HackingTheUniverse

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Marin Mersenne was born in France in 1588 and studied theology, philosophy, mathematics and music. He is known for some of the first major contributions to acoustics and for his work compiling a list of large prime numbers by using the form 2^p - 1 where p is a known prime number. [raise 2 [...]

In 1698 Thomas Savery patented a steam powered pump which he called “the miner’s friend” because it was intended to help pump water out of mines. He may have copied the design from a previously published book by Edward Somerset. The device had no piston and almost no moving parts, working through the [...]

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1646 and became known primarily for his contributions to philosophy and mathematics but was also accomplished in many other fields. He created the modern binary number system that is used by computers and at the same time as Newton, invented calculus.
PRECURSOR:
Descartes
Pascal
Huygens
CONCURRENT:
Newton
Spinoza
SUBSEQUENT:
Cauchy
1826 - Riemann
Mandelbrot

Rene Descartes was born in France in 1596. He is known as “the father of modern philosophy” and also contributed to mathematics and general science. The cartesian coordinate system is named for him and he created analytic geometry. He also did some work in the field of optics, with both refraction and reflection.
Prior to Descartes, [...]

Blaise Pascal was born in 1623 in Clermont, France. He is mostly known as being an outstanding mathematician, but also was a physicist and philosopher. He made significant contributions to the areas of conic sections and projective geometry. Pascal’s triangle is a number matrix in the shape of a triangle with the numbers staggered [...]

Niccolo Fontana was born in Brescia, Italy around 1500 and became known as Tartaglia, which was a knickname meaning stammerer; the result of sabre wounds to his jaw. In 1537 he wrote Nova Scienta, which applied mathematical principles to the trajectories of cannonballs. This work later influenced Galileo. He produced both some [...]

Tycho Brahe was born in 1546 in Sweden. He was an astronomer and alchemist who is known for his contributions to astronomy. While he was probably the last astronomer to work mostly without a telescope, he revolutionized the use of precise instrumentation in astronomy. Because of this precision, he was able to discover and document [...]

Boyle’s law describes the inverse relationship between pressure and volume in gases. In a closed system if temperature stays constant and either pressure or volume increases, the other (pressure or volume) will decrease proportionally.
PRECURSOR:
barometer
SUCCESSOR:
Robert Hooke
ideal gas law

Born in 1571 in the Stuttgart region of Germany, Johannes Kepler was a mathematician and astronomer. Kepler became the first published defender of the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. He described planetary orbits as platonic solids and then realized that the orbits are eliptical.
Kepler studied the golden ration and wrote this about it:
“Geometry has two [...]

While optics and the principles of magnification had been studied for hundreds of years, the first real microscope was crafted by three lensmakers in Holland around 1595.
PRECURSOR:
SUCCESSOR:
telescope