Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (French: [ʒɔʁʒ lwi ləklɛʁ kɔ̃t də byfɔ̃]; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopédiste.

His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.

Ernst Mayr wrote that “Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century”. Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succession, he was later forced by the theology committee at the University of Paris to recant his theories about geological history and animal evolution because they contradicted the Biblical narrative of Creation.

Buffon held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des Plantes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_von_Humboldt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Gottlob_Werner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Langevin

Leon Max Lederman (July 15, 1922 – October 3, 2018) was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was Resident Scholar Emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.[2][3]

An accomplished scientific writer, he became known for his 1993 book The God Particle establishing the popularity of the term for the Higgs boson.

Franco Dino Rasetti (August 10, 1901 – December 5, 2001) was an Italian-born American physicist, paleontologist and botanist. Together with Enrico Fermi, he discovered key processes leading to nuclear fission. Rasetti refused to work on the Manhattan Project on moral grounds

Source: Franco Rasetti – Wikipedia

Source: Emilio Segrè – Wikipedia