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Scientists Biographies for 5th and 6th Graders?
kimery asks: "My wife has just been named librarian for a 5th and 6th grade school. As part of the science program, students are required to read several science biographies over the course of the school year. The current biography collection consists mainly of dead (but oh so famous!) scientists. She'd like to expand the collection of science biographies, and would like to have your suggestions as to which scientists should be included. Bonus points for suggesting someone outside the 'usual suspects.' So, what scientists do you think would be interesting for a typical 5th/6th grade student?"
Putting into a kid's mind that you could make a lifetime of selectively breeding plants for size and tastiness is a good thing.
God spoke to me.
I attend a large private university in America and I only learned about Kurt Godel through a biography project last year. I have written many bios in my time and Godel is an incredible person. Even Einstein was good friends with him. Godel contributed so many great ideas to the world and is so poorly recognized.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
Richard Feynman's Curious Character autobiographies are great reading, though perhaps not age-appropriate.
Here's some biographies of the less conventional scientists:
Ada Byron Lovelace: The Lady and the Computer
Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius
Turing and the Computer: The Big Idea
Vito Volterra
Murray Gell-Mann because he named his quark theory The Eightfold Way, which automatically makes him kick ass.
If you don't know why Isaac Asimov kicks ass, you should be ashamed.
ResidntGeek
For no other good reason than to be the a member of the team that first "debugged" a computer by removal of the moth.
So says Grace Hopper Wikipedia entry.
That was all I could remember until I read the Wikipedia entry. More good stuff is there.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.
Richard Feynman
Charles Darwin
Ed Ricketts
Feynman because he is the exemplar of a truly clever person.
Charles Darwin because he had such an astonishingly insightful way of slowly accumulating information until he could see the "big picture".
Ed Ricketts because he had such an intensely committed life in biology that he is a wonderful example of how doing science can be an intensely fun life -- quite the opposite of the cold passionlessness one usually sees portrayed in science biographies
Évariste Galois is the immediate, obvious choice.
Of course Albert Einstein would probably be in the library, but it's worth making sure there's a good biography that explains his struggles as a child, his annus mirabilis, how his Nobel was for the photoelectric effect, what E=mc^2 and relativity really are, how he was invited to be PM of Israel, etc.
I suppose it's entirely appropriate for 5th and 6th graders to know there was indeed a real Nicholas Flamel.
Another fascinating biography is that of Thomas Midgley, the poor soul who came up with three ideas that seemed brilliant at the time: leaded fuels, CFCs, and a system of ropes and pulleys in his bed that strangled him.
And what middle-schooler would not appreciate the toilet humor in the life of Tycho Brahe, so concerned for court etiquette that he let his bladder clog and kill him?
Alan Turing. Lesson: if you're gay, your government will use you to win the biggest war in history, then hound you to suicide.
John Nash: Lesson: really, really, really crazy people win Nobel prizes.
Evariste Galois. Lesson: live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Show scientists that did otehr things as well:
Heddy Lamar (sp?)
I like the Asimov suggestion.
Da Vinci
Bacon (not Kevin)
Franklin
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Richard Feynman (A definite must-have!!!!)
Paul Erdos
Alan Turing
Dmitri Mendeleev
Claude Shannon
John von Neumann
The Bernoulli family...
Emmy Noether A mathematician that made great contributions to theoretical physics.
Euler is somebody that no one seems to learn much about, along with Gauss. Lots of 17th and 18th century scientists are relatively unknown apart from the theorems learned in secondary school, Hooke and Boyle come to mind. People like Huygens are also relatively unknown. Even someone like Newton, whose name is so well known, is not very well known outside of his scientific work, which only took up a small part of his life (only around 2-3 years if I remember correctly).
I assume that these biographies are already supposed to be available - and many of the suggested people do not have biographies appropriate for fifth or sixth graders... That being said, I would suggest a biography, there are a few but the level is not right, of Rosalind Franklin. Depending on the person telling the story she should/should not have received a lot of credit for the DNA model proposed by Watson and Crick. Jim Watson's autobiographical work on the work leading to a structural model for DNA is also a good book for students, who are interested in how science really works.
How about the giants whose shoulders these men stood on? Descartes and Bacon. Though not 'scientists', I think the joint fathers of the scientific method's roots deserve some credit.
It really shows how far you can go in life on pure unmitigated genius ;-)
Also, turing, babbage, ada lovelace, and aristotle are some interesting ones that you might not already have.
Gene Shoemaker
Best known as one of the discoverers of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that hit Jupiter in 1994, but he did an incredible amount of other stuff as well. He was the first person to prove that craters on Earth and the Moon were caused by asteroid impacts, and he practically invented the field of Astrogeology. This all lead to him being heavily involved in developing scientific experiments for the Apollo missions, and training the astronauts to perform them - most likely he would've been sent to the Moon himself if not for health problems. He spent the last few years of his life alternating between searching the night skies for asteroids and comets, and travelling the world hunting for impact craters. He was killed in a car crash in 1997 in Central Australia.
As far as I know there's only been on biography written on him - thankfully it's a decent one, written by long-time friend David Levy. See here.
