crème de la crème

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-03 17:21:54

1116) Margaret Court

Summary

Margaret Court AC MBE (née Smith; born 16 July 1942), also known as Margaret Smith Court, is an Australian retired tennis player and former world No. 1. Considered one of the greatest tennis players of all time, her 24 major singles titles and total of 64 major titles (including 19 Grand Slam women's doubles and 21 Grand Slam mixed doubles titles) are the most in tennis history, but not in the Open era, when everyone played the same format and everyone was allowed to play. She is currently a Christian minister in Perth, Western Australia.

In 1970, Court became the first woman during the Open Era (the second woman in history after Maureen Connolly) to win the singles Grand Slam (all four major tournaments in the same calendar year). Her all-surfaces (hard, clay, grass and carpet) singles career-winning percentage of 91.74 is the best of all time according to the Sporteology website. Her Open era singles career winning percentage of 91.02% (608–60) is unequalled, as is her Open era winning percentage of 91.67% (11–1) in Grand Slam singles finals. Her win–loss performance in all Grand Slam singles tournaments was 90.00% (207–23). She was 95.24% (60–3) at the Australian Open, 89.80% (44–5) at the French Open, 85.00% (51–9) at Wimbledon, and 89.66% (52–6) at the US Open. She also shares the Open era record for most Grand Slam singles titles as a mother with Kim Clijsters. In 1973, Court set the record for most singles titles won in a single Grand Slam event, with 11 Australian Open wins. This record was surpassed by Rafael Nadal in 2019 when he won his 12th French Open title, but remains a women's record.

Details

Court is one of only three players in history (all women) to have won the "Grand Slam Boxed Set", consisting of every Grand Slam title (the singles, doubles and mixed doubles). Court, however, is the only one in tennis history to complete a Multiple Grand Slam set, twice, in all three disciplines. Uniquely, she won all 12 as an amateur and then after a period of retirement, returned as a professional to win all 12 again. Court is also one of only six tennis players ever to win a Multiple Grand Slam set in two disciplines, matching Roy Emerson, Martina Navratilova, Frank Sedgman, Doris Hart, and Serena Williams.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame states "For sheer strength of performance and accomplishment there has never been a tennis player to match (her)." In 2010, the Herald Sun called her the greatest female tennis player of all time, a view supported by Evonne Goolagong Cawley.

Having grown up as a Roman Catholic, Court became associated with Pentecostalism in the 1970s and became a Christian minister in that tradition in 1991. She later founded Margaret Court Ministries.

Margaret Court, née Margaret Smith, (born July 16, 1942, Albury, New South Wales, Australia) is an Australian tennis player who dominated women’s competition in the 1960s. She won 66 Grand Slam championships, more than any other woman, and in 1970 became the second woman (after Maureen Connolly in 1953) to win the Grand Slam of tennis singles: Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, the Australian Open, and the French Open titles in the same year. She is the only player to have achieved the Grand Slam in doubles as well as singles, winning the four events with fellow Australian Kenneth Fletcher in 1963.

Smith first attracted attention after winning the Australian Open singles title in 1960. She won that title the next six years; the Wimbledon singles in 1963, 1965, and 1970; the U.S. Open singles in 1962, 1965, 1969, 1970, and 1973; and the French Open singles in 1962, 1969, 1970, and 1973. She retired after marrying Barrymore Court in 1967 but returned to competition shortly afterward. She won many doubles titles, including U.S. Open mixed doubles in 1969 and 1970.

Court was noted for her powerful serve and volley and her exceptional endurance. She continued to win many tournaments after the birth of her first child, including the U.S. Open in 1973. That year she lost to 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, in a much-publicized match. Court was the top woman player in the world in 1962–65, 1969–70, and 1973 and placed in the top five in 1961, 1966, 1968, 1971–72. Court retired from the game in 1976, and three years later she was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

In 1995 Court founded a Pentecostal Christian church outside of Perth, West Australia, where she served as pastor.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-04 20:25:25

1117) John Hasbrouck Van Vleck

Summary

John H. van Vleck AKA John Hasbrouck van Vleck

Born: 13-Mar-1899
Birthplace: Middletown, CT
Died: 27-Oct-1980
Location of death: Cambridge, MA
Remains: Buried, Forest Hill Cemetery, Madison, WI

Occupation: Physicist

Nationality: United States

Executive summary: Quantum theory of paramagnetism

American physicist John H. van Vleck studied Paul Dirac's then-new wave equation, to reveal its implications for the scientific understanding of magnetism, and developed the concept of temperature-independent susceptibility, now known as Van Vleck paramagnetism. In 1924 he explained the correspondence principle of absorption. In 1948 he introduced the "crystal field" concept of magnetic ionization. In 1952 he proposed a feasible compromise between two competing theories of magnetic itinerant electrons. He studied nuclear magnetism, ferromagnetism, molecular bonding, and magnetic resonance, and he is considered a founder of the modern theory of magnetism. His work was instrumental to the developing science of solid-state physics, with applications spanning modern electronics, and he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977.

In college he was a member of the University of Wisconsin marching band, and he later wrote an article exploring the history of college football fight songs. He was always fascinated with railroads, memorizing the schedules of all the passenger trains serving his home town of Madison when he was a boy, and he remained familiar with arrivals and departure times even at Harvard.

Details

John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (March 13, 1899 – October 27, 1980) was an American physicist and mathematician. He was co-awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, for his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electronic magnetism in solids.

Education and early life

Van Vleck was born to mathematician Edward Burr Van Vleck and Hester L. Raymond in Middletown, Connecticut, while his father was an assistant professor at Wesleyan University, and where his grandfather, astronomer John Monroe Van Vleck, was also a professor. He grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, and received an A.B. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1920, before earning his Ph.D at Harvard University in 1922 under the supervision of Edwin C. Kemble.

Career and research

He joined the University of Minnesota as an assistant professor in 1923, then moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison before settling at Harvard. He also earned Honorary D. Sc., or D. Honoris Causa, degree from Wesleyan University in 1936.

J. H. Van Vleck established the fundamentals of the quantum mechanical theory of magnetism, crystal field theory and ligand field theory (chemical bonding in metal complexes). He is regarded as the Father of Modern Magnetism.

During World War II, J. H. Van Vleck worked on radar at the MIT Radiation Lab. He was half time at the Radiation Lab and half time on the staff at Harvard. He showed that at about 1.25-centimeter wavelength water molecules in the atmosphere would lead to troublesome absorption and that at 0.5-centimeter wavelength there would be a similar absorption by oxygen molecules. This was to have important consequences not just for military (and civil) radar systems but later for the new science of radioastronomy.

J. H. Van Vleck participated in the Manhattan Project. In June 1942, J. Robert Oppenheimer held a summer study for confirming the concept and feasibility of a nuclear weapon at the University of California, Berkeley. Eight theoretical scientists, including J. H. Van Vleck, attended it. From July to September, the theoretical study group examined and developed the principles of atomic bomb design.

J. H. Van Vleck's theoretical work led to the establishment of the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory. He also served on the Los Alamos Review committee in 1943. The committee, established by General Leslie Groves, also consisted of W. K. Lewis of MIT, Chairman; E. L. Rose, of Jones & Lamson; E. B. Wilson of Harvard; and Richard C. Tolman, Vice Chairman of NDRC. The committee's important contribution (originating with Rose) was a reduction in the size of the firing gun for the Little Boy atomic bomb, a concept that eliminated additional design weight and sped up production of the bomb for its eventual release over Hiroshima. However, it was not employed for the Fat Man bomb at Nagasaki, which relied on implosion of a plutonium shell to reach critical mass.

The philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn completed a Ph.D. in physics under Van Vleck's supervision at Harvard.

In 1961/62 he was George Eastman Visiting Professor at University of Oxford and held a professorship at Balliol College.

In 1950 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1966 and the Lorentz Medal in 1974. For his contributions to the understanding of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids, Van Vleck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1977, along with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill Mott. Van Vleck transformations, Van Vleck paramagnetism and Van Vleck formula are named after him.

Van Vleck died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, aged 81.

Awards and honors

He was awarded the Irving Langmuir Award in 1965, the National Medal of Science in 1966 and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1967. He was awarded the Elliott Cresson Medal in 1971, the Lorentz Medal in 1974 and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977.

Personal life

J. H. Van Vleck and his wife Abigail were also important art collectors, particularly in the medium of Japanese woodblock prints (principally Ukiyo-e), known as Van Vleck Collection. It was inherited from his father Edward Burr Van Vleck. They donated it to the Chazen Museum of Art in Madison, Wisconsin in 1980s.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-05 20:51:22

1118) Katharine Hepburn

Summary

Katharine Houghton Hepburn (May 12, 1907 – June 29, 2003) was an American actress of film, stage and television. Hepburn's career as a Hollywood leading lady spanned over 60 years. She was known for her headstrong independence, spirited personality and outspokenness, cultivating a screen persona that matched this public image, and regularly playing strong-willed, sophisticated women. Her work was in a range of genres, from screwball comedy to literary drama, and earned her various accolades, including four Academy Awards for Best Actress—a record for any performer. In 1999, Hepburn was named the greatest female star of classic Hollywood cinema by the American Film Institute.

Raised in Connecticut by wealthy, progressive parents, Hepburn began to act while at Bryn Mawr College. Favorable reviews of her work on Broadway brought her to the attention of Hollywood. Her early years in film brought her international fame, including an Academy Award for Best Actress for her third film, Morning Glory (1933), but this was followed by a series of commercial failures culminating in the critically lauded box office failure Bringing Up Baby (1938). Hepburn masterminded her own comeback, buying out her contract with RKO Radio Pictures and acquiring the film rights to The Philadelphia Story, which she sold on the condition that she be the star. That comedy film was a box office success and landed her a third Academy Award nomination. In the 1940s, she was contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where her career focused on an alliance with Spencer Tracy. The screen-partnership spanned 26 years, and produced nine films.

Hepburn challenged herself in the latter half of her life, as she tackled Shakespearean stage productions and a range of literary roles. She found a niche playing middle-aged spinsters, such as in The African Queen (1951), a persona the public embraced. Hepburn received three more Academy Awards for her performances in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and On Golden Pond (1981). In the 1970s, she began appearing in television films, which later became her focus. She made her final screen appearance at the age of 87. After a period of inactivity and ill health, Hepburn died in 2003 at the age of 96.

Hepburn shunned the Hollywood publicity machine and refused to conform to society's expectations of women, famously wearing trousers before they were fashionable for women. She was briefly married as a young woman but thereafter lived independently. With her unconventional lifestyle and the independent characters she brought to the screen, Hepburn epitomized the "modern woman" in the 20th-century United States, and is remembered as an important cultural figure.

Details

Katharine Hepburn, in full Katharine Houghton Hepburn, (born May 12, 1907, Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.—died June 29, 2003, Old Saybrook, Connecticut), indomitable American stage and film actress, known as a spirited performer with a touch of eccentricity. She introduced into her roles a strength of character previously considered to be undesirable in Hollywood leading ladies. As an actress, she was noted for her brisk upper-class New England accent and tomboyish beauty.

Hepburn’s father was a wealthy and prominent Connecticut surgeon, and her mother was a leader in the women’s suffrage movement. From early childhood, Hepburn was continually encouraged to expand her intellectual horizons, speak nothing but the truth, and keep herself in top physical condition at all times. She would apply all of these ingrained values to her acting career, which began in earnest after her graduation from Bryn Mawr College in 1928. That year she made her Broadway debut in Night Hostess, appearing under the alias Katharine Burns. Hepburn scored her first major Broadway success in The Warrior’s Husband (1932), a comedy set in the land of the Amazons. Shortly thereafter she was invited to Hollywood by RKO Radio Pictures.

Hepburn was an unlikely Hollywood star. Possessing a distinctive speech pattern and an abundance of quirky mannerisms, she earned unqualified praise from her admirers and unmerciful criticism from her detractors. Unabashedly outspoken and iconoclastic, she did as she pleased, refusing to grant interviews, wearing casual clothes at a time when actresses were expected to exude glamour 24 hours a day, and openly clashing with her more-experienced coworkers whenever they failed to meet her standards. She nonetheless made an impressive movie debut in George Cukor’s A Bill of Divorcement (1932), a drama that also starred John Barrymore. Hepburn was then cast as an aviator in Dorothy Arzner’s Christopher Strong (1933). For her third film, Morning Glory (1933), Hepburn won an Academy Award for her portrayal of an aspiring actress.

However, Hepburn’s much-publicized return to Broadway, in The Lake (1933), proved to be a flop. And while moviegoers enjoyed her performances in homespun entertainments such as Little Women (1933) and Alice Adams (1935), they were largely resistant to historical vehicles such as Mary of Scotland (1936), A Woman Rebels (1936), and Quality Street (1937). Hepburn recovered some lost ground with her sparkling performances in the screwball comedies Bringing Up Baby (1938) and Holiday (1938), both of which also starred Cary Grant. However, it was too late: a group of leading film exhibitors had already written off Hepburn as “box office poison.”

Undaunted, Hepburn accepted a role written specifically for her in Philip Barry’s 1938 Broadway comedy The Philadelphia Story, about a socialite whose ex-husband tries to win her back. It was a huge hit, and she purchased the motion picture rights to the play. The 1940 film version—in which she reteamed with Cukor and Grant—was a critical and commercial success, and it jump-started her Hollywood career. She continued to make periodic returns to the stage (notably as the title character in the 1969 Broadway musical Coco), but Hepburn remained essentially a film actor for the remainder of her career. Her stature increased as she chalked up such cinematic triumphs as John Huston’s The African Queen (1951), in which she played a missionary who escapes German troops with the aid of a riverboat captain (Humphrey Bogart), and David Lean’s Summertime (1955), a love story set in Venice. In Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s acclaimed play, Hepburn was cast as a drug-addicted mother.

Hepburn won a second Academy Award for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), a dramedy about interracial marriage; a third for The Lion in Winter (1968), in which she played Eleanor of Aquitaine; and an unprecedented fourth Oscar for On Golden Pond (1981), about long-married New Englanders (Hepburn and Henry Fonda). Her 12 Academy Award nominations also set a record, which stood until 2003, when it was broken by Meryl Streep.

In addition, Hepburn appeared frequently on television in the 1970s and ’80s. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for her memorable portrayal of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1973), and she won the award for her performance opposite Laurence Olivier in Love Among the Ruins (1975), which reunited her with her favourite director, Cukor. Though hampered by a progressive neurological disease, Hepburn was nonetheless still active in the early ’90s, appearing prominently in films such as Love Affair (1994), which was her last movie.

Hepburn was married once, to Philadelphia broker Ludlow Ogden Smith, but the union was dissolved in 1934. While filming Woman of the Year in 1942, she began an enduring intimate relationship with her costar, Spencer Tracy, with whom she would appear in films such as Adam’s Rib (1949) and Pat and Mike (1952); both were directed by Cukor. Tracy and Hepburn never married—he was Roman Catholic and would not divorce his wife—but they remained close both personally and professionally until his death in 1967, just days after completing the filming of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. Hepburn had suspended her own career for nearly five years to nurse Tracy through what turned out to be his final illness. Hepburn was a 1990 Kennedy Center honoree, and in 1999 the American Film Institute named her the top female American screen legend of all time. She wrote several memoirs, including Me: Stories of My Life (1991).

