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

• Abraham Darby
• Abraham Darby I
• Acceleration
• Age of Enlightenment
• Ahmad Y Hassan
• Albert Einstein
• Alchemy
• Alexandre Koyré
• Allen G. Debus
• Almagest
• Ambroise Paré
• Anatomist
• Ancient Greece
• Andreas Vesalius
• Anti-realism
• Antoine Lavoisier
• Archimedes
• Aristotelian physics
• Aristotelian Physics
• Aristotelianism
• Aristotle
• Arithmometer
• Arun Bala
• Astronomer
• Astronomy
• Atomic theory
• Atomism
• Auguste Comte
• Averroes
• Axiom
• Barometer
• Battlefield medicine
• Benjamin Franklin
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• Biology
• Blaise Pascal
• Blast furnace
• Book of Optics
• Botany
• Boyle's Law
• Buoyancy
• Byzantine science
• C. D. Broad
• Calculator
• Carl Gustav Hempel
• Carl von Linné
• Causality
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• Charles Darwin
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• Chemistry
• Christiaan Huygens
• Christopher Wren
• Circulatory system
• Classical antiquity
• Classical element
• Classical elements
• Coherentism
• Coke (fuel)
• Columbia University
• Confirmation holism
• Conservation of mass
• Contextualism
• Continuity thesis
• Conventionalism
• Copernicus
• Cosmology
• Cosmos
• Crayon
• Criticism of science
• D. C. Lindberg
• Daniel Dennett
• De Magnete
• De re metallica
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• Deductive reasoning
• Demarcation problem
• Democritus
• Denis Papin
• Dentistry
• Determinism
• Dialogue
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• Early modern period
• Economics
• Edmond Halley
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• Electricity
• Empiricism
• Encarta
• England
• Entropic gravity
• Epicureanism
• Epistemology
• Euclid's Elements
• Eudoxus of Cnidus
• Eurocentrism
• Europe
• Explanatory power
• Fact
• Fallibilism
• Falsifiability
• Fluid
• Force
• Formula
• Foundationalism
• Francis Bacon
• Franciscus Vieta
• Galen
• Galilean moons
• Galileo Galilei
• Geocentric model
• Geocentrism
• Georg Agricola
• Georg von Peuerbach
• George Saliba
• Georges Buffon
• Germany
• Godfrey Kneller
• Gottfried Leibniz
• Gravity
• Greek Mathematics
• Greek Philosophy
• Gregorian calendar
• Gregorian telescope
• Heliocentric model
• Heliocentric theory
• Heliocentrism
• Henri Poincaré
• Henry Cavendish
• Herbal
• Herbert Butterfield
• Herbert Spencer
• Herman Boerhaave
• Hermeticism
• Hieronymus Bock
• History of astronomy
• History of biology
• History of botany
• History of calculus
• History of chemistry
• History of ecology
• History of geography
• History of geology
• History of geometry
• History of logic
• History of medicine
• History of physics
• History of science
• History of sociology
• Hugh of Saint Victor
• Human anatomy
• Hydrogen
• Ibn al-Haytham
• Ibn Bajjah
• Immanuel Kant
• Impetus theory
• Imre Lakatos
• Inductive reasoning
• Inertia
• Infinitism
• Ingenuity
• Inquiry
• Instrumentalism
• Irish people
• Isaac Newton
• Islamic science
• J. D. Bernal
• Jean Buridan
• Johannes Kepler
• John Dewey
• John Donne
• John Hadley
• John Napier
• John Philoponus
• John Stuart Mill
• Joseph Priestley
• JSTOR
• Jupiter
• Jürgen Habermas
• Karl Pearson
• Karl Popper
• Karl Theodor Jaspers
• Larry Laudan
• Leibniz wheel
• Leonhart Fuchs
• Leucippus
• Leyden jar
• List of timelines
• Logarithm
• Logic
• Machine
• Magnetism
• Maragheh observatory
• Marxism
• Mathematics
• Mechanics
• Medical Renaissance
• Medicine
• Merton Thesis
• Metaphysics
• Microscope
• Middle ages
• Middle Ages
• Millennia
• Mineralogy
• Modern science
• Motion (physics)
• Multiculturalism
• Multiplication
• Natural philosophers
• Natural philosophy
• Nature (philosophy)
• Neolithic Revolution
• New algebra
• Newtonian telescope
• Nicolaus Copernicus
• Nominalism
• Novum Organum
• Objective (optics)
• Observation
• Octant (instrument)
• Optics
• Otto Brunfels
• Otto Neurath
• Otto von Guericke
• Oxidation
• Oxygen
• Parabolic reflector
• Paracelsus
• Paradigm
• Paradigm shift
• Pascaline
• Paul Feyerabend
• Paul Häberlin
• Pharmacopoeia
• Philosopher
• Philosophy
• Philosophy of mind
• Physician
• Physics
• Pierre de Fermat
• Pierre Duhem
• Pierre Fauchard
• Pierre Gassendi
• Pierre Vernier
• Pinwheel calculator
• Plato
• Political science
• Pope Gregory XIII
• Portal Science
• Positivism
• Pragmatism
• Pressure
• Printing press
• Probability theory
• Problem of induction
• Projective geometry
• Pseudoscience
• Ptolemaic system
• Ptolemy
• Pythagoras
• Pythagoreanism
• R.B. Braithwaite
• Rationalism
• Reductionism
• Reflecting telescope
• Renaissance
• René Descartes
• Revolution
• Rhetoric of science
• Robert Boyle
• Robert Briffault
• Robert Hooke
• Robert Kilwardby
• Roger Bacon
• Rudolf Carnap
• Saturn
• Scientific law
• Scientific method
• Scientific realism
• Scientific theory
• Scientism
• Sextant
• Skepticism
• Slide rule
• Social sciences
• Star catalogue
• Steam digester
• Steam engine
• Stellar parallax
• Stephen Toulmin
• Steven Shapin
• Stillman Drake
• Stoicism
• Sunspot
• Surgery
• Syllogism
• Systema Naturae
• Taxonomy
• Telescope
• Testability
• The Assayer
• The Enlightenment
• Theory choice
• Theory of impetus
• Thomas Browne
• Thomas Hobbes
• Thomas Kuhn
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• Thomas Samuel Kuhn
• Thomas Savery
• Tycho Brahe
• Vacuum
• Valerius Cordus
• Venus
• Vernier scale
• Vienna Circle
• Vitalism
• W.V.O. Quine
• Wilhelm Windelband
• Wilhelm Wundt
• William Harvey
• William of Ockham
• William Oughtred
• William Whewell
• World Scientific
• 
  

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  Columbia University
  Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is an American private Ivy League research university located in New York City, New York, United States. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Today the university operates seven Columbia Global Centers overseas in Amman, Beijing, Istanbul, Paris, Mumbai, Santiago and Nairobi.
  The university was founded in 1754 as King's College by royal charter of George II of Great Britain. After the American Revolutionary War, King's College briefly became a state entity, and was renamed Columbia College in 1784. The University now operates under a 1787 charter that places the institution under a private board of trustees, and in 1896 it was further renamed Columbia University. That same year, the university's campus was moved from Madison Avenue to its location in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, where it occupies more than six city blocks, or 32 acres (0.13 km²). The university encompasses twenty schools and is affiliated with numerous institutions, including Teachers College, Barnard College, and the Union Theological Seminary, with joint undergraduate programs available through the Jewish Theological Seminary of America as well as the Juilliard School.
  
  wn.com/Columbia_University
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  England
  England ⁱ/ˈɪŋɡlənd/ is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, while the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separate it from continental Europe. Most of England comprises the central and southern part of the island of Great Britain in the North Atlantic. The country also includes over 100 smaller islands such as the Isles of Scilly and the Isle of Wight.
  The area now called England was first inhabited by modern humans during the Upper Palaeolithic period, but it takes its name from the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes who settled during the 5th and 6th centuries. England became a unified state in AD 927, and since the Age of Discovery, which began during the 15th century, has had a significant cultural and legal impact on the wider world. The English language, the Anglican Church, and English law—the basis for the common law legal systems of many other countries around the world—developed in England, and the country's parliamentary system of government has been widely adopted by other nations. The Industrial Revolution began in 18th-century England, transforming its society into the world's first industrialised nation. England's Royal Society laid the foundations of modern experimental science.
  