It's a little heavy on the mathematician side, but all of these are heavy hitters who had interesting lives and careers. I've read biographies on most of them.
Kurt Godel
Gregor Mendel
Paul Erdos
Stanislaw Ulam
Alan Turing
John von Neumann
George Dantzig
Evariste Galois
Clearly, the misunderstood genius of our time.
Don't forget good old Teddy Kaczynski!
Lesson: um... type your letters instead of writing?
Not your typical scientist, but Josef Mengele did preform lots of experiments.
Neils Bohr
Enrico Fermi
Lise Meitner
Otto Hahn
Leo Szilard
How many of these scientists responded to the Nazi's is extremely insightful on the way that scientists think outside of the laboratory. Heck, the story of Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi working on CP-1 is worth it just due to Szilard's misconception of what Fermi meant by 'pile.'
The book "the microbe hunters" is written specifically for children in this age group, and every microbiologist / virologist / geneticist I've met from the baby boomer generation points to it as the book that sparked his interest in the field.
Oliver Sacks isn't dead, but he is a scentist. Not the kind of scientist you automatically think of when you hear the word, but he's a clinical neurologist. And this book is entertaining, while sneaking in a lot of facts about science and history that kids will think are cool.
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So, even if it's not strictly a biography, you should consider buying it, anyway. Here, read the review on
Did everything from cosmology to genetics. He was even sentenced to death, but never executed, by the USSR for defection.
For example: he predicted the strength of the cosmic microwave background about 20 years before it was actually observed and explained alpha decay of radioactive isotopes through quantum tunneling.
I haven't seen these folks mentioned:
Tycho Brahe (Silver noses and burst bladders)
Charles Steinmetz (dwarfism, socialism, and alternating current! Oh, my!)
Benjamin Franklin (A little inventing, a little politics, and a lot of great one-liners)
Archimedes (just plain awesome)
Turing and Nash are both fantastic examples. The gayness and crazyness are really side issues to amazing thinkers, sadly, like Daniel, most people will focus on those instead of the ideas.
It's an oldie, but a goodie. He proved to me that applies pure science can be an amazing thing. Got me interested in plant genetics, actually. His work created industries and jobs that didn't exist before he did his work.
Saw a show on PBS or History Channel or somesuch about him. It was about e=mc^2, and while it included a bit about the giants whose shoulders he stood on, it also included quite a bit about "A young Einstein. A rebellious, even a sexy Einstein."
That should be popular, especially some of the quotes:
"Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school."
Or, in a private school like the one I went to:
"Even on the most solemn occasions I got away without wearing socks and hid that lack of civilisation in high boots."
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
He discovered or helped discover 10 transuranium elements, won the Nobel Prize, chaired the Atomic Energy Commission (helping get the Limited Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty signed), and even transmuted lead into gold. A great combination of top-notch chemistry and good citizenship.
Richard P. Feynman. Read Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman and you'll understand. :))
"All you have to do is be fragile and grateful. So stay the underdog." Chuck Palahniuk, Choke
my nominees:
Madame Curie, Galielo, Copernicus, Tycho Brahae, Messier, John Wesley Powell, Roy Chapman Andrews, Hubbell, Michaelson & Morley, Lavoiser, Mendeleev, Werner Von Braun, Goddard, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver, Admiral Hyman Rickover, Charles Darwin, Freud, Watt, Archimedes, Da Vinci, Amundsen, Peary, Lewis & Clark, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wilbur & Orville, Rudolph Diesel, Thomas Edison, Marconi
Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
When I was a kid I remember reading this. Last updated in the 1980's [although Asimov's daughter is working on an update], so no new names from the last 25 years. Biographies for over a thousand scientists from ancient egypt to 1982 [with hyperlinks].
IIRC, the reading level was more geared toward grades 8-10, so it might be a stretch for grades 4-6. [But then again, my high school science teacher had us reading Scientific American articles as an intentional stretch - in the 1970's when Scientific American was still hard science.]
Well, nobody mentioned Levy yet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_(astronome r) ) but this guy's career really does illustrate what it means to do scientific investigation, globally if needed, and to stick to it, not give up if you don't get famous in 3 years. This guy found evidence of huge meteor craters on Earth that nobody else had found, proved that asteroids are a danger to humankind and not just a video game, and it took huge balls to stick it out and prove it. He was exemplary in his efforts to show something to the rest of the world. While I'm at it, the head librarian at the library of Alexandria (can't remember his name) was a hugely important person. He knew the world was round, and why before we forgot in the dark ages. He made many other discoveries too.
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Richard Feynmann, not only for being one of the most awesome scientists ever, but for his passion and sense of fun, he makes physics look a lot less like a subject for "eggheads". John von Neumann, because he was a godlike intellect and far more important to the 20th century than your man in the street realises. Freeman Dyson, because his imagination would appeal to youngsters - stuff like genetically engineering diamond-toothed turtles to eat all the garbage off the US Highway system. Really, you could blindfold youself and throw a dart into a room full of the most important scientists of the 20th & 21st centuries, and chances are you'd hit someone that no-one without a science background's ever heard of. I do not condone the throwing of darts and important scientists.
