Prof. Dr. Ing h.c. Ferdinand Porsche was an Austrian automotive engineer. He is best known for creating the Volkswagen (Beetle) as well as the first of many Porsche automobiles, and for his contributions to advanced German tank designs: Tig...

Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was a Jewish Austrian composer, music theorist, and painter. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. By 1938, with the rise of the...

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,...

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...

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...

Herbert George Wells, usually referred to as H. G. Wells, was an English writer. He was prolific in many genres, writing dozens of novels, short stories, and works of social commentary, satire, biography, and autobiography, including even t...

William Howard Taft was an American politician, the twenty-seventh President of the United States (1909–1913), the tenth Chief Justice of the United States, a leader of the progressive conservative wing of the Republican Party in the early...

Ludwig II was king of Bavaria from 1864 until shortly before his death. He is sometimes referred to as the Swan King in English and der Märchenkönig (the Fairy tale King) in German. Ludwig is sometimes referred to as Mad King Ludwig, though...

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the...

Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician who made contributions to analysis, number theory, and differential geometry. In the field of real analysis, he is mostly known for the first rigorous formulation of the integral, the Riemann inte...

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the wo...

Michael Faraday was an English chemist and physicist (or natural philosopher, in the terminology of the time) who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew...

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (Lodewijk Napoleon in Dutch), king of Holland (1806-1810). Intended by his older brother Napoleon Bonaparte as little more than a French governor, Louis took his duties as King seriously, calling himself King Lodewi...

William I Frederick, born Willem Frederik Prins van Oranje-Nassau, was a Prince of Orange and the first King of the Netherlands and Grand Duke of Luxembourg. In Germany, he was ruler (as Fürst) of the Principality of Nassau-Orange-Fulda fro...

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, and a major figure in German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and M...