Famous Scientists from the United States
- Benjamin Franklin was a Founding Father of the United States and a polymath with many talents and accomplishments. He was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, Freemason, postmaster, scientist, inventor, humorist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. He founded many civic organizations, including the Library Company, Philadelphia's first fire department, and the University of Pennsylvania. As a scientist, he made significant contributions to the American Enlightenment and the history of physics, particularly in the area of electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, and the Franklin stove, among other things. Franklin played an important role in defining the American ethos as a blend of practical values and scientific and tolerant values. He was instrumental in uniting the colonies and was the first United States Ambassador to France. He was a successful newspaper editor and author of Poor Richard's Almanack.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria, was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who left a significant mark on both the entertainment and scientific communities. She began her acting career in Europe in the early 1930s, but it was her move to Hollywood in 1937 that propelled her to international stardom. Known for her striking beauty and charisma, Lamarr starred in numerous successful films across the '40s and '50s, such as Algiers, Samson and Delilah, and Ecstasy. Her performances were lauded for their depth and nuance, and she quickly became one of the most popular actresses of her time. However, Lamarr's contributions extended beyond the silver screen. Possessing a keen interest in applied sciences and technology, she co-invented an early version of spread spectrum communication, specifically frequency-hopping, during World War II. This invention, initially designed to prevent jamming of Allied torpedoes, would later lay the groundwork for modern technologies like Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Despite the significance of her contribution, Lamarr's work in this field remained largely unrecognized during her lifetime. Lamarr's life was not without controversy. She faced several legal issues and her six marriages garnered significant media attention. Regardless, her legacy as both a pioneering actress and inventor has endured. She was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, a testament to her lasting impact. Hedy Lamarr's story is a fascinating tale of talent, beauty, and brilliance, a woman who defied the norms of her time to leave a lasting imprint on two very different industries.
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria-Hungary
- 1Samson and Delilah77 Votes
- 2Algiers70 Votes
- 3Ziegfeld Girl52 Votes
- Scientist and Inventor from United States of America. Educated in U.S.A. with M.B.A. in Finance and Marketing. Also holds Ph.D. and M.S. in Polymer and Chemical Engineering from University of Manchester, U.K., and B.S. and B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from University of Mumbai, India. Author of many papers and patents worldwide. Lives in Massachusetts, U.S.A.
- Birthplace: Mumbai, India
- Nikola Tesla was a Serbian American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, physicist, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system. Tesla gained experience in telephony and electrical engineering before immigrating to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison in New York City. He soon struck out on his own with financial backers, setting up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC induction motor and transformer were licensed by George Westinghouse, who also hired Tesla for a short time as a consultant.
- Birthplace: Smiljan, Croatia
- 1Petar Božović32 Votes
- 2Goran Višnjić24 Votes
- 3Ethan Hawke26 Votes
- Alexander Graham Bell ('Graham' pronounced ) (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and engineer who is credited with inventing and patenting the first practical telephone. He also founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1885.Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first U.S. patent for the telephone in 1876. Bell considered his invention an intrusion on his real work as a scientist and refused to have a telephone in his study.Many other inventions marked Bell's later life, including groundbreaking work in optical telecommunications, hydrofoils, and aeronautics. Although Bell was not one of the 33 founders of the National Geographic Society, he had a strong influence on the magazine while serving as the second president from January 7, 1898, until 1903.
- Birthplace: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
- Alan Greenspan (; born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as Chair of the Federal Reserve of the United States from 1987 to 2006. He currently works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First appointed Federal Reserve chairman by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position (behind William McChesney Martin).Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a consulting career. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a "rock star". Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts, which they felt would increase the deficit.The easy-money policies of the Fed during Greenspan's tenure have been suggested by some to be a leading cause of the dotcom bubble, and the subprime mortgage crisis (occurring within a year of his leaving the Fed), which, said the Wall Street Journal, "tarnished his reputation." Yale economist Robert Shiller argues that "once stocks fell, real estate became the primary outlet for the speculative frenzy that the stock market had unleashed". Greenspan argues that the housing bubble was not a product of low-interest rates but rather a worldwide phenomenon caused by the precipitous decline in long term interest rates.
- Birthplace: Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
- Carl Sagan was a renowned American astronomer, astrophysicist, and author, born on November 9, 1934, in Brooklyn, New York. His profound curiosity about the cosmos was evident from his early years, which led him to study physics and astronomy. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Chicago and subsequently obtained his Ph.D. in Astronomy and Astrophysics in 1960. Sagan held academic positions at prestigious institutions such as Harvard University and Cornell University, where he imparted his knowledge to eager minds. Sagan's contributions to the field of space science were nothing short of monumental. He played a pivotal role in NASA's Mariner, Viking, Voyager, and Galileo expeditions to other planets. Notably, he helped select the Mars landing sites for the Viking probes and was instrumental in the creation of the gold-anodized plaques and golden records carried by the Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, and Voyager spacecraft. These records contained sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life on Earth and were intended for any extraterrestrial life that might find them. Apart from his scientific endeavors, Sagan was an eloquent communicator of science, making complex concepts accessible to the general public. His landmark television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage aired in 1980, captivating millions with its exploration of the universe's mysteries. He also penned many books, including the critically acclaimed Pale Blue Dot and Contact, the latter of which was adapted into a successful film. Sagan passed away on December 20, 1996, but his legacy continues to inspire curiosity and wonder about the cosmos.
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller was an American neo-futuristic architect, systems theorist, author, designer, and inventor. Fuller published more than 30 books, coining or popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres. Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.
- Birthplace: Milton, Massachusetts
- George Washington Carver (1860s – January 5, 1943), was an American agricultural scientist and inventor. He actively promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion.While a professor at Tuskegee Institute, Carver developed techniques to improve soils depleted by repeated plantings of cotton. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, as a source of their own food and to improve their quality of life. The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes using peanuts. Although he spent years developing and promoting numerous products made from peanuts, none became commercially successful.Apart from his work to improve the lives of farmers, Carver was also a leader in promoting environmentalism. He received numerous honors for his work, including the Spingarn Medal of the NAACP. In an era of very high racial polarization, his fame reached beyond the black community. He was widely recognized and praised in the white community for his many achievements and talents. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "[b]lack Leonardo".
- Birthplace: Popes Creek, Colony of Virginia, British America
- Bill Nye, popularly known as "The Science Guy", is an eminent television presenter, science communicator, and mechanical engineer. Nye's passion for science was ignited at a young age, leading him to pursue a Mechanical Engineering degree at Cornell University, where he graduated in 1977. After a spell working as an engineer at Boeing, his career took a dramatic twist when he won a Steve Martin look-alike contest and began moonlighting as a stand-up comedian. Combining his love for comedy with his scientific background, he started making appearances on a local sketch comedy show in Seattle, Almost Live, where his famous Bill Nye the Science Guy character was born. Nye's fame skyrocketed in the 1990s when he became the host of the educational television program Bill Nye the Science Guy. The show was lauded for its creative approach to presenting complex scientific concepts to children, earning Nye a total of 18 Emmy Awards. Nye's charismatic and enthusiastic persona and his knack for simplifying science helped cement his status as one of the most influential science educators of his generation. Beyond his television career, Nye has been an indefatigable advocate for science education and the environment. He served as the executive director of The Planetary Society, the world's largest space-interest group, from 2000 to 2010, and later as its CEO. He has written several children's books on science, hosted various science programs, and even made guest appearances on popular television series like The Big Bang Theory. Nye's contributions to science and education have left an indelible mark on society, making him a celebrated icon in the world of edutainment.
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C., USA
- Alfred Charles Kinsey (; June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, previously known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.
- Birthplace: Hoboken, New Jersey
- Dian Fossey (; January 16, 1932 – c. December 26, 1985) was an American primatologist and conservationist known for undertaking an extensive study of mountain gorilla groups from 1966 until her 1985 murder. She studied them daily in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey. Gorillas in the Mist, a book published two years before her death, is Fossey's account of her scientific study of the gorillas at Karisoke Research Center and prior career. It was adapted into a 1988 film of the same name.Fossey was one of the foremost primatologists in the world, a member of the so-called "Trimates", a group formed of prominent female scientists originally sent by Leakey to study great apes in their natural environments, along with Jane Goodall who studied chimpanzees, and Birutė Galdikas, who studied orangutans. During her time in Rwanda, she actively supported conservation efforts, strongly opposed poaching and tourism in wildlife habitats, and made more people acknowledge sapient gorillas. Fossey and her gorillas were victims of mobbing; and, she was brutally murdered in her cabin at a remote camp in Rwanda in December 1985. It has been theorized that her murder was linked to her conservation efforts, probably by a poacher.
