World Biographical Encyclopedia

Pope Clement VII must be a standout amongst the most insulted pontiffs the Catholic Church has had, and quite often unjustifiably so. His notoriety endures, not just from his own behavior, but rather from the season of his rule, toward the end of the celebrated Italian Renaissance. The offenses (generally overstated) of a portion of the pontiffs of this time have brought about numerous individual...

Lewis Hamilton

Lewis Hamilton is a British race-car driver who was one of the most successful Formula One (F1) Grand Prix racing drivers of the early 21st century. In 2008 he won his first F1 world drivers' championship, becoming the first Black driver to capture that title.

Philip I Landgrave of Hesse

Philip I of Hesse was the Landgrave (Landgraf) of the German province of Hesse. He is best known for being one of the first Reformers of the Protestant Reformism in Germany. Also, Philip I is well-known for being one of the early Protestant rulers of Germany. He had championed the independence of the prince of Germany against Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor.

Lindsey Vonn

Lindsey Vonn is a former American alpine skier. A three-time Olympic Champion, she won four women's World Cup overall alpine skiing championships (2008–10 and 2012) and eight World Cup season titles in all five disciplines, in particular, downhill, super-G, slalom, giant slalom, and super combined. She is the all-time leader in women's World Cup race victories with 82.

Ruud Lubbers

Rudolphus Lubbers was a Dutch politician and diplomat who served as Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 4 November 1982 to 22 August 1994 and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from 1 January 2001 until 20 February 2005.

Hyman Minsky

Hyman Philip Minsky was an American professor of economics, writer, and economist in the field of Domestic Monetary and Financial Theory and Institutions, Economic Fluctuations, Macroeconomic Theory.

Klemens Metternich

Klemens was an Austrian government official and statesman and maybe the most vital negotiator of his period. He was a noteworthy figure in the transactions prompting the Congress and Treaty of Vienna and is viewed as both a worldview of remote approach administration and a noteworthy figure on the advancement of tact. He participated in European Congresses at Troppau in 1820, Aix-la-Chapelle in 1...

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher, often called the "philosopher of pessimism," who was primarily important as the exponent of a metaphysical doctrine of the will in immediate reaction against Hegelian idealism. His writings influenced later existential philosophy and Freudian psychology.

Aryabhata I

Aryabhata was an astronomer and the earliest Indian mathematician whose work and history are available to modern scholars. He is also known as Aryabhata I or Aryabhata the Elder to distinguish him from a 10th-century Indian mathematician of the same name.

Marcel Paul Pagnol

Marcel Pagnol was a French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker. Regarded as an auteur, in 1946, he became the first filmmaker elected to the Académie française. Although his work is less fashionable than it once was, Pagnol is still generally regarded as one of France's greatest 20th-century writers and is notable for the fact that he excelled in almost every medium memoir, novel, drama and film.

William Rehnquist

William Hubbs Rehnquist was an American lawyer and jurist who served on the Supreme Court of the United States for 33 years, first as an Associate Justice from 1972 to 1986, and then as the 16th Chief Justice of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2005. Considered a conservative, Rehnquist favored a conception of federalism that emphasized the Tenth Amendment's reservation of powers to...

Alan Parker

Sir Alan William Parker is an English film director, producer and screenwriter. Parker's early career, beginning in his late teens, was spent as a copywriter and director of television advertisements. After about ten years of filming adverts, many of which won awards for creativity, he began screenwriting and directing films.

Joseph Lamar

Joseph Rucker Lamar was an American jurist and politician. An influential member of the Georgia legal community at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, he was the fourth native Georgian appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

John of Austria

John of Austria was the natural son of the emperor Charles V. Spanish King Philip II acknowledged him as his half-brother and appointed him as a General of the (Mediterranean) Sea. John proved to be a great commander, leading the Holy League alliance to the historic victory in the Battle of Lepanto. He was also believed to know his way around women.

James Cabell

James Branch Cabell was an American sci-fi author. He is known chiefly for his novel Jurgen (1919).

Swami Vivekananda

Swami Vivekananda was a key figure in the introduction of Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the western world. He was a major force in the revival of Hinduism in India and contributed to the notion of nationalism in colonial India. He was the chief disciple of the 19th-century saint Ramakrishna and the founder of the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission.