Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School…

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent…

I was born in Superior, Wisconsin on September 27, 1932 as the second child of Scott and Lucille Williamson. Both of my parents had been high school teachers but my father left teaching when he married my mother and joined my grandfather, Oliver E. Dunn, in the family real estate business. My father was a…

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was born on 18th November, 1897, the son of Arthur Stuart Blackett. He was originally trained as a regular officer for the Navy (Osborne Naval College, 1917; Dartmouth, 1912), and started his career as a naval cadet (1914), taking part, during the First World War, in the battles of Falkland Islands…

My parents, Auke Bloembergen and Sophia Maria Quint, had four sons and two daughters. I am the second child, born on March 11, 1920, in Dordrecht, the Netherlands. My father, a chemical engineer, was an executive in a chemical fertilizer company. My mother, who had an advanced degree to teach French, devoted all her energies…

I was born in 1937, in Yakima, Washington, the oldest child of Robert Emerson Lucas and Jane Templeton Lucas. My sister Jenepher was born in 1939 and my brother Peter in 1940. My parents had moved to Yakima from Seattle, to open a small restaurant, The Lucas Ice Creamery. The restaurant was a casualty of…

Malala Yousafzai was born on July 12, 1997, in Mingora, the largest city in the Swat Valley in what is now the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province of Pakistan. She is the daughter of Ziauddin and Tor Pekai Yousafzai and has two younger brothers. At a very young age, Malala developed a thirst for knowledge. For years…

Internationally known as Africa’s “Iron Lady,” President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is a leading promoter of peace, justice and democratic rule. She grew up in Liberian capital of Monrovia, where she married and had four sons. President Johnson Sirleaf later moved to the United States where she earned an accounting degree from the Madison College of…

Il’ja Mikhailovich Frank was born in Leningrad on October 23, 1908, the younger son of Mikhail Lyudvigovic Frank, a Professor of Mathematics, and his wife, Dr. Yelizaveta Mikhailovna Gratsianova. He attended the Moscow State University as a pupil of Vavilov, and graduated in 1930. In 1931 he became a senior scientific officer in Professor A.N.…

This text is adapted from “Leonid Hurwicz’s Game”, by Ann Bauer. Reprinted with permission from the author and Twin Cities Business magazine. Professor Hurwicz says that he is simply a product of his history. He knows from experience how circumstances change when people don’t abide by the rules of the game. “I cannot tell you…