Peggy Fortnum (1919 - 2016)

Margaret Emily Noel Fortnum (23 December 1919 – 28 March 2016) as pen name Peggy Fortnum was an English illustrator best known for illustrating children’s literature series Paddington Bear. Peggy Fortnum was born in England on 23 December 1919, at Harrow, Middlesex. She briefly attended Tunbridge Wells School of Art in 1939, before she enlisted […]

Michael Bond (1926 - 2017)

Michael Bond began writing in 1945 while stationed with the army in Cairo, and sold his first short story to the magazine London Opinion. He was paid seven guineas, and thought he “wouldn’t mind being a writer”. In 1958, after producing several plays and short stories and while working as a BBC television cameraman (where […]

Dave Semenko (1957 - 2017)

Dave Semenko played junior hockey for the Brandon Wheat Kings. He was originally selected 25th overall in 1977 by the Minnesota North Stars of the National Hockey League and the Houston Aeros of the World Hockey Association. The Aeros traded Semenko to the Oilers just before their 1977–78 season. He spent his first two professional […]

Darrall Imhoff (1938 - 2017)

Darrall Imhoff was the most highly publicized draft pick of the NBA that same year. The New York Knicks, picking third overall, made him their first pick, a move which generated much excitement for the team. The Knicks had two all-stars already, Richie Guerin and Willie Naulls, and looked for Imhoff to complete a potential […]

Skip Homeier (1930 - 2017)

Skip Homeier changed his first name from Skippy to Skip when he became 18. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles. Although Homeier worked frequently throughout his childhood and adolescence, playing wayward youths with no chance of redemption, he did not become a major star; but he did make a transition from child actor […]

Gene Conley (1930 - 2017)

In the middle of his first season of professional baseball, Gene Conley agreed to sign with the Wilkes-Barre Barons of the struggling American Basketball League. On April 26, 1952, the Boston Celtics selected Conley with the 90th pick of the NBA draft. Playing 39 games as a rookie in the 1952-53 NBA season, Conley averaged […]

Michele Besso (1873 - 1955)

Michele Angelo Besso (Riesbach, 25 May 1873 – Geneva, 15 March 1955) was a Swiss/Italian engineer. Michele Besso was born in Riesbach of Italian Jewish (Sephardi) descent. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, and then at the patent office […]

Marcel Grossmann (1878 - 1936)

In 1900 Marcel Grossmann graduated from the Federal Polytechnic School (ETH) and became an assistant to the geometer Wilhelm Fiedler. He continued to do research on non-Euclidean geometry and taught in high schools for the next seven years. In 1902, he earned his doctorate from the ETH with the thesis On the Metrical Properties of […]

Evelyn Einstein (1941 - 2011)

Evelyn Einstein was born in Chicago; after her birth she was adopted by Hans Albert Einstein. She obtained a Master’s degree in Medieval literature at University of California, Berkeley. She was married to Grover Krantz for 13 years from 1964 to about 1977. She then worked briefly as an animal control officer, as a cult […]

Mileva Marić (1875 - 1948)

On December 19, 1875, Mileva Marić was born into a wealthy family in Titel in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy (today Serbia) as the eldest of three children of Miloš Marić (1846–1922) and Marija Ružić–Marić (1847–1935). Shortly after her birth, her father ended his military career and took a job at the court in Ruma and later […]

Wilhelm Röntgen (1845 - 1923)

In 1874 Wilhelm Röntgen became a lecturer at the University of Strassburg. In 1875, he became a professor at the Academy of Agriculture at Hohenheim, Württemberg. He returned to Strassburg as a professor of physics in 1876, and in 1879, he was appointed to the chair of physics at the University of Giessen. In 1888, […]

Dennis Gabor (1900 - 1979)

Dennis Gabor was born as Günszberg Dénes, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In 1918, his family converted to Lutheranism. Dennis was the first-born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. Despite having a religious background, religion played a minor role in his later life and he considered himself agnostic. In 1902, the family […]

Philipp Lenard (1862 - 1947)

As a physicist, Philipp Lenard’s major contributions were in the study of cathode rays, which he began in 1888. Prior to his work, cathode rays were produced in primitive, partially evacuated glass tubes that had metallic electrodes in them, across which a high voltage could be placed. Cathode rays were difficult to study using this […]

Fritz Haber (1868 - 1934)

During his time at University of Karlsruhe from 1894 to 1911, Fritz Haber and his assistant Robert Le Rossignol invented the Haber–Bosch process, which is the catalytic formation of ammonia from hydrogen and atmospheric nitrogen under conditions of high temperature and pressure. This discovery was a direct consequence of Le Châtelier’s principle, announced in 1884, […]

