Who are you preferred scientists.

Knuth in general.

I'm totally in awe of people like Oliver Heaviside and George Green - self taught geniuses. I have a background in Electronics for which they are best known, but I'm sure that other domains have similar cases.
 
_martin said:
He's in around the same job specialization as Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy.
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God is the name we give to an extraordinarily complex set of mathematical equations that governs the universe. So God is effectively a tool.
Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy are also tools used to convince the kids to do the right thing and behave. So weirdly they really are quite similar.

As for my favorite Scientists, I am a big fan of Brian Cox and Matt O'Dowd. Both of them have a great way of explaining concepts that plodders like me can at least think we understand :)
 
kpedersen :) So God is real, unless defined as integer. :)
I do like to talk about these with my friends over a nice cold beer. We had some interesting conversations over the time. It's hard to do this over internet; I was a bit hesitant when I responded to hruodr's answer.

When it comes to scientists I admire and respect many. I don't have anybody favorite (but then I don't even have favorite movie, singer, etc..). More I listen to videos about particular topics more I see myself thinking about these:
a) more I know, less I know
b) I really am stupid
 
Off the top of my head:-

James Lovelock, inventor of the gaia hypothesis. :)

Dr Jonas Salk, inventor of the polio vaccine, who refused to patent his invention, making it freely available to the world and eschewing a fortune in the process; a true hacker.

'On April 12, 1955, the day the Salk vaccine was declared “safe, effective and potent,” legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow interviewed its creator and asked who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine’s research and field testing. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”'

The great Carl Sagan, who inspired me so much as a teenager, for his vision and humanity

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

Marie Curie for her fortitude, determination and brillance.

Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the three female NASA mathamaticians honoured in the movie "Hidden Figures".

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6ltvr52ppY


And Aaron Swartz definitely deserves an honourable mention :cool:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZBe1VFy0gc


There are, of course, so many others...
 
Alexander Graham Bell invented the world's first wireless telephone, in 1880, called the Photophone.
He focused a lot on this before moving on to the Graphophone, they had all these ideas on how to improve the range, etc.
If he paid more attention to the receiver he probably could have invented the transistor, the receiver is a very rough basic transistor anyways.
 
A different question would be, what piece of science do you like.

One could admire a scientist because of the big discovery.

But one can also like simple things that are no big science. It is an issue of aesthetic.

Aesthetic may also be an impediment for science, once searchs for a pretty description of something also there is no one.
 
www.britannica.com

Dmitri Mendeleev | Biography, Periodic Table, & Facts

Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian chemist who devised the periodic table of the elements. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements.
www.britannica.com www.britannica.com

I read this when I was a kid. It led to a 30-year love/hate relationship with Chemistry.
 
Easy. My preferred scientist is the one bringing mankind forward. There of course is the other kind who is working the other way - like testifying that smoking is good for you, lead in gasoline is fine and so on.
 
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