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-07 00:07:05

1119) Ilya Prigogine

Summary

Viscount Ilya Romanovich Prigogine (25 January [O.S. 12 January] 1917 – 28 May 2003) was a physical chemist and Nobel laureate noted for his work on dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

Biography

Prigogine was born in Moscow a few months before the Russian Revolution of 1917, into a Jewish family. His father, Ruvim Abramovich Prigogine, was a chemical engineer at the Imperial Moscow Technical School; his mother, Yulia Vikhman, was a pianist. Because the family was critical of the new Soviet system, they left Russia in 1921. They first went to Germany and in 1929, to Belgium, where Prigogine received Belgian nationality in 1949. His brother Alexandre (1913–1991) became an ornithologist.

Prigogine studied chemistry at the Free University of Brussels, where in 1950, he became professor. In 1959, he was appointed director of the International Solvay Institute in Brussels, Belgium. In that year, he also started teaching at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States, where he later was appointed Regental Professor and Ashbel Smith Professor of Physics and Chemical Engineering. From 1961 until 1966 he was affiliated with the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago and was a visiting professor at Northwestern University. In Austin, in 1967, he co-founded the Center for Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics, now the Center for Complex Quantum Systems. In that year, he also returned to Belgium, where he became director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.

He was a member of numerous scientific organizations, and received numerous awards, prizes and 53 honorary degrees. In 1955, Ilya Prigogine was awarded the Francqui Prize for Exact Sciences. For his study in irreversible thermodynamics, he received the Rumford Medal in 1976, and in 1977, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1989, he was awarded the title of Viscount in the Belgian nobility by the King of the Belgians. Until his death, he was president of the International Academy of Science, Munich and was in 1997, one of the founders of the International Commission on Distance Education (CODE), a worldwide accreditation agency. Prigogine received an Honorary Doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1985 and in 1998 he was awarded an honoris causa doctorate by the UNAM in Mexico City.

Prigogine was first married to Belgian poet Hélène Jofé (as an author also known as Hélène Prigogine) and in 1945 they had a son Yves. After their divorce, he married Polish-born chemist Maria Prokopowicz (also known as Maria Prigogine) in 1961. In 1970 they had a son, Pascal.

In 2003 he was one of 22 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

Details

Ilya Prigogine, (born Jan. 25, 1917, Moscow, Russia—died May 28, 2003, Brussels, Belg.), was a Russian-born Belgian physical chemist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1977 for contributions to nonequilibrium thermodynamics.

Prigogine was taken to Belgium as a child. He received a doctorate in 1941 at the Free University in Brussels, where he accepted the position of professor in 1947. In 1962 he became director of the International Institute of Physics and Chemistry in Solvay, Belg. He also served as director of the Center for Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics at the University of Texas in Austin from 1967 until his death.

Prigogine’s work dealt with the application of the second law of thermodynamics to complex systems, including living organisms. The second law states that physical systems tend to slide spontaneously and irreversibly toward a state of disorder (a process driven by an increase in entropy); it does not, however, explain how complex systems could have arisen spontaneously from less-ordered states and have maintained themselves in defiance of the tendency toward maximum entropy. Prigogine argued that as long as systems receive energy and matter from an external source, nonlinear systems (or dissipative structures, as he called them) can go through periods of instability and then self-organization, resulting in more-complex systems whose characteristics cannot be predicted except as statistical probabilities. Prigogine’s work was influential in a wide variety of fields, from physical chemistry to biology, and was fundamental to the new disciplines of chaos theory and complexity theory.

Thermodynamics is about heat and its transformation into other forms of energy—basically involving statistical descriptions of atomic and molecular movements. Irreversible thermodynamic processes go in only one direction, usually toward more disorder. However, during the 1960s Ilya Prigogine developed a theory about dissipative structures, which maintains that long before a state of equilibrium is reached in irreversible processes, orderly and stable systems can arise from more disordered systems. The result has been applied in a great many areas.

Ilya Prigogine was a Belgian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate born on January 25, 1917 – died on May 28, 2003. Prigogine was well known for his dissipative structures, complex systems, and irreversibility.

He was also the winner of many notable prizes and awards like Francqui Prize in the year of 1955, Rumford Medal in the year of 1976, Nobel Prize in the year of 1977.

He discovered importation and dissipation of energy into chemical systems. Prigogine developed mathematical models to explain irreversible thermodynamics. He gave explanations regarding dissipative structures and their role in thermodynamic systems.

Further in later years he aimed at fundamental role of Indeterminism in nonlinear systems on both the classical and quantum level. Prigogine and coworkers proposed a Liouville space extension of quantum mechanics.

Prigogine was unhappy with the work of Ludwig Boltzmann which showed how macroscopic irreversibility could arise from microscopic reversibility as a result of statistical considerations. It is also well known that the steady flow of energy which originates in the sun and the stars prevents the atmosphere of the earth or stars from reaching a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Prigogine notes numerous examples of irreversibility, including diffusion, radioactive decay, solar radiation, weather and the emergence and evolution of life.

Prigogine believed that before him, there was "no direction of time, no distinction between past and future," because even quantum mechanics, in the form of Schrödinger's deterministic wave equation, could not do so Prigogine introduced what he called a "third time" into physics - time as irreversibility. He saw non-equilibrium, dissipative systems far from equilibrium, as a new source of order giving to the system ill-defined "new space-time properties."

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-09 00:15:58

1120) Roger Guillemin

Summary

Roger Charles Louis Guillemin (born January 11, 1924) is a French-American neuroscientist. He received the National Medal of Science in 1976, and the Nobel prize for medicine in 1977 for his work on neurohormones, sharing the prize that year with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow.

Biography

Completing his undergraduate work at the University of Burgundy, Guillemin received his M.D. degree from the Medical Faculty at Lyon in 1949, and went to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to work with Hans Selye at the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the Université de Montréal where he received a Ph.D. in 1953. The same year he moved to the United States to join the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine at Houston. In 1965, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1970 he helped to set up the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California where he worked until retirement in 1989.

Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally discovered the structures of TRH and GnRH in separate laboratories. The process of this scientific discovery at Guillemin's laboratory is the subject of a study by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, published as Laboratory Life.

Guillemin signed along with other Nobel Prize winners a petition requesting a delegation of the Committee on the Rights of the Children of the United Nations to visit a Tibetan child who is under house arrest in China since 1995, namely Gendhun Choekyi Nyima, recognized as the 11th Panchen Lama by the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

Details

Roger Guillemin, in full Roger Charles Louis Guillemin, (born January 11, 1924, Dijon, France), is a French-born American physiologist whose research into the hormones produced by the hypothalamus gland resulted in his being awarded a share (along with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow) of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1977.

Guillemin was educated at the universities of Dijon, Lyon, and Montreal. He taught at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, from 1953 to 1970, except for the years 1960–63, when he was on the faculty of the Collège de France in Paris. In 1970 he became a resident fellow and research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and he served as the institute’s interim president in 2007–09. Guillemin became a U.S. citizen in 1963.

Guillemin proved the hypothesis that the hypothalamus releases hormones that regulate the pituitary gland. Among the hypothalamic hormones that he and his colleagues discovered, isolated, analyzed, or synthesized were TRH (thyrotropin-releasing hormone), which regulates thyroid activity; GHRH (growth hormone-releasing hormone), which causes the pituitary to release gonadotropin; and somatostatin, which regulates the activities of the pituitary gland and the pancreas. Guillemin also discovered an important class of proteins called endorphins that are involved in the perception of pain.

(Roger Guillemin shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1977 with Andrew V. Schally, for their separate and often hotly competed research into brain hormones, and with Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, for her development of radioimmunoassays of peptid hormones. Guillemin proved the hypothesis that the pituitary gland is regulated by hypothalamus releases, and discovered endorphins (proteins involved in the perception of pain), somatocrinin (the growth-hormone releasing factor hormone, also called GHR or GHRF, which is used to treat growth deficiencies in children); and somatostatin (the growth-hormone-inhibiting hormone, also called GHIH, which is used to inhibit internal bleeding during surgery). He also studied activins and inhibins (peptides that help regulates the menstrual cycle) and fibroblast growth factors receptors (FGFs, now used in treatment for eye diseases and diabetic blindness).

During World War II, Guillemin's French homeland was occupied by German forces, and he interrupted his studies to become active in the French resistance, serving in an underground network that helped refugees escape to Switzerland over the Jura Mountains. In the early 1950s, he nearly died of tubercular meningitis, but recovered and married his nurse, Lucienne Jeanne Billard. They became American citizens in 1963, and she became a professional harpsichord player. Following his retirement in 1989, Guillemin became an accomplished creator of abstract impressionist art, using his Macintosh computer to create his images that are then transferred to either canvas or paper, via lithography or inkjet processes. His works have been exhibited in major American and European galleries.)

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-10 00:07:27

1121) Maureen Connolly

Summary

Maureen Connolly, in full Maureen Catherine Connolly, byname Little Mo, (born September 17, 1934, San Diego, California, U.S.—died June 21, 1969, Dallas, Texas), was an American tennis player who in 1953 became the first woman to win the Grand Slam of tennis: the British (Wimbledon), United States, Australian, and French singles championships.

Connolly began playing tennis at the age of 10. After a few months of training under a professional teacher, she entered her first tournament and in 1947 won the girl’s 15-and-under title in the Southern California Invitational. By the time she was 15 she had won more than 50 championships. In 1949 she became the youngest girl ever to win the national junior championship, and she successfully defended the title the following year.

In 1951, her second year in women’s division play, Connolly won eight major tournaments and helped the U.S. Wightman Cup team to victory. In September of that year she won the women’s singles at the U.S. Open championship at Forest Hills in New York City. Dubbed “Little Mo” by an affectionate press, Connolly was deceptively slight and engaging off court, but in action she displayed awesome power in her drives and a distractingly expressionless face. In 1952 she retained her U.S. title and won the prestigious Wimbledon (All-England) championship. The next year she became the first woman to win a tennis Grand Slam.

In 1954 she won her third Wimbledon title and second French title. Later that year she suffered a crushed leg in a horseback riding accident and never again entered tournament play. She worked subsequently as a tennis instructor. In 1968 she was elected to the National Lawn Tennis Hall of Fame.

Details

Maureen Catherine Connolly-Brinker (née Connolly; September 17, 1934 – June 21, 1969), known as "Little Mo", was an American tennis player, the winner of nine major singles titles in the early 1950s. In 1953, she became the first woman to win a Grand Slam (all four major tournaments during the same calendar year). She is also the only player in history to win a title without losing a set at all four major championships. The following year, in July 1954, a horseback riding accident seriously injured her right leg and ended her competitive tennis career at age 19.

Early years

Maureen was born in San Diego, California on September 17, 1934, the first child of Martin and Jessamine Connolly. Her parents divorced when she was three years old and she was raised by her mother and an aunt. She loved horseback riding as a child, but her mother was unable to pay the cost of riding lessons. So, she took up the game of tennis. Connolly's tennis career began at the age of 10 on the municipal courts of San Diego. Her first coach, Wilbur Folsom, encouraged her to switch from a left-handed grip to right and she soon became a baseline specialist with tremendous power and accuracy, and a strong backhand. When she was 11, Maureen was dubbed "Little Mo" by San Diego sportswriter Nelson Fisher, who compared the power of her forehand and backhand to the firepower of the USS Missouri, known colloquially as "Big Mo". In 1948, Folsom was replaced as her coach by Eleanor Tennant, who previously coached Alice Marble and Bobby Riggs, both Wimbledon and U.S. singles champions. At age 14, she won 56 consecutive matches, and the following year became the youngest ever to win the U.S. national championship for girls 18 and under.

Playing career

At the 1951 U.S. Championships, the 16-year-old Connolly defeated Shirley Fry to become, at that time, the youngest ever to win America's most prestigious tennis tournament. Her coach at the time was Eleanor Tennant.

Connolly won her first Wimbledon title in 1952, defeating Louise Brough in the final. She had arrived at the tournament with a shoulder injury but refused to withdraw when Tennant instructed her to do so. The ensuing argument resulted in the end of their partnership. Connolly was seeded first at the 1952 U.S. Championships and successfully defended her title with a victory in the final against Doris Hart. For the 1953 season, she hired a new coach, the Australian Davis Cup captain Harry Hopman, and entered all four Grand Slam tournaments for the first time. She defeated Julie Sampson Haywood in the Australian Championships final and Doris Hart in the finals of the French Championships, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Championships to become the first woman, and only the second tennis player after Don Budge, to win the world's four major titles in the same year, commonly known as a "Grand Slam." She lost only one set in those four tournaments.

Connolly won the last nine Grand Slam singles tournaments she played, including 50 consecutive singles matches. During her Wightman Cup career from 1951 through 1954, she won all seven of her singles matches. Connolly's achievements made her the darling of the media and one of the most popular personalities in the U.S.; she was named Female Athlete of the Year by the Associated Press for three straight years, from 1951 through 1953. In 1954, Connolly did not defend her title at the Australian Championships, but successfully defended her French and Wimbledon championships.

Later life

Horseriding accident

Two weeks after she won her third-straight Wimbledon title, she was horseback riding in San Diego on July 20, 1954. A passing concrete mixer truck frightened her horse Colonel Merryboy, which pinned Connolly between the horse and truck. She was thrown and suffered a compound fracture to her right fibula, which ultimately ended her tennis career at age 19. She had intended to turn professional after the 1954 U.S. National Championships. She officially retired from tennis in February 1955 when she announced her impending marriage to Norman Brinker. Connolly retained Melvin Belli as counsel and sued the concrete mixer company. On December 17, 1957, the Supreme Court of California unanimously affirmed a $95,000 jury verdict in her favor; the opinion was signed by Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson.

Marriage

In June 1955, Connolly married Norman Brinker, a member of the 1952 Olympic equestrian team for the United States, who shared her love of horses. They had two daughters, Cindy and Brenda, and she remained partially involved in tennis, acting as a correspondent for some U.S. and British newspapers at major U.S. tennis tournaments. Connolly was a coach for the British Wightman Cup team during its visits to the U.S. In Texas, where the couple lived, she established the Maureen Connolly Brinker Foundation to promote junior tennis.

In 1957, she published an autobiography titled Forehand Drive. Connolly recognized the downside of her tennis career, writing "I have always believed greatness on a tennis court was my destiny, a dark destiny, at times, where the court became my secret jungle and I a lonely, fear-stricken hunter. I was a strange little girl armed with hate, fear, and a Golden Racket."

Death

In 1966, Connolly was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. On June 4, 1969, she underwent a third operation for a stomach tumor at Baylor Hospital in Dallas. She died nearly three weeks later on June 21, at the age of 34.

Legacy

According to John Olliff and Lance Tingay of The Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail, Connolly was ranked in the world top 10 from 1951 through 1954, reaching a career high of world number one in those rankings from 1952 through 1954. Connolly was included in the year-end top-10 rankings issued by the United States Lawn Tennis Association from 1950 through 1953. She was the top-ranked U.S. player from 1951 through 1953.

Connolly was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1969 and the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1956, she was inducted by the San Diego Hall of Champions into the Breitbard Hall of Fame honoring San Diego's finest athletes both on and off the playing surface.

Since 1973, the Maureen Connolly Challenge Trophy is played, a yearly competition between the best female tennis players age 18 and younger from the United States and Great Britain.

