Tim Berners-lee - biography, information, personal life. British scientists Who is Tim Berners-Lee

Return to CERN happened in 1984 - Berners-Lee was invited to work on the "FASTBUS" system. In parallel with this, he developed RPC - his own remote procedure call system, which, roughly speaking, allowed you to access functions or procedures on another computer, and also finalized Enquire - it was she who eventually turned into the World Wide Web.

In general, Berners-Lee is not that he was going to change the world. He simply worked for the benefit of his employer, simultaneously implementing some of his own projects, which, again, were created in order to simplify and automate the work. This is how the WWW came about. And this is worth talking about in more detail.

Creation of the World Wide Web

The terms "World Wide Web" (World Wide Web, www) and "Internet" are often confused, although they are far from the same thing. The Internet - just like a network - was indeed created by the US military and long before the WWW. But the World Wide Web is a project that originated in Europe, within the walls of the Geneva laboratory for nuclear research at CERN, and Berners-Lee was its author. Although, of course, it was the creation of the WWW that provoked the frantic pace of the development of the Internet.

So what is the World Wide Web? This phrase Berners-Lee called the scheme of cross-references in hypertext documents. To put it even more simply, these are web pages with links. That is, each web page is such a document created using a special HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language - Hypertext Markup Language) document. And this document has its own unique link URI / URL (Uniform Resource Identifier - Uniform Resource Identifier), and you can access it using a special program - a browser - via the HTTP protocol (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol - Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

Scientific discoveries are the main driving force of evolution. British researchers and scientists in Great Britain have made a great contribution to the development of various scientific fields, especially in biology and physics.

For example, Isaac Newton developed the theory of color, studied the speed of sound for a long time and eventually formulated the basic laws of universal attraction and motion.

Michael Faraday worked on the study of electrolysis and electromagnetic induction, and the well-known Charles Darwin made a revolutionary discovery and described the theory of evolution in his book On the Origin of Species. There were many more scientists, inventors, experimenters who radically changed our lives.

By the way, the device without which our life will now be impossible (we are talking about a computer) was also invented by the British. And, in the end, even the World Wide Web (www) saw the light thanks to the British scientist Tim Burners-Lee.

This article will focus on British scientists and their contribution to world science. So let's go.

He is the founder of the idea of ​​empiricism in philosophy. The essence of this idea is that the more experience (both practical and theoretical) accumulates humanity (or individual), the faster it approaches the realization of truth and true knowledge.

But True knowledge cannot be an end in itself. The famous expression "Knowledge is power" belongs precisely to Bacon and expresses the compressed essence of his ideas.

He became the founder of the social contract theory. He tried to describe as fully as possible the essence of the emergence and development of the state.

Hobbes argued that the emergence of the state, as a complex system, is preceded by a natural state or a state of absolute and unlimited freedom of people who were originally equal in their rights and abilities.

He was the first scientist who introduced the term "cell" in relation to an integral part of the structure of living tissue. It was he who discovered plant cells, as well as female eggs and male spermatozoa.

Robert Hooke can rightfully be called the founder of experimental physics. He discovered the law of proportionality between elastic tensions and the stresses that produce them, which was named Hooke's law in his honor, improved the theory of universal attraction, and also proved that the Earth revolves around the Sun and nothing else. Hooke also invented the spiral spring that regulates the clock, improved the microscope, telescope, barometer, and created the first prototype of the steam engine.

The founder of modern physics during his scientific career was able to create a unified physical program that, on the basis of mechanics, described all the physical phenomena of this world. He also discovered the law of universal gravitation, explained how the planets move around the Sun, and the Moon around the Earth, he studied the tides in the oceans, founded acoustics, continuum mechanics and optics.

The name of the great scientist is associated with many discoveries in astronomy. First job halley was the scientific work "On the orbits of the planets", which described in detail the great inequality of Saturn and Jupiter.

