Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet composer and pianist, and a prominent figure of 20th-century music. Shostakovich achieved fame in the Soviet Union under the patronage of Soviet chief of staff Mikhail Tukhachevsky, but later...

Josephine Baker was an American-born French entertainer, French Resistance agent, and civil rights activist. Her career was centered primarily in Europe, mostly in her adopted France. She was the first black woman to star in a major motion...

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian American logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made...

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. He is widely regarded as among the most influential writer...

Clyde William Tombaugh was an American astronomer. Although he is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt, Tombaugh also discovered ma...

Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German and American nuclear physicist who, in addition to making important contributions to astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the the...

Albert Hofmann was a Swiss scientist best known for having been the first to synthesize, ingest and learn of the psychedelic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Hofmann authored more than 100 scientific articles and wrote a number...

Royal Dutch Shell PLC, commonly known as Shell, is a British-Dutch oil and gas company headquartered in the Netherlands and incorporated in the United Kingdom. It is one of the oil and gas "supermajors" and the third-largest company in the...

There are more than 28 million Scouts, young people and adults, male and female, in 216 countries and territories. Some 300 million people have been Scouts, including prominent people in every field. This is impressive considering that S...

The Peace Palace is an international law administrative building in The Hague, the Netherlands. It houses the International Court of Justice (which is the principal judicial body of the United Nations), the Permanent Court of Arbitration (P...

Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as an aquatic biologist in the U...

Charles Eames is one of the most important designers of the 20th century. His colleagues were Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, Florence Knoll and Ray Kaiser whom he married in 1941. The Eames collaborated with Saarinen on a molded-plywood chai...

Georges Prosper Remi, known by the pen name Hergé, was a Belgian cartoonist. He is best known for creating The Adventures of Tintin, the series of comic albums which are considered one of the most popular European comics of the 20th century...

Oscar Niemeyer, known as Master Niemeyer, was a Brazilian architect who is considered one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city w...

The Tunguska event, or Tunguska explosion, was a powerful explosion that occurred not far from the Podkamennaya (Lower Stony) Tunguska River in what is now Krasnoyarsk Krai in Russia, at 00:13:35 Greenwich Mean Time (around 07:14 local time...