Ancient 450 and years prior

1. Ancient 450 and years prior

2. Pythagoras of Samos • about 569 BC - about 475 BC • Samos, Ionia • Commonly known to be the founder of the Pythagorean Theorem, Pythagoras was also considered the first mathematician. With very little written information about this man, it was very hard for researchers to gather information about him and his mathematical achievements. His mother was Pythais and she was a native of Samos. His father, Mnesarchus, was a merchant who came from Tyre. His parents made sure he would get the best education he possible could. Later in life he started a school focused on mathematics, music and astronomy. Although there are very few definite facts about his life, it was clear that he was intended to be seen as a god. • Pythagoras is known to be the founder of the Pythagorean Theorem when in fact; it was known and used hundreds of years prior to his life time by the ancient Chinese. He does take much of the credit for making it popular. The Pythagorean Theorem is an equation that allows a third side of a triangle to be calculated with only the other two lengths. . When a and b are sides, and c is the hypotenuse. • http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Mathematicians/Pythagoras.html

3. Democritus • about 460 BC-about 370 BC • Abdera, Greece • Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Greece. He was known to be the creator of the atomic theory alongside Leucippus, who was said to be his mentor. Democritus had many followers that admired and respected his work. He also gave many philosophers of his time the credit they deserved as he would read their writings. He was very wealthy which enabled him to purchase their writings to learn from. . Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science" • Democritus claimed that matter was made up of small individual particles and had spaces between the particles called atoms. His theory states that atoms cannot be divided any further. However, this theory has been disproved with the discovery of protons, electrons, neutrons. • http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Mathematicians/Democritus.html

4. Isaac Newton • 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727 • WoolsthorpeManor, Lincolnshire • 1687- Laws of gravity • Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, England on December 25, 1642. He attended Trinity College in Cambridge Massachusetts starting in 1661. During the time of the plague, school closed and Newton studied on his own. Eventually he finished his studies at trinity and began teaching mathematics. In 1703 he became president of the Royal Society. Isaac Newton's discoveries were so numerous and varied that many consider him to be the father of modern science. He died in London on March 20, 1727. • Isaac First developed new methods in mathematics, starting with the binomial theorem, which deals with fractional powers of an algebraic expression. Newton is best known for his discovery of the laws of gravity and movement. Gravity involved the planets and how they move around the sun. Newton also discovered what we know as calculus but he did not tell anyone, instead he used it to find more discoveries. • http://www.newton.ac.uk/newtlife.html

5. 1700-1800

6. Henry Cavendish • 10 October 1731 - 24 February 1810 • Nice, France • 1797 – 1798 • Henry Cavendish was born in Nice, France, on October 10, 1731, the oldest son of Lord Charles Cavendish and Lady Anne Grey. Cavendish entered Cambridge University, Cambridge, in 1749 and left after 3 years without taking a degree. During his lifetime he made notable discoveries in chemistry mainly between 1766 and 1788 and in electricity between 1771 and 1788. Cavendish died Feb. 24, 1810. • Cavendish was the first to recognize the element hydrogen as its own element. In order to establish that hydrogen gas was a substance entirely different from ordinary air, he calculated their densities as well as the densities of several other gases. Cavendish also showed that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen. • http://www.chemistry.mtu.edu/~pcharles/SCIHISTORY/HenryCavendish.html

7. James Watts • 19 January 1736 – 25 August 1819 • Greenock, Renfrewshire, • 1774 – steam engine improvements • James Watt was born on Jan. 19, 1736, in Greenock, Scotland. He worked as a mathematical-instrument maker from the age of 19 and soon became interested in improving the steam engines, invented by the English engineers Thomas Savery and Thomas Newcomen, which were used at the time to pump water from mines. Watt died in Heathfield, England, on August 19, 1819. By the time he died, he'd changed history and was the most honored engineer who had ever lived. • James Watt, however, is credited with inventing the first practical engine. And so the history of the "modern" steam engine often begins with James Watt. Watts saw flaws in the existing steam engine. He began projects to make the steam engine more efficient. He did this by making the water closer to the temperature of steam as possible, allowing for a more efficient cycle. • http://inventors.about.com/od/wstartinventors/a/JamesWatt.htm

