AP European History
AP European History
Copernicus (1473-1534), Poland/East Prussia. He was responsible for spreading the heliocentric (sun centered) theory of the solar system throughout Europe. His On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published posthumously.
Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), Netherlands. He invented and used microscopes to create a basis for modern biological science; his drawings of blood corpuscles, sperm, and bacteria began the science of microbiology.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), France. He was a skeptic and inventor of the essay. He stated that he knew nothing decades before Descartes wrote, “Cogito ergo sum.” (“I think therefore I am”).
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), England. He is of ten cited as the codifier of the inductive method. He believed “Knowledge is power,” and should be put to practical use.
René Descartes (1596-1650), France. He was an ardent advocate for the deductive method. His Discourse on Method defined two kinds of matter: thinking substance (everything within the mind) and extended substance (the objective world or everything outside the mind). This division of reality is known as Cartesian dualism. He invented analytical geometry and wrote the eternal line, “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”).
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Denmark. This eccentric astronomer collected vast amounts of data and hired a mathematically gifted assistant named Johannes Kepler.
Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Germany. Brahe’s assistant. He discovered three laws of planetary motion that helped Newton later understand gravity, and proved that the orbits of planets are ellipses.
Galileo Galilei (1571-1642), Italy. Perhaps the best example of the Enlightenment emerging from the Renaissance, Galileo was a master of many sciences and tried to know everything he could. His astronomical observations of the moons of Jupiter proved that Earth was not the center of the universe, getting him put under house arrest by the Roman Catholic Church. His experiments with inertia proved that objects of different weights fall at the same rate.
Vesalius (1514-1564), Belgium. His anatomical drawings from dissection of corpses were the first detailed anatomical maps of the human body.
William Harvey (1578-1657), England. He was the author of On the Movement of the Heart and Blood, which explained the circulation of the blood through arteries and veins.
Isaac Newton (1642-1727), England. He synthesized Kepler’s and Galileo’s ideas together in his laws of motion. His definition of physics defined what scientists knew about the universe until Einstein conceived of relativity. He developed calculus to measure and predict curves and trajectories. Newton also explained the laws of universal gravitation. He said he “stood on the shoulders of giants,” in deference to Galileo.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), Germany. He invented calculus simultaneously with Newton.