Intellect PlusScientists, inventors and mathematicians
349 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 6.
Hilbert's 1900 problem list steered a century of mathematicsIn 1900 David Hilbert presented a set of unsolved problems that shaped what mathematicians worked on for the next hundred years. He turned Gottingen into the world's leading mathe…
Dennis Ritchie's C language lives inside almost every modern programming languageWorking with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie created the C language and helped build Unix, whose name began as a pun. C shaped C++, Java and C sharp, and Unix thinking r…
The father of fibre optics realised the glass, not the idea, was faultyIn the early 1960s, light sent down glass fibres faded so fast that the idea looked hopeless for communications. Charles Kao, a young engineer in Harlow, England, showed the losse…
The geologist who taught Darwin to think in deep timeCharles Lyell argued that the forces shaping Earth today, erosion, earthquakes and volcanoes working at ordinary rates, could explain its entire history if given enough time. His …
Caroline Herschel was raised for housework and became the first salaried woman scientistTyphus left Caroline Herschel barely 1.30 metres tall and blind in one eye, and her mother planned a life of servitude for her. Instead she followed her brother William to England…
Charles Parsons gatecrashed Queen Victoria's naval review in a turbine-powered speedboatIn June 1897, with admirals and a prince looking on, an uninvited little vessel called Turbinia tore through the fleet at 34 knots, faster than anything the Royal Navy owned. Its …
Babbage's difference engine finally worked in 1991, 120 years after his deathCharles Babbage designed a mechanical calculator and a programmable computer in the 19th century but never saw either completed. In 1991 engineers built his difference engine from…
Before the Beagle, young Darwin was a bored medical student and beetle hunterThe man who explained how species change nearly became a country parson. Charles Darwin found medical lectures dull and surgery distressing, preferred riding and shooting at Cambr…
Expelled over a deformed foot, Charles Hermite went on to prove e transcendentalThe École Polytechnique turned Charles Hermite away after a single year because of a deformity in his right foot. He never graduated from it, yet came back as an examiner and prof…
Cai Lun, the palace eunuch who made paper cheap enough to replace bambooOf the men behind China's Four Great Inventions, only one is known by name, and he did not strictly invent anything. Paper had existed for three centuries before Cai Lun, a Han co…
Gauss beat Cooley and Tukey to the fast Fourier transform by 160 yearsA bricklayer's son from Brunswick, Carl Friedrich Gauss devised the fast Fourier transform, named non-Euclidean geometry and co-built an electromagnetic telegraph, yet let much of…
Jacobi's research advice to students was three words: invert, always invertCarl Jacobi told students hunting for a problem to take a known result and turn it upside down. He had done exactly that with elliptic integrals, flipping them into elliptic funct…
The father of taxonomy was nearly apprenticed to a cobblerHis schoolmasters told his father the boy would never be a scholar, and Carl Linnaeus was almost sent off to learn shoemaking. He kept skipping lessons to hunt plants instead. A l…
Carl Sagan asked a Brooklyn librarian about stars and got film starsA small boy in Bensonhurst walked into the public library and asked for a book on stars. The librarian handed him portraits of Hollywood actors. When she found the right book, it …
Avicenna's medical textbook was still taught in Europe six centuries laterIbn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was a royal physician at 17, a vizier, a fugitive and a prisoner. Along the way he wrote The Canon of Medicine, which European universitie…
Barbara McClintock found jumping genes, then stopped publishing because nobody believed herIn the 1940s and 1950s Barbara McClintock discovered that pieces of DNA can move around a genome, switching traits on and off. Colleagues were so sceptical that in 1953 she quit p…
A coastline looks just as jagged from space as at your feetBenoit Mandelbrot noticed that clouds, coastlines and even cotton prices share a hidden kind of order: they stay equally rough however closely you look. He named such shapes fract…
Riemann's housekeeper threw away some of his unpublished mathematicsBernhard Riemann, a shy pastor's son who died at 39, laid the geometric groundwork for Einstein's relativity and posed the most famous unsolved problem in mathematics. He refused …- In 628, Brahmagupta wrote the first rules for calculating with zeroBabylonians used zero as a placeholder and Romans as a sign of absence, but a 30-year-old Indian astronomer was the first to treat it as a number you can add, subtract and multipl…
- Apollonius named the ellipse, parabola and hyperbola after a bookkeeping ideaSlice a cone at different angles and you get three curves whose names we owe to Apollonius of Perga. They come from a Greek geometric test of whether an area fits a square exactly…
Archimedes' famous legends are shakier than his mathematicsThe naked dash shouting Eureka comes from a writer two centuries later. The water screw probably predates him, the sun-focusing heat ray first appears centuries after his death, a…
Arthur Cayley wrote hundreds of maths papers while working as a London lawyerFor fourteen years Arthur Cayley earned his living drawing up property deeds, and in his spare hours produced between two and three hundred mathematics papers. He and his friend J…- The word sine began as Aryabhata's 'half-chord' and a translator's mix-upAryabhata called the sine ardha-jya, half-chord. Arabic translators wrote it jiba, which without vowels became jb, then was misread as jaib, a fold in a garment. In the 12th centu…
Augustin Fresnel's stepped lens made lighthouses visible for milesSuspended from his road-building job after opposing Napoleon's return from Elba, a sickly French engineer used the idle months at his mother's house to begin experimenting with li…
