List of Mathematicians and Scientists

One of the requirements for Pyramid Project is to do a presentation on a scientist or science topic.

Create a sign-up sheet for students to give presentations. We have one or two per week depending on how large the class is. I suggest students aim for 10 minutes. There are a number of things that can contribute to interesting presentations:

• Visual boards
• Experiments or Demonstration
• Power Point presentations
• Dressing up in costume
• Things to pass around
• I had one student who was a professional actress who created a small movie
• Another student came in with a script and roles for his fellow classmates to play. Some were to produce sound effects (for example: hoof beats as Paul Revere's ride was being discussed, poppers to represent gunfire, etc.)

another list: science heros

Hippocrites

Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460 BC - c. 377 BC) was an ancient Greek physician. He has been called "The Father of Medicine", and is commonly regarded as one of the most outstanding figures in medicine of all time. Writings attributed to him rejected the superstition and magic of primitive "medicine" and laid the foundations of medicine as a branch of science.

Plato

Plato (c. 427 - c. 347 BC) was an immensely influential ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens where Aristotle studied.

Aristotle

Aristotle (384 - 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote books on many subjects, including physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology, none of which survive in their entirety. Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, is generally considered one of the most influential of ancient Greek philosophers. They transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle founded two of the most important schools of Ancient philosophy.

Archimedes

Archimedes (c. 287 BC - 212 BC) was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and philosopher born in the seaport colony of Syracuse, Sicily. He is considered by some historians of mathematics to be one of the greatest mathematicians in antiquity; Carl Friedrich Gauss considered him one of the two greatest ever (the other being Isaac Newton).

Galen

Galen (129-200 AD) was an ancient Greek physician. Galen's views dominated European medicine for over a thousand years.

Galileo

Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) was an Italian physicist, astronomer, astrologer, and philosopher who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first and second laws of motion, and effective support for Copernicanism. He has been referred to as the "father of modern astronomy", as the "father of modern physics", and as the "father of science".

Al-biruni

Muslim Cartographer, Astronomer, and Mathematician. (973 - 1048) He refined the ancient estimate of the Earth's radius from approximately 6,314 km (measured by Eratosthenes in 240 AD) to 6,339.6 km. This feat was not repeated or surpassed in the western world until the sixteenth century.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) was a talented Italian Renaissance Roman Catholic polymath: architect, anatomist, sculptor, engineer, inventor, geometer, scientist, mathematician, musician, and painter. He has been described as the archetype of the "Renaissance man", a man infinitely curious and equally inventive. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time. He conceived of ideas vastly ahead of his own time, notably conceptually inventing the helicopter, a tank, the use of concentrated solar power, the calculator, a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics, the double hull, and many others. In addition, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, astronomy, civil engineering, optics, and the study of water (hydrodynamics).

Nicolaus Copernicus

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 - 1543) was an astronomer who provided the first modern formulation of a heliocentric (sun-centered) theory of the solar system in his epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres).

Andreas Vesalius

Andreas Vesalius (1514 - 1564) was a Flemish anatomist and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton, (1643 - 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws. Newton played a major role in the development of calculus, sharing credit famously at time with Gottfried Leibniz.

William Harvey

William Harvey (1578-1657) was a medical doctor who is credited with first correctly describing, in exact detail, the properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart.

Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601), was a Danish nobleman best known today as an early astronomer, though in his lifetime he was also well known as an astrologer and alchemist. He is credited with the most accurate astronomical observations of his time, and the data were used by his assistant Kepler to derive the laws of planetary motion. No one before Tycho had attempted to make so many redundant observations, and the mathematical tools to take advantage of them had not yet been developed. He did what others before him were unable or unwilling to do — to catalogue the planets and stars with enough accuracy so as to determine whether the Ptolemaic or Copernican system was more valid in describing the heavens.

Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743 - 1794) was a French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry, finance, biology, and economics. The "father of modern chemistry," he stated the first version of the Law of conservation of matter, recognized and named oxygen as well as hydrogen, disproved the phlogiston theory, introduced the Metric system, invented the first periodic table including 33 elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature.

George Washington Carver

George Washington Carver (1864 - 1943) was an African American botanist who worked in agricultural extension at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama, and who taught former slaves farming techniques for self-sufficiency. He is also widely credited in American public schools and in American culture generally for inventing hundreds of uses for the peanut and other plants to increase the profitability of farming.

