André Lichnerowicz

André Lichnerowicz was a noted French differential geometer and mathematical physicist of Polish descent.

Theodor Paleologu

Theodor Paleologu is a Romanian historian, diplomat and politician. An independent who was formerly a member of the National Liberal Party (PNL), the People's Movement Party (PMP) and the Democratic Liberal Party (PD-L), he was a member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies for Bucharest from 2008 to 2016. Additionally, in the first two Emil Boc cabinets, from December 2008 to December 2009 he was Minister of Culture, Religious Affairs and Cultural Heritage.

Alexandru Paleologu

Alexandru Paleologu was a Romanian essayist, literary critic, diplomat and politician.

Karl-Heinz Funke

Karl-Heinz Funke is a German politician. He was from 1998 to 2001 Federal Minister of Food, Agriculture and Forestry, and a local politician in the district of Friesland in Lower Saxony.

Heinz Fischer

Heinz Fischer is an Austrian politician. He took office as 11th President of Austria on 8 July 2004 and was re-elected for a second and last term on 25 April 2010, leaving office on 8 July 2016. Fischer previously served as Minister of Science from 1983 to 1987 and as President of the National Council of Austria from 1990 to 2002. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ), he suspended his party membership for the duration of his presidency.

Robert W. Wood

Robert Williams Wood was an American physicist and inventor. He is often cited as being a pivotal contributor to the field of optics and a pioneer of infrared and ultraviolet photography. Wood's patents and theoretical work shed much light on the nature and physics of ultra-violet radiation, and made possible the myriad uses of UV-fluorescence which became popular after World War I.

Gianni Brera

Giovanni Luigi "Gianni" Brera was an Italian sports journalist and novelist.


Brera was born in San Zenone al Po, near Pavia, the son of Carlo, a tailor, and Marietta Ghisoni. Among his ancestors was a Hungarian great-grandmother who married a Lombard sergeant of the Imperial Austrian Army.

He obtained his degree in Political Sciences at Pavia University in 1943, while on leave from his post as Lieutenant of the paratrooper division "Folgore". In late spring 1944 he joined the Italian Resistance movement and fought in the Ossola Valley. He took pride in having lived through World War II without ever shooting another human being.

In 1943 he married Rina Gramegna (a teacher, 1920–2000) and had four sons: Franco (1944-1944), Carlo (a painter, 1946–1994), Paolo (a novelist and journalist, 1949-), Franco (a musician, 1951-).

When he was discharged in 1945, he started working for La Gazzetta dello Sport (Italy's first sports daily), eventually becoming Editor-in-Chief in 1949, the youngest-ever Editor-in-Chief of a national newspaper in Italy.

Brera wrote for La Gazzetta dello Sport, Il Guerin Sportivo, Il Giorno, Il Giornale, La Repubblica and several other publications. His articles were translated into several European languages. He often referred to himself as "Gioannbrerafucarlo" (a reference to Italy's long-foregone system of including the father's name in a citizen's complete name).

He also wrote a number of books (handbooks, essays and fictional works), a theatre play, and a couple of radio plays.

Brera died at middle-way between Codogno and Casalpusterlengo, in 1992, from injuries suffered in a car accident.

Raymond Queneau

Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), notable for his wit and cynical humor.

Kees van Dongen

Cornelis Theodorus Maria 'Kees' van Dongen was a Dutch-French painter who was one of the leading Fauves. Van Dongen's early work was influenced by the Hague School and symbolism and it evolved gradually into a rough pointillist style. From 1905 onwards - when he took part at the controversial 1905 Salon d'Automne exhibition - his style became more and more radical in its use of form and colour. The paintings he made in the period of 1905-1910 are considered by some to be his most important works. The themes of his work from that period are predominantly centered around the nightlife; he paints dancers, singers, masquerades and theatre. Van Dongen gained a reputation for his sensuous - at times garish - portraits of especially women.

Otto Kahn

Otto Hermann Kahn was a German-born American investment banker, collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts.

Johann Jaun

Johann Jaun was a mountaineer and Swiss guide, considered the most worthy successor of Melchior Anderegg.

Boris Artzybasheff

Boris Artzybasheff was an American illustrator of Russian origin active in the United States, notable for his strongly worked and often surreal designs.

