Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
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• Topology
• Trignometry
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• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
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• Electromagnetic Spectrum
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• Computational Mathematics
• Gamma Ray Optics
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• Relative Velocity
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  Charité
  The Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin is the medical school for both the Humboldt University and the Free University of Berlin. After the merger with their fourth campus in 2003, the Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe.
  Complying with an order of King Frederick I of Prussia from November 14, 1709, it was initially established in 1710 north of the Berlin city walls in anticipation of an outbreak of bubonic plague that already had depopulated East Prussia. After the plague spared the city it came to be used as a charity hospital for the poor. On January 9, 1727 Frederick William I of Prussia gave it the name Charité, meaning "charity". The construction of an anatomical theatre in 1713 marks the beginning of the medical school, then supervised by the collegium medico-chirurgicum of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. 1795 saw the establishment of the Pépinière school for the education of military surgeons.
  After the University of Berlin (today Humboldt University) had been founded in 1810, the dean of the medical college Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in 1828 integrated the Charité as a teaching hospital. Rudolf Virchow, once student at the Pépinière, worked with anatomist Robert Froriep as prosector here and in 1856 became director of the newly created institute of pathology, where he developed his cell theory.
  
  wn.com/Charité
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  German Empire
  The German Empire (German: Deutsches Kaiserreich) is the common name given to the state officially named the Deutsches Reich (literally: "German Realm"), designating Germany from the unification of Germany and proclamation of Wilhelm I as German Emperor on 18 January 1871, to 1918, when it became a federal republic after defeat in World War I and the abdication of the Emperor, Wilhelm II.
  The German Empire consisted of 27 constituent territories (most of them ruled by royal families). While the Kingdom of Prussia contained most of the population and most of the territory of the Reich; the Prussian leadership became supplanted by German leaders and Prussia itself played a lesser role. As Dwyer (2005) points out, Prussia's "political and cultural influence had diminished considerably" by the 1890s. Its three largest neighbors were rivals Imperial Russia to the east and France to the west and ally Austria-Hungary to the south.
  After 1850, Germany industrialized rapidly, with a foundation in coal, iron (and later steel), chemicals and railways. From a population of 41 million people in 1871, it grew to 68 million in 1913. From a heavily rural nation in 1815, it was now predominantly urban. During its 47 years of existence, the German Empire operated as an industrial, technological and scientific giant, receiving more Nobel Prizes in science than Britain, France, Russia and the United States combined.
  
  wn.com/German_Empire
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  University of Bonn
  The University of Bonn (German: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn) is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number of undergraduate and graduate programs in a range of subjects. Its library holds more than two million volumes. The University of Bonn has 525 professors and 27,800 students. Among its notable alumni and faculty are seven Nobel Laureates, two Fields Medalists, twelve Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winners, Pope Benedict XVI, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph Schumpeter. In the years 2010 and 2011, the Times Higher Education ranked the University of Bonn as one of the 200 best universities in the world.
  The university's forerunner was the Kurkölnische Akademie Bonn (English: Academy of the Prince-elector of Cologne) which was founded in 1777 by Maximilian Frederick of Königsegg-Rothenfels, the prince-elector of Cologne. In the spirit of the Enlightenment the new academy was nonsectarian. The academy had schools for theology, law, pharmacy and general studies. In 1784 Emperor Joseph II granted the academy the right to award academic degrees (Licentiat and Ph.D.), turning the academy into a university. The academy was closed in 1798 after the left bank of the Rhine was occupied by France during the French Revolutionary Wars.
  
  wn.com/University_of_Bonn

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  Adam Sedgwick
  Adam Sedgwick (22 March 1785 – 27 January 1873) was one of the founders of modern geology. He proposed the Devonian period of the geological timescale. Later, he proposed the Cambrian period, based on work which he did on Welsh rock strata.
  Though he had guided the young Charles Darwin in his early study of geology, Sedgwick was an outspoken opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution by means of natural selection.
  Sedgwick was born in Dent, Yorkshire, the third child of an Anglican vicar. He was educated at Sedbergh School and Trinity College, Cambridge.
  He studied mathematics and theology, and obtained his BA (5th Wrangler) from the University of Cambridge in 1808 and his MA in 1811. His academic mentors at Cambridge were Thomas Jones and John Dawson. He became a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and Woodwardian Professor of Geology at Cambridge from 1818, holding the chair until his death in 1873.
  Sedgwick studied the geology of the British Isles and Europe. He founded the system for the classification of Cambrian rocks and with Roderick Murchison worked out the order of the Carboniferous and underlying Devonian strata. These studies were mostly carried out in the 1830s. The investigations into the Devonian meant that Sedgwick was involved with Murchison in a vigorous debate with Henry De la Beche, in what became known as the great Devonian controversy.
  
  wn.com/Adam_Sedgwick
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  Albert von Kölliker
  Albert von Kölliker (born Rudolf Albert Kölliker; 6 July 1817–2 November 1905) was a Swiss anatomist and physiologist.
  Albert Kölliker was born in Zurich, Switzerland. His early education was carried on in Zurich, and he entered the university there in 1836. After two years, however, he moved to the University of Bonn, and later to that of Berlin, becoming a pupil of noted physiologists Johannes Peter Müller and of Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle. He graduated in philosophy at Zurich in 1841, and in medicine at Heidelberg in 1842. The first academic post which he held was that of prosector of anatomy under Henle, but his tenure of this office was brief - in 1844 he returned to Zurich University to occupy a chair as professor extraordinary of physiology and comparative anatomy. His stay here was also brief; in 1847 the University of Würzburg, attracted by his rising fame, offered him the post of professor of physiology and of microscopical and comparative anatomy. He accepted the appointment, and at Würzburg he remained thenceforth, refusing all offers tempting him to leave the quiet academic life of the Bavarian town, where he died.
  
