Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

popular name: Kurt Gödel

date_of_death: January 14, 1978

age: 71

cause_of_death: Malnutrition and inanition caused by personality disturbance

claim_to_fame: Science

best_know_for: Kurt Gödel was a prominent Austrian/American logician, mathematician and philosopher who is mentioned as most likely autistic (Asperger's Syndrome) in Genius Genes by Michael Fitzgerald and Brendan O’Brien, in Asperger Syndrome – A Gift or a Curse? by Michael Fitzgerald and Viktoria Lyons. He is known in particular for Gödel's incompleteness theorems, Gödel's completeness theorem, the consistency of the Continuum hypothesis with ZFC, Gödel metric, Gödel's ontological proof and Gödel–Dummett logic, Among notable awards he has won are the Albert Einstein Award (1951), the National Medal of Science (1974) and ForMemRS (1968). He was also a Fellow of the British Academy. Looking back over that century in the year 2000, TIME magazine included Kurt Gödel (1906–78), the foremost mathematical logician of the twentieth century among its top 100 most influential thinkers. Gödel was associated with the Princeton University Institute for Advanced Study from his first visit in the academic year 1933–34, until his death in 1978. He was Professor in the School of Mathematics from 1953 until 1976, when he became Professor Emeritus.

popular name: Christa McAuliffe

date_of_death: January 28, 1986

age: 37

cause_of_death: Space shuttle accident

claim_to_fame: Science

best_know_for: Christa McAuliffe was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire, who was killed on the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L where she was serving as a payload specialist. On January 28, 1986, McAuliffe boarded Challenger with the other six crew members of STS-51-L. Seventy-three seconds into its flight at an altitude of 48,000 ft (14.630 km), the shuttle broke apart, resulting in the deaths of all seven crew members. According to NASA, it was in part because of the excitement over her presence on the shuttle that the accident had such a significant effect on the nation. Many schoolchildren were viewing the launch live, and media coverage of the accident was extensive.

popular name: Ludwig Boltzmann

date_of_death: September 5, 1906

age: 62

cause_of_death: Suicide - hanging

claim_to_fame: Science

best_know_for: Ludwig Boltzmann was one of the greatest theoretical physicists of all time. His fame is due to his pioneering research work on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics (his basic equation of kinetic gas theory and the second principle of thermodynamics) as well as the atomic hypothesis of matter. He also made important contributions in mechanics, electromagnetism, mathematics and philosophy. Boltzmann was an extraordinary mathematician, a philosopher, a great teacher (he had an outstanding memory), he was a brilliant conversationalist as well as an excellent pianist with a great passion for Beethoven. And yet he was a controversial figure and his innovative ideas (on atomism and irreversibility in particular) were often misunderstood and ostracized. In particular, his love of extreme mathematics earned him the by-name of "algebraic terrorist". Only a few years after his suicide that Jean Baptiste Perrin’s experimental verification of Brownian motion would settle the century-long debate about the atomic theory and thereby validate Boltzmann’s career.