Famous Scientists a to z

Robert Adamson was a Scottish chemist and photographer who is best known for producing 2500 Calotype photographic prints with painter David Octavius Hill.

Howard H. Aiken was a 20th century mathematician and engineer who came up with the idea behind the Mark I, a forerunner to modern computing devices.

Sidney Altman is a Nobel Prize-winning Canadian-American molecular biologist.

Alois Alzheimer was a German psychiatrist who discovered the pathological condition of dementia and diagnosed the disease that bears his name.

Svante Arrhenius was a Nobel Prize winning scientist known for his revolutionary theories in various fields, including physics, chemistry and astronomy.

John James Audubon was an American ornithologist, artist and naturalist known for his studies, drawings and paintings of North American birds.

American neuroscientist Richard Axel is best known for his work on the olfactory system, exploring how the brain interprets smell.

Pharmacologist Julius Axelrod’s studies of neurotransmission of adrenalin and amphetamines led to his investigations into drugs for treatment of mental illness.

Francis Bacon was an English Renaissance statesman and philosopher, best known for his promotion the scientific method.

Joseph Banks was a late-18th to early-19th century British explorer and botanist who pushed for the advancement of science.

Benjamin Banneker was a largely self-educated mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor and writer.

Arnold Beckman was an American chemist who founded Beckman Instruments and funded the first silicon transistor company, giving rise to Silicon Valley.

Henri Becquerel was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, an achievement for which he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.

Alexander Graham Bell was one of the primary inventors of the telephone, did important work in communication for the deaf and held more than 18 patents.

Charles H. Best was a physiologist and medical researcher who co-discovered the use of insulin as a treatment for diabetes.

Naturalist, inventor and businessman Clarence Birdseye pioneered the process of flash freezing in the United States. His company was bought by General Foods.

J. Michael Bishop is a Nobel Prize winning physician and scholar who made groundbreaking discoveries in cancer research.

Cellular and molecular biologist Günter Blobel won the Nobel Prize in 1999 for his discoveries about proteins and their placement in the cell.

Bluford became the first African American to travel in space in 1983, as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Challenger.

Franz Boas was a German-born anthropologist who founded the relativistic, culture-centered school of American anthropology that dominated 20th century thought.

Niels Bohr was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and humanitarian whose revolutionary theories on atomic structures helped shape research worldwide.

Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose is known for working with Albert Einstein on the Bose-Einstein Condensate and as namesake of the boson, or “God particle.”

Sydney Brenner is a Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and a science writer.

Herbert C. Brown was a scientist and professor who won the Nobel Prize for his work in organic chemistry.

Michael S. Brown is a molecular geneticist who was co-awarded a 1985 Nobel Prize for his work on the metabolism of cholesterol in the human body.

British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell assisted in constructing a large radio telescope and discovered pulsars, cosmic sources of peculiar radio pulses.

Macfarlane Burnet was an Australian physician and researcher who made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of immunology and virology.

Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer responsible for the classification of hundreds of thousands of stars.

A chemist, W.H. Carothers worked for DuPont and with his research laid the foundation for the synthetic fiber industry.

Scientist George Carruthers created inventions, such as the ultraviolet camera, or spectograph, which was used by NASA in the 1972 Apollo 16 flight, revealing the mysteries of space and the Earth's atmosphere.

Rachel Carson was a marine biologist, environmentalist and writer who alerted the world to the environmental impact of fertilizers and pesticides.

George Washington Carver was a prominent African-American scientist and inventor. Carver is best known for the many uses he devised for the peanut.

Costa Rican-born Franklin Chang-Díaz was the first Hispanic-American astronaut. He made several trips to space for NASA and developed plasma propulsion.

Jacques Alexandre César Charles was a French scientist and inventor who, along with Nicholas Robert, was the first to take flight in a hydrogen balloon.

Physicist Steven Chu was co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1997 for his work on cooling atoms, and became the U.S. Secretary of Energy in 2009.

Scientist Edwin Cohn helped develop a method of separating blood plasma proteins, which provided lifesaving care to many soldiers during World War II.

Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus identified the concept of a heliocentric solar system, in which the sun, rather than the earth, is the center of the solar system.

John Warcup Cornforth is an Australian scientist who won the 1975 Nobel Prize for his research in stereochemistry and enzyme-based synthesis.

Jeff Corwin is a conservationist and the television host and producer of The Jeff Corwin Experience on the Animal Planet network.

Jacques Cousteau was a French undersea explorer, researcher, photographer and documentary host who invented diving and scuba devices, including the Aqua-Lung. He also conducted underwater expeditions and produced films and television series, including the Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau. 

Francis Crick is responsible for discovering, along with James Watson, the double-helix structure of the DNA strand.

Marie Curie was a Polish-born French physicist famous for her work on radioactivity and twice a winner of the Nobel Prize.

French physicist Pierre Curie was of founding fathers of modern physics and is best known for being a pioneer in radioactive studies.

Chemist John Dalton is credited with pioneering modern atomic theory. He was also the first to study color blindness.

Charles Darwin is best known for his work as a naturalist, developing a theory of evolution to explain biological change.

Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton was a French naturalist who introduced Merino sheep to France.

Humphry Davy was a British chemist best known for his contributions to the discoveries of chlorine and iodine. He is noted for suggesting the anesthetic use of nitrous oxide in human surgery.

Charles Coulomb was a French engineer and physicist who made pioneering discoveries in his field and came up with the theory called Coulomb’s Law.

Astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson hosted NOVA ScienceNow and appeared on such shows as The Daily Show and Real Time with Bill Maher.

Philosopher and mathematician René Descartes is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky was a 20th century scientist, professor and author who did pioneering work in genetics and evolution.

Austrian physicist Christian Doppler first described the Doppler effect, in reference to the observed frequency of light and sound waves, in the paper "Concerning the Coloured Light of Double Stars."

Renato Dulbecco was an Italian virologist best known winning the Nobel Prize for pioneering the growing of viruses in culture in the 1950s.

Paul Ehrlich is a German Jewish medical scientist best known for discovering the first effective treatment for syphilis.

Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the theory of relativity. He is considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century.

Willem Einthoven was a physiologist who discovered the electrical properties of the heart and developed the EKG.

American biochemist and pharmacologist Gertrude B. Elion helped develop drugs to treat leukemia and prevent kidney transplant rejection. She won a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1988.

Physicist Enrico Fermi built the prototype of a nuclear reactor and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb.

Alexander Fleming was a doctor and bacteriologist who discovered penicillin, receiving the Nobel Prize in 1945.