Giants of Science
40-word Biographies
( © 2003-2010 Gérard P. Michon, Ph.D.)
Thales of Miletus, engineer (c. 624-546 BC)
First
sage of Greece,
he founded classical geometry and natural philosophy.
The Theorem of Thales
(one of two)
is about two triangles with parallel sides:
The shadow of the pyramid is to the pyramid what the shadow of a man is to the man
[wow].
Earliest Mathematics
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Pythagoras of Samos (c. 569-475 BC)
In Croton,
he founded the mystic cult of the Phythagoreans,
whose initiated members called themselves mathematikoi.
They are credited with the first proof of the Pythagorean Theorem
(itself known to the Chaldeans
1000 years before).
Tetractys
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Constant of Pythagoras
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Euclid of Alexandria (c. 325-265 BC)
Father of axiomatic geometry and author of the most
enduring textbook in the history of mathematics: The Elements.
His presentation of the mathematics of his times
would become the centerpiece of mathematical teaching for more than 2000 years.
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Archimedes of Syracuse (c. 287-212 BC)
A native and resident of
Syracuse,
Archimedes studied in Alexandria and maintained
relations with Alexandrian scholars. Although he became famous for designing war
machines, this early physicist was, above all, an
outstanding mathematician.
Spiral
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Parabola
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Sand Reckoner
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Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276-294 BC)
Eratosthenes headed the
Library of Alexandria
after the death of
Callimachus.
In number theory, he is remembered for the
Sieve of Eratosthenes.
He also came up with the first accurate experimental measurement of the
circumference of the Earth.
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Geber, experimental chemist (c. AD 721-815)
Abu Musa Jabir ibn Hayyan al azdi was born in Tus (Persia) but the
Arabs claim him
as one of their own. Geber (or Jabir) made remarkable scientific advances in
practical chemistry but is also credited with
eponymous gibberish on occult alchemy.
Wikipedia
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Jabir
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Chemical
Heritage Foundation
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al Shindagah
Nicole Oresme (1323-1382)
Nicolas Oresme is credited with the introduction of
fractional exponents and the graphing of functions.
He also established the
divergence of the harmonic series.
Oresme anticipated analytic geometry, the law
of free fall and chemical structures...
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Université de Caen
Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543)
Mikolaj Kopernik attended
Krakow,
Bologna,
Padua and
Ferrara.
Thanks to his uncle,
he became a canon at Frauenberg
(1497) where he would have an
observatory.
Around 1514, he gave
an heliocentric
explanation to
planetary
retrograde motion.
De
revolutionibus (1543)
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Copernican revolution
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Copernicium
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
Using his own pulse as a timer,
Galileo discovered the pendulum isochronism in 1581.
He found that all bodies fall with the same acceleration and
declared mechanical laws valid for all observers in uniform motion.
He made the first telescopic observations.
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Johannes Kepler (1571-1630)
Kepler's precise calculations helped establish heliocentric
astronomy. In 1609 and 1619,
he published his famous 3 laws of planetary motion.
He studied optics,
polyhedra,
logarithms, etc.
In hindsight,
Kepler also paved the road to Calculus.
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René Descartes (1596-1650)
Descartes attended the famous Jesuit college of
La Flèche
from 1607 to 1615. He met his scientific mentor
Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637)
in 1618. He introduced cartesian geometry in one of three appendices
to Discours
sur la méthode (1637).
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Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)
Fermat attended
Toulouse and
Bordeaux,
got a law degree from
Orléans
and purchased an office at the
parlement of Toulouse
in 1631. He relentlessly pursued investigations in
mathematics
and physics in his spare time
(his judicial work suffered).
Fermat's Little Theorem
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Fermat's Last Theorem
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Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)
Lucasian professor of
mathematics at Cambridge
in 1669. FRS in 1672. Publishes
Principia
in 1687. Retires from research in 1693. Warden (1696) then Master (1699) of the
Royal Mint.
President of the
Royal Society from 1703. Knighted in 1705.
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716)
A major philosopher and a polymath,
Leibniz invented differential calculus
independently
of Newton. He introduced a consistent notation for
integrals and
infinitesimals (1675).
Unlike d'Alembert,
Leibniz never thought of derivatives
as limits.
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Leonhard Euler, Swiss expatriate (1707-1783)
The most prolific mathematician of all times, Euler
became totally blind in 1771 but produced almost half of his phenomenal output
in St. Petersburg
after 1766, with the help of several assistants, including the young
Nicolaus Fuss
(1755-1826) from 1773 on.
