crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-21 22:08:44

1091) Serena Williams

Summary

Serena Williams, (born September 26, 1981, Saginaw, Michigan, U.S.), is an American tennis player who revolutionized women’s tennis with her powerful style of play and who won more Grand Slam singles titles (23) than any other woman or man during the open era.

Williams learned tennis from her father on the public courts in Los Angeles and turned professional in 1995, one year after her sister Venus. Possessing powerful serves and ground strokes and superb athleticism, the sisters soon attracted much attention. Many predicted Venus would be the first Williams sister to win a Grand Slam singles title, but it was Serena who accomplished the feat, winning the 1999 U.S. Open. At that tournament the sisters won the doubles event, and, over the course of their careers, the two teamed up for 14 Grand Slam doubles titles.

At the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia, Serena and Venus won gold medals in the doubles event. After several years of inconsistent play, Serena asserted herself in 2002 and won the French Open, the U.S. Open, and Wimbledon, defeating Venus in the finals of each tournament. Known for her fierce tenacity, Serena won the Australian Open in 2003 and thus completed a career Grand Slam by having won all four of the slam’s component tournaments. Later that year she was also victorious at Wimbledon; both of her Grand Slam wins in 2003 came after she had bested her sister in the finals. In 2005 Serena won the Australian Open again. Beset by injury the following year, she rebounded in 2007 to win her third Australian Open. Serena and Venus won their second doubles tennis gold medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Later that year Serena won the U.S. Open for a third time. In 2009 she captured her 10th Grand Slam singles title by winning the Australian Open. Later that year she won her third Wimbledon singles title, once again defeating her sister. Serena defended her titles at the Australian Open and Wimbledon in 2010. She subsequently battled various health issues that kept her off the court for almost a year.

In 2012 she captured her fifth Wimbledon singles title. A month later at the London Olympic Games, Serena won a gold medal in the singles event, becoming the second woman (behind Steffi Graf) to win a career Golden Slam. She also teamed with Venus to win the doubles event. Later that year Serena claimed her 15th Grand Slam singles title with a victory at the U.S. Open. In 2013 she won her second French Open singles championship and fifth U.S. Open singles title. Williams successfully defended her U.S. Open championship in 2014, which gave her 18 career Grand Slam titles, tying her with Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova for the second highest women’s singles total of the open era. The following year she captured her sixth Australian Open. Williams then won the 2015 French Open—her 20th total Grand Slam singles championship. She continued her torrid streak at Wimbledon, winning a straight-set final to capture her sixth career Wimbledon singles title. Williams again won Wimbledon in 2016, giving her 22 career Grand Slam singles titles, which tied her with Graf for the most Slams in the open era for both women and men. Williams broke Graf’s record at the 2017 Australian Open, where she defeated her sister Venus in the final.

In April of that year, Williams announced that she was pregnant (she had gotten engaged to Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of the Web site Reddit, in December 2016) and would miss the remainder of the 2017 season. In September she gave birth to a daughter, and two months later she married Ohanian. Williams returned to tennis in March 2018. She failed to win a tournament that year, though she reached the finals at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. The latter loss proved controversial as Williams was penalized a game after arguing with the chair umpire over a code violation. In 2019 she was again defeated in the finals at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. At the 2020 ASB Classic in Auckland, New Zealand, Williams won her first singles event in some three years.

Williams’s autobiography, On the Line (written with Daniel Paisner), was published in 2009.

Details

Serena Jameka Williams (born September 26, 1981) is an American professional tennis player. She has been ranked singles world No. 1 by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) for 319 weeks, including a joint-record 186 consecutive weeks, and finished as the year-end No. 1 five times. She has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles, the most by any player in the Open Era, and the second-most of all time (behind Margaret Court's 24).

Along with her older sister Venus, Serena Williams was coached by her parents Oracene Price and Richard Williams. Turning professional in 1995, she won her first major singles title at the 1999 US Open. From the 2002 French Open to the 2003 Australian Open, she was dominant, winning all four major singles titles (each time over Venus in the final) to achieve a non-calendar year Grand Slam and the career Grand Slam, known as the "Serena Slam". The next few years saw her claim two more singles majors, but suffer from injury and decline in form. Beginning in 2007, however, she gradually returned to form despite continued injuries, retaking the world No. 1 singles ranking. Beginning at the 2012 Wimbledon Championships, Williams returned to dominance, claiming Olympic gold and becoming the first tennis player to achieve a Career Golden Slam in both singles and doubles. She won eight out of thirteen singles majors, including all four in a row from 2014–15 to achieve a second "Serena Slam". At the 2017 Australian Open, she won her 23rd major singles title, surpassing Steffi Graf's Open Era record. She then took a break from professional tennis after becoming pregnant, and has reached four major finals since returning to play.

Williams has also won 14 major women's doubles titles, all with her sister Venus, and the pair are unbeaten in Grand Slam doubles finals. This includes a non-calendar year Grand Slam between the 2009 Wimbledon Championships and the 2010 French Open, which granted the sisters the doubles world No. 1 ranking. She has won four Olympic gold medals, three in women's doubles — an all-time joint record shared with her sister. She has also won two major mixed doubles titles, both in 1998.

Williams is widely considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time.[a] The arrival of the Williams sisters has been credited with ushering in a new era of power and athleticism on the women's professional tennis tour. Serena holds the most combined major titles in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles among active players, with 39: 23 in singles, 14 in women's doubles, and two in mixed doubles. She is joint-third on the all-time list and second in the Open Era for total major titles. She is the most recent woman to simultaneously hold all four major singles titles (2002–03 and 2014–15), and the most recent woman to win the Surface Slam (major titles on hard, clay and grass courts in the same calendar year), doing so in 2015. She is also, with Venus, the most recent player to have simultaneously held all four major women's doubles titles (2009–10).

Williams was the world's highest paid woman athlete in 2016, earning almost $29 million. She repeated this feat in 2017 when she was the only woman on Forbes' list of the 100 highest-paid athletes, with $27 million in prize money and endorsements. She has won the Laureus Sportswoman of the Year award four times (2003, 2010, 2016, 2018), and in December 2015 was named Sportsperson of the Year by Sports Illustrated magazine. In 2021, she was ranked 28th on Forbes' World's Highest-Paid Athletes list. She is the highest-earning woman athlete of all time.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-22 21:35:03

1092) S. P. Balasubrahmanyam

Summary

Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam (4 June 1946 – 25 September 2020), also known as SPB or Balu, was an Indian playback singer, television presenter, music director, actor and film producer who worked predominantly in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam films. He is widely considered one of the greatest Indian singers of all time.

Balasubrahmanyam has won six National Film Awards for Best Male Playback Singer for his works in four different languages – Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Hindi; 25 Andhra Pradesh state Nandi Awards for his work in Telugu cinema; and numerous other state awards from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. In addition, he won the Filmfare Award and six Filmfare Awards South. According to some sources, he held the Guinness World Record for recording the highest number of songs by a singer with over 40,000 songs. He recorded 21 songs in Kannada for the composer Upendra Kumar in Bengaluru from 9 am to 9 pm on 8 February 1981. In addition, he recorded 19 songs in Tamil and 16 songs in Hindi in a day, which has also been called a record. In 2012, he received the state NTR National Award for his contributions to Indian cinema. In 2016, he was honoured with the Silver Peacock Medal as Indian Film Personality of the Year. He was a recipient of the Padma Shri (2001), Padma Bhushan (2011) and Padma Vibhushan (Posthumously) (2021) from the Government of India. He was a recipient of Harivarasanam Award from the Government of Kerala.

On 25 September 2020, S. P. Balasubrahmanyam died in Chennai after being hospitalized for over a month for complications due to COVID-19.

Details

Affectionately called as ‘Balu’ in his friends’ circle, SPB made his singing debut in 1966, and went on to sing over 40,000 songs in as many as 16 languages

Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam (4 June 1946 – 25 September 2020), also referred to as S. P. Balu or SPB, was an Indian musician, playback singer, music director, actor, dubbing artist and film producer who worked predominantly in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Hindi and Malayalam.

Affectionately called as ‘Balu’ in his friends’ circle, SPB made his singing debut in 1966 with the Telugu movie Sri Sri Sri Maryada Ramanna, and went on to sing over 40,000 songs in as many as 16 languages including Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, and Hindi.

He also won the Guinness World Record for recording the highest number of songs by a singer.

He bagged six National Film Awards for Best Male Playback Singer for his songs in four different languages (Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Hindi), as well as 25 Andhra Pradesh state Nandi Awards for his work in Telugu cinema, apart from numerous other state awards from Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

In addition, he also garnered six Filmfare Awards. In 2012, he received the state NTR National Award for his contributions to Indian cinema. In 2016, he was honored with the Indian Film Personality of the Year consisting of a Silver Peacock Medal.

He was a recipient of civilian awards Padma Shri (2001) and Padma Bhushan (2011). On September 25, 2020, he died in MGM Hospital due breathing difficulties, even though he recovered from COVID-19.

Early life

SPB was born in Nellore into a Telugu family. His father, late S. P. Sambamurthy, was a Harikatha artist who had also acted in plays. His mother was Sakunthalamma. He has two brothers and five sisters, including singer S. P. Sailaja. His son is S. P. Charan who is also a popular south Indian singer, actor and a producer.

Balasubrahmanyam developed an interest in music at an early age, studied notations and learned music. He enrolled at JNTU College of Engineering Anantapur with the intention of becoming an engineer. He discontinued his studies early due to typhoid, and joined as an Associate Member of the Institution of Engineers, Chennai.

He continued to pursue music during his engineering studies and won awards at singing competitions. In 1964, he won the first prize in a music competition for amateur singers organised by the Madras-based Telugu Cultural Organisation.

He was the leader of a light music troupe composed of Anirutta (on the harmonium), Ilaiyaraaja (on guitar and later on harmonium), Baskar (on percussion), and Gangai Amaran (on guitar). He was selected as the best singer in a singing competition which was judged by S. P. Kodandapani and Ghantasala. Often visiting music composers seeking opportunities, his first audition song was “Nilave Ennidam Nerungadhe”. It was rendered by veteran playback singer P. B. Srinivas, who used to write and give him multi-lingual verses in Telugu, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Sanskrit, English and Urdu.

Singing career:

Beginnings: 1960s–1970

Balasubrahmanyam made his debut as a playback singer on December 15, 1966 with Sri Sri Sri Maryada Ramanna , a Telugu film scored by his mentor, S. P. Kodandapani.The first non-Telugu song that he recorded just eight days after his debut Telugu song was in Kannada in 1966 for the film Nakkare Ade Swarga , starring Kannada comedy stalwart T. R. Narasimharaju.

He recorded his first Tamil song “Athaanodu Ippadi Irundhu Eththanai Naalaachu”, a duet with L.R. Eswari in the music direction of M. S. Viswanathan for the film Hotel Ramba, which never got released. Other early songs he sang were duets with P. Susheela, “Iyarkai Ennum Ilaya Kanni” in the 1969 film Shanti Nilayam , starring Gemini Ganesh, and “Aayiram Nilavae Vaa” for MGR in Adimaippenn . His first song with S. Janaki was “Pournami Nilavil Pani Vizhum Iravil” in Kannippenn . He was then introduced to the Malayalam film industry by G. Devarajan in the film Kadalppalam.

He has the rare distinction of rendering the most songs in a single day by any singer. He recorded 21 songs in Kannada for the composer Upendra Kumar in Bengaluru from 9 am to 9 pm on 8 February, 1981. Futhermore, he also recorded 19 songs in Tamil and 16 songs in Hindi in a day, which is a notable achievement and a record.

He established a prolific career. “There were days when I used to record 15 to 20 songs, but only for Anand-Milind. And I would take the last flight back to Chennai,” SPB said.

In the 1970s, he also worked with M. S. Viswanathan in Tamil movies for actors such as M. G. Ramachandran, Sivaji Ganesan and Gemini Ganesan. He recorded duets with P. Susheela, S. Janaki, Vani Jayaram and L. R. Eswari. Balasubrahmanyam’s association with Ilaiyaraaja began even before Ilaiyaraaja came to the cine field. In those days, SPB used to sing in towns and villages all over south India and Ilaiyaraaja, then an unknown harmonium and guitar player accompanied SPB by playing in his concerts.

International recognition: 1980s

Balasubrahmanyam came to international prominence with the 1980 film Sankarabharanam. The film is considered to be one of the best films ever to emerge from the Telugu film industry. Directed by K. Vishwanath, the film’s soundtrack was composed by K.V. Mahadevan, and led to an increase in the usage of Karnatak music in Telugu cinema. Not a classically trained singer, he used a “film music” aesthetic in recording the songs. Balasubrahmanyam received his first National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer for his work. His first work in Hindi films was in the following year, in Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981), for which he received another National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer.

Balasubrahmanyam began to record more songs in Tamil, especially for Ilaiyaraaja with S.Janaki, the trio considered to be highly successful in the Tamil film industry from the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. The songs were based on classical music, such as in Saagara Sangamam (1983), for which both Ilaiayaraaja and S.P.B won National Film Awards, Swathi Muthyam (1986) and Rudraveena (1988) which again won National Awards for Ilaiyaraaja and Balasubrahmanyam.

In 1989, Balasubrahmanyam was the playback singer for actor Salman Khan in the blockbuster Maine Pyar Kiya . The soundtrack for the film was very successful and he won a Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer for the song Dil Deewana . For much of the next decade, Balasubrahmanyam continued as the “romantic singing voice” on the soundtracks of Khan’s films.

Notable among these was Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! which became the all time highest-grossing Hindi film, and Balasubrahmanyam’s duet with Lata Mangeshkar, “Didi Tera Devar Deewana”, was very popular. This solidified Balasubrahmanyam as one of the biggest playback singers in India. SPB was identified as Salman Khan’s voice in the 90s, just like Kishore Kumar became Rajesh Khanna’s voice through the 70s.

Association with other composers, including A.R. Rahman: 1990s

In the 1990s, he worked with composers such as Vidyasagar, M. M. Keeravani, S. A. Rajkumar and Deva among others, but his association with A.R.Rahman turned out be a major success.

Balasubramanyam’s association with Hamsalekha began after the latter’s successful venture Premaloka in Kannada. Balasubramanyam sung the most songs for Hamsalekha in Kannada. He received his fourth National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer for the song “Umandu Ghumandu” from the Kannada film Ganayogi Panchakshari Gavayi (1995), which was a Hindustani classical music-based composition by Hamsalekha.

Balasubrahmanyam recorded three songs for A. R. Rahman in his debut film Roja. He began a long time association with Rahman since then. Other popular songs include “July Maadham” from Pudhiya Mugam , which also marked the debut of singer Anupama, “Mannoothu Manthayilae” from Kizhakku Cheemayile which was a folk number and he almost sang all songs in the musical love story Duet and “Thanga Thaamarai” from Minsara Kanavu which fetched him the sixth and latest of his National Film Award for Best Male Playback Singer till date.

Cementing his legacy: 2000s–2020

In 2013, Balasubrahmanyam recorded the title song for Chennai Express , singing for the lead actor Shahrukh Khan, under the music direction of Vishal-Shekhar. He returned to Hindi film music after being away from it for 15 years.

In May 2020, SPB crooned a song on humanity titled “Bharath Bhoomi” which was composed by Ilaiyaraaja as a tribute to the people such as police, army, doctors, nurses and janitors who have been significantly working amid COVID-19 pandemic. The video song was officially unveiled by Ilaiyaraaja through his official YouTube account on 30 May 2020 in both Tamil and Hindi languages.

Voice acting

Balasubrahmanyam accidentally became a dubbing artist with K. Balachander’s film Manmadha Leela , the dubbed Telugu version of Manmadha Leelai , providing a voice-over for Kamal Haasan.

He has also provided voice-overs for various other artists, including Rajinikanth, Vishnuvardhan, Salman Khan, K. Bhagyaraj, Mohan, Anil Kapoor, Girish Karnad, Gemini Ganesan, Arjun Sarja, Nagesh, Karthik, and Raghuvaran in various languages.

He was assigned as the default dubbing artist for Kamal Haasan in Telugu-dubbed versions of Tamil films. For the Telugu version of Dasavathaaram , he gave voice to seven characters (including the female character) out of ten characters played by Kamal Haasan. He was awarded the Nandi Award for Best Male Dubbing Artist for the films Annamayya and Sri Sai Mahima . He dubbed for Nandamuri Balakrishna for the Tamil version of the movie Sri Rama Rajyam in 2012. He also dubbed for Ben Kingsley in the Telugu-dubbed version of Gandhi.

Death

On August 5 2020, Balasubrahmanyam tested positive for COVID-19 and was admitted to MGM Healthcare in Chennai. Subsequently, his health deteriorated and he was shifted to the intensive care unit in a critical state. He required a ventilator and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) support.

His son Charan provided updates via social media to fans, while members of the Tamil film industry engaged in a mass prayer via Zoom on 20 August and candlelight vigils were held by fans outside the hospital.

On 7 September 2020, Balasubrahmanyam tested negative for the coronavirus, although he remained on a ventilator. His son said SPB was responsive and watching tennis and cricket matches on his iPad. He died on September 25 after a month-long hospitalisation.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-23 21:13:22

1093) Glenn McGrath

Summary

Glenn Donald McGrath AM (born 9 February 1970) is an Australian former international cricketer who played international cricket for 14 years. He was a fast-medium pace bowler and is considered one of the greatest international bowlers of all time, and a leading contributor to Australia's domination of world cricket from the mid-1990s to the late-2000s.

Known throughout his career for maintaining an accurate line and length, McGrath displayed a consistency that enabled him to be one of the most economical and successful fast bowlers of his time. In terms of total career Test wickets taken by fast bowlers, McGrath is the second-most successful of all time behind James Anderson. On the list of all Test bowlers, he is fifth, and no bowler has taken more wickets at a lower average. He has also taken the seventh-highest number of one day international wickets (381) and holds the record for most wickets (71) in the Cricket World Cup. McGrath announced his retirement from Test cricket on 23 December 2006, with his Test career coming to an end after the fifth Ashes Test in Sydney in January 2007, while the 2007 World Cup, which marked the end of his one-day career, saw him win the man-of-the-tournament award for his outstanding bowling, which was instrumental in Australia winning the tournament.

McGrath later played for the Indian Premier League team of the Delhi DareDevils and was one of the competition's most economical bowlers during its first season, but he saw no action in the second season, ultimately having his contract bought out.

McGrath is the director of MRF Pace Foundation, Chennai, replacing Dennis Lillee, who served for 25 years. He currently serves as president of the McGrath Foundation, a breast cancer support and education charity he founded with his late first wife, Jane.

McGrath was honoured during the seventh annual Bradman Awards in Sydney on 1 November 2012.

He was inducted into the ICC Hall of fame in January 2013.

Details

Good is ubiquitous, greatness rare. And then there's something greater and rarer, like a cricketing career that punctures conventions by making limitations fashionably incisive, so much so that an entire generation is inspired into considering them indispensable.

Glenn McGrath wasn't the quickest or the canniest ever, but in a career spanning over 14 years, he had the simplest of tool kits for menacing returns - scalping a staggering tally of 563 Test wickets to end up statistically, if not otherwise, as the greatest ever fast bowler. His famous partnership with Shane Warne bullied oppositions, crippling them mentally to engineer improbable victories that helped an all-time great Australian side sustain its warfare.

McGrath's genius wasn't derived from his pin-like long legs that conspired his nickname Pigeon, and not from his lanky physique that hardly bordered on athletic either; McGrath's selling point was his metronome precision: tidy lines and lengths boringly hurled in an infinite loop outside off, rivaling an all-devouring bowling machine, until either the batsman's technique or his temperament yielded.

Born in Dubbo to Beverly and Kevin McGrath, Glenn Donald McGrath was spotted by Doug Walters at New South Wales. He eventually debuted at the age of 23, against New Zealand at Perth in 1993, after only eight First Class matches. A month later, he made his ODI debut against South Africa at the MCG. As soon as 1995, he graduated to become Australia's bowling leader, snaffling 17 wickets during their tour of West Indies. In the return tour by Courtney Walsh's men, McGrath followed up his performance by taking away the series honours in a 3-2 win.

