William Henry Gates III KBE (born 28 October 1955) is an American entrepreneur and chairman of Microsoft, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions. back to top Peter Howson OBE (born 1958) is a Scottish painter. He was an official war artist in the 1993 Bosnian Civil War. He has produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time. One painting in particular Croatian and Muslim, detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the accounts of its victims rather than witnessing it firsthand. Much of his work cast stereotypes on the lower social groups; he portrayed brawls including drunken, even physically deformed men and women. His work is exhibited in many major collections and is in the private collection of celebrities such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Madonna who inspired a number of paintings in 2002 Howson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honour back to top Michael Edward Palin, CBE (born 5 May 1943) is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries. Palin wrote most of his material with Terry Jones. Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows such as The Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including The Dead Parrot, The Lumberjack Song, The Spanish Inquisition and Spam. Palin continued to work with Jones, co-writing Ripping Yarns. He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role back to top Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE (August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980) was an iconic and highly influential director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. After a substantial film career in his native Britain he moved to Hollywood and became an American citizen in 1956, although he also remained a British subject. He ultimately directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the colour era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly recognizable world directors during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular of all time. back to top Sir Isaac Newton FRS (4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, theologian, natural philosopher, and alchemist to be the greatest single work in the history of science, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. He showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Keplers laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution. back to top Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was a British novelist whose realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely-read and best-loved writers in British literature back to top Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect. back to top Hans Christian Andersen or simply H.C. Andersen (April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet, most famous for his fairy tales. Among his best-known stories The Snow Queen, The Little Mermaid, The Emperors New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling. During Andersens lifetime he was feted by royalty and acclaimed as having brought joy to children across Europe. His fairy tales have been translated into well over a hundred languages and continue to be published in millions of copies all over the world. back to top Henry Cavendish (October 10, 1731 - February 24, 1810) was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called inflammable air.He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper On Factitious Airs. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendishs experiment and gave the element its name. Cavendish is also known for his measurement of the Earths density and early research into electricity. back to top Charles Robert Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist After becoming eminent among scientists for his field work and inquiries into geology, he proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of natural selection The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life. back to top Satoshi Tajiri born on August 28, 1965) is a Japanese electronic game designer and the creator of Pocket Monsters, better known as Pokémon. Tajiri went to work for Nintendo and spent the next six years working on Pokémon. He became friends with Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, and Donkey Kong, who also became a mentor to Tajiri. As a tribute to Tajiri and Miyamoto, Ash Ketchum (the anime counterpart of Red in the games) is named Satoshi and Gary Oak (the anime counterpart of Blue in the English games, and Green in the original Japanese version) is named Shigeru in the Japanese version of Pokémon. Most recently, Tajiri (along with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata) served as an executive producer for the Game Boy Advance game ScrewBreaker released outside of Japan as Drill Dozer. Satoshi Tajiri has allegedly been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome according to the Independent.co.uk but i have been contacted by Game freak inc press officer saying this information is not correct. Click here to see the email i recieved back to top James Maury Jim Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was the most widely known puppeteer in American television history. He was the creator of The Muppets and the leading force behind their long creative run in the television series Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and films such as The Muppet Movie (1979) and The Dark Crystal (1982). He was also an Oscar-nominated film director, Emmy Award-winning television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Hensons Creature Shop. Henson is widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which infused nearly all of his work back to top Charles Monroe Schulz (November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000) was a 20th-century American cartoonist best known worldwide for his Peanuts comic strip.Schulzs drawings were first published by Robert Ripley in his Ripleys Believe It or Not!. His first regular cartoons, Lil Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post; the first of seventeen single-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Lil Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Lil Folks was dropped in January, 1950 back to top Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826) As a political philosopher, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and knew many intellectual leaders in Britain and France. He idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favored states rights and a strictly limited federal government. Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786). He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for a quarter-century. Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793) and second Vice President (1797–1801). back to top Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564) commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. back to top Wolfgang Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. His output of over 600 compositions includes works widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire. Authors of fictional works have found Mozarts life a compelling source of raw material.An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, particularly the idea that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozarts death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkins play Mozart and Salieri and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakovs opera Mozart and Salieri. The idea receives no support at all from modern scholars.Modern audiences have been gripped by the account of Mozarts life given in Peter Shaffers play Amadeus, as well as the film based on the play. Shaffer seems to have been especially taken by the contrast between Mozarts enjoyment of vulgarity (noted above) and the sublime character of his music. The scene in Shaffers work in which Mozart dictates music to Salieri on his deathbed is entirely an authors fancy; for the question of whether Mozart did any dictation on his deathbed at all see back to top George Orwell (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) who was an English writer and journalist well-noted as a novelist, critic, and commentator on politics and culture, George Orwell is one of the most admired English-language essayists of the twentieth century, and most famous for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general (Nineteen Eighty-Four), and Stalinism in particular (Animal Farm), which he wrote and published towards the end of his life back to top Dan Aykroyd (July 1, 1952) is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning Canadian-American comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician, and ufologist. He was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, an originator of the Blues Brothers (with John Belushi), and has had a long career as a film actor and screenwriter. Some of his well known films are Ghostbusters, The Blue Brothers, My Girl and many many more. Aykroyd described himself (in a radio interview with Terry Gross) as having mild Tourette syndrome that was successfully treated with therapy when he was a preteen, as well as mild Asperger syndrome.The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome did not exist in the 1960s, when Aykroyd was a preteen. It is unclear if Aykroyd received the diagnoses of TS or AS from a medical source, whether he was speaking in his role as a comic, or whether the diagnoses were self-made. It was an audio interview, so the audience could not see Aykroyds facial expressions, but the interviewer indicated uncertainty about whether Aykroyd was kidding. back to top Ludwig Van Beethoven (December 16, 1770 – March 26, 1827) was a German composer and virtuoso pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most respected and influential composers of all time. back to top Thomas Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and therefore is often cred asperger-syndrome.me.uk/people.htm
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 23:07:07 +0000
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