Carolus Linnaeus

Carl Linnaeus (Latinized: Carolus Linnaeus; originally Carl Nilsson Linnæus) was a Swedish botanist, naturalist, physician and zoologist. He was the first person to lay down the principles to determine the natural genera and species of organisms, and to form a uniform system for naming them (also known as binomial nomenclature). Linnaeus is considered to be the founding father of modern taxonomy as well as ecology.

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Early Life and Education:

Born in Roeshult, Sweden to a Lutheran minister, Carolus Linnaeus frustrated his father by showing no interest in the priesthood. When he entered the University of Lund in 1727 to study medicine, his parents were quite excited, but within a year, he was transferred to the University of Uppsala, where he took botany. Linnaeus acquired his medical degree from the University of Harderwijk, Netherlands. He received further education at the University of Leiden.

Contributions and Achievements:

Carolus Linnaeus put out his work “Systema Naturae” in 1735, the first edition of his classification of living things. He came back to Sweden in 1738 and practised medicine. In 1740, he took a teaching position at the University of Uppsala.

Linnaeus, primarily known as a naturalist and botanist, was a leading figure in the history of entomology. He laid down the binomial system of nomenclature, which became the basis for the moderm classification of living organisms. Widely known as the “father of biological systematics and nomenclature”, Linnaeus also devised the wing vein-based system for separation of orders, and set up the chronological starting point for the naming of insects.

Later Life and Death:

Carolus Linnaeus used to travel extensively in Europe. He collected and named several specimens from different countries of the world. His 1758 work “Systema Naturae 10th edition” is known to be the starting point for naming of insects. All names prior to it are considered outdated. Linnaeus was ennobled in 1761, and was later known as “Carl von Linne”.

He died of stroke in Uppsala, Sweden, on June 10, 1778.

Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan, also known as the “the astronomer of the people”, was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, author and researcher. He made crucial contributions in popularizing astronomy to the public. He authored over 600 scientific papers and several books about astronomy and natural sciences. He also gained worldwide fame for narrating and writing the popular 1980 television series “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage”.

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Early Life and Education:

Carl Sagan was born in New York in 1934 to a garment worker. When he was four, his parents took him to the 1939 New York World’s Fair. This became a turning point in his life and little Sagan developed an early interest in skyscrapers, science, space and the stars. His parents encouraged his growing interest in science by gifiting him chemistry sets and books. After graduating from Rahway High School in 1951, he went on to acquire three different science degrees.

Sagan was a lecturer and researcher at Harvard University until 1968. He then joined Cornell University in Ithaca, where he became a full Professor in 1971, and later, the director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. He remained at Cornell until 1981.

Contributions and Achievements:

Saga authored more than 20 books about space and the universe. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his work. His TV series Cosmos still remains one of the most-watched shows in television history. Sagan helped NASA with U.S. space missions to Venus, Mars, and Jupiter. Particularly, his discovery of the high surface temperatures of the planet Venus is highly regarded. He also worked on understanding the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter and seasonal changes on Mars.

The 1997 film Contact has been inspired by Sagan’s book of the same name. Contrary to the popular belief that aliens would be destructive to mankind, Sagan advocated that aliens would be friendly and good-natured.

Sagan is known to be one of the earliest scientists to propose that there might be life on other planets. He encouraged NASA to explore the solar system for signs of life. He received the Public Welfare Medal, the highest award of the National Academy of Sciences, in 1994.

Later Life and Death:

In his last written works, Sagan contended that the possibilities of extraterrestrial space vehicles visiting Earth are vanishingly small.

Carl Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996 at the age of 62.

Carl Friedrich Gauss

Johann Friedrich Carl Gauss, more commonly known as Carl Friedrich Gauss, was a German mathematician, widely known as one of the greatest mathematicians in history. He made crucial contributions to geometry, statistics, number theory, planetary astronomy, the theory of functions, potential theory, optics and geophysics.

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Early Life and Education:

Born on April 30, 1777 in Brunswick, Germany to a very poor family, the father of Carl Friedrich Gauss was a gardener and brick layer. His mother was, however, very keen to educate her son. Gauss was a child prodigy in mathematics. The Duke of Brunswick was very impressed with his computing skills when he was only 14, so his stay at the Brunswick Collegium Carolinum, Hanover was generously financed.

Gauss attended the University of Göttingen from 1795 to 1798. He earned his doctorate in 1799 at the University of Helmstedt.

