page_title: List of lay Catholic scientists
section_title: Catholic scientists
hierarchical_section_title: List of lay Catholic scientists / Catholic scientists
caption_attribution_description: Anonymous portrait of Blaise Pascal
context_page_description: Many Catholics have made significant contributions to the development of science and mathematics from the Middle Ages to today. These scientists include Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, Louis Pasteur, Blaise Pascal, André-Marie Ampère, Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, Pierre de Fermat, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, Alessandro Volta, Augustin-Louis Cauchy, Pierre Duhem, Jean-Baptiste Dumas, Alois Alzheimer, Georgius Agricola, and Christian Doppler.
context_section_description: Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799) – mathematician who wrote on differential and integral calculus
  Georgius Agricola (1494–1555) – father of mineralogy
  Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) – father of natural history
  Rudolf Allers (1883–1963) – Austrian psychiatrist; the only Catholic member of Sigmund Freud's first group, later a critic of Freudian psychoanalysis
  Alois Alzheimer (1864–1915) – credited with identifying the first published case of presenile dementia, which is now known as Alzheimer's disease
  André-Marie Ampère (1775–1836) – one of the main discoverers of electromagnetism
  Leopold Auenbrugger (1722–1809) – first to use percussion as a diagnostic technique in medicine
  Adrien Auzout (1622–1691) – astronomer who contributed to the development of the telescopic micrometer
  Amedeo Avogadro (1776–1856) – Italian scientist noted for contributions to molecular theory and Avogadro's Law
  Francisco J. Ayala (1934–) – Spanish-American biologist and philosopher at the University of California, Irvine
  Jacques Babinet (1794–1872) – French physicist, mathematician, and astronomer who is best known for his contributions to optics 
  Stephen M. Barr (1953–) – professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Delaware and a member of its Bartol Research Institute
  Joachim Barrande (1799–1883) – French geologist and paleontologist who studied fossils from the Lower Palaeozoic rocks of Bohemia 
  Laura Bassi (1711–1778) – physicist at the University of Bologna and Chair in experimental physics at the Bologna Institute of Sciences, the first woman to be offered a professorship at a European university
  Antoine César Becquerel (1788–1878) – pioneer in the study of electric and luminescent phenomena
  Henri Becquerel (1852–1908) – awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for his co-discovery of radioactivity
  Carlo Beenakker (1960–) – professor at Leiden University and leader of the university's mesoscopic physics group, established in 1992.
  Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823) – prolific Italian explorer and pioneer archaeologist of Egyptian antiquities
  Pierre-Joseph van Beneden (1809–1894) – Belgian zoologist and paleontologist who established one of the world's first marine laboratories and aquariums
  Claude Bernard (1813–1878) – physiologist who helped to apply scientific methodology to medicine
  Jacques Philippe Marie Binet (1786–1856) – mathematician known for Binet's formula and his contributions to number theory
  Jean-Baptiste Biot (1774–1862) – physicist who established the reality of meteorites and studied polarization of light
  John Birmingham (astronomer) (1816–1884) – Irish astronomer who discovered the recurrent nova T Coronae Borealis and revised and extended Schjellerup's Catalogue of Red Stars.
  Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville (1777–1850) – zoologist and anatomist who coined the term paleontology and described several new species of reptiles
  Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) – often referred to as the father of modern biomechanics
  Raoul Bott (1923–2005) – mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense
  Marcella Boveri (1863–1950) – biologist and first woman to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  Theodor Boveri (1862–1915) – first to hypothesize the cellular processes that cause cancer
  Louis Braille (1809–1852) – inventor of the Braille reading and writing system
  Edouard Branly (1844–1940) – inventor and physicist known for his involvement in wireless telegraphy and his invention of the Branly coherer
  James Britten (1846–1924) – botanist, member of the Catholic Truth Society and Knight Commander of the Order of St. Gregory the Great
  Hermann Brück (1905–2000) – Astronomer Royal for Scotland from 1957–1975; honored by Pope John Paul II
  Albert Brudzewski (c. 1445–c.1497) – first to state that the Moon moves in an ellipse
  Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) – one of the pioneers of natural history, especially through his monumental Histoire Naturelle
  Nicola Cabibbo (1935–2010) – Italian physicist, discoverer of the universality of weak interactions
caption: Blaise Pascal
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