- Birthplace: USA, California, San Francisco
- Julius Robert Oppenheimer (; April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Oppenheimer was the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory and is among those who are credited with being the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II undertaking that developed the first nuclear weapons. The first atomic bomb was successfully detonated on July 16, 1945, in the Trinity test in New Mexico. Oppenheimer later remarked that it brought to mind words from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." In August 1945, the weapons were used in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war ended, Oppenheimer became chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission. He used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power to avert nuclear proliferation and a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken opinions during the Second Red Scare, he suffered the revocation of his security clearance in a much-publicized hearing in 1954, and was effectively stripped of his direct political influence; he continued to lecture, write and work in physics. Nine years later, President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Oppenheimer's achievements in physics included the Born–Oppenheimer approximation for molecular wave functions, work on the theory of electrons and positrons, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process in nuclear fusion, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as to quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays. As a teacher and promoter of science, he is remembered as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics that gained world prominence in the 1930s. After World War II, he became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Joseph Eugene Stiglitz (; born February 9, 1943) is an American economist, public policy analyst, and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank and is a former member and chairman of the (US president's) Council of Economic Advisers. He is known for his support of Georgist public finance theory and for his critical view of the management of globalization, of laissez-faire economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists"), and of international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. He has been a member of the Columbia faculty since 2001, and received that university's highest academic rank (university professor) in 2003. He was the founding chair of the university's Committee on Global Thought. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute. He is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. In 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, appointed Stiglitz as the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, where he oversaw suggested proposals and commissioned a report on reforming the international monetary and financial system. He served as chair of the international Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, appointed by President Sarkozy of France, which issued its report in 2010, Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP doesn't add up, and currently serves as co-chair of its successor, the High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress. From 2011 to 2014, Stiglitz was president of the International Economic Association (IEA). He presided over the organization of the IEA triennial world congress held near the Dead Sea in Jordan in June 2014.Stiglitz has received more than 40 honorary degrees, including from Cambridge and Harvard, and he has been decorated by several governments including Bolivia, Korea, Colombia, Ecuador, and most recently France, where he was appointed a member of the Legion of Honor, order Officer. In 2011 Stiglitz was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Stiglitz's work focuses on income distribution from a Georgist perspective, asset risk management, corporate governance, and international trade. He is the author of several books, the latest being The Euro: How a Common Currency Threatens the Future of Europe (2016), The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (2015), Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy: An Agenda for Growth and Shared Prosperity (2015), and Creating a Learning Society: A New Approach to Growth Development and Social Progress (2014).
- Birthplace: USA, Indiana, Gary
- Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian and naturalized-American physicist and the creator of the world's first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the "architect of the nuclear age" and the "architect of the atomic bomb". He was one of very few physicists to excel in both theoretical physics and experimental physics. Fermi held several patents related to the use of nuclear power, and was awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on induced radioactivity by neutron bombardment and for the discovery of transuranium elements. He made significant contributions to the development of statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and nuclear and particle physics. Fermi's first major contribution involved the field of statistical mechanics. After Wolfgang Pauli formulated his exclusion principle in 1925, Fermi followed with a paper in which he applied the principle to an ideal gas, employing a statistical formulation now known as Fermi–Dirac statistics. Today, particles that obey the exclusion principle are called "fermions". Pauli later postulated the existence of an uncharged invisible particle emitted along with an electron during beta decay, to satisfy the law of conservation of energy. Fermi took up this idea, developing a model that incorporated the postulated particle, which he named the "neutrino". His theory, later referred to as Fermi's interaction and now called weak interaction, described one of the four fundamental interactions in nature. Through experiments inducing radioactivity with the recently discovered neutron, Fermi discovered that slow neutrons were more easily captured by atomic nuclei than fast ones, and he developed the Fermi age equation to describe this. After bombarding thorium and uranium with slow neutrons, he concluded that he had created new elements. Although he was awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery, the new elements were later revealed to be nuclear fission products. Fermi left Italy in 1938 to escape new Italian racial laws that affected his Jewish wife, Laura Capon. He emigrated to the United States, where he worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Fermi led the team that designed and built Chicago Pile-1, which went critical on 2 December 1942, demonstrating the first human-created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. He was on hand when the X-10 Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, went critical in 1943, and when the B Reactor at the Hanford Site did so the next year. At Los Alamos, he headed F Division, part of which worked on Edward Teller's thermonuclear "Super" bomb. He was present at the Trinity test on 16 July 1945, where he used his Fermi method to estimate the bomb's yield. After the war, Fermi served under J. Robert Oppenheimer on the General Advisory Committee, which advised the Atomic Energy Commission on nuclear matters. After the detonation of the first Soviet fission bomb in August 1949, he strongly opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb on both moral and technical grounds. He was among the scientists who testified on Oppenheimer's behalf at the 1954 hearing that resulted in the denial of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Fermi did important work in particle physics, especially related to pions and muons, and he speculated that cosmic rays arose when material was accelerated by magnetic fields in interstellar space. Many awards, concepts, and institutions are named after Fermi, including the Enrico Fermi Award, the Enrico Fermi Institute, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Generating Station, and the synthetic element fermium, making him one of 16 scientists who have elements named after them.
- Birthplace: Rome, Italy
- Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old. She instead joined the Navy Reserves. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly she began developing the compiler. She believed that a programming language based on English was possible. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System. During her wartime service, she co-authored three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1. In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, which consulted Hopper to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language. This led to the COBOL language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words. In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty. She retired from the Navy in 1986 and found work as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation, sharing her computing experiences. The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC. During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- George Robert Carruthers (born October 1, 1939) is an award-winning African-American inventor, physicist, engineer and space scientist. Carruthers invented the ultraviolet camera/spectograph for NASA to use when it launched Apollo 16 in 1972. His work also demonstrated that molecular hydrogen exists in the interstellar medium. In 2003, Carruthers was inducted into the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. He received an honorary doctorate for Engineering from Michigan Technological University.
- Birthplace: Cincinnati, Ohio
- Linus Carl Pauling (; February 28, 1901 – August 19, 1994) was an American chemist, biochemist, peace activist, author, educator, and husband of American human rights activist Ava Helen Pauling. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, and as of 2000, he was rated the 16th most important scientist in history.Pauling was one of the founders of the fields of quantum chemistry and molecular biology. His contributions to the theory of the chemical bond include the concept of orbital hybridisation and the first accurate scale of electronegativities of the elements. Pauling also worked on the structures of biological molecules, and showed the importance of the alpha helix and beta sheet in protein secondary structure. Pauling's approach combined methods and results from X-ray crystallography, molecular model building, and quantum chemistry. His discoveries inspired the work of James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA, which in turn made it possible for geneticists to crack the DNA code of all organisms.In his later years he promoted nuclear disarmament, as well as orthomolecular medicine, megavitamin therapy, and dietary supplements. None of the latter have gained much acceptance in the mainstream scientific community.For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of four individuals to have won more than one Nobel Prize (the others being Marie Curie, John Bardeen and Frederick Sanger). Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two people to be awarded Nobel Prizes in different fields, the other being Marie Curie.
- Birthplace: Portland, Oregon, USA
- Jonas Edward Salk (; October 28, 1914 – June 23, 1995) was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. Born in New York City, he attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine, later choosing to do medical research instead of becoming a practicing physician. In 1939, after earning his medical degree, Salk began an internship as a physician scientist at Mount Sinai Hospital. Two years later he was granted a fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he would study flu viruses with his mentor Thomas Francis Jr.Until 1955, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, polio was considered one of the most frightening public health problems in the world. In the postwar United States, annual epidemics were increasingly devastating. The 1952 U.S. epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis, with most of its victims being children. The "public reaction was to a plague", said historian William L. O'Neill. "Citizens of urban areas were to be terrified every summer when this frightful visitor returned." According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio." As a result, scientists were in a frantic race to find a way to prevent or cure the disease. In 1947, Salk accepted an appointment to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In 1948, he undertook a project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, the organization that would fund the development of a vaccine, to determine the number of different types of polio virus. Salk saw an opportunity to extend this project towards developing a vaccine against polio, and, together with the skilled research team he assembled, devoted himself to this work for the next seven years. The field trial set up to test the Salk vaccine was, according to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers." Over 1.8 million school children took part in the trial. When news of the vaccine's success was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a "miracle worker" and the day almost became a national holiday. Around the world, an immediate rush to vaccinate began, with countries including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium planning to begin polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine. Salk campaigned for mandatory vaccination, claiming that public health should be considered a "moral commitment." Salk claimed that his sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit, and credited this attitude with the fact that there is no patent for the vaccine. However, there would have been no patent either way, as the vaccine was already ruled to be unpatentable due to prior art. In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books, including Man Unfolding (1972), The Survival of the Wisest (1973), World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981), and Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983). Salk's last years were spent searching for a vaccine against HIV. His personal papers are stored at the University of California, San Diego Library.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is an American engineer, physician and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel in space when she served as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. Jemison joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1987 and was selected to serve for the STS-47 mission, during which she orbited the Earth for nearly eight days on September 12–20, 1992. Born in Alabama and raised in Chicago, Jemison graduated from Stanford University with degrees in chemical engineering as well as African and African-American studies. She then earned her medical degree from Cornell University. Jemison was a doctor for the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 1983 until 1985 and worked as a general practitioner. In pursuit of becoming an astronaut she applied to NASA. Jemison left NASA in 1993 and founded a technology research company. She later formed a non-profit educational foundation and through the foundation is the principal of the 100 Year Starship project funded by DARPA. Jemison also wrote several books for children and appeared on television several times, including in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She holds several honorary doctorates and has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame and the International Space Hall of Fame.
- Birthplace: Decatur, Alabama, USA
- Judith Arlene Resnik (; April 5, 1949 – January 28, 1986) was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died when the Space Shuttle Challenger was destroyed during the launch of mission STS-51-L. Resnik was the second American woman in space and the fourth woman in space worldwide, logging 145 hours in orbit. She was also the first Jewish American in space and the first Jewish woman of any nationality in space. The IEEE Judith Resnik Award for space engineering is named in her honor. Initially planning to be a concert pianist, Resnik turned down a place at the Juilliard School of Music, choosing instead to study at Carnegie Mellon University after being 1 of only 16 women in the history of the United States to have attained a perfect score on the SAT exam at the time. She went on to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon before attaining a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland. Recognised while still a child for her "intellectual brilliance", Resnik went on to work for RCA as an engineer on NASA missile and radar projects, was a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation and published research on special purpose integrated circuitry before she was recruited by NASA to the astronaut program as a mission specialist at age 28. While training on the astronaut program, she developed software and operating procedures for NASA missions. She was also a pilot and made research contributions to biomedical engineering as a research fellow of biomedical engineering at the National Institutes of Health.
