Assignment In Physics

Give 5 physicist and their contributions with pictures and short autobiography .

Submitted BY : Monia Lantaca

Submitted To : Ms. Mata

Galileo Galilei
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performed fundamental observations, experiments, and mathematical analyses in astronomy and physics; discovered mountains and craters on the moon, the phases of Venus, and the four largest satellites of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede

Biography
Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, Italy on February 15, 1564. He was the oldest of seven children. His father was a musician and wool trader, who wanted his son to study medicine as there was more money in medicine. At age eleven, Galileo was sent off to study in a Jesuit monastery. Galileo Galilei - Rerouted from Religon to Science After four years, Galileo had announced to his father that he wanted to be a monk. This was not exactly what father had in mind, so Galileo was hastily withdrawn from the monastery. In 1581, at the age of 17, he entered the University of Pisa to study medicine, as his father wished. Galileo Galilei - Law of the Pendulum At age twenty, Galileo noticed a lamp swinging overhead while he was in a cathedral. Curious to find out how long it took the lamp to swing back and forth, he used his pulse to time large and small swings. Galileo discovered something that no one else had ever realized: the period of each swing was exactly the same. The law of the pendulum, which would eventually be used to regulate clocks, made Galileo Galilei instantly famous. Except for mathematics, Galileo Galilei was bored with university. Galileo's family was informed that their son was in danger of flunking out. A compromise was worked out, where Galileo would be tutored full-time in mathematics by the mathematician of the Tuscan court. Galileo's father was hardly overjoyed about this turn of events, since a mathematician's earning power was roughly around that of a musician, but it seemed that this might yet allow Galileo to successfully complete his college education. However, Galileo soon left the University of Pisa without a degree. Galileo Galilei Mathematics To earn a living, Galileo Galilei started tutoring students in mathematics. He did some experimenting with floating objects, developing a balance that could tell him that a piece of, say, gold was 19.3 times heavier than the same volume of water. He also started

campaigning for his life's ambition: a position on the mathematics faculty at a major university. Although Galileo was clearly brilliant, he had offended many people in the field, who would choose other candidates for vacancies. Galileo Galilei - Dante's Inferno Ironically, it was a lecture on literature that would turn Galileo's fortunes. The Academy of Florence had been arguing over a 100-year-old controversy: What were the location, shape, and dimensions of Dante's Inferno? Galileo Galilei wanted to seriously answer the question from the point of view of a scientist. Extrapolating from Dante's line that "[the giant Nimrod's] face was about as long/And just as wide as St. Peter's cone in Rome," Galileo deduced that Lucifer himself was 2,000 arm-length long. The audience was impressed, and within the year, Galileo had received a three-year appointment to the University of Pisa, the same university that never granted him a degree! The Leaning Tower of Pisa At the time that Galileo arrived at the University, some debate had started up on one of Aristotle's "laws" of nature, that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. Aristotle's word had been accepted as gospel truth, and there had been few attempts to actually test Aristotle's conclusions by actually conducting an experiment! According to legend, Galileo decided to try. He needed to be able to drop the objects from a great height. The perfect building was right at hand--the Tower of Pisa, 54 meters tall. Galileo climbed up to the top of the building carrying a variety of balls of varying size and weight, and dumped them off of the top. They all landed at the base of the building at the same time (legend says that the demonstration was witnessed by a huge crowd of students and professors). Aristotle was wrong. However, Galileo Galilei continued to behave rudely to his colleagues, not a good move for a junior member of the faculty. "Men are like wine flasks," he once said to a group of students. "...look at....bottles with the handsome labels. When you taste them, they are full of air or perfume or rouge. These are bottles fit only to pee into!"Not surprisingly, the University of Pisa chose not to renew Galileo's contract. Necessity is the Mother of Invention Galileo Galilei moved on to the University of Padua. By 1593, he was desperate in need of additional cash. His father had died, so Galileo was the head of his family, and personally responsible for his family. Debts were pressing down on him, most notably, the dowry for one of his sisters, which was paid in installments over decades (a dowry could be thousands of crowns, and Galileo's annual salary was 180 crowns). Debtor's prison was a real threat if Galileo returned to Florence. What Galileo needed was to come up with some sort of device that could make him a tidy profit. A rudimentary thermometer (which, for the first time, allowed temperature variations to be measured) and an ingenious device to raise water from aquifers found no market. He found greater success in 1596 with a military compass that could be used to accurately aim cannonballs. A modified civilian version that could be used for land surveying came out in 1597, and ended up earning a fair amount of money for Galileo. It helped his profit margin that 1) the instruments were sold for three times the cost of manufacture, 2) he also offered classes on how to use the instrument, and 3) the actual toolmaker was paid dirt-poor wages. A good thing. Galileo needed the money to support his siblings, his mistress (a 21 year old with a reputation as a woman of easy habits), and his three children (two daughters and a boy). By 1602, Galileo's name was famous enough to help bring in students to the University, where Galileo was busily experimenting with magnets.