But the main thing that most people remember when they mention the name of a scientist is a change in the idea of ​​comets. Before Newton's research, it was believed that comets were alien wanderers that simply flew through our system. Once Halley saw a bright comet in the sky and decided to calculate when it would return next. He calculated that she should return in 53 years, which happened. True, Halley himself, alas, did not find his triumph. The comet was named after the famous scientist.

Edmund Halley collaborated with Isaac Newton and helped him publish some of his scientific writings.

He formulated an economic theory in which he defined the term "capital", dividing it into fixed and circulating. He advocated for the replacement of coins with paper money, believing that this was of great importance for the agrarian and industrial state potential. Smith believed that the basis of capital is by no means money, but human labor and production.

jenner known to the general public primarily for his contribution to medicine, namely for the invention of the smallpox vaccine. Some researchers call him the father of immunology.

It was Jenner who was able to empirically establish that many milkmaids manage to resist the smallpox virus. This is because most of them managed to recover from cowpox, and they developed immunity to the strain. Jenner developed a vaccine that stopped the wave of the epidemic that raged across the continents and saved many lives.

He was mainly engaged in research in the field of physics. He is the creator of the doctrine of the electromagnetic field. Among other significant discoveries of Faraday are:

• Extra currents when the electrical circuit is closed;
• Proof of the existence of animal and magnetic thermoelectricity;
• Invention of the voltmeter;
• Direction of electrical movement;
• Introduction of terms anode, electrolyte, cathode, electrode, ion, electrolysis;
• Proof of the idea of ​​conservation of electric charge;
• Paramagnetism;
• Clarification of the concept of electromagnetic field;
• Relationship between the nature of light and the electromagnetic field;
• Put forward the theory of the unity of natural forces and mutual transformation;
• Diamagnetism.

Countess Ada Lovelace was none other than the daughter of the famous poet George Byron. She is known for being able to create a calculating machine from a design developed by Charles Babbage. Later, she compiled commentaries in which she cited the world's first three computing programs. The simplest of these was the one that allowed solving systems of two linear algebraic equations in two unknowns. The remaining two took into account trigonometry and the calculation of Bernoulli numbers.

Darwin became the founder of such a direction in science as Darwinism. He summarized the results of his own observations and the achievements of biology and breeding practice. He was able to identify the main factors in the evolution of the organic world. He gave the basis for the theory of the origin of man from his ape-like ancestor.

James Maxwell relied on Faraday's ideas about the electromagnetic field. He studied statistical physics, suggested the existence of electromagnetic waves, established the law of the distribution of molecules in terms of velocities.

Investigated the viscosity, thermal conductivity and diffusion of gases, proved that the rings of Saturn are based on separate bodies. He was also fond of the theory of color vision and colorimetry, optics, the theory of elasticity, thermodynamics, etc.

Thomson's main discoveries were:

• The passage of an electric current of low voltage through a gas irradiated with X-rays;
• The discovery of the electron;
• The study of anode rays, which led to the discovery of stable isotopes.

He did not recognize the existence of other sciences, except for physics. As he himself stated, all science is divided into two types: physics and stamp collecting. Founding father of nuclear physics. It was "thanks" to him that the creation of nuclear weapons of mass destruction became possible. He founded a school, 12 students of which subsequently received Nobel Prizes.

He gained wide popularity in scientific circles thanks to his research in the field of medicine, namely the mechanism of transmission of nerve impulses. It was thanks to Dale that it became possible to create a classification of centrifugal nerves depending on the chemical origin of the neurotransmitter.

Creator of penicillin. His discoveries were pure chance and luck, which subsequently helped create, perhaps, one of the most important inventions for mankind - antibiotics. Fleming published detailed studies in his scientific work, which laid the foundation for the study of antibiotics of other series.

He continued Rutherford's research, which claimed that there is an electrically neutral particle called the neutron. But Resenford was unable to prove his assumption, while Chadwig, with the help of experiments, managed to detect the neutron and introduce this concept into scientific use.

