🎓The Greats

Her student Synesius of Cyrene, later a bishop, wrote to her all his life; his surviving letters address her with the reverence owed a mother and teacher, and one asks her to oversee the construction of a hydrometer for him, instructions included — a working scholarly bond across the era's hardening religious lines. In March 415 she was murdered by a Christian mob amid Alexandria's civic feuds, and her death has stood ever since for what a city loses when it kills its teachers.

After a church council at Soissons condemned his book on the Trinity in 1121, Abelard withdrew to empty land near Nogent-sur-Seine and built an oratory of reeds and thatch he called the Paraclete. His autobiographical Historia Calamitatum records what happened next: students left the cities to follow him into the wilderness, building themselves huts and living on coarse bread and herbs from the fields so they could keep hearing him lecture. In 1122, the professor, not the campus, was the university.

Bologna gave her the chair but, because she was a woman, restricted her public lecturing to ceremonial occasions. Her answer was to move the teaching home: from 1749 she ran experimental-physics courses from a laboratory in her own house with her physician husband Giuseppe Veratti, and the course became one of Europe's most sought-after. In 1776, aged sixty-four, Bologna's Institute of Sciences appointed her to its chair of experimental physics — with Veratti formally serving as her assistant.

Alexander von Humboldt met the twenty-one-year-old Liebig in Paris and persuaded the Grand Duke of Hesse to appoint him professor at Giessen in 1824, over the faculty's objections. In a converted guard barracks, Liebig built the laboratory that drew students from Britain, France, Russia and America; trainees like August Kekulé and August Wilhelm von Hofmann went on to fill chemistry chairs across Europe, and academic genealogists still trace tens of thousands of living scientists' doctoral ancestry back through Giessen.

Pierre Curie was killed by a horse-drawn wagon in April 1906, and the Sorbonne offered his chair to his widow — its first woman teacher. On 5 November 1906, before a hall packed with students, journalists and society onlookers who had queued for hours expecting a moment of theater, she began at the exact sentence of the physics syllabus where Pierre's final lecture had stopped: no eulogy, no acknowledgment of the occasion, just the course, continued.

Raman was so certain his work on the scattering of light would win the 1930 Nobel Prize that, by his own account, he booked steamship passage to Stockholm for himself and his wife in July — months before the announcement. The confidence was earned: the effect he and his student K. S. Krishnan demonstrated on 28 February 1928, with sunlight, filters and simple optics, gave chemistry a new way to fingerprint molecules, and India still marks the date as National Science Day.

As the two-year experiment wore on, his colleague David Goodstein later recounted, many of the freshmen the course was designed for quietly stopped attending — yet the hall stayed full, because graduate students and Caltech faculty kept taking the empty seats to hear the subject rethought from scratch. Feynman himself judged the experiment a partial failure for its intended audience; the published lectures went on to teach generations of physicists anyway.