Not strictly what the poster is asking for, as it's not a single, long biography, but I can't recommend highly enough Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. It's a thick, massively cross referenced volume with mini biographies of over 1500 scientists arranged chonologically from Imhotep to Stephen Hawking. Lengths range from a short paragraph to several pages (Galileo gets 4+ pages, for example).
As a teen, this book was a constant pleasure. I'd look up a single scientist and find myself following the cross references from one to another, coming up for air hours later. Never boring, although the heavy cross referencing really screams out for an online version.
Obviously not enough for those needing complete biographies, but an excellent starting point.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
I don't know any books which are age appropriate but (with appologies for spelling)
Madame Curie
Grace Hopper
(There are a few women of Astronomy from around 1900 who should be interesting, but I don't know names)
Richard Feynman (try some of his popular writing also)
Charles Darwin
Gregor Mendel
Murray Gell-Mann(?)
Linus Pauling
Benjamin Franklin
Paul Erdos
Rauld Hoffman (nobel science and literature)
(somebody) Perkins, inventor of the first synthetic dyestuff
Antoine Lavoisier
William Thompson (Lord Kelvin)
Thomas Edison
Michael Faraday (give them a crack at his "The Chemical History of the Candle")
Jaque Custo (the diver in case I goofed the spelling)
John Holland (computer science)
Flemming (discoverer of penicillian)
Pres. Calvin Coolidge (mining engineer, gave one of the best descriptions of the joy of engineering I've ever seen)
Hope this helps
This is a wonderful book. I have the 1970-something second edition. Pocket mini-bios of just about everyone loosely describable as having anything to do with science, from the dawn of history until the book was written. Fascinating stuff. (Like, why Giordano Bruno was really burned at the stake. Had next to nothing to do with that Earth going around the sun stuff.)
I don't think any bright 5th-grader would have any trouble reading it. I haven't seen the 1980 version.
The father of radio, but he also was involved in very strange research on earth energy. He appears to have invented a telephone that was able to transmit through the ground. He had been dead for about a week in the middle of winter when the neighbors asked the sheriff to break down the door. The odd thing was his home was still warm even though it had been snowing for weeks. The sheriff traced the heat source to 2 round copper plates spaced a couple of inches apart and leading to 2 wires which were attached to grounding rods under the sink. Of course, all of his equipment from his farm disappeared very quickly and has not been heard of since. Another odd scientist is John Keeley. His work with vibratory physics is landmark, though most of his work was 'removed' as soon as he passed on. Good luck, HGM
Two personal heroes of mine:
Ernest Rutherford - A great scientist with several ground breaking discoveries, a national hero, and the mentor to numerous other Nobel Prize winners, such as Bohr, Geiger and Chadwick. Admired by Einstein.
Rosalind Franklin A heartbreaking and inspiring story about a scientist that eschewed fame (and was cheated of it) but was instead dedicated to science for science sake and not the politics.
Not one of the grandest but has certainly left his mark w.r.t. communication. Decent sci-fi prophet as well [sentiment classification: subjective; +4.67].
Advantage of being one who is alive.
.
Even though he is not that famous but he is still a physicist that could be studied.
He was one of the fore runners in computational physics too.
Oppenheimer led a really fascinating life, and a recent biography of him (American Prometheus) won the Pulitzer.
-Tyr1
Of course, you can find Edmund Halley biographies in many places, but he's not really a common figure since the comet receded in the '80s. He's got a lot more to him than just that one comet discovery too. My favorite factoid is his estimate of Earth's age by the salt levels in the oceans. Being Newton's publisher and friend didn't hurt his reputation either.
Of course, I might be biased in this suggestion...
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Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists is a collection of comics about famous (and unfortunately not so famous) women scientists including: Marie Skladovska, Hedy Lamarr, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, Barbara McClintock, and Birute Galdikas. While the profiles in this book may not be deep enough to be a final resource for student projects, they can definitely ignite some interest in further study.
Hedy Lamarr
Maybe not quite a scientist, but at least the inventor of the incredibly important concept of "spread spectrum" communications.
And she was a hot chick. We need more hot chicks with brains.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Glen Seaborg, who at one time had the longest entry in Who's Who, was an accomplished scientist AND engineering manager. His team at Lawrence Berkeley Labs 'discovered' (created, really) elements 96 to 102. Born April 18th, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan, died several years ago in 1999. He was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission under Kennedy and helped negotiate the (mostly Atmospheric) Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1960 (?).
He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for their discoveries about transuranic elements.
He is a fascinating character.
Why do I know this? I've known it since High School. Several friends of mine in from Highland Park High School (Illinois) and I started a fan club in honor of Glen Seaborg. We called him at his office in Berkeley on his Birthdays for several years. One year, we sent him a t-shirt with the name of our fan club (the 'Hansians' for reasons too obscure to discuss here). My summer before my senior year, he contacted us and mentioned he was flying through O'Hare soon. So, in August 1984 I met him at the airport and I had the great honor of sharing dinner and conversation with him for about 2 hours with him in an airport restaurant. It was a profound experience in my life.
