5 Best Scientists in the World | Galileo Galilei,Rosalind Franklin,Ada Lovelace,Pythagoras,Carl Linnaeus 

(1)Galileo Galileo

Around Dec. 1, 1609, Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei pointed a telescope at the moon and created modern astronomy. His subsequent observations turned up four satellites — massive moons — orbiting Jupiter, and showed that the Milky Way’s murky light shines from many dim stars. Galileo also found sunspots upon the surface of our star and discovered the phases of Venus, which confirmed that the planet circles the sun inside Earth’s own orbit.

“I give infinite thanks to God, who has been pleased to make me the first observer of marvelous things,” he wrote.

The 45-year-old Galileo didn’t invent the telescope, and he wasn’t the first to point one at the sky. But his conclusions changed history. Galileo knew he’d found proof for the theories of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), who had launched the Scientific Revolution with his sun-centered solar system model.

Galileo’s work wasn’t all staring at the sky, either: His studies of falling bodies showed that objects dropped at the same time will hit the ground at the same time, barring air resistance — gravity doesn’t depend on their size. And his law of inertia allowed for Earth itself to rotate.

But all this heavenly motion contradicted Roman Catholic doctrine, which was based on Aristotle’s incorrect views of the cosmos. The church declared the sun-centered model heretical, and an inquisition in 1616 ordered Galileo to stop promoting these views. The real blow from religious officials came in 1633, after Galileo published a comparison of the Copernican (sun-centered) and Ptolemaic (Earth-centered) systems that made the latter’s believers look foolish. They placed him under house arrest until his death in 1642, the same year Isaac Newton was born.

The English mathematician would build on Galileo’s law of inertia as he compiled a set of laws so complete that engineers still use them centuries later to navigate spacecraft across the solar system — including NASA’s Galileo mission to Jupiter.

(2)Rosalind Franklin

In 1962, Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize for describing DNA’s double-helix structure — arguably the greatest discovery of the 20th century. But no one mentioned Rosalind Franklin — arguably the greatest snub of the 20th century.

The British-born Franklin was a firebrand, a perfectionist who worked in isolation. “She was prickly, did not make friends easily, but when she did she was outgoing and loyal,” Jenifer Glynn wrote in My Sister Rosalind Franklin.

Franklin was also a brilliant chemist and a master of X-ray crystallography, an imaging technique that reveals the molecular structure of matter based on the pattern of scattered X-ray beams. Her early research into the microstructures of carbon and graphite are still cited, but her work with DNA was the most significant — and it may have won three men a Nobel.

While at King’s College London in the early 1950s, Franklin was close to proving the double-helix theory after capturing “photograph #51,” considered the finest image of a DNA molecule at the time. But then both Watson and Crick got a peek at Franklin’s work: Her colleague, Wilkins, showed Watson photograph #51, and Max Perutz, a member of King’s Medical Research Council, handed Crick unpublished data from a report Franklin submitted to the council. In 1953, Watson and Crick published their iconic paper in Nature, loosely citing Franklin, whose “supporting” study also appeared in that issue.

Franklin left King’s in 1953 in a long-planned move to join J.D. Bernal’s lab at Birkbeck College, where she discovered the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. But in 1956, in the prime of her career, she developed ovarian cancer — perhaps due to her extensive X-ray work. Franklin continued working in the lab until her death in 1958 at age 37.

“As a scientist, Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook,” Bernal wrote in her obituary, published in Nature. Though it’s her achievements that close colleagues admired, most remember Franklin for how she was forgotten.

(3) Ada Lovelace

To say she was ahead of her time would be an understatement. Ada Lovelace earned her place in history as the first computer programmer — a full century before today’s computers emerged.

She couldn’t have done it without British mathematician, inventor and engineer Charles Babbage. Their collaboration started in the early 1830s, when Lovelace was just 17 and still known by her maiden name of Byron. (She was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron.) Babbage had drawn up plans for an elaborate machine he called the Difference Engine — essentially, a giant mechanical calculator. In the middle of his work on it, the teenage Lovelace met Babbage at a party.

There, he showed off an incomplete prototype of his machine. According to a family friend who was there: “While other visitors gazed at the working of this beautiful instrument with the sort of expression. . . that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking-glass or hearing a gun. . . Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.”

