Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

Related Topics

• Electromagnetic Spectrum
• Linear Equations
• Applied Physics
• Nano Technology
• Engineering Sciences
• Mathematical Medicine
• Fluid dynamics
• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
• Onfrared Optics
• Relative Velocity
• Iciam
• Intelligent Imaging Neuroscience
• Biomedical Engineering
• Neuroscience Research
• Quantum Cosmology
• Brain Research

• Alice Roberts
• Amir Aczel
• Are We Alone?
• Ask A Biologist
• Bas Haring
• BBC
• BBC Focus
• BBC Horizon
• Ben Goldacre
• Bill Bryson
• Bill Nye
• Bob Berman
• Brian Clegg
• Brian Greene
• Brian J. Ford
• Carl Sagan
• Carl Zimmer
• CBC Radio
• Chriet Titulaer
• Chris Lintott
• Christopher Hitchens
• Colin Tudge
• Cosmos Magazine
• Daily Planet
• Daniel Dennett
• Daniel J. Boorstin
• David Attenborough
• David Bellamy
• David Bodanis
• David Suzuki
• David X. Cohen
• Desmond Morris
• Discover (magazine)
• Discovery Channel
• Don Herbert
• Douglas Hofstadter
• Exploratorium
• Forensic
• Fred Pearce
• Fritjof Capra
• Frontiers of Science
• Fulvio Melia
• Futurama
• General audience
• George Gamow
• Guru Magazine
• Heinz Haber
• Howard Bloom
• HowStuffWorks
• Isaac Asimov
• J. B. S. Haldane
• Jacob Bronowski
• James Gleick
• Jamie Hyneman
• Jared Diamond
• Jay Ingram
• Jayant Narlikar
• Jim Al-Khalili
• John Acorn
• John Allen Paulos
• John D. Barrow
• John Gribbin
• Johnny Ball
• Julius Sumner Miller
• Kalinga Prize
• Karl Kruszelnicki
• Kenneth Feder
• Kevin Warwick
• Kirsten Sanford
• Lawrence Krauss
• Lewis Wolpert
• Maggie Aderin-Pocock
• Magnus Pyke
• Marcus Chown
• Marcus Du Sautoy
• Martin Gardner
• Matt Ridley
• Medicine Magazine
• Michael Faraday
• Michio Kaku
• Mr Science Show
• Mr. Wizard
• MythBusters
• Natalie Angier
• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• New Scientist
• Nigel Calder
• Nova (series)
• NPR
• Oliver Sacks
• Olivia Judson
• Omni (magazine)
• Patrick Moore
• Paul Davies
• PBS
• Peter Atkins
• Peter Fairley
• Pharyngula (blog)
• Phil Plait
• Popular science
• Popular Science
• Pseudoscience
• PZ Myers
• Quirks & Quarks
• Richard Dawkins
• Richard Feynman
• Richard Leakey
• Richard Lewontin
• Roald Hoffmann
• Robert Krulwich
• Robert Olby
• Robert Winston
• Roger Lewin
• Science
• Science (magazine)
• Science Friday
• Science journalism
• Science News
• Science outreach
• Scientific American
• Seed (magazine)
• Seth Shostak
• Simon Singh
• Sir Arthur Eddington
• Stephen Hawking
• Stephen Jay Gould
• Steve Irwin
• Steven Novella
• Steven Pinker
• Steven Rose
• TED (conference)
• The Bell Curve
• The Crocodile Hunter
• The Loom
• This Week in Science
• Thomas Hager
• Tor Nørretranders
• Total depravity
• V. S. Ramachandran
• Wikipedia Bare URLs
• WP REFLINKS
• Yakov I. Perelman
• Yoshiro Nakamatsu
• 
  

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  Exploratorium
  The Exploratorium is a museum in San Francisco with over 475 participatory exhibits, all of them made onsite, that mix science and art. It also aims to promote museums as informal education centers.
  Founded in 1969 by physicist and educator Frank Oppenheimer, the Exploratorium offers visitors a variety of ways—including exhibits, webcasts, websites and events—to explore and understand the world around them. In 2011, the Exploratorium received the National Science Board 2011 Public Service Science Award for its contributions to public understanding of science and engineering.
  The Exploratorium was founded in 1969 by Frank Oppenheimer, a noted experimental physicist and university professor. He served as the museum’s director until his death in 1985.
  In 1949, Oppenheimer was forced to resign from his position at the University of Minnesota as a result of inquiry by the House Un-American Activities Committee. He was drawn into the local high school in Pagosa Springs, Colorado, where he taught for several years. When Oppenheimer returned to university physics in 1959, he focused on improving laboratory teaching, developing a "Library of Experiments" in which students could explore physical phenomena. Oppenheimer was invited to do the initial planning for a new branch of the Smithsonian, but he turned it down to work on what he called his "San Francisco project." He was convinced of the need for public museums to supplement science curricula at all levels. He toured Europe and studied museums on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965. Then in 1969, with a $50,000 grant from the San Francisco Foundation, the Exploratorium opened at the Palace of Fine Arts.
  
  wn.com/Exploratorium

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  Adam Savage
  Adam Whitney Savage (born July 15, 1967) is an American industrial design and special effects designer/fabricator, actor, educator, and co-host of the Discovery Channel television series MythBusters. His model work has appeared in major films, including Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones and The Matrix Reloaded. He is a prominent member of the skeptic community. He lives in San Francisco with his twin sons and wife, Julia.
  Born in New York City, Savage was raised in Sleepy Hollow in Westchester County New York. He graduated from Sleepy Hollow High School in 1985. His father, Whitney Lee Savage (1928-1998), was a painter, filmmaker and animator known for his work on Sesame Street, and has a permanent exhibit in the Avampato Discovery Museum. His mother is a psychotherapist. His sister Kate Savage is also an artist. As a teenager in Sleepy Hollow, he routinely visited the local bike shop to have flat tires fixed. The shop showed him how to do the repairs himself. From this experience, Savage said, "I realized you could take a bike apart and put it back together and it wasn't that hard...I've been building and putting bicycles together since then."
  
  wn.com/Adam_Savage
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  Alice Roberts
  Alice May Roberts (born 1973) is an English anatomist, osteoarchaeologist, anthropologist, paleopathologist, television presenter, and author.
  Best known for her TV appearances in the BBC series Coast, Dr Alice Roberts: Don't Die Young, and The Incredible Human Journey, she has also appeared as an expert osteoarchaeologist on the Channel 4 television series Time Team and its spin-off show Extreme Archaeology, as well as presenting the BBC series, Digging for Britain (2010).
  Roberts was born in Bristol in 1973 and attended The Red Maids' School in Westbury-on-Trym, in the north of Bristol. She was a medical student at University of Wales College of Medicine (then part of the University of Wales, now part of Cardiff University) and qualified in 1997 as a medical doctor with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MB BCh) having gained an intercalated Bachelor of Science (BSc) in anatomy.
  After graduating in 1997, Roberts worked in clinical medicine as a junior doctor with the National Health Service in South Wales for 18 months. In 1998 she left clinical medicine and worked as an anatomy demonstrator in the Anatomy Department at the University of Bristol, becoming a lecturer there in 1999. She spent more than seven years working part-time on her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in paleopathology, the study of disease in ancient human remains. She worked as Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Bristol Centre for Comparative and Clinical Anatomy where her main roles were teaching clinical anatomy, embryology, and physical anthropology, as well as researching osteoarchaeology and paleopathology. She stated in 2009 that she was working towards becoming a professor of anatomy.
  
  wn.com/Alice_Roberts
• Amir Aczel
  Amir D. Aczel (born November 6, 1950) is a lecturer in mathematics and the history of mathematics and science, and an author of popular books on mathematics and science.
  Amir D. Aczel was born in Haifa, Israel. Aczel's father was the captain of a passenger ship that sailed primarily in the Mediterranean Sea. When he was ten, Aczel's father taught his son how to steer a ship and navigate. This inspired Aczel's book The Riddle of the Compass.
  When Aczel was 21 he studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated with a BA in mathematics in 1975, and received a Master of Science in 1976. Several years later Aczel earned a Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Oregon.
  Aczel has taught mathematics at universities in California, Alaska, Massachusetts, Italy, and Greece. He married his wife Debra in 1984 and has one daughter and one stepdaughter. He accepted a professorship at Bentley College in Massachusetts where he taught classes on the history of science and the history of mathematics. While teaching at Bentley, Aczel wrote several non-technical books on mathematics and science, as well as two textbooks. His book, Fermat's Last Theorem (ISBN 978-1-56858-077-7), was a United States bestseller and was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Aczel has appeared on CNN, CNBC, The History Channel, and Nightline. Aczel was a 2004 Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and Visiting Scholar in the History of Science at Harvard University (2007). Since 2003, he has been a research fellow at the Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, and as of Fall 2011 has been teaching mathematics courses at University of Massachusetts Boston as a part-time lecturer.
  
  wn.com/Amir_Aczel
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  Bas Haring
  Sebastiaan (Bas) Haring (born April 23, 1968 in De Bilt) is a Dutch philosopher and writer of popular science and children's literature. He holds a temporary special professor chair (bijzonder LUF Hoogleraar) in the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Leiden. He also acts as a television presenter for the public broadcasting association RVU.
  Haring first achieved prominence with his 2001 children's book Cheese and the Theory of Evolution in which he explained evolution and its implications. The book received several awards and has been translated into ten different languages. His book For a Successful Life was published in 2008 by Beautiful Books Limited (UK).
  
