crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2017-04-17 19:45:48

Thanks again, iamaditya! This is a hobby for a long time (compiling data).

MathsIsFun encouraged me and that is how "Ganesh's Puzzles" commenced.

Regarding Mathematicians, Scientists, Writers and other celebrities, I put these in 'Dark Discussions at Cafe Infinity: crème de la crème'.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-04-17 21:24:55

168. Thomas Cook, (born November 22, 1808, Melbourne, Derbyshire, England - died July 18, 1892, Leicester, Leicestershire), English innovator of the conducted tour and founder of Thomas Cook and Son, a worldwide travel agency. Cook can be said to have invented modern tourism.

Cook left school at the age of 10 and worked at various jobs until 1828, when he became a Baptist missionary. In 1841 he persuaded the Midland Counties Railway Company to run a special train between Leicester and Loughborough for a temperance meeting on July 5. It was believed to have been the first publicly advertised excursion train in England. Three years later the railway agreed to make the arrangement permanent if Cook would provide passengers for the excursion trains. During the Paris Exposition of 1855, Cook conducted excursions from Leicester to Calais, France. The next year he led his first Grand Tour of Europe.

In the early 1860s he ceased to conduct personal tours and became an agent for the sale of domestic and overseas travel tickets. His firm took on military transport and postal services for England and Egypt during the 1880s. On his death the business passed to his only son, John Mason Cook (1834-99), who had been his father’s partner since 1864. The company passed to Cook’s grandsons in 1899 and remained in the family until 1928. In 1972 the company was renamed Thomas Cook, and in 2001 it was wholly owned by Thomas Cook AG, one of the largest travel groups in the world.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-05-04 23:57:24

169. Augustin-Jean Fresnel
Born : 10 May 1788, Broglie, Kingdom of France (now Eure, France); Died : 14 July 1827 (aged 39), Ville-d'Avray, Kingdom of France, (now Hauts-de-Seine, France).
Augustin-Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 - 14 July 1827), was a French engineer and physicist who contributed significantly to the establishment of the theory of wave optics. Fresnel studied the behaviour of light both theoretically and experimentally.
He is perhaps best known as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses while he was a French commissioner of lighthouses, and found in many applications today. His Fresnel equations on waves and reflectivity also form the basis for many applications in computer graphics today - for instance, the rendering of water.
Personal life and education
Fresnel was the son of an architect, born at Broglie (in present-day Eure). His early progress in learning was slow, and he still could not read when he was eight years old. At thirteen he entered the École Centrale in Caen, and at sixteen and a half the École Polytechnique, where he acquitted himself with distinction. From there he went to the École des Ponts et Chaussées.
He received only scant public recognition during his lifetime for his labours in the cause of optical science. Some of his papers were not printed by the Académie des Sciences until many years after his death. But as he wrote to Young in 1824: in himself "that sensibility, or that vanity, which people call love of glory" had been blunted. "All the compliments," he says, "that I have received from Arago, Laplace and Biot never gave me so much pleasure as the discovery of a theoretic truth, or the confirmation of a calculation by experiment".
Fresnel has been described as a man with interest in religious questions and deep faith in God. As a form of consolation, he took religion very seriously especially during his illness.
He spent much of his life in Paris, and died of tuberculosis at Ville-d'Avray, near Paris. His is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. The writer Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870) was his first cousin.
Career
He served as an engineer successively in the departments of Vendée, Drôme and Ille-et-Vilaine; but having supported the Bourbons in 1814 he lost his appointment on Napoleon's return to power. He appears to have begun his research in optics around 1814, when he prepared a paper on the aberration of light, although it was never published. In 1815, on the second restoration of the monarchy, he obtained a post as engineer in Paris.
In 1818 he wrote a memoir on diffraction, for which he received the prize of the Académie des Sciences at Paris the following year. He was the first to construct a special type of lens, now called a Fresnel lens, as a substitute for mirrors in lighthouses. In 1819, he was nominated to be a commissioner of lighthouses. In 1823 he was unanimously elected a member of the academy. In 1825 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of London. In 1827, the time of his last illness, the Royal Society of London awarded him the Rumford Medal.
In 1818 he published his Memoir on the Diffraction of Light, submitted to the Academe of science in 1818. His discoveries and mathematical deductions, building on experimental work by Thomas Young, extended the wave theory of light to a large class of optical phenomena, especially, to the double-refraction property of Iceland Spar, or calcite.
In 1817, Young had proposed a small transverse component to light, while yet retaining a far larger longitudinal component. Fresnel, by the year 1821, was able to show by mathematical methods that polarization could be explained only if light was entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever. He proposed the aether drag hypothesis to explain a lack of variation in astronomical observations. His use of two plane mirrors of metal, forming with each other an angle of nearly 180°, allowed him to avoid the diffraction effects caused (by the apertures) in the experiment of F. M. Grimaldi on interference. This allowed him to conclusively account for the phenomenon of interference in accordance with the wave theory.
With François Arago he studied the laws of the interference of polarized rays. He obtained circularly polarized light by means of a rhombus of glass, known as a Fresnel rhomb, having obtuse angles of 126° and acute angles of 54°. The Fresnel–Arago laws are three laws which summarise some of the more important properties of interference between light of different states of polarization. The laws are as follows:
1. Two orthogonal, coherent linearly polarized waves cannot interfere.
2. Two parallel coherent linearly polarized waves will interfere in the same way as natural light.
3. The two constituent orthogonal linearly polarized states of natural light cannot interfere to form a readily observable interference pattern, even if rotated into alignment (because they are incoherent).
The Fresnel equations describe the behaviour of light when moving between media of differing refractive indices. When light moves from a medium of a given refractive index n1 into a second medium with refractive index n2, both reflection and refraction of the light may occur.
The Fresnel diffraction equation is an approximation of Kirchhoff-Fresnel diffraction that can be applied to the propagation of waves in the near field. It is used to calculate the diffraction pattern created by waves passing through an aperture or around an object, when viewed from relatively close to the object. In contrast the diffraction pattern in the far field region is given by the Fraunhofer diffraction equation.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-06-27 16:54:55

170. Adam Osborne (March 6, 1939 – March 18, 2003) was a Thailand-born British-American author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere.

Computers

Osborne was known to frequent the famous Homebrew Computer Club's meetings around 1975. He was best known for creating the first commercially available portable computer, the Osborne 1, released in April 1981. It weighed 24.5 pounds (12 kg), cost US$1795 - just over half the cost of a computer from other manufacturers with comparable features - and ran the popular CP/M 2.2 operating system. It was designed to fit under an airline seat. At its peak, Osborne Computer Corporation shipped 10,000 units of "Osborne 1" per month. Osborne was one of the first personal computing pioneers to understand fully that there was a wide market of buyers who were not computing hobbyists: the Osborne 1 included word processing and spreadsheet software. This was at a time when IBM would not bundle hardware and software with their PCs, selling separately the operating systems, monitors, and even cables for the monitor.

Adam Osborne's experience in the computer industry gave his new company credibility. Osborne Computer Corporation advertisements compared Adam Osborne's influence on the personal computer market to Henry Ford's influence on transportation. It is said that in 1983, Osborne bragged about two advanced new computers his company was developing. These statements destroyed consumer demand for the Osborne 1, and the resulting inventory glut forced Osborne Computer to file for bankruptcy on September 13, 1983. This phenomenon, a pre-announcement of a new product causing a catastrophic collapse in demand for older ones, became known as the Osborne effect, but according to some new sources the real reason for Osborne Computer's bankruptcy was management errors and insufficient cash flow.

Book

After Osborne Computer's collapse, Adam Osborne wrote a best-selling memoir of his experience, Hypergrowth: The Rise and Fall of the Osborne Computer Corporation with John C. Dvorak, which was published in 1984.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-07-01 00:32:59

171. Colin Murdoch

Colin Albert Murdoch (6 February 1929 – 4 May 2008) was a New Zealand pharmacist and veterinarian who made a number of significant inventions, in particular the tranquilliser gun, the disposable hypodermic syringe and the child-proof medicine container. He had a total of 46 patents registered in his name.

Biographical background

Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 1929, to parents Mary Kathleen and Frank William James, Murdoch displayed a talent for chemistry at a very early age. Although he struggled through his schooling years with dyslexia, Murdoch already displayed an interest in both mechanical and technical skills. At the age of ten he successfully made gunpowder and came to the realization that an ignition could be caused by the mixing of certain nitrates and sulphuric acid. This discovery led the young Murdoch to build a successful firearm using a wick and a small asbestos-filled hammer.

At the age of 13 he was awarded the Royal Humane Society Medal for saving a drowning man in the New Brighton estuary.

Murdoch later came to outgrow his dyslexia and went on to study at The College of Pharmacy in Wellington. Following this, he completed a five-year apprenticeship and, like his father, became a pharmacist. He later studied to become a veterinarian. as he had an interest in not only human welfare, but also the welfare of animals.

Disposable hypodermic syringe

Both a pharmacist and a veterinarian, Murdoch was aware of the risks in reusing syringes. There was a high risk of passing infection from one patient to the next in both humans and animals, unless the glass syringe was sterilized accurately. Wanting to eliminate these risks, and needing more effective vaccination for his animal patients, Murdoch designed and invented the disposable hypodermic syringe, a plastic version of its glass predecessor. Murdoch presented the design to officials of the New Zealand Department of Health, who were skeptical, and believed it “too futuristic”, and that it would not be received well by both doctors and patients. Development of the syringe was held off for a few years due to lack of funding. Eventually, when he was granted both patents, Murdoch’s syringe became hugely successful, with millions used throughout the world every day. It is not widely known as a New Zealand design, although Murdoch's achievements have been covered in the New Zealand media.

Tranquilliser gun

In the 1950s, while working with colleagues who were studying introduced wild goat, deer and tahr populations in New Zealand, Murdoch had the idea that the animals would be much easier to catch, examine and release if a dose of tranquilliser could be administered by projection from afar. Murdoch became experienced with repairing and modifying guns during World War II, as rifles and shot guns were not being imported into New Zealand at that time. With both motive and experience, Murdoch went on to develop a range of rifles, darts and pistols, which have had an enormous impact on the treatment and study of animals around the world.

At the time Murdoch started testing his gun, the only tranquilliser drugs available were curare and alkaloids of nicotine, both of which tended to have fatal reactions in a high percentage of animals. In partnership with pharmaceutical companies, he helped develop more sophisticated drugs with precise and safe reactions.

Paxarms Limited (which stands for peace and arms), Murdoch’s own company, has developed various systems for administering veterinary products to a range of animals.

Recognition

Colin Murdoch has been acknowledged for his life's work. In 1976 he won three gold medals and a bronze at the World Inventions Fair in Brussels. The New Zealand Design Council has also honoured him and in 2000 he was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to inventing. Time magazine included him in a list of the 100 most influential people of the South Pacific.

Despite the relative ubiquity of his inventions, Murdoch did not become rich because of them. He deliberately chose not to sue companies that violated his patents, satisfied instead that they were being put to good use.

In his final years he lived quietly in Timaru until his death from cancer.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-07-23 22:54:47

172. Mithali Raj

(Statistics : As on July 24, 2017)

Mithali Dorai Raj is an Indian cricketer and the captain of the Indian Women's cricket team in Tests and ODI. Often regarded as one of the greatest cricketing batswoman to have ever played the game, she is the highest run-scorer in women's international cricket and the only female cricketer to surpass the 6,000 run mark in ODIs. She is the first player to score 7 consecutive 50s in ODIs. Raj is the first captain (men or women) to lead India to an ICC ODI World Cup final twice - 2005 and 2017.

Mithali Raj was born on 3 December 1982 in Jodhpur. Mithali's Mother tongue is Tamil, her father is Dorai Raj, who was an Airman in the Indian Air Force, and mother is Leela Raj. Mithali started to play the game at the age of 10 and at the age of 17, she was picked for the Indian team. Her ODI debut was against Ireland at Milton Keynes in the year 1999. She lives in Hyderabad, Telangana. She attended Keyes high school for girls in Secunderabad. She started cricket coaching in her school days along with her elder brother. Mithali practised in Keyes Girls High School, Secunderabad often playing male cricketers in the nets. She has practiced classical dance for eight years and she quit dance to pursue her cricket career.

