Who are the 5 Most Influential Scientists on Today’s World ?

BY MARC MOSS

All of us have already heard about Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, and Morgan Freeman. But many people have forgotten that when it comes to pure science, fame for discoveries takes a back seat.

It means, that science is continually developing, but scientists often prefer live unnoticed life. You may think that there is no more place for new discovering, and everything was already discovered back in the 19th century, but it is not true. Research keeps churning out each and every day. The more knowledge humanity obtains about the surrounding world, the more secrets appear.

Whose names should don the list of the most influention scientists of recent times? Perhaps men and women whose work paved the way for today’s advanced technological civilization.

Charles Hard Townes, the inventor of the laser

Charles died at the age of 99 years old, in 2015, but we are using his invention every day of our lives. He gained the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing an extraordinary maser and laser devices. His hometown is Greenville, South Carolina. California Institute of Technology granted him with a Ph.D. degree in 1940. He was an Executive Director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory for two years, and after that, he had built his first maser back in 1953. The device was revolutionary. After that, he was working at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and more than 48 years at University of California at Berkeley. He has also managed to invest in Science Advisory Committee as a chairman. There he was working for the Apollo lunar landing program. Maser and laser were used to discover molecules in space and even helped to determine the mass of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. His discovering has influenced the modern world and astronomy.

Graig Venter, biotechnologist, and geneticist

Today, with the number of spectacular researchers, it is impossible to highlight five great scientists. On the other hand, Graig Venter was 14th in the list of “The World’s 50 Most Influential Figures 2010” by the version of the British magazine the New Statesman.  His hometown is Salt Lake City, Utah. After the failure in suicide at Vietnam War, he decided to study medicine and then switched to biomedical research. Graig gained his Ph.D. degree at University of California San Diego. Later he was working on the Human Genome Project trying to find the most effective way to get human genome data. He also used his personal yacht to run a G lobal Ocean Sampling Expedition to explore genetic diversity in the ocean. Except being a scientist, Mr. Venter is also a successful businessman and founder of   J . Craig Venter Institute conducting researches on synthetic biology, and TIGER The Institute for Genomic Research. His findings are influential for other areas of the modern scientific world.

Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem

Fermat’s Last Theorem was a mystery for the last 300 years for mathematicians all over the world who were trying to prove it. Andrew offered an intuitively understandable solution and won $720,000 for that. Fermat’s Last Theorem says that there is no whole number solution to the problem of aⁿ + bⁿ = cⁿ if n equals of more than 3. Andrew proved the theorem ad absurdum. His education started at Cambridge and ended in Oxford. Wiles published his paper in May 1995. He is a unique number-theorist who can bear new creative and bright ideas to the theoretic world. He is one of the most famous scientists today.

Gordon Moore, the beginner of informational revolution

Co-founder of Intel Corporation and engineer from SF received his B.A. in chemistry at the University of California Berkeley, and Ph.D. at California Institute of Technology. It’s fair to say he cruised through college without any professional essay writing help. His business career started after working at MIT and founding Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation.  The well known “Moor’s Law” is a prediction that the number of resistors, transistors, capacitors, or diodes in a microchip will double every year approximately during the next decade (1965-1975). In 1968 together with Robert Noyce Gordon have founded Intel Corporation. It has changed the world in terms of computer memory, microprocessor design, and integrated circuits.

Donald Knuth, the author of The Art Of Computer Programming

Every modern student software developer knows the name of Donald Knuth as a fundamental programming expert. It has four volumes explaining the identity of a totally new field. Bill Gates motivates students to send him a resume if they understand all of the volumes. Knuth believed that the computer programming is becoming more and more complex but has no single explanatory guide which tells the story from the very beginning. He is known as a father of algorithmic analysis. He was working on cryptography for National Security Agency at Princeton University. After that, he started working at Stanford University as a professor of Computer Science. He is one of the top scientists who changed the world.

  top scientists