  wn.com/Bas_Haring
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  Bill Bryson
  William McGuire "Bill" Bryson, OBE, (born December 8, 1951) is a best-selling American author of humorous books on travel, as well as books on the English language and on science. Born an American, he was a resident of Britain for most of his adult life before returning to the US in 1995. In 2003 Bryson moved back to Britain, living in the old rectory of Wramplingham, Norfolk, and was appointed Chancellor of Durham University.
  Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of William and Mary Bryson. (In 2006 Bryson published The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a humorous account of his childhood years in Des Moines.) His mother was of Irish stock. He has an older brother, Michael and a sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth.
  Bryson attended Drake University for two years before dropping out in 1972, deciding to instead backpack around Europe for four months. He returned to Europe the following year with a high school friend, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz. Some of his experiences from this trip are relived as flashbacks in Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe, which documents a similar journey Bryson made twenty years later.
  
  wn.com/Bill_Bryson
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  Bob Berman
  Robert Berman — known as Bob Berman — is an American astronomer, author, and science popularizer. He is director of the Storm King Observatory in Cornwall, New York, and of the Overlook Observatory in Woodstock, New York, USA. He was an adjunct professor of astronomy at the performing arts college, Marymount Manhattan College from 1996 to 2000 and has appeared on CBS This Morning, the Today Show, and Late Night with David Letterman.
  In 1976, Berman founded the Catskill Astronomical Society. Beginning in 1988, he has run the summer astronomy program at Yellowstone National Park (most years). He was the "Sky Lights" and "Night Watchman" astronomy columnist for Discover from 1989 to 2006. He is currently Astronomy Magazine's "Strange Universe" columnist. He is also responsible for the astronomy section of The Old Farmer's Almanac. He has lead aurora and eclipse expeditions as far away as the Arctic and Antarctic. Berman conducts a weekly radio broadcast, "Skywindow", and a monthly, hour-long call-in show on Northeast Public Radio. He was keynote speaker at Starfest 2007. He is also heard nightly on Slooh.com
  
  wn.com/Bob_Berman
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  Brian Clegg
  Brian Clegg (born 1955) is an English author and popular science writer. He has written a range of popular science books, covering topics including light, infinity, quantum entanglement and surviving the impact of climate change, and biographies of Roger Bacon and Eadweard Muybridge.
  Born in Rochdale, Lancashire, UK, Clegg was educated at the Manchester Grammar School and went on to read Natural Science (specializing in experimental physics) at Cambridge University. After graduating, he spent a year at Lancaster University where he gained a second MA in Operational Research, a discipline originally developed during the Second World War to apply the power of mathematics to warfare. It has since been widely applied to problem solving and decision making in business.
  From Lancaster, he joined British Airways, where he formed a new department tasked with providing all PC hardware, software and consultancy to the airline. When this was successfully running, he set up the Emerging Technologies Group, a team of the most eccentric but talented staff in the company, who researched and trialled technologies from fingerprint recognition to electronic cash. This emphasis on innovation led to training with Dr. Edward de Bono, and in 1994 he left BA to set up his own creativity consultancy, running courses on the development of new ideas and products, and the creative solution of business problems. His clients include the BBC, the Met Office, British Airways, GlaxoSmithKline, Sony, Royal Bank of Scotland and many other blue-chips.
  
  wn.com/Brian_Clegg
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  Brian Greene
  Brian Greene (born February 9, 1963) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. He has been a professor at Columbia University since 1996. Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point. He has become known to a wider audience through his books for the general public, The Elegant Universe, Icarus at the Edge of Time, The Fabric of the Cosmos, The Hidden Reality, and a related PBS television special. Greene also appeared on The Big Bang Theory episode "The Herb Garden Germination."
  Greene was born in New York City. His father, Alan Greene, was a one-time vaudeville performer and high school dropout who later worked as a voice coach and composer. After attending Stuyvesant High School, Greene entered Harvard in 1980 to concentrate in physics. After completing his bachelor's degree, Greene earned his doctorate from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, graduating in 1987. While at Oxford, Greene also studied piano with the concert pianist Jack Gibbons.
  
  wn.com/Brian_Greene
• Brian J. Ford
  Brian J. Ford (born 1939 in Corsham, Wiltshire ) is an independent research biologist, author, and lecturer, who publishes on scientific issues for the general public. He has also been a television personality for more than 40 years.
  Ford attended Cardiff University between 1959 and 1961, and left before graduating to set up his own multi-disciplinary laboratory.
  Ford has campaigned on the mis-use of forensic data in courts and the misuse of dangerous germs^[vague], which have resulted in new laws being passed.^{[citation needed]} Ford's current research interests include e-learning, for which he is based at the University of Leicester.
  Ford's other publications range from microbial research and elucidating newly threatening infections to examining scientists' dissatisfaction with their lot. Other areas of his interests are the invention of a space microscope commissioned by Brunel University, to be used by European Space Agency^{[citation needed]}, safety of the water supply and the rising incidence of head lice and bed bugs, his discovery of new phenomena in blood coagulation, the of plants excretory mechanisms of plants and investigations of the 'ingenuity' of living cells that alter our understanding of the living cell. Ford's proposal for biohazard legislation led to supportive articles in Nature and The Times and has led to the introduction of worldwide biohazard controls.
  
  wn.com/Brian_J._Ford
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  Carl Sagan
  Carl Edward Sagan ( /ˈseɪɡɪn/; November 9, 1934 – December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and natural sciences. He published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He advocated scientifically skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).
  Sagan is known for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. Sagan wrote the novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name.
  Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Ukrainian Jewish family. His father, Sam Sagan, was an immigrant garment worker from Kamenets-Podolsk, Ukraine; his mother, Rachel Molly Gruber, a housewife. Carl was named in honor of Rachel's biological mother, Chaiya Clara, in Sagan's words, "the mother she never knew." Sagan graduated from Rahway High School in Rahway, New Jersey, in 1951.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Sagan
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  Carl Zimmer
  Carl Zimmer (born 1966) is a popular science writer and blogger, especially regarding the study of evolution and parasites. He has written several books and contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times and Discover. He is a Fellow at Yale University's Morse College.
  Besides his popular science writing, Zimmer also gives frequent lectures, and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's "Radiolab", Fresh Air and This American Life. His most recent award was a 2007 prize for science communication from the United States National Academy of Sciences, for his wide-ranging coverage of biology and evolution in newspapers, magazines and his blog, "The Loom". Since 11 November 2009 (episode 35) he has been host of the periodic audio podcast Meet the Scientist of the American Society for Microbiology (replacing Merry Buckley).
  Zimmer received his B.A. in English from Yale University in 1987, and began freelance writing for Natural History magazine. In 1989, Zimmer started at Discover magazine, first as a copy editor and fact checker, eventually becoming a contributing editor.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Zimmer
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  Chris Lintott
  Christopher John Lintott (born 1980, Torbay) is an English astrophysicist currently serving as the Director of Citizen Science at the Adler Planetarium. He is a post-doctoral researcher who is involved in a number of popular science projects aimed at bringing astronomical science to a wider audience. He is the co-presenter of Patrick Moore's BBC series The Sky at Night and a co-author of the book Bang! – The Complete History of the Universe with Patrick Moore and Queen guitarist Brian May.
  He attended Torquay Boys' Grammar School in Devon, whilst living in Churston Ferrers. Whilst at school, in 1999, he won a $500 Earth and Space Sciences award and the Priscilla and Bart Bok Honorable Mention Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for an article on Dust Around Young Stellar Objects. This came from a six week project at the University of Hertfordshire funded by a Nuffield bursary. Lintott read for a degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge where he was a student of Magdalene College. He received a PhD in astrophysics from University College London, where his thesis was on the subject of star formation. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and is presently a researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford and a junior research fellow at Somerville College. His research there focuses on galaxies, galaxy evolution, and on the application of astrochemical models of star formation to galaxies beyond the Milky Way; particularly the use of sulphur compounds as a signature of stars that are in the process of forming.
  
  wn.com/Chris_Lintott
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  Christopher Hitchens
  Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was an English American author and journalist whose career spanned more than four decades. Hitchens, often referred to colloquially as "Hitch", was a columnist and literary critic for New Statesman, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Mirror, The Times Literary Supplement and Vanity Fair. He was an author of twelve books and five collections of essays. As a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits, he was a prominent public intellectual, and his confrontational style of debate made him both a lauded and controversial figure.
  Hitchens was known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, as well as for his excoriating critiques of various public figures including Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Diana, Princess of Wales. Although he supported the Falklands War, his key split from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left to the Rushdie Affair. The September 11 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, although Hitchens insisted he was not "a conservative of any kind", and his friend Ian McEwan describes him as representing the anti-totalitarian left.
  
  wn.com/Christopher_Hitchens
• Colin Tudge
  Colin Tudge (born 22 April 1943) is a British science writer and broadcaster. A biologist by training, he is the author of numerous works on food, agriculture, genetics, and species diversity.
  Tudge was born and brought up in south London^{[citation needed]} and attended Dulwich College^{[citation needed]}, from where he won a scholarship to Peterhouse, Cambridge, studying zoology and English.^{[citation needed]} In his career he has worked for World Medicine, Farmers' Weekly and New Scientist,^{[citation needed]} before becoming a freelance writer.^{[citation needed]} In the 1980s he was a regular broadcaster for the BBC, including the BBC Radio 4 science series Spectrum; he wrote and presented The Food Connection; he made one-off documentaries and guest appearances.^{[citation needed]}
  He lives in Oxford with his second wife, Ruth West. He was married to Rosemary Tudge and had three children, Amanda, Amy and Robin, the last being an author of political works.^{[citation needed]}
  Co-authorships
  
  wn.com/Colin_Tudge
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  Daniel Dennett
  Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
  Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
  
  wn.com/Daniel_Dennett
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  Daniel J. Boorstin
  Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He was appointed twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress from 1975 until 1987.
  Boorstin was born in 1914, in Atlanta, Georgia into a Jewish family; his father was a lawyer who participated in the defense of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent who was accused of the rape and murder of a teenage girl. After Frank's 1915 lynching led to a surge of anti-Semitic sentiment in Georgia, the family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Boorstin was raised. He graduated from Tulsa's Central High School at the age of 15. He graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, receiving BA and BCL degrees and earned an SJD degree at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years and was the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at the University of Cambridge in 1964. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. Boorstin wrote more than 20 books, including a trilogy on the American experience and one on world intellectual history. The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the final book in the first trilogy, received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in history. Boorstin also wrote the books The Discoverers, The Creators and The Seekers, a trilogy of books that attempt to survey the scientific, artistic and philosophic histories of humanity, respectively.
  
