Scientists featured in A Short History of Nearly Everything

Benjamin Banneker - (November 9, 1731–October 9, 1806) was a free African American mathematician, astronomer, clockmaker, publisher. From 1792 through 1797.

Niels Bohr – (October 7, 1885 – November 18, 1962) was a Danish physicist who made fundamental contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics. Bohr is widely considered one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century.

Marie Curie – (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the early field of radiology, later becoming the first two-time Nobel laureate and the only person with Nobel Prizes in two different fields of science (physics and chemistry).

Charles Darwin - (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist who achieved lasting fame by producing considerable evidence that species originated through evolutionary change, at the same time proposing the scientific theory that natural selection is the mechanism by which such change occurs. This theory is now considered a cornerstone of biology.

Albert Einstein - (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born Jewish-American Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist widely regarded as the most important scientist of the 20th century and one of the greatest physicists of all time. He played a leading role in formulating the special and general theories of relativity; moreover, he made significant contributions to quantum theory and statistical mechanics. While best known for the Theory of Relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mc2), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect in 1905.

Edmond Halley – (November 8, 1656 – January 14, 1742) was an English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist, and physicist. A friend and colleague of Isaac Newton’s. Halley’s Comet, the most famous of all periodic comets, is named after him.

Thomas Huxley – (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist a popularizer of science, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his defense of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Percy Julian – (April 11, 1899-April 19, 1975) was an American research chemist of international renown, and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs. During his lifetime he received more than 130 chemical patents.

Gregor Mendel – (July 20, 1822 – January 6, 1884) was an Augustinian abbot who is often called the "father of genetics" for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of genetics.

Isaac Newton - (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) [OS: 25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727][1] was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, and natural philosopher who is generally regarded as one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians in history. Newton wrote the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, in which he described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics. By deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion from this system, he was the first to show that the motion of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws.

Max Plank – (April 23, 1858 – October 4, 1947) was a German physicist. He is considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and therefore regarded as one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century.