Melchior Anderegg

Melchior Anderegg was a Swiss mountain guide and the first ascensionist of many prominent mountains in the western Alps during the golden and silver ages of alpinism. His clients were mostly British, the most famous of whom was Leslie Stephen, the writer, critic and mountaineer; Anderegg also climbed extensively with members of the Walker family, including Horace Walker and Lucy Walker, and with Florence Crauford Grove. His cousin Jakob Anderegg was also a well-known guide.

Michel Déon

Michel Déon was a French novelist and literary columnist. He published over 50 works and was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Interallié for his 1970 novel, Les Poneys sauvages (The Wild Ponies). Déon's 1973 novel Un taxi mauve received the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française. His novels have been translated into numerous languages.

Reuben Nakian

Reuben Nakian was an American sculptor and teacher of Armenian extraction. His recurring themes are from Greek and Roman mythology. Noted works include Leda and the Swan, The Rape of Lucrece, Hecuba, and The Birth of Venus. He was also commissioned to create portraits of Roosevelt's cabinet in the 1930s.

Gaston Monmousseau

Gaston Monmousseau was a French railway worker, trade union leader, politician and author, from a rural working-class background. He became an anarcho-syndicalist, then a communist, and played a leading role in the French Communist Party and in the national trade union movement both before and after World War II (1939–45).

León Rozitchner

León Rozitchner was a philosopher, writer, professor and Argentine intellectual. He taught at the University of Buenos Aires and was a teacher at the Free Faculty of Rosario. He is well known in his country for his commitment to the social and cultural context, and spoke primarily in the philosophical field, as well as the psychoanalytic one.

Jean-Pierre Otte

Jean-Pierre Otte is a Belgian writer and painter.

Pierre Dubois

Pierre Dubois is a French author, Franco-Belgian comics (bande dessinée) scriptwriter, storyteller and lecturer at the origin of renewed interest in fairies and little people in France.

Lyonel Trouillot

Lyonel Trouillot is a novelist and poet in French and Haitian Creole, a journalist and a professor of French and Creole literature in Port-au-Prince.

Paul Conrad

Paul Francis Conrad was an American political cartoonist and winner of three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning. In the span of a career lasting five decades, Conrad provided a critical perspective on eleven presidential administrations in the United States. He is best known for his work as the chief editorial cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times during a time when the newspaper was in transition under the direction of publisher Otis Chandler, who recruited Conrad from the Denver Post.

At the conservative Times, Conrad brought a more liberal editorial perspective that readers both celebrated and criticized; he was also respected for his talent and his ability to speak truth to power. On a weekly basis, Conrad addressed the social justice issues of the day—poverty in America, movements for civil rights, the Vietnam War, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and corporate and political corruption were leading topics. 

Larry Gales

Lawrence Bernard Gales was an American jazz double-bassist.

Gales began playing bass at age 11, and attended the Manhattan School of Music in the late 1950s. In that decade and the beginning of the next he worked with J.C. Heard, Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis, Johnny Griffin, Herbie Mann, Junior Mance, and Joe Williams. From 1964 to 1969 he was a member of the Thelonious Monk Quartet, where he recorded extensively and toured worldwide. After 1969, Gales relocated to Los Angeles, where he worked frequently on the local scene with Erroll Garner, Willie Bobo, Red Rodney, Sweets Edison, Benny Carter, Blue Mitchell, Clark Terry, and Kenny Burrell. He also recorded with Buddy Tate, Bennie Green, Sonny Stitt, Mary Lou Williams, Jimmy Smith, Sonny Criss, and Big Joe Turner, among others. His first session as a leader was released in 1990 on Candid Records; comprising one original and five Thelonious Monk tunes, the album was entitled A Message From Monk

Cesare Pascarella

Cesare Pascarella was an Italian dialect poet and a painter.

Pascarella was born in Rome and initially was a painter. His literary activity began in 1881 with the publication of sonnets in Romanesco dialect. In the same period he made friends with Gabriele D'Annunzio. He made a series of journeys through Africa, India and the Americas in 1882–1885. On his return to Rome he published the collection Villa Glori, who was hailed as a masterwork by Giosuè Carducci. Also well received was the imaginative La scoperta dell'America (1893).

In 1905 Pascarella began Storia nostra, a history of Rome which was planned as a sequence of 350 sonnets, but was left unfinished after 270 had been written.

He founded in 1904 with other artists, among which Giuseppe Ferrari, the group "XXV della campagna romana."

He was appointed to the Royal Academy of Italy in 1930.

Curt Goetz

Curt Goetz was a Swiss German writer, actor and film director.

