World Biographical Encyclopedia

Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a physician who specialized in obstetrics. He is known for implementing hand disinfection standards, which was a pioneering move when it comes to antiseptic procedures. His discoveries significantly decreased mortality rates due to puerperal fever with mother who just gave births. However, despite obvious success, his work wasn’t widely acknowledged due to political t...

Julianne Moore

Julianne Moore is an American-British actress and writer. She is known for her exacting and sympathetic portrayals of women at odds with their surroundings, often in films that examined social issues.

David Hume

David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist. He is known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism.

François Magendie

Francois Magendie was a French experimental physiologist. He was the first to prove the functional difference of the spinal nerves.

Giambattista Vico

Giambattista Vico was an Italian philosopher, historian, rhetorician and jurist. He is most known for his greatest piece, the Scienza Nuova (the New Science), published in 1725. He is considered to be the founder of modern philosophy of history and one of the greatest thinkers of the Enlightenment era.

Ichiro Suzuki

Ichiro Suzuki is a former Japanese baseball player who has amassed the most total hits across all professional baseball leagues in the history of the sport. He was notably also the first non-pitcher to shift from Japanese professional baseball to the American major leagues.

Gérard de Villiers

Gérard de Villiers was a French writer and journalist. He's famous for his spy novel series about Prince Malko Linge, Austrian Prince and CIA operative. De Villiers wrote 200 novels that were sold in over 150 million copies worldwide. Each of them is full with high-paced action, unique characters and vivid sex scenes, which is why he is considered to be the successor of Ian Fleming, creator of Ja...

Hu Jintao

Hu Jintao is a Chinese politician. He became vice president of China in 1998 and president in 2003. His administration has focused on social and economic reform.

Harry Shearer

Harry Julius Shearer is an American comic actor, writer, musician, scriptwriter and director. He is best known for the cult classic movie This Is Spinal Tap. Shearer was a founding member of the comedy group the Credibility Gap, with whom he began to build his writing and performing career.

Jean-François Lyotard

Jean-François Lyotard was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. He was a leading figure in the intellectual movement known as postmodernism.

George Martin

George Raymond Richard Martin is an American screenwriter and author of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He is best known for A Song of Ice and Fire, his international bestselling series of epic fantasy novels that HBO adapted for their dramatic series Game of Thrones. Martin was selected by Time magazine as one of the "2011 Time 100," a list of the "most influential people in the world."

Mary Stuart

Mary Stuart was the Queen of Scotland (1542-67) and the Queen consort of France (1569-60). She is famous for her disastrous marriages, which caused a rebellion in Scotland that led to her being overthrew in 1567. She believed she was the righteous heir to the English throne instead of Elizabeth I and was even involved in a plot to kill her. Elizabeth, who considered her a Catholic threat to her p...

Britney Spears

Britney Jean Spears is an American singer, dancer, and actress. She performed acting roles in stage productions and television shows as a child, before signing with Jive Records in 1997. Spears's first two studio albums, ...Baby One More Time (1999) and Oops!... I Did It Again (2000), were global successes and made her the best-selling teenage artist of all time.