  wn.com/Daniel_J._Boorstin
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  David Attenborough
  Sir David Frederick Attenborough ( /ˈætənbərə/) OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, FSA (born 8 May 1926) is a British broadcaster and naturalist.
  His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years. He is best known for writing and presenting the nine Life series, in conjunction with the BBC Natural History Unit, which collectively form a comprehensive survey of all life on the planet. He is also a former senior manager at the BBC, having served as controller of BBC Two and director of programming for BBC Television in the 1960s and 1970s.
  Attenborough is widely considered a national treasure in Britain, although he himself does not care for the term. He is a younger brother of director, producer and actor Richard Attenborough.
  Attenborough was born in Isleworth, west London, but grew up in College House on the campus of the University College, Leicester, where his father, Frederick, was principal. He is the middle of three sons (his elder brother, Richard, became an actor and his younger brother, John, an executive at Italian car manufacturer Alfa Romeo). During World War II his parents also adopted two Jewish refugee girls from Europe.
  
  wn.com/David_Attenborough
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  David Suzuki
  David Suzuki, CC, OBC (born March 24, 1936) is a Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist. Suzuki earned a Ph.D in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1961, and was a professor in the genetics department at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. Since the mid-1970s, Suzuki has been known for his TV and radio series and books about nature and the environment. He is best known as host of the popular and long-running CBC Television science magazine, The Nature of Things, seen in over forty nations. He is also well known for criticizing governments for their lack of action to protect the environment.
  A long time activist to reverse global climate change, Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990, to work "to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us." The Foundation's priorities are: oceans and sustainable fishing, climate change and clean energy, sustainability, and Suzuki's Nature Challenge. He also served as a director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association from 1982-1987.
  
  wn.com/David_Suzuki
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  David X. Cohen
  David Samuel Cohen (born July 13, 1966), primarily known as David X. Cohen, is an American television writer. He has written for The Simpsons and he is the head writer and executive producer of Futurama.
  Cohen was born as David S. Cohen. The alias "David X. Cohen" was adopted around the origin of his creation, Futurama. As both of his parents were biologists, Cohen had always planned to be a scientist, but he also enjoyed writing and drawing cartoons.
  Cohen graduated from Dwight Morrow High School in Englewood, New Jersey, where he wrote the humor column for the high school paper and was a member of the school's state champion mathematics team. From there, Cohen went on to attend Harvard University, graduating with a B.A. in physics, and the University of California, Berkeley, with an M.S. in computer science. While at Harvard, he wrote for and served as President of the Harvard Lampoon, and was classmates in the Harvard physics department with director Lawrence Guterman. Both studied under physicist Sidney Coleman and Nobel Prize winner Norman F. Ramsey, as well as Fields Medal winner David Mumford.
  
  wn.com/David_X._Cohen
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  Desmond Morris
  Desmond John Morris FZS, born 24 January 1928 in Purton, north Wiltshire, is a British zoologist and ethologist, as well as a popular anthropologist. He is also known as a painter, television presenter and popular author.
  Morris was educated at Dauntsey's School, an independent school in West Lavington, Wiltshire. After military service, he attended the University of Birmingham where he graduated in 1951 with a First Class Honours Degree in Zoology. In 1954, he was awarded a D.Phil. from Oxford University for his thesis on the Reproductive Behaviour of the Ten-spined Stickleback, supervised by Nobel Laureate Niko Tinbergen. He was employed by the Zoological Society of London as Curator of Mammals at the London Zoo, eventually leaving in 1966 in frustration about stagnation at the zoo.
  Morris first came to public attention in the 1950s as a presenter of the ITV television programme Zoo Time, but achieved worldwide fame in 1967 with his book The Naked Ape. The book is an unabashed look at the human species, notable for its focus on humanity's animal-like qualities and our similarity with apes, and for explaining human behaviour as largely evolved to meet the challenges of prehistoric life as a hunter-gatherer. Reprinted many times and in many languages, it continues to be a best-seller.
  
  wn.com/Desmond_Morris
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  Don Herbert
  Donald Jeffry Herbert (July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007), better known as Mr. Wizard, was an American television personality. He hosted two television shows about science aimed at children.
  Born in Waconia, Minnesota, Herbert was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (then called La Crosse State Normal College) who was interested in drama. His career as an actor was interrupted by World War II when he enlisted in the United States Army as a Private. Herbert later joined the United States Army Air Forces took pilot training and became a B-24 bomber pilot who flew 56 combat missions from Italy with the 767th Bomb Squadron, 461st Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force. When Herbert was discharged in 1945 he was a Captain and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
  After the war Herbert worked at a radio station in Chicago where he acted in children's programs such as the documentary health series It's Your Life (1949). It was during this time that Herbert formulated the idea of Mr. Wizard and a general science experiments show that used the new medium of television. Herbert's idea was accepted by Chicago NBC station WNBQ and the series Watch Mr. Wizard premiered on March 3, 1951. The weekly half hour show, co-produced by Jules Power, featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard, with a young boy and girl who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments. The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. Each show ended the same way: with an experiment that somehow displayed the letters "FCMBB", which Mr. Wizard reminded us stood for "Fruit, Cereal, Milk, Bread and Butter, the five elements of a healthy breakfast."
  
  wn.com/Don_Herbert
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  Douglas Hofstadter
  Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first published in 1979. It won both the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and a National Book Award for Science.
  Hofstadter was born in New York City, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor, and he attended the International School of Geneva in 1958–1959. He graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1965. He continued his education and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975.
  
  wn.com/Douglas_Hofstadter
• Fred Pearce
  Fred Pearce is an English author and journalist based in London. He has been described as one of Britain's finest science writers^{[dead link]} and has reported on environment, popular science and development issues from 64 countries over the past 20 years. He specializes in global environmental issues, including water and climate change.
  Fred Pearce (b. 1951) is currently the environment consultant of New Scientist magazine and a regular contributor to the British newspapers Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, and Times Higher Education. He has also written for several US publications including Audubon, Foreign Policy, Popular Science, Seed, and Time.
  Pearce has written a wide range of books on environment and development issues published in both the UK and US, including the following:
  
  His books have been translated into at least ten languages including French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
  He is a regular broadcaster and international speaker on environmental issues, and has given public presentations on all six continents in the past few years. Among his engagements have been the Edinburgh, Hay and Salisbury Book Festivals, the Ottawa and Melbourne International Writers Festivals, the Brisbane River Symposium in 2006,Yale and Cambridge Universities, a speaking tour for the British Council in India, and presentations to business and financial groups, such as Anglo American PLC in South Africa, Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong and UBS in London.
  
  wn.com/Fred_Pearce
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  Fritjof Capra
  Fritjof Capra (born February 1, 1939) is an Austrian-born American physicist. He is a founding director of the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, California, and is on the faculty of Schumacher College.
  Capra is the author of several books, including The Tao of Physics (1975), The Turning Point (1982), Uncommon Wisdom (1988), The Web of Life (1996), and The Hidden Connections (2002).
  Born in Vienna, Austria, Capra attended the University of Vienna, where he earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1966. He conducted research in particle physics and systems theory at the University of Paris (1966–1968), the University of California, Santa Cruz (1968–1970), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (1970), Imperial College, London (1971–1974), and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (1975–1988). While at Berkeley, he was a member of the Fundamental Fysiks Group, founded in May 1975 by Elizabeth Rauscher and George Weissmann, which met weekly to discuss philosophy and quantum physics. He also taught at U.C. Santa Cruz, U.C. Berkeley, and San Francisco State University.
  
  wn.com/Fritjof_Capra
• Fulvio Melia
  Fulvio Melia (born 2 August 1956) is an Italian-American astrophysicist and author. He is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Arizona and Associate Editor of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. A former Presidential Young Investigator and Sloan Research Fellow, he is the author of six books and more than 230 articles on theoretical astrophysics.
  Melia was born in Gorizia, Italy. He was educated at Melbourne University and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and held a post-doctoral research position at the University of Chicago before taking an assistant professorship at Northwestern University in 1987. Moving to the University of Arizona as an associate professor in 1991, he became a full professor in 1993. From 1988 to 1995, he was a Presidential Young Investigator (under President Ronald Reagan), and then an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow from 1989 to 1992. He became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002. He is also a Professorial Fellow in the School of Physics, Melbourne University.
  
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• 
  George Gamow
  George Gamow (Russian pronunciation: [ˈɡaməf]; March 4 [O.S. February 20] 1904 – August 19, 1968), born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov (Russian: Георгий Антонович Гамов), was a Ukrainian-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist - notably an early advocate and developer of Lemaître's Big Bang theory. He discovered a theoretical explanation of alpha decay via quantum tunneling, and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis and Big Bang nucleosynthesis (which he collectively called nucleocosmogenesis), the cosmic microwave background, and molecular genetics.
  In his middle and late career, Gamow focussed more on teaching, and became well-known as an author of popular books on science, including One, Two, Three...Infinity, and the Mr. Tompkins... series of books (1939–1967). Some of his books are still in print more than a half-century after their original publication, and have become classic but still-relevant introductions to fundamental principles of mathematics and science.
  
