Alfred Nobel

About Alfred NobelAlfred Bernhard Nobel (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈalfrɛd noˈbɛl] About this sound listen (help·info); 21 October 1833 – 10 December 1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer.He was the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments. Nobel held 350 different patents, dynamite being the most famous. His fortune was used posthumously to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element nobelium was name

Alfred Kinsey

About Alfred KinseyAlfred Charles Kinsey (June 23, 1894 – August 25, 1956) was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who in 1947 founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University,[1] now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in t

Alfred Binet

About Alfred BinetAlfred Binet (July 8, 1857 – October 18, 1911) was a French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale. His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his intelligence scale in 1908 and 1911, the last appearing just before his death.Early yearsBinet was born as Alfredo Binetti in Nice, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He was the only child of a physician father and an artist mother. His parent

Alexander Graham Bell

About Alexander Graham BellAlexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 – August 2, 1922) was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone.Bell's father, grandfather, and brother had all been associated with work on elocution and speech, and both his mother and wife were deaf, profoundly influencing Bell's life's work. His research on hearing and speech further led him to experiment with hearing devices which eventually culminated in Bell being awarded the first US patent for the telephone in 1876. In retrospect, Bell consider

Alexander Fleming

About Alexander FlemingSir Alexander Fleming, FRSE, FRS, FRCS(Eng) (6 August 1881 – 11 March 1955) was a Scottish biologist, pharmacologist and botanist. He wrote many articles on bacteriology, immunology, and chemotherapy. His best-known discoveries are the enzyme lysozyme in 1923 and the antibiotic substance penicillin from the mould Penicillium notatum in 1928, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain.BiographyFleming was born on 6 August 1881 at Lochfield farm near Darvel, in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was the third of

Alessandro Volta

About Alessandro VoltaAlessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (February 18, 1745 – March 5, 1827) was an Italian physicist known for the invention of the battery in the 1800s.Early life and worksVolta was born in Como, a town in present-day northern Italy (near the Swiss border) on February 18, 1745. In 1774, he became a professor of physics at the Royal School in Como. A year later, he improved and popularized the electrophorus, a device that produced static electricity. His promotion of it was so extensive that he is often credited with its invention, even though a machine operating

Albrecht von Haller

About Albrecht von HallerAlbrecht von Haller (16 October 1708 – 12 December 1777) was a Swiss anatomist, physiologist, naturalist and poet. Early lifeHe was born of an old Swiss family at Bern. Prevented by long-continued ill-health from taking part in boyish sports, he had the more opportunity for the development of his precocious mind. At the age of four, it is said, he used to read and expound the Bible to his father’s servants; before he was ten he had sketched a Chaldee grammar, prepared a Greek and a Hebrew vocabulary, compiled a collection of two thousand biographies of famous men

Albert Abraham Michelson

About Albert Abraham MichelsonAlbert Abraham Michelson (surname pronunciation anglicized as "Michael-son", December 19, 1852 – May 9, 1931) was an American physicist known for his work on the measurement of the speed of light and especially for the Michelson–Morley experiment. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He became the first American to receive the Nobel Prize in sciences.BiographyMichelson was born in Strzelno, Province of Posen in the Kingdom of Prussia (now Poland) into a Jewish family. He moved to the US with his parents in 1855, at the age of two. He grew up in

Alan Turing

About Alan TuringAlan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Ble

Agnes Arber

About Agnes Arber Agnes Robertson Arber FRS (23 February 1879 – 22 March 1960) was a British plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. She was born in London but lived most of her life in Cambridge, including the last 51 years of her life. She was the first woman botanist to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (21 March 1946, at the age of 67) and the third woman overall. She was the first woman to receive the Gold Medal of the Linnean Society of London (24 May 1948, at the age of 69) for her contributions to botanical science. Her sci

