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

• Academic discipline
• Al-Birjandi
• Al-Ghazali
• Al-Kindi
• Alan Guth
• Albert Einstein
• Alexander Friedmann
• Ali Kuşçu
• Almagest
• Ambiplasma
• Anaxagoras
• Andrei Linde
• Andromeda galaxy
• Annihilation
• Antimatter
• Aristarchus of Samos
• Aristotle
• Arno Penzias
• Arthur Eddington
• Arthur Koestler
• ArXiv
• Aryabhata
• Astrobiology
• Astrochemistry
• Astrodynamics
• Astrology
• Astrometry
• Astronomy
• Astrophysics
• Atom
• Atomism
• Babylonian astronomy
• Barry Long
• Belgium
• Biblical cosmology
• Big bang
• Big Bang
• Big crunch
• Brahmanda Purana
• Brans-Dicke
• Carl H. Brans
• Causality
• Celestial mechanics
• Celestial object
• Celestial sphere
• Celestial spheres
• Christian philosophy
• Classical element
• Copernican principle
• Cosmic inflation
• Cosmochemistry
• Cosmogony
• Cosmography
• Cosmology
• Cosmos
• Creation myth
• Creationism
• Cyclic model
• Dark energy
• De Sitter universe
• Dialectic
• Earth
• Earth's rotation
• Edward Arthur Milne
• Edwin Hubble
• Elliptical orbit
• Emanationism
• Entropy
• Epicurus
• Epicycles
• Epistemology
• Equant
• Eschatology
• Esoteric cosmology
• Esotericism
• Existence
• Expanding universe
• Faith
• Fakhr al-Din al-Razi
• Flatness problem
• Fred Hoyle
• Friedmann equations
• Galactic astronomy
• Galaxy
• Galileo Galilei
• General relativity
• General Relativity
• Geocentric
• Geocentric model
• Georges Lemaître
• Gods
• Hannes Alfvén
• Harlow Shapley
• Heaven
• Heber D. Curtis
• Heliocentric
• Herman Bondi
• Horizon problem
• Hylomorphism
• Hyperbolic space
• Ibn al-Shatir
• Immanuel Kant
• Inertia
• Isaac Newton
• Islamic cosmology
• Island universe
• Jewish philosophy
• Johann Kepler
• Johann Lambert
• Johannes Kepler
• John Philoponus
• Kalam
• Karl Schwarzschild
• Kepler's laws
• Leucippus
• M-theory
• Mach's principle
• Maragheh observatory
• Marcus Aurelius
• Martinus Thomsen
• Medieval philosophy
• Medieval universe
• Membrane (M-theory)
• Metaphysics
• Milky Way
• Milne universe
• Monism
• Moon
• Multiverse
• Nasir al-Din al-Tusi
• Neil Turok
• Nicolaus Copernicus
• Nilakantha Somayaji
• On the Heavens
• Orbifold
• Oscillating universe
• Oskar Klein
• Pantheism
• Particle physics
• Paul Dirac
• Paul Frampton
• Paul Steinhardt
• Phantom energy
• Philolaus
• Philosophy
• Physical cosmology
• Physical law
• Physical laws
• Physics
• Planet
• Planetary geology
• Planetary science
• Plasma cosmology
• Portal Astronomy
• Ptolemaic system
• Ptolemy
• Pythagoreans
• Quantum foam
• Radiation
• Reality
• Redshift
• Religion
• Religion and science
• Religious cosmology
• René Descartes
• Richard Tolman
• Rigveda
• Robert H. Dicke
• Saadia Gaon
• Science
• Solar astronomy
• Special relativity
• Spirituality
• Static universe
• Steady state theory
• Stellar astronomy
• Steven Weinberg
• Stoicism
• Stoics
• Sun
• Taiji (philosophy)
• Talk Cosmology
• Tao
• Teleology
• The Great Debate
• The Sleepwalkers
• The Sophia Centre
• Thomas Gold
• Time
• Tusi-couple
• Tycho Brahe
• Tychonic system
• Universe
• Vincent Cronin
• Willem de Sitter
• William H. McCrea
• WMAP
• World War I
• WP references
• WP Verifiability
• 
  

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  Belgium
  Belgium (ⁱ/ˈbɛldʒəm/ BEL-jəm), officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a federal state in Western Europe. It is a founding member of the European Union and hosts the EU's headquarters, and those of several other major international organisations such as NATO. Belgium covers an area of 30,528 square kilometres (11,787 sq mi), and it has a population of about 11 million people. Straddling the cultural boundary between Germanic and Latin Europe, Belgium is home to two main linguistic groups, the Dutch-speakers, mostly Flemish (about 60%), and the French-speakers, mostly Walloons (about 40%), plus a small group of German-speakers. Belgium's two largest regions are the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and the French-speaking southern region of Wallonia. The Brussels-Capital Region, officially bilingual, is a mostly French-speaking enclave within the Flemish Region. A German-speaking Community exists in eastern Wallonia. Belgium's linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in the political history and a complex system of government.
  
