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Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:37:32 -0700

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Welcome to The First Post. It is a blogazine on extraordinary people, who made a difference. It is also for extraordinary human beings, who care for others.

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This is a Biography Site.This is a Biography Site.This is a Biography Site

FRANZ KAFKA.SOPHIA LOREN. FRéDéRIC FRANCOIS CHOPIN.SEN CHOPIN.INDIRA GANDHI.PELE. FERNANDO.PESSOA.ROSA PARKS .CLARKE. FRANçOIS BERNIER.KURT GöDEL.CHRISTIAN DIOR. THICH NHAT HANH .JOSIAH WEDGWOOD.AMARTYA SEN. XENOPHONE. ANNA PAVLOVA.YVES.ALFRED HITCHCOCK KALHO.YVES SAINT LAURENT. JOHN ERNST STEINBECK. MARGARET MEAD .HANH. PHIL BORGES .ALAIN ROBBE GRILLET. BOB DYLAN. GEORGE ORWELL . EWARD ST.JOHN GOREY. ARTHUR CLARKE. BOAS. DALAI LAMA. GODEL.EIFFEL.HIKMET .HARPER LEE .LEONARD BERNSTEIN .ELLA.FRIDA KAHLO.BERNINI. JOHN DAVISON ROCKEFELLER. BOB DYLAN. NAZIM HIKMET .MAURITS CORNELIS ESCHER .CONSTANCE COLLIER.ECO.FIDEL CASTRO .SEAN DEVEREUX .UMBERTO ECO.FELLINI.SALK.FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE. NOSTRADAMUS. CHIEF JOSEPH NEZ PERCE .BUDDHA.OMAR KHAYYAM.GAUTAMA BUDDHA.MARGARET XENOPHON.HOMER.EDMUND HILLARY.JEAN-BAPTISTE TAVERNIER.KAHLO.PHILIPP WESDIN.CARL SAGAN. SIGMUND FREUD.HAYEK.HIPPOCRATES.FRANK LLYODWRIGHT. STEVEN SPIELBERG.JEAN.FEDERICO FELLINI.GEORGE EASTMAN. RIEDRICH A VON HAYEK.EDWARD de BONO.JONAS SALK. JOHN JAMES AUDUBON.ELLA FITZGERALD.FRANZ BOAZ . HANK KETCHAM .

Biography site.This is a Biography Site.This is a Biography Site.This is
For Archive of Biographies in this Site.Click Here.

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Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:37:09 -0700

The Nobel Prize in Literature 2009 - Bio-bibliography

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 04:34:47 -0700

HERTA MULLER

(1953 - Present)

Herta Muller is a Romanian-born German novelist, poet and essayist noted for her works depicting the harsh conditions of life in Communist Romania under the repressive Nicolae Ceau�...�...¸escu regime, the history of the Germans in Transylvania, and the persecution of Romanian ethnic Germans by Soviet forces in Romania. On October 8th, 2009, it was announced she would be awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

The decision was expected to keep alive the controversy surrounding the academy's pattern of awarding the prize to European writers. Muller, a member of Romania's ethnic German minority, was honored for work that "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed," the Swedish Academy said.

Muller was born in Ni�...�,£chidorf (German: Nitzkydorf), a historically German-speaking town in the Banat. The daughter of Banat Swabian farmers, her family was part of Romania's German minority; her father had served in the Waffen SS and her mother served five years (1944-1949) in a labour camp in the Soviet Union during and after World War II Her grandfather had been a wealthy farmer and merchant. While she speaks German as a native language, she is also fluent in Romanian.

She studied German studies and Romanian literature at the Timi�...�...¸oara University. She was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a German-speaking literary society.

In 1976, M��,¼ller began working as a translator for an engineering factory, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.

Muller left for Wualler received membership of the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merger with the former German Democratic Republic branch. In July 2008, Muller sent a critical open letter to Horia-Roman Patapievici, president of the Romanian Cultural Institute in reaction to the support given by the institute to a Romanian-German Summer School involving two former informants of the Securitate.

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M�ller, 56, made her debut in 1982 with a collection of short stories titled "Niederungen," or "Nadirs," depicting the harshness of life in a small, German-speaking village in Romania. It was promptly censored by the communist government.

In 1984 an uncensored version was smuggled to Germany, where it was published and devoured by readers. That work was followed by "Oppressive Tango" in Romania but she was eventually prohibited from publishing inside her country for her criticism of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu's rule and its feared secret police, the Securitate."The Romanian national press was very critical of these works while, outside of Romania, the German press received them very positively," the Academy said.

