Overview

Throughout the 1990s and the 2000s, Istvan, Balazs, and Magdolna Hargittai conducted hundreds of interviews with leading scientists in physics, chemistry, materials, and biomedical research. These interviews appeared in a variety of publications, including Chemical Intelligencer, Mathematical Intelligencer, and Chemical Heritage. In four-thousand pages of interviews, the Hargittais had conversations with over a hundred Nobel laureates, along with many other top minds and personalities in various scientific fields.Now, in a single volume, the Hargittais have gathered the best and most notable moments of these interviews, creating a survey of the past, present, and future of science, as told by some of the most influential members of many scientific disciplines. Figures like James D. Watson, Francis Crick, and Glenn T. Seaborg share their thoughts in these pages, in a collection that includes 68 Nobel Laureates. Without exaggeration, their backgrounds come from all over the globe: scientists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Taiwan are featured. These interviews discuss many of the most prominent debates and issues in today's scientific climate. Great Minds is a synthesis of scientific thought, as told by some of the most notable scientists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

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9780199336173

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Reviews

What makes this compendium more interesting than most is the fact that the Hargittais are astutely aware of important contributions of many scientists. It is valuable because it adds some interesting new jigsaw puzzle pieces to the pictures of how various important scientific discoveries came about. --Harold W. Kroto, Nobel Laureate, Florida State University The general or lay reader should have little doubt that this collection of 111 biographical commentaries of great minds includes most of the influential scientists of the past century. Most of them are among the most cited researchers of our era and often are characterized as citation laureates by information scientists like myself. The interviews with my beloved colleagues Joshua Lederberg, Roald Hoffman, Baruch Blumberg, Carl Djerassi, Richard Zare, and Mildred Cohn are vintage pieces reflecting their great communication and humanistic temperaments. --Eugene Garfield, Founder and ChairEmeritus of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia

Author Information

Istvan Hargittai is Professor Emeritus of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and is the author of three previous books with OUP: Buried Glory (Fall 2014), Martians of Science (2006), and The Road to Stockholm (2003). Balazs Hargittai is a Professor of Chemistry at St. Francis University. Magdolna Hargittai is a Research Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

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