Contributions and Achievements:

Gauss was made the director of the Göttingen Observatory in 1807, as well a professor of mathematics at the same place. During his tenure, he spent much of his time establishing a new observatory. He also worked with Wilhelm Weber for almost six years making a primitive telegraph device which could send messages over a distance of 1500 meters. A a statue of Gauss and Weber was later built in Göttingen.

Carl Friedrich Gauss was a prolific author who wrote more than 300 papers, mostly in Latin. He also knew Russian and other foreign languages. He was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society of London in 1801, mainly due to his his calculations of the orbits of the asteroids Ceres and Pallas. He also won the Copley Medal in 1838.

Later Life and Death:

Carl Friedrich Gauss was appointed a Geheimrat; a privy councilor, and he was also featured on the 10 Deutsche Mark note. He died on February 23, 1855 in Göttingen, Germany. He was 77 years old.

Carl Bosch

Carl Bosch was a prominent German industrial chemist and entrepreneur. Notable for the development of the Haber-Bosch process for high-pressure synthesis of ammonia, he was one of the founders of IG Farben, which became one of the world’s largest chemical companies. Bosch won the 1931 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for formulating chemical high-pressure methods.

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Early Life and Education:

Born in Cologne, Germany to a rich gas supplier, Carl Bosch’s uncle was the legendary industrialist Robert Bosch who helped develop the first spark plug. He attended the Technical College of Charlottenburg and the University of Leipzig for six years, from 1892 to 1898. Bosch later accepted an entry level job at BASF, a leading German chemical company.

Contributions and Achievements:

Carl Bosch started working to adapt the laboratory process for synthesizing ammonia for commercial production in 1909.
He formulated the process that bore his name, in which hydrogen is manufactured on an industrial scale by passing steam and water over a catalyst at high temperatures. The Haber-Bosch process turned out to be the most commonly used big-scale process for nitrogen fixation. Bosch was appointed the president of I.G. Farbenindustrie AG.

Bosch shared the 1931 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Friedrich Bergius for his work on the invention and development of chemical high-pressure methods. He became a successor to Max Planck in 1935 as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

Later Life and Death:

Carl Bosch died after a prolonged illness on April 26, 1940 in Heidelberg, Germany. He was 65 years old.

C. V. Raman

One of the most prominent Indian scientists in history, C.V. Raman was the first Indian person to win the Nobel Prize in science for his illustrious 1930 discovery, now commonly known as the “Raman Effect”. It is immensely surprising that Raman used an equipment worth merely Rs.200 to make this discovery. The Raman Effect is now examined with the help of equipment worth almost millions of rupees.

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Early Life:

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu on 7th November 1888 to a physics teacher. Raman was a very sharp student. After doing his matriculation at 12, he was supposed to go abroad for higher studies, but after medical examination, a British surgeon suggested against it. Raman instead attended Presidency College, Madras. After completing his graduation in 1904, and M.Sc. in Physics in 1907, Raman put through various significant researches in the field of physics. He studied the diffraction of light and his thesis on the subject was published in 1906.

Raman was made the Deputy Accountant General in Calcutta in 1907, after a successful Civil Service competitive examination. Very much occupied due to the job, he still managed to spare his evenings for scientific research at the laboratory of the Indian Association for Cultivation of Sciences. On certain occasions, he even spent the entire nights. Such was his passion that in 1917, he resigned from the position to become the Professor of Physics at Calcutta University.

Contributions and Achievements:

On a sea voyage to Europe in 1921, Raman curiously noticed the blue color of the glaciers and the Mediterranean. He was passionate to discover the reason of the blue color. Once Raman returned to India, he performed many experiments regarding the scattering of light from water and transparent blocks of ice. According to the results, he established the scientific explanation for the blue color of sea-water and sky.

There is a captivating event that served as the inspiration for the discovery of the Raman Effect. Raman was busy doing some work on a December evening in 1927, when his student, K.S. Krishnan (who later became the Director of the National Physical Laboratory, New Delhi), gave him the news that Professor Compton has won the Nobel Prize on scattering of X-rays. This led Raman to have some thoughts. He commented that if the Compton Effect is applicable for X-rays, it must also be true for light. He carried out some experiments to establish his opinion.

Raman employed monochromatic light from a mercury arc which penetrated transparent materials and was allowed to fall on a spectrograph to record its spectrum. During this, Raman detected some new lines in the spectrum which were later called ‘Raman Lines’. After a few months, Raman put forward his discovery of ‘Raman Effect’ in a meeting of scientists at Bangalore on March 16, 1928, for which he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930.

