Kosacki was an officer in the Polish Army in World War Two and is notably remembered as an engineer and inventor. He invented the first man-portable mine detector during his stay in St Andrews, with the Ardgowan Hotel as army headquarters and West Sands as a test site. Prior to World War Two, he had …
John Napier, the “Marvellous Merchiston” (as he was known in his day), was a Scottish landowner, mathematician, physicist, astronomer and discoverer of logarithms invented the so-called ‘Napier’s bones’, and made common the use of the decimal point. He was enrolled in St Salvator’s College, St Andrews at the age of 13, and it is suspected …
George Martine the younger became a physician and studied at the University of St Andrews. He there headed a student riot during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715, ringing the college bells the day that the ‘Old Pretender’ was proclaimed. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Leyden but settled in …
George Martine the Elder, (1635-1712) was an historian of St Andrews, following in the footsteps of his grandfather Dr George Martine, who was the principal of St Salvator’s College, St Andrews. Martine (the younger) is remembered through his work ‘Reliquiae divi Andreae’, which is the first history of the archbishopric, published after his death and …
Scottish Mathematician John Maoir worked in both Paris and St Andrews teaching logic and theology. He studied at Cambridge (rare for a Scot at this time), where he spent around a year before furthering his studies in France. He contributed to a range of fields, including ethics, metaphysics, theology, biblical commentary, history and (above all) …
The Scottish mathematician, astronomer, and first Regius Professor of Mathematics at the University of St Andrews, James Gregory, was one of the three inventors of calculus and the first to write a textbook concerning it (hence why calculus was taught at St Andrews a hundred years before it was on the curriculum at the University …
Charles Darwin described Robert FitzRoy as a ‘very extraordinary person’, being ‘everything that is delightful’ and ‘very scientific’. Vice-Admiral FitzRoy was an English officer of the Royal Navy and a scientist. He is most celebrated as the captain of the HMS Beagle during Darwin’s famous voyage, a major cartographic expedition from 1831 to 1836. FitzRoy …
Founding father of the United States of America, Benjamin Franklin, was deeply interested in the world around him and excelled in numerous fields. He was many things in his lifetime: a printer, a postmaster, an ambassador, an author, a scientist, a philosopher, a writer, a statesman and, above all, an inventor. His contributions to the …
Geologist Charles Lapworth taught English at Madras College, St Andrews. Although predominately self-taught in the field of geology, he made significant contributions to research regarding the Southern Uplands. He is mostly remembered for proposing the Ordovician epoch, a new classification of Lower Paleozoic rocks between the Cambrian and the Silurian periods. This term only gained …
James David Forbes, principal at the University of St Andrews from 1859 to his death in 1868, studied the contradictory topics of heat and glaciers. Despite familial pressure to become a lawyer, Forbes (with David Brewster’s encouragement) pursued a career in science, studying at the University of Edinburgh in the 1820s. While there, Forbes won …