Most of M�ller 's work is in German, but some works have been translated into English, French and Spanish, including "The Passport," "The Land of Green Plums," "Traveling on One Leg" and "The Appointment."

This year, her novel Atemschaukel was nominated for the German Book Prize and is now among the six finalists. In this book M�ller describes the journey of a young man to a labour camp in the Soviet Union as an example for the fate of the German population in Siebenb�rgen (Transylvania) after World War II. It was inspired by the experience of Oskar Pastior, whose oral memories she had made notes of, but also by what happened to her own mother.

Irving Penn - Biography.com Biography - Biography.com

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 06:04:46 -0700

IRVING PENN

(1907 - 2009 )

Irving Penn, Fashion Photographer Is Dead. Irving Penn, one of the 20th century's most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.

Penn, the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn, initially intended to become a painter, but at age 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer.

Irving Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School from which he graduated 1938. Penn's drawings were published by Harper's Bazaar and he also painted. As his career in photography blossomed, he became known for post World War II feminine chic and glamour photography.

His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraitist. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.

He was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Posing his subjects within this tight, unorthodox space, Penn brought an unprecedented sense of drama to his portraits, driving the viewer's focus onto the person and their expression. In many photos, the subjects appeared wedged into the corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky and Marlene Dietrich.

While a master of the studio flash, most of Penn's portraits are lighted with window light. For travelling to New Guinea and other locations to photograph indigenous people, Penn created a portable studio with a skylight deployed facing north with impressive results.

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A memorable series of portraits he created in 1950-51, collectively called Small Trades, was of labourers in New York, Paris, and London formally posed in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade. This project eventually extended to places such as Nepal, New Guinea, Dahomey (now Benin), and Morocco. Penn's later platinum prints of female nudes and of cigarette butts are characterized by the same tonal subtlety, compositional virtuosity, and serenity that mark his fashion photography and portraiture.

Three hundred of Penn's pictures were published in Moments Preserved (1960). His other books include Worlds in a Small Room (1974), a collection of portraits of people he encountered in remote foreign locales, and Passage (1991), a retrospective survey of more than 400 examples of his work in portraiture, fashion, ethnic studies, and still life. In 1996 he donated his archives to the Art Institute of Chicago. The museum organized a traveling retrospective of his work the following year.

In 1950, Penn married his favorite model, Lisa Fonssagrives and he founded his studio in 1953. They had one son together, who is named Tom.

Dirac biography

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:24:57 -0700

PAUL DIRAC

(1902 -1984)

The mathematician Mark Kac divided geniuses into two classes. Ordinary ones whose achievements others will emulate, and magicians whose inventions are so astounding that it is hard to see how any human could have imagined them. Paul Dirac was one of these magicians.

When he went to Cambridge in 1923, at the age of 21, the world of physics was in turmoil. Experiments had shown that classical physicists could not explain the behaviour of atoms. The old principles of Isaac Newton didn't seem to apply to the microscopic world. Dirac soon developed his own widely-acclaimed theory of quantum mechanics. His theory included wave mechanics, the version of uantum mechanics developed by Erwin Schrodinger, and matrix mechanics, the theory put forward by Werner Heisenberg.

At the time, it seemed miraculous. Albert Einstein described Dirac's theory as "the most logically perfect of quantum mechanics". Perfect as it was, the theory was only a reformulation of a newly-discovered branch of physics. In 1928, Dirac made a breakthrough. He combined the theories of quantum mechanics and Einstein's special relativity. The resulting Dirac equation, still widely used today, was able to explain the mysterious magnetic and "spin" properties of the electron. Like so many great discoveries, it required an extraordinary leap of imagination.

But there was a conundrum. The equation had two solutions, one representing the electron, the other representing its opposite, a particle with negative energy and positive charge, that had never been seen or suspected before. Dirac concluded that each electron had an "anti-particle". The two could be created or destroyed in matching pairs. Dirac had predicted the existence of anti-matter, which makes up, at least in principle, half the universe.
Heisenberg judged this to be the supreme achievement of 20th Century physics.

Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac was born in Bristol, England and grew up in the Bishopston area of the city. His father, Charles Dirac, was an immigrant from Saint-Maurice in the Canton of Valais, Switzerland. His mother was originally from Cornwall and the daughter of a mariner. Paul had an elder brother, F�lix, who committed suicide in March 1925, and a younger sister, B�atrice. His early family life appears to have been unhappy due to his father's unusually strict and authoritarian nature.

He was educated first at Bishop Road Primary School and then at Merchant Venturers' Technical College , where his father was a