University of Edinburgh

(James Clerk Maxwell), Evolution (Charles Darwin), Knot theory (Peter Guthrie Tait), modern Geology (James Hutton), Nephrology (Richard Bright), Endocrinology (Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer), Hematology (William Hewson), Dermatology (Robert Willan), Epigenetics (C. H. Waddington), Gestalt psychology (Kurt Koffka), Thermodynamics (William Rankine),
Colloid chemistry (Thomas Graham), and Wave theory (Thomas Young); the discovery of Brownian motion (Robert Brown), Magnesium, carbon dioxide, latent heat and specific heat (Joseph Black), chloroform anaesthesia (Sir James Young Simpson), Hepatitis B vaccine (Sir Kenneth Murray), Cygnus X-1 black hole (Paul Murdin), Higgs mechanism (Sir Tom Kibble), structure of DNA (Sir John Randall), HPV vaccine (Ian Frazer), Iridium and Osmium (Smithson Tennant), Nitrogen (Daniel Rutherford), Strontium (Thomas Charles Hope), and SARS coronavirus (Zhong Nanshan); and the invention of the Stirling engine (Robert Stirling), Cavity magnetron (Sir John Randall), ATM (John Shepherd-Barron), refrigerator (William Cullen), diving chamber (John Scott Haldane), reflecting telescope (James Gregory), hypodermic syringe (Alexander Wood), kaleidoscope (Sir David Brewster), pneumatic tyre (John Boyd Dunlop), telephone (Alexander Graham Bell), telpherage (Fleeming Jenkin), and vacuum flask (Sir James Dewar).
Other notable alumni and academic staff of the university have included signatories to the US Declaration of Independence Benjamin Rush, James Wilson and John Witherspoon, actors Ian Charleson, Robbie Coltrane and Kevin McKidd, architects Robert Adam, William Thornton, William Henry Playfair, Sir Basil Spence and Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, astronaut Piers Sellers, biologists Sir Adrian Bird, Sir Richard Owen and Sir Ian Wilmut, business executives Tony Hayward, Alan Jope, Lars Rasmussen and Susie Wolff, composer Max Richter, economists Kenneth E. Boulding and Thomas Chalmers, historians Thomas Carlyle and Neil MacGregor, journalists Laura Kuenssberg and Peter Pomerantsev, judges Lord Reed and Lord …