The ‘Raman Effect’ is considered very significant in analyzing the molecular structure of chemical compounds. After a decade of its discovery, the structure of about 2000 compounds was studied. Thanks to the invention of the laser, the ‘Raman Effect’ has proved to be a very useful tool for scientists.

Some of Raman’s other interests were the physiology of human vision, the optics of colloids and the electrical and magnetic anisotropy.

Later Life and Death:

Sir C.V. Raman became the Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1924. A year later, he set up Raman Research Institute near Bangalore, where he continued the scientific research until his death which was caused by a strong heart attack on November 21, 1970. His sincere advice to aspiring scientists was that “scientific research needed independent thinking and hard work, not equipment.”

Brian Cox

The pop idol turned Science idol, Professor Brian Edward Fox is an English physicist, PPARC Advanced Fellow and a Royal Society University Research Fellow as the University of Manchester. He is an active affiliate of the group of High Energy Physics in the university. He graduated and enjoys his job on the experiment of ATLAS at CERN in the vicinity of Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently running through on the development and research of the FP420 experiment in a collaboration of all nations to promote the Compact Muon Solenoid or CMS experiment and ATLAS by putting in additional, lesser detectors with a space of 420 meters from the main points of interaction of the core experiments.

Brain Cox is best recognized by the people and viewers as the broadcaster of several science programs for the British Broadcasting Corporation, whose role mainly boosts the recognition of subjects that are perceived to be difficult and least favorite, Physics and Astronomy. He has been recognized as the usual descendant for BBC’s scientific programs by both bereaved Patrick Moore and David Attenborough. He was also able to gain some popularity during the 90’s as the one playing the keyboards for the popular band which was named D: Ream.

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Early Life and Educational Background

Brian Edward Cox was born on March 3, 1968 to banker parents. From 1979 to 1986, he attended and studied at the independent establishment of Hulme Grammar School. During his interview in The Jonathan Ross Show, he revealed that he poorly performed on his A-level on Math and got a grade of D, which he then considered as a very bad score and needed to really pour time and effort to practice. He mentions two reasons for his Math grade result – fledging band commitments and lack of interest.

Cox acquired first class Bachelor of Science and Master of Philosophy degrees in Physics. After his band, D: Ream disbanded in the year 1997 Brian Cox completed Doctor of Philosophy degree in high energy particle Physics at the University of Manchester. Supervised by Robin Marshall, he came up with a thesis entitled, “Double Diffraction Dissociation at Large Momentum Transfer” which he worked on at DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany basing on the H1 experiment at the HERA particle accelerator.

He recollects a joyful childhood in Oldham, which included pursuits like gymnastics, dance, spotting planes, and even spotting bus. He has mentioned in various interviews and in one episode of Wonders of the Universe that there was one book that really turned the table for him and inspired him to become a physicist. It was reading the book written by Carl Sagan called Cosmos when he was still 12. Professor Cox is a humanist and is a “Distinguished Supporter” of the BHA or the British Humanist Association.

In the year 2003, he tied the knot with the love of his life and married U.S. Science presenter Gia Milinovich and had their first son named George on May 26, 2009. The middle name of George is “Eagle” gotten from the lunar module Apollo 11. The whole family currently resides in Manchester.

Career in Science

Brian Edward Cox, after gaining popularity over his musical career as a keyboard player in his pop band in the 90’s, he focused on his career in Science. He returned to the heart of Physics and landed himself a led researcher position at CERN, which put him in a higher pace and position to perform numerous interviews tackling about the run up to the Great Switch On of the Large Hadron Collider.

His works and knowledge on the field was accentuated through his broadcasting career. He targets boosting science in the minds of people and the importance of studying it. He appeared in a lot of science programs for both BBC television and radio, which included In Einstein’s Shadow, the BBC Horizon series and also worked as a voice-over for the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Bitesize review programs. Cox became a presenter in a five-part BBC Two series on television entitled Wonders of the Solar System during the early 2010 and a follow-up 4-part series called the Wonders of the Universe that began on March 6, 2011. In June 2012, another series called Wonders of Life filmed which Cox describes as a physicist’s take on natural history and life.

In January 2011, Cox and comedian Dara O Briain hosted the BBC’s Stargazing Live where they acted like small and curious children looking at meteor showers and different planets. Because of his eagerness to impart his knowledge on physics and astronomy, he voiced out his interest in giving out proper lectures than just sounding and sighting the Wonders. This was generally realized in December 2011 when he gave lectures in television about the basic principles of quantum mechanics. There, he was given a complete lecture set with a blackboard in front of a lot of celebrity guests who also raised their hands on demonstrations where Jonathan Ross was seen struggling with elementary mathematics.

