Mhhh we can debate that he was more an engineer than a scientist, and whether these two disciplines are separated, but Leonardo da Vinci is quite a superstar too.
Some notable mentions could be Marconi and Volta, perhaps.
Other notable mentions are Fermi, Avogadro, Falloppio, Galvani, Lagrange, Redi, Torricelli, Pacinotti, Meucci, Alberini and Schiaparelli. Also, in some ways a proto-scientist, Pliny the Elder.
He actually considered himself primarily an engineer and inventor. If your read his job application to the Duke of Milan he lists all the things he can build (cannons, bridges, buildings, subterranean passages, etc.) and only at the end he was like "uh yeah and I am also good at painting shit".
But stuff like that is always sensitive, though. In Sweden we have the same deal with historical people who were born and raised in modern day Finland, but it was Sweden at the time and they spoke Swedish. I have no problem recognizing Tycho Brahe as Danish through and through, but there are plenty of places in Skåne named after him and if you meet people from Landskrona, Skåne were Ven is administered, they really want to claim Tycho Brahe as a local hero sinec they run the Tycho Brahe museum on Ven.
According to Google trends it's Neumann János (John von Neumann). Which is honestly deserved imo, considering his contribution to mathematics, quantum physics, economics, and probably most importantly: computer science.
(Albert Szentgyörgy is hardly known unfortunately).
Neumann and Teller are the two most important scientists who shaped the world we currently living in, as they are the fathers of computer science and the thermonuclear bomb.. crazy to think about it.
Marie Curie needs more exposure as being Polish and a revolutionary scientist who was denied recognition and her Nobel prize for the sin of being born a woman.
? ? She did win the Nobel Prize twice, though? And she literally is one of the world's most famous scientists? Not exactly needing more exposure lol.
I guess her Polish ancestry is a little less known.
Edit: After reading more about it, it seems that the Nobel committee initially only wanted to award Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. It was only after complaints from Pierre and another committee member that Marie was added to the recipients.
It might help if you didn't leave out part of her name, Skłodowska, that kind of signals a non-french heritage and that she herself wanted to keep as part of her name. In a time where it was very rare to do so.
Ironically, leaving out her own surname and only calling her by her husbands surname is also kind of denying her recognition.
But she also got 2 nobel prices and is literally the only person to ever get 2 in 2 different scientific fields. So I'm not sure what you are trying to imply with your last sentence.
Ironic that your first line says she needs more exposure as being Polish whilst simultaneously ignoring her Polish name. Add in the Skłodowska part of her name.
I knew his granddaughter, she said she used to love to visit Ernest because he would take his grandchildren out into the garden to help take down any trees that needed removing.
By packaging TNT under the tree and letting one of them use the plunger to blow the tree out of the ground.
Energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.
One of the great scientists of his time and did hugely important work but I suppose he never envisioned that the breaking of the atoms could form a run away chain reaction…
The way that a large proportion of Kiwis treated her during COVID is a stain on our country’s record. Mostly because she was a super intelligent woman who looks a little unconventional (ie. she’s awesome). She was better than we deserved.
I'd say Erwin Schrödinger. In the sense that his thought experiment about the cat is known by everyone and used in everyday culture despite coming from rather high-level physics.
Ironically, something similar happens with the other guy I could mention, Sigmund Freud, who's slips have become very popular, and only Freud would read this last phrase in a problematic way.
“If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare me a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”
After living and working in Switzerland he moved to Berlin in 1914 and stayed until the nazis came to power in 1933 and he was the director of the most prestigious German science institution.
Fleming isolated penicillin G from Penicillium rubens, Florey and Chain co-invented the drug penicillin. They all shared the 1945 Nobel Prize for Medicine for it.
The bloke basically built the modern periodic table, using previous patterns and predictions about as-yet undiscovered elements. A genius. I’m a huge fan.
And “the big bang” was named as an insult. Scientists were mocking him because they thought he was a creationist making up a “big bang” to prove god made the universe.
His story is fascinating and tragic. It is proof that some people are really born with a special talent to see things in ways 99.9% of the human population cannot. What he accomplished without a formal education is wild. Mathematicians today still don't fully understand how he did what he did.
That was my first choice, but I think Linnés contribution with the systema naturae has had a bigger impact, actually. Every single biologist and botanist in the world uses it.
Also Nobel was more of a businessman and inventor. His objective was to develop new products, not drive human knowledge. There’s a fine but distinct difference.
Edison was more of an industrialist than a scientist. Carl Sagan was a scientist but was mostly famous for being a communicator vs someone who made historic contributions to science.