He worked with several other scientists (James Watson, Maurice Wilkins) and managed to discover the DNA double helix. This discovery predetermined the further development of biology and made it possible to master such areas as molecular biology and biotechnology. This discovery is considered to be one of the most important in the last century.

The hero of our century, one of the most talented and strong-willed people the world has ever known. Studied black holes, quantum mechanics. He was able to make science popular even among those who are far from formulas and calculations. Despite his illness, he was able to produce several popular science works translated into hundreds of languages.

He was active in political and social activities. He believed that the state arises only on the basis of a social contract. The ideal state system is one in which all citizens are independent and equal. In such a system, one main principle operates - do not harm the health, life, property and freedom of another. The basis of such a state is an agreement that must be concluded by a certain number of people to create legislative, judicial and executive powers. Everyone is equal before the law and can act as they wish, unless prohibited by law.

If you think that one or more significant names were not mentioned in the article, please add them in the comments. Share interesting facts about all the mentioned scientists, interesting details of their biography and scientific activities.

Today, networking has become commonplace. Going online is sometimes easier than getting up from the couch to turn on the TV because the remote again disappeared somewhere :). Why, many don’t even watch TV anymore, because the network has everything you need, well, except that they don’t feed ... yet.

But who invented what we use daily, hourly? You know? Until now, I had no idea. And invented the Internet Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee. He is the one inventor of the World Wide Web and author of many other major developments in this area.

Timothy John Berners-Lee was born on June 8, 1955 in London, in an unusual family. His parents were mathematicians Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods, who were researching one of the first computers, the Manchester Mark I.

I must say that time itself was conducive to various kinds of technological breakthroughs in the field of IT technologies: a few years earlier, Vannevar Bush (a scientist from the USA) proposed the so-called hypertext. This is a unique phenomenon, which was an alternative to the usual linear structure of development, narration, etc. and had a noticeable impact on many areas of life - from science to art.

And just a few years after the birth of Tim Berners-Lee, Ted Nelson proposed the creation of a "documentary universe" where all the texts ever written by mankind would be linked together with what we would today call "cross-references" . In anticipation of the invention of the Internet, all these and many other events, of course, created fertile ground and suggested appropriate reflections.

At the age of 12, the parents sent the boy to the Emanuel private school in the town of Wandsworth, where he showed an interest in the exact sciences. After leaving school, he entered college at Oxford, where, together with his comrades, he was caught in a hacker attack and for this they were deprived of the right to access educational computers. This unfortunate circumstance prompted Tim for the first time to independently assemble a computer based on the M6800 processor, with an ordinary TV instead of a monitor and a broken calculator instead of a keyboard.

Berners-Lee graduated from Oxford in 1976 with a degree in physics, after which he began his career at Plessey Telecommunications Ltd. The scope of his activity at that time was distributed transactions. After a couple of years, he moved to another company - DG Nash Ltd, where he developed software for printers. It was here that he first created a kind of analogue of the future operating system capable of multitasking.

The next place of work was the European Laboratory for Nuclear Research, located in Geneva (Switzerland). Here, as a software consultant, Berners-Lee wrote the Enquire program, which used the method of random associations. The principle of its work, in many ways, was a help for the creation of the World Wide Web.

This was followed by three years of work as a systems architect and research work at CERN, where he developed a number of distributed systems for data collection. Here, in 1989, he first implemented a project based on hypertext - the founder of the modern Internet. This project was later called the World Wide Web. world wide web).

In a nutshell, its essence was as follows: the publication of hypertext documents that would be interconnected by hyperlinks. This made it possible to significantly facilitate the search for information, its systematization and storage. Initially, the project was supposed to be implemented in the internal CERN network for local research needs, as a modern alternative to the library and other data repositories. At the same time, data download and access to them were possible from any computer connected to the WWW.