 Willebrord Snell
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discovered law of refraction (Snell's law)

Biography
Willebrord Snell's name appears as Snel or Snel van Royen. It is also commonly given as Willebrordus Snellius, the Latin version of Willebrord Snell, which he used for all his publications. His father was Rudolph Snell (1546-1613), the professor of mathematics at Leiden, and his mother was Machteld Cornelisdochter from an leading family from Oudewater. Willebrord, the eldest of his parents' three children, was named after his paternal grandfather. His two younger brothers were Jacob (who died in 1599 aged 16) and Hendrik (who died in childhood). Let us make a comment on Willebrord's date of birth. Some biographies of Snell give 1591 as the year of his birth but this is simply an error copied from an old biography. Others give the year as 1580 or 1581 but claim that his date of birth is unknown. In fact no record of his birth exists but his date of birth can be deduced with a fair degree of certainty from a letter his father wrote on his son's birthday. See [3] for further details. Rudolph Snell (1546-1613), although appointed as an extraordinary professor of mathematics at the University of Leiden in 1581, was a broad scholar who did not have a great deal of mathematical skill. His teaching was based mainly on the work of Peter Ramus although the university authorities tried to persuade him to teach more Euclid and less Ramus. He had taught Greek, Latin, Hebrew and the liberal arts in a high school earlier in his career and he had studied medicine and Aristotle's works. In addition to his university work, Rudolphus ran his own private school and, in his house near the university, he boarded a large number of students. It is in this house, filled with students, in which Willebrord grew up. His schooling was from his father who taught him Latin, Greek and philosophy. He had no other education before entering university but since his father ran a school this is not remarkable. Rudolphus would have liked his son to study law at university but Willebrord was keen to study mathematics and, continuing to live at home, he became a private pupil of Ludolph Van Ceulen. By 1600 Snell was studying law and teaching mathematics at the university on days when the professor was not teaching. From 1600 he travelled to various European countries, mostly discussing astronomy. He visited Adriaan van Roomen in Wrzburg where he was professor of medicine and "Mathematician to the Chapter". After spending a while in Wrzburg, the two mathematicians went to Prague where Snell was introduced to Tycho Brahe by van Roomen. Several years earlier Snell's father had arranged for him to be educated in Prague in an exchange with Brahe's son who would have been educated in Leiden but the arrangement was never put into practice. Snell spent some time with Brahe assisting him in making observations and clearly learnt much during this visit. The valuable experience came to an end in October 1601, however, when Brahe died. During this visit he got to know Johannes Kepler who was Brahe's assistant at the time. Snell, still in the company of van Roomen, continued visits to mathematicians in various German towns

such as Joannes Praetorius in Altdorf, Michael Mstlin in Tbingen, and Wilhelm Hatzfeld and Christophorus Vulteius in Hersfeld. He returned to his father's home in Leiden in the spring of 1602 and began preparing manuscripts for publication. In 1603 he went to Paris where his studies of law continued but he also had many contacts with mathematicians. After this visit he gave up the study of law and spent most of the rest of his life in his hometown of Leiden. Although Snell had no official position at the University of Leiden at this time he began teaching there to assist his father whose health was beginning to fail. For several years the two formed a good team teaching mathematics in Leiden. Slowly Snell's position at Leiden became more official. In 1609 he was assigned teaching at 8 o'clock every Saturday morning. In July of the following year daily afternoon teaching was added and by 1612 he was receiving additional payment for his work. At this stage he was promised the chair of mathematics when his father retired and Snell took the opportunity created by having a low teaching load to publish translations, commentaries and editions of several works. These included commentaries on, and editions of, works by Ramus as well as translations of works by Stevin and Van Ceulen. It will not have escaped the reader's notice that Snell, like his father, was keen on Ramus. This was undoubtedly due to his father's influence as seen by a letter Snell wrote to his father in 1607 (see for example [3]):Because you had stimulated me from my youth onwards to apply myself truly and fully to scholarship, and spurred me on when I hesitated, nothing was more important to me than to examine more attentively the exactness, clearness and brevity in the proofs of the ancients by means of your precepts, as rules and norms, because your Apollo [Ramus] resolutely urged to do so in his 'Prooemium Mathematicum'. Other major contributions he made around this time, showing vastly more mathematical skills than his father, involve the restoration of books by Apollonius on plane loci which had been lost but an outline of their contents had been preserved by Pappus. He published two of these under a Greek title which may be translated as The Revived Geometry of Cutting off of a Ratio and Cutting off of an Area (1607). He also published Apollonius Batavus (1608) containing a reconstruction of a third work by Apollonius. Further work on Apollonius which Snell produced at this time was never published and has been lost. Snell received the degree for Master of Arts from Leiden on 12 July 1608 after defending theses on artes liberales: grammatica, rhetorica, logica, arithmetica, geometria, analysis/algebra, physica, optica, astronomia, geographia, gnonomica, statica and ethica. He married Maria de Langhe, the daughter of Janneke Symons and Laurens Adriaens de Langhe, a burgomaster of Schoonhoven, in August 1608. The couple had at least seven children (the statement in his funeral oration that he had 18 children seems unlikely), only three of whom survived to adulthood. On 8 February 1613 he succeeded his father as professor of mathematics at the University of Leiden. The arrangement was that he should take over the teaching duties since his father was too ill to continue but, should his father recover, he had to stand down. Since Rudolph died a month later, Snell was required to continue teaching but he struggled to get proper recognition from the University of Leiden. He received a higher salary in February 1614 but was still getting between 1/3 and 1/2 of the salary of other professors. He was made a full professor of mathematics in February 1615 but his salary was not increased. Slowly he received increases but only in 1618 did he receive what he considered the proper amount for his position. In 1626, at the age of 46, Snell died from colic which caused a fever and paralysis of his arms and legs. His illness lasted two weeks [3]:When Snell had fallen ill, the medical doctors ... had been consulted, but they had not been able to prevent the deterioration of his situation. In the evening of 30 October, [the doctors] went to visit Snell to see the effects of a new medicine. This had not helped at all and after giving him a suppository for some relief, they left. Snell had dinner with his wife. Because he was not able to walk, his servants had to lift him up. He then suddenly lost consciousness and died, 46 years old. He was buried on 4 November in the Pieterskerk in Leiden. Twenty students carried his coffin. Let us now look briefly at the contributions he made after being appointed as a professor at Leiden. In 1617 he published Eratosthenes Batavus, which contains his methods for

