Jawaharlal Nehru was the first, and is so far the longest-serving, prime minister of independent India, serving from 1947 to 1964. A leading figure in the Indian independence movement, Nehru was elected by the Congress party to assume offic...

Chiang Kai-shek was a Chinese military and political leader who assumed the leadership of the Kuomintang (KMT) after the 1925 death of Sun Yat-sen. He commanded the Northern Expedition to unify China against the warlords and emerged victori...

Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, nicknamed "Monty" and "The Spartan General", was a senior British Army officer who fought in both the First World War and the Second World War. He saw action in the First World War as a junior office...

General George Smith Patton Jr. was a senior officer of the United States Army who commanded the U.S. Seventh Army in the Mediterranean and European theaters of World War II, but is best known for his leadership of the U.S. Third Army in Fr...

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for...

Alfred Lothar Wegener was a German polar researcher, geophysicist and meteorologist. During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as th...

Became a revolutionary in 1896. Later worked with Lenin on Iskra in 1902. He broke with Lenin the next year over the nature of the revolutionary party and aligned himself with the Menshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Par...

Chen Duxiu was a Chinese revolutionary socialist, educator, philosopher, and author, who co-founded the Chinese Communist Party (with Li Dazhao) in 1921, serving from 1921 to 1927 as its first General Secretary. Chen was a leading figure in...

Vallabhbhai Patel, popularly known as Sardar Patel, was the first Deputy Prime Minister of India. He was an Indian barrister and statesman, a senior leader of the Indian National Congress and a founding father of the Republic of India who p...

Hiram Bingham III was an American academic, explorer and politician. He rediscovered the Inca settlement of Machu Picchu in 1911. Later, Bingham served as Governor of Connecticut and a member of the United States Senate. Machu Picchu ha...

Marie Sklodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win twice, the only person...

Warren Gamaliel Harding was an American politician, and the twenty-ninth President of the United States, serving from 1921 to 1923, his term ending as he died from a heart attack at age 57. A Republican from Ohio, Harding was an influential...

Theodore Roosevelt is mostly remembered as the twenty-sixth President of the United States (1901-1909), but this astonishingly multifaceted man was a great many other things as well. In addition to holding elective office as a New York S...

Abraham "Bram" Stoker was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. During his lifetime, he was better known as the personal assistant of actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, wh...

John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, was a British scientist who made extensive contributions to both theoretical and experimental physics. He spent all of his academic career at the University of Cambridge. Among many honours, he recei...