Stanley Miller

Stanley Miller (1930-2007) was an American chemist. Short Biography: In the early 1950s, under laboratory conditions, he tried to imitate the original conditions of the Earth's...

Albert Abraham Michelson

Albert Abraham Michelson (1852-1931) was a German born American physicist. Short Biography: In conjunction with Edward Morley, he performed in 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment...

Charles Messier

Charles Messier (1730-1817) was a French astronomer, who discovered 15 comets and in 1781 published a list of 103 star clusters and nebulae. Short Biography: Objects on this...

Gregor Mendel

Gregor Johann Mendel (1822-1884) experiments with successive generations of peas gave the basis for his theory of particulate inheritance rather than blending, involving dominant and...

Lise Meitner

Lise Meltner (1878-1968) was a Austrian physicist, the first to realize that Otto Hahn had inadvertentiy achieved the fission of uranium. Short Biography: Driven from Nazi Germany...

Peter Medawar

Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987) was a Brazilian-born British immunologist, who, with Bumet, discovered that the body's resistance to grafted tissue is undeveloped in the newborn child...

John Maynard Smith

John Maynard Smith (1920-2004) was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Short Biography: He applied game theory (the mathematics of winning strategies)...

James Clerk Maxwell

James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) major achievement was to the understanding of electromagnetic waves: Maxwell's equations bring together electricity, magnetism, and light in one set...

John Mauchly

John William Mauchly (1907-1980) constructed in 1946 the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC, in collaboration with John Eckert. Short Biography: Their company was bought...

Nevil Maskelyne

Nevil Maskelyne (1732-1811) was a English astronomer, who accurately measured the distance from the Earth to the Sun by observing a transit of Venus across the Sun's face 1769. Short...

Guglielmo Marconi

Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937) in 1895 he achieved wireless communication over more than a mile, and in England in 1896. Short Biography: He conducted successful experiments that...

Patrick Manson

Patrick Manson (1844-1922) was a Scottish physician, who showed that insects are responsible for the spread of diseases like elephantiasis and malaria. Short Biography: Manson...

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was a Polish anthropologist, one of the founders of the theory of functionalism in the social sciences, in which society is seen as a number of interrelated...

Marshall McLuhan

Herbert Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) was a Canadian theorist of communication, noted for his views on the effects of technology on modern society. Short Biography: He coined...

Charles Macintosh

Charles Macintosh (1766-1843) was a Scottish manufacturing chemist who invented a waterproof fabric lined with a rubber that was used for raincoats, hence mackintosh. Other waterproofing...

Ernst Mach

Ernst Mach (1838-1916) was an Austrian philosopher and physicist. Short Biography: He was an empiricist, believing that science was a record of facts perceived by the senses...

Trofim Lysenko

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) was a Soviet biologist, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (changes acquired in an individual's lifetime) and used his...

Charles Lyell

Charles Lyell (1797-1875) book "The Principles of Geology" (1830-1833), he opposed Cuvier's theory that the features of the Earth were formed by a series of catastrophes, and expounded...

Ramon Llull

Ramon Llull (1232-1315) was a Spanish scientist and theologian. Short Biography: His Ars Magna was a mechanical device, a kind of prototype computer, by which all problems could...

Carl Ludwig

Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig (1816-1895) was a German physiologist who invented graphic methods of recording events within the body. Short Biography: In the course of this work...

Percival Lowell

Percival Lowell (1855-1916) was an American astronomer, who started the search for "Planet X" beyond Neptune, which led to the discovery of Pluto. Short Biography: In 1894 he...

Bernard Lovell

Bernard Lovell (born in 1913) was director until 1981 of Jodrell Bank Experimental Station (now Nuffield radio astronomy laboratories) site of Britain's first major radio telescope. Short...

Konrad Lorenz

Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) was an Austrian ethologist. Short Biography: Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physiology of Behaviour in Bavaria (1955-1973), he wrote the...

Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (1853-1928) was a Dutch physicist, winner (with his pupil Pieter Zeeman) of the Nobel physics prize in 1902 for his work on the Zeeman effect. Short Biography...