Here is an alphabetical list of hundreds of the most famous scientists in history; the men and women whose crucial discoveries and inventions changed the world.
If you’re looking for scientists in particular fields, you could try our pages here:
→ Biologists & Health Scientists
→ Chemists
→ Geologists & Paleontologists
→ Mathematicians
→ Physicists
A
Louis Agassiz
Maria Gaetana Agnesi
Al-Battani
Abu Nasr Al-Farabi
Alhazen
Jim Al-Khalili
Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
Mihailo Petrovic Alas
Angel Alcala
Salim Ali
Luis Alvarez
Andre Marie Ampère
Anaximander
Carl Anderson
Mary Anning
Virginia Apgar
Archimedes
Agnes Arber
Aristarchus
Aristotle
Svante Arrhenius
Oswald Avery
Amedeo Avogadro
Avicenna
B
Charles Babbage
Francis Bacon
Alexander Bain
John Logie Baird
Joseph Banks
Ramon Barba
John Bardeen
Charles Barkla
Ibn Battuta
William Bayliss
George Beadle
Arnold Orville Beckman
Henri Becquerel
Emil Adolf Behring
Alexander Graham Bell
Emile Berliner
Claude Bernard
Timothy John Berners-Lee
Daniel Bernoulli
Jacob Berzelius
Henry Bessemer
Hans Bethe
Homi Jehangir Bhabha
Alfred Binet
Clarence Birdseye
Kristian Birkeland
James Black
Elizabeth Blackwell
Alfred Blalock
Katharine Burr Blodgett
Franz Boas
David Bohm
Aage Bohr
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Max Born
Carl Bosch
Robert Bosch
Jagadish Chandra Bose
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Wilhelm Georg Bothe
Robert Boyle
Lawrence Bragg
Tycho Brahe
Brahmagupta
Hennig Brand
Georg Brandt
Wernher Von Braun
J Harlen Bretz
Louis de Broglie
Alexander Brongniart
Robert Brown
Michael E. Brown
Lester R. Brown
Eduard Buchner
Linda Buck
William Buckland
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
Robert Bunsen
Luther Burbank
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
Macfarlane Burnet
Thomas Burnet
C
Benjamin Cabrera
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Rachel Carson
George Washington Carver
Henry Cavendish
Anders Celsius
James Chadwick
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Erwin Chargaff
Noam Chomsky
Steven Chu
Leland Clark
John Cockcroft
Arthur Compton
Nicolaus Copernicus
Gerty Theresa Cori
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
Jacques Cousteau
Brian Cox
Francis Crick
James Croll
Nicholas Culpeper
Marie Curie
Pierre Curie
Georges Cuvier
Adalbert Czerny
D
Gottlieb Daimler
John Dalton
James Dwight Dana
Charles Darwin
Humphry Davy
Peter Debye
Max Delbruck
Jean Andre Deluc
Democritus
René Descartes
Rudolf Christian Karl Diesel
Diophantus
Paul Dirac
Prokop Divis
Theodosius Dobzhansky
Frank Drake
K. Eric Drexler
E
John Eccles
Arthur Eddington
Thomas Edison
Paul Ehrlich
Albert Einstein
Gertrude Elion
Empedocles
Eratosthenes
Euclid
Eudoxus of Cnidus
Leonhard Euler
F
Michael Faraday
Pierre de Fermat
Enrico Fermi
Richard Feynman
Fibonacci – Leonardo of Pisa
Emil Fischer
Ronald Fisher
Alexander Fleming
Ambrose Fleming
Howard Florey
Henry Ford
Lee De Forest
Dian Fossey
Leon Foucault
Benjamin Franklin
Rosalind Franklin
Sigmund Freud
Elizebeth Smith Friedman
G
Galen
Galileo Galilei
Francis Galton
Luigi Galvani
George Gamow
Martin Gardner
Carl Friedrich Gauss
Murray Gell-Mann
Sophie Germain
Willard Gibbs
William Gilbert
Sheldon Lee Glashow
Robert Goddard
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
Thomas Gold
Jane Goodall
Stephen Jay Gould
Otto von Guericke
H
Fritz Haber
Ernst Haeckel
Otto Hahn
Albrecht von Haller
Edmund Halley
Alister Hardy
Thomas Harriot
William Harvey
Stephen Hawking
Otto Haxel
Werner Heisenberg
Hermann von Helmholtz
Jan Baptist von Helmont
Joseph Henry
Caroline Herschel
John Herschel
William Herschel
Gustav Ludwig Hertz
Heinrich Hertz
Karl F. Herzfeld
George de Hevesy
Antony Hewish
David Hilbert
Maurice Hilleman
Hipparchus
Hippocrates
Shintaro Hirase
Dorothy Hodgkin
Robert Hooke
