12 lives in this collection worked in natural philosophy, from 384 BC to today. Each has a full course on their life and the mathematics and physics they made.
Often together with: mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, logic, theology, acoustics, optics, physics. All fields
Greek philosopher and student of Plato who founded the Lyceum and wrote the first systematic treatises on motion, the cosmos, formal logic, zoology and meteorology, which framed natural science until the Scientific Revolution.
natural philosophy, physics, cosmology
Alexandrian Christian commentator on Aristotle who proposed an impressed force for projectiles, argued that falling times barely depend on weight, defined place as extension, denied the aether, and argued from the infinite that the world had a beginning.
natural philosophy, mechanics, cosmology
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
Paris arts master who named and developed the theory of impetus, a motive power growing with quantity of matter and speed, weighed the daily rotation of the Earth, and wrote the most widely taught nominalist logic of the late Middle Ages.
natural philosophy, mechanics, logic
Founder of the mathematical science of motion and of telescopic astronomy, condemned by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for defending the Copernican system.
mechanics, astronomy, strength of materials
Minim friar who established the laws of the vibrating string, gave his name to the primes 2^p − 1, and ran the correspondence network at the centre of European science in the 1630s and 1640s.
acoustics, music theory, number theory
Philosopher and mathematician who joined algebra to geometry, published the sine law of refraction and the theory of the rainbow, and built a mechanical physics of inertia and vortices.
analytic geometry, algebra, optics
Anglo-Irish experimental philosopher who, with Robert Hooke's air pump, established the law of pressure and volume and argued for a corpuscular, experimental chemistry.
pneumatics, chemistry, natural philosophy
French mathematician and philosopher who led the Lapland expedition that showed the Earth is oblate, proposed the principle of least action, and presided over the Berlin Academy.
geodesy, mechanics, variational principles
Natural philosopher who defended Leibniz's vis viva, wrote the Institutions de physique and produced the only complete French translation of Newton's Principia.
natural philosophy, mechanics, mathematics
Dissenting minister and experimenter who isolated oxygen and many other gases, discovered that plants restore air, and inferred the inverse-square law of electric force.
chemistry, electricity, natural philosophy
Danish physicist and chemist who discovered in 1820 that an electric current deflects a magnetic needle, founding electromagnetism.
electromagnetism, physics, chemistry