Charles Darwin

Charles Robert Darwin (1809 - 1882) was an English naturalist who achieved lasting fame by producing considerable evidence that species originated through evolutionary change, at the same time proposing the scientific theory that natural selection is the mechanism by which such change occurs. This theory is now considered a cornerstone of biology.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie (1867 - 1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the early field of radiology, later becoming the first two-time Nobel laureate and the only person with Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science (physics and chemistry). She also became the first woman appointed to teach at the Sorbonne. She founded the Curie Institutes in Paris and in Warsaw.

William T.G. Morton

William Thomas Green Morton (1819 - 1868) was responsible for the first successful public demonstration of ether as an inhalation anesthetic. Many consider him to be the "inventor and revealer" of anesthesia. However, he was not the first person to use ether for surgical anesthesia - Crawford Williamson Long was. Morton's accomplishment was the key factor to the medical and scientific pursuit that we now refer to as anesthesiology.

Joseph Lister

Joseph Lister (1827-1912) was an English surgeon who promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. He successfully introduced carbolic acid to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955) was a German-born American theoretical physicist widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century and one of the greatest physicists of all time. He played a leading role in formulating the special and general theories of relativity; moreover, he made significant contributions to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.

Louis Pasteur

Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895) was a French microbiologist and chemist. He is best known for demonstrating how to prevent milk and wine from going sour, which came to be called pasteurization. His experiments confirmed the germ theory of disease, and he created the first vaccine for rabies. He became one of the founders of bacteriology, the other major figure being Robert Koch. He also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the asymmetry of crystals.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of the psychoanalytic school of psychology.

Louis Agassiz

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807-1873) was a Swiss-born American zoologist, glaciologist, and geologist, the husband of educator Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz, and one of the first world-class American scientists.

Carolus Linnaeus

Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778), was a Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist who laid the foundations for the modern scheme of nomenclature. He is also considered one of the fathers of modern ecology. He is known as the "father of modern taxonomy."

Jane Goodall

Dame Valerie Jane Goodall (1934--) is an English primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist, probably best-known for conducting a forty-five year study of chimpanzee social and family life, as director of the Jane Goodall Institute in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 - 1855) was a German mathematician and scientist of profound genius who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, magnetism, astronomy and optics. Sometimes known as "the prince of mathematicians" and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked among one of history's most influential mathematicians.

Edmond Halley

Edmond Halley (1656 - 1742) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist. Predicted the return of the comet named after him.

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (1831 - 1879) was a Scottish mathematical physicist. Maxwell formulated a set of equations expressing the basic laws of electricity and magnetism and developed the Maxwell distribution in the kinetic theory of gases. He is also credited with developing the first permanent Colour photograph in 1861. Maxwell had one of the finest mathematical minds of any theoretical physicist of his time. Maxwell is widely regarded as the nineteenth century scientist who had the greatest influence on twentieth century physics, making contributions to the fundamental models of nature. Einstein described Maxwell's work as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton."

Linus Pauling

Linus Carl Pauling (1901 - 1994) was an American quantum chemist and biochemist, widely regarded as the premier chemist of the twentieth century. Pauling was a pioneer in the application of quantum mechanics to chemistry, and in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work describing the nature of chemical bonds. He also made important contributions to crystal and protein structure determination, and was one of the founders of molecular biology. Pauling received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his campaign against above-ground nuclear testing.

Leonhard Euler

Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783) was a Swiss mathematician and physicist. He is considered to be the preeminent mathematician of the 18th century and one of the greatest of all time; he is certainly the most prolific, with collected works filling over 70 volumes. Euler developed many important concepts and proved numerous lasting theorems in diverse areas of mathematics, from calculus to number theory to topology. In the course of this work, he introduced much of modern mathematical terminology, defining the concept of a function, and its notation, such as sin, cos, and tan for the trigonometric functions.

Benjamin Franklin

The foremost scientist of colonial America. Discovered many important properies of electricity, including the conservation of charge, the existance of 2 opposite charges, that lightning is an electrical phenomena. Also discovered the method of refridgeration by evaporation, and made discoveries in meteorology, medicine, etc. (Oh, and he was a statesman too.) List of inventions.

Wilhelm Rontgen

Discoverer of the X-Ray.

Jonas Salk

Developer of Polio Vaccine

Buckminster Fuller

Inventor of the geodesic dome, and icon of the 60's.

Richard Feynman

Noble prize winning physicist and an outrageous character.

et cetera ad infinitum

Remember, this list is not intended to limit you.

Even Johann Sebastian Bach was a scientist.