was born in the city of El-Zahra, six miles northwest of Córdoba, Andalusia. He was descended from the AnsarArab tribe who settled earlier in Spain. He lived most of his life in Córdoba. It is also where he studied, taught and practiced medicine and surgery until shortly before his death in about 1013, two years after the sacking of El-Zahra.
was an Afro-Arab astronomer, geographer and ophthalmologist in the 9th century. Ali bin Isa (940 - 1010AD) is considered one of the most famous physicians of the tenth century. His famous Notebook of the Oculists combined information obtained from both Greco -Roman and Arab sources. The book encompassed information on treatment and classification of over one hundred different eye diseases. In the book, eye diseases were sorted by their anatomical location. The Notebook of the Oculists was widely used by European physicians for hundreds of years. Ibn Isa’s book was one of the first, along with Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s Ten Treatises on the Eye, to illustrate anatomy of the eye.
Niels Henrik David Bohr (October 7, 1885 - November 8, 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr mentored and collaborated with many of the top physicists of the century at his institute in Copenhagen. He was part of a team of physicists working on the Manhattan Project. Bohr married Margrethe Nørlund in 1912, and one of their sons, Aage Bohr, grew up to be an important physicist who in 1975 also received the Nobel Prize. Bohr has been described as one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
Charles Darwin (Feb. 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882) was an English naturalist renowned for his documentation of evolution and for his theory of its operation, known as Darwinism. His evolutionary theories, propounded chiefly in two works--On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)--have had a profound influence on subsequent scientific thought. Darwin was the son of Robert Waring Darwin, who had one of the largest medical practices outside of London, and the grandson of the physician Erasmus Darwin, the author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life, and of the artisan-entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood. Darwin thus enjoyed a secure position in the professional upper middle class that provided him with considerable social and professional advantages.
René Descartes (March 31, 1596 - February 11, 1650), was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the DutchRepublic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy," and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day.
Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the Passions of the Soul, a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, he goes so far as to assert that he will write on his topic "as if no one had written on these matters before".
Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the Schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends - divine or natural - in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God¹s act of creation.
Marie Curie was a physicist and chemist of Polish upbringing and, subsequently, French citizenship. She was a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the first person honored with two Nobel Prizes, and the first female professor at the University of Paris. Her achievements include the creation of a theory of radioactivity (a term coined by her), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new elements, polonium and radium. It was also under her personal direction that the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms ("cancers"), using radioactive isotopes. While an actively loyal French citizen, she never lost her sense of Polish identity. She named the first new chemical element that she discovered (1898) "polonium" for her native country, and in 1932 she founded a Radium Institute in her home town Warsaw, headed by her physician-sister Bronislawa.
was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the SwissFederalPolytechnicSchool in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.
*One of the great scientists of his day, and one of the "founding fathers" of the modern American scientific tradition, Louis Agassiz remains something of a historical enigma. A great systematist and paleontologist, a renowned teacher and tireless promoter of science in America, he was also a lifelong opponent of Darwin's theory of evolution. Yet even his most critical attacks on evolution have provided evolutionary biologists with insights.
was a great French chemist who is often called the father of modern chemistry. Lavoisier was a scientist and thinker of unusually wide interests. He made contributions to many scientific fields. Lavoisier's brilliant scientific career was cut short by radicals of the French Revolution who had him executed by the guillotine in 1794. Lavoisiers most important contribution to science was his explanation of the chemical basis of combustion (fire). He observed that when the chemical elements sulfur and phosphorus are burned, they increase in weight.