BIOGRAPHY OF HOMER (2)BIOGRAPHY OF ARISTOTLE (2)CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS (3)LEONARDO DA VINCI (4)SOCRATE S (4)CONFUCIUS (5)BIOGRAPHY OF MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (5)FERDINAND MAGELLAN (5)MIGUEL DE CERVANTE S (6)SHAKE SPEARE (6)BACON (10)DE S CARTE S (11)NEWTON (12)ROUSS EAU (12)KANT (13)WAS HINGTON (14)WATT (16)JEFFERSON (17)ADAM S MITH (18)GOETHE (19)BEETHOVEN (20)HEGLE (21)ROBERT OWEN (22)FARADAY (23)JOHN BROWN (24)H. C. ANDERS EN (26)LINCOLN (27)DARWIN (31)PASTEUR (32)EINS TEIN (35)GALILEO (36)Biography of HomerHomer is the man who, according to legend, wrote the two great epics of Greek history: the Iliad (the tale of the Trojan War) and the Odyssey (about the travels of Odysseus). Both books are considered landmarks in human literature and Homer is therefore often cited as the starting point of Western literary and historical tradition. The details of Homer's life are a mystery; some scholars believe that no such man ever existed, and that the works credited to him were actually told and gathered by many people over many centuries. Other storie s give various birthplace s and ages for Homer and sugge st he was a wandering poet or minstrel. Homer is usually said to have been blind, a pointon which nearly all the legends agree.Biography of AristotleAristotle is one of the "big three" in ancient Greek philosophy, along with Plato and Socrates. (Socrates taught Plato, who in turn instructed Aristotle.) Aristotle spent nearly 20 years at Plato's Academy, first as a student and then as a teacher. After Plato's death he travelled widely and educated a famous pupil, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian who nearly conquered the world. Later Aristotle began his own school in Athens, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle is known for his carefully detailed observations about nature and the physical world, which laid the groundwork for the modern study of biology. Among his works are the texts Physics, Metaphysics, Rhetoric and Ethics. Biography of ArchimedesArchmedes (ar-ke-me'-deez), a renowned mathematician. His astonishing skill in mechanics was such that some of the greatest real triumphs of antiquity may be ascribed to him. His inventions amazed his contemporaries: the lifting of weights by means of pulleys and the endless screw are among them. A Roman historian celebrates the warlike engines produced by the skill of Archimedes. His mind ever fruitful of extraordinary resources, when Syracuse was besieged by Marcellus, he constructed a burning-glass on a scale of such magnitude that by means of it the enemy's fleet was fired. Eventually, the city being taken, he was found among the slain. Biography of DanteAn exiled and wandering figure during his writing lifetime, Dante is now considered Italy's greatestpoet -- so much a literary giant that he is generally known by his first name alone. The Divine Comedy, by far his most famous work, is the story of a journey through Hell, Purgatory and finally Paradise. (The journey through Hell is often referred to independently as "Dante's Inferno.") In the poem the first two stages are guided by the Roman poet Virgil, and the final visit to Paradise is led by a woman named Beatrice -- a girl Dante met briefly when he was nine and whom he idolized the rest of his life. The Divine Comedy is the source of many famous classical images, inspiring works by William Blake andothers, and is famous for its inscription on the gates of Hell: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Joan of Arc (1412-1431)A hero of the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc remains a French national hero six centuries later. As a teenager she heard voices from on high urging h er to save France from English domination. Despite being a young woman, she was placed at the head of an army; she attacked the English and forced them to retreat from Orléans. Later she was captured by the English, tried for heresy, and burned at the stake. In 1920 she was canonized by the Catholic Church.Christopher ColumbusChristopher Columbus was born in 1451 Calvi (Corsica), northwest of the island, 200km from Ajaccio. He was the oldest of five children. As a child, he helped his father as a weaver. He always liked the sea. Genoa was an important seaport. There is no doubt that as a child he caught rides on ships. He had little schooling but was a genius with the sea. His plan was not to prove that the world was flat, but it was to find a shortcut to the Spice Islands. He wanted to establish a city there for trade, seaports, and much more. When he grew into a man he was interested in sailing to Asia by going west. First he went to the king of Italy and presented his idea before him. Italy wasn't looking for a way to Asia, they were still recieving riches from their old trade routes. His three ships were the Santa Maria, the Nina, and the Pinta.One-Tank Trip: Columbus, Ga.Pensacola News Journal - 路FOUNDED/ESTABLISHED: 1828. 