• 306-283 B.C. Euclid of Greece known as the 'father of geometry' creates the most printed literary work of all time, 'The Elements'.
• 1285-1349 William of Ockham (also Occam) fights papal power and proposes 'plurality should not be assumed without necessity' (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate), now known as Occam's razor.
• 1564-1642 Galileo Galilei born in Pisa, Italy distinguished himself as a musician, mathematician, astronomer and natural philosopher.  One of his works, entitled ‘Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World - Ptolemaic and Copernican, 1632’, actually saw him tried by the Inquisition. His study of mechanics led to a description of uniform motion referred to as the Galilean transformations.
• 1768-1830 Jean-Baptiste Fourier studied a wide range of topics encompassing sunspots, tides and the weather. His work 'The Analytical Theory of Heat' (Théorie analytique de la chaleur, 1822) modeled heat conduction with series of sine and cosine functions.
• 1803-1853 Christian Doppler Austrian born mathematician and astronomer describes the perceived change of frequency in light and sound waves is due to the relative motion of the source and the observer (1842). This effect or Doppler Shift provides one method in finding planets orbiting other stars.
• 1831-1879 James Maxwell of Scotland publishes his work 'On a Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865)', and 'A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (1873)' which form the foundation of Light.
• 1858-1947 Max Planck of Germany proposed that light emanating from matter had energy proportional to it's frequency (i.e.-color).
• 1864-1909 Hermann Minkowski Though primarily interested in pure mathematics, he is perhaps best known for his non-Euclidean four-dimensional treatment of electrodynamics, which provides a mathematical framework to the prior work of Einstein and Lorentz. 'Space and Time' (Raum und Zeit , 1907).
• 1879-1955 Albert Einstein publishes a series of diverse papers in 1905 ranging from atomic particles, light waves to light particles. 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies' ('Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper'), which was published on June 30, 1905.
• 1902-1984 Paul Dirac Dirac derived a relativistic theory for the electron (1928) and the theory of holes (1930) (later known as positrons). He is also known for his relativitstic treatment of Schrödinger's equation.
• 1960-1970 Lasers improve optical spectroscopy by over a billionfold.
• 1932-2002 Ken Evenson, et. al., improved frequency and speed-of-light measurements. (K. M. Evenson, J.S. Wells, F.R. Peterson, B.L. Danielson, G.W. Day, R.L. Barger and J.L. Hall, Phys. Rev. Letters 29, 1346(1972).) This led to a redefinition of the meter in terms of the speed of light c=299,792,458 m/s.
• 2005 Roy Glauber, John "Jan" Hall and Theodor Hänsch received the 2005 nobel prize in physics. John Hall and Theodor Hänsch were honored for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy. Roy Glauber was recognized for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence in which he described the behavior of light particles known as photons.
• Present William Harter uses Doppler shifted light to derive space-time relativity and various properties of classical and quantum mechanics.

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