Solution of the Basel Problem (1735)
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Jean-le-Rond d'Alembert (1717-1783)
Born illegitimately to
Louis Camus
Destouches-Canon
and Claudine de Tencin, he was
editor of the Encyclopedia. He founded
analytical mechanics on a principle of
virtual work and solved the wave equation.
The d'Alembertian
is a 4D operator.
Remarkable
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Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813)
Lagrange pioneered the calculus of variation
(before Euler gave it that name, in 1766) and
applied it to analytical mechanics.
He also invented Lagrange multipliers.
In 1794, Polytechnique was founded and
Lagrange became its first professor of analysis.
Remarkable
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 Pierre Simon Laplace (1749-1827)
Introduced to mathematics in
Caen by
Christophe
Gadbled
and Pierre Le Canu,
he was mentored by d'Alembert in Paris.
He went on to become one of the most innovative and influential scientists ever.
(Laplacian,
Laplace transform, etc.)
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 Adrien-Marie Legendre (1752-1833)
Legendre was one of the greatest contributors to the mathematics of his times.
Many concepts are named after him.
At left is what seems to be
his only extant portrait
(it was found among 73 caricatures of members of the French academy of Sciences).
Legendre symbols
&
polynomials
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1911
 Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768-1830)
In January 1795, Joseph Fourier was the star trainee in the new
Ecole normale de l'an III (the forerunner of
ENS)
as he was simultaneously teaching at Polytechnique.
He is the founder of
Harmonic Analysis
(cf. Fourier transform).
PhD / ENS
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Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855)
At the age of 7, the
Prince of Mathematics found instantly the sum (5050) of all integers
from 1 to 100 (as the sum of 50 pairs, each adding up to 101).
At age 19, his breakthrough about
constructible polygons helped him choose
a mathematical career.
Quadratic reciprocity
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Siméon Poisson (1781-1840; X1798)
Among his many mathematical contributions is a very abstract construct in
analytical mechanics (Poisson
Brackets, 1809) which helped Dirac
formulate a precise correspondence between classical and quantum
mechanics (Sunday, Sept. 20, 1925).
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Augustin Fresnel (1788-1827; X1804)
Educated in Caen and at Polytechnique
Augustin Fresnel established (with Arago)
that light is a transverse wave
whose two orthogonal polarizations do not interfere
with each other. He promoted the use of
Fresnel lenses in lighthouses.
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Augustin Cauchy (1789-1857; X1805)
Cauchy wrote 789 papers in all areas of the mathematics and
theoretical physics of his time. In 1821, his Cours d'analyse
at Polytechnique put analysis on a rigorous footing.
He originated the calculus of residues (1826) and
complex analysis (1829).
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Michael Faraday, experimentalist (1791-1867)
In 1831, Faraday came up with the
Law of Electromagnetic Induction, which
ultimately made the electric era possible.
He is widely regarded as one of the greatest
experimentalists who ever lived.
Yet, he had little or no grasp of higher mathematics.
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Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804-1851)
An inspiring teacher, he was an outstanding and prolific creator of mathematics
who has been likened to Euler.
He introduced ¶ and
Jacobians in 1841.
Jacobi admired
Poisson brackets
and proved that they satisfy what's now called
Jacobi's identity.
Ph.D. 1825
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Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet (1805-1859)
His full name was Johann Peter Gustav Lejeune-Dirichlet.
He signed Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet, (no hyphen)
published as P.G.L. Dirichlet
and was quoted as Lejeune-Dirichlet. He contributed to
number theory, mechanics and
analysis.
h.c. 1827
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Theorems
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D-branes
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DE
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Life and Work (pdf)
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Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1805-1865)
Hamilton taught himself mathematics at the age of 17.
In 1833, he devised a version of
rational mechanics
(based on co-called conjugate momenta) which helps clarify modern
formulations of quantum mechanics.
He invented quaternions in 1843.
DIT 2005
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Joseph Liouville (1809-1882; X1825)
Many of Liouville's 400+ papers include key contributions, like his
conservation
of Hamiltonian phase-measure. In 1836, he founded the
Journal de mathématiques pures et appliquées and promoted
the work of others, including Evariste Galois.
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Arthur Cayley (1821-1895)
He wrote 996 papers on many mathematical subjects
(200 of these while praticing law, for 14 years).