Brinker Elementary School in Plano, Texas is named in honor of her. The school was dedicated on November 20, 1988.

Connolly was portrayed by Glynnis O'Connor in Little Mo, a television movie that initially aired on September 5, 1978.

In 2019, the United States Postal Service released a commemorative Forever stamp in her honor.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-12 00:17:26

1122) Michael Collins

Summary

Michael Collins (October 31, 1930 – April 28, 2021) was an American astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969 while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the surface. He was also a test pilot and major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.

Born in Rome, Italy, Collins graduated in the Class of 1952 from the United States Military Academy. He joined the United States Air Force, and flew F-86 Sabre fighters at Chambley-Bussières Air Base, France. He was accepted into the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1960, also graduating from the Aerospace Research Pilot School (Class III).

Selected as part of NASA's third group of 14 astronauts in 1963, Collins flew in space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10 in 1966, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed orbital rendezvous with two spacecraft and undertook two extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). On the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, he became one of 24 people to fly to the Moon, which he orbited thirty times. He was the fourth person (and third American) to perform a spacewalk, the first person to have performed more than one spacewalk, and, after Young, who flew the command module on Apollo 10, the second person to orbit the Moon alone.

After retiring from NASA in 1970, Collins took a job in the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A year later, he became the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and held this position until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980, he took a job as vice president of LTV Aerospace. He resigned in 1985 to start his own consulting firm. Along with his Apollo 11 crewmates, Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011.

Details

Michael Collins, (born October 31, 1930, Rome, Italy—died April 28, 2021, Naples, Florida, U.S.), was an U.S. astronaut who was the command module pilot of Apollo 11, the first crewed lunar landing mission.

A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, Collins transferred to the air force, becoming a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He joined the space program in 1963.

Gemini 10, crewed by Collins and command pilot John W. Young, was launched on July 18, 1966. After a rendezvous with an Agena target vehicle, the two men used the Agena’s engines to propel them to a record altitude of 764 km (475 miles), where Collins left the spacecraft to remove equipment needed for a micrometeorite experiment from the aft end of the Gemini and attempted unsuccessfully to attach similar equipment to the Agena. He succeeded in retrieving an instrument from the Agena, but his activity was cut short because the Gemini craft was low on fuel. Gemini 10 returned to Earth on July 21.

On July 16, 1969, Collins was launched to the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission with commander Neil A. Armstrong and lunar module pilot Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the Moon in the lunar module Eagle on July 20 while Collins remained in the command module Columbia, circling the Moon at an altitude of 97–121 km (60–75 miles). On July 21 Armstrong and Aldrin rejoined him, and the following day the astronauts left lunar orbit. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on July 24. The three astronauts spent 18 days in quarantine to guard against possible contamination by lunar microbes. During the days that followed and during a tour of 21 nations, they were hailed for their part in the opening of a new era in humankind’s exploration of the universe.

Apollo 11 was his last space mission; later in 1969 Collins was appointed assistant secretary of state for public affairs. In 1971 he became the first director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and in 1978 he became undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. From 1980 to 1985 he was vice president for field operations for Vought Corporation, an American aerospace firm. He wrote four books, including an account of the Apollo 11 mission, Carrying the Fire (1974), and a history of the American space program, Liftoff (1988).

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-14 00:21:49

1123) Muhammad Ali

Summary

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.; January 17, 1942 – June 3, 2016) was an American professional boxer and activist. Nicknamed "The Greatest", he is regarded as one of the most significant sports figures of the 20th century, and is frequently ranked as the greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. In 1999, he was named Sportsman of the Century by Sports Illustrated and the Sports Personality of the Century by the BBC.

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, he began training as an amateur boxer at age 12. At 18, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics and turned professional later that year. He became a Muslim after 1961. He won the world heavyweight championship from Sonny Liston in a major upset on February 25, 1964, at age 22. Also that year, he renounced his birth name as a "slave name" and formally changed his name to Muhammad Ali. In 1966, Ali refused to be drafted into the military owing to his religious beliefs and ethical opposition to the Vietnam War and was found guilty of draft evasion and stripped of his boxing titles. He stayed out of prison while appealing the decision to the Supreme Court, where his conviction was overturned in 1971. However, he had not fought for nearly four years by this point and had lost a period of peak performance as an athlete. Ali's actions as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War made him an icon for the larger 1960s counterculture generation, and he was a very high-profile figure of racial pride for African Americans during the civil rights movement and throughout his career. As a Muslim, Ali was initially affiliated with Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam (NOI). He later disavowed the NOI, adhering to Sunni Islam, and supported racial integration like his former mentor Malcolm X.

He fought in several historic boxing matches, such as his highly publicized fights with Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier (including the Fight of the Century, the biggest boxing event up until then), the Thrilla in Manila, and his fight with George Foreman in The Rumble in the Jungle. Ali thrived in the spotlight at a time when many boxers let their managers do the talking, and he became renowned for his provocative and outlandish persona. He was famous for trash-talking, often free-styled with rhyme schemes and spoken word poetry incorporating elements of hip hop, and often predicted in which round he would knockout his opponent.

Outside boxing, Ali attained success as a spoken word artist, releasing two studio albums: I Am the Greatest! (1963) and The Adventures of Ali and His Gang vs. Mr. Tooth Decay (1976). Both albums received Grammy Award nominations. He also featured as an actor and writer, releasing two autobiographies. Ali retired from boxing in 1981 and focused on religion, philanthropy and activism. In 1984, he made public his diagnosis of Parkinson's syndrome, which some reports attributed to boxing-related injuries, though he and his specialist physicians disputed this. He remained an active public figure globally, but in his later years made fewer public appearances as his condition worsened, and he was cared for by his family.

Details

Muhammad Ali, original name Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., (born January 17, 1942, Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.—died June 3, 2016, Scottsdale, Arizona), was an American professional boxer and social activist. Ali was the first fighter to win the world heavyweight championship on three separate occasions; he successfully defended this title 19 times.

Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., grew up in the American South in a time of segregated public facilities. His father, Cassius Marcellus Clay, Sr., supported a wife and two sons by painting billboards and signs. His mother, Odessa Grady Clay, worked as a household domestic.

When Clay was 12 years old, he took up boxing under the tutelage of Louisville policeman Joe Martin. After advancing through the amateur ranks, he won a gold medal in the 175-pound division at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome and began a professional career under the guidance of the Louisville Sponsoring Group, a syndicate composed of 11 wealthy white men.

In his early bouts as a professional, Clay was more highly regarded for his charm and personality than for his ring skills. He sought to raise public interest in his fights by reading childlike poetry and spouting self-descriptive phrases such as “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” He told the world that he was “the Greatest,” but the hard realities of boxing seemed to indicate otherwise. Clay infuriated devotees of the sport as much as he impressed them. He held his hands unconventionally low, backed away from punches rather than bobbing and weaving out of danger, and appeared to lack true knockout power. The opponents he was besting were a mixture of veterans who were long past their prime and fighters who had never been more than mediocre. Thus, purists cringed when Clay predicted the round in which he intended to knock out an opponent, and they grimaced when he did so and bragged about each new conquest.

On February 25, 1964, Clay challenged Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. Liston was widely regarded as the most intimidating, powerful fighter of his era. Clay was a decided underdog. But in one of the most stunning upsets in sports history, Liston retired to his corner after six rounds, and Clay became the new champion. Two days later Clay shocked the boxing establishment again by announcing that he had accepted the teachings of the Nation of Islam. On March 6, 1964, he took the name Muhammad Ali, which was given to him by his spiritual mentor, Elijah Muhammad.

For the next three years, Ali dominated boxing as thoroughly and magnificently as any fighter ever had. In a May 25, 1965, rematch against Liston, he emerged with a first-round knockout victory. Triumphs over Floyd Patterson, George Chuvalo, Henry Cooper, Brian London, and Karl Mildenberger followed. On November 14, 1966, Ali fought Cleveland Williams. Over the course of three rounds, Ali landed more than 100 punches, scored four knockdowns, and was hit a total of three times. Ali’s triumph over Williams was succeeded by victories over Ernie Terrell and Zora Folley.

Then, on April 28, 1967, citing his religious beliefs, Ali refused induction into the U.S. Army at the height of the war in Vietnam. This refusal followed a blunt statement voiced by Ali 14 months earlier: “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong.” Many Americans vehemently condemned Ali’s stand. It came at a time when most people in the United States still supported the war in Southeast Asia. Moreover, although exemptions from military service on religious grounds were available to qualifying conscientious objectors who were opposed to war in any form, Ali was not eligible for such an exemption, because he acknowledged that he would be willing to participate in an Islamic holy war.

Ali was stripped of his championship and precluded from fighting by every state athletic commission in the United States for three and a half years. In addition, he was criminally indicted and, on June 20, 1967, convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. armed forces and sentenced to five years in prison. Although he remained free on bail, four years passed before his conviction was unanimously overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court on a narrow procedural ground.

Meanwhile, as the 1960s grew more tumultuous, Ali’s impact upon American society was growing, and he became a lightning rod for dissent. Ali’s message of Black pride and Black resistance to white domination was on the cutting edge of the civil rights movement. Having refused induction into the U.S. Army, he also stood for the proposition that “unless you have a very good reason to kill, war is wrong.” As Black activist Julian Bond later observed, “When a figure as heroic and beloved as Muhammad Ali stood up and said, ‘No, I won’t go,’ it reverberated through the whole society.”

In October 1970, Ali was allowed to return to boxing, but his skills had eroded. The legs that had allowed him to “dance” for 15 rounds without stopping no longer carried him as surely around the ring. His reflexes, while still superb, were no longer as fast as they had once been. Ali prevailed in his first two comeback fights, against Jerry Quarry and Oscar Bonavena. Then, on March 8, 1971, he challenged Joe Frazier, who had become heavyweight champion during Ali’s absence from the ring. It was a fight of historic proportions, billed as the “Fight of the Century.” Frazier won a unanimous 15-round decision.

Following his loss to Frazier, Ali won 10 fights in a row, 8 of them against world-class opponents. Then, on March 31, 1973, a little-known fighter named Ken Norton broke Ali’s jaw in the second round en route to a 12-round upset decision. Ali defeated Norton in a rematch. After that he fought Joe Frazier a second time and won a unanimous 12-round decision. From a technical point of view, the second Ali-Frazier bout was probably Ali’s best performance in the ring after his exile from boxing.

On October 30, 1974, Ali challenged George Foreman, who had dethroned Frazier in 1973 to become heavyweight champion of the world. The bout (which Ali referred to as the “Rumble in the Jungle”) took place in the unlikely location of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo). Ali was received by the people of Zaire as a conquering hero, and he did his part by knocking out Foreman in the eighth round to regain the heavyweight title. It was in this fight that Ali employed a strategy once used by former boxing great Archie Moore. Moore called the maneuver “the turtle” but Ali called it “rope-a-dope.” The strategy was that, instead of moving around the ring, Ali chose to fight for extended periods of time leaning back into the ropes in order to avoid many of Foreman’s heaviest blows.

Over the next 30 months, at the peak of his popularity as champion, Ali fought nine times in bouts that showed him to be a courageous fighter but a fighter on the decline. The most notable of these bouts occurred on October 1, 1975, when Ali and Joe Frazier met in the Philippines, 6 miles (9.5 km) outside Manila, to do battle for the third time. In what is regarded by many as the greatest prizefight of all time (the “Thrilla in Manila”), Ali was declared the victor when Frazier’s corner called a halt to the bout after 14 brutal rounds.

The final performances of Ali’s ring career were sad to behold. In 1978 he lost his title to Leon Spinks, a novice boxer with an Olympic gold medal but only seven professional fights to his credit. Seven months later Ali regained the championship with a 15-round victory over Spinks. Then he retired from boxing, but two years later he made an ill-advised comeback and suffered a horrible beating at the hands of Larry Holmes in a bout that was stopped after 11 rounds. The final ring contest of Ali’s career was a loss by decision to Trevor Berbick in 1981.

Ali’s place in boxing history as one of the greatest fighters ever is secure. His final record of 56 wins and 5 losses with 37 knockouts has been matched by others, but the quality of his opponents and the manner in which he dominated during his prime placed him on a plateau with boxing’s immortals. Ali’s most-tangible ring assets were speed, superb footwork, and the ability to take a punch. But perhaps more important, he had courage and all the other intangibles that go into making a great fighter.

Ali’s later years were marked by physical decline. Damage to his brain caused by blows to the head resulted in slurred speech, slowed movement, and other symptoms of Parkinson syndrome. However, his condition differed from chronic encephalopathy, or dementia pugilistica (which is commonly referred to as “punch drunk” in fighters), in that he did not suffer from injury-induced intellectual deficits.

Ali’s religious views also evolved over time. In the mid-1970s he began to study the Qurʾān seriously and turned to Orthodox Islam. His earlier adherence to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (e.g., that white people are “devils” and there is no heaven or hell) were replaced by a spiritual embrace of all people and preparation for his own afterlife. In 1984 Ali spoke out publicly against the separatist doctrine of Louis Farrakhan, declaring, “What he teaches is not at all what we believe in. He represents the time of our struggle in the dark and a time of confusion in us, and we don’t want to be associated with that at all.”

Ali married his fourth wife, Lonnie (née Yolanda Williams), in 1986. He had nine children, most of whom avoided the spotlight of which Ali was so fond. One of his daughters, however, Laila Ali, pursued a career as a professional boxer during which she went undefeated in 24 bouts between 1999 and 2007 while capturing a number of titles in various weight classes.

In 1996 Ali was chosen to light the Olympic flame at the start of the Games of the XXVI Olympiad in Atlanta, Georgia. The outpouring of goodwill that accompanied his appearance confirmed his status as one of the most-beloved athletes in the world. The dramatic period of his life from 1964 to 1974 was the basis of the film Ali (2001), in which Will Smith starred as the boxer. His life story is told in the documentary film I Am Ali (2014), which includes audio recordings that he made throughout his career and interviews with his intimates. He also was the subject of the docuseries What’s My Name (2019) and Muhammad Ali (2021), the latter of which was codirected by Ken Burns. Ali was a member of the inaugural class of the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1990, and in 2005 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-15 00:15:59

1124) Andrew Schally

Summary

Andrzej Viktor "Andrew" Schally (born 30 November 1926) is an American endocrinologist of Polish ancestry, who was a corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. This award recognized his research in the discovery that the hypothalamus controls hormone production and release by the pituitary gland, which controls the regulation of other hormones in the body. Later in life Schally utilized his knowledge of hypothalamic hormones to research possible methods for birth control and cancer treatment.

Details

Andrew V. Schally, in full Andrew Victor Schally, (born November 30, 1926, Wilno, Poland [now Vilnius, Lithuania]), is a Polish-born American endocrinologist and corecipient, with Roger Guillemin and Rosalyn Yalow, of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. He was noted for isolating and synthesizing three hormones that are produced by the region of the brain known as the hypothalamus; these hormones control the activities of other hormone-producing glands.

Schally fled Poland with his family in 1939. He attended the University of London and worked for three years at the National Institute for Medical Research in London before traveling to Montreal to enter McGill University. He graduated in 1955 and two years later took a Ph.D. in biochemistry. From 1957 to 1962 he was associated with Baylor University in Houston, Texas, and in 1962 he became a U.S. citizen. That same year Schally was made chief of endocrine and polypeptide laboratories at the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the same time he joined the medical faculty of the Tulane University School of Medicine, becoming a professor in 1967. He became senior medical investigator with the VA in 1973.