measuring the Earth. He proposed the method of triangulation and this work is the foundation of geodesy. Bowie writes [6]:Willebrord Snell ... made a great advance over the methods used by his predecessors by introducing trigonometrical methods in the measurement of distances across country. He was really the originator of triangulation, which is now the universally employed method in surveying and mapping large areas. He published a book in Leiden describing his work in 1617. In observing the angles of the triangles of his arc he used a quadrant of a circle of about two feet in radius. This was graduated to two minutes and readings were estimated to single minutes. In this work Snell attempted to measure the circumference of the earth and so required a considerable number of measurements. To make these he had to travel quite widely in the Netherlands but leaving his family in Leiden caused him unhappiness. He used as a baseline the distance from his house to the local church spire, then built a system of triangles which allowed him to determine the distance between the towns of Alkmaar and Bergen-op-Zoom which is around 130 km. He chose these towns since they were approximately on the same meridian (modern data gives Alkmaar 4 45' 0" East and Bergen-op-Zoom 4 18' 0" East). His measurements were surprising accurate allowing him to deduce a good value for the radius of the earth. He dedicated Eratosthenes Batavus to the States General which was a good move financially since in return they awarded him a sum amounting to almost half his annual salary. Throughout his career Snell was interested in astronomy and published several works on that topic some, but not all, of which contained data from his own observations. For example his Observationes Hassiacae (1618) was a work which he wrote using data from the observations of other astronomers including Tycho Brahe and Joost Brgi, while Descriptio Cometae (1619) contains his own observations of the comet which appeared in November 1618. In this latter work Snell strongly criticised Aristotle and stressed how harmful to the development of science it was to continue to treat his views with such reverence. Of course, in so doing Snell was following the teaching of Ramus and of his own father. Despite his attack on Aristotle, Snell did not accept Copernicus's heliocentric system but firmly believed in an Earth centred system. Snell also improved the classical method of calculating approximate values of by polygons which he published in Cyclometricus (1621). Using his method 96 sided polygons gives correct to 7 places while the classical method yields only 2 places. Van Ceulen's 35 places could be found with polygons of 230 sides rather than 262. In fact Van Ceulen's 35 places of appear in print for the first time in this book by Snell. Although he discovered the law of refraction now known as "Snell's law" in 1621, a basis of modern geometric optics, he did not publish it and only in 1703 did it become known when Christiaan Huygens published Snell's result in Dioptrica. There is a manuscript by Snell's which is an outline of a treatise he intended to write on optics. It is now in the library of the University of Amsterdam and known as the 'Amsterdam manuscript'. Klaus Hentschel in [10] tries to construct the path which led Snell to discover Snell's law:Because of his geodetic work in which he pioneered the method of triangulation, Snell already had considerable experience with trigonometric functions; indicative of this are the two allusions to geodesics in the Amsterdam manuscript, one of them directly before the law of refraction .... Other remarks in the manuscript reveal that Snell had studied the existing literature on optics, particularly on refraction; various passages in the manuscript are analogous in formulation and sequence to other treatises as shown by his marginal notes and occasional references to other texts interspersed throughout the manuscript. Snell showed special interest in Ibn al-Haytham's experimentum elegans .... He sought a geometrical description of the refractaria .... This search led him to find the law of refraction in the secant form .... Snell studied the loxodrome, the path on the sphere that makes constant angle with the meridians. This appears in Tiphys batavus published in 1624, a work in which he studied navigation. The work was in two parts, one a theoretical piece of mathematics, the other devoted to practical applications.

