Pierre de Fermant (1601) A founder of modern probability theory and number theory, Fermat was a French jurist and amateur mathematician. A contemporary of Descartes, he independently discovered the basic principles of analytic geometry. Yet he is best remembered for […]

Christian Mortensen (1882) When Mortensen died at the age of 115 years and 252 days, he was the oldest man who had ever lived whose age is undisputed. Mortensen was born in Denmark in 1882 and immigrated to the US […]

Julia Child (1912) Child was an American chef, author, and TV personality who introduced French cooking to the American public. She began studying French cuisine while her husband was stationed in France on a diplomatic assignment and attended Paris’s famous […]

Alfred Hitchcock (1899) Hitchcock was a six-time Academy Award-nominated English-American filmmaker who directed more than 50 feature films in a career spanning six decades. A master of the suspense thriller, he developed a style that is so distinctive that any […]

Christiaan Eijkman (1858) While seeking a bacterial cause for the nutritional disorder beriberi, Eijkman, a Dutch pathologist, noticed a resemblance between a nerve disorder in his laboratory chickens and the symptoms of beriberi. He traced the chickens’ disorder to a […]

Charles Darrow (1889) Darrow was a heating engineer who is generally credited with developing “Monopoly,” a board game in which players compete to purchase real estate and bankrupt their opponents, though there is evidence that he merely adapted Elizabeth Magie’s […]

Jean Piaget (1896) Regarded as the foremost developmental psychologist of the 20th century, Piaget developed a theory of “genetic epistemology,” a natural timetable for the development of the child’s ability to think, in which he traced four stages—the sensorimotor (ages […]

Esther Hobart Morris (1814) Morris was the first female justice of the peace in the US. A mother of three, she began her tenure as justice in 1870, after the previous justice resigned in protest of Wyoming’s passage of the […]

Ralph Bunche (1904) Bunche was a US diplomat who in 1950 became the first person of color awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he earned for mediating the 1949 Arab-Israeli truce. During WWII, he worked in the US War and […]

Nicolas Malebranche (1638) Malebranche was a French priest, theologian, and philosopher who developed a synthesis of Cartesian and Augustinian thought with the purpose of reconciling the new science with Christian theology. Beginning with Descartes’s dualism between mind and body, Malebranche […]

Guy de Maupassant (1850) Maupassant was a 19th-century French writer considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protégé of Gustave Flaubert, Maupassant wrote with a simplicity, clarity, and objective calm that echoed the style of his […]

Louis Armstrong (1901) Armstrong was an innovative trumpeter and singer who strongly influenced the melodic development of jazz in the 1920s. He began playing in marching, riverboat, and cabaret bands as a youth in New Orleans and later joined King […]

Leon Uris (1924) Uris was an American novelist known for his many popular novels, especially the 1958 bestseller Exodus, a fictional account of Israel’s early history that was eventually translated into dozens of languages. Meticulously researched, much of his fiction […]

Carroll O’Connor (1924) O’Connor was an American actor who started out on the stage and appeared in a number of movies in the 1950s and 60s. He gained fame in the 70s and early 80s playing Archie Bunker in All […]

Herman Melville (1819) Neglected for much of his career but now considered one of the greatest American writers, Melville was born into an impoverished family and had little formal schooling. He sailed for the South Seas on a whaler in […]