Inventors like John Taylor turn the breakthroughs made by theoretical science into the applied benefits we see all around us.

BBC: Inventing the basics

More and more students are choosing to attend Poland's burgeoning new private universities, which offer marketable vocational degrees rather than the intellectually laudable but unlucrative theoretical science.

ECONOMIST: Polish education

It may all come down to this: Unless you're a theoretical physicist, science requires heaps of money.

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It also called for a more theoretical approach to political science with emphasis on research methods rather than activism and ideology.

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After a long career as a theoretical physicist, Geoffrey West began studying the science of urban life.

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Theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, scientist Dorothy Hodgkin and science lecturer Richard Feynman have also been honoured with road names.

BBC: Building at Science Park

Sadly for science, it may have misled a later generation of theoretical physicists.

ECONOMIST: Theoretical physics

He is the Executive Director of the Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute and The Institute for Strengthening the Understanding of Mathematics and Science.

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Even if you did not understand a word - and, to be fair, it was aimed at real students of science - it was hard to dislike what Jim Al-Khalili, theoretical physicist and TV presenter describes as "the undiluted geekiness of it".

BBC: Patrick Moore to Brian Cox - A history of TV science

The science behind all this is rather complicated and, at the moment, fairly theoretical.

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