  wn.com/Albert_von_Kölliker
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  Arthur Cayley
  Arthur Cayley F.R.S. (16 August 1821 – 26 January 1895) was a British mathematician. He helped found the modern British school of pure mathematics.
  As a child, Cayley enjoyed solving complex math problems for amusement. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he excelled in Greek, French, German, and Italian, as well as mathematics. He worked as a lawyer for 14 years.
  He postulated the Cayley–Hamilton theorem—that every square matrix is a root of its own characteristic polynomial, and verified it for matrices of order 2 and 3. He was the first to define the concept of a group in the modern way—as a set with a binary operation satisfying certain laws. Formerly, when mathematicians spoke of "groups", they had meant permutation groups.
  See also Cayley's theorem.
  Arthur Cayley was born in Richmond, London, England, on 16 August 1821. His father, Henry Cayley, was a distant cousin of Sir George Cayley the aeronautics engineer innovator, and descended from an ancient Yorkshire family. He settled in Saint Petersburg, Russia, as a merchant. His mother was Maria Antonia Doughty, daughter of William Doughty. According to some writers she was Russian, but her father's name indicates an English origin. His brother was the linguist Charles Bagot Cayley. Arthur spent his first eight years in Saint Petersburg. In 1829 his parents were settled permanently at Blackheath, near London. Arthur was sent to a private school. He early showed great liking for, and aptitude in, numerical calculation. At age 14 he was sent to King's College School. The school's master observed indications of mathematical genius and advised the father to educate his son not for his own business, as he had intended, but to enter the University of Cambridge.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Cayley
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  Arthur König
  Arthur Peter König (September 13, 1856, Krefeld – October 26,1901, Berlin) devoted his short life to physiological optics. Born with congenital kyphosis he studied in Bonn and Heidelberg, moving to Berlin in the fall of 1879 where he studied under Hermann von Helmholtz, whose assistant he became in 1882. After obtaining a doctoral degree in 1882 he qualified for a professorial position in 1884. In 1890 he became director of the physical department of the Physiological Institute of the University of Berlin. In the same year he married Laura Köttgen with whom he had a son, Arthur, who became an astronomer. Circulatory problems caused by his kyphosis resulted in his premature death in 1901.[1] Originally working in physics, he began in 1883 to concentrate on physiological optics where he published over thirty papers, some of seminal importance. Among these are the 1886 paper (together with C. Dietrici) ‘Fundamental sensations and their sensitivity in the spectrum’, an empirical determination of what in fact is the spectral sensitivity of the human rod and cone sensors of vision.[2] Earlier attempts at such measurements, but based on much simpler technology, had been made in 1860 by the English physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879). Using newly development spectrophotometric equipment and modifications of the experimental procedure König and Dieterici published a more detailed paper in 1892, determining the “fundamental sensations” not only of subjects with normal color vision (trichromats) but also of dichromats and monochromats (Fig. 2).[3] With these measurements König provided evidence for the conjecture that the most common form of color blindness, dichromacy, is due to the absence of one cone type in the eye. Averaged König functions were widely used in psychophysical color stimulus calculations until new data based on a slightly different method and involving many more observers were determined by J. Guild and W. D. Wright in the later 1920s, resulting in the recommendations of standard observer data by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE, International Commission on Illumination) in 1931.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_König
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  Carl Ludwig
  Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (29 December 1816, Witzenhausen – 23 April 1895, Leipzig) was a German physician and physiologist.
  In 1842 Ludwig became a professor of physiology and in 1846 of comparative anatomy. From professorships in Zurich and Vienna he went in 1865 to the University of Leipzig and developed there the Physiological Institute, designated today after him: Carl Ludwig Institute of Physiology. Ludwig researched several topics such as the physiology of blood pressure, urinary excretion and anesthesia. He received the Copley Medal in 1884 for his research. In 1869, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is credited for inventing the stromuhr.
  Since 1932 the Carl Ludwig Honorary Medal is awarded by the German Society for Cardiology to outstanding investigators in the area of cardiovascular research.
  Ludwig was born at Witzenhausen, near Kassel, and studied medicine at Erlangen and Marburg, taking his doctor's degree at Marburg in 1839. He made Marburg his home for the next ten years, studying and teaching anatomy and physiology, first as prosector to FL Fick (1841), then as privat-docent (1842), and finally as extraordinary professor (1846). In 1849 he was chosen professor of anatomy and physiology at Zurich, and 6 years afterwards he went to Vienna as professor in the Josephinum school for military surgeons.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Ludwig
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  Charles Darwin
  Charles Robert Darwin, FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection.
  Darwin published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.
  Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. Studies at the University of Cambridge encouraged his passion for natural science. His five-year voyage on HMS Beagle established him as an eminent geologist whose observations and theories supported Charles Lyell's uniformitarian ideas, and publication of his journal of the voyage made him famous as a popular author.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Darwin
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  Charles Lyell
  Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, Kt FRS (14 November 1797 – 22 February 1875) was a British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism – the idea that the earth was shaped by slow-moving forces still in operation today. Lyell was a close and influential friend of Charles Darwin.
  Lyell was born in Scotland about 15 miles north of Dundee in Kinnordy, near Kirriemuir in Forfarshire (now in Angus). He was the eldest of ten children. Lyell's father, also named Charles, was a lawyer and botanist of minor repute: it was he who first exposed his son to the study of nature.
  The house/place of his birth is located in the north-west of the Central Lowlands in the valley of the Highland Boundary Fault. Round the house, in the rift valley, is farmland, but within a short distance to the north-west, on the other side of the fault, are the Grampian Mountains in the Highlands. His family's second home was in a completely different geological and ecological area: he spent much of his childhood at Bartley Lodge in the New Forest, England.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Lyell
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  Charles Wheatstone
  Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS (6 February 1802 – 19 October 1875), was an English scientist and inventor of many scientific breakthroughs of the Victorian era, including the English concertina, the stereoscope (a device for displaying three-dimensional images), and the Playfair cipher (an encryption technique). However, Wheatstone is best known for his contributions in the development of the Wheatstone bridge, originally invented by Samuel Hunter Christie, which is used to measure an unknown electrical resistance, and as a major figure in the development of telegraphy.
  Charles Wheatstone was born in Barnwood Gloucester Gloucester. His father was a music-seller in the town, who moved to 128 Pall Mall, London, four years later, becoming a teacher of the flute. Charles, the second son, went to a village school, near Gloucester, and afterwards to several institutions in London. One of them was in Kennington, and kept by a Mrs. Castlemaine, who was astonished at his rapid progress. From another he ran away, but was captured at Windsor, not far from the theatre of his practical telegraph. As a boy he was very shy and sensitive, liking well to retire into an attic, without any other company than his own thoughts.
  
