But this can be misleading: the Le Chatelier recognised on the Tower is Louis - it is his son who is the more famous, and whom Le Chatelier's Principle commemorates. So the Le Chatelier I thought I recognised was not actually there.
Wikipedia has a good entry on all of these names - all apparently chosen by Eiffel, and all men.
The names were chosen in the 1880s, of course. Just before the worlds of chemistry and physics were overturned by atomic theory, radioactivity, relativity and quantum mechanics. I couldn't help wondering which famous French men (and women) would have been memorialised if the Tower had been built fifty years later - or a hundred. The younger Le Chatelier and Carnot; both Curies, of course. Who else?
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