Frederick Gowland Hopkins
William Hopkins
Grace Murray Hopper
Frank Hornby
Jack Horner
Bernardo Houssay
Fred Hoyle
Edwin Hubble
Alexander von Humboldt
Zora Neale Hurston
James Hutton
Christiaan Huygens
Hypatia
I
Ernesto Illy
Ernst Ising
Keisuke Ito
J
Mae Carol Jemison
Edward Jenner
J. Hans D. Jensen
Irene Joliot-Curie
James Prescott Joule
Percy Lavon Julian
K
Michio Kaku
Heike Kamerlingh Onnes
Pyotr Kapitsa
Friedrich August Kekulé
Frances Kelsey
Pearl Kendrick
Johannes Kepler
Abdul Qadeer Khan
Omar Khayyam
Alfred Kinsey
Gustav Kirchoff
Martin Klaproth
Robert Koch
Emil Kraepelin
Thomas Kuhn
Stephanie Kwolek
L
Joseph-Louis Lagrange
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Hedy Lamarr
Edwin Herbert Land
Karl Landsteiner
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Max von Laue
Antoine Lavoisier
Ernest Lawrence
Henrietta Leavitt
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Inge Lehmann
Gottfried Leibniz
Georges Lemaître
Leonardo da Vinci
Niccolo Leoniceno
Aldo Leopold
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Claude Levi-Strauss
Willard Frank Libby
Justus von Liebig
Carolus Linnaeus
Joseph Lister
John Locke
Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
Konrad Lorenz
Ada Lovelace
Percival Lowell
Lucretius
Charles Lyell
Trofim Lysenko
M
Ernst Mach
Marcello Malpighi
Jane Marcet
Guglielmo Marconi
Lynn Margulis
Barry Marshall
Polly Matzinger
Matthew Maury
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
Barbara McClintock
Lise Meitner
Gregor Mendel
Dmitri Mendeleev
Franz Mesmer
Antonio Meucci
John Michell
Albert Abraham Michelson
Thomas Midgeley Jr.
Milutin Milanković
Maria Mitchell
Mario Molina
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Samuel Morse
Henry Moseley
N
Ukichiro Nakaya
John Napier
Giulio Natta
John Needham
John von Neumann
Thomas Newcomen
Isaac Newton
Charles Nicolle
Florence Nightingale
Tim Noakes
Alfred Nobel
Emmy Noether
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard
Bill Nye
O
Hans Christian Oersted
Georg Ohm
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Wilhelm Ostwald
William Oughtred
P
Blaise Pascal
Louis Pasteur
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli
Linus Pauling
Randy Pausch
Ivan Pavlov
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Wilder Penfield
Marguerite Perey
William Perkin
John Philoponus
Jean Piaget
Philippe Pinel
Max Planck
Pliny the Elder
Henri Poincaré
Karl Popper
Beatrix Potter
Joseph Priestley
Proclus
Claudius Ptolemy
Pythagoras
Q
Adolphe Quetelet
Harriet Quimby
Thabit ibn Qurra
R
C. V. Raman
Srinivasa Ramanujan
William Ramsay
John Ray
Prafulla Chandra Ray
Francesco Redi
Sally Ride
Bernhard Riemann
Wilhelm Röntgen
Hermann Rorschach
Ronald Ross
Ibn Rushd
Ernest Rutherford
S
Carl Sagan
Abdus Salam
Jonas Salk
Frederick Sanger
Alberto Santos-Dumont
Walter Schottky
Erwin Schrödinger
Theodor Schwann
Glenn Seaborg
Hans Selye
Charles Sherrington
Gene Shoemaker
Ernst Werner von Siemens
George Gaylord Simpson
B. F. Skinner
William Smith
Frederick Soddy
Mary Somerville
Arnold Sommerfeld
Hermann Staudinger
Nicolas Steno
Nettie Stevens
William John Swainson
Leo Szilard
T
Niccolo Tartaglia
Edward Teller
Nikola Tesla
Thales of Miletus
Theon of Alexandria
Benjamin Thompson
J. J. Thomson
William Thomson
Henry David Thoreau
Kip S. Thorne
Clyde Tombaugh
Susumu Tonegawa
Evangelista Torricelli
Charles Townes
Youyou Tu
Alan Turing
Neil deGrasse Tyson
U
V
Craig Venter
Vladimir Vernadsky
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Artturi Virtanen
Alessandro Volta
W
Selman Waksman
George Wald
Alfred Russel Wallace
John Wallis
Ernest Walton
James Watson
James Watt
Alfred Wegener
John Archibald Wheeler
Maurice Wilkins
Thomas Willis
E. O. Wilson
Sven Wingqvist
Sergei Winogradsky
Carl Woese
Friedrich Wöhler
Wilbur and Orville Wright
Wilhelm Wundt