• Question: who is your favourite scientist

    Asked by anon-245258 to Ondrej, Jordan, Eleanor, Ed, Christine, Alice on 10 Mar 2020.
    • Photo: Ondrej Kovanda

      Ondrej Kovanda answered on 10 Mar 2020:

      Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 – 1813), a French-Swiss mathematician and physicist. He reformulated classical mechanics in completely novel way – in my view the greatest outside-the-box thinking in the history of science. Today, we are using his approach in quantum physics, most notably the quantum field theory – the theory of particles.

    • Photo: Edward Banks

      Edward Banks answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      Probably Thales of Miletus- he was arguably the first scientist ever! He lived in Greece around 600BCE and was one of the first people documented who looked for patterns in the world around him and used them to explain and predict phenomena.
      Looking for patterns and using them to predict future events is pretty much the foundation of science!

    • Photo: Jordan McElwee

      Jordan McElwee answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      Marie Curie! She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win it twice, and also the only person (ever!) who has won it in two different scientific fields (physics and chemistry). That’s a pretty incredible career!

    • Photo: Eleanor Jones

      Eleanor Jones answered on 11 Mar 2020:

      I’m a big fan of Emmy Noether. She was a mathematician in the early 1900s and made huge contributions to both maths and physics. She even has a theorem named after her, which is one of the most important theorems in physics!

      In addition to her work itself, I also think she must have been a very strong person. It was not easy being a female academic back then; when she was working in a university, she had to spend four years working under a colleague’s name just because she was a woman. She was also a Jew and so was forced to flee her home in Germany 1933 when the Nazis gained power. So she definitely had to work hard to achieve as much as she did!

    • Photo: Christine Beavers

      Christine Beavers answered on 12 Mar 2020: last edited 12 Mar 2020 3:52 pm

      I don’t really idolize scientists of the past much- they were certainly great, but I find relating to them difficult. My favortie scientists are people who are alive and doing science. My supervisor during my PhD, Professor Marilyn Olmstead, is one of the most highly cited women in chemistry. She is a leader in X-ray crystallography and also a wonderful human being. She’s probably my favorite scientist.

Comments