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Born in Vienna, Austria, Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) was the only child of a Catholic father and an Austrian-English Lutheran mother. He attended the University of Vienna, receiving his doctorate in 1910. For the next 45 years, he held positions at many different universities in Europe, the U.K., and the U.S., a result both of his antipathy to Nazism, as well as his unconventional lifestyle, which often involved living with multiple women at...

Founder of the Mongol Empire and one of the most feared conquerors of all time, Genghis Khan (1162-1227) created the largest empire in the world by destroying individual tribes in Northeast Asia.

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) traveled the globe, transforming his experiences in Paris, Spain, Italy, Africa, Key West, and Cuba into enduring fiction. As an 18-year-old ambulance driver during World War I, he was the first American injured in that conflict to survive, and throughout his life, he was continually involved in extreme exploits, ranging from war correspondent to big-game hunter to four-time-married cele...

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was born in Ulm in the German Empire and received his academic teaching diploma from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1900. Unable to secure a teaching post, he eventually found work in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, where he began to develop his special theory of relativity. In 1905 (his "miracle year"), he published four revolutionary papers, which came to be recognized as stunning breakthroughs in physic...

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was born in Paris during a time of great social and political upheaval, a ferment that is dealt with extensively in his monumental work In Search of Lost Time. He was a sickly child and spent the earlier part of his short life pursuing a variety of sometimes frivolous activities, which led to his not being taken seriously as a writer. It was not until 1909, when he was 38 years old, that he began work on the groundbre...

Loved by many, hated by some, Noam Chomsky is an outspoken, world-renowned activist for social change. He is also a very distinguished scholar whose work is admired by some, but denounced, ignored and misunderstood by many. This book concentrates on Chomsky's concerns in the last decade, some of which look different from his earlier work. In a 2010 article, Chomsky wrote that his current research program about language "bars almost everything ...

Born in the port city of Taganrog in southern Russia, Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) survived a difficult childhood with an abusive father and put himself through school (while supporting his family), qualifying as a physician in 1884. At the same time he began practicing medicine, he also became celebrated for his short fiction, which redefined the genre with its formal innovations and psychological depth. His first serious play, The Seagull, was ...

Born in Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was largely raised by his mother and his maternal grandparents after his father died when he was two. He attended the renowned École Normale Supérieure, where he studied psychology, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and physics. In 1929, he met Simone de Beauvoir, who went on to become a celebrated feminist writer and philosopher, with whom he had a lifelong intellectual and romantic relationship. After...

Born in Dublin on Good Friday, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) attended Trinity College and taught briefly in Belfast before moving to Paris, where he lived for most of his adult life. Deeply influenced by James Joyce, who became a close friend and mentor, he published poetry, novels, essays and reviews before stunning Paris, and eventually the rest of the world, with his play Waiting for Godot in 1953. Famously described by one critic as "a play i...

Michael Olinick has written a vibrant and absorbing biography of Alan Turing. Turing's work as a cryptographer during WW II and his pioneering development of the digital computer helped us win that war and make our technology-driven world of today possible-all this against the backdrop of the homophobic world Turing tried to navigate." - Joseph Malkevitch, Professor of Mathematics at York College (CUNY) and CUNY Graduate CenterAlan Turing (191...

Born in Bonn, Germany, Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827) showed musical talent from an early age and was first taught by his musician father, Johann, an alcoholic who often beat his son. At the age of 21, Beethoven moved to Vienna, where he studied with composer Joseph Haydn, and quickly became renowned as a pianist and conductor, as well as a composer. He continued to perform until 1811 when increasing deafness made it impossible, but until hi...

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) was one of the most influential composers of the 20th-century. His career spanned from the early twentieth century when he composed ballets inspired by Russian myth and the era's revived interest in distinctly Russian culture, to the experimentation in compositional styles that followed the Second World War. Though born in the nineteenth century, he lived and worked long enough to see his works inspire progressive r...

Born to a poor Lutheran pastor in what is today the Federal Republic of Germany, Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) was a child math prodigy who began studying for a degree in theology before formally committing to mathematics in 1846, at the age of 20. Though he would live for only another 20 years (he died of pleurisy during a trip to Italy), his seminal work in a number of key areas-several of which now bear his name-had a decisive impact on the ...

Robert Wicks has achieved the near-miracle of presenting the whole of Hegel's thought in a way that will both enlighten the novice and be of great interest to seasoned Hegel buffs for its originality and insight. Wicks's esteem for Hegel is evident throughout, he writes from the heart as well as the intellect."- Michael Inwood, author of A Hegel Dictionary and Emeritus Fellow, Trinity College, University of OxfordBorn in Stuttgart, Georg Wilhe...

German philosopher of the late 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) boldly and daringly challenged the foundations of Christianity, traditional morality, and other prevalent social mores. He was at the forefront of the existentialism, perspectivism, and nihilism movements that emphasized the importance of human individuality and freedom, discovery of truth only in the context of our own perceptions and interpretations, and rejection o...

The "Father of Modern Philosophy", René Descartes (1596-1650) was one of the most prominent voices of the Scientific Revolution. A key philosopher of the 17th century, he developed a connection between algebraic logic and philosophical concepts-a practice that would eventually lead to the creation of modern philosophic study. His landmark works such as Meditations on First Philosophy established him as one of the most influential philosophers ...

Though he was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, at the age of 26, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) emigrated to England, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Influenced equally by his formative years in the United States and his experiences in London during and after World War I, Eliot strove to reconcile a variety of conflicting ideas while trapped in an unhappy marriage-a struggle that gave rise to s...

Born into a Jewish family in the Moravian town of Freiberg, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) entered the University of Vienna at the age of 17 and began his medical career in 1882. Following an 1885 fellowship in Paris, during which he learned about the use of hypnosis to treat hysteria, he embarked on the incredible journey of discovery that would lead to the creation of the "talking cure" and, ultimately, a whole new way to think about human consci...

A seasoned author and Hemingway scholar, Scott Donaldson brings this remarkable story to life with precision, lending keen new insight into Hemingway's elusive character. A masterful work and a cracking good read." -Valerie Hemingway, author of Running With the Bulls: My Years with the Hemingways Ernest Hemingway was not only one of the most important 20th-century American writers, but also a man whose adventurous and colorful life has become ...

From Dial M for Murder and Vertigo to North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) made some of the most memorable thrillers in the history of cinema. Acclaimed for both his daring artistic innovations and his irrepressible showmanship, Hitchcock blended suspense, humor, and psychologically unsettling themes to create an extraordinary body of work.In Simply Hitchcock, author and movie critic David Sterritt explores th...