Portal:Engineering and Technology/Biography

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Thomas Young, English scientist

Thomas Young (*June 14, 1773 – †May 10, 1829) was an English scientist, researcher, physician and polymath. He is sometimes considered to be "the last person to know everything": that is, he was familiar with virtually all the contemporary Western academic knowledge at that point in history. Clearly this can never be verified, and other claimants to this title are Gottfried Leibniz, Leonardo da Vinci, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Francis Bacon, among others. Young also wrote about various subjects to contemporary editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica. His learning was so prodigious in scope and breadth that he was popularly known as "Phenomenon Young."

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