Raj has played both Test and One Day International cricket for India's women's cricket team. She was named among the probables in the 1997 Women's Cricket World Cup when she was just 14, but couldn't make it to the final squad. She made her One Day International debut in 1999 against Ireland at Milton Keynes and scored unbeaten 114 runs. She made her Test debut in the 2001-02 season against South Africa at Lucknow. On 17 August 2002, at the age of 19, in her third Test, she broke Karen Rolton's record of world’s highest individual Test score of 209*, scoring a new high of 214 against England in the second and final Test at County Ground, Taunton. The record has since been surpassed by Kiran Baluch of Pakistan who scored 242 against West Indies in March 2004.

Mithali was taken ill with a strain of typhoid in the CricInfo Women's World Cup in 2002, seriously hampering India's progress. However, she then led them to their first World Cup final in 2005, in South Africa, where they met Australia who proved just too strong. In August 2006, she led the side to their first ever Test and series victory in England and wrapped up the year winning the Asia Cup - the second time in 12 months - without dropping a single game.

She led the Indian team to the finals in the 2005 Women's Cricket World Cup where the team lost to Australia. She is a part-time leg-break bowler as well. She is a recipient of the Arjuna award for the year 2003. She currently tops the batting table with 703 ratings. Her composure when at the crease and ability to score briskly make her a dangerous cricketer. In addition to her ability with the bat, Mithali rolls her arm over bowling leg-spinners and providing variety to the attack.

At the 2013 Women's World Cup, Mithali Raj starred as the No.1 Cricketer in the ODI chart among women. She scored 100s: 1 and 50s: 4 in Test cricket, 100s: 5 and 50s: 40 with best bowling of 3/4 in ODI's and 50s: 10 in T20's.

in February 2017, she became the second player to make 5,500 runs in WODIs. Raj most matches captained player for india in ODI and T20I.
In July 2017, she became the first player to make 6,000 runs in WODIs.

Domestic career

Playing for Railways in the domestic competition, Mithali began by playing with stars like Purnima Rau, Anjum Chopra and Anju Jain for Air India.

Cricket performance

Mithali Raj held the record for the highest individual score by an Indian Woman Cricketer in a World Cup match (91 not out off 104 deliveries which included 9 fours) against New Zealand in Women's World Cup 2005. Harmanpreet Kaur overtook Mithali Raj by scoring a century (107 from 109 balls) in second match of ICC Women's World Cup 2013 against England.

Mithali is nicknamed as the "Tendulkar of Indian women's cricket", as she is currently the all-time leading run-scorer for India in all formats, including Tests, ODIs and T20Is.

During the 2017 Women's Cricket World Cup, Raj scored her seventh consecutive half-century and made a record for most consecutive fifties by a player.
Mithali Raj also is the 1st Indian & 5th woman cricketer overall to score over 1,000 World Cup runs.

Awards

2003 – Arjuna Award, by the Government of India in recognition of her achievement in sports.

2015 – Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian award.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-07-25 23:30:11

173. O. Henry

O. Henry, pseudonym of William Sydney Porter, original name William Sidney Porter (born Sept. 11, 1862, Greensboro, N.C., U.S. - died June 5, 1910, New York, N.Y.), American short-story writer whose tales romanticized the commonplace - in particular the life of ordinary people in New York City. His stories expressed the effect of coincidence on character through humour, grim or ironic, and often had surprise endings, a device that became identified with his name and cost him critical favour when its vogue had passed.

Porter attended a school taught by his aunt, then clerked in his uncle’s drugstore. In 1882 he went to Texas, where he worked on a ranch, in a general land office, and later as teller in the First National Bank in Austin. He began writing sketches at about the time of his marriage to Athol Estes in 1887, and in 1894 he started a humorous weekly, The Rolling Stone. When that venture failed, Porter joined the Houston Post as reporter, columnist, and occasional cartoonist.

In February 1896 he was indicted for embezzlement of bank funds. Friends aided his flight to Honduras. News of his wife’s fatal illness, however, took him back to Austin, and lenient authorities did not press his case until after her death. When convicted, Porter received the lightest sentence possible, and in 1898 he entered the penitentiary at Columbus, Ohio; his sentence was shortened to three years and three months for good behaviour. As night druggist in the prison hospital, he could write to earn money for support of his daughter Margaret. His stories of adventure in the southwest U.S. and Central America were immediately popular with magazine readers, and when he emerged from prison W.S. Porter had become O. Henry.

In 1902 O. Henry arrived in New York - his “Bagdad on the Subway.” From December 1903 to January 1906 he produced a story a week for the New York World, writing also for magazines. His first book, Cabbages and Kings (1904), depicted fantastic characters against exotic Honduran backgrounds. Both The Four Million (1906) and The Trimmed Lamp (1907) explored the lives of the multitude of New York in their daily routines and searchings for romance and adventure. Heart of the West (1907) presented accurate and fascinating tales of the Texas range.

Then in rapid succession came The Voice of the City (1908), The Gentle Grafter (1908), Roads of Destiny (1909), Options (1909), Strictly Business (1910), and Whirligigs (1910). Whirligigs contains perhaps Porter’s funniest story, “The Ransom of Red Chief.”

Despite his popularity, O. Henry’s final years were marred by ill health, a desperate financial struggle, and alcoholism. A second marriage in 1907 was unhappy. After his death three more collected volumes appeared: Sixes and Sevens (1911), Rolling Stones (1912), and Waifs and Strays (1917). Later seven fugitive stories and poems, O. Henryana (1920), Letters to Lithopolis (1922), and two collections of his early work on the Houston Post, Postscripts (1923) and O. Henry Encore (1939), were published. Foreign translations and adaptations for other art forms, including films and television, attest his universal application and appeal.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-07-28 00:43:50

174. Ernst Haeckel

Ernst Haeckel, in full Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (born Feb. 16, 1834, Potsdam, Prussia [Germany] - died Aug. 9, 1919, Jena, Ger.), German zoologist and evolutionist who was a strong proponent of Darwinism and who proposed new notions of the evolutionary descent of human beings. He declared that ontogeny (the embryology and development of the individual) briefly, and sometimes necessarily incompletely, recapitulated, or repeated, phylogeny (the developmental history of the species or race).

Early Years

Haeckel grew up in Merseburg, where his father was a government official. He studied at Würzburg and at the University of Berlin, where his professor, the physiologist and anatomist Johannes Müller, took him on a summer expedition to observe small sea creatures off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea.

Such experiences in marine biology strongly attracted Haeckel toward zoology, but dutifully he took a medical degree, as his family wished, at Berlin in 1857. For a time he practiced medicine; his father then agreed to his traveling to Italy, where he painted and even considered art as a career. At Messina he studied the one-celled protozoan group Radiolaria, members of which are strikingly crystalline in form; not surprisingly, Haeckel later maintained that the simplest organic life had originated spontaneously from inorganic matter by a sort of crystallization.

The turning point in Haeckel’s thinking was his reading of Charles Darwin’s 1859 work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. Meanwhile, he completed a dissertation in zoology in 1861 at Jena and became privatdozent there. In 1862 he was appointed extraordinary (that is, associate) professor of zoology, and that year, when he published his monograph on the Radiolaria, he expressed in it his agreement with Darwin’s theory of evolution; from that time he was a proponent of Darwinism, and he soon was lecturing to scientific and lay audiences on the descent theory. Darwin had described evolution through the natural selection of accumulated favourable variations that in time formed new species; to Haeckel, however, this was only a beginning, with consequences to be pursued further. In 1865 he was appointed full professor, and he remained at Jena until his retirement in 1909.

Haeckel’s Views On Evolution

Haeckel saw evolution as the basis for a unified explanation of all nature and the rationale of a philosophical approach that denied final causes and the teleology of the church. His Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866; “General Morphology of Organisms”) presented many of his evolutionary ideas, but the scientific community was little interested. He set forth his ideas in popular writings, all of which were widely read though they were deplored by many of Haeckel’s scientific colleagues.

Enthusiastically attempting to explain both inorganic and organic nature under the same physical laws, Haeckel portrayed the lowest creatures as mere protoplasm without nuclei; he speculated that they had arisen spontaneously through combinations of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, and sulfur. In those days of great interest in protoplasm, it was believed for a while that certain deep-sea dredgings had brought up such structureless organisms; when scientists found this to be in error, Haeckel continued to insist, throughout the years, that “monera” existed. From them he traced one-celled forms with nuclei and three kingdoms—animal, vegetable, and the neutral, borderline “protista.” His artistic leanings toward ideal symmetries led him to outline numerous genealogical trees, sometimes to supply missing links or branches; and he reconstructed the human ancestral tree to demonstrate humankind’s descent from the lower animals.

Haeckel tended to speculate, and for some years, he pondered the problem of heredity. Interestingly, though it was only on a theoretical basis, he suggested as early as 1866 that the cell nucleus was concerned with inheritance. He had long been thinking of “vital molecular movement” when, in 1876, he attempted to place heredity on a molecular basis in a work entitled Die Perigenesis der Plastidule (“The Generation of Waves in the Small Vital Particles”). Here again he traced a branching scheme, this time to illustrate the mechanism of heredity and to show the influence of outer conditions on the inherited undulatory motion he attributed to the “plastidules,” the term he adopted for the molecules making up protoplasm.

Though his concepts of recapitulation were in error, Haeckel brought attention to important biological questions. His gastraea theory, tracing all multicellular animals to a hypothetical two-layered ancestor, stimulated both discussion and investigation. His propensities to systematization along evolutionary lines led to his valuable contributions to the knowledge of such invertebrates as medusae, radiolarians, siphonophores, and calcareous sponges.

Building collections around his own, Haeckel founded both the Phyletic Museum in Jena and the Ernst Haeckel Haus; the latter contains his books and archives, and it preserves many other mementos of his life and work.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-07-30 16:42:09

175. Epicurus

Epicurus, (born 341 BC, Samos, Greece - died 270, Athens), Greek philosopher, author of an ethical philosophy of simple pleasure, friendship, and retirement. He founded schools of philosophy that survived directly from the 4th century BC until the 4th century AD.

Early Life And Training

Epicurus was born on the island of Samos of Athenian parents who had gone there as military settlers. His father, a schoolteacher, was named Neocles, his mother Chairestrate; both were of the same village, the deme Gargettos. According to his own report, Epicurus began his study of philosophy at the age of 14. One account has him turning to philosophy when his schoolmaster could not explain the concept of chaos in Hesiod, an early Greek philosophical poet. His first master is said to have been the Platonist Pamphilus of Samos. Much more significant, however, is the report that Epicurus was for three years (327–324) a student in the Ionian city of Teos, where his teacher was Nausiphanes, a disciple of the naturalistic philosopher Democritus. It may have been from this source that Epicurus’ atomistic theory came, which he used not as a means of studying physics but as the basis for a philosophical system that ultimately sought ethical ends.

At the age of 18, Epicurus went to Athens to perform the two years of military training required for Athenian citizenship. While there he may have heard Xenocrates, second in succession after Plato as head of his Academy, and Aristotle, who was then in Athens. One year later Epicurus rejoined his parents at Colophon, where they had gone as exiles when, at the close of the Lamian War, Athens lost Samos to the Macedonians. For the next 10 years, there is virtually no record. It seems probable that Epicurus travelled and studied, and it is reasonable to suppose that this was the period during which he developed his philosophical outlook and confirmed it in exchanges with the Platonists and Aristotelians. A letter written by him from Teos, addressed to his mother, was preserved by Diogenes of Oenoanda. At the age of 32, Epicurus began to teach, first at Mytilene and subsequently at Lampsacus, a period that lasted from 311/310 to 307/306.

In various places Epicurus met the disciples who were destined to follow him to Athens and to become of great significance as vehicles through whom the Epicurean school would achieve its mature development: at Mytilene, he met his first disciple, Hermarchus, who eventually succeeded him as head of the Athenian school; and at Lampsacus, he met Metrodorus and Polyaenus, whose death preceded the master’s and whose sons Epicurus provided for in his will; Metrodorus’ brother, Timocrates; Leonteus and his wife, Themista, who had been a hetaira (an independent courtesan); Colotes, whom Epicurus flattered with the pet name Colotarion; and Idomeneus and his wife, Batis, sister of Metrodorus.