  wn.com/Charles_Wheatstone
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  Claude Bernard
  Claude Bernard (12 July 1813 – 10 February 1878) was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur (now known as homeostasis, a term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon). Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science". Among many other accomplishments, he was one of the first to suggest the use of blind experiments to ensure the objectivity of scientific observations.
  Bernard was born in 1813 in the village of Saint-Julien near Villefranche-sur-Saône. He received his early education in the Jesuit school of that town, and then proceeded to the college at Lyon, which, however, he soon left to become assistant in a druggist's shop. His leisure hours were devoted to the composition of a vaudeville comedy, and the success it achieved moved him to attempt a prose drama in five acts, Arthur de Bretagne.
  At the age of twenty-one in 1834 he went to Paris, armed with this play and an introduction to Saint-Marc Girardin, but the critic dissuaded him from adopting literature as a profession, and urged him rather to take up the study of medicine. This advice Bernard followed, and in due course he became interne at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. In this way he was brought into contact with the great physiologist, François Magendie, who was physician to the hospital, and whose official 'preparateur' at the Collège de France he became in 1841.
  
  wn.com/Claude_Bernard
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  Edward Frankland
  Sir Edward Frankland, KCB, FRS (18 January 1825 – 9 August 1899) was a chemist, one of the foremost of his day. He was an expert in water quality and analysis, and originated the concept of combining power, or valence, in chemistry. He was also one of the originators of organometallic chemistry.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Frankland
• Eugen Goldstein
  Eugen Goldstein (September 5, 1850 – December 26, 1930) was a German physicist. He was an early investigator of discharge tubes, the discoverer of anode rays, and is sometimes credited with the discovery of the proton.
  Goldstein was born in 1850 at Gleiwitz Upper Silesia, now known as Gliwice, Poland. He studied at Breslau and later, under Helmholtz, in Berlin. Goldstein worked at the Berlin Observatory from 1878 to 1890, but spent most of his career at the Potsdam Observatory, where he became head of the astrophysical section in 1927. He died in 1930 and was buried in the Weißensee Cemetery in Berlin.
  In the mid-nineteenth century, Julius Plücker investigated the light emitted in discharge tubes (Crookes tubes) and the influence of magnetic fields on the glow. Later, in 1869, Johann Wilhelm Hittorf studied discharge tubes with energy rays extending from a negative electrode, the cathode. These rays produced a fluorescence when they hit a tube's glass walls, and when interrupted by a solid object they cast a shadow.
  
  wn.com/Eugen_Goldstein
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  Ewald Hering
  Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering (August 5, 1834 – January 26, 1918) was a German physiologist who did much research into color vision and spatial perception. He proposed opponent color theory in 1892. His uncle was the homeopath Constantine Hering.
  Born in Alt-Gersdorf, Kingdom of Saxony, Hering studied at the University of Leipzig and became a professor at Charles University in Prague.
  Hering disagreed with the leading theory developed mostly by Thomas Young and Hermann von Helmholtz. Helmholtz's theory stated that the human eye perceived all colors in terms of three primary colors: red, green, and blue. Hering instead believed that the visual system worked based on a system of color opponency. Hering's proposal is now widely recognized as nearer to the neurophysiological truth, while the red, green, blue primaries dominate in the engineering of color reproduction.
  Hering looked more at qualitative aspects of color and said there were six primary colors, coupled in three pairs: red–green, yellow–blue and white–black. Any receptor that was turned off by one of these colors, was excited by its coupled color. This results in six different receptors. It also explained afterimages.
  
  wn.com/Ewald_Hering
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  Franz Ernst Neumann
  Franz Ernst Neumann (September 11, 1798 – May 23, 1895) was a German mineralogist, physicist and mathematician.
  Neumann was born in Joachimsthal, Margraviate of Brandenburg, located not far from Berlin. In 1815 he interrupted his studies at Berlin to serve as a volunteer in the Hundred Days against Napoleon, and was wounded in the Battle of Ligny. Subsequently he entered Berlin University as a student of theology, but soon turned to scientific subjects. His earlier papers were mostly concerned with crystallography, and the reputation they gained him led to his appointment as Privatdozent at the University of Königsberg, where in 1828 he became extraordinary, and in 1829 ordinary, professor of mineralogy and physics. His 1831 study on the specific heats of compounds included what is now known as Neumann's Law: the molecular heat of a compound is equal to the sum of the atomic heats of its constituents.
  
  wn.com/Franz_Ernst_Neumann
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  Friedrich Schottky
  Friedrich Hermann Schottky (24 July 1851 – 12 August 1935) was a German mathematician who worked on elliptic, abelian, and theta functions and introduced Schottky groups and Schottky's theorem. He was born in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland) and died in Berlin.
  He is also the father of Walter H. Schottky, the German physicist and inventor of a variety of semiconductor concepts.
  
  
  
  wn.com/Friedrich_Schottky
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  Friedrich Wöhler
  Friedrich Wöhler (31 July 1800 – 23 September 1882) was a German chemist, best known for his synthesis of urea, but also the first to isolate several chemical elements.
  He was born in Eschersheim, which belonged to Hanau at the time but is nowadays a district of Frankfurt am Main. In 1823 Wöhler finished his study of medicine in Heidelberg at the laboratory of Leopold Gmelin, who arranged for him to work under Jöns Jakob Berzelius in Stockholm. He taught chemistry from 1826 to 1831 at the Polytechnic School in Berlin until 1839 when he was stationed at the Polytechnic School at Kassel. Afterwards, he became Ordinary Professor of Chemistry in the University of Göttingen, where he remained until his death in 1882. In 1834, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
  Wöhler is regarded as a pioneer in organic chemistry as a result of his (accidentally) synthesizing urea in the Wöhler synthesis in 1828. This discovery has become celebrated as a refutation of vitalism, the hypothesis that living things are alive because of some special "vital force". However, contemporary accounts do not support that notion. This Wöhler Myth, as historian of science Peter J. Ramberg called it, originated from a popular history of chemistry published in 1931, which, "ignoring all pretense of historical accuracy, turned Wöhler into a crusader who made attempt after attempt to synthesize a natural product that would refute vitalism and lift the veil of ignorance, until 'one afternoon the miracle happened'". Nevertheless, it was the beginning of the end of one popular vitalist hypothesis, that of Jöns Jakob Berzelius that "organic" compounds could only be made by living things.
  
