Isaac Newton: Laws of motion and universal gravitation
Albert Einstein: Theory of relativity and E = mc squared
Marie Curie: Discovered polonium and radium; studied radioactivity; won two Nobel Prizes
Charles Darwin: Theory of evolution by natural selection
Galileo Galilei: Used the telescope to find Jupiter's moons and supported a Sun-centered system
Nicolaus Copernicus: Proposed that the Earth orbits the Sun
Johannes Kepler: Laws of planetary motion
Louis Pasteur: Germ theory, pasteurization and vaccines
Alexander Fleming: Discovered penicillin in 1928
Edward Jenner: Created the first smallpox vaccine
Gregor Mendel: Father of genetics, through pea plant experiments
Rosalind Franklin: X-ray images that helped reveal DNA's structure
James Watson and Francis Crick: Proposed the double helix structure of DNA in 1953
Dmitri Mendeleev: Created the first widely used periodic table
Antoine Lavoisier: Father of modern chemistry; named oxygen and hydrogen
John Dalton: Atomic theory of matter
J. J. Thomson: Discovered the electron
Ernest Rutherford: Discovered the atomic nucleus
Niels Bohr: Model of the atom with electron shells
James Chadwick: Discovered the neutron
Robert Hooke: Named cells after looking at cork
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek: First to see bacteria and single-celled life with a microscope
Robert Boyle: Boyle's law about gases
Michael Faraday: Electromagnetic induction
James Clerk Maxwell: Equations of electromagnetism
Benjamin Franklin: Studied electricity and lightning
Alessandro Volta: Invented the battery
Nikola Tesla: Alternating current systems
Thomas Edison: Practical light bulb and phonograph
Alexander Graham Bell: Patented the telephone in 1876
Stephen Hawking: Studied black holes and the universe
Edwin Hubble: Showed the universe is expanding
Carl Sagan: Astronomer who made science popular on television
Jane Goodall: Studied wild chimpanzees in Tanzania
Dian Fossey: Studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda
Rachel Carson: Wrote Silent Spring, about pesticides and nature
Jacques Cousteau: Ocean explorer who co-invented the aqualung
Sylvia Earle: Oceanographer and deep-sea explorer
Mae Jemison: Doctor and first African American woman in space
Katherine Johnson: NASA mathematician who calculated orbits for early space flights
Ada Lovelace: Wrote an early computer program in the 1840s
Charles Babbage: Designed an early mechanical computer
Alan Turing: Pioneer of computer science and codebreaker
Grace Hopper: Computer pioneer who helped create early programming languages
George Washington Carver: Agricultural scientist who promoted peanuts and crop rotation
Archimedes: Ancient Greek who studied levers and buoyancy
Aristotle: Greek thinker who classified living things
Hippocrates: Ancient Greek physician called the Father of Medicine
Euclid: Ancient Greek mathematician known for geometry
Eratosthenes: Ancient Greek who measured the Earth's size
Ptolemy: Ancient astronomer who put Earth at the center
Carl Linnaeus: Created the two-part naming system for species
Alfred Wegener: Proposed continental drift
Wilhelm Roentgen: Discovered X-rays in 1895
Enrico Fermi: Built the first nuclear reactor in 1942
Max Planck: Founder of quantum theory
Richard Feynman: Physicist known for quantum electrodynamics and teaching
Lise Meitner: Helped explain nuclear fission
Chien-Shiung Wu: Physicist whose experiment changed ideas about particle physics
Percy Julian: Chemist who made medicines from plants
Elizabeth Blackwell: First woman to earn a medical degree in the United States
Florence Nightingale: Nurse who improved hospitals and used statistics
Clara Barton: Founded the American Red Cross
Jonas Salk: Developed the first successful polio vaccine
Barbara McClintock: Discovered jumping genes in corn
Tu Youyou: Discovered a malaria treatment, won a Nobel Prize in 2015
Jennifer Doudna: Co-developed the CRISPR gene-editing method

Free flashcards from Peabody at peabody.kids/flashcards/sci-famous-scientists