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Eilish McColgan is a British middle-distance athlete. She competes in the 3000 meters steeplechase and 5000 meters. She represented Great Britain at the 2012 Olympic Games and the 2016 Olympic Games. She won the Great South Run in Portsmouth in 2018. She has a degree in mathematics and accountancy from the University of Dundee.
Born in Scotland, William Lyon Mackenzie moved to Canada as a merchant but soon got involved in the country’s politics. He later stepped into journalism and launched his own newspaper, the Colonial Advocate. He spearheaded the Canadian Rebellion of 1837, a failed uprising against the Canadian government.
Initially representing teams such as the Rangers and Blackpool, Charlie Adam later gained fame as a midfielder for teams such as Liverpool, Stoke City, and Dundee. He also won a League Cup with Liverpool and was a UEFA Cup runner-up with the Rangers. His father, too, was a footballer.
Olympic silver medalist Liz McColgan had apparently started training at age 12. The former British track and field athlete secured her first major win representing the University of Alabama at the NCAA Indoor Mile Championship. She is also two-time Commonwealth winner, apart from being a one-time world champion.
Born in Scotland, Williamina Fleming moved to the U.S. with her husband, where she began working as a housekeeper for Harvard Observatory director Edward C. Pickering. Pickering secured her a job at the observatory, and Fleming went on to establish a classification and cataloguing system for stars.
Scottish engineer and political economist William Playfair is best-remembered as the inventor of statistical graphs and secret agent for Great Britain during its war with France. He published the first data graphs in his book The Commercial and Political Atlas. He used line, area and bar charts to represent the economy of 18th Century England and introduced the pie chart.
Born to a Scottish mother and a Ghanaian father, Lesley Lokko grew up to be not just an architect but also an educator and an author. Her written works deal with themes such as politics, urbanism, and racial identity. After her debut novel, Sundowners, became a bestseller, she penned several other novels.
Hector Boece was a Scottish historian and philosopher best remembered for his role as the first principal of King's College, a precursor of the University of Aberdeen, where he often delivered lectures on divinity and on medicine. He is also remembered for his books, History of the Scottish People and Lives of the Bishops of Murthlack and Aberdeen.
Scottish astronomer and physicist Malcolm Longair has been a renowned academic, having taught at the University of Cambridge and the University of Edinburgh. His research also took him to Moscow. Known for his work in cosmology and astrophysics, he spends his leisure time indulging in music, art, and mountain walking.
Scottish astronomer Thomas Henderson was the first to measure the parallax of the Alpha Centauri. He was also named the first Astronomer Royal of Scotland. Though initially trained as a lawyer, he later focused on his love for math and astronomy. He also taught at the University of Edinburgh.
Best remembered for discovering the magnetic property of hysteresis, Alfred Ewing also taught at the University of Tokyo and King’s College, Cambridge. He had also penned papers on subjects such as metallic structure and seismology. He also headed naval education of the British Admiralty and was knighted.
