Odd Hassel was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway, I7 May, 1897. His father was Ernst Hassel, a physician who specialized in gynaecology, his mother Mathilde née Klaveness. In 1915 he entered the University of his native town where he studied mathematics and physics with chemistry as his chief subject and graduated as a cand.…

Willard Frank Libby was born in Grand Valley, Colorado, on 17th December, 1908, to Ora Edward Libby and his wife Eva May (née Rivers). He attended grammar and high schools near Sebastopol, California, between 1913 and 1926, moving to the University of California at Berkeley in 1927, where he studied till 1933, taking his B.Sc.…

Juan Ramón Jiménez (1881-1958) belonged to the group of writers who, in the wake of Spain’s loss of her colonies to the United States (1898), staged a literary revival. The leader of this group of modernistas, as they called themselves, Rubén Darío, helped Juan Ramón to publish Almas de violeta (Souls of Violet), 1900, his…

Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff was born in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on August 30, 1852. He was the third child in a family of seven children of Jacobus Henricus van ‘t Hoff, a physician, and Alida Jacoba Kolff. In 1869 he entered the Polytechnic School at Delft and obtained his technology diploma in 1871. His decision…

I was born on June 2, 1857, in the Roholte vicarage at Praestö. My father was Pastor Carl Adolph Gjellerup, my mother, Anna Fibiger. After my father’s death in 1860, in Landet vicarage on Lolland (from which I still have a number of memories), I went in November of the same year to the home…

My father, Dines Pontoppidan, belonged to an old family of clergymen and was himself a minister. My mother, whose maiden name was Oxenbøl, was the daughter of a government official. They had sixteen children. One of the middle ones in the flock, I was born on July 24, 1857, in the small Jutland town of…

Descendant of an old family of Lesbos, he was born in Heraclion (Candia) on the island of Crete, November 2, 1911. Some time later his family settled permanently in Athens where the poet finished his secondary school studies and later visited the Law School of the Athens University. His first appearance as a poet in…

Czesław Miłosz was born June 30, 1911 in Seteiniai, Lithuania, as a son of Aleksander Miłosz, a civil engineer, and Weronika, née Kunat. He made his high-school and university studies in Wilno, then belonging to Poland. A co-founder of a literary group “Zagary”, he made his literary début in 1930, published in the 1930s two…

Henri Moissan was born in Paris on September 28, 1852. His advanced education began in the Collège de Meaux and later in Edmond Frémy’s laboratory at the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle, where he attended lectures by E.H. Sainte-Claire Deville and Henri Debray. A year later, he removed to Dehérain’s laboratory in the École Pratique des Haute…

Written over the author’s signature and translated into English by Fernando Rodrigues and Tim Crosfield I was born in a family of landless peasants, in Azinhaga, a small village in the province of Ribatejo, on the right bank of the Almonda River, around a hundred kilometres north-east of Lisbon. My parents were José de Sousa…