Scientists Biographies for 5th and 6th Graders?

kimery asks: "My wife has just been named librarian for a 5th and 6th grade school. As part of the science program, students are required to read several science biographies over the course of the school year. The current biography collection consists mainly of dead (but oh so famous!) scientists. She'd like to expand the collection of science biographies, and would like to have your suggestions as to which scientists should be included. Bonus points for suggesting someone outside the 'usual suspects.' So, what scientists do you think would be interesting for a typical 5th/6th grade student?"

Greggor Mendel is a good one

Putting into a kid's mind that you could make a lifetime of selectively breeding plants for size and tastiness is a good thing.

Re:Greggor Mendel is a good one

I know some of these are probably among the usual suspects, but maybe she won't have already thought of them as "scientists", since there seem to be a lot of more recent "hard" scientists in the ones people are listing.

Benjamin Franklin, one of our early US true scientists who has tons of fun stories about his life.

Thomas Jefferson, who seems to have invented some sort of improvement to just about everything he came into contact with, from windows to agriculture.

Ludwig Von Mises and Friedrich Hayek for their contributions to economics and social philosophy. Von Mises scientifically/mathmatically predicted that the roaring 20's would end in a crash and depression and also the final reasons for the economic demise of the Socialist/Communist model long before his theories became popular after the fact.

Tesla is always fun, if only for all the fun/weird stuff.

If they don't already have them (they likely do most of them), then Adam Smith, Isaac Newton, Stephen Hawking, James Maxwell, Robert Boyle, Robert Hook, Bernoulli, Gottfried Leibniz.

Kurt Godel

I attend a large private university in America and I only learned about Kurt Godel through a biography project last year. I have written many bios in my time and Godel is an incredible person. Even Einstein was good friends with him. Godel contributed so many great ideas to the world and is so poorly recognized.

Re:Kurt Godel

I just finished A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein [amazon.com]. Though the material is a little dense for those without a background in science and philosophy, I thought the book was great. Kurt Godel never made it on the "usual suspect

Re:

I once read an incomplete biography of Godel. But at least it was consistent.

Less conventional scientists

Here's some biographies of the less conventional scientists:

Ada Byron Lovelace: The Lady and the Computer [amazon.com]
Nikola Tesla: A Spark of Genius [amazon.com]
Turing and the Computer: The Big Idea [amazon.com]

Murray Gell-Mann or Isaac Asimov

Murray Gell-Mann because he named his quark theory The Eightfold Way, which automatically makes him kick ass.

If you don't know why Isaac Asimov kicks ass, you should be ashamed.

Grace Hopper

For no other good reason than to be the a member of the team that first "debugged" a computer by removal of the moth.

So says Grace Hopper Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org].

That was all I could remember until I read the Wikipedia entry. More good stuff is there.

Feynman, Darwin, and Ricketts

Richard Feynman
Charles Darwin
Ed Ricketts

Feynman because he is the exemplar of a truly clever person.

Charles Darwin because he had such an astonishingly insightful way of slowly accumulating information until he could see the "big picture".

Ed Ricketts because he had such an intensely committed life in biology that he is a wonderful example of how doing science can be an intensely fun life -- quite the opposite of the cold passionlessness one usually sees portrayed in science biographies

Re:Feynman, Darwin, and Ricketts

Richard Feynman

Surely you're joking. Mr. Feynman??

(Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)

Re:

(Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)

What do you care what other people think?

Re:

I would recommend also a biography about Alexander von Humboldt, the famous traveller, discoverer and researcher in biology, geography and ethnography.

My suggestions

Évariste Galois [ctc.edu] is the immediate, obvious choice.

Of course Albert Einstein would probably be in the library, but it's worth making sure there's a good biography that explains his struggles as a child, his annus mirabilis, how his Nobel was for the photoelectric effect, what E=mc^2 and relativity really are, how he was invited to be PM of Israel, etc.

I suppose it's entirely appropriate for 5th and 6th graders to know there was indeed a real Nicholas Flamel [wikipedia.org].

Another fascinating biography is that of Thomas Midgley [wikipedia.org], the poor soul who came up with three ideas that seemed brilliant at the time: leaded fuels, CFCs, and a system of ropes and pulleys in his bed that strangled him.

