Interesting people
Interesting people
JD Bernal - Known to the world's brightest people as sage - at wikipedia

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