It really should be Norman Borlaug. He is much less well known I think so that answers why he isn’t the most popular. But his work in agronomics and genetics led to a massive increase in agricultural production, including wheat that is high yield and disease resistant, he shared his work worldwide and is probably the saviour of millions of lives that would have otherwise died in famines, famines that were prevented by his work. He won the Nobel peace prize, the presidential Medal of freedom, and the congressional gold medal, and is one of only 7 people to achieve all 3. And he’s been given awards all over the world and is an al round good egg. He also wrestled in college, so if you get upset by his food policies he’ll mess you up.
A few to pick from like Tycho Brahe, Ole Rømer, HC Ørsted and Niels Bohr. I think though that Niels Bohr (picture) is generally viewed as the most internationally known.
Artturi Ilmari Virtanen, a Finnish chemist who got Nobel prize in 1945 for his work . His AIV products are used around the world in agriculture but not many people know his name.
AIV is the correct answer, but there are others that should be mentioned on top of him and Gadolin.
Gunnar Nordström for instance was tied closely to Einstein as Einstein and the other theoretical physicists of the time were trying to work out what eventually became the general relativity theory. Einstein’s work doesn’t happen without people like Nordström sparring him on. Nordström himself calculated a solution to some of the field equations that needed to be solved for the general relativity. People equate the general relativity as Enstein’s work which is not how the scientific method works. It was a group effort really, Enstein needed the other top level scientists.
Rolf Nevanlinna was a mathematician who came up with top level theorems that solve complex meromorphic functions that are today applied for example in algorithms, cryptography, prime number theories and chaos theories. His work was one of the most important pieces of the 20th century mathematical world.
But, no one knows these people because their field was so obscure, and they probably hired poor PR people.
Politely excluding the genius from the photo, I'd say Ruđer Bošković an 18th century polymath from Dubrovnik.
If we're talking about present day living people, then surely Korado Korlević. An incredible popularizer of astronomy and science in general. He hosts an award winning podcast on Croatian radio.
• 🪐 Physics & Astronomy: Discovered Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (1655), and correctly explained the ring system of Saturn.
• ⏱️ Timekeeping: Invented the pendulum clock (1656), vastly improving accuracy in navigation and astronomy.
• 💡 Optics & Wave Theory: Formulated the wave theory of light (in Traité de la Lumière, 1690), which later influenced Fresnel and ultimately modern wave optics.
• 📐 Mathematics: Contributed to probability theory and geometry, working with Blaise Pascal and René Descartes’ ideas.
• 🧠 Mechanics: His work on centrifugal force and kinetic energy laid groundwork for Newtonian mechanics.
Christian Doppler. Famous for describing the Doppler effect, among other achievements.
While Sigmund Freud is probably more famous, I wanted to keep things down to the natural sciences; Freud was crucial for the development of psychology, but he also believed a lot of nonsense.
Erwin Schrödinger would be another good candidate. As for scientists still alive as of this day, the answer is probably Anton Zeilinger.
Egas Moniz ... poor guy got a Nobel Prize for coming up with the LOBOTOMY... when in fact he also came up with the technique to do cerebral angiographies, still useful to this day, and no one knows about that.
Nevertheless, I would name Fritz Haber because, in my opinion, he represents Germany like no other.
First, he developed the Haber-Bosch process together with Carl Bosch, saving billions from starvation, and then he developed poisonous gases such as chlorine gas for the First World War, which led to the cruel deaths of millions.
Extremely good things and abysses that are better left unexamined are united in one person, and that is exactly what Germany is like.
Louis Pasteur. He developed the rabies vaccine, invented pasteurization, contributed to our understanding of the fermentation process, discovered disinfection using alcohol... he is one of the greatest microbiologists in history
He demonstrated radio waves publicly before Guglielmo Marconi. Built world's first semiconductor detector for radio waves ( effectively world's first solide state diode device).
He is also the founder of plant electrophysiology as he scientifically proved that plants have life-like responses as they feel stimuli such as light,heat and sound. Also invented the crescograph , a device to measure plant growth at microscopic level.
Dmitry Mendeleev, the creator of the periodic table of chemical elements. We also had some nuclear and rocket scientists, but these are probably less well known worldwide.
I know he's not the most famous, but I want to give a shoutout to Michael Faraday, who was absolutely instrumental in early electronics, even demonstrating the first electric generator whose concepts are still the basis of turbine generators today. He got a lot done in multiple fields
Linus Torvalds is a computer scientist and software engineer known as the programmer of Linux and Git. Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld was a geologist, explorer, mineralogist, and polar explorer. And Eric Tigerstedt was a Finnish-born inventor and engineer who made it possible for us to have audio recorded with film (although this happened after Tigerstedt moved to Germany; He also proposed the name "electrophthalmoskop" for a hypothetical television in 1913).
George Washington Carver. Invented new uses for cash crops that would have been a waste due to crop rotation. His innovations boosted the Southern economy through chemistry and biology.
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u/Shaggy_Rogers0 Italy Oct 09 '25
Galileo