Biographical Encyclopedia Of Science and Technology. The lives and Achievements of More than 1000 Great Scientists from Ancient Greece to the Space Age.
This wonderful reference book begins with the bio of ancient Egyptian engineer/architect/physician Imhotep (ca. 2650 BC) and ends with the bio of the contemporary British cosmologist Stephen Hawking (born 1942). Actually, Asimov (1920-1992) includes his own biography at the very end, right after Hawkings. Each biography is informative and engagingly written, and contains relevant cross-references to other biographies in the book. The cross-references are deftly implemented; theyre paper-and-ink analogs of online hyperlinks. Each biography, on average, is six-tenths of a page long, but there is considerable variability around this mean, as one would expect. For example, the bio of American biochemist David Baltimore (born 1938) is 4 sentences long (very long sentences!), while the bio of German-Swiss-American physicist Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is 4.75 pages long. This is a wonderful reference work.