Greatest Scientists of all Time

lionking

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lionking
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I couldn't find a thread about this. I've read quite a few top ten scientists lists, and none I agree with. Subjective as hell; let's not get into a debate about what "greatest" means; all blokes in my list, sorry about that; but here's mine, in no particular order:

Newton
Einstein
Darwin
Kepler
Laplace
Turing
Faraday
Hubble
Pasteur
Bohr

I would expect the first three would be in everyone's list, for fairly obvious reasons. Kepler extended the work of Galileo and influenced Newton. Laplace was a true polymath who theorised the nebular origin of the solar system and black holes hundreds of years before others, amongst many other achievements. Turing might not be in many top 10 lists, but someone credited with shortening WWII and laying the foundation for computers does it for me. Faraday the father of electromagnetism. Hubble, who opened up the universe. Pasteur whose discoveries saved more lives than arguably anyone else. Bohr laid the foundations for quantum mechanics.

Not a bad top 10 IMHO. Anyone else?
 
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Let's see. If you are going to include Einstein, you have to include Feynman. Turing was fantastic, but he was a mathematician, and if you are going to include mathematicians, you have to put Noether on the list.
 
Yes I took a broad definition of "scientist". Yes Feynman was on my shortlist, but I've never heard of Noether. I know I can look him up, but am interested in why he would be in your top 10.
 
Aristotle and Democritus. They did unbelievable work for their time. Aristotle is my favorite. From WP:

"His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology."

And about most of those subjects he knew more than the vast majority of his contemporaries.
 
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Noether

1) Put algebra on a firm footing after nearly 2000 years, with some of the most abstract and theoretical reasoning ever.

2) Created Noether's Theorem, which unified the great conservation laws (energy, momentum, and angular momentum) with the great symmetry laws (time, displacement, and rotation).

The sheer range of that, from the most abstruse to the most practical, makes me consider her the greatest mathematician of all time. She did lots of other stuff, like fix GR.

Plus, number 2 is an answer to a question often posed by theists: why do we think that the laws of physics are unchanging? Because we think that energy is conserved. Why is the origin of the universe an exception, maybe? Because time symmetry is broken.
 
Less of a foundational figure than Pasteur, but Joseph Lister also has quite a number of lives saved under his belt. I think Kary Mullis's work (PCR) is also going to prove to have been quite a turning point in Biology and related fields like, say, medicine.
 
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El Greco said:
Aristotle and Democritus. They did unbelievable work for their time. Aristotle is my favorite. From WP:

"His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology."

And about most of those subjects he knew more than the vast majority of his contemporaries.
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No love for the Milesian school? Thales and Anaximander were quite prescient in some of the conclusions drawn from their observations.
 
Boltzmann

Cantor

Descartes

Leibniz

You cant have a top 10 of mathematicians without Euclid, Gauss and Euler in surely?

:)

Or scientists without Planck and Gailileo?
 
Anyone know the name of the bloke that invented the big black rubbish bags?
Either him or Turing.
 
My favorite:
Ramon y Cajal, a Spaniard who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1906. He invented the neuron (cellular) theory of brain structure and studied and described the micro anatomy of almost every brain structure in virtually all classes of animals (vertebrates and invertebrates), and through development of those animals. He also described the reaction of the nervous system to injury, and the regeneration of nerves.
The sheer volume of his work is astounding, and he was dead on correct in most of his theorizing and analysis, in spite of strong opposing opinions by other neurologists of his day. He's my hero...
 
Personally I’d keep the mathematicians and scientists on separate lists, but if you are going to include mathematicians Euler probably had a bigger impact than the ones mentioned so far.
 
lomiller said:
Personally I’d keep the mathematicians and scientists on separate lists, but if you are going to include mathematicians Euler probably had a bigger impact than the ones mentioned so far.
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If you're going to go with mathematicians with the "Eu" phoneme, why not include the seminal one that continues to effect the world to this day (via trajectories and telemetries) - Euclid?
 
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