Linnaeus, Carolus (1707-1778)

Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who introduced a standard method of naming and classifying living things.
Linnaeus spent much of his childhood collecting plants and animals before studying to become a doctor at the University of Uppsala.
In 1741 he was appointed Professor of medicine and Botany at Uppsala, and so spent more time studying the Ecology and distribution of plants.
He described nearly 8000 plant species and about 4400 animal species (almost everything known to Europeans at the time) and he gave each a scientific name in two parts.
For examples, he called the wolf canis lupus and the jackal canis aureus.
Canis is the genus to which the animals belong, and so the scientific name shows that the animal are related.

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Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695)

Huygens was a Dutch physicist and mathematician who first suggested that light travels as waves.
He explained reflection and refraction in terms of wave motion. He invented new ways of making glass lenses for telescopes.
With his improved telescope, he was able to see the true shape of the rings around Saturn.


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Leonardo da vinci (1452-1519)

Leonardo da vinci was a great Italian painter,sculptor,architect and engineer who contributed more to science, TECHNOLOGY and art than anyone else of this time.
Many of his ideas were hundreds of years ahead of their time. For example, his drawings included plans of helicopter long before the MATERIALS and technology were available to build one.
He was trained as an artist by the painter and sculptor Andrea del Verocchio. While learning to draw things, he became interested in how they worked.
His great paintings include The Last Supper and Mona Lisa. In 1513 Leonardo was invited to France by the French king, Francis 1.
He spent his last years living in a castle given to him by the king in Cloux, near Amboise.
Many of Leonardo's sketch books are preserved in museums.

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Augustine Fresnel (1788-1827)

Fresnel was a French physicist who developed the transverse-wave theory of light, as a result of his work on lenses and optical interference.
Fresnel showed that normal sunlight consisted of vibrations that were at right angles (transverse) to the direction travelled by the light.
He also invented a type of lens in wich the surface is cut into a series of concentric steps resizing forwards the centre. These lenses are still widely used in light house


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Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936)

Pavlov was a Russian biologist who was the first to make a scientific study of learning by association.
He worked with dogs and noticed how their saliva. began to run every time they were fed .
This was a normal reflex action-the dogs did not have to think about it.
Then Pavlov rang a bell every time the dogs were fed. After a while, he saw that the dogs' saliva began to run as soon as they heard the bell - even before the food arrived.
The dogs had learned to associate the sound of the bell with food.
Pavlov Called this type of reaction a conditioned reflex.


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Theodore Maiman (1927- )

The United states physicist Theodore Maiman constructed the first working laser in 1960.
After developing the master (a device that generates or amplifies microwaves) in 1955 he began to work on an optical maser, or laser.
His device consisted of a cylindrical artificial ruby crystal with parallel mirror coated ends, one of which was semi-transparent.
Bursts of intense white light were provided by a flash lamp.


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Lamarck, Jean Baptiste (1744-1829)

Jean Baptiste Lamarck was a French biologist, best known for his attempts to explain Evolution.
He suggested that useful features acquired during the life of an individual could pass to the next generation,
thus making each generation more efficient.
Lamarck believed that giraffes stretched their necks as they reached for leaves, and then passed their longer necks on to their offspring.
According to his theory, a person who trained to become an athlete would have athletic children.
Neither Lamarck nor anyone else could provide any evidence for this kind of evolution and few people believed his theory.
Body cells and reproductive cells are quite separate, and only the genes in the reproductive cells are passed on to the offspring.

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Kepler, Johannes (1571-1630)

Kepler proved that the Earth and the other planets in the solar system orbit the sun in elliptical paths.
Kepler was born in what is now southwestern Germany. He was very frail, and often ill but a brilliant mathematician.
He worked with Tycho Brahe in Prague and built on his theories and those of Copernicus.
Copernicus was the first to show that the Earth revolved around the sun.
After years of painstaking observations and calculation Kepler discovered planets do not move in circles as Copernicus believed,
but ellipses, which are like flattened circles.
Finally he published his laws of planetary motion to explain the motion of the planets.
Kepler also believed in astrology and earned money casting horoscopes.


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Kelvin, William Thomson (1824-1907)

William Thomson , later Lord Kelvin of Largs, was a British physicist and engineer who was born in Belfast and died near Largs, Scotlands.
He entered the University of Glasgow when he was 10, published his first scientific article at 16 and went on to study at Cambridge.
In 1846 he became a professor in Glasgow.
He was one of the first people to state the Second Law of Thermodynamics that Heat cannot be completely converted into work.
He also estimated the age of the Earth from its temperature, although he was wrong because he did not know about the production of heat through Radioactivity in the Earth.
He became rich because of his design for a Galvanometer to receive the signals sent through underwater Telegraph cables.

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James Joule (1818-1889)

James Prescott Joule was a British physicist who studied with Lord Kelvin and the chemist John Dalton.
His experiments showed that the production of heat is always accompanied by a loss of another form of energy and so he deduced that heat itself is a form of energy.
The unit of energy is named after him.

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Frank Whittle (1907-1987)

Whittle, an officer in the British Royal Air Force, built the first successful jet engine in the 1940s.
Whittle's turbojet design powered the world's first practical jet aircraft, the Gloster Meteor, the prototype of which first flew in 1941.
The first jet-engined aircraft actually to fly was the German Heinkel He-178 in 1939.
But this later proved impractical.

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Frederick Soddy (1877-1956)

Soddy was a British chemist who worked alongside Ernest Rutherford and carried out pioneering research into radioactive decay.
As a result, Soddy was able to formulate the theory of isotopes, and in 1921 he was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry.
Aware of the great potential of the energy contained in uranium, he became increasingly concerned about the use of atomic energy and the social responsibility of scientists.

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Henry Bessemer (1813-1898)

Bessemer was a British steel manufacturer who invented a cheap method for making large quantities of steel.
At the heart of the process was the Bessemer converter, a large pear-shaped blast furnace.
In the united states, Henry Kelly independently devised a similar process.

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Edward Appleton (1892-1965)

Appleton was the British physicist who discovered one of the layers of ionized particles that reflect radio waves in ionosphere.
This layer was often known as the Appleton layer, but is now understood to be two separate layers that are known as F1 and F2.
Appleton's work in atmospheric physics was important to the development of radar, and in 1974 he was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics.

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Nikolaus Otto (1832-1891)

Otto was a German engineer who developed a four-stroke, gas -fuelled internal combustion engine which he potented in 1877.
Otto did not invent the four-stroke cycle but was the first to incorporate it into a successful design.
Otto's smooth running gas engines were widely used before World War I, after which they were superseded by petrol engines.

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