Physicists have been honored by having their picture on currency in many countries around the world. Some are shown in small images below. Click on the colored text to view or down load a larger copy of the image. (The size of each image is shown in parentheses.)
This collection contains most of the biographical sketches, obituaries and essays on the life and work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton published in the nineteenth century. The authors are Robert and Charles Graves, Peter Guthrie Tait, Augustus De Morgan, Sir Robert Stawell Ball, Charles Pritchard, Clement Mansfield Ingleby and John Francis Waller.
Enrico Fermi was born in Rome on September 29, 1901. He is best known for his contributions to nuclear physics and the development quantum theory.
The truth is that today, 200 years since his birth, Henry, the Smithsonian Institution's first Secretary, is largely unknown.
GIORDANO BRUNO, born in 1548, died February 17, 1600, is perhaps the best-known philosopher of the Italian Renaissance. Ordained a Dominican priest in 1575, he was accused of heresy and in 1576 left his order. After some travel and further study, he taught (1580-81) theology at Toulouse. Soon he found favor with Henry III, who in 1583 sent him to England, where he taught at Oxford.
I would say that in my scientific and philosophical work, my main concern has been with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which is never static or complete but which is an unending process of movement and unfoldment..
Archimedes was born in the city of Syracuse on the island of Sicily in 287 BC. He was the son of an astronomer and mathematician named Phidias. Aside from that, very little is known about the early life of Archimedes or his family. Some maintain that he belonged to the nobility of Syracuse, and that his family was in some way related to that of Hiero II, King of Syracuse.
This site is a companion piece to an Archimedes exhibit at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. The Gallery exhibit is centered around The Archimedes Palimpsest, a rare and ancient document that contains a compendium of the Greek mathematicians's work, the only copy of his essay, Method of Mechanical Theorems, and the only source for the treatise, On Floating Bodies, in the original Greek. The site contains a nice timeline and biography of Archimedes' life, an explanation of the historical significance of the Palimpsest, and a history of the discovery and conservation of the piece. The site is professionally designed, informative, and easy to navigate. The site may serve as a resource for historians interested in rare manuscripts and their preservation.
Portraits of staticians
The "greatest European mathematician of the middle ages", his full name was Leonardo of Pisa, or Leonardo Pisano in Italian since he was born in Pisa (Italy), the city with the famous Leaning Tower, about 1175 AD.
Thomas Jefferson, born in 1743 on the Virginian frontier to a wealthy surveyor and land-owner and his English wife, went at the age of 17, in 1760, to William and Mary College in Williamsburg, the second oldest college, after Harvard, in the American colonies. Here his abilities were recognised and nurtured by one of the great influences upon his life, his mathematics teacher the Scots-born William Small. In his autobiography Jefferson wrote a warm tribute to his teacher