Ashes are a solid testament to his impact, a criterion ever so essential for greatness. Ten of his twenty-nine 5-wicket hauls came against England, and his spell of 8/38 at Lord's in 1997, in his first ever Test on English soil, is a bowling timestamp that dawned upon us a ridiculously skewed era in the Ashes rivalry. Except the year 2005 which proved to be a momentous blip: Australia lost the second and the fourth Tests - the two Tests McGrath missed after infamously rolling his ankle over a spare cricket ball on the morning of the second Test - for England to notch up a historic 2-1 win in the 2005 Ashes.

McGrath had a penchant for marquee occasions and for scissoring out the best players on biggest of stages. He reached the 300 landmark with Lara's wicket sandwiched in a hat-trick, hit the 500 mark on Day 1 at Lord's in 2005, took 2/13 in the 1999 World Cup final and could often keep a belligerent Lara under check. His many battles with Tendulkar though were routinely rendered subtle under the Warne clout.

Despite major doubts, McGrath made roaring returns: after his ankle surgery in 2003, and then again after the longish sabbatical he took in 2006 to care for his ailing wife. He finally hung his boots after avenging the 2-1 Ashes loss with a ruthless 5-0 whitewash, where he bid farewell with a wicket off the last ball he bowled. Later that year, he bagged the most number of wickets in a successful World Cup campaign, his third title, to end his limited-overs career on a high too. He also finished with most number of World Cup wickets and was later inducted into the ICC Hall of fame in January 2013.

Off the field, Glenn McGrath championed the cause of breast cancer after losing his wife Jane McGrath to it in 2008. As the Chairman of 'The McGrath Foundation', he reincarnated Sydney Test as the Pink Test and Day 3 has since been annually celebrated as Jane McGrath Day. He currently also serves as the Director of MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai, having replaced Dennis Lillee, and makes occasional appearances as a commentator. His moot predictions not only underline his overwhelming self-confidence but also his conviction for Australian Cricket - an entity that gave him all.

Personal information

Full name : Glenn Donald McGrath
Born : 9 February 1970 (age 52)
Dubbo, New South Wales, Australia
Nickname : Pigeon
Height : 197 cm (6 ft 6 in)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Right arm fast-medium
Role : Bowler

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 124 : 250 : 189 : 305
Runs scored : 641 : 115 : 977 : 124
Batting average : 7.36 : 3.83 : 7.75 : 3.35
100s/50s : 0/1 : 0/0 : 0/2 0/0
Top score : 61 : 11 : 61 : 11
Balls bowled : 29,248 : 12,970 : 41,759 : 15,808
Wickets : 563 : 381 : 835 : 465
Bowling average : 21.64 : 22.02 : 20.85 : 21.60
5 wickets in innings : 29 : 7 : 42 : 7
10 wickets in match : 3 : 0 : 7 : 0
Best bowling : 8/24 : 7/15 : 8/24 : 7/15
Catches/stumpings : 38/– : 37/– : 54/– : 48/–

Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-25 00:17:18

1094) Muttiah Muralitharan

Summary

Deshabandu Muttiah Muralitharan (born 17 April 1972) is a Sri Lankan cricket coach, former professional cricketer, businessman and a member of the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. Averaging over six wickets per Test match, Muralitharan is widely regarded as the most successful bowler to play international cricket. He is the only bowler to take 800 Test wickets and more than 530 One Day International (ODI) wickets. As of 2022, he has taken more wickets in international cricket than any other bowler.

Muralitharan's international career was beset by controversy over his bowling action. Due to an unusual hyperextension of his congenitally bent arm during delivery, his bowling action was called into question on a number of occasions by umpires and sections of the cricket community. After biomechanical analysis under simulated playing conditions, Muralitharan's action was cleared by the International Cricket Council, first in 1996 and again in 1999.

Muralitharan held the number one spot in the International Cricket Council's player rankings for Test bowlers for a record period of 1,711 days spanning 214 Test matches. He became the highest wicket-taker in Test cricket when he overtook the previous record-holder Shane Warne on 3 December 2007. Muralitharan had previously held the record when he surpassed Courtney Walsh's 519 wickets in 2004, but he suffered a shoulder injury later that year and was overtaken by Warne. Muralitharan took the wicket of Gautam Gambhir on 5 February 2009 in Colombo to surpass Wasim Akram's ODI record of 502 wickets. He retired from Test cricket in 2010, registering his 800th and final wicket on 22 July 2010 from his final ball in his last Test match.

Muralitharan was rated the greatest Test match bowler by Wisden's Cricketers' Almanack in 2002, and in 2017 was the first Sri Lankan cricketer to be inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. He won the Ada Derana Sri Lankan of the Year award in 2017.

Details

By almost universal consensus, Muttiah Muralitharan is one of the nicest blokes to play cricket. And yet, he has been at the centre of numerous controversies, none of them of his own making.

Viewed purely through numbers, Muralitharan is a giant performer and is in the unique position of holding the records for most wickets in One Day Internationals as well as Test matches. In fact, what Murali has done in bowling is akin to what Tendulkar has done in batting.

However, most people view Murali through a prism -- fair or unfair -- and questions about the legality of his action have continued to haunt him throughout his career. He has been cleared numerous times -- by biomechanical experts, by the ICC and by independent observers -- but the doubters refuse to be silenced.

He has been called for chucking by umpires in Australia, and been cast aspersions on every time he has walked out on the field.

What nobody can dispute though, is the fact that Murali weaves magic with a cricket ball in his hands. He has flummoxed generations of batsmen with his prodigious spin, subtle variations and often been a one-man army for the Sri Lankan bowling.

Although his talent was never in doubt, Murali really flowered a few years after his debut in 1992. From 1998 onwards, his stats tell the story of a stunning decade. He averaged 20.80 in Test matches and 21.23 in ODIs, picking up over 1000 international wickets (653 in Tests and 405 in ODIs).

In contrast to his success all over the world, Murali has never managed to replicate his feats in Australia. That may be partly due to the fact that for much of his career, Australia have had the best international team, but it is also largely due to the barracking he has had to endure at the hands of the Australian press, players and public. The only other place where Murali has not done well is in India.

Amongst the deluge of the peaks of numbers that Murali has scaled, one startling fact is that he bowls more than 55 overs per Test on an average. And that figure has come after a career that has so far spanned 17 years and 131 Tests - during the early part of which he wasn't the team's strike bowler.

It has been alleged that Murali has picked up a lot of 'cheap' wickets by playing often against Zimbabwe and Bangladesh, but even if you exclude his statistics against these two teams, he still has world-beating figures of 612 Test wickets at an average of 24.73 -- which incidentally is better than Shane Warne's career average of 25.41.

The spin wizard signed off Test cricket in 2010, with a wicket off his last ball, propelling his tally to 800 wickets. Fittingly, the final script had tinges of romance. The ODI flame though kept flickering until the 2011 World Cup. Murali has also featured in T20 leagues across the world including the IPL, BBL and CPL.

Statistics:

Personal information

Full name : Muttiah Muralitharan
Born : 17 April 1972 (age 50), Kandy, Ceylon
Nickname : Murali
Height : 5 ft 7 in (1.70 m)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Right-arm off break
Role : Bowler

International information:

National side : Sri Lanka (1992–2011)
Test debut (cap 54) : 28 August 1992 v Australia
Last Test : 18 July 2010 v India
ODI debut (cap 70) : 12 August 1993 v India
Last ODI : 2 April 2011 v India
ODI shirt no. : 8
T20I debut (cap 13) : 22 December 2006 v New Zealand
Last T20I : 31 October 2010 v Australia

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 133 : 350 : 232 : 453
Runs scored : 1,256 : 674 : 2,192 : 945
Batting average : 11.67 : 6.80 : 11.35 : 7.32
100s/50s : 0/1 : 0/0 : 0/1 : 0/0
Top score : 67 : 33* : 67 : 33*
Balls bowled : 44,039 : 18,811 : 66,933 : 23,734
Wickets : 800 : 534 : 1,374 : 682
Bowling average : 22.72 : 23.08 : 19.64 : 22.39
5 wickets in innings : 67 : 10 : 119 : 12
10 wickets in match : 22 : 0 : 34 : 0
Best bowling : 9/51 : 7/30 : 9/51 : 7/30
Catches/stumpings : 72/– : 130/– : 123/– : 159/–

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-27 00:36:27

1095) Shaun Pollock

Summary

Shaun Maclean Pollock OIS (born 16 July 1973) (The Order of Ikhamanga is a South African honour) is a South African cricket commentator and former cricketer, who was captain in all formats of the game. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest fast bowlers and allrounders of all time. A genuine bowling all-rounder, Pollock along with Allan Donald formed a bowling partnership for many years. From 2000 to 2003 he was the captain of the South African cricket team, and also played for Africa XI, World XI, Dolphins and Warwickshire. He was chosen as the Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 2003.

On 11 January 2008 he announced his retirement from all forms of international cricket after his 303rd One Day International on 3 February. Pollock now works as a commentator on SuperSport's coverage of South African cricket.

In November 2021, he was inducted to the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

Details

Batting Career Summary:

M : Inn : NO : Runs : HS : Avg : BF : SR : 100 : 200 : 50 : 4s : 6s
Test : 108 : 156 : 39 : 3781 : 111 : 32.32 : 7198 : 52.53 : 2 : 0 : 16 : 412 : 35
ODI : 303 : 205 : 72 : 3519 : 130 : 26.46 : 4059 : 86.7 : 1 : 0 : 14 : 248 : 58
T20I : 12 : 9 : 2 : 86 : 36 : 12.29 : 70 : 122.86 : 0 : 0 : 0 : 4 : 4
IPL : 13 : 8 : 0 : 147 : 33 : 18.38 : 111 : 132.43 : 0 : 0 : 0 : 12 : 8

Bowling Career Summary:

M : Inn : B : Runs : Wkts : BBI : BBM : Econ : Avg : SR : 5W : 10W
Test : 108 : 202 : 24353 : 9733 : 421 : 7/87 : 10/147 : 2.4 : 23.12 : 57.85 : 16 : 1
ODI : 303 : 297 : 15712 : 9631 : 393 : 6/35 : 6/35 : 3.68 : 24.51 : 39.98 : 5 : 0
T20I : 12 : 11 : 243 : 309 : 15 : 3/28 : 3/28 : 7.63 : 20.6 : 16.2 : 0 : 0
IPL : 13 : 13 : 276 : 301 : 11 : 3/12 : 3/12 : 6.54 : 27.36 : 25.09 : 0 : 0

Career Information

Test debut vs England at SuperSport Park, Nov 16, 1995
Last Test vs West Indies at Kingsmead, Jan 10, 2008
ODI debut vs England at Newlands, Jan 09, 1996
Last ODI vs West Indies at The Wanderers Stadium, Feb 03, 2008
T20 debut vs New Zealand at The Wanderers Stadium, Oct 21, 2005
Last T20vs West Indies at The Wanderers Stadium, Jan 18, 2008
IPL debut vs Royal Challengers Bangalore at math Stadium, Apr 20, 2008
Last IPL vs Royal Challengers Bangalore at M.Chinnaswamy Stadium, May 28, 2008

Profile

Hailing from a family of cricketing legends, it was no surprise when Pollock went on to become one himself. Son of respected Peter Pollock and nephew of the legendary Graeme Pollock, the junior Pollock went on to make his name as one of the finest all-rounders to represent South Africa.

With a heap of wickets behind him, it was no surprise that Shaun was introduced into the hard rigor of Test cricket when South Africa squared off against England in Centurion in 95. Shaun's uncle, Graeme Pollock was the chief selector at that time but there was no hint of any sort of favoritism regarding the debut of Shaun. An impressive first series was capped with his first 5-wicket haul at Cape Town. After a slow start, Pollock came into his own in 1998 scalping 69 Test wickets in 14 Test matches which included career best figures of 7/87 against arch rivals Australia in Adelaide. Consistency was Pollock's forte and his nagging accuracy and his ability to get zip off the pitch from any surface added to his charm.

Pollock was thrust into the captaincy role after the shocking exit of Hansie Cronje when the match fixing bubble burst in early 2000. Pollock was left to resurrect a country that was left demoralized and distraught with things that transpired during the murky dealings of its erstwhile captain.

Pollock started his captaincy stint in a solid fashion and brought some credibility back into the South African set-up with convincing performances. His bowling prospered with the additional load of captaincy. Pollock completed his first and what turned out to be his only 10-wicket haul in a match when he claimed 10/147 against India at Bloemfontein in 2001-02. He though suffered the ignominy of leading South Africa to a 3-0 whitewash down under, the 1st such occurrence post-apartheid.

Things went from bad to worse as South Africa failed to reach the Super 6 stage in the 2003 WC held at home. An apparent D/L miscalculation led to the hosts being knocked out at the group stages itself and Pollock was sacked as the captain with a young Graeme Smith taking over the mantle. Pollock continued to remain an integral part of the team and played his role as a senior to perfection. The advent of Dale Steyn meant that Pollock was relegated from being the main strike bowler to one of support. He cut down on his pace and concentrated more on a stifling line and length to harass the batsmen. Injury and lack of form though continued to hassle Pollock and he announced his decision to quit international cricket at the end of the international summer of 2008.

Shaun Pollock was a part of the Mumbai based IPL team and even captained it in the absence of Sachin Tendulkar and Harbhajan Singh. He was later appointed as the coach of the Mumbai Indians and was at the helm of the affairs when they clinched the 2011 Champions League T20.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-06-29 00:13:08

1096) Adam Gilchrist

Summary

Adam Craig Gilchrist AM (born 14 November 1971) is an Australian cricket commentator and former international cricketer and captain of the Australia national cricket team. He was an attacking left-handed batsman and record-breaking wicket-keeper, who redefined the role for the Australia national team through his aggressive batting. Widely regarded as one of the greatest wicket-keeper-batsman in the history of the game, Gilchrist held the world record for the most dismissals by a wicket-keeper in One Day International (ODI) cricket until it was surpassed by Kumar Sangakkara in 2015 and the most by an Australian in Test cricket.

His strike rate is amongst the highest in the history of both ODI and Test cricket; his 57 ball century against England at Perth in December 2006 is the fourth-fastest century in all Test cricket. He was the first player to have hit 100 sixes in Test cricket. His 17 Test centuries and 16 in ODIs are both second only to Sangakkara by a wicket-keeper. He holds the unique record of scoring at least 50 runs in successive World Cup finals (in 1999, 2003 and 2007). His 149 off 104 balls against Sri Lanka in the 2007 World Cup final is rated one of the greatest World Cup innings of all time. He is one of the only three players to have won three World Cup titles.

Gilchrist was renowned for walking when he considered himself to be out, sometimes contrary to the decision of the umpire. He made his first-class debut in 1992, his first One-Day International appearance in 1996 in India and his Test debut in 1999. During his career, he played for Australia in 96 Test matches and over 270 One-day internationals. He was Australia's regular vice-captain in both forms of the game, captaining the team when regular captains Steve Waugh and Ricky Ponting were unavailable. He retired from international cricket in March 2008, though he continued to play domestic tournaments until 2013.

Details:

Career Information

Test debut vs Pakistan at The Gabba, Nov 05, 1999
Last Test vs India at Adelaide Oval, Jan 24, 2008
ODI debut vs South Africa at Nahar Singh Stadium, Oct 25, 1996
Last ODI vs India at The Gabba, Mar 04, 2008
T20 debut vs New Zealand at Eden Park, Feb 17, 2005
Last T20vs India at Melbourne Cricket Ground, Feb 01, 2008
IPL debut vs Kolkata Knight Riders at Eden Gardens, Apr 20, 2008
Last IPL vs Mumbai Indians at Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association Stadium, May 18, 2013

Profile

The role of a wicket-keeper batsman primarily included keeping duties with the runs scored by the gloveman deemed as a bonus. All that changed with the arrival of Adam Gilchrist who revolutionized the role forever. A dasher of a batsman who could destroy the best of bowlers, he was also a terrific keeper against both pace and spin. Such was his effectiveness that Australia considered him as a genuine all-rounder. While in Tests, 'Gilly' used to wreck havoc in the lower middle order at number seven, in ODIs he opened the innings to take full toll of the fielding restrictions. With Matthew Hayden, he formed an inflammable opening pair, often getting Australia off to rollicking starts. The advent of Gilchrist certainly rewrote perceptions of a wicket-keeper batsman like never before.

Gilchrist first represented Australia in ODIs, primarily as a back up to the evergreen Ian Healy who was starting to age at that point. Gilly's superior batting skills allowed him to play as a pure batter as well, albeit for a handful of games as Australia phased out Healy successfully with a successor ready to take over. After starting out in the middle order, Gilchrist was made the opener in 1998 and the rest as they say, is history. He was extremely flamboyant at the top and generated momentum in the early overs for the side. Apart from being a fluent shot-maker, he was also fairly consistent and this along with his keeping credentials made him a priceless asset for the side. Gilly's ODI success saw him eventually making it to the Test side in 1999 and the progress continued there as well.

The year 1999 was not only significant for him due to his Test debut, he also had a phenomenal year in ODIs, racking up more than 1200 runs in the calendar year. He was also part of the World Cup-winning Australian side. In Tests too, he was churning out iconic knocks including the famous Hobart run chase that year when he, along with Justin Langer, conducted an absolute heist to take Australia over the line in a big run chase. A fierce cutter and puller of the ball, Gilchrist often picked the length very early and was severe on anything loose, irrespective of the match situation. This intent of his put pressure on the best of bowlers.

Gilchrist entered rare club of players to have won the World Cup thrice as Australia followed up their 1999 triumph with titles in 2003 and 2007 as well. He was a big match player and performed in all the three finals, the third being the most notable of them all as he absolutely bludgeoned a clueless Sri Lankan attack to all parts of the ground to virtually seal the deal at the innings break itself. The 2007-08 season saw Gilchrist being plagued by injuries and although he was still doing a good job, particularly in ODIs, he decided to retire from international cricket in 2008. It was a classical case for a player knowing his body properly and timing his decision perfectly without any compulsion.

Despite retiring from international cricket, Gilchrist continued to shine as the IPL was born in the same year that he quit international cricket. His fluid strokeplay was always ahead of the era he played in and as a result, he adjusted to the T20 format with elan. He had played a few games for Australia in the shortest format and was among the rare players from his era who were able to adapt with ease. In the IPL, he was successful not only as a batsman but also as a leader who was adorable and admirable. Gilchrist led the Deccan Chargers outfit to the IPL title in 2009 and even led Kings XI Punjab later on albeit without the same success. Irrespective of the results, Gilchrist as a captain was fantastic in man-management and tactics.

Arguably amongst the most loved Australians to ever play the game, Gilchrist was as aggressive as they come on the cricket field. However, the rapport he established with opposition players off the field made him a likeable character. The advent of the IPL saw this quality of his going up another notch as he mingled selflessly with the rookie Indian talents and helped to mold them into better players. After the 2013 season, Gilchrist decided to quit from all forms of the game. The decision, much like his international retirement, came when he was still in good rhythm but that defined the man. He didn't bother about dragging himself and always promptly decided to leave when he felt he must. A game-changer of another level, Gilchrist was arguably Australia's biggest impact player during their golden era. Like many of his Aussie teammates, he has also taken to TV commentary.

Domestic team information

Years : Team
1992/93–1993/94 : New South Wales
1994/95–2007/08 : Western Australia
2008–2010 : Deccan Chargers
2010 : Middlesex
2011–2013 : Kings XI Punjab

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 96 : 287 : 190 : 356
Runs scored : 5,570 : 9,619 : 10,334 : 11,326
Batting average : 47.60 : 35.89 : 44.16 : 34.95
100s/50s : 17/26 : 16/55 : 30/43 : 18/63
Top score : 204* : 172 : 204* : 172
Catches/stumpings : 379/37 : 417/55 : 756/55 : 526/65

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-01 00:18:53

1097) Kapil Dev

Summary

Kapil Dev Ramlal Nikhanj (born 6 January 1959) is an Indian former cricketer. He was a fast-medium bowler and a hard-hitting middle-order batsman, and was named by Wisden as the Indian Cricketer of the Century in 2002.