Element Seaborgium is named in his honor.
The lesson: Have the kids pick any famous scientist. There are many. Create a list to help them, or just say 'any Nobel or Fields medal (for math geeks) prize winner'. Have them give a short speech on the person from memory, telling some anecdotes (they must cite the sources).
Unitarian Church: Freethinkers Congregate!
I can't believe no one has mentioned the Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton story arc yet!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Some have already been stated.
Ada Lovelace
Grace Hopper
Marie Curie
Pierre Curie
George Washington Carver
Benjamin Banneker
Daniel Hale Williams
Elizabeth Blackwell
Rebecca Cole
Richard Feynman
Isaac Asimov
Leonardo DiVinci
Garrett Augustus Morgan
Norbert Rillieux
Thomas Edison
Ming Antu
One idea: encourage people to find scientists they can "identify" with. Show diversity, and that *everyone* can indeed be a scientist. My list is somewhat more geared at minorities, because most of the big names are well-known.
But thumbs up to the teacher. Shoulders of giants and all that.
Leonardo da Vinci
Socrates
Fermi
Max Plank
Goddard
and...
Daystorm
better yet teach them what science is: asking questions and getting more questions. like who is Daystorm? Well he is a fictional but very important part of an imaginary universe. What is an imaginary universe? It is a place where there are vulcans. What are vulcans? Vulcans are people with pointy ears and green blood. Why is their blood green? becuase instead of iron which makes our blood red, they have copper. (Somewhere along the line the child should have looked for a bat to hit you with since you introduced him to star trek, inadvertanly.)
A few of the biggies that get omitted...
Carl Gauss - I'm seriosuly trying hard to think of the last day I did not assume something was Gaussian...
Niels Bohr
Henrietta Swan Leavitt - add in a nice article on how the Cepheid calibration is absolutely vital to cosmology
Emmy Noether
Enrico Fermi
Grace Hopper
Glenn Seaborg - 10 elements - I think thats still a record and he worked on multiple Nuclear test ban treaties.
A couple of fun ones might be -
Margaret Thatcher - no I kid you not she helped make soft serve ice cream mix!
Fritz Zwicky - oh come on the guy though of supernovae and called people spherical bastards because they were bastards anyway he looked at them
Also given the recent brouhaha about evolution in the classroom lets give the kiddies some good old Charles Darwin and maybe even some William of Ockham.
Actually with the fun exception of Maggie Thatcher everyone on this list is dead - can we nominate people who are alive? Alan Guth - ideas on inflation very important for cosmology and still being debated.
Apologies if the list is slightly Physics/Astronomy/Math heavy.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
I would love to suggest Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Unfortunately, it's probably a bit heavy for elementary school students.
Great book, though. It'd be nice to see some computer scientists represented in science curriculums along with the usual physicists, chemists and biologists.
No Robert Goddard yet? Rockets! And he got his start right around the same age as the kids. You could throw in Wernher von Braun for a counterpoint as well.
Nikola Tesla.
http://www.mkaku.org/
Michio Kaku is a great scientist who has learned to communicate science fluently and interestingly to the layman. I'm sure he and his work would be very interesting to young people.
Sophie Germain is an interesting scientist (she even has an entire class of prime numbers named after her!). She worked on Fermat's Last Theorem (proving the case for the class of primes which would be later named after her), a number of areas of number theory and mathematical physics, and she did it all in a time when women weren't supposed to be involved in mathematics.
(There's a story that her parents took her candles and pajamas away from her to keep her from getting up at night to do mathematics. When she started stealing candles and doing mathematics in the buff [or wrapped in quilts, depending on which story you read], they finally relented. Talk about dedication to science!)
How about people like Christopher Reeve (Nobel Prize for his research and expertise on embryonic stem cells), Al Gore (noted top environmental scientist and inventor of the Internet), etc. That's the kind I thought of when I read 'usual suspects'.
How about Hans Christian Ørsted? It seems to me that kids will understand his significance well enough, if you remind them that every device electrical and electronic (from light bulbs to computers) owes its existence to his discovery of electromagnetism.
Or you could go back far enough that the "science" enters the realm of the absurd (to us, but reasonable enough at the time). People like Hippocrates and Galen could serve to illustrate how very, very far medical science has come. And at the same time, the fact that their teachings were in use up until just over a century ago could illustrate how recent many of the innovations in medical theory are.
While we're on the topic of medicine, it's not a bad idea to remind children that, not too terribly long ago, most people died young. The impending eradication of infant paralysis, or poliomyelitis (down from 190 thousand cases worldwide in 1993, to 1900 in 2003, thanks to a coördinated effort by the WHO), can be a good reason to discuss Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Unaipon
Maurice Wilkins, his autobiography is excellent, very readable and gives an insight into the career of a scientist. It also shows the human side of someone who was rather glossed over in the story of the double helix.
- 7368813-0262849?v=glance&n=266239&s=gateway&v=glan ce/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/019280667X/026
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm.
Here's some easily digestable biographies on Wikipedia's "simple english" branch: ... and more specifically, e.g. Physicists.
