Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev

Dmitri Mendeleev
chemist,physicist

Born  : 8 February 1834 Verkhnie Aremzyani, Tobolsk Governorate, Russian Empire

Died : 2 February 1907 (aged 72) Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire

Nationality : Russian

Alma mater : Saint Petersburg University

Known for : Formulating the Periodic table of chemical elements

Awards

• Davy Medal (1882)
• ForMemRS (1892)

Scientific career

• Fields

1. Chemistry
2. Physics

Mendeleev was born in the village of Verkhnie Aremzyani, near Tobolsk in Siberia, to Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev (1783–1847) and Maria Dmitrievna Mendeleeva (née Kornilieva) (1793–1850).His paternal grandfather Pavel Maximovich Sokolov was a Russian Orthodox priest from the Tver region.Ivan, along with his brothers and sisters, obtained new family names while attending the theological seminary. He worked as a school principal and a teacher of fine arts, politics and philosophy at the Tambov and Saratov gymnasiums.

In 1849, his mother took Mendeleev across Russia from Siberia to Moscow with the aim of getting Mendeleev a higher education. The university in Moscow did not accept him. The mother and son continued to Saint Petersburg to the father’s alma mater. The now poor Mendeleev family relocated to Saint Petersburg, where he entered the Main Pedagogical Institute in 1850. After graduation, he contracted tuberculosis, causing him to move to the Crimean Peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea in 1855. While there, he became a science master of the Simferopol gymnasium №1. In 1857, he returned to Saint Petersburg with fully restored health.Between 1859 and 1861, he worked on the capillarity of liquids and the workings of the spectroscope in Heidelberg. Later in 1861, he published a textbook named Organic Chemistry.This won him the Demidov Prize of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.

Unaware of the earlier work on periodic tables going on in the 1860s, he made the following table:

Cl 35.5 K 39 Ca 40
Br 80 Rb 85 Sr 88
I 127 Cs 133 Ba 137

By adding additional elements following this pattern, Mendeleev developed his extended version of the periodic table.[40][41] On 6 March 1869, he made a formal presentation to the Russian Chemical Society, titled The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements, which described elements according to both atomic weight and valence.

Did You Know

In 1865 Dmitri Mendeleev became Doctor of Science for his dissertation "On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol"

Quotes

"The most all penetrating spirit before which will open the possibility of tilting not tables, but planets, is the spirit of free human inquiry. Believe only in that."

“Work, look for peace and calm in work: you will find it nowhere else.”

“The elements, if arranged according to their atomic weights, exhibit an apparent periodicity of properties.” 

“No law of nature, however general, has been established all at once; its recognition has always been preceded by many presentiments.” 

“We must expect the discovery of many as yet unknown elements-for example, elements analogous to aluminum and silicon- whose atomic weight would be between 65 and 75.” 

"There exists everywhere a medium in things, determined by equilibrium."

"I want you to have this feeling too - it is my moral responsibility to help you achieve this inner freedom."

Mendeleyev_gold_Barry_Kent

Marie Curie

Marie Skłodowska Curie

Born : 7 November 1867 Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire

Died : 4 July 1934 (aged 66) Passy, Haute-Savoie, Third French Republic

Cause of death : Aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation

Residence : Poland, France

Citizenship :

1. Poland (by birth)
2. France (by marriage)

Alma mater : 

University of Paris

ESPCI

Known for : 

• Radioactivity
• Polonium
• Radium

Awards

• Nobel Prize in Physics (1903)
• Davy Medal (1903)
• Matteucci Medal (1904)
• Elliott Cresson Medal (1909)
• Albert Medal (1910)
• Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1911)
• Willard Gibbs Award (1921)

Scientific career

Fields :

• Physics,
• chemistry

Institutions :

• University of Paris
• Institut du Radium
• École Normale Supérieure
• French Academy of Medicine
• International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation

Thesis : Recherches sur les substances radioactives (Research on Radioactive Substances)

Marie Skłodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and was part of the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris.

