Medicine

Persian physician and philosopher whose Book of the Cure recast Aristotelian physics, including a theory of imparted inclination (mayl) for projectiles, and whose Canon of Medicine organized medicine as a science and was taught in Europe for five centuries.

natural philosophy, medicine, logic

Canon of Warmia whose De revolutionibus (1543) set the Earth in motion around the Sun and fixed the order and relative distances of the planets.

astronomy, mathematics, medicine

Renaissance physician and polymath whose Ars Magna published the solutions of the cubic and quartic and the first computations with square roots of negative numbers, and who wrote the first book on the mathematics of chance.

algebra, probability theory, medicine

Elizabethan physician whose De Magnete (1600) showed that the Earth is a great magnet and first distinguished electrical from magnetic attraction.

magnetism, electricity, geomagnetism

Basel physician and mathematical physicist who wrote Hydrodynamica, founded the kinetic theory of gases, introduced expected utility and built the first epidemic model.

fluid mechanics, kinetic theory, vibrations and acoustics

Scottish physician and chemist who identified carbon dioxide (fixed air) by quantitative weighing and discovered specific heat and latent heat.

chemistry, physics of heat, calorimetry

Physician and polymath who established the principle of interference of light, introduced the modulus of elasticity, and proposed the three-receptor theory of colour vision.

physical optics, elasticity, physiological optics

Heilbronn physician who in 1842 first published the conservation of energy as a universal principle and computed the mechanical equivalent of heat from gas data.

thermodynamics, physiology, medicine