Among Schally’s chief accomplishments were the synthesis of TRH (thyrotropin-releasing hormone), the isolation and synthesis of LHRH (luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone), and studies of the action of the peptide somatostatin. His research helped elucidate pathways of hormone regulation in males and females and contributed to the development of fertility treatments and contraceptives. In 1975 Schally and Guillemin received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award.

Additional Information

Dr. Andrew V. Schally, endocrine oncologist, is the discoverer of hypothalamic hormones and has pioneered the application of their analogs in the field of cancer treatment. For his work, he was awarded to Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1977. He is Tulane University’s and the South’s only Nobel Laureate. Today, thousands of cancer patients worldwide are benefiting and receiving treatment because of Dr. Schally's discoveries.

Fluent in several languages, Dr. Schally has 46 awards and 26 honorary degrees to his credit and belongs to more than 40 scientific organizations worldwide. In 1978, he was listed as the most cited author in the field of endocrinology. Dr. Schally received his training in England and Canada. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1962 and, in the same year, joined the staff of the Veterans Administration Hospital, subsequently becoming a faculty member of Tulane University School of Medicine.

Since 1978, Dr. Schally has been working intensively on hormone- dependent tumors and is, at present, Chief of the Endocrine, Polypeptide and Cancer Institute at the V. A. Medical Center in New Orleans, Head of the Section of Experimental Medicine at Tulane University School of Medicine, Professor of Medicine, Tulane University School of Medicine, and Distinguished Medical Research Scientist of the Veterans Affairs Department. He was married to a Brazilian Endocrinologist, the late Dr. Ana Maria Comaru-Schally, F.A.C.P. Dr. Schally is author or co-author of more than 2,200 publications (articles, abstracts, reviews, books).

Honors: Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology, 1977; Elected to US National Academy of Sciences, 1978; Lasker Award, 1975; Officer in the French Legion of Honor, 2004; Borden Award in Medical Research, 1975; Gairdner Award, 1974; Mickle Prize for Practical Medical Advances, 1974; Tyler Award for Reproduction, 1975; Middleton (highest VA) Award, 1970; Endocrine Society Award, 1969; Van Meter Am. Thyroid Prize, 1969; Laude Award, Spain, 1975. Elected, Academy of Medicine, Mexico, 1971; Brazil, 1983; Venezuela, 1986; Poland, 1994; Spain, 2004; Hungarian Academy of Science, 1986; Russian Academy of Science, 1991; Academy of Science, Mexico, 1998 numerous other awards.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-17 00:05:36

1125) Roger Moore

Summary

Sir Roger George Moore KBE (14 October 1927 – 23 May 2017) was an English actor. He was the third actor to portray fictional British secret agent James Bond in the Eon Productions film series, playing the character in seven feature films between 1973 and 1985. Moore's seven appearances as Bond, from Live and Let Die to A View to a Kill, are the most of any actor in the Eon-produced entries.

On television, Moore played the lead role of Simon Templar, the title character in the British mystery thriller series The Saint (1962–1969). He also had roles in American series, including Beau Maverick on the Western Maverick (1960–1961), in which he replaced James Garner as the lead, and a co-lead of the action-comedy The Persuaders! (1971–1972). Continuing to act on screen in the decades after his retirement from the Bond franchise, Moore's final appearance was in a pilot for a new Saint series that became a 2017 television film.

Moore was appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1991 and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2003 for services to charity. In 2007, he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the film industry. He was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2008.

Details

Roger Moore will perhaps always be remembered as the man who replaced Sean Connery in the James Bond series, arguably something he never lived down.

Roger George Moore was born on October 14, 1927 in Stockwell, London, England, the son of Lillian (Pope) and George Alfred Moore, a policeman. His mother was born in Calcutta, India, to a British family. Roger first wanted to be an artist, but got into films full time after becoming an extra in the late 1940s. He came to the United States in 1953. Suave, extremely handsome, and an excellent actor, he received a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. His initial foray met with mixed success, with movies like Diane (1956) and Interrupted Melody (1955), as well as The Last Time I Saw Paris (1954).

Moore went into television in the 1950s on series such as Ivanhoe (1958) and The Alaskans (1959), but probably received the most recognition from Maverick (1957), as cousin Beau. He received his big breakthrough, at least internationally, as The Saint (1962). The series made him a superstar and he became very successful thereafter. Moore ended his run as the Saint, and was one of the premier stars of the world, but he was not catching on in America. In an attempt to change this, he agreed to star with Tony Curtis on ITC's The Persuaders! (1971), but although hugely popular in Europe, it did not catch on in the United States and was canceled. Just prior to making the series, he starred in The Man Who Haunted Himself (1970), which proved there was far more to Moore than the light-hearted roles he had previously accepted.

He was next offered and accepted the role of James Bond, and once audiences got used to the change of style from Connery's portrayal, they also accepted him. Live and Let Die (1973), his first Bond movie, grossed more outside of America than Diamonds Are Forever (1971); Connery's last outing as James Bond. He went on to star in another six Bond films, before bowing out after A View to a Kill (1985). He was age 57 at the time the film was made and was looking a little too old for Bond - it was possibly one film too many. In between times, there had been more success with appearances in films such as That Lucky Touch (1975), Shout at the Devil (1976), The Wild Geese (1978), Escape to Athena (1979) and North Sea Hijack (1980).

Despite his fame from the Bond films and many others, the United States never completely took to him until he starred in The Cannonball Run (1981) alongside Burt Reynolds, a success there. After relinquishing his role as Bond, his work load tended to diminish a little, though he did star in the American box office flop Fire, Ice & Dynamite (1990), as well as the comedy Bullseye! (1990), with Michael Caine. He did the overlooked comedy Bed & Breakfast (1991), as well as the television movie The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1994), and then the major Jean-Claude Van Damme flop The Quest (1996). Moore then took second rate roles such as Spice World (1997), and the American television series The Dream Team (1999). Although his film work slowed down, he was still in the public eye, be it appearing on television chat shows or hosting documentaries.

Roger Moore was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire on December 31, 1998 in the New Years Honours for services to UNICEF, and was promoted to Knight Commander of the same order on June 14, 2003 in the Queen's Birthday Honours for services to the charities UNICEF and Kiwanis International.

Roger Moore died of cancer on 23 May, 2017, in Switzerland. He was 89.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-19 00:05:27

1126) Clint Eastwood

Summary

Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor, film director and producer. After achieving success in the Western TV series Rawhide, he rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" of Spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Harry Callahan in the five Dirty Harry films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.

An Academy Award nominee for Best Actor, Eastwood won Best Director and Best Picture for his Western film Unforgiven (1992) and his sports drama Million Dollar Baby (2004). His greatest commercial successes are the adventure comedy Every Which Way but Loose (1978) and its action comedy sequel Any Which Way You Can (1980). Other popular Eastwood films include the Westerns Hang 'Em High (1968) and Pale Rider (1985), the action-war film Where Eagles Dare (1968), the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979), the war film Heartbreak Ridge (1986), the action film In the Line of Fire (1993), and the romantic drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995). More recent works are Gran Torino (2008), The Mule (2018), and Cry Macho (2021). Since 1967, Eastwood's company Malpaso Productions has produced all but four of his American films.

In addition to directing many of his own star vehicles, Eastwood has also directed films in which he did not appear, such as the mystery drama Mystic River (2003) and the war film Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), for which he received Academy Award nominations, the drama Changeling (2008), and the biographical sports drama Invictus (2009). The war drama biopic American Sniper (2014) set box-office records for the largest January release ever and was also the largest opening ever for an Eastwood film.

Eastwood's accolades include four Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, three César Awards, and an AFI Life Achievement Award. In 2000, he received the Italian Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion award, honoring his lifetime achievements. Bestowed two of France's highest civilian honors, he received the Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1994, and the Legion of Honour medal in 2007.

Details

Clint Eastwood was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, the son of Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margaret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, when Eastwood was 19, his parents and younger sister relocated to Seattle, and Clint spent a couple years working menial jobs in the Pacific Northwest. These included operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs lifeguarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at Los Angeles City College, but dropped out after two semesters to pursue acting. During the mid-'50s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming. Though only a secondary player for the first seven seasons, Clint was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country.

Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice for Clint's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967/68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from low-level actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968). He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970)), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969). In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970), Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor.

1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971). His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971), meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972), High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976), the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977), and the fact-based prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979). He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way but Loose (1978), which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the '70s were nonstop success for Clint.

Eastwood kicked off the '80s with Any Which Way You Can (1980), the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983), was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." Clint also starred in Bronco Billy (1980), Firefox (1982), Tightrope (1984), City Heat (1984), Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986), all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988 he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988). Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990), it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988), a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990), an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release).

Eastwood bounced back--big time--with his dark western Unforgiven (1992), which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993), then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner. Next up was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995), where Clint surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep. But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), which he directed but didn't appear in.

Eastwood surprised again in the mid-'00s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004). Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman, the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Clint. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. Eastwood's next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008), earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012), as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012). And between acting jobs, Clint chalked up a long and impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for screen megastar Angelina Jolie), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010), J. Edgar (2011), Jersey Boys (2014), American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018). Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018), which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019). At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021).

Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-21 00:05:56

1127) Meryl Streep

Summary

Mary Louise Streep (born June 22, 1949) is an American actress. Often described as "the best actress of her generation", Streep is particularly known for her versatility and accent adaptability. She has received numerous accolades throughout her career spanning over four decades, including a record 21 Academy Award nominations, winning three, and a record 32 Golden Globe Award nominations, winning eight. She has also received two British Academy Film Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Primetime Emmy Awards, in addition to nominations for a Tony Award and six Grammy Awards.

Streep made her stage debut in Trelawny of the Wells and received a Tony Award nomination for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and A Memory of Two Mondays in 1976. In 1977, she made her film debut in Julia. In 1978, she won a Primetime Emmy Award for her leading role in the mini-series Holocaust, and received her first Oscar nomination for The Deer Hunter. She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a troubled wife in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and went on to establish herself as a film actor in the 1980s. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress for starring as a Holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice (1982) and had her biggest commercial success to that point in Out of Africa (1985). She continued to gain awards, and critical praise, for her work in the late 1980s and 1990s, but commercial success was varied, with the comedy Death Becomes Her (1992) and the drama The Bridges of Madison County (1995), her biggest earners in that period.

Streep reclaimed her stardom in the 2000s and 2010s with starring roles in Adaptation (2002), The Hours (2002), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), Doubt (2008), Mamma Mia! (2008), Julie & Julia (2009), It's Complicated (2009), Into the Woods (2014), The Post (2017) and Little Women (2019). She also won her third Academy Award for her portrayal of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011). Her stage roles include The Public Theater's 2001 revival of The Seagull, and her television roles include two projects for HBO, the miniseries Angels in America (2003), for which she won another Primetime Emmy Award, and the drama series Big Little Lies (2019).

Streep has been the recipient of many honorary awards. She was awarded the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2004, Gala Tribute from the Film Society of Lincoln Center in 2008, and Kennedy Center Honor in 2011 for her contribution to American culture, through performing arts. President Barack Obama awarded her the 2010 National Medal of Arts, and in 2014, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2003, the government of France made her a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. She was awarded the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2017.

Details

Considered by many critics to be the greatest living actress, Meryl Streep has been nominated for the Academy Award an astonishing 21 times, and has won it three times. Meryl was born Mary Louise Streep in 1949 in Summit, New Jersey, to Mary Wolf (Wilkinson), a commercial artist, and Harry William Streep, Jr., a pharmaceutical executive. Her father was of German and Swiss-German descent, and her mother had English, Irish, and German ancestry.

Meryl's early performing ambitions leaned toward the opera. She became interested in acting while a student at Vassar and upon graduation she enrolled in the Yale School of Drama. She gave an outstanding performance in her first film role, Julia (1977), and the next year she was nominated for her first Oscar for her role in The Deer Hunter (1978). She went on to win the Academy Award for her performances in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) and Sophie's Choice (1982), in which she gave a heart-wrenching portrayal of an inmate mother in a Nazi death camp.

A perfectionist in her craft and meticulous and painstaking in her preparation for her roles, Meryl turned out a string of highly acclaimed performances over the next decade in great films like Silkwood (1983); Out of Africa (1985); Ironweed (1987); and A Cry in the Dark (1988). Her career declined slightly in the early 1990s as a result of her inability to find suitable parts, but she shot back to the top in 1995 with her performance as Clint Eastwood's married lover in The Bridges of Madison County (1995) and as the prodigal daughter in Marvin's Room (1996). In 1998 she made her first venture into the area of producing, and was the executive producer for the moving ...First Do No Harm (1997). A realist when she talks about her future years in film, she remarked that "...no matter what happens, my work will stand..."

Additional Information

Meryl Streep, original name Mary Louise Streep, (born June 22, 1949, Summit, New Jersey, U.S.), is an American film actress known for her masterly technique, expertise with dialects, and subtly expressive face.

Early life

Streep started voice training at age 12 and took up acting in high school. In 1971 she graduated from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, with a degree in drama and costume design. After working in summer stock theatre, Streep studied drama at Yale University, where she earned a master of fine arts degree in 1975. She then moved to New York City to begin a professional career as an actress.

Stardom: The Deer Hunter, Sophie’s Choice, and Silkwood

Streep made her Broadway debut in 1975 with Trelawny of the “Wells.” Two years later she appeared in her first feature film, Julia (1977), but it was her performance in The Deer Hunter (1978) that earned Streep widespread recognition. Though her role was relatively small, she displayed a quiet softness that contrasted sharply with the bravado of the male characters and deepened the film’s testament to the devastating effects of the Vietnam War on young Americans. That same year she starred in the television miniseries Holocaust, for which she won an Emmy Award.

Over the next 10 years, Streep confirmed her reputation as one of Hollywood’s finest dramatic actresses. Her performances in Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)—as a mother who leaves her young son and then fights to regain his custody—and Sophie’s Choice (1982)—as a Polish survivor of a Nazi concentration camp—earned her Academy Awards for supporting actress and leading actress, respectively. She further demonstrated her range and her gifts for rendering complex emotional states and seamless characterization in such roles as a modern-day actress portraying a Victorian woman of mystery in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981), a factory-worker-turned-activist in Silkwood (1983), and the aristocratic Danish author Isak Dinesen in Out of Africa (1985). She won the Cannes film festival and New York Film Critics’ Circle awards for best actress for her moving performance in A Cry in the Dark (1988) as Lindy Chamberlain, the real-life Australian mother accused of having murdered her baby daughter although she claimed that the child was carried off by a dingo.

A devil, Julia Child, and Margaret Thatcher

By the late 1980s Streep’s reputation as a brilliant technical actress came to be a burden. Her name was typically associated with a serious, often depressing sort of film, and some critics complained that her performances lacked compassion. As a result, Streep tried to change her popular image by appearing in a handful of comedies, including Postcards from the Edge (1990) and Death Becomes Her (1992), and in the action-adventure film The River Wild (1994). For the most part, these films were not well received, and Streep returned to dramatic films that required more technical skill and less personal charisma. She gave memorable performances in The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Marvin’s Room (1996), One True Thing (1998), and The Hours (2002).

