Enrico Fermi was an Italian-born, naturalized American physicist particularly known for his work on the development of the first nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile-1, and for his contributions to the development of quantum theory, nuclear and pa...

Walt Disney was an American business magnate, animator, producer, director, screenwriter, philanthropist, and voice actor. As a prominent figure within the American animation industry and throughout the world, he is regarded as a cultural i...

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key creators of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during t...

Machgielis "Max" Euwe was a Dutch chess Grandmaster, mathematician, author, and chess administrator. He was the fifth player to become World Chess Champion (1935–37). Euwe served as President of FIDE, the World Chess Federation, from 1970 t...

Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, reigned over Japan from 1926 to 1989. He was known in the West by his given name Hirohito (he had no surname). He was the 124th Emperor of Japan. His reign was the longest of all Japanese emperors, and oversaw t...

Milman Parry was a scholar of epic poetry and the founder of the discipline of oral tradition. He studied at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A. and M.A.) and at the Sorbonne (Ph.D.). A student of the linguist Antoine Meillet at...

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). As the author of twenty-seven books, includ...

Charles Augustus Lindbergh, an American aviator, made the first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean on May 20-21, 1927. Other pilots had crossed the Atlantic before him. But Lindbergh was the first person to do it alone nonstop. L...

Marcel Lajos Breuer was a Hungarian-born modernist architect, and furniture designer. At the Bauhaus he designed the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair which is “among the 10 most important chairs of the 20th century.” Breuer extended the sc...

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was an English theoretical physicist who is regarded as one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century. Dirac made fundamental contributions to the early development of both quantum mechanics and qua...

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...