  wn.com/Belgium
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  Maragheh observatory
  Maragheh observatory (Persian: رصدخانهٔ مراغه‎) is an institutionalized astronomical observatory which was established in 1259 CE under the patronage of the Ilkhanid Hulagu and the directorship of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, an Iranian scientist and astronomer. Located in the heights west of Maragheh, East Azarbaijan Province, Iran, it was once considered one of the most prestigious observatories in the world.^{[citation needed]}
  It was financed by waqf revenues, which allowed it to continue to operate even after the death of its founder and was active for more than 50 years. The observatory served as a model for later observatories including the 15th-century Ulugh Beg Observatory at Samarkand, the 16th-century Taqi al-Din observatory at Istanbul, and the 18th-century Jai Singh observatory at Jaipur.
  Considerable parts of the groundwork are preserved in the ruins. In a 340 to 135 m² citadel-like area stood a four-story circular stone building of 28 m diameter. The mural quadrant to observe the positions of the stars and planets was aligned with the meridian. This meridian served as Prime meridian for the tables in the Zij-i Ilkhani, as we nowadays apply the meridian which passes the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
  
  wn.com/Maragheh_observatory

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  Alan Guth
  Alan Harvey Guth (born February 27, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist and cosmologist. Guth has researched elementary particle theory (and how particle theory is applicable to the early universe). Currently serving as Victor Weisskopf Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he is the originator of the inflationary universe theory.
  He graduated from MIT in 1968 in physics and stayed to receive a master's and a doctorate, also in physics.
  As a junior particle physicist, Guth first developed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1979 at Cornell and gave his first seminar on the subject in January 1980. Moving on to Stanford University Guth formally proposed the idea of cosmic inflation in 1981, the idea that the nascent universe passed through a phase of exponential expansion that was driven by a positive vacuum energy density (negative vacuum pressure). The results of the WMAP mission in 2006 made the case for cosmic inflation very compelling.
  Alan Guth was born on February 27, 1947 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After his junior year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he enrolled in a five-year program where he could get his bachelor’s and master’s after two more years. Guth obtained a bachelor’s and master’s degree in 1969 and a doctorate in 1972. In 1971, he married Susan Tisch, his high school sweetheart. They have two children: Lawrence (born 1977) and Jennifer (born 1983).
  
  wn.com/Alan_Guth
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  Albert Einstein
  Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
  Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
  
  wn.com/Albert_Einstein
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  Alexander Friedmann
  Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (also spelled Friedman or Fridman, Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Фри́дман) (June 29 (17 old style) by himself, June 16 (4 old style) by J. O'Conor in 1888, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire – September 16, 1925, Leningrad, USSR) was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician.
  Alexander Friedmann was born to the composer and ballet dancer Alexander Friedmann (who was a son of baptized Jewish cantonist) and the pianist Ludmila Voyachek. He lived much of his life in Saint Petersburg. He fought in World War I (on behalf of Imperial Russia) as a bomber and later lived through the Russian Revolution of 1917.
  Friedmann obtained his degree in St. Petersburg State University (1910), became a lecturer in St.-Petersburg State College of Mines, and a professor in Perm State University in 1918.
  In June 1925 he was given the job of the director of Main Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad. In July 1925 he participated in a record-setting balloon flight, reaching the elevation of 7,400 m (24,300 ft).
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Friedmann
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  Anaxagoras
  Anaxagoras (Greek: Ἀναξαγόρας, Anaxagoras, "lord of the assembly"; c. 500 BC – 428 BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than the Peloponnese. According to Diogenes Laertius and Plutarch he fled to Lampsacus due to a backlash against his pupil Pericles.
  Anaxagoras is famous for introducing the cosmological concept of Nous (mind), as an ordering force. He regarded material substance as an infinite multitude of imperishable primary elements, referring all generation and disappearance to mixture and separation respectively.
  Anaxagoras appears to have had some amount of property and prospects of political influence in his native town of Clazomenae in Asia Minor. However, he supposedly surrendered both of these out of a fear that they would hinder his search for knowledge. Valerius Maximus preserves a different tradition: Anaxagoras, coming home from a long voyage, found his property in ruin, and said: "If this had not perished, I would have." A sentence, denoted by Maximus, as being "possessed of sought-after wisdom!". Although a Greek, he may have been a soldier of the Persian army when Clazomenae was suppressed during the Ionian Revolt.
  
  wn.com/Anaxagoras
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  Andrei Linde
  Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde (Russian: Андрей Дмитриевич Линде; born March 2, 1948) is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and professor of Physics at Stanford University. Dr. Linde is best known for his work on the concept of the inflationary universe. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow State University. In 1975, Linde was awarded a Ph.D. from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. Among the various awards he's received for his work on inflation, in 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal, along with Alan Guth of MIT and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.
  Linde is best known for proposing "eternal chaotic inflation" to explain a number of problems in cosmology. This variant of cosmic inflation proposes that the false vacuum is eternally inflating in exponential growth powered by repulsive constant random zero point dark energy of negative pressure. This false vacuum is like supersaturated steam in which liquid bubbles of more stable vacuum form with Higgs-Goldstone fields that describe the cohering of most of the pre-inflationary random dark energy into the smooth fabric of curved spacetime. Our universe is only a small causal part of a single bubble, and there are 10^10^10^7 bubbles. In fact, there are 10^10^10^7 of universes like ours on a single bubble which is more like an expanding infinite sheet than a finite spherical surface (suppressing 1 space dimension for ease of visualization).
  
  wn.com/Andrei_Linde
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  Aristarchus of Samos
  Aristarchus (310 BC – ca. 230 BC), was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it (see Solar system). He was influenced by Philolaus of Croton, but he identified the "central fire" with the Sun, and put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun. His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy.
  His name is Ἀρίσταρχος in Greek letters, which transliterates to Aristarchos. He was born on the island of Samos, in the eastern Aegean Sea.
  Though the original text has been lost, a reference in Archimedes' book The Sand Reckoner (Archimedis Syracusani Arenarius & Dimensio Circuli) describes another work by Aristarchus in which he advanced the heliocentric model as an alternative hypothesis. Archimedes wrote:
  Aristarchus thus believed the stars to be very far away, and that in consequence there was no observable parallax, that is, a movement of the stars relative to each other as the Earth moves around the Sun. The stars are much farther away than was generally assumed in ancient times; and since stellar parallax is only detectable with telescopes, his speculation although accurate was unprovable at the time.
  