In 2003 Streep received an unprecedented 13th Academy Award nomination—for best supporting actress in Adaptation (2002); Katharine Hepburn originally held the record with 12 nominations. Streep earned another Oscar nomination (for best actress) for her portrayal of an overbearing fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006). In 2008 she played Donna, a middle-aged woman reunited with three of her former lovers, in the musical Mamma Mia! and later that year starred with Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, about a nun who suspects a priest of having inappropriate relationships with children at a Catholic school; her performance in the latter film earned Streep another Academy Award nomination. She also garnered critical acclaim for her portrayal of famed American chef Julia Child in Julie & Julia (2009), a role for which she received a Golden Globe Award and her 16th Oscar nomination.

Streep later provided the voice of Mrs. Fox in the animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009), a film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, and starred with Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in It’s Complicated (2009), a comedy about a divorced woman having an affair with her remarried ex-husband. She then stepped into the role of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady (2011), a portrait of the former British prime minister. For her performance, Streep earned her eighth Golden Globe Award and third Oscar. In the lighthearted Hope Springs (2012), she and Tommy Lee Jones starred as a couple trying to save their stagnant marriage. She next evinced a razor-tongued matriarch whose husband has committed taking one's own life in August: Osage County (2013), adapted from Tracy Letts’s play; for her performance, Streep earned her 18th Oscar nomination.

Later films

In 2014 Streep appeared as the dispassionate leader of an ostensibly utopian community in The Giver, based on the novel for young readers by Lois Lowry; as a minister’s wife who cares for mentally ill women in the western The Homesman; and as a vengeful witch in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods. She was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress for the latter role. Streep then slipped into the role of a feckless (and unsuccessful) rock-and-roll singer who attempts to reconcile with her family in Ricki and the Flash (2015). After depicting woman-suffrage pioneer Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette (2015), Streep delivered an ebullient and sympathetic performance in the title role of Florence Foster Jenkins (2016), about the tragicomic but ultimately inspiring efforts of a syphilitic society matron to establish an opera career. For her work in the film, Streep received her 20th Oscar nomination.

Streep next starred in The Post, portraying Katharine Graham, owner of The Washington Post. The drama, directed by Steven Spielberg, chronicles the newspaper’s publication of the Pentagon Papers. For her performance, Streep was nominated for another Academy Award. She then reprised her role as Donna in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and played a disorderly cousin to the eponymous character in Mary Poppins Returns (both 2018). In 2019 Streep took a turn on television, joining the critically acclaimed cast of the HBO series Big Little Lies for its second season. That same year she starred in The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh’s farce about the Panama Papers scandal, and portrayed Aunt March in Little Women, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved classic. Her films from 2020 included The Prom, a musical in which a theatre troupe tries to help a gay teenager, and Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk, about an award-winning author who reunites with several old friends during a cruise. Streep next played a narcissistic U.S. president in Don’t Look Up (2021), a dramedy about an impending comet strike that will destroy Earth.

In addition to receiving numerous acting awards, Streep was made Commander in the Order of Arts and Letters (the highest cultural award presented by the French government) in 2002. In 2010 she was elected an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The following year Streep received a Kennedy Center Honor. In 2017 she was given the Cecil B. DeMille Award (a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement).

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-23 00:13:33

1128) Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

Gist

Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (July 19, 1921 – May 30, 2011) was an American medical physicist, and a co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay technique. She was the second woman (after Gerty Cori), and the first American-born woman, to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Summary

Rosalyn S. Yalow, in full Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, (born July 19, 1921, New York, New York, U.S.—died May 30, 2011, New York), was an American medical physicist and joint recipient (with Andrew V. Schally and Roger Guillemin) of the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, awarded for her development of radioimmunoassay (RIA), an extremely sensitive technique for measuring minute quantities of biologically active substances.

Yalow graduated with honours from Hunter College of the City University of New York in 1941 and four years later received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois. From 1946 to 1950 she lectured on physics at Hunter, and in 1947 she became a consultant in nuclear physics to the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, where from 1950 to 1970 she was physicist and assistant chief of the radioisotope service.

With a colleague, the American physician Solomon A. Berson, Yalow began using radioactive isotopes to examine and diagnose various disease conditions. Yalow and Berson’s investigations into the mechanism underlying type II diabetes led to their development of RIA. In the 1950s it was known that individuals treated with injections of animal insulin developed resistance to the hormone and so required greater amounts of it to offset the effects of the disease; however, a satisfactory explanation for this phenomenon had not been put forth. Yalow and Berson theorized that the foreign insulin stimulated the production of antibodies, which became bound to the insulin and prevented the hormone from entering cells and carrying out its function of metabolizing glucose. In order to prove their hypothesis to a skeptical scientific community, the researchers combined techniques from immunology and radioisotope tracing to measure minute amounts of these antibodies, and the RIA was born. It was soon apparent that this method could be used to measure hundreds of other biologically active substances, such as viruses, drugs, and other proteins. This made possible such practical applications as the screening of blood in blood banks for hepatitis virus and the determination of effective dosage levels of drugs and antibiotics.

In 1970 Yalow was appointed chief of the laboratory later renamed the Nuclear Medical Service at the Veterans Administration Hospital. In 1976 she was the first female recipient of the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award. Yalow became a distinguished professor at large at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University in 1979 and left in 1985 to accept the position of Solomon A. Berson Distinguished Professor at Large at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1988.

Details

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1977

Born: 19 July 1921, New York, NY, USA

Died: 30 May 2011, New York, NY, USA

Affiliation at the time of the award: Veterans Administration Hospital, Bronx, NY, USA

Prize motivation: “for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones”

Prize share: 1/2

Life

Rosalyn Yalow was a stubborn and single-minded child. Her parents wanted her to become a schoolmistress, but instead they became a physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Rosalyn Yalow grew up in and lived almost her entire life in New York. Her parents came from humble backgrounds, but that did not stop Rosalyn and her brother, Alexander, from striving for something greater. Rosalyn began to read before she began preschool. Her 7th-grade chemistry teacher aroused her interest in science, and when at university, she took a liking to nuclear physics. Rosalyn Yalow was married with two children.

Work

Rosalyn Yalow was a nuclear physicist. She developed radioimmunoassay (RIA) together with doctor Solomon Berson. RIA is used to measure small concentrations of substances in the body, such as hormones in the blood. Yalow and Berson tracked insulin by injecting radioactive iodine into patients' blood. Because the method is so precise, they were able to prove that type 2 diabetes is caused by the body's inefficient use of insulin. Previously it was thought that the disease was caused by a lack of insulin.

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Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-25 00:08:45

1129) Pyotr Kapitsa

Gist

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa or Peter Kapitza FRS (8 July [O.S. 26 June] 1894 – 8 April 1984) was a leading Soviet physicist, engineer and Nobel laureate, best known for his work in low-temperature physics.

Summary

Pjotr Leonidovich Kapitsa was born in Kronstadt, near Leningrad, on the 9th July 1894, son of Leonid Petrovich Kapitsa, military engineer, and Olga Ieronimovna née Stebnitskaia, working in high education and folklore research.

Kapitsa began his scientific career in A.F. Ioffe’s section of the Electromechanics Department of the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, completing his studies in 1918. Here, jointly with N.N. Semenov, he proposed a method for determining the magnetic moment of an atom interacting with an inhomogeneous magnetic field. This method was later used in the celebrated Stern-Gerlach experiments.

At the suggestion of A.F. Ioffe in 1921 Kapitsa came to the Cavendish Laboratory to work with Rutherford. In 1923 he made the first experiment in which a cloud chamber was placed in a strong magnetic field, and observed the bending of alfa-particle paths. In 1924 he developed methods for obtaining very strong magnetic fields and produced fields up to 320 kilogauss in a volume of 2 cm3. In 1928 he discovered the linear dependence of resistivity on magnetic field for various metals placed in very strong magnetic fields. In his last years in Cambridge Kapitsa turned to low temperature research. He began with a critical analysis of the methods that existed at the time for obtaining low temperatures and developed a new and original apparatus for the liquefaction of helium based on the adiabatic principle (1934).

Kapitsa was a Clerk Maxwell Student of Cambridge University (1923-1926), Assistant Director of Magnetic Research at Cavendish Laboratory (1924-1932), Messel Research Professor of the Royal Society (1930-1934), Director of the Royal Society Mond Laboratory (1930-1934). With R.H. Fowler he was the founder editor of the International Series of Monographs on Physics (Oxford, Clarendon Press).

In 1934 he returned to Moscow where he organized the Institute for Physical Problems at which he continued his research on strong magnetic fields, low temperature physics and cryogenics.

In 1939 he developed a new method for liquefaction of air with a lowpressure cycle using a special high-efficiency expansion turbine. In low temperature physics, Kapitsa began a series of experiments to study the properties of liquid helium that led to discovery of the superfluidity of helium in 1937 and in a series of papers investigated this new state of matter.

During the World War II Kapitsa was engaged in applied research on the production and use of oxygen that was produced using his low pressure expansion turbines, and organized and headed the Department of Oxygen Industry attached to the USSR Council of Ministers.

Late in the 1940’s Kapitsa turned his attention to a totally new range of physical problems. He invented high power microwave generators – planotron and nigotron (1950- 1955) and discovered a new kind of continuous high pressure plasma discharge with electron temperatures over a million K.

Kapitsa is director of the Institute for Physical Problems. Since 1957 he is a member of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He was one of the founders of the Moscow Physico-Technical Institute (MFTI), and is now head of the department of low temperature physics and cryogenics of MFTI and chairman of the Coordination Council of this teaching Institute. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics and member of the Soviet National Committee of the Pugwash movement of scientists for peace and disarmament.

He was married in 1927 to Anna Alekseevna Krylova, daughter of Academician A.N. Krylov. They have two sons, Sergei and Andrei.

Pyotr Kapitsa died on April 8, 1984.

Details

Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, also spelled Kapitza, (born June 26 [July 8, New Style], 1894, Kronshtadt, Russian Empire—died April 8, 1984, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), was a Soviet physicist who invented new machines for liquefaction of gases and in 1937 discovered the superfluidity of liquid helium. He was a corecipient of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for his basic inventions and discoveries in the area of low-temperature physics.

After a short military service in World War I, Kapitsa resumed his engineering education at the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute, turning to physics in the seminar of Abram Joffe. Before graduation in 1919, he started work at the Petrograd Physico-Technical Institute, a new research institution organized by Joffe after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Kapitsa lost his father, wife, and two small children during the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918–19. In 1921, when Joffe took him on an academic tour of postwar Europe, Kapitsa remained in England at the University of Cambridge as a research student of Ernest Rutherford. Kapitsa received his doctorate from Cambridge in 1923 and became assistant director of magnetic research at the Cavendish Laboratory. He was made a fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge, in 1925 and elected to the Royal Society in 1929. The same year, the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences elected Kapitsa a corresponding member. Kapitsa started research in low-temperature physics, and in the Royal Society’s Mond Laboratory, established for him at Cambridge in 1932, he built a new type of helium liquefier based on an expansion turbine.

During a regular visit to the U.S.S.R in 1934, Kapitsa was told that he would have to continue his work in the Soviet Union. In 1935 he was appointed director of the specially established Institute of Physical Problems in Moscow, where he installed his former equipment from the Mond Laboratory after it was purchased by the Soviet government. He resumed researching the heat-conduction properties of liquid helium, and in 1938 he discovered superfluidity, or the fact that helium II (the stable form of liquid helium below 2.174 K, or −270.976 °C) has almost no viscosity (i.e., resistance to flow). In the meantime, he also invented an apparatus for large-scale industrial production of liquid oxygen. In 1939 he was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences.

During the precarious years of political purge trials in the Soviet Union, Kapitsa developed ties with several leaders of the government, including Joseph Stalin, to whom he wrote long and sometimes daring personal letters. As one of the politically best-connected Soviet scientists, he managed to secure certain privileges for his institute, advance the industrial application of his inventions, and save several scientists from prison, including two of the nation’s best theoretical physicists, Vladimir Fock and Lev Landau. Landau, who worked as house theoretician at Kapitsa’s institute, developed a quantum theoretical explanation of the phenomenon of superfluidity in 1941. During World War II, Kapitsa became responsible for the entire Soviet industry’s production of liquid oxygen and supervised the construction of large plants based on machines he invented.

In August 1945 the Politburo appointed Kapitsa to the special committee entrusted with the construction of the Soviet atomic bomb. Tensions soon developed between him and the committee’s political chairman, Lavrenty Beria; as a result, Kapitsa fell out of favour with Stalin. By mid-1946 Kapitsa had been dismissed from all of his official appointments, except membership in the Academy of Sciences. After Stalin died in 1953, Beria was ousted by Nikita Khrushchev, who gradually restored Kapitsa’s academic (but not government) positions. In 1955 Kapitsa regained the directorship of the Institute of Physical Problems and kept it until his death.

Having done some original work on ball lightning while he was out of favour with the government, Kapitsa switched from low-temperature physics to high-power microwave generators. Later he also contributed to controlled thermonuclear fusion research. Starting in 1955, he edited the main Soviet periodical in physics, the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics, and from 1957 he was an influential member of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.

Kapitsa maintained a visible profile, pushing the boundaries of allowed public speech by his addresses and actions, including support for the temporarily banned field of genetics and the 1960s environmental campaign to preserve Lake Baikal from industrial pollution. While disagreeing with political dissidents, he refused to sign an official letter by the Academy of Sciences condemning physicist Andrey Sakharov. Kapitsa was also active in the international Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, in which many scientists spoke out against the Cold War and the dangers of thermonuclear conflict.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-26 20:29:15

1130) Courtney Walsh

Summary

Courtney Andrew Walsh OJ (born 30 October 1962) is a former Jamaican cricketer who represented the West Indies from 1984 to 2001, captaining the West Indies in 22 Test matches. He is a fast bowler and considered one of the all time greats, best known for a remarkable opening bowling partnership along with fellow West Indian Curtly Ambrose for several years. Walsh played 132 Tests and 205 ODIs for the West Indies and took 519 and 227 wickets respectively. He shared 421 Test wickets with Ambrose in 49 matches. He held the record of most Test wickets from 2000, after he broke the record of Kapil Dev. This record was later broken in 2004 by Shane Warne. He was the first bowler to reach 500 wickets in Test cricket. His autobiography is entitled "Heart of the Lion". Walsh was named one of the Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1987. In October 2010, he was inducted into the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame. He was appointed as the Specialist Bowling Coach of Bangladesh Cricket Team in August 2016.

Details

Batting Career Summary

M : Inn : NO : Runs : HS : Avg : BF : SR : 100 : 200 : 50 : 4s : 6s
Test : 132 : 185 : 61 : 936 : 30 : 7.55 : 2088 : 44.83 : 0 : 0 : 0 : 77 : 19
ODI : 205 : 79 : 33 : 321 : 30 : 6.98 : 451 : 71.18 : 0 : 0 : 0 : 23 : 9

Bowling Career Summary

M : Inn : B : Runs : Wkts : BBI : BBM : Econ : Avg : SR : 5W : 10W
Test : 132 : 242 : 30019 : 12688 : 519 : 7/37 : 13/55 : 2.54 : 24.45 : 57.84 : 22 : 3
ODI : 205 : 204 : 10822 : 6918 : 227 : 5/1 : 5/1 : 3.84 : 30.48 : 47.67 : 1 : 0

Career Information

Test debut vs Australia at W.A.C.A. Ground, Nov 09, 1984
Last Test vs South Africa at Sabina Park, Apr 19, 2001
ODI debut vs Sri Lanka at Tasmania Cricket Association Ground, Jan 10, 1985
Last ODI vs New Zealand at AMI Stadium, Jan 11, 2000

Profile

He has taken 519 Test wickets, has bowled more than 5000 overs in Test cricket, has taken 5 wickets in an innings more than 100 times in first class cricket, but Courtney Walsh was a bowler who will be remembered for the spirit with which he played as much as the feats he achieved.

