~ 2.6 million years ago: Start of Stone Age

~ 1.7 – 2.0 million years ago: Earliest known controlled fire

~ 12,000 years ago: Earliest known farming

~ B.C. 3300: Sumerian Calendar – 12 lunar months and 29/30 days in each month

~ B.C. 3100: Start of Bronze Age

~ B.C. 3000: Pyramids built by Ancient Egyptians

~ B.C. 1200: Start of Iron Age

~ B.C. 600: Pythagoras – The Pythagorean Theorem established

~ B.C. 400: Democritus – Idea of “Atoms”

B.C. 387: Plato Founded the Platonic Academy

B.C. 384: Aristotle was born: Important influence of scholars for centuries to come

~ B.C. 300: Hippocrates of Kos – Father of Medicine 

~ B.C. 300: Aristarchus of Samos – First proposal of a model of Which the Sun is the center of all planets (the Heliocentric Theory)

~ B.C. 300: Euclid – The Elements (Major contributions to Geometry)

~ B.C. 300: Diophantus – Arithmetica (Father of Algebra)

~ B.C. 250: Archimedes of Syracuse – Understanding of Buoyancy, Accurate approximation of π

B.C. 240: Eratosthenes of Cyrene – First accurate measurement of a round Earth

B.C. 46: Julius Caesar – The Julian calendar (First effective Solar calendar)

A.D. 70: Menelaus of Alexandria was born – Menelaus's Theorem

A.D. 100: Ptolemy was born: Major Contributions to Mathematics, Geography, and Astronomy

A.D. 105: Cai Lun – Refinements of paper-making

A.D. 117: Zhang Heng – Water-powered Celestial Sphere

A.D. 628: Brahmagupta – Introduced the concept of “Zero”, Father of Arithmetic

A.D. 672: Kallinikos – Introduced Greek Fire

~ A.D. 800: The Bagdad House of Wisdom – Preservation of antique knowledge and advancements in mathematics, medical sciences and astronomy

~ A.D. 850: Gunpowder saw early usage in Tang Dynasty

~ A.D. 1200: The navigational compass saw early usage in the Song Dynasty

A.D. 1202: Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) – Fibonacci’s Sequence

A.D. 1261: Yang Hui proposed the earliest version of Pascal’s Triangle

~ A.D. 1300: Start of Renaissance – Crucial contribution to Art and Science

~ A.D. 1400: Matchlock muskets started to appear 

A.D. 1450: Johannes Gutenberg – Introduced the printing press 

A.D. 1510: Leonardo da Vinci – Dissected and sketched the human body 

A.D. 1514: Nicolaus Copernicus – who gave his friend a handwritten notebook supporting the idea of Heliocentric Theory

A.D. 1582: Pope Gregory XIII – The Gregorian Calendar(Our modern Solar calendar)

~ A.D. 1600: Flintlock muskets invented in France

A.D. 1609: Johannes Kepler – Astronomia Nova (Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion)

A.D. 1610: Galileo Galilei (Father of Modern Science) – Used improved telescopes and ended up with Copernicus’ conclusion

A.D. 1618: John Napier – Published about Logarithm 

A.D. 1621: Willebrord Snellius – Snell’s Law

A.D. 1637: Pierre de Fermat – Claims to have proved Fermat's Last Theorem

A.D. 1637: René Descartes – Invented the x-y grid (Cartesian Coordinates)

A.D. 1656: Christiaan Huygens – Invented clock

A.D. 1660: Blaise Pascal – Pascal's Principle

A.D. 1660: Robert Hooke: Hooke’s Law

A.D. 1662: Robert Boyle – The Sceptical Chymist (Marked the beginning of Modern Chemistry) Boyle’s Law

A.D. 1665: Robert Hooke – Observed and named “cells” (Which turns out to be cell wall)

A.D. 1665: Sir Isaac Newton – Developed his version of infinitesimal calculus

A.D. 1671: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Individually developed integral calculus

A.D. 1676: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Sued for developing a better version of Newton’s calculus

A.D. 1678: Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light (Mathematical Wave Theory of Light)

A.D. 1683: Antonie van Leeuwenhoek – Discovered bacteria

A.D. 1686: Giovanni Ceva – Proposed Ceva’s Theorem

A.D. 1687: Sir Isaac Newton – Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Newton’s Law of Motion)

A.D. 1705: Edmond Halley – predicted the return of Comet Halley of 1758

A.D. 1735: Leonhard Euler – Proposed Graph Theory

A.D. 1736: Joseph-Louis Lagrange was born – multiple major contributions in Mathematics (Lagrange Multipliers, Interpolation Polynomial, etc) 

A.D. 1748: Leonhard Euler – Introduced Function

A.D. 1751: Leonhard Euler – Found a common function for Catalan’s Number

A.D. 1752: Adrien-Marie Legendre was born – Later known for Legendre Transformation and Legendre polynomials

