Scientists, Mathmaticians, and Explorers Flashcards
Wilhelm Röntgen
German physicist, 1845-1923 (78)
Nobel prize in physics, 1901
X-Rays, bitch!
Alfred Nobel
Swiss chemist, 1833-1896 (63)
Invented dynamite, founder of Nobel prize
Frederick Sanger
British biologist, 1918-2013 (85)
Nobel prizes in chemistry (1958, 1980)
Structure of proteins, esp. insulin
Who is “The Father of Geology”?
James Hutton (Scottish, 1726-1797 [71])
Who invented the laser, and when?
Charles Hard Townes (1915-2015), 1964
Nicolaus Copernicus
Polish astronomer, 1473-1543
Heliocentricism, bitch
Who invented the transistor, and when?
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, at Bell Labs in 1947.
William Shockley, as it turns out, is a racist, eugenics-loving wacko.
Edward Jenner
British physiscian, 1749-1823
Smallpox vaccine, “father of immunology”
Georg Cantor
German mathematician, 1845-1918
Founder of set theory
Transfinite numbers
“No one shall expell us from the paradise that Cantor has created” - Hilbert
Opposed by Poincaré, Kronecker, and Wittgenstein
Marie Curie
1867-1934 (67)
Polish born, French by marriage
Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Physics (one of four people to be twice laureates)
Tycho Brahe
Danish astronomer, 1546-1601
James Hutton
“Father of Geology”
Scottish, 1726-1797 (71)
John Venn
British mathematician, 1834-1923 (89)
Charles Hard Townes
American physicist, 1915-2015
Won Nobel Prize in 1964 for work leading to the invention of the laser
Donald Glaser
American physicist, 1926-2013 (87)
1960 Nobel prize in physics for invention of the bubble chamber (proving wrong one of Fermi’s conclusions)
Maryam Mirzakhani
Iranian, 1977-2017 (40)
Stanford
Fields Medal, 2014
Who led the first successful expidition to the geographic South Pole?
Roald Amundsen (Norwegan, 1872-1928), in 1911. Amundsen disappeared in the Barents Sea in 1928 at the age of 55.
Amerigo Vespucci
Italian explorer, 1454-1512
Explored the coast of South America
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
German mathematician, 1646-1716
Roald Amundsen
Norwegian explorer, 1872-1928
First to reach South Pole in 1911
Disappeared in Barents Sea in 1928
Enrico Fermi
Italian physicist, 1901-1954
Discovered first nuclear chain reaction, Fermi paradox
Columbia, University of Chicago (many more in Europe)
From his deathbed, when asked what he would first ask his maker: “The cause and nature of turbulence”
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
French mathematician, 1789-1857 (68)
Analysis (esp. complex), among the first to rigorously prove theorems of calculus
Linus Pauling
American chemist, 1901-1994 (93)
born in Portland -> OSU -> Cal Tech -> UCSD -> Stanford
One of founders of quantum chemistry and molecular biology
Won Nobel prizes in chemistry and peace, the only person to win two unshared Nobel prizes
Charles Darwin
British naturalist, 1809-1882
Four people are twice Nobel laureates; who are they?
Marie Curie, Linus Pauling, John Bardeen, Frederick Sanger
Ferdinand Magellan
Portuguese explorer, 1480-1521
First circumnavigation of Earth
First expedition to Asia (from Europe
First expedition across Atlantic, through Straight of Magellan, to Pacific
Who invented modern air conditioning?
Willis Carrier (American, 1876-1950, age 64)
Sir Francis Galton
English polymath, 1822-1911 (89)
Created statistical correlation
Promoted regression to the mean
Into eugenics and racism 👎
Who won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry?
Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless; “click chemistry”
Who invented the transistor, and when?
John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, Bell Labs, 1947
Thomas Bayes
English statistician, philosopher, and Presbyterian minister, 1701-1761 (60).
Otto Warburg
German physiologist, 1883-1970
Nobel prize in 1931 for his “discovery of the nature and mode of action of the respiratory enzyme”
Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology, Berlin (now located in Tübingen)
John Goodenough
American physicist, 1922-2023 (100). Won Nobel prize in chemistry in 2019 for work on Li-ion batteries. MIT, UT Austin
