Idle Portraits of Busy Men

Dimitri Mendeleev worked for years to find a way to organize the elements of the universe into some structured manner, some pattern. He made himself a pack of playing cards with the elements names, atomic weights, and various properties listed on each, and spent long train rides organizing, reorganizing, searching for clues and relationships. In the end he dreamed of the table as we know it - charting the elements in periodic series.

Jane Goodall lived in the jungle with monkeys. You know the rest.

Pierre Curie discovered piezoelectricity, and together with his wife discovered radium. They did important founding work on radioactivity.

Charles Darwin was born two hundred years ago. Y'all know about Darwin.

Joseph Fourier is a mathematician best known today for the Fourier series, and his investigations into heat flow. He was the first person to discover the greenhouse effect in Earth's atmosphere. Before that, he was an avid Egyptologist, traveling to Cairo with Napoleon Bonaparte and being named Governor of Lower Egypt.