The Science Hall of Fame

 
Science has published the Science Hall of Fame, a list of the most famous scientists of the past few hundred years. They compiled the list by counting the number of times that a scientist was mentioned in books published since 1800. The standard is Charles Darwin whose citations are set at 1000 milliDarwins. The only one who ranked higher was Bertrand Russell at 1500 milliDarwins.

Here are the top 25. The ones on the bottom have scores of 152. One remarkable thing about this list is how few of them are really famous for doing science. Many of them are cited in popular books for other reasons. Another remarkable thing about the list is that all of the scientists in the top 25 are dead.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) (1500mD)
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) (1000mD)
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) (878mD)
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) (479mD)
Claude Bernard (1813-1878) (429mD)
Oliver Lodge (1851-1940) (394mD)
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) (350mD)
Karl Pearson (1857-1936) (346mD)
Niels Bohr (1885-1962) (289mD)
Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) (274mD)
Max Planck (1858-1947) (256mD)
Francis Galton (1822-1911) (255mD)
Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (252mD)
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) (237mD)
Chaim Weizmann (1874-1952) (236mD)
Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) (229mD)
Marie Curie (1867-1934) (189mD)
Robert Koch (1843-1910) (185mD)
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) (183mD)
James Jeans (1877-1946) (182mD)
Ray Lankester (1847-1929) (175mD)
Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) (169mD)
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) (163mD)
Rachel Carson (1907-1964) (152mD)
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) (152mD)

The website has an interactive table that links you to Wikipedia articles. If you click on "Karl Pearson," for example, you'll learn about his science. You can also click on the citation score to see how their citations vary over time. I've copied the charts for Dawkins and Gould so you can see how they compare.

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