# The greatest scientists of all time

The scientists who appear most often in 'greatest scientists ever' rankings (one compilation of over 30 such lists puts Einstein, Newton, Curie and Darwin at the top), with the discovery each is remembered for.

- 200 votes · 23 items
- Sep 20, 2020 · Olivia Walker
- https://even.best/en/l/189/the-greatest-scientists-of-all-time

## Top 20

1. **Isaac Newton** (17 · ▲17 ▼0) — English physicist and mathematician (1643-1727): laws of motion, universal gravitation, calculus and optics.
2. **Albert Einstein** (16 · ▲18 ▼2) — German-born physicist (1879-1955): special and general relativity; Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 for the photoelectric effect.
3. **Marie Curie** (10 · ▲11 ▼1) — Polish-French physicist and chemist (1867-1934): radioactivity, polonium and radium; the first person to win two Nobel Prizes.
4. **Richard Feynman** (10 · ▲10 ▼0) — American physicist (1918-1988): quantum electrodynamics and Feynman diagrams; Nobel Prize 1965.
5. **Galileo Galilei** (9 · ▲10 ▼1) — Italian astronomer (1564-1642): telescope observations of Jupiter's moons and the father of the scientific method.
6. **Charles Darwin** (7 · ▲8 ▼1) — English naturalist (1809-1882): evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species (1859).
7. **Aristotle** (7 · ▲8 ▼1) — Greek philosopher (384-322 BC) who founded biology, logic and much of Western science.
8. **Dmitri Mendeleev** (7 · ▲8 ▼1) — Russian chemist (1834-1907) who created the periodic table of the elements.
9. **Rosalind Franklin** (7 · ▲8 ▼1) — English chemist (1920-1958) whose X-ray images revealed the double helix of DNA.
10. **James Clerk Maxwell** (7 · ▲7 ▼0) — Scottish physicist (1831-1879): the equations that unified electricity, magnetism and light.
11. **Max Planck** (7 · ▲7 ▼0) — German physicist (1858-1947), originator of quantum theory; Nobel Prize 1918.
12. **Nikola Tesla** (6 · ▲7 ▼1) — Serbian-American inventor (1856-1943): alternating-current systems and the induction motor.
13. **Alan Turing** (6 · ▲6 ▼0) — English mathematician (1912-1954): founder of computer science and codebreaker of Enigma.
14. **Michael Faraday** (5 · ▲7 ▼2) — English scientist (1791-1867): electromagnetic induction, the electric motor and the dynamo.
15. **Archimedes** (5 · ▲7 ▼2) — Greek mathematician and engineer from Syracuse (c. 287-212 BC): the principle of buoyancy and the lever.
16. **Gregor Mendel** (5 · ▲6 ▼1) — Austrian monk (1822-1884) whose pea experiments founded genetics.
17. **Niels Bohr** (4 · ▲8 ▼4) — Danish physicist (1885-1962): the quantum model of the atom; Nobel Prize 1922.
18. **Stephen Hawking** (4 · ▲5 ▼1) — English physicist (1942-2018): black-hole radiation and author of A Brief History of Time.
19. **Johannes Kepler** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — German astronomer (1571-1630): the three laws of planetary motion.
20. **Nicolaus Copernicus** (3 · ▲4 ▼1) — Polish astronomer (1473-1543) who put the Sun at the centre of the solar system.
21. **Antoine Lavoisier** (2 · ▲5 ▼3) — French chemist (1743-1794), father of modern chemistry; executed in the French Revolution.
22. **Louis Pasteur** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — French chemist and microbiologist (1822-1895): germ theory, pasteurisation and the rabies vaccine.
23. **Ibn al-Haytham** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Arab polymath (c. 965–1040) whose Book of Optics laid the foundations of modern optics and experimental method.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.