Monozigote · CC BY-SA 4.0

An Italian chemist who survived a year in Auschwitz and wrote about it in If This Is a Man, an account built on precision rather than outrage — he treated the camp almost as a case study in what happens to human beings under extreme conditions. The Periodic Table, his 1975 memoir structured around chemical elements, was later named the best science book ever written by Britain's Royal Institution. He died in 1987 in a fall from his apartment landing, ruled a suicide, though some who knew him have disputed that.