- Birthplace: Akron, Ohio
- Elevated by a steady stream of appearances on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" (Syndicated 1986-2011), Dr. Mehmet Oz jumped from being a skilled heart surgeon to becoming one of the world's best known and lauded doctors. A pioneer in his approach to well-being, which utilized both Western and alternative therapies, Oz believed "global medicine" to be the most comprehensive method in aligning body, mind and spirit. To spread the word, Oz co-authored a series of self-help books, including: YOU: The Owner's Manuel, YOU: The Smart Patient, and YOU: Staying Young, all New York Times best-sellers, as was his own award-winning Healing from the Heart. With the powerful blessing of Oprah Winfrey and with a list of honors and awards as long as his patient list, Oz launched his own program "The Dr. Oz Show," (syndicated, 2009- ), which televised his mission to place individuals on their own enlightened road to wellness.
- Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio, USA
- Kalpana Chawla (March 17, 1962 – February 1, 2003) was an American astronaut, engineer, and the first woman of Indian descent to go to space. She first flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator. In 2003, Chawla was one of the seven crew members who died in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster when the spacecraft disintegrated during its re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. Chawla was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, and several streets, universities and institutions have been named in her honor. The late astronaut is recognized as a national hero in India.
- Birthplace: Karnal, India
- Milton Friedman (; July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the second generation of Chicago school of economics, a methodological movement at the University of Chicago's Department of Economics, Law School and Graduate School of Business from the 1940s onward. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function. In the 1960s, he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies and described his approach (along with mainstream economics) as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions. He theorized that there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment and argued that unemployment below this rate would cause inflation to accelerate. He argued that the Phillips curve was in the long run vertical at the "natural rate" and predicted what would come to be known as stagflation. Friedman promoted an alternative macroeconomic viewpoint known as "monetarism" and argued that a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the preferred policy. His ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation influenced government policies, especially during the 1980s. His monetary theory influenced the Federal Reserve's response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008.Friedman was an advisor to Republican President Ronald Reagan and Conservative British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. His political philosophy extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with minimal intervention. He once stated that his role in eliminating conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment. In his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school vouchers and opposed the war on drugs. His support for school choice led him to found the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, later renamed EdChoice.Friedman's works include monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs and lectures and cover a broad range of economic topics and public policy issues. His books and essays have had global influence, including in former communist states. A survey of economists ranked Friedman as the second-most popular economist of the 20th century following only John Maynard Keynes and The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century ... possibly of all of it".
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Edward Teller (Hungarian: Teller Ede; January 15, 1908 – September 9, 2003) was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" (see the Teller–Ulam design), although he did not care for the title. He made numerous contributions to nuclear and molecular physics, spectroscopy (in particular the Jahn–Teller and Renner–Teller effects), and surface physics. His extension of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay, in the form of Gamow–Teller transitions, provided an important stepping stone in its application, while the Jahn–Teller effect and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) theory have retained their original formulation and are still mainstays in physics and chemistry. Teller also made contributions to Thomas–Fermi theory, the precursor of density functional theory, a standard modern tool in the quantum mechanical treatment of complex molecules. In 1953, along with Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, and his wife Augusta Teller, Teller co-authored a paper that is a standard starting point for the applications of the Monte Carlo method to statistical mechanics. Throughout his life, Teller was known both for his scientific ability and for his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality. Teller was born in Hungary and emigrated to the United States in the 1930s. He was an early member of the Manhattan Project, charged with developing the first atomic bomb; during this time he made a serious push to develop the first fusion-based weapons as well, but these were deferred until after World War II. After his controversial testimony in the security clearance hearing of his former Los Alamos Laboratory superior, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Teller was ostracized by much of the scientific community. He continued to find support from the U.S. government and military research establishment, particularly for his advocacy for nuclear energy development, a strong nuclear arsenal, and a vigorous nuclear testing program. He was a co-founder of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), and was both its director and associate director for many years. In his later years, Teller became especially known for his advocacy of controversial technological solutions to both military and civilian problems, including a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using thermonuclear explosive in what was called Project Chariot. He was a vigorous advocate of Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Franklin Ramón Chang Díaz (April 5, 1950) is a Costa Rican American mechanical engineer, physicist, former NASA astronaut. He is the founder and current CEO of Ad Astra Rocket Company as well as a member of Cummins' board of directors. He became an American citizen in 1977. He is of Costa Rican Spanish (maternal side) and Chinese (paternal side) descent. He is a veteran of seven Space Shuttle missions, tying the record, as of 2018 for the most spaceflights (a record set by Jerry L. Ross). He was the third Latin American, but the first Latin American immigrant NASA Astronaut selected to go into space. Chang Díaz is a member of the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame.
- Birthplace: San José, Costa Rica
- Mihajlo Idvorski Pupin, Ph.D., LL.D. (Serbian Cyrillic: Михајло Идворски Пупин, pronounced [miˈxǎjlo ˈîdʋoɾski ˈpǔpin]; 4 October 1858 – 12 March 1935), also known as Michael I. Pupin was a Serbian American physicist, physical chemist, philanthropist and patriot. Pupin is best known for his numerous patents, including a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire (known as "pupinization"). Pupin was a founding member of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) on 3 March 1915, which later became NASA. In 1924, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his autobiography. Pupin was elected president or vice-president of the highest scientific and technical institutions, such as the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Radio Institute of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was also a honorary consul of Serbia in the United States from 1912 to 1920.
- Birthplace: Idvor, Serbia
- John Bidwell (August 5, 1819 – April 4, 1900) was known throughout California and nationally as a pioneer, farmer, soldier, statesman, politician, prohibitionist, and philanthropist. He was active in the Democratic and then Republican parties, and was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1864, serving one term. He is noted for having led one of the first emigrant parties, known as the Bartleson–Bidwell Party, along the California Trail, and for founding Chico, California. He received Mexican land grants after becoming a Mexican citizen before the Mexican–American War, and became a wealthy rancher.
- Birthplace: New York, USA
- Charles Proteus Steinmetz (born Karl August Rudolph Steinmetz, April 9, 1865 – October 26, 1923) was a German-born American mathematician and electrical engineer and professor at Union College. He fostered the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers. He made ground-breaking discoveries in the understanding of hysteresis that enabled engineers to design better electromagnetic apparatus equipment including especially electric motors for use in industry.At the time of his death, Steinmetz held over 200 patents. A genius in both mathematics and electronics, he did work that earned him the nicknames "Forger of Thunderbolts" and "The Wizard of Schenectady". Steinmetz's equation, Steinmetz solids, Steinmetz curves, and Steinmetz equivalent circuit theory are all named after him, as are numerous honors and scholarships, including the IEEE Charles Proteus Steinmetz Award, one of the highest technical recognitions given by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional society.
- Birthplace: Wrocław, Poland
- Stanford Robert Ovshinsky (November 24, 1922 – October 17, 2012) was an American inventor and scientist who over a span of fifty years was granted well over 400 patents, mostly in the areas of energy and information. Many of his inventions have had wide ranging applications. Among the most prominent are: an environmentally friendly nickel-metal hydride battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and electric and hybrid cars; flexible thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat screen liquid crystal displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile phase-change memory.Ovshinsky opened the scientific field of amorphous and disordered materials in the course of his research in the 1940s and 50s in neurophysiology, neural disease, the nature of intelligence in mammals and machines, and cybernetics. Amorphous silicon semiconductors have become the basis of many technologies and industries. Ovshinsky is also distinguished in being self-taught, without formal college or graduate training. Throughout his life, his love for science and his social convictions were the primary engines for his inventive work.In 1960, Ovshinsky and his soon-to-be second wife, Iris Dibner, founded Energy Conversion Laboratory in a storefront in Detroit, dedicating the laboratory to the solution of important societal problems using science and technology. Focusing on the critical areas of energy and information, their new company, reconstituted in 1964 as Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), went on to become a forefront invention and development laboratory whose products have built new industries, many of them aimed at making fossil fuel obsolete. ECD continues (through joint ventures and license partners) to be a leading solar energy and battery production firm.Roughly a year after Iris Ovshinsky's death in August 2006, Ovshinsky left ECD and established a new company, Ovshinsky Innovation LLC, devoted to developing the scientific basis for new energy and information technologies. In October 2007 he married Rosa Young, a physicist who had worked at ECD on numerous energy technologies including a hydrogen-powered hybrid car and on Ovshinsky's vision of a hydrogen-based economy.
- Birthplace: Akron, Ohio
- Harrison Hagan "Jack" Schmitt (born July 3, 1935) is an American geologist, retired NASA astronaut, university professor, former U.S. senator from New Mexico, and, as a crew member of Apollo 17, the most recent living person to have walked on the Moon. In December 1972, as one of the crew on board Apollo 17, Schmitt became the first member of NASA's first scientist-astronaut group to fly in space. As Apollo 17 was the last of the Apollo missions, he also became the twelfth and second-youngest person to set foot on the Moon, and the second-to-last person to step off of the Moon (he boarded the Lunar Module shortly before commander Eugene Cernan). Schmitt also remains the only professional scientist to have flown beyond low Earth orbit and to have visited the Moon. He was influential within the community of geologists supporting the Apollo program and, before starting his own preparations for an Apollo mission, had been one of the scientists training those Apollo astronauts chosen to visit the lunar surface. Schmitt resigned from NASA in August 1975 in order to run for election to the United States Senate as a member from New Mexico. As the Republican candidate in the 1976 election, he defeated the two-term Democratic incumbent Joseph Montoya. In 1982, Schmitt was defeated by Democrat Jeff Bingaman.
- Birthplace: USA, New Mexico, Santa Rita
- Benoit B. Mandelbrot (20 November 1924 – 14 October 2010) was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist" and is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.In 1936, while he was a child, Mandelbrot's family emigrated to France from Warsaw, Poland. After World War II ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and the United States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he became an IBM Fellow, and periodically took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences. Because of his access to IBM's computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovering the Mandelbrot set in 1980. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be "rough", a "mess" or "chaotic", like clouds or shorelines, actually had a "degree of order". His math and geometry-centered research career included contributions to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy and the social sciences.Toward the end of his career, he was Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Yale University, where he was the oldest professor in Yale's history to receive tenure. Mandelbrot also held positions at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Université Lille Nord de France, Institute for Advanced Study and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. During his career, he received over 15 honorary doctorates and served on many science journals, along with winning numerous awards. His autobiography, The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick, was published posthumously in 2012.