 Blaise Pascal
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Biography

discovered that pressure applied to an enclosed fluid is transmitted undiminished to every part of the fluid and to the walls of its container (Pascal's principle)

Birth: June 19, 1623 in Clermont-Ferrand, France Death: August 19, 1662 in Paris, France Nationalit French y: Blaise Pascal, French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist, considered one of the great minds in Western intellectual history. Inventor of the first mechanical adding machine. Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand on June 19, 1623, and his family settled in Paris in 1629. Under the tutelage of his father, Pascal soon proved himself a mathematical prodigy, and at the age of 16 he formulated one of the basic theorems of projective geometry, known as Pascal's theorem and described in his Essai pour les coniques (Essay on Conics, 1639). In 1642 he invented the first mechanical adding machine. Pascal proved by experimentation in 1648 that the level of the mercury column in a barometer is determined by an increase or decrease in the surrounding atmospheric pressure rather than by a vacuum, as previously believed. This discovery verified the hypothesis of the Italian physicist Evangelista Torricelli concerning the effect of atmospheric pressure on the equilibrium of liquids. Six years later, in conjunction with the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, Pascal formulated the mathematical theory of probability, which has become important in such fields as actuarial, mathematical, and social statistics and as a fundamental element in the calculations of modern theoretical physics. Pascal's other important scientific contributions include the derivation of Pascal's law or principle, which states that fluids transmit pressures equally in all directions, and his investigations in the geometry of infinitesimal. His methodology reflected his emphasis on empirical experimentation as opposed to analytical, a priori methods, and he believed that human progress is perpetuated by the accumulation of scientific discoveries resulting from such experimentation. Pascal espoused Jansenism and in 1654 entered the Jansenist community at Port Royal, where he led a rigorously ascetic life until his death eight years later. In 1656 he wrote the famous 18 Lettres provinciales (Provincial Letters), in which he attacked the Jesuits for their attempts to reconcile 16th-century naturalism with orthodox Roman Catholicism.

His most positive religious statement appeared posthumously (he died August 19, 1662); it was published in fragmentary form in 1670 as Apologie de la religion Chrtienne (Apology of the Christian Religion). In these fragments, which later were incorporated into his major work, he posed the alternatives of potential salvation and eternal damnation, with the implication that only by conversion to Jansenism could salvation be achieved. Pascal asserted that whether or not salvation was achieved, humanity's ultimate destiny is an afterlife belonging to a supernatural realm that can only be known intuitively. Pascal's final important work was Penses sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (Thoughts on Religion and on Other Subjects), also published in 1670. In the Penses Pascal attempted to explain and justify the difficulties of human life by the doctrine of original sin, and he contended that revelation can be comprehended only by faith, which in turn is justified by revelation. Pascal's writings urging acceptance of the Christian life contain frequent applications of the calculations of probability; he reasoned that the value of eternal happiness is infinite and that although the probability of gaining such happiness by religion may be small it is infinitely greater than by any other course of human conduct or belief. A reclassification of the Penses, a careful work begun in 1935 and continued by several scholars, does not reconstruct the Apologie, but allows the reader to follow the plan that Pascal himself would have followed. Pascal was one of the most eminent mathematicians and physicists of his day and one of the greatest mystical writers in Christian literature. His religious works are personal in their speculation on matters beyond human understanding. He is generally ranked among the finest French polemicists, especially in the Lettres provinciales, a classic in the literature of irony. Pascal's prose style is noted for its originality and, in particular, for its total lack of artifice. He affects his readers by his use of logic and the passionate force of his dialectic.

Jean-Babtiste Biot
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studied polarization of light; co-discovered that intensity of magnetic field set up by a current flowing through a wire varies inversely with the distance from the wire

Biography
Jean-Baptiste Biot's father was Joseph Biot, whose ancestors were farmers in Lorraine, had achieved an important role working in the Treasury. Jean-Baptiste was educated at the college of Louis-le-Grand in Paris, where he specialised in classics. He completed his studies at Louis-le-Grand in 1791 following which, since his father wanted him to make a career in commerce, he took private lessons in mathematics from Antoine-Rene Mauduit who was professor of mathematics at the Collge de France. Joseph Biot then sent his son to Le Havre to become a clerical assistant to a merchant. His job there consisted of copying vast numbers of letters (we have to be thankful for photocopiers!) which bored Biot so much that he volunteered for the army. He joined the French army in September 1792, and served in the artillery at the Battle of Hondschoote in September 1793. In this battle the French defeated the British and Hanoverian soldiers besieging Dunkirk. After the battle Biot, suffering from an illness, decided to leave the army and return to his parents. As he was walking towards Paris, he was befriended by an important person who passed in his carriage. He took Biot in his carriage to Paris where he (Biot) was arrested as a deserter (he was still in uniform) and brought before a revolutionary committee. This would have had serious consequences for Biot had not the stranger intervened and he was set free. Despite Biot's efforts, he was not able to identify the important stranger and thank him. It took Biot some months to recover from the illness during which time he continued with his studies of mathematics. He took the entrance examinations for the cole des Ponts et Chauses and was accepted in January 1794. The cole Polytechnique was founded later in 1794 (actually named 'cole centrale des travaux publics' for its first year) and Biot transferred there in November of that year. Gaspard Monge, one of the founders of l'cole Polytechnique who taught the first intake of students, quickly realised Biot's potential. Biot, however, quickly became involved in student politics and was made a section leader. There was an attempted insurrection by the royalists against the Convention and Biot took part. He was captured by government forces and taken prisoner. Had it not been for Monge, who could not see someone with such talents remain in jail, or even die, pleading successfully for his release his promising career might have ended. It is not surprising that for a second time he had come close to a death sentence, giving the dangerous times in Revolutionary France through which he lived. He returned to his studies at the cole Polytechnique, befriending a fellow student, Simon-Denis Poisson, and graduated in 1797. He had found a patron in SylvestreFranois Lacroix who was highly influential in helping Biot develop his career. He became Professor of Mathematics at the cole Centrale de l'Oise at Beauvais in 1797. It might seems remarkable that even someone as able as Biot could move from being an