Dev captained the Indian cricket team that won the 1983 Cricket World Cup, and in the process became the first Indian captain to win the Cricket World Cup, and is still the youngest captain (at the age of 24) to win the World Cup for any team. He retired in 1994, at the time holding the world record for the highest number of wickets taken in Test cricket, a record subsequently broken by Courtney Walsh in 2000. At the time, he was also India's highest wicket-taker in both major forms of cricket, Tests and ODIs. He is the first player to take 200 ODI wickets. He is the only player in the history of cricket to have taken more than 400 wickets (434 wickets) and scored more than 5,000 runs in Tests, making him one of the greatest all-rounders in the history of cricket. Dev's all-round performance has been praised by cricketers including Sunil Gavaskar who regards him as one of the greatest all-rounders to play the game. He was the coach of the Indian national team between September 1999 and September 2000. On 11 March 2010, Dev was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. In 1982 awarded with the Padma Shri and in 1991 the Padma Bhushan.

Details

Career Information

Test debut vs Pakistan at Iqbal Stadium, Oct 16, 1978
Last Test vs New Zealand at Seddon Park, Mar 19, 1994
ODI debut vs Pakistan at Ayub National Stadium, Oct 01, 1978
Last ODI vs West Indies at Nahar Singh Stadium, Oct 17, 1994

Profile

When a prolific batsman comes along from the production hub that is India, it isn't particularly surprising. India wouldn't blink if the successor to a Tendulkar or a Kohli comes along tomorrow. However, tell them that at one point, Test cricket's highest wicket-taker was one of their own, and they will give you a blank stare of disbelief. Or perhaps ridicule you. Kapildev Ramlal Nikhanj, arguably India's best fast bowler, and certainly India's best all-rounder, will always be remembered for leading the country to the title that changed Indian cricket into phenomenon it is today: the 1983 World Cup triumph. As Kapil Dev lifted that chalise of champions, several young cricketers, including a frizzy-haired Mumbaikar, watched in awe.

Kapil Dev was known for his energetic curved run-up and lethal outswingers as a result of that open-chested action. With the bat, he was an aggressive lower-middle order batsman who could cause carnage with the bat in an era before helmets, monster bats, or T20s. On the field, he was known for his inspirational leadership and athletic fielding. Perhaps the fittest and most disciplined man in the Indian dressing room at the time, Kapil is still remembered for that backward running catch of Sir Vivian Richards. Furthermore, Kapil Dev never missed a Test match due to fitness issues. It would be fair to say that his value to the team lay beyond numbers, but even the stats bow down before him: he remains the only man in the history of the game to have taken 400 wickets and scored more than 5000 runs in Test cricket - making him one of the greatest all-rounders of all time.

Kapil made his debut in 1978 and gradually started to produce performances of substance, especially in Test cricket. In his early years, he came across as a raw talent who was keen on just 'ripping his shoulder off' every ball, and 'tonking the leather off the ball' when he had the bat. The approach saw him score India's fastest Test half-century (off 33 balls) against Pakistan in his very third match. He came of age in the home series against Pakistan in 1979-80, where his all-round performances (32 wickets and 278 runs) helped India win 2 Tests. In the series, he became the youngest player to reach 100 wickets and 1000 runs in Test cricket. For the next two seasons, steady performances with the ball and useful contributions with the bat made him a certainty in the side and a viable candidate for captainship. Perhaps due to the nascent stages of the format or his priorities stacked up in favour of Test cricket, his ODI performances didn't quite live up to his antics in Test cricket.

And then, it happened. Kapil Dev replaced Sunil Gavaskar in the 1982-83 season and was appointed the captain for the 1983 World Cup to be played in England. He played one of the best ODI innings of all time in a must-win match against Zimbabwe at Tunbridge Wells, where India were reeling at 17 for 5. Without any official telecast of the match due to a BBC strike, Kapil strode out and tore apart the Zimbabwean bowling to hammer 175* off 138 balls - a lesson in counter-attacking cricket, and a lesson decades ahead of its time. The scarcely believable knock gave India the momentum which they seized, and went on to win the coveted vessel of victory for the first time, beating the West Indies in the league stages, the hosts in the semi-final, and finally, edging the mighty West Indies yet again in a low-scoring final at Lord's.

In the hangover of the World Cup triumph, a slump in Kapil's batting form meant Gavaskar would return to captaincy briefly. However, he regained his leadership role and led India for the title defence in the 1987 World Cup at home. India reached the semi-finals but lost unexpectedly to England. Furthermore, in a league game against Australia, Kapil Dev agreed with the umpires to increase Australia’s total from 268 to 270 as one boundary had mistakenly been marked as 4 instead of 6 by the scorers - India went on to lose the game by 1 run, and Kapil came to rue his generosity. Kapil Dev took responsibility for the semi-final loss upon himself and never captained India again, although he continued to be India's first-choice pacer until he retired in 1994 as Test cricket's highest wicket-taker.

After retirement, Kapil Dev became India's coach for a brief period. A 0-3 loss against Australia, a 0-2 loss to South Africa and accusations of match-fixing saw him step down from the post in tears as he announced that he was leaving the game forever. However, he was cleared of all charges and went on to win the accolade of the Wisden Indian Cricketer of the Century, ahead of Sunil Gavaskar and Sachin Tendulkar. He joined the National Cricket Academy in 2004 but was removed from the chairmanship after he joined the rebel Indian Cricket League (ICL) in 2007. He continues to be a popular critic and commentator to this day.

Personal information

Full name : Kapil Dev Ramlal Nikhanj
Born : 6 January 1959 (age 63) (Chandigarh, East Punjab), India,
Nickname : The Haryana Hurricane, Kapil Paaji, Kaps
Height : 6 ft 0 in (183 cm)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Right arm fast-medium
Role : All-rounder

International information

National side : India (1978–1994)
Test debut (cap 141) : 16 October 1978 v Pakistan
Last Test : 19 March 1994 v New Zealand
ODI debut (cap 25) : 1 October 1978 v Pakistan
Last ODI : 17 October 1994 v West Indies

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 131 : 225 : 275 : 309
Runs scored : 5,248 : 3,783 : 11,356 : 5,461
Batting average : 31.05 : 23.79 : 32.91 : 24.59
100s/50s : 8/27 : 1/14 : 18/56 : 2/23
Top score : 163 : 175* : 193 : 175*
Balls bowled : 27,740 : 11,202 : 48,853 : 14,947
Wickets : 434 : 253 : 835 : 335
Bowling average : 29.64 : 27.45 : 27.09 : 27.34
5 wickets in innings : 23 : 1 : 39 : 2
10 wickets in match : 2 : 0 : 3 : 0
Best bowling : 9/83 : 5/43 : 9/83 : 5/43
Catches/stumpings : 64/– : 71/– : 192/– : 99/–

kapil-dev-16343548293x2.jpg?impolicy=website&width=510&height=356

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-03 00:52:47

1098) Amitabh Bachchan

Summary

Amitabh Bachchan (born Amitabh Srivastava; 11 October 1942) is an Indian actor, film producer, television host, occasional playback singer and former politician known for his work in Hindi cinema. He is regarded as one of the most influential actors in the history of Indian cinema. During the 1970s–1980s, he was the most dominant actor in the Indian movie scene; the French director François Truffaut called him a "one-man industry".

Bachchan was born in 1942 in Allahabad to the Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan and his wife, the social activist Teji Bachchan. He was educated at Sherwood College, Nainital, and Kirori Mal College, University of Delhi. His film career started in 1969 as a voice narrator in Mrinal Sen's film Bhuvan Shome. He first gained popularity in the early 1970s for films such as Zanjeer, Deewaar and Sholay, and was dubbed India's "angry young man" for his on-screen roles in Hindi films. Referred to as the Shahenshah of Bollywood (in reference to his 1988 film Shahenshah), Sadi ka Mahanayak (Hindi for, "Greatest actor of the century"), Star of the Millennium, or Big B, he has since appeared in over 200 Indian films in a career spanning more than five decades, and has won numerous accolades in his career, including four National Film Awards as Best Actor, Dadasaheb Phalke Award as lifetime achievement award and many awards at international film festivals and award ceremonies. He has won sixteen Filmfare Awards and is the most nominated performer in any major acting category at Filmfare, with 42 nominations overall. In addition to acting, Bachchan has worked as a playback singer, film producer and television presenter. He has hosted several seasons of the game show Kaun Banega Crorepati, India's version of the game show franchise, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. He also entered politics for a time in the 1980s.

The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri in 1984, the Padma Bhushan in 2001 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2015 for his contributions to the arts. The Government of France honoured him with its highest civilian honour, Knight of the Legion of honour, in 2007 for his exceptional career in the world of cinema and beyond. Bachchan also made an appearance in a Hollywood film, Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby (2013), in which he played a non-Indian Jewish character, Meyer Wolfsheim.

Beyond the Indian subcontinent, he acquired a large overseas following of the South Asian diaspora, as well as others, in markets including Africa (South Africa, Eastern Africa and Mauritius), the Middle East (especially UAE and Egypt), the United Kingdom, Russia, the Caribbean (Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago), Oceania (Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand), Canada and the United States.

Details

Amitabh Bachchan was born on October 11, 1942 in Allahabad, British India (present-day Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, India) to legendary poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan & Teji Bachchan. He also has a brother named Ajitabh. He completed his education from Uttar Pradesh and moved to Bombay to find work as a film star, in vain though, as film-makers preferred someone with a fairer skin, and he was not quite fair enough. But they did use one of his other assets, his deep baritone voice, which was used for narration and background commentary. He was successful in being cast in Saat Hindustani. He got his break in Bollywood after a letter of introduction from the then Prime Minister Mrs. Indira Gandhi, as he was a friend of her son, Rajiv Gandhi. This is how Bachchan made an entry in Bollywood, starting with Zanjeer, co-starred with his future wife Jaya Bhaduri, and since then there has been no looking back.

He married Jaya Bhaduri, an accomplished actress in her own right, and they had two children, Shweta and Abhishek. Shweta is married, lives a non-filmy life and has two children.

After a four year break, he was back in the unsuccessful Mrityudaata (1997), a comeback which the actor wanted to forget. Critics written him off but his career was saved with Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (1998). But four flops in 1999 and incurring debt of over 90 crore rupees of his sinking company ABCL saw him at an all-time low. To make matters worse, after the defeat of the Congress party, Bachchan lost considerable political support, the opposition made him a target, and his credit rating deteriorated to such an extent that a leading nationalized bank, Canara Bank, sued him for outstanding loans. He did bounce back, presenting the Indian version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire called Kaun Banega Crorepati? (2000). After a series of hits with Mohabbatein (2000), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... (2001) and Baghban (2003) and Khakee (2004), Bachchan is showing no signs of slowing down and proving the critics wrong once again.

Amitabh and Jaya were interested in getting their son Abhishek married to Karisma Kapoor, the daughter of Babita and Randhir Kapoor, they went through a formal engagement, but later broke it off.

The former Miss World and Bollywood actress, Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek, were formally engaged on Sunday January 14, 2007, at the Bachchan residence in Juhu, Bombay, with the marriage taking place at the Bachchan residence on April 20, 2007.

On November 16, 2011, he became a Dada (paternal grandfather) when Aishwarya gave birth to a daughter in a Mumbai Hospital. He is already a Nana (maternal grandfather) to Navya and Agastye - Shweta's children.

He continues to be one of the busiest actors and singers in Bollywood as well as on TV, as can be seen from the commercials that he appears on, especially on Sahara One. Looks like there are no limits for this super-star and once the "Angry Young Man" of Bollywood.

Additional Information

Amitabh Bachchan, (born October 11, 1942, Allahabad, India), is an Indian film actor, perhaps the most popular star in the history of India’s cinema, known primarily for his roles in action films.

Bachchan, the son of the renowned Hindi poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan, attended Sherwood College in Nainital and the University of Delhi. He worked as a business executive in Calcutta (Kolkata) and performed in theatre before embarking on a film career. Bachchan made his big-screen debut in Saat Hindustani (1969; “Seven Indians”), and he received the first of his numerous Filmfare Awards for his performance in Anand (1971). His first major success came with Zanjeer (1973; “Chain”). A string of action films followed, including Deewar (1975; “Wall”), Sholay (1975; “Embers”), and Don (1978). Nicknamed “Big B,” Bachchan personified a new type of action star in Indian films, that of the “angry young man,” rather than the romantic hero. He was often compared to Clint Eastwood—although, unlike Eastwood and other American action stars, Bachchan was renowned for his versatility, and many of his roles showcased his talents at singing, dancing, and comedy.

By the end of the 1970s, Bachchan had appeared in more than 35 films and was regarded as India’s top film star. His popularity was such that he became something of a cultural phenomenon, drawing large crowds of screaming fans wherever he went. A near-fatal accident on the set of his film Coolie in 1982 touched off a national prayer vigil for his recovery. His subsequent films, however, did poorly at the box office, and Bachchan entered politics at the encouragement of his friend Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 1984 he was elected to India’s parliament by an overwhelming majority, but he resigned his seat in 1989 after being implicated in a bribery scandal that toppled Gandhi’s government.

Bachchan returned to film and won a National Film Award for his portrayal of a mafia don in Agneepath (1990; “Path of Fire”). He later headed Amitabh Bachchan Corporation Ltd., an entertainment venture that specialized in film production and event management. The business was plagued by financial difficulties, however, and Bachchan eventually returned to performing. His later movies included the crime drama Hum (1991); Mohabbatein (2000; Love Stories), a musical that was a major box-office success; and Black (2005), which was inspired by Helen Keller’s life story. For the latter film Bachchan won another National Film Award, and he also received that honour for his performance in the drama Paa (2009), playing a boy who suffers from an aging disease similar to progeria.

By the early 21st century, Bachchan had appeared in more than 175 Bollywood films, and at age 70 he made his Hollywood debut as a minor character in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby (2013). His later notable films included the comedy Piku (2015), for which he won his fourth National Film Award, and Pink (2016), a crime drama in which he was cast as a lawyer. In 102 Not Out (2018), he played a man trying to break the record for the oldest man alive. The crime drama Badla (2019) was among the biggest hits of Bachchan’s career.

In addition, from 2000 to 2006 Bachchan hosted the television game show Kaun Banega Crorepati, the Indian version of the American and British hit Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? His easygoing nature and charisma helped make the show one of India’s top television programs.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-05 00:08:33

1099) Rahul Dravid

Summary

Rahul Sharad Dravid (born 11 January 1973) is a former Indian cricketer and captain of the Indian national team, currently serving as its head coach. Prior to his appointment to the senior men's national team, Dravid was the Head of Cricket at the National Cricket Academy (NCA), and the head coach of the India Under-19 and India A teams. Under his tutelage, the under-19 team finished runners up at the 2016 U-19 Cricket World Cup and won the 2018 U-19 Cricket World Cup. Known for his sound batting technique, Dravid scored 24,177 runs in international cricket and is widely regarded as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket. He is colloquially known as Mr. Dependable and often referred to as 'The Wall'.

Born in a Marathi family and raised in Bangalore, he started playing cricket at the age of 12 and later represented Karnataka at the under-15, under-17 and under-19 levels. Dravid was named one of the best five cricketers of the year by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack in 2000 and received the Player of the Year and the Test Player of the Year awards at the inaugural ICC awards ceremony in 2004. In December 2011, he became the first non-Australian cricketer to deliver the Bradman Oration in Canberra.

As of January 2022, Dravid is the fourth-highest run scorer in Test cricket, after Sachin Tendulkar, Ricky Ponting and Jacques Kallis. In 2004, after completing his century against Bangladesh in Chittagong, he became the first player to score a century in all the ten Test-playing countries. As of October 2012, he holds the record for the most catches taken by a player (non-wicket-keeper) in Test cricket, with 210. Dravid holds a unique record of never getting out for a Golden duck in the 286 Test innings which he has played. He has faced 31258 balls, which is the highest number of balls faced by any player in test cricket. He has also spent 44152 minutes at the crease, which is the highest time spent on crease by any player in test cricket. Dravid and Sachin Tendulkar are currently the highest scoring partnership in Test cricket history having scored 6920 runs combined when batting together for India.

In August 2011, after receiving a surprise recall in the ODI series against England, Dravid declared his retirement from ODIs as well as Twenty20 International (T20I), and in March 2012, he announced his retirement from international and first-class cricket. He appeared in the 2012 Indian Premier League as captain of the Rajasthan Royals.

Rahul Dravid, along with Glenn McGrath were honoured during the seventh annual Bradman Awards function in Sydney on 1 November 2012. Dravid has also been honoured with the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan award, India's fourth and third highest civilian awards respectively.

In 2014, Rahul Dravid joined the GoSports Foundation, Bangalore as a member of their board of advisors. In collaboration with GoSports Foundation he is mentoring India's future Olympians and Paralympians as part of the Rahul Dravid Athlete Mentorship Programme. Indian badminton player Prannoy Kumar, Para-swimmer Sharath Gayakwad and young Golfer S. Chikkarangappa were part of the initial group of athletes to be mentored by Rahul Dravid. In July 2018, Dravid became the fifth Indian cricketer to be inducted into ICC Hall of Fame.

Career Information

Test debut vs England at Lord's, Jun 20, 1996
Last Test vs Australia at Adelaide Oval, Jan 24, 2012
ODI debut vs Sri Lanka at The Padang, Apr 03, 1996
Last ODI vs England at Sophia Gardens, Sep 16, 2011
T20 debut vs England at Emirates Old Trafford, Aug 31, 2011
Last T20 vs England at Emirates Old Trafford, Aug 31, 2011
IPL debut vs Kolkata Knight Riders at M.Chinnaswamy Stadium, Apr 18, 2008
Last IPL vs Mumbai Indians at Eden Gardens, May 24, 2013

Profile

Who’s the greatest batsman in the world?

Sachin Tendulkar and Brian Lara are the names that come to mind immediately. Ponting perhaps. Maybe Kallis. Run machines, we call them. And if you’ve watched them bat, you’re likely to agree. They were so good at their craft that they had basically invented their own technique...

However, there exists another breed of cricketers in the same league who have had to rely more on hard work rather than cricketing aptitude. They tend to develop a standard technique like a computer-based batting simulator would. Through hard work and perseverance, they have crafted an airtight technique through conventional means and made it work in international cricket; a technique so perfect and versatile that it suits all conditions, and works equally well in attack and defense.

Rahul Dravid, also known as, the Wall – a rather clever term coined by a journalist, according to Dravid himself, that could later be modified, depending on his batting form. Prospective modifications include “crack in the wall” or “hole in the wall”. Nevertheless, if there was ever a batting technique that could be used as a blueprint to create a computer simulation for cricket shots, it has to be Rahul Dravid’s.

A blistering 95 on debut at Lord’s, perhaps overshadowed by Sourav Ganguly’s 131. A gritty 217 at the Oval in 2002, a chanceless, flawless 148 on a green Leeds surface, shielding the middle-order from the live-grass and paving the way for Ganguly’s fluent 128 and Tendulkar’s flamboyant 193. It’s not often that a Sachin knock gets overshadowed, but Dravid’s 148 was probably the best knock he’s ever played; even better than each of his 5 double-hundreds. I say this because most gritty knocks on green surfaces are accompanied by a bit of luck. This required nothing. It is chance-less. No plays and misses, a couple of close leaves, but Dravid had the edge throughout. And he won the battle, having played out the new ball and scored a century.

In 2007, India won the series under his leadership (although in terms of batting this tour wasn’t up to his standards: 1 fifty in 6 innings). However, he still looked comfortable while batting, especially with the first part of his job: shielding the middle-order from the new ball in case the openers fail.

And 2011 was just a one-man show. Sachin showed up and made 3 fifties, including a 90 at the Oval, but it was Dravid, with 3 hundreds, including one at Lord’s that he missed out on on his debut, who ran a one-man show in England as the other aging stalwarts of the Indian team had fitness issues and failed miserably. In Nottingham, he carried the bat throughout the innings for a hundred, opened the batting again when the follow-on was enforced.

So clearly, a man with a high-back lift has managed to do quite well in England. Specifically against the new-ball on fresh grassy surfaces. It doesn’t get more challenging than that for a subcontinent batsman who has grown up using his feet to get to the pitch of the ball on rank turners.

Rahul Dravid was perhaps the best in the world at handling the first part of the number 3 batsman’s job: shielding the stroke-makers and the stars from the new ball. Several celebrated batsmen owe him their hundreds and double-hundreds to Rahul Dravid, who has pulled off countless blockathons and leaveathons to see off vicious spells on treacherous seaming wickets.

