Innovators in Science

#sciencepwr

Ever wondered how the elements got arranged into the periodic table? Why, we have Dmitri Mendeleev to thank for that! In a time when new elements were being discovered regularly, Russian chemist Mendeleev saw the necessity in arranging them into an organized table. His arrangement relied on a pattern, or periodicity, of elemental properties. Not bad for the 14th child born into a family from remote Siberia!

1834-1907

Dmitri Mendeleev

The Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and many more pieces of important legislation have Rachel Carson’s studies and work “Silent Spring” to thank for their inception. Pesticide use and its impact on the natural world was one of Carson’s main focuses in her career. She underwent scrutiny and relentless attacks from the chemical industry, but her research and writings have helped Americans understand the environmental hazards that surround them.1907-1964

Rachel Carson

From surviving a Nazi labor camp to winning the 1981 Nobel Prize, Roald Hoffman has lived a life of heartbreaking drama and scientific genius. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1949 and graduating from Cornell and Harvard, Hoffman focused his attention to chemistry and eventually developed a framework that gave chemists the ability to predict the outcome of reactions.

1937-

Roald Hoffman

Lonnie Johnson grew up in segregated Alabama and dreamed determinedly of being an inventor. After high school, Johnson attained his degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering before joining the U.S. Air Force and working for NASA. Lonnie Johnson is most well-known, however, for inventing the wildly popular Super Soaker water gun! More recently, Johnson has been working in Palo Alto, CA on the Johnson Thermo-Electrochemical Converter System- an invention that converts heat to energy with no moving parts!

1949-

Lonnie Johnson

In a time when knowledge was simply handed down from predecessors, Rene Descartes relied solely on his own proven facts, rather than established beliefs. Mathematics was his focus, for he deemed that geometry and numbers could teach volumes about the world. In seventeenth-century Europe, however, these were radical thoughts. The French mathematician’s innovative ideas helped to kick off the scientific revolution and transform the way society viewed the world! Descartes is also known for the phrase, “I think, therefore I am.”1596-1650

René Descartes

Even though he spoke several languages and traveled the world extensively, Paul Dirac was noted for going long periods of time without saying a single word. Coined the “British Einstein,” modern biographers have speculated that Dirac had undiagnosed autism. Contemporaries of Dirac found him immensely remarkable, for he was able to theorize quantum physics out of seemingly thin air! Notably, the British physicist introduced the scientific community to the first instance of antimatter, the antielectron

1902-1984

Paul Dirac

Muhammad al-Khwarizmi was a Muslim scholar who lived in Baghdad during a time when the city was at the center of a cultural and ideological transformation. Trade routes connecting Europe with Asia traveled through Baghdad and carried commerce and goods, as well as ideas and philosophies. Muhammad al-Khwarizmi is known as one of the creators of algebra and he expanded on Hindu-Arabic numeration to further demonstrate equations and “the act of completion”- or al-jabr.

c.780-c.850

Muhammad al-Khwarizmi

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell fused his mathematical knowledge with his scientific curiosity to develop theories surrounding electromagnetism, viscosity, light, electricity, and photography. Maxwell’s advances in photography and light resulted in a better understanding of the way colors mix together and in 1861 he took a color photograph of a tartan ribbon- the world’s first color photograph!

1831-1879

James Clerk Maxwell

Dorothy C. Hodgkin is a shining example of sheer perseverance. Over the course of 35 years, Hodgkin dedicated her life to crystallography, a technique used to help understand molecules. Because of this devotion to science, Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize for her studies and breakthroughs surrounding the structure of molecules such as penicillin, insulin, vitamin B-12, and cholesterol.

1910-1994

Dorothy C. Hodgkin

Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla gained fame in his lifetime for creating alternating-current machinery while simultaneously embattling himself in a “War of Currents” with American inventor Thomas Edison. In addition to developing the AC system in the hopes of creating a global, wireless communication structure, Tesla also helped to influence many other patents, including the induction motor, dynamos, remote controls, and X-ray technology.

1856-1943

Nikola Tesla