Thomas Young, English, the youngest of 10 children of a Quaker family from Somerset; by the age of 14, he had already learned seven languages, including Hebrew, Persian, and Arabic; having become a doctor, he made important contributions to the understanding of the functioning of the heart and eyes, showing, among other things, that in the back of the eye there are three receptors (cones) that allow color vision; he also developed the theory of the wave motion of light and the Young-Laplace equation, which governs the effect of capillarity and shows, for example, that capillarity will lift a column of water no more than 14 mm in a tube of 1 mm radius.