  wn.com/Aristarchus_of_Samos
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  Aristotle
  Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
  Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
  
  wn.com/Aristotle
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  Arthur Eddington
  Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS (28 December 1882 – 22 November 1944) was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. He was also a philosopher of science and a popularizer of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honor.
  He is famous for his work regarding the Theory of Relativity. Eddington wrote a number of articles which announced and explained Einstein's theory of general relativity to the English-speaking world. World War I severed many lines of scientific communication and new developments in German science were not well known in England. He also conducted an expedition to observe the Solar eclipse of 29 May 1919 that provided one of the earliest confirmations of relativity, and he became known for his popular expositions and interpretations of the theory.
  Eddington was born in Kendal, Cumbria, England, the son of Quaker parents, Arthur Henry Eddington and Sarah Ann Shout. His father taught at a Quaker training college in Lancashire before moving to Kendal to become headmaster of Stramongate School. He died in the typhoid epidemic which swept England in 1884. His mother was left to bring up her two children with relatively little income. The family moved to Weston-super-Mare where at first Stanley (as his mother and sister always called Eddington) was educated at home before spending three years at a preparatory school.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Eddington
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  Arthur Koestler
  Arthur Koestler CBE (5 September 1905, Budapest – 1 March 1983, London) was a Hungarian-British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931 Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned by Stalinist atrocities, he resigned in 1938. In 1940 he published his novel Darkness at Noon, an anti-totalitarian work, which gained him international fame.
  Over the next 43 years from his residence in Great Britain, Koestler espoused many political causes and wrote novels, memoirs, biographies, and numerous essays. In 1968, he was awarded the prestigious Sonning Prize "for outstanding contribution to European culture" and, in 1972, he was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). In 1976, Koestler was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and, in 1979, with terminal leukaemia. In 1983 he and his wife committed suicide at home in London.
  
  wn.com/Arthur_Koestler
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  Aryabhata
  Aryabhata (IAST: Āryabhaṭa, Sanskrit: आर्यभट) (476–550 CE) was the first in the line of great mathematician-astronomers from the classical age of Indian mathematics and Indian astronomy. His most famous works are the Āryabhaṭīya (499 CE, when he was 23 years old) and the Arya-siddhanta.
  While there is a tendency to misspell his name as "Aryabhatta" by analogy with other names having the "bhatta" suffix, his name is properly spelled Aryabhata: every astronomical text spells his name thus, including Brahmagupta's references to him "in more than a hundred places by name". Furthermore, in most instances "Aryabhatta" does not fit the metre either.
  Aryabhata mentions in the Aryabhatiya that it was composed 3,630 years into the Kali Yuga, when he was 23 years old. This corresponds to 499 CE, and implies that he was born in 476
  Aryabhata was born in Taregna (literally, song of the stars), which is a small town in Bihar, India, about 30 km (19 mi) from Patna (then known as Pataliputra), the capital city of Bihar State. Evidences justify his birth there. In Taregna Aryabhata set up an Astronomical Observatory in the Sun Temple 6th century.
  
  wn.com/Aryabhata
• Barry Long
  Barry Long (1 August 1926 – 6 December 2003) was an Australian spiritual teacher and writer.
  Barry Long was born and raised in Australia and had little formal education. In his twenties he became editor of a Sydney Sunday newspaper, The Truth and later press secretary in the New South Wales Parliament. At this time he was married with two children. In his early thirties he began to experience a disillusionment with his material life and in 1964 he abandoned everything, including his family, to go to India. There he experienced a spiritual crisis culminating in a self-ascribed "mystic death," which he called his "realisation of immortality," followed four years later by a "transcendental realisation"; a contact with a depth of consciousness from which he stated his knowledge of universal reality ultimately derived.
  Leaving India he moved to London, living in Highgate and working as a sub-editor in Fleet Street until he was able to support himself from teaching and publishing. In 1986 he returned to his native Australia, living on Mount Tamborine QLD with his wife Kathy and young stepson, Simon, then in Burleigh Heads QLD when they divorced, and finally moving to Crabbes Creek NSW where he lived until his death from prostate cancer in December 2003.
  
  wn.com/Barry_Long
• Edward Arthur Milne
  Edward Arthur Milne FRS (14 February 1896 – 21 September 1950) was a British astrophysicist and mathematician.
  Milne was born in Hull, Yorkshire, England. He attended Hymers College and from there he won an open scholarship in mathematics and natural science to study at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1914, gaining the largest number of marks which had ever been awarded in the examination. He was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, 1919–1925, being assistant director of the solar physics observatory, 1920–1924, mathematical lecturer at Trinity, 1924–1925, and university lecturer in astrophysics, 1922–1925. He was Beyer professor of applied mathematics, Victoria University of Manchester, 1924–1928, before his appointment as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics and to a fellowship at Wadham College, Oxford, in 1928. Milne's earlier work was in mathematical astrophysics. From 1932 he also worked on the problem of the "expanding universe" and in Relativity, Gravitation, and World-Structure (1935), proposed an alternative to Albert Einstein's general relativity theory. His later work, concerned with the interior structure of stars, aroused controversy. Milne was president of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1943–1945. He was, as would be the next Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Charles Coulson, a pioneer in religion and science discussions.
  
