Benoît B. Mandelbrot was a Franco-American mathematician. Born in Poland, he moved to France with his family when he was a child. Mandelbrot spent much of his life living and working in the United States, acquiring dual French and American...

Karol Jzef Wojtyla known as John Paul II since his October 1978 election to the papacy, was born in Wadowice, a small city 50 kilometres from Cracow in Poland, on May 18, 1920. No other Pope has encountered so many individuals like John...

Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria-Teschen, later Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen. Austrian archduke, colonel of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, and poet. Archduke Wilhelm was the youngest son of Archduke Karl Stephan and Archduchess Mari...

Maj. Gen. Stanislaw Franciszek Sosabowski was a Polish general in World War II. He fought in the Battle of Arnhem (Netherlands) in 1944 as commander of the Polish 1st Independent Parachute Brigade. Following the Polish surrender, Sosabow...

Vaslav Nijinsky was a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer of Polish descent. He grew to be celebrated for his virtuosity and for the depth and intensity of his characterizations. He could perform en pointe, a rare skill among male danc...

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...

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...

Johannes Hermann Zukertort was a leading Polish chess master. He was one of the leading world players for most of the 1870s and 1880s, and lost to Wilhelm Steinitz in the World Chess Championship 1886, generally regarded as the first World...

Nikolai Mikhaylovich Przhevalsky also transliterated Przewalski, was a Russian geographer of Polish origin and explorer of Central and Eastern Asia. Although he never reached his final goal, Lhasa in Tibet, he travelled through regions unk...

Karl Ernst Adolf Anderssen was a German chess master. He is considered to have been the world's leading chess player for much of the 1850s and 1860s. He was quite soundly defeated by Paul Morphy who toured Europe in 1858, but Morphy retired...

Frédéric François Chopin was a Polish composer and virtuoso pianist of the Romantic era who wrote primarily for the solo piano. He gained and has maintained renown worldwide as a leading musician of his era, whose "poetic genius was based o...

Nicholas I was the Emperor of Russia from 1825 until 1855, known as one of the most reactionary of the Russian monarchs. On the eve of his death, the Russian Empire reached its historical zenith spanning over 20 million square kilometers (7...

Aleksander Pavlovich Romanov or Tsar Alexander I (The Blessed), was Emperor of Russia from 1801-1825 and King of Poland from 1815–1825. The son of the Grand Duke Paul Petrovich, afterwards Paul I, and Maria Fedorovna, daughter of the Duke o...

Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who rose to prominence during the latter stages of the French Revolution and its associated wars in Europe. As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and a...

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, German physicist and instrument maker. He spent most of his life in the Netherlands, where he devoted himself to the study of physics and the manufacture of precision meteorological instruments. He is best known f...