  wn.com/England
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  Germany
  Germany (ⁱ/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] ( listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km² and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
  A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
  
  wn.com/Germany
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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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  Abdus Salam
  Mohammad Abdus Salam,NI, SPk (Urdu: محمد عبد السلام, pronounced English pronunciation: /əbd̪ʊs səlɑm/, (29 January 1926 – 21 November 1996) was a Pakistani theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his work on the electroweak unification of the electromagnetic and weak forces. Salam, Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg shared the 1979 Nobel prize for this discovery. Salam holds the distinction of being the first Pakistani and the first Muslim Nobel Laureate to receive the prize in the sciences.
  Salam was a science advisor to the Government of Pakistan from 1960 till 1974, a position from which he played a major and influential role in Pakistan's science infrastructure. Salam was responsible for not only major development and contribution in theoretical and particle physics, but as well as promoting scientific research at maximum level in his country. Salam was the founding director of Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission (SUPARCO), and responsible for the establishment of the Theoretical Physics Group (TPG) in Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC). As Science Advisor, Salam played an integral role in Pakistan's development of peaceful use of nuclear energy, and directed the research on development of atomic bomb project of Pakistan in 1972; for this, he is viewed as the "scientific father" of this programme in the views of the scientists who researched under his scientific umbrella. In 1974, Salam left Pakistan in protest when Pakistan Parliament controversially passed a parliamentary bill declaring Ahmadiyya Muslim Community as Non-Muslims. Even after his death, Salam remained one of the most influential scientists in his country. In 1998, following the country's nuclear tests, the Government of Pakistan issued a commemorative stamp, as a part of "Scientists of Pakistan", to honour the services of Salam.
  
  wn.com/Abdus_Salam
• Abraham Darby I
  Abraham Darby I (14 April 1678 – 8 March 1717) was the first, and most famous, of three generations with that name in an English Quaker family that played an important role in the Industrial Revolution. He developed a method of producing pig iron in a blast furnace fuelled by coke rather than charcoal. This was a major step forward in the production of iron as a raw material for the Industrial Revolution.
  Abraham Darby was the son of John Darby, a yeoman farmer and locksmith by trade, and his wife Ann Baylies. He was born at Wren's Nest, Woodsetton, Staffordshire, just across the county boundary from Dudley, Worcestershire. He was descended from nobility; his great-grandmother Jane was an illegitimate child of Edward Sutton, 5th Baron Dudley.
  Abraham's great-grandmother was a sister of the whole blood to Dud Dudley, who claimed to have smelted iron using coke as a fuel. Unfortunately, the iron that Dudley produced was not acceptable to the charcoal ironmasters. However, this may have inspired his great-grandnephew Darby to perfect this novel method of smelting.
  
  wn.com/Abraham_Darby_I
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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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  Alexandre Koyré
  Alexandre Koyré (French pronunciation: [kware]; 29 August 1892 – 28 April 1964), sometimes anglicized as Alexander Koiré, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science.
  Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Александр Владимирович Койранский - Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyranskiy. In Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
  In Göttingen, Germany (1908-1911) he studied under Edmund Husserl and David Hilbert. Husserl did not approve of Koyré's dissertation, whereupon Koyré left for Paris, to study from 1912 under Bergson, Brunschvicg, Lalande, Delbos and Picavet. Following Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, a series of lectures given in Paris and one of the more important of Husserl's later works, Koyré met again with Husserl repeatedly and influenced his understanding of Galileo.
  In 1914 he joined the French Foreign Legion as soon as the war broke out. In 1916 he volunteered for a Russian regiment fighting on the Russian front, following a cooperation agreement between the French and Russian governments.
  
  wn.com/Alexandre_Koyré
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  Ambroise Paré
  Ambroise Paré (c. 1510 – 20 December 1590) was a French surgeon. He was the great official royal surgeon for kings Henry II, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III and is considered as one of the fathers of surgery and modern forensic pathology. He was a leader in surgical techniques and battlefield medicine, especially the treatment of wounds. He was also an anatomist and invented several surgical instruments.
  " Je le pansai, Dieu le guérit "
  ("I bandaged him and God healed him") is a quote that summarizes his work philosophy. At this time, little could be done for battlefield wounds and injured soldiers were often put out of their misery by comrades if the wound was too severe to be treated. During the 1536 Battle of Milan, Paré encountered two men who had been horribly burned by gunpowder. A soldier came up and asked if anything could be done to help them, to which he shook his head. The soldier then calmly took out his dagger and proceeded to cut their throats. A horrified Paré shouted that he was "a villain", to which he was told "Were I in such a situation, I would only pray to God for someone to do the same for me."
  
  wn.com/Ambroise_Paré
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  Andreas Vesalius
  Andreas Vesalius (31 December 1514 – 15 October 1564) was a Flemish anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Structure of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy. Vesalius is the Latinized form of Andries van Wesel. He is sometimes also referred to as Andreas Vesal, André Vesalio and Andre Vesale.
  Vesalius was born to Andries van Wesele and Isabel Crabbe on 31 December 1514, in Brussels, which was then part of the Habsburg Netherlands. His great grandfather, Jan van Wesel, probably born in Wesel, received his medical degree from the University of Pavia and taught medicine in 1528 at the then newly founded University of Leuven. His grandfather, Everard van Wesel, was the Royal Physician of Emperor Maximilian, while his father, Anders van Wesel, went on to serve as apothecary to Maximillian, and later a valet de chambre to his successor Charles V. Anders encouraged his son to continue in the family tradition, and enrolled him in the Brethren of the Common Life in Brussels to learn Greek and Latin according to standards of the era.
  
  wn.com/Andreas_Vesalius
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  Antoine Lavoisier
  Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (also Antoine Lavoisier after the French Revolution); 26 August 1743 – 8 May 1794; French pronunciation: [ɑ̃twan lɔʁɑ̃ də lavwazje]), the "father of modern chemistry", was one of the French nobleman prominent in the histories of chemistry and biology. He named both oxygen (1778) and hydrogen (1783) and helped construct the metric system, put together the first extensive list of elements, and helped to reform chemical nomenclature. He was also the first to establish that sulfur was an element (1777) rather than a compound. He discovered that, although matter may change its form or shape, its mass always remains the same.
  He was an administrator of the "Ferme Générale" and a powerful member of a number of other aristocratic councils. All of these political and economic activities enabled him to fund his scientific research. At the height of the French Revolution he was accused by Jean-Paul Marat of selling watered-down tobacco, and of other crimes and was eventually guillotined a year after Marat's death. Benjamin Franklin was familiar with Antoine as they were both members of the "Benjamin Franklin inquiries" into Mesmer and animal magnetism.
  
  wn.com/Antoine_Lavoisier
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  Archimedes
  Archimedes of Syracuse (Ancient Greek: Ἀρχιμήδης; c. 287 BC – c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, inventor, and astronomer. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and an explanation of the principle of the lever. He is credited with designing innovative machines, including siege engines and the screw pump that bears his name. Modern experiments have tested claims that Archimedes designed machines capable of lifting attacking ships out of the water and setting ships on fire using an array of mirrors.
  Archimedes is generally considered to be the greatest mathematician of antiquity and one of the greatest of all time. He used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, and gave a remarkably accurate approximation of pi. He also defined the spiral bearing his name, formulae for the volumes of surfaces of revolution and an ingenious system for expressing very large numbers.
  
  wn.com/Archimedes
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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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  Auguste Comte
  Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte [oɡyst kɔ̃t], was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
  Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th century thought, impacting the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outdated, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into Modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.
  Comte's social theories culminated in the "religion of humanity", which was influential to the development of religious humanist and Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word "altruism".
  
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  Averroes
  ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد‎), better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد‎), and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
  Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
  Averroes' name is also seen as Averroës, Averroès or Averrhoës, indicating that the "o" and the "e" form separate syllables. Averroes is a Latinisation of a Hebrew transcription of the Arab name Ibn Rushd.
  
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  Benjamin Franklin
  Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
  Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
  
  wn.com/Benjamin_Franklin
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  Blaise Pascal
  Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
  In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
  
  wn.com/Blaise_Pascal
• Carl Gustav Hempel
  Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 in Oranienburg, Germany - November 9, 1997 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a philosopher of science and a major figure in 20th-century logical empiricism. He is especially well known for his articulation of the Deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the Raven paradox, which highlights the problem of induction.
  Hempel studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin. In Göttingen he encountered David Hilbert and was impressed by his attempt to base all of mathematics on solid logical foundations derived from a limited number of axioms (Hilbert's Program). Having moved to Berlin he participated in a congress on scientific philosophy in 1929, where he met Rudolf Carnap and became involved in the Berlin Circle of philosophers that was associated with the Vienna Circle. In 1934 he received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin with a dissertation on probability theory.
  
  wn.com/Carl_Gustav_Hempel
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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.
  
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  Christiaan Huygens
  Christiaan Huygens, FRS (/ˈhaɪɡənz/; [ˈɦœyɣə(n)s] ( listen); 14 April 1629 – 8 July 1695) was a prominent Dutch mathematician, astronomer, physicist and horologist. His work included early telescopic studies elucidating the nature of the rings of Saturn and the discovery of its moon Titan, the invention of the pendulum clock and other investigations in timekeeping, and studies of both optics and the centrifugal force.
  Huygens achieved note for his argument that light consists of waves, now known as the Huygens–Fresnel principle, which two centuries later became instrumental in the understanding of wave-particle duality. He generally receives credit for his discovery of the centrifugal force, the laws for collision of bodies, for his role in the development of modern calculus and his original observations on sound perception (see repetition pitch).
  Christiaan Huygens was born in April 1629 at The Hague, the second son of Constantijn Huygens, (1596–1687), a friend of mathematician, philosopher and minor physicistRené Descartes, and of Suzanna van Baerle (deceased 1637), whom Constantijn had married on 6 April 1627. Christiaan studied law and mathematics at the University of Leiden and the College of Orange in Breda. After a stint as a diplomat, Huygens turned to science.
  
