Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was an American business tycoon, investor, aviator, aerospace engineer, inventor, filmmaker and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest people in the world. As a maverick film tycoon, Hughes gained prominence...

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic. He was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism and phenomenology, and one...

Albert Speer was a German architect who was, for part of World War II, Minister of Armaments and War Production for the Third Reich. Speer was Adolf Hitler's chief architect before assuming ministerial office. As "the Nazi who said sorry",...

Viktor Emil Frankl was an Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. Frankl was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of Existential Analysis, the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy". His best-selling...

Thomas "Tommy" Harold Flowers was an English engineer. During World War II, Flowers designed Colossus, the world's first programmable electronic computer, to help solve encrypted German messages. Flowers's first contact with the wartime...

Max Schmeling was a German boxer who was heavyweight champion of the world between 1930 and 1932. His two fights with Joe Louis in the late 1930s transcended boxing and became worldwide social events because of their national associations....

The San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a major earthquake that struck San Francisco and the coast of northern California at 5:12am on Wednesday, April 18, 1906. The most widely accepted estimate for the magnitude of the earthquake is a mo...

The Benjamin Franklin Medal presented by the American Philosophical Society located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., also called Benjamin Franklin Bicentennial Medal, is awarded since 1906. The originally called "Philosophical Society...

Ettore Majorana (missing, presumed dead on 27 March 1938) was an Italian theoretical physicist who began work on neutrino masses. He disappeared suddenly in mysterious circumstances. The Majorana equation and Majorana fermions are named aft...

Aisin-Gioro Puyi was the Xuantong Emperor of China between 1908 and 1924 (ruling emperor between 1908 and 1912, and non-ruling emperor between 1912 and 1924), the tenth (and last) emperor of the Manchu Qing Dynasty to rule over China. Later...

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...