8. 1800-1875

9. John Dalton • 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844 • Eaglesfield, Cumberland, England • 1805 – combining atoms • John Dalton is known as the man who pioneered the Atomic theory. Born in Eaglesfield, Cumberland, Eng, he spent most of his life in private teaching and research. His experiments with water vapor and gasses lead him to come up the Daltons laws, or gas laws. He was one of the very first to decide that matter is made up of atoms and are all alike and have the same atomic weight. He was also the first to describe color blindness in 1794. • http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Dalton_John.html • Dalton classified atoms by their chemical behavior and their reactions to each other. He stated that matter was composed of tiny indivisible particles called atoms. Also, atoms of the same element are identical and have a characteristic mass. In addition, Atoms of dissimilar elements are different. And finally argued, Atoms of elements combine in fixed ratios to form new substances. • http://www.dl.clackamas.edu/ch104-04/dalton's.htm

10. James Clerk Maxwell • 13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879 • Edinburgh, Scotland, UK • 1866- Maxwell distribution • James Clerk Maxwell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on June 13, 1831. After family problems such as his mother’s death at a young age, the family’s plan for his education had fell through. He attended Edinburgh Academy and continued education until he graduated with a degree in mathematics from Trinity College in 1854. • The Maxwell distribution function is commonly used in statistical mechanics in order to determine the speeds of molecules. Particle has a different speed, and each collision between particles changes the speeds of the particles. An understanding of the properties of the gas requires an understanding of the distribution of particle speeds. • http://www.answersingenesis.org/Home/Area/bios/jc_maxwell.asp

11. Alfred Nobel • 21 October 1833- 10 December 1896 • Stockholm, Sweden • 1867 as 'dynamite' • Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father Immanuel Nobel was an engineer and inventor. Alfred attended St. Jacob’s School in Stockholm in 1841 and 1842, but then the family moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where Nobel's father, a chemist and inventor, had established an engineering and weapons company. Here, Nobel received private tutoring from there. Later Nobel successfully exploded nitroglycerin upon request. In 1866 Nobel visited the United States and built factories in New York and San Francisco that produced his new discovery he called dynamite. With his fortune he created the Nobel foundation. And to this day we often know of his as the man behind the Nobel Prize. • In 1863, Alfred Nobel was the inventor of the patent detonator or blasting cap for detonating nitroglycerin. The Nobel patent detonator used a strong shock rather than heat combustion to ignite the explosives. In 1866 he discovered that mixing nitroglycerine with silica would turn the liquid into a malleable paste, called dynamite. In 1867, Nobel received U.S. patent number 78,317 for his dynamite. • http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ni-Pe/Nobel-Alfred.html

12. 1875-1900

13. Wilhelm Rontgen • 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923 • Lennep, Prussia • 1895- xray • Röntgenwas born in Lennep. He received his early education at the private school of Martinus Herman van Doorn, in Apeldoorn. He was expelled for refusing to reveal the identity of a classmate guilty of drawing an unflattering portrait of one of the school's teachers. Röntgen died on February 10, 1923 from carcinoma of the intestine. • While investigating the effects from the various types of vacuum tube equipment, he discovered a first form of x-rays. Röntgen brought a small piece of lead into position while a discharge was occurring. During this he saw the first radiologic image. X rays have very small wavelenghs giving them more energy that ultra violet rays. X-ray detectors collect photons of x-ray light to create an image. • http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1901/rontgen-bio.html

14. Henri Becquerel • 15 December 1852 – 25 August 1908 • Paris, France • 1896- radioactivity • Antoine- Henri Becquerel was born in Paris on December 15, 1852. In 1895, Becquerel became the chief engineer on bridge and highway department. While studying the work of Wilhelm Rontgen, Becquerel discovered that his x-rays had some radioactivity within them. in 1903 Becquerel received one Nobel Prize. Becquerel, after further important work in radioactivity, died in 1908 at Croissic in Britanny. • The radioactivity in which Becquerel discovered has since been so advanced and is used every day in hospitals around the world. X rays have opened doors to many other imaging systems. Radioactivity is defined as the breaking apart or decay of unstable atomic nuclei. The main ingredient for the radioactivity is uranium. • http://www.vigyanprasar.gov.in/scientists/AntoineHenriBecquerel.htm

15. Marie Curie • November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934 • Warsaw, Vistula Country, Russian Empire • 1898 – polonium/ radium • Born in 1867, Marie Curie was the first women to win a Nobel Prize. Her parents were both very successful, one a math professor, the other a musician. Her father was a freethinker and her mother was a Catholic. She married Pierre who was also interested in math and physics and was researching radioactivity with her. He died when he was hit by a car. In 1911 Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize for her achievement of isolating radium and examining its chemical properties. Marie Curie died at the age of 67 in 1934 of leukemia, brought on by her years of exposure to high levels of radiation. • Marie discovered two new radioactive elements: polonium and radium. She was able to isolated polonium out of the uraninite, the radioactive element was called polonium to honor the country of her birth. During the same year, she announced the discovery of radium. The name of this element gave birth to medical science of radiology, which is used commonly today to treat tumors.