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• 
  Howard Bloom
  Howard Bloom (born June 25, 1943) is an American author. He was a publicist in the 1970s and 1980s for singers and bands such as Prince,Billy Joel, and Styx. In 1988 he became disabled with chronic fatigue syndrome. Since then he has published three books on human evolution and group behavior, The Genius of the Beast, The Global Brain and The Lucifer Principle, which are informed by his ideas about what underlies the success of major rock and roll artists.
  Bloom was born in Buffalo, New York to a Jewish family. He began his interest in science as early as ten years old, becoming fascinated in cosmology and microbiology, and at the age of twelve won the Westinghouse Science Award for his design with computers. By sixteen, Bloom was working as an assistant researching the immune system, at the world's largest cancer research center, the Roswell Park Memorial Research Cancer Institute. Bloom graduated from New York University and at the age of twenty-five, veered from his scientific studies to work as an editor for a rock magazine. Bloom would go on to found the largest P.R. firm in the music industry.
  
  wn.com/Howard_Bloom
• 
  Isaac Asimov
  Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzək ˈæzɨməv/ EYE-zək AZ-i-məv; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; Yiddish: אייזיק יודאָוויטש אסימאוו; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (although his only work in the 100s—which covers philosophy and psychology—was a foreword for The Humanist Way).
  Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote many short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.
  
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  J. B. S. Haldane
  John Burdon Sanderson Haldane FRS (5 November 1892 – 1 December 1964), known as Jack (but who used 'J.B.S.' in his printed works), was a British-born geneticist and evolutionary biologist. A staunch Marxist, he was critical of Britain's role in the Suez Crisis, and chose to leave Oxford, move to India and become an Indian citizen. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics.
  Haldane was born in Oxford to physiologist John Scott Haldane and Louisa Kathleen Haldane (née Trotter), and descended from an aristocratic intellectual Scottish family (See Haldane family). His younger sister, Naomi, became a writer. His uncle was Richard Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane, politician and one time Secretary of State for War; his aunt was the author Elizabeth Haldane. His father was a scientist, a philosopher and a Liberal, and his mother was a Conservative. Haldane took an interest in his father’s work very early in childhood. It was the result of this lifelong study of the natural world and his devotion to empirical evidence that he became an atheist. He felt that atheism was the only rational deduction available in light of all the evidence, saying, "My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course... I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world."
  
  wn.com/J._B._S._Haldane
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  Jacob Bronowski
  Jacob Bronowski (18 January 1908 – 22 August 1974) was a Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor. He is best remembered as the presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying book.
  Jacob Bronowski was born in Łódź, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, in 1908. His family moved to Germany during the First World War, and then to England in 1920. Although, according to Bronowski, he knew only two English words on arriving in Great Britain, he gained admission to the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and went on to study at the University of Cambridge and graduated as the senior wrangler.
  As a mathematics student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bronowski co-edited—with William Empson—the literary periodical Experiment, which first appeared in 1928. Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life. He was also a strong chess player, earning a half-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for the British Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. For a time in the 1930s he lived near Laura Riding and Robert Graves in Majorca. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. Beginning in this period, the British secret service MI5 kept Bronowski under surveillance believing he was a security risk, which is thought to have restricted his access to senior posts in the UK.
  
  wn.com/Jacob_Bronowski
• James Gleick
  James Gleick (born August 1, 1954) is an American author, journalist and biographer whose best-selling books include The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood and Chaos: Making a New Science. Three of his books have been Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists. They have been translated into more than twenty languages.
  Born in New York City, USA, Gleick attended Harvard University, graduating in 1976 with a bachelor's degree in English and linguistics. Having worked for the Harvard Crimson and freelanced in Boston, he moved to Minneapolis, where he helped found a short-lived weekly newspaper, Metropolis. After its demise, he returned to New York and joined as staff of the New York Times, where he worked for ten years as an editor and reporter.
  After the publication of Chaos, Gleick collaborated with the photographer Eliot Porter on Nature's Chaos and with developers at Autodesk on Chaos: The Software. He was the McGraw Distinguished Lecturer at Princeton University in 1989-90. In 1993, he founded The Pipeline, an early Internet service. He was the first editor of the Best American Science Writing series.
  
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  Jamie Hyneman
  James Franklin "Jamie" Hyneman (born September 25, 1956) is an American special effects expert, best known for being the co-host of the television series MythBusters. He is also the owner of M5 Industries, the special effects workshop where MythBusters is filmed. He is known among Robot Wars devotees for his robot entry, Blendo, which, for a time, was deemed too dangerous for entry in the competition. He is one of the designers of the aerial robotic camera system Wavecam, used in sports and entertainment events. On May 16, 2010, he delivered the commencement address and received an honorary Doctorate of Engineering, from Villanova University.
  Hyneman was born in Marshall, Michigan and raised in Columbus, Indiana. Describing his early life, Hyneman said "I was a problematic kid, to be sure. I left home when I was 14 and hitchhiked all over the country."
  He earned a degree in Russian linguistics from Indiana University. He also received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from Villanova University. On November 25, 2011, Hyneman was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Twente (Enschede, Netherlands) for his role in the popularization of science and technology.
  
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  Jared Diamond
  Jared Mason Diamond (born September 10, 1937) is an American scientist and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Originally trained in physiology, Diamond's work is known for drawing from a variety of fields, and he is currently Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles.
  Diamond was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to a Bessarabian Jewish family. His father Louis K. Diamond was a physician and his mother Flora Kaplan a teacher, musician, and linguist. He attended the Roxbury Latin School and earned an A.B. from Harvard College in 1958 and a Ph.D. in physiology and membrane biophysics from the University of Cambridge in 1961.
  After graduating from Cambridge, Diamond returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow until 1965, and, in 1968, became Professor of Physiology at UCLA Medical School. While in his twenties, he developed a second, parallel, career in ornithology and ecology, specialising in New Guinea and nearby islands. Then in his fifties, Diamond developed a third career in environmental history and became Professor of Geography at UCLA, his current position. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1999 and an honorary doctorate by Westfield State University in 2009.
  
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  Jay Ingram
  Jay Ingram CM, BSc, MSc (born March 20, 1945) is a Canadian author and broadcaster. He was host of the television show Daily Planet (originally titled @discovery.ca), which airs on Discovery Channel Canada, since the channel's inception in 1995. Ingram's last episode of Daily Planet aired on June 5, 2011. Ingram announced his retirement but stated he will make guest appearances on Daily Planet. He was succeeded by science commentator Dan Riskin.
  Ingram hosted the science program Quirks and Quarks on CBC Radio One from 1979 (when he took over the show from David Suzuki) to 1992 (when he was succeeded by Bob McDonald). During his tenure Ingram won two ACTRA Awards. In 1993, Ingram hosted The Talk Show, a CBC Radio series about language, winning the "Science in Society Journalism Award" for his efforts. He then moved to CBC Television where he contributed science features to CBC Newsworld's Canada Live and segments on the brain to The Health Show on the main network. In November 1994 he moved to the Discovery Channel.
  
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  Jayant Narlikar
  Dr. Jayant Vishnu Narlikar (born July 19, 1938) (Marathi: जयंत विष्णू नारळीकर) is an Indian cosmologist.
  Narlikar is a proponent of the steady state cosmology. He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesizes Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle. It proposes that the inertial mass of a particle is a function of the masses of all other particles, multiplied by a coupling constant, which is a function of cosmic epoch. In cosmologies based on this theory, the gravitational constant G decreases strongly with time.
  Narlikar was born in Kolhapur, India on July 19, 1938. His father, Vishnu Vasudev Narlikar, was a mathematician who served as a professor and later as the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi. Jayant's mother, Sumati Narlikar, was a scholar of Sanskrit language. He studied in Kendriya Vidyalaya Banaras(till class 12) and Banaras Hindu University(12th Onwards) campus, Varanasi.
  
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  Jim Al-Khalili
  Jim Al-Khalili OBE (born 20 September 1962) is an Iraqi-born British theoretical physicist, author and science communicator. He is Professor of Theoretical Physics and Chair in the Public Engagement in Science at the University of Surrey. He has hosted several BBC productions about science and is a frequent commentator about science in other British media venues.
  Born in Baghdad in 1962 to an Iraqi father and English mother, Al-Khalili studied physics at the University of Surrey. He graduated with a B.Sc. degree in 1986 and stayed on to pursue a Ph.D. degree in nuclear reaction theory, which he obtained in 1989. In 1989, he was awarded a Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC) postdoctoral fellowship at University College London.
  Al-Khalili returned to Surrey in 1991, first as a research assistant then lecturer. In 1994, Al-Khalili was awarded an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Research Fellowship for five years, during which time he established himself as a leading expert on mathematical models of exotic atomic nuclei. He has published widely in his field.
  
  wn.com/Jim_Al-Khalili
• John Acorn
  John Acorn, also known as The Nature Nut, is a naturalist who is known for his inspiring personality and infectious love of nature. He is a local Edmonton celebrity, combining folk music with educational lyrics about the natural world. He is a lecturer at the University of Alberta, a research associate at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, and a research associate at the E.H. Strickland Entomology Museum.
  John Acorn became publicly known for his television series. 88 episodes were produced, each focusing on a different aspect of Alberta's natural world. Acorn's personality was expertly captured in this series, expressed through folk songs and whimsical descriptions like Flying Neon Toothpicks in the Grass. (Damselflies.)
  Acorn also appears in recorded displays at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology.
  
  wn.com/John_Acorn
• John Gribbin
  John R. Gribbin (born 1946) is a British science writer, an astrophysicist, and a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Sussex. The topical range of his prolific writings include quantum physics, biographies of famous scientists, human evolution, the origins of the universe, climate change and global warming. His writings often speculate on what some critics consider science fiction.
  John Gribbin graduated with his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Sussex in 1966. Gribbin then earned his master of science (M.Sc.) degree in astronomy in 1967, also from the Univ. of Sussex, and he earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge (1971).
  In 1968, Gribbin worked as one of Fred Hoyle's research students at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, and wrote a number of stories for New Scientist about the Institute's research and speculation into what were eventually discovered to be pulsars.
  In 1974, Gribbin published, along with Stephen Plagemann, a book titled The Jupiter Effect, that predicted that the alignment of the planets in quadrant on one side of the Sun on March 10, 1982 would cause gravitational effects that would trigger earthquakes in the San Andreas fault, wiping out Los Angeles and its suburbs. Gribbin repudiated The Jupiter Effect in the July 17, 1980, issue of New Scientist magazine in which he stated that he had been "too clever by half".
  
