Scientist | achievement |
André-Marie Ampère | electrodynamics the astatic needle |
Neil Alden Armstrong | first man on the moon |
John Audubon | ornithologist |
Florence Bascom | geologist |
Alexander Graham Bell | telephone |
Niels Bohr | electrons move around the nucleus of the atom in restricted orbits |
Elizabeth Blackwell | woman in the United States to receive a medical degree |
Robert Bunsen | gas analysis the explanation of geyser action discovered by spectroscopy the elements cesium and rubidium |
Jocelyn Bell Burnell | pulsar |
J. Michael Bishop | discovered the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes: cancer gene |
Frank MacFarlane Burnet | understanding of influenza and the development of immunity against it |
Rachel Louise Carson | the modern environmental movement |
George Washington Carver | hundreds of uses for the peanut, the sweet potato, and the soybean |
Henry Cavendish | composition of air & the density of the earth |
Francis Crick | the structure and function of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) |
Marie Curie | radioactivity and on radium |
John Dalton | law of partial pressures |
Charles Robert Darwin | the theory of organic evolution |
Sir Humphry Davy | electrochemistry led to his isolation of potassium and sodium in 1807 and of calcium, barium, boron, magnesium, and strontium in 1808 |
René Descartes | analytical geometry |
Thomas Alva Edison | incandescent electric lamp, the phonograph, the carbon telephone transmitter, and the motion-picture projector. |
Albert Einstein | theory of relativity & the quantum theory |
Michael Faraday | the first dynamo & electromagnetic induction & research on electrolysis |
Rosalind Elsie Franklin | helical molecular structure of DNA |
Benjamin Franklin | Franklin stove, bifocal eyeglasses, and a glass harmonica, & lightning rod |
Richard Phillips Feynman | development of the atomic bomb, theories of superfluidity and quarks |
Robert Fulton | inventor of the steamboat & expert gunsmith |
Galileo Galilei | first complete astronomical telescope & the four largest satellites of Jupiter |
Robert Hutchings Goddard | world's first liquid fuel rocket |
Stephen Jay Gould | the evolutionary theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” which states that in geologic time and strata, the appearance of a new species occurs suddenly and without the continuous slow accretion of tiny variations |
William Harvey | the function of the heart and the complete circulation of the blood |
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin | determining the structure of biochemical compounds (particularly of vitamin B12 & the first X-ray photograph of a protein (pepsin |
Grace Murray Hopper | earliest computer programmers |
Edwin Powell Hubble | the theory of the expanding universe & classified the different types of galaxies including irregular galaxies, three types of spirals and barred spirals, and elliptical galaxies |
Mae Carol Jemison | the first African-American woman to enter space |
Edward Jenner | the vaccination against smallpox |
Johannes Kepler | accurately describe the revolutions of the planets around the sun |
Robert Koch | established the bacterial cause of many infectious diseases and discovered the microorganisms causing anthrax (1876), wound infections (1878), tuberculosis (1882), conjunctivitis (1883), cholera (1884), and other diseases. |
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier | the role of oxygen in the respiration of both animals and plants & explained combustion |
Anton van Leeuwenhoek | maker of microscopes & the first complete descriptions of the bacteria, the protozoans (which he called animalcules), spermatozoa, and striped muscle |
Carolus Linnaeus | the originator of modern scientific classification of plants and animals. modern taxonomy |
Maria Göppert-Mayer | models of the nucleus of atoms & the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for theoretical physics |
James Clerk Maxwell | the theory of the electromagnetic field , color blindness & the color disk |
Barbara McClintock | discovered that certain genetic material, “transposable elements,” shifted its location in the chromosomes from generation to generation |
Peter Brian Medawar | a method for joining ends of severed nerves & discovery of acquired immunological tolerance |
Gregor Johann Mendel | experimental work on heredity & investigations on garden peas |
Dmitri Mendeleev | periodic law and the invention of the periodic table, |
Peter D. Mitchell | the chemiosmotic theory, which explains how energy is generated in the mitochondria of living cells |
Joseph-Michel Montgolfier | the first practical balloon & the first manned free balloon flight. Paris |
Samuel Finley Breese Morse | the electric telegraph & telegraphy |
Isaac Newton, | universal gravitation & three famous laws of motion; |
J. Robert Oppenheimer | development of atomic energy & proponents of civilian and international control of atomic energy |
Louis Pasteur | process of pasteurization, vaccination against anthrax & rabies |
Linus Carl Pauling | developed the concept of resonance to explain covalent bonds in certain organic compounds & three-dimensional structures of many antitoxins, amino acids, and proteins |
Joseph Priestley | oxygen, & sulfur dioxide, ammonia |
Sally Kristen Ride | the first American woman in space |
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen | X ray |
Jonas Edward Salk | vaccine against polio |
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger | mathematical development of wave mechanics (1926), a form of quantum mechanics |
Edward Teller | hydrogen bomb |
James Dewey Watson | molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) ,The Double Helix, Human Genome Research |
James Watt | steam engine & coined the term horsepower |
Eli Whitney | inventor of the cotton gin, &interchangeable parts on muskets |
Wilbur Wright | the first powered, sustained and controlled flight of a heavier than air machine at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. |
Chien-Shiung Wu | develop a process to enrich uranium ore to produce the fuel for the atomic bomb. & helped to destroy the “law of conservation of parity,” |