undergraduate straight into a professorship. However, things had worked in his favour [7]:The Convention, in a law of 25 February 1795 had called for a system of coles centrales, one in each large town, to replace the collges of the ancien rgime as seats of secondary education. The curricula of the new schools was practical and modern and included two years devoted to mathematics, experimental physics and chemistry. These subjects had never been taught before on a high school level, so, inevitably, there was a shortage of qualified teachers. Biot got to know of the vacant mathematics professorship through his friendship with Barnab Brisson, the son of Antoine Franois Brisson de Beauvais, while studying at l'cole Polytechnique. Through Barnab Brisson, Biot had got to know his sister Gabrielle. Although Gabrielle was only sixteen years old, they married in 1797 soon after Biot took up his position at Beauvais. Biot taught Gabrielle mathematics and physics so that she might translate into French a German text by Ernst Gottfried Fischer. It was Claude Louis Berthollet who had asked Biot to make the translation which was published as Physique mcanique in 1806. Biot's wife was well educated and fluent in German, so her translation was excellent. However, in line with the practice of the time, the book records Biot himself as the translator rather than his wife. Biot and his wife had a son Edouard Constant Biot who was born in 1803. It was largely through Lacroix that Biot had been appointed at Beauvais and Lacroix advised him frequently through the first years that he worked there. However, he also managed to get support in his career from Laplace. In fact in late 1799 Biot approached Laplace, who had taught him at l'cole Polytechnique, and offered to proof-read the Mcanique cleste which at that time was with the publisher. He didn't give up when Laplace said "No thanks" but persisted in a polite way and eventually Laplace agreed. Biot was, by this time, an entrance examiner at the cole Polytechnique so was frequently in Paris. He wrote [7]:From that time on, each time I went to Paris I brought my proof-reading work and personally presented it to M Laplace. He always received it with kindness, examined it and discussed it, and that gave me the opportunity to submit to him the difficulties that had stopped me. His willingness to explain them was boundless. But even he could not always do it without stopping to think for a long while. This usually occurred in places where he had used the expedient phrase 'it can easily be seen'. Certainly the effort required by Biot was enormous. He wrote near the end of 1799 [7]:I spent all of my days at this work [proof-reading the 'Mcanique cleste'] which I felt to be important in several respects, and I hope I have succeeded. I worked like a devil to finish it on time, and 1 remained at the task eighteen hours in a row the last day, without eating or drinking. Finally, thank heaven, it is finished, and I can flatter myself that I understand the 'Mecanique celeste'. If this were to be the only benefit I would get from it, it would still be a lot. Laplace was also interested in the research on mathematics which Biot was undertaking and gave him advice both on the material and on getting it published. In 1800 he was appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at the Collge de France, an appointment which was due mainly to the influence of Laplace. In 1800 Biot was elected an associate to the First Class of the Institute, replacing Jean Montucla who died in December 1799. Again Laplace's support was important to Biot in this election. In January 1803 the Institut was reorganised and Delambre became perpetual secretary, creating a vacancy in the Mathematics Section. Although Biot had produced excellent mathematics memoirs in the years up to 1800, he had concentrated on experimental physics from that time on. However, presumably to improve his chances of gaining a place in the Mathematics Section, he submitted a memoir on the axes of tautochronous curves just before the election was to take place. It was sufficient to keep his mathematical reputation high and he was elected on 11 April 1803. The first balloon ascent made for scientific purposes was by Biot and Joseph-Louis GayLussac from the garden of the Conservatoire des Arts on 24 August 1804. They achieved a height of 4000 metres and measured magnetic, electrical, and chemical properties of the atmosphere at various heights. In 1806, again with the support of Laplace, Biot was appointed as an assistant astronomer at the Bureau de Longitudes in addition to his other roles. On 3 September of that year he set out with Franois Arago to Formentera, in