  wn.com/John_Gribbin
• Johnny Ball
  Johnny Ball (born Graham Ball, 23 May 1938) is a British television personality, a populariser of mathematics and the father of BBC Radio 2 DJ Zoë Ball.
  Originally from Bristol, he spent his primary school years there and later in his childhood moved to Bolton, Lancashire, where he attended Bolton School. He left formal education with two 'O' Levels, one in Mathematics. He then signed on for three years in the Royal Air Force, worked as a Butlin's Redcoat, and was an entertainer in northern clubs and cabaret.
  He was a regular fixture on children's television in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, presenting several series of popular science and technology programmes intended for children (including Think of a Number; Think Again; Think Backwards; Think...This Way and Johnny Ball Reveals All). He was also one of the hosts of infant education programme Play School at the start of BBC2 in 1964.. All of these shows (except the ITV programme ...Reveals All) appeared on the BBC. Ball's shows were renowned for presenting scientific and technological principles in an entertaining and accessible way for young people.
  
  wn.com/Johnny_Ball
• Julius Sumner Miller
  Julius Sumner Miller (May 17, 1909 – April 14, 1987) was an American physicist and television personality. He is best known for his work on children's television programs in North America and Australia.
  Julius Sumner Miller was born in Billerica, Massachusetts the youngest of nine children. His father was Latvian, his Lithuanian mother spoke 12 languages.
  Miller graduated with a Philosophy degree and a Master's in Physics from Boston University in 1933 but due to the Depression worked as a butler for a wealthy Boston doctor for the next two years during which time he married the doctor's maid, Alice Brown; they were to have no children, but he was to go on to reach millions of children through his popular science programs.
  After making over 700 applications for employment, in 1937 he was offered a place in the Physics Department of Dillard University, a private, black liberal arts college in New Orleans. During World War II he worked as a civilian physicist for the U.S. Army Signal Corps while holding fellowships in physics at the universities of Idaho and Oklahoma and was a Ford Foundation Fellow at UCLA. In 1950 he enrolled in the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, N.J. where he was a student of Albert Einstein. He became a lifelong friend of Einstein and went on to amass a collection of Einstein memorabilia that included Einstein's birth certificate. Miller also taught at Princeton but disliked large institutions, leaving in 1952 to join the Physics Department at the then small El Camino College in Torrance, California (1952–1974), to maximum student enrollments due to his great popularity and where he was instantly recognizable by his casual hair and horn-rimmed spectacles.
  
  wn.com/Julius_Sumner_Miller
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  Karl Kruszelnicki
  Karl Kruszelnicki AM is a scientist, who is best known as an author and science commentator on Australian radio and television. He is often referred to as Dr Karl.
  He holds degrees in mathematics, biomedical engineering, medicine and surgery. He has also studied astrophysics, computer science, and philosophy. He has worked as a physicist, labourer, roadie for bands, car mechanic, film-maker, hospital scientific officer, biomedical engineer, TV weatherman, taxi driver, and medical doctor. Kruszelnicki is the Julius Sumner Miller Fellow in the Science Foundation for Physics at the School of Physics, University of Sydney.
  Kruszelnicki was born in Helsingborg, Sweden to Polish parents. His mother's background was hidden from him for a long time, with his mother having told him that she was Swedish and a Lutheran but was, in fact, Jewish. Both of his parents were Holocaust survivors.
  Kruszelnicki wrote and presented the first series of Quantum. He writes a weekly column for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald newspapers on scientific "mythconceptions". His radio work includes a weekly science talkback show on Triple J which attracts up to 300,000 listeners and is available as a podcast. He often helps with other science and education Triple J promotions, such as the Sleek Geek Week roadshow with Adam Spencer and Caroline Pegram.
  
  wn.com/Karl_Kruszelnicki
• Kenneth Feder
  Kenneth L. Feder is a professor of archaeology at Central Connecticut State University. He has authored several books on archaeology and criticism of pseudoarchaeology such as Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology. He gained his Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology in 1973 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, his Master of Arts in anthropology from the University of Connecticut in 1975 and his Ph.D. in anthropology in 1982. He is the founder and director of the Farmington River Archaeological Project which studies the prehistory of the region. He has also appeared on the ancient astronauts episode of the National Geographic Channel's Is It Real? and several episodes of the BBC documentary series Horizon discussing Atlantis and Caral. In 2004 he spoke at the World Skeptics Congress in Italy.
  His book Encyclopedia of Dubious Archaeology: From Atlantis To The Walam Olum was published in 2010.
  
  
  
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  Kevin Warwick
  Kevin Warwick (born 9 February 1954 Coventry, UK) is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research in the field of robotics.
  Kevin Warwick was born in 1954 in Coventry in the United Kingdom. He attended Lawrence Sheriff School in Rugby, Warwickshire. He left school in 1970 to join British Telecom, at the age of 16. In 1976 he took his first degree at Aston University, followed by a Ph.D and a research post at Imperial College London.
  He subsequently held positions at Oxford, Newcastle and Warwick universities before being offered the Chair in Cybernetics at the University of Reading in 1987.
  Warwick is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology and a Fellow of the City and Guilds of London Institute. He is Visiting Professor at the Czech Technical University in Prague and the University of Strathclyde and in 2004 was Senior Beckman Fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is also Director of the University of Reading Knowledge Transfer Partnerships Centre, which links the University with Companies and is on the Advisory Boards of the Instinctive Computing Laboratory, Carnegie Mellon University and the Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter.
  
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  Kirsten Sanford
  Kirsten "Kiki" Sanford (born August 1, 1974) was previously an American research scientist in neurophysiology at the University of California, Davis and is a specialist in learning and memory. She holds a B.S. in Conservation Biology and a Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Integrative Physiology from U.C. Davis. Sanford has left bench science and now hosts several video podcasts that are science themed. She is founder and host of the This Week in Science radio show/podcast, a weekly program broadcast from U.C. Davis since June 2000. She also holds a black belt in taekwondo.
  Starting in late 2007, Sanford expanded her work into online video, starring in both On Networks successful series Food Science and Revision3's variety show PopSiren. On April 30, 2009, Dr. Kiki's Science Hour kicked off on TWiT.tv. The show became a podcast with episode 24 and is recorded live on TWiT live Thursdays at 6:00 PM EDT, and is released on Saturdays. In early 2010 Dr. Kiki's Science Hour made its debut on TWiT live as a live show every Thursday.
  
  wn.com/Kirsten_Sanford
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  Lewis Wolpert
  Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL (born 19 October 1929) is a developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster.
  Wolpert was educated at the University of Witwatersrand (BSc), at Imperial College London, and at King's College London (PhD). As of 2010^[update] he holds the position of Emeritus Professor of Biology as applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and developmental biology at University College London.
  Biologists recognise Wolpert for elaborating and championing the ideas of positional information and positional value: molecular signals and internal cellular responses to them that enable cells to do the right thing in the right place during embryonic development. The essence of these concepts is that there is a dedicated set of molecules for spatial coordination of cells that is the same across many species and across different developmental stages and tissues. The discovery of Hox gene codes in flies and vertebrates has largely vindicated Wolpert's positional-value concept, while identification of growth-factor morphogens in many species has supported the concept of positional information.
  
  wn.com/Lewis_Wolpert
• Maggie Aderin-Pocock
  Maggie Aderin-Pocock, MBE (born 1968) is a British space scientist.
  Aderin-Pocock was born in London to Nigerian parents. She attended La Sainte Union Convent School in North London. She has dyslexia and, as a child, when she told a teacher she wanted to be an astronaut, it was suggested she try nursing, "as that was science too". However she gained four A Levels in maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
  She went on to study at Imperial College London, where she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Doctorate in Mechanical Engineering.
  Aderin-Pocock has worked on many projects, from private industry to government contracts to academic research. She began in the Ministry of Defence and the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency on missile warning systems. She then worked on hand-held instruments to detect landmines. Aderin-Pocock moved back to Imperial College London in 1999 with a Fellowship from the Science and Technology Facilities Council to work on a high-resolution spectrograph for the Gemini telescope in Chile, which probes the heart of stars by converting the starlight gathered by huge telescopes into the component rainbow colours, and then analyses them to work out what's happening billions of miles away.
  
  wn.com/Maggie_Aderin-Pocock
• Magnus Pyke
  Magnus Alfred Pyke (Paddington, London, 29 December 1908 — 19 October 1992) was a British scientist and media figure, who, although apparently quite eccentric and playing up to the mad scientist stereotype, succeeded in explaining science to a lay audience. He was known for his enthusiastic way of waving his arms around as he spoke.
  Born in Paddington, London and educated at St Paul's School, he then moved to Canada for seven years and studied agriculture at McGill University, Montreal before continuing his studies on his return to the United Kingdom at University College London. Pyke rose to prominence as a young food researcher working for the wartime Minister of Food, Frederick Marquis, 1st Earl of Woolton. Even then, he was known to be eccentric. It is said that, in an effort to cope with the problem of blood donation outstripping local storage for blood transfusion, Pyke suggested using the excess human blood to make black pudding.
  Pyke was a regular panellist on the Yorkshire Television science programme Don't Ask Me from 1974 to 1979, and was awarded the Pye Colour Television Award as the most promising male newcomer to television in 1975. The programmer's panel was chaired by Derek Griffiths, and other members included botanist David Bellamy, Dr Miriam Stoppard and Dr Rob Buckman. The programme consisted of the panel attempting to answer viewers' queries about science and the everyday world. This was later replaced with the studio show Don't Just Sit There presented by Magnus Pyke with David Bellamy. Don't Just Sit There broadcast 19 episodes during 1979-80.
  
  wn.com/Magnus_Pyke
• Marcus Chown
  Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer, journalist and broadcaster, currently cosmology consultant for New Scientist magazine. He graduated from the University of London in 1980, gaining a first class degree in physics, and later gained a Master of Science in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology. His books on astronomy and physics are aimed primarily at the popular market, including Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, for which he was praised for "expressing opaque concepts with a unique clarity".
  