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  Christopher Wren
  Sir Christopher Wren FRS (20 October 1632 – 25 February 1723) is one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history. He was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 51 churches in the City of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including his masterpiece, St. Paul's Cathedral, on Ludgate Hill, completed in 1710. The principal creative responsibility for a number of the churches is now more commonly attributed to others in his office, especially Nicholas Hawksmoor. Other notable buildings by Wren include the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and the south front of Hampton Court Palace.
  Educated in Latin and Aristotelian physics at the University of Oxford, Wren was a notable astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist, as well as an architect. He was a founder of the Royal Society (president 1680–82), and his scientific work was highly regarded by Sir Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal.
  Wren was born at East Knoyle in Wiltshire, the only surviving son of Christopher Wren DD (1589–1658), at that time the rector of East Knoyle and later Dean of Windsor. A previous son of Dr Wren, also named Christopher, was born on 22 November 1631 and died the same day. John Aubrey’s confusion of the two persisted occasionally into late twentieth-century literature.
  
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  Daniel Dennett
  Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
  Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
  
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  Democritus
  Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος, Dēmokritos, "chosen of the people") (ca. 460 BC – ca. 370 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos.
  His exact contributions are difficult to disentangle from his mentor Leucippus, as they are often mentioned together in texts. Their speculation on atoms, taken from Leucippus, bears a passing and partial resemblance to the nineteenth-century understanding of atomic structure that has led some to regard Democritus as more of a scientist than other Greek philosophers; however their ideas rested on very different bases. Largely ignored in ancient Athens, Democritus was nevertheless well known to his fellow northern-born philosopher Aristotle. Plato is said to have disliked him so much that he wished all his books burned. Many consider Democritus to be the "father of modern science".
  Democritus was born in the city of Abdera in Thrace, an Ionian colony of Teos, although some called him a Milesian. He was born in the 80th Olympiad (460–457 BC) according to Apollodorus of Athens, and although Thrasyllus placed his birth in 470 BC, the later date is probably more likely.John Burnet has argued that the date of 460 is "too early", since according to Diogenes Laërtius ix.41, Democritus said that he was a "young man (neos)" during Anaxagoras' old age (circa 440–428). It was said that Democritus' father was so wealthy that he received Xerxes on his march through Abdera. Democritus spent the inheritance which his father left him on travels into distant countries, to satisfy his thirst for knowledge. He traveled to Asia, and was even said to have reached India and Ethiopia.
  
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  Denis Papin
  Denis Papin (22 August 1647 - c. 1712) was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the steam engine and of the pressure cooker.
  Born in Chitenay, (Loir-et-Cher, Centre Région), Papin attended a Jesuit school there, and from 1661 attended University at Angers, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1669. In 1673, while working with Christiaan Huygens and Gottfried Leibniz in Paris, he became interested in using a vacuum to generate motive power.
  Papin first visited London in 1675, and worked with Robert Boyle from 1676 to 1679, publishing an account of his work in Continuation of New Experiments (1680). During this period, Papin invented the steam digester, a type of pressure cooker with a safety valve. He first addressed the Royal Society in 1679 on the subject of his digester, and remained mostly in London until about 1687, when he left to take up an academic post in Germany.
  As a Huguenot, Papin found himself greatly affected by the increasing restrictions placed on Protestants by Louis XIV of France and by the King's ultimate revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. In Germany he was able to live with fellow Huguenot exiles from France.
  
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  Edmond Halley
  Edmond Halley FRS (/ˈɛdmənd ˈhæli/; 8 November 1656 – 14 January 1742) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist who is best known for computing the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet. He was the second Astronomer Royal in Britain, following in the footsteps of John Flamsteed.
  Halley was born in Haggerston, Shoreditch, England. His father, Edmond Halley Sr., came from a Derbyshire family and was a wealthy soap-maker in London. As a child, Halley was very interested in mathematics. He studied at St Paul's School, and then, from 1673, at The Queen's College, Oxford. While an undergraduate, Halley published papers on the Solar System and sunspots.
  On leaving Oxford, in 1676, Halley visited the south Atlantic island of Saint Helena and set up an observatory with a 24-foot-long (7.3 m) aerial telescope with the intention of studying stars from the Southern Hemisphere.. While there he observed a transit of Mercury, and realised that a similar transit of Venus could be used to determine the absolute size of the solar system. He returned to England in November 1678. In the following year he went to Danzig (Gdańsk) on behalf of the Royal Society to help resolve a dispute. Because astronomer Johannes Hevelius did not use a telescope, his observations had been questioned by Robert Hooke. Halley stayed with Hevelius and he observed and verified the quality of Hevelius' observations. The same year Halley published Catalogus Stellarum Australium which included details of 341 southern stars. These additions to present-day star maps earned him comparison with Tycho Brahe. Halley was awarded his M.A. degree at Oxford and elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society.
  
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  Edmund Gunter
  Edmund Gunter (1581 – 10 December 1626), English mathematician, of Welsh descent, was born in Hertfordshire in 1581.
  He was educated at Westminster School, and in 1599 was elected a student of Christ Church, Oxford. He took orders, became a preacher in 1614, and in 1615 proceeded to the degree of bachelor in divinity. Mathematics, particularly the relationship between mathematics and the real world, was the one overriding interest throughout his life.
  In 1619 the wealthy but earnest Sir Henry Savile put up money to fund Oxford University's first two science faculties, the chairs of astronomy and geometry. Gunter applied to become professor of geometry but Savile was famous for distrusting clever people, and Gunter's behavior annoyed him intensely. As was his habit, Gunter arrived with his sector and quadrant, and began demonstrating how they could be used to calculate the position of stars or the distance of churches, until Savile could stand it no longer. "Doe you call this reading of Geometric?" he burst out. "This is mere showing of tricks, man!" and, according to a contemporary account, "dismissed him with scorne."
  
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• Edward Grant
  Edward Grant (born April 6, 1926) is an American historian. He was named a Distinguished Professor in 1983. Other honors include the 1992 George Sarton Medal, for "a lifetime scholarly achievement" as an historian of science.
  Grant is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, Bloomington. Before arriving at Indiana University in the fall of 1959, Professor Grant taught at the University of Maine and in the history of science program at Harvard University. Professor Grant was twice chair of his department (1973–1979; 1987–1990) where he taught courses on medieval science, natural philosophy and science and religion.
  He has received many honors and awards, including the George Sarton Medal in 1992, the most prestigious award given by the History of Science Society that "recognizes those whose entire careers have been devoted to the field and whose scholarship is exceptional."
  In his book The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts, Grant discusses the developments and discoveries that culminated in the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. He emphasize how the roots of modern science were planted in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the modern period, and that the Christian Latin civilization of Western Europe began the last stage of its intellectual development. One basic factor is how Christianity developed in the West with the establishment of the medieval universities around 1200.
  
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• Eudoxus of Cnidus
  Eudoxus of Cnidus (410 or 408 BC – 355 or 347 BC) was a Greek astronomer, mathematician, scholar and student of Plato. Since all his own works are lost, knowledge of him is obtained from secondary sources, such as Aratus's poem on astronomy. Theodosius of Bithynia's Sphaerics may be based on a work of Eudoxus.
  His name Eudoxus means "honored" or "of good repute" (in Greek Εὔδοξος, from eu "good" and doxa "opinion, belief, fame"). It is analogous to the Latin name Benedictus.
  Eudoxus's father Aeschines of Cnidus loved to watch stars at night. Eudoxus first travelled to Tarentum to study with Archytas, from whom he learned mathematics. While in Italy, Eudoxus visited Sicily, where he studied medicine with Philiston.
  Around 387 BC, at the age of 23, he traveled with the physician Theomedon, who according to Diogenes Laërtius some believed was his lover, to Athens to study with the followers of Socrates. He eventually became the pupil of Plato, with whom he studied for several months, but due to a disagreement they had a falling out. Eudoxus was quite poor and could only afford an apartment at the Piraeus. To attend Plato's lectures, he walked the seven miles (11 km) each direction, each day. Due to his poverty, his friends raised funds sufficient to send him to Heliopolis, Egypt to pursue his study of astronomy and mathematics. He lived there for 16 months. From Egypt, he then traveled north to Cyzicus, located on the south shore of the Sea of Marmara, the Propontis. He traveled south to the court of Mausolus. During his travels he gathered many students of his own.
  
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  Francis Bacon
  Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban(s),KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.
  Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.
  Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created both the Baron Verulam in 1618, and the Viscount St Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs both peerages became extinct upon his death. He famously died by contracting pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.
  
