Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist and an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.
Hanaoka Seishū was a Japanese of the Edo period with a knowledge of Chinese herbal medicine, as well as Western surgical techniques he had learned through Rangaku.
Edmond Halley, in his 1705 Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets, used Newton’s new laws to calculate the gravitational effects of Jupiter and Saturn on cometary orbits.
The Principia is “regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science”.
Leibniz is credited, along with Sir Isaac Newton, with the discovery of calculus (differential and integral calculus). According to Leibniz’s notebooks, a critical breakthrough occurred on 11 November 1675, when he employed integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of a function y = f(x).
Before Van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery of microorganisms in 1675, it had been a mystery why grapes could be turned into wine, milk into cheese, or why food would spoil.
Robert Hooke was a 17th century “natural philosopher” — an early scientist — noted for a variety of observations of the natural world.
Galileo is a central figure in the transition from natural philosophy to modern science and in the transformation of the scientific Renaissance into a scientific revolution.
Kepler’s work improved the heliocentric theory of Nicolaus Copernicus, explaining how the planets’ speeds varied, and using elliptical orbits rather than circular orbits with epicycles.
The history of logarithm in seventeenth century Europe is the discovery of a new function that extended the realm of analysis beyond the scope of algebraic methods.