In 1858, Cayley established the
Cayley-Hamilton theorem
(a matrix is a zero of its characteristic polynomial) without providing a
formal proof.
Dr Sc. 1875
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Group Th.
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Cayley-Dickson
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Length of a flat ellipse
Leopold Kronecker, algebraist (1823-1891)
Famous for his credo "God made the
natural numbers;
all else is the work of man", Kroneccker
championed constructivism. He strongly opposed his former
student Georg Cantor and the
emerging nonconstructive tenets of
Set Theory.
Ph.D. 1845
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Legendre symbols
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Bernhard Riemann, mathematician (1826-1866)
In 1851, his thesis introduced Riemann surfaces.
His habilitation lecture on the foundations
of geometry (1854) stunned even Gauss.
In 1859, Riemann probed the distribution of primes
with his zeta function
and he formulated the Riemann Hypothesis.
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James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
In 1864, he devised Maxwell's equations
which unify electricity and magnetism, by describing electromagnetic
fields traveling at the speed of light.
In 1866, Maxwell proposed (independently of
Boltzmann) the Maxwell-Boltzmann
kinetic theory of gases.
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Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906)
Boltzmann was a proponent of atomic theory
and the father of statistical mechanics.
Boltzmann's constant is
the coefficient of proportionality between entropy
(in J/k) and the natural logarithm of
the number of allowed physical states.
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Georg Cantor, mathematician (1845-1918)
Cantor's diagonal argument shows that
the points of a line are not countable.
More generally,
Cantor's Theorem
states that no function from a set to its powerset
can possibly be surjective,
which establishes an infinite sequence of increasing
infinities.
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Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro (1853-1925)
In 1884, he started the investigations of quadratic differential forms which led him
to invent tensor calculus
(1884-1894). The text he published about that with
Tullio Levi-Civita
in 1900 would enable Einstein to formulate
General Relativity in 1915.
Ph.D. 1873
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Hendrik A. Lorentz (1853-1928)
Among the many contributions of H.A. Lorentz is
the coordinate transformation
which is the cornerstone of Special Relativity.
In 1892, Lorentz proposed a
theory of the
electron (discovered by Perrin in 1895 and
J.J. Thomson in 1898).
Nobel 1902
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J. Henri Poincaré (1854-1912;
X1873)
Poincaré was the last universal genius and quintessential
absent-minded professor (cf. Savant Cosinus
comic strip).
Poincaré conceived Special Relativity
before Einstein did. His mathematical legacy includes
chaos theory and topology.
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Bruce
Medal 1911
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Nikola Tesla, inventor (1856-1943)
At least 272 patents
were awarded to Tesla in 25 countries.
His work is the basis of modern alternating current
(AC) electric power distribution.
The SI unit of magnetic induction
(magnetic flux density) was named after him, in 1960.
Master of Lightning
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Tesla coil
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Max Planck (1858-1947)
Planck combined the formulas of
Wien (UV) and
Rayleigh (IR) to obtain
a single expression for the whole
blackbody spectrum.
On Dec. 14, 1900, he justified it by proposing that exchanges of
energy only occur in discrete lumps,
which he dubbed quanta.
Nobel 1918
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David Hilbert, mathematician (1862-1943)
One of the most powerful mathematicians ever, David Hilbert gave a famous
list of 23 unsolved problems in 1900. Quantum Theory
is formally based on the complex normed vector spaces
which are named after him.
Hilbert's List
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 Marie Curie, physical chemist (1867-1934)
Marie Sklodowska-Curie was the first woman to earn a Nobel
prize and the first person to earn two.
In 1898, she isolated two new elements (polonium and radium)
by tracking their ionizing radiation, using the electrometer of
Jacques and Pierre Curie.
Nobel 1903
(Physics)
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Nobel 1911
(Chemistry)
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AIP
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Elie Cartan, mathematician (1869-1951)
In 1913, Cartan established, from a purely geometrical standpoint, the relations that
lead to the quantization of spin.
He developed exterior calculus
and published his full Theory of Spinors as a textbook
in 1935.
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Albert Einstein, physicist (1879-1955)
In 1905, Einstein published on
Brownian motion (existence of atoms) the photoelectric effect (discovery of the photon)
and his own
Special Theory of Relativity,
which he would unify with gravity in 1915 by
formulating the General Theory of Relativity.
Nobel 1921 |
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Bonn
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AIP
Emmy Noether, mathematician (1882-1935)
Emmy Noether discovered the remarkable equivalence between symmetries in physical laws
and conserved physical quantities
(Noether's theorem, 1915).