路HISTORY: This city, named for Christopher Columbus, is located on a bluff overlooking the Chattahoochee River. It is the third largest city in Georgia and the fourth largest metropolitan area in the state. Coca-Cola ...Little League team has full support from ColumbusPhiladelphia Enquirer - COLUMBUS, Ga. - Georgia schools students usually are allowed no more than five non-excused absences before they are considered truant. The boys of summer from Columbus who are still swinging away in the Little League World Series have been given the ...City: Knights fall in ColumbusToledo Blade - COLUMBUS - St. Francis de Sales outgained Columbus DeSales by 187 yards, but DeSales' special teams were superior in knocking off the Knights 24-21 last night in aseason-opener. After Knights quarterback Matt Meinert hit Mike Jesionowski for a six ... Leonardo da VinciLeonardo da Vinci is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa (1503-1506) and The Last Supper (1495). But he's almost equally famous for his astonishing multiplicity of talents: he dabbled in architecture, sculpture, engineering, geology, hydraulics and the military arts, all with success, and in his spare time doodled parachutes and flying machines that resembled inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. He made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today. Leonardo also was quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror (backwards) script, a trick which kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death.Nicolas CopernicusNicolas Copernicus was born into a well-to-do family, and after his father died in 1483 he was put under the guardianship of his uncle, a bishop of Warmia (Poland). He went to university in Krakow and spent a decade in Italy, studying law and mathematics. A canon of the cathedral at Frombork, Copernicus carried out administrative duties and, from his house, observed the stars and planets. For years he worked on his theory that the planets in our solar system revolved around the sun (Ptolemy of ancient Greece had explained that the universe was a closed system revolving around the earth, and the Catholic church concurred). Hesitant to publish his work for fear of being charged with heresy, Copernicus summarized it in 1530 and circulated it among Europe's scholars, where it was greeted with enthusiasm. His work, titled De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was finally published in 1543, apparently just a few weeks before he diedSocratesPhilosopherSocrates is credited with laying the foundation for Western philosophical thought. His "Socratic Method" involved asking probing questions in a give-and-take which would eventually lead to the truth. Socrates's iconoclastic attitude didn't sit well with everyone, and at age 70 he was charged with heresy and corruption of local youth. Convicted, he carried out the death sentence by drinking hemlock, becoming one of history's earliest martyrs of conscience. Socrates's most famous pupil was Plato, who in turn instructed the philosopher AristotleConfuciusPhilosopherAlso Known As: Kong Fu-ZiConfucius was a teacher, scholar and minor political figure, whose commentary on Chinese literary classics developed into a pragmatic philosophy for daily life. Not strictly religious, his teachings were a utilitarian approach to social harmony and the moral obligations between individuals and social systems.Biography of Michelangelo BuonarrotiPerhaps the greatest influence on western art in the last five centuries, Michelangelo was an Italian sculptor, architect, painter and poet in the period known as the High Renaissance. His great works were almost entirely in the service of the Catholic Church, and include a huge statue of the Biblical hero David (over 14 feet tall) in Florence, sculpted between 1501 and 1504, and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome (commissioned by Pope Julius II), painted between 1508 and 1512. After 1519 Michelangelo was increasingly active in architecture; he designed the dome of St. Peter's Basilica, completed after his death. Along with contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael, he is considered one of the great masters of European art.Ferdinand MagellanExplorerPortuguese name: Fernao de MagalhaesMagellan was born in Portugal, but it was under the Spanish flag that he sailed in 1519 with the intention of reaching the Spice Islands by sailing west around South America. After much hardship he succeeded in reaching and then sailing across the Pacific Ocean. Soon thereafter he was killed while trying to subdue the natives on what is now the island of Mactan in the Philippines. After still more hardships, one of his original five ships, Victoria, eventually made it back to Spain. Though Magellan didn't complete the entire circumnavigation, as the expedition's leader he is usually credited with being the first man to circle the globeMiguel de CervantesWriterFull name: Miguel de Cervantes SaavedraCervantes wrote the epic satire Don Quixote, regarded as the first true modern novel. Little is known of Cervantes's early life; at 23 he enlisted in the Spanish militia and then fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto (1571) where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write Don Quixote. The title character, a dreamy middle-aged nobleman, sets out through Spain on a makeshift quest to fight injustice through acts of chivalry. Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but none had the impact or popularity of his masterpiece.Shakespeare1564?616, English dramatist and poet, b. Stratford-on-Avon. He is considered the greatest playwright who ever lived.LifeHis father, John Shakespeare, was successful in the leather business during Shakespeare's early childhood but later met with financial difficulties. During his prosperous years his father was also involved in municipal affairs, holding the offices of alderman and bailiff during the 1560s. While little is known of Shakespeare's boyhood, he probably attended the grammar school in Stratford, where he would have been educ ated in the classics, particularly Latin grammar and literature. Whatever the veracity of Ben Jonson's famous comment that Shakespeare had "small Latine, and less Greeke," much of his work clearly depends on a knowledge of Roman comedy, ancient history, and classical mythology.In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior and pregnant at the time of the marriage. They had three children: Susanna, born in 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. Nothing is known of the period b etween the birth of the twins and Shakespeare's emergence as a playwright in London (c.1592). However, various suggestions have been made regarding this time, including those that he fled Stratford to avoid prosecution for stealing deer, that he joined a group of traveling players, and that he was a country schoolteacher. The last suggestion is given some credence by the academic style of his early plays; The Comedy of Errors, for example, is an adaptation of two plays by Plautus.In 1594 Shakespeare became an actor and playwright for the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company that later became the King's Men under James I. Until the end of his London career Shakespeare remained with the company; it is thought that as an actor he played old men's roles, such as the ghost in Hamlet and Old Adam in As You Like It. In 1596 he obtained a coatof arms, and by 1597 he was prosperous enough to buy New Place in Stratford, which later was the home of his retirement years. In 1599 he became a partner in the ownership of the Globe theatre, and in 1608 he was part owner of the Blackfriars theatre. Shakespeare retired and returned to Stratford c.1613. He undoubtedly enjoyed a comfortable living throughout his career and in retirement, although he was never a wealthy man.The PlaysChronology of CompositionThe chronology of Shakespeare's plays is uncertain, but a reasonable approximation of their order can be inferred from dates of publication, references in contemporary writings, allusions in the plays to contemporary events, thematic relationships, and metrical and stylistic comparisons. His first plays are believed to be the three parts of Henry VI; it is uncertain whether Part I was written before or after Parts II and III. Richard III is related to these plays and is usually grouped with them as the final part of a first tetralogy of historical plays.After these come The Comedy of Errors,Titus Andronicus (almost a third of which may have been written by George Peele), The Taming of the Shrew,The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labour's Lost, and Romeo and Juliet. Some of the comedies of this early period are classical imitations with a strong element of farce. The two tragedies, Titus Andronicus and Romeo and Juliet, were both popular in Shakespeare's own lifetime. In Romeo and Juliet the main plot, in which the new love between Romeo and Juliet comes into conflict with the longstanding hatred between their families, is skillfully advanced, while the substantial development of minor characters supports and enriches it.After these early plays, and before his great tragedies, Shakespeare wrote Richard II, A Midsummer Night's Dream, King John, The Merchant of Venice,Parts I and II of Henry IV, Much Ado about Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It,and Twelfth Night.The comedies of this period partake less of farce and more of idyllic romance, while the history plays successfully integrate political elements with individual characterization. Taken together, Richard II,each part of Henry IV,and Henry V form a second tetralogy