Sir Alexander Fleming was a Scottish biologist and pharmacologist. He discovered the antibiotic substance lysozyme and isolated the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum, for which he shared a Nobel Prize. The...

Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher, a graduate of the University of Amsterdam, who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and...

Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for...

Amalie Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who made important contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. She invariably used the name "Emmy Noether" in her life and publications. She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Al...

James Joyce was an Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century. Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer'...

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, L...

Thirty-Second President USA, 1933-1945. Assuming the Presidency at the depth of the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt helped the American people regain faith in themselves. He brought hope as he promised prompt, vigorous action, and a...

Willem Elsschot was a Flemish writer and poet (pseudonym of Alphonsus Josephus de Ridder). A few of his works have been translated into English. Elsschot published poems in a magazine titled "Alvoorder". His writing took off while he worked...

Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his...

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was a Russian (and later, a naturalized French and American) composer, pianist and conductor. He is widely considered one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century. Stravinsky's compo...

A 19th-century literary masterpiece, tremendously influential in the arts and in philosophy, uses the Persian religious leader Zarathustra to voice the author’s views, including the introduction of the controversial doctrine of the Übermens...

Krakatoa is a volcanic island in the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It has erupted repeatedly, massively and with disastrous consequences throughout recorded history. The best known eruption culminated in a series of ma...

Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isola...

Theo van Doesburg was a Dutch artist, practicing in painting, writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl. Although he considered himself to be a modern painter at that time, his early work is in...

Faisal bin al-Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi, was for a short time King of Greater Syria in 1920 and King of Iraq from 23 August 1921 to 1933. He was a member of the Hashemite dynasty, a descendant of the tribe of Muhammad. Faisal encouraged ov...