

Eratosthenes was mocked by some critics as Beta, a later Byzantine encyclopedia reports, because he supposedly came second in every field he tried.

Which mathematician and astronomer of Alexandria, child of the scholar Theon, was murdered by a Christian mob in 415?

Hypatia built astrolabes and hydrometers and advised the Roman prefect Orestes, whose feud with Bishop Cyril made her a target of rumour.

Which French lawyer scribbled a famous theorem in a book margin that went unproven until Andrew Wiles succeeded in 1994?

Pierre de Fermat never published the claim: his son found the note after his death, in the margin of his father's copy of an ancient Greek book on arithmetic.

Which French prodigy built a mechanical calculator before age 19 to ease his tax-collector father's sums in Rouen?

Blaise Pascal later clarified the ideas of pressure and vacuum, which is why the SI unit of pressure carries his name, though his adding machine sold poorly.

Which Italian physicist built the first electric battery in 1800 after disputing Luigi Galvani's 'animal electricity'?

Alessandro Volta so impressed Napoleon Bonaparte with the invention that the emperor made him a count, and the unit of electric potential carries his name.

Which Lyme Regis fossil hunter found the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton at the age of twelve?

Mary Anning could never join the Geological Society of London, which barred women even as guests, and she was often denied full credit for her finds.

Which British scientist designed naval mines in wartime before helping to work out the double helix of DNA in 1953?

Francis Crick shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery, then gave his later decades to a different riddle, the scientific study of consciousness.

Which Cambridge research student spotted the first pulsar in 1967, a signal jokingly dubbed 'Little Green Man 1'?

Jocelyn Bell Burnell was left off the 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery, and when a three-million-dollar prize came in 2018 she gave it all away to fund new physics students.

Which Canadian surgeon won a 1923 Nobel Prize for insulin and split his share of the money with student Charles Best?

Frederick Banting was only 32 when he won, and he publicly shared both the honour and his half of the prize money with Best, who had been left off the award.

Which physicist launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket at Auburn, Massachusetts, in 1926?

Robert Goddard was scoffed at in a 1920 New York Times editorial, which the paper took back in an item headed 'A Correction' the day after Apollo 11 launched.

Which Columbia physicist's cobalt-60 experiment proved parity is not conserved, winning two theorists a Nobel Prize?

Chien-Shiung Wu watched the 1957 physics prize go to the two colleagues whose idea she had tested, and waited until 1978 for the first Wolf Prize in Physics.

Which American astronomer's study of how fast spiral galaxies rotate became key evidence for invisible dark matter?

Vera Rubin applied in 1965 to become the first female astronomer permitted to observe at Palomar Observatory, a building that had no facilities for women.

Which Chinese scientist won a 2015 Nobel Prize for artemisinin, a malaria drug traced to a fourth-century herbal text?

Tu Youyou took her cue from a remedy written down by Ge Hong in the year 340, which said the herb should be steeped in cold water, so she extracted it at low temperature.

Which geologist, co-discoverer of a comet that hit Jupiter in 1994, had some of his ashes carried to the Moon?

Eugene Shoemaker had been in line to be the first geologist to walk on the Moon until Addison's disease ruled him out, so he trained the Apollo crews instead.

Which Nobel-winning physicist argued in 1980, with his geologist son Walter, that an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs?

Luis Alvarez ranged far beyond particle physics: he also proposed using muon particles to search the Egyptian pyramids for unknown chambers.

Which Cambridge physicist's equation predicted antimatter, and whose silences inspired a joke unit of one word per hour?

Paul Dirac was so precise and sparing with speech that Cambridge colleagues named the unit the dirac, yet he held the university's Lucasian chair for 37 years.

Which co-inventor of the transistor became the first person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice?

John Bardeen took his second prize in 1972 for explaining superconductivity, work that underpins the magnets in hospital MRI scanners.

Which scholar at Baghdad's House of Wisdom gave the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations?

Al-Khwarizmi left two words to mathematics: 'algebra' comes from Al-Jabr, the title of his treatise, and 'algorithm' grew out of the Latin form of his own name.