Max Planck (1858 - 1947)

Max Planck came from a traditional, intellectual family. His paternal great-grandfather and grandfather were both theology professors in Göttingen; his father was a law professor in Kiel and Munich. Planck was born in Kiel, Holstein, to Johann Julius Wilhelm Planck and his second wife, Emma Patzig. He was baptized with the name of Karl Ernst […]

Ernest Rutherford (1871 - 1937)

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) 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, Rutherford discovered the concept of radioactive […]

Heinrich Hertz (1857 - 1894)

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was born in 1857 in Hamburg, then a sovereign state of the German Confederation, into a prosperous and cultured Hanseatic family. His father Gustav Ferdinand Hertz (originally named David Gustav Hertz) (1827–1914) was a barrister and later a senator. His mother was Anna Elisabeth Pfefferkorn. Hertz’s father converted from Judaism to Christianity […]

Michael Faraday (1791 - 1867)

Michael Faraday FRS (/ˈfæ.rəˌdeɪ/; 22 September 1791 – 25 August 1867) was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. His main discoveries include the principles underlying electromagnetic induction, diamagnetism and electrolysis. Although Faraday received little formal education, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. It was by […]

Enrico Fermi (1901 - 1954)

Enrico Fermi (Italian: [enˈriːko ˈfermi]; 29 September 1901 – 28 November 1954) was an Italian physicist and the creator of the world’s first nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1. He has been called the “architect of the nuclear age” and the “architect of the atomic bomb”.[2] He was one of the very few physicists in history […]

Niels Bohr (1885 - 1962)

Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [ne̝ls ˈb̥oɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research. Niels Bohr developed the […]

Max Born (1882 - 1970)

Max Born (German: [bɔɐ̯n]; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel […]

Ugo Fano (1912 - 2001)

Ugo Fano earned his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Turin in 1934, under Enrico Persico, with a thesis entitled Sul Calcolo dei Termini Spettrali e in Particolare dei Potenziali di Ionizzazione Nella Meccanica Quantistica (On the Quantum Mechanical Calculation Spectral Terms and their Extension to Ionization). As part of his PhD examination he […]

Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913 - 1994)

In 1942, Roger Wolcott Sperry began work at the Yerkes Laboratories of Primate Biology, then a part of Harvard University. There he focused on experiments involving the rearranging of motor and sensory nerves. He left in 1946 to become an assistant professor, and later associate professor, at the University of Chicago. In 1949, during a […]

Herman Eisen (1918 - 2014)

Herman Eisen’s first faculty position was at NYU in the then-new Department of Industrial Medicine, where he was funded to work part-time as a researcher and invest the remainder of his time in clinical practice. He found this combination unsustainable and therefore was receptive when approached by Barry Wood to recruit him to Washington University […]

Salvador Luria (1912 - 1991)

Salvador Luria arrived in New York City on September 12, 1940, and soon changed his first and middle names. With the help of physicist Enrico Fermi, whom he knew from his time at the University of Rome, Luria received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship at Columbia University. He soon met Delbrück and Hershey, and they collaborated […]

Renato Dulbecco (1914 - 2012)

After the war Renato Dulbecco resumed his work at Levi’s laboratory, but soon he moved, together with Levi-Montalcini, to the U.S., where, at Indiana University, he worked with Salvador Luria on bacteriophages. In the summer of 1949 he moved to Caltech, joining Max Delbrück’s group (see Phage group). There he started his studies about animal […]

Howard Martin Temin (1934 - 1994)

Howard Martin Temin’s first exposure to experimental science was during his time at the California Institute of Technology as a graduate student in laboratory of Professor Renato Dulbecco. Temin originally studied embryology at CIT, but after about a year and a half, he switched to animal virology. He became interested Dulbecco’s lab after a chance […]

John Kendrew (1917 - 1997)

John Kendrew shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for chemistry with Max Perutz for determining the first atomic structures of proteins using X-ray crystallography. Their work was done at what is now the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Kendrew determined the structure of the protein myoglobin, which stores oxygen in muscle cells. On Saturday […]

Daniel Nathans (1928 - 1999)

Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 – November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist. He shared the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for the discovery of restriction enzymes. Daniel Nathans was born in Wilmington, Delaware, the last of nine children born to Russian Jewish immigrant parents, Sarah (Levitan) and Samuel Nathans. During the Great […]

Edward Tatum (1909 - 1975)

Edward Lawrie Tatum (December 14, 1909 – November 5, 1975) was an American geneticist. He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1958 with George Beadle for showing that genes control individual steps in metabolism. The other half of that year’s award went to Joshua Lederberg. Beadle and Tatum’s key experiments […]