Benjamin Banneker was a largely self-educated mathematician, astronomer, compiler of almanacs, inventor and writer.
British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell assisted in constructing a large radio telescope and discovered pulsars, cosmic sources of peculiar radio pulses.
Annie Jump Cannon was a pioneering astronomer responsible for the classification of hundreds of thousands of stars.
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.
Italian scientist and scholar Galileo made pioneering observations that laid the foundation for modern physics and astronomy.
Robert Hooke was an English philosopher, mathematician and architect who discovered the law of elasticity, now known as Hooke's law.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble revolutionized the field of astrophysics. His research helped prove that the universe is expanding, and he created a classification system for galaxies that has been used for several decades.
English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, most famous for his law of gravitation, was instrumental in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.
Jan Hendrik Oort was a Dutch astronomer who confirmed that the Milky Way rotates in its own plane around the center of the galaxy.
American radio astronomer and physicist Joseph H. Taylor Jr. was the co-recipient of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering the first binary pulsar.