For a major part of the 2000s decade, he did the first part of his task and then proceeded to make big runs for the team too. He did go through a dry spell individually when he started getting out to the left-arm quick; not because he had a technical chink, but because he was getting beaten by unplayable deliveries and was going through an inevitable dip in form. The heavy run-scoring wasn’t really happening, owing to which he adjusted his technique, started playing late with his fore-arms.

He realized his wrists weren’t as strong as before and started focusing on 'economy of movement' and check-drives rather than running his hands through the ball. By the time India toured New Zealand and England in 2009 and 2011 respectively, he was back at his best at the ripe age of 38, protecting the middle-order stroke-players from the new ball, as well as scoring hundreds in England like he spent his childhood batting on a wet, skiddy Nottingham strip.

I think its quite clear how important Rahul Dravid was to the Indian team. He did every thankless job for the team, such as protecting the middle-order from the new ball, in addition to scoring runs. Of course, people only look at the runs. Sachin’s 193 features above Dravid’s 148 in that Leed’s Test scorecard. It was Sachin’s innings that stole the limelight because he went past the Don’s century tally. But the team knew what Dravid’s innings was worth.

This is a taboo topic in India, but Sachin would have found it much more difficult to make that 30th hundred, if Rahul Dravid had been dismissed sooner. I’m not saying that he wouldn’t have made a hundred. Sachin’s skill against the new ball and the old ball are unquestionable (his countless one-man-shows in the 90s). Lone performances by Sachin became the trend of Indian scorecards in the 90s. In the 2000s, however, Sachin suddenly had a support structure. He could play freely, and he could become one of many forces to reckon with in the Indian middle order. The aforementioned support structure happened to be Rahul Sharad Dravid – the new symbol of solidity and grit in the Indian batting line-up of the 21st century.

Dravid’s whole career reflected that of an unsung hero: do the hard work for the team, get overshadowed by a (metaphorically) colossal figure, and just walk away with a modest smile on your face.

Rahul Dravid was basically Sachin from the ’90s: A middle-order batsman facing the new ball and grinding it out to protect the middle-order so that the giants can come in and play their shots. He, however, had more capable and stable batsmen to support him, and a captain that understood him and stood by him.

He has done so much for Indian cricket. Not just as a batsman, but as a captain as well. His versatility is unquestionable, with his numbers, his countless innings of glory – 93 in the Perth victory of 2008, 233 and 72* at Adelaide, 270 at Rawalpindi (out reverse-sweeping to a part-timer just to up the scoring rate, with no regard to a potential 300) and the list goes on.

It’s all about getting the timing right. When do you show your technical prowess? When do you start playing your shots? Is this the right time to bat aggressively? Are you sure you have enough knowledge of the conditions to take risks now? That’s the kind of question an egocentric man can never answer truthfully. “Mujhe pataa hai.” will be the first words out of his mouth. “India Under-19 ke liye khela hoon mai.”

But Rahul Dravid is anything but delusional.

In a team with a genius like Sachin, a sorcerer like Laxman, swashbucklers like Sehwag and Dhoni, and the ever-so-volatile Sourav Ganguly, India needed a stabilizer. And they found one in Rahul Dravid.

He is still remembered for some of the slowest innings he has played: 21 off 140 at Nagpur, waving his bat after scoring his first run in 40 balls, to name a few. He was even hated for declaring with the nation’s beloved Sachin Tendulkar on 194*.

Rahul Dravid, deserves to be remembered, for always, come what may, putting the team ahead of himself. For genuinely not caring what people thought about him as long as India won. The stable, humble man full of resolve and aggression, known even in Indian Pop Culture as Mr. Dependable, was one of the best things that happened to Indian cricket.

Personal information

Full name : Rahul Sharad Dravid
Born : 11 January 1973 (age 49)
(Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India)
Nickname : The Wall, The Great Wall, Jammy, Mr. Dependable
Height : 1.80 m (5 ft 11 in)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Right arm off break
Role : Batsman, Part-time wicket-keeper
Website : www.rahuldravid.com

International information

National side : India (1996–2012)
Test debut : (cap 207) 20 June 1996 v England
Last Test : 24 January 2012 v Australia
ODI debut : (cap 95) 3 April 1996 v Sri Lanka
Last ODI : 16 September 2011 v England
ODI shirt no : 19
Only T20I : (cap 38) : 31 August 2011 v England
T20I shirt no. : 19

Domestic team information

Years : Team : 1990–2012 : Karnataka
2000 : Kent
2003 : Scottish Saltires
2008–2010 : Royal Challengers Bangalore
2011–2013 : Rajasthan Royals
2014 : arylebone Cricket Club

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 164 : 344 : 298 : 449
Runs scored : 13,288 : 10,889 : 23,794 : 15,271
Batting average : 52.31 : 39.16 : 55.33 : 42.30
100s/50s : 36/63 : 12/83 : 68/117 : 21/112
Top score : 270 : 153 : 270 : 153
Balls bowled : 120 : 186 : 617 : 477
Wickets : 1 : 4 : 5 : 4
Bowling average : 39.00 : 42.50 : 54.60 : 105.25
5 wickets in innings : 0 : 0 : 0 : 0
10 wickets in match : 0 : 0 : 0 : 0
Best bowling : 1/18 : 2/43 : 2/16 : 2/43
Catches/stumpings : 210/0 : 196/14 : 353/1 : 233/17

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-07 00:14:27

1100) Anil Kumble

Profile

Anil 'Jumbo' Kumble, an unorthodox spinner who didn't turn the ball much, was perhaps India’s greatest ever match-winner. Tall and lithe in his build, Kumble was not the quintessential, everyday spinner. He produced no lateral magic from the surface like Shane Warne did, nor did he creat ripples around the batsmen like the wily old fox, Muralitharan. Yet he ended up with 619 Test wickets, second only to the magical duo of Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan. In the process, he gained enormous goodwill amongst fans and his fellow teammates for being fiercely aggressive and competitive on the field, and unerringly composed and humble off it. Anil Kumble was perhaps cricket's last gentleman.

Kumble did have one thing in his favour: he was a hard-worker and his tough as nails attitude towards the game stood positively. Anil did not have the greatest of starts to his career: a few fleeting appearances in the Australasia Cup in 1990 and the subsequent ODI series in England gave an early indication of his nagging accuracy. He was surprisingly overlooked for the subsequent tour of Australia and the 1992 World Cup Down Under.

The Irani trophy season-opener of 1992, though, was an eye-opener. Kumble singlehandedly delivered a handsome victory for the Rest of India side by claiming handsome figures of 13/138, also paving the way for his inclusion for the twin tours of South Africa and Zimbabwe. Kumble impressed in the away Test series against South Africa, picking up 18 wickets in four Tests with conditions not particularly conducive to spin bowling. The subsequent home series against England, though, cemented Kumble's spot as the leader of India's spin attack - Kumble grabbed 21 wickets in the 3-match series as India whitewashed the visitors 3-0.

There was no looking back then as the then-bespectacled spinner from Bangalore continued to haunt the opponents with his subtle variations. The backspinning flipper and the custom-made googly (squeezed between his thumb and the first two fingers) were his most potent skills, while the loopy and flat yorkers led many a tail-enders to their doom. As the years progressed, Kumble added a more potent topspinner and the double-bluff slider to his math, making him a uniquely formidable bowler to face - as a batsman and as a wicketkeeper (just ask Parthiv Patel). Quicker through the air and metronomic in his line and length, Kumble turned out to be a captain’s delight.

Despite his outstanding record, there were snide remarks that Kumble was nothing more than just a home track bully, suited to demolish the opponents on dust-bowls. While the accusations were just a figment of truth, Kumble’s overseas record did help them to sustain the theory. As years progressed, Kumble put them to bed as he led India to victory across continents, from Rawalpindi to Adelaide, from Jamaica to Johannesburg, from Wellington to Nottingham.

Kumble’s moment of glory was definitely the Delhi Test against Pakistan in early 1999. In his favorite hunting ground, Kumble ran through the entire Pakistani batting line-up to finish with amazing figures of 10/74, only the second bowler after Jim Laker to have taken all the ten wickets in an innings as India went on to defend a total that was looking improbable when Pakistan was 101/0 at some stage. Wisden Almanack, the Bible of cricket, rated the performance as the second best bowling performance of all time.

Kumble rapidly became one of the go-to guys in the Indian dressing room and was also involved in the negotiations with the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) when player contracts were introduced for the first time in Indian cricket. Kumble ended his ODI career after India’s disappointing exit from the 2007 World Cup in the Caribbean Islands. His ODI exploits were no less relative to his Test achievements; he ended up with 337 wickets in the shorter form of the game and his figures of 6/12 against West Indies in the Hero Cup in 1993 was the best individual performance by an Indian bowler until Stuart Binny shattered it in late 2014.

Kumble was named the captain of the Indian Test team following the resignation of Rahul Dravid in 2007. He led India to a series victory against arch-rivals Pakistan and was praised for his diplomatic handling of crisis moments during India’s tour of Australia in 2007-08, particularly the ‘Monkeygate’ scandal. A lean period followed, during India’s tour to Sri Lanka, where he was well below par and the subsequent home series against Australia in October, 2008. Kumble announced his retirement from international cricket mid-way through the 3rd Test of the series in the Delhi Test alongside Sourav Ganguly who bid the game goodbye in the Nagpur Test.

The Indian city of Bangalore honored one of its favourite sons by renaming the ‘Oriental Circle’ (just behind the M. Chinnaswamy stadium) after the legendary bowler. Kumble was also a part of the Royal Challengers Bangalore franchise in the Indian Premier League and took over as the captain of the team mid-way through the 2009 season. His captaincy turned out to be a major boost for the struggling franchise as they made it to the final that season.

Kumble announced his retirement from all forms of the game ahead of the 2011 IPL auctions and was immediately offered the mentorship role for the Bangalore franchise. Under his mentorship, Bangalore finished as the runners-up in the 2011 edition of the IPL. In 2013, Kumble resigned as the mentor of the Bangalore franchise and took over in the same role for Mumbai.

Kumble is also associated with a company called ‘Tenvic’ which handles sports management. In 2010, Kumble contested for the post of the president of the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) and comfortably beat Srikantadatta Narasimharaja Wodeyar, scion of the Mysore Royal family, by a margin of 33 votes. He also held the post of the chairman of the National Cricket Academy (NCA). However, he chose not to contest the 2013 KSCA elections.

Personal information

Full name : Anil Kumble
Born : 17 October 1970 (age 51)
(Bangalore, Mysore State, (present-day Karnataka) India)
Height : 6 ft 1 in (1.85 m)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Leg break
Role : Bowler

International information

National side

India : (1990–2008)
Test debut (cap 192) : 9 August 1990 v England
Last Test : 29 October 2008 v Australia
ODI debut (cap 78) : 25 April 1990 v Sri Lanka
Last ODI : 19 March 2007 v Bermuda

Domestic team information

Years : Team
1989/90–2008/09 : Karnataka
1995 : Northamptonshire
2000 : Leicestershire
2006 : Surrey
2008–2010 : Royal Challengers Bangalore

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 132 : 271 : 244 : 380
Runs scored : 2,506 : 938 : 5,572 : 1,456
Batting average : 17.77 : 10.54 : 21.68 : 11.20
100s/50s : 1/5 : 0/0 : 7/17 : 0/0
Top score : 110* : 26 : 154* : 30*
Balls bowled : 40,850 : 14,496 : 66,931 : 20,247
Wickets : 619 : 337 : 1,136 : 514
Bowling average : 29.65 : 30.89 : 25.83 : 27.58
5 wickets in innings : 35 : 2 : 72 : 3
10 wickets in match : 8 : 0 : 20 : 0
Best bowling : 10/74 : 6/12 : 10/74 : 6/12
Catches/stumpings : 60/– : 85/– : 120/– : 122/–

Anil Kumble (born 17 October 1970) is a former Indian cricket captain, coach and commentator who played Test and One Day International cricket for his national team over an international career of 18 years. Widely regarded as one of the best leg spin bowlers in Test cricket history, he took 619 wickets in Test cricket and is the fourth highest wicket taker of all time as of 2022. In 1999 while playing against Pakistan, Kumble dismissed all ten batsmen in a Test match innings, joining England's Jim Laker as the second player to achieve the feat. Unlike his contemporaries, Kumble was not a big turner of the ball, but relied primarily on pace, bounce, and accuracy. He was nicknamed "Apple" and "Jumbo". Kumble was selected as the Cricketer of the Year in 1993 Indian Cricket, and one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year three years later.

Born in Bangalore, Karnataka, Kumble developed an early interest in cricket as he grew up watching players like B. S. Chandrasekhar before becoming a full-fledged cricketer. He made his First-class debut at the age of 19 while representing Karnataka. Soon he was picked up for the Austral-Asia Cup in 1990 before making his Test debut against England later that year. Since then he has represented the Indian Test team on more than 132 Test matches and was responsible for many of India's victories. Kumble became a part of the regular ODI team during the early 1990s and held some of the best performances during this time; which included his six for 12 (six wickets for 12 runs) against the West Indies. The year 1996 proved to very successful for him as he was selected for the World Cup and emerged as the most successful bowler of the tournament; he played seven matches and captured 15 wickets at an average of 18.73.

Kumble was awarded the Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour in 2005. After having played for 18 years, he announced his retirement from international cricket in November 2008. In October 2012, Kumble was appointed the chairman of the International Cricket Council (ICC)'s cricket committee.

Between 2012 and 2015, Kumble held positions as a chief mentor for the teams Royal Challengers Bangalore and Mumbai Indians in the Indian Premier League. He was also a former head coach of the Indian cricket team as well. In February 2015, he became the fourth Indian cricketer to be inducted into ICC Hall of Fame. Kumble is currently the Head Coach and the Director of Cricket Operations of Punjab Kings.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-09 00:06:24

1101) Joe Root

Summary

Joseph Edward Root, MBE (born 30 December 1990) is an English cricketer, who plays for the England Test and One Day International (ODI) teams, and formerly captained the Test team. He also represents Yorkshire in English domestic cricket.

Root made his Test debut in 2012, his ODI debut in 2013, and played for the England T20I team between 2012 and 2019. He captained England's Test team between February 2017 and April 2022, and holds the records for most Test matches (64), wins (27) and losses (26) as England captain. On the occasion of England's 1,000th Test in August 2018, Root was named in the country's greatest all-time Test XI by the England and Wales Cricket Board. He was part of the England team that won the 2019 Cricket World Cup and was England's leading run-scorer at the tournament. He was named both the ICC Men's Test Cricketer of the Year and the Wisden Leading Cricketer in the World for 2021. In June 2022, he became the second batsman for England, and fourteenth overall, to score 10,000 Test runs. As of June 2022, he is ranked as the number one Test batsman in the world in the ICC Men's Player Rankings.

A right-handed batsman, Root originally played as an opener but has played the majority of his cricket for England in the middle order. He is England's second-highest run-scorer in Tests behind Alastair Cook, and England's second-highest run-scorer in ODIs behind Eoin Morgan. He holds the record for most ODI centuries for England with 16 and, along with James Anderson, holds the world record for highest tenth-wicket stand in Tests: 198 against India during their 2014 tour of England. Root also bowls occasional off spin.

Details:

Career Information

Test debut vs India at Vidarbha Cricket Association Stadium, Dec 13, 2012
Last Test vs India at Edgbaston, Jul 01, 2022
ODI debut vs India at Saurashtra Cricket Association Stadium, Jan 11, 2013
Last ODI vs Sri Lanka at County Ground, Jul 04, 2021
T20 debut vs India at math Stadium, Dec 22, 2012
Last T20 vs Pakistan at Sophia Gardens, May 05, 2019

Profile

Joe Root, born on 30th December 1990, hails from a rich cricketing background. His grandfather captained Rotherham CC in the Yorkshire League for several seasons whilst his younger brother, Billy, is a regular with Glamorgan. In addition to being awarded a Daily Telegraph scholarship at the 2005 Bunbury festival, Root also attracted cricket scholarships at Workshop College, the school he attended, and Yorkshire Cricket academy. The gifted batsman celebrated his Yorkshire second Team debut in July 2007 with a fifty.

There was no looking back as Root's meteoric rise continued unabated. A thoroughly emphatic Man of the Series performance for England Under-19 against Bangladesh Under-19 in 2010 witnessed the 'boy wonder' land a three-year professional contract with Yorkshire. Having marked his County Championship debut at the onset of 2011, Root established himself as a reliable batsman. The big breakthrough ensued in the following season when Root cracked an undefeated 222 in the County Championship encounter against Hampshire at the Rose Bowl.

It was not long before Root's consistency earned him a Test berth as he was picked for England's historic Indian sojourn in 2012. Alastair Cook and his merry men surmounted tremendous odds to taste victory in the Test series. Among several stellar displays - Root's debut, a baptism by fire stood out. When young Root strode out to bat in Nagpur, England were reeling at 139 for five with India's spin quartet - Ravi Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Piyush Chawla and Pragyan Ojha ruling the roost. Almost unmindful of the slow nature of the pitch that was described as one of the toughest by Kevin Pietersen, Root starred in a composed 289-minute 73, the sixth longest innings by an English batsman on debut, to steer England to a safe stalemate.

In the subsequent ODI series, Root compiled four successive scores of 30 plus, including his maiden half-century in the fourth ODI. Root's right-arm off-breaks also presented a more than useful bowling option to Cook. The champagne moment of Yorkshire cricket arrived when Root along with another Yorkshire-bred batsman, Jonny Bairstow, pieced together a 124-run partnership versus New Zealand to prop up England at Headlingley. During the process, Root reached his maiden ton and England romped to a 247-run win.

Root was in for another stern examination, this time at the top of the order in the 2013 Ashes. He responded brilliantly with a monumental 180 in the second innings of the second Test at the home of cricket, Lord's. Root's insatiable hunger for runs helped him secure a central contract following England's 3-0 drubbing of their arch-rivals. He was also at it in the Champions Trophy, hitting 173 runs, the most by an Englishman. Just before The Ashes series got underway in England, he was involved in an ugly altercation with David Warner which ended with the latter 'throwing a punch' on Root. With Michael Carberry also racking up big runs to seal the opening slot alongside Cook, Root returned to his customary No. 6 role for the return Ashes that same year. He was later promoted up the order when Jonathan Trott left the tour midway due to a stress-related illness. He failed in the entire series with only a couple of noteworthy performances to account for.

However, the selectors retained their faith in him and he was a part of England's squad to West Indies. Root did not disappoint and put up a solid display in the ODI series finishing as the highest run-getter, including his maiden ton in the fourth ODI. For his stellar performance, Root was also adjudged as the Player of the Series. Sadly, he was forced to leave the tour midway due to a broken thumb and was ruled out of the World T20 tournament.

Root went from strength-to-strength in 2014, he started the summer with an unbeaten 200 against Sri Lanka at Lord's and followed it up with two more hundreds against India. He was also a standout performer in the 50-over format and the only batsman to hold his own in the 5-2 drubbing against Sri Lanka. He was one of the first names to be penned down when the 15-member World Cup squad was picked.

Root's stocks zoomed after a successful 2015 Ashes series against arch-rivals, Australia. Having started the series with a fluent 134 at Cardiff, an innings which helped his team gain the early advantage, he then made a superb 130 in Nottingham to help England regain the Ashes after having suffered a 5-0 hammering a year and a half ago. In all, Root made 460 runs during the series, at an impressive average of 57.50.

Root had well and truly arrived and he then went on to make a career-best 254 - against Pakistan in Lord's. Root was now crowned as one of the best four young batsmen in the world - alongside the captains of Australia, New Zealand and India. Having played just one Test during his debut tour of India in 2012, the 2016 series was expected to be Root's biggest Test of his career. He started with a hundred, but the age old problems of not converting fifties into hundreds came back to haunt him. He made four scores of fifty plus and ended the series with 491 runs at an average of 49.10 - clearly the best England batsman on the tour.

Having become an established player for England across formats, Root took over the Test captaincy from Alastair Cook in February 2017, with the latter stepping down after a four-year stint. Root's first assignment was the home series against a probing South African outfit. He shone with the bat and also led decently as England comfortably clinched the series. West Indies were the next visitors and they were also brushed aside although they did stun the pundits by winning a Test match. Root seemed to be fairly in control tactically although it was arguable if he was as influential on the field as a captain needs to be. An away tour was the best way to analyse this part.