She was born in Warsaw, in what was then the Kingdom of Poland, part of the Russian Empire. She studied at Warsaw's clandestine Flying University and began her practical scientific training in Warsaw. In 1891, aged 24, she followed her older sister Bronisława to study in Paris, where she earned her higher degrees and conducted her subsequent scientific work. She shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and with physicist Henri Becquerel. She won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Quotes

Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.

Be less curious about people and more curious about ideas.

One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done.

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales.

I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

There are sadistic scientists who hurry to hunt down errors instead of establishing the truth.

I have frequently been questioned, especially by women, of how I could reconcile family life with a scientific career. Well, it has not been easy.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, that humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

In science, we must be interested in things, not in persons.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Born  : 15 April 1452 Vinci, Republic of Florence (present-day Tuscany, Italy)

Died  : 2 May 1519 (aged 67) Amboise, Kingdom of France

Nationality : Italian

Known for  : Art, science

Works 

• Mona Lisa
• The Last Supper
• Salvator Mundi
• The Vitruvian Man
• Lady with an Ermine

Signature

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci more commonly Leonardo da Vinci or simply Leonardo, was an Italian polymath of the Renaissance, whose areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He has been variously called the father of palaeontology, ichnology, and architecture, and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. Sometimes credited with the inventions of the parachute, helicopter and tank, he epitomised the Renaissance humanist ideal.

A painting by Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, sold for a world record $450.3 million at a Christie's auction in New York, 15 November 2017, the highest price ever paid for a work of art.Perhaps fifteen of his paintings have survived. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists rivalled only by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Quotes

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Learning never exhausts the mind.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.

Water is the driving force of all nature.

Nikola Tesla

   Nikola Tesla    inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer,futurist

Born : 10 July 1856 Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia)

Died : 7 January 1943 (aged 86) New York City, United States

Citizenship :

• Austrian (1856–1891)
• American (1891–1943)

Education : Graz University of Technology (abandoned)

Engineering career

Discipline : 

• Electrical engineering,
• Mechanical engineering

Projects :

• Alternating current,
• high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments

Significant design : 

• Tesla Tower/World Wireless System/Wireless power transfer
• Tesla Experimental Station
• Tesla's Egg of Columbus
• Tesla coil/Resonant inductive coupling
• Tesla turbine
• Tesla valve
• Tesla's oscillator
• Polyphase system
• AC motor/Induction motor
• Rotating magnetic field
• Radio control
• Plasma globe
• Plasma lamp
• Carbon button lamp
• Teleforce/Death ray
• Telegeodynamics
• Teleoperation
• Torpedo
• Vacuum variable capacitor
• Violet ray
• VTOL

Awards :

1. Order of St. Sava, II Class, Government of Serbia (1892)
2. Elliott Cresson Medal (1894)
3. Order of Prince Danilo I (1895)
4. Edison Medal (1916)
5. Order of St. Sava, I Class, Government of Yugoslavia (1926)
6. Order of the Yugoslav Crown (1931)
7. John Scott Medal (1934)
8. Order of the White Eagle, I Class, Government of Yugoslavia (1936)
9. Order of the White Lion, I Class, Government of Czechoslovakia (1937)
10. University of Paris Medal (1937)
11. The Medal of the University St Clement of Ochrida, Sofia, Bulgaria (1939)

Signature :                 

Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Though he was famous and respected, he was never able to translate his copious inventions into long-term financial success—unlike his early employer and chief rival, Thomas Edison.

Tesla studied math and physics at the Technical University of Graz and philosophy at the University of Prague. In 1882, while on a walk, he came up with the idea for a brushless AC motor, making the first sketches of its rotating electromagnets in the sand of the path. Later that year he moved to Paris and got a job repairing direct current (DC) power plants with the Continental Edison Company. Two years later he immigrated to the United States.

Did you know? 