of historical plays, although each can stand alone, and they are usually performed separately. The two parts of Henry IV feature Falstaff, a vividly depicted character who from the beginning has enjoyed immense popularity.The period of Shakespeare's great tragedies and the "problem plays" begins in 1600 with Hamlet.Following this are The Merry Wives of Windsor(written to meet Queen Elizabeth's request for another play including Falstaff, it is not thematically typical of the period), Troilus and Cressida,All's Well That Ends Well,Measure for Measure,Othello,King Lear,Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra,Coriolanus,and Timon of Athens(the last may have been partially written by Thomas Middleton).On familial, state, and cosmic levels, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth present clear oppositions of order and chaos, good and evil, and spirituality and animality. Stylistically the plays of this period become increasingly compressed and symbolic. Through the portrayal of political leaders as tragic heroes, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra involve the study of politics and social history as well as the psychology of individuals.The last two plays in the Shakespearean corpus, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, may be collaborations with John Fletcher. The remaining four plays?i>Pericles (two acts of which may have been written by George Wilkins), Cymbeline,The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest朼re tragicomedies. They feature characters of tragic potential, but resemble comedy in that their conclusions are marked by a harmonious resolution achieved through magic, with all its divine, humanistic, and artistic implications.Appeal and InfluenceSince his death Shakespeare's plays have been almost continually performed, in non-English-speaking nations as well as those where English is the native tongue; they are quoted more than the works of any other single author. The plays have been subject to ongoing examination and evaluation by critics attempting to explain their perennial appeal, which does not appear to derive from any set of profound or explicitly formulated ideas. Indeed, Shakespeare has sometimes been criticized for not consistently holding to any particular philosophy, religion, or ideology; for example, the subplot of A Midsummer Night's Dream includes a burlesque of the kind of tragic love that he idealizes in Romeo and Juliet.The strength of Shakespeare's plays lies in the absorbing stories they tell, in their wealth of complex characters, and in the eloquent speech杤ivid, forceful, and at the same time lyric杢hat the playwright puts on his characters' lips. It has often been noted that Shakespeare's characters are neither wholly good nor wholly evil, and that it is their flawed, inconsistent nature that makes them memorable. Hamlet fascinates audiences with his ambivalence about revenge and the uncertainty over how much of his madness is feigned and how much genuine. Falstaff would not be beloved if, in addition to being genial, openhearted, and witty, he were not also boisterous, cowardly, and, ultimately, poignant. Finally, the plays are distinguished by an unparalleled use of language. Shakespeare had a tremendous vocabulary and a corresponding sensitivity to nuance, as well as a singular aptitude for coining neologisms and punning.Editions and SourcesThe first collected edition of Shakespeare is the First Folio, published in 1623 and including all the plays except Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen(the latter play also generally not appearing in modern editions). Eighteen of the plays exist in earlier quarto editions, eight of which are extremely corrupt, possibly having been reconstructed from an actor's memory. The first edition of Shakespeare to divide the plays into acts and scenes and to mark exits and entrances is that of Nicholas Rowe in 1709. Other important early editions include those of Alexander Pope (1725), Lewis Theobald (1733), and Samuel Johnson (1765).Among Shakespeare's most important sources, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1587) is significant for the English history plays, although Shakespeare did not hesitate to transform a character when it suited his dramatic purposes. For his Roman tragedies he used Sir Thomas North's translation (1579) of Plutarch's Lives. Many times he rewrote old plays, and twice he turned English prose romances into drama (As You Like It and The Winter's Tale). He also used the works of contemporary European authors. For further information on Shakespeare's sources, see the table entitled Shakespeare's Play.The PoetryShakespeare's first published works were two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). In 1599 a volume of poetry entitled The Passionate Pilgrim was published and attributed entirely to Shakespeare. However, only five