Yellapragada Subbarow

About Yellapragada SubbarowYellapragada Subbarow (12 January 1895 – 9 August 1948) was an Indian biochemist who discovered the function of adenosine triphosphate as an energy source in the cell, and developed methotrexate for the treatment of cancer. Most of his career was spent in the United States. Despite his isolation of ATP, Subbarow was denied tenure at Harvard and remained without a green card throughout his life, though he would lead some of America's most important medical research during World War II.Early life and educationHe was born to a Telugu Niyogi Brahmin family in Bhimav

V. Balakrishnan

About V. Balakrishnan V. Balakrishnan (born 1943 as Venkataraman Balakrishnan) is an Indian theoretical physicist who has worked in a number of fields of areas, including particle physics, many-body theory, the mechanical behavior of solids, dynamical systems, stochastic processes, and quantum dynamics. He is an accomplished researcher who has made important contributions to the theory of anelasticity, continuous-time random walks, and recurrences in dynamical systems.He received his PhD from Brandeis University in 1970. After a decade at TIFR and IGCAR Kalpakkam, he joined IIT Madras as

Vikram Sarabhai

About Vikram SarabhaiVikram Ambalal Sarabhai (12 August 1919 – 30 December 1971) was an Indian physicist.He is considered the father of India's space programme.BiographyDr.Vikram Sarabhai was born on 12 August 1919 in the city of Ahmedabad, in Gujarat state in western India. The Sarabhai family was an important and rich Jain business family. His father Ambalal Sarabhai was an affluent industrialist and owned many textiles mills in Gujarat. Vikram Sarabhai was one of the eight children of Ambalal and Sarla Devi.Sarabhai matriculated from the Gujarat College in Ahmedabad after passing the I

Vijay P. Bhatkar

About Vijay P. BhatkarVijay Bhatkar is an Indian scientist. India's computer magazine Dataquest has placed him among the star pioneers who shaped India's IT industry.Career & ContributionsBhatkar is best known as the architect of India's national initiative in supercomputing where he led the development of Param supercomputers. He developed the first Indian supercomputer, the Param 8000, in 1991 and then later the Param 10000 in 1998. Based on the Param series of supercomputers, he built the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF) which has been now made available as a grid

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

About Venkatraman RamakrishnanVenkatraman "Venki" Ramakrishnan (born 1952) is an Indian-born American and British structural biologist, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada E. Yonath, "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome". He currently works at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England.Early lifeRamakrishnan was born in Chidambaram in Cuddalore district of Tamil Nadu, India to C. V. Ramakrishnan and Rajalakshmi. Both his parents were scientists and taught biochemistry at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Ba

U. Aswathanarayana

About U. AswathanarayanaUppugunduri Aswathanarayana (born 1928) is the Honorary Director of the Mahadevan International Centre for Water Resources Management, India. He is counted among the doyens of geology in independent India and is revered as a leading scientist from Andhra Pradesh. He studied / taught geology in Andhra University, India; California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California; Oxford University, United Kingdom, University of Western Ontario, Canada; University of Sagar, India; University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique. He ha

Tej P. Singh

About Tej P. SinghTej P. Singh is an Indian biophysicist and a scientific leader who has made original and novel contributions in the fields of Rational Structure based drug design, Protein Structure biology and X-ray crystallography. He has played an active role in the development of research programmes on drug design in the fields of Tuberculosis, Inflammation, Cancer, Epilepsy, Gastropathy and Arthritis in India. He has published more than 350 research papers in leading international journals and has submitted the highest number of protein structures in India in the Protein Data Bank (

Swapan Chattopadhyay

About Swapan ChattopadhyaySwapan Chattopadhyay (born December 26, 1951) is a particle accelerator physicist noted for his pioneering contributions of innovative concepts, techniques and developments in high energy particle colliders, coherent and incoherent light sources, ultrafast sciences in the femto- and atto- second regimes, superconducting linear accelerators and various applications of interaction of particle and light beams. He has directly contributed to the development of many accelerators around the world, e.g. the Super Proton-Antiproton Synchrotron and the Large Hadron Collid