  wn.com/Friedrich_Wöhler
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  George Salmon
  The Reverend George Salmon (25 September 1819 - 22 January 1904) was, firstly, a mathematician whose publications in algebraic geometry were widely read in the second half of the 19th century. He was also an Anglican theologian who devoted himself mostly to theology for the last forty years of his life. His publications in theology were widely read, too. He spent his entire career at Trinity College Dublin.
  George Salmon was almost certainly born in Dublin, but he spent his boyhood in Cork City, Ireland, where his father was a linen merchant. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin in 1839 with very high honors in mathematics. In 1841 at the age of 21 he attained a paid fellowship and teaching position in mathematics at Trinity. In 1845 he was concurrently appointed to a position in theology at Trinity, after having been ordained a priest in the Church of Ireland in 1844.
  He remained at Trinity College Dublin for the rest of his career. He married in 1844 Frances Anne, daughter of Rev J L Salvador of Staunton, Herefordshire with whom he had six children, of whom only two survived him. He died at Trinity college and was buried in Mount Jerome cemetery, Dublin.
  
  wn.com/George_Salmon
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  Heinrich Hertz
  Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (22 February 1857 – 1 January 1894) was a German physicist who clarified and expanded James Clerk Maxwell's electromagnetic theory of light, which was first demonstrated by David Edward Hughes using non-rigorous trial and error procedures. Hertz is distinguished from Maxwell and Hughes because he was the first to conclusively prove the existence of electromagnetic waves by engineering instruments to transmit and receive radio pulses using experimental procedures that ruled out all other known wireless phenomena. The scientific unit of frequency — cycles per second — was named the "hertz" in his honor.
  Hertz was born in Hamburg, then a sovereign state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous and cultured Hanseatic family. His father, David Gustav Hertz, was a writer and later a senator. His mother was the former Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn. His paternal great-grandfather, David Wolff Hertz (1757–1822), fourth son of Benjamin Wolff Hertz, moved to Hamburg in 1793, where he made his living as a jeweller; he and his wife Schöne Hertz (1760–1834) were buried in the former Jewish cemetery in Ottensen. Their first son, Wolff Hertz (1790–1859), was chairman of the Jewish community. Hertz' paternal grandfather, Heinrich David Hertz (1797–1862), was a respected businessman, and his paternal grandmother, Betty Oppenheim, was the daughter of the banker Salomon Oppenheim, from Cologne. Hertz's father and paternal grandparents converted from Judaism to Christianity. His mother's family was Lutheran.
  
  wn.com/Heinrich_Hertz
• Heinrich Kayser
  Heinrich Gustav Johannes Kayser (16 March 1853 – 14 October 1940) was a German physicist.
  He was born at Bingen am Rhein. Kayser's early work was concerned with the characteristics of acoustic waves. He discovered the occurrence of helium in the Earth's atmosphere. Together with Carl Runge, he examined the spectra of chemical elements. In 1905, he wrote a paper on electron theory.
  The kayser unit, associated with wavenumber, of the CGS system was named after him. He died at Bonn in 1940.
  
  
  
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  Immanuel Kant
  Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
  Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
  He stated:
  Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
  Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.
  
  wn.com/Immanuel_Kant
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  James Dwight Dana
  James Dwight Dana (1813–1895) was an American geologist, mineralogist, volcanologist, and zoologist. He made pioneering studies of mountain-building, volcanic activity, and the origin and structure of continents and oceans around the world.
  Dana was born February 12, 1813 in Utica, New York. His father was merchant James Dana (1780–1860), and mother was Harriet Dwight (1792–1870). Through his mother he was related to the Dwight New England family of missionaries and educators including uncle Harrison Gray Otis Dwight and first cousin Henry Otis Dwight. He showed an early interest in science, which had been fostered by Fay Edgerton, a teacher in the Utica high school, and in 1830 he entered Yale College in order to study under Benjamin Silliman the elder. Graduating in 1833, for the next two years he was teacher of mathematics to midshipmen in the Navy, and sailed to the Mediterranean while engaged in his duties.
  In 1836 and 1837 he was assistant to Professor Silliman in the chemical laboratory at Yale, and then, for four years, acted as mineralogist and geologist of the United States Exploring Expedition, commanded by Captain Charles Wilkes, in the Pacific Ocean. His labors in preparing the reports of his explorations occupied parts of thirteen years after his return to America in 1842. His notebooks from the four years of travel contained fifty sketches, maps, and diagrams, including views of both Mount Shasta and Castle Crags. Dana's sketch of Mount Shasta was engraved in 1849 for publication in the American Journal of Science and Arts (which Silliman had founded in 1818), along with a lengthy article based on Dana's 1841 geological notes. In the article he described in scientific terms the rocks, minerals, and geology of the Shasta region. As far as is known, his sketch of Mount Shasta became the second view of the mountain ever published.
  
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  James Prescott Joule
  James Prescott Joule FRS ( /dʒuːl/; 24 December 1818 – 11 October 1889) was an English physicist and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work (see energy). This led to the theory of conservation of energy, which led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him. He worked with Lord Kelvin to develop the absolute scale of temperature, made observations on magnetostriction, and found the relationship between the current through resistance and the heat dissipated, now called Joule's law.
  The son of Benjamin Joule (1784–1858), a wealthy brewer, and Alice Prescott Joule, James Prescott Joule was born in the house adjoining the Joule Brewery in New Bailey Street, Salford 24 December 1818. James was tutored at the family home 'Broomhill', Pendlebury, near Salford, until 1834 when he was sent with his elder brother Benjamin, to study with John Dalton at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. The pair only received two years' education in arithmetic and geometry before Dalton was forced to retire owing to a stroke. However, Dalton's influence made a lasting impression as did that of his associates, chemist William Henry and Manchester engineers Peter Ewart and Eaton Hodgkinson. Joule was subsequently tutored by John Davies. Fascinated by electricity, he and his brother experimented by giving electric shocks to each other and to the family's servants.
  
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  Joseph Dalton Hooker
  Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker OM, GCSI, CB, FRS (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) was one of the greatest British botanists and explorers of the 19th century. Hooker was a founder of geographical botany, and Charles Darwin's closest friend. He was Director of the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, for twenty years, in succession to his father, William Jackson Hooker, and was awarded the highest honours of British science.
  Hooker was born in Halesworth, Suffolk, England. He was the second son of the famous botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker and Maria Sarah Turner, eldest daughter of the banker Dawson Turner and sister-in-law of Francis Palgrave. From age seven, Hooker attended his father's lectures at Glasgow University where he was Regius Professor of Botany. Joseph formed an early interest in plant distribution and the voyages of explorers like Captain James Cook. He was educated at the Glasgow High School and went on to study medicine at Glasgow University, graduating M.D. in 1839. This degree qualified him for employment in the Naval Medical Service: he joined renowned polar explorer Captain James Clark Ross's Antarctic expedition to the South Magnetic Pole after receiving a commission as Assistant-Surgeon on HMS Erebus.
  
