History of chemistry
An important breakthrough in making sense of the list of known chemical elements (as well as in understanding the internal structure of atoms) was Dmitri Mendeleev's development of the first modern periodic table, or the periodic classification of the elements. Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, felt that there was some type of order to the elements and he spent more than thirteen years of his life collecting data and assembling the concept, initially with the idea of resolving some of the disorder in the field for his students. Mendeleev found that, when all the known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. Mendeleev's law allowed him to build up a systematic periodic table of all the 66 elements then known based on atomic mass, which he published in "Principles of Chemistry" in 1869. His first Periodic Table was compiled on the basis of arranging the elements in ascending order of atomic weight and grouping them by similarity of properties.
Edgar James Banks
Banks is credited with the discovery of the Plimpton 322 tablet in Southern Iraq. It is believed to be the world’s oldest trigonometric table, predating Hipparchus by around 1000 years and, using base 60, also the most accurate trigonometric table, avoiding inexact numbers. It thus displayed knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem long before the birth of Pythagoras himself. The ancient cuneiform tablet was sold to the New York publisher George Arthur Plimpton, reportedly for $10. It was housed in Plimpton's private collection before being donated to Columbia University upon Plimpton's death. The artifact, now famously known as Plimpton 322 (denoting that it is the 322nd item in the catalog), has provided great insight into the Babylonian era mathematics.