And what middle-schooler would not appreciate the toilet humor in the life of Tycho Brahe [st-and.ac.uk], so concerned for court etiquette that he let his bladder clog and kill him?

Unconventional Einstein

Saw a show on PBS or History Channel or somesuch about him. It was about e=mc^2, and while it included a bit about the giants whose shoulders he stood on, it also included quite a bit about "A young Einstein. A rebellious, even a sexy Einstein."

That shou

Re:

There are some biographies in simple English on wikipedia, if the main encyclopedia's articles are too far above the students' reading levels. (An example of a short one (there's probably better ones for more famous people): Nikola Tesla [wikipedia.org].)
list of famous e [wikipedia.org]

Mathematicians: great lessons for kids!

Alan Turing. Lesson: if you're gay, your government will use you to win the biggest war in history, then hound you to suicide.

John Nash: Lesson: really, really, really crazy people win Nobel prizes.

Evariste Galois. Lesson: live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.

Re:

Don't forget good old Teddy Kaczynski!
Lesson: um... type your letters instead of writing?

Suggestions

My personal favorites (although I have no suggestions wether material exists about them which is acceptable for 5th/6th grade levels):

Richard Feynman (A definite must-have!!!!)
Paul Erdos
Alan Turing
Dmitri Mendeleev
Claude Shannon
John von Neumann
The Bernoulli

You've got to include Tesla

It really shows how far you can go in life on pure unmitigated genius ;-)

Also, turing, babbage, ada lovelace, and aristotle are some interesting ones that you might not already have.

Gene Shoemaker

Gene Shoemaker [wikipedia.org]

Best known as one of the discoverers of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet that hit Jupiter in 1994, but he did an incredible amount of other stuff as well. He was the first person to prove that craters on Earth and the Moon were caused by asteroid

my suggestions

It's a little heavy on the mathematician side, but all of these are heavy hitters who had interesting lives and careers. I've read biographies on most of them.

Kurt Godel
Gregor Mendel
Paul Erdos
Stanislaw Ulam
Alan Turing
John von Neumann
George Dantzig

Gene Ray

Clearly, the misunderstood genius of our time.

Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood

Oliver Sacks isn't dead, but he is a scentist. Not the kind of scientist you automatically think of when you hear the word, but he's a clinical neurologist. And this book is entertaining, while sneaking in a lot of facts about science and history that kids will think are cool.

So, even if it's not strictly a biography, you should consider buying it, anyway. Here, read the review on /. [slashdot.org]

Interesting Scientists

I haven't seen these folks mentioned:
Tycho Brahe (Silver noses and burst bladders)
Charles Steinmetz (dwarfism, socialism, and alternating current! Oh, my!)
Benjamin Franklin (A little inventing, a little politics, and a lot of great one-liners)
Archimedes (just plain awesome)

George Washington Carver

It's an oldie, but a goodie. He proved to me that applies pure science can be an amazing thing. Got me interested in plant genetics, actually. His work created industries and jobs that didn't exist before he did his work.

Re:

Totally. I had a mini biography of him on my bookshelf for probably my entire childhood. That and Robert Goddard, another good one for this.

Glenn Seaborg

He discovered or helped discover 10 transuranium elements, won the Nobel Prize, chaired the Atomic Energy Commission (helping get the Limited Test Ban Treaty and Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty signed), and even transmuted lead into gold. A great combinat

There is this one guy

Richard P. Feynman [wikipedia.org]. Read Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman [wikipedia.org] and you'll understand. :))

Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science ...

Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology [amazon.com]

When I was a kid I remember reading this. Last updated in the 1980's [although Asimov's daughter is working on an update], so no new names from the last 25 years. Biographies for over a thousand scientists from ancient egypt to 1982 [with hyperlinks].

IIRC, the reading level was more geared toward grades 8-10, so it might be a stretch for grades 4-6. [But then again, my high school science teacher had us reading Scientific American articles as an intentional stretch - in the 1970's when Scientific American was still hard science.]

Re:Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science .

