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Ten Scientific Bios Waiting to be Written

Writer's picture: Mishkat BhattacharyaMishkat Bhattacharya

My last two posts have been about biographies of scientists (Roy Glauber and Srinivas Ramanujan). While writing these, I began looking around in the scientific biography space and noticed a number of gaps.


Below is a short list of missing biographies that I thought would be nice to have - authors/biographers, please take note!


The List


In no particular order (the only qualification is that the subjects should not be alive), they are:


i) Lagrange : One of the greatest mathematicians of all time. His - Lagrangian - formulation of Newtonian mechanics has been very influential. He is one of pioneers of the calculus of variations.


There's plenty to write about: his Italian birth and his French citizenship, his latecoming to mathematics (at 17), his mathematical service to artillery and ballistics, his exchanges with Euler, his two decades of service at the court of King Frederick of Prussia, his life during the French revolution.


ii) J. M. Charcot: Sometimes considered to be the father of neurology; famous for his investigations of hysteria and hypnosis, he was the first to describe multiple sclerosis. He taught: Freud, Binet, William James, de la Tourette (after whom Tourette's syndrome is named).


iii) Lars Onsager: Nobel prize in Chemistry 1968. A great theoretical physicist who famously solved the two-dimensional Ising model (because 'he had a lot of time' during World War II), among other things.


Things to write about: his early childhood in Norway, his first degree in chemical engineering, his confrontation of Debye to inform him of the mistake in his theory of electrolytes (Debye was impressed enough to hire Onsager as an assistant), his dismissal from Johns Hopkins for poor teaching, his move to Brown (where his course on Statistical Mechanics was dubbed Sadistical Mechanics by his students), then to Yale and finally to Miami.


iv) A. K. Raychaudhuri: A general relativist whose 'Raychaudhuri Equation' is a crucial component of Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems (for which Penrose received his Nobel).

Things to write about: His mathematician father, his four years of experimental research which convinced him to move to theory, the refusal of S. N. Bose to discuss Raychaudhuri's work with him, how he worked essentially by himself to arrive at his pioneering research.


v) Harish Chandra: A great mathematician who contributed, among other topics, to group theory. Facts of biographical interest: His PhD under Dirac, his switch from physics to math (famously memorialized by his conversation with Freeman Dyson, who was switching the other way); his interactions with Borel and Weil; the fact that many of his papers are exactly 33 or 66 printed pages long (from his 50 or 100 handwritten pages).


vi) Freeman Dyson: A famous mathematician with numerous scientific contributions (including some fun ones, like the idea of self-replicating spacecraft, or Astrochicken). The son of a social worker mother and a musician father, a mathematical prodigy, Dyson became a professor at Cornell without ever getting a PhD, was controversial for his opposition to theories of climate change, his support of ESP, and his general scientific iconoclasm. He has an autobiography, but it is epistolary; I would like to see a proper biography.


vii) Kenneth Wilson: Nobel Prize in Physics 1982. A physicist who made deep contributions to the theory of phase transitions (how water turns to steam, to give a simple example). Bio highlights: His father, who was a chemist at Harvard, and who tried to teach him, unsuccessfully, group theory; his thesis under Murray Gell-Mann; his preference for a faculty position at Cornell because it had a good folk-dancing group; his achievement of tenure without publishing a single paper (surely a feat even more unique than the Nobel prize); his seminal work on the renormalization group (nothing to do with the folk-dancing group).


viii) Michael Atiyah : Fields medal 1966. One of the greatest geometers of the last hundred years. Interest: Early childhood in Sudan, PhD under Hodge at Cambridge, many collaborations with other famous mathematicians. Most of his work is too sophisticated for my understanding. Would be nice if someone wrote an accessible biography.


ix) John Pople: Chemistry Nobel prize 1998. A pioneer of computational methods in chemistry. Facts worth writing about: He picked up calculus from a book discarded in the wastepaper basket; often injected artificial mistakes in his homework at school to avoid coming off as too clever; but was discovered after he succumbed to the temptation of winning a math competition; ended up at Cambridge; claims that his attempts at piano led to his neighbor (the philosopher Wittgenstein) leaving the university; his movement from pure to applied mathematics, from physics eventually to chemistry.


x) J.W. Gibbs: One of the fathers of statistical mechanics and of physical chemistry, and a pioneer of vector calculus. Highlights: was one of the earliest PhDs in the US, a doctorate from Yale, he taught Latin as well as Natural Philosophy, never married, was a good horseman; Einstein said he would not have written some his papers had he been aware of Gibbs' work (it was so good); the Chair created in his name at Yale was at one time occupied by Onsager.


Afterword


The total absence of women from this list might be a good sign - biographies have been written of all the female scientists I could think of. Would be happy to learn of any gaps - that would make for a separate post.


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