PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: reference work
English physicist and mathematician
Isaac Newton, English physicist and mathematician, who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated...
Persian philosopher and scientist
Avicenna, Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian philosophy...
French chemist
Antoine Lavoisier, prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the...
Swedish botanist
Carolus Linnaeus, Swedish naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature)....
Scottish geologist
Charles Lyell, Scottish geologist largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth’s surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through...
Persian scholar and scientist
Al-Bīrūnī, Muslim astronomer, mathematician, ethnographist, anthropologist, historian, and geographer. Al-Bīrūnī lived during a period of unusual political turmoil in the eastern Islamic world. He served...
French scientist
Claude Bernard, French physiologist known chiefly for his discoveries concerning the role of the pancreas in digestion, the glycogenic function of the liver, and the regulation of the blood supply by the...
Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer
Ptolemy, an Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent who flourished in Alexandria during the 2nd century ce. In several fields his writings represent the culminating achievement...
French biologist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, pioneering French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern genetics and evolutionary...
Greek physician
Galen, Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine...
German-Swiss physician
Paracelsus, German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis...
American biologist
E.O. Wilson, American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals,...
Greek physician
Hippocrates, ancient Greek physician who lived during Greece’s Classical period and is traditionally regarded as the father of medicine. It is difficult to isolate the facts of Hippocrates’ life from the...
French naturalist
Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon, French naturalist, remembered for his comprehensive work on natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749). He was created a count...
German scholar and scientist
Georgius Agricola, German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet singularly...
Muslim alchemist
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān, Muslim alchemist known as the father of Arabic chemistry. He systematized a “quantitative” analysis of substances and was the inspiration for Geber, a Latin alchemist who developed...
German physiologist
Johannes Müller, German physiologist and comparative anatomist, one of the great natural philosophers of the 19th century. His major work was Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen, 2 vol....
American geologist and mineralogist
James D. Dana, American geologist, mineralogist, and naturalist who, in explorations of the South Pacific, the U.S. Northwest, Europe, and elsewhere, made important studies of mountain building, volcanic...
Swiss physician and naturalist
Conrad Gesner, Swiss physician and naturalist best known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants. Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious furrier,...
English naturalist
John Ray, leading 17th-century English naturalist and botanist who contributed significantly to progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to botany was the establishment of species as the ultimate unit...
British actor and director
Edward Gordon Craig, English actor, theatre director-designer, producer, and theorist who influenced the development of the theatre in the 20th century. Craig was the second child of a liaison between...
American artist
John James Audubon, ornithologist, artist, and naturalist who became particularly well known for his drawings and paintings of North American birds. Audubon’s name is associated with a number of bird-related...
American author
Sarah Josepha Hale, American writer who, as the first female editor of a magazine, shaped many of the attitudes and thoughts of women of her period. Sarah Josepha Buell married David Hale in 1813, and...
Spanish writer
Camilo José Cela, Spanish writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989. He is perhaps best known for his novel La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942; The Family of Pascual Duarte) and is considered...
American botanist
Asa Gray, American botanist whose extensive studies of North American flora did more than the work of any other botanist to unify the taxonomic knowledge of plants of this region. His most widely used...
British dancer
John Weaver, dancer, ballet master, choreographer, and theorist known as the father of English pantomime. Like his father, a dance teacher at Shrewsbury, Weaver began his career as a dance master in the...
English scholar, preacher, and author
Thomas Fuller, British scholar, preacher, and one of the most witty and prolific authors of the 17th century. Fuller was educated at Queens’ College, Cambridge (M.A., 1628; B.D., 1635). Achieving great...
American geneticist
George Wells Beadle, American geneticist who helped found biochemical genetics when he showed that genes affect heredity by determining enzyme structure. He shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or...
Swiss biologist
Albrecht von Haller, Swiss biologist, the father of experimental physiology, who made prolific contributions to physiology, anatomy, botany, embryology, poetry, and scientific bibliography. At the University...