  wn.com/Edward_Arthur_Milne
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  Edwin Hubble
  Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer who is known for Hubble's law. He is incorrectly credited with the discovery of the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way and galactic red shift- discoveries made by the astronomer Vesto Slipher in 1912. He popularized Vesto Slipher's discovery that the loss in frequency—the redshift—observed in the spectra of light from other galaxies increased in proportion to a particular galaxy's distance from Earth. This relationship which was based Slipher's data became known as Hubble's law. Vesto Slipher, the unsung hero of twentieth-century astronomy was the first to present his findings in a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in August 1914. Stephen Hawking wryly notes in his book the Universe in a Nutshell "Hubble heard the presentation". Due to Vesto Slipher's reserved and reticent personality, his discoveries are incorrectly credited to Hubble.
  Hubble doubted the Doppler shift interpretation of the observed redshift that had been proposed earlier by Vesto Slipher, whose data he used, and that led to the theory of the metric expansion of space. He tended to believe the frequency of any beam of light could, by some so far unknown means, be diminished ever stronger, the longer the beam travels through space.
  
  wn.com/Edwin_Hubble
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  Epicurus
  Epicurus (Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκουρος, Epikouros, "ally, comrade"; 341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher as well as the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works. Much of what is known about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.
  For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.
  
  wn.com/Epicurus
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  Fred Hoyle
  Sir Fred Hoyle FRS (24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) was an English astronomer and mathematician noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally coined by him out of ridicule for the main rival of his own theory. In addition to his work as an astronomer, Hoyle was a writer of science fiction, including a number of books co-written with his son Geoffrey Hoyle. Hoyle spent most of his working life at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge and served as its director for a number of years. He died in Bournemouth, England, after a series of strokes.
  Hoyle was born near Bingley in Gilstead, West Yorkshire, England. His father, Ben Hoyle, worked in the wool trade in Bradford. His mother, Mabel Pickard, had studied music at the Royal College of Music in London. Hoyle was educated at Bingley Grammar School and read mathematics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. In the autumn of 1940, Hoyle left Cambridge to go to Portsmouth to work for the Admiralty on radar research, for example devising a method to get the altitude of the incoming airplanes. Two key colleagues in this war work were Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, and the three had many and deep discussions on cosmology.
  
  wn.com/Fred_Hoyle
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  Galileo Galilei
  Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science".
  His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.
  Galileo's championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the absence of an observed stellar parallax. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could only be supported as a possibility, not as an established fact. Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarized the work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.
  
  wn.com/Galileo_Galilei
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  Georges Lemaître
  Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( lemaitre.ogg (help·info) 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He was the first person to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble. He was also the first to derive what is now known as the Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his 'hypothesis of the primeval atom'. As he was a secular priest, he was called Abbé, then, after being made a canon, Monseigneur.
  After a classical education at a Jesuit secondary school (Collège du Sacré-Coeur, Charleroi), Lemaître began studying civil engineering at the Catholic University of Leuven at the age of 17. In 1914, he interrupted his studies to serve as an artillery officer in the Belgian army for the duration of World War I. At the end of hostilities, he received the Belgian War Cross with palms.
  
  wn.com/Georges_Lemaître
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  Hannes Alfvén
  Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (born 30 May 1908 in Norrköping, Sweden; died 2 April 1995 in Djursholm, Sweden) was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves. He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy.
  Alfvén received his PhD from the University of Uppsala in 1934. His thesis was titled "Investigations of the Ultra-short Electromagnetic Waves."
  In 1934, Alfvén taught physics at both the University of Uppsala and the Nobel Institute for Physics (later renamed the Manne Siegbahn Institute of Physics) in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1940, he became professor of electromagnetic theory and electrical measurements at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In 1945, he acquired the nonappointive position of Chair of Electronics. His title was changed to Chair of Plasma Physics in 1963. In 1954-1955, Alfvén was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1967, after leaving Sweden and spending time in the Soviet Union, he moved to the United States. Alfvén worked in the departments of electrical engineering at both the University of California, San Diego and the University of Southern California.
  
  wn.com/Hannes_Alfvén
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  Harlow Shapley
  Harlow Shapley (November 2, 1885 – October 20, 1972) was an American astronomer.
  He is notable for his groundbreaking 1918 work using Cepheid variables to estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the sun's position within it as well as in 1953 proposing the "Liquid Water Belt" theory, now known as the concept of a habitable zone.
  He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education. After studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter, Shapley returned to complete a six-year high school program in only two years, graduating as class valedictorian.
  In 1907, at the age of 22, Harlow Shapley went to study journalism at University of Missouri. When he learned that the opening of the School of Journalism had been postponed for a year, he decided to study the first subject he came across in the course directory. Rejecting Archaeology, which Harlow later explained he couldn't pronounce, Harlow chose the next subject, Astronomy.
  
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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.
  
