Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

popular name: Marie Curie

date_of_death: July 4, 1934

age: 66

cause_of_death: Aplastic anemia from exposure to radiation

claim_to_fame: Science

best_know_for: Marie Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. She was the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris in 1906, and the first of only five women to be buried in Le Panthéon. Working with her husband, Pierre Curie, Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium in 1898. In 1903 they won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering radioactivity. In 1911 she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for isolating pure radium. Following work on X-rays during World War I, she studied radioactive substances and their medical applications.

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: Jaime Escalante

date_of_death: March 30, 2010

age: 79

cause_of_death: Bladder cancer

claim_to_fame: Science

best_know_for: Jaime Escalante became famous for his work with troubled, "unteachable" high school math students. Escalante was an educator who was born in Bolivia and came to the United States in the 1960s to seek a better life. He began teaching math to troubled students in a violent Los Angeles school and became famous for leading many of them to pass the advanced placement calculus test. In 1991, the number of Garfield students taking advanced placement examinations in math and other subjects jumped to 570 with many of them going on to selective universities including the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) He was played by Edward James Olmos in the 1988 film Stand and Deliver.