Interesting people
JD Bernal - Known to the world's brightest people as sage, crystallographer and socialist
R.A Fisher - Statistician, geneticist, My son meets Ronald Fisher.
Francis Galton - 19th century British polymath, Isaac Newton - the Newton Project
Isaac Newton at the NYPL - Newton's chemistry
JBS Haldane - one of 3 founders of evolutionary modern synthesis, charismatic Marxist and science popularizer.
HJ Muller - Nobel prize winning geneticist and social activist
Giordano Bruno - burned at the stake in 1500
New! - Thomas Coram - created the Foundling Hospital (London)
New! - William Hazlitt - Early 19th century British essayist
Henry Maudslay - machine tool innnovator
Giambattista Vico - 18th centry Italian philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli
David Hume - skeptical philosopher
Crick and Watson - DNA structure - James E. Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis)
Benjamin Franklin - I.F. Stone - independent journalist
New! - John Smeaton - father of civil engineering
New! - Ibn-al-Haytham - early scientist
Louis Agassiz - Swiss native who became influential American geologist
Paul Otlet (more) - information management (video)
Alexander Crummell - first American black intellectual
George Parker Bidder - 19th century British calculating prodigy and engineer
Robert Moses - urban planner
Captain James Cook - 18th century British explorer
Olaudah Equiano - British equivalent of Frederick Douglass, former slave and antislavery advocate.
Alfred Russel Wallace - codiscoverer of natural selection
John Edward Routh - reknowned Cambridge Mathematical Tripos coach.
Robert LaFollette - progressive pollitician
Rudolf Vrba - escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau
Thomas Buxton - British antislavery advocate
Savonarola - Florentine religious reformer and demagogue
Jacob Riis - Photographer, social reformer
Matthew Arnold - poet, literary critic, school inspector
Thomas Clarkson - prime mover behind British antislavery campaign
Jacob Bronowski - observer of science
Louis Antoine de Bougainville - French counterpart of Captain Cook
Thomas Crapper - famous plumber, next time you're in Westminster Abbey see the Crapper manhole covers.
Ottmar Mergenthaler - inventor of the linotype
Martin Gardner 20th century polymath, skeptic and contributor to Scientific American, despite majoring in philosophy he was able to stimulate young people to pursue mathematical careers
Archimedes
Paul Erdos - World class mathematician and World class eccentric.
Alexander Meiklejohn - educator
Edwin A. Abbott - Author of Flatland
Harry Emerson Fosdick - liberal theologian
John Henry Newman - the Oxford Movement (religion)
Thomas Blanchard - inventor of the "copy lathe", very clever, very simple
Robert Boyle - early modern scientist
Florence Nightingale - public health pioneer, first female fellow of the Statistical Society.
Micahel Faraday - the relationship between chemistry and electricity
Srinivasa Ramanujan - History's greatest mathematician? - Ramanujan page
George Green - miller & self taught mathematician. Developed Green's theorem (multivariate calculus) in the early 19th century.
Vannevar Bush - computer pioneer and WWII science policy leader
James Bryant Conant - Organic chemist, Harvard president and educational reformer.
Kofi Annan - Secretary general of the UN. Experienced independence movement in Gold Coast (Ghana) first hand. Then came to the US for college and experienced the civil rights movement first hand. At his best he exudes the spirit of these events.
Richard Hofstadter - historian, emphasizing cognitive aspects of American history
Joseph McCabe - early 20th century champion of freethought
George Olah - Nobel prizewinning chemist who popularized superacids including magic acid, which dissolves candles forming a solution which gives a single NMR peak.
Virginia Woolf - born into a distinguished family, she helped found and inspire the most important intellectual movement of the first half of the 20th century (Bloomsbury group)
John Andrew Rice - Author and idiosyncratic teacher - taught a few years at UNL. His Autobiography I came out out the 18th century is a great read
Salvador Luria - biologist
Hubert Lyautey - prominent French colonial administrator
Sir Richard Francis Burton - African explorer and linguist.
Biography web sites