American pediatrician
Benjamin Spock, American pediatrician whose books on child-rearing, especially his Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946; 6th ed., 1992), influenced generations of parents and made his name a...
British critic
Sir Leslie Stephen, English critic, man of letters, and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. A member of a distinguished intellectual family, Stephen was educated at Eton, at King’s College,...
British scholar and diplomat
John Crawfurd, Scottish Orientalist and East India Company employee who successfully combined scholarship and diplomatic abilities. Trained as a doctor in Edinburgh, Crawfurd was first appointed, at age...
German musicologist
Curt Sachs, eminent German musicologist, teacher, and authority on musical instruments. In his youth Sachs took lessons in piano, theory, and composition. Later, at Berlin University—although he included...
British publisher
George Smith, British publisher, best known for issuing the works of many Victorian writers and for publishing the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography. Smith’s father, also named George...
Egyptian author
Al-Suyūṭī, Egyptian writer and teacher whose works deal with a wide variety of subjects, the Islamic religious sciences predominating. The son of a judge, al-Suyūṭī was tutored by a Sufi (Muslim mystic)...
Dutch naturalist
Jan Swammerdam, Dutch naturalist, considered the most accurate of classical microscopists, who was the first to observe and describe red blood cells (1658). Swammerdam completed medical studies in 1667...
Malian author
Yambo Ouologuem, Malian writer who was highly acclaimed for his first novel, Le Devoir de violence (1968; Bound to Violence), which received the Prix Renaudot. With this work, Ouologuem became the first...
Persian physician
Al-Rāzī, celebrated alchemist and Muslim philosopher who is also considered to have been the greatest physician of the Islamic world. One tradition holds that al-Rāzī was already an alchemist before he...
American ornithologist
Roger Tory Peterson, American ornithologist, author, conservationist, and wildlife artist whose field books on birds, beginning with A Field Guide to the Birds (1934; 4th ed. 1980), did much in the United...
German Jesuit priest and scholar
Athanasius Kircher, Jesuit priest and scholar, sometimes called the last Renaissance man, important for his prodigious activity in disseminating knowledge. Kircher learned Greek and Hebrew at the Jesuit...
American philosopher and psychologist
James Mark Baldwin, philosopher and theoretical psychologist who exerted influence on American psychology during its formative period in the 1890s. Concerned with the relation of Darwinian evolution to...
German botanist
Adolf Engler, German botanist famous for his system of plant classification and for his expertise as a plant geographer. Engler obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Breslau (now Wrocław) in 1866. After...
German composer
Johann Gottfried Walther, German organist and composer who was one of the first musical lexicographers. Walther grew up in Erfurt, where as a child he studied the organ and took singing lessons. In 1702...
American writer
Leo Rosten, Polish-born American author and social scientist best known for his popular books on Yiddish and for his comic novels featuring the immigrant night-school student Hyman Kaplan. At age three...
Austrian pathologist
Karl, baron von Rokitansky, Austrian pathologist whose endeavours to establish a systematic picture of the sick organism from nearly 100,000 autopsies—30,000 of which he himself performed—helped make the...
American engineer
Karl Terzaghi, civil engineer who founded the branch of civil engineering science known as soil mechanics, the study of the properties of soil under stresses and under the action of flowing water. He studied...
American author
Richard Kostelanetz, American writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields. Kostelanetz attended Brown University (B.A., 1962), Columbia University (M.A., 1966), and...
American literary critic
Evert Augustus Duyckinck, American biographer, editor, and critic who with such works as the two-volume Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855, supplement 1866), written with his younger brother George...
American scholar
George Perkins Marsh, U.S. diplomat, scholar, and conservationist whose greatest work, Man and Nature (1864), was one of the most significant advances in geography, ecology, and resource management of...
Scottish ornithologist
Alexander Wilson, Scottish-born ornithologist and poet whose pioneering work on North American birds, American Ornithology, 9 vol., (1808–14), established him as a founder of American ornithology and one...