Augustin-Louis Cauchy: brilliant mathematician, stubborn royalist, dreadful tutorMore concepts and theorems carry Cauchy's name than any other mathematician's, sixteen in elasticity alone. Yet he spent five years in exile tutoring a teenage prince who hated ma…
André-Marie Ampère, the self-taught 'Newton of electricity'Ampère never attended school. His father, a devotee of Rousseau, let him educate himself in the family library, where he began advanced mathematics at 12. In 1820 he heard of a co…
Andrey Kolmogorov gave probability its rules in a single 1933 bookAt six, Andrey Kolmogorov noticed that 1, then 1 plus 3, then 1 plus 3 plus 5 always add up to a perfect square. By 30 he had written the axioms modern probability still rests on,…
Lavoisier weighed his way to modern chemistry, and tax farming cost him his lifeAntoine Lavoisier named oxygen, showed that mass survives every chemical change, and helped design the metric system. He paid for it all with money from the Ferme générale, France…- A Delft cloth merchant found microbes and hid how he did itAntonie van Leeuwenhoek sold linen and ribbon in Delft and wanted a better look at his thread. His homemade lenses revealed bacteria, sperm cells and red blood cells, yet he guard…
- Handed fourteen open problems, a stateless student solved them all within monthsAround 1949, two leading mathematicians in Nancy showed a newcomer their latest paper, which closed with 14 unsolved questions. Within a few months Alexander Grothendieck had inve…
- Before crossing the Americas, Humboldt was a mine inspector who paid for a miners' schoolLong before he climbed higher than any Westerner had gone, Alexander von Humboldt inspected Prussian mines. In his first year, gold ore output beat the previous eight years combin…
Alfred Kinsey spent two decades measuring gall wasps before he studied peopleSome 5 million of the insects in the American Museum of Natural History are gall wasps, all gathered by one man. Alfred Kinsey took 26 measurements of each of hundreds of thousand…
The famous merchant of death obituary may never have been printedThe tale goes that a French paper mistook his brother's death for Alfred Nobel's in 1888 and branded him the merchant of death, shaming him into founding the prizes. Historians ca…
Wallace lost his Amazon collection to fire at sea, then sailed eastIn 1852, twenty-five days out from Brazil, the cargo of Alfred Russel Wallace's ship caught fire. Two years of his finest Amazon specimens went down, and he drifted ten days in an…
A lecture invitation put Alfred Tarski on the last ship from PolandIn August 1939 the logician Alfred Tarski sailed for a congress at Harvard on what proved the final ship from Poland to America before the invasion. He went reluctantly, leaving h…
Avogadro's big idea was ignored until four years after he diedIn 1811 a provincial physics teacher proposed that equal volumes of any gas, at the same temperature and pressure, hold equal numbers of molecules. Almost nobody paid attention. O…
For 1,400 years anatomists kept finding holes in the heart that weren't thereGalen's theory needed tiny openings between the heart's two ventricles, and generation after generation of anatomists dutifully reported seeing them. Andreas Vesalius simply admit…- Every algorithm carries the name of a ninth-century scholar from KhwarazmWhen Europeans translated a Baghdad arithmetic book into Latin in the 12th century, its author's name came out as Algoritmi. That garbled label became our word algorithm, and the …
- A monkey chewing lute strings pointed a Cordoba surgeon toward dissolving stitchesAl-Zahrawi, a tenth-century surgeon in Cordoba, reportedly noticed that his pet monkey had eaten the gut strings of his oud and digested them. Catgut, he realised, was a natural m…
Alexander Graham Bell's telephone began with a book he misreadAs a teenager, Alexander Bell struggled through a French edition of Helmholtz's work on sound and wrongly concluded the German scientist had sent vowels electrically. If vowels co…
Before cracking Enigma, a teenage Turing cycled 60 miles to reach schoolHis first day at Sherborne School fell during the 1926 General Strike, with no trains running. Thirteen-year-old Alan Turing simply got on his bicycle and rode alone from Southamp…
Michelson chased the speed of light for fifty years because it was funAsked why he devoted his life to light, Albert Michelson reputedly answered that it was so much fun. He timed beams bouncing between California mountains 22 miles apart, fought fo…
Einstein promised his Nobel money to his ex-wife before he had won itWhen Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić divorced on 14 February 1919, part of the settlement said that if he ever won a Nobel Prize, the cash would go to her. It was a bet on his ow…
The first battery grew out of an argument about frogs' legsLuigi Galvani believed twitching frog legs revealed a special animal electricity. Alessandro Volta suspected the frog was merely a detector and the real source was the two differe…
Fleming paid lab staff threepence per tear, years before penicillinIn 1921 Alexander Fleming noticed that a drop of his own runny-nose mucus dissolved bacteria on a culture plate. To test other fluids, his team spent weeks squeezing lemons into t…
The Baghdad doctor who chose a hospital site by watching meat rotAsked to build the largest hospital of the Abbasid Caliphate, the Persian physician al-Razi reportedly hung pieces of fresh meat around Baghdad and picked the spot where they spoi…
For two centuries, the famous portrait of Legendre showed the wrong manTextbooks, paintings and articles long illustrated the mathematician Adrien-Marie Legendre with a profile sketch labelled simply Legendre. In 2005 someone noticed it actually depi…- Al-Biruni reasoned his way to an unknown continent across the oceanIn 1037, centuries before Columbus sailed, the Persian scholar al-Biruni argued that land must lie in the great ocean between Asia and Europe. His logic was geometric: Afro-Eurasi…
The brilliant, controversial, and deeply flawed architect of the DNA double helixJames Watson’s discovery of the DNA structure changed biology forever, yet his legacy is inseparable from the shadows of scientific controversy. From the Nobel Prize to the loss o…