Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

[Alan] Turing
Pythagoras [of Samos]
[Temple] Grandin
[Muḥammad ibn Mūsā] al-Khwārizmī

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

How about America's greatest living inventor....Kamen Field.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I forgot the obvious one that works on many levels...
BACON!!!

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

Since no one has said it yet how about Baker :D .

I really like Euclid, Tesla, Hopper, and the older JVN http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann for my top four choices

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I've thought about it, and even though I'd personally love a field named after an Arab Muslim, I don't think it should happen, because people have enough problems with Curie :P

On a broader note, I don't think FIRST can go wrong here. 2/2 or 3/4 of the new fields really should be named after minorities of some kind, but there's more than a dozen good options mentioned here. I'm just excited to see who they pick.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I like this one

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I personally would vote for Mandelbrot cause he is awesome, But I also back Lovelace and Hopper.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

Faraday
Tesla
Turing
Perlman, for Radia Perlman. Her work on early network protocols has probably had the greatest lasting impact on the internet than any single person's contributions.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

Ramanujan would be cool, too.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I think it's unlikely to happen, as there is a financial cost to having a new name (all the banners, etc). However, this did spawn an idea that would be less costly than renaming all the fields each year.

What if the winning division got "naming rights" to the championship field, and then was retired? For 2015, retire Einstein (and Archimedes, Galileo & Newton) as a field name, and the divisional winners get to play off on the Curie field. For 2016, retire the Curie name and the winners get to play off on a field named for the division that wins in 2015. This allows for some name rotation, reduces the cause of cycling all the fields from year to year, and seems like a good way to celebrate braking the "Curie curse".

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

Feynman, Richard Feynman - an excellent physicist, dramatic actor, and teacher. He introduced the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics, quantum electrodynamics theory, and superfluidity of liquid helium. His form of dramatic teaching engaged his students and introduced physics concepts in a new, more relatable, and more memorable way. For many of his classes, other professors and graduate students would outnumber the actual students in the classroom because his presentations were so phenomenal. He developed and used a very pictorial representations of mathematical expressions describing the behavior of subatomic particles. These later became known as the Feynman diagrams. He is also credited with pioneering the field of quantum computing and nanotechnology. His merits would certainly earn him a name among the ranks of the fields.

tl;dr
Richard Feynman widely known for development in subatomic and quantum physics. Was an excellent teacher. Drew shapes to replace complicated math.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

"Will science ever get over its' collective crush on Richard Feynman?"
--Randall Munroe

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I personally doubt almost all of the choices already given. If we look at what FIRST has chosen for names they are not engineers and there are many who are arguable more disturbing. What the requirement would seem to be is that the names be common in popular culture and used regularly by non scientists.
And so with that in mind:
Darwin
Hawking
Aristotle
Tesla
Pasteur
da Vinci
Bohr
Edison

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

da Vinci and Edison (and Franklin) are out. FTC fields Edison and Franklin are grouped as da Vinci.

Samuel Morse.
Alexander Graham Bell.
If you're looking for a minority, I hear "the real McCoy" (Elijah McCoy) was a pretty prolific inventor, with 57 patents to his name.

Re: What's in a name? New Championship Divisions
 

I second Lovelace, and I absolutely love tesla...
also another female scientist to consider:

Caroline Herschel (she was an astronomer and the first woman to spot a comet)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel
plus the name sounds pretty cool :)