Thus, apart from his two years in Athens, Epicurus spent the first 35 years of his life in Asia. This need not mean, however, that he developed an aversion to the literary circles in Athens. Instead, his Asiatic ties, which he continued to cultivate intensely all his life (including two or three actual journeys to Asia Minor) seem to have been reflected mainly in his choice of words and style and, more significantly, in the ecumenical scope of his philosophy.

The Schools At Athens And Elsewhere

When Epicurus and his followers came to Athens in 306, he bought a house and, in the garden, established a school, which came to be known as Ho Kepos (The Garden). At this time in Athens, cultural life was dominated by the Academy of Plato and the Lyceum of Aristotle, both of which had passed into the hands of successors. These schools attracted both the best theoretical students and those concerned with the application of philosophy to politics and public life. Therefore, any school that hoped to endure through this period had to enter into direct rivalry with the Academy and the Lyceum by establishing itself - as did the Stoa a few years later - in the city of Athens.

What Epicurus brought to Athens was more a way of life than a school or a community. Unlike both of the famous schools, it admitted women, and even one of Epicurus’ slaves, named Mouse. It taught the avoidance of political activity and of public life, although, when one follower from a school outside Athens rose to political power and then fell, he was succoured by the school. Quite different from the usual connotations borne by the term epicurean today, life in the house and garden was simple. Water was the usual drink, although a half-pint daily ration of wine was allowed, and barley bread was eaten. During a famine Epicurus saved his students by doling out a few numbered beans daily. There was no communal property, as was the case in Pythagorean schools. Whereas the relationships of the members of the school were not platonic, in either the contemporary or any later sense, there are only the attacks of Stoic opponents to support any idea of physical irregularity. Epicurus wrote clearly but in no highly organized way. There was much correspondence with students in Athens and at other schools, some letters being concerned with doctrinal matters but many seeming to be merely social and friendly.

On the day in his 72nd year that Epicurus died painfully of prostatitis, he dictated an affectionate and touching letter to Idomeneus - probably intended, in fact, for all of his friends in Lampsacus - which displayed the spirit in which he had remained true to his philosophy of repose and serenity even in the throes of pain. Epicurus’ will left the house, garden, and some funds to trustees of the school. Remaining funds were left to honour Epicurus’ deceased family and to celebrate his birthday annually and his memory monthly. His slaves were freed, and provision was made that the daughter of Metrodorus should be wed to someone in the Athenian school, with the approval of Hermarchus.

Writings And Assessment

Diogenes Laërtius described Epicurus as a most prolific writer and preserved three of his letters and the Kyriai doxiai (“Principal Doctrines”). The three letters are (1) To Herodotus, dealing with physics; (2) To Pythocles (probably a disciple’s abridgement), on meteorology; and (3) To Menoeceus, on ethics and theology. The Kyriai consists of 40 short aphoristic statements. Another major source is the papyri from the Casa dei Papiri discovered at Herculaneum (1752–54), which include not only parts of his great work Peri physeōs (“On Nature”), originally in 37 books, but also numerous fragments of correspondence with his friends.

Many of Epicurus’ methods made him comparable to a religious figure. The breadth of his appeal in Rome during the 1st century bc is indicated by the fact that the poet-philosopher Lucretius based his work on Epicurus (Lucretius in fact held Epicurus in reverential awe), by the references to his thought by the statesman-moralist Cicero, and by the detailing by the biographer Plutarch of how Cassius soothed the mind of Brutus with his Epicurean ideas. Epicurus’ atomistic theory was revived in the 17th century by Pierre Gassendi, a French philosopher-scientist.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-01 03:14:13

176. Sir Garfield St Aubrun Sobers

Sir Garfield St Aubrun Sobers, (born 28 July 1936), also known as Gary or Garry Sobers, is a former cricketer who played for the West Indies between 1954 and 1974, and is widely considered to be cricket's greatest all-rounder.

Born in Bridgetown, Barbados, Sobers made his first-class debut for the Barbados cricket team at the age of 16 in 1953, and his Test debut for the West Indies the following year. Originally playing mainly as a bowler, he was soon promoted up the batting order. Against Pakistan in 1958, Sobers scored his maiden Test century, progressing to 365 not out and establishing a new record for the highest individual score in an innings. His record was not broken until Brian Lara scored 375 in 1994. Sobers was made captain of the West Indies in 1965, a role which he would hold until 1972. He would also captain a Rest of the World XI during their 1970 tour of England.

Overall, Sobers played 93 Tests for the West Indies, scoring 8032 runs at an average of 57.78, and taking 235 wickets at an average of 34.03. He has the fourth highest batting average in Test cricket in the list of cricketers with more than 5,000 runs. In his 383 first-class matches, he scored over 28,000 runs and took over 1000 wickets, having spent time with South Australia and Nottinghamshire towards the end of his career. Sobers was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1975 for his services to cricket. He became a dual Barbadian-Australian citizen through marriage in 1980. By an act of Parliament in 1998, Sobers was named as one of the ten National Heroes of Barbados.

1936–1954: Early years

Garfield St Aubrun Sobers was born on 28 July 1936 to Shamont and Thelma Sobers of Walcott Avenue, Bay Land, St Michael, Bridgetown, Barbados, and was the fifth of six children. At birth he had two extra fingers, one on each hand, which he removed himself during childhood, "with the aid of catgut and a sharp knife." Sobers was only five when his father died at sea in January 1942, after his ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

From an early age, Sobers demonstrated the talent and ability to play with great skill almost any sport involving a ball, particularly cricket, football and basketball. He and his similarly talented brother Gerald helped their Bay Street Boys' School team to win the primary school Inter-School Cricket championship for three consecutive years. When he was 13, he was recruited to play for two cricket teams. These were the Kent St Philip club in the Barbados Cricket League (BCL) and the Wanderers club, located at Bay Land, in the Barbados Cricket Association (BCA). Garnet Ashby, captain of Kent St Philip, told him that this was his opportunity to play cricket with "the big boys".

Sobers gained useful experience by bowling to Wanderers batsmen, including West Indies Test player Denis Atkinson, at practice in the nets and soon developed his great skill as a left arm spin bowler. More importantly for his career, he was observed by Inspector Wilfred Farmer, captain of the Police team in the BCL First Division. Farmer offered Sobers a chance to play for Police in the 1951–52 season while he was still only 15. In the 1952–53 season, Sobers was invited to the Barbados trials for the colony's tour match against the Indian touring team at Kensington Oval, Bridgetown. He was initially selected as 12th man but then made the team itself when Frank King was forced to withdraw. He therefore made his first-class debut on 31 January 1953, aged only 16. Batting at number nine, he scored 7 not out in his only innings but made an immediate impression as a bowler, taking 4/50 and 3/92.

A full year passed before Sobers, now 17, made his second first-class appearance, again playing against a touring team. He batted at number five against Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), scoring 46 and 27; and took two wickets in the match. He had shown enough talent in these two matches to be selected for West Indies and his third first-class appearance was his Test debut.

International cricket career

1954–1957: Early Test career

Sobers had progressed quickly and made his Test debut in March 1954, aged 17, against England at Sabina Park in Kingston, Jamaica for the Fifth and final Test, after Alf Valentine had fallen ill. Sobers was selected as a bowler, despite only mediocre performances against England for Barbados. He made a good impression by taking 4/75 in England's first innings, including a wicket in his opening over. Sobers also scored 14 not out and 26 batting at number nine; however, England won the match by nine wickets.

Australia toured the West Indies in 1954–55, and their all-rounder Keith Miller thought that Sobers would become a better batsman than bowler despite batting in the lower-order. Sobers was not selected for the First Test, which the West Indies lost by nine wickets. However, he regained his place for the Second Test in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. The match was a high-scoring draw, with Sobers scoring 47 and eight not out. He was barely used with the ball, bowling three overs for ten runs, as Australia amassed a first-innings total of over 600. Sobers was given a further opportunity in the next Test in Georgetown, Guyana (British Guiana at the time) in South America. Despite scoring only 12 and 11 with the bat, he took three wickets in the Australians' first innings. Nevertheless, Australia won by eight wickets. West Indian captain and opening batsman Jeff Stollmeyer twisted his ankle after treading on a ball ahead of the Fourth Test in Barbados, "triggering huge debate about who should open." Eventually, Sobers was chosen to open the innings after Australia had amassed another total of over 600. Sobers had a suspicion he might be asked to do the job. "I couldn't see them sending in anyone else - I was a bowler with a little ability as a batsman and they wanted someone to help see off the shine and protect the three W's." Sobers struck his first three deliveries for boundaries, all from the bowling of Miller. In the fast-bowler's second over, Sobers hit him for another three fours. He was eventually dismissed for 43 out of a first-wicket partnership of 52 with JK Holt. The match was drawn, and Sobers took one wicket in the Australians' only innings, before scoring 11 in the West Indies second innings. The home team were again defeated in the Fifth and final Test in Jamaica. Sobers performed with the bat, however, scoring 35 not out and 64.

Sobers went on his first overseas tour in the early months of 1956 when, aged 19, he was part of the West Indian tour of New Zealand. The series was not successful personally for Sobers, who struggled on the foreign batting wickets. West Indies pitches had little or no grass to speak of, while in New Zealand the pitches were green. "I took one look and asked myself how I could possibly bat on that? How could I make runs? I was out before I even walked to the crease," Sobers later wrote.[24] Playing in all four Tests, he totalled 81 runs and two wickets. As a batsman, Sobers needed time to develop at Test level and, in nine Tests as a teenager, he scored only one half century, and averaged 29.33 with the bat.

He was sent home from New Zealand early to play an unofficial Test match against an England team that included feared fast-bowler Frank Tyson. After struggling to cope with Tyson's pace, Sobers managed to score a half-century, raising hope that he would be selected for the upcoming tour to England, something he considered unlikely after his lack of form. In the first trial match to help select the squad for the upcoming tour, Sobers scored a century in Trinidad. The matches also saw Sobers get his first look at West Indian cricket politics. Wes Hall and Frank Mason were competing for a single place in the touring party, and Sobers and Everton Weekes decided they "would take on Mason and knock him out of the firing line to try and get our fellow Bajan (countryman) Wes in the team." The pair attacked Mason, while they defended Hall in a tactic that paid off with Hall selected, despite Sobers believing Mason was the better bowler at the time.

Sobers toured England for their summer in 1957. He played his first match against the Jim Swanton XI in April, and was surprised about how cold the conditions were, often causing him to wear two or three jumpers. His performances with the bat throughout the five Test series were classed as mediocre, scoring 320 runs at 32, with three half centuries. On the bowling front, Sobers struggled, taking five wickets at 71. It was in the final Test at The Oval that Sobers gained the attention of critics with defiant batting amid a disappointing team performance. The condition of the pitch was subject to criticism and described by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack as "a strange sight". After England had scored 412, the West Indies were easily dismissed for 89 and 86 by the Surrey spinners Jim Laker and Tony Lock, who were playing on their home ground. Batting at number 3, Sobers made 39 and 42, while none of his colleagues passed 30 in either innings. In its summary of the tour, Wisden said: "(of the newcomers) Collie Smith, Sobers, Rohan Kanhai and Roy Gilchrist were particularly impressive"; adding that "to Sobers, a tall left-handed all-rounder, fell the distinction of hitting the highest score of the tour: 219 not out against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge. Sobers undoubtedly was a very fine stroke-player who should go far".

1958–1964: 365 not out

At this stage of his career, Sobers had frustrated his admirers by failing to convert good starts into high scores. He had reached double figures in 18 of his 22 Test innings, although his highest score was still only 66. But, in the three years following the 1957 tour, he fulfilled his promise. In his next 24 Tests, he scored 2,250 runs at the exceptionally high average of 93.75. In 1958, he scored his maiden Test century against Pakistan in Kingston and expanded it to an unbeaten 365, breaking the world record Test score of 364 set by England's Len Hutton in 1938. Sobers batted for 614 minutes and scored 38 fours but, unusually in such a large total, no sixes. At 21 years and 216 days, he is the youngest player to break the individual scoring record in Tests, and remains the youngest triple-centurion. Sir Garfield Sobers set the world records for the highest maiden test ton(365*) as well as becoming the first batsman in test history to convert his maiden test ton into a triple ton. He made 824 runs with three centuries in the five Tests against Pakistan, and followed this with 557 runs and three more centuries on the West Indies tour of India in 1958 - 59. Sobers underwent trauma following the death of Collie Smith in September 1959, but he continued to play cricket successfully. In the home Test series against England in 1959–60, he scored three centuries in five matches, totalling 709 runs.

