Scientist of the Day

The first boat lift on the Canal du Centre in Wallonia, Belgium, opened for traffic on June 4, 1888. It was designed and built by Edwin Clark of...

Otto Loewi, a German/Austrian/American pharmacologist, was born in Frankfurt on June 3, 1873. He studied medicine at Strasbourg, but decided that...

Ptolemy of Alexandria, sometimes called Claudius Ptolemy, lived in the first half of the second century CE. He was Greek, but unrelated to the...

Kip Thorne, an American astrophysicist, was born June 1, 1940, in Logan, Utah. He studied physics at Caltech, and did his doctoral work at...

J. Halcombe Laning, Jr., an American computer software engineer known as Hal Laning, died on May 29, 2012, at the age of 92. Laning worked for the...

Louis Agassiz, a Swiss/American naturalist, was born May 28, 1807, in the canton of Fribourg. He had a distinguished career in Europe, writing a...

Artur Hazelius, a Swedish anthropologist and ethnological collector, died May 27, 1901, at the age of 67. He was born in Stockholm in 1833, studied...

Sally Kristen Ride, an American astronaut and physicist, was born in Los Angeles on May 26, 1951.

Pehr Georg Scheutz, a Swedish publisher and inventor, died on May 22, 1873, at the age of 87. He was born in Jönköping, south of Stockholm, on...

Albrecht Dürer, a German painter, engraver, and theorist on perspective, proportion, and geometry, was born in Nuremberg on May 21, 1471.  He was...

George Phillips Bond, an American astronomer, was born May 20, 1825, in Dorchester, Mass., now part of Boston. His father, William Cranch Bond...

Richard of Wallingford, an English abbot and astronomer, was born in Wallingford England, around 1292, and died at St. Albans in 1336, at the age...