Kurt Walter Götz was born in Mainz, Germany as the son of the Swiss wine examiner Bernhard Götz, and his German wife of Italian and French descent, Selma (born Rocco). His father died in 1890. His mother then went with the two-year-old Curt to Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, where she managed a private clinic.

In 1906 he completed the City High School in Halle, where he had played Franz Moor in The Robbers by Schiller.

His mother remarried, and his stepfather encouraged and financed his first steps in the theatre. He studied acting under the Berlin actor Emanuel Reicher, and in 1907 he made his stage debut at the Stadttheater in Rostock. In Rostock, he also wrote his first sketches for the stage. He then played at theatres in Nuremberg and then went to Berlin. In 1912 he played the lead in the silent movie Black Blood, directed by Harry Piel.

In 1914 he married Erna Nitter, whom he divorced in 1917. Goetz continued acting in silent movies, mainly thrillers, for example, Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I Don't Want To Be A Mann), directed by Ernst Lubitsch in 1918. One of his colleagues from that time was the actor Max Landa.

In 1923 he married Valérie von Martens, whom he had got to know while acting in Vienna, in Berlin. He started going on tour with Valérie, acting with her in his own productions.

In 1939 he went to Hollywood to study film-making, and decided to remain there, along with Valérie, when war broke out. He worked with the director Reinhold Schunzel, among others, and several of his comedies were turned into films. Goetz obtained a contract with MGM and worked on a number of film scripts. After the success of the Greta Garbo movie Two-Faced Woman he was offered a 5-year contract. However, he refused this, saying he had had enough experience with the American film-industry. He and Valérie bought a chicken-farm in Van Nuys, California and proceeded (successfully) to breed chickens.

In California Goetz drafted his tale Tatjana and a new version of his Hokuspokus. He also re-worked an older play into The House in Montevideo, which he successfully produced in the Playhouse Theatre on Broadway in 1945.

They returned to Europe in 1945, living in Switzerland by Lake Thun, where Goetz wrote some successful novels. The couple later moved to Liechtenstein. He died in Grabs, St. Gallen, on September 12, 1960.

J. M. Simmel

Johannes Mario Simmel, also known as J. M. Simmel, was an Austrian writer.

He was born in Vienna and grew up in Austria and England. He was trained as a chemical engineer and worked in research from 1943 to the end of World War II. After the end of the war, he worked as a translator for the American military government and published reviews and stories in the Vienna Welt am Abend. Starting in 1950, he worked as a reporter for the Munich illustrated Quick in Europe and America.

He wrote a number of screenplays and novels, which have sold tens of millions of copies. Many of his novels were successfully filmed in the 1960s and 1970s. He won numerous prizes, including the Award of Excellence of the Society of Writers of the UN. Important issues in his novels are a fervent pacifism as well as the relativity of good and bad. Several novels are said to have a true background, possibly autobiographic.

According to his Swiss lawyer, Simmel died on 1 January 2009 in Lucerne, at 84 years of age.

Felix Timmermans

Leopold Maximiliaan Felix Timmermans is a much translated author of Flanders. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times.

Timmermans was born in the Belgian city of Lier, as the thirteenth of fourteen children. He died in Lier at age 60. He was an autodidact, and wrote plays, historical novels, religious works, and poems. His best-known book is Pallieter (1916). Timmermans also wrote under the pen-name Polleke van Mher. He was a painter and drawer as well as an author.

During the first years of the Second World War, Timmermans was editor of the Flemish nationalist Volk. He also attended meetings of the Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung (European Writers' League), which was initiated by Joseph Goebbels. Because of this, and because of the Rembrandt prize he received in 1942 from the University of Hamburg, he was wrongly seen as a collaborator, which may have caused health problems and premature death.

Jean-Luc Marion

Jean-Luc Marion is a French historian of philosophy, phenomenologist, and Roman Catholic theologian.

Marion is a former student of Jacques Derrida whose work is informed by patristic and mystical theology, phenomenology, and modern philosophy. Much of his academic work has dealt with Descartes and phenomenologists like Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl, but also religion. God Without Being, for example, is concerned predominantly with an analysis of idolatry, a theme strongly linked in Marion's work with love and the gift, which is a concept also explored at length by Derrida.

Jean-Rodolphe de Salis

Jean-Rodolphe de Salis was a historian, essayist, journalist, political columnist and Swiss professor.