Largely inspired by new West Indies captain Frank Worrell, who was a close personal friend, Sobers had an outstanding 1960–61 series in Australia. He scored a celebrated 132 on the first day of the First Test at Brisbane Cricket Ground, the match which resulted in the first Tied Test. Wisden confirmed that "some observers considered it the best hundred they had ever seen". Sobers scored 430 runs in the series, which Australia won 2–1, with two centuries; his fielding was outstanding and he took 12 catches. He felt he had "had a good series, starting badly but then coming on" and a very positive outcome for him was to receive an invitation from Don Bradman to play for South Australia in 1961–62.

Sobers took 15 wickets in the 1960–61 series, including a best analysis of 5/120, at an average of 39.20, and his bowling allowed Worrell to play an extra batsman in the final three Tests, thus using Sobers for the first time as a designated all-rounder, a role in which he became the dominant player in world cricket over the next decade, being awarded the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World title (retrospectively) eight times in 13 years.[40] Sobers was never a prolific wicket-taker in Test cricket, and his average of three wickets per game in this series typified his whole career. Overall, he took 235 wickets in his 93 Tests at an average of 34.03 and was more effective when operating as a pace bowler. His best performance was 6/73 and, although he achieved five wickets in an innings six times, he never took ten in a match.

His success continued in the next two series at home to India in 1961–62 and away to England in 1963. He was elected Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1964, and then succeeded Worrell, who had retired, as West Indies captain for the 1964–65 home series against Australia.

1965–1974: West Indies captaincy

Sobers enjoyed immediate success as West Indies captain when his team defeated Australia by 179 runs in the First Test at Sabina Park. West Indies went on to win the series 2–1 and so claim the new Frank Worrell Trophy. This was the first time West Indies had beaten Australia in a Test series.

He enjoyed spectacular success in England in 1966 and was widely acclaimed as "King Cricket". In the five Tests he scored 722 runs at an average of 103.14 with three centuries, and had 20 wickets at 27.25, as well as taking 10 catches. West Indies won the series 3–1, with one match drawn. His status was celebrated at that time by the Trinidadian calypso artist Mighty Sparrow, with his song "Sir Garfield Sobers".

In 1966–67, Sobers captained the West Indies team to India in 1966–67 and they won the series 2–0 with one match drawn.

He lost a series for the first time in 1967–68 when West Indies were surprisingly beaten at home by England. Four matches were drawn and England won the Fourth Test at Queen's Park Oval following a controversial declaration by Sobers which enabled England to score the necessary 215–3 to win at just four runs an over.

In 1968–69, Sobers captained the West Indian cricket team in Australia in 1968-69 but they lost the series 3–1 and then drew a three-Test series in New Zealand 1–1.

In 1969, West Indies lost 2–0 in England with one match drawn.

Sobers captained West Indies for the five-Test home series versus India in 1970–71. India won the series 1–0 with four matches drawn. A year later, Sobers led West Indies in five home Tests against New Zealand and all five were drawn.

Sobers was succeeded as West Indies captain by Rohan Kanhai for the 1972–73 home series against Australia. Sobers did not play in that series but returned to play under Kanhai in England in 1973. He played his last Test in March 1974 at Queen's Park Oval against England.

Rest of the World XI

When South Africa was banned from international cricket because of the country's apartheid policy, the team's two lucrative tours to England in 1970 and to Australia in 1971–72 were cancelled. The cricket authorities responded by forming Rest of the World teams to play unofficial Test series in lieu and these teams included some leading South African players. Sobers was invited to captain the Rest of the World in both series.

In 1970, captaining the Rest of the World XI against England, he took 6/21 on the opening day of the First (unofficial) Test at Lord's with pace bowling, the ball swinging and seaming at high speed. He then scored "a magnificent" 183 and helped bowl out England in the second innings using his left arm wrist spin. In the Fourth Test at Headingley, Sobers scored 114 and 59 as his team won by two wickets. Following the Rest of the World series, he outraged many in the West Indies by playing in a friendly double-wicket tournament in Rhodesia in September 1970.

In January 1972, in the Third (unofficial) Test between Australia and the Rest of the World XI at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Sobers played an innings of 254 which was described by Don Bradman as "probably the greatest exhibition of batting ever seen in Australia". He reached his century in 129 balls and after a rest day, reached 254 in 326 balls. It was "one of the most magnificent innings seen on the Melbourne Cricket Ground" and his "superb display of forceful cricket" lasted 376 minutes and included two sixes and 33 fours.

League cricket in England

Sobers spent several seasons in English league cricket. Having completed his first tour of England with West Indies in 1957, he followed the advice of his mentor Frank Worrell and became the professional at Radcliffe Cricket Club in the Central Lancashire League, staying for five seasons from 1958 to 1962. This experience enabled him to hone his skills in varying conditions and Sobers says that playing in the league furthered his cricket education. He enjoyed considerable success at Radcliffe. In 1961, he achieved a rare "double" by scoring 1008 runs and taking 144 wickets, his performances being instrumental in Radcliffe winning both the league's championship title and its supplementary Wood Cup competition.

While he was engaged at Radcliffe, Sobers underwent emotional trauma after a road accident in September 1959 on the A34 near Stoke-on-Trent which resulted in Collie Smith's death. Sobers was driving a car in which Smith and another West Indian Test player Tom Dewdney were passengers. Smith's back was broken by the collision and he died three days later. Sobers could not recall much about the crash and was fined 10 pounds for driving without due care and attention. He "began drinking more" and there were concerns, expressed by himself and others, that the experience might affect his cricket career. He got over the trauma by deciding that he would be letting his country down if he "disappeared into the mists of an alcoholic haze" and he resolved to play not just for Garfield Sobers but for Collie Smith as well, thus setting himself the task of playing for two men. He recovered well and, after an outstanding home Test series against England in 1959–60, he returned to Radcliffe where he continued as club professional for the next three seasons.

Sobers gives an insight into the life of the club professional in his autobiography. He was paid £500 a season by Radcliffe. That was a reasonable wage but he relied on matchday collections to augment it and a good performance would boost the collection. He sometimes received as much as £50 in a collection and "that represented a massive bonus". Radcliffe placed no restrictions on him and, when they had no game, he could play as a guest professional in other leagues throughout Lancashire and Yorkshire. He particularly liked playing in Yorkshire when he could because they would pay him £25 per appearance with a collection on top if he did well.

After touring England with West Indies in 1963, he moved to the North Staffordshire and South Cheshire League in 1964 to play for Norton Cricket Club, who duly won the league title. Sobers made 549 runs in 18 innings at 49.90, finishing second in the league averages behind only his amateur brother Gerald, also playing for Norton, who averaged 50.12. Gary Sobers did even better with the ball, his 97 wickets at 8.38 heading the league averages. 1965 saw a repeat performance with Norton again winning the league and, though Sobers only averaged 25.38 with the bat, he again topped the league bowling averages with 76 wickets at 8.03. Norton lost the league title in 1966 while Sobers was touring England with West Indies but regained it in 1967 when he returned. He was fourth in the 1967 league batting averages with 41.83 and third in the bowling with 95 wickets at 9.37 (the two bowlers with better averages took only 22 and 24 wickets).

Sheffield Shield with South Australia

In the 1961–62 Australian season which followed the 1960–61 West Indies tour, Sobers and his West Indian colleagues Wes Hall and Rohan Kanhai returned to Australia to take part in the Sheffield Shield. Sobers played for South Australia and had an enormous impact on attendances, causing an 89% increase with gate receipts rising "by two and a half times". He topped both the batting and bowling averages at South Australia, his best performance being against champions New South Wales at the Adelaide Oval when he scored 251 and took 3/51 and 6/72.

He was even more outstanding in 1963–64 when, largely due to his efforts, South Australia won the Sheffield Shield. Sobers was the season's leading runscorer with 973 at 74.84 and the leading wicket taker with 47 at 28.27.

Sobers spent three seasons with South Australia and in two he achieved the rare double of 1000 runs and 50 wickets.

Shell Shield with Barbados

Sobers played intermittently for Barbados throughout his first-class career. He made his first appearance in the inaugural season of the new Shell Shield competition in February 1966. His last appearance for Barbados came in the 1973–74 Shell Shield match against Jamaica, at Kensington Oval.

County Championship with Nottinghamshire

At the end of the 1967 English cricket season, it was agreed that each county club could immediately sign a non-English player for the 1968 season. Seven clubs approached Sobers and, on 14 December 1967, Nottinghamshire announced that he had signed for them and had been appointed club captain. Sobers stated that, although he had enjoyed his time in league cricket, he had a definite preference for the first-class game and he looked forward to restoring Nottinghamshire's fortunes. Though details were undisclosed, Wisden 1968 speculated that his contract would run for three years and be worth £7000 a year (a very high income at the time), including an apartment and a car.

Six sixes in an over

On 31 August 1968, Sobers became the first batsman ever to hit six sixes in a single over of six consecutive balls in first-class cricket. The feat consisted of five clean hits for six and one six where the ball was caught but carried over the boundary by Roger Davis. Sobers was playing as captain of Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan at St. Helen's in Swansea; the unfortunate bowler was Malcolm Nash. This tally of 36 runs in an over broke a 57-year-old record of 34 runs, held by Ted Alletson. The ball was collected from a garden by 11-year-old Richard Lewis; he later gave the ball to Sobers. In 1984–85, Indian batsman Ravi Shastri equalled the record by scoring six sixes in an over while playing for Bombay versus Baroda.

Style and technique

An outstanding all-rounder, Sobers was left-handed as both batsman and bowler. His versatility enabled him to bowl all varieties of left-arm bowling from spin to fast-medium. As a fielder he was usually stationed close to the wicket but he was also a very capable outfielder.

Richie Benaud described Sobers as "the greatest all-round cricketer the world has seen". Sobers, wrote Benaud, was "a brilliant batsman, splendid fielder, particularly close to the wicket, and a bowler of extraordinary skill, whether bowling with the new ball, providing orthodox left-arm spin or over-the-wrist spin".

Fred Trueman enjoyed a great rivalry with Sobers and later described him as a "sublime left-hand batsman" who was "one of the greatest cricketers ever to have graced the game, certainly the greatest all-rounder". Trueman went on to say that Sobers as a batsman "has a great cricketing brain and his thought processes are lightning quick".

C. L. R. James, when describing the batsmanship of Wilton St Hill, commented upon St Hill's ability to judge the ball early in its flight and so quickly decide which stroke to play. In James's view, only Don Bradman and Sobers were comparable with St Hill in having this capability of "seeing" the ball. Wisden 1969 described the "lightning footwork" of Sobers as he got into position for his stroke. Commenting upon Sobers' six sixes in an over against his team in 1968, Glamorgan captain Tony Lewis said: "It was not sheer slogging through strength, but scientific hitting with every movement working in harmony."

As a bowler, Sobers began as an orthodox left arm spinner (SLA) and later developed the ability to bowl left arm wrist spin or chinaman and googlies. Sobers could also operate as a seamer, sometimes using medium pace, but he was much more effective when he bowled fast. With the new ball, he could make the delivery curve late in flight at high speed; his action being a loose, springy run followed by a "whiplash" delivery.

Though he mostly fielded close to the wicket, Sobers was an exceptional outfielder who was seen on one occasion, when he had fielded the ball on the boundary, to "bend his hand back almost parallel with his arm before flipping the ball a full seventy yards to the wicketkeeper".

Following his success as captain of West Indies on the 1966 tour of England, the 1967 edition of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack declared that for Sobers "(the 1966 Tests) were one triumph after another with bat and ball, as well as in the field as a master tactician and fantastic catcher close to the bat". Sobers' exploits in 1966 earned him the media-bestowed sobriquet of "King Cricket", which soon afterwards became the title of a book about him.

