Neumann was a Hungarian-born American mathematician. He emigrated to the US in 1930 to teach at Princeton University and was among the original faculty of its Institute for Advanced Study. He solved one of David Hilbert’s 23 theoretical problems, colla…

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Dietrich was a German actress and singer. Abandoning an early ambition to be a violinist, she turned to acting and gained international attention as a femme fatale in The Blue Angel (1930). She then moved to Hollywood, where she starred in a series of …

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Dewey was an American admiral and a hero of the Battle of Manila. He graduated from the US Naval Academy and served with Union naval forces in the American Civil War. In the Spanish-American War (1898), his Asiatic Squadron sailed to the Philippines an…

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Born in Switzerland, Chevrolet was an auto mechanic who emigrated to the US in 1900 to race cars. In 1905, he drove a mile in a record 52.8 seconds. In 1911, he founded the Chevrolet Motor Company with support from General Motors founder William C. Dur…

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Stone worked on several newspapers in his native Philadelphia and in New York before starting his own investigative newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly. It was believed to have an influence far greater than the size of its readership, which included some …

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Smith was the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In 1827, he claimed that an angel directed him to buried golden plates containing God’s revelation, which he translated as the Book of Mormon. He led converts to Ohio, Missouri, …

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Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician. Extremely poor, he was largely self-taught from age 15. In 1913, he began a correspondence with English mathematician Godfrey H. Hardy that took him to England, where he made advances, especially in the theory of …

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Jackson is an American actor who has appeared in more than 100 movies since making his feature film debut in the 1970s, and he claims to have seen every one of his films in theaters alongside paying customers. He is best known for his role as a philoso…

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Rickey was an American baseball executive. In 1919, he devised baseball’s farm system of using minor-league teams to train major-league players. In 1945, after he took over the Brooklyn Dodgers, he defied convention and broke a long-standing race barri…

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Brezhnev joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1931 and steadily rose through the ranks, eventually becoming general secretary of the CPSU (1964-1982) and president of the USSR (1977-1982). A protégé of Nikita Khrushchev, he took p…

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Cobb was one of the greatest offensive players and perhaps the fiercest competitor in baseball history. During his 24-year career as an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers and Philadelphia Athletics, he set records that would stand for decades, including…

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Davy was an English chemist and one of the greatest exponents of the scientific method. His discovery of the anesthetic effect of nitrous oxide was a major contribution to surgery. He did early research on voltaic cells and batteries, tanning, electrol…

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One of the greatest composers of Western classical music, Beethoven was born to a musical family and was a precociously gifted pianist and violist. After nine years as a court musician, he moved to Vienna to study with Joseph Haydn. There, he quickly w…

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The son of an oil millionaire, Getty was an American industrialist who increased his fortune and became the richest man in the world by acquiring oil companies and obtaining rights to a tract of land in Saudi Arabia that yielded great quantities of oil…

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A newspaper editor, De Leon joined the Socialist Labor Party in the US in 1890 and soon became one of its leaders. He led a radical faction that seceded from the Knights of Labor in 1895 and formed the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA). The STL…

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From 1927 until his retirement in 1974, Parsons, an American sociologist, trained three generations of students at Harvard University. He was known for his attempt to construct a single theoretical framework within which general and specific characteri…

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Best known as the painter of The Scream, Munch was a Norwegian artist and an important forerunner of expressionistic art. His early life was marked by the deaths of his mother and favorite sister, and he said about his father: “From him I inherited the…

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Berlioz was a French Romantic composer. He studied music in Paris against his parents’ wishes, and his first great score, Symphonie fantastique, became a landmark of the Romantic era. An impassioned and contentious critic, he was constantly at war with…

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Dickinson is widely considered one of the greatest American poets. After attending Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke Seminary, she returned to her family home and spent the rest of her life there, writing. By 1860, she was boldly experimenting with lan…

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Whiston was an English clergyman and mathematician. He won favor through his New Theory of the Earth and in 1701 was made deputy to Sir Isaac Newton, whom he succeeded as a professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Well known as a preacher, Whiston arouse…

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