Brian Cox appeared as well for numerous times at TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) in which he gave talks on the particle and LHC physics. He was then featured in 2009 as one of the Sexiest Men Alive in People’s Magazine. The Symphony of Science featured him in The Case for Mars in 2010.

Cox gave a lecture on “Science, a Challenge to TV Orthodoxy” during the Royal Television Society’s Memorial Lecture in 2010. There, he examined problems and issues in media coverage of news about science and science in the general aspect. It was consequently broadcasted on BBC Two.

Apart from broadcasting science, he has also co-authored and numerous books about Physics, which include The Quantum Universe and Why does E=mc2, both with Jeff Forshaw.

His effort to broadcast and publicize science has brought him numerous awards and recognitions. In the year 2002, he was voted for an International Fellow of The Explorers Club. After 4 years, Brian Cox received the award on British Association’s Lord Kelvin because of this craft. It was the same year that he was awarded an early career research fellowship system – the Royal Society University Research Fellowship.

In 2012, he was awarded for his exemplary work and expertise in science communication with Michael Faraday Prize of the Royal Society.

Brahmagupta

Brahmagupta is unique. He is the only scientist we have to thank for discovering precisely zero…

Brahmagupta was an Ancient Indian astronomer and mathematician, who lived from 597 AD to 668 AD. He was born in the city of Bhinmal in Northwest India. His father, whose name was Jisnugupta, was an astrologer.

Although Brahmagupta thought of himself as an astronomer who did some mathematics, he is now mainly remembered for his contributions to mathematics.

Many of his important discoveries were written as poetry rather than as mathematical equations! Nevertheless, truth is truth, regardless of how it may be written.

Quick Guide to Brahmagupta

Brahmagupta:

• was the director of the astronomical observatory of Ujjain, the center of Ancient Indian mathematical astronomy.

• wrote four books about astronomy and mathematics, the most famous of which is Brahma-sphuta-siddhanta ( Brahma’s Correct System of Astronomy, or The Opening of the Universe.)

• wrote that solving mathematical problems was something he did for pleasure.

• was the first person in history to see zero as a number with its own properties.

• defined zero as the number you get when you subtract a number from itself. Identifying zero as a number whose properties needed to be defined was vital for the future of mathematics and science.

• said that zero divided by any other number is zero.

• said that dividing zero by zero produces zero. (Although, this seems reasonable, Brahmagupta actually got this one wrong. Mathematicians have now shown that zero divided by zero is undefined – it has no meaning. There really is no answer to zero divided by zero.)

• was the first person to discover the formula for solving quadratic equations.

• wrote that pi, the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, could usually be taken to be 3, but if accuracy were needed, then the square-root of 10 (this equals 3.162…) should be used. This is about 0.66 percent higher than the true value of pi.

• indicated that Earth was nearer the moon than the sun

• incorrectly said that Earth did not spin and that Earth did not orbit the sun. This, however, may have been for reasons of self-preservation. Opposing the Brahmins’ religious myths of the time would have been dangerous.

• produced a formula to find the area of any four-sided shape whose corners touch the inside of a circle. This actually simplifies to Heron’s formula for triangles.

• wrote that the length of a year was 365 days 6 hours 12 minutes 9 seconds.

• calculated that Earth was a sphere of circumference around 36,000 km (22,500 miles).

Brahmagupta established rules for working with positive and negative numbers, such as:

• adding two negative numbers together always results in a negative number.

• subtracting a negative number from a positive number is the same as adding the two numbers.

• multiplying two negative numbers together is the same as multiplying two positive numbers.

• dividing a positive number by a negative, or a negative number by a positive results in a negative number.

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Why is Zero Important?

Although it may seem obvious to us now that zero is a number, and obvious that we can produce it by subtracting a number from itself, and that dividing zero by another non-zero number gives an answer of zero, these results are not actually obvious.

The brilliant mathematicians of Ancient Greece, so far ahead of their time in many ways, had not been able to make this breakthrough. Neither had anyone else, until Brahmagupta came along!

It was a huge conceptual leap to see that zero was a number in its own right. Once this leap had been made, mathematics and science could make progress that would have been impossible otherwise.

Brahmagupta might smile at the fact that, without his concept of zero, we would not have the science of thermodynamics; and without thermodynamics we could not even begin to understand the universe – the same universe that Brahmagupta, who viewed himself chiefly as an astronomer, tried so hard to understand over 1300 years ago.