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  Galen
  Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus (b. 129 AD, d. circa 200 AD), better known as Galen of Pergamon (modern-day Bergama, Turkey), was a prominent Roman (of Greek ethnicity) physician, surgeon and philosopher. Arguably the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen contributed greatly to the understanding of numerous scientific disciplines, including anatomy,physiology, pathology,pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.
  The son of Aelius Nicon, a wealthy architect with scholarly interests, Galen received a comprehensive education that prepared him for a successful career as a physician and philosopher. He traveled extensively, exposing himself to a wide variety of medical theories and discoveries before settling in Rome, where he served prominent members of Roman society and eventually was given the position of personal physician to several emperors.
  
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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.
  
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  Georg von Peuerbach
  Georg von Peuerbach (also Purbach, Peurbach, Purbachius, his real surname is unknown) (born May 30, 1423 in Peuerbach near Linz – April 8, 1461 in Vienna) was an Austrian astronomer, mathematician and instrument maker.
  About the year 1440 Peuerbach received the degree of master of philosophy and the free arts, cum insigni laude, at the University of Vienna. His teacher in mathematics was probably Johann von Gmunden.
  In 1448 Peuerbach went on a trip to Italy for the sake of study. There, Giovanni Bianchini of Ferrara and Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, then in Rome, became interested in the young man and induced him to lecture on astronomy at the University of Ferrara. He refused offers of professorships at Bologna and Padua, and also the appointment as court astronomer to King Ladislaus of Hungary, but went back to Vienna in 1450 to teach. He lectured on philology and classical literature. His scientific teaching was done chiefly in private, his most famous pupil being Johann Müller of Königsberg, later known as Regiomontanus.
  
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• George Saliba
  George Saliba is Professor of Arabic and Islamic Science at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University, New York, United States, where he has been working since 1979.
  Saliba received his Bachelor of Science (1963) in mathematics and a Master of Arts (1965) from the American University of Beirut; he earned a Master of Science degree in Semitic languages and a doctorate in Islamic sciences from the University of California, Berkeley. He has received a number of awards and honors, including the History of Science Prize given by the Third World Academy of Science in 1993, and the History of Astronomy Prize in 1996 from the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science. He was also selected as a Distinguished Kluge Chair, at the Library of Congress (2005-2006), and as a Distinguished Carnegie Scholar (2009-2010).
  In his website he writes about himself: "I study the development of scientific ideas from late antiquity until early modern times, with a special focus on the various planetary theories that were developed within the Islamic civilization and the impact of such theories on early European astronomy."
  
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  Godfrey Kneller
  Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (8 August 1646 – 19 October 1723) was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to English and British monarchs from Charles II to George I. His major works include The Chinese Convert (1687); a series of four portraits of Isaac Newton painted at various junctures of the latter's life; a series of ten reigning European monarchs, including King Louis XIV of France; over 40 "Kit-cat portraits" of members of the Kit-Cat Club; and ten "beauties" of the court of William III, to match a similar series of ten beauties of the court of Charles II painted by his predecessor as court painter, Sir Peter Lely.
  Kneller was born Gottfried Kniller in the Free City of Lübeck, the son of Zacharias Kniller. Kneller studied in Leiden, but became a pupil of Ferdinand Bol and Rembrandt in Amsterdam. He then traveled with his brother John Zacharias Kneller, who was an ornamental painter, to Rome and Venice in the early 1670s, painting historical subjects and portraits in the studio of Carlo Maratti, and later moved to Hamburg. They came to England in 1676, and won the patronage of the Duke of Monmouth. He was introduced to, and painted a portrait of, Charles II. In England, Kneller concentrated almost entirely on portraiture. He founded a studio which churned out portraits on an almost industrial scale, relying on a brief sketch of the face with details added to a formulaic model, aided by the fashion for gentlemen to wear full wigs. His portraits set a pattern that was followed until William Hogarth and Joshua Reynolds.
  
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  Henri Poincaré
  Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
  As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
  Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.
  
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  Henry Cavendish
  Henry Cavendish FRS (10 October 1731 – 24 February 1810) was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air". He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper "On Factitious Airs". Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish's experiment and gave the element its name. Cavendish is also known for the Cavendish experiment, his measurement of the Earth's density, and early research into electricity.
  Henry Cavendish was born on 10 October 1731 in Nice, France, where his family was living at the time. His mother was Lady Anne Grey, daughter of Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent and his father was Lord Charles Cavendish, son of William Cavendish, 2nd Duke of Devonshire. The family traces its lineage across eight centuries to Norman times and was closely connected to many aristocratic families of Great Britain.
  At age 11, Cavendish was a pupil at Peter Newcome's School in Hackney. At age 18 (on 24 November 1749) he entered the University of Cambridge in St Peter's College, now known as Peterhouse, but left four years later on 23 February 1753 without graduating. His first paper, "Factitious Airs", appeared thirteen years later, in 1766.
  
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• Herbert Butterfield
  Sir Herbert Butterfield (7 October 1900, Oxenhope, Yorkshire – 20 July 1979, Sawston, Cambridgeshire) was a British historian and philosopher of history who is remembered chiefly for two books—a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) and his Origins of Modern Science (1949). Over the course of his career, Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives. Butterfield thought individual personalities more important than great systems of government or economics in historical study. His Christian beliefs in personal sin, salvation, and providence heavily influenced his writings, a fact he freely admitted. At the same time, Butterfield's early works emphasized the limits of a historian's moral conclusions, "If history can do anything it is to remind us that all our judgments are merely relative to time and circumstance."
  
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  Herbert Spencer
  Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
  Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did." As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900; "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
  
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  Herman Boerhaave
  Herman Boerhaave (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɦɛrmɑn ˌburˈɦaːvə], Voorhout, 31 December 1668 – Leiden, 23 September 1738) was a Dutch botanist, humanist and physician of European fame. He is regarded as the founder of clinical teaching and of the modern academic hospital. His main achievement was to demonstrate the relation of symptoms to lesions. In addition, he was the first to isolate the chemical urea from urine. His motto was Simplex sigillum veri; Simplicity is the sign of truth.
  From 1950 to 1970, Boerhaave's image was printed on Dutch 25-guilder banknotes. The Leiden University Medical Centre organises medical trainings called Boerhaave-courses.
  He was born at Voorhout near Leiden. Entering the University of Leiden he took his degree in philosophy in 1689, with a dissertation De distinctione mentis a corpore (on the difference of the mind from the body), in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza. He then turned to the study of medicine, in which he graduated in 1693 at Harderwijk in present-day Gelderland.
  
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  Hieronymus Bock
  Hieronymus Bock (Latinised Tragus) (1498 – February 21, 1554) was a German botanist, physician, and Lutheran minister who began the transition from medieval botany to the modern scientific worldview by arranging plants by their relation or resemblance.
  The details of his life are sketchy. In 1519 he inscribed at the university of Heidelberg. He married Eva Victor in 1523, and was schoolteacher in Zweibrücken for nine years. He became the prince's physician and caretaker of the kitchen garden of the count palatine and in 1533 received a life-time position as a Lutheran minister in nearby Hornbach where he stayed up to his death in 1554.
  The first edition of his Kreutterbuch (literally "plant book") appeared in 1539 unillustrated; his stated objectives were to describe German plants, including their names, characteristics, and medical uses. Instead of following Dioscorides as was traditional, he developed his own system to classify 700 plants. Bock apparently traveled widely through the German region observing the plants for himself, since he includes ecological and distributional observations.
  
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  Hugh of Saint Victor
  Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096 – 11 February 1141) was born perhaps in France, or more probably in Saxony. His origins and early life are rather obscure. He studied and taught at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris after which he is named. His writings include works of theology, mysticism, philosophy and the arts. Appointed a canon of the Victorines around the turn of the twelfth century.
  The early Didascalion was an elementary, encyclopedic approach to God and Christ, in which Hugh avoided controversial subjects and focused on what he took to be commonplaces of Catholic Christianity. In it he outlined three types of philosophy or "science" [scientia] that can help mortals improve themselves and advance toward God: theoretical philosophy (theology, mathematics, physics) provides them with truth, practical philosophy (ethics, economics, politics) aids them in becoming virtuous and prudent, and "mechanical" or "illiberal" philosophy (e.g., carpentry, agriculture, medicine) yields physical benefits. A fourth philosophy, logic, is preparatory to the others and exists to ensure clear and proper conclusions in them. Hugh's deeply mystical bent did not prevent him from seeing philosophy as a useful tool for understanding the divine, or from using it to argue on behalf of faith.
  
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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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  Imre Lakatos
  Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.
  Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He became an active communist during the Second World War. He changed his last name once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos.
  After the war, from 1947 he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948, and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. When he returned, however, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known.
  