Personal life

Sobers was briefly engaged to Indian actress Anju Mahendru after he met her on the 1966–67 tour of India. He married Prue Kirby, an Australian, in September 1969. They had two sons, Matthew and Daniel, and an adopted daughter, Genevieve. The marriage ended in divorce in 1990 after the couple broke up in 1984; however, Sobers acquired dual Australian citizenship through marriage in 1980.

He says that his was a multi-sporting family who were all good at football, basketball, table tennis and tennis. His own favourite sport is golf and he has been an enthusiastic gambler. He is the author of a children's novel about cricket, Bonaventure and the Flashing Blade, in which computer analysis helps a university cricket team become unbeatable.

Honours and legacy

Statue of Sobers outside Kensington Oval, Bridgetown, Barbados

In the 1975 New Year Honours, Queen Elizabeth II created Sobers a Knight Bachelor for his services to cricket. The award was made in the British Diplomatic and Overseas section of the list, rather than on the nomination of the Government of Barbados, which had stopped putting forward recommendations for British honours. This caused the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office some unease, as shown by papers released by The National Archives in 2005. However, since Barbados had not yet introduced its own system of honours, the Prime Minister of Barbados was pleased that an honour would be forthcoming for Sobers.

The award was originally intended to be made in the 1975 Queen's Birthday Honours, but since there was a royal visit to Barbados planned for February 1975, it was moved forward to the New Year list so that Sobers could be knighted by the Queen in person during the visit. The very short turnaround between the decision to make the award and its announcement meant that the Governor-General of Barbados was not informed of the award before the public announcement, which caused some hurt feelings between London and Bridgetown.

He was the subject of This Is Your Life in 1975 when he was surprised by Eamonn Andrews while attending a reception at the Barbados High Commission in London to celebrate his recent knighthood.

Sobers was made a National Hero of Barbados by the Cabinet of Barbados in 1998[86] and is thus accorded the honorary prefix "The Right Excellent". He is one of only ten people to have received this honour and the only recipient still living.

Sobers coached internationally, having a one-time stint with Sri Lanka. In 2003 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia, where he had played many first-class games for South Australia.

Cricket awards

Among the awards that Sobers won during his playing career were:

West Indian Cricket Cricketer of the Year: 1958–59
Wisden Cricketer of the Year: 1964
The Cricket Society Wetherall Award for the Leading All-Rounder in English First-Class Cricket: 1970
Walter Lawrence Trophy winner: 1974
Wisden Cricketer of the Century: 2000

In 2000 Sobers was named by a 100-member panel of experts as one of the five Wisden Cricketers of the Century. He received 90 votes out of a possible 100. The other four cricketers selected for the honour were Don Bradman (100 votes), Jack Hobbs (30), Shane Warne (27) and Viv Richards (25).

In 2004, the International Cricket Council (ICC) inaugurated the Sir Garfield Sobers Trophy which is awarded annually to the player selected by ICC as its Player of the Year. The recommendation to name the award after Sobers was made by a panel consisting of Richie Benaud, Sunil Gavaskar and Michael Holding, who were asked by the ICC "to select an individual with whom to honour cricket's ultimate individual award".

In 2007 Wisden retrospectively selected the Leading Cricketer in the World for every year dating back to 1900 (except 1915–18 and 1940–45), Sobers being selected for eight years (1958, 1960, 1962, 1964–66, 1968 and 1970). Only Sobers and Bradman (10) received the accolade more than three times.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-02 23:55:52

177. W. Somerset Maugham

W. Somerset Maugham, in full William Somerset Maugham (born Jan. 25, 1874, Paris, France - died Dec. 16, 1965, Nice), English novelist, playwright, and short-story writer whose work is characterized by a clear unadorned style, cosmopolitan settings, and a shrewd understanding of human nature.

Maugham was orphaned at the age of 10; he was brought up by an uncle and educated at King’s School, Canterbury. After a year at Heidelberg, he entered St. Thomas’ medical school, London, and qualified as a doctor in 1897. He drew upon his experiences as an obstetrician in his first novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897), and its success, though small, encouraged him to abandon medicine. He traveled in Spain and Italy and in 1908 achieved a theatrical triumph - four plays running in London at once - that brought him financial security. During World War I he worked as a secret agent. After the war he resumed his interrupted travels and, in 1928, bought a villa on Cape Ferrat in the south of France, which became his permanent home.

His reputation as a novelist rests primarily on four books: Of Human Bondage (1915), a semi-autobiographical account of a young medical student’s painful progress toward maturity; The Moon and Sixpence (1919), an account of an unconventional artist, suggested by the life of Paul Gauguin; Cakes and Ale (1930), the story of a famous novelist, which is thought to contain caricatures of Thomas Hardy and Hugh Walpole; and The Razor’s Edge (1944), the story of a young American war veteran’s quest for a satisfying way of life. Maugham’s plays, mainly Edwardian social comedies, soon became dated, but his short stories have increased in popularity. Many portray the conflict of Europeans in alien surroundings that provoke strong emotions, and Maugham’s skill in handling plot, in the manner of Guy de Maupassant, is distinguished by economy and suspense. In The Summing Up (1938) and A Writer’s Notebook (1949) Maugham explains his philosophy of life as a resigned atheism and a certain skepticism about the extent of man’s innate goodness and intelligence; it is this that gives his work its astringent cynicism.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-04 02:01:33

178. Chester Williams Rice

Chester Williams Rice (December 16, 1888 – 1951) was an electrical engineer who was the joint inventor in 1925 of the moving coil loudspeaker along with Edward W. Kellogg.

Career

Rice was born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1888 and educated at The Albany Academy and Harvard College, from which he received an S.B. and an M.E.E. in 1911. He was later employed by General Electric in Schenectady, New York.

In 1925, Rice, while working for General Electric, published a paper with Edward W. Kellogg outlining an early moving coil loudspeaker. The paper also discussed a way of boosting power to amplifiers; this was incorporated in General Electric's Radiola line of radios in 1926.

Personal

Rice married Helen Currier of Lynn in 1914. They had three children, Barbara, Wilbur Burrier, and Priscilla.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-04 03:51:12

179. Kellogg Edward Washburn

(20 February 1883 – 29 May 1960)

Biography

He was born in Washington in 1883. He was a graduate of Phillips Academy, in Andover (Class of 1902)

He was the joint inventor of the moving coil loudspeaker in 1925 along with Chester W. Rice at General Electric, and independently by Edward Wente at Bell Labs. Kellogg also patented an electrostatic loudspeaker in 1934.

Kellogg was the first director of the GE Advanced Technology Laboratory in Schenectady, New York, which later became a part of RCA Victor in Camden, New Jersey (and is now part of Lockheed Martin). Kellogg was also the first head of their Photophone development group.

He died in 1960.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-06 17:24:23

180. Mary Cartwright

Mary Cartwright, Born - 17 December 1900, Aynho, Northamptonshire, England, UK; Died - 3 April 1998 (aged 97), Cambridge, England, UK

Dame Mary Lucy Cartwright was a British mathematician.

With J. E. Littlewood she was the first to analyse a dynamical system with chaos.

Early life and education

Cartwright was born in Aynho, Northamptonshire, where her father, William Digby Cartwright, was vicar. Through her grandmother Jane Holbech she was descended from the poet John Donne and William Mompesson, the Vicar of Eyam.

Early education was at Leamington High School (1912–1915) then Gravely Manor School in Boscombe (1915–1916) before completion in Godolphin School in Salisbury (1916–1919).

She studied mathematics at St Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating in 1923 with a first class degree. She was the first woman to attain the final degree lectures and to obtain a first. She then taught at Alice Ottley School in Worcester and Wycombe Abbey School in Buckinghamshire before returning to Oxford in 1928 to read for her D.Phil.

She was supervised by G. H. Hardy in her doctoral studies. During the academic year 1928–9 Hardy was at Princeton, so it was E. C. Titchmarsh who took over the duties as a supervisor. Her thesis on zeroes of entire functions was examined by J. E. Littlewood whom she met for the first time as an external examiner in her oral examination for the D.Phil. She would later establish an enduring collaboration with Littlewood.

In 1930, Cartwright was awarded a Yarrow Research Fellowship and she went to Girton College, Cambridge, to continue working on the topic of her doctoral thesis. Attending Littlewood's lectures, she solved one of the open problems which he posed. Her mathematical theorem, now known as Cartwright's theorem, gives an estimate for the maximum modulus of an analytic function that takes the same value no more than p times in the unit disc. To prove the theorem she used a new approach, applying a technique introduced by Lars Ahlfors for conformal mappings.

Career

In 1936, Cartwright became director of studies in mathematics at Girton College, and in 1938 she began work on a new project which had a major impact on the direction of her research. The Radio Research Board of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research produced a memorandum regarding certain differential equations which came out of modelling radio and radar work. They asked the London Mathematical Society if they could help find a mathematician who could work on these problems and Cartwright became interested in this memorandum. The dynamics lying behind the problems were unfamiliar to Cartwright so she approached Littlewood for help with this aspect. They began to collaborate studying the equations. Littlewood wrote:

“For something to do we went on and on at the thing with no earthly prospect of "results"; suddenly the whole vista of the dramatic fine structure of solutions stared us in the face.”

The fine structure which Littlewood describes here is today seen to be a typical instance of the butterfly effect. The collaboration led to important results, and these have greatly influenced the direction that the modern theory of dynamical systems has taken.

In 1945, she simplified Hermite's elementary proof of the irrationality of

. Her version of the proof was published in an appendix to Sir Harold Jeffreys' book Scientific Inference. In 1947, she was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society and, although she was not the first woman to be elected to that Society, she was the first female mathematician.

Cartwright was appointed Mistress of Girton in 1948 then, in addition, a Reader in the Theory of Functions in Cambridge in 1959, holding this appointment until 1968.

Death

She died in Midfield Lodge Nursing Home in Cambridge in 1998.

Recognition: She was the first woman:

1. to receive the Sylvester Medal
2. to serve on the Council of the Royal Society
3. to be President of the London Mathematical Society (in 1961 - 62)

She also received the De Morgan Medal of the Society in 1968. In 1968 she was elected an Honorary Fellow of The Royal Society of Edinburgh (HonFRSE). In 1969 she received the distinction of being honoured by the Queen, becoming Dame Mary Cartwright, Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

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Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-08 16:53:29

181. Linus Pauling

Linus Pauling, in full Linus Carl Pauling (born February 28, 1901, Portland, Oregon, U.S. - died August 19, 1994, Big Sur, California), American theoretical physical chemist who became the only person to have won two unshared Nobel Prizes. His first prize (1954) was awarded for research into the nature of the chemical bond and its use in elucidating molecular structure; the second (1962) recognized his efforts to ban the testing of nuclear weapons.

Early Life And Education

Pauling was the first of three children and the only son of Herman Pauling, a pharmacist, and Lucy Isabelle (Darling) Pauling, a pharmacist’s daughter. After his early education in Condon and Portland, Oregon, he attended Oregon Agricultural College (now Oregon State University), where he met Ava Helen Miller, who would later become his wife, and where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering summa cum laude in 1922. He then attended the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where Roscoe G. math showed him how to determine the structures of crystals using X rays. He received his Ph.D. in 1925 for a dissertation derived from his crystal-structure papers. Following a brief period as a National Research Fellow, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study quantum mechanics in Europe. He spent most of the 18 months at Arnold Sommerfeld’s Institute for Theoretical Physics in Munich, Germany.

Elucidation Of Molecular Structures

After completing postdoctoral studies, Pauling returned to Caltech in 1927. There he began a long career of teaching and research. Analyzing chemical structure became the central theme of his scientific work. By using the technique of X-ray diffraction, he determined the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms in several important silicate and sulfide minerals. In 1930, during a trip to Germany, Pauling learned about electron diffraction, and upon his return to California he used this technique of scattering electrons from the nuclei of molecules to determine the structures of some important substances. This structural knowledge assisted him in developing an electronegativity scale in which he assigned a number representing a particular atom’s power of attracting electrons in a covalent bond.

To complement the experimental tool that X-ray analysis provided for exploring molecular structure, Pauling turned to quantum mechanics as a theoretical tool. For example, he used quantum mechanics to determine the equivalent strength in each of the four bonds surrounding the carbon atom. He developed a valence bond theory in which he proposed that a molecule could be described by an intermediate structure that was a resonance combination (or hybrid) of other structures. His book 'The Nature of the Chemical Bond, and the Structure of Molecules and Crystals' (1939) provided a unified summary of his vision of structural chemistry.

