Quakers in science
- William Allen â more known for abolitionism and penal reform; a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Linnean Society of London
- James Backhouse â botanist and missionary; author abbreviation "Backh"
- Wilson Baker â organic chemist
- John Bartram â described as the "father of American botany"; founded Bartram Botanical Gardens in Kingsessing on the bank of the Schuylkill River
- Anna McClean Bidder â marine zoologist and first president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge
- Kenneth E. Boulding â systems theorist and economist
- Russell Brain, 1st Baron Brain â neurologist known for Brain's reflex; became a Quaker in 1931 and gave the Swarthmore Lecture in 1944, "Man, Society and Religion", in which he stressed the importance of a social conscience
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell â discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish; raised Quaker in Northern Ireland; volunteered in local and national Quaker activities up to at least the 1970s; her Swarthmore Lecture was titled "Broken for Life"; still an active Quaker
- John Cassin â ornithologist
- Ezra Townsend Cresson â entomologist
- Peter Collinson â botanist with some interest in electricity; his family belonged to the Gracechurch meeting of the Religious Society of Friends
- Edward Drinker Cope â early paleontologist who took part in the Bone Wars and for whom Cope's Rule is named
- John Dalton â taught at a Quaker school, but is best known for work in atomic theory.
- Jeremiah Dixon â surveyor and astronomer known for the MasonâÂÂDixon line
- Henry Doubleday â horticulturist and lace designer
- Arthur Stanley Eddington â astrophysicist known especially for the Eddington experiment and as a populariser of science, active in the Quaker Guild of Teachers, attended meetings regularly; his Swarthmore Lecture was titled "Science and the Unseen World"
- George Ellis â co-authored The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking; won the 2004 Templeton Prize and got involved with the Quaker Service Fund
- John Fothergill â physician and botanist; Fothergilla (witch alder) is named for him
- Robert Were Fox the Younger â geologist active in the early days of the British Association for the Advancement of Science
- Ursula Franklin â metallurgist and physicist
- George Graham â clockmaker and geophysicist who discovered the diurnal variation of the terrestrial magnetic field
- John Gummere â astronomer
- Richard Harlan â naturalist
- Thomas Hodgkin â lived in the more ultra-orthodox era of Quakerism so wore plain clothes and spoke in a formal manner; Hodgkin's disease is named for him
- Rush D. Holt, Jr. â Congressman; former assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory; beat Watson; has a patent for a "method for maintaining a correct density gradient in a non-convecting solar pond"
- Luke Howard â meteorologist known for work in cloud types and nomenclature
- George Barker Jeffery â known for Jeffery's equations and translating works on the theory of relativity to English; his Swarthmore Lecture was "Christ, Yesterday and Today"
- Isaac Lea â conchologist born a Quaker
- Graceanna Lewis â ornithologist and social reformer
- Joseph Jackson Lister â known for his role in the development of the optical microscope; his son, Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, was a pioneer in surgical sterile techniques, but left the Quakers and joined the Scottish Episcopal Church
- Kathleen Lonsdale â prominent crystallographer; discovered the planar hexagonal structure of benzene; became a Quaker in 1935, as such, she was a committed pacifist and served time in Holloway prison during World War II because she refused to register for civil defense duties or to pay the resulting fine; her Swarthmore Lecture was titled "Removing the Causes of War"
- Maria Mitchell â astronomer who was raised as a Quaker but later adopted Christian Unitarianism
- Frank Morley â mathematician specializing in algebra and geometry and known for Morley's trisector theorem. Was the son of two Quakers
- Frederick Parker-Rhodes â plant pathologist and linguistics researcher, also active in other fields
- William Philips â founder of the Geological Society of London
- Lewis Fry Richardson â meteorologist; his Quaker beliefs exempted him from military service during World War I
- Frederick Sanger â biochemist, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; raised Quaker
- Lucy Say â naturalist, nature artist, and first female member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia
- Thomas Say â entomologist, conchologist, and herpetologist
- Joseph Hooton Taylor, Jr. â astrophysicist and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation"
- Silvanus P. Thompson â known for his book Calculus Made Easy; developed an idea of a telegraph submarine cable; his Swarthmore Lecture was titled "The Quest for Truth"
- William Homan Thorpe â President of the British Ornithologists' Union from 1955 to 1960; his Swarthmore Lecture was titled "Quakers and Humanists"
- Daniel Hack Tuke â expert on mental illness; came from a long line of Quakers from York who were interested in mental illness and concerned with those afflicted
- Caspar Wistar â anatomist in colonial America
- Thomas Young â polymath and child prodigy; raised Quaker.
See also
References
Further reading
- Quakers in Science and Industry by Arthur Raistrick.