National History Day 2015: Math, Physics, and Technology Topics

The theme for 2015 NHD is Leadership and Legacy in History.

History of science topics tend to be underrepresented in NHD, so here are some math and physics topic suggestions for this year's theme! Some of these might be a bit of a stretch of the theme or might interpret it in an unusual way. This post might be updated occasionally throughout the summer and fall.

Something I find cool about this topic is that the 'legacy' bit explicitly requires discussing the impact in the present, so think about all of these with that in mind! Another thing to keep in mind is something that is specifically called out in this year's theme handbook: not everyone who "leads the way" shows leadership. The handbook actually specifically calls out scientists: "Does a scientist display leadership because he or she invents something that is historically significant? Not necessarily." The people I've listed here did great things in their field. The question to consider is whether they displayed leadership, showing an ability to lead and inspire others.

Math and Statistics
--Paul Erdos and collaboration in mathematics
--David Hilbert's 23 problems
--Mary W. Gray and the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM)
--Charlotte Scott and women in mathematics
--Kuratowski and Polish mathematics
Choose a mathematician who helped create/made a lot of progress in an area of mathematics. Here are some suggestions:
 --Abel, abstract algebra
--Janos Bolyai, non-Euclidean geometry
--Leibniz (okay, okay, and Newton), calculus
--Emmy Noether, analysis and mathematical physics
--Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics
--Leonard Euler. There's a reason there's a biography called Euler, Master of Us All.
--Stanislaw Ulam and the Monte Carlo simulation
--Joseph Fourier and Fourier series
--Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace and statistics
--William Playfair and graphical methods for statistics
--John von Neumann. Take your pick of particular topic; he made a huge impact in a lot of areas. Game theory would be an interesting one.
--Alan Turing and theoretical computer science
--Georg Cantor and set theory

Physics
--Andrei Sakharov. There are so many directions from which you could approach this. He was a nuclear physicist who felt very strongly about proper uses of nuclear technology. Sakharov was also a human rights activist within the Soviet Union, and he was eventually arrested and internally exiled for protesting the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
--Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, would also be fantastic to research.
--Edward Teller (who worked on the hydrogen bomb) as leader and not. He led the Lawrence Livermore National Lab for a long time, but he was also very controversial.
--National Labs: I know Oak Ridge has a lot of history on their website. It would be interesting to pick a national lab and then look at leadership there.
--The Manhattan Project: there were many prominent scientists involved in leadership here. Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Bohr come to mind.
-- (suggestion from NHD website) NASA's decision to launch Challenger
-- (suggestion from NHD website) James A Van Allen and space science 
Choose a physicist who helped create/made a lot of progress in an area of physics. Here are some suggestions:
--Galileo or Newton and mechanics (Galileo could be read as a *lack* of leadership)
--Michael Faraday and all kinds of electromagnetic stuff
--Einstein and relativity
--Hertz and Einstein and Millikan and the photoelectric effect
--Leonard Euler (yes, again) and fluid dynamics
--Alessandro Volta and electricity
--Sadi Carnot and thermodynamics
--James Clark Maxwell and electromagnetism
--Niels Bohr and nuclear things or quantum things
--The Curies and radioactivity
--More ideas at this website. Remember that you have to make an argument about leadership, not just significant progress; those two aren't always the same.

Technology (most of these are suggestions from the NHD website)
--The invention of transistors (honestly, look at a lot of Bell labs stuff - there was good work and leadership there)
-- Steve Jobs
-- Ferdinand de Lesseps and the building of the Suez Canal
-- Building of and opposition to the Garrison Dam
-- History of Computing: ENIAC at Penn
-- Sylvan Goldman and the shopping cart

None of the Above But Scientific
Alfred Nobel and the Nobel Prize