the Balearic Islands, to complete earlier work begun there on calculating the measure of the arc of the meridian. They were still undertaking measurements when, in May 1808, Napoleon declared his brother Joseph Bonaparte as Spanish ruler and the War of Independence began. Biot and Arago must have looked extremely suspicious; two Frenchmen with sophisticated measuring instruments working on Spanish territory. Biot fled back to France immediately. Later in 1808, together with Claude-Louis Mathieu, he embarked on a series of measurements of the length of the seconds pendulum at different points on the meridian, in particular at Bordeaux and at Dunkirk. Both Mathieu and Biot received a prize from the Acadmie des Sciences in 1809 for this highly accurate work, and in 1812 they received a second prize from the Academy for their achievements. In 1809 Biot was appointed Professor of Physical Astronomy at the Faculty of Sciences. He held this position for over fifty years. Biot studied a wide range of mathematical topics, mostly on the applied mathematics side. He made advances in astronomy, elasticity, electricity and magnetism, heat and optics on the applied side while, in pure mathematics, he also did important work in geometry. He collaborated with Arago on refractive properties of gases. Biot, together with Felix Savart, discovered that the intensity of the magnetic field set up by a current flowing through a wire varies inversely with the distance from the wire. This is now known as Biot-Savart's Law and is fundamental to modern electromagnetic theory. Morris Kline, reviewing [8], writes:Biot depended entirely upon experiments to determine the interaction of a magnet and a straight line of electrical current and then inferred a mathematical law concerning the force between current and magnet. Light was the topic on which Biot devoted most time, making the major discovery of the laws of rotary polarization by crystalline bodies. Having discovered these laws he used them in analysis of saccharine solutions using an instrument called a polarimeter which he invented. For this work on the polarisation of light passing through chemical solutions he was awarded the Rumford Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1840. He had been elected as a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1815. One of his important works was Mmoire sur la figure de la terre (1827) which describes the shape of the Earth. Among his other major works we mention: Analyse de la mcanique cleste de M Laplace (1801); Trait analytique des courbes et des surfaces du second degr (1802); Recherches sur l'intgration des quations diffrentielles partielles et sur les vibrations des surfaces (1803); Essai de gomtrie analytique appliqu aux courbes et aux surfaces de second ordre (1806); Recherches exprimentales et mathmatiques sur les mouvements des molcules de la lumire autour de leur centre de gravit (1814); Trait de physique experimentale et mathmatique (1816); Precis de physique (1817); (with Arago) Recueil d'observations godsiques, astronomiques et physiques excutes en Espagne et cosse (1821); Mmoire sur la vraie constitution de l'atmosphre terrestre (1841); Trait lmentaire d'astronomie physique (1805); Recherches sur plusieurs points de l'astronomie gyptienne (1823); Recherches sur l'ancienne astronomie chinoise (1840); tudes sur l'astronomie indienne et sur l'astronomie chinoise (1862); Essai sur l'histoire gnrale des sciences pendant la Rvolution (1803); Discours sur Montaigne (1812); Lettres sur l'approvisionnement de Paris et sur le commerce des grains (1835); Traite d'astronomie physique (1850); and Mlanges scientifiques et littraires (1858). He tried twice for the post of Secretary to the Acadmie des Sciences and to improve his chances for election to this post he wrote Essai sur l'Histoire Gnrale des Sciences pendant la Rvolution. However he lost out in 1822 to Fourier for this post, then again when Fourier died in May 1830 he applied again for the post of Secretary, only to lose to Arago on this occasion. The rivalry between Arago and Biot was again evident in 1839 when different photographic processes were competing [10]:Arago and Biot, France's leading authorities in the field of optics, had spent the past thirty years disagreeing about the ability of optical instruments to represent the world. Photography became one more opportunity for them to disagree, and they did not shrink from the task. The debate extended beyond questions of assigning priority and apportioning credit. At its heart was the question of what the photographic surfaces showed, what relation the visible inscription bore to the real world.

Arago supported the Daguerre photographic process with silver plates while Biot championed an approach with paper soaked in a silver solution as developed by Henry Fox Talbot. This was not because he thought this process produced clearer photographs, rather it was because he believed that the images captured 'chemical radiation' invisible to the eye. We should note that the idea of 'chemical radiation' was widely believed at this time. Biot also believed that the photographic process should be one reserved for scientific use and not made available for public use. There was a period of collaboration between Biot and Talbot, the two exchanging letters frequently. Basically the photographic process became another tool for Biot to use in his investigations of light which had always been a major interest to him. As well as interests in almost every branch of science, Biot was interested in the history of the subject. He published works on this topic such as: Essai sur l'histoire gnrale des sciences pendant la Rvolution franaise (1803); Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de Newton (1822); Recherches sur plusieurs points de l'astronomie gyptienne appliques aux monuments astronomiques trouvs en gypte (1823); Sur la manire de calculer les positions des toiles relativement l'quateur et l'cliptique pour les poques anciennes (1823); Opuscule sur l'Astronomie ancienne des Chinois, des Indous et des Arabes (1840); Mmoire sur le Zodiaque de Denderah (1844); Prcis de l'histoire de l'Astronomie plantaire (1847); and tudes sur l'astronomie indienne et l'astronomie chinoise (1862). In [4] St Beuve says that Biot was endowed to the highest degree with all the qualities of curiosity, finesse, penetration, precision, ingenious analysis, method, clarity, in short with all the essential and secondary qualities, bar one, genius, in the sense of originality and invention. A contrasting comment by Olinthus Gregory in 1821 is:With regard to M Biot, I had an opportunity of pretty fully appreciating his character when we were together in the Zetland [= Shetland] Isles; and I do not hesitate to say that I never met so strange a compound of vanity, impetuosity, fickleness, and natural partiality, as is exhibited in his character. In addition to the honours we mentioned above, Biot was also honoured by being made chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1814 and commander in 1849. He was elected to the to the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettre in 1841 and to the French Academy in 1856.

