Physics, genetics, vaccines and spaceflight, all claimed under the same passport.
1Albert EinsteinNaturalised American who spent his last two decades at Princeton after reshaping physics.1000pts
2Richard FeynmanNobel-winning physicist who reworked quantum electrodynamics and explained it better than anyone.751pts
3Glenn T. SeaborgNobel chemist who co-discovered plutonium and nine other elements and reorganised the periodic table with the actinide series.716pts
4John BardeenThe only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, for the transistor in 1956 and the theory of superconductivity in 1972.716pts
5Linus PaulingThe only person with two unshared Nobel Prizes, for chemical bonding and for peace.704pts
6Vera RubinAstronomer whose measurements of galaxy rotation provided the strongest early evidence for dark matter.678pts
7Subrahmanyan ChandrasekharIndian-born Nobel astrophysicist at Chicago who calculated the mass limit beyond which a white dwarf star must collapse.657pts
8Barbara McClintockGeneticist who discovered transposable elements in maize decades before the field caught up.586pts
9Grace HopperComputer scientist and Navy rear admiral who built the first compiler and shaped COBOL, bringing programming closer to plain English.586pts
10Claude ShannonMathematician and engineer whose 1948 paper founded information theory and defined the bit as the unit of information.532pts
11Henrietta Swan LeavittHarvard astronomer who discovered the period-luminosity law of Cepheid stars, the yardstick Hubble used to measure the universe.532pts
12Edwin HubbleShowed the universe is full of other galaxies and that it is expanding.469pts
13Norman BorlaugAgronomist whose high-yield wheat drove the Green Revolution and won him the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.469pts
14Benjamin FranklinProved lightning was electrical, named positive and negative charge, and charted the Gulf Stream.469pts
15Jonas SalkDeveloped the first effective polio vaccine and declined to patent it.469pts
16J. Robert OppenheimerTheoretical physicist who led the Los Alamos laboratory during the Manhattan Project.469pts
17Annie Jump CannonHarvard astronomer who classified hundreds of thousands of stars and devised the spectral classification scheme still in use.469pts
18Irving LangmuirChemist at General Electric who won the 1932 Nobel Prize for surface chemistry and improved the incandescent lamp.469pts
19Enrico FermiItalian-born Nobel physicist who built the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, in 1942 and shaped nuclear and particle physics.469pts
20Josiah Willard GibbsFounded chemical thermodynamics and statistical mechanics from a quiet post at Yale.469pts
21Willard LibbyNobel chemist who developed radiocarbon dating, giving archaeology and geology a reliable clock.469pts
22Carl SaganPlanetary scientist who turned public science communication into a craft of its own.469pts
23Charles Richard DrewSurgeon whose blood-plasma research made large-scale blood banks possible.397pts
24Katherine JohnsonNASA mathematician whose orbital calculations put American astronauts into space and back.397pts
25Murray Gell-MannNobel physicist who proposed quarks and the eightfold way, bringing order to the zoo of subatomic particles.397pts
26Joseph HenryNineteenth-century physicist who discovered self-inductance, built powerful electromagnets and became the first Secretary of the Smithsonian.397pts
27Thomas EdisonInventor and industrial researcher whose Menlo Park laboratory produced the phonograph, a practical light bulb and the first modern research lab.397pts
28George Washington CarverAgricultural scientist at Tuskegee who promoted crop rotation and hundreds of uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes to revive Southern soils.397pts
29Ernest LawrencePhysicist who invented the cyclotron, won the 1939 Nobel Prize and founded the Berkeley laboratory that now bears his name.397pts
30Hans BetheGerman-born Nobel physicist who explained how stars produce energy through nuclear fusion.397pts
31James WatsonCo-authored the double-helix model of DNA with Francis Crick in 1953.313pts
32E. O. WilsonHarvard biologist who founded sociobiology, championed biodiversity and became the world's leading authority on ants.313pts
33Maria Goeppert MayerWon the Nobel for the nuclear shell model, the second woman to take the physics prize.313pts
34Robert A. MillikanNobel physicist whose oil-drop experiment measured the charge of the electron and confirmed Einstein's photoelectric equation.313pts
35Albert A. MichelsonPhysicist who measured the speed of light with record precision and became the first American Nobel laureate in science in 1907.313pts
36Jennifer DoudnaBiochemist who co-developed CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing and shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.313pts
37Robert H. GoddardPhysicist who launched the world's first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926 and laid the groundwork for spaceflight.213pts
38Rachel CarsonMarine biologist whose Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement.213pts
39Steven WeinbergNobel physicist who unified the electromagnetic and weak forces, a cornerstone of the Standard Model.213pts
40Kip ThorneTheoretical physicist who co-founded LIGO and shared the 2017 Nobel Prize for the first detection of gravitational waves.213pts
41Arthur ComptonNobel physicist whose discovery of the Compton effect proved that light carries momentum as particles.213pts
42John von NeumannHungarian-born mathematician at Princeton who founded game theory and designed the stored-program architecture used by nearly every computer.213pts
43Nikola TeslaSerbian-American engineer whose alternating-current motor and polyphase system became the basis of the world's electrical grids.0pts
44Thomas Hunt MorganGeneticist whose fruit-fly experiments proved that genes sit on chromosomes and earned the 1933 Nobel Prize.0pts
Photo credits
- Claude Shannon — Unknown authorUnknown author, CC BY 2.0
- Willard Libby — Willy Pragher, CC BY 3.0
- Murray Gell-Mann — World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0
- E. O. Wilson — Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Jennifer Doudna — Christopher Michel, CC BY-SA 4.0
- Steven Weinberg — Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0
- Kip Thorne — Cmichel67, CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments 1
Einstein spent his last two decades at Princeton. Franklin did his work before the country he is ranked for existed, true of nobody else here: https://youpick.best/articles/benjamin-franklin-ranked-many-ways
YP
ypb-teamAug 21
