On The Side: 10 Eminent Part-Time Scientists

Nowadays a scientific career is a substantial undertaking, requiring many years of training and preparation, resources from agencies, a relatively stable job at a university or research institute, etc.

This post is about some scientists who gained eminence in science while their main employment was in another profession. One wonders if this is still possible today; in any case, here are some examples for inspiration:

1. Leibniz: The co-inventor of calculus (along with Newton). Leibniz was a polymath who never held an academic position, serving instead mainly as an advisor to rulers and politicians.

2. Ben Franklin: Inventor of the lightning rod and bifocals. He was a printer.

3. Mendel: Gregor Mendel was the founder of modern genetics. He was a monk.

4. Anton van Leewenhoek: The father of microscopy. He was a draper by profession.

5. Einstein: Early in his professional career, Einstein was a clerk in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. In this capacity, he published earth-shaking papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect. After seven years in the patent office, he became a professor at the University of Zurich.

6. Fermat: Best known for his work in number theory (including 'Fermat's Last Theorem' proved by Andrew Wiles), Fermat's day job was that of a judge. His bachelor's degree was in law. He apparently 'bought' the position of a councilor in the Parlement de Toulouse, at which served until his end.

7. Joule: James Prescott Joule has the unit of energy named after him. He was a brewer.

8. Oliver Heaviside: Heaviside independently developed vector calculus, which he used to express Maxwell's equations in the compact form we currently know them in. Heaviside worked as a telegraph operator in his youth and never held an academic position.

9. Ramanujan: One of the great exponents of number theory, among other fields. He was never formally trained in mathematics, and discovered many of his results while he was an accounting clerk.

10. Yuval Ne'eman: Famous for his work in high energy physics (classification of strongly interacting particles). I have included him here because at the time he made his discoveries, he was not only a (somewhat older) graduate student in physics (working with Nobel laureate Abdus Salam), but also the Israeli military attache in London.