| 1873 |
Johannes Diderik van der Waals, Leiden University, Netherlands |
| Over de Continuïteit van den Gas - en Vloeistoftoestand (On the Continuity of the Gas and Liquid State)
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| Physics/refridgeration: "...he put forward an 'Equation of State' embracing both the gaseous and the liquid state; he could demonstrate that these two states of aggregation not only merge into each other in a continuous manner, but that they are in fact of the same nature.[...] Modern refrigeration engineering, which is nowadays such a potent factor in our economy and industry, bases its vital methods mainly on Van der Waals' theoretical studies."
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| 1928 |
Margaret Mead, Columbia University, New York |
| An Inquiry into the Question of Cultural Stability in Polynesia |
| Cultural Anthropology: Mead brought anthropology to the public's interest and pioneered areas of study dealing with culture versus biology in the formation of societies and the "complexities of being human." |
| 1948 |
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Université de Paris, France |
| The Family and Social Life of the Nambikwara Indians and The Elementary Structures of Kinship |
| Cultural Anthropology: The Elementary Structures of Kinship was published in 1949 and quickly came to be regarded as one of the most important anthropological works on kinship. It was even reviewed favorably by Simone de Beauvoir, who viewed it as an important statement of the position of women in non-western cultures. A play on the title of Durkheim's famous Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Elementary Structures re-examined how people organized their families by examining the logical structures that underlay relationships rather than their contents. While British anthropologists such as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown argued that kinship was based on descent from a common ancestor, Lévi-Strauss argued that kinship was based on the alliance between two families that formed when women from one group married men from another. |
| 1950 |
John Nash, Princeton University, NJ |
| Non-Cooperative Games |
| Economics:
Nash introduced to the field of economics "the distinction between cooperative games, in which binding agreements can be made, and non-cooperative games, where binding agreements are not feasible," which enabled researchers to make better predictions about economic outcomes. |
| 1955 |
Noam Chomsky, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia |
| Transformational Analysis |
| Linguistics: Chomsky introduced transformational grammar, a theory which changed conceptions about how children acquire language and the construction of language and grammars, with significant implications for the field of cognitive psychology. He "contributed substantially to a major methodological shift in the human sciences, turning away from the prevailing empiricism of the middle of the twentieth century: behaviorism in psychology, structuralism in linguistics and positivism in philosophy."
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| 1967 |
Stephen Jay Gould, Columbia University, New York |
| Pleistocene and Recent History of the Subgenus Poecilozonites (Poecilozonites) (Gastropoda: Pulmonata) in Bermuda: An Evolutionary Microcosm
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| Evolutionary Biology, Geology: Gould's doctoral work with fossilized land snails developed into an often controversial theory "that evolutionary change occurs relatively rapidly in comparatively brief periods, separated by longer periods of evolutionary stability," as opposed to at a steady pace.
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