A.D. 1761: Johann Heinrich Lambert – proved that π is irrational

A.D. 1763: Leonhard Euler – Discovered Euler’s Line

A.D. 1769: James Watt – Improved the steam engine dramatically, boosting the start of the Industrial Revolution

A.D. 1773: Pierre-Simon Laplace – Introduced the invariability of planetary mean motion

A.D. 1774: Antoine Lavoisier (The Father of Modern Chemistry) – Law of Conservation of Mass

A.D. 1781: William Herschel – Discovered Uranus


A.D. 1783: Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d'Arlandes – First hot air Balloon flight

A.D. 1875: Pierre-Simon Laplace – Laplace Transform

A.D. 1785: Charles-Augustin de Coulomb: confirmed Coulomb’s Law 

A.D. 1787: Jacques Charles – Charles's Law

A.D. 1797: Joseph Proust – Law of Definite Proportions

A.D. 1799: Carl Friedrich Gauss – proved the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra

A.D. 1800: Alessandro Volta – first chemical battery (Volta Battery) 

A.D. 1801: Thomas Young – the Double-slit experiment

A.D. 1802: First Steam locomotive revealed in Britain

A.D. 1803: John Dalton – Dalton's law

A.D. 1808: Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac – Gay-Lussac’s Law

A.D. 1808: John Dalton – His version of Atomic Theory

A.D. 1809: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – Lamarckism

A.D. 1811: Lorenzo Romano Amedeo Carlo Avogadro – Avogadro's law

A.D. 1812: Pierre-Simon Laplace – Invented Probability

A.D. 1820: Hans Christian Ørsted – Confirmed electromagnetic interactions

A.D. 1821: Augustin-Louis Cauchy – Cauchy inequality

A.D. 1826: André-Marie Ampère – the Circuital Law

A.D. 1827: Robert Brown – Observed the Brownian Motion

A.D. 1827: Georg Ohm – established the relationship between voltage, current, and resistance

A.D. 1828: Friedrich Woehler – synthesized Urea, redefining Organic Chemistry entirely

A.D. 1829: Niels Henry Abel: Founded Group Theory and proved that there is no general solution for roots of any polynomial equation

A.D. 1831: Michael Faraday – Faraday's Law of Induction

A.D. 1838: Matthias Jakob Schleiden – All plants are made out of cells

A.D. 1839: Theodor Schwann – All animals are made out of cells

A.D. 1841: James Prescott Joule – Joule's First Law


A.D. 1842: Christian Doppler – Doppler effect


A.D. 1844: Eugène Charles Catalan – Proposed Catalan Conjecture

A.D. 1846: Évariste Galois – Galois theory published by Joseph Liouville

A.D. 1846: Johann Gottfried Galle – observed Neptune under Urbain Le Verrier’s instructions

A.D. 1848: Lord Kelvin – proposed “Absolute Zero”


A.D. 1855: Rudolf Virchow – Each cell comes from another cell

A.D. 1851: Sir Alfred Russel Wallace – First ideologies on natural selection

A.D. 1859: Charles Darwin – On the Origin of Species (His theory of evolution)

A.D. 1862: James Clerk Maxwell – Proposed Maxwell’s Equations


A.D. 1866: Gregor Mendel – Experiments on Plant Hybridization

A.D. 1869: Dmitri Mendeleev – published the first modern Periodic Table

A.D. 1870: Josiah Willard Gibbs – Proposed Entropy and Free Energy

A.D. 1871: Ludwig Boltzmann – Mathematically explained the Second Law of Thermodynamics

A.D. 1876: Oscar Hertwig – Discovered Meiosis

A.D. 1879: Sir Walter Flemming – Observed Mitosis

A.D. 1881: Josiah Willard Gibbs – Invented Vector Analysis 

A.D. 1883: Svante Arrhenius – Developed his ion theory

A.D. 1884: Henry Louis Le Chatelier – developed Le Chatelier's Principle

A.D. 1884: Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim – The Maxim machine gun was introduced

A.D. 1886: Karl Benz – presented the first modern car with an internal combustion engine

A.D. 1887: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz – confirmed the existence of electromagnetic waves

A.D. 1888: Hermann Schwarz – Schwarz inequality

A.D. 1897: Wilhelm Wein – Wein’s Displacement Law

A.D. 1897: Sir Joseph John Thomson – discovered the electron

A.D. 1898: Maria Sklodowska-Curie and Pierre Curie isolate radium and polonium from pitchblende

A.D. 1900: Max Planck – Proposed the formula for Black-Body Radiation

A.D. 1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright – first successful flight of their airplane

A.D. 1905: Albert Einstein’s Miracle Year – Special relativity, proposed the photon to explain the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and Mass–energy equivalence

A.D. 1911: Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom, remodelled it