He made his debut in 1984, and for the rest of the 1980s remained a stock bowler alongside Marshall, Joel Garner and Ambrose. Come the 90s, post retirement of Garner and Marshall, Walsh took the new ball and formed one of the most dreaded pairs along with Curtly Ambrose. Walsh's easy run up and natural bowling action allowed him to swing the ball both ways, and when coupled with the aggressive fast bowling by his partner Ambrose, formed one of the best new ball attacks in the 90s.

Walsh was appointed West Indies captain in 1994, taking over from Richie Richardson. The second half of the 90s saw Walsh picking wickets at will; in 1995, he picked up 62 wickets at a stunning average of around 21. He lost pace towards the end of his career but that was never a detriment, as highlighted by the 66 Test wickets he bagged in the year 2000 (at an average of around 18). It also included a 34 wicket series against England, at an average of around 12. In March 2000, in his 114th Test against Zimbabwe at Sabina Park, Walsh went past Kapil Dev's record of 434 wickets to become the highest wicket taker in Test cricket. He retired with 519 wickets, and held the record until 2004 when Muthiah Muralitharan broke it.

In ODIs, Walsh was not as successful as he was in Tests. However, he maintained good economy, and had his moments like the 5 wickets for 1 run spell against Sri Lanka in 1986. Walsh did not know how to bat, and scored a record 43 ducks in his Test career.

Interesting facts: Walsh is also famous for his sportsmanlike gesture of not mankading last man Saleem Jaffar of Pakistan in a World Cup match in 1987, which cost the West Indies the match and a spot in the semi-finals.

Courtney Walsh Also owns a restaurant in Jamaica called Cuddyz.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-28 00:04:06

1131) Jane Campion

Summary

Dame Elizabeth Jane Campion DNZM (born 30 April 1954) is a New Zealand filmmaker. She has received two Academy Awards, two BAFTA Awards, and two Golden Globe Awards for her critically acclaimed films, The Piano (1993), and The Power of the Dog (2021). Campion was appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (DNZM) in the 2016 New Year Honours, for services to film.

Campion is known as a groundbreaking female director and is currently the only woman to be nominated twice for Academy Award for Best Director (winning once), and is the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme d'Or for The Piano (1993) which also won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. She also made history at the 94th Academy Awards when she won Best Director for The Power of the Dog (2021), making her the oldest female director to win, the first woman to win Academy Awards for both directing and screenwriting in her different films, and the first woman not to win Best Picture after winning Best Director. She broke the same barrier at the 78th Venice International Film Festival when she won the Silver Lion award. She is the third woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Feature Film.

Campion is also known for directing the films An Angel at My Table (1990), The Portrait of a Lady (1996), Holy Smoke! (1998), and Bright Star (2009). She also co-created the television series Top of the Lake (2013) and received three Primetime Emmy Award nominations.

Details

Jane Campion, (born April 30, 1954, Wellington, New Zealand), is a New Zealand director and screenwriter whose films often focus on women who are outsiders in society.

Although both her parents were involved in New Zealand theatre, Campion initially chose a different direction, earning a B.A. (1975) in anthropology from the Victoria University of Wellington. She obtained a second degree (1981), in art, from the Sydney College of the Arts at the University of Sydney in Australia before turning to film. Campion enrolled in the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and made several notable short films while there and afterward. Her first theatrical feature, Sweetie (1989), won notice at the Cannes film festival and was followed by the successful An Angel at My Table (1990; originally produced for New Zealand television), which was based on autobiographies by Janet Frame.

Campion next wrote and directed the internationally acclaimed The Piano (1993), for which she won an Academy Award for best original screenplay and was nominated for best director. The movie was also nominated for best picture. The 19th-century love story centres on a mute woman (played by Holly Hunter) who journeys from Scotland to New Zealand for an arranged marriage and later has a passionate affair with her husband’s overseer (Harvey Keitel).

Campion’s subsequent films included The Portrait of a Lady (1996), an adaptation of the novel by Henry James starring Nicole Kidman and John Malkovich; Holy Smoke (1999), a dramedy that examines spiritual awakenings and deprogrammers and featured Kate Winslet; and the thriller In the Cut (2003). In 2009 Campion earned accolades for Bright Star, which chronicles the romance between poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. She later cowrote and codirected the eerie TV series Top of the Lake (2013, 2017), about a female detective.

Campion returned to the big screen with The Power of the Dog (2021), a western centring on a rancher (Benedict Cumberbatch) whose cruelty—especially toward his brother and the latter’s wife—hides his inner turmoil. The drama earned widespread acclaim, and its 12 Oscar nominations included nods for Campion’s direction and for her screenplay, which was adapted from a novel by Thomas Savage. She ultimately received the Academy Award for best director, becoming the third woman to win in that category.

Additional Information

Jane Campion was born in Wellington, New Zealand, and now lives in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Having graduated with a BA in Anthropology from Victoria University of Wellington in 1975, and a BA, with a painting major, at Sydney College of the Arts in 1979, she began filmmaking in the early 1980s, attending the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS). Her first short film, Peel (1982) won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. Her other short films include A Girl's Own Story (1984), Passionless Moments (1985), After Hours (1985) and the tele-feature 2 Friends (1986), all of which won Australian and international awards. She co-wrote and directed her first feature film, Sweetie (1989), which won the Georges Sadoul prize in 1989 for Best Foreign Film, as well as the LA Film Critics' New Generation Award in 1990, the American Independant Spirit Award for Best Foreign Feature, and the Australian Critics' Award for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. She followed this with An Angel at My Table (1990), a dramatization based on the autobiographies of Janet Frame which won some seven prizes, including the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1990. It was also awarded prizes at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals, again winning the American Independent Spirit Award, and was voted the most popular film at the 1990 Sydney Film Festival. The Piano (1993) won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, making her the first woman ever to win the prestigious award. She also captured an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay at the 1993 Oscars, while also being nominated for Best Director.

* Became the second female to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Director category for her film The Piano (1993). The first being Lina Wertmüller for her film Seven Beauties (1975) (aka Seven Beauties). She is also the first woman to be nominated for more than one Best Director Academy Award.
* Was among the guests at Nicole Kidman's wedding to Keith Urban
* Was part of the jury of the 2007 Venice Film Festival.
* Has directed seven actors in Oscar nominated performances: Holly Hunter, Anna Paquin, Barbara Hershey, Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons. Hunter and Paquin won Oscars for their performances in The Piano (1993).
* In Istanbul for 24th International Istanbul Film Festival as the president of Golden Tulip Jury and for the screening of The Piano (1993) in the honor of Jane Campion and Harvey Keitel collaboration. [April 2005]
* Has a look-alike puppet in the French show Les Guignols de l'info (1988).
* She and Steven Spielberg have both been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director twice: once in 1994 when Campion was nominated for The Piano (1993) and Spielberg was nominated for Schindler's List (1993) and again in 2022 when Campion was nominated for The Power of the Dog (2021) and Spielberg was nominated for West Side Story (2021).
* First woman to have been nominated twice in the Best Director category, and the third woman after Chloé Zhao and Kathryn Bigelow to actually win in that category.

Jane-Campion-1.jpg?w=681&h=383&crop=1

Jai Ganesh · 2022-08-30 00:04:08

1132) Judith Resnik

Summary

Judith Arlene Resnik (April 5, 1949 – January 28, 1986) was an American electrical engineer, software engineer, biomedical engineer, pilot and NASA astronaut who died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. She was the fourth woman, the second American woman and the first Jewish woman of any nationality to fly in space, logging 145 hours in orbit.

Recognized while still a child for her intellectual brilliance, Resnik was accepted at Carnegie Mellon University, after being one of only sixteen women in the history of the United States to have attained a perfect score on the SAT exam at the time. She went on to graduate with a degree in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon before attaining a PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland.

Resnik worked for RCA as an engineer on Navy missile and radar projects, as a senior systems engineer for Xerox Corporation, and published research on special-purpose integrated circuitry. She was also a pilot and made research contributions to biomedical engineering as a research fellow at the National Institutes of Health.

At age 28, Resnik was selected by NASA as a mission specialist. She was part of NASA Astronaut Group 8, the first group to include women. While training on the astronaut program, she developed software and operating procedures for NASA missions. Her first space flight was the STS-41-D mission in August and September 1984, the twelfth Space Shuttle flight, and the maiden voyage of Discovery, where her duties included operating its robotic arm. Her second Shuttle mission was STS-51-L in January 1986 aboard Challenger. She died when it broke up shortly after liftoff, and crashed into the ocean.

Details

Dr. Judith Resnik was a NASA astronaut and engineer. She was part of the first group of female astronauts recruited by the space agency, and the second American woman to fly in space. She participated in two missions, logging a total of 144 hours and 57 minutes on orbit. Dr. Resnik was part of the ill-fated Challenger mission, which exploded 73 seconds after launch on January 28, 1986.

* Fast Facts: Judith A. Resnik
* Born: April 5, 1949 in Akron, Ohio
* Died: January 28, 1986 in Cape Canaveral, Florida
* Parents: Sarah and Marvin Resnik
* Spouse: Michael Oldak (m. 1970-1975)
* Education: Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, doctorate in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland
* Interesting Fact: Judith A. Resnik planned at one time to become a concert pianist. She was accepted at Juilliard School of Music but turned it down to study mathematics.

Early Life

Born on April 5, 1949, in Akron, Ohio, Judith A. Resnik grew up under the influence of two talented parents. Her father, Marvin Resnik was an optometrist who had served in the Army in World War II, and her mother, Sarah, was a paralegal. Resnik's parents raised her as an observant Jew and she studied Hebrew as a child. She was also very much interested in music, planning at one time to become a concert pianist. Many of her biographies describe Judith Resnik as a very strong-minded child, bright, disciplined and talented at whatever she set out to learn and do.

Education

Judith (Judy) Resnik went to Firestone High School, graduating as valedictorian of her class. She actually had a place waiting for her at Juilliard School of Music in New York but elected instead to study mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, she began studying electrical engineering. She did her master's degree work at the University of Maryland. Eventually, she went on to get a Ph.D. in the subject in 1977.

While pursuing her graduate studies, Resnik worked at RCA on missile and radar projects for the military. Her research into integrated circuitry caught NASA's attention and played a role in her acceptance as an astronaut. She also did research into biomedical engineering at the National Institutes of Health, with a particular interest in vision systems. During her graduate studies, Resnik also qualified as a professional aircraft pilot, ultimately piloting NASA T-38 Talon aircraft. During the years before her eventual acceptance at NASA, she worked in California, getting ready for the application and tryout process.

NASA Career

In 1978, Judy Resnik became a NASA astronaut at the age of 29. She was one of six women accepted into the program and went through its rigorous years of training. She often cited the actress Nichelle Nichols (from Star Trek) as an influence on her decision to join NASA. In her training, Resnik focused on all the systems astronauts were required to know, and paid particular attention to robotic arm operations, as well as the deployment of orbiting experiments and solar array systems. Her work on the ground focused on tethered satellite systems, spacecraft manual control systems, and software applications for the remote manipulator systems.

Resnik's first flight took place aboard the space shuttle Discovery. It was also the maiden voyage for the spacecraft. With that mission, she became the second American to fly, following the first woman, Sally Ride. Many viewers of the IMAX film The Dream is Alive first saw her as the astronaut with long, flowing hair, fast asleep on orbit during one of the scenes.

Resnik's second (and last flight) was aboard the space shuttle Challenger, which was to carry the first teacher to space, Christa McAuliffe. It broke up 73 seconds into launch on January 26, 1986. Had that mission been successful, she would have been one of the mission specialists, working on a variety of experiments. In her short 37-year lifespan, she logged 144 hours and 57 minutes on orbit, worked toward two degrees in science, and pursued both her work and her hobbies (cooking and car racing) with equal intensity.

Personal Life

Judith Resnik was briefly married to engineer Michael Oldak. They had no children, and both were engineering students when they met. They divorced in 1975.

Awards and Legacy

Judith A. Resnik was honored many times after her death. Schools are named for her, and there's a lunar crater on the far side of the Moon called Resnik. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers established an award in her name, given to people who make outstanding contributions to space engineering. At the Challenger Centers, a network of museums and centers named for the Challenger 7, she holds a place of interest and honor, particularly for female students. Each year, NASA honors lost astronauts at the Memorial Wall and space mirror at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Center in Florida, including the Challenger Seven who died in the 1986 tragedy.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-01 00:14:15

1133) Allan Border

Summary

Allan Robert Border AO (born 27 July 1955) is an Australian cricket commentator and former international cricketer. A batsman, Border was for many years the captain of the Australian team. His playing nickname was "A.B.". He played 156 Test matches in his career, a record until it was passed by fellow Australian Steve Waugh. Border formerly held the world record for the number of consecutive Test appearances of 153, before it was surpassed in June 2018 by Alastair Cook, and is second on the list of number of Tests as captain.

He was primarily a left hand batsman, but also had occasional success as a part-time left arm orthodox spinner. Border amassed 11,174 Test runs (a world record until it was passed by Brian Lara in 2006). He hit 27 centuries in his Test career. He retired as Australia's most capped player and leading run-scorer in both Tests and ODIs. His Australian record for Test Match runs stood for 15 years before Ricky Ponting overtook him during the Third Ashes Test against England in July 2009.

Border was one of the 55 inaugural inductees of the ICC Cricket Hall of Fame.

In 2009 as part of the Q150 celebrations, Allan Border was announced as one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland for his role as a "sports legend".

In 2016, Border was a recipient of the Queensland Greats Awards. In a fan poll conducted by the CA in 2017, he was named in the country's best Ashes XI in the last 40 years.

Details

Full profile

Batting Career Summary

M : Inn : NO : Runs : HS : Avg : BF : SR : 100 : 200 : 50 : 4s : 6s

Test : 156 : 265 : 44 : 11174 : 205 : 50.56 : 27002 : 41.38 : 27 : 2 : 63 : 1161 : 28
ODI : 273 : 252 : 39 : 6524 : 127 : 30.63 : 9134 : 71.43 : 3 : 0 : 39 : 500 : 43

Bowling Career Summary

M : Inn : B : Runs : Wkts : BBI : BBM : Econ : Avg : SR : 5W : 10W
Test : 156 : 98 : 3911 : 1525 : 39 : 7/46 : 11/96 : 2.34 : 39.1 : 100.28 : 2 : 1
ODI : 273 : 87 : 2659 : 2071 : 73 : 3/20 : 3/20 : 4.67 : 28.37 : 36.42 : 0 : 0

Career Information

Test debut vs England at Melbourne Cricket Ground, Dec 29, 1978
Last Test vs South Africa at Kingsmead, Mar 25, 1994
ODI debut vs England at Sydney Cricket Ground, Jan 13, 1979
Last ODI vs South Africa at Mangaung Oval, Apr 08, 1994

Profile

Toughness seems to be the prevalent trait among Australians. However, none utilized it better than Allan Border. His captaincy dragged Australia from the lowest ebb, transformed them into world beaters and maintained such an a degree of pressure that the term mental disintegration came to be associated with the Australian way of playing.