- Birthplace: Second Polish Republic, Warsaw
- Dr. Gregory Goodwin Pincus (April 9, 1903 – August 22, 1967) was an American biologist and researcher who co-invented the combined oral contraceptive pill.
- Birthplace: Woodbine, New Jersey
- Michio Kaku (; born January 24, 1947) is an American theoretical physicist, futurist, and popularizer of science (science communicator). He is a professor of theoretical physics in the City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center. Kaku has written several books about physics and related topics, has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and film, and writes online blogs and articles. He has written the New York Times best sellers: Physics of the Impossible (2008), Physics of the Future (2011), The Future of the Mind (2014). Kaku has hosted several TV specials for the BBC, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, and the Science Channel.
- Birthplace: San Jose, USA, California
- Richard Phillips Feynman, ForMemRS (; May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist, known for his work in the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, as well as in particle physics for which he proposed the parton model. For contributions to the development of quantum electrodynamics, Feynman received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 jointly with Julian Schwinger and Shin'ichirō Tomonaga. Feynman developed a widely used pictorial representation scheme for the mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles, which later became known as Feynman diagrams. During his lifetime, Feynman became one of the best-known scientists in the world. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World he was ranked as one of the ten greatest physicists of all time.He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb during World War II and became known to a wide public in the 1980s as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Along with his work in theoretical physics, Feynman has been credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and introducing the concept of nanotechnology. He held the Richard C. Tolman professorship in theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology. Feynman was a keen popularizer of physics through both books and lectures including a 1959 talk on top-down nanotechnology called There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom and the three-volume publication of his undergraduate lectures, The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? and books written about him such as Tuva or Bust! by Ralph Leighton and the biography Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick.
- Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York, USA
- Robert Hutchings Goddard (October 5, 1882 – August 10, 1945) was an American engineer, professor, physicist, and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket. Goddard successfully launched his rocket on March 16, 1926, ushering in an era of space flight and innovation. He and his team launched 34 rockets between 1926 and 1941, achieving altitudes as high as 2.6 km (1.6 mi) and speeds as fast as 885 km/h (550 mph).Goddard's work as both theorist and engineer anticipated many of the developments that were to make spaceflight possible. He has been called the man who ushered in the Space Age. Two of Goddard's 214 patented inventions—a multi-stage rocket (1914), and a liquid-fuel rocket (1914)—were important milestones toward spaceflight. His 1919 monograph A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes is considered one of the classic texts of 20th-century rocket science. Goddard successfully applied two-axis control (gyroscopes and steerable thrust) to rockets to effectively control their flight. Although his work in the field was revolutionary, Goddard received little public support, moral or monetary, for his research and development work. The press and other scientists ridiculed his theories of spaceflight. As a result, he became protective of his privacy and his work. He also preferred working alone because of the aftereffects of a bout with tuberculosis. Years after his death, at the dawn of the Space Age, he came to be recognized as one of the founding fathers of modern rocketry, along with Robert Esnault-Pelterie, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and Hermann Oberth. He not only recognized the potential of rockets for atmospheric research, ballistic missiles and space travel but was the first to scientifically study, design and construct the rockets needed to implement those ideas.NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center was named in Goddard's honor in 1959. He was also inducted into the International Aerospace Hall of Fame in 1966, and the International Space Hall of Fame in 1976.
- Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
- Robert Koffler Jarvik, M.D. (born May 11, 1946) is an American scientist, researcher and entrepreneur known for his role in developing the Jarvik-7 artificial heart.
- Birthplace: Midland, Michigan
- James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". Watson earned degrees at the University of Chicago (BS, 1947) and Indiana University (PhD, 1950). Following a post-doctoral year at the University of Copenhagen with Herman Kalckar and Ole Maaløe, Watson worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England, where he first met his future collaborator Francis Crick. From 1956 to 1976, Watson was on the faculty of the Harvard University Biology Department, promoting research in molecular biology. From 1968 he served as director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), greatly expanding its level of funding and research. At CSHL, he shifted his research emphasis to the study of cancer, along with making it a world leading research center in molecular biology. In 1994, he started as president and served for 10 years. He was then appointed chancellor, serving until he resigned in 2007 after making comments claiming a genetic link between intelligence and race. Between 1988 and 1992, Watson was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. Watson has written many science books, including the textbook Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968). In January 2019, following the broadcast of a television documentary in which Watson repeated his views about race and genetics, CSHL revoked honorary titles that it had awarded to him and severed all ties with him.
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Herbert Simon may refer to: Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001), American political scientist and economist Herbert Simon (real estate) (born 1934), American real estate developer
- Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
- John Bardeen (; May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, making possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers, and ushering in the Information Age. Bardeen's developments in superconductivity—for which he was awarded his second Nobel Prize—are used in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and medical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). In 1990, Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
- Birthplace: Madison, Wisconsin
- Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart (also Schweikart; born October 25, 1935) is an American aeronautical engineer, and a former NASA astronaut, research scientist, U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, as well as a former business executive and government executive. Schweickart was selected in 1963 for NASA's third astronaut group. He was the Lunar Module Pilot on the 1969 Apollo 9 mission, the first crewed flight test of the lunar module, on which he performed the first in-space test of the portable life support system used by the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon. As backup Commander of the first crewed Skylab mission in 1973, he was responsible for developing the hardware and procedures used by the first crew to perform critical in-flight repairs of the Skylab station. After Skylab, he served for a time as Director of User Affairs in NASA's Office of Applications. Schweickart left NASA in 1977 to serve for two years as California Governor Jerry Brown's assistant for science and technology, then was appointed by Brown to California's Energy Commission for five and a half years, serving as chairman for three.In 1984–85 he co-founded the Association of Space Explorers and later in 2002 co-founded the B612 Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to defending Earth from asteroid impacts, along with fellow former astronaut Ed Lu and two planetary scientists. He served for a period as its chair before becoming its chair emeritus.
- Birthplace: Neptune Township, New Jersey
- Kirsten "Kiki" Sanford is an American science communicator. After working at the University of California, Davis as a research scientist in neurophysiology, she left research work to pursue a career in science communication. Her work has included multiple audio and video programs, including the This Week in Science radio program and Dr. Kiki's Science Hour.
- Birthplace: Santa Rosa, California
- Gregory Hammond "Greg" Olsen (born April 20, 1945) is an American entrepreneur, engineer and scientist who, in October 2005, became the third private citizen to make a self-funded trip to the International Space Station with the company Space Adventures. Olsen was the co-founder and chairman of Sensors Unlimited Inc., a company developing optoelectronic devices such as sensitive near-infrared (NIR) and shortwave-infrared (SWIR) cameras. One of Sensors Unlimited's major customers is NASA. Currently, Olsen is President of GHO Ventures, LLC, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he manages his angel investments, South African winery, Montana ranch, and performs numerous speaking engagements to encourage children – especially minority and female children – to consider careers in science or engineering. He also is a physics professor at Rider University.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- David Joseph Bohm (; December 20, 1917 – October 27, 1992) was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind. Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality – that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of "implicate" and "explicate" order. He also believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are.Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontology. Due to his Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete but rather an unfolding process.
- Birthplace: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
- John Muir (; April 21, 1838 – December 24, 1914) also known as "John of the Mountains" and "Father of the National Parks", was an influential Scottish-American naturalist, author, environmental philosopher, glaciologist, and early advocate for the preservation of wilderness in the United States of America. His letters, essays, and books describing his adventures in nature, especially in the Sierra Nevada, have been read by millions. His activism has helped to preserve the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park and many other wilderness areas. The Sierra Club, which he co-founded, is a prominent American conservation organization. In his later life, Muir devoted most of his time to the preservation of the Western forests. As part of the campaign to make Yosemite a national park, Muir published two landmark articles on wilderness preservation in The Century Magazine, "The Treasures of the Yosemite" and "Features of the Proposed Yosemite National Park"; this helped support the push for U.S. Congress to pass a bill in 1890 establishing Yosemite National Park. The spiritual quality and enthusiasm toward nature expressed in his writings has inspired readers, including presidents and congressmen, to take action to help preserve large nature areas.John Muir has been considered "an inspiration to both Scots and Americans". Muir's biographer, Steven J. Holmes, believes that Muir has become "one of the patron saints of twentieth-century American environmental activity," both political and recreational. As a result, his writings are commonly discussed in books and journals, and he is often quoted by nature photographers such as Ansel Adams. "Muir has profoundly shaped the very categories through which Americans understand and envision their relationships with the natural world," writes Holmes.Muir was noted for being an ecological thinker, political spokesman, and religious prophet, whose writings became a personal guide into nature for countless individuals, making his name "almost ubiquitous" in the modern environmental consciousness. According to author William Anderson, Muir exemplified "the archetype of our oneness with the earth", while biographer Donald Worster says he believed his mission was "saving the American soul from total surrender to materialism." On April 21, 2013, the first ever John Muir Day was celebrated in Scotland, which marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, paying homage to the conservationist.
- Birthplace: Dunbar, United Kingdom
- Edward Witten (born August 26, 1951) is an American theoretical physicist and professor of mathematical physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Witten is a researcher in string theory, quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories, and other areas of mathematical physics. In addition to his contributions to physics, Witten's work has significantly impacted pure mathematics. In 1990, he became the first physicist to be awarded a Fields Medal by the International Mathematical Union, awarded for his 1981 proof of the positive energy theorem in general relativity.
- Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
- Louis Agassiz Shaw Jr. (September 25, 1886 – August 27, 1940) was an instructor of physiology at the School of Public Health of Harvard University, where he is credited in 1928 along with Philip Drinker for inventing the Drinker respirator, the first widely used iron lung.