16. JJ Thomson • 18 December 1856 – 30 August 1940 • CheethamHill, Manchester, UK • 1897 – discovery of electron • Joseph John Thomson was born in Cheetham Hill, Manchester on December 18, 1856. At the young age of 16, his father died. In 1876 entered Trinity College located in Cambridge, Ma. Thomson graduated 2nd in his class. Thompson married one of his students named rose paget in 1890. In 1906 he won the Nobel Prize in physics for his researches into the discharge of electricity in gases. Thomson died in 1940 as one of the greatest scientist of his era. • JJ Thompson’s model of the atom described the atom as a positively charged sphere with the electrons within the sphere. Today we know if it as the plum pudding model. He came to this by experimenting with cathode rays. He discovered that they could be deflected by electric and magnetic fields. He was able to conclude that cathode rays were streams of electrons, or negatively charged particles. • http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1906/thomson-bio.html

17. 1900-1915

18. Ernest Rutherford • 30 August 1871–19 October 1937 • Brightwater, New Zealand • 1907- father of physics • Ernest Rutherford was born to farmers in Bridgewater, New Zealand on August 30, 1871. Rutherford attended Nelson Collegiate College and was awarded an academic scholarship to Canterbury College in Christchurch, New Zealand in 1889. In 1895 he studied at Trinity College at Cambridge University in England. In 1898, at the age of 28, he accepted the physics chair at McGill College in Canada. After 9 years, Rutherford returned to England as a physics professor at the University of Manchester. In 1908 he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. Rutherford ended his career as the director of the Cavendish Laboratory in England, a position he accepted in 1919. Ernest Rutherford died on October 19, 1937. • Rutherford discovered that alpha particles were sometimes very strongly scattered by the positive charges of the atom. He therefore suggested that every atom had a compact nucleus, with negative electrons floating around it. He suggested that the Nucleus was like a miniature Sun, with electrons orbiting it like planets. • http://www.mhhe.com/physsci/chemistry/essentialchemistry/flash/ruther14.swf

19. Robert A. Millikan • 22 March 1868 – 19 December 1953 • Morrison, Illinois • 1909- charge of single electron • Robert Millikan was born in Morrison, Illinois on March 22, 1868. He attended Oberlin College and received his PhD in physics from Columbia University in 1895. He spent 25 years as a physics professor at the University of Chicago. Later he served as the head of the California Institute of Technology. Millikan died on December 19, 1953 in San Marino, Ca. • Millikan found the charge of electrons by spraying tiny droplets of oil from an atomizer into a region of electric forces, between two parallel horizontal plates. Some of the droplets became electrically charged by friction or radioactivity. After his test, he narrowed to one unknown variable, and used Avogadro’s number to find the electrical charge. • http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/millikanoildrop.html

20. Niels Bohr • 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962 • Copenhagen, Denmark • 1913 Bohr model of the atom • Niels Henrik David Bohr was born in Copenhagen in 1885 to Christian Bohr and Ellen Adler Bohr. Bohr received his doctorate from Copenhagen University in 1911 and then studied under Ernest Rutherford in the Victoria University in Manchester, England. Following in his father's footsteps, in 1916, Bohr became a professor at the University of Copenhagen. In 1943 he fled to Sweden before he was arrested by German police where he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project. Bohr and his wife had six children. One of which went on to be a successful physicist and won a Nobel Prize. • Bohr proposed that the electrons are arranged in a specific pattern. They are arranged in “energy levels”. When it was previous thought to have been arranged randomly. He claimed that the electron farthest away from the nucleus had the highest energy and each level had a certain number of electrons it could support.

21. 1915-1950

22. Werner Heisenbergue • 5 December 1901 – 1 February 1976 • Würzburg, Germany • 1925- matrix formulation of quantum mechanics

23. Erwin Schrödinger • 12 August 1887 - 4 January 1961 • Erdbergde, Vienna, Austria-Hungary • 1926 – Schrödinger equation

24. James Chadwick • 20 October1891 – 24 July1974 • Bollington, Cheshire, England • 1935 – discovery of neutron • James Chadwick was born on October 20,1891 near Manchester, England. In 1911 he received a bachelor's degree from the Honours School of Physics at the University of Manchester in England. He continued to study physics and earned his Master's by 1913.In the same year Chadwick received a scholarship for graduate study at the PhysikalscheTechnischeReichsanstalt in Berlin. From 1935 to 1948 he worked as a physics professor at the University of Liverpool in England. He won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1935 for his discovery of the neutron. James Chadwick died at Cambridge on July 24, 1974.