 Thomas Young
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Biography

studied light and color; known for his double-slit experiment that demonstrated the wave nature of light

Thomas Young (13 June 1773 10 May 1829) was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs (specifically the Rosetta Stone) before Jean-Franois Champollion eventually expanded on his work. He was admired by, among others, Herschel and Einstein. Young made notable scientific contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony and Egyptology. Young belonged to a Quaker family of Milverton, Somerset, where he was born in 1773, the eldest of ten children. At the age of fourteen Young had learned Greek and Latin and was acquainted with French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Amharic.[1] Young began to study medicine in London in 1792, moved to Edinburgh in 1794, and a year later went to Gttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany where he obtained the degree of doctor of physics in 1796. In 1797 he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge.[2] In the same year he inherited the estate of his granduncle, Richard Brocklesby, which made him financially independent, and in 1799 he established himself as a physician at 48 Welbeck Street, London (now recorded with a blue plaque). Young published many of his first academic articles anonymously to protect his reputation as a physician. In 1801 Young was appointed professor of natural philosophy (mainly physics) at the Royal Institution. In two years he delivered 91 lectures. In 1802, he was appointed foreign secretary of the Royal Society, of which he had been elected a fellow in 1794. He resigned his professorship in 1803, fearing that its duties would interfere with his medical practice. His lectures were published in 1807 in the Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and contain a number of anticipations of later theories. In 1811 Young became physician to St. George's Hospital, and in 1814 he served on a committee appointed to consider the dangers involved in the general introduction of gas into London. In 1816 he was secretary of a commission charged with ascertaining the precise length of the second's or seconds pendulum (the length of a pendulum whose period is exactly 2 seconds), and in 1818 he became secretary to the Board of Longitude and superintendent of the HM Nautical Almanac Office. A few years before his death he became interested in life assurance,[3] and in 1827 he was chosen one of the eight foreign associates of the French Academy of Sciences. In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Thomas Young died in London on 10 May 1829, and was buried in the cemetery of St. Giles Church in Farnborough, Kent, England. Later scholars and scientists have praised Young's work although they may know him only through achievements he made in their fields. His contemporary Sir John Herschel called him a "truly original genius". Albert Einstein praised him in the 1931 foreword to an edition of Newton's Opticks. Other admirers include physicist Lord Rayleigh and Nobel laureate Philip Anderson.

Thomas Young's name has been adopted as the name of the London-based Thomas Young Centre, an alliance of academic research groups engaged in the theory and simulation of materials. Wave theory of light In Young's own judgment, of his many achievements the most important was to establish the wave theory of light. To do so, he had to overcome the century-old view, expressed in the venerable Isaac Newton's "Optics", that light is a particle. Nevertheless, in the early 19th century Young put forth a number of theoretical reasons supporting the wave theory of light, and he developed two enduring demonstrations to support this viewpoint. With the ripple tank he demonstrated the idea of interference in the context of water waves. With the two-slit, or double-slit experiment, he demonstrated interference in the context of light as a wave. In a paper entitled Experiments and Calculations Relative to Physical Optics, published in 1803, Young describes an experiment in which he placed a narrow card (approx. 1/30th in.) in a beam of light from a single opening in a window and observed the fringes of color in the shadow and to the sides of the card. He observed that placing another card before or after the narrow strip so as to prevent light from the beam from striking one of its edges caused the fringes to disappear.[4] This supported the contention that light is composed of waves.[5] Young performed and analyzed a number of experiments, including interference of light from reflection off nearby pairs of micrometer grooves, from reflection off thin films of soap and oil, and from Newton's rings. He also performed two important diffraction experiments using fibers and long narrow strips. In his Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts (1807) he gives Grimaldi credit for first observing the fringes in the shadow of an object placed in a beam of light. Within ten years, much of Young's work was reproduced and then extended by Fresnel. (Tony Rothman in Everything's Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology argues that there is no clear evidence that Young actually did the two-slit experiment. Young's modulus Young described the characterization of elasticity that came to be known as Young's modulus, denoted as E, in 1807, and further described it in his subsequent works such as his 1845 Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts.[6] However, the first use of the concept of Young's modulus in experiments was by Giordano Riccati in 1782 predating Young by 25 years.[7] Furthermore, the idea can be traced back to a paper by Leonhard Euler published in 1727, some 80 years before Thomas Young's 1807 paper. The Young's modulus relates the stress (pressure) in a body to its associated strain (change in length as a ratio of the original length); that is, stress = E strain, for a uniaxially loaded specimen. Young's modulus is independent of the component under investigation; that is, it is an inherent material property (the term modulus refers to an inherent material property). Young's Modulus allowed, for the first time, prediction of the strain in a component subject to a known stress (and vice versa). Prior to Young's contribution, engineers were required to apply Hooke's F = kx relationship to identify the deformation (x) of a body subject to a known load (F), where the constant (k) is a function of both the geometry and material under consideration. Finding k required physical testing for any new component, as the F = kx relationship is a function of both geometry and material. Young's Modulus depends only on the material, not its geometry, thus allowing a revolution in engineering strategies. Vision and colour theory Young has also been called the founder of physiological optics. In 1793 he explained the mode in which the eye accommodates itself to vision at different distances as depending on change of the curvature of the crystalline lens; in 1801 he was the first to describe astigmatism;[8] and in his Lectures he presented the hypothesis, afterwards developed by Hermann von Helmholtz, that colour perception depends on the presence in the retina of three kinds of nerve fibres which respond respectively to red, green and violet light. This foreshadowed the modern understanding of color vision, in particular the finding that the

