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...

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...