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  Julius Plücker
  Julius Plücker (16 June 1801 – 22 May 1868) was a German mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions to the field of analytical geometry and was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery of the electron. He also vastly extended the study of Lamé curves.
  Plücker was born at Elberfeld (now part of Wuppertal). After being educated at Düsseldorf and at the universities of Bonn, Heidelberg and Berlin he went to Paris in 1823, where he came under the influence of the great school of French geometers, whose founder, Gaspard Monge, was only recently dead. In 1825 he returned to Bonn, and in 1828 was made professor of mathematics. In the same year he published the first volume of his Analytisch-geometrische Entwicklungen, which introduced the method of abridged notation. In 1831 he published the second volume, in which he clearly established on a firm and independent basis projective duality.
  In 1836 Plücker was made professor of physics at University of Bonn. In 1858, after a year of working with vacuum tubes of his Bonn colleague Heinrich Geissler, he published the first of his classical researches on the action of the magnet on the electric discharge in rarefied gases. He found that the discharge caused a fluorescent glow to form on the glass walls of the vacuum tube, and that the glow could be made to shift by applying an electromagnet to the tube, thus creating a magnetic field. It was later shown that the glow was produced by cathode rays.
  
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  Julius von Mayer
  Julius Robert von Mayer (November 25, 1814 – March 20, 1878) was a German physician and physicist and one of the founders of thermodynamics. He is best known for enunciating in 1841 one of the original statements of the conservation of energy or what is now known as one of the first versions of the first law of thermodynamics, namely:
  In 1842, Mayer described the vital chemical process now referred to as oxidation as the primary source of energy for any living creature. His achievements were overlooked and priority for the discovery of the mechanical equivalent of heat was attributed to James Joule in the following year. He also proposed that plants convert light into chemical energy.
  Von Mayer was born on November 25, 1814 in Heilbronn, Württemberg (Baden-Württemberg, modern day Germany), the son of a pharmacist. He grew up in Heilbronn. After completing his Abitur, he studied medicine at the University of Tübingen, where he was a member of the Corps Guestphalia, a German Student Corps. During 1838 he attained his doctorate as well as passing the Staatsexamen. After a stay in Paris (1839/40) he left as a ship's physician on a Dutch three-mast sailing ship for a journey to Jakarta.
  
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  Karl Ernst von Baer
  Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer, Edler von Huthorn (Russian: Карл Эрнст фон Бэр) also known in Russia as Karl Maksimovich Baer (Russian: Карл Макси́мович Бэр, 28 February [O.S. 17 February] 1792 – 28 November [O.S. 16 November] 1876) was an Estoniannaturalist, biologist, geologist, meteorologist, geographer, a founding father of embryology, explorer of European Russia and Scandinavia, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a co-founder of the Russian Geographical Society and the first President of the Russian Entomological Society.
  Karl Ernst von Baer was born into a Baltic German noble family in the Piep estate, Wierland, Estonia, as a Knight by birthright. Many of his ancestors had come from Westphalia. He was educated at the Knight and Cathedral School in Reval (Tallinn) and the Imperial University of Dorpat (Tartu), each of which he found lacking in quality education. In 1812, during his tenure at the university, he was sent to Riga to aid the city after Napoleon's armies had laid siege to it. As he attempted to help the sick and wounded, he realized that his education at Dorpat had been inadequate, and upon his graduation he notified his father that he would need to go abroad to "finish" his education. In his autobiography his discontent with his education at Dorpat inspired him to write a lengthy appraisal of education in general, a summary that dominated the content of the book. After leaving Tartu, he continued his education in Berlin, Vienna, and Würzburg where Döllinger introduced him to the new field of embryology.
  
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  Karl Gegenbaur
  Karl Gegenbaur (21 August 1826 - 14 June 1903) was a German anatomist and professor who demonstrated that the field of comparative anatomy offers important evidence supporting of the theory of evolution. As a professor of anatomy at the University of Jena (1855–1873) and at the University of Heidelberg (1873–1903), Carl Gegenbaur was a strong supporter of Charles Darwin's theory of organic evolution, having taught and worked, beginning in 1858, with Ernst Haeckel, 8 years his junior.
  Gegenbaur's book Grundzüge der vergleichenden Anatomie (1859; Elements of Comparative Anatomy) became the standard textbook, at the time, of evolutionary morphology, emphasizing that structural similarities among various animals provide clues to their evolutionary history. Carl Gegenbaur noted that the most reliable clue to evolutionary history is homology, the comparison of anatomical parts which have a common evolutionary origin.
  Gegenbaur had been a student of Albert von Kölliker, Rudolf Virchow, Heinrich Müller and Franz Leydig (1821–1908).
  
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  Karl Weierstrass
  Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass (German: Weierstraß; 31 October 1815 – 19 February 1897) was a German mathematician who is often cited as the "father of modern analysis".
  Weierstrass was born in Ostenfelde, part of Ennigerloh, Province of Westphalia.
  Weierstrass was the son of Wilhelm Weierstrass, a government official, and Theodora Vonderforst. His interest in mathematics began while he was a Gymnasium student at Theodorianum in Paderborn. He was sent to the University of Bonn upon graduation to prepare for a government position. Because his studies were to be in the fields of law, economics, and finance, he was immediately in conflict with his hopes to study mathematics. He resolved the conflict by paying little heed to his planned course of study, but continued private study in mathematics. The outcome was to leave the university without a degree. After that he studied mathematics at the University of Münster (which was even at this time very famous for mathematics) and his father was able to obtain a place for him in a teacher training school in Münster. Later he was certified as a teacher in that city. During this period of study, Weierstrass attended the lectures of Christoph Gudermann and became interested in elliptic functions. In 1843 he taught in Deutsch-Krone in Westprussia and since 1848 he taught at the Lyceum Hosianum in Braunsberg. Besides mathematics he also taught physics, botanics and gymnastics.
  
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  Louis Agassiz
  Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (May 28, 1807 – December 14, 1873) was a Swiss paleontologist, glaciologist, geologist and a prominent innovator in the study of the Earth's natural history. He grew up in Switzerland and became a professor of natural history at University of Neuchâtel. Later, he accepted a professorship at Harvard University in the United States.
  Louis Agassiz was born in Môtier (now part of Haut-Vully) in the canton of Fribourg, Switzerland. Educated first at home, then spending four years of secondary school in Bienne, he completed his elementary studies in Lausanne. Having adopted medicine as his profession, he studied successively at the universities of Zürich, Heidelberg and Munich; while there he extended his knowledge of natural history, especially of botany. In 1829 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Erlangen, and in 1830 that of doctor of medicine at Munich. Moving to Paris he fell under the tutelage of Alexander von Humboldt and Georges Cuvier, who launched him on his careers of geology and zoology respectively. Previously he had not paid special attention to the study of ichthyology, but it soon became the great focus of his life's work.
  
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  Louis Pasteur
  Louis Pasteur ( /ˈluːi pæˈstɜr/, French: [lwi pastœʁ]; December 27, 1822 – September 28, 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist born in Dole. He is remembered for his remarkable breakthroughs in the causes and preventions of diseases. His discoveries reduced mortality from puerperal fever, and he created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax. His experiments supported the germ theory of disease. He was best known to the general public for inventing a method to stop milk and wine from causing sickness, a process that came to be called pasteurization. He is regarded as one of the three main founders of microbiology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch. Pasteur also made many discoveries in the field of chemistry, most notably the molecular basis for the asymmetry of certain crystals. His body lies beneath the Institute Pasteur in Paris in a spectacular vault covered in depictions of his accomplishments in Byzantine mosaics.
  Louis Pasteur was born on December 27, 1822, in Dole in the Jura region of France, into the family of a poor tanner. Louis grew up in the town of Arbois. He gained degrees in Letters and in Mathematical Sciences before entering the École Normale Supérieure, an elite college. After serving briefly as professor of physics at Dijon Lycée in 1848, he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and courted Marie Laurent, daughter of the university's rector, in 1849. They were married on May 29, 1849, and together had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood; the other three died of typhoid. These personal tragedies inspired Pasteur to try to find cures for diseases such as typhoid.
  
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  Léon Foucault
  Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bɛʁnaʁ leɔ̃ fuko]) (18 September 1819 – 11 February 1868) was a French physicist best known for the invention of the Foucault pendulum, a device demonstrating the effect of the Earth's rotation. He also made an early measurement of the speed of light, discovered eddy currents, and although he didn't invent it, is credited with naming the gyroscope.
  Foucault was the son of a publisher in Paris, where he was born on September 18, 1819. After an education received chiefly at home, he studied medicine, which he abandoned in favour of physics due to a fear of blood. He first directed his attention to the improvement of L. J. M. Daguerre's photographic processes. For three years he was experimental assistant to Alfred Donné (1801–1878) in his course of lectures on microscopic anatomy.
  With A. H. L. Fizeau he carried out a series of investigations on the intensity of the light of the sun, as compared with that of carbon in the arc lamp, and of lime in the flame of the oxyhydrogen blowpipe; on the interference of infrared radiation, and of light rays differing greatly in lengths of path; and on the chromatic polarization of light.
  
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  Marcellin Berthelot
  Pierre Eugène Marcellin Berthelot (25 October 1827 – 18 March 1907) was a French chemist and politician noted for the Thomsen-Berthelot principle of thermochemistry. He synthesized many organic compounds from inorganic substances and disproved the theory of vitalism. He is considered as one of the greatest chemists of all time.
  He was born in Paris, the son of a doctor. After doing well at school in history and philosophy, he became a scientist.
  The fundamental conception that underlay all Berthelot's chemical work was that all chemical phenomena depend on the action of physical forces which can be determined and measured. When he began his active career it was generally believed that, although some instances of the synthetic production of organic substances had been observed, on the whole organic chemistry remained an analytical science and could not become a constructive one, because the formation of the substances with which it deals required the intervention of vital activity in some shape. To this attitude he offered uncompromising opposition, and by the synthetic production of numerous hydrocarbons, natural fats, sugars and other bodies he proved that organic compounds can be formed by ordinary methods of chemical manipulation and obey the same principles as inorganic substances, thus exhibiting the "creative character in virtue of which chemistry actually realizes the abstract conceptions of its theories and classifications—a prerogative so far possessed neither by the natural nor by the historical sciences."
  
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  Max Planck
  Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS, (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist who discovered quantum physics, initiating a revolution in natural science and philosophy. He is regarded as the founder of quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
  Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich; and his paternal uncle was a judge.
  Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptised with the name of Karl Ernst Ludwig Marx Planck; of his given names, Marx (a now obsolete variant of Markus or maybe simply an error for Max, which is actually short for Maximilian) was indicated as the primary name. However, by the age of ten he signed with the name Max and used this for the rest of his life.
  He was the sixth child in the family, though two of his siblings were from his father's first marriage. Among his earliest memories was the marching of Prussian and Austrian troops into Kiel during the Danish-Prussian war of 1864. In 1867 the family moved to Munich, and Planck enrolled in the Maximilians gymnasium school, where he came under the tutelage of Hermann Müller, a mathematician who took an interest in the youth, and taught him astronomy and mechanics as well as mathematics. It was from Müller that Planck first learned the principle of conservation of energy. Planck graduated early, at age 17. This is how Planck first came in contact with the field of physics.
  
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  Michel Chasles
  Michel Floréal Chasles (15 November 1793 – 18 December 1880) was a French mathematician.
  He was born at Épernon in France and studied at the École Polytechnique in Paris under Siméon Denis Poisson. In the War of the Sixth Coalition he was drafted to fight in the defence of Paris in 1814. After the war, he gave up on a career as an engineer or stockbroker in order to pursue his mathematical studies.
  In 1837 he published his Historical view of the origin and development of methods in geometry, a study of the method of reciprocal polars in projective geometry. The work gained him considerable fame and respect and he was appointed Professor at the École Polytechnique in 1841, then he was awarded a chair at the Sorbonne in 1846. A second edition of his book was published in 1875, and Leonhard Sohncke translated the work into German.
  Jakob Steiner had proposed the problem of enumerating the number of conic sections tangent to each of five given conics, and had answered it incorrectly. Chasles developed a theory of characteristics that enabled the correct enumeration of the conics (there are 3264) (see enumerative geometry). He established several important theorems (all called Chasles' theorem). That on solid body kinematics was seminal for understanding their motions, and hence to the development of the theories of dynamics of rigid bodies.
  