An Ashes campaign is a historic part of a cricketer's campaign and to have that as your first overseas assignment makes it extremely tough for any captain. Like most visiting sides in Australia, England also got a severe beating in the series and Root's captaincy was under the scanner, as was his continuing inability to convert fifties into hundreds. As a batsman, he was trying his best but it was evident that he seemed helpless as a leader. Obviously, the tour may have come as a sharp learning curve for Root who definitely has a lot to improve upon, as far as his captaincy is concerned.

While Root has been churning out runs across formats, there has been a talk about his relative vulnerability in limited-overs cricket. He does make the runs but at times, forcing the pace has seemed an issue for him. The fact that there is a plethora of strokemakers around him in the XI allows him to play his game without much worries but Root would also want to take his white-ball game to the next level. A part of this can be understood from his decision to participate in the 2018 IPL auctions.

At the World Cups - The youngest player in the 15-member squad of England in the 2015 World Cup, Root was one of the two English batters to score more than 200 runs in the competition. In his first-ever World Cup, Root recorded a century at a 110+ strike-rate, but he ended up on the losing side against Sri Lanka. You could call Root an exception in a team that is flooded with aggressive-and-powerful batsmen. This is despite him scoring 3498 runs from 74 innings at a strike-rate of 91 - England’s highest run-getter - since the 2015 World Cup. While Root may not be grabbing the headlines, he’s the glue around which the other batters play. This was exactly what he was required to do in the 2019 edition of the tournament. A 'new England' under Eoin Morgan had emerged and Root was to be a vital cog of it. Playing at home, England were firm favourites to lift their maiden World Cup trophy. That they eventually did win in a less than cavalier fashion will not take away the fact that they were clearly at the top of their game. So was Root, who ended the tournament as the fifth highest run-scorer, with 556 runs from 11 innings.

Personal information

Full name : Joseph Edward Root
Born : 30 December 1990 (age 31)
(Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England)
Height : 6 ft 0 in (183 cm)
Batting : Right-handed
Bowling : Right-arm off break
Role : Top-order batsman
Relations : Billy Root (brother)

International information

National : side
England : (2012–present)
Test debut : (cap 655) : 13 December 2012 v India
Last Test : 1 July 2022 v India
ODI debut : (cap 227) : 11 January 2013 v India
Last ODI : 4 July 2021 v Sri Lanka
ODI shirt no. : 66
T20I debut (cap 63) 22 December 2012 v India
Last T20I : 5 May 2019 v Pakistan
T20I shirt no. : 66

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : FC : LA
Matches : 121 : 152 : 189 : 191
Runs scored : 10,458 : 6,109 : 15,071 : 7,393
Batting average : 50.76 : 51.33 : 49.73 : 48.96
100s/50s : 28/54 : 16/35 : 40/73 : 17/44
Top score : 254 : 133* : 254 : 133*
Balls bowled : 3,950 : 1,552 : 6,231 : 2,139
Wickets : 46 : 26 : 68 : 40
Bowling average : 46.15 : 57.34 : 48.69 : 49.75
5 wickets in innings : 1 : 0 : 1 : 0
10 wickets in match : 0 : 0 : 0 : 0
Best bowling : 5/8 : 3/52 : 5/8 : 3/52
Catches/stumpings : 156/– : 77/– : 203/– : 89/–

GettyImages-174100069-scaled-e1608787373619-1024x554.jpg

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-11 00:08:31

1102) Stuart Broad

Stuart Christopher John Broad, MBE (born 24 June 1986) is an English cricketer who plays Test cricket for the England cricket team and a former One Day and Twenty 20 International captain.

A right-arm seam bowler and left-handed batsman, Broad began his professional career at Leicestershire; in 2008 he transferred to Nottinghamshire, the county of his birth and the team for which his father played. In August 2006 he was voted the Cricket Writers' Club Young Cricketer of the Year. In the fourth Test of the 2015 Ashes series Broad took career-best figures of 8–15 in the Australian first innings as they were dismissed for just 60. This performance was named as Wisden's Men's Test spell of the decade.

Broad was awarded the Man of the Match in the fifth Test of the 2009 Ashes series at the Oval, after figures of 5/37 in the afternoon session of the second day. On 30 July 2011, at the Nottingham Test match against India, he achieved a Test match hat-trick in the process gaining his then best Test figures of 6–46. As a batsman, he holds the second-highest ever Test score made by a number 9, having scored 169 against Pakistan in August 2010. At the start of the summer in 2012 Broad, returning from injury, produced figures of 7 for 72 in a match haul of 11 wickets against the West Indies. He is England's second highest wicket taker in Test cricket.

On the morning of the fifth and final day of the third Test of the 2020 series against the West Indies, Broad became the seventh bowler to take 500 wickets in Test cricket, after dismissing Kraigg Brathwaite. Broad was the fourth fast bowler, and second bowler for England to reach the milestone after James Anderson, who achieved it against the same batsman. In December 2021, in the second match of the 2021–22 Ashes series, Broad played in his 150th Test match.

Career Information

Test debut vs Sri Lanka at Sinhalese Sports Club, Dec 09, 2007
Last Test vs India at Edgbaston, Jul 01, 2022
ODI debut vs Pakistan at Sophia Gardens, Aug 30, 2006
Last ODI vs South Africa at Newlands, Feb 14, 2016
T20 debut vs Pakistan at County Ground, Aug 28, 2006
Last T20vs Netherlands at Zahur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium, Mar 31, 2014

Profile

The son of current ICC match referee Chris Broad, Stuart Broad is a tall medium pacer who has impressed his way into the England team. His meteoric rise over the years led to the selectors appointing him as the England T20 captain at one point of time, but his reign didn't last long.

Like his father, Stuart Broad ventured into playing cricket primarily as an opening batsman. However, he resorted to bowling because he did not want to stand around all day in the field. Following impressive showings at the U-19 level, Broad was selected to play in a T20 match against Pakistan in 2006. Broad put in a credible performance by just missing out on a hat-trick in the match.

His turning point came in the 2007 ODI series against India when he shared a record 8th wicket stand of 99 with Bopara to guide England to a two-wicket win. Earlier, he had snapped up 4/51 in the India innings and that won him his first Man of the Match award.

However, Broad had some torrid times ahead. He took a real pounding in the match against India in the 2007 T20 World Cup when Yuvraj Singh created history by carting him for six sixes in one over. Broad has never managed to shake that moment off, but his confidence and belief helped him overcome that blip.

He toiled hard on his Test debut in Sri Lanka as he showed admirable heart in adverse circumstances. He starred with both bat and ball during the New Zealand and South Africa series, but he was at his best during England's victorious 2009 Ashes campaign. He had fired a warning shot against the Aussies at Headingley when he took 6/91 and blasted 61 off 49 balls. It was in the fifth Test at the Oval that Broad churned out his best ever performance. His spell of 5/37 ruined Australia's chances and helped England to victory.

He also scored a century at Lords in the year 2010, something that his father had never achieved. It was his first ever century in any form of cricket and came when England needed it the most. His team was struggling at 102 for 7 against a brilliant Pakistan bowling attack and his 332-run world record stand with Trott helped England recover and seal the series.

Broad had a poor Ashes tour of 2011 as it was cut short due to injuries and was out of the squad for most of the Test and ODI series. He was almost dropped from the side before the India tour but after being named in the team for the first Test, he went on to pick up 7 wickets in the match. He also scored a classy 74 not out in the second innings. The same brilliant form continued in the second Test when he hit an aggressive 64 with the bat and achieved superb bowling figures of 6-46 in the first innings, which included a hat-trick. His second innings contribution (44 runs and 2 wickets) was just as useful. He went on to take 6 wickets in the next two Tests as England completed a 4-0 series whitewash.

Broad started the 2012 summer with a bang when he took 7/72 against West Indies in the first innings of the Test at Lords, becoming the 8th all-rounder to feature on both honours boards after his maiden Test century of 169 against Pakistan in 2010. He took another 4 wickets in the second innings to finish with Test best figures of 11/165 and became the first bowler to take a 10 wicket haul at Lords since Ian Botham in 1978.

Later that year, Broad failed miserably against South Africa in the first Test as England bowlers suffered at the hands of South African top order batsmen. In the second Test, however, Broad did manage to make up for earlier mistakes finishing with figures of 5/69 as England ended the game in a draw. His dip in form continued into the Test series in India and he was dropped after the first Test. An injury kept him out of the ODIs and T20s but he returned to the side for the tour of New Zealand in 2013.

He had a very good Ashes in 2013 in England, he ended the series with 22 wickets. He was the Man of the Match in the fourth Test at Chester-le-Street, where he had match figures of 11/121. He bowled a fiery spell and brought England back in the match as he helped them retain the Ashes. The biggest talking point of the series though was Stuart Broad's bull-headed refusal to walk despite genuinely nicking an Ashton Agar delivery to the waiting hands of Michael Clarke at first slip via Brad Haddin's pad in the Trent Bridge Test. This ugly controversy, which saw sparks fly all round, set the tone for the return Ashes Down Under. Infuriated by Broad's behaviour, the Australian press launched a scathing attack on him with the public hopping onto the bandwagon as well. Never the one to back down from a challenge, the lean mean pace machine fought fire with fire, picking up 6 Aussies wickets in the first innings at the Gabba. However, it could not prevent his side from crashing to a cataclysmic loss. The miserable form for his home side continued as England ended up being whitewashed for the third time in Ashes history. He was England's best bowler on display and finished as England's leading wicket-taker.

After Alastair Cook opted to take a break at the conclusion of the series Down Under, Broad was named as the captain for the tour to West Indies as well as the 2014 World T20. England won the ODI series 2-1 but were beaten in the three-match T20 series that followed. Under his captaincy, England couldn't do much in the World T20 and failed to go past the Super-10s stages.

When India toured England in 2014, he played a crucial part in piloting the hosts to a 3-1 series win. The tall fast bowler picked up 19 wickets in the series, which also included a Man of the Match performance at Manchester for his 6/25. Broad, however, had to undergo a knee surgery which he had prolonged for a while, he timed the surgery in a way that would see him fit before the World Cup. And as he had planned, he was named in the squad that was picked for the tri-series, where Australia played hosts to England and India.

The Nottinghamshire pacer didn't have the best of World Cups. However, he was instrumental in helping England to reclaim the Ashes in 2015. In the absence of the spearhead of the pace attack, James Anderson, Broad decimated Australia with a supreme spell of 8 for 15 in the fourth Test at Trent Bridge, as the tourists hurtled towards a defeat.

Broad also proved his worth when England toured the UAE and South Africa. In fact, it was his game-changing spell of 6 for 17 in the third Test at Wanderers that paved the way for the visitors to pip South Africa in their own den. Eventually, England won the series 2-1. After his awe-inspiring spell at Wanderers, Broad also topped the ICC Test Bowler Rankings.

But even as his Test aura continues to rise, the focus on 'new England' in the shorter formats of the game has meant that Broad has struggled for a place in the ODI and T20I setup. He even missed the marquee World T20 where England made the final.

Personal information

Full name : Stuart Christopher John Broad
Born : 24 June 1986 (age 36)
(Nottingham, England)
Nickname : Broady, Malfoy
Height : 6 ft 6 in (198 cm)
Batting : Left-handed
Bowling : Right-arm fast-medium
Role : Bowler
Relations : Chris Broad (father)

International information

National side : England (2006–present)
Test debut : (cap 638) : 9 December 2007 v Sri Lanka
Last Test : 1 July 2022 v India
ODI debut : (cap 197) : 30 August 2006 v Pakistan
Last ODI : 14 February 2016 v South Africa
T20I debut : (cap 18) : 28 August 2006 v Pakistan
Last T20I : 31 March 2014 v Netherlands

Career statistics

Competition : Test : ODI : T20I : FC
Matches : 156 : 121 : 56 : 249
Runs scored : 3,473 : 529 : 118 : 5,589
Batting average : 18.37 : 12.30 : 7.37 : 19.33
100s/50s : 1/13 : 0/0 : 0/0 : 1/25
Top score : 169 : 45* : 18* : 169
Balls bowled : 31,571 : 6,109 : 1,173 : 47,093
Wickets : 552 : 178 : 65 : 880
Bowling average : 28.08 : 30.13 : 22.93 : 26.95
5 wickets in innings : 19 : 1 : 0 : 31
10 wickets in match : 3 : 0 : 0 : 4
Best bowling : 8/15 : 5/23 : 4/24 : 8/15
Catches/stumpings : 53/– : 27/– : 21/– : 90/–

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-13 00:06:39

1103) Novak Djokovic

Summary

Novak Djokovic (born 22 May 1987) is a Serbian professional tennis player. He is currently ranked world No. 7 in singles by the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP). He has been ranked world No. 1 for a record total 373 weeks, and has finished as the year-end No. 1 a record seven times.[8] He has won 21 Grand Slam men's singles titles, including a record nine Australian Open titles. Overall, he has won 88 ATP singles titles, which include a record 64 Big Titles and a record 38 Masters titles. Djokovic is the first and only man in tennis history to be the reigning champion of the four majors at once across three different surfaces. He is the only man to complete a non-calendar year Grand Slam in the Open Era and the first to achieve a double Career Grand Slam. He is also the only player to complete the Career Golden Masters on the ATP Tour, which he has done twice.

Djokovic began his professional career in 2003. At age 20, he disrupted Roger Federer's and Rafael Nadal's streak of 11 consecutive majors to win his first major title at the 2008 Australian Open. By 2010, Djokovic also separated himself from the rest of field to join Federer and Nadal in the Big Three, the group of three players who have dominated men's tennis for more than a decade. In 2011, Djokovic ascended to No. 1 for the first time, winning three out of the four majors and a then-season record of five Masters events. He remained the best player in men's tennis for the rest of the decade, leading the tour in winning the Grand Slam, Masters and Year-end Championship titles. In 2015, Djokovic reached fifteen consecutive finals winning three majors and a season-record of six Masters events as well as the ATP Finals. The following year, he won the 2016 French Open to become the only man in the Open Era to complete a non-calendar year Grand Slam and his first Career Grand Slam. He became the first man since Rod Laver in 1969 to hold all four major titles at once and the only one in history to do so on three different surfaces. During the decade, Djokovic finished as No. 1 for six years and No. 2 for three other years, and in 2021 he set the records for both most weeks spent as world No. 1 and most year-end No. 1 finishes.

Representing Serbia, Djokovic led the Serbian national team to their first Davis Cup title in 2010 and to the inaugural ATP Cup title in 2020. Moreover, he won the bronze medal for Serbia at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Djokovic has won the Laureus World Sportsman of the Year award four times (2012, 2015, 2016, 2019), the BBC Sports Personality World Sport Star of the Year award in 2011 and the L'Équipe Champion of Champions award in 2021. He is also a recipient of the Order of St. Sava, the Order of Karađorđe's Star, and the Order of the Republika Srpska.

Beyond competition, Djokovic is an active philanthropist and a former ATP player council president. In August 2020, Djokovic and Vasek Pospisil announced the formation of the Professional Tennis Players Association as the first player-only association in tennis, citing the need for players to have more influence on the tour and advocating better prize money structure for lower ranked players.

Details

Novak Djokovic, (born May 22, 1987, Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia [now in Serbia]), is a Serbian tennis player who was one of the greatest men’s players in the history of the game. His 21 Grand Slam singles titles included a record nine Australian Open championships.

Djokovic took up tennis at age four and quickly ascended the junior ranks. Despite the hardships that came with growing up in the war-torn Serbia of the 1990s, he became Europe’s top-ranked 14-and-under player and later the number one 16-and-under player on the Continent before turning professional in 2003. Djokovic entered the top 100 of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) at age 18, and in July 2006 he won his first ATP event. After advancing to the semifinals at both the French Open and Wimbledon in 2007, he reached the finals of that year’s U.S. Open but lost in straight sets to Roger Federer. Djokovic’s hot play continued into 2008 as he won his first Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open, thereby becoming the first Serbian man to win one of tennis’s four most prestigious singles championships. Later that year he captured a bronze medal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Djokovic’s progress plateaued for almost three years, as he won just 10 ATP men’s singles tournaments and reached only one Grand Slam final (the 2010 U.S. Open) between February 2008 and the end of 2010. His fortunes turned in December 2010 when he led the Serbian Davis Cup team to the country’s first Davis Cup title. His Davis Cup victories marked the beginning of a 43-match winning steak—the third longest such streak in the Open era (since 1968)—which included a second Australian Open title in January 2011. Djokovic’s remarkable streak ended with a French Open semifinal loss to Federer, but his strong play helped him rise to the number one world ranking shortly after he defeated Rafael Nadal to capture the 2011 Wimbledon championship. Djokovic later defeated Nadal in the U.S. Open final to claim his third Grand Slam title of the year.

At the Australian Open in 2012, he again bested Nadal, winning a five-set thriller that lasted nearly six hours. The two met for the fourth consecutive Grand Slam final at the 2012 French Open, where Djokovic lost to Nadal in four sets. In 2013 Djokovic defeated Andy Murray to win his fourth Australian Open title, and he captured another Wimbledon championship the following year when he beat Federer in a dramatic five-set final. In 2015 he beat Murray to capture his fifth career Australian Open, which made Djokovic the all-time leader in Australian Open men’s singles championships during the Open era. After a loss in the 2015 French Open final, the top-ranked Djokovic bested Federer to win his third Wimbledon championship. He continued his hot play at the U.S. Open, beating Federer in the final to capture his 10th career Grand Slam title. Djokovic ran his winning streak in Grand Slam matches to 21 when he beat Murray in straight sets in the final of the 2016 Australian Open. At the 2016 French Open he again bested Murray in a Grand Slam final. By winning his first French Open championship, Djokovic achieved a career Grand Slam.

Djokovic reached the finals of the 2016 U.S. Open but lost a four-set match to Switzerland’s Stan Wawrinka. He failed to advance past the quarterfinals in the first three Grand Slam tournaments of 2017, and in July he announced that he would not play the remainder of the year in order to treat an elbow injury that had been bothering him for the previous 18 months. He returned to play in January 2018. Djokovic slowly improved throughout the year, and in July he won his fourth career Wimbledon title. Two months later he captured his third U.S. Open singles championship. In January 2019 Djokovic won his seventh career Australian Open singles title, the most in the history of that tournament. He then defended his Wimbledon title in epic fashion, defeating Federer in a 4-hour 57-minute final (the longest singles final in tournament history) that was decided in an unprecedented tiebreaker after the fifth set ended in a 12–12 tie.

In 2020 Djokovic continued to dominate at the Australian Open, winning his 17th Grand Slam title. Although Wimbledon was canceled that year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the French Open was held in the fall. He reached the finals there but lost to Nadal. Djokovic claimed yet another title when he won the Australian Open in 2021. In June of that year he won his second French Open singles championship. Djokovic’s hot streak continued when he won another Wimbledon title in July 2021, which gave him 20 total Grand Slam men’s singles championships, tying the all-time record that was shared by Federer and Nadal. Later that year he entered the U.S. Open, hoping to become the third male player to win all four Grand Slam events in one calendar year. Although he reached the finals, Djokovic was defeated in straight sets by Daniil Medvedev of Russia.

Djokovic sought to make history at the 2022 Australian Open by winning his 21st Grand Slam men’s singles title. However, he became embroiled in a dispute involving Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for those entering the country. The unvaccinated Djokovic was initially granted an exemption, but it came under scrutiny amid a public uproar. His visa was ultimately canceled, and Djokovic was deported before the tournament began. Nadal ended up winning the men’s event to surpass Djokovic and Federer for most Grand Slam titles. Later in 2022 Djokovic competed at the French Open, where he lost in the quarterfinals to Nadal, who went on to win the tournament. In July Djokovic turned around his disappointing season by winning Wimbledon to claim his 21st Grand Slam championship.