- Birthplace: Chestnut Hill, Newton, Massachusetts
- Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.
- Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
- Lillian Evelyn Moller Gilbreth (May 24, 1878 – January 2, 1972) was an American psychologist, industrial engineer, consultant, and educator who was an early pioneer in applying psychology to time-and-motion studies. She was described in the 1940s as "a genius in the art of living." Gilbreth, one of the first female engineers to earn a Ph.D., is considered to be the first industrial/organizational psychologist. She and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, were efficiency experts who contributed to the study of industrial engineering, especially in the areas of motion study and human factors. Cheaper by the Dozen (1948) and Belles on Their Toes (1950), written by two of their children (Ernestine and Frank Jr.) tell the story of their family life and describe how time-and-motion studies were applied to the organization and daily activities of their large family. Both books were later made into feature films.
- Birthplace: Oakland, California
- John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 – October 24, 2011) was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. McCarthy was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" (AI), developed the Lisp programming language family, significantly influenced the design of the ALGOL programming language, popularized timesharing, and was very influential in the early development of AI. McCarthy spent most his career at Stanford University. He received many accolades and honors, such as the 1971 Turing Award for his contributions to the topic of AI, the United States National Medal of Science, and the Kyoto Prize.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Hugo Münsterberg (; June 1, 1863 – December 16, 1916) was a German-American psychologist. He was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to industrial/organizational (I/O), legal, medical, clinical, educational and business settings. Münsterberg encountered immense turmoil with the outbreak of the First World War. Torn between his loyalty to the United States and his homeland, he often defended Germany's actions, attracting highly contrasting reactions.
- Birthplace: Gdańsk, Poland
- Paul Charles Zamecnik (22 November 1912 – 27 October 2009) was an American scientist who played a central role in the early history of molecular biology. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Zamecnik pioneered the in vitro synthesis of proteins and helped elucidate the way cells generate proteins. With Mahlon Hoagland he co-discovered transfer RNA (tRNA). Through his later work, he is credited as the inventor of antisense therapeutics. Throughout his career, Zamecnik earned over a dozen US patents for his therapeutic techniques. Up until his death in 2009 he maintained a lab at MGH where he studied the application of synthetic oligonucleotides (antisense hybrids) for chemotherapeutic treatment of drug resistant and XDR tuberculosis in his later years.
- Birthplace: Cleveland, Ohio
- David Rittenhouse (April 8, 1732 – June 26, 1796) was an American astronomer, inventor, clockmaker, mathematician, surveyor, scientific instrument craftsman, and public official. Rittenhouse was a member of the American Philosophical Society and the first director of the United States Mint.
- Birthplace: Paper Mill Run, Pennsylvania
- Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.
- Birthplace: Bronxville, New York
- Gerard Joseph Foschini (born 1940 in Jersey City, New Jersey), is an American telecommunications engineer who has worked for Bell Laboratories since 1961. His research has covered many kinds of data communications, particularly wireless communications and optical communications. Foschini has also worked on point-to-point systems and networks.
- Birthplace: Jersey City, New Jersey
- Edward Osborne Wilson (born June 10, 1929), usually cited as E. O. Wilson, is an American biologist, theorist, naturalist and author. His biological specialty is myrmecology, the study of ants, on which he has been called the world's leading expert.Wilson has been called "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity” for his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanist and deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. Among his greatest contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography, which he developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur. This theory served as the foundation of the field of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen Hubbell. Wilson is the Pellegrino University Research Professor, Emeritus in Entomology for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University, a lecturer at Duke University, and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He is a Humanist Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (for On Human Nature in 1979, and The Ants in 1991) and a New York Times bestselling author for The Social Conquest of Earth, Letters to a Young Scientist, and The Meaning of Human Existence.
- Birthplace: Birmingham, Alabama, USA
- Joseph Michael "Joe" Acabá (born May 17, 1967) is an American educator, hydrogeologist, and NASA astronaut. In May 2004 he became the first person of Puerto Rican heritage to be named as a NASA astronaut candidate, when he was selected as a member of NASA Astronaut Training Group 19. He completed his training on February 10, 2006 and was assigned to STS-119, which flew from March 15 to March 28, 2009 to deliver the final set of solar arrays to the International Space Station. Acabá served as a Flight Engineer aboard the International Space Station, having launched on May 15, 2012. He arrived at the space station on May 17 and returned to Earth on September 17, 2012. Acaba returned to the International Space Station in 2017 as a member of Expedition 53/54.
- Birthplace: Inglewood, Los Angeles, California
- Bonnie Jeanne Dunbar (born March 3, 1949) is a former NASA astronaut. She retired from NASA in September 2005 then served as president and CEO of The Museum of Flight until April 2010. From January 2013 - December 2015, Dr. Dunbar lead the University of Houston's STEM Center (science, technology, engineering and math) and was a faculty member in the Cullen College of Engineering. Currently, she is a professor of aerospace engineering at Texas A&M University and serves as Director of the Institute for Engineering Education and Innovation (IEEI), a joint entity in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University.
- Birthplace: Sunnyside, Washington
- An Wang (Chinese: 王安; pinyin: Wáng Ān; February 7, 1920 – March 24, 1990) was a Chinese–American computer engineer and inventor, and co-founder of computer company Wang Laboratories, which was known primarily for its dedicated word processing machines. An Wang was an important contributor to the development of magnetic core memory.
- Birthplace: Shanghai, China
- Jerome "Jay" Apt III, Ph.D. (born April 28, 1949 in Massachusetts) is an American astronaut and professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Before he became an astronaut, Apt was a physicist who worked on the Pioneer Venus 1978 space probe project, and used visible light and infrared techniques to study the planets and moons of the solar system from ground-based observatories.
- Birthplace: Springfield, Massachusetts
- Ronald Anthony Parise (May 24, 1951 – May 9, 2008) was an Italian American scientist who flew aboard two NASA Space Shuttle missions as a payload specialist. Parise was born in Warren, Ohio to Henry and Catherine Parise. By age 11, he became a licensed amateur radio operator. In his teens, he developed an interest in astronomy and aviation and became a pilot. He attended Western Reserve High School, graduating in 1969 before attending Youngstown State University. In 1973, he obtained a bachelor of science degree in physics, with minors in mathematics, astronomy, and geology. He went on to receive a master's degree in 1977 and a doctorate in 1979 from the University of Florida, both in astronomy. He and his wife Cecelia Sokol Parise had two children. Parise died from a brain tumor on May 9, 2008 at the age of 56.
- Birthplace: Warren, Ohio
- Leroy Chiao (born August 28, 1960) is a Chinese-American engineer, former NASA astronaut, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and engineering consultant. Chiao flew on three Space Shuttle flights, and was the commander of Expedition 10, where he lived on board the International Space Station from October 13, 2004 to April 24, 2005. He is also a co-author and researcher for the Advanced Diagnostic Ultrasound in Microgravity project.
- Birthplace: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
- Clarence Frank Birdseye II (December 9, 1886 – October 7, 1956) was an American inventor, entrepreneur, and naturalist, and is considered to be the founder of the modern frozen food industry.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Melvin Ellis Calvin (April 8, 1911 – January 8, 1997) was an American biochemist known for discovering the Calvin cycle along with Andrew Benson and James Bassham, for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He spent most of his five-decade career at the University of California, Berkeley.
- Birthplace: Saint Paul, Minnesota
- Leo Strauss (; German: [ˈleːo ˈʃtʁaʊs]; September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. Born in Germany to Jewish parents, Strauss later emigrated from Germany to the United States. He spent much of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.Trained in the neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy and encouraging the application of those ideas to contemporary political theory.
- Birthplace: Kirchhain, Germany
- Dr. Erna Schneider Hoover (born June 19, 1926) is an American mathematician notable for inventing a computerized telephone switching method which "revolutionized modern communication" according to several reports. It prevented system overloads by monitoring call center traffic and prioritizing tasks on phone switching systems to enable more robust service during peak calling times. At Bell Laboratories where she worked for over 32 years, Hoover was described as an important pioneer for women in the field of computer technology.
- Birthplace: Irvington, New Jersey
- Qian Xuesen, or Hsue-Shen Tsien (Chinese: 钱学森; 11 December 1911 – 31 October 2009), was a Chinese rocket scientist, mathematician, and physicist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. Recruited from MIT, he joined Theodore von Karman's group at Caltech. During WWII, he was involved in the Manhattan Project, which ultimately led to the successful development of the first atomic bomb in America. Later on, he would eventually return to China, where he would make important contributions to China's missile and space program. During the Second Red Scare, in the 1950s, the US federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues, he was stripped of his security clearance. He decided to return to China, but he was detained at Terminal Island, near Los Angeles.After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in China via Hong Kong.Upon his return, he helped lead the Chinese nuclear weapons program. This effort ultimately led to China's first successful atomic bomb test and hydrogen bomb test, making China the fifth nuclear weapons state, and achieving the fastest fission-to-fusion development in history. Additionally, Qian's work led to the development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry", nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998. He was the cousin of mechanical engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of China and the United States; his nephew is Roger Y. Tsien, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- Birthplace: Hangzhou, China
- Andrew Michael Spence (born November 7, 1943, Montclair, New Jersey) is a Canadian American economist and recipient of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with George Akerlof and Joseph E. Stiglitz, for their work on the dynamics of information flows and market development.
- Birthplace: Montclair, New Jersey
- Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", that he published in 1948. He is also well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.