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  Isaac Newton
  Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
  
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  Johannes Kepler
  Johannes Kepler (German pronunciation: [ˈkʰɛplɐ]; December 27, 1571 – November 15, 1630) was a German mathematician, astronomer and astrologer. A key figure in the 17th century scientific revolution, he is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion, codified by later astronomers, based on his works Astronomia nova, Harmonices Mundi, and Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. These works also provided one of the foundations for Isaac Newton's theory of universal gravitation.
  During his career, Kepler was a mathematics teacher at a seminary school in Graz, Austria, where he became an associate of Prince Hans Ulrich von Eggenberg. Later he became an assistant to astronomer Tycho Brahe, and eventually the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II and his two successors Matthias and Ferdinand II. He was also a mathematics teacher in Linz, Austria, and an adviser to General Wallenstein. Additionally, he did fundamental work in the field of optics, invented an improved version of the refracting telescope (the Keplerian Telescope), and mentioned the telescopic discoveries of his contemporary Galileo Galilei.
  
  wn.com/Johannes_Kepler
• John Philoponus
  John Philoponus^{[pronunciation?]}(Greek: Ἰωάννης ὁ Φιλόπονος; AD. 490–AD. 570), also known as John the Grammarian or John of Alexandria, was a Christian and Aristotelian commentator and the author of a considerable number of philosophical treatises and theological works. A rigorous, sometimes polemical writer and an original thinker who was controversial in his own time, John Philoponus broke from the Aristotelian-Neoplatonic tradition, questioning methodology and eventually leading to empiricism in the natural sciences.
  He was posthumously condemned as a heretic by the Orthodox Church in 680-81 because of what was perceived of as a tritheistic interpretation of the Trinity.
  His works were widely printed in Latin translations in Europe from the 15th century onwards. His critique of Aristotle in the Physics commentary was a major influence on Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Galileo Galilei, who cited Philoponus substantially in his works.
  Possibly born into a Christian family, nothing is known of his early life. Philoponus studied at the school of Alexandria and began publishing from about 510. He was a pupil and sometime amanuensis to the Neoplatonic philosopher Ammonius Hermiae, who had studied at Athens under Proclus.
  
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  Karl Schwarzschild
  Karl Schwarzschild (/shvärts'shĭld/) (October 9, 1873 – May 11, 1916) was a German physicist. He is also the father of astrophysicist Martin Schwarzschild.
  He is best known for providing the first exact solution to the Einstein field equations of general relativity, for the limited case of a single spherical non-rotating mass, which he accomplished in 1915, the same year that Einstein first introduced general relativity. The Schwarzschild solution, which makes use of Schwarzschild coordinates and the Schwarzschild metric, leads to the well-known Schwarzschild radius, which is the size of the event horizon of a non-rotating black hole.
  Schwarzschild accomplished this triumph while serving in the German army during World War I. He died the following year from pemphigus, a painful autoimmune disease which he developed while at the Russian front.
  Asteroid 837 Schwarzschilda is named in his honor.
  Schwarzschild was born in Frankfurt am Main to Jewish parents. His father was active in the business community of the city, and the family had ancestors in the city dating back to the sixteenth century. Karl attended a Jewish primary school until 11 years of age. He was something of a child prodigy, having two papers on binary orbits (celestial mechanics) published before he was sixteen. He studied at Straßburg and Munich, obtaining his doctorate in 1896 for a work on Jules Henri Poincaré's theories.
  
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  Leucippus
  Leucippus or Leukippos (Greek: Λεύκιππος, first half of 5th century BCE) was one of the earliest Greeks to develop the theory of atomism — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms — which was elaborated in greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus.
  According to this atomism, if you take a piece of wood and then cut it in to two equal parts, then do it continuously, eventually you will find a part that you can't cut. This smallest possible part is the "atom". A possible earlier candidate for atomism is Mochus of Sidon, from the Trojan War era (13th or 12th century BCE).
  He was most likely born in Miletus, although Abdera and Elea are also mentioned as possible birth-places.
  Leucippus is a shadowy figure, as his dates are not recorded and he is often mentioned in conjunction with his more well-known pupil Democritus, who replaced indeterminism with determinism as the ontological cause of atomic movement. It is therefore difficult to determine which contributions come from Democritus and which come from Leucippus.
  
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  Marcus Aurelius
  Marcus Aurelius (Latin: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; 26 April 121 – 17 March 180 AD), was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus' death in 169. He was the last of the "Five Good Emperors", and is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers. During his reign, the Empire defeated a revitalized Parthian Empire; Aurelius' general Avidius Cassius sacked the capital Ctesiphon in 164. Aurelius fought the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians with success during the Marcomannic Wars, but the threat of the Germanic tribes began to represent a troubling reality for the Empire. A revolt in the East led by Avidius Cassius failed to gain momentum and was suppressed immediately.
  Marcus Aurelius' Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration.
  
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  Martinus Thomsen
  Martinus Thomsen, referred to as Martinus (August 11, 1890 – March 8, 1981) was a Danish writer and mystic.
  Thomsen was born to a poor family and had a simple education. He worked as a dairyman.
  In March 1921, he claimed to have experienced a vision which inspired him to follow a spiritual path and to describe a cosmology which he documented in a series of books. His main work is entitled Livets Bog (English: The Book of Life), and is also referred to as The Third Testament.
  Martinus' cosmology is a view of life and existence. The cosmology has references to Jesus but is a departure from traditional Christian beliefs.
  His work is marked by elaborate symbolic drawings which are included in his books with detailed explanations of the symbology of each.
  Martinus Thomsen is not widely known outside Scandinavia.
  Martinus published many books and pamphlets, many of which have been translated.
  
  
  
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  Neil Turok
  Neil Geoffrey Turok (born 1958 in Johannesburg, South Africa) is the Director of Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He is the son of Mary and Ben Turok, activists in the anti-apartheid movement and the African National Congress.
  After graduating from Churchill College, Cambridge, Turok gained his doctorate from Imperial College, London, under the supervision of Professor David Olive, one of the inventors of superstring theory. After a postdoctoral post at Santa Barbara, he was an associate scientist at Fermilab, Chicago. In 1992 he was awarded the Maxwell medal of the Institute of Physics for his contributions to theoretical physics. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Physics at Princeton University, then held the Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge starting in 1997. He was appointed Director of the Perimeter Institute in 2008.
  Turok has worked in a number of areas of mathematical physics and early universe physics, focusing on observational tests of fundamental physics in cosmology. In the early 1990s, his group showed how the polarisation and temperature anisotropies of the cosmic background radiation would be correlated, a prediction which has been confirmed in detail by recent precision measurements by the WMAP spacecraft. They also developed a key test for the presence of a cosmological constant, also recently confirmed. Turok and collaborators developed the theory of open inflation. With Stephen Hawking, he later developed the so-called Hawking-Turok instanton solutions which, according to the no-boundary proposal of Hawking and James Hartle, can describe the birth of an inflationary universe.
  
