Before Their Time

On the recent trip to Italy, talk arose of Ettore Majorana, the Italian scientist whose contributions are now considered fundamental in physics and valuable for applications like quantum computing. Ettore vanished without a trace at an early age (see below).

I became curious about scientists whose career was cut short at an early age. One might wonder how much they would have contributed if they had lived longer - but there is also the caveat that physics and mathematics are said to be young people's games.

An incomplete list below to browse through...(note the role played by the then incurable tuberculosis):

1. Niels Henrik Abel (26): In the work of about 7 years Abel made profound contributions to many areas of mathematics. His legacy ranges from the proof of the impossibility of solution of polynomial equations of degree 5, to elliptic functions. About 20 mathematical objects (e.g. theorems, equations, groups, functions, etc.) carry his name. The Abel prize in mathematics is named after him. Abel died from tuberculosis.

2. Sadi Carnot (36): One of the pioneers of thermodynamics. The maximum efficiency of a heat engine is named the Carnot limit. Carnot died of cholera.

   
   

3. William Clifford (33): The originator of Clifford algebras. These are a powerful framework for describing geometric transformations. They have applications in differential geometry, quantum mechanics and image processing. He died of tuberculosis.

4. Paul Ehrenfest (53): Ehrenfest's Theorem links quantum mechanics to classical mechanics (for some cases) and can be used as a starting point for the derivation of Schrodinger's equation. He was a student of Boltzmann. Ehrenfest died by his own hand.

   
   

5. Rosalind Franklin (37): She pioneered X-ray diffraction studies of DNA, resulting in the elucidation of its structure, and later of the tobacco mosaic virus. Franklin died of ovarian cancer.

6. Augustin Fresnel (39): A giant of optics. His work led to establishment of the wave theory. Fresnel died of tuberculosis.

   
   

7. Evariste Galois (20): He came up with a technique to determine whether any polynomial is solvable by radicals. This was a seminal contribution to the start of group theory. Gaois was killed in a duel.

   
   

8. Heinrich Hertz (36): Hertz famously experimentally proved the existence of electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell. He died from complications arising from surgery.

9. Ada Lovelace (36): She is credited with writing the first computer program (for the computer built by Charles Babbage). The programming language Ada was named after her. She died of cancer.

   
   

10. Ettore Majorana (32): Perhaps currently best known for his work on Majorana fermions, named after him, which are their own anti-particles, and are relevant to neutrino physics and quantum computation. He disappeared after writing a farewell note. There is a prize named after him.

    
    

11. Miriam Mirzakhani (40): She was a mathematician at Stanford, and the first woman to be awarded the Fields Medal, the equivalent of the Nobel prize in mathematics. Her main contributions were in geometry. She died of cancer.

    
    

12. James Clerk Maxwell (48): Maxwell united electricity and magnetism, and contributed greatly to statistical mechanics. I have heard people say he would have found special relativity if he had lived longer. He died of cancer.

    
    

13. Blaise Pascal (39): His contributions were to probability theory, hydrostatics, and mechanical calculation. He died, probably, of tuberculosis.

    
    

14. Srinivasa Ramanujam (32): A mathematical genius whose contributions were mainly in number theory. He died of amoebiasis.

15. Bernhard Riemann (39): Another genius whose mathematical contributions range over a number of fields; his work provides the mathematical structure underlying the general theory of relativity. He died of tuberculosis.