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There are so many amazing minds in our history that I absolutely love reading about. I find it really fun to start at their Wikipedia entries and go from there, finding primary source material from the people themselves. As the title relates, these people aren’t named for their exclusive importance, but because these minds and their labors are the reasons for my appreciation of and interaction with the sciences.

Contemporary:
These two are important to me in the manner of which they’ve brought the hard sciences and the scientific method to the minds of science-curious laymen (yours truly). I stopped math somewhere in the middle of Calculus II. I didn’t have any astounding patience for antiderivatives, and so ended my path to astro- or quantum physicist. Still, this halt to my formal education didn’t stop me from discovering the wonders of string theory, the search for our Universe’s GUT, or the new ground we break everyday at places like Fermilab and CERN. The next two men put those wonders in the reach of millions of armchair physicists, and even those of us that couldn’t even get to Diff. Eq. in college.

Carl Sagan

Watching Ted Turner’s interview with Doctor Sagan and Sagan’s series COSMOS accelerated my curiosity at a young age. One of mom’s friends had let us borrow the series, and I ate every VHS tape up. It was incredible. It set the stage for my reading of Sagan’s works a few short years later, but of every contribution that he made to the world of science, it’s my sincere hope that The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark will endure among his other works. (I’d add “become required reading for every science student in the country,” if I didn’t believe Sagan would think the sentiment too heavy-handed.) His principal discussions–the importance of science, the scientific method, and most of all, of marrying skepticism and wonder as we seek the mysteries of the universe–reflect the core of my scientific passions. His writing style brings an elegance and a softness to what many humans perceive as world of controlled experiments and hard data. Sagan passed in 1996, and though his insights are greatly missed, he has left us with an incredible knowledge of our solar system, the wonder of science, and an extensive collection of his thoughts and hopes for humanity.

Stephen Hawking

The stuff the world was made of was interesting to me. I was a sophomore in high school, looking behind me at a shelf of books about the laws of physics, and I picked up a book called Elementary Particles. Imagine my surprise upon finding a book (from thirty years ago) that explained the universe wasn’t as simple as the protons, neutrons, and electrons everyone had let on about. My science teacher for the 6th-8th grades, Mrs. Hezel, had hinted at quarks and recited their names (now that I look back, probably in 1995 upon CDF and D-Zero’s confirmation of the top quark), but until I found that book I had forgotten hearing about it. How quarks related to nuclei,  how they could be put together in different combinations to create exotic particles,  and how they couldn’t ever seem to stand alone were mysteries that I’d discover later thanks to Doctor Hawking. Most everyone has heard of A Brief History of Time, but Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays is just as relevant.

Next Segment – Physical Sciences, Part Two: 20th Century
Richard Feynman
Buckminster Fuller