Work on the project continued from 1991 to 1993 in the form of collecting user feedback, coordination and all kinds of improvements to the World Wide Web. In particular, the first versions of the URL protocols (as a special case of the URI identifier), HTTP and HTML were already proposed then. The first web browser based on World Wide Web hypertext and a WYSIWYG editor were also introduced.

In 1991, the very first website was launched, which had the address . Its contents were introductory and auxiliary information regarding the World Wide Web: how to install a web server, how to connect to the Internet, how to use a web browser. There was also an online catalog with links to other sites.

Since 1994, Berners-Lee has held the 3Com Founders Chair at the MIT Informatics Laboratory (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with the Massachusetts Institute of Massachusetts), where he serves as principal investigator.

In 1994, he founded at the Laboratory, which to this day develops and implements standards for the Internet. In particular, the Consortium is working to ensure that the World Wide Web develops in a stable and continuous manner - in line with the latest user requirements and the level of technological progress.

In 1999, the famous book by Berners-Lee called "". It describes in detail the process of working on a key project in the life of the author, talks about the prospects for the development of the Internet and Internet technologies, and outlines a number of important principles. Among them:

- the importance of web 2.0, the direct participation of users in the creation and editing of website content (a vivid example of Wikipedia and social networks);
- the close relationship of all resources with each other through cross-references in combination with equal positions of each of them;
— the moral responsibility of scientists implementing certain IT technologies.

Berners-Lee has been a professor at the University of Southampton since 2004, where he works on the Semantic Web Project. It is a new version of the World Wide Web, where all data is suitable for processing using special programs. This is a kind of “add-on”, assuming that each resource will have not only plain text “for people”, but also specially encoded content that is understandable to a computer.

In 2005, his second book, Traversing the Semantic Web: Unlocking the Full Potential of the World Wide Web, was published.

Tim Berners-Lee is currently a Knight Commander by Queen Elizabeth II, a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and many others. His work has received many awards, including the Order of Merit, a place in the list of "100 Greatest Minds of the Century" according to Time Magazine (1999), the Quadriga Award in the "Knowledge Network" nomination (2005), the M.S. Gorbachev Prize in the nomination "Perestroika" - "The Man Who Changed the World" (2011), etc.

Unlike many of his successful brothers, like, or, Berners-Lee has never been distinguished by a special desire to monetize and receive super profits from his projects and inventions. His manner of communication is characterized as a "rapid stream of thought", accompanied by rare digressions and self-irony. In a word, there are all the signs of a genius living in his own "virtual" world, which, at the same time, has had a colossal impact on the world today.

A native of Great Britain, who now lives in the USA, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, received a knighthood from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain a year ago for this invention, and now he is officially referred to as Sir. And in April 2004, for the same invention, Sir Tim Berners-Lee became the first laureate of the new Millennium Technology Prize ("Technology of the Millennium"), the monetary equivalent of which is 1 million euros.

And here is a new recognition of the merits of one of the fathers of the Internet: he is named "The Greatest Briton of 2004". This title was given to another 6 people, natives of the UK, who work in various fields (sports, literature, art, business, charity), but Berners-Lee was named "the absolute winner." Of course, the monetary equivalent of this award (£25,000) is nothing compared to the million for Millennium Technology, but Sir Tim Berners-Lee was very flattered by such an award. At the awards ceremony, he said it was a "stunning honor" to be awarded such a title. He also noted that he has previously received awards for computer technology, but because he is a native of Britain, he has never received an award and he is very proud to be British.

Regarding his invention of the Web, he modestly said that he simply happened to be "at the right time in the right place." Let us doubt it.

Tim Berners-Lee graduated from King's College Oxford University in 1976. In college, he became interested in computers and soldered his first PC on the M6800 processor. Then he went to work in Geneva at CERN (European Center for Particle Research). It was there that in 1980 he wrote his Enquire program, designed to store information, which used randomly established connections (an analogue of the human brain). It was this program that became the forerunner of the WWW. Later in 1989, he coined the term "web" (Web) and created the HTML hypertext markup language. Then in 1990 came the first http server and the first Web browser. The World Wide Web WWW, as a system of access to information, began to work in 1991.