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People
Not many, but still some.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
1. Mikhail Lomonosov which is the real polymath and has made significant contributions to science and art. Everyone should know him. The story of his life is also quite interesting and motivating for students.
2. Henri Poincaré another 'universalist' - a great mathematician and physicist of the XX century and of all times.
3. Somewhat standard, I was just afraid you forgot about him by chance - Évariste Galois - is an absolutely genius person with tragic faith, dying at the age of 20 and having at that age already contributed the foundation of the major branch of abstract algebra...
Neils Bohr. Not only was he a great scientist, but also an Olympic athlete. Cool guy.
Betrand Russell -- Philosophy, Mathematics, Religion, Politics...
Anyone with a sense of humor about Gary Larson's cartoon is someone your students should be learning about.
As for monolithic dead-tree biographies, not so much, but she's written a number of books and there's abundant information on the web.
Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin (who has already been mentioned).
Manhatten Project, stand-alone collision avoidance system for instrument flight rules, co-author (with his son) of the Alvarez Hypothesis for the K-T Extinction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner
Helped to invent Nuclear Physics but credit (and Nobel Prize) went a male. Her tombstone reads, "A physicist who never lost her humanity."
He was simply one of the most extraordinary people that modern history has known. http://lib.ru/ANEKDOTY/FEINMAN/feinman_engl.txt That probably infringes somebodies copyright somewhere, but it's like Shakespeare or Aspirin - too good to not freely share.
There are millions of more useful science-related things to be learning about, and universities are complaining that their intake of science students doesn't know enough science. Skip the fluffy stuff and teach them Feynman diagrams or special relativity - cool, mindbending physics that will get kids interested in science for its own sake. What we don't need is more of the cult-of-personality that surrounds many scientists. Science is fundamentally independent of people, this is something that often seems to be misunderstood.
Yes, I know you don't control the curriculum and this post is pointless; I just think it has to be said.
I quit!
I do believe that the kids should learn about Scientist and how they work, however in todays world there is far too much emphasis on their personal life and their fame, than about their scientific work and what it made so special. Rather then give them biographies to read, teach them how to do science and show this by explaining why a certain scientist became so famous, what was his methology, why was it such a big advance in his time.
What does a kid learn, if you give him a biography which is 90 % about the private life of this person and doesn't give any insight into the science the person did? If you read slashdot, you get the feeling that quite a lot of people don't know the difference between a theory and a theorem, why you should falsify and not verify a hypothesis, what a proof is and so on.
Tell them what it is, to become a scientist, that you have to devote your life to it, that this is the big difference between an outstanding scientist (apart from an outstanding intelligence) and the average worker. You need passion to do it...and you do it your whole life! It is not talent, it is hard work that often started in their early life.
"People who are willing to sacrifice essential freedoms for security deserve neither freedom nor security."
B F
I would like to suggest Tracy Hickam... He works for Nasa... Not really a scientist but almost. You can easily put the movie based on him in the Library, its "October Sky"
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
I've noticed that many of these fine suggestions are male. One of the biggest problems in my field of physics is that there is a very large gender imbalance. Perhaps we're sending a message early on that only men are good at science -- an absolutely false one. So, for instance, consider Marie Curie and her daughter Irene.
Preferably, look for a treatment which doesn't portray the scientists as demigods; the dirty little secret that you find out after joining their ranks is that they're just as normal as everyone else.
How about Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the discoverer of x-rays and thus the father of medical imaging. Interestingly enough, after the discovery, he was the only one smart enough to hide behind lead when experimenting. Everyone else thought he was a wuss. Most of them died of cancer.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Oh and Westinghouse too. His AC electricity womped Edison's DC electricity in the end.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
"Rosalind Franklin: the dark lady of DNA"
-Brenda Maddox-
God: "An inordinate fondness for beetles." -JBS Haldane-
Back when I was in 6th grade, I did a report on a biography of Joseph Priestley. In general, he discovered electrolysis and, with that, oxygen, nitrogen, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, and a few other chemicals. But that wasn't what stuck with me through life.
What I remember the most about him was that he was a believer in phlogiston. In short, people of the time (around the American Revolution) believed that this phlogiston was something that flammable things contained, and that burning such things was releasing phlogiston. Another scientist discovered that combustion was a reaction of a fuel with oxygen and heat, and Priestley was faced with the concept that phlogiston theory was false.
I don't remember if he ever did fully accept the oxygen model of combustion, but it got me thinking about what I would do if I discovered something that proved one of my beliefs false. It was probably the first step in weaning me off creationism.
Although Lovelace is a good example of a scientist (and one of the few famous historical females), there's the slight problem of name similarity that might be a problem in assignments for 10-12 year olds.
A true story -- I used to work at a university where all of the servers had various 'theme' names. One generation of the mail system was all named after scientists: (Einstein, Boltzman, Planck, Fermi, Faraday, Fourier, Laplace, Joule, Feynman, Hawking (which was mis-named 'Hawkins'), Fuchs, Newton, Curie, etc).