Her considerable legacy also includes
three Isomorphism Theorems named after her (1927).
1918 Paper
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EmmyNoether.com
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Niels Bohr, physicist (1885-1962)
In 1913, Bohr started the quantum revolution
with a model where
the orbital angular momentum
of an electron only has discrete values.
He spearheaded the Copenhagen Interpretation which
holds that quantum phenomena are inherently probabilistic.
Nobel 1922
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Coat of Arms
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"Peter" Hermann Weyl (1885-1955)
In 1908, Weyl obtained his doctorate in mathematics from
Göttingen
under Hilbert.
He was enthralled by the mathematical aspects of physics.
In 1913, Weyl became a
colleague of Einstein's at the
ETH Zürich.
He befriended Shrödinger in 1921.
Ph.D. 1908
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Symmetry (1952)
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Erwin Schrödinger, physicist (1887-1961)
In 1926, Schrödinger matched observed quantum behavior with the properties of
a continuous nonrelativistic wave obeying the
Schrödinger Equation.
In 1935, he challenged the Copenhagen Interpretation,
with the famous tale of Schrödinger's cat.
Nobel 1933
| Nobel
Lecture |
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Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)
Ramanujan lacked a formal mathematical education but, in 1913, a few of his early results
managed to startle
G.H. Hardy
(1877-1947) who invited him to Cambridge in 1914.
Ramanujan has left an unusual legacy of brilliant unconventional results.
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Louis de Broglie, physicist (1892-1987)
In 1923, de Broglie proposed that any particle has
wavelike properties, with a
wavelength inversely proportional to its momentum
(this helps justify Schrödinger's equation).
He predicted interferences for an electron beam hitting a crystal.
Nobel 1929
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Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902-1984)
In 1925, Paul Dirac came up with the formalism
on which quantum mechanics is now based.
In 1928, he discovered a relativistic wave function for the electron,
which predicted the existence of antimatter (first observed by
Anderson in 1932).
Nobel 1933
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Jancsi "John" von Neumann (1903-1957)
He is credited with the
stored program architecture whereby a computer use
its primary memory space to store both the data it operates on and the
codes for the programs it executes.
Von Neumann also pioneered game theory and
decision analysis.
The Scientific 100
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Kurt Gödel, logician (1906-1978)
Grave |
Dangerous Knowledge
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IAS
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André Weil (1906-1998)
Older brother of the philosopher Simone
Weil (unrelated to the politician
Simone Veil)
he was the leading founder of Bourbaki.
Weil created algebraic geometry
and, arguably, charted the course of much abstract mathematics
in the 20-th century.
D.Sc. 1928
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Weil conjectures (1949)
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Wikipedia
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ams
Alan Turing, computer scientist (1912-1954)
A Turing Machine is a finite automaton endowed with an infinite
read/write tape on which it can move back and forth, one step at a time.
Turing showed that this type of machine is actually capable
of computing anything that any other machine could.
The Death of Alan Turing (Video)
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Paul Erdős, mathematician (1913-1996)
Paul Erdös wrote over 1500 papers with 511 collaborators.
He contributed many conjectures and proved some great ones.
Faced with antisemitism, he left Hungary in 1934 and spent the
rest of his frugal life on the road, touring mathematical centers.
Erdös number
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Richard P. Feynman, physicist (1918-1988)
In 1949, he introduced
Feynman diagrams
to describe the relativistic quantum theory of
electromagnetic interactions known as
Quantum
electrodynamics (QED).
This has helped visualize all other types of fundamental interactions ever since.
Nobel 1965
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1972 Interviews
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1979 QED Lectures
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1988
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Steven Weinberg, physicist (1933-)
In 1967, he formulated the electroweak unification of the
weak nuclear force and electromagnetism,
predicting a massive neutral messenger
particle (the Z boson) which was first observed in 1979.
Steven Weinberg gave the Standard Model its name.
home
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Nobel 1979
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Emperor
Has No Clothes Award
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John H. Conway (1937-)
In 1970, Conway found the simple rules of a cellular automaton
(the Game of Life)
capable of self-replication and universal computation.
His many other original contributions include
the ultimate extension of the ordered number line:
surreal numbers.
bibliography
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New York Times
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The 3 Conway sporadic groups
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MacTutor
Sharing Science on the Web
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Giants of Science
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Solvay Conferences
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Armorial
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