Represented In this book are the some of the greatest practitioners of science from a wide range of scientific disciplines. Each entry gives a biographical background of its subject and a description of the main themes of their work, together with concise expositions of some their key ideas.

Includes index.

The Ancients. Euclid ; Archimedes ; Hipparchus & Claudius Ptolemy -- The Middle Ages. The medieval Arab scientists (Al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina, al-Biruni) -- The Renaissance. Leonardo da Vinci ; Nicolas Copernicus ; Andreas Vesalius ; Galileo Galilei -- The Seventeenth Century. Christiaan Huygens ; Anton van Leeuwenhoek ; Robert Hooke ; Sir Isaac Newton -- The Eighteenth Century. Carolus Linnaeus ; James Hutton ; Antoine Lavoisier ; John Dalton -- The Nineteenth Century. Michael Faraday ; Charles Babbage ; Charles Darwin ; Louis Pasteur ; Gregor Mendel ; Dmitri Mendeleyev ; James Clerk Maxwell -- The Twentieth Century. Max Planck ; Marie Curie ; Ernest Rutherford ; Albert Einstein ; Alfred Wegener ; Niels Bohr ; Edwin Hubble ; Werner Heisenberg ; Linus Pauling ; The DNA team: Francis Crick, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin ; Stephen Hawking.