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THE IRISH MIND
JohnTyndall (1820–1893) was born in Leighlinbridge Co Carlow. He is consid- ered one of Ireland’s most successful sci- entists, as well as one of the greatest scientists overall in the 19th century. In 1853 he was appointed professor of natu- ral philosophy (physics) at The Royal In- stitution in London. In 1867, he succeeded Michael Faraday as director of the Institution.While there, he car- ried out pioneering work in a range of areas, including radiant heat, germ the- ory of disease and glacier motion. He is probably best known for his explanation that the scattering of light by small par- ticles in the atmosphere causes the sky to be blue. He also invented a method for destroying bacteria in food, called Tyndallisation. And, he invented the first double beam spectrophotometer.
WilliamThomson (1824–1907) (Lord Kelvin) was born in Belfast. A world- renowned physicist, he was appointed professor of natural philosophy at Glas- gow University in 1846, a position he held until 1899. He is best known for defining the absolute scale of tempera- ture, the Kelvin scale, in 1847. He was also very involved in developing the sec- ond law of thermodynamics.
George Francis Fitzgerald (1851–1901) was born in Dublin and, in 1881, became professor of natural and experimental philosophy at TCD. He is best known for his theory – the Fitzgerald-Lorentz Con- traction – that a moving body contracts in the direction of its motion. The theory was used as a step towards Einstein’s special theory of relativity.
ErnestWalton (1903–1995), who was born in Dungarvan, CoWaterford, is the only Irish person to win aNobel Prize in science to date.He was a pioneering nu- clear physicist who, together with an- other research student at Cambridge, John Cockcroft, designed and built the first successful particle accelerator, which enabled themto disintegrate lithium, or split the atom, in the early 1930s.He was professor of physics at Trinity College, Dublin from1947 to 1974 and, together with Cockcroft, was awarded the 1951Nobel Prize for physics.
GeorgeBoole
JohnBell (1928–1990) was born in Belfast. He worked as a nuclear physi- cist in the UK before moving to Geneva in 1960 when he joined CERN, the Euro- pean Centre for Nuclear Research. In CERN, he developed Bell’s theorem, which is also called Bell’s inequality, which is significant in quantumphysics.
COMPUTER SCIENCE/IT/ MATHEMATICS GeorgeBoole (1815–1864) was born in Lincoln and, in 1849, was appointed the first professor of mathematics at Queens College, Cork, which is now Uni- versity College Cork.While he was there, he wrote An Investigation of the
78 INNOVATION IRELAND REVIEW Issue 3 Autumn/Winter 2011
Laws of Thought, which includes his sys- temof Boolean Algebra, which is now applied in the design and operation of computers and switching circuits.
This article is reproduced courtesy of
Siliconrepublic.com. Elena Irina Paşcu is a biomedical engineering and nursing graduate fromRomania, currently an IRC- SET-funded PhD candidate in tissue engineering and biomaterials science, at Dublin CityUniversity.
Some of the sources referred to in compiling the information
includeAskaboutireland.ie,
understandingscience.ucc.ie and
irishscientists.tripod.com/scientists.
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