The arrival of the geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan at Caltech in the late 1920s stimulated Pauling’s interest in biological molecules, and by the mid-1930s he was performing successful magnetic studies on the protein hemoglobin. He developed further interests in protein and, together with biochemist Alfred Mirsky, Pauling published a paper in 1936 on general protein structure. In this work the authors explained that protein molecules naturally coiled into specific configurations but became “denatured” (uncoiled) and assumed some random form once certain weak bonds were broken.

On one of his trips to visit Mirsky in New York, Pauling met Karl Landsteiner, the discoverer of blood types, who became his guide into the field of immunochemistry. Pauling was fascinated by the specificity of antibody-antigen reactions, and he later developed a theory that accounted for this specificity through a unique folding of the antibody’s polypeptide chain. World War II interrupted this theoretical work, and Pauling’s focus shifted to more practical problems, including the preparation of an artificial substitute for blood serum useful to wounded soldiers and an oxygen detector useful in submarines and airplanes. J. Robert Oppenheimer asked Pauling to head the chemistry section of the Manhattan Project, but his suffering from glomerulonephritis (inflammation of the glomerular region of the kidney) prevented him from accepting this offer. For his outstanding services during the war, Pauling was later awarded the Presidential Medal for Merit.

While collaborating on a report about postwar American science, Pauling became interested in the study of sickle-cell anemia. He perceived that the sickling of cells noted in this disease might be caused by a genetic mutation in the globin portion of the blood cell’s hemoglobin. In 1949 he and his coworkers published a paper identifying the particular defect in hemoglobin’s structure that was responsible for sickle-cell anemia, which thereby made this disorder the first “molecular disease” to be discovered.

While serving as a visiting professor at the University of Oxford in 1948, Pauling returned to a problem that had intrigued him in the late 1930s—the three-dimensional structure of proteins. By folding a paper on which he had drawn a chain of linked amino acids, he discovered a cylindrical coil-like configuration, later called the alpha helix. The most significant aspect of Pauling’s structure was its determination of the number of amino acids per turn of the helix. During this same period he became interested in deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and early in 1953 he and protein crystallographer Robert Corey published their version of DNA’s structure, three strands twisted around each other in ropelike fashion. Shortly thereafter James Watson and Francis Crick published DNA’s correct structure, a double helix. Pauling’s efforts to modify his postulated structure had been hampered by poor X-ray photographs of DNA and by his lack of understanding of this molecule’s wet and dry forms. In 1952 he failed to visit Rosalind Franklin, working in Maurice Wilkins’s laboratory at King’s College, London, and consequently did not see her X-ray pictures of DNA. Frankin’s pictures proved to be the linchpin in allowing Watson and Crick to elucidate the actual structure. Nevertheless, Pauling was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize for Chemistry “for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances.”

Humanitarian Activities

During the 1950s Pauling and his wife became well known to the public through their crusade to stop the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. In 1958 they presented an appeal for a test ban to the United Nations in the form of a document signed by 9,235 scientists from 44 countries. Pauling’s sentiments were also promulgated through his book No More War! (1958), a passionate analysis of the implications of nuclear war for humanity. In 1960 he was called upon to defend his actions regarding a test ban before a congressional subcommittee. By refusing to reveal the names of those who had helped him collect signatures, he risked going to jail - a stand initially condemned but later widely admired. His work on behalf of world peace was recognized with the 1962 Nobel Prize for Peace awarded on October 10, 1963, the date that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty went into effect.

Pauling’s Peace Prize generated such antagonism from Caltech administrators that he left the institute in 1963. He became a staff member at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where his humanitarian work was encouraged. Although he was able to develop a new model of the atomic nucleus while working at the Center, his desire to perform more experimental research led him to a research professorship at the University of California in San Diego in 1967. There he published a paper on orthomolecular psychiatry that explained how mental health could be achieved by manipulating substances normally present in the body. Two years later he accepted a post at Stanford University, where he worked until 1972.

Later Years

While at San Diego and Stanford, Pauling’s scientific interests centred on a particular molecule - ascorbic acid (vitamin C). He examined the published reports about this vitamin and concluded that, when taken in large enough quantities (megadoses), it would help the body fight off colds and other diseases. The outcome of his research was the book 'Vitamin C and the Common Cold' (1970), which became a best-seller. Pauling’s interest in vitamin C in particular and orthomolecular medicine in general led, in 1973, to his founding an institute that eventually bore his name - the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine. During his tenure at this institute, he became embroiled in controversies about the relative benefits and risks of ingesting megadoses of various vitamins. The controversy intensified when he advocated vitamin C’s usefulness in the treatment of cancer. Pauling and his collaborator, the Scottish physician Ewan Cameron, published their views in 'Cancer and Vitamin C' (1979). Their ideas were subjected to experimental animal studies funded by the institute. While these studies supported their ideas, investigations at the Mayo Clinic involving human cancer patients did not corroborate Pauling’s results.

Although he continued to receive recognition for his earlier accomplishments, Pauling’s later work provoked considerable skepticism and controversy. His cluster model of the atomic nucleus was rejected by physicists, his interpretation of the newly discovered quasicrystals received little support, and his ideas on vitamin C were rejected by the medical establishment. In an effort to raise money to support his increasingly troubled institute, Pauling published 'How to Live Longer and Feel Better' (1986), but the book failed to become the success that he and his associates had anticipated.

Both Pauling and his wife developed cancer. Ava Helen Pauling died of stomach cancer in 1981. Ten years later Pauling discovered that he had prostate cancer. Although he underwent surgery and other treatments, the cancer eventually spread to his liver. He died at his ranch on the Big Sur coast of California.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-10 00:25:28

182. Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Arthur William Russell was born at Trelleck on 18th May, 1872. His parents were Viscount Amberley and Katherine, daughter of 2nd Baron Stanley of Alderley. At the age of three he was left an orphan. His father had wished him to be brought up as an agnostic; to avoid this he was made a ward of Court, and brought up by his grandmother. Instead of being sent to school he was taught by governesses and tutors, and thus acquired a perfect knowledge of French and German. In 1890 he went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge, and after being a very high Wrangler and obtaining a First Class with distinction in philosophy he was elected a fellow of his college in 1895. But he had already left Cambridge in the summer of 1894 and for some months was attaché at the British embassy at Paris.

In December 1894 he married Miss Alys Pearsall Smith. After spending some months in Berlin studying social democracy, they went to live near Haslemere, where he devoted his time to the study of philosophy. In 1900 he visited the Mathematical Congress at Paris. He was impressed with the ability of the Italian mathematician Peano and his pupils, and immediately studied Peano's works. In 1903 he wrote his first important book, The Principles of Mathematics, and with his friend Dr. Alfred Whitehead proceeded to develop and extend the mathematical logic of Peano and Frege. From time to time he abandoned philosophy for politics. In 1910 he was appointed lecturer at Trinity College. After the first World War broke out, he took an active part in the No Conscription fellowship and was fined £ 100 as the author of a leaflet criticizing a sentence of two years on a conscientious objector. His college deprived him of his lectureship in 1916. He was offered a post at Harvard university, but was refused a passport. He intended to give a course of lectures (afterwards published in America as Political Ideals, 1918) but was prevented by the military authorities. In 1918 he was sentenced to six months' imprisonment for a pacifistic article he had written in the Tribunal. His Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919) was written in prison. His Analysis of Mind (1921) was the outcome of some lectures he gave in London, which were organized by a few friends who got up a subscription for the purpose.

In 1920 Russell had paid a short visit to Russia to study the conditions of Bolshevism on the spot. In the autumn of the same year he went to China to lecture on philosophy at the Peking university. On his return in Sept. 1921, having been divorced by his first wife, he married Miss Dora Black. They lived for six years in Chelsea during the winter months and spent the summers near Lands End. In 1927 he and his wife started a school for young children, which they carried on until 1932. He succeeded to the earldom in 1931. He was divorced by his second wife in 1935 and the following year married Patricia Helen Spence. In 1938 he went to the United States and during the next years taught at many of the country's leading universities. In 1940 he was involved in legal proceedings when his right to teach philosophy at the College of the City of New York was questioned because of his views on morality. When his appointment to the college faculty was cancelled, he accepted a five-year contract as a lecturer for the Barnes foundation, Merion, Pa., but the cancellation of this contract was announced in Jan. 1943 by Albert C. Barnes, director of the foundation.

Russell was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1908, and re-elected a fellow of Trinity College in 1944. He was awarded the Sylvester medal of the Royal Society, 1934, the de Morgan medal of the London Mathematical Society in the same year, the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1950.

In a paper "Logical Atomism" (Contemporary British Philosophy. Personal Statements, First series. Lond. 1924) Russell exposed his views on his philosophy, preceded by a few words on historical development.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-11 14:28:44

183. Jonas Salk

Jonas Edward Salk (October 28, 1914 - June 23, 1995) was an American medical researcher and virologist. He discovered and developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. Born in New York City, he attended New York University School of Medicine, later choosing to do medical research instead of becoming a practicing physician. In 1939, after earning his medical degree, Salk began an internship as a scientist physician at Mount Sinai Hospital. Two years later he was granted a fellowship at the University of Michigan, where he would study flu viruses with his mentor Thomas Francis, Jr..

Until 1955, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, polio was considered one of the most frightening public health problems in the world. In the postwar United States, annual epidemics were increasingly devastating. The 1952 U.S. epidemic was the worst outbreak in the nation's history. Of nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 people died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis, with most of its victims being children. The "public reaction was to a plague", said historian William L. O'Neill. "Citizens of urban areas were to be terrified every summer when this frightful visitor returned." According to a 2009 PBS documentary, "Apart from the atomic bomb, America's greatest fear was polio." As a result, scientists were in a frantic race to find a way to prevent or cure the disease. In 1938, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the world's most recognized victim of the disease, had founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (known as March of Dimes Foundation since 2007), an organization that would fund the development of a vaccine.

In 1947, Salk accepted an appointment to the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In 1948, he undertook a project funded by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to determine the number of different types of polio virus. Salk saw an opportunity to extend this project towards developing a vaccine against polio, and, together with the skilled research team he assembled, devoted himself to this work for the next seven years. The field trial set up to test the Salk vaccine was, according to O'Neill, "the most elaborate program of its kind in history, involving 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school personnel, and 220,000 volunteers." Over 1,800,000 school children took part in the trial. When news of the vaccine's success was made public on April 12, 1955, Salk was hailed as a "miracle worker" and the day almost became a national holiday. Around the world, an immediate rush to vaccinate began, with countries including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium planning to begin polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine.

Salk campaigned for mandatory vaccination, claiming that public health should be considered a "moral commitment." His sole focus had been to develop a safe and effective vaccine as rapidly as possible, with no interest in personal profit. When asked who owned the patent to it, Salk said, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books, including Man Unfolding (1972), The Survival of the Wisest (1973), World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981), and Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983). Salk's last years were spent searching for a vaccine against HIV. His personal papers are stored at the University of California, San Diego Library.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-17 22:58:20

184. Johan Edvard Lundström

Johan Edvard Lundström (1815–1888) was a Swedish industrialist and inventor who pioneered the production of safety matches. Johan is spelt John outside Scandinavia.

Biography

Johan was born in 1815 in the town of Jönköping, Sweden. Johan Edvard is most of all recognized to have improved the safety match and made it possible to commercially exploit it. The safety match had been invented and patented by the Swedish chemist Gustaf Erik Pasch (1788-1862) in 1844, but at that time, it was too difficult to produce it. In 1845 Johan Edvard started to experiment with these new type of matches in a small workshop he had rented. In 1846 his younger brother Carl Frans (1823-1917) joined his small workshop. In 1847 they were ready to set up a production plant and bought an estate on the coast of Lake Vättern where they built a large match factory. Today, their original factory is a museum.

