When you hear Darwin's name, you probably think of evolution. But for lesser known scientists, it's sometimes hard to keep track of their groundbreaking achievements.


Here's a series of clever mash-ups that combine the names of scientific game-changers with their discoveries. Dr. Prateek Lala, a physician and amateur calligrapher from Toronto, designed these "typographies" to make science more engaging for students as well as the general public.


Story continues below.



Loading Slideshow...



  • Plato


    The ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428/427 BCE–348/347 BCE) is among the giants in the history of science and Western thought. Among his many legacies is the suggestion that mathematical entities are abstract and ideal, such as the eponymous five Platonic solids which he discusses in the Timaeus: (left to right) the icosahedron, cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, and dodecahedron.




  • Leonardo da Vinci


    Leonardo da Vinci (1452 CE-1519 CE) made vast contributions not only in art, but also in mathematics, optics, and engineering. He created an enormous collection of anatomical drawings, the most famous of which is now referred to as <a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Da_Vinci_Vitruve_Luc_Viatour.jpg">The Vitruvian Man</a>.




  • Luigi Galvani


    Luigi Galvani (1737-1798), Italian physicist and physician, discovered that electricity plays a role in physiology. An apocryphal story tells us that he had this realization after touching a scalpel, which had picked up a static charge, to the sciatic nerve of a frog he was dissecting. This caused the frog's leg to kick.




  • Edward Jenner


    Though he was not the first to describe the concept, Edward Jenner's name is now firmly attached to his observation that milkmaids infected with cowpox were generally immune to smallpox. In 1796, Jenner (1749-1823) proceeded to "vaccinate" (from Latin vacca, "cow") his gardener's 8-year-old son with pus from the hand of a milkmaid who had caught cowpox, rendering the young boy completely immune to later challenges with smallpox-infected material (an experiment which today might have difficulty getting through any research ethics board). Immunization has since become the most successful preventative intervention in all of medicine.




  • Charles Darwin


    Charles Darwin (1809-1882), English naturalist, provided the first evidence that all life as we know it is descended from common ancestors. He proposed the theory of a branching pattern of evolution that worked through the process of natural selection.




  • Louis Pasteur


    Often called the "father of microbiology", Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) made numerous contributions to the fields of bacteriology, vaccinology, and chemistry. Today he is widely known for his process of treating milk and wine to prevent bacterial growth, now called "pasteurization".




  • Gregor Mendel


    Though he was an Augustinian monk by vocation, Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) completed ingenious experiments on the hybridization of pea plants that give him precedence as the founder of the modern field of genetics. The concepts described by Mendelian inheritance are crucial to the study and practice of medical genetics.




  • Alexander Graham Bell


    Scottish engineer and inventor Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922) is credited with the invention of the telephone. He was greatly influenced in his work by his family: both his mother and his wife were deaf, and several other family members did work on speech and elocution.




  • Alexis Carrel


    Though French surgeon Alexis Carrel's name is not widely known in the general public, modern surgery would not be what it is today without his work. Carrel (1873-1944) won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1912 for developing pioneering techniques of suturing blood vessels, which allowed for surgical procedures that were rarely successful, or even attempted before.




  • G.H Hardy & Srinivasa Ramanujan


    English mathematician G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) and Indian mathematical savant Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) could hardly have been stranger collaborators. Ramanujan was brought to England by Hardy, who recognized his work to be that of a natural genius. Ramanujan soon became ill in the cold, wet English climate. Hardy went to visit him in hospital, riding there in taxi cab number 1729, a number Hardy described as "rather dull". Ramanujan immediately replied, "No, Hardy, it is a very interesting number: it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways."




  • George Washington Carver


    Born as a slave, but raised by his former master when slavery was abolished, George Washington Carver (1864-1943) became a prominent botanist, agricultural scientist, and educator. He developed and promoted techniques of rotating crops to improve the quality of nitrogen-depleted soil (from repeated planting of cotton), by alternating cotton with seasonal planting of sweet potatoes and legumes (peanuts in particular).




  • Frederick Banting


    Canadian medical scientist Frederick Banting (1891-1941) actually trained as an orthopedic surgeon, but is known for his work, with Charles Best, isolating insulin. Secreted by beta-islet cells of the pancreas, this hormone is deficient in Type 1 diabetics. Banting's discovery has since allowed for the successful treatment of diabetic patients around the world, turning a previously lethal disease into a chronic but manageable illness.




  • Gerty Cori


    Along with her husband Carl and colleague Bernardo Houssay, Gerty Cori (1896-1957) won the 1947 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of how glycogen (a natural polymer of glucose in the body) is metabolized. It is broken down to lactic acid in muscle tissue, and then resynthesized in the liver so it can be stored as an energy source. This process is now called the Cori cycle.




  • Jane Goodall


    Widely recognized as the world's leading expert on chimpanzees, primatologist Dame Jane Goodall (b. 1934) has spent nearly half a century living among and studying our primate cousins in Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania.




  • Norman Borlaug


    American agronomist Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) has been called the "father of the Green Revolution" and "the man who saved a billion lives" for his work developing disease-resistant, high-yield strains of wheat and modern production techniques. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his crucial role in improving the global food supply, especially in developing countries such as Mexico, India, and Pakistan.




  • Rachel Carson


    The 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book "Silent Spring" introduced the American public to the environmental dangers of the use of pesticides, such as DDT. The grassroots environmental movement that Carson (1907-1964) helped trigger eventually led to the formation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.




  • Dian Fossey


    American zoologist Dian Fossey (1932-1985), was directed to study mountain gorillas in Rwanda in the late 1960s. Through her work, she passionately opposed the common practice of poaching baby gorillas in Rwandan national parks, which may have led to her murder in 1985; the case is still open. Her life was depicted in the 1988 film, "Gorillas in the Mist," with actress Sigourney Weaver portraying Fossey.




  • Leakey Family


    Sometimes referred to as the "first family of paleontology", Louis and Mary Leakey, along with their son Richard and his wife Meave, are some of the most renowned paleoanthropologists in the world. The family has made key discoveries that affect our understanding of human origins -- from Louis's first African expedition in 1925, to Meave's 1999 discovery of a new fossil hominid species, Kenyanthropus platyops,




  • Elizabeth Blackburn


    Australian-born American molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn (b. 1948) studies telomeres, the protective "end-caps" of chromosomes. For her co-discovery of the telomerase enzyme, which repairs telomeres after cell division, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Medicine along with Carol Greider and Jack Szostak.




  • Kary Mullis


    Though criticized by some as an AIDS conspiracy theorist and climate change denialist, Kary Mullis (b. 1944) made contributions to biochemistry that changed the world of genetic research forever. His improvement on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, ubiquitous in DNA labs worldwide today, earned him the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, shared with late Canadian biochemist Michael Smith.





“I started off with scientists I was familiar with, and whose work I feel has impacted the scientific world most deeply over time,” Dr. Lala told The Huffington Post in an email.


Inspired by the work of Indian graphic artist Kapil Bhagat, who creates similar type biographies[1] , Dr. Lala posted his first batch of graphics on the website Visual.ly[2] .


He received an enthusiastic response from the website’s users, gaining “a lot of feedback in the form of suggestions for other subjects,” he said. “Since then, I've been updating the page periodically; it's a bit of a cyclic process.”


Dr. Lala is also planning to publish a series of designs highlighting physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists for a poster to be published in the fall issue of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics[3] ’ magazine.