[A] Aryabhata | Indian astronomer who calculated Earth's rotation and year length in 499 CE with stunning accuracy using just observations and epic math skills.
2/40
2. Alessandro Volta
[B] Alessandro Volta | Italian physicist who invented the battery after arguing with Galvani about whether frog legs contained "animal electricity" or just needed better wiring.
3/40
3. Christiaan Huygens
[C] Christiaan Huygens | Dutch scientist who invented the pendulum clock, discovered Saturn's moon Titan, and proposed light travels in waves while Newton insisted on particles.
4/40
4. Carl Linnaeus
[A] Carl Linnaeus | Swedish botanist who gave every living thing two Latin names, creating the classification system that makes biology students cry during taxonomy exams.
5/40
5. Walther Hermann Nernst
[D] Walther Hermann Nernst | German chemist who won the Nobel Prize for thermodynamics work and invented an electric piano that nobody wanted because it sounded terrible.
6/40
6. Hippocrates of Kos
[D] Hippocrates of Kos | Greek physician whose oath doctors still swear today, though he thought illness came from imbalanced bodily humors like phlegm and black bile.
7/40
7. Charles-Augustin de Coulomb
[B] Charles-Augustin de Coulomb | French physicist who measured electric force with twisted wires and showed that electric charges follow an inverse square law like gravity.
8/40
8. Gerolamo Cardano
[C] Gerolamo Cardano | Italian polymath who published solutions to cubic equations he arguably stole, invented probability theory for gambling, and wrote the first autobiography.
9/40
9. Andrey Kolmogorov
[D] Andrey Kolmogorov | Soviet mathematician who formalized probability theory and turbulence, making randomness mathematically rigorous while hiking mountains and discussing poetry.
10/40
10. Muhammad ibn-Jabir al-Battani
[C] Muhammad ibn-Jabir al-Battani | Islamic astronomer whose precise measurements of the solar year were accurate to within 2 minutes, using medieval instruments and exceptional patience.
11/40
11. Andreas Vesalius
[B] Andreas Vesalius | Belgian anatomist who corrected Galen's 1,300-year-old mistakes by actually dissecting human bodies and drawing what he saw, revolutionizing medical education.
12/40
12. Abu-Yusuf al-Kindi
[D] Abu-Yusuf al-Kindi | Arab philosopher who pioneered cryptanalysis, described frequency analysis for breaking codes, and tried to measure the dosage of drugs mathematically.
13/40
13. Heinrich Hertz
[A] Heinrich Hertz | German physicist who proved electromagnetic waves exist but thought they were useless, dying before radio made his discovery world-changing.
14/40
14. Zhang Zhongjing
[B] Zhang Zhongjing | Chinese physician whose treatise on cold damage disorders became traditional Chinese medicine's most important clinical manual for treating infectious diseases.
15/40
15. Hans Christian Oersted
[A] Hans Christian Oersted | Danish physicist who discovered electromagnetism during a lecture when his compass needle moved near a wire, completely derailing his planned demonstration.
16/40
16. Madhava of Sangamagrama
[C] Madhava of Sangamagrama | Indian mathematician who developed infinite series for trigonometric functions 300 years before European calculus, working entirely without formal notation.
17/40
17. John Dalton
[C] John Dalton | English chemist who proposed atomic theory and discovered color blindness by realizing his perception of red was completely different from everyone else's.
18/40
18. André-Marie Ampère
[A] André-Marie Ampère | French physicist who founded electrodynamics and gave his name to electric current measurement while battling depression after his father's execution.
19/40
19. Enrico Fermi
[D] Enrico Fermi | Italian physicist who built the first nuclear reactor under a Chicago football stadium and could estimate anything accurately using simple assumptions.
20/40
20. Claude Bernard
[B] Claude Bernard | French physiologist who discovered the liver makes sugar and founded experimental medicine, though his wife left him for vivisecting their pets.
21/40
21. Johann Heinrich Lambert
[B] Johann Heinrich Lambert | Swiss polymath who proved pi is irrational, pioneered photometry, and created map projections while working as a tutor to aristocratic children.
22/40
22. James Prescott Joule
[C] James Prescott Joule | English physicist who proved heat is energy by measuring water temperature changes, conducting experiments in his family's brewery between beer batches.
23/40
23. Kitasato Shibasaburo
[A] Kitasato Shibasaburo | Japanese bacteriologist who co-discovered the plague bacillus and developed antitoxins, establishing Japan's first institute for infectious diseases.
24/40
24. Hendrik Antoon Lorentz
[D] Hendrik Antoon Lorentz | Dutch physicist whose transformation equations made Einstein's relativity possible, winning the Nobel Prize for explaining the Zeeman effect.
25/40
25. Otto Hahn
[C] Otto Hahn | German chemist who discovered nuclear fission but was so horrified by atomic weapons that he considered suicide when Hiroshima was bombed.
26/40
26. Luigi Galvani
[A] Luigi Galvani | Italian physician who made dead frogs dance with electricity, starting the "animal electricity" debate that led to the invention of batteries.
27/40
27. Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier
[D] Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier | French mathematician whose series decomposition lets us compress music files and analyze heat flow, discovered while governing Egypt for Napoleon.
28/40
28. Katherine Coleman Johnson
[B] Katherine Coleman Johnson | NASA mathematician whose trajectory calculations were so trusted that John Glenn refused to fly until she personally verified the computer's numbers.
29/40
29. Georg Simon Ohm
[D] Georg Simon Ohm | German physicist whose law relating voltage, current, and resistance was initially ridiculed, costing him his teaching job before becoming fundamental.
30/40
30. William Thomson Kelvin
[B] William Thomson Kelvin | British physicist who calculated absolute zero, laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable, and incorrectly calculated Earth's age, refusing to accept he was wrong.
31/40
31. John Bardeen
[A] John Bardeen | Only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics, inventing both the transistor and explaining superconductivity while being remarkably modest about it.
32/40
32. Li Shizhen
[C] Li Shizhen | Chinese physician who spent 30 years writing a 52-volume pharmaceutical encyclopedia, personally testing hundreds of remedies on himself including mercury and arsenic.
33/40
33. James Joseph Sylvester
[D] James Joseph Sylvester | English mathematician who created matrix theory and coined mathematical terms while being denied positions because he was Jewish and wouldn't take Anglican oaths.
34/40
34. Vivien Theodore Thomas
[C] Vivien Theodore Thomas | Surgical technician who developed heart surgery techniques despite being denied medical school due to race, training generations of cardiac surgeons.
35/40
35. Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen
[A] Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen | German physicist who discovered X-rays, immediately X-rayed his wife's hand, and scared her so badly she thought she'd seen her own death.
36/40
36. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
[B] Antonie van Leeuwenhoek | Dutch cloth merchant who ground his own lenses, discovered bacteria, and wrote letters to the Royal Society describing the "animalcules" in his mouth.
37/40
37. Jesse Ernest Wilkins (Jr.)
[D] Jesse Ernest Wilkins (Jr.) | Youngest person to earn a PhD in mathematics at 19, contributing to nuclear reactor design while facing discrimination in Manhattan Project facilities.
38/40
38. Humphry Davy
[C] Humphry Davy | British chemist who discovered nitrous oxide gets you high, isolated sodium and potassium, and invented the safety lamp for miners.
39/40
39. Lise Meitner
[A] Lise Meitner | Austrian physicist who explained nuclear fission but was excluded from the Nobel Prize because she was a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany.
40/40
40. Alexander Fleming
[B] Alexander Fleming | Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin because he forgot to clean his petri dishes before vacation, returning to find mold killing bacteria.