In 1994, Berners-Lee, who by that time had become an employee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and moved to the United States, founded and led a new non-profit organization, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which deals with the technical problems of the development and operation of the Web system.

Now Sir Tim Berners-Lee is developing the concept of a semantic network, which will have certain elements of artificial intelligence. The semantic web provides for the maximum classification of any information. It should combine different types of information into a single structure with semantic tags. Thanks to these tags, all programs for working on the Internet will be able to understand the meaning of the information that the user is working with, and, in accordance with this meaning, help him find the necessary data.

While it looks somewhat abstract, but all the inventions that we use every day once looked like this. All in all, The Greatest Briton 2004 continues to work for the future.

Great Britain has given the world many influential scientists. Such people usually give rise to grandiose ideas, theories and inventions that can change the world forever. This ranking contains ten such inventions of the British.

10. United States of America.

A slightly controversial invention opens the list. The United States of America was formed when the British colonies in North America declared independence after an eight-year war with the colonialists.

The fact remains that the inhabitants of the colonies were British subjects until the victory in 1783 when they became independent Americans. By this logic, the USA at the time of its creation was a British invention 🙂

9. Almost every modern sport

The most popular sports in the world today have their origins in the UK, at least in terms of standardized rules. First of all, it is about football, cricket, rugby and tennis. Of course, the British were not the first to come up with the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bdriving the ball around the field, but it was they who built the system of rules for most sports as we know it now.

8. Newton's laws

British Isaac Newton- one of the greatest physicists and mathematicians in the history of mankind. It was he who discovered the law of universal gravitation and established the three basic laws of motion.

7. Programmable computer

English mathematician and engineer Charles Babbage(1791–1871) is one of the most significant figures in the prehistory of computer computing. He is rightly called the father of computing. The Analytical Engine, invented by him in 1834, had all the essential logical capabilities of today's mainframe PCs.

6. World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a distributed system that provides access to interconnected documents located on various computers connected to the Internet. invented the World Wide Web in 1989 British scientist Tim Berners-Lee. He is also the author of HTTP, URI/URL and HTML technologies.

5. Television

In 1926, Scottish inventor John Logie Bird demonstrated a mechanical television. The picture had 30 vertical lines. The image changed due to the revolutions of a special disk. The speed is 5 frames per second instead of the 24 common today.

Today, Byrd's TV may seem ironic to some. But then it was a real breakthrough. Scientists have been trying to create something similar since the advent of radio. However, no one succeeded, but Byrd did.

IN 1926 Scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated a mechanical TV. The picture had 30 vertical lines. The image changed due to the revolutions of a special disk. The speed is 5 frames per second instead of the 24 common today.

Today, Baird's television may be ironic to some. But then it was a real breakthrough. Scientists have been trying to create something similar since the advent of radio. However, before Baird, no one could do it.

4. Steam locomotive

March 24, 1802 English inventor Richard Trevithick received the first patent for a steam locomotive.

Richard Trevithick proved by experience that the frictional force of the smooth wheels of a steam locomotive on smooth rails is perfectly sufficient to move the locomotive even if it has to drag a train of loaded wagons. Thus, he revolutionized the transportation industry.

3. Theory of evolution

The evolutionary theory of a British scientist Charles Darwin was truly revolutionary. The main work of the researcher is a book "Origin of Species", in which natural selection and variability are named as the driving forces of evolution. The works of the scientist became the foundation of modern biology.

2. Phone

Alexander Graham Bell born March 3, 1847 in Edinburgh. Alexander received a degree in physiology from University College London. In 1871, Bell's family emigrated to the United States, where he founded a school for deaf children. In order to somehow help them, the scientist undertook to investigate the nature of vibrations. The results of Bell's research formed the basis of the future telephone. IN 1876 the first telephone session took place.