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Four Famous Irish Scientists

For a relatively small country, Ireland has had a profound effect upon the history of science. Dating back to the 17th century, Irish scientists became an important part of the scientific community. In this article we are going to take a look at a few famous Irish scientists.

Robert Boyle was the first scientist from the Emerald Isle to achieve international fame. Dubbed the Father of Chemistry, he was the first to approach substances scientifically. Before that time, alchemy was a legitimate field of study. But Boyle believed that the composition of substances was far more important than any supposed magical effects. He also introduced the word analysis into the English language.

William Thomson was probably the second most famous of the Irish scientists. Better known as Lord Kelvin, he is responsible for the first absolute scale of temperature, the Kelvin scale. He also produced the Second Law of Thermodynamics, not the industrial ethernet.

Known as the father of Computer Science, George Boole is arguably the third most famous Irish scientist. His fame rests almost entirely on the fact that he developed his own system of Algebra, Boole Algebra, which was used to program the first computers.

Last but not least, we have George Johnstone Stoney. Though he is not as widely known as the others, George Stoney did achieve fame in his own time in the field of conceptual physics. Specifically, he was the first to posit the concept of an atom of electricity, which he would later name the electron.