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  Nicolaus Copernicus
  Nicolaus Copernicus (German: Nikolaus Kopernikus; Italian: Nicolò Copernico; Polish:  Mikołaj Kopernik (help·info); in his youth, Niclas Koppernigk; 19 February 1473 – 24 May 1543) was a Renaissance astronomer and the first person to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe.
  Copernicus' epochal book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), published just before his death in 1543, is often regarded as the starting point of modern astronomy and the defining epiphany that began the scientific revolution. His heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the universe, demonstrated that the observed motions of celestial objects can be explained without putting Earth at rest in the center of the universe. His work stimulated further scientific investigations, becoming a landmark in the history of science that is often referred to as the Copernican Revolution.
  Among the great polymaths of the Renaissance, Copernicus was a mathematician, astronomer, jurist with a doctorate in law, physician, quadrilingual polyglot, classics scholar, translator, artist,Catholic cleric, governor, diplomat and economist.
  
  wn.com/Nicolaus_Copernicus
• Nilakantha Somayaji
  Kelallur Nilakantha Somayaji (Malayalam: നീലകണ്ഠ സോമയാജി, Hindi: नीलकण्ठ सोमयाजि) (1444–1544) (also referred to as Kelallur Comatiri) was a major mathematician and astronomer of the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics. One of his most influential works was the comprehensive astronomical treatise Tantrasamgraha completed in 1501. He had also composed an elaborate commentary on Aryabhatiya called the Aryabhatiya Bhasya. In this Bhasya, Nilakantha had discussed infinite series expansions of trigonometric functions and problems of algebra and spherical geometry. Grahapareeksakrama is a manual on making observations in astronomy based on instruments of the time.
  Nilakantha Somayaji was one of the very few authors of the scholarly traditions of India who had cared to record details about his own life and times. So fortunately a few accurate particulars about Nilakantha Somayaji are known.
  In one of his works titled Siddhanta-darpana and also in his own commentary on Siddhanta-darpana, Nilakantha Somayaji has stated that he was born on Kali-day 1,660,181 which works out to 14 th June 1444 CE. A contemporary reference to Nilakantha Somayaji in a Malayalam work on astrology implies that Somayaji lived to a ripe old age even to become a centenarian. Sankara Variar, a pupil of Nilakantha Somayaji, in his commentary on Tantrasamgraha titled Tantrasamgraha-vyakhya, points out that the first and last verses of Tantrasamgraha contain chronograms specifying the Kali-days of the commencement (1,680,548) and of completion (1,680,553) of Somayaji's magnum opus Tantrasamgraha. Both these days occur in 1500 CE.
  
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  Oskar Klein
  Oskar Benjamin Klein (September 15, 1894 – February 5, 1977) was a Swedish theoretical physicist.
  Klein was born in Danderyd outside Stockholm, son of the chief rabbi of Stockholm, Dr. Gottlieb Klein from Homonna in Hungary and Antonie (Toni) Levy. He became a student of Svante Arrhenius at the Nobel Institute at a young age, and was on the way to Jean-Baptiste Perrin in France when World War I broke out and he was drafted into the military.
  From 1917 he worked a few years with Niels Bohr in Copenhagen and received his doctoral degree at the University College of Stockholm (now Stockholm University) in 1921. In 1923 he received a professorship at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and moved there with his recently wedded wife, Gerda Koch from Denmark. Klein returned to Copenhagen in 1925, spent some time with Paul Ehrenfest in Leiden, then became docent at Lund University in 1926 and in 1930 accepted the offer of the professorial chair in physics at the Stockholm University College, which had previously been held by Ivar Fredholm until his death in 1927; Klein retired as professor emeritus in 1962. He was awarded the Max Planck medal in 1959.
  
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  Paul Dirac
  
  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac, OM, FRS ( /dɪˈræk/ di-RAK; 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984) was an English theoretical physicist who made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, was a member of the Center for Theoretical Studies, University of Miami, and spent the last decade of his life at Florida State University.
  Among other discoveries, he formulated the Dirac equation, which describes the behaviour of fermions, and predicted the existence of antimatter.
  Dirac shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1933 with Erwin Schrödinger, "for the discovery of new productive forms of atomic theory."
  Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born at his parents' home in Bristol, England, on 8 August 1902, and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Adrien Ladislas Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland, who worked in Bristol as a French teacher. His mother, Florence Hannah Dirac, née Holten, the daughter of a ship's captain, was born in Cornwall and worked as a librarian at the Bristol Central Library. Paul had a younger sister, Béatrice Isabelle Marguerite, known as Betty, and an older brother, Reginald Charles Félix, known as Felix, who committed suicide in March 1925. Dirac later recalled: "My parents were terribly distressed. I didn't know they cared so much. /.../ I never knew that parents were supposed to care for their children, but from then on I knew."
  