of the poems are definitely considered his, two appearing in other versions in the Sonnets and three in Love's Labour's Lost. A love elegy, The Phoenix and the Turtle, was published in 1601. In the 1980sand 90s many Elizabethan scholars concluded that a poem published in 1612 entitled A Funeral Elegy and signed "W.S." exhibits many Shakespearean characteristics; it has not yet been definitely included in the canon.Shakespeare's sonnets are by far his most important nondramatic poetry. They were first published in 1609, although many of them had certainly been circulated privately before this, and it is generally agreed that the poems were written sometime in the 1590s. Scholars have long debated the order of the poems and the degree of autobiographical content.The first 126 of the 154 sonnets are addressed to a young man whose identity has long intrigued scholars. The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, wrote a dedication to the first edition in which he claimed that a person with the initials W. H. had inspired the sonnets. Some have thought these letters to be the transposed initials of Henry Wriothesley, 3d earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece; or they are possibly the initials of William Herbert, 3d earl of Pembroke, whose connection with Shakespeare is more tenuous. The identity of the dark lady addressed in sonnets 127?52 has also been the object of much conjecture but no proof. The sonnets are marked by the recurring themes of beauty, youthful beauty ravaged by time, and the ability of love and art to transcend time and even death.Critical OpinionThere has been a great variety of critical approach to Shakespeare's work since his death. During the 17th and 18th cent., Shakespeare was both admired and condemned. Since then, much of the adverse criticism has not been considered relevant, although certain issues have continued to interest critics throughout the years. For instance, charges against his moral propriety were made by Samuel Johnson in the 18th cent. and by George Bernard Shaw in the 20th.Early criticism was directed primarily at questions of form. Shakespeare was criticized for mixing comedy and tragedy and failing to observe the unities of time and place prescribed by the rules of classical drama. Dryden and Johnson were among the critics claiming that he had corrupted the language with false wit, puns, and ambiguity. While some of his early plays might justly be charged with a frivolous use of such devices, 20th-century criticism has tended to praise their use in later plays as adding depth and resonance of meaning.Generally critics of the 17th and 18th cent. accused Shakespeare of a want of artistic restraint while praising him for a fecund imagination. Samuel Johnson, while agreeing with many earlier criticisms, defended Shakespeare on the question of classical rules. On the issue of u nity of time and place he argued that no one considers the stage play to be real life anyway. Johnson inaugurated the criticism of Shakespeare's characters that reached its culmination in the late 19th cent. with the work of A. C. Bradley. The German critics Gotthold Lessing and Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel saw Shakespeare as a romantic, different in type from the classical poets, but on equal footing. Schlegel first elucidated the structural unity of Shakespeare's plays, a concept of unity that is developed much more completely by the English poet and critic Samuel Coleridge.While Schlegel and Coleridge were establishing Shakespeare's plays as artistic, organic unities, such 19th-century critics as the German Georg Gervinus and the Irishman Edward Dowden were trying to see positive moral tendencies in the plays. The 19th-century English critic William Hazlitt, who continued the development of character analysis begun by Johnson,considered each Shakespearean character to be unique, but found a unity through analogy and gradation of characterization. While A. C. Bradley marks the culmination of romantic 19th-century character study, he also suggested that the plays had unifying imagistic atmospheres, an idea that was further developed in the 20th cent.The tendency in 20th-century criticism has been to abandon both the study of character as independent personality and the assumption that moral considerations can be separated from their dramatic and aesthetic context. The plays have been increasingly viewed in terms of the unity of image, metaphor, and tone. Caroline Spurgeon began the careful classification of Shakespeare's imagery, and although her attempts were later felt to be somewhat naive and morally biased, her work is a landmark in Shakespearean criticism. Other important trends in 20th-century criticism include the Freudian approach, such as Ernest Jones's Oedipal interpretation of Hamlet; the study of Shakespeare in terms of the Elizabethan world view and Elizabethan stage conventions; and the study of the plays in mythic terms.BibliographySee also biographies by E. K. Chambers (2 vol., 1930), G. E. Bentley (1961), S. Schoenbaum (1970 and 1975), S. Wells (1974), R. Fraser (2 vol., 1988), P. Levi (1988, repr. 1995), E. Sams (1995), P. Honan (1998), A. Holden (1999), and I. L. Matus (1999); bibliographies ed. by G. R. Smith (1963) and E. Quinn et al. (1973); A. Nicoll, Shakespeare: An Introduction (1952); G. Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare(8 vol., 1957?5); O. J. Campbell and E. G. Quinn, ed., The Reader's Encyclopedia of Shakespeare(1966); M. R. Martin and R. C. Harrier, The Concise Encyclopedic Guide to Shakespeare(1972); M. Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare(6 vol., 1970); The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (1973); S. Wells, ed., Current Approaches to Shakespeare: Language, Text, Theatre, and Ideology(1988); G. T aylor, Reinventing Shakespeare(1989); J. Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare(1997); H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997); H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998);D. S. Kastan, ed., A Companion to Shakespeare (1999); S. Orgel, Imagining Shakespeare: A History of Texts and Visions(2003); B. Vickers, Shakespeare, Co-Author(2003); S. Wells, Shakespeare for All Time (2003); S. Greenblatt, Will in the World (2004).BaconFrancis Bacon was the son of Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Seal of Elisabeth I. He entered Trinity College Cambridge at age 12. Bacon later described his tutors as "Men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells of a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their Dictator." This is likely the beginning of Bacon's rejection of Aristotelianism and Scholasticism and the new Renaissance Humanism.His father died when he was 18, and being the youngest son this left him virtually penniless. He turned to the law and at 23 he was already in the House of Commons. His rich relatives did little to advance his career and Elisabeth apparently distrusted h im. Itwas not until James I became King that Bacon's career advanced. He rose to become Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Albans and Lord Chancellor of England. His fall came about in the course of a struggle between King and Parliament. He was accused of havin g taken a bribe while a judge, tried and found guilty. He thus lost his personal honour, his fortune and his place at court.Loren Eiseley in his beautifully written book about Bacon The Man Who Saw Through Time remarks that Bacon: "...more fully than any man of his time, entertained the idea of the universe as a problem to be solved, examined, meditated upon, rather than as an eternally fixed stage, upon which man walked."This is the title page from Bacon's Instauratio Magna which contains his Novum Organum which is a new method to replace that of Aristotle. The image is of a ship passing through the pillars of Hercules, which symbolized for the ancients the limits of man's possible explorations. The image represents the analogy between the great voyages o f discovery and the explorations leading to the advancement of learning. In The Advancement of Learning Bacon makes this analogy explicit. Speaking to James I, to whom the book is dedicated, he writes: "For why should a few received authors stand up like Hercules columns, beyond which there should be no sailing or discovering, since we have so bright and benign a star as your Majesty to conduct and prosper us." The image also forcefully suggests that using Bacon's new method, the boundaries of ancient learning will be passed. The Latin phrase at the bottom from the Book of Daniel means: "Many will pass through and knowledge will be increased."Bacon saw himself as the inventor of a method which would kindle a light in nature - "a light that would eventually disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the universe." This method involved the collection of data, their judicious interpretation, the carrying out of experiments, thus to learn the secrets of nature by organized observation of its regularities. Bacon's proposals had a powerful influence on the development of science in seventeenth century Europe. Thomas Hobbes served as Bacon's last amunensis or secretary. Many members of the British Royal Society saw Bacon as advocating the kind of enquiry conducted by that society.DescartesDescartes is often called the father of modern science. He established a new, clear way of thinking about philosophy and science by rejecting all ideas based on assumptions or emotional beliefs and accepting only those ideas which could be proved by or systematically deduced from direct observation. He took as his philosophical starting point the statement Cogito ergo sum -- "I think, therefore I am." Descartes made major contributions to modern。
