HackingTheUniverse

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born in 1826 in Breselenz, Germany. He worked on analytic geometry, algebraic geometry, and both non-euclidean and n-dimensional geometries. Some of this work laid important foundations for Einstein’s theory of relativity. He composed the famous “Riemann Hypothesis” which deals with predicting prime numbers. He was a student under Gauss.
PRECURSOR:
-0575 Pythagoras
-0300 [...]

Francoise Arago was born in 1786 in France and was an astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Some of his work complemented similar work by Faraday and Fresnel. His confirmation of a bright spot of light at the center of a circular shadow helped confirm Fresnel’s wave theory of light and is now known as [...]

Arnold Sommerfeld was born in 1868 in Germany and was a physicist and mathematician. He has become known for cultivating a large group of students who made significant contributions to science, including Pauli, Heisenberg, Debye, Bethe, Pauling and Rabi, all of whom won nobel prizes. There were many more who made significant contributions [...]

Max Born was born in Prussia (then part of Germany, now part of Poland) in 1882 and was a physicist and mathematician who made contributions to quantum theory. He was responsible for interpreting Schrodinger’s wave equation as an expression of probability which became part of what is known as “the Copenhagen Interpretation”.
PRECURSOR:
1831 - Maxwell
1849 [...]

Max Planck was born in 1858 in Kiel, Germany and was the physicist responsible for creating the beginnings of quantum theory. Planck was working on a description of electromagnetic radiation when he discovered that energy is only radiated in discrete bundles, or quanta. A constant derived from the equation he produced is now [...]

Louis de Broglie was born in Dieppe, France in 1892 and was a physicist. He was known primarily for creating the “de Broglie hypothesis”, which associates wavelength characteristics with any moving particle or object. At the time, electrons were being defined mostly as particles, although there had been some evidence developed of both [...]

Erwin Schrodinger was born in Vienna, Austria in 1887 and was a physicist who made major contributions to quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger wave equation describes the state of an atom, including the electrons as mathematical waves. It was later demonstrated that Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics and the wave function were describing the same thing. [...]

Daniel Bernoulli was born in 1700 in the Netherlands and became a mathematician known for his work with fluid dynamics and probability and statistics. In fluid mechanics, “Bernoulli’s Principle” describes the relationships involved amongst fluid speed, pressure differential and potential energy.
PRECURSOR:
1642 - Newton
1662 - Boyle’s law
CONCURRENT:
1707 - Euler
SUBSEQUENT:
1736 - Lagrange
Laplace
1768 - Fourier
SEE ALSO:
timeline of [...]

A gyroscope is a device that can maintain a directional orientation because it is spinning rapidly and the axis of the spin resists being changed. A spinning top is a simple example. The first known gyroscope was documented by Johann Bohnenberger in 1817. In 1851 Leon Foucault demonstrated the Foucault pendulum and [...]

Jean Babtiste Joseph Fourier (known as Joseph) was born in 1768 in France and was a mathematician who became known for his work on heat transfer and the analysis of periodic functions (wave forms) using combinations of trigonometric series. These are now called Fourier series and the process is called Fourier analysis.
PRECURSOR:
1642 - Newton
1700 - [...]