Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. He was a designer in the post impressionist movement and also the main representative of Art Nouveau in the United Kingdom. He had considerable influe...

Emanuel Lasker was a German chess player, mathematician, and philosopher who was World Chess Champion for 27 years (from 1894 to 1921). In his prime Lasker was one of the most dominant champions, and he is still generally regarded as one of...

Edward Sheriff Curtis was a photographer of the American West and of Native American peoples. In 1906 J.P. Morgan offered Curtis $75,000 to produce a series on the North American Indian. It was to be in 20 volumes with 1,500 photographs....

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a Russian mystic with an influence in the later days of Russia's Romanov dynasty. Rasputin played an important role in the lives of the Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsarina Alexandra, and their only son the...

The Right Honourable Arthur Neville Chamberlain was a British politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1937 to 1940. Chamberlain is perhaps the most ill-regarded British Prime Minister of the 20th century, largely because of...

Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens was an English architect known for imaginatively adapting traditional architectural styles to the requirements of his era. He designed many English country houses, war memorials and public buildings. In his biogra...

Gandhi became the international symbol of a free India. He lived a spiritual and ascetic life of prayer, fasting, and meditation. The Mahatma's political and spiritual hold on India was so great that the British authorities dared not interf...

David Grandison Fairchild was an American botanist and plant explorer. Fairchild was responsible for the introduction of more than 200,000 exotic plants and varieties of established crops into the United States, including soybeans, pistachi...

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse was a French artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarde...

Rosa Luxemburg was a Polish-born German Marxist political theorist, socialist philosopher, and revolutionary. She was a theorist of the Social Democratic Party of the Kingdom of Poland, later becoming involved in the German SPD, followed by...

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as the leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from...

Joseph Baermann Strauss was an American structural engineer of German descent, who revolutionized the design of bascule bridges. He was the chief engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge, a suspension bridge. As Chief engineer of the Golden G...

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...

Marcel-Valentin-Louis-Eugène-Georges Proust was a French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of Lost Time (in French À la recherche du temps perdu, also translated previously as Remembrance of...

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,...