Anyway, we had some problems, and placed a couple of extra boxes to deal with spam and virus filtering, etc, and we just picked some names. The sysadmins explained to management what was going on, and one of the managers started getting all pissy, because we named one of the servers after a porn star. We had to explain to him who Ada Lovelace was.
After that, all production server names had to be approved by management. (We switched to names of elements for the next generation of mail servers, to avoid the problem).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
YES!!! I totally forgot Ørsted - and in his case we can reel in the kiddies with music
;-)
Original or a techno version
Probably not going to make it to myspace but still interesting - if you have some time you should browse the rest of the songs on the site especially the love song of the EM field. The mathematicians have better stuff - seriously its a riot. And for the computer programmers
So pshaw to those of you who say you cant find good free music on the internet
(ducks)
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Lindley also wrote Degrees Kelvin which I am starting. It's about William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, the origins of thermodynamics and the Industrial Age.
I think we underemphasize the thermodynamic view in science education, yet it is omnipresent in the world. These books show that viewpoint.
Check out these: Paul Erdös Wolfgang Pauli Eugene Paul Wigner Louis de Broglie also, I would seriously consider adding these guys for an interesting take on the business or literary side of science and technology: Steve Jobs Kurt Vonnegut
DAMMIT...
:)
Check out these:
Paul Erdös
Wolfgang Pauli
Eugene Paul Wigner
Louis de Broglie
also, I would seriously consider adding these guys for an interesting take on the business or literary side of science and technology:
Steve Jobs
Kurt Vonnegut
Also add the asshole who invented HTML
Franklin did critical X-ray crystallography of DNA; she neither discovered deoxyribonucleic acid, nor showed that it was the genetic material.
One of the most brilliant of British mathematicians and physicists after Newton. Showed great intellect at an early age, learning several languages as a child. Was also a notoriously bad poet. He is best known for applying the least action principle to problems of classical mechanics and optics. Studying him might also get kids interested in quaternions which have been largely and unjustly forgotten.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
There is a series suported by the National Academy of Sciences and published by Scholastic called "Women's Adventures in Science". It profiles well known living female scientists. I think kids will appreciate scientists who are not dead (you don't have to be dead to do science!) and girls especially will appreciate female role models.
Sanjay
Also, was hot on the trail of the double helix, inspiring Watson and Crick to work harder.
Also, big into Vitamin C (although his ideas are considered controversial)
One scientist/inventor whose biography would likely be very interesting to that age group is Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented the television as a farmboy who was roughly the age of those students. A good biography of this fellow would be a great view into the science and big business trends of the day, as he had numerous dealings with other scientists who admired and stole his work, and with RCA who first stole his work, then when they lost litigation ended up buying it from him. I know I'm mangling the story, but hey, that's why books are written, right? He invented a number of things such as the first device that proved nuclear fusion, radar enhancements, keyed ignitions, and so forth.
I could do like the next lameoid and get links to titles from Amazon, but I'm not a good judge as to which titles are feasible for 5th and 6th graders, but I'm sure your wife is.
I would have also suggested Nikola Tesla, but he has been mentioned several times already, it appears.
I actually remember reading a biography of Sikorsky in 4th grade. Helicopters were teh kewl!
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
To everyone's consternation, Gödel suddenly informed the presiding judge that he had discovered a way in which a dictatorship could be legally installed in the United States. Fortunately, the judge, who was apparently a very patient person, took this in good part and awarded Gödel his citizenship.
After all, nobody had ever heard of either 9/11 or George W back then eh?
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Mendeleev would make a nice point of departure for talking about basic chemistry. I don't know if there's an age-appropriate biography, though.
He's a great example of an integrative mind, and his accomplishments with the periodic table are a very cool example of being able to sift a seemingly confused and overwhelming set of known information in order to understand the world differently, more simply, and better.
As a human figure, too, he's interesting enough to maybe catch a kid's eye. Huge beard, stories about dreams and how they gave him insight, and so on.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Some of these are really good suggestions (though I'm not sure some of the stuff in "Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" is age appropriate for 5th/6th graders (isn't that the one with the bit about the topless bar in Brazil?). However, I don't see any female scientists on this list - be sure to get Marie Curie (obviously) and Rosalind Franklin (helped discover DNA, but got shafted in the credits). If you want something really odd, Hedy Lamarr was an electrical engineer who invented a guidance system for torpedos (though, again I'm not sure her early acting career is age appropriate - nudity was a big deal in the '30s). Or for more traditional scientists there is Maria Goeppert Mayer (described nuclear structure) and Emily Noether (a mathematician who's theorem is a fundamental underpinning of theoretical physics). Unfortunately, there are few really famous female scientists, so they may be difficult to find info on.
John Bardeen. Lesson: Even if you win two Nobel prizes and create the most important device of the 20th century, people still won't know who you are.
What about our ol' Buddy August Ferdinand Möbius ???
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B6bius_strip/
Nah, by "usual suspects", he was referring to that colored guy that invented the peanut.
The women you named are all noteworthy scientists, but there are a lot more famous women scientists than that! What about Lise Meitner, the famous nuclear physicist? Marie Curie's daughter, Irene Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Don't forget Jane Goodall, the famous primatologist. Laura Bassi was a well-known Italian scientist in the 1700s who became the first woman to teach at a European college. Maria Mitchell was America's first professional woman astronomer. There were even female philosophers and mathematicians in ancient times, like Hypatia of Alexandria.