- Birthplace: Petoskey, Michigan
- John von Neumann (; Hungarian: Neumann János Lajos, pronounced [ˈnɒjmɒn ˈjaːnoʃ ˈlɒjoʃ]; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, and polymath. Von Neumann was generally regarded as the foremost mathematician of his time and said to be "the last representative of the great mathematicians"; a genius who was comfortable integrating both pure and applied sciences. He made major contributions to a number of fields, including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, representation theory, operator algebras, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and quantum statistical mechanics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics. He was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics in the development of functional analysis, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer. He published over 150 papers in his life: about 60 in pure mathematics, 60 in applied mathematics, 20 in physics, and the remainder on special mathematical subjects or non-mathematical ones. His last work, an unfinished manuscript written while he was in hospital, was later published in book form as The Computer and the Brain. His analysis of the structure of self-replication preceded the discovery of the structure of DNA. In a short list of facts about his life he submitted to the National Academy of Sciences, he stated, "The part of my work I consider most essential is that on quantum mechanics, which developed in Göttingen in 1926, and subsequently in Berlin in 1927–1929. Also, my work on various forms of operator theory, Berlin 1930 and Princeton 1935–1939; on the ergodic theorem, Princeton, 1931–1932." During World War II, von Neumann worked on the Manhattan Project with theoretical physicist Edward Teller, mathematician Stanisław Ulam and others, problem solving key steps in the nuclear physics involved in thermonuclear reactions and the hydrogen bomb. He developed the mathematical models behind the explosive lenses used in the implosion-type nuclear weapon, and coined the term "kiloton" (of TNT), as a measure of the explosive force generated. After the war, he served on the General Advisory Committee of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, and consulted for a number of organizations, including the United States Air Force, the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. As a Hungarian émigré, concerned that the Soviets would achieve nuclear superiority, he designed and promoted the policy of mutually assured destruction to limit the arms race.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Samuel Thornton Durrance (Ph.D.) is an American scientist who flew aboard two NASA Space Shuttle missions as a payload specialist.
- Birthplace: Tallahassee, Florida
- Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRI (May 7, 1909 – March 1, 1991) was an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948 and made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less.
- Birthplace: Bridgeport, Connecticut
- Murray Gell-Mann (; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a distinguished fellow and one of the co-founders of the Santa Fe Institute, a professor of physics at the University of New Mexico, and the Presidential Professor of Physics and Medicine at the University of Southern California.Gell-Mann spent several periods at CERN, a nuclear research facility in Switzerland, among others as a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellow in 1972.
- Birthplace: Manhattan, New York City, New York
- Manfred Clynes (born August 14, 1925) is a scientist, inventor, and musician. He is best known for his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology.
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
- Piers John Sellers OBE (11 April 1955 – 23 December 2016) was a British-American meteorologist, NASA astronaut and Director of the Earth Science Division at NASA/GSFC. He was a veteran of three space shuttle missions. Sellers attended Cranbrook School, Cranbrook, Kent, United Kingdom, until 1973, and achieved a bachelor's degree in ecological science from the University of Edinburgh in 1976. In 1981 he gained a doctorate in biometeorology from the University of Leeds. In 2011, Sellers retired from the NASA Astronaut Corps.Before joining the astronaut corps, Sellers worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on research into how the Earth's biosphere and atmosphere interact. This work involved climate system computer modelling and field work utilising aircraft, satellites and ground support input.
- Birthplace: Crowborough, United Kingdom
- Ralph Vinton Lyon Hartley (November 30, 1888 – May 1, 1970) was an electronics researcher. He invented the Hartley oscillator and the Hartley transform, and contributed to the foundations of information theory.
- Birthplace: Spruce Mountain
- David Alter (December 3, 1807 – September 18, 1881) was a prominent American inventor and scientist of the 19th century. He was born in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania and graduated from the Reformed Medical School in New York City. He had German and Swiss ancestry.
- Birthplace: Pennsylvania
- John Lynch Phillips (born April 15, 1951) is a NASA astronaut. Phillips is also a Naval Aviator and retired captain, United States Navy Reserve. Phillips has received numerous awards and special honors. He is a National Merit Scholar, graduated 2nd in his class of 906 people at the U.S. Naval Academy in 1972. Phillips has also been awarded the NASA Space Flight Medal, NASA Distinguished Service Medal, the Gagarin Medal and several others. Phillips has logged over 4,400 flight hours and 250 aircraft carrier landings, flying the A-7 Corsair II carrier-based light attack aircraft while on active duty in the Regular Navy and subsequently during his time as a Navy Reservist from 1982 to 2002. At the time of his retirement, Phillips had retained the rank of captain.
- Birthplace: Fort Belvoir
- Ann A. Kiessling is an American reproductive biologist and one of the leaders in human parthenogenic stem cell research at The Bedford Research Foundation. She was an Associate Professor in teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School (Brigham and Women's Hospital, Faulkner Hospital, New England Deaconess, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center) from 1985 until 2012.
- Daniel McFarlan Moore (February 27, 1869 – June 15, 1936) was a U.S. electrical engineer and inventor. He developed a novel light source, the "Moore lamp", and a business that produced them in the early 1900s. The Moore lamp was the first commercially viable light-source based on gas discharges instead of incandescence; it was the predecessor to contemporary neon lighting and fluorescent lighting. In his later career Moore developed a miniature neon lamp that was extensively used in electronic displays, as well as vacuum tubes that were used in early television systems.
- Birthplace: Northumberland, Pennsylvania
- Robert C. Baker (December 29, 1921 – March 13, 2006) was an inventor and Cornell University professor. He invented the chicken nugget as well as many other poultry-related inventions. Due to his contributions to the poultry sciences, he is a member of the American Poultry Hall of Fame.
- Min Chueh Chang (simplified Chinese: 张明觉; traditional Chinese: 張明覺; pinyin: Zhāng Míngjué, October 10, 1908 – June 5, 1991), often credited as M.C. Chang, was a Chinese-American reproductive biologist. His specific area of study was the fertilisation process in mammalian reproduction. Though his career produced findings that are important and valuable to many areas in the field of fertilisation, including his work on in vitro fertilisation which led to the first "test tube baby", he was best known to the world for his contribution to the development of the combined oral contraceptive pill at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology.
- Birthplace: Taiyuan, China
- John Whiteside "Jack" Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons; October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952) was an American rocket engineer and rocket propulsion researcher, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets. Born in Los Angeles, Parsons was raised by a wealthy family on Orange Grove Avenue in Pasadena. Inspired by science fiction literature, he developed an interest in rocketry in his childhood and in 1928 began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward S. Forman. He dropped out of Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression, and in 1934 he united with Forman and graduate student Frank Malina to form the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) Rocket Research Group, supported by GALCIT chairman Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 the GALCIT Group gained funding from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) for the U.S. military. After the U.S. entered World War II, they founded Aerojet in 1942 to develop and sell JATO technology; the GALCIT Group became JPL in 1943. After a brief involvement with Marxism in 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, the English occultist Aleister Crowley's new religious movement. In 1941, with his first wife Helen Northrup, Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.). At Crowley's bidding, he replaced Wilfred Talbot Smith as its leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Avenue. Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 due to the Lodge's infamous reputation and his hazardous workplace conduct. In 1945 Parsons separated from Helen after having an affair with her sister Sara; when Sara left him for L. Ron Hubbard, he conducted the Babalon Working, a series of rituals designed to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon to Earth. He and Hubbard continued the procedure with Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons married in 1946. After Hubbard and Sara defrauded him of his life savings, Parsons resigned from the O.T.O. and held various jobs while acting as a consultant for Israel's rocket program. Amid the climate of McCarthyism, he was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry. In 1952 Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion that attracted national media attention; the police ruled it an accident, but many associates suspected suicide or murder. Parsons's occult and libertarian writings were published posthumously, with Western esoteric and countercultural circles citing him as one of the most significant figures in propagating Thelema across North America. Although academic interest in his scientific career was negligible, historians came to recognize Parsons's contributions to rocket engineering. For these innovations, his advocacy of space exploration and human spaceflight, and his role in founding JPL and Aerojet, Parsons is regarded as among the most important figures in the history of the U.S. space program. He has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals, including the television drama Strange Angel.
- Birthplace: Pasadena, California
- Sir Charles Kuen Kao (4 November 1933 – 23 September 2018) was a physicist and electrical engineer who pioneered the development and use of fibre optics in telecommunications. In the 1960s, Kao created various methods to combine glass fibres with lasers in order to transmit digital data, which laid the groundwork for the evolution of the Internet. Known as the "Godfather of Broadband", the "Father of Fiber Optics", and the "Father of Fiber Optic Communications", Kao was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication".Born in Shanghai, China, Kao was a permanent resident of Hong Kong and held citizenships in the United Kingdom and the United States.
- Birthplace: Shanghai, China
- Spencer Ferguson Silver, an American chemist who worked together with Arthur Fry to invent the Post-it notes in 1974. (disputed)
- Ahmed Hassan Zewail (Arabic: أحمد حسن زويل, Egyptian Arabic: [ˈæħmæd ˈħæsæn zeˈweːl]; February 26, 1946 – August 2, 2016) was an Egyptian-American scientist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
- Birthplace: Damanhur, Egypt
- Fred Weldon Leslie is an American scientist who flew on the NASA STS-73 Space Shuttle mission as a payload specialist.
- Birthplace: Ancón, Panama
- Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
- Birthplace: New York City, USA, New York
- Edward Sapir (; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist-linguist, who is widely considered to be one of the most important figures in the early development of the discipline of linguistics.Sapir was born in German Pomerania. His family emigrated to United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia, where he came under the influence of Franz Boas who inspired him to work on Native American languages. While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting the indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield. He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics. By the end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale, where he never really fit in. Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh, and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker. With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views. This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology, maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual personalities is important for the ways in which culture and society develop.Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas, upon which he elaborated for most of his professional life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme, greatly advancing the understanding of phonology. Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply the methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages. Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and the first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics. He was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic, Uto-Aztecan, and Na-Dene languages. He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation such as Hokan and Penutian. He specialized in the study of Athabascan languages, Chinookan languages, and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma, Wishram, Southern Paiute. Later in his career he also worked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Chinese, as well as Germanic languages, and he also was invested in the development of an International Auxiliary Language.
