Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1778) It was on this date, December 6, 1778, that French chemist Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac was born in Saint-Léonard-de-Noblat. He studied at the École Polytechnique, then at the École des Ponts et Chausses, and apprenticed under the famous chemist Claude Louis Berthollet. Gay-Lussac returned to the École Polytechnique to became professor of […]

Marie Curie (1867) It was on this date, November 7, 1867, that French chemist and nuclear physicist Marie Curie was born Maria Salomea Skłodowska in Warsaw, Poland. She was brought up a Catholic by her mother, but her father was a freethinker and provided her with some scientific training. She abandoned Catholicism before she was […]

Alfred Nobel (1833) It was on this date, October 21, 1833, that Swedish chemist Alfred Bernhard Nobel was born in Stockholm. It is one of the ironies of his life that a man who made his fortune in the invention and manufacture of weapons of war – dynamite and other nitroglycerine derivatives – bequeathed among […]

Albert Camus (1913) It was on this date, November 7, 1913, that French existentialist philosopher Albert Camus was born in Mondovi, Algeria. Camus studied philosophy with the idea of teaching it, but also discovered theater and journalism, working at those endeavors full time by 1938. In World War Two (1941) he joined the French Resistance […]