Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity tow...

Jeremy Bentham was a British philosopher, jurist, and social reformer. He is regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism. Bentham became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas inf...

Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau was a French revolutionary, as well as a writer, diplomat, journalist and French politician. He was a popular orator and statesman. During the French Revolution, he was a moderate, favoring a consti...

In 1795 Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre was admitted to the Bureau des Longitudes, becoming President in 1800. In 1801 he was appointed secretary to the Académie des Sciences making him the most powerful figure in science in France. In 17...

Jenner was an English physician and pupil of John Hunter, a pioneer in comparative anatomy and morphology. Jenner's invaluable experiments, beginning in 1796 with the vaccination of eight-year-old James Phipps, proved that cowpox provided i...

Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace, was an influential French scholar whose work was important to the development of mathematics, statistics, physics, and astronomy. He summarized and extended the work of his predecessors in his five-volume M...

German poet, novelist, playwright, courtier, and natural philosopher, one of the greatest figures in Western literature. Throughout his life Goethe was interested in a variety of studies and pursuits. He made important discoveries in connec...

Tipu Sultan, also known as the Tiger of Mysore and Tippoo Sahib, was a ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore and a scholar, soldier and poet. Tipu was the eldest son of Sultan Hyder Ali of Mysore and his wife Fatima Fakhr-un-Nisa. Tipu introduced...

Antonio Salieri is still better known today for the renowned composers with whom he was associated than for his own many and varied compositions. While he cannot be ranked among the great masters himself, he has nevertheless come into view...

Caroline Lucretia Herschel was a German astronomer, whose most significant contributions to astronomy were the discoveries of several comets, including the periodic comet 35P/Herschel–Rigollet, which bears her name. She was the younger sist...

Madison, James, 4th President of the United States (1809–1817). A member of the Virginia planter class, he attended the College of New Jersey (now Princeton Univ.), graduating in 1771. Like George Washington and others, he opposed the colon...

Sébastien Érard was a French instrument maker of German origin who specialised in the production of pianos and harps, developing the capacities of both instruments and pioneering the modern piano. Érard's grand piano action (English pate...

Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla or simply Miguel Hidalgo, was a Mexican Catholic priest and a leader of the Mexican War of Independence. As a priest, Hidalgo served in a church in Dolores, Mexico. After his arrival, he was shocked by the p...

Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was an American-born British physicist and inventor whose challenges to established physical theory were part of the 19th century revolution in thermodynamics. He also served as a Lieutenant-Colonel in...

François Le Vaillant was a French explorer, collector and ornithologist. Hugely popular in his lifetime for his engaging and colourful travel accounts, Le Vaillant is best known today for his spectacular books of ornithology, but his reputa...