Archimedes of Syracuse was an Ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered the greatest mathematician of ancient history, and one of the greatest of all time, Archimedes anticipated modern calculus and analysis by applying the concept of the infinitely small and the method of exhaustion to derive and rigorously prove a range of geometrical theorems. These include the area of a circle, the surface area and volume of a sphere, the area of an ellipse, the area under a parabola, the volume of a segment of a paraboloid of revolution, the volume of a segment of a hyperboloid of revolution, and the area of a spiral.
Physics is a branch of science whose primary objects of study are matter and energy. Discoveries of physics find applications throughout the natural sciences and in technology. Physics today may be divided loosely into classical physics and modern physics.
Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author who was described in his time as a natural philosopher. He was a key figure in the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment that followed. His pioneering book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, first published in 1687, consolidated many previous results and established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus.
Mechanics is the area of mathematics and physics concerned with the relationships between force, matter, and motion among physical objects. Forces applied to objects result in displacements or changes of an object's position relative to its environment.
Experimental physics is the category of disciplines and sub-disciplines in the field of physics that are concerned with the observation of physical phenomena and experiments. Methods vary from discipline to discipline, from simple experiments and observations, such as Galileo's experiments, to more complicated ones, such as the Large Hadron Collider.
A scientific celebrity or celebrity scientist is a scientist who has gained significant public attention, usually through the media. For the general public, scientific celebrities serve to represent science or a field of science, usually in an unofficial capacity. In some instances, such promotion can be self-serving in nature, can be at the behest of governmental or corporate interests or to promote the science involved.
The sociology of the history of science—related to sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies—has in the 20th century been occupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science "works" both in a philosophical and practical sense.
Men of Mathematics: The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré is a book on the history of mathematics published in 1937 by Scottish-born American mathematician and science fiction writer E. T. Bell (1883–1960). After a brief chapter on three ancient mathematicians, it covers the lives of about forty mathematicians who flourished in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The book is illustrated by mathematical discussions, with emphasis on mainstream mathematics.
The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" is a metaphor which means "using the understanding gained by major thinkers who have gone before in order to make intellectual progress".
In physics, theories of gravitation postulate mechanisms of interaction governing the movements of bodies with mass. There have been numerous theories of gravitation since ancient times. The first extant sources discussing such theories are found in ancient Greek philosophy. This work was furthered through the Middle Ages by Indian, Islamic, and European scientists, before gaining great strides during the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution—culminating in the formulation of Newton's law of gravity. This was superseded by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity in the early 20th century.
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology is a history of science by Isaac Asimov, written as the biographies of initially 1000 scientists and later with over 1500 entries. Organized chronologically, beginning with Imhotep and concluding with Stephen Hawking, each biographical entry is numbered, allowing for easy cross-referencing of one scientist with another. Nearly every biographical sketch contains links to other biographies. For example, the article about John Franklin Enders [1195] has the sentence "Alexander Fleming's [1077] penicillin was available thanks to the work of Howard Florey [1213] and Ernst Boris Chain [1306]. . ." This allows one to quickly refer to the articles about Fleming, Florey, and Chain. It includes scientists in all fields including biologists, chemists, astronomers, physicists, mathematicians, geologist, and explorers. The alphabetical list of biographical entries starts with ABBE, Cleveland [738] and ends with ZWORYKIN, Vladimir Kosma [1134]
Jed Zachary Buchwald is Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at Caltech. He was previously director of the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT. He won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1995 and was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.
Jameel Sadik "Jim" Al-Khalili is an Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, author and broadcaster. He is professor of theoretical physics and chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey. He is a regular broadcaster and presenter of science programmes on BBC radio and television, and a frequent commentator about science in other British media.
David Bodanis is an American speaker, business advisor and writer of bestselling nonfiction books, notably E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation, which was translated into 26 languages. Originally from Chicago, he received an undergraduate education in mathematics, physics and economics at the University of Chicago. He lived in France for ten years from his early twenties and has since been based in London.
Albert Einstein has been the subject of, or inspiration for, many works of popular culture.
Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, natural philosopher, theologian, alchemist and one of the most influential scientists in human history. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica is considered to be one of the most influential books in the history of science, laying the groundwork for most of classical mechanics by describing universal gravitation and the three laws of motion. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of the differential and integral calculus.
Manuel Toharia Cortés is a Spanish science writer, museum director, and television personality.
The Ortega hypothesis holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science. According to this hypothesis, scientific progress occurs mainly by the accumulation of a mass of modest, not so intelligent, narrowly specialized intellectual contributions. On this view, major breakthroughs draw heavily upon a large body of minor and little-known work, without which the major advances could not happen.
On the Shoulders of Giants: The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy is a compilation of scientific texts edited and with commentary by the British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. The book was published by Running Press in 2002.
