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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 to [...]

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 [...]

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 of the earliest [...]

Aristarchus was born on the island of Samos in Greece around -0310. He was a mathematician and philospher and probably the first on record to propose that the Earth circled around the Sun instead of the other way around. He wrote a work titled, “On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun and Moon” which [...]

Albert Einstein was born in Wurttemburg, Germany in 1879 and become known as one of the greatest physicists and thinkers. PRECURSOR: -0300 – Euclid 1564 – Galileo 1642 – Newton 1777 – Gauss 1826 – Riemann 1831 – Maxwell 1838 – Mach 1849 – Klein 1853 – Lorentz 1854 – Poincare 1858 – Planck 1862 [...]

Galileo knew that pumps had a problem pushing water to an elevation above thirty feet and had theorized that a vacuum might be involved. At the time, the idea of a vacuum was controversial and there was no observational evidence that it could exist. He assigned one of his students, Torricelli to work on this [...]

Isaac Newton was born in 1643 in Linconshire, England. He made exceptional contributions to physics, mathematics and astronomy and was also accomplished in philosophy and theology. His laws of motion and gravity became landmarks for centuries. He and Liebnitz independently developed calculus. He investigated the refraction of light and created the first working reflecting telescope. [...]

Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy in 1564. He was an astronomer, physicist, mathematician and philospher. Galileo made improvements to the newly invented telescope and then used it to discover and make observations of the moons around Jupiter and published his findings advocating the heliocentric ideas authored by Copernicus. Galileo taught at the University [...]

Nicolaus Copernicus was born in 1473 in Poland. He is known as the first astronomer to claim that the Sun is at the center of the solar system with the Earth rotating about it. Copernicus studied at the Universities of Bologna and Padua in Italy. He studied astronomy with a famous astronomer of the time [...]