- Birthplace: Lębork, Poland
- Robert Endre Tarjan (born April 30, 1948) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the discoverer of several graph algorithms, including Tarjan's off-line lowest common ancestors algorithm, and co-inventor of both splay trees and Fibonacci heaps. Tarjan is currently the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University, and the Chief Scientist at Intertrust Technologies Corporation.
- Birthplace: Pomona, California
Louis R. Vitullo
Dec. at 81 (1924-2006)Louis R. Vitullo (1924? – January 3, 2006) was a Chicago police sergeant and later became chief microanalyst at the city's crime lab. He is best known as the first person to standardize evidence collection in cases of sexual assault, which until then was not done in a systematic fashion. The resulting evidence kits were initially called Vitullo kits and continued to be known as such even after his name was officially removed from them. They are now more commonly known as sexual assault evidence kits (SAEK) or rape kits for short.- Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), often known by his initials, rms, (also his email ID), and occasionally upper-case RMS, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in a manner such that its users receive the freedoms to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote the GNU General Public License. Stallman launched the GNU Project in September 1983 to create a Unix-like computer operating system composed entirely of free software. With this, he also launched the free software movement. He has been the GNU project's lead architect and organizer, and developed a number of pieces of widely used GNU software including, among others, the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU Debugger, and GNU Emacs text editor. In October 1985 he founded the Free Software Foundation. Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, which uses the principles of copyright law to preserve the right to use, modify, and distribute free software, and is the main author of free software licenses which describe those terms, most notably the GNU General Public License (GPL), the most widely used free software license.In 1989, he co-founded the League for Programming Freedom. Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time advocating for free software, as well as campaigning against software patents, digital rights management (which he referred to as digital restrictions management, calling the more common term misleading), and other legal and technical systems which he sees as taking away users' freedoms. This has included software license agreements, non-disclosure agreements, activation keys, dongles, copy restriction, proprietary formats, and binary executables without source code.
- Birthplace: Manhattan, New York City, New York
- Allan Rex Sandage (June 18, 1926 – November 13, 2010) was an American astronomer. He was Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.
- Birthplace: Iowa City, Iowa
- Gregory S. Berns is an American neuroeconomist, neuroscientist, professor of psychiatry, psychologist and writer. He lives with his family in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.Berns holds the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta where he is a professor of both psychiatry and economics. He is Director of the Center for Neuropolicy; the author of the books Satisfaction: The Science of Finding True Fulfillment, Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain, and has made numerous media appearances.
- Percy Lavon Julian (April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975) was a research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, plus a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.He later started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from the wild Mexican yam. His work helped greatly reduce the cost of steroid intermediates to large multinational pharmaceutical companies, helping to significantly expand the use of several important drugs.Julian received more than 130 chemical patents. He was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted (behind David Blackwell) from any field.
- Birthplace: Montgomery, Alabama
- James Joseph Sylvester FRS HFRSE LLD (3 September 1814 – 15 March 1897) was an English mathematician. He made fundamental contributions to matrix theory, invariant theory, number theory, partition theory, and combinatorics. He played a leadership role in American mathematics in the later half of the 19th century as a professor at the Johns Hopkins University and as founder of the American Journal of Mathematics. At his death, he was a professor at Oxford.
- Birthplace: London, United Kingdom
- Gerty Theresa Cori (née Radnitz; August 15, 1896 – October 26, 1957) was a Jewish Austro-Hungarian-American biochemist who in 1947 was the third woman—and first American woman—to win a Nobel Prize in science, and the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for her role in the discovery of glycogen metabolism. Cori was born in Prague (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now the Czech Republic). Gerty was not a nickname, but rather she was named after an Austrian warship. Growing up at a time when women were marginalized in science and allowed few educational opportunities, she gained admittance to medical school, where she met her future husband Carl Ferdinand Cori in an anatomy class; upon their graduation in 1920, they married. Because of deteriorating conditions in Europe, the couple emigrated to the United States in 1922. Gerty Cori continued her early interest in medical research, collaborating in the laboratory with Carl. She published research findings coauthored with her husband, as well as publishing singly. Unlike her husband, she had difficulty securing research positions, and the ones she obtained provided meager pay. Her husband insisted on continuing their collaboration, though he was discouraged from doing so by the institutions that employed him. With her husband Carl and Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay, Gerty Cori received the Nobel Prize in 1947 for the discovery of the mechanism by which glycogen—a derivative of glucose—is broken down in muscle tissue into lactic acid and then resynthesized in the body and stored as a source of energy (known as the Cori cycle). They also identified the important catalyzing compound, the Cori ester. In 2004, both Gerty and Carl Cori were designated a National Historic Chemical Landmark in recognition of their work in clarifying carbohydrate metabolism.In 1957, Gerty Cori died after a ten-year struggle with myelosclerosis. She remained active in the research laboratory until the end of her life. She received recognition for her achievements through multiple awards and honors.
- Birthplace: Prague, Czech Republic
- Leander Hamilton McCormick (May 27, 1859 – February 2, 1934) was an American author, inventor, art collector and sculptor.
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Felix Bloch (23 October 1905 – 10 September 1983) was a Swiss-American physicist and Nobel physics laureate who worked mainly in the U.S. He and Edward Mills Purcell were awarded the 1952 Nobel Prize for Physics for "their development of new ways and methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements." In 1954–1955, he served for one year as the first Director-General of CERN. Felix Bloch made fundamental theoretical contributions to the understanding of electron behavior in crystal lattices, ferromagnetism, and nuclear magnetic resonance.
- Birthplace: Zürich, Switzerland
- David Jonathan Gross (; born February 19, 1941) is an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Along with Frank Wilczek and David Politzer, he was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of asymptotic freedom. Gross is the Chancellor’s Chair Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and was formerly the KITP director and holder of their Frederick W. Gluck Chair in Theoretical Physics . He is also a faculty member in the UC Santa Barbara Physics Department and is currently affiliated with the Institute for Quantum Studies at Chapman University in California. He is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
- Birthplace: Washington, D.C.
- Mario Ramberg Capecchi (6 October 1937) is an American molecular geneticist and a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a method to create mice in which a specific gene is turned off, known as knockout mice. He shared the prize with Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies. He is currently Distinguished Professor of Human Genetics and Biology at the University of Utah School of Medicine.
- Birthplace: Verona, Italy
- Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927. There she started her career as the leader in the development of maize cytogenetics, the focus of her research for the rest of her life. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. She developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas. One of those ideas was the notion of genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome to physical traits. She demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized as among the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944. During the 1940s and 1950s, McClintock discovered transposition and used it to demonstrate that genes are responsible for turning physical characteristics on and off. She developed theories to explain the suppression and expression of genetic information from one generation of maize plants to the next. Due to skepticism of her research and its implications, she stopped publishing her data in 1953. Later, she made an extensive study of the cytogenetics and ethnobotany of maize races from South America. McClintock's research became well understood in the 1960s and 1970s, as other scientists confirmed the mechanisms of genetic change and genetic regulation that she had demonstrated in her maize research in the 1940s and 1950s. Awards and recognition for her contributions to the field followed, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; she is the only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.
- Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
- Peter Joseph William Debye (; Dutch: [dəˈbɛiə]; March 24, 1884 – November 2, 1966) was a Dutch-American physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.
- Birthplace: Maastricht, Netherlands
- Gertrude "Trudy" Belle Elion (January 23, 1918 – February 21, 1999) was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, who shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with George H. Hitchings and Sir James Black for their use of innovative methods of rational drug design for the development of new drugs. This new method focused on understanding the target of the drug rather than simply using trial-and-error. Her work led to the creation of the AIDS drug AZT. Her well known works also include the development of the first immunosuppressive drug, azathioprine, used to fight rejection in organ transplants, and the first successful antiviral drug, acyclovir (ACV), used in the treatment of herpes infection.
- Birthplace: New York City, New York
- Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist and inventor of the maser. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US President from Harry Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999). He directed the US government Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program. After becoming a professor of the University of California at Berkeley in 1967, he began an astrophysical program that produced several important discoveries, for example, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Townes was religious and believed that science and religion are converging to provide a greater understanding of the nature and purpose of the universe.
- Birthplace: Greenville, South Carolina
- Paul Ralph Ehrlich (born May 29, 1932) is an American biologist, best known for his warnings about the consequences of population growth and limited resources. He is the Bing Professor of Population Studies of the Department of Biology of Stanford University and president of Stanford's Center for Conservation Biology. Ehrlich became well known for his controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he famously stated: The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate...[6] which categorically stated that the world's human population would soon increase to the point where mass starvation ensued. Among the solutions he suggested in that book was population control, to be used if voluntary methods were to fail. Ehrlich has been criticized for his opinions; for example, Ronald Bailey termed Ehrlich an "irrepressible doomster". However, Carl Haub observed that Ehrlich's warnings had encouraged governments to change their policies to avert disaster. Ehrlich has acknowledged that some of what he predicted has not occurred, but maintains that his predictions about disease and climate change were essentially correct (even though the book never even mentions climate) and that human overpopulation is a major problem.
- Birthplace: USA, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- George Andrew Olah (born Oláh György; May 22, 1927 – March 8, 2017) was a Hungarian and American chemist. His research involved the generation and reactivity of carbocations via superacids. For this research, Olah was awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1994 "for his contribution to carbocation chemistry." He was also awarded the Priestley Medal, the highest honor granted by the American Chemical Society and F.A. Cotton Medal for Excellence in Chemical Research of the American Chemical Society in 1996. According to György Marx he was one of The Martians.
- Birthplace: Budapest, Hungary
- Douglas Dean Osheroff (born August 1, 1945) is a physicist known for his work in experimental condensed matter physics, in particular for his co-discovery of superfluidity in Helium-3. For his contributions he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics along with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson. Osheroff is currently the J. G. Jackson and C. J. Wood Professor of Physics, Emeritus at Stanford University.