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  Paul Frampton
  Paul Frampton (born 31 October 1943, in England) is a particle phenomenologist. Since 1996, he is the Louis D. Rubin, Jr. Distinguished Professor of physics and astronomy, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He is also Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator at the U.S. Department of Energy. Born in Kidderminster, he attended King Charles I School, 1954–62, then Brasenose College, 1962-68. He received BA (Double First) in 1965, MA, DPhil in 1968, and DSc in 1984, degrees all from Oxford. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1990), the American Physical Society (1981) and the U.K. Institute of Physics (1986).
  In 1987, Frampton was the Project Director, for siting the Superconducting Supercollider, in North Carolina. A Festschrift for his 60th anniversary has been published.
  
  
  Frampton's Oxford doctoral thesis analyzed the relationship between current algebra and superconvergence sum rules, and contained a 1967 sum rule. In 1970, he analyzed the absence of ghosts in the dual resonance model.
  
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  Paul Steinhardt
  Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor of Science at Princeton University and a professor of theoretical physics. He received his B.S. at the California Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. in Physics at Harvard University. He was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows and Mary Amanda Wood Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at Princeton University in 1998. He is currently the Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science.
  He is best known for his work in theoretical cosmology, where he helped develop the theory of cosmic inflation, which attempts to explain the homogeneity and geometry of the universe and the origin of the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies and large-scale structure. He introduced the concept of quintessence, a time-varying form of dark energy to explain the current accelerating expansion of the universe. His recent work has been on brane cosmology, especially the ekpyrotic and cyclic models. The cyclic theory of the universe is a radical alternative to big bang/inflationary cosmology in which the evolution of the universe is periodic and the key events shaping the large scale structure of the universe occur before the big bang.
  
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  Philolaus
  Philolaus (Greek: Φιλόλαος; c. 470–c. 385 BCE) was a Greek Pythagorean and Presocratic philosopher. He argued that all matter is composed of limiting and limitless things, and that the universe is determined by numbers. He is credited with originating the theory that the earth was not the center of the universe.
  Philolaus is variously reported as being born in either Croton,Tarentum, or Metapontum. All three places were located in southern Italy. He may have fled the second burning of the Pythagorean meeting-place around 454 BCE, after which he migrated to Greece. According to Plato's Phaedo, he was the instructor of Simmias and Cebes at Thebes, around the time the Phaedo takes place, in 399 BCE. This would make him a contemporary of Socrates, and agrees with the statement that Philolaus and Democritus were contemporaries. The various reports about his life are scattered among the writings of much later writers and are of dubious value in reconstructing his life. He apparently lived for some time at Heraclea^{[disambiguation needed ]}, where he was the pupil of Aresas, or (as Plutarch calls him) Arcesus.Diogenes Laërtius is the only authority for the claim that Plato, shortly after the death of Socrates, traveled to Italy where he met with Philolaus and Eurytus. The pupils of Philolaus and were said to have included Xenophilus, Phanto, Echecrates, Diocles and Polymnastus. As to his death, Diogenes Laërtius reports a dubious story that Philolaus was put to death at Croton on account of being suspected of wanting to be the tyrant; a story which Laërtius even took the trouble to put into verse.
  
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  Ptolemy
  Claudius Ptolemy ( /ˈtɒləmi/; Greek: Κλαύδιος Πτολεμαῖος, Klaudios Ptolemaios; Latin: Claudius Ptolemaeus; c. AD 90 – c. AD 168), was a Greek-Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the Thebaid. This theory, proposed by Theodore Meliteniotes, could be correct, but it is late (ca. 1360) and unsupported. There is no reason to suppose that he ever lived anywhere else than Alexandria, where he died around AD 168.
  Ptolemy was the author of several scientific treatises, at least three of which were of continuing importance to later Islamic and European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest (in Greek, Ἡ Μεγάλη Σύνταξις, "The Great Treatise", originally Μαθηματικὴ Σύνταξις, "Mathematical Treatise"). The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion of the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise known sometimes in Greek as the Apotelesmatika (Ἀποτελεσματικά), more commonly in Greek as the Tetrabiblos (Τετράβιβλος "Four books"), and in Latin as the Quadripartitum (or four books) in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.
  
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  René Descartes
  René Descartes (French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; Latinized form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian"; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system — allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes in a two-dimensional coordinate system — was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution and has been described as an example of genius.
  
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• Saadia Gaon
  Saʻadiah ben Yosef Gaon (Arabic: سعيد بن يوسف الفيومي‎ Saʻīd bin Yūsuf al-Fayyūmi, Sa'id ibn Yusuf al-Dilasi, Saadia ben Yosef aluf, Sa'id ben Yusuf ra's al-Kull;Hebrew: רבי סעדיה בן יוסף אלפיומי גאון‎ or in short: סעדיה גאון; Alternative English Names: Saadia b. Joseph,Saadia ben Joseph or Saadia ben Joseph of Faym or Saadia ben Joseph Al-Fayyumi; b. Egypt 882/892, d. Baghdad 942) was a prominent rabbi, Jewish philosopher, and exegete of the Geonic period.
  The first important rabbinic figure to write extensively in Arabic, he is considered the founder of Judeo-Arabic literature. Known for his works on Hebrew linguistics, Halakha, and Jewish philosophy, he was one of the more sophisticated practitioners of the philosophical school known as the "Jewish Kalam" (Stroumsa 2003). In this capacity, his philosophical work Emunoth ve-Deoth represents the first systematic attempt to integrate Jewish theology with components of Greek philosophy. Saadia was also very active in opposition to Karaism, in defense of rabbinic Judaism.
  