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  Irish people
  The Irish people (Irish: Muintir na hÉireann or na hÉireannaigh; Ulster-Scots: Airisch or Airish fowk) are an ethnic group who originate in Ireland, an island in northwestern Europe. Ireland has been populated for around 9,000 years (according to archaeological studies, see Prehistoric Ireland). The Irish people's earliest ancestors are recorded in legends – they are claimed to be descended from groups such as the Nemedians, Fomorians, Fir Bolg, Tuatha Dé Danann and the Milesians.Lebor Gabála Érenn, a book of Irish mythology tells that Tuatha Dé Dananns were Scythian descendants.
  The main groups that interacted with the Irish in the Middle Ages include the Picts, Scots, and the Vikings. Due to this contact, Icelanders are noted for having some Irish descent. The Anglo-Norman invasion of the High Middle Ages, the English plantations and the subsequent English rule of the country introduced the Normans and Flemish into Ireland. Welsh, Picts, Bretons, and small parties of Gauls and even Anglo-Saxons are known in Ireland from much earlier times.
  
  wn.com/Irish_people
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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.
  
  wn.com/Isaac_Newton
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  Jean Buridan
  Jean Buridan (in Latin, Johannes Buridanus) (ca. 1300 – after 1358) was a French priest. He developed the concept of impetus, the first step toward the modern concept of inertia, and an important development in the history of medieval science. His name is most familiar through the thought experiment known as Buridan's ass (a thought experiment which does not appear in his extant writings).
  Born, most probably, in Béthune, France, Buridan studied and later taught at the University of Paris. Apocryphal stories abound about his reputed amorous affairs and adventures which are enough to show that he enjoyed a reputation as a glamorous and mysterious figure in Paris life. In particular, a rumour held that he was sentenced to be thrown in a sack into the River Seine, but was ultimately saved through the ingenuity of a student. François Villon alludes to this in his famous poem Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis. Buridan also seems to have had an unusual facility for attracting academic funding which suggests that he was indeed a charismatic figure.
  
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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
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  John Dewey
  John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.
  Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
  In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  John Donne
  John Donne ( /ˈdʌn/ DUN) (between 24 January and 19 June 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, satirist, lawyer and priest. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of British society and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne’s poetry is the idea of true religion, something that he spent much time considering and theorising about. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits.
  
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  John Hadley
  John Hadley (16 April 1682 – 14 February 1744) was an English mathematician, inventor of the octant, a precursor to the sextant, around 1730.
  He was born in Bloomsbury, London, to Katherine FitzJames and George Hadley.
  In 1717 he became a member (and later vice-president) of the Royal Society of London. On 6 June 1734 he married Elizabeth Hodges who herself was wealthy. They had one child, a son John born in 1738.
  
  The octant is used to measure the altitude of the Sun or other celestial objects above the horizon at sea. A mobile arm carrying a mirror and pivoting on a graduated arc provides a reflected image of the celestial body overlapping the image of the horizon, which is observed directly. If the position of the object on the sky and the time of the observation are known, it is easy for the user to calculate his own latitude. The octant proved extremely valuable for navigation and displaced the use of other instruments such as the Davis quadrant.
  An American, Thomas Godfrey, independently invented the octant at approximately the same time.
  
  wn.com/John_Hadley
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  John Napier
  John Napier of Merchiston (1550 – 4 April 1617) – also signed as Neper, Nepair – named Marvellous Merchiston, was a Scottish landowner known as a mathematician, physicist, astronomer and astrologer. He was the 8th Laird of Merchistoun.
  John Napier is best known as the discoverer of logarithms. He was also the inventor of the so-called "Napier's bones". Napier also made common the use of the decimal point in arithmetic and mathematics.
  Napier's birthplace, the Merchiston Tower in Edinburgh, Scotland, is now part of the facilities of Edinburgh Napier University. After his death from the effects of gout, Napier's remains were buried in St Cuthbert's Church, Edinburgh.
  Napier's father was Sir Archibald Napier of Merchiston Castle, and his mother was Janet Bothwell, daughter of a member of the Estates of Parliament, and a sister of Adam Bothwell who became the Bishop of Orkney. Archibald Napier was 16 years old when John Napier was born.
  As was the common practice for members of the nobility at that time, John Napier did not enter schools until he was 13. He did not stay in school very long, however. It is believed that he dropped out of school in Scotland and perhaps travelled in mainland Europe to better continue his studies. Little is known about those years, where, when, or with whom he might have studied, although his uncle Adam Bothwell wrote a letter to John's father on 5 December 1560, saying "I pray you, sir, to send John to the schools either to France or Flanders, for he can learn no good at home", and it is believed that this advice was followed.
  
  wn.com/John_Napier
• 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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  John Stuart Mill
  John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
  John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
  
  wn.com/John_Stuart_Mill
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  Joseph Priestley
  Joseph Priestley, FRS (13 March 1733 (O.S.) – 6 February 1804) was an 18th-century English theologian, Dissenting clergyman, natural philosopher, chemist, educator, and political theorist who published over 150 works. He is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen, having isolated it in its gaseous state, although Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Antoine Lavoisier also have a claim to the discovery.
  During his lifetime, Priestley's considerable scientific reputation rested on his invention of soda water, his writings on electricity, and his discovery of several "airs" (gases), the most famous being what Priestley dubbed "dephlogisticated air" (oxygen). However, Priestley's determination to defend phlogiston theory and to reject what would become the chemical revolution eventually left him isolated within the scientific community.
  Priestley's science was integral to his theology, and he consistently tried to fuse Enlightenment rationalism with Christian theism. In his metaphysical texts, Priestley attempted to combine theism, materialism, and determinism, a project that has been called "audacious and original". He believed that a proper understanding of the natural world would promote human progress and eventually bring about the Christian Millennium. Priestley, who strongly believed in the free and open exchange of ideas, advocated toleration and equal rights for religious Dissenters, which also led him to help found Unitarianism in England. The controversial nature of Priestley's publications combined with his outspoken support of the French Revolution aroused public and governmental suspicion; he was eventually forced to flee, in 1791, first to London, and then to the United States, after a mob burned down his home and church. He spent the last ten years of his life living in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania.
  
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  Jürgen Habermas
  Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
  
  wn.com/Jürgen_Habermas
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  Karl Pearson
  Karl Pearson FRS (27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.
  In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.
  A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.
  Carl Pearson, later known as Karl Pearson (1857–1936), was born to William Pearson and Fanny Smith, who had three children, Aurthur, Carl (Karl) and Amy. William Pearson also sired an illegitimate son, Frederick Mockett.
  Pearson's mother, Fanny Pearson née Smith, came from a family of master mariners who sailed their own ships from Hull; his father read law at Edinburgh and was a successful barrister and Queen's Counsel (QC). William Pearson's father's family came from the North Riding of Yorkshire.
  "Carl Pearson" inadvertently became "Karl Pearson" when he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1879, which changed the spelling. He used both variants of his name until 1884 when he finally adopted Karl — supposedly also after Karl Marx^{[citation needed]}, though some argue otherwise. Eventually he became universally known as "KP".
  
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  Karl Popper
  Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRSFBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-Britishphilosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
  Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.
  Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born. Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society: Simon Siegmund Carl became a legal partner^{[clarification needed]} of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimond Grübl and, after his death in 1898, took over the firm (Karl received his middle name from the mayor).
  
  wn.com/Karl_Popper
• Larry Laudan
  Larry Laudan (b. Austin, Texas, 1941) is a contemporary philosopher of science and epistemologist. He has strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he has defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs."
  His most important contributions to the philosophy of science can be found in his book Progress and its Problems (1977) while acting as chair of the history and philosophy of science department at the University of Pittsburgh. Laudan charges philosophers of science with paying lip service to the view that “science is fundamentally a problem-solving activity” without taking seriously the view's implications for the history of science and its philosophy, and without questioning certain issues in the historiography and methodology of science. Against empiricism, which is represented by Karl Popper, and "revolutionism," represented by Thomas Kuhn, Laudan maintained in Progress and its Problems that science is an evolving process that accumulates more empirically validated evidence while solving conceptual anomalies at the same time. Mere evidence collecting or empirical confirmation does not constitute the true mechanism of scientific advancement; conceptual resolution and comparison of the solutions of anomalies provided by various theories form an indispensable part of the evolution of science.
  
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  Leonhart Fuchs
  Leonhart Fuchs (17 January 1501 – 10 May 1566), sometimes spelled Leonhard Fuchs, was a German physician and one of the three founding fathers of botany, along with Otto Brunfels and Hieronymus Bock (also called Hieronymus Tragus).
  Fuchs was born in 1501 in Wemding in the Duchy of Bavaria. After attending a school in Heilbronn, Fuchs went to the Marienschule in Erfurt, Thuringia at the age of twelve, and graduated as Baccalaureus artium. In 1524 he became Magister Artium in Ingolstadt, and was received doctor of medicine in the same year.
  From 1524-1526 he practiced as a doctor in Munich, until he received a chair of medicine at Ingolstadt^{[clarification needed]} in 1526. From 1528-1531 he was the personal physician of Georg, Margrave of Brandenburg in Ansbach.
  Fuchs was called to Tübingen by Ulrich, Duke of Württemberg in 1533 to help in reforming the University of Tübingen in the spirit of humanism. He created its first medicinal garden in 1535 and served as chancellor seven times, spending the last thirty-one years of his life as professor of medicine. Fuchs died in Tübingen in 1566.
  
