I was born on the 8th of October 1918 into a wealthy family in Lemvig, a town in the western part of Denmark. The town is nicely situated on a fjord, which runs across the country from the Kattegat in East to the North Sea in West. It is surrounded by hills, and is only…

The first 21 years of my life were spent in Provo, Utah, then a city of about 15,000 people, beautifully situated at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. Hardy Mormon pioneers had settled the area only 70 years before my birth in 1918. Provo was a well-designed city with stable neighbourhoods, a pride in its…

A typical question I am often asked as a Nobel Laureate in physics is “what brought you to physics?” I am not sure but I do know that in school in geography when looking at the presentations of the planets orbiting around the sun I asked myself: “What is the reason for this strange behavior?”…

I was born in Helsinki in 1949. My sister Marianne was born in 1946. Our parents were married when the war against the Soviet Union ended in 1944. My father had spent five years on the front like so many young Finnish men. The post-war years were challenging socially and economically. The government had to…

On my mother’s side I come from Midlands engineers and on my father’s from tenant farmers near Oxford. As far back as I remember, and earlier, I was an artisan, a maker and doer. Mechanically minded, my parents said. Ted, my father, was an Anglican priest; after serving as an army chaplain in the second…

I was born in London in 1948. My parents were both doctors. My mother was a gynecologist at a time when women doctors in the U.K. were relatively uncommon; she was a German-born Jew, who had left Germany in 1933 just after Hitler came to power. My father was an epidemiologist of some distinction whose…

Pragmatist by nature, disciplined, cosmopolitan, committed to his country, Juan Manuel Santos has been an effective leader throughout his life. He was effective when it was time to wage war against illegal armed groups and he was even more effective in seeking and obtaining, against all odds, a peace agreement with Latin America’s oldest and…

Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. He grew up in the city of Hibbing. As a teenager, he played in various bands and with time his interest in music deepened, with a particular passion for American folk music and blues. One of his idols was the folk singer Woody Guthrie.…

My father, Ju Chin Chu, came to the United States in 1943 to continue his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in chemical engineering, and two years later, my mother, Ching Chen Li, joined him to study economics. A generation earlier, my mother’s father earned his advanced degrees in civil engineering at Cornell while…

1. Early life and influences I was born in 1945 in Fukuoka, half a year before the end of the World War II, to my father Yoshio and mother Shina. My father was employed at Kyushu University as a professor of mining engineering. At that time, everyone in Japan was equally poor, and even food…