It was mathematical obsession at first sight. The two struck up a working relationship and eventual close friendship that would last until Lovelace’s death in 1852, when she was only 36. Babbage abandoned his Difference Engine to brainstorm a new Analytical Engine — in theory, capable of more complex number crunching — but it was Lovelace who saw that engine’s true potential.

The Analytical Engine was more than a calculator — its intricate mechanisms and the fact that the user fed it commands via a punch card meant the engine could perform nearly any mathematical task ordered. Lovelace even wrote instructions for solving a complex math problem, should the machine ever see the light of day. Many historians would later deem those instructions the first computer program, and Lovelace the first programmer. While she led a raucous life of gambling and scandal, it’s her work in “poetical science,” as she called it, that defines her legacy.

In the words of Babbage himself, Lovelace was an “enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects. . . could have exerted over it.”

(4)Pythagoras

Memories of middle or high school geometry invariably include an instructor drawing right triangles on a blackboard to explain the Pythagorean theorem. The lesson was that the square of the hypotenuse, or longest side, is equal to the sum of the squares of the other sides. Simply put: a2 + b2 = c2. A proof followed, adding a level of certainty rare in other high school classes, like social studies and English.

Pythagoras, a sixth-century B.C. Greek philosopher and mathematician, is credited with inventing his namesake theorem and various proofs. But forget about the certainty.

Babylonian and Egyptian mathematicians used the equation centuries before Pythagoras, says Karen Eva Carr, a retired historian at Portland State University, though many scholars leave open the possibility he developed the first proof. Moreover, Pythagoras’ students often attributed their own mathematical discoveries to their master, making it impossible to untangle who invented what.

Even so, we know enough to suspect Pythagoras was one of the great mathematicians of antiquity. His influence was widespread and lasting. Theoretical physicist James Overduin sees an unbroken chain from Pythagoras to Albert Einstein, whose work on curving space and time Overduin calls “physics as geometry.”

Even today, the sea of numerical formulas typically on physicists’ blackboards suggests the Pythagorean maxim “All is number,” an implication that everything can be explained, organized and, in many cases, predicted through mathematics. The Pythagorean theorem proof doesn’t just work sometimes, most of the time or when the stars align — it works all the time. Pythagoras’ legacy includes the scientific hallmarks of pattern, order, replication and certainly.

(5) Carl Linnaeus

It started in Sweden: a functional, user-friendly innovation that took over the world, bringing order to chaos. No, not an Ikea closet organizer. We’re talking about the binomial nomenclature system, which has given us clarity and a common language, devised by Carl Linnaeus.

Linnaeus, born in southern Sweden in 1707, was an “intensely practical” man, according to Sandra Knapp, a botanist and taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London. He lived at a time when formal scientific training was scant and there was no system for referring to living things. Plants and animals had common names, which varied from one location and language to the next, and scientific “phrase names,” cumbersome Latin descriptions that could run several paragraphs.

The 18th century was also a time when European explorers were fanning out across the globe, finding ever more plants and animals new to science.

“There got to be more and more things that needed to be described, and the names were becoming more and more complex,” says Knapp.

Linnaeus, a botanist with a talent for noticing details, first used what he called “trivial names” in the margins of his 1753 book Species Plantarum. He intended the simple Latin two-word construction for each plant as a kind of shorthand, an easy way to remember what it was.

“It reflected the adjective-noun structure in languages all over the world,” Knapp says of the trivial names, which today we know as genus and species. The names moved quickly from the margins of a single book to the center of botany, and then all of biology. Linnaeus started a revolution, but it was an unintentional one.

Today we regard Linnaeus as the father of taxonomy, which is used to sort the entire living world into evolutionary hierarchies, or family trees. But the systematic Swede was mostly interested in naming things rather than ordering them, an emphasis that arrived the next century with Charles Darwin.

As evolution became better understood and, more recently, genetic analysis changed how we classify and organize living things, many of Linnaeus’ other ideas have been supplanted. But his naming system, so simple and adaptable, remains.

“It doesn’t matter to the tree in the forest if it has a name,” Knapp says. “But by giving it a name, we can discuss it. Linnaeus gave us a system so we could talk about the natural world."

These 5 are the best scientests in the world