HackingTheUniverse

You are browsing the archives of History of Science and Technology.

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 [...]

Wolfgang Pauli was born in Vienna, Austria in 1900 and was a physicist known as one of the creators of quantum mechanics. He particularly become known for the “Pauli Exclusion Principle” which states that no two electrons can be in the same quantum state at the same time.
PRECURSOR:
1831 - Maxwell
1838 - Mach
1853 - Lorentz
1858 [...]

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. [...]

Heron was born around 0010 and was a Greek mathematician, engineer and inventor who lived in Alexandria, Egypt when it was a province of the Roman Empire. He designed the first known simple steam engine (the aeolipile or Hero’s engine), the first vending machine, a wind powered organ, a water displacement pump (fire engine [...]

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 [...]