Biographical

Described as one of the 8 true geniuses, Von Kármán's inspiration for aeronautics came about during doctoral study at one of the world's foremost universities in the 1900s, Göttingen. After an all-night party in Paris, a friend suggested that, instead of going to sleep, they watch the French aviation pioneer Henri Farman fly his machine. Farman successfully completed a 2-kilometre (1.25-mile) course as Von Kármán embarked upon a long career in the aeronautical and astronautical sciences.

Fifty years ago, in 1947, it was common knowledge that there was a "Wall of Air" at the speed of sound. As an airplane neared this critical point, shock waves would buffet its wings and tail. The pilot would lose control, a condition then called "compressibility." Often, the airplane would shatter into pieces

Outline of the History of Biology in Finland

If the word hydraulics is understood to mean the use of water for the benefit of mankind, then its practice must be considered to be even older than recorded history itself. Traces of irrigation canals from prehistoric times still exist in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the Nile is known to have been dammed at Memphis some six thousand years ago to provide the necessary water supply, and the Euphrates River was diverted into the Tigris even earlier for the same purpose. Ancient wells still in existence reach to surprisingly great depths; and underground aqueducts were bored considerable distances, even through bedrock. In what is now Pakistan, houses were provided with ceramic conduits for water supply and drainage some five thousand years ago; and legend tells of vast flood-control projects in China barely a millenium later. All of this [1] clearly demonstrates that men must have begun to deal with the flow of water countless millenia before these times.

Welcome to the National Library of Medicine's Profiles in Science site!
This site celebrates twentieth-century leaders in biomedical research and public health. It makes the archival collections of prominent scientists, physicians, and others who have advanced the scientific enterprise available to the public through modern digital technology.

When future historians turn to examine the major intellectual accomplishments of the twentieth century, they will undoubtedly give a special place to the extraordinary achievements in biology, achievements that have revolutionized our understanding of life's processes and of disease. Important intimations of what was to happen in biology were already apparent in the second half of the nineteenth century. Darwin had delineated the evolution of animal species, Mendel had discovered some basic rules about inheritance, and Weissman, Roux, Driesch, de Vries, and other embryologists were beginning to decipher how an organism develops from a single cell. What was lacking at the end of the nineteenth century, however, was an overarching sense of how these bold advances were related to one another.

Edward O. Wilson is the founder of Sociobiology and is widely regarded to be the world's most famous living scientist. Recently, Wilson seized the word "consilience" from deep within the history of science and reintroduced it into our language by emblazoning it across the cover of his latest best-seller, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In this book, Wilson offers to unify the "two cultures" of literature and science for once and forever, as "the way to renew the crumbling structure of the liberal arts" (12). It is an offer many of my colleagues find attractive, for Wilson carries enormous authority both as a natural scientist and as an eloquent speaker for the environmentally appealing concepts of "biophilia" and "biodiversity." He has well-nigh captured the Thoreau Society: for example, in June 1998 he joined Bill and Hillary Clinton as a featured guest at the opening of the Thoreau Institute, delivering a brief address which has been reprinted as the Preface to the Thoreau Society's collection of Thoreau's writings on science, which I edited and entitled Material Faith.

The Victorian biologist and early social philosopher Herbert Spencer was a great rival of Charles Darwin's. His theory of evolution preceded Darwin's own, but was soon overshadowed because of the absence of an effective theory of natural selection - although it was Spencer, and not Darwin, who popularized the term "evolution" itself and coined the now-ubiquitous phrase, "survival of the fittest". Although no longer influential in biology, his extension of his theory of evolution to psychology and sociology remains important. His "Social Darwinism" was particularly influential on early evolutionary economists such as Thorstein Veblen, but, more contemporaneously, it was adopted with gusto by American apologists such as William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten.

Charles Darwin did not come up with the idea of evolution, he was merely the first to come up with an explanation for how evolution worked that explained what he and other biologists saw in the world. Darwin came up with the idea of Natural Selection. This is the idea that the environment an organism lives in helps to determine which organisms survive and produce young, and which do not.

These web pages are the result of a project for Dr. Phillips's Psychology of Women class, Spring 1999. Originally these biographies of women in psychology were displayed as a bulletin board recognizing March as Women's History Month. When we searched the web and found almost no information on women in psychology, we decided to make it a resource that the world could share.
In chosing women to write about, we tried to include women of various races, ages, and sexual orientations. Some of these women are famous, some are not. Some are modern, and some are from the past. We feel they all share one trait, however: They are all remarkable women who have made an impact on psychology. We hope you enjoy reading about them.