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Albert Einstein is perhaps the most amazing scientific mind the world has ever seen. Few people (with the exception of Newton, Hawking, etc.) in the history of the world compare to his superior genius. Albert Einstein not only changed the scientific community forever, but changed every-day life as we know it.
Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in March 14, 1879. He had a troubled childhood as most people know. From the time he was very young, he had a deep seeded interest in math and science. At times, he got so board with his schoolwork he stopped doing it and consequently failed math. Einstein's mathematics professor, Hermann Minkowski, got so angered with Albert's lack of interest in the class; he called Einstein a "lazy dog." From the time he was very young till his death, he would only study what he wanted to. When Einstein was in college, he often got upset because the Physics Professors only covered the "Old Physics" and Einstein wanted to learn about the "New Physics."

Many things are known about optics: the rectilinearity of light rays; the law of reflection; transparency of materials; that rays passing obliquely from less dense to more dense medium is refracted toward the perpendicular of the interface; general laws for the relationship between the apparent location of an object in reflections and refractions; the existence of metal mirrors (glass mirrors being a 19th century invention).

Andrew Balfour was a native of Edinburgh, born on March 21st 1873, the son of Dr T A G Balfour, a well known practitioner in that city. At an early age Balfour established a reputation for being a man of many talents. During his student days he was a 6-foot-tall,14 stone boxer and rugby player who appeared for Scotland against England on many occasions. He was also a novelist. His first novel By Stroke of Sword , published in 1897, was a story of romance and adventure in the high seas and Spanish America. He also wrote To Arms (1898), Vengeance is Mine (1899), Cashiered and Other War Stories (1902) and The Golden Kingdom (1903). The last novel was founded upon his scientific knowledge of sleeping sickness. After graduating MB.,C.M. at Edinburgh in 1894, he joined his father's medical practice, but soon he realized that he had more inclination towards public health than to clinical practice. Thus he entered Cambridge University in 1885 and obtained the D.P.H. degree in 1887, followed by a M.D. degree for which he was awarded a gold medal for outstanding research work. Then he obtained a BSc in public health. The first tropical experience of Balfour was a typhoid camp in Pretoria during the period 1900-1901.

Henry Solomon Wellcome was born half a world away from the Sudan in the American Midwest in 1853. His personal qualities and attitudes to life have been shaped in his early years. The Wellcome family was deeply religious , his father and two uncles were ministers of the Adventist sect. When Henry was eight, his family moved to Garden City, Minnesota where his other uncle, Jacob Wellcome was in medical practice.
In the 1860ies the Midwest was still frontier country. Shortly after the family settled in Garden City there was an Indian uprising in the area. Over 2000 settlers were killed and the towns were transformed to small fortresses defended by volunteers and troops. The young Henry helped his uncle in caring for the wounded and he was also appointed captain to a group of children casting rifle bullets for the settlers. The uprising ended in an Indian defeat and the public hanging of 38 Sioux Indian chiefs. This event created in Wellcome a life-long awareness of the suffering of the dispossessed peoples in whom he saw the suffering of mankind. Later in his life, for many years he supported missionary work among a group of American Indians.

The most primitive electrical and magnetic phenomena -- the attraction of dry light material such as chaff to rubbed amber, and the attraction of iron to loadstone -- were no doubt observed before recorded history began. However, as far as I can find, these phenomena were not recorded by the Egyptians or any other pre-Greek civilization. The first definite statement is by Thales of Miletus (about 585B.C.) who said loadstone attracts iron because it has a soul. The prevailing view at the time was that movement of any kind indicated life, or a soul, or a god. In fact, it was advanced thinking on Thales’ part to think that the loadstone’s moving of the iron was caused by itself rather than by the intervention of some god. Actually Miletus was a very multicultural environment -- a flourishing commercial city in Asia Minor (now part of Turkey), trading with Babylon and also Egypt, where Thales travelled. This mixture of cultures meant that there was not a strongly repressive religious orthodoxy, as was often the case in primitive (and not so primitive) societies, so freedom of inquiry was tolerated. Sad to report, this did not lead to a more enlightened political system -- it was a slave based society, with bloody rebellion and repression.

an on-line book by Bob Arnebeck with companion essays and primary documents

Plus
A Short History of Yellow Fever in the US
And, my thoughts on Fever 1793 Laurie Halse Anderson's, novel for young readers,

Ever wonder how people figured out there used to be such things as dinosaurs? Curious about how scientists learned to reconstruct fossil skeletons? The knowledge we take for granted today was slow in coming, and along the way, scientists and scholars had some weird ideas. This Web site shows some of their mistakes, provides a timeline of events, gives biographies of a few of the people who have gotten us where we are today, and lists resources you can use to learn more.

This site contains HTML-versions of some original documents related to the early history of calculators.
For more information on the history of calculators, see Erez Kaplan's Calculating Machines, the pre-HP section of Dave Hicks' Museum of HP Calculators, James Redin's Vintage Calculators and Andrew Davie's Slide Rule Trading Post (and their lists of links).
If you are interested in the more recent history of computers, check out the document collections of Ed Thelen and the Computer History Museum.

V.G Sprindzuk was a famous authority on the theory of Diophantine equations, Diophantine approximation and transcendental Number Theory. An alumnus of the Belorussian State University (1954-1959, where he was an undergraduate) and of the State University of Vilnius (1959-1962, where he undertook his postgraduate studies), he obtained his PhD in 1963, and his DSc degree in 1965. In 1969 he was made a full professor and a member of the Editorial Board of the Vesti of the Akademija Nauk BSSR (Mathematics). The following year he joined the Editorial Board of Acta Arithmetica, and in 1986 Prof. Sprindzuk became an Academician of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences.

Bibliography
Published Papers
Books
Conference Papers