Notable Chemists & Physicists Posters & Prints “S...-”
for science classrooms, laboratories, home schoolers.

Carl Sagan
b. 11-9-1934; Brooklyn, NY
d. 12-20-1996

Astrophysicist Carl Sagan popularized astronomy with his PBS program Cosmos, and his novel “Contact” was the basis of a movie by the same name.

• You Are Here: “Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. ...”

Andrei Sakharov
b. 5-21-1921; Moscow
d. 12-14-1989

Andrei Sakharov was a nuclear physicist in the former Soviet Union who became uneasy about the human rights issues around the work he was doing. He became an advocate of civil liberties and reforms, being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

• more Nobel Peace Prize winners posters
• Sakharov: A Biography

Frederick Sanger
b. 8-13-1918; England

Biochemist Frederick Sanger was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1958 and 1980 for work with DNA. Sanger was the fourth person to be awarded two Nobel Prizes (others Marie Curie, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen).

• Selected Papers of Frederick Sanger

Carl Wilhelm Scheele
b. 12-9-1742; Germany
d. 5-21-1786

Carl Wilhelm Scheele, the son of a carpenter, and without a formal science education, became a pharmacist. Scheele read many books and was an experimenter. Scheele, Priestley and Lavoisier all “discovered” oxygen about the same time.

Scheele also died at a young age, probably due to his experimentation of tasting the chemicals he was studying.

• Oxygen

Erwin Schrödinger
b. 8-12-1887; Vienna
d. 1-4-1961

Schrödinger was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 1933 (with Dirac) for his Schrödinger equation describing the space and time dependence of quantum mechanical systems. In 1935, he proposed the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment.

• What is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger

Berthold Schwarz
fl. 13th century; Germany

Franciscan monk Berthold Schwarz (Berthold the Black), whose work as an alchemist with a burning powder called gunpowder, is generally credited as leading to the invention of firearms in Europe.

• Gunpowder: Alchemy, Bombards, And Pyrotechnics: The History Of The Explosive That Changed The World

William Shockley
b. 2-13-1910; London
d. 8-12-1989; Stanford, CA

Physicist William Shockley was co-awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for their invention of the transistor.

• Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age

Benjamin Silliman
b. 8-8-1779; North Stratford, now Trumbull, Connecticut
d. 11-24-1864

Benjamin Silliman, one of the first American professors of science, was the first American to fractionate petroleum (crude oil) by distillation in 1854. He was first educated as a lawyer, then studied chemistry and geology.

Leo Szilard
b. 2-11-1898; Budapest
d. 5-30-1964; La Jolla, CA

Physicist Leo Szilard “conceived the nuclear chain reaction in 1933, patented the idea of a nuclear reactor with Enrico Fermi, and in late 1939 wrote the letter for Albert Einstein's signature that resulted in the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb.”