During the 1890s Mark Twain struck up a friendship with inventor Nilola Tesla. Twain often visited him in his lab, where in 1894 Tesla photographed the great American writer in one of the first pictures ever lit by phosphorescent light.

Quotes :

The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine. 

The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence. 

The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.  

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate,man is no more. 

 I do not think you can name many great inventions that have been made by married men. 

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame,then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

Charles Robert Darwin

     Charles Darwin     
naturalist, geologist and biologist 

Born : 12 February 1809  The Mount, Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England

Died : 19 April 1882 (aged 73) Down House, Downe, Kent, England

Education  : Christ's College, Cambridge
                      University of Edinburgh Medical School
                      Shrewsbury School

Known for

• The Voyage of the Beagle
• On the Origin of Species
• The Descent of Man

Awards

• FRS (1839)
• Royal Medal (1853)
• Wollaston Medal (1859)
• Copley Medal (1864)
• Doctor of Laws (Honorary), Cambridge (1877)

Fields : Natural history, geology

Signature :                                      


Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist,best known for his contributions to the science of evolution.He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and, in a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding.

Darwin published his theory of evolution with compelling evidence in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.By the 1870s, the scientific community and a majority of the educated public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed in which natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution.Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life.

Quotes

A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities... still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.

I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection.

An American monkey, after getting drunk on brandy, would never touch it again, and thus is much wiser than most men.

A man's friendships are one of the best measures of his worth.

To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.

The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton
mathematician, astronomer, and physicist

Born : 4 January 1643 Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England
Died : 31 March 1727 (aged 84) Kensington, Middlesex, England
Resting place : Westminster Abbey
Nationality : English
Alma mater : Trinity College, Cambridge

Known for

• Newtonian mechanics
• Universal gravitation
• Calculus
• Newton's laws of motion
• OpticsBinomial series
• PrincipiaNewton's method

Awards

• FRS (1672) 
•  Knight Bachelor (1705

Fields

• PhysicsNatural philosophy
• AlchemyTheology
• MathematicsAstronomy
• Economics

Signature :         

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, author and physicist who is widely recognised as one of the most influential scientists of all time, and a key figure in the scientific revolution. His book Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, first published in 1687, laid the foundations of classical mechanics.

In Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint until being superseded by the theory of relativity.Newton also built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a sophisticated theory of colour based on the observation that a prism separates white light into the colours of the visible spectrum. His work on light was collected in his highly influential book Opticks, published in 1704. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling, made the first theoretical calculation of the speed of sound, and introduced the notion of a Newtonian fluid. In addition to his work on calculus, as a mathematician Newton contributed to the study of power series, generalised the binomial theorem to non-integer exponents, developed a method for approximating the roots of a function, and classified most of the cubic plane curves.

Quotes

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.

Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.

Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.

This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.

If I have done the public any service, it is due to my patient thought.

If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient attention, than to any other talent.

Every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.

To myself I am only a child playing on the beach, while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

Super scientist Galileo Galilei

Galileo Galilei
astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician

Born : 15 February 1564 Pisa, Duchy of Florence

Died : 8 January 1642 (aged 77) Arcetri, Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Italy

Residence : Grand Duchy of Tuscany

Nationality : Italian

Alma mater : University of Pisa 1580-85 (no degree)

Known for          

• Kinematics
• Dynamics
• Telescopic observational astronomy
• Heliocentrism

Scientific career

Fields : Astronomy, physics, engineering, natural philosophy, mathematics

Institutions :        

• University of Pisa 1589-1592
• University of Padua 1592-1610

Signature : 

Galileo Galilei was an Italian polymath. Known for his work as astronomer, physicist, engineer, philosopher, and mathematician, Galileo has been called the "father of observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of the scientific method", and the "father of science".

Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and "hydrostatic balances", inventing the thermoscope and various military compasses, and using the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, the observation of Saturn and the analysis of sunspots.

Quotes

If I were again beginning my studies, I would follow the advice of Plato and start with mathematics.

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.

Wine is sunlight, held together by water.

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do.

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.