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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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  New algebra
  The new algebra or symbolic analysis is a formalization of algebra promoted by François Viète in 1591 and by his successors (after 1603). It marks the beginning of the algebraic formalization (late sixteenth - the early seventeenth centuries).
  In artem analyticem Isagoge (1591) is the program of this large axiomatic project.
  This work is available via gallica, written in Latin, and announcing that it will be the first volume of a work divided into ten parts:
  It provides a new approach to writing algebra and begins with the famous dedication to the Melusinide princess Catherine de Parthenay.
  In the first part of his Isagoge, Viète provides definitions of his symbolic analysis, and gives, in a rhythmic movement, the definitions of Zetetic, Poristic, and Exegetic, for the purpose of writing the science of inventing Mathematics. He gives, concurrently, an axiomatic for calculation on the quantities (known and unknown) and a program, which provides heuristic rules.
  In this introduction, Viète requires three steps to solve algebraic or geometrical problems: formalization, general resolution, special resolution. He adds that, contrary to the former analysts, his method will act on the resolution of symbols (non iam in numeris sed sub specie)... which is the major input. He also predicts that after his works, training in Zetetic will be done through the analysis of symbols and not by the numbers.
  
  wn.com/New_algebra
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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.
  
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  Otto Brunfels
  Otto Brunfels (also known as Brunsfels or Braunfels) (believed to be born in 1488 near Mainz – December 23, 1534 in Bern, Switzerland) was a German theologian and botanist. Carl von Linné listed him among the "Fathers of Botany".
  After studying theology and philosophy at the University of Mainz, Brunfels entered a Carthusian monastery in Mainz and later resettled to another Carthusian monastery at Königshofen near Strasbourg. In Strasbourg he got in contact with a learned lawyer Nikolaus Gerbel (they met in person in 1519). Gerbel drew Brunfels' attention to the healing powers of plants and thus gave the impetus to the further botanical investigations.
  After the conversion to the Protestantism (he was supported by Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten), upon the insistence of the Dean of Frankfurt Johann Indagine, Brunfels became a minister at Steinau an der Straße (1521) and later, in Neuenburg am Rhein. After that he served for eight years as the head of a Carmelite school in Strasbourg. In the list of most important heretics published by the order of the Emperor by the University of Leuven (1550), Brunfels was listed first.
  
  wn.com/Otto_Brunfels
• Otto Neurath
  Otto Neurath (Vienna, December 10, 1882 - Oxford, December 22, 1945) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was to flee his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
  Neurath was born in Vienna, the son of Wilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-known political economist at the time. He studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his Ph.D. in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin.
  He married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died as a result of childbirth (Paul Neurath) in 1911, and he married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn. Perhaps because of Olga's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, his son, Paul Neurath was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with his father and Olga when he was nine years old.
  Neurath taught political economy at the Neue Wiener Handelsakademie (New College of Commerce, Vienna) until war broke out. Subsequently he became director of the Deutsches Kriegwirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the Deutsches Wirtschaftmuseum) at Leipzig. Wolfgang Schumann, known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles, urged him to work out a plan for socialization. Neurath joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918-19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison he wrote "Anti-Spengler", a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West".
  
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  Otto von Guericke
  Otto von Guericke (originally spelled Gericke, German pronunciation: [ˈɡeːʁɪkə]) (November 20, 1602 – May 11, 1686 (Julian calendar); November 30, 1602 – May 21, 1686 (Gregorian calendar)) was a German scientist, inventor, and politician. His major scientific achievements were the establishment of the physics of vacuums, the discovery of an experimental method for clearly demonstrating electrostatic repulsion, and his advocacy of the reality of "action at a distance" and of "absolute space".
  
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  Paracelsus
  Paracelsus (born Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 11 November or 17 December 1493 – 24 September 1541) was a German-Swiss Renaissance physician, botanist, alchemist, astrologer, and general occultist. He is also credited for giving zinc its name, calling it zincum, and is regarded as the first systematic botanist.
  "Paracelsus", meaning "equal to or greater than Celsus", refers to the Roman encyclopedist Aulus Cornelius Celsus from the 1st century, known for his tract on medicine.
  Paracelsus was born and raised in the village of Einsiedeln in Switzerland. His father, Wilhelm Bombast von Hohenheim, was a Swabian (German) chemist and physician; his mother was Swiss, she presumably died in his childhood. In 1502 the family moved to Villach, Carinthia where Paracelsus' father worked as a physician. He received a profound humanistic and theological education by his father, local clerics and the convent school of St. Paul's Abbey in the Lavanttal. At the age of 16 he started studying medicine at the University of Basel, later moving to Vienna. He gained his doctorate degree from the University of Ferrara in 1515 or 1516.
  
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  Paul Feyerabend
  Paul Karl Feyerabend (January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958–1989). He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland. His major works include Against Method (published in 1975), Science in a Free Society (published in 1978) and Farewell to Reason (a collection of papers published in 1987). Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules. He is an influential figure in the philosophy of science, and also in the sociology of scientific knowledge.
  
  wn.com/Paul_Feyerabend
• Paul Häberlin
  Paul Haeberlin (February 17, 1878, Kesswil – September 29, 1960, Basel) was a Swiss philosopher who at different times in his career took the standpoint that either religion or theoretical knowledge was the answer to human problems. He always gave philosophy an important role, but religion was to him the only way man could understand his real position in existence. Haeberlin made contributions to characterology and psychotherapeutics, and was especially successful in treating psychopathic youth and teens. Made a full professor of philosophy, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Basel.
  
  
  
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  Pierre de Fermat
  Pierre de Fermat (French pronunciation: [pjɛːʁ dəfɛʁˈma]; 17 August 1601 or 1607/8 – 12 January 1665) was a French lawyer at the Parlement of Toulouse, France, and an amateur mathematician who is given credit for early developments that led to infinitesimal calculus, including his adequality. In particular, he is recognized for his discovery of an original method of finding the greatest and the smallest ordinates of curved lines, which is analogous to that of the then unknown differential calculus, and his research into number theory. He made notable contributions to analytic geometry, probability, and optics. He is best known for Fermat's Last Theorem, which he described in a note at the margin of a copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica.
  Fermat was born in Beaumont-de-Lomagne, Tarn-et-Garonne, France; the late 15th century mansion where Fermat was born is now a museum. He was of Basque origin. Fermat's father was a wealthy leather merchant and second consul of Beaumont-de-Lomagne. Pierre had a brother and two sisters and was almost certainly brought up in the town of his birth. There is little evidence concerning his school education, but it may have been at the local Franciscan monastery.
  
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  Pierre Duhem
  Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem ([pjˈɛʁ moʁˈis maʁˈi dyˈɛm] ( listen); 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages. Duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics.
  Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.
  
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  Pierre Fauchard
  Pierre Fauchard (1678 – March 22, 1761) was a significant French physician, credited as being the "father of modern dentistry". He is widely known for his book, Le chirurgien dentiste, "The Surgeon Dentist" 1728, where he described the basic oral anatomy and function, signs and symptoms of oral pathology, operative methods for removing decay and restoring teeth, periodontal disease (pyorrhea), orthodontics, replacement of missing teeth, and tooth transplantation. His book is said to be the first complete scientific description of dentistry. Fauchard's text was followed by others who continued to expand the knowledge of the dental profession throughout Europe.
  Fauchard was born in a very modest home in Brittany. In 1693 he joined the French Royal Navy at the age of 15, much to his family's distress, and came under the influence of Alexander Poteleret, a surgeon major, who had spent considerable time studying diseases of the teeth and mouth.
  During that time, Fauchard learned that sailors who were on long voyages suffered severely from dental ailments, scurvy in particular. Eventually Major Poteleret inspired and encouraged him to read and carefully investigate the findings of his predecessors in the healing arts. He said he wanted to disseminate the knowledge he learned at sea based on actual practice. This idea led Fauchard to become a combat medic as Poteleret's protégé.
  
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  Pierre Gassendi
  Pierre Gassendi (January 22, 1592 – October 24, 1655) was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
  He wrote numerous philosophical works, and some of the positions he worked out are considered significant, finding a way between scepticism and dogmatism. Richard Popkin indicates that Gassendi was one of the first thinkers to formulate the modern "scientific outlook", of moderated scepticism and empiricism. He clashed with his contemporary Descartes on the possibility of certain knowledge. His best known intellectual project attempted to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.
  Gassendi was born at Champtercier, near Digne, in France. A youthful prodigy, at a very early age he showed academic potential and attended the college at Digne, where he displayed a particular aptitude for languages and mathematics. Soon afterwards he entered the University of Aix-en-Provence, to study philosophy under Philibert Fesaye. In 1612 the college of Digne called him to lecture on theology. Four years later he received the degree of Doctor of Theology at Avignon, and in 1617 he took holy orders. In the same year he answered a call to the chair of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence University, and seems gradually to have withdrawn from theology.
  
  wn.com/Pierre_Gassendi
• Pierre Vernier
  Pierre Vernier (19 August 1580 at Ornans, Franche-Comté, Spanish Habsburgs (now France) – 14 September 1637 same location) was a French mathematician and instrument inventor. He was inventor and eponym of the vernier scale used in measuring devices.
  He was born in Ornans, France, in 1580, he was taught science by his father. He later became captain and castellan of the castle at Ornans, for the King of Spain. He was also later councillor and director general of moneys in the County of Burgundy.
  At Brussels, in 1631, he published, his treatise "La construction, l'usage, et les propriétés du quadrant nouveau de mathematiques", and dedicated it to the Infanta. In it he described the ingenious device which now bears his name, the Vernier scale.
  To a quadrant with a primary scale in half degrees Vernier proposed to attach a movable sector, thirty-one half degrees in length but divided into thirty equal parts (each part consisting then of a half degree plus one minute). In measuring an angle, minutes could be easily reckoned by noticing which division line of the sector coincided with a division line of the quadrant.
  