Before the safety match was invented, matches were dangerous for the workers in the factory because the use of the very poisonous white/yellow phosphorus that the workers were inhaling, in particular those who worked with the application on the sticks. After some years of exposure they could get infected from the poisonous phosphorus and get a disease called “Phossy jaw” and could lose their teeth. This disease was very deadly. When the cause for the disease was discovered, the ventilation in the production process was improved, but the dangerous type of phosphorus were soon forbidden to use for matches. The safety match used the non-poisonous red phosphorus that was placed on the striking surface, not the match itself. The reason they were called “safety matches” was because they would only ignite on the striking surface on the box, nowhere else would the match ignite. The safety match patent included the combination of using red phosphorus and separating it from the stick. Johan made it possible to mass-produce the safety match.

The Lundström safety match got an award at the “World Exhibition” in Paris 1855. Alexander Lagerman (1836-1904), a Swedish engineer that was employed by the Lundström brothers, invented the first fully automatic match machine. The safety match combined with the advanced machines that the company developed themselves, soon made the company in Jönköping the largest match company in Scandinavia and one of the world's largest match production companies. Today the safety match is the most widely used match in the world.

J. E. Lundström left the match business in Jönköping around 1862-63 to work with his cellulose factory, Munksjö Cellulose, in Jönköping that he had founded in 1862 together with Lars Johan Hierta. In 1869 he left the Munksjö factory and founded Katrinefors cellulose industry in Mariestad, but left that business in 1875. He then worked as a government inspector in the match industry between 1875-77 in Sweden and was to a great extent involved in the work to prevent and forbid the use of the dangerous white phosphorus.

J. E. Lundström died in 1888 at the age of 73, having never married. His brother Carl Frans had left the match industry in 1863 and moved to Stockholm to work with other projects. A new generation took over the factory in Jönköping but details about this is not very well documented. Most likely, the brothers both sold their shares in Jönköping factory around 1863. Whether J. E. Lundström had any children or any other relatives that were involved in the factory is not known.

In 1917 the company in Jönköping was sold to Ivar Kreuger and incorporated in the company Svenska Tändsticks AB, today known as Swedish Match.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-18 22:56:05

185. Granville Bradshaw

Granville Eastwood Bradshaw (1887–1969) was an English engineer and inventor who designed motorcycle, auto, and aero-engines.

Bradshaw was born in Preston, Lancashire in 1887 as the son of William and Annie Bradshaw. His father was a jeweler and optician.

Bradshaw's early work was involved with the early pioneers of flight, which led him to become an expert on stressing. He designed the Star Monoplane including the engine for Star Aircraft when he was 19, which he later flew. He then started to work on aero-engines and was the co-founder of the All-British Engine Company (later ABC Motors then Walton Motors).

The ABC radial aero-engines designed and built during the First World War were extremely advanced and the government placed large orders for the Dragonfly. A number of aircraft were designed to use the Dragonfly, but the engines were plagued by problems and failed to live up to the promises. The design was taken over by the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough to try to resolve the issues, but with the end of the war, it was abandoned.

He was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his war work in 1918.

At the end of 1918 it was announced that ABC Motors Ltd had transferred its motor cycle manufacturing and selling rights to Sopwith Aviation Co Ltd, with Granville Bradshaw of ABC Motors Ltd concentrating on design. This allowed him to sell his designs to other companies. He designed a number of engines for Panther motorcycles. He also designed motorcycle engines where the cylinder barrels were oil cooled, and these were made under licence by J Walmsley & Co (Preston) Ltd. The flat-twin 500cc version of this engine was utilised from 1921 on the Zenith-Bradshaw motorcycle. A single cylinder 348cc version was optional for OK-Supreme, Sheffield-Henderson, Dot, Orbit, and Coventry-Mascot in 1922; and a 1100cc V-twin version of this oil-cooled engine was adopted for the Belsize light car.

His biggest seller was selling patents for gambling machines, although he lost all the money he made in further business deals. He later concentrated on toroidal internal-combustion engines. Bradshaw produced a long list of inventions and designs, although very few achieved commercial success.

A biography Granville Bradshaw: a flawed genius? by Barry Jones was published in 2008.

The omega : Omega toroidal engine

The Bradshaw engine was a type of had a single toroidal cylinder, containing four double-ended curved pistons. The pistons reciprocated in pairs, while the cylinder rotated around them, carrying around the spark plug and inlet/exhaust ports.

Family

In 1911 he married Violet Elsie Partridge in Wolverhampton. Violet petitioned for divorce in 1926. Bradshaw married again in 1927 to Muriel Mathieson in Kensington, London. He died in 1969 at Hitchin in Hertfordshire.

bradshaw%20portrait%201955.jpg

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-19 21:51:52

186. J. K. Rowling

Joanne Rowling, (born 31 July 1965), who writes under the pen names J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, is a British novelist and screenwriter who wrote the Harry Potter fantasy series. The books have won multiple awards, and sold more than 400 million copies. They have become the best-selling book series in history and been the basis for a series of films, over which Rowling had overall approval on the scripts and was a producer on the final films in the series.

Born in Yate, Gloucestershire, England, Rowling was working as a researcher and bilingual secretary for Amnesty International when she conceived the idea for the Harry Potter series while on a delayed train from Manchester to London in 1990. The seven-year period that followed saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband and relative poverty until the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. There were six sequels, of which the last, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released in 2007. Since then, Rowling has written four books for adult readers: The Casual Vacancy (2012) and - under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith - the crime fiction novels The Cuckoo's Calling (2013), The Silkworm (2014) and Career of Evil (2015).

Rowling has lived a "rags to riches" life story, in which she progressed from living on state benefits to multi-millionaire status within five years. She is the United Kingdom's best-selling living author, with sales in excess of £238M. The 2016 Sunday Times Rich List estimated Rowling's fortune at £600 million, ranking her as the joint 197th richest person in the UK. Time magazine named her as a runner-up for its 2007 Person of the Year, noting the social, moral, and political inspiration she has given her fans. In October 2010, Rowling was named the "Most Influential Woman in Britain" by leading magazine editors. She has supported charities including Comic Relief, One Parent Families, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Lumos (formerly the Children's High Level Group).

Although she writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling (pronounced rolling), her name, before her remarriage, was simply Joanne Rowling. Anticipating that the target audience of young boys might not want to read a book written by a woman, her publishers asked that she use two initials rather than her full name. As she had no middle name, she chose K (for Kathleen) as the second initial of her pen name, from her paternal grandmother. She calls herself Jo. Following her re-marriage, she has sometimes used the name Joanne Murray when conducting personal business. During the Leveson Inquiry she gave evidence under the name of Joanne Kathleen Rowling and her entry in Who's Who lists her name also as Joanne Kathleen Rowling.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-20 15:28:11

187. Pelé

(Original Name - Edison Arantes do Nascimento)

A member of three Brazilian World Cup-champion teams, Pelé is considered by many to be the greatest soccer player of all time.

QUOTES : “I was born to play football, just like Beethoven was born to write music and Michelangelo was born to paint.” - Pelé

Synopsis

Born on October 23, 1940, in Três Corações, Brazil, soccer legend Pelé became a superstar with his performance in the 1958 World Cup. Pelé played professionally in Brazil for two decades, winning three World Cups along the way, before joining the New York Cosmos late in his career. Named FIFA co-Player of the Century in 1999, he is a global ambassador for soccer and other humanitarian causes.

Childhood

Pelé was born Edson Arantes do Nascimento on October 23, 1940 in Três Corações, Brazil, the first child of João Ramos and Dona Celeste. Named after Thomas Edison and nicknamed "Dico," Pelé moved with his family to the city of Bauru as a young boy.

João Ramos, better known as "Dondinho," struggled to earn a living as a soccer player, and Pelé grew up in poverty. Still, he developed a rudimentary talent for soccer by kicking a rolled-up sock stuffed with rags around the streets of Bauru. The origin of the "Pelé" nickname is unclear, though he recalled despising it when his friends first referred to him that way.

As an adolescent, Pelé joined a youth squad coached by Waldemar de Brito, a former member of the Brazilian national soccer team. De Brito eventually convinced Pelé's family to let the budding phenom leave home and try out for the Santos professional soccer club when he was 15.

Soccer's National Treasure

Pelé signed with Santos and immediately started practicing with the team's regulars. He scored the first professional goal of his career before he turned 16, led the league in goals in his first full season and was recruited to play for the Brazilian national team.

The world was officially introduced to Pelé in the 1958 World Cup in Sweden. Displaying remarkable speed, athleticism and field vision, the 17-year-old erupted to score three goals in a 5-2 semifinal win over France, then netted two more in the finals, a 5-2 win over the host country.

The young superstar received hefty offers to play for European clubs, and Brazilian President Jânio Quadros eventually had Pelé declared a national treasure, making it legally difficult for him to play in another country. Regardless, Santos club ownership ensured its star attraction was well paid by scheduling lucrative exhibition matches with teams around the world.

More World Cup Titles

Pelé aggravated a groin injury two games into the 1962 World Cup in Chile, sitting out the final rounds while Brazil went on to claim its second straight title. Four years later, in England, a series of brutal attacks by opposing defenders again forced him to the sidelines with leg injuries, and Brazil was bounced from the World Cup after one round.

Despite the disappointment on the world stage, the legend of Pelé continued to grow. In the late 1960s, the two factions in the Nigerian Civil War reportedly agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire so they could watch Pelé play in an exhibition game in Lagos.

The 1970 World Cup in Mexico marked a triumphant return to glory for Pelé and Brazil. Headlining a formidable squad, Pelé scored four goals in the tournament, including one in the final to give Brazil a 4-1 victory over Italy.

Pelé announced his retirement from soccer in 1974, but he was lured back to the field the following year to play for the New York Cosmos in the North American Soccer League, and temporarily helped make the NASL a big attraction. He played his final game in an exhibition between New York and Santos in October 1977, competing for both sides, and retired with a total of 1,281 goals in 1,363 games.

The Legend Lives On

Retirement did little to diminish the public profile of Pelé, who remained a popular pitchman and active in many professional arenas.

In 1978, Pelé was awarded the International Peace Award for his work with UNICEF. He has also served as Brazil's Extraordinary Minister for Sport and a United Nations ambassador for ecology and the environment.

Pelé was named FIFA's "Co-Player of the Century" in 1999, along with Argentine Diego Maradona. To many, his accomplishments on the soccer field will never be equaled, and virtually all great athletes in the sport are measured against the Brazilian who once made the world stop to watch his transcendent play.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-22 02:09:13

188. Hero of Alexandria

Hero of Alexandria (Heron ho Alexandreus; also known as Heron of Alexandria; c. 10 AD – c. 70 AD) was a mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria, Roman Egypt. He is considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.

Hero published a well recognized description of a steam-powered device called an aeolipile (sometimes called a "Hero engine"). Among his most famous inventions was a windwheel, constituting the earliest instance of wind harnessing on land. He is said to have been a follower of the atomists. Some of his ideas were derived from the works of Ctesibius.

Much of Hero's original writings and designs have been lost, but some of his works were preserved in Arabic manuscripts.

Life and career

Hero may have been either a Greek or a Hellenized Egyptian. It is almost certain that Hero taught at the Musaeum which included the famous Library of Alexandria, because most of his writings appear as lecture notes for courses in mathematics, mechanics, physics, and pneumatics. Although the field was not formalized until the twentieth century, it is thought that the work of Hero, his automated devices in particular, represents some of the first formal research into cybernetics.

Inventions

Hero described the construction of the 'aeolipile' (a version of which is known as 'Hero's engine') which was a rocket-like reaction engine and the first-recorded steam engine (although Vitruvius mentioned the aeolipile in De Architectura some 100 years earlier than Hero). It was created almost two millennia before the industrial revolution. Another engine used air from a closed chamber heated by an altar fire to displace water from a sealed vessel; the water was collected and its weight, pulling on a rope, opened temple doors. Some historians have conflated the two inventions to assert that the aeolipile was capable of useful work.

a) The first vending machine was also one of his constructions; when a coin was introduced via a slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed. This was included in his list of inventions in his book 'Mechanics and Optics'. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.
b) A windwheel operating an organ, marking the first instance in history of wind powering a machine.
c) Hero also invented many mechanisms for the Greek theater, including an entirely mechanical play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum.
d) The force pump was widely used in the Roman world, and one application was in a fire-engine.
e) A syringe-like device was described by Hero to control the delivery of air or liquids.
f) In optics, Hero formulated the principle of the shortest path of light: If a ray of light propagates from point A to point B within the same medium, the path-length followed is the shortest possible. It was nearly 1000 years later that Alhacen expanded the principle to both reflection and refraction, and the principle was later stated in this form by Pierre de Fermat in 1662; the most modern form is that the path is at an extremum.
g) A standalone fountain that operates under self-contained hydrostatic energy (Hero's fountain)
h) A programmable cart that was powered by a falling weight. The "program" consisted of strings wrapped around the drive axle.

