Interesting people
R.A Fisher - Statistician, geneticist - My son meets Ronald Fisher - at wikipedia.
Alma Deutscher - musical prodigy
Nick Hanauer - TED talk
Kwame Anthony Appiah - English, Ghanaian philosopher
Richard Owen - Paleontologist, founder of the Natural History Museum
Paul Robeson - actor, intellectual, radical
Francis Galton - 19th century British polymath, Isaac Newton - the Newton Project
Isaac Newton at the NYPL - Newton's chemistry
Harvey Washington Wiley - originated the Pure Food and Drug Act
JBS Haldane - one of 3 founders of evolutionary modern synthesis, charismatic Marxist and science popularizer. - at wikipedia
HJ Muller - Nobel prize winning geneticist and social activist - at wikipedia
Giordano Bruno - burned at the stake in 1500 - at wikipedia
Thomas Coram - created the Foundling Hospital (London)
William Hazlitt - Early 19th century British essayist
Henry Maudslay - machine tool innnovator
Giambattista Vico - 18th centry Italian philosopher
Niccolo Machiavelli
Mary Somerville - Early science promoter
David Hume - skeptical philosopher
Crick and Watson - DNA structure - James E. Lovelock (Gaia hypothesis)
New! - James Henry Breasted - America's first Egyptologist
Benjamin Franklin - I.F. Stone - independent journalist - at wikipedia
John Smeaton - father of civil engineering
Ibn-al-Haytham - early scientist
Louis Agassiz - Swiss native who became influential American geologist
Paul Otlet (more) - information management (video)
Percy Julian - outstanding black chemist
Alexander Crummell - first American black intellectual
George Parker Bidder - 19th century British calculating prodigy and engineer - at wikipedia
Arnold Toynbee - Historian and philosopher
Robert Moses - urban planner - at wikipedia
Captain James Cook - 18th century British explorer
Olaudah Equiano - British equivalent of Frederick Douglass, former slave and antislavery advocate.
Alfred Russel Wallace - codiscoverer of natural selection
John Edward Routh - reknowned Cambridge Mathematical Tripos coach. - at wikipedia
Gitanjali Rao - Teenage inventor
Robert LaFollette - progressive pollitician
Rudolf Vrba - escaped from Auschwitz-Birkenau
Thomas Buxton - British antislavery advocate
Savonarola - Florentine religious reformer and demagogue - at wikipedia
Jacob Riis - Photographer, social reformer - at wikipedia
Matthew Arnold - poet, literary critic, school inspector - at wikipedia
Thomas Clarkson - prime mover behind British antislavery campaign - at wikipedia
Jacob Bronowski - observer of science
Louis Antoine de Bougainville - French counterpart of Captain Cook - at wikipedia
Thomas Crapper - famous plumber, next time you're in Westminster Abbey see the Crapper manhole covers.
Ottmar Mergenthaler - inventor of the linotype - at wikipedia
Martin Gardner 20th century polymath, skeptic and contributor to Scientific American, despite majoring in philosophy he was able to stimulate young people to pursue mathematical careers - at wikipedia
Archimedes
Paul Erdos - World class mathematician and World class eccentric.
Alexander Meiklejohn - educator - at wikipedia
Esther Duflo - economist
Edwin A. Abbott - Author of Flatland
Harry Emerson Fosdick - liberal theologian
John Henry Newman - the Oxford Movement (religion)
Thomas Blanchard - inventor of the "copy lathe", very clever, very simple - at wikipedia
Robert Boyle - early modern scientist - more
Florence Nightingale - public health pioneer, first female fellow of the Statistical Society.
Micahel Faraday - the relationship between chemistry and electricity
Srinivasa Ramanujan - History's greatest mathematician? - Ramanujan page - at wikipedia
George Green - miller & self taught mathematician. Developed Green's theorem (multivariate calculus) in the early 19th century. - at wikipedia
Vannevar Bush - computer pioneer and WWII science policy leader
James Bryant Conant - Organic chemist, Harvard president and educational reformer.
Kofi Annan - Secretary general of the UN. Experienced independence movement in Gold Coast (Ghana) first hand. Then came to the US for college and experienced the civil rights movement first hand. At his best he exudes the spirit of these events.
Richard Hofstadter - historian, emphasizing cognitive aspects of American history
Joseph McCabe, more - early 20th century champion of freethought - at wikipedia
George Olah - Nobel prizewinning chemist who popularized superacids including magic acid, which dissolves candles forming a solution which gives a single NMR peak.
Virginia Woolf - born into a distinguished family, she helped found and inspire the most important intellectual movement of the first half of the 20th century (Bloomsbury group) - at wikipedia
R.G. Collingwood - philosopher and historian
John Andrew Rice - Author and idiosyncratic teacher - taught a few years at UNL. His Autobiography I came out out the 18th century is a great read
Salvador Luria - biologist
Hubert Lyautey - prominent French colonial administrator - at wikipedia
Sir Richard Francis Burton - African explorer and linguist.
Biography web sites, more