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Albert Einstein
1879 — 1955
Albert Einstein was the German-born theoretical physicist who rewrote the laws of the universe with his special and general theories of relativity, and whose famous equation E=mc² unlocked the terrify…
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Charles Darwin
1809 — 1882
Charles Darwin was a British naturalist who, after five years circumnavigating the globe aboard HMS Beagle, spent twenty more years assembling the evidence that would overturn humanity's understanding…
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Werner Heisenberg
1901 — 1976
Werner Heisenberg was the German theoretical physicist who, at twenty-five years old, invented matrix mechanics and shattered the classical picture of the atom — earning a Nobel Prize before he was th…
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Isaac Newton
1643 — 1727
Isaac Newton was the English mathematician and natural philosopher who gave the world the laws of motion, universal gravitation, and the calculus — remaking what it meant to know anything about the ph…
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Percy Lavon Julian
1899 — 1975
Percy Lavon Julian was an African American chemist who pioneered the synthesis of medicinal compounds from soybeans, producing cortisone, progesterone, and physostigmine at industrial scale and transf…
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Lewis Howard Latimer
1848 — 1928
Lewis Howard Latimer was a self-taught draftsman, inventor, and engineer who refined the carbon filament that made Edison's incandescent bulb commercially viable, then personally supervised the instal…
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George Washington Carver
1864–1943
Born into slavery and orphaned as an infant, George Washington Carver became the most celebrated agricultural scientist in American history, transforming the economy of the post-Reconstruction South b…
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Benjamin Banneker
1731–1806
Benjamin Banneker was a free Black farmer, self-taught astronomer, mathematician, and almanac author from Maryland who corresponded with Thomas Jefferson to challenge the contradiction at the heart of…
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Charles R. Drew
1904–1950
Charles Richard Drew was an American surgeon and medical researcher who pioneered the science of blood banking, developing the methods for collecting, processing, and storing blood plasma that saved h…
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Patricia Bath
1942–2019
Patricia Bath was an ophthalmologist, inventor, and humanitarian who in 1988 became the first Black American woman to receive a medical patent — for the Laserphaco Probe, a device that revolutionized …
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Marie Curie
1867 — 1934
Two Nobel Prizes. Two new elements. She coined the term radioactivity and proved it is an atomic property. She is dying from the radiation exposure that earned her those prizes. Her notebooks are kept in lead-lined boxes.
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Nikola Tesla
1856 — 1943
He powered the modern world with alternating current and died broke in a New York hotel room while his patents ran the world. He predicted the internet in 1900. He won the War of Currents. He has views about Edison.
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Galileo Galilei
1564 — 1642
He looked through the telescope and saw four moons orbiting Jupiter. Not everything orbits the Earth. The Inquisition put him under house arrest. Under house arrest, nearly blind, he wrote the foundational text of classical mechanics and had it smuggled to Amsterdam.
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Leonardo da Vinci
1452 — 1519
The Florentine painter, engineer and anatomist who dissected thirty corpses, designed flying machines and war engines, painted the Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, and left seven thousand pages of notes on everything he saw. Most of what he began he never finished. He drew siege engines for Ludovico Sforza and rode with Cesare Borgia, and called war a bestial madness.
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Michael Faraday
1791 — 1867
The bookbinder's apprentice who discovered electromagnetic rotation, induction, the dynamo and the laws of electrolysis, and invented the field without a line of mathematics. He gave the Christmas Lectures to children, refused a knighthood and the Royal Society's chair, and declined to make poison gas for the Crimea. His memory failed him for twenty years; he kept notebooks because he could not trust it.
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Alfred Russel Wallace
1823 — 1913
The self-taught collector who found natural selection independently of Darwin in a malarial fever on Ternate, mailed it to him, and spent the rest of his life refusing to resent what followed. He drew the line through the East Indies, founded biogeography, and lived on what his specimens fetched. He also defended the mediums and campaigned against vaccination. He is held to both.
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