- Birthplace: Aberdeen, Washington
- James Bryant Conant (March 26, 1893 – February 11, 1978) was an American chemist, a transformative President of Harvard University, and the first U.S. Ambassador to West Germany. Conant obtained a PhD in Chemistry from Harvard in 1916. During World War I he served in the U.S. Army, working on the development of poison gases. He became an assistant professor of chemistry at Harvard in 1919, and the Sheldon Emery Professor of Organic Chemistry in 1929. He researched the physical structures of natural products, particularly chlorophyll, and he was one of the first to explore the sometimes complex relationship between chemical equilibrium and the reaction rate of chemical processes. He studied the biochemistry of oxyhemoglobin providing insight into the disease methemoglobinemia, helped to explain the structure of chlorophyll, and contributed important insights that underlie modern theories of acid-base chemistry. In 1933, Conant became the President of Harvard University with a reformist agenda that involved dispensing with a number of customs, including class rankings and the requirement for Latin classes. He abolished athletic scholarships, and instituted an "up or out" policy, under which scholars who were not promoted were terminated. His egalitarian vision of education required a diversified student body, and he promoted the adoption of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and co-educational classes. During his presidency, women were admitted to Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School for the first time. Conant was appointed to the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) in 1940, becoming its chairman in 1941. In this capacity, he oversaw vital wartime research projects, including the development of synthetic rubber, and the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bombs. On July 16, 1945, he was among the dignitaries present at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range for the Trinity nuclear test, the first detonation of an atomic bomb, and was part of the Interim Committee that advised President Harry S. Truman to use atomic bombs on Japan. After the war, he served on the Joint Research and Development Board (JRDC) that was established to coordinate burgeoning defense research, and on the influential General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); in the latter capacity he advised the president against starting a development program for the "hydrogen bomb". In his later years at Harvard, Conant taught undergraduate courses on the history and philosophy of science, and wrote books explaining the scientific method to laymen. In 1953 he retired as President of Harvard and became the United States High Commissioner for Germany, overseeing the restoration of German sovereignty after World War II, and then was Ambassador to West Germany until 1957. On returning to the United States, he criticized the education system in works such as The American High School Today (1959), Slums and Suburbs (1961) and The Education of American Teachers (1963). Between 1965 and 1969, Conant, suffering from a heart condition, worked on his autobiography, My Several Lives (1970). He became increasingly infirm, suffered a series of strokes in 1977, and died in a nursing home the following year.
- Birthplace: Dorchester, Boston, Massachusetts
- Arthur Louis Hugo Rudolph (November 9, 1906 – January 1, 1996) was a German rocket engineer who was a leader of the effort to develop the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany. After World War II, the United States Government's Office of Strategic Services (OSS) brought him to the U.S. as part of the clandestine Operation Paperclip, where he became one of the main developers of the U.S. space program. He worked within the U.S. Army and NASA, where he managed the development of several systems, including the Pershing missile and the Saturn V Moon rocket. In 1984, the U.S. Government investigated him for war crimes, and he agreed to renounce his United States citizenship and leave the U.S. in return for not being prosecuted.
- Birthplace: Meiningen, Germany
- Paul John Flory (June 19, 1910 – September 9, 1985) was an American chemist and Nobel laureate who was known for his work in the field of polymers, or macromolecules. He was a leading pioneer in understanding the behavior of polymers in solution, and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1974 "for his fundamental achievements, both theoretical and experimental, in the physical chemistry of macromolecules".
- Birthplace: Sterling, Illinois
- Lawrence Henry Summers (born November 30, 1954) is an American economist, former Vice President of Development Economics and Chief Economist of the World Bank (1991–93), senior U.S. Treasury Department official throughout President Clinton's administration (ultimately Treasury Secretary, 1999–2001), and former director of the National Economic Council for President Obama (2009–2010). He is a former president of Harvard University (2001–2006), where he is currently (as of March, 2017) a professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.Born in New Haven, Connecticut, Summers became a professor of economics at Harvard University in 1983. He left Harvard in 1991, working as the Chief Economist at the World Bank from 1991 to 1993. In 1993, Summers was appointed Undersecretary for International Affairs of the United States Department of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration. In 1995, he was promoted to Deputy Secretary of the Treasury under his long-time political mentor Robert Rubin. In 1999, he succeeded Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury. While working for the Clinton administration Summers played a leading role in the American response to the 1994 economic crisis in Mexico, the 1997 Asian financial crisis, and the Russian financial crisis. He was also influential in the Harvard Institute for International Development and American-advised privatization of the economies of the post-Soviet states, and in the deregulation of the U.S financial system, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Following the end of Clinton's term, Summers served as the 27th President of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Summers resigned as Harvard's president in the wake of a no-confidence vote by Harvard faculty, which resulted in large part from Summers's conflict with Cornel West, financial conflict of interest questions regarding his relationship with Andrei Shleifer, and a 2005 speech in which he suggested that the under-representation of women in science and engineering could be due to a "different availability of aptitude at the high end", and less to patterns of discrimination and socialization. Remarking upon political correctness in institutions of higher education, Summers said in 2016: There is a great deal of absurd political correctness. Now, I'm somebody who believes very strongly in diversity, who resists racism in all of its many incarnations, who thinks that there is a great deal that's unjust in American society that needs to be combated, but it seems to be that there is a kind of creeping totalitarianism in terms of what kind of ideas are acceptable and are debatable on college campuses. After his departure from Harvard, Summers worked as a managing partner at the hedge fund D. E. Shaw & Co., and as a freelance speaker at other financial institutions, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers. Summers rejoined public service during the Obama administration, serving as the Director of the White House United States National Economic Council for President Barack Obama from January 2009 until November 2010, where he emerged as a key economic decision-maker in the Obama administration's response to the Great Recession. After his departure from the NEC in December 2010, Summers has worked in the private sector and as a columnist in major newspapers. In mid-2013, his name was widely floated as the potential successor to Ben Bernanke as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, though Obama eventually nominated Federal Reserve Vice-Chairwoman Janet Yellen for the position. As of 2017, Summers retains his Harvard University status as former president emeritus and Charles W. Eliot University Professor.
- Birthplace: New Haven, Connecticut, USA
- Daniel Joseph Levitin, FRSC (born December 27, 1957) is an American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, neuroscientist, writer, musician, and record producer. Levitin holds three academic appointments: he is James McGill Professor Emeritus of psychology and behavioral neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he is an Associate member in music theory, computer science, neurology and neurosurgery, and education; Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at The Minerva Schools at KGI; and a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley. From 2000 to 2017, he was Director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition, and Expertise at McGill. An accomplished public speaker, his TED talk has been viewed more than 16 million times. He is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a fellow of the Psychonomic Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC). He has appeared frequently as a guest commentator on NPR and CBC. Levitin is the author of four consecutive #1 best-selling books, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (2006), The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature (2008), The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (2014) and A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age (2016). He has published scientific articles on absolute pitch, music cognition, and neuroscience.Levitin worked as a music consultant, producer and sound designer on albums by Blue Öyster Cult, Chris Isaak, Joni Mitchell and Joe Satriani among others; produced punk bands including MDC and The Afflicted; and served as a consultant on albums by artists including Steely Dan, Stevie Wonder, and Michael Brook; and as a recording engineer for Santana, Jonathan Richman, O.J. Ekemode and the Nigerian Allstars, and The Grateful Dead. Records and CDs to which he has contributed have sold in excess of 30 million copies.
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California, USA
- Carl Djerassi (October 29, 1923 – January 30, 2015) was an Austrian-born Bulgarian-American chemist, novelist, playwright and co-founder of Djerassi Resident Artists Program with Diane Wood Middlebrook. He is best known for his contribution to the development of oral contraceptive pills, nicknamed the father of the pill.
- Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
- Christian Boehmer Anfinsen Jr. (March 26, 1916 – May 14, 1995) was an American biochemist. He shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanford Moore and William Howard Stein for work on ribonuclease, especially concerning the connection between the amino acid sequence and the biologically active conformation (see Anfinsen's dogma).
- Birthplace: Monessen, Pennsylvania
- Harry Dexter White (October 9, 1892 – August 16, 1948) was a senior U.S. Treasury department official. Working closely with the Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., he helped set American financial policy toward the Allies of World War II while at the same time he passed numerous secrets to the Soviet Union, which was an American ally for part of the time and an adversary at other times.He was the senior American official at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that established the postwar economic order. He dominated the conference and imposed his vision of post-war financial institutions over the objections of John Maynard Keynes, the British representative. At Bretton Woods, White was a major architect of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. White was accused in 1948 of spying for the Soviet Union, which he adamantly denied. Although he was never a Communist party member, his status as a Soviet informant was later confirmed by declassified FBI documents related to the interception and decoding of Soviet communications, known as the Venona Project.
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts, USA
- Yang Chen-Ning or Yang Zhenning (Chinese: 杨振宁; born October 1, 1922) is a Chinese theoretical physicist who made significant contributions to statistical mechanics, integrable systems, gauge theory, and both particle physics and condensed matter physics. He and Tsung-dao Lee received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. The two proposed that one of the basic quantum-mechanics laws, the conservation of parity, is violated in the so-called weak nuclear reactions, those nuclear processes that result in the emission of beta or alpha particles. The most important work of Yang is Yang-Mills theory.
- Birthplace: Hefei, China
- Roger Wolcott Sperry (August 20, 1913 – April 17, 1994) was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
- Birthplace: Hartford, Connecticut
- John Robinson Pierce (March 27, 1910 – April 2, 2002), was an American engineer and author. He worked extensively in the fields of radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. As a sideline to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years under various names: John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Palo Alto, California from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
- Birthplace: Des Moines, Iowa