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  Oliver Heaviside
  Oliver Heaviside FRS ( /ˈɒlɪvər ˈhɛvisaɪd/ (18 May 1850 – 3 February 1925) was a self-taught English electrical engineer, mathematician, and physicist who adapted complex numbers to the study of electrical circuits, invented mathematical techniques to the solution of differential equations (later found to be equivalent to Laplace transforms), reformulated Maxwell's field equations in terms of electric and magnetic forces and energy flux, and independently co-formulated vector analysis. Although at odds with the scientific establishment for most of his life, Heaviside changed the face of mathematics and science for years to come.
  Heaviside was born at 55 Kings Street (now Plender Street) in London's Camden Town. He was short and red-headed, and suffered from scarlet fever when young, which left him with a hearing impairment. He was a good student (e.g. placed fifth out of five hundred students in 1865). Heaviside's uncle Sir Charles Wheatstone (1802–1875) was the original co-inventor of the telegraph in the mid 1830s, and was an internationally celebrated expert in telegraphy and electromagnetism. Wheatstone was married to Heaviside's aunt in London and took a strong interest in his nephew's education.
  
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  Richard Owen
  Sir Richard Owen, FRS KCB (20 July 1804 – 18 December 1892) was an English biologist, comparative anatomist and paleontologist.
  Owen is probably best remembered today for coining the word Dinosauria (meaning "Terrible Reptile" or "Fearfully Great Reptile") and for his outspoken opposition to Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. He agreed with Darwin that evolution occurred, but thought it was more complex than outlined in Darwin's Origin. Owen's approach to evolution can be seen as having anticipated the issues that have gained greater attention with the recent emergence of evolutionary developmental biology. He was the driving force behind the establishment, in 1881, of the British Museum (Natural History) in London.Bill Bryson argues that, "by making the Natural History Museum an institution for everyone, Owen transformed our expectations of what museums are for".
  Owen was born in Lancaster in 1804, one of six children of a West Indian Merchant named Richard Owen (1754–1809). His mother, Catherine Parrin, was descended from Huguenots and he was educated at Lancaster Royal Grammar School. In 1820, he was apprenticed to a local surgeon and apothecary and, in 1824, he proceeded as a medical student to the University of Edinburgh. He left the university in the following year and completed his medical course in St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, where he came under the influence of the eminent surgeon, John Abernethy.
  
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  Robert Bunsen
  Robert Wilhelm Eberhard Bunsen (30 March 1811^[N1] – 16 August 1899) was a German chemist. He investigated emission spectra of heated elements, and discovered caesium (in 1860) and rubidium (in 1861) with Gustav Kirchhoff. Bunsen developed several gas-analytical methods, was a pioneer in photochemistry, and did early work in the field of organoarsenic chemistry. With his laboratory assistant, Peter Desaga, he developed the Bunsen burner, an improvement on the laboratory burners then in use. The Bunsen–Kirchhoff Award for spectroscopy is named after Bunsen and Kirchhoff.
  Robert Bunsen was born at Göttingen in 1811 in what is now the state of Lower Saxony in Germany, but was then the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia; upon the defeat of Napoleon three years later it became the Kingdom of Hanover. Robert was the youngest of four sons of the University of Göttingen's chief librarian and professor of modern philology, Christian Bunsen (1770–1837).Sources disagree on Robert Bunsen's exact birth date. His parish register, as well as two curricula vitae, handwritten by Bunsen himself, support the claim that 30 March 1811 is Bunsen's true birth date; however, many later sources cite 31 March as the date. According to his biographer Georg Lockemann, Bunsen himself celebrated his birthday on the 31st in his later years. Lockemann nevertheless regarded the 30th as the correct date.
  
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  Rudolf Clausius
  Rudolf Julius Emanuel Clausius (Born Rudolf Gottlieb, 2 January 1822 – 24 August 1888), was a German physicist and mathematician and is considered one of the central founders of the science of thermodynamics. By his restatement of Sadi Carnot's principle known as the Carnot cycle, he put the theory of heat on a truer and sounder basis. His most important paper, On the mechanical theory of heat, published in 1850, first stated the basic ideas of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1865 he introduced the concept of entropy.
  Clausius was born in Köslin (now Koszalin) in the Province of Pomerania. He started his education at the school of his father. After a few years, he went to the Gymnasium in Stettin (now Szczecin). Clausius graduated from the University of Berlin in 1844 where he studied mathematics and physics with, among others, Gustav Magnus, Johann Dirichlet and Jakob Steiner. He also studied history with Leopold von Ranke. During 1847, he got his doctorate from the University of Halle on optical effects in the Earth's atmosphere. He then became professor of physics at the Royal Artillery and Engineering School in Berlin and Privatdozent at the Berlin University. In 1855 he became professor at the ETH Zürich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, where he stayed until 1867. During that year, he moved to Würzburg and two years later, in 1869 to Bonn.
  
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  Rudolf Virchow
  Rudolph Carl Virchow (13 October 1821 – 5 September 1902) was a German doctor, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician, known for his advancement of public health. Referred to as "the father of modern pathology," he is considered one of the founders of social medicine.
  In 1861, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 1892, he was awarded the Copley Medal. Among his most famous students was anthropologist Franz Boas, who became a professor at Columbia University.
  The Society for Medical Anthropology gives an annual award in Virchow's name, Rudolf Virchow Award.
  From a farming family, he studied medicine and chemistry in Berlin at the Prussian Military Academy from 1839 to 1843 on a scholarship. When he graduated in 1843, he went to serve as Johannes Peter Mueller's assistant at the Charité Hospital. At this time, the German medical tradition was inclined more towards ‘romantic speculation’ and ‘naked empiricism’, in contrast with the more scientific approach found in England and France.
  
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  Simon Newcomb
  Simon Newcomb (March 12, 1835 – July 11, 1909) was a Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician. Though he had little conventional schooling, he made important contributions to timekeeping as well as writing on economics and statistics and authoring a science fiction novel.
  Simon Newcomb was born in the town of Wallace, Nova Scotia. His parents were Emily Prince, the daughter of a New Brunswick magistrate, and itinerant school teacher John Burton Newcomb. John moved around teaching in different parts of Canada, particularly in different villages in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Newcomb seems to have had little conventional schooling other than from his father and from a short apprenticeship to Dr. Foshay, a charlatan herbalist, in New Brunswick in 1851. Nevertheless, his father provided him with an excellent foundation for his future studies. Newcomb's apprenticeship with Dr. Foshay occurred when he was only 16. They entered an agreement that Newcomb would serve a five-year apprenticeship during which time Foshay would train him in using herbs to treat illnesses. For two years he was an apprentice but became increasingly unhappy and disillusioned with his apprenticeship and about Foshay's unscientific approach, realizing that the man was a charlatan. He made the decision to walk out on Foshay and break their agreement. He walked the 120 miles to the port of Calais in Maine where he met the captain of a ship who agreed to take him to Salem, Massachusetts so that he could join his father. In about 1854, he joined his father in Salem (John Newcomb had moved earlier to the United States), and the two journeyed together to Maryland.
  