Biography

Country (sports) : Serbia
Residence : Belgrade, Serbia, Monte Carlo, Monaco
Born : 22 May 1987 (age 35)
(Belgrade, SR Serbia, SFR Yugoslavia)
(now Serbia)
Height : 1.88 m (6 ft 2 in)
Turned pro : 2003
Plays : Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Coach : Goran Ivanišević

Singles

Career record : 1012–204 (83.2%)
Career titles : 88 (5th in the Open Era)
Highest ranking : No. 1 (4 July 2011)
Current ranking : No. 7 (11 July 2022)

Grand Slam singles results

Australian Open : W (2008, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2019, 2020, 2021)
French Open : W (2016, 2021)
Wimbledon : W (2011, 2014, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022)
US Open : W (2011, 2015, 2018).

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-15 00:12:37

1104) Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Summary

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Tennyson also excelled at short lyrics, such as "Break, Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as "Ulysses", although "In Memoriam A.H.H." was written to commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died of a stroke at the age of 22. Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King, "Ulysses", and "Tithonus". During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.

A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplace in the English language, including "Nature, red in tooth and claw" ("In Memoriam A.H.H."), "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of ten, / Because my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.

Details

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in full Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson of Aldworth and Freshwater, (born August 6, 1809, Somersby, Lincolnshire, England—died October 6, 1892, Aldworth, Surrey), is an English poet often regarded as the chief representative of the Victorian age in poetry. He was raised to the peerage in 1884.

Early life and work

Tennyson was the fourth of 12 children, born into an old Lincolnshire family, his father a rector. Alfred, with two of his brothers, Frederick and Charles, was sent in 1815 to Louth grammar school—where he was unhappy. He left in 1820, but, though home conditions were difficult, his father managed to give him a wide literary education. Alfred was precocious, and before his teens he had composed in the styles of Alexander Pope, Sir Walter Scott, and John Milton. To his youth also belongs The Devil and the Lady (a collection of previously unpublished poems published posthumously in 1930), which shows an astonishing understanding of Elizabethan dramatic verse. Lord Byron was a dominant influence on the young Tennyson.

At the lonely rectory in Somersby the children were thrown upon their own resources. All writers on Tennyson emphasize the influence of the Lincolnshire countryside on his poetry: the plain, the sea about his home, “the sand-built ridge of heaped hills that mound the sea,” and “the waste enormous marsh.”

In 1824 the health of Tennyson’s father began to break down, and he took refuge in drink. Alfred, though depressed by unhappiness at home, continued to write, collaborating with Frederick and Charles in Poems by Two Brothers (1826; dated 1827). His contributions (more than half the volume) are mostly in fashionable styles of the day.

In 1827 Alfred and Charles joined Frederick at Trinity College, Cambridge. There Alfred made friends with Arthur Hallam, the gifted son of the historian Henry Hallam. This was the deepest friendship of Tennyson’s life. The friends became members of the Apostles, an exclusive undergraduate club of earnest intellectual interests. Tennyson’s reputation as a poet increased at Cambridge. In 1829 he won the chancellor’s gold medal with a poem called Timbuctoo. In 1830 Poems, Chiefly Lyrical was published; and in the same year Tennyson, Hallam, and other Apostles went to Spain to help in the unsuccessful revolution against Ferdinand VII. In the meantime, Hallam had become attached to Tennyson’s sister Emily but was forbidden by her father to correspond with her for a year.

In 1831 Tennyson’s father died. Alfred’s misery was increased by his grandfather’s discovery of his father’s debts. He left Cambridge without taking a degree, and his grandfather made financial arrangements for the family. In the same year, Hallam published a eulogistic article on Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in The Englishman’s Magazine. He went to Somersby in 1832 as the accepted suitor of Emily.

In 1832 Tennyson published another volume of his poems (dated 1833), including “The Lotos-Eaters,” “The Palace of Art,” and “The Lady of Shalott.” Among them was a satirical epigram on the critic Christopher North (pseudonym of the Scottish writer John Wilson), who had attacked Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in Blackwood’s Magazine. Tennyson’s sally prompted a scathing attack on his new volume in the Quarterly Review. The attacks distressed Tennyson, but he continued to revise his old poems and compose new ones.

In 1833 Hallam’s engagement was recognized by his family, but while on a visit to Vienna in September he died suddenly. The shock to Tennyson was severe. It came at a depressing time; three of his brothers, Edward, Charles, and Septimus, were suffering from mental illness, and the bad reception of his own work added to the gloom. Yet it was in this period that he wrote some of his most characteristic work: “The Two Voices” (of which the original title, significantly, was “Thoughts of a Suicide”), “Ulysses,” “St. Simeon Stylites,” and, probably, the first draft of “Morte d’Arthur.” To this period also belong some of the poems that became constituent parts of In Memoriam, celebrating Hallam’s death, and lyrics later worked into Maud.

In May 1836 his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.

Major literary work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

In 1842 Tennyson published Poems, in two volumes, one containing a revised selection from the volumes of 1830 and 1832, the other, new poems. The new poems included “Morte d’Arthur,” “The Two Voices,” “Locksley Hall,” and “The Vision of Sin” and other poems that reveal a strange naïveté, such as “The May Queen,” “Lady Clara Vere de Vere,” and “The Lord of Burleigh.” The new volume was not on the whole well received. But the grant to him at this time, by the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, of a pension of £200 helped to alleviate his financial worries. In 1847 he published his first long poem, The Princess, a singular anti-feminist fantasia.

The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed his correspondence with Emily Sellwood, and their engagement was renewed and followed by marriage. Meanwhile, Edward Moxon offered to publish the elegies on Hallam that Tennyson had been composing over the years. They appeared, at first anonymously, as In Memoriam (1850), which had a great success with both reviewers and the public, won him the friendship of Queen Victoria, and helped bring about, in the same year, his appointment as poet laureate.

In Memoriam is a vast poem of 131 sections of varying length, with a prologue and epilogue. Inspired by the grief Tennyson felt at the untimely death of his friend Hallam, the poem touches on many intellectual issues of the Victorian Age as the author searches for the meaning of life and death and tries to come to terms with his sense of loss. Most notably, In Memoriam reflects the struggle to reconcile traditional religious faith and belief in immortality with the emerging theories of evolution and modern geology. The verses show the development over three years of the poet’s acceptance and understanding of his friend’s death and conclude with an epilogue, a happy marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of Tennyson’s sister Cecilia.

After his marriage, which was happy, Tennyson’s life became more secure and outwardly uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel. The times of wandering and unsettlement ended in 1853, when the Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight. Tennyson was to spend most of the rest of his life there and at Aldworth (near Haslemere, Surrey).

Tennyson’s position as the national poet was confirmed by his Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852)—though some critics at first thought it disappointing—and the famous poem on the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, published in 1855 in Maud and Other Poems. Maud itself, a strange and turbulent “monodrama,” provoked a storm of protest; many of the poet’s admirers were shocked by the morbidity, hysteria, and bellicosity of the hero. Yet Maud was Tennyson’s favourite among his poems.

A project that Tennyson had long considered at last issued in Idylls of the King (1859), a series of 12 connected poems broadly surveying the legend of King Arthur from his falling in love with Guinevere to the ultimate ruin of his kingdom. The poems concentrate on the introduction of evil to Camelot because of the adulterous love of Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, and on the consequent fading of the hope that had at first infused the Round Table fellowship. Idylls of the King had an immediate success, and Tennyson, who loathed publicity, had now acquired a sometimes embarrassing public fame. The Enoch Arden volume of 1864 perhaps represents the peak of his popularity. New Arthurian Idylls were published in The Holy Grail, and Other Poems in 1869 (dated 1870). These were again well received, though some readers were beginning to show discomfort at the “Victorian” moral atmosphere that Tennyson had introduced into his source material from Sir Thomas Malory.

In 1874 Tennyson decided to try his hand at poetic drama. Queen Mary appeared in 1875, and an abridged version was produced at the Lyceum in 1876 with only moderate success. It was followed by Harold (1876; dated 1877), Becket (not published in full until 1884), and the “village tragedy” The Promise of May, which proved a failure at the Globe in November 1882. This play—his only prose work—shows Tennyson’s growing despondency and resentment at the religious, moral, and political tendencies of the age. He had already caused some sensation by publishing a poem called “Despair” in The Nineteenth Century (November 1881). A more positive indication of Tennyson’s later beliefs appears in “The Ancient Sage,” published in Tiresias and Other Poems (1885). Here the poet records his intimations of a life before and beyond this life.

Tennyson accepted a peerage (after some hesitation) in 1884. In 1886 he published a new volume containing “Locksley Hall Sixty Years After,” consisting mainly of imprecations against modern decadence and liberalism and a retraction of the earlier poem’s belief in inevitable human progress.

In 1889 Tennyson wrote the famous short poem “Crossing the Bar,” during the crossing to the Isle of Wight. In the same year he published Demeter and Other Poems, which contains the charming retrospective “To Mary Boyle,” “The Progress of Spring,” a fine lyric written much earlier and rediscovered, and “Merlin and the Gleam,” an allegorical summing-up of his poetic career. In 1892 his play The Foresters was successfully produced in New York City. Despite ill health, he was able to correct the proofs of his last volume, The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream, and Other Poems (1892).

Legacy

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was the leading poet of the Victorian Age in England and by the mid-19th century had come to occupy a position similar to that of Alexander Pope in the 18th. Tennyson was a consummate poetic artist, consolidating and refining the traditions bequeathed to him by his predecessors in the Romantic movement—especially Wordsworth, Byron, and Keats. His poetry is remarkable for its metrical variety, rich descriptive imagery, and exquisite verbal melodies. But Tennyson was also regarded as the preeminent spokesman for the educated middle-class Englishman, in moral and religious outlook and in political and social consciousness no less than in matters of taste and sentiment. His poetry dealt often with the doubts and difficulties of an age in which established Christian faith and traditional assumptions about man’s nature and destiny were increasingly called into question by science and modern progress. His poetry dealt with these misgivings, moreover, as the intimate personal problems of a sensitive and troubled individual inclined to melancholy. Yet through his poetic mastery—the spaciousness and nobility of his best verse, its classical aptness of phrase, its distinctive harmony—he conveyed to sympathetic readers a feeling of implicit reassurance, even serenity. Tennyson may be seen as the first great English poet to be fully aware of the new picture of man’s place in the universe revealed by modern science. While the contemplation of this unprecedented human situation sometimes evoked his fears and forebodings, it also gave him a larger imaginative range than most of the poets of his time and added a greater depth and resonance to his art.

Tennyson’s ascendancy among Victorian poets began to be questioned even during his lifetime, however, when Robert Browning and Algernon Charles Swinburne were serious rivals. And 20th-century criticism, influenced by the rise of a new school of poetry headed by T.S. Eliot (though Eliot himself was an admirer of Tennyson), proposed some drastic devaluations of his work. Undoubtedly, much in Tennyson that appealed to his contemporaries has ceased to appeal to many readers today. He can be mawkish and banal, pompous and orotund, offering little more than the mellifluous versifying of shallow or confused thoughts. The rediscovery of such earlier poets as John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins (a poet of Tennyson’s own time who was then unknown to the public), together with the widespread acceptance of Eliot and W.B. Yeats as the leading modern poets, opened the ears of readers to a very different, and perhaps more varied, poetic music. A more balanced estimate of Tennyson has begun to prevail, however, with the recognition of the enduring greatness of “Ulysses,” the unique poignancy of Tennyson’s best lyric poems, and, above all, the stature of In Memoriam as the great representative poem of the Victorian Age. It is now also recognized that the realistic and comic aspects of Tennyson’s work are more important than they were thought to be during the period of the reaction against him. Finally, the perception of the poet’s awed sense of the mystery of life, which lies at the heart of his greatness, as in “Crossing the Bar” or “Flower in the Crannied Wall,” unites his admirers in this century with those in the last. Though less of Tennyson’s work may survive than appeared likely during his Victorian heyday, what does remain—and it is by no means small in quantity—seems likely to be imperishable.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-17 01:21:28

1105) Samuel C. C. Ting

Summary

Samuel C.C. Ting, in full Samuel Chad Chung Ting, (born Jan. 27, 1936, Ann Arbor, Mich., U.S.), is an American physicist who shared in the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1976 for his discovery of a new subatomic particle, the J/psi particle.

The son of a Chinese college professor who was studying in the United States when Ting was born, he was raised in mainland China and Taiwan and at the age of 20 immigrated to the United States. He was educated at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he received his doctorate in 1962. Ting taught briefly at Columbia University and was group leader at a nuclear facility at Hamburg, W.Ger., before joining the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1967, becoming a professor in 1969.

In 1974 in experiments conducted at the Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, Long Island, N.Y., Ting discovered a new subatomic particle that he called the J-particle (now usually called the J/psi particle), the first of a new class of very massive, long-lived mesons. The discovery of this particle, which is thought to be composed of a charmed quark and its antiquark, led to a significant expansion and refinement of the quark model. For this discovery Ting was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with Burton Richter, who had made the same discovery independently at almost the same time. At the time of the award Ting was conducting research at the European Commission for Nuclear Research (CERN) at Geneva.

Details

Samuel Chao Chung Ting (born January 27, 1936) is an American physicist who, with Burton Richter, received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. More recently he has been the principal investigator in research conducted with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a device installed on the International Space Station in 2011.

Biography

Ting was born to Chinese immigrant parents with ancestry from Ju County, Shandong province on January 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting and Tsun-ying Wong, met and married as graduate students at the University of Michigan.

Ting's parents returned to China two months after his birth where Ting was homeschooled by his parents throughout WWII. After the communist takeover of the mainland that forced the nationalist government to flee to Taiwan, Ting moved to the island in 1949. He would live in Taiwan from 1949 to 1956 and conducted most of his formal schooling there. His father started to teach engineering and his mother would teach psychology at National Taiwan University (NTU). Ting attended and finished Middle School in Taiwan.

In 1956, Ting, who barely spoke English, returned to the United States at the age of 20 and attended the University of Michigan. There, he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics. In 1959, he was awarded a B.S.E. in mathematics and in physics, and in 1962, he earned a doctorate in physics. In 1963, he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). From 1965, he taught at Columbia University and worked at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Since 1969, Ting has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Ting was awarded the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (in 1976), Nobel Prize in Physics (in 1976), Eringen Medal (in 1977), DeGaspari Award in Science from the Government of Italy (in 1988), Gold Medal for Science from Brescia, Italy (in 1988), and the NASA Public Service Medal (in 2001).

Nobel Prize

In 1976, Ting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle. They were chosen for the award, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind." The discovery was made in 1974 when Ting was heading a research team at MIT exploring new regimes of high energy particle physics.

Ting gave his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Mandarin. Although there had been Chinese Nobel Prize recipients before (Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang), none had previously delivered the acceptance speech in Chinese. In his Nobel banquet speech, Ting emphasized the importance of experimental work:

In reality, a theory in natural science cannot be without experimental foundations; physics, in particular, comes from experimental work. I hope that awarding the Nobel Prize to me will awaken the interest of students from the developing nations so that they will realize the importance of experimental work.

Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer

In 1995, not long after the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on Earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted and he became the principal investigator and has been directing the development since then. A prototype, AMS-01, was flown and tested on Space Shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998. The main mission, AMS-02, was then planned for launch by the Shuttle and mounting on the International Space Station.

This project is a massive $2 billion undertaking involving 500 scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries. After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA announced that the Shuttle was to be retired by 2010 and that AMS-02 was not on the manifest of any of the remaining Shuttle flights. Dr. Ting was forced to (successfully) lobby the United States Congress and the public to secure an additional Shuttle flight dedicated to this project. Also during this time, Ting had to deal with numerous technical problems in fabricating and qualifying the large, extremely sensitive and delicate detector module for space. AMS-02 was successfully launched on Shuttle mission STS-134 on May 16, 2011 and was installed on the International Space Station on May 19, 2011.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-19 00:07:36

1106) William Lipscomb

Summary

William Nunn Lipscomb, Jr., (born Dec. 9, 1919, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.—died April 14, 2011, Cambridge, Mass.), was an American physical chemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1976 for his research on the structure and bonding of boron compounds and the general nature of chemical bonding.

Lipscomb graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1941 and earned his Ph.D. in 1946 from the California Institute of Technology. He worked as a physical chemist in the Office of Science Research and Development from 1942 to 1946 and then joined the University of Minnesota as assistant professor. By 1959, when he left the university, he was professor and chief of the physical chemistry division. He then became professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he served as chairman of the department of chemistry from 1962 to 1965. By developing X-ray techniques that later proved useful in many chemical applications, Lipscomb and his associates were able to map the molecular structures of numerous boranes and their derivatives. Boranes are compounds of boron and hydrogen. The stability of boranes could not be explained by traditional concepts of electron bonding, in which each pair of atoms is linked by a pair of electrons, because boranes lacked sufficient electrons. Lipscomb showed how a pair of electrons could be shared by three atoms. His theory successfully served to describe boranes and many other analogous structures.

Details

William Nunn Lipscomb Jr. (December 9, 1919 – April 14, 2011) was a Nobel Prize-winning American inorganic and organic chemist working in nuclear magnetic resonance, theoretical chemistry, boron chemistry, and biochemistry.

Biography

Lipscomb was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family moved to Lexington, Kentucky in 1920, and he lived there until he received his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry at the University of Kentucky in 1941. He went on to earn his Doctor of Philosophy degree in Chemistry from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1946.

From 1946 to 1959 he taught at the University of Minnesota. From 1959 to 1990 he was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, where he was a professor emeritus since 1990.

Lipscomb was married to the former Mary Adele Sargent from 1944 to 1983. They had three children, one of whom lived only a few hours. He married Jean Evans in 1983. They had one adopted daughter.

Lipscomb resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts until his death in 2011 from pneumonia.

For "his studies on the structure of boranes illuminating problems in chemical bonding" Lipscomb received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He first became interested in X-ray diffraction as a graduate student at Cal Tech (Ph.D. 1946 with Linus Pauling), when the field was in its infancy. The enigmatic relationship between structure and bonding in the boranes attracted his attention and, with collaborators at the University of Minnesota (1946-59) Lipscomb developed the vacuum-line and low-temperature X-ray techniques needed to handle these volatile and pyrophoric substances. He determined their structures and developed theory necessary to understand the three-center bonding in these electron-deficient molecules.

At Harvard (1959-present) Lipscomb published "Boron Hydrides" (1963), a landmark text for those working in the field. Later he co-authored "NMR Studies of Boron Hydrides and Related Compounds" (1963).

His research interests shifted toward biochemical studies. He established the X-ray structures of several proteins, among them carboxypeptidase A, glucagon, aspartate transcarbamylase and fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase, and bound ligands to their active sites to understand their enzymatic mechanisms.

Among his other awards and many honorary degrees is the ACS 1968 Award for Distinguished Service in the Advancement of Inorganic Chemistry.

William Lipscomb is a Chemist. William Lipscomb was born in in December 9, 1919. An American chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1976 for his studies on the structure of boranes. He was also a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences as well as a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-21 00:09:33

1107) Mansa Musa

Summary

Mansa Musa (romanized: Mansā Mūsā; r. c. 1312 – c. 1337) was the ninth mansa of the Mali Empire, which reached its territorial peak during his reign. Musa is known for his wealth and gift-giving, and has sometimes been called one of the wealthiest people in history, though this claim is difficult to evaluate.

At the time of Musa's ascension to the throne, Mali in large part consisted of the territory of the former Ghana Empire, which Mali had conquered. The Mali Empire consisted of land that is now part of Guinea, Senegal, Mauritania, The Gambia and the modern state of Mali.

Musa went on hajj to Mecca in 1324, traveling with an enormous entourage and a vast supply of gold. En route, he spent time in Cairo, where his lavish gift-giving is said to have noticeably affected the value of gold in Egypt and garnered the attention of the wider Muslim world.

Musa expanded the borders of the Mali Empire, in particular incorporating the cities of Gao and Timbuktu into its territory. He sought closer ties with the rest of the Muslim world, particularly the Mamluk Sultanate and Marinid Sultanate. He recruited scholars from the wider Muslim world to travel to Mali, such as the Andalusian poet Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, and helped establish Timbuktu as a center of Islamic learning. His reign is associated with numerous construction projects, including part of Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu. Musa's reign is often regarded as the zenith of Mali's power and prestige.

Details

Mūsā I of Mali, Mūsā also spelled Musa or Mousa, also called Kankan Mūsā or Mansa Musa, (died 1332/37?), was mansa (emperor) of the West African empire of Mali from 1307 (or 1312). Mansa Mūsā left a realm notable for its extent and riches—he built the Great Mosque at Timbuktu—but he is best remembered in the Middle East and Europe for the splendour of his pilgrimage to Mecca (1324).

