Category Famous Nobel Laureates

               Albert Einstein, born on 14th March 1879, in Germany, was one of the most well-known and influential physicists of the 20th century.

               The Nobel Prize awarding institution, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, decided to reserve the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, and therefore awarded no physics prize that year. According to the statutes, a reserved prize can be awarded the year after, and Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for 1921 one year later, in 1922. Einstein was unable to attend the December 10th Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. He presented his Nobel speech on 11th July 1923, in Gothenburg.

               Einstein developed the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. The second pillar is considered as the quantum theory. Einstein is best known by the general public for his mass-energy equivalence formula E=mc2, which is considered “the world’s most famous equation”.

               He died on 18th April 1955, at Princeton, US.

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          Max Planck was born on 23rd April 1858 in Germany. Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family.

          Planck’s fame as a physicist rests primarily on his role as the originator of the quantum theory. Planck’s theory, won him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1918. He was elected to foreign membership of the Royal Society in 1926, and was awarded the Society’s Copley Medal in 1928.

          Max Planck led an unfortunate, tragic life after he was 50. In 1909, his first wife, Marie Merck died after 22 years of happy marriage, leaving Planck with two sons and twin daughters. The elder son Karl was killed in 1916. His two daughters Margarete and Emma died during childbirth.

          World War II brought further tragedy. Planck’s house in Berlin was completely destroyed by bombs in 1944. His younger son Erwin died a horrible death. Max Planck died on 4th October 1947.

          In 1948, the German scientific institution the Kaiser Wilhelm Society was renamed as the Max Planck Society, which now includes 83 institutions representing a wide range of scientific fields.

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               Guglielmo Marconi sent the first wireless message over 100 years ago. Marconi became known for his work on long-distance radio transmission, and for his development of Marconi’s law and a radio telegraph system.

               Marconi won the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Karl Ferdinand Braun, in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy.

               Guglielmo Marconi was born on 25th April 1874 in Bologna, Italy. In 1895, he succeeded in sending wireless signals over a distance of 2.4 kilometres.

               In 1896, Marconi took his apparatus to England, and demonstrated his system successfully in London. He founded the Marconi Telegraph Company in 1899. He established wireless communication between France and England across the English Channel.

               His experiment was significant, as it disproved the dominant belief of the Earth’s curvature affecting transmission. Marconi died on 20th July, 1937.

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               J.J. Thomson was a Nobel Prize winning physicist whose research led to the discovery of electrons. In the 1890s, J.J. Thomson managed to estimate their magnitude by performing experiments with charged particles in gases. In 1897, he showed that cathode rays consist of ‘electrons’ that  conduct electricity.

               Thomson was born on 18th December 1856 in Cheetham Hill, England. In 1894, Thomson began studying cathode rays, which are glowing beams of light that follow an electrical discharge in a high-vacuum tube. Thomson determined that all matter is made up of tiny particles that are much smaller than atoms. He originally called these particles ‘corpuscles’, although they are now called electrons.

               Thomson was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1884, and was its President from 1916-1920. He died at the age of 83, on 30th August 1940.

               His ashes were buried in the Nave of Westminster Abbey, joining other science greats such as Isaac Newton, Lord Kelvin, Charles Darwin, Charles Lyell, and Ernest Rutherford.

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            Henri Becquerel was born in Paris on 15th December 1852, in a distinguished family of scholars and scientists. He won the Physics Nobel Prize in the year 1903, along with Marie and Pierre Curie.

            He was the first person to discover evidence of radioactivity. He studied how uranium salts are affected by light. By accident, he discovered that uranium salts spontaneously emit a penetrating radiation that can be caught on a photographic plate. Further studies made it clear that this radiation was something new and not X-ray radiation. Thus he discovered a new phenomenon, radioactivity. The term radioactivity was coined by Marie Curie.  

