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An iconic actor and martial artist, Bruce Lee, in his short life, gained international fame and developed his own form of martial arts, Jeet Kune Do. In films, he debuted as a child actor and became a huge Hollywood star after the release of his last film Enter the Dragon.
Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian electrical engineer and inventor best remembered for his work on long-distance radio transmission. Marconi, who is credited with inventing the radio, was honored with the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in the field of wireless telegraphy. Also a businessman, Marconi founded the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company in 1897.
Canadian actor James Doohan was initially a soldier in the Canadian army and had even sustained injuries in World War II. He later soared to fame with his Saturn Award-nominated role of Montgomery Scott in the Star Trek film and TV franchise. He also voiced the character in various video games.
Bernhard Riemann was a German mathematician best remembered for his contributions to number theory, analysis, and differential geometry. His paper on the prime-counting function, which was published in 1859, is considered one of the most influential papers in the history of analytic number theory. Riemann is widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians ever.
Paul Valery was a French poet, philosopher, and essayist. Thanks to his immense contribution to literature, Valery received several nominations for the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature. The title of the 2013 Japanese animated historical drama film The Wind Rises was inspired by one of Paul Valery's verses. Also, his poem Palme inspired James Merrill's celebrated poem, Lost in Translation.
Best known for his collections of folklore, fairy tales, and legends, Scottish author and Merton College fellow Andrew Lang was also an avid historian and anthropologist who coined the term psychical research. His The World of Homer and his translations of Homer’s works remain invaluable to Homerian students.
Sergey Yosifovich Paradzhanov was a Soviet film director, artist, and screenwriter. He is best remembered for making important contributions to world cinema with films like The Color of Pomegranates and Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. Sergei Parajanov is widely regarded as one of the most influential and greatest filmmakers in cinema history.
Legendary American investment banker Marcus Goldman was born into a German Jewish family of farmers and was part of the first wave of Jewish immigration to America. He went from being a peddler to founding Goldman Sachs, which is now one of the largest investment banks of the world.
The son of architect L. Freud and the grandson of legendary psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, painter Lucian Freud was born in Berlin but later moved to London to flee Nazism. He showed an inclination toward surrealism initially but later drifted to realism. Cedric Morris remains one of his notable works.
Paul Delvaux was a Belgian painter best remembered for his dream-like scenes of classical architecture, women, train stations, trains, and skeletons. Although he is considered a surrealist, Delvaux identified with the Surrealist movement only briefly. However, he did combine the bizarre juxtapositions of surrealism with the classical beauty of academic painting.
Ernest Mandel was a Belgian Trotskyist activist and theorist, Marxian economist, and Holocaust survivor. During the German occupation of Belgium, Mandel fought against the Nazis in the underground resistance. He served as an editor of Het Vrije Woord, an underground newspaper during the Second World War. During his life, Mandel published some 30 books and 2,000 articles in various languages.
Regarded as the pioneer of modern ophthalmology, Albrecht von Gräfe was born to German surgeon Karl Ferdinand von Graefe, known for his pathbreaking research on plastic surgery. He explained Gräfe’s sign, made the first legitimate use of the ophthalmoscope, and also launched an eye clinic deemed one of Europe’s best.
José Sanjurjo was a Spanish general best remembered for his involvement in the July 1936 coup d'etat which led to the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in a plane crash while returning to Spain from Portugal in 1936. Sanjurjo was featured in Harry Turtledove's novel Hitler's War, which was part of his six-novel series The War That Came Early.
Edward T. Hall was an anthropologist and cross-cultural researcher best known for developing the concepts of proxemics, monochronic time, and polychronic time. He explored cultural and social cohesion in his research and described how people behave and react in different types of culturally defined personal space. Hall was a colleague of philosopher Marshall McLuhan and architect Buckminster Fuller.
Josefina de Vasconcellos was an English sculptor. She worked in a variety of materials, including bronze, stone, wood, and lead. Her best-known works are Reconciliation, Holy Family, and Nativity. She was trained at the Royal Academy Schools. During World War II, she worked on several large sculptures. She also held exhibitions regularly. She was married to artist Delmar Banner.
Kai Siegbahn was a Swedish physicist best remembered for winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1981. He shared the Nobel Prize with Arthur Schawlow and Nicolaas Bloembergen for their contribution to laser spectroscopy. Kai Siegbahn also served as a professor at Uppsala University and the Royal Institute of Technology.
One of the greatest Greek modern poets, Kostas Karyotakis was a qualified lawyer but chose to write instead of practicing law. He was known for pioneering iconoclastic themes in Greek poems. Depressed over his diagnosis of syphilis, he unsuccessfully tried killing himself by drowning and then shot himself to death.
Initially known as the drummer and backing singer for the Soviet cult rock band Kino, Georgy Guryanov later also joined Timur Novikov’s non-conformist group The New Artists. He didn’t just create innovative music for Kino but was also known as a style icon, playing the drums almost half-naked.
Roberto Fernández Retamar was a Cuban poet, literary critic, and essayist. He is best remembered for serving as the president of a popular organization called Casa de las Américas. A close confidant of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Roberto Fernández Retamar played an important role during the Cuban Revolution. He was honored with the National Prize for Literature in 1989.
Germaine Dulac was a French filmmaker, critic, film theorist, and journalist. She is remembered for her 1923 impressionist silent film La Souriante Madame Beudet and her 1928 experimental film The Seashell and the Clergyman. Germaine Dulac's contributions to the French film industry were recognized in 1929, when she was presented the Legion of Honor.
Singer, songwriter, and musician Chester Bennington rose to prominence as the lead vocalist for the band, Linkin Park. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest rock vocalists of his generation. He possessed a three-octave tenor vocal range that showed tremendous durability for the entirety of his career. He died of suicide in 2017.
An alumnus of State School of Photography, Munich, Helmut Erich Robert Gernsheim was a celebrated photographer, photo historian and collector. Born in Germany, he eventually moved to London, where he spent most of his life, publishing several works, collecting over 33,000 photographs, 4,000 books, research notes and correspondences, trying to establish photographic galleries and museums in the USA and Britain.
