Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet was a French mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment. Her crowning achievement is considered to be her translation and commentary on Isaac Newton's...

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman...

The Kingdom of Great Britain, also known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain, was a state in Western Europe, in existence from 1707 to 1800. It was created by the merger of the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England, under the Ac...

John Baskerville was an English businessman, in areas including japanning and papier-mâché, but he is best remembered as a printer and type designer. Baskerville established an early career teaching handwriting and is known to have offer...

Carl Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who laid the foundations for the modern biological naming scheme of binomial nomenclature. He is known as the father of modern taxonomy, and is also considered one of the fathe...

Leonhard Euler was a pioneering Swiss mathematician and physicist. He made important discoveries in fields as diverse as infinitesimal calculus and graph theory. He also introduced much of the modern mathematical terminology and notation, p...

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmologist, and encyclopedic author. His works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon pu...

Carlo Osvaldo Goldoni was a celebrated Venetian playwright and librettist, whom critics today rank among the European theatre's greatest authors. His works, along with those of the modernist Luigi Pirandello, include some of Italy's most fa...

Francis I was Holy Roman Emperor and Grand Duke of Tuscany, though his wife effectively executed the real power of those positions. With his wife, Maria Theresa, he was the founder of the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty. From 1728 until 1737 he w...

Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, French physician, atheist, mechanist and materialist; an infamous specimen of the Enlightenment. La Mettrie's Man a Machine (L'Homme Machine, 1748) is his main and most infamous work. He wrote his Man a Machine...

Elizaveta Petrovna, also known as Yelisavet and Elizabeth, was the Empress of Russia (1741–1762) who took the country into the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and the Seven Years' War (1756–1763). On the eve of her death in 1762, the...

Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican...

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Italian composer of the Neapolitan school. Although he died at the age of 26, he is credited with masterpieces in two fields of music: La serva padrona (The Maid as Mistress, c.1733), an intermezzo, or short com...

Louis XV, known as Louis the Beloved (Louis le bien aimé) was a monarch of the House of Bourbon who ruled as King of France and Navarre from 1 September 1715 until his death. He succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV at the age of five....

William IV, Prince of Orange-Nassau was the first hereditary Stadtholder of all the United Provinces. William was born in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, the son of John William Friso, Prince of Orange, head of the Frisian branch of the House o...