To find information about noteworthy women scientists, just search on the Internet for WISE (Women in Science and Engineering) Programs. Many WISE programs at large universities often have a resource libary of information on women scientists. Some WISE programs even maintain web sites with biographies of women scientists that include reference lists. I suggest that any teacher or librarian who is interested in developing a collection of materials on women scientists try contacting the director of a WISE program at a local college. She would probably be happy to help.
I have a book someplace that has short biographies of living women scientists and engineers who work for NASA, but I can't remember what it was called at the moment so I am having trouble finding it online at Barnes and Noble. There is also a web site related to this book called Women of NASA that has biographies of women who work for NASA (click on the Profiles link). This web site has a teacher guide on it as well.
The National Academies of Science also has a good web site about women in science called "I was wondering..." which is geared towards a young audience. The National Academies Press also has a Women's Adventures in Science book series related to this web site.
Women have made many important contributions to science throughout history, and there is a lot of information about women scientists out there. It just might take a little effort to find it.
The Fermilab Spires database lists over 50 titles, including:
The discovery of anti-matter : the autobiography of Carl David Anderson, the youngest man to win the Nobel prize
Cockcroft and the atom
Atoms in the family My life with Enrico Fermi (by Laura Fermi)
Strong force : the story of physicist Shirley Ann Jackson
Living with nuclei : 50 years in the nuclear age, memoirs of a Japanese physicist
Lawrence and his laboratory : a history of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory
Schrèodinger, life and thought
The day after Trinity : J. Robert Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb
Strange beauty : Murray Gell-Mann and the revolution in twentieth-century physics
and of course the obligatory dozen or so books about Einstein, Feynmann, etc.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Ameilia Earhart by Dennis Brindell Fradin (OK, she's not a scientist exactly but can't leave her out)
Charles Fort: prophet of the unexplained, by Damon Francis Knight
To Space and Back by Sally Ride
Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life by Georgina Ferry
Maria Goeppert Mayer: Physicist by Joseph P. Ferry, Chelsea House Publishers, Jill Sideman
Sadly there is no biography I can find on France Anne Córdova but there is biographical info on her online.
I've been involved with an outreach project called Solar Week that tries to combat the stereotype that only men can be scientists. During Solar Week, students can ask actual women scientists who study the Sun questions about the solar system and careers in science. Students can also read the biographies of the Solar Week scientists on the web site, and there are lots of suggestions of activities for teachers to do in the classroom.
The scientists who answer questions online during Solar Week aren't famous, but the kids always seem to enjoy participating in this program.
While Leonhard Euler is probably one of the more important mathematicians, you know, ever, a lot of people don't know who he is and basically noone pronounces his name right. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler
And Carl Gauss is easily the most importnat scientist that laypeople have never heard about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
I am always a little shocked deep down that we hear so much more about Newton than Gauss. I don't know if it is because Newton is English and Gauss is German, or if there are other historical pressures, but it is a terrible shame.
Kary Mullis is the most important inventor of the Polymerase Chain Reaction. This is the fundamental technology behind DNA sequencing, some DNA fingerprinting, Pathogen screening (like some HIV tests) and lots of other cool things. Also, his autobiography, Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, sounds like it was written by Hunter S. Thompson. We're talking about a dude who made his own LSD derivatives for fun. Every third grader should read it.
not everything is a science experiment!
I first encountered a biography of Ramanujan in eighth grade, and found his life story absolutely fascinating. Mathematician, not scientist, but it might still be worth looking into for the library. Sadly, I don't recall what the title of the book was.
PBS has had some good programs lately on scientific contributions from women. I'd consider these:
* Vera Rubin -- Her ideas were ridiculed for most of her life, but she was right. She established the existence of dark matter.
* Lise Meitner -- She discovered nuclear fission, with chemist Otto Hahn, but she did not get credit because of WWII politics.
* Mileva Maric, Einstein's 1st wife -- No major scientific discoveries, but her emotional and intellectual support contributed to Einstein's success.
* Emilie de Breteuil -- This fascinating individual, with Voltaire amongst her suitors, deepened our understanding of the relation between energy and velocity, though her own contributions would not be considered "discoveries".
* Marie Curie -- Possibly the greatest female scientist in history, and certainly the best known.
Be careful not to dumb the biographies down for the kids. That's how we got such a misunderstanding of "theory".
Benoit Mandelbrot
Arthur C. Clarke
Ellen Ochoa
Stephen Hawking
Masatoshi Koshiba
and recently deceased...
Raymond Davis Jr.
It is often the case that reading of the sciences is the critical thing, and a book chosen by a youngster is more likely to be read by the youngster.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Robert Goddard Werner Von Braun Carl Sagan Arthur C. Clarke (He did invent the communications satellite, after all)
---- Now, where did I put that knife.....
Nikola Tesla - Would be a fantastic choice.