eye does indeed have three color receptors which are sensitive to different wavelength ranges. YoungLaplace equation In 1804, Young developed the theory of capillary phenomena on the principle of surface tension.[9] He also observed the constancy of the angle of contact of a liquid surface with a solid, and showed how from these two principles to deduce the phenomena of capillary action. In 1805 Simon-Pierre Laplace, the French philosopher, discovered the significance of meniscus radii with respect to capillary action. In 1830 Carl Friedrich Gauss, the German mathematician, unified the work of these two scientists to derive the YoungLaplace equation, the formula that describes the capillary pressure difference sustained across the interface between two static fluids. Young was the first to define the term "energy" in the modern sense.

Young's equation and YoungDupr equation Youngs equation describes the contact angle of a liquid drop on a plane solid surface as a function of the surface free energy, the interfacial free energy and the surface tension of the liquid. Youngs equation was developed further some 60 years later by Dupr to account for thermodynamic effects, and this is known as the YoungDupr equation. Medicine In physiology Young made an important contribution to haemodynamics in the Croonian lecture for 1808 on the "Functions of the Heart and Arteries," and his medical writings included An Introduction to Medical Literature, including a System of Practical Nosology (1813) and A Practical and Historical Treatise on Consumptive Diseases (1815). Young devised a rule of thumb for determining a childs drug dosage. Youngs Rule states that the child dosage is equal to the adult dosage multiplied by the childs age in years, divided by the sum of 12 plus the childs age. Languages In an appendix to his Gttingen dissertation (1796; "De corporis hvmani viribvs conservatricibvs. Dissertatio.") there are four pages added proposing a universal phonetic alphabet (so as 'not to leave these pages blank'; lit.: "Ne vacuae starent hae paginae, libuit e praelectione ante disputationem habenda tabellam literarum vniuersalem raptim describere"). It includes 16 "pure" vowel symbols, nasal vowels, various consonants, and examples of these, drawn primarily from French and English. In his Encyclopdia Britannica article "Languages", Young compared the grammar and vocabulary of 400 languages. In a separate work in 1813, he introduced the term IndoEuropean languages, 165 years after the Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn proposed the grouping to which this term refers in 1647. Egyptian hieroglyphs Young was also one of the first who tried to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs, with the help of a demotic alphabet of 29 letters built up by Johan David kerblad in 1802 (14 turned out to be incorrect), but kerblad wrongly believed that demotic was entirely alphabetic. "Dr Young however showed that neither the alphabet of Akerblad, nor any modification of it which could be proposed, was applicable to any considerable part of the enchorial portion of the Rosetta inscription beyond the proper names."[3] By 1814 Young had completely translated the "enchorial" (demotic, in modern terms) text of the Rosetta Stone (he had a list with 86 demotic words), and then studied the hieroglyphic alphabet but initially failed to recognize that the demotic and hieroglyphic texts were paraphrases and not simple translations. Some of Young's conclusions appeared in the famous article "Egypt" he wrote for the 1818 edition of the Encyclopdia Britannica.

When the French linguist Jean-Franois Champollion in 1822 published a translation of the hieroglyphs and the key to the grammatical system, Young (and many others) praised his work. In 1823 Young published an Account of the Recent Discoveries in Hieroglyphic Literature and Egyptian Antiquities, in order to have his own work recognised as the basis for Champollion's system. In this he made it clear that many of his findings had been published and sent to Paris in 1816. Young had correctly found the sound value of six signs, but had not deduced the grammar of the language. Champollion was unwilling to share the credit. In the ensuing schism, strongly motivated by the political tensions of that time, the British championed Young, while the French supported Champollion. Champollion maintained that he alone had deciphered the hieroglyphs, although his understanding of the hieroglyphic grammar showed the same mistakes made by Young. However, after 1826, when Champollion was a curator in the Louvre he did offer Young access to demotic manuscripts. Music He developed Young temperament, a method of tuning musical instruments.