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  Stanislao Cannizzaro
  Stanislao Cannizzaro, FRS (13 July 1826 – 10 May 1910) was an Italian chemist. He is remembered today largely for the Cannizzaro reaction and for his influential role in the atomic-weight deliberations of the Karlsruhe Congress in 1860.
  Cannizzaro was born in Palermo. In 1841, he entered the university there with the intention of making medicine his profession, but he soon turned to the study of chemistry. In 1845 and 1846, he acted as assistant to Raffaele Piria (1815 – 1865), known for his work on salicin, and who was then professor of chemistry at Pisa and subsequently occupied the same position at Turin.
  During the Sicilian revolution of independence of 1848, Cannizzaro served as an artillery officer at Messina and was also chosen deputy for Francavilla in the Sicilian parliament; and, after the fall of Messina in September 1848, he was stationed at Taormina. On the collapse of the insurgents, Cannizzaro escaped to Marseille in May 1849, and, after visiting various French towns, reached Paris in October. There he gained an introduction to Michel Eugène Chevreul's laboratory, and in conjunction with F.S. Cloez (1817 – 1883) made his first contribution to chemical research, in 1851, when they prepared cyanamide by the action of ammonia on cyanogen chloride in ethereal solution. In the same year, Cannizzaro accepted an appointment at the National College of Alessandria, Piedmont as professor of physical chemistry. In Alessandria, he discovered that aromatic aldehydes are decomposed by an alcoholic solution of potassium hydroxide into a mixture of the corresponding acid and alcohol. For example, benzaldehyde decomposes into benzoic acid and benzyl alcohol, the Cannizzaro reaction.
  
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  Thomas Henry Huxley
  Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist (anatomist), known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
  Huxley's famous 1860 debate with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated whether humans were closely related to apes.
  Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.
  In 1869 Huxley coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his own views on theology, a term whose use has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism).
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Henry_Huxley
• Wikipedia Persondata
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  Wilhelm Eduard Weber
  Wilhelm Eduard Weber (24 October 1804 – 23 June 1891) was a German physicist and, together with Carl Friedrich Gauss, inventor of the first electromagnetic telegraph.
  Weber was born in Wittenberg, where his father, Michael Weber, was professor of theology. Wilhelm was the second of three brothers, all of whom were distinguished by an aptitude for science. After the dissolution of the University of Wittenberg his father was transferred to Halle during 1815. William had received his first lessons from his father, but was now sent to the Orphan Asylum and Grammar School at Halle. After that he entered the University, and devoted himself to natural philosophy. He distinguished himself so much in his classes, and by original work, that after taking his degree of Doctor and becoming a Privatdozent he was appointed Professor Extraordinary of natural philosophy at Halle.
  
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  Wilhelm Wien
  Wilhelm Carl Werner Otto Fritz Franz Wien (German pronunciation: [ˈviːn]; 13 January 1864 – 30 August 1928) was a German physicist who, in 1893, used theories about heat and electromagnetism to deduce Wien's displacement law, which calculates the emission of a blackbody at any temperature from the emission at any one reference temperature.
  He also formulated an expression for the black-body radiation which is correct in the photon-gas limit. His arguments were based on the notion of adiabatic invariance, and were instrumental for the formulation of quantum mechanics. Wien received the 1911 Nobel Prize for his work on heat radiation.
  Wien was born at Gaffken near Fischhausen (Rybaki), Province of Prussia (now Primorsk, Russia) as the son of landowner Carl Wien. In 1866, his family moved to Drachstein near Rastenburg (Rastembork).
  In 1879, Wien went to school in Rastenburg and from 1880-1882 he attended the city school of Heidelberg. In 1882 he attended the University of Göttingen and the University of Berlin. From 1883-85, he worked in the laboratory of Hermann von Helmholtz and, in 1886, he received his Ph.D. with a thesis on the diffraction of light upon metals and on the influence of various materials upon the color of refracted light. From 1896 to 1899, Wien lectured at the prestigious RWTH Aachen University. In 1900 he went to the University of Würzburg and became successor of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen.
  
  wn.com/Wilhelm_Wien
• 
  Wilhelm Wundt
  Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920 in Germany) was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.
  By creating this laboratory he was able to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged parts of the brain. In doing so, he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other topics. He also formed the first journal for psychological research in 1881.
  Asteroids 635 Vundtia and 11040 Wundt are named in his honour.
  Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden on August 16th, 1832 (now part of Mannheim), the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (a Lutheran minister), and his wife Marie Frederike. When about four years of age, Wundt's family moved to Heidelsheim which was known to be a small town. He studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Berlin. After graduating in medicine from Heidelberg (1856), Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the University's staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–62). In 1865, he wrote a textbook about human physiology. In 1867 he became a professor in acquainting medical students with the exact physical needs for medical investigation. In 1874, he became a professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich. In 1875, he moved back to Leipzig.
  
  wn.com/Wilhelm_Wundt
• 
  William Huggins
  Sir William Huggins, OM, KCB, FRS (7 February 1824 – 12 May 1910) was an English astronomer best known for his pioneering work in astronomical spectroscopy.
  William Huggins was born at Cornhill, Middlesex in 1824. He married Margaret Lindsay, daughter of John Murray of Dublin, who also had an interest in astronomy and scientific research. She encouraged her husband's photography and helped to systemise their research.
  Huggins built a private observatory at 90 Upper Tulse Hill, South London from where he and his wife carried out extensive observations of the spectral emission lines and absorption lines of various celestial objects. On August 29, 1864, Huggins was the first to take the spectrum of a planetary nebula when he analyzed NGC 6543. He was also the first to distinguish between nebulae and galaxies by showing that some (like the Orion Nebula) had pure emission spectra characteristic of gas, while others like the Andromeda Galaxy had spectra characteristic of stars. Huggins was assisted in the analysis of spectra by his neighbour, the chemist William Allen Miller. Huggins was also the first to adopt dry plate photography in imaging astronomical objects.
  
  wn.com/William_Huggins
• 
  William James
  William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens.
  William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
  James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
  
  wn.com/William_James

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