Claude Debussy was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures associated with Impressionist music, although Debussy disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Hono...

Paul Marie Ghislain Otlet was a Belgian author, entrepreneur, visionary, lawyer and peace activist; he is one of several people who have been considered the father of information science, a field he called "documentation". Otlet created the...

In 1894 Maria Montessori became the first woman physician in Italy. Her interest in children and education led her to open a children's school in 1907 in the slums outside Rome. Montessori put into practice her theory that children have a n...

Ernest Rutherford was a New Zealand-born British physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867). In early work,...

The Wright brothers, Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur (1867–1912), were two American brothers, inventors, and aviation pioneers who are credited with inventing and building the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled...

Herbert Clark Hoover, the 31st President of the United States (1929-1933), was a world-famous mining engineer and humanitarian administrator before turning to political administration. A Republican, he defeated Democrat Alfred E. Smith in t...

Margaretha Geertruida "Margreet" Zelle MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a member of the Frisian minority from the Netherlands, and was an exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by fir...

The Honourable Charles Stewart Rolls was, together with Frederick Henry Royce, a co-founder of the Rolls-Royce car manufacturing firm. Rolls started one of Britain's first car dealerships when he started importing and selling French made ve...

Cecil Blount DeMille was an Academy Award-winning American film director. He was famous in the first half of the 20th century, known for the flamboyance and showmanship of his movies. DeMille directed dozens of silent films, including Param...

Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. He discovered the antibiotic substance lysozyme and isolated the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum, for which he shared a Nobel Prize. The...

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. Although he considered himself to be a modern painter at that time, his early work is in...

Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel was a pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired fashions, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion. Her influence on haut...

Erwin Schrödinger, sometimes written as Erwin Schrodinger or Erwin Schroedinger, was a Nobel Prize-winning Austrian physicist who developed a number of fundamental results in the field of quantum theory, which formed the basis of wave mecha...

Lieutenant-Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, CB, DSO, known professionally as T.E. Lawrence and, later, T.E. Shaw, but most famously as "Lawrence of Arabia," gained international renown for his role as a British liaison officer during the Ara...

Howard Phillips Lovecraft — known as H. P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy, poetry and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was w...