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  Marcus Du Sautoy
  Marcus Peter Francis du Sautoy OBE (born in London, 26 August 1965) is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. Formerly a Fellow of All Souls College, and Wadham College, he is now a Fellow of New College. He is President of the Mathematical Association. He was previously an EPSRC Senior Media Fellow and a Royal Society University Research Fellow. His academic work concerns mainly group theory and number theory. In October 2008, he was appointed to the Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, succeeding the inaugural holder Richard Dawkins. His surname is pronounced  /dʉˈsoʊtɔɪ/ (doo-SOH-toy).
  He grew up in Henley-on-Thames and was educated at local comprehensives Gillott's School and King James's College (VI Form, now Henley College) and Wadham College, Oxford where he obtained first class honours in Mathematics, although he "messed up" his first year, only attaining a second class grade. He went on to complete his DPhil in mathematics. He currently lives in London with his wife and three children. He plays football and the trumpet.
  
  wn.com/Marcus_Du_Sautoy
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  Martin Gardner
  Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 – May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll and G.K. Chesterton), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion. He wrote the Mathematical Games column in Scientific American from 1956 to 1981 and the Notes of a Fringe-Watcher column in Skeptical Inquirer from 1983 to 2002 and published almost 100 books.
  I just play all the time and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.
  Gardner, son of a petroleum geologist, grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma. He showed an early interest in puzzles and games and his closest childhood friend, John Bennett Shaw, later became "the greatest of all collectors of Sherlockian memorabilia". He attended the University of Chicago (UC) where he earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936. Early jobs included reporter on the Tulsa Tribune, writer at the UC Office of Press Relations and case worker in Chicago's Black Belt for the city's Relief Administration. During World War II, he served for several years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman on board the destroyer escort USS Pope (DE-134) in the Atlantic. His ship was still in the Atlantic when the war came to an end with the surrender of Japan in August 1945.
  
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  Matt Ridley
  Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci, DL (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland), known as Matt Ridley, is a British scientist, journalist and author. He also is a former Chairman of Northern Rock. He has written several science books including the The Red Queen (1994), Genome (1999) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). Ridley has been short-listed twice for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. In 2011, he won the Hayek Prize, which "honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty." Ridley also gave the Angus Millar Lecture on "scientific heresy" at the RSA in 2011 and his TED.com talk on "when ideas have sex" has been viewed 1.4 million times. He was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Julian Simon award in March 2012.
  Ridley was educated at Eton College from 1970–1975 and then went on to Magdalen College of the University of Oxford and completed a BA degree with first class honours in zoology and then a DPhil degree in zoology in 1983.
  
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  Michael Faraday
  Michael Faraday, FRS (22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was a British scientist, chemist, physicist and philosopher who greatly contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include that of the magnetic field, electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis.
  Although Faraday received little formal education and knew little of higher mathematics such as calculus, he was one of the most influential scientists in history; historians of science refer to him as having been the best experimentalist in the history of science. It was by his research on the magnetic field around a conductor carrying a DC electric current that Faraday established the basis for the concept of the electromagnetic field in physics. Faraday also established that magnetism could affect rays of light and that there was an underlying relationship between the two phenomena. He similarly discovered the principle of electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism, and the laws of electrolysis. His inventions of electromagnetic rotary devices formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became viable for use in technology.
  
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• Michio Kaku
  Michio Kaku (加来 道雄, Kaku Michio^?, born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a co-founder of string field theory, a futurist, and a "communicator" and "popularizer" of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film; and he writes extensive online blogs and articles. He has written two New York Times best sellers, Physics of the Impossible (2008) and Physics of the Future (2011). He has hosted several TV specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery Channel, and the Science Channel.
  Kaku was born in San Jose, California to Japanese immigrant parents. His grandfather came to the United States to take part in the clean-up operation after the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake^{[citation needed]}. His father was born in California but was educated in Japan and spoke little English. Both his parents were put in the Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where they met and where his two brothers were born.
  
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  Mr. Wizard
  Donald Jeffry Herbert (July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007), better known as Mr. Wizard, was an American television personality. He hosted two television shows about science aimed at children.
  Born in Waconia, Minnesota, Herbert was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (then called La Crosse State Normal College) who was interested in drama. His career as an actor was interrupted by World War II when he enlisted in the United States Army as a Private. Herbert later joined the United States Army Air Forces took pilot training and became a B-24 bomber pilot who flew 56 combat missions from Italy with the 767th Bomb Squadron, 461st Bomb Group of the Fifteenth Air Force. When Herbert was discharged in 1945 he was a Captain and had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.
  After the war Herbert worked at a radio station in Chicago where he acted in children's programs such as the documentary health series It's Your Life (1949). It was during this time that Herbert formulated the idea of Mr. Wizard and a general science experiments show that used the new medium of television. Herbert's idea was accepted by Chicago NBC station WNBQ and the series Watch Mr. Wizard premiered on March 3, 1951. The weekly half hour show, co-produced by Jules Power, featured Herbert as Mr. Wizard, with a young boy and girl who watched while Herbert performed interesting science experiments. The experiments, many of which seemed impossible at first glance, were usually simple enough to be re-created by viewers. Each show ended the same way: with an experiment that somehow displayed the letters "FCMBB", which Mr. Wizard reminded us stood for "Fruit, Cereal, Milk, Bread and Butter, the five elements of a healthy breakfast."
  
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• Nigel Calder
  Nigel Calder (born 2 December 1931) is a British science writer.
  Between 1956 and 1966, Calder wrote for the magazine New Scientist, serving as editor from 1962 until 1966. Since that time, he has worked as an independent author and TV screenwriter. He has conceived and scripted thirteen major documentaries and series concerning popular science subjects broadcast by the BBC and Channel 4 (London), with accompanying books. For his television work he received the Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science during 1972. During 2004, his book Magic Universe was shortlisted for The Aventis Prizes for Science Books.
  In 1970, Calder participated in the original [Earth Day] by proclaiming "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."
  Nigel Calder is the son of the late Lord (Peter) Ritchie-Calder, a brother of the historian Angus Calder (1942–2008), mathematician Allan Calder and educationist Isla Calder (1946–2000), and the father of travel writer Simon Calder. His other children are Sarah (business writer), Penny (museums writer and consultant), Jo (working in an IT company) and Kate (public relations consultant). His wife Liz is his literary agent and was formerly an adviser on language teaching for the London Chambers of Commerce.
  
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  Patrick Moore
  Sir Patrick Alfred Caldwell-Moore, CBE, FRS, FRAS (born 4 March 1923) is a British amateur astronomer who has attained prominent status in astronomy as a writer, researcher, radio commentator and television presenter, and who is credited as having done more than any other person to raise the profile of astronomy among the British general public.^{[citation needed]}
  He is a former president of the British Astronomical Association, co-founder and former president of the Society for Popular Astronomy (SPA), author of over 70 books on astronomy, and presenter of the world's longest-running television series with the same original presenter, The Sky at Night on the BBC. As an amateur astronomer, he became known as a specialist on observing the Moon and creating the Caldwell catalogue. Idiosyncrasies such as his rapid diction and monocle have made him a popular and instantly recognisable figure on British television.
  Moore is also a self-taught xylophone and piano player and an accomplished composer, and a former amateur cricketer, golfer, and chess player. In addition to his many popular science books, he has written numerous works of fiction, and was the presenter of the 1990s TV series GamesMaster. An opponent of fox hunting, he is an outspoken critic of the European Union, and served as chairman of the short-lived anti-immigration United Country Party. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II; his fiancée was killed during the war and he has never married or had children.
  
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• Paul Davies
  Paul Charles William Davies, AM (born 22 April 1946) is an English physicist, writer and broadcaster, currently a professor at Arizona State University as well as the Director of BEYOND: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He has held previous academic appointments at the University of Cambridge, University of London, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, University of Adelaide and Macquarie University. His research interests are in the fields of cosmology, quantum field theory, and astrobiology. He has proposed that a one-way trip to Mars could be a viable option.
  In 2005, he took up the chair of the SETI: Post-Detection Science and Technology Taskgroup of the International Academy of Astronautics. He is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum.
  Davies was brought up in Finchley and attended Woodhouse Grammar School on Woodhouse Road. He then studied Physics at UCL, gaining a 1st class BSc in 1967.
  In 1970, he completed his PhD entitled Contributions to Theoretical Physics: (i) Radiation Damping in the Optical Continuum (ii) A Quantum Theory of Wheeler-Feynman Electrodynamics under Michael J. Seaton and Sigurd Zienau at UCL. He then carried out postdoctoral research under Fred Hoyle at Cambridge University.
  