Pilgrimage to Mecca

Mansa Mūsā, either the grandson or the grandnephew of Sundiata, the founder of his dynasty, came to the throne in 1307. In the 17th year of his reign (1324), he set out on his famous pilgrimage to Mecca. It was this pilgrimage that awakened the world to the stupendous wealth of Mali. Cairo and Mecca received this royal personage, whose glittering procession, in the superlatives employed by Arab chroniclers, almost put Africa’s sun to shame. Traveling from his capital of Niani on the upper Niger River to Walata (Oualâta, Mauritania) and on to Tuat (now in Algeria) before making his way to Cairo, Mansa Mūsā was accompanied by an impressive caravan consisting of 60,000 men including a personal retinue of 12,000 enslaved persons, all clad in brocade and Persian silk. The emperor himself rode on horseback and was directly preceded by 500 enslaved persons, each carrying a gold-adorned staff. In addition, Mansa Mūsā had a baggage train of 80 camels, each carrying 300 pounds of gold.

Mansa Mūsā’s prodigious generosity and piety, as well as the fine clothes and exemplary behaviour of his followers, did not fail to create a most-favourable impression. The Cairo that Mansa Mūsā visited was ruled by one of the greatest of the Mamlūk sultans, Al-Malik al-Nāṣir. The Black emperor’s great civility notwithstanding, the meeting between the two rulers might have ended in a serious diplomatic incident, for so absorbed was Mansa Mūsā in his religious observances that he was only with difficulty persuaded to pay a formal visit to the sultan. The historian al-ʿUmarī, who visited Cairo 12 years after the emperor’s visit, found the inhabitants of this city, with a population estimated at one million, still singing the praises of Mansa Mūsā. So lavish was the emperor in his spending that he flooded the Cairo market with gold, thereby causing such a decline in its value that the market some 12 years later had still not fully recovered.

Rulers of West African states had made pilgrimages to Mecca before Mansa Mūsā, but the effect of his flamboyant journey was to advertise both Mali and Mansa Mūsā well beyond the African continent and to stimulate a desire among the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa, and among many of European nations as well, to reach the source of this incredible wealth.

Conquest of Songhai kingdom

Mansa Mūsā, whose empire was one of the largest in the world at that time, is reported to have observed that it would take a year to travel from one end of his empire to the other. While this was probably an exaggeration, it is known that during his pilgrimage to Mecca one of his generals, Sagmandia (Sagaman-dir), extended the empire by capturing the Songhai capital of Gao. The Songhai kingdom measured several hundreds of miles across, so that the conquest meant the acquisition of a vast territory. The 14th-century traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭah noted that it took about four months to travel from the northern borders of the Mali empire to Niani in the south.

The emperor was so overjoyed by the new acquisition that he decided to delay his return to Niani and to visit Gao instead, there to receive the personal submission of the Songhai king and take the king’s two sons as hostages. At both Gao and Timbuktu, a Songhai city almost rivalling Gao in importance, Mansa Mūsā commissioned Abū Isḥāq al-Sāḥilī, a Granada poet and architect who had travelled with him from Mecca, to build mosques. The Gao mosque was built of burnt bricks, which had not, until then, been used as a material for building in West Africa.

Under Mansa Mūsā, Timbuktu grew to be a very important commercial city having caravan connections with Egypt and with all other important trade centres in North Africa. Side by side with the encouragement of trade and commerce, learning and the arts received royal patronage. Scholars who were mainly interested in history, Qurʾānic theology, and law were to make the mosque of Sankore in Timbuktu a teaching centre and to lay the foundations of the University of Sankore. Mansa Mūsā probably died in 1332.

Legacy

The organization and smooth administration of a purely African empire, the founding of the University of Sankore, the expansion of trade in Timbuktu, the architectural innovations in Gao, Timbuktu, and Niani and, indeed, throughout the whole of Mali and in the subsequent Songhai empire are all testimony to Mansa Mūsā’s superior administrative gifts. In addition, the moral and religious principles he had taught his subjects endured after his death.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-23 00:10:25

1108) Baruch Samuel Blumberg

Summary

Baruch Samuel Blumberg (July 28, 1925–April 5, 2011) — known as Barry Blumberg — was an American physician, geneticist, and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (with Daniel Carleton Gajdusek), for his work on the hepatitis B virus while an investigator at the NIH. He was president of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death.

Blumberg and Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for discovering "new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Blumberg identified the hepatitis B virus, and later developed its diagnostic test and vaccine.

Details

Baruch S. Blumberg, in full Baruch Samuel Blumberg, (born July 28, 1925, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died April 5, 2011, Moffett Field, near Mountain View, California), was an American research physician whose discovery of an antigen that provokes antibody response against hepatitis B led to the development by other researchers of a successful vaccine against the disease. He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with D. Carleton Gajdusek for their work on the origins and spread of infectious viral diseases.

Blumberg received an M.D. degree from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1951 and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford in 1957. In 1960 he became chief of the Geographic Medicine and Genetics Section of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. In 1964 he was appointed associate director for clinical research at the Institute for Cancer Research (later named the Fox Chase Cancer Center) in Philadelphia. He also served as professor of medicine, human genetics, and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1989 Blumberg became the first Fox Chase Distinguished Scientist, and he returned to Oxford to become master of Balliol College, a position that he held until 1994. Upon his return to the United States, he continued to teach as professor of medicine and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1999 to 2002 Blumberg served as director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Astrobiology Institute, where he embarked on investigations into the possibility of life on other planets. He held several different positions while at NASA, where he remained until 2004. The following year he was elected president of the American Philosophical Society; he held the post until his death.

In the early 1960s Blumberg was examining blood samples from widely diverse populations in an attempt to determine why the members of different ethnic and national groups vary widely in their responses and susceptibility to disease. In 1963 he discovered in the blood serum of an Australian Aboriginal person an antigen that he later (1967) determined to be part of a virus that causes hepatitis B, the most severe form of hepatitis. The discovery of that so-called Australian antigen, which causes the body to produce antibody responses to the virus, made it possible to screen blood donors for possible hepatitis B transmission. Further research indicated that the body’s development of an antibody against the Australian antigen was protective against further infection with the virus itself. In 1982 a safe and effective vaccine utilizing the Australian antigen was made commercially available in the United States. Blumberg’s book on his Nobel Prize-winning work, Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus, was published in 2002.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-24 00:13:15

1109) Philip W. Anderson

Summary

Philip Warren Anderson (December 13, 1923 – March 29, 2020) was an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism, symmetry breaking (including a paper in 1962 discussing symmetry breaking in particle physics, leading to the development of the Standard Model around 10 years later), and high-temperature superconductivity, and to the philosophy of science through his writings on emergent phenomena. Anderson is also responsible for naming the field of physics that is now known as condensed matter physics.

Details

Philip W. Anderson, in full Philip Warren Anderson, (born December 13, 1923, Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.—died March 29, 2020, Princeton, New Jersey), was an American physicist and corecipient, with John H. Van Vleck and Nevill F. Mott, of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on semiconductors, superconductivity, and magnetism.

Educated at Harvard University, Anderson received his doctorate in 1949. From 1949 to 1984 he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. From 1967 to 1975 he was professor of theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, and in 1975 he began teaching at Princeton University, where he later became professor emeritus. His research in solid-state physics made possible the development of inexpensive electronic switching and memory devices in computers. In 1982 he was awarded the National Medal of Science.

His writings included Concepts of Solids (1963) and Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics (1984). Anderson was a certified first degree–master of the Japanese board game go.

Philip Warren Anderson, who has died aged 96, led the development of condensed-matter physics. In 1977, he won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron localization, whereby disordered metals become insulators, and for his pioneering work on magnetism. His studies of superconductors led him to propose how the force carriers between subatomic particles, such as photons, acquire mass: the Anderson–Higgs mechanism is now part of the standard model of particle physics.

Quantum physics’ early triumphs persuaded some that advances would derive exclusively from reducing nature to its most fundamental particles. Anderson rejected this view, arguing that the emergent properties that develop when matter comes together are equally significant. He reasoned that, in science, each new level of complexity requires new fields, connecting physics, chemistry, biology, computer science and economics.

Anderson was born in 1923. The son of a plant pathologist, he grew up in Urbana–Champaign, Illinois, and developed an early passion for speed skating. At 16, he went to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he fell in love with physics. During the Second World War, he worked on radar at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He first learnt about quantum mechanics when a colleague gave him a precious text on it to repay a wartime loan. Returning to Harvard for graduate work, he studied the effects of pressure on the broadening of spectral lines, mentored by John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, one of those with whom he shared the Nobel prize.

In 1949, William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor, hired Anderson to join the theory group at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Here, Anderson first focused on magnetism. Quantum mechanics predicts that electrons carry tiny magnetic moments called spin. The attraction of fridge magnets results when spins orient in the same direction. By contrast, the read heads of hard disk drives rely on an antiferromagnet, in which the spin alternates direction on adjacent atomic layers. By combining the effects of electron repulsion and quantum mechanics, Anderson explained how iron atoms become magnetic, and accounted for the interactions that result in antiferromagnetism.

In 1958, Anderson discovered a remarkable parallel between magnetism and superconductivity. Whereas magnets concentrate fields, superconductors expel them, allowing them to levitate. Following John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schrieffer’s discovery that superconductivity results from electrons forming Cooper pairs, Anderson realized that these pairs are a kind of pseudospin. In a magnet, fluctuations in the magnetization propagate, forming a spin wave. Cooper pairs are charged, and pseudospin waves cause an electric current that interacts with the electromagnetic fields, which are carried by photons. When Anderson calculated the motion of photons inside a superconductor, he found that they acquired a mass.

Anderson realized that there were still-deeper parallels between superconductivity and particle physics. In 1962, he proposed a mechanism for subatomic force carriers called gauge bosons to acquire mass in a kind of cosmic superconductor, now known as the Higgs field after the British physicist Peter Higgs. Anderson’s work was prominently cited in Higgs’s 1964 paper predicting the existence of the Higgs boson.

Work on semiconductors at Bell Labs led Anderson to propose in 1957 that disorder — such as that caused by defects and impurities in a material — localizes electron waves, producing an insulator. Today, Anderson localization is recognized as a general property of all kinds of waves in disordered media. But the original idea was radical and took two decades and the contributions of many leading physicists to be developed in detail. Anderson also studied spin glasses, a type of random magnet that contains both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic interactions. Working with Sam Edwards at the University of Cambridge, UK, he modelled the glass’s capacity to ‘remember’ the history of its environment. The Edwards–Anderson model was an early forerunner of the neural networks used in modern machine learning.

Anderson had an artist’s eye for original interpretation, and worked closely with experimentalists to develop ideas that led to new fields of study. During a year in Japan in 1953, visiting the mathematical physicist Ryogo Kubo at the University of Tokyo, he became a master in the ancient game of Go. Just as he could instinctively see several moves beyond his opponent, he often reached an understanding of physics that was hard for others to grasp. Unusually intuitive for a theoretical physicist, he was able to reduce complex problems so they would succumb to a minimum of mathematics.

To the many younger physicists he mentored, with whom he generously shared inspiring ideas, he was something of a guru. He would invite them, and their families, for dinner, developing lasting friendships. He had a passion for the outdoors, spending Sundays gardening and clearing the woodland around his house.

From 1967 to 1975, Anderson was a visiting professor at Cambridge, where he was a close associate of Nevill Mott, the third of the 1977 Nobel prizewinners. In 1975, he took up a position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he devoted much of his research to high-temperature superconductivity (discovered in 1986 by Georg Bednorz and Alex Müller).

Anderson’s resonating valence bond (RVB) theory, proposed in 1987, once again borrows ideas from magnetism, positing that high-temperature superconductivity results from the injection of charge into an insulating quantum spin liquid. High-temperature superconductivity has still not been achieved, but many think that RVB theory contains the seeds of how it might be. Although Anderson has left us, his ideas are still many moves ahead.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-26 00:12:41

1110) Nevill Francis Mott

Summary

Sir Nevill Francis Mott (30 September 1905 – 8 August 1996) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors. The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes insulating.

Sir Nevill F. Mott, in full Sir Nevill Francis Mott, (born Sept. 30, 1905, Leeds, West Yorkshire, Eng.—died Aug. 8, 1996, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire), was an English physicist who shared (with P.W. Anderson and J.H. Van Vleck of the United States) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 for his independent researches on the magnetic and electrical properties of noncrystalline, or amorphous, semiconductors.

Mott earned bachelor’s (1927) and master’s (1930) degrees at the University of Cambridge. He became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Bristol in 1933. At Bristol his work in solid-state physics included studies of metals and metal alloys, semiconductors, and photographic emulsions. In 1938 Mott devised the theoretical description of the effect that light has on a photographic emulsion at the atomic level. In 1954 he became Cavendish professor of experimental physics at the University of Cambridge, retiring in 1971.

Mott’s studies of electrical conduction in various metals led him in the 1960s to explore the conductivity potential of amorphous materials, which are so called because their atomic structures are irregular or unstructured. He devised formulas describing the transitions that glass and other amorphous substances can make between electrically conductive (metallic) states and insulating (nonmetallic) states, thereby functioning as semiconductors. These glassy substances, which are relatively simple and cheap to produce, eventually replaced more expensive crystalline semiconductors in many electronic switching and memory devices, and this in turn led to more affordable personal computers, pocket calculators, copying machines, and other electronic devices. Mott was knighted in 1962.

Details

Nevill Francis Mott was born in Leeds, U.K., on September 30th, 1905. His parents, Charles Francis Mott and Lilian Mary (née) Reynolds, met when working under J.J. Thomson in the Cavendish Laboratory; his great grandfather was Sir John Richardson, the arctic explorer. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol and St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and theoretical physics. He started research in Cambridge under R.H. Fowler, in Copenhagen under Niels Bohr and in Göttingen under Max Born, and spent a year as a lecturer at Manchester with W.L. Bragg before accepting a lectureship at Cambridge. Here he worked on collision theory and nuclear problems in Rutherford’s laboratory. In 1933 he went to the chair of theoretical physics at Bristol, and under the influence of H. W. Skinner and H. Jones turned to the properties of metals and semiconductors. Work during his Bristol period before the war included a theory of transition metals, of rectification, hardness of alloys (with Nabarro) and of the photographic latent image (with Gurney). After a period of military research in London during the war, he became head of the Bristol physics department, publishing papers on low-temperature oxidation (with Cabrera) and the metal-insulator transition.

In 1954 he was appointed Cavendish Professor of Physics, a post which he held till 1971, serving on numerous government and university committees. The research for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize began about 1965. Some of his main books are “The Theory of Atomic Collisions” (with H.S.W. Massey), “Electronic Processes in Ionic Crystals” (with R.W. Gurney) and “Electronic Processes in Non-Crystalline Materials” (with E.A. Davis).

Outside research in physics he has taken a leading part in the reform of science education in the United Kingdom and is still active on committees about educational problems. He was chairman of a Pugwash meeting in Cambridge in 1965. He was chairman of the board and is now president of Taylor & Francis Ltd., scientific publishers since 1798. He was Master of his Cambridge college (Gonville and Caius) from 1959-66. He was President of the International Union of Physics from 1951 to 1957, and holds more than twenty honorary degrees, including Doctor of Technology at Linkoping.

In 1930 he married Ruth Eleanor Horder. They have two daughters and three grandchildren, Emma, Edmund and Cecily Crampin.

For the last ten years he has lived in a village, Aspley Guise, next door to his son-in-law and family. During this period he has written an autobiography “A Life in Science” (Taylor and Francis) and edited a book with several authors on a religion-science interface “Can Scientists Believe?” (James and James, London), together with many scientific papers, mainly in the last 3 years on high-temperature superconductors.

Sir Nevill F. Mott died on August 8, 1996.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-27 00:30:35

1111) Anatoly Karpov

Summary

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov (born May 23, 1951) is a Russian and former Soviet chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, ⁣and politician. He was the 12th World Chess Champion from 1975 to 1985, a three-time FIDE World Champion (1993, 1996, 1998), twice World Chess champion as a member of the USSR team (1985, 1989), and a six-time winner of Chess Olympiads as a member of the USSR team (1972, 1974, 1980, 1982, 1986, 1988). The International Association of Chess Press awarded him nine Chess "Oscars" (1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1984).

Karpov's tournament successes include over 160 first-place finishes. He had a peak Elo rating of 2780, and his 102 total months at world number one is the third-longest of all time, behind Magnus Carlsen and Garry Kasparov, since the inception of the FIDE ranking list in 1970.

Karpov is also an elected Member of the Duma in Russia. Since 2006, he has chaired the Commission for Ecological Safety and Environmental Protection of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, and since 2007, he has been a member of the Public Council under the Ministry of Defence.

Details

Anatoly Yevgenyevich Karpov, (born May 23, 1951, Zlatoust, Russia, U.S.S.R.), is a Russian chess master who dominated world competition from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

Karpov moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) with his family early in life. A child prodigy, he learned to play chess at the age of four and was rated a first-category player by the time he was nine. In 1969 he won the world junior championship at Stockholm, and a year later, at age 19, he became the world’s youngest grandmaster. An almost uninterrupted series of successes in tournaments during 1971–74 made him the official challenger to Bobby Fischer of the United States for the 1975 world chess championship. Karpov became world champion that year when Fischer refused to play a match with him under conditions set by the official world chess organization, the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE). Karpov narrowly retained his title against the Soviet defector Viktor Korchnoi in 1978 and beat Korchnoi again handily in 1981.

Karpov defended his title against his countryman Garry Kasparov in 1984–85. Karpov gained a commanding lead early in the series, but Kasparov eventually rallied. The match became a grueling endurance contest that stretched to 48 games before it was halted on the grounds that both players were exhausted. In their rematch during 1985, Karpov lost his title to Kasparov after 24 games had been played.

Karpov regained the FIDE world chess champion title in 1993 after Kasparov left FIDE to form a rival organization. In response, FIDE stripped Kasparov of his title, which Karpov regained by defeating the Dutch player Jan Timman in a FIDE championship match. Karpov defended his FIDE title in 1998, turning back Viswanathan Anand of India. The following year Karpov refused to defend his title in the FIDE world championship knockout tournament in Las Vegas, Nevada, which was won by Alexander Khalifman of Russia.

Though slim and of small stature, Karpov had notable powers of endurance. His style of play was without noticeable weaknesses; he tended to prefer positional play to tactical play, inexorably building up minute advantages through flawless but colourless maneuvers to achieve eventual victory. His book Anatoly Karpov’s Best Games (1996) offers readers an annotated collection of his games and his observations on the world of chess.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-28 00:08:53

1112) Garry Kasparov

Summary

Garry Kimovich Kasparov (born 13 April 1963) is a Russian chess grandmaster, former World Chess Champion, writer, political activist and commentator. His peak rating of 2851, achieved in 1999, was the highest recorded until being surpassed by Magnus Carlsen in 2013. From 1984 until his retirement in 2005, Kasparov was ranked world No. 1 for a record 255 months overall for his career, which outstrips all other previous and current chess ranking records. Kasparov also holds records for the most consecutive professional tournament victories and Chess Oscars.

Kasparov became the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion in 1985 at age 22 by defeating then-champion Anatoly Karpov. He held the official FIDE world title until 1993, when a dispute with FIDE led him to set up a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association. In 1997 he became the first world champion to lose a match to a computer under standard time controls when he lost to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue in a highly publicized match. He continued to hold the "Classical" World Chess Championship until his defeat by Vladimir Kramnik in 2000. Despite losing the title, he continued winning tournaments and was the world's highest-rated player when he retired from professional chess in 2005.

Since retiring, he devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin. In 2008, he announced an intention to run as a candidate in that year's Russian presidential race, but after encountering logistical problems in his campaign, for which he blamed "official obstruction", he withdrew. In the wake of the Russian mass protests that began in 2011, he announced in 2013 that he had left Russia for the immediate future out of fear of persecution. Following his flight from Russia, he had lived in New York City with his family. In 2014, he obtained Croatian citizenship, and has maintained a residence in Podstrana near Split.