            Becquerel was an esteemed member of the European scientific community. He also belonged to the Accademia dei Lincei and the Royal Academy of Berlin, amongst other scholarly societies. He was named an officer of the French Legion of Honour in 1900.

            Antoine Henri Becquerel died on 25th August, 1908. His work with radioactive materials, leaving him burned and scarred, may have contributed to his death. The SI unit for radioactivity, the Becquerel (Bq), is named after him.

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            Pierre Curie was a French physicist, and one of the pioneers in radioactivity. He and his wife, Marie Curie, along with Henri Becquerel, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, for their research on radiation.

            Pierre was born on 15th May, 1859. He received his early education at home before entering the Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne. In his early studies on crystallography, together with his brother Jacques, Pierre discovered piezoelectric effects.

            The marriage of Pierre and Marie Curie resulted in a scientific dynasty. Their children and grandchildren also became noted scientists. Pierre and Marie’s daughter Irene and their son-in-law Frederic Joliot-Curie were also physicists involved in the study of radioactivity, and each received Nobel prizes for their work as well. The Curies’ other daughter Eve married Henry Richardson Labouisse, Jr., who received a Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of UNICEF in 1965.

            Pierre was killed in a street accident in Paris on 19th April 1906.

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            Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person to win the award in two different fields – physics and chemistry. Marie curie is remembered for her discovery of Radium and Polonium, and her huge contribution to the fight against cancer.

            She was born in Warsaw in Poland on 7th November 1867. Marie married French physicist Pierre Curie on 26th July 1895.

            During World War I, she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to field hospitals. Later, Marie and her husband Pierre decided to hunt for the new element they suspected might be present in pitchblende.

            By the end of 1898 they announced the discovery of two new chemical elements. The first element they discovered was Polonium, named by Marie to honour her homeland. The second element the couple discovered was Radium, which they named after the Latin word for ray.

            She shared the Nobel Prize with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, the original discoverer of radioactivity.

            Marie Curie died in 1934, aged 66, of aplastic anaemia from exposure to radiation in the course of her scientific research.

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        The German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen was the first Nobel recipient in Physics. He was awarded Nobel Prize in the year 1901 for his  remarkable achievement in discovering X-rays.

            Born on 27th March 1845, in Germany, Röntgen was the first person to systematically produce and detect electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays. Röntgen is considered the father of diagnostic radiology.

            To highlight the unknown nature of his discovery, he called them X-rays, though they are still known as Roentgen-rays as well.

            He took the very first picture using X-rays of his wife Anna Bertha’s hand. When she saw her skeleton she exclaimed “I have seen my death!”

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            Malala Yousafzai was born on 12th July 1997, in Mingora in Swat Valley, Pakistan. She grew up witnessing the miserable conditions of girl children in her native village in north-west Pakistan, where the local Taliban had at times, banned girls from attending school.

            From 2009, she started blogging for the BBC about her experiences during the Taliban’s growing influence in her native region. As a young girl, Malala Yousafzai defied the Taliban in Pakistan and demanded that girls be allowed to receive an education, which resulted in the Taliban issuing a death threat against her.

            She was shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in 2012. She survived, but underwent several surgeries in the UK, where she lives today. In addition to her schooling, she continues her work for the right of girls to education.

            She was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. In 2014, she was nominated again and won, becoming the youngest person to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was announced as the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Kailash Satyarthi of India.

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            Wangari Maathai was an internationally renowned Kenyan politician and environmental activist. She served as the country’s assistant minister of environment, natural resources, and wildlife. She was born on 1st April 1940, in Neyri in Kenya.

            In 1977, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on the planting of trees, environmental conservation, and women’s rights. The movement was initiated to draw attention, and attend to environmental and domestic hardships faced by rural women in Kenya.

            Through the Green Belt Movement Maathai assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees. The Green Belt Movement encouraged the women to work together to plant trees and receive a small monetary token for their work.

            In 2004, Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Maathai died on 25th September 2011.

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