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  Peter Atkins
  Peter William Atkins (born 10 August 1940) is a British chemist and former Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Lincoln College. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics. Atkins is also the author of a number of science books for the general public, including Atkins' Molecules and Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science.
  Atkins left school (Dr Challoner's Grammar School, Amersham) at fifteen and took a job with Monsanto as a laboratory assistant. He studied for A-levels by himself and gained a place, following a last-minute interview, at University of Leicester.
  Atkins studied chemistry there, obtaining a bachelor's degree in chemistry, and – in 1964 – a PhD for research into electron spin resonance spectroscopy, and other aspects of theoretical chemistry. Atkins then took a postdoctoral position at the UCLA as a Harkness Fellow of the Commonwealth fund. He returned to Oxford in 1965 as fellow and tutor of Lincoln College, and lecturer in physical chemistry (later, professor of physical chemistry). In 1969, he won the Royal Society of Chemistry's Meldola Medal. He retired in 2007, and since then has been a full-time author .
  
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• Peter Fairley
  Peter Fairley (born 2 November 1930 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia - died 4 August 1998) was a science journalist who was the Science Editor for Independent Television News and TV Times magazine the late sixties and early seventies.
  His name became synonymous with ITN's extensive live coverage of the Apollo moon landing missions.
  His father was a telecommunications engineer. He attended Sutton Valence School, Kent and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge and he was then the science correspondent for the London Evening Standard and made numerous radio broadcasts in the 1960s. He was also a familiar face to ITV's younger viewers with regular appearances on Magpie and the children's science fiction series Timeslip as well as science articles in ITV's children's magazine Look-in, and writing books on popular science. He died of cancer aged 67.
  
  
  
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  Phil Plait
  Philip Cary Plait, Ph.D. (a.k.a. The Bad Astronomer) is an American astronomer and skeptic who runs the website BadAstronomy.com. He formerly worked at the physics and astronomy department at Sonoma State University. In early 2007, he resigned from his job to write Death from the Skies. On August 4, 2008, he became President of the James Randi Educational Foundation. He served in that position until January 1, 2010, when he was succeeded by noted skeptic D. J. Grothe.
  Plait grew up in the Washington, D.C. area. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 with a thesis on SN 1987A, which he studied with the Supernova Intensive Study (SINS). He first worked with the COBE satellite and then with the STIS on the Hubble Space Telescope for five years. He currently resides in Boulder, Colorado and writes full time, but often hosts special events and serves as an adviser and commentator in several capacities, including events focusing on skepticism, such as SkeptiCamp.
  
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  PZ Myers
  Paul Zachary "PZ" Myers (born March 9, 1957) is an American scientist and biology professor at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM) and the author of the Pharyngula science blog, hosted on both the Science Blogs and Freethought Blogs blog networks. He is currently an associate professor of biology at UMM, works with zebrafish in the field of evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo), and also cultivates an interest in cephalopods. He has published numerous research papers in Nature and other notable scientific journals.
  He is a public critic of intelligent design (ID) and of the creationist movement in general and is an activist in the American creation–evolution controversy. He is widely regarded as a confrontationalist.
  In 2006, the journal Nature listed his blog, Pharyngula, as the top-ranked blog written by a scientist. Additionally, PZ Myers was the recipient of the Humanist of the Year award in 2009, and the International Humanist Award in 2011.
  Asteroid 153298 Paulmyers is named in his honor.
  
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  Richard Dawkins
  Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
  Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
  Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.
  
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  Richard Feynman
  Richard Phillips Feynman ( /ˈfaɪnmən/; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American physicist known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics (he proposed the parton model). For his contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman, jointly with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. He developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions governing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.
  He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb and was a member of the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. In addition to his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing, and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard Chace Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology.
  
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  Richard Leakey
  Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (born 19 December 1944 in Nairobi) is a politician, paleoanthropologist and conservationist. He is second of the three sons of the archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey, and is the younger brother of Colin Leakey.
  As a small boy Richard lived in Nairobi with his parents, Louis Leakey, curator of the Coryndon Museum, and Mary Leakey, director of the Leakey excavations at Olduvai, and his two brothers, Jonathan and Philip. The Leakey brothers had a very active childhood. All the boys had ponies and belonged to the Langata Pony Club. They participated in jumping and steeplechase competitions but often rode for fun across the plains to the Ngong Hills, chasing and playing games with the animals. Sometimes the whole club were guests at the Leakeys for holidays and vacations. Richard's parents founded the Dalmatian Club of East Africa and won a prize in 1957. Dogs and many other pets shared the Leakey home. The Leakey boys participated in games conducted by both adults and children, in which they tried to imitate early man, catching springhares and small antelope by hand on the Serengeti. They drove lions and jackals from the kill to see if they could do it.
  
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• Richard Lewontin
  Richard Charles "Dick" Lewontin (born March 29, 1929) is an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and social commentator. A leader in developing the mathematical basis of population genetics and evolutionary theory, he pioneered the application of techniques from molecular biology such as gel electrophoresis to questions of genetic variation and evolution.
  In a pair of 1966 papers co-authored with J.L. Hubby in the journal Genetics, Lewontin helped set the stage for the modern field of molecular evolution.
  In 1979 he and Stephen Jay Gould introduced the term "spandrel" into evolutionary theory.
  Lewontin strongly opposes genetic determinism, especially as allegedly expressed by sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.
  Lewontin was born in New York City to Jewish parents. Lewontin attended Forest Hills High School and the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York. In 1951, he obtained a bachelor's degree in biology from Harvard University. In 1952, he received a master's degree in mathematical statistics followed by a doctorate in zoology in 1954, both from Columbia University where he was a student of Theodosius Dobzhansky. Lewontin held faculty positions at North Carolina State University, the University of Rochester, and the University of Chicago. In 1973 Lewontin served as Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and Professor of Biology at Harvard until 1998, and as of 2003 was the Alexander Agassiz Research Professor at Harvard. Lewontin has worked with and had great influence on many philosophers of biology, including William C. Wimsatt, Elliott Sober, Philip Kitcher, Elisabeth Lloyd, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Sahotra Sarkar, and Robert Brandon, often inviting them to work in his lab.
  
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  Roald Hoffmann
  Roald Hoffmann (born July 18, 1937) is an American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He is the Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters, Emeritus, at Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York.
  Hoffmann was born in Zolochiv,(Ukraine) to a Jewish family and was named in honor of the Norwegian explorer, Roald Amundsen. After Germany invaded Poland and occupied the town, his family was placed in a labor camp where his father, a civil engineer familiar with much of the local infrastructure, was a valued prisoner. As the situation grew more dangerous, with prisoners being transferred to liquidation camps, the family bribed guards to allow an escape and arranged with Ukrainian neighbors for Hoffman, his mother, two uncles and an aunt to hide in the attic and a storeroom of the local schoolhouse, where they remained for fifteen months, while Hoffman was aged 5 to 7.
  His father remained at the labor camp, but was able to occasionally visit, until he was tortured and killed by the Germans for his involvement in a plot to arm the camp prisoners. When she received the news, his mother attempted to contain her sorrow by writing down her feelings in a notebook her husband had been using to take notes on a relativity textbook he had been reading. While in hiding his mother kept Hoffman entertained by teaching him to read and having him memorize geography from textbooks stored in the attic, then quizzing him on it. He referred to the experience as having been enveloped in a cocoon of love.
  
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  Robert Krulwich
  Robert Krulwich is an American radio and television journalist whose specialty is explaining complex topics in depth. He has worked as a full-time employee of ABC, CBS, National Public Radio, and Pacifica. He has done assignment pieces for ABC's Nightline and World News Tonight, as well as PBS's Frontline, NOVA, and NOW with Bill Moyers. TV Guide called him "the most inventive network reporter in television", and New York Magazine wrote that he's "the man who simplifies without being simple".
  Krulwich received his bachelor's degree in U.S. history from Oberlin College in 1969 and his Juris Doctor degree from Columbia Law School in 1974. Just two months later, he abandoned his pursuit of a law career to cover the Watergate hearings for Pacifica Radio. In 1976, he became Washington bureau chief for Rolling Stone.
  From 1978 to 1985, he was the business and economics correspondent for NPR. Among other creative efforts, he recorded an opera called "Rato Interesso" to explain interest rates. He went on to host the PBS arts series The Edge.
  
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  Robert Winston
  Robert Maurice Lipson Winston, Baron Winston (born 15 July 1940) is an English professor, medical doctor, scientist, television presenter and politician.
  Robert Winston was born in London to Laurence Winston and Ruth Winston-Fox and raised as an Orthodox Jew. His mother was Mayor of the former Borough of Southgate. Winston's polymath father died as a result of medical negligence when Winston was nine years old, which was partly the inspiration for his eventual career choice. Robert has two younger siblings: a sister, Willow, and a brother, Anthony.
  Winston attended St Paul's School (London), later graduating from The London Hospital Medical College, University of London, in 1964 with a degree in medicine and surgery and achieved prominence as an expert in human fertility. For a brief time he gave up clinical medicine and worked as a theatre director, winning the National Directors' Award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1969. On returning to academic medicine, he developed tubal microsurgery and various techniques in reproductive surgery, including sterilization reversal.
  
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• Roger Lewin
  Roger Lewin is a British anthropologist, scientist and author of 20 books.
  Lewin was a staff member of New Scientist in London for nine years. He went to Washington, D.C. to write for Science for ten years as News Editor. An example article was "Evolutionary Theory Under Fire", 21, November 1980, vol. 210,pp 883-887. Lewin wrote three books with Richard Leakey. He became a full-time free lance writer in 1989 and concentrated on writing books. In 1989 Roger Lewin won the Royal Society Prizes for Science Books for Bones of Contention.
  In 2000, Lewin formed Harvest Associates with Birute Regine for business consulting.[1] Together they wrote a book. He is a member of the Complexity Research Group at the London School of Economics.
  Lewin has two adult sons living in England.
  http://www.harvest-associates.com/
  
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  Seth Shostak
  Seth Shostak (born July 20, 1943) is an American astronomer. He grew up in Arlington, VA and earned his physics degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology.
  He is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, and the 2004 winner of the Klumpke-Roberts Award awarded by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in recognition of his outstanding contributions to the public understanding and appreciation of astronomy.
  Before his involvement with SETI research, he used radio telescopes in the USA and the Netherlands, searching for clues to the ultimate fate of the universe by analyzing galaxy motion.
  In addition to his experience as an active participant in SETI research, Shostak is also involved as a science educator. He presented twelve 30-minute lectures on audio-tape and video titled "The Search for Intelligent Life in Space" for the Teaching Company in 1999.
  Since February 2002 Shostak has hosted the SETI Institute's radio program Are We Alone? which was renamed "Big Picture Science" in July 2011. Each week, Shostak interviews guests about the latest scientific research on a variety of topics: cosmology, physics, genetics, paleontology, evolutionary biology and astrobiology. Big Picture Science is distributed on the Public Radio Satellite System and the Public Radio Exchange and is available for download at the SETI Institute's website and through podcasts.
  