Kasparov is currently chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and chairs its International Council. In 2017, he founded the Renew Democracy Initiative (RDI), an American political organization promoting and defending liberal democracy in the U.S. and abroad. He serves as chairman of the group. Kasparov is also a Security Ambassador for the software company Avast.

Details

Garry Kasparov, in full Garri Kimovich Kasparov, original name Garri Weinstein or Harry Weinstein, (born April 13, 1963, Baku, Azerbaijan, U.S.S.R. [now Baku, Azerbaijan]), is a Soviet-born chess master who became the world chess champion in 1985. Kasparov was the youngest world chess champion (at 22 years of age) and the first world chess champion to be defeated by a supercomputer in a competitive match.

Kasparov was born to a Jewish father and an Armenian mother. He began playing chess at age 6, by age 13 was the Soviet youth champion, and won his first international tournament at age 16 in 1979. Kasparov became an international grandmaster in 1980. From 1973 to 1978 he studied under former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik.

Kasparov first challenged the reigning world champion Anatoly Karpov in a 1984–85 match, after he survived the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; the international chess federation) series of elimination matches. Kasparov lost four out of the first nine games but then adopted a careful defensive stance, taking an extraordinarily long series of drawn games with the champion. With Kasparov finally having won three games from the exhausted Karpov, FIDE halted the series after 48 games, a decision protested by Kasparov. In the two players’ rematch in 1985, Kasparov narrowly defeated Karpov in a 24-game series and thereby became the youngest official champion in the history of the game.

In 1993 Kasparov and the English grandmaster Nigel Short left FIDE and formed a rival organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA). In response, FIDE stripped the title of world champion from Kasparov, who defeated Short that same year to become the PCA world champion. In 1995 he successfully defended his PCA title against Viswanathan Anand of India; the PCA disbanded in 1996.

In 1996 Kasparov defeated a powerful IBM custom-built chess computer known as Deep Blue in a match that attracted worldwide attention. Kasparov and the team of Deep Blue programmers agreed to have a rematch in 1997. Deep Blue’s intelligence was upgraded, and the machine prevailed. Kasparov resigned in the last game of the six-game match after 19 moves, granting the win to Deep Blue. In 2000 Kasparov lost a 16-game championship match to Vladimir Kramnik of Russia.

Kasparov retired from competitive chess in 2005, though not from involvement in chess. In particular, he produced an acclaimed series of books, Kasparov on My Great Predecessors (2003–06), that covered all the world chess champions from Wilhelm Steinitz through Karpov, as well as many other great players. In Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (2017), Kasparov offered details of his 1997 match with Deep Blue while praising technological progress. Following his retirement, Kasparov continued to participate in exhibition matches and to coach other players still active in competitive chess.

Kasparov also remained in the public eye with his decision in 2005 to start a political organization, the United Civil Front, to oppose Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin. In 2006 Kasparov was one of the prime movers behind a broad coalition of political parties that formed the Other Russia, a group held together by only one goal: ousting Putin from power. In 2007, following several protest marches organized by the coalition in which Kasparov and other participants were arrested, the Other Russia chose Kasparov as its candidate for the 2008 presidential election but was unable to nominate him by the deadline. He continued to be an outspoken critic of Putin, and in 2015 he published Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped. Kasparov also served as a contributing editor for The Wall Street Journal from 1991. He became a Croatian citizen in 2014.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-29 00:21:51

1113) Viswanathan Anand

Summary

Viswanathan Anand (born 11 December 1969) is an Indian chess grandmaster and a five-time world chess champion. He became the first grandmaster from India in 1988, and is one of the few players to have surpassed an Elo rating of 2800, a feat he first achieved in 2006.

Anand defeated Alexei Shirov in a six-game match to win the 2000 FIDE World Chess Championship, a title he held until 2002. He became the undisputed world champion in 2007, and defended his title against Vladimir Kramnik in 2008, Veselin Topalov in 2010, and Boris Gelfand in 2012. In 2013, he lost the title to challenger Magnus Carlsen, and he lost a rematch to Carlsen in 2014 after winning the 2014 Candidates Tournament.

The former World Chess Champion became India's first grandmaster in 1988. He held the FIDE World Chess Championship title from 2000 to 2002 and became the undisputed World Chess Champion in 2007. He defended his title against Vladimir Kramnik in 2008, Veselin Topalov in 2010 and Boris Gelfand in 2012 before finally losing the title to Magnus Carlsen in their World Chess Championship match in 2013. He won the Candidates Tournament the following year thus earning the right the challenge Carlsen. He is also a two-time World Rapid Champion. In 2006, he became the fourth player in history to cross 2800. He has been ranked No. 1 in the world for 21 months. Anand is considered a hero in India and Anand was also the first recipient of the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna Award, India's highest sporting honour. In 2007, he became the first sportsman to receive the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award.

Details

Viswanathan Anand, (born December 11, 1969, Madras [now Chennai], India), is a Indian chess master who won the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; international chess federation) world championship in 2000, 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2012.

Anand learned to play chess from his mother when he was 6 years old. By the time he was 14, Anand had won the Indian National Sub-Junior Championship with a perfect score of nine wins in nine games. At age 15 he became the youngest Indian to earn the international master title. The following year, he won the first of three consecutive national championships. At age 17 Anand became the first Asian to win a world chess title when he won the 1987 FIDE World Junior Championship, which is open to players who have not reached their 20th birthday by January 1 of the tournament year. Anand followed up that victory by earning the international grandmaster title in 1988. In 1991 Anand won his first major international chess tournament, finishing ahead of world champion Garry Kasparov and former world champion Anatoly Karpov. For the first time since the American Bobby Fischer abandoned the title in 1975, a non-Russian had emerged as a favourite to become world chess champion.

Throughout the 1990s Anand vied with Kasparov and Vladimir Kramnik for position at the top of FIDE’s official chess rating list. Anand’s first attempt to win FIDE’s world chess championship ended in 1991, when he lost in the quarter finals to Karpov in the FIDE Knockout World Chess Championship. Because of the unusual format of the event, involving a series of short matches with quick time controls, it was boycotted by many of the top players. The decision to use a knockout format sprang from FIDE’s difficulty in securing a prize fund to pay for the usual long sequence of championship matches following Kasparov’s defection from FIDE to form a new organization, the Professional Chess Association (PCA; 1993–96). Anand got his first title shot in 1995, when he was ranked number two behind Kasparov, but he lost the PCA championship match to Kasparov with a score of 1 win, 13 draws, and 4 losses. Anand’s next title shot came in 1998 against Karpov, who had reclaimed the FIDE title following Kasparov’s formation of the PCA. At the time of their match, Anand was ranked third, behind Kasparov and Kramnik but ahead of sixth-ranked Karpov. Anand first had to battle his way through the strongest sequence of knockout matches in chess history in order to play Karpov, who was directly seeded into the final match. The players drew their regular six-game match with two wins apiece and two draws, but Karpov won the two “quick chess” tie-break games to win the match.

Anand broke through in 2000, winning the FIDE World Chess Championship, which again featured knockout matches. Because of the tradition of having to beat the previous champion in a relatively long match, as well as misgivings about the short formats and quick time controls used in the knockout matches, most fans did not recognize Anand, or any of the FIDE champions since Kasparov, as legitimate. Anand finally achieved his place in the list of generally recognized world chess champions with his victory in the 2007 FIDE World Chess Championship, a double round-robin tournament against most of the best players in the world. (In a double round-robin, each participant plays two games, one with the white pieces and one with the black pieces, against every other player.)

Acceptance of the legitimacy of this tournament as a title event was the result of a series of agreements between FIDE and Kramnik, who had become the “classical” world chess champion by defeating Kasparov in a match. In the agreement, FIDE recognized Kramnik as the classical champion, Kramnik agreed to defend his classical title against a FIDE challenger in a unification match, and both sides agreed that the winner of that match would put the unified title on the line in FIDE’s next championship tournament. In addition, FIDE guaranteed Kramnik a championship match against the tournament winner should he fail to win the event. Although Kramnik officially conceded the championship title after losing the tournament to Anand, he later expressed some reservations, stating, “At present, I take the view that I have just lent Anand the title temporarily.”

Anand defended the title against Kramnik in a 12-game match scheduled from October 14 to November 2, 2008, in Bonn, Germany. The match ended October 29, 2008, as Anand drew the 11th game to win the match with a score of 3 wins, 7 draws, and 1 loss. Anand retained his title as world champion in 2010, defeating Veselin Topalov of Bulgaria in the 12th and final game of their match. In 2012 he faced Boris Gelfand of Israel in the championship match. The two men were tied after the 12th game, but Anand won the rapid tiebreaker round to remain world champion. Anand defended his world champion title in 2013 against Magnus Carlsen of Norway, who won the scheduled 12-game tournament after the tenth game. The next year Anand and Carlsen had a rematch for the world championship, which ended in victory for Carlsen.

Anand, who first earned the nickname of the “Lightning Kid” in India, was known for quick tactical calculations, which he displayed by winning numerous “speed chess” titles. In 1998 Anand published a collection of his games, Vishy Anand: My Best Games of Chess, which he expanded with new games in 2001.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-07-31 00:23:00

1114) Magnus Carlsen

Summary

Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen[a] (born 30 November 1990) is a Norwegian chess grandmaster who is the reigning five-time World Chess Champion. He is also a three-time World Rapid Chess Champion and five-time World Blitz Chess Champion. He has held the No. 1 position in the FIDE world chess rankings since 1 July 2011, and trails only Garry Kasparov in time spent as the highest rated player in the world. His peak rating of 2882 is the highest in history. He also holds the record for the longest unbeaten streak at the elite level in classical chess.

A chess prodigy, Carlsen finished first in the C group of the Corus chess tournament shortly after he turned 13, and earned the title of grandmaster a few months later. At 15, he won the Norwegian Chess Championship, and at 17, finished joint first in the top group of Corus. He surpassed a rating of 2800 at 18, the youngest at the time to do so. In 2010, at 19, he reached No. 1 in the FIDE world rankings, the youngest person ever to do so.

Carlsen became World Chess Champion in 2013 by defeating Viswanathan Anand. He retained his title against Anand the following year, and won both the 2014 World Rapid Championship and World Blitz Championship, becoming the first player to hold all three titles simultaneously, a feat which he repeated in 2019. He defended his classical world title against Sergey Karjakin in 2016, against Fabiano Caruana in 2018, and against Ian Nepomniachtchi in 2021. In 2022, he stated that he will not defend his title against Nepomniachtchi the following year.

Known for his attacking style as a teen, Carlsen has since developed into a universal player. He uses a variety of openings to make it harder for opponents to prepare against him and reduce the utility of pre-game computer analysis. He has stated the middlegame is his favourite part of the game as it "comes down to pure chess". His positional mastery and endgame prowess have drawn comparisons to former world champions Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer, Vasily Smyslov and José Raúl Capablanca.

Details

Magnus Carlsen, in full Sven Magnus Øen Carlsen, (born November 30, 1990, Tønsberg, Norway), is a Norwegian chess player who in 2013 at age 22 became the second youngest world chess champion.

Carlsen’s father first taught him how to play chess when he was five years old. He played in his first tournament at the age of eight. Carlsen finished second in the boys’ under-12 division at the 2002 Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE) World Youth Chess Championship, held in Iráklion, Greece.

In January 2004 he won his first tournament, at Wijk aan Zee, Netherlands. Although he was playing in the lowest-rated group against adult players, his domination of the tournament, best exemplified in a game won with a 29-move checkmate, established him as a player with enormous potential and led American chess player Lubomir Kavalek to dub him the “Mozart of chess.” In March of the same year, at a blitz chess tournament (where the game is played at a much faster pace than normal) in Reykjavík, Iceland, he defeated former world champion Anatoly Karpov and drew a game against another former champion, Garry Kasparov. He became a grandmaster after finishing in second place at the Dubai Open Chess Championship in April 2004.

Carlsen came in 10th at the 2005 World Chess Cup in Khanty-Mansiysk, Russia, thus becoming the youngest player to earn a place at the Candidate Matches in Elista, Russia, in 2007, where the top four players received a spot at the FIDE World Chess Championship later that year in Mexico City. However, he was defeated in the first round by Armenian chess player Levon Aronian (who went on to place seventh at the world championship).

Carlsen’s victory at the Pearl Spring Chess Tournament in Nanjing, China, in October 2009 with 8 out of a possible 10 points was considered one of the all-time best tournament performances. In November he won the World Blitz Championship (in which players are given a total of 3 minutes of time with an additional 2 seconds per move) in Moscow.

In January 2010 FIDE announced that Carlsen was the top player in the world. He had recently turned 19 and was thus the youngest player to become number one. That year he was hired by the Dutch clothing company G-Star to model its denim clothing in an advertising campaign. Carlsen surprised the chess world in November 2010, when he decided to forgo the 2011 Candidate Matches to select a challenger to play against Indian chess player Viswanathan Anand for the world championship, arguing that the championship structure was flawed and that the reigning champion should not receive an automatic spot in the final round.

However, Carlsen participated in the 2013 Candidates Tournament in London. Despite losing in the final round to Russian player Peter Svidler, he accumulated enough wins earlier in the tournament to best Russian player Vladimir Kramnik (who had the same number of points) and secure the challenger spot against Anand. In November 2013 Carlsen defeated Anand in 10 games at the world championship match in Chennai, India, with a score of 3 wins and 7 draws. Carlsen was the second youngest player (after Kasparov) to win the world title. He successfully defended his title in a rematch against Anand in 2014 in Sochi, Russia, with a score of 3 wins, 7 draws, and 1 loss. That same year he won the World Rapid Championship (in which players are given a total of 15 minutes of time with an additional 10 seconds per move) in Dubai, and he won that title again in 2015 in Berlin.

At the 2016 world championship in New York City, Carlsen was tied against Russian player Sergey Karjakin after 12 games. He defeated Karjakin by winning 2 games in a 4-game rapid round, in which each player had only 25 minutes on the clock, with 10 seconds added after each move. Carlsen clinched his victory with style on the last move of game 4 by sacrificing his queen to set up checkmate on the next move. He again successfully defended his title at the 2018 world championship in London. He tied against American player Fabiano Caruana after 12 games but won 3 games in the tie-breaking rapid round. In 2019 Carlsen won the rapid and blitz titles in Moscow, thereby becoming the first person to hold all three FIDE titles: blitz, rapid, and regular.

From 2018 to 2020 Carlsen had the longest undefeated streak in chess, either winning or drawing 125 games. He won the world championship title for the fifth time, against Russian player Ian Nepomniachtchi, in Dubai in 2021. He won 4 of 11 games and tied the rest. His first victory in the series, in the sixth game, was the longest game ever played in a world chess championship and lasted 136 moves over 7 hours and 45 minutes.

In July 2022 Carlsen announced that he would not defend his championship title in 2023. He said that he was not motivated to defend his title but that he would continue to play competitive chess.

From the very beginning of his career, Carlsen impressed his coaches with a prodigious memory, which he has used in his career to play a large variety of openings. He favours a positional style of play in which overall control of the board, rather than attacking an opponent’s pieces, is of paramount importance.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-02 00:30:56

1115) Vladimir Kramnik

Summary

Vladimir Borisovich Kramnik (born 25 June 1975) is a Russian chess grandmaster. He was the Classical World Chess Champion from 2000 to 2006, and the undisputed World Chess Champion from 2006 to 2007. He has won three team gold medals and three individual medals at Chess Olympiads.

In 2000, Kramnik defeated Garry Kasparov and became the Classical World Chess Champion. He defended his title in 2004 against Peter Leko, and defeated the reigning FIDE World Champion Veselin Topalov in a unification match in 2006. As a result, Kramnik became the first undisputed World Champion, holding both the FIDE and Classical titles, since Kasparov split from FIDE in 1993.

In 2007, Kramnik lost the title to Viswanathan Anand, who won the World Chess Championship 2007 tournament ahead of Kramnik. He challenged Anand at the World Chess Championship 2008 to regain his title, but lost. Nonetheless, he remained a top player; he reached a peak rating of 2817 in October 2016, which makes him the joint-eighth highest-rated player of all time.

Kramnik publicly announced his retirement as a professional chess player in January 2019. He stated he intends to focus on projects relating to chess for children and education.

Details

Vladimir Kramnik, (born June 25, 1975, Tuapse, Russia, U.S.S.R.), is a Russian international chess grandmaster who defeated his countryman Garry Kasparov to win the Professional Chess Association world championship. The match was held in London from October 8 to November 2, 2000, with Kramnik winning 2 games, drawing 13, and losing none.

Kramnik’s father was an artist and his mother a music teacher. Although no one in his home played serious chess, Kramnik learned to play when he was four years old from his father. Kramnik was fascinated by the game and began taking instruction at the local Pioneers (a Soviet youth organization) at the age of five, becoming champion of Tuapse at seven. At the age of 11 he left the ranks of first category players and became a “candidate” master. More important, he came to the attention of the famous Soviet Chess School and its headmaster, former world champion Mikhail Botvinnik. Only the most talented pupils in the Soviet Union were invited to study chess there, and Kramnik made rapid progress.

The great players whose games most influenced Kramnik were the former world champions José Capablanca, Alexander Alekhine, Bobby Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, and Garry Kasparov. Kasparov lectured at the school on occasion, and Kramnik was struck by the fact that Karpov and Kasparov played chess completely differently yet were both champions. He came to the conclusion that it was necessary to study a broad range of chess positions in order to become a well-rounded player.

Kramnik had good success in junior tournaments during his early years, winning the World Under 18 Championship in 1991. However, the first big break of his chess career came in 1992, and the man who gave it to him was Kasparov. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russia looked to have a real contest for the first time in decades at the upcoming Chess Olympiad. Kasparov led the team, but he shocked the Russian chess establishment by insisting that the 16-year-old Kramnik be allowed to play. (The Men’s Olympiad traditionally consists of a series of national matches between four of each nation’s six available players. At the time, Kramnik had not even earned the grandmaster title, and Russia had dozens of grandmasters.) Nevertheless, the weight of the world champion’s opinion was such that Kramnik was included on the team. Kramnik justified his inclusion by scoring a stunning eight wins and one draw out of nine games. The Russian team swept to victory once again, and Kramnik won an individual gold medal for best score, which was awarded to him on his 17th birthday.

The years from 1992 to 2000 saw Kramnik move into the world’s elite by winning outright or tying for first or second place at numerous international chess tournaments. Many chess aficionados, including Kasparov, considered Kramnik the most likely heir to the chess throne. Nevertheless, Kramnik’s defeat of Kasparov was made more stunning because he had previously shown little aptitude for match play, although he had served as Kasparov’s training partner in the past. The difference in London seems to have been meticulous “opening” preparation and development of the right attitude. After winning the championship match, Kramnik said of Kasparov, “Most of the players tend to be afraid of him when they shouldn’t. I can see it in their eyes when they come to play him. They just want to make some moves and stop the clock. I tell you, this isn’t the way to play against Garry!”

Following negotiations with the Fédération Internationale des Échecs (FIDE; the international chess federation), which recognized Kramnik as the “classical” world chess champion, he agreed to a unification match in 2006 with FIDE’s challenger, the Bulgarian grandmaster Veselin Topalov, who had won the 2005 FIDE World Championship Tournament. Kramnik earned the match victory with five wins, seven draws, and four losses, with one of the losses by way of a forfeit during an acrimonious dispute, known as “toilet gate,” over unsubstantiated accusations that he was somehow cheating during his very frequent visits to one of the player’s restrooms. As part of the unification contract, the winner agreed to risk the consolidated title in FIDE’s 2007 World Championship Tournament. Topalov and several other top grandmasters who had not previously qualified for this tournament were excluded from participating, which caused considerable animosity in the chess community. In addition, some individuals were incensed that Kramnik was guaranteed a title rematch should he not win the tournament. Viswanathan Anand of India, a former FIDE champion and perennial challenger for the top chess rating, won the tournament and defended the title against Kramnik in a 12-game match scheduled from October 14 to November 2, 2008, in Bonn, Germany. The match ended October 29, 2008, as the players drew the 11th game to give Anand the victory with a score of 3 wins, 7 draws, and 1 loss.

Kramnik’s autobiography, Kramnik: My Life and Games, was published in 2000.

Math Is Fun Forum

#1126 2022-06-21 22:08:44

Re: crème de la crème

#1127 2022-06-22 21:35:03

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