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  Plato
  Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
  Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
  
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  Pope Gregory XIII
  Pope Gregory XIII (7 January 1502 – 10 April 1585), born Ugo Boncompagni, was Pope from 1572 to 1585. He is best known for commissioning and being the namesake for the Gregorian calendar, which remains the internationally accepted civil calendar to this date.
  During his pontificate, Gregory fostered cultural patronages associated with his papacy. He strengthened many ecclesiastical and diplomatic envoys to Asia, namely the islands of Japan and the Philippines. He was also the first Pope to bestow the Immaculate Conception as Patroness to the Philippine Islands on 9 February 1579.
  Ugo Boncompagni was born the son of Cristoforo Boncompagni (10 July 1470–1546) and of his wife Angela Marescalchi in Bologna, where he studied law and graduated in 1530. He later taught jurisprudence for some years, and his students included notable figures such as Cardinals Alexander Farnese, Reginald Pole and Charles Borromeo. He had an illegitimate son before he took holy orders.
  At the age of thirty-six he was summoned to Rome by Pope Paul III (1534–1549), under whom he held successive appointments as first judge of the capital, abbreviator, and vice-chancellor of the Campagna. Pope Paul IV (1555–1559) attached him as datarius to the suite of Cardinal Carlo Carafa, Pope Pius IV (1559–1565) made him Cardinal-Priest of San Sisto Vecchio and sent him to the Council of Trent.
  
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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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  Pythagoras
  Pythagoras of Samos (Ancient Greek: Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος [Πυθαγόρης in Ionian Greek] Pythagóras ho Sámios "Pythagoras the Samian", or simply Πυθαγόρας; b. about 570 – d. about 495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him. He was born on the island of Samos, and might have travelled widely in his youth, visiting Egypt and other places seeking knowledge. Around 530 BC, he moved to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and there set up a religious sect. His followers pursued the religious rites and practices developed by Pythagoras, and studied his philosophical theories. The society took an active role in the politics of Croton, but this eventually led to their downfall. The Pythagorean meeting-places were burned, and Pythagoras was forced to flee the city. He is said to have ended his days in Metapontum.
  
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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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  Robert Boyle
  Robert Boyle, FRS, (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was a 17th-century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology. He has been variously described as Irish, English and Anglo-Irish, his father having come to Ireland from England during the time of the Plantations.
  Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry.
  Boyle was born in Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland, the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork and Catherine Fenton. Richard Boyle arrived in Dublin from England in 1588 during the Tudor plantations of Ireland and obtained an appointment as a deputy escheator. He had amassed enormous landholdings by the time Robert was born. Catherine Fenton was the daughter of English writer Geoffrey Fenton, who was born in Dublin in 1539, and Alice Weston, the daughter of Robert Weston, who was born in Lismore in 1541.
  
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• Robert Briffault
  Robert Stephen Briffault (1876 – 11 December 1948) was trained as a surgeon, but found fame as a social anthropologist and in later life as a novelist.
  According to one source, Briffault was born in Nice, France. According to others he was born in London, though he spent time in France and elsewhere in Europe following his diplomat father. After the death of his father, Briffault and his Scottish-born mother emigrated to New Zealand.
  His first wife (m 1896) was Anna Clarke with whom he had three children. After her death he married Herma Hoyt (1898-1981), an American writer and translator.
  Briffault received his MB, ChB from the University of Dunedin in New Zealand and commenced medical practice. After service on the Western Front during World War I (where he was awarded the Military Cross, he settled in England where he turned to the study of sociology and anthropology. He also lived for some time in the USA, and later Paris.
  Briffault debated marriage with Bronisław Malinowski in the 1930s and corresponded with Bertrand Russell.
  
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  Robert Hooke
  Robert Hooke FRS (28 July [O.S. 18 July] 1635 – 3 March 1703) was an English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.
  His adult life comprised three distinct periods: as a scientific inquirer lacking money; achieving great wealth and standing through his reputation for hard work and scrupulous honesty following the great fire of 1666, but eventually becoming ill and party to jealous intellectual disputes. These issues may have contributed to his relative historical obscurity.
  He was at one time simultaneously the curator of experiments of the Royal Society and a member of its council, Gresham Professor of Geometry and a Surveyor to the City of London after the Great Fire of London, in which capacity he appears to have performed more than half of all the surveys after the fire. He was also an important architect of his time, though few of his buildings now survive and some of those are generally misattributed, and was instrumental in devising a set of planning controls for London whose influence remains today. Allan Chapman has characterised him as "England's Leonardo".
  
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  Robert Kilwardby
  Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215–11 September 1279) was an Archbishop of Canterbury in England and as well as a cardinal.
  Kilwardby studied at the University of Paris, then was a teacher of grammar and logic there. He then joined the Dominican Order and studied theology, and became regent at Oxford University before 1261, probably by 1245. He was named provincial prior of the Dominicans for England in 1261, and in October 1272 Pope Gregory X appointed him as Archbishop of Canterbury to end a disupte over the election. Kilwardby was provided to the archbishopric on 11 October 1272, given the temporalities on 12 December 1272, and consecrated on 26 February 1273.
  Kilwardby crowned Edward I and his wife Eleanor as king and queen of England in August 1274, but otherwise took little part in politics. He instead concentrated on his ecclesiastical duties, including charity to the poor and donating to the Dominicans.
  In 1278 Pope Nicholas III named Kilwardby Cardinal Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina. He then resigned Canterbury and left England, taking with him papers, registers and documents belonging to the see. He also left the see deep in debt again, after his predecessor had cleared the debt. He died in Italy in 1279 and was buried in the Dominican convent in Viterbo, Italy. While in theory this was a promotion, probably it was not, as the pope was unhappy with Kilwardy's support of efforts to resist the payment of papal revenues and with the lack of effort towards the reforms demanded at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.
  
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  Roger Bacon
  Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214–1294), (scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, meaning "wonderful teacher"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited, mainly starting in the 19th century, as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Aristotle and later pseudo-Aristotelian works, like the works of Muslim scientist Alhazen. However, more recent reevaluations emphasize that he was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books, in the scholastic tradition. A survey of the reception of Bacon's work over centuries found that it often reflects the concerns and controversies central to the receivers.
  Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, possibly in 1213 or 1214 at the Ilchester Friary. The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet". The 1214 birth date assumes he was not being literal, and may have meant 40 years had passed since he matriculated at Oxford at the age of 13. If he had been literal, his birth date was more likely to have been around 1220/1222. In the same passage he reports that for all but two of those forty years he had always been engaged in study. His family appears to have been well-off, but, during the stormy reign of Henry III of England, their property was despoiled and several members of the family were driven into exile.
  
  wn.com/Roger_Bacon
• Rudolf Carnap
  Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 – September 14, 1970) was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
  Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble until his parents' generation. He began his formal education at the Barmen Gymnasium. From 1910 to 1914, he attended the University of Jena, intending to write a thesis in physics. But he also studied carefully Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic. After serving in the German army during World War I for three years, he was given permission to study physics at the University of Berlin, 1917–18, where Albert Einstein was a newly appointed professor. Carnap then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time. The physics department said it was too philosophical, and Bruno Bauch of the philosophy department said it was pure physics. Carnap then wrote another thesis, with Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, and published as Der Raum (Space) in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien (1922). In it he makes the clear distinction between formal, physical and perceptual (e.g., visual) spaces.
  
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• Stephen Toulmin
  Stephen Edelston Toulmin (25 March 1922 - 4 December 2009) was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.
  Stephen Toulmin was born in London, England, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1942. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination on the relationship between the uses and the meanings of language shaped much of Toulmin’s own work.
  
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  Steven Shapin
  Steven Shapin (born 1943) is a historian and sociologist of science. He is currently the Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Before that, he was a professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego, and at the Science Studies Unit, Edinburgh University.
  He has written broadly on the history and sociology of science, and is known as a key contributor to the sociology of scientific knowledge. He is probably best known for his influential 1985 book with Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, for which they received the prestigious Erasmus Prize in 2005. His 1996 book, The Scientific Revolution, has been translated into 14 languages.
  His other honors include the J.D. Bernal Prize and the Ludwik Fleck Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science, the Robert K. Merton Prize of the American Sociological Association, the Herbert Dingle Prize of the British Society for the History of Science, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.
  