Not the flashiest or most famous scientists and inventors: but some very important people were/are:
:-(
1) Fritz Haber
The inventor of the Haber Process, which allowed the mass production of fertilizer. The Haber Process feeds 40% of the world's population to this day.
2) Joseph Lister
The guy who discovered that making hospitals sanitary was a good idea. Before that, wounds were literally left to rot. We desperately needed his insights. They didn't come about until 1867; when they arrived it was well past time.
3) Henry Hill Hickman
One of the first guys to discover anesthetics. No one listened to him.
Now, he's regarded as one of the founders of anesthetics; and blocking pain is very important, as anyone who's needed surgery can agree.
4) Norman Borlaug
Lots of people talk about ending world hunger. This guy went out and did something about it. A modern science hero, Borlaugh was granted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his so called "Green Revolution" to improve the quality of crops worldwide. He credited with saving over one billion people from starvation due to his program to grow better crops in underdeveloped nations. This is what science should be about, kids: directly improving the quality of life for people around the world.
DNA's pretty cool, and theyre not as well known.
why don't you try NIKOLA TESLA? His story about the Wardenclyffe is very interesting. And the philiphaldia experiment.
How About Alberto Santos-Dumont, the actual father of aviation??... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santos_Dumont Many of you probably don't know, but the actual centenary of aviation is next October! :) (ithink) We will actually fly a copy of the 14-bis, and I don't believe it will crash like you replica of the Wright brother's plane that crashed in the mud the other year...
It's time for you to start teaching the complete story to your children! And you know what, it sucks to grown here in Brasil, knowing about Santos-Dumont, but watching every time american TV shows ignoring him... Please, stop doing that! ...I would also vote for the history of modern inventors and Engineers as Watt, Edison, Tesla, Ford, Babbage... There's also the folks involved in television and telephony... The history of these modern discoveries are sometimesconfusing. We should let our children know how confusing they are, and not simpy stick to someone's version of the history.....
Nicolau Werneck - NIC1138
"The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of childhood into maturity" -- Thomas Huxley
There are plenty of very noteworthy scientists that make active appeals to the general public to get them more interested in science. Michio Kaku has a number of books published aimed at educating the layman, and even set me on my path to becoming a physicist, and he is the creator and one of the leading scientists of String Field Theory. Brian Greene also has a couple of books published aimed at a general audience, though they are definitely geared towards a high school and college level. I could see the more intelligent 7th and 8th graders understanding it, though. For astronomers, an easy choice would be Patrick Moore. He dazzles the public with pretty pictures of far away things, and does a very good job at explaining them so his audience can understand the actual science behind it.
Ada Lovelace
Marie Curie
Irene Joliot-Curie
Maria Mayer
Lise Meitner
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
Linda B. Buck
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard
Sophie Germain
Rosalyn Yalow
Gerty Radnitz Cori
Emmy Noether
Roger Arliner Young
Mary Anning
and of course Danica McKellar
I disagree 110%. Perhaps you think intelligent design should taught along with evolution? I mean not to troll, but to make a point. Those that would argue intelligent design is as much a 'fact' as evolution is fail to understand what science, and science eduction, are about.
Yes, we have facts. We should seek to discover these, and our students should learn these, but facts do not make science. Science is process. How do you discover facts, the truths about the world around us? How do you test whether an idea is true or not? How are facts assembled into more complex systems?
And I think your approach might encourage the cult of personality you try to avoid. Einstein is the perfect example. The guy is on such a pedestal it's a wonder any child would even go into Physics. Such a genius, so far ahead of his time, such wonder. How do you follow that act?
It might benefit children to know he didn't ace all his classes in school. He wasn't an overnight success. All his brilliant ideas didn't just pop out of his head fully formed. It might encourage children to know that even the brightest struggle. Even that most acclaimed achievers had some failure.
Through Einstein's life you might teach perseverance, you might teach dedication, you might teach imagination. I doubt students find any of those things in the mere facts of Einstein's theories. And I haven't even touched upon his involvement with the development of the nuclear bomb.
If the goal is to produce technicians and button-mashers, by all means stick to the facts. If the goal is to produce independent thinkers with the potential to become scientists and engineers, you need to teach more than just the facts.
I'd say if the choice is between Einstein's biography and his physics, you're better off learning his biography. But I don't think that's a choice we need to make.
Look at me, I'm on slashdot!
LinuxRulzFlameBait.
Am I cool yet?
The true genius behind modern personal computers, that doesn't get as much credit as he deserves.
Korolev was the founding father of modern space rocketry, despite being killed way before his time during routine surgery by incompetent Soviet doctors.
A couple very interesting scientists for students to read about:
Niels Bohr was a Danish scientist who studied atoms and quantum physics. He contributed to the Manhattan Project after fleeing Denmark under Nazi occupation (was of Jewish ancestry).
Werner Heisenberg was a German physicist, friend of Bohr (for a while) and a founder of quantum physics. He was initially slandered for writing theories that the Nazis did not approve of, but later became useful in assisting in the development of nuclear warfare.
These two men would be very interesting biography reads. Not only are their contributions to science immesurable, the political aspects of their lives make it very interesting to read.