Border's arrival on the Australian cricket scene came when there was turmoil. Many of the Australian players had opted to play in the World Series Championships organized by Kerry Packer in 1977. The task of rebuilding Australian cricket was not going to be easy.

His first Test century was a bitter-sweet one. In the first Test against Pakistan in 1979, Australia needed 382 runs to clinch the match. Border notched his first ton as Australia reached 305/3. However, Sarfraz Nawaz's burst of seven wickets for one run triggered a collapse as Pakistan bundled Australia out for 310 to help them win by 71 runs. However, in 1980, Border became the first and only player to go past 150 in both the innings when he smashed an unbeaten 150 and 153 against Pakistan at Lahore .

Border stamped his class in the 1981 Ashes series in which he ended with 533 runs at an average of 59.2, including three centuries. However, the series was defined by some heroic all-around performances by Ian Botham as England clinched the series 3-1. The series was termed as 'Botham's Ashes', but Border was named as Wisden Cricketer of the year in 1981 for his contributions in that series. Following Hughes' resignation, Border was given captaincy under the most difficult circumstances. Later on, he admitted that he was a reluctant captain.

Australia still did not see results go their way. They lost a series against New Zealand at home for the first time and they suffered another thrashing at the hands of the West Indies. Along the way, Border was milking runs in all conditions.

In the 2nd Test of the 1984 series at Port of Spain in Trinidad, Border withstood some ferocious bowling as he stroked 98 and 100, remaining unbeaten on both the occasions. Australia had salvaged a draw and Border had made his first statement of intent. The West Indies had conquered everybody in their path but they could not get the better of Border.

The 1986 Test match between India and Australia at Chennai was the starting point of Australia's renaissance in Cricket. Border grafted his way to 106 but his comments to spur Dean Jones on was memorable. When Jones was suffering from heat exhaustion, Border came up to him and offered no sympathy. He told him harshly that he wanted Jones to tough it out and not be a weakling. Jones went onto make a remarkable 210 and the match entered into cricketing folklore as the second tied Test match in history. The 1987 World Cup win completed the turn-around for Border and Australia. In the final against England in Kolkata, he turned the match around with the ball. Mike Gatting, the England skipper, was going along nicely when he decided to play the reverse sweep. It resulted in a simple catch to the keeper and England never recovered from it. They lost the final by seven runs to hand Australia their first World Cup win.

Along the way, Border showed that he was an able all-rounder as well. In the 4th Test at the SCG in 1988, Border comes onto bowl with West Indies at 144/1. With his accurate left arm spinners, he ran through the West Indies batting as he snapped up 7/46. He contributed 75 and picked up 4/50 in the second innings to pick up his only 10 wicket haul in Tests. In the second innings, Border hit the winning runs to cap off a memorable match for him.

In a Test match against New Zealand at Christchurch in 1993, he went past Sunil Gavaskar's mark of 10122 runs to become the highest run-getter in Tests. He smashed a double century at Leeds as Australia routed England 4-0 in the 1993 Ashes. However, if there is one regret in Border's captaincy, it was the fact that he never managed to conquer the West Indies.

He played his final Test against South Africa and became a selector after-wards. Such has been his contribution to Australian cricket that his name stands for excellence. Every year, players are awarded the Allan Border medal for being the best.

He has a whole host of records that has now been surpassed. He played in the most number of Test (156), scored the most number of runs (11,174 runs), featured in the most consecutive Tests (153), captained the side 93 times which is a world record. Allan Border is the colossus that has given Australia a solid foundation for long term success.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-03 00:05:36

1134) Arno Allan Penzias

Summary

Arno Penzias, in full Arno Allan Penzias, (born April 26, 1933, Munich, Germany), is a German American astrophysicist who shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery of a faint electromagnetic radiation throughout the universe. Their detection of this radiation lent strong support to the big-bang model of cosmic evolution. (The other half of the Nobel Prize was awarded to the Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa for unrelated work.)

Educated at City College of New York in New York City and Columbia University, where he received a doctorate in 1962, Penzias joined Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, New Jersey. In collaboration with Wilson he began monitoring radio emissions from a ring of gas encircling the Milky Way Galaxy. Unexpectedly, the two scientists detected a uniform microwave radiation that suggested a residual thermal energy throughout the universe of about 3 K. Most scientists now agree that this is the residual background radiation stemming from the primordial explosion billions of years ago from which the universe was created. From 1976 to 1979 Penzias was director of the Bell Radio Research Laboratory. He later served as vice president of research (1981–95) and as vice president and chief scientist (1995–98) at Bell Laboratories, which was spun off as part of Lucent Technologies in 1996.

Details

Arno Allan Penzias (born April 26, 1933) is an American physicist, radio astronomer and Nobel laureate in physics. Along with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory of cosmology.

Career

Penzias went on to work at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, where, with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he worked on ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receivers, intended for radio astronomy observations. In 1964, on building their most sensitive antenna/receiver system, the pair encountered radio noise which they could not explain. It was far less energetic than the radiation given off by the Milky Way, and it was isotropic, so they assumed their instrument was subject to interference by terrestrial sources. They tried, and then rejected, the hypothesis that the radio noise emanated from New York City. An examination of the microwave horn antenna showed it was full of bat and pigeon droppings (which Penzias described as "white dielectric material"). After the pair removed the dung buildup the noise remained. Having rejected all sources of interference, Penzias contacted Robert math, who suggested it might be the background radiation predicted by some cosmological theories. The pair agreed with math to publish side-by-side letters in the Astrophysical Journal, with Penzias and Wilson describing their observations and math suggesting the interpretation as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the radio remnant of the Big Bang. This allowed astronomers to confirm the Big Bang, and to correct many of their previous assumptions about it.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences in 1975. Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize, sharing it with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Kapitsa's work on Low-temperature physics was unrelated to Penzias and Wilson's). In 1977, the two had received the Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1979, Penzias received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He is also the recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence. In 1998, he was awarded the IRI Medal from the Industrial Research Institute.

On April 26, 2019 the Nürnberger Astronomische Gesellschaft e.V. (NAG) inaugurated the 3-m radio telescope at the Regiomontanus-Sternwarte, the public observatory of Nuremberg, and dedicated this instrument to Arno Penzias.

Penzias has been a resident of Highland Park, New Jersey. He has a son, David, and two daughters, Mindy Penzias Dirks, PhD, and Rabbi Shifra (Laurie) Weiss-Penzias.

He currently serves as a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-05 00:14:18

1135) Robert Woodrow Wilson

Summary

Robert Woodrow Wilson (born January 10, 1936) is an American astronomer who, along with Arno Allan Penzias, discovered cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in 1964. The pair won the 1978 Nobel prize in physics for their discovery.

While doing tests and experiments with the Holmdel Horn Antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel Township, New Jersey, Wilson and Penzias discovered a source of noise in the atmosphere that they could not explain. After removing all potential sources of noise, including pigeon droppings on the antenna, the noise was finally identified as CMB, which served as important corroboration of the Big Bang theory.

In 1970, Wilson led a team that made the first detection of a rotational spectral line of carbon monoxide (CO) in an astronomical object, the Orion Nebula, and eight other galactic sources. Subsequently, CO observations became the standard method of tracing cool molecular interstellar gas, and detection of CO was the foundational event for the fields of millimeter and submillimeter astronomy.

Details

Robert Woodrow Wilson, (born January 10, 1936, Houston, Texas, U.S.), is an American radio astronomer who shared, with Arno Penzias, the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for a discovery that supported the big-bang model of creation. (Soviet physicist Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa also shared the award, for unrelated research.)

Educated at Rice University in Houston and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he received his doctorate in 1962, Wilson then worked (1963–76) at the Bell Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, where, in collaboration with Penzias, he began monitoring radio emissions from a ring of gas encircling the Milky Way Galaxy. The two scientists detected an unusual background radiation that seemed to permeate the cosmos uniformly and indicated a temperature of 3 kelvins (three degrees above absolute zero). This radiation appeared to be a remnant of the big bang, the primordial explosion billions of years ago from which the universe originated.

In 1976 Wilson became head of Bell’s Radio Physics Research Department. In 1994 he began working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Wilson contributed to many scientific journals on such subjects as background temperature measurements and millimetre-wave measurements of interstellar molecules. He became a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1979.

Additional Information

American astrophysicist Robert Woodrow Wilson developed an interest in electronics and radio transmissions as a youngster. In his high school years he earned spending money by repairing radio and television sets, built his own hi-fi system, and helped ham operators build and fix their machinery, though he says he lost interest in such devices as soon as they were working again. He studied under John G. Bolton and Maarten Schmidt at CalTech, worked at the Owens Valley Radio Observatory, and was hired at the Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey in 1963, where he was the second radio astronomer alongside Arno Penzias. When budget cuts were announced, and Bell decided it could only afford one radio astronomer, Wilson and Penzias offered to cut their paid work to half-time, and both continued their work there, using an advanced radio telescope to monitor radio waves from the Milky Way galaxy.

In 1964, they discovered a consistent background buzz received from all directions, which they first suspected was a mechanical problem or a reflection of terrestrial broadcasting. Instead, further research revealed that they had discovered cosmic background radiation, a quiet but consistent remnant of the "big bang" that began the universe some 15 billion years ago. They were promptly returned to full-time status, and both scientists were honored with the Nobel Prize in 1978, sharing the accolade with Pyotr Kapitsa, who conducted unrelated research into low-temperature physics. Wilson's later work has included millimeter wave astronomy, measuring the sun's radiation in the earth's atmosphere, quantifying interstellar isotopes, and investigating the properties of molecules detected in open space.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-07 00:42:37

1136) Kristin Otto

Summary

Kristin Otto (born 7 February 1966) is a German Olympic swimming champion. She is most famous for being the first woman to win six gold medals at a single Olympic Games, doing so at the 1988 Seoul Olympic games. In long course, she held the world records in the 100 meter and 200 meter freestyle events. Otto was also the first woman to swim the short course 100 meter backstroke in under a minute, doing so at an international short course meet at Indiana University in 1983.

Career

Otto was born in Leipzig, Bezirk Leipzig (present-day Sachsen), East Germany, and began swimming at the age of 11, training in an East German sports academy. At sixteen, she participated in her first world championships, the 1982 World Aquatics Championships, winning the gold medal in the 100 meter backstroke as well as two additional gold medals in the 4×100 m relays with the East German team.

After 1982, Otto changed coaches and began concentrating on other speed strokes. At the following European Championships in 1983, Otto finished second in the 100 meter freestyle, following her fellow East German, Birgit Meineke.

In 1984, Otto set a world record in the 200 meter freestyle. She was expected to win gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic games, but was unable to compete due to the boycott by 14 Eastern Bloc countries, including East Germany. In 1985 she fractured a vertebra, keeping her from competing for most of the year or to go to the European Championships.

Otto returned to competitive swimming at the 1986 World Championships in Madrid, where she won 4 gold medals (100 m freestyle, 200 m individual medley, 4×100 m medley relay and 4×100 m freestyle relay) and 2 silver medals (50 m freestyle, 100 m butterfly). Her success continued the following year at the 1987 European Championships where she won 5 gold medals.

At the 1988 Seoul Olympic games she once again was expected to win Olympic gold. She won six gold medals, as well as setting Olympic records in the 50 m freestyle and 100 m butterfly.

Otto retired from swimming in 1989. She currently works as a sports reporter for German television.

She was named the Female World Swimmer of the Year in 1984, 1986 and 1988 by Swimming World magazine. In October 1986, she was awarded a Star of People's Friendship in gold (second class) for her sporting success.

Otto's career was marred by the revelations of widespread performance-enhancing drugs used by East German athletes: former teammate Petra Schneider openly admitted that she had used banned substances. However, Otto stated that she was not aware that she was being doped and she passed all the doping tests during competition, saying: "The medals are the only reminder of how hard I worked. It was not all drugs.

Details

Kristin Otto, (born Feb. 7, 1966, Leipzig, E.Ger.), German swimmer, is the first female athlete to win six gold medals at a single Olympic Games.

Otto entered a special sports school at age 11 after East Germany’s comprehensive scouting program identified her as a swimming prospect. In 1982 she set her first world record as a member of her country’s 4 × 100-metre medley relay team. A favourite to win a medal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Otto was unable to compete because of East Germany’s boycott. Later that year she cracked a vertebra and spent nine months in a neck brace; although physicians advised her to give up her sport, she returned to compete at the 1986 world championships in Madrid, winning four gold and two silver medals.

At the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, Otto entered six events and won gold medals in all of them. Her individual victories included the 100-metre butterfly, 50-metre freestyle, 100-metre freestyle, and 100-metre backstroke. She also swam the lead leg in East Germany’s 4 × 100-metre freestyle relay victory and the backstroke leg in the 4 × 100-metre individual medley relay. Prior to Otto’s achievement, no woman had won more than four gold medals at a single Olympics.

Otto was considered one of the most versatile female swimmers, winning world or Olympic championships in the backstroke, butterfly, freestyle, and individual medley. She retired after the 1988 Olympics.

Additional Information

Kristin Otto, of the German Democratic Republic, won six gold medals at one Games (1988) to set a women's record for any sport at the Olympics. In Seoul Otto uniquely won gold medals in three different strokes, freestyle, backstroke and butterfly, and her overall performance at the 1988 Games ranks as one of history's greatest sporting achievements. Her gold medals came in the 50 freestyle, 100 freestyle, 100 backstroke, 100 butterfly, and both relays. In 1987 at the European Championships she had won five of the same six events, missing only the 50, in which she did not compete. At the World Championships (1982, 1986) she won seven gold medals. Otto set two individual world records and contributed to four relay world records in her career.

Personal Bests: 50 freestyle – 25.49 (1988); 100 freestyle – 54.93 (1994); 100 backstroke – 1:00.89 (1988); 100 butterfly – 59.00 (1988).

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-09 00:02:13

1137) George Stibitz

Summary

George Robert Stibitz (April 30, 1904 - January 31, 1995) was a Bell Labs researcher internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was known for his work in the 1930s and 1940s on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.

Stibitz was born in York, Pennsylvania. He received his bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.

Computer

In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs (1930–1941), completed a relay-based adder he later dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Replicas of the "Model K" now reside in the Computer History Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University and the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana, where the George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Awards are granted.

Bell Labs subsequently authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Computer, completed in November 1939 and put into operation in 1940, was able to do calculations on complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College in September 1940, Stibitz used a modified teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Computer in New York over telegraph lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely.

