Question: Can you please tell me about an amazing scientist? ( but not any of the really famous ones like Newton)

Susan Cartwright answered on 20 Jun 2015:

Here are three, from different fields…

One of my heroes as a physicist is James Clerk Maxwell, who really should be “one of the really famous ones like Newton”, but isn’t. I think most physicists would bracket Maxwell with Newton and Einstein as one of the greatest physicists ever.
Maxwell was a Scotsman, born in Edinburgh in 1831. He wrote his first scientific paper, in mathematics, at the age of 14, before going to Cambridge University in 1850. He graduated second top (“Second Wrangler”) in mathematics.
Maxwell’s contributions to physics are immense. He is mostly remembered for two enormous achievements: the theory of electricity and magnetism, finally encapsulated in the four equations still called Maxwell’s Equations (finally published in finished form in 1873, though he had been making advances in electromagnetic theory since 1855), and the co-founding, with Ludwig van Boltzmann, of the kinetic theory of gases, i.e. the first treatment of gases as clouds of moving particles: the key distribution in this field is called the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (it was derived independently by both of them). Further work in thermodynamics (the study of heat and energy) led to another important set of equations, called Maxwell’s relations (well, they couldn’t call them “Maxwell’s equations”, that name was taken!).
Among the consequences of Maxwell’s equations is the recognition that light is an electromagnetic wave whose speed is set by the properties of electricity and magnetism – this later paved the way for Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Similarly, the kinetic theory of gases introduced the idea that temperature and heat are consequences of molecular motion, and again led to great advances in theoretical physics.
Maxwell was also the first to prove that Saturn’s rings cannot be solid, but must be composed of many independently-orbiting particles. He studied the principles of colour vision and produced (in 1861) the first colour photograph. He was professor of physics at Cambridge University when the famous Cavendish Laboratory was built, and supervised its construction. Oh yes, and he also published a paper on the regulation of steam engines, which is considered one of the founding papers of the important engineering field of control theory – the branch of engineering that deals with controlling and regulating systems.
Maxwell died of cancer when he was only 48. Who knows what he would have achieved if he had lived into his 80s?

Although he was very much a physicist, Maxwell initially studied mathematics. Another amazing scientist in the field of mathematics was Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Ramanujan was a brilliant Indian mathematician, born in 1887 in a small village in southern India. His father was a clerk in a cloth merchant’s shop, and as a relatively poor Indian in the late 19th century Ramanujan had almost no formal training in mathematics – he taught himself, from books that were well out of date. He quickly began to develop his own ideas – although some of them were known results, they weren’t in his 50-year-old books, and he developed them all independently. By 1910 he was becoming famous among Indian mathematicians, and in 1913 he started corresponding with the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy, who encouraged him to come to England, where he remained from 1914 to 1919 (though for part of this time he was seriously ill). He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society – a great scientific honour – in 1918. He returned to India in 1919 but died the following year, aged only 32.
Because of his lack of formal training, Ramanujan spent much of his time rediscovering results by great 19th-century mathematicians like Gauss. However, he produced much genuinely original work, espcially in the technical field of hypergeometric series and elliptic functions (don’t ask me, I’m not a mathematician!). His unpublished notebooks inspired much later work.
Ramanujan is not in the very top rank of mathematicians, but in view of how little help he got in developing his mathematical skills, he was a true genius and certainly an amazing scientist.

Finally, on a completely different note, I give you the Australian doctor and medical researcher Barry Marshall (born in 1951 and still very much with us).
There is a disabling medical condition called a stomach ulcer, where the digestive acids in the stomach attack the stomach lining, producing pain and inflammation. For decades, it was believed by doctors that stomach ulcers were the result of stress, and/or eating too much spicy food. Patients were prescribed medication to reduce the acidity of their stomach and told to change their lifestyle to reduce stress.
Around 1980, Marshall was working on this condition with a colleague, Robin Warren. Marshall and Warren found that cases of stomach ulcer and inflammation seemed to be associated with the presence of a spiral-shaped bacterium, Helicobacter pylori. They proposed that ulcers were not the result of stress after all, but were a bacterial disease caused by H. pylori, and should be treated using antibiotics.
Nobody believed them. Although their evidence was suggestive, it was not convincing, and people had trouble believing that bacteria could really live and grow in the hostile conditions of the stomach. Marshall’s solution to this was to have an endoscopy, to prove that his stomach lining was healthy, and then deliberately drink a culture of H. pylori. He expected that after some incubation period he might develop a stomach ulcer – in fact, within a week he was quite seriously ill, and another endoscopy showed massive inflammation of the stomach lining. When a sample was taken for analysis, the inflamed tissue turned out to be heavily infected with H. pylori.
As a result of Marshall’s brave action, the treatment for this common condition – the NHS website says that about 1 in 10 of us will develop a stomach ulcer at some point – has completely changed, and people are now cured by antibiotics instead of having to live with the condition for years.
Marshall (and Warren) got the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 2005. I think he’s an amazing scientist.