Mathematics

Hero described a method for iteratively computing the square root of a number. Today, however, his name is most closely associated with Hero's formula for finding the area of a triangle from its side lengths.

Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-23 03:49:42

189. Christian Friedrich Schönbein

Christian Friedrich Schönbein (18 October 1799 - 29 August 1868) was a German-Swiss chemist who is best known for inventing the fuel cell (1838) at the same time as William Robert Grove, Robert Cumming and his discoveries of guncotton and ozone.

Life

Schönbein (Schoenbein) related to Michael Schoenbein was born at Metzingen in the Duchy of Württemberg. Around the age of 13 he was apprenticed to a chemical and pharmaceutical firm at Böblingen. Through his own efforts, he acquired sufficient scientific skills and knowledge to ask for, and receive, an examination by the professor of chemistry at Tübingen. Schönbein passed the exam and, after a series of moves and university studies, eventually acquired a position at the University of Basel in 1828, becoming a full professor in 1835. He remained there until his death in 1868, and was buried in Basel.

Ozone

It was while doing experiments on the electrolysis of water at the University of Basel that Schönbein first began to notice a distinctive odor in his laboratory. This smell gave Schönbein the clue to the presence of a new product from his experiments. Because of the pronounced smell, Schönbein coined the term "ozone" for the new gas, from the Greek word "ozein", meaning "to smell". Schönbein described his discoveries in publications in 1840. He later found that the smell of ozone was similar to that produced by the slow oxidation of white phosphorus.

The ozone smell Schönbein detected is the same as that occurring in the vicinity of a thunderstorm, an odor that indicates the presence of ozone in the atmosphere.

Explosives

Although his wife had forbidden him to do so, Schönbein occasionally experimented at home in the kitchen. One day in 1845, when his wife was away, he spilled a mixture of nitric acid and sulfuric acid. After using his wife's cotton apron to mop it up, he hung the apron over the stove to dry, only to find that the cloth spontaneously ignited and burned so quickly that it seemed to disappear. Schönbein, in fact, had converted the cellulose of the apron, with the nitro groups (added from the nitric acid) serving as an internal source of oxygen; when heated, the cellulose was completely and suddenly oxidized.

Schönbein recognized the possibilities of the new compound. Ordinary black gunpowder, which had reigned supreme in the battlefield for the past 500 years, exploded into thick smoke, blackening the gunners, fouling cannons and small arms, and obscuring the battlefield. Nitrocellulose was perceived as a possible "smokeless powder" and a propellant for artillery shells thus it received the name of guncotton.

Attempts to manufacture guncotton for military use failed at first because the factories were prone to explode and, above all else, the burning speed of straight guncotton was always too high. It was not until 1884 that Paul Vieille tamed guncotton into a successful progressive smokeless gunpowder called Poudre B. Later on, in 1891, James Dewar and Frederick Augustus Abel also managed to transform gelatinized guncotton into a safe mixture, called cordite because it could be extruded into long thin cords before being dried.

Legacy

In 1990 an asteroid was named after him.

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Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-24 00:54:45

190. King C. Gillette

King Camp Gillette (January 5, 1855 – July 9, 1932) was an American businessman. He invented a best selling version of the safety razor. Several models were in existence before Gillette's design. Gillette's innovation was the thin, inexpensive, disposable blade of stamped steel. Gillette is widely credited with inventing the so-called razor and blades business model, where razors are sold cheaply to increase the market for blades, but in fact he only adopted this model after his competitors did.

Biography

His ancestors came from England to Massachusetts in 1630. He was born on January 5, 1855 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin and raised in Chicago, Illinois. His family survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

While working as a salesman for the Crown Cork and Seal Company in the 1890s, Gillette saw bottle caps, with the cork seal he sold, thrown away after the bottle was opened. This made him recognize the value in basing a business on a product that was used a few times, then discarded. Men shaved with straight razors that needed sharpening every day using a leather strop. As existing, relatively expensive, razor blades dulled quickly and needed continuous sharpening, a razor whose blade could be thrown away when it dulled would meet a real need and likely be profitable.

Safety razors had been developed in the mid-19th century, but still used a forged blade. In the 1870s, the Kampfe Brothers introduced a type of razor along these lines. Gillette improved these earlier safety-razor designs, and introduced the high-profit-margin stamped razor blade steel blade. Gillette's razor retailed for a substantial $5 (about $140 in 2014 dollars) - half the average working man's weekly pay - yet sold by the millions.

The most difficult part of development was engineering the blades, as thin, cheap steel was difficult to work and sharpen. This accounts for the delay between the initial idea and the product's introduction. Steven Porter, a machinist working with Gillette, used Gillette's drawings to create the first disposable razor that worked. William Emery Nickerson, an expert machinist and partner of Gillette, changed the original model, improving the handle and frame so that it could better support the thin steel blade. Nickerson designed the machinery to mass-produce the blades.

To sell the product, Gillette founded the American Safety Razor Company on September 28, 1901 (changing the company's name to Gillette Safety Razor Company in July 1902). Gillette obtained a trademark registration (0056921) for his portrait and signature on the packaging. Production began in 1903, when he sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades.

The second year, he sold 90,884 razors and 123,648 blades, thanks in part to Gillette's low prices, automated manufacturing techniques and good advertising. Sales and distribution were handled by a separate company, Townsend and Hunt, which was absorbed by the parent company for $300,000 in 1906. By 1908, the corporation had established manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada, Britain, France and Germany. Razor sales reached 450,000 units and blade sales exceeded 70 million units in 1915. In 1917, when the U.S. entered World War I, the company provided all American soldiers with a field razor set, paid for by the government. Gillette vetoed a plan to sell the patent rights in Europe, believing correctly that Europe would eventually provide a very large market. Gillette and a fellow director John Joyce, battled for control of the company. Gillette eventually sold out to Joyce, but his name remained on the brand. In the 1920s, as the patent expired, the Gillette Safety Razor Company emphasized research to design ever improved models, realizing that even a slight improvement would induce men to adopt it.

He was almost bankrupt from spending large amounts of money on property, and to his having lost much of the value of his corporate shares as a result of the 'Great Depression'.

He died on July 9, 1932 in Los Angeles, California. He was interred in the lower levels of the Begonia Corridor in the Great Mausoleum located at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

Personal life

Gillette was also a Utopian Socialist. He published a book titled 'The Human Drift' (1894) which advocated that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public, and that everyone in the US should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. A later book, 'World Corporation' (1910) was a prospectus for a company set up to create this vision. He offered Theodore Roosevelt the presidency of the company, with a fee of one million dollars. (Roosevelt declined the offer.) Gillette's last book, 'The People's Corporation' (1924), was written with Upton Sinclair and later inspired Glen H. Taylor.

Gillette married Alanta "Lantie" Ella Gaines (Oct. 12, 1868 – Aug. 28, 1951) in 1890. They had one child, King Gaines Gillette (Nov. 18, 1891 - June 18, 1955).

In his later life he traveled extensively, and was universally recognized from his picture on the packets of razor blades. People were surprised that he was a real person rather than just a marketing image. A Gillette company history stated that in non-English speaking countries people would often ask for "the kind with the Man's Face" blades.

Around 1922 or 1923, he built a residence at 324 West Overlook Road, in "The Mesa" district of Palm Springs. A 4,800-square-foot (450 m sq) main home and 720-square-foot (67 m sq) guest house. The homes, sitting on 1-acre (4,000 sq m) of land, are what remain of the original estate.

Sometime in the late 1920s, Gillette was known as a frequent guest of Nellie Coffman, proprietor of the Desert Inn in Palm Springs, California. He was often seen wandering about the grounds and lobby in a tattered old bathrobe. When Coffman was asked why she allowed such a low life to hang out at her establishment, she responded, "Why that is King C. Gillette. He has practically kept this place in the black the last few years."

Legacy

The company continues in the present day as the Gillette brand of Procter & Gamble.

Some peers in the marketing industry quote him as one of the innovators who revolutionized the Freebie marketing ideas. The Gillette Company continued to thrive and sell products under a variety of brand names including Gillette, Braun, Oral-B, and Duracell. In 2005, the Gillette company was sold to Procter & Gamble for $57 billion USD. It is now known as Global Blades & Razors, with the Gillette (brand), a business unit of Procter & Gamble.

King Gillette Ranch

King Gillette purchased property for a large ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains near Calabasas in Southern California in 1926. The master plan and new buildings on the ranch were designed and built for Gillette in the late 1920s by renowned architect Wallace Neff. The architectural style was Spanish Colonial Revival. After his death, his wife sold the home to Clarence Brown, an MGM film director who held A-List Hollywood parties at the ranch. In 1952, Bob Hope bought the property, immediately giving it to the Claretian Order of the Catholic Church, which operated a seminary on the grounds for 25 years. In 1970 Thomas Aquinas College rented the property from the Claretian Order later moving their campus to Santa Paula in 1977, Elizabeth Clare Prophet, founder of the Church Universal and Triumphant, purchased the property in 1978, and ran her New Age church at the site until 1986 when Soka University of America bought the land.

After the university moved to a purpose-built campus, the King Gillette ranch was collaboratively purchased for $35 million by the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority, National Park Service, Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and California State Parks who then made it available for public use. Those agencies are also funding an $8.4 million visitor's center on the property. On June 30, 2007, the 588-acre (2.38 sq km) King Gillette Ranch opened to the public as a park. The ranch is situated adjacent to Malibu Creek State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains, at 26800 West Mulholland Highway in Calabasas, California.

Since 2008, the ranch has been used for the NBC reality show 'The Biggest Loser'.

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Jai Ganesh · 2017-08-25 02:05:36

191. Eratosthenes

Eratosthenes, in full Eratosthenes of Cyrene (born c. 276 BCE, Cyrene, Libya - died c. 194 BCE, Alexandria, Egypt), Greek scientific writer, astronomer, and poet, who made the first measurement of the size of Earth for which any details are known.

At Syene (now Aswān), some 800 km (500 miles) southeast of Alexandria in Egypt, the Sun’s rays fall vertically at noon at the summer solstice. Eratosthenes noted that at Alexandria, at the same date and time, sunlight fell at an angle of about 7.2° from the vertical. (Writing before the Greeks adopted the degree, a Babylonian unit of measure, he actually said “a fiftieth of a circle.”) He correctly assumed the Sun’s distance to be very great; its rays therefore are practically parallel when they reach Earth. Given an estimate of the distance between the two cities, he was able to calculate the circumference of Earth, obtaining 250,000 stadia. Earlier estimates of the circumference of Earth had been made (for example, Aristotle says that “some mathematicians” had obtained a value of 400,000 stadia), but no details of their methods have survived. An account of Eratosthenes’ method is preserved in the Greek astronomer Cleomedes’ Meteora. The exact length of the units (stadia) he used is doubtful, and the accuracy of his result is therefore uncertain. His measurement of Earth’s circumference may have varied by 0.5 to 17 percent from the value accepted by modern astronomers, but it was certainly in the right range. He also measured the degree of obliquity of the ecliptic (in effect, the tilt of Earth’s axis) and wrote a treatise on the octaëteris, an eight-year lunar-solar cycle. His only surviving work is Catasterisms, a book about the constellations, which gives a description and story for each constellation, as well as a count of the number of stars contained in it, but the attribution of this work has been doubted by some scholars. His mathematical work is known principally from the writings of the Greek geometer Pappus of Alexandria, and his geographical work from the first two books of the Geography of the Greek geographer Strabo.

After study in Alexandria and Athens, Eratosthenes settled in Alexandria about 255 BCE and became director of the great library there. He tried to fix the dates of literary and political events since the siege of Troy. His writings included a poem inspired by astronomy, as well as works on the theatre and on ethics. Eratosthenes was afflicted by blindness in his old age.

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