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  Simon Singh
  Simon Lehna Singh, MBE (born 1 January 1964) is a British author who has specialised in writing about mathematical and scientific topics in an accessible manner. His written works include Fermat's Last Theorem (in the United States titled Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem), The Code Book (about cryptography and its history), Big Bang (about the Big Bang theory and the origins of the universe) and Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial (about complementary and alternative medicine).
  He has also produced documentaries and works for television to accompany his books, is a trustee of NESTA, the National Museum of Science and Industry and co-founded the Undergraduate Ambassadors Scheme.
  In 2008, Singh was unsuccessfully sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association for criticising their activities in a column in The Guardian. A "furious backlash" to the lawsuit resulted in the filing of formal complaints of false advertising against more than 500 individual chiropractors within one 24 hour period, with one national chiropractic organisation ordering its members to take down their websites, and Nature Medicine noting that the case had gathered wide support for Singh, as well as prompting calls for the reform of English libel laws. On 1 April 2010, Simon Singh won his court appeal for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment. On 15 April 2010, the BCA officially withdrew its lawsuit, ending the case.
  
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  Stephen Hawking
  Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA (born 8 January 1942) is a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author. His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding gravitational singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein–Hawking radiation).
  He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1979 and 2009. Subsequently, he became research director at the university's Centre for Theoretical Cosmology.
  Hawking has a motor neurone disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a condition that has progressed over the years. He is now almost completely paralysed and communicates through a speech generating device. He has been married twice and has three children. Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own theories and cosmology in general; these include A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
  
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  Stephen Jay Gould
  Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo.
  Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record.
  Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or "magisteria") whose authorities do not overlap.
  
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  Steve Irwin
  Stephen Robert "Steve" Irwin (22 February 1962 – 4 September 2006), nicknamed "The Crocodile Hunter", was an Australian wildlife expert, television personality, and conservationist. Irwin achieved worldwide fame from the television series The Crocodile Hunter, an internationally broadcast wildlife documentary series which he co-hosted with his wife Terri. Together, the couple also owned and operated Australia Zoo, founded by Irwin's parents in Beerwah, about 80 kilometres (50 mi) north of the Queensland state capital city of Brisbane. Irwin died on 4 September 2006 after being pierced in the chest by a stingray barb while filming an underwater documentary film titled Ocean's Deadliest. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship MY Steve Irwin was named in his honour.
  Irwin was born on his mother's birthday to Lyn and Bob Irwin in Essendon, a suburb of Melbourne, Victoria. He moved with his parents as a child to Queensland in 1970, where he attended Landsborough State School and Caloundra State High School. Irwin described his father as a wildlife expert interested in herpetology, while his mother Lyn was a wildlife rehabilitator. After moving to Queensland, Bob and Lyn Irwin started the small Queensland Reptile and Fauna Park, where Steve grew up around crocodiles and other reptiles.
  
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  Steven Novella
  Steven P. Novella (born July 29, 1964) is an American clinical neurologist, assistant professor and Director of General Neurology at Yale University School of Medicine. Novella is best known for his involvement in the skeptical movement.
  Novella's academic specialization is in neuromuscular disease, including more specifically, neuropathy, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, myasthenia gravis, and the treatment of neuropathic pain.
  Novella received his medical degree from Georgetown University School of Medicine, completed his residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital, his fellowship at Yale University School of Medicine, and was board certified in 1998.
  Novella is a medical advisor to Quackwatch, an associate editor of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, and the executive editor of the blog Science-Based Medicine. Among other topics, Novella has published on homeopathy and AIDS denialism. In 2009, he was the board chairman when the Institute for Science in Medicine was founded. He has also taught a course for The Teaching Company titled "Medical Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths: What We Think We Know May Be Hurting Us."
  
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  Steven Pinker
  Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
  Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).
  
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• Steven Rose
  Steven P. Rose (born 4 July 1938 in London, United Kingdom) is a Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and University of London.
  Growing up as an Orthodox Jew, Rose recounted how he decided to became an atheist when he was eight years old.
  Rose studied biochemistry at King's College, Cambridge, and neurobiology at Cambridge and the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. When he was appointed to the professorship of biology at the newly instituted Open University in 1969 he was Britain's youngest full professor and chair of department. At the Open University he established the Brain Research Group, within which he and his colleagues focussed on the biological processes involved in memory formation and treatments for Alzheimer's Disease on which he has published some 300 research papers and reviews. He has written several popular science books and regularly writes for The Guardian newspaper. From 1999 to 2002, he gave public lectures as Professor of Physic at Gresham College, London. His work has won him numerous medals and prizes including the Biochemical Society medal for communication in science and the prestigious Edinburgh Medal. His book The Making of Memory won the Science Book Prize in 1993.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Rose
• 
  Tor Nørretranders
  Tor Nørretranders (born June 20, 1955) is a Danish author of popular science. He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. His books and lectures have primarily been focused on science and its role in society, often with Nørretranders' own advice about how society should integrate new findings in science. He introduced the notion of exformation in his book The User Illusion.
  Tor Nørretranders' mother is Yvonne Levy (1920-) and his father is Bjarne Nørretranders (1922-1986). Tor Nørretranders graduated at "Det frie gymnasium" in 1973 and reached a cand.techn.soc-degree from Roskilde University (Roskilde) in 1982, specialized in environment planning and its scientific theoretic basis. He lives north of Copenhagen with his wife Rikke Ulk and three children.
  
  wn.com/Tor_Nørretranders
• 
  V. S. Ramachandran
  Vilayanur Subramanian Ramachandran (born 1951) is a neuroscientist known for his work in the fields of behavioral neurology and visual psychophysics. He is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Neurosciences Graduate Program at the University of California, San Diego.
  Ramachandran is noted for his use of experimental methods that rely relatively little on complex technologies such as neuroimaging. According to Ramachandran, "too much of the Victorian sense of adventure [in science] has been lost." Despite the apparent simplicity of his approach, Ramachandran has generated many new ideas about the brain. He has been called "The Marco Polo of neuroscience" by Richard Dawkins and "the modern Paul Broca" by Eric Kandel. In 1997 Newsweek named him a member of "The Century Club", one of the "hundred most prominent people to watch" in the 21st century. In 2011 Time listed him as one of "the most influential people in the world" on the "Time 100" list.
  
  wn.com/V._S._Ramachandran
• 
  Yakov I. Perelman
  Yakov Isidorovich Perelman (Russian: Яков Исидорович Перельман; December 4, 1882–March 16, 1942) was a Russian and Soviet science writer and author of many popular science, including Physics Can Be Fun and Mathematics Can Be Fun (both translated from Russian into English).
  Perelman was born in 1882 in the town of Białystok, Congress Poland. He obtained the diploma of forester from the St. Petersburg Forestry Institute in 1909. After the success of "Physics for Entertainment", Perelman set out to produce other books, in which he showed himself to be an imaginative populariser of science. Especially popular were "Arithmetic for entertainment", "Mechanics for entertainment", "Geometry for Entertainment", "Astronomy for entertainment", "Lively Mathematics", " Physics Everywhere", and "Tricks and Amusements".
  His famous books on physics and astronomy were translated into various languages by the erstwhile Soviet Union.
  The great scientist K.E.Tsiolkovsky always thought highly of the talent and creative genius of Perelman. He wrote of him in the preface of Interplanetary Journeys: "The author has long been known by his popular, witty and quite scientific works on physics, astronomy and mathematics, which are, moreover written in a marvelous language and are very readable."
  
  wn.com/Yakov_I._Perelman
• 
  Yoshiro Nakamatsu
  Yoshiro Nakamatsu (中松 義郎, Nakamatsu Yoshirō^?, born June 26, 1928), also known as Dr. NakaMats (ドクター中松, Dokutā Nakamatsu^?), is a Japanese inventor who has become something of a minor celebrity for his inventions. He regularly appears on Japanese talk shows which, in conjunction with his appearance, usually craft a humorous segment based on one or more of his inventions.
  He is a prolific inventor, and he even claims to hold the world record for number of inventions with over 4,000 patents. While this claim has been mentioned in several media articles, several other sources do not list Nakamatsu among the world's most prolific inventors., and some sources have directly opposed his claim. In addition, he was also mentioned in several satirical publications, such as "What a Stroke of . . . Um, Ingenuity, Anyhow" and "81-Year-Old Dr. NakaMats May Have Invented Nearly Everything You Hold Dear" , and was a main character in documentary comedy "The Invention of Dr Nakamats".
  
  
  In his interviews, Nakamatsu described his "creativity process", which includes listening to music and concludes with diving underwater, where he says he comes up with his best ideas and records them while underwater. Nakamatsu claims to benefit from lack of oxygen to the brain, making inventions "0.5 seconds before death". He also built a million dollar toilet room made completely out of gold that he claims helps make him think better. Nakamatsu also has an elevator in his house that he claims helps him think better. He strictly denies that it is an elevator, but rather a "vertical moving room". Nakamatsu's goal is to live at least 144 years.
  
  wn.com/Yoshiro_Nakamatsu

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