The most important philosopher of science since Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Sir Karl Popper finally solved the puzzle of scientific method, which in practice had never seemed to conform to the principles or logic described by Bacon -- see Th...

Leni Riefenstahl was a German film director, producer, screenwriter, editor, photographer, actress and dancer. Born in 1902, Leni Riefenstahl grew up in Germany with her brother Heinz (1905–1944), who was killed on the Eastern Front in W...

The Wright Flyer (often retrospectively referred to as Flyer I or 1903 Flyer) was the first successful heavier-than-air powered aircraft, designed and built by the Wright brothers. They flew it four times on December 17, 1903, near Kill Dev...

Amy Johnson CBE was a pioneering English aviatrix. Flying solo or with her husband, Jim Mollison, Johnson set numerous long-distance records during the 1930s. Johnson flew in the Second World War as a part of the Air Transport Auxiliary whe...

Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and commitment to democratic...

John von Neumann was a Hungarian American mathematician who made major contributions to a vast range of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, continuous geometry, economics and game theory, co...

Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is among the persons who are often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for their role in the Manhattan...

Sir Cecil Walter Hardy Beaton CBE was an English fashion and portrait photographer and an Academy Award-winning stage and costume designer for films and the theatre....

Johnny Weissmuller was an Austro-Hungarian-born American competition swimmer and actor, best known for playing Tarzan in films of the 1930s and 1940s and for having one of the best competitive swimming records of the 20th century. Weissmull...

Salvador Dalí was a prominent Spanish surrealist artist of Catalan ethnicity born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills ar...

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American psychologist, author, inventor, social philosopher, and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. Skinner invented the operan...

Ralph Kronig was a German American physicist. He is noted for the discovery of particle spin and for his theory of x-ray absorption spectroscopy. His theories include the Kronig–Penney model, the Coster–Kronig transition and the Kramers–Kro...

One of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, was born in Rotterdam, Holland, in 1904. Following formal studies in fine and applied art at the Rotterdam Academy, he emigrated to America at age twenty-two. In New York he init...

One of the old guard of the Chinese Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping became the party's Secretary General in 1954, but was purged by Chairman Mao in 1966 for his strong objections to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward. By 1974 Deng had be...

The book is a chronology of the development of the theory of Relativity. Starting with Lorentz' papers on Michelson's interference experiment and electomagnetic phenomena in moving frames of reference, the book follows the rapid development...