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• Stillman Drake
  Stillman Drake (December 24, 1910 – October 6, 1993) was a Canadian historian of science best known for his work on Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). Drake published over 131 books, articles, and book chapters on Galileo. Drake received his first academic appointment in 1967 as full professor at the University of Toronto after a career as a financial consultant. During that time he had begun his studies of the works of Galileo and translated Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1953), parts of four of Galileo's works in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957), and Galileo's The Assayer in The Controversy of Comets (1960), co-authored with C. D. O'Malley.
  Possibly his most significant contribution to the history of science was his defense of Galileo's experiments as documented in his published Two New Sciences and in his manuscript notes. Drake showed how the complex interaction of experimental measurement and mathematical analysis led Galileo to his law of falling bodies. This clearly refuted Alexandre Koyré's claim that experiment played no significant part in Galileo's thought.^{[citation needed]}
  
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  Thomas Browne
  Sir Thomas Browne (19 October 1605 – 19 October 1682) was an English author of varied works which reveal his wide learning in diverse fields including medicine, religion, science and the esoteric.
  Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry, while his Christian faith exuded tolerance and goodwill towards humanity in an often intolerant era. A consummate literary craftsman, Browne's works are permeated by frequent reference to Classical and Biblical sources and to his own highly idiosyncratic personality. His literary style varies according to genre resulting in a rich, unusual prose that ranges from rough notebook observations to the highest baroque eloquence. Although he was described as suffering from melancholia, Browne's writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour.
  On 14 March 1673, Browne sent a short autobiography to the antiquarian John Aubrey, presumably for Aubrey's collection of Brief Lives, which provides an introduction to his life and writings.
  
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  Thomas Hobbes
  Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
  Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
  He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.
  
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• Thomas Kuhn
  Thomas Samuel Kuhn ( /ˈkuːn/; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple.
  Kuhn has made several notable claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way; that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding that scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing accounts of reality which cannot be coherently reconciled. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely on full "objectivity"; we must account for subjective perspectives as well.
  
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  Thomas Newcomen
  Thomas Newcomen (shortly before 24 February 1664 – 5 August 1729) created the first practical steam engine for pumping water, the Newcomen steam engine. He was an ironmonger by trade and a Baptist lay preacher by calling. He was born in Dartmouth, Devon, England, near a part of the country noted for its tin mines. Flooding was a major problem, limiting the depth at which the mineral could be mined.
  He could be said to have been more than a lay preacher as he was a teaching elder in the local Baptist church. That he continued in business is almost certainly because the church could not afford to pay him as a full-time elder. His father had been one of a group who brought the well-known Puritan John Flavel to Dartmouth. Later one of Newcomen's business contacts in London, Edward Wallin, was another Baptist minister who had connections with the well known Dr. John Gill of Horsleydown, Southwark. Newcomen's connection with the Baptist church at Bromsgrove materially aided the spread of his steam engine.
  
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  Thomas Savery
  Thomas Savery (c. 1650–1715) was an English inventor, born at Shilstone, a manor house near Modbury, Devon, England.
  Savery became a military engineer, rising to the rank of Captain by 1702, and spent his free time performing experiments in mechanics. In 1696 he took out a patent for a machine for polishing glass or marble and another for "rowing of ships with greater ease and expedicion than hitherto beene done by any other" which involved paddle-wheels driven by a capstan and which was dismissed by the Admiralty following a negative report by the Surveyor of the Navy, Edmund Dummer.
  Savery also worked for the Sick and Hurt Commissioners, contracting the supply of medicines to the Navy Stock Company, which was connected with the Society of Apothecaries. His duties on their behalf took him to Dartmouth, which is probably how he came into contact with Thomas Newcomen.
  On 2 July 1698 Savery patented an early steam engine, "A new invention for raiseing of water and occasioning motion to all sorts of mill work by the impellent force of fire, which will be of great use and advantage for drayning mines, serveing townes with water, and for the working of all sorts of mills where they have not the benefitt of water nor constant windes." He demonstrated it to the Royal Society on 14 June 1699. The patent has no illustrations or even description, but in 1702 Savery described the machine in his book The Miner's Friend; or, An Engine to Raise Water by Fire, in which he claimed that it could pump water out of mines.
  
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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.
  
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  Valerius Cordus
  Valerius Cordus (18 February 1515 – 25 September 1544) was a German physician and botanist who authored one of the greatest pharmacopoeias and one of the most celebrated herbals in history. He is also widely credited with having pioneered a method for synthesizing ether (which he called by the poetic Latin name oleum dulci vitrioli, or "sweet oil of vitriol").
  Cordus wrote prolifically, and also identified and described several new plant species and varieties. The plant genus Cordia is named for him.
  In 1515, Valerius Cordus was born either in the city of Erfurt in Thuringia, or somewhere in the westwardly adjacent state of Hesse. His father, Euricius Cordus (born Heinrich Ritze, 1486-1535), was an educated physician and an ardent Lutheran convert.
  Valerius began his higher education in 1527, at the young age of 12, studying botany and pharmacy under the tutelage of his father. In the same year he also enrolled at the University of Marburg. He completed his bachelor's degree in 1531, whereupon he furthered his studies by enrolling in the University of Leipzig, and by working at an apothecary shop in Leipzig owned by his uncle (either Johannes or Joachim).
  
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  Wilhelm Windelband
  Wilhelm Windelband (May 11, 1848, Potsdam – October 22, 1915, Heidelberg) was a German philosopher of the Baden School.
  Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who protested other neo-Kantians of his time and maintained that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries, Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests in psychology and cultural sciences represented an opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a critical philosophic system.
  Windelband relied in his effort to reach beyond Kant on such philosophers as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Hermann Lotze. Closely associated with Windelband was Heinrich Rickert. Windelband's disciples were not only noted philosophers, but sociologists like Max Weber and theologians like Ernst Troeltsch and Albert Schweitzer.
  
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  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
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  William Harvey
  William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who was the first person to describe completely and in detail the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the body by the heart, although blood circulation was described by Ibn al-Nafis earlier in his Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna's Canon (1242). After his death the William Harvey Hospital was constructed in the town of Ashford, several miles from his birthplace of Folkestone.
  Harvey's father: Tom Harvey, was a jurat of Folkestone where he served the office of mayor in 1600. Records and personal descriptions delineate him as an overall calm, diligent and intelligent man whose "sons... revered, consulted and implicitly trusted in him... (they) made their father the treasurer of their wealth when they acquired great estates...(He) kept, employed and improved their gainings to their great advantage." Thomas Harvey's portrait can still be seen in the central panel of a wall of the dining-room at Rolls Park, Chigwell, in Essex.
  
  wn.com/William_Harvey
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  William of Ockham
  William of Ockham ( /ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Ockham's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.
  William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age. It is believed that he studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Worthy Beginner" (an inceptor was a student formally admitted to the ranks of teachers by the university authorities). He was also known as the Doctor Invincibilis or "Unconquerable Teacher."
  
  wn.com/William_of_Ockham
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  William Oughtred
  William Oughtred (5 March 1575 – 30 June 1660) was an English mathematician.
  After John Napier invented logarithms, and Edmund Gunter created the logarithmic scales (lines, or rules) upon which slide rules are based, it was Oughtred who first used two such scales sliding by one another to perform direct multiplication and division; and he is credited as the inventor of the slide rule in 1622. Oughtred also introduced the "×" symbol for multiplication as well as the abbreviations "sin" and "cos" for the sine and cosine functions.
  Oughtred was born at Eton in Buckinghamshire (now part of Berkshire), and educated there and at King's College, Cambridge, of which he became fellow. Being admitted to holy orders, he left the University of Cambridge about 1603, for a living at Shalford; he was presented in 1610 to the rectory of Albury, near Guildford in Surrey, where he settled. He married Christsgift Caryll, (niece) of the Caryll family of Tangley Hall at Wonersh, of which Lady Elizabeth Aungier (daughter of Sir Francis), wife of Simon Caryll 1607-1619, was matriarch and then dowager until her death c.1650.
  
  wn.com/William_Oughtred
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  William Whewell
  William Whewell ( /ˈhjuːəl/ HEW-əl; 24 May 1794 – 6 March 1866) was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
  Whewell was born in Lancaster. His father, a carpenter, wished him to follow his trade, but his success in mathematics at Lancaster and Heversham grammar schools won him an exhibition (a type of scholarship) at Trinity College, Cambridge (1812). In 1814 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry. He was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college, and, in 1841, succeeded Dr Christopher Wordsworth as master. He was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy (then called "moral theology and casuistical divinity") from 1838 to 1855.
  Whewell died in Cambridge 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
  Full bibliographical details are given by Isaac Todhunter, W. Whewell: an Account of his Writings (2 vols., 1876). See also Life of W. Whewell, by Mrs Stair Douglas (1881).
  
  wn.com/William_Whewell