Wartime activities and subsequent Bell Labs computers

After the United States entered World War II in December 1941, Bell Labs became active in developing fire-control devices for the U.S. military. The Labs' most famous invention was the M-9 Gun Director, an ingenious analog device that directed anti-aircraft fire with uncanny accuracy. Stibitz moved to the National Defense Research Committee, an advisory body for the government, but he kept close ties with Bell Labs. For the next several years (1941–1945), with his guidance, the Labs developed relay computers of ever-increasing sophistication. The first of them was used to test the M-9 Gun Director. Later models had more sophisticated capabilities. They had specialized names, but later on, Bell Labs renamed them "Model II", "Model III", etc., and the Complex Number Computer was renamed the "Model I". All used telephone relays for logic, and paper tape for sequencing and control. The "Model V", was completed in 1946 and was a fully programmable, general-purpose computer, although its relay technology made it slower than the all-electronic computers then under development.

After the war, in 1945, Stibitz did not return to Bell Labs, but instead went into private consulting work.

Use of the term "digital"

In April 1942, Stibitz attended a meeting of a division of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), charged with evaluating various proposals for fire-control devices to be used against Axis forces during World War II. Stibitz noted that the proposals fell into two broad categories: "analog" and "pulse". In a memo written after the meeting, he suggested that the term "digital" be used in place of "pulse", as he felt the latter term was insufficiently descriptive of the nature of the processes involved.

Details:

Biography

George Robert Stibitz was born on 20 April 1904, in York, Pennsylvania. Stibitz’s childhood was spent in Dayton, Ohio, where his father taught at a local college. Because of the interest in and aptitude for science and engineering that he had exhibited, Stibitz was enrolled at an experimental high school in Dayton established by Charles Kettering, inventor of the first automobile ignition system.

Stibitz enrolled at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. After earning hisbachelor’s degree there in 1926, he went on to Union College in Schenectady,New York, where he was awarded his M.S. degree in 1927. After graduating fromUnion, he worked as a technician at General Electric in Schenectady for oneyear before returning to Cornell University to begin his doctoral program. Stibitz received his Ph.D. in mathematical physics from Cornell in 1930. Stibitz’s first job after graduation was as a research mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City.

In the fall of 1937 Stibitz made the discovery for which he is now best known, the use of relays for automated computing. A relay is a metallic device that can assume one of two positions — open or closed — when an electrical current passes through it. The relay acts as a kind of gate, therefore, that will control the flow of electrical current, and was a common device used to regulate telephone circuits.

In November 1937 Stibitz decided to see if relays could be used to perform simple mathematical functions. He borrowed a few of the metal devices from theBell stockroom, took them home, and assembled a simple computing system on his kitchen table. The system consisted of the relays, a dry cell, flashlight bulbs, and metal strips cut from a tobacco can. He soon had a device in whicha lighted bulb represented the binary digit “1” and an unlighted bulb, the binary digit “0.” The device was also able to use binary mathematics to add andsubtract decimal numbers. Stibitz’s colleagues later gave the name “K-Model”to this primitive computer because it was built on his kitchen table.

When Stibitz first demonstrated his K-model computer for company executives, they were not very impressed. Less than a year later, however, Bell executives had changed their minds about the Stibitz invention. An important factor in that decision was the increasing pressure on Bell to find a way of solving its increasingly complex mathematical problems. The company agreed to finance construction of a large experimental model of Stibitz’s invention. Construction on that machine began in April 1939, and the final product was first put into operation on 8 January 1940. Called the Complex Number Calculator (CNC),the machine had the capacity to add, subtract, multiply, and divide complex numbers — just the kinds of problems that were particularly troublesome for engineers at Bell.

Nine months later, Stibitz recorded another milestone in the history of computer science. At a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College, he hooked up the new CNC in New York City with a telegraph system. Hethen sent problems from Dartmouth to the CNC in New York, which solved the problems and sent the answers back to Dartmouth by means of the telegraph. This type of data transmission has now become commonplace in a modern day society of modems and fax machines.

During World War II, Bell Labs permitted Stibitz to join the National DefenseResearch Council. There the demands of modern military artillery convinced Stibitz even more of the need for improved computer hardware, and he spent most of the war working on improved versions of the CNC, also known as the Model1. The Model 2 computer, for instance, used punched tapes to store programsthat would give the computer instructions; in this manner the computer couldperform the same complex calculations many times on different sets of numbers. This proved useful in calculating weapons trajectories.

At the end of World War II, Stibitz moved with his family to Vermont where he became a consultant in applied mathematics. After two decades, Stibitz was offered a job at Dartmouth’s Medical School, where he was asked to show how computers can be used to deal with biomedical problems. He accepted and was appointed professor of physiology; in that capacity he investigated the motion of oxygen in the lungs and the rate at which drugs and nutrients are spread throughout the body. In 1972 he retired from his position and was made professor emeritus; nevertheless, he continued to contribute his knowledge to the department. He died in his Hanover, New Hampshire, home on 31 January 1995. He was 90.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-11 00:04:25

1138) Larry Page

Summary

Lawrence Edward Page (born March 26, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-founding Google with Sergey Brin.

Page was the chief executive officer of Google from 1997 until August 2001 (stepping down in favor of Eric Schmidt) then from April 2011 until July 2015 when he moved to become CEO of Alphabet Inc. (created to deliver "major advancements" as Google's parent company), a post he held until December 4, 2019. He remains an Alphabet board member, employee, and controlling shareholder.

Creating Google helped Page build a significant amount of wealth. As of September 2022, Page has an estimated net worth of $98 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, making him the sixth-wealthiest person in the world. He has also invested in flying car startups Kitty Hawk and Opener.

Page is the co-creator and namesake of PageRank, a search ranking algorithm for Google. He received the Marconi Prize in 2004 with co-writer Brin.

Details

Larry Page, byname of Lawrence Edward Page, (born March 26, 1973, East Lansing, Michigan, U.S.), is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who, with Sergey Brin, created the online search engine Google, one of the most popular sites on the Internet.

Page, whose father was a professor of computer science at Michigan State University, received a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan (1995) and entered into the doctorate program at Stanford, where he met Brin. The two were both intrigued with the idea of enhancing the ability to extract meaning from the mass of data accumulated on the Internet. Working from Page’s dormitory room, they devised a new type of search engine technology that leveraged Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them.

In order to further their search engine, Page and Brin raised about $1 million in outside financing from investors, family, and friends. They called their expanded search engine Google—a name derived from a misspelling of the word googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros). By September 1998 the two had founded Google Inc., with Page as chief executive officer (CEO). The next year Google received $25 million of venture capital funding and was processing 500,000 queries per day.

Page stepped down as CEO in 2001 to become president of products. He was replaced as CEO by technology executive Eric Schmidt. However, both he and Brin remained intimately involved in running Google. By 2004 the search engine was being utilized 200 million times a day. On August 19, 2004, Google Inc. issued its initial public offering (IPO), which netted Page more than $3.8 billion. In an acquisition reflecting the company’s efforts to expand its services beyond Internet searches, Google purchased in 2006 the most popular Web site for user-submitted streaming videos, YouTube, for $1.65 billion in stock. In 2011 Page resumed his duties as Google’s CEO, Schmidt having moved to the position of executive chairman. Google was restructured in August 2015 as a subsidiary of the newly created holding company Alphabet Inc., and Page became CEO of Alphabet. Page left that post in December 2019 but continued to serve on Alphabet’s board of directors.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-13 00:12:14

1139) Sergey Brin

Summary

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin (born August 21, 1973) is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and internet entrepreneur. He co-founded Google with Larry Page. Brin was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders, board members, and employees. As of September 2022, Brin is the 8th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $94 billion.

Brin immigrated to the United States with his family from the Soviet Union at the age of six. He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Maryland, College Park, following in his father's and grandfather's footsteps by studying mathematics, as well as computer science. After graduation, he enrolled in Stanford University to acquire a PhD in computer science. There he met Page, with whom he built a web search engine. The program became popular at Stanford, and they suspended their PhD studies to start up Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage in Menlo Park.

Details

Sergey Brin, (born August 21, 1973, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.), is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who created, along with Larry Page, the online search engine Google, one of the most successful sites on the Internet.

Brin’s family moved from Moscow to the United States in 1979. After receiving degrees (1993) in computer science and mathematics at the University of Maryland, he entered Stanford University’s graduate program, where he met Page, a fellow graduate student. The two were both intrigued by the idea of enhancing the ability to extract meaning from the mass of data accumulating on the Internet. They began working from Page’s dormitory room to devise a new type of search technology that leveraged Web users’ own ranking abilities by tracking each site’s “backing links”—that is, the number of other pages linked to them. Brin received a master’s degree in 1995, but he went on leave from Stanford’s doctorate program to continue working on the search engine.

In mid-1998 Brin and Page began receiving outside financing, and they ultimately raised about $1 million from investors and from family and friends. They called their updated search engine Google—a name derived from a misspelling of the originally planned name, googol (a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros)—and created the corporation Google Inc. Brin became the company’s president of technology, and by mid-1999, when Google received $25 million of venture capital funding, the search engine was processing 500,000 queries per day. Technology executive Eric Schmidt replaced Page as chief executive officer of Google in 2001. However, Google was in effect led by the trio of Brin, Page, and Schmidt. By 2004 users were accessing the Web site 200 million times a day (roughly 138,000 queries per minute). On August 19, 2004, Google Inc. issued its initial public offering (IPO), which netted more than $3.8 billion dollars for Brin.

In 2006 Google acquired YouTube, the Web’s most popular site for user-submitted streaming videos, for $1.65 billion in stock. The move reflected the company’s efforts to expand its services beyond Internet searches. That same year Google was criticized for agreeing to comply with the Chinese government’s censorship requirements—blocking Web sites extolling democracy, for example, or those covering the 1989 demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Brin defended the decision, saying that Google’s ability to supply some, albeit restricted, information was better than supplying none. In April 2011 Brin relinquished his duties as president of technology to become director of special projects. Google was reorganized in August 2015 to become a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., a newly created holding company with Brin as its president. In December 2019 he left the post, though he continued to serve on Alphabet’s board of directors.

Jai Ganesh · 2022-09-15 00:05:36

1140) Peter D. Mitchell

Summary

Peter Dennis Mitchell, (born Sept. 29, 1920, Mitcham, Surrey, Eng.—died April 10, 1992, Bodmin, Cornwall), was a British chemist who won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for helping to clarify how ADP (adenosine diphosphate) is converted into the energy-carrying compound ATP (adenosine triphosphate) in the mitochondria of living cells.

Mitchell received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 1950. He served as director of the chemistry and biology unit in the department of zoology of the University of Edinburgh from 1955 to 1963. In 1964 he joined the Glynn Research Laboratories as director of research.

Mitchell studied the mitochondrion, the organelle that produces energy for the cell. ATP is made within the mitochondrion by adding a phosphate group to ADP in a process known as oxidative phosphorylation. Mitchell was able to determine how the different enzymes involved in the conversion of ADP to ATP are distributed within the membranes that partition the interior of the mitochondrion. He showed how these enzymes’ arrangement facilitates their use of hydrogen ions as an energy source in the conversion of ADP to ATP.

Details

Peter Dennis Mitchell, (29 September 1920 – 10 April 1992) was a British biochemist who was awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery of the chemiosmotic mechanism of ATP synthesis.

Education and early life

Mitchell was born in Mitcham, Surrey on 29 September 1920. His parents were Christopher Gibbs Mitchell, a civil servant, and Kate Beatrice Dorothy (née) Taplin. His uncle was Sir Godfrey Way Mitchell, chairman of George Wimpey. He was educated at Queen's College, Taunton and Jesus College, Cambridge where he studied the Natural Sciences Tripos specialising in Biochemistry.

He was appointed a research post in the Department of Biochemistry, Cambridge, in 1942, and was awarded a Ph.D. in early 1951 for work on the mode of action of penicillin.

Career and research

In 1955 he was invited by Professor Michael Swann to set up a biochemical research unit, called the Chemical Biology Unit, in the Department of Zoology, at the University of Edinburgh, where he was appointed a Senior Lecturer in 1961, then Reader in 1962, although institutional opposition to his work coupled with ill health led to his resignation in 1963.

From 1963 to 1965, he supervised the restoration of a Regency-fronted Mansion, known as Glynn House, at Cardinham near Bodmin, Cornwall - adapting a major part of it for use as a research laboratory. He and his former research colleague, Jennifer Moyle founded a charitable company, known as Glynn Research Ltd., to promote fundamental biological research at Glynn House and they embarked on a programme of research on chemiosmotic reactions and reaction systems.

Chemiosmotic hypothesis

In the 1960s, ATP was known to be the energy currency of life, but the mechanism by which ATP was created in the mitochondria was assumed to be by substrate-level phosphorylation. Mitchell's chemiosmotic hypothesis was the basis for understanding the actual process of oxidative phosphorylation. At the time, the biochemical mechanism of ATP synthesis by oxidative phosphorylation was unknown.

Mitchell realised that the movement of ions across an electrochemical potential difference could provide the energy needed to produce ATP. His hypothesis was derived from information that was well known in the 1960s. He knew that living cells had a membrane potential; interior negative to the environment. The movement of charged ions across a membrane is thus affected by the electrical forces (the attraction of positive to negative charges). Their movement is also affected by thermodynamic forces, the tendency of substances to diffuse from regions of higher concentration. He went on to show that ATP synthesis was coupled to this electrochemical gradient.

His hypothesis was confirmed by the discovery of ATP synthase, a membrane-bound protein that uses the potential energy of the electrochemical gradient to make ATP; and by the discovery by André Jagendorf that a pH difference across the thylakoid membrane in the chloroplast results in ATP synthesis.

Protonmotive Q-cycle

Later, Peter Mitchell also hypothesized some of the complex details of electron transport chains. He conceived of the coupling of proton pumping to quinone-based electron bifurcation, which contributes to the proton motive force and thus, ATP synthesis.

Awards and honours

In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contribution to the understanding of biological energy transfer through the formulation of the chemiosmotic theory." He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1974.

Math Is Fun Forum

#1151 2022-08-03 17:21:54

Re: crème de la crème

#1152 2022-08-04 20:25:25

Re: crème de la crème

#1153 2022-08-05 20:51:22

Re: crème de la crème

#1154 2022-08-07 00:07:05

Re: crème de la crème

#1155 2022-08-09 00:15:58

Re: crème de la crème

#1156 2022-08-10 00:07:27

Re: crème de la crème

#1157 2022-08-12 00:17:26

Re: crème de la crème

#1158 2022-08-14 00:21:49

Re: crème de la crème

#1159 2022-08-15 00:15:59

Re: crème de la crème

#1160 2022-08-17 00:05:36

Re: crème de la crème

#1161 2022-08-19 00:05:27

Re: crème de la crème

#1162 2022-08-21 00:05:56

Re: crème de la crème

#1163 2022-08-23 00:13:33

Re: crème de la crème

#1164 2022-08-25 00:08:45

Re: crème de la crème

#1165 2022-08-26 20:29:15

Re: crème de la crème

#1166 2022-08-28 00:04:06

Re: crème de la crème

#1167 2022-08-30 00:04:08

Re: crème de la crème

#1168 2022-09-01 00:14:15

Re: crème de la crème

#1169 2022-09-03 00:05:36

Re: crème de la crème

#1170 2022-09-05 00:14:18

Re: crème de la crème

#1171 2022-09-07 00:42:37

Re: crème de la crème

#1172 2022-09-09 00:02:13

Re: crème de la crème

#1173 2022-09-11 00:04:25

Re: crème de la crème

#1174 2022-09-13 00:12:14

Re: crème de la crème

#1175 2022-09-15 00:05:36

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