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  Steven Weinberg
  Steven Weinberg (born May 3, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.
  Steven Weinberg was born in 1933 in New York City to Jewish immigrants Frederick and Eva Weinberg. He graduated from Bronx High School of Science in 1950 in the same graduating class as Sheldon Glashow, whose own research, independent of Weinberg's, would result in them (and Abdus Salam) sharing the same 1979 Nobel in Physics (see below).
  Weinberg received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1954, living at the Cornell branch of the Telluride Association. He left Cornell and went to the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where he started his graduate studies and research. After one year, Weinberg returned to Princeton University where he earned his Ph.D. degree in Physics in 1957, studying under Sam Treiman. Weinberg is an atheist.
  
  wn.com/Steven_Weinberg
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  Thomas Gold
  Thomas Gold (May 22, 1920 – June 22, 2004) was an Austrian-born astrophysicist, a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London). Gold was one of three young Cambridge scientists who in the 1950s proposed the now mostly abandoned 'steady state' hypothesis of the universe. Gold's work crossed academic and scientific boundaries, into biophysics, astronomy, aerospace engineering, and geophysics.
  Gold was born on May 22, 1920 in Vienna, Austria to Max Gold, a wealthy Jewish industrialist (pre-war) who ran one of Austria's largest mining and metal fabrication companies, and German former actress Josefine Martin. Following the economic downfall of the European mining industry in the late 1920s, Max Gold moved his family to Berlin, where he had taken a job as director of a metal trading company. Following the start of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's anti-Jewish campaigns in 1933, Gold and his family left Germany because of his father's heritage. The family traveled through Europe for the next few years. Gold attended boarding school at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz in Zuoz, Switzerland, where he quickly proved to be a clever, competitive and physically and mentally aggressive individual. Gold finished his schooling at Zuoz in 1938, and fled with his family to England after the German invasion of Austria in early 1938. Gold entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1939 and began studying mechanical sciences. In May 1940, just as Hitler was commencing his advance in Belgium and France, Gold was sent into internment as an enemy alien by the British government. It was on the first night of internment, at an army barracks in Bury St Edmunds, that he met his future collaborator and close friend, Hermann Bondi.
  
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  Tycho Brahe
  Tycho Brahe (14 December 1546 – 24 October 1601), born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations. Coming from Scania, then part of Denmark, now part of modern-day Sweden, Tycho was well known in his lifetime as an astronomer and alchemist.
  In his De nova stella (On the new star) of 1573, he refuted the Aristotelian belief in an unchanging celestial realm. His precise measurements indicated that "new stars" (novae or also now known as supernovae), in particular that of 1572, lacked the parallax expected in sub-lunar phenomena, and were therefore not "atmospheric" tail-less comets as previously believed, but occurred above the atmosphere and moon. Using similar measurements he showed that comets were also not atmospheric phenomena, as previously thought, and must pass through the supposed "immutable" celestial spheres.
  Tycho Brahe was granted an estate on the island of Hven and the funding to build the Uraniborg, an early research institute, where he built large astronomical instruments and took many careful measurements, and later Stjerneborg, underground, when he discovered that his instruments in the former were not sufficiently steady. Something of an autocrat on the island he nevertheless founded manufactories such as paper-making to provide material for printing his results. After disagreements with the new Danish king in 1597, he was invited by the Bohemian king and Holy Roman emperor Rudolph II to Prague, where he became the official imperial astronomer. He built the new observatory at Benátky nad Jizerou. Here, from 1600 until his death in 1601, he was assisted by Johannes Kepler. Kepler later used Tycho's astronomical results to develop his own theories of astronomy.
  
  wn.com/Tycho_Brahe
• Vincent Cronin
  Vincent Archibald Patrick Cronin FRSL (24 May 1924 – 25 January 2011) was a British historical, cultural, and biographical writer, best known for his biographies of Louis XIV, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Catherine the Great, and Napoleon, as well as for his books on the Renaissance.
  Cronin was born in Tredegar, Monmouthshire to Scottish doctor and novelist, A. J. Cronin and his wife May Gibson, but moved to London at the age of two. He was educated at Ampleforth College, Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and Trinity College, Oxford, from which he graduated with honours in 1947, earning a degree in Literae Humaniores. During the Second World War, he served as a lieutenant in the British Army.
  In 1949, he married Chantal de Rolland, and they had five children. The Cronins were long-time residents of London, Marbella, and Dragey, in Avranches, Basse-Normandie, where they lived at the Manoir de Brion. He died at his home in Marbella on 25 January 2011.
  Cronin was a recipient of the Richard Hillary Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award (1955), and the Rockefeller Foundation Award (1958). He also contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes, was the first General Editor of the Companion Guides series, and was on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.
  
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  Willem de Sitter
  Willem de Sitter (6 May 1872 – 20 November 1934) was a Dutch mathematician, physicist and astronomer.
  Born in Sneek, De Sitter studied mathematics at the University of Groningen and then joined the Groningen astronomical laboratory. He worked at the Cape Observatory in South Africa (1897–1899). Then, in 1908, de Sitter was appointed to the chair of astronomy at Leiden University. He was director of the Leiden Observatory from 1919 until his death.
  De Sitter made major contributions to the field of physical cosmology. He co-authored a paper with Albert Einstein in 1932 in which they argued that there might be large amounts of matter which do not emit light, now commonly referred to as dark matter. He also came up with the concept of the de Sitter space and de Sitter universe, a solution for Einstein's general relativity in which there is no matter and a positive cosmological constant. This results in an exponentially expanding, empty universe. De Sitter was also famous for his research on the planet Jupiter.
  
  wn.com/Willem_de_Sitter
• 
  World War I
  World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
  
  wn.com/World_War_I

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