La science à découvert

By studying the number of points needed to form perfect squares, the Greek mathematician Pythagoras and his colleagues laid the foundation for the concept of the square root.

Two thousand years before our era, the Babylonians had already observed that the circumference of a circle is roughly three times its diameter. Mathematicians don't like approximations.

How can a tiny change in the initial conditions produce a result very different from the one expected?

Created to address specific needs, the natural numbers were quickly expanded to include zero, negative integers, and rational numbers in order to meet new requirements.

Upon returning from vacation, Alexander Fleming discovered a mold in his Petri dishes that led to the invention of penicillin.

At the end of the 19th century, Louis Pasteur succeeded in isolating the rabies virus and producing an attenuated strain. Gradually, vaccines became mandatory, which led to the eradication of more and more diseases.

In ancient times, it was thought that blood was responsible for the emotions and was produced in the liver. When blood circulation was discovered in the 17th century and it was understood that the liver does not produce blood, we wondered what purpose this organ could serve.

By flying a kite on a stormy night, Benjamin Franklin demonstrated the presence of natural electricity in clouds, leading to the understanding of electricity as a flow between positive and negative charges.

By testing how a ball rolls down an inclined plane, Galileo demonstrated that objects move at the same speed regardless of their size.

In the eighteenth century, Lavoisier will eventually decompose and then recompose the air and find its main composition, which is nitrogen and oxygen. It was later discovered that it also contains rare gases and carbon dioxide.

Born in 1822, the Austrian Gregor Mendel set up a greenhouse where he began experiments on peas. Thus he invented the concept of dominant character and established the first laws of heredity.

Drawing on geological evidence, Alfred Wegener argued in the early 20th century that the continents, which are now separated, were originally a single landmass.

It was not until the 19th century that scientists such as Buckland, Mantell, and Owen pieced together the fossils known since ancient times to identify an extinct species: the dinosaurs.

In the late 18th century, Joseph Priestley and Jan Ingenhousz demonstrated that plants use sunlight—and not just nutrients from the soil—to grow and purify the air.

At the end of the 18th century, the work of Henry Cavendish and Antoine Lavoisier sparked a controversy that ultimately resulted in Lavoisier being credited with the discovery of the exact composition of water.