André Héléna

André Héléna was a French writer who spent most of his life in Leucate (southern France) on the Mediterranean coast. 

Philip José Farmer

Philip José Farmer was an American author known for his science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories.

Farmer is best known for his sequences of novels, especially the World of Tiers (1965–93) and Riverworld (1971–83) series. He is noted for the pioneering use of sexual and religious themes in his work, his fascination for, and reworking of, the lore of celebrated pulp heroes, and occasional tongue-in-cheek pseudonymous works written as if by fictional characters. Farmer often mixed real and classic fictional characters and worlds and real and fake authors as epitomized by his Wold Newton family group of books. These tie all classic fictional characters together as real people and blood relatives resulting from an alien conspiracy. Such works as The Other Log of Phileas Fogg (1973) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973) are early examples of literary mashup.

Farmer was born in North Terre Haute, Indiana. According to colleague Frederik Pohl, his middle name was in honor of an aunt, Josie. Farmer grew up in Peoria, Illinois, where he attended Peoria High School. His father was a civil engineer and a supervisor for the local power company. A voracious reader as a boy, Farmer said he resolved to become a writer in the fourth grade. He became an agnostic at the age of 14. At age 23, in 1941, he married and eventually fathered a son and a daughter. After washing out of flight training in World War II, he went to work in a local steel mill. He continued his education, however, earning a bachelor's degree in English from Bradley University in 1950.

Farmer had his first literary success when his novella The Lovers was published by Samuel Mines in Startling Stories, August 1952. It features a sexual relationship between a human and an extraterrestrial and he won the next Hugo Award as "most promising new writer" (his first of three Hugos). Thus encouraged, he quit his job to become a full-time writer, entered a publisher's contest, and promptly won the $4,000 first prize for a novel, Owe for the Flesh, that contained the germ of his later Riverworld series. But the book was not published and Farmer did not get the money. Literary success did not translate into financial security so he left Peoria in 1956 to launch a career as a technical writer. He spent the next 14 years working in that capacity for various defense contractors, from Syracuse, New York to Los Angeles, while writing science fiction in his spare time.

He won a second Hugo for the 1967 novella Riders of the Purple Wage, a pastiche of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as well as a satire on a futuristic, cradle-to-grave welfare state. Reinvigorated, Farmer became a full-time writer again in 1969. Upon moving back to Peoria in 1970, he entered his most prolific period, publishing 25 books in 10 years. His novel To Your Scattered Bodies Go (a reworked, previously unpublished version of the prize-winning first novel of 20 years before) won him his third Hugo in 1971. A 1975 novel, Venus on the Half-Shell, created a stir in the larger literary community and media. It purported to be written in the first person by one “Kilgore Trout,” a fictional character appearing as an underappreciated science fiction writer in several of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels. The escapade did not please Vonnegut when some reviewers not only concluded that it had been written by Vonnegut himself, but that it was a worthy addition to his works. Farmer did have permission from Vonnegut to write the book, though Vonnegut later said he regretted giving permission.


In 2001 Farmer won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement and the Science Fiction Writers of America made him its 19th SFWA Grand Master in the same year.

Farmer died on February 25, 2009.

Jean de Brunhoff

Jean de Brunhoff was a French writer and illustrator remembered for creating the Babar books, the first of which appeared in 1931.

De Brunhoff was the fourth and youngest child of Maurice de Brunhoff, a publisher, and his wife Marguerite. He attended Protestant schools, including the prestigious École Alsacienne. Brunhoff joined the army and reached the front lines when World War I was almost over. Afterwards, he decided to be a professional artist and studied painting at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. In 1924 he married Cécile Sabouraud, a talented pianist, and they had two sons Laurent and Mathieu in 1925 and 1926; a third son, Thierry, was born nine years later.

The Babar books began as a bedtime story that Cécile de Brunhoff invented for their children, Mathieu and Laurent, when they were four and five years old, respectively. She was trying to comfort Mathieu, who was sick. He turned it into a picture book, with text, which was published by a family-run publishing house, Le Jardin des Modes. Originally, it was planned that the book's title page would describe the story as told by Jean and Cécile de Brunhoff. However, she had her name removed. Due to the role she played in the genesis of the Babar story, many sources continue to refer to her as the creator of the Babar story.