This is a wonderful book. I have the 1970-something second edition. Pocket mini-bios of just about everyone loosely describable as having anything to do with science, from the dawn of history until the book was written. Fascinating stuff. (Like, why Gio

A couple of suggestions

Well, nobody mentioned Levy yet ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levy_(astronom e r) [wikipedia.org] ) but this guy's career really does illustrate what it means to do scientific investigation, globally if needed, and to stick to it, not give up if you don't get famous

Re:

update: Then the Egyptian Eratosthenes, director of the Library in Alexandria, wedded observation to calculation. His idea was as simple as it was brilliant. When the sun was directly above Aswan, 500 miles away, he measured the shadow cast by a vertical t

My two cents

Richard Feynmann, not only for being one of the most awesome scientists ever, but for his passion and sense of fun, he makes physics look a lot less like a subject for "eggheads". John von Neumann, because he was a godlike intellect and far more important to the 20th century than your man in the street realises. Freeman Dyson, because his imagination would appeal to youngsters - stuff like genetically engineering diamond-toothed turtles to eat all the garbage off the US Highway system. Really, you could blindfold youself and throw a dart into a room full of the most important scientists of the 20th & 21st centuries, and chances are you'd hit someone that no-one without a science background's ever heard of. I do not condone the throwing of darts and important scientists.

My Father

Even though he is not that famous but he is still a physicist that could be studied.
He was one of the fore runners in computational physics too.

Edmund Halley

Of course, you can find Edmund Halley biographies in many places, but he's not really a common figure since the comet receded in the '80s. He's got a lot more to him than just that one comet discovery too. My favorite factoid is his estimate of Earth's

Hedy Lamarr

Hedy Lamarr [inventions.org]

Maybe not quite a scientist, but at least the inventor of the incredibly important concept of "spread spectrum" communications.
And she was a hot chick. We need more hot chicks with brains.

Glen Theodore Seaborg

Glen Seaborg, who at one time had the longest entry in Who's Who, was an accomplished scientist AND engineering manager. His team at Lawrence Berkeley Labs 'discovered' (created, really) elements 96 to 102. Born April 18th, 1912 in Ishpeming, Michigan, d

Astronomers!

I can't believe no one has mentioned the Tycho Brahe [wikipedia.org], Kepler [wikipedia.org], Newton [wikipedia.org] story arc yet!

Turing

I would love to suggest Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. Unfortunately, it's probably a bit heavy for elementary school students.

Great book, though. It'd be nice to see some computer scientists represented in science curriculums along with the u

What?

No Robert Goddard yet? Rockets! And he got his start right around the same age as the kids. You could throw in Wernher von Braun for a counterpoint as well.

Hans Christian Ørsted

How about Hans Christian Ørsted [wikipedia.org]? It seems to me that kids will understand his significance well enough, if you remind them that every device electrical and electronic (from light bulbs to computers) owes its existence to his discovery of electromagnet

Biographies in simple english

Here's some easily digestable biographies on Wikipedia's "simple english" branch:
http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People [wikipedia.org] ... and more specifically, e.g. Physicists [wikipedia.org].

Not many, but still some.

Don't forget.......

Neils Bohr. Not only was he a great scientist, but also an Olympic athlete. Cool guy.

How about Jane Goodall?

Anyone with a sense of humor about Gary Larson's cartoon [janegoodall.org] is someone your students should be learning about.

As for monolithic dead-tree biographies, not so much, but she's written a number of books and there's abundant information on the web.

Luis Walter Alvarez

Manhatten Project, stand-alone collision avoidance system for instrument flight rules, co-author (with his son) of the Alvarez Hypothesis for the K-T Extinction.

Biographies don't belong in a science curriculum

There are millions of more useful science-related things to be learning about, and universities are complaining that their intake of science students doesn't know enough science. Skip the fluffy stuff and teach them Feynman diagrams or special relativity -

Suggestion

I would like to suggest Tracy Hickam... He works for Nasa... Not really a scientist but almost. You can easily put the movie based on him in the Library, its "October Sky"

Emphasize Women

I've noticed that many of these fine suggestions are male. One of the biggest problems in my field of physics is that there is a very large gender imbalance. Perhaps we're sending a message early on that only men are good at science -- an absolutely false

Re:

I would agree with the Noether suggestion, except I've no idea how to explain what she did to 5th and 6th graders. Lie algebras? Rings? Action principles in physics, and symmetries? By 5th or 6th grade, they'll have learned about conservation of energy. Ho

Re:

As sarcastic as the parent poster is, I don't think he's entirely wrong. There's something to be said for teaching children that science is subject to perversion -- that scientists can be led into morally questionable activities. There are plenty of exampl