After the first book Histoire de Babar (The Story of Babar), six more titles followed before Jean de Brunhoff died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. He was buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

Henry de Ségogne

Henry de Ségogne was a mountaineer most notably the leader of the first French expedition to the Himalayas in 1936, a senior civil servant (State Council, Commissioner General for Tourism) and a pioneer in the protection of the landscape and cultural heritage in La France.

Michel-Clément Payot

Michel-Clément Payot was a Chamoniard mountain guide.

A trained farrier, Michel Payot was one of the three sons of Jean Payot, a farmer and guide (he had notably guided Rodolphe Töpffer, Eugene de Savoie, Marshal Auguste Marmont and Don Pedro, Emperor of Brazil. His brothers Frederick and Alphonse were also guides. In 1858 he was chosen as porter by the guide Auguste Balmat to accompany to Mont Blanc John Tyndall and Alfred Wills, two British celebrities in the world of mountaineering. He joined the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix in 1863. In 1870, he met the English geologist James Eccles. In 1877 he made the first ascent of the southern slopes of Mont Blanc, July 30 and 31, by the ridge of Peuterey. The following year, with Eccles, he made the second ascent of Fremont Peak in the Rocky Mountains.

Louis Neltner

Louis Neltner was a French geologist, director of the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines of Saint-Etienne from 1944 to 1971, a climber and an explorer. He was also part of the United Resistance Movements during WWII.

Neltner was born in Toulouse on July 9, 1903. He was a student of Pierre Termier at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris. He was a member of the first French expedition to the Himalayas (Karakoram) in 1936, led by Henry de Segogne, alongside Pierre Allain, Marcel Ichac, and Jean Carle.

Netlner died in Lyon on January 23, 1985.

Alexander Burgener

Alexander Burgener was a Swiss mountain guide and the first ascentionist of many mountains and new routes in the western Alps during the silver age of alpinism.

Together with Albert Mummery, he made the first ascent of the Zmuttgrat on the Matterhorn on September 3, 1879, and of the Grands Charmoz (1880) and the Aiguille du Grépon in the Mont Blanc Massif (August 5, 1881). With another British alpinist, Clinton Thomas Dent, he made the first ascent of the Lenzspitze (August 1870) and the Grand Dru (September 12, 1878),

He was killed by an avalanche on July 8, 1910 near the Berglihütte in the Bernese Alps. Six other climbers died in the avalanche, including Burgener's son Adolf.

Michel Croz

Michel Auguste Croz was a French mountain guide and the first ascentionist of many mountains in the western Alps during the golden age of alpinism. He is chiefly remembered for his death on the first ascent of the Matterhorn and for his climbing partnership (as a guide) with Edward Whymper.

Fernand Oury

Fernand Oury was a French pedagogue and creator of institutional pedagogy.

As a teacher in 1950, Oury reacted to what he saw as the deplorable state of the French educational system: "overloaded classes", "colossal school sizes", and "absurd regulations". Along with fellow educator Célestin Freinet, he worked with school leadership to reform organizational practice within urban schools. By 1958, following on the initiatives of Institutional Psychotherapy led by his brother Jean Oury, François Tosquelles, and Lucien Bonnafe, Fernand Oury founded the discipline of institutional pedagogy, the object of which would be the progressive analysis of liberating means of education. Perhaps the most well-known name in the field of institutional pedagogy, Oury maintained an open relationship with respect to defining the scope and practice of teaching.

By 1966, Oury and psychoanalyst Aïda Vasquez, along with the Groupe Techniques Éducatives (GET) begin to work out the practical and theoretical instruments institutional pedogagy would develop as a practice. This was accomplished primarily through the elaboration of monographs. The practice of publishing articles of analysis, case-studies and critiques also began to be encouraged.

In 1978, Oury and others established CEPI, the Collective of Teams of Institutional Pedagogy (French Le Collectif des Équipes de Pédagogie Institutionnelle), and the MPI, Association for the Support of Institutional Pedogagy (Association Maintenant la Pédagogie Institutionnelle), both still in existence. Their primary tasks are the publication and dissemination of institutional pedagogic literature, reports, analyses and case-studies, the promotion and activism in favour of progressive pedagogic practices, and the education of teachers, social workers and others in Institutional Pedagogic practices.

He recommended and practiced a "school of the people" methodology, in which children were no longer passive receivers, but actively participated in the management of their learning, methods, forms of relations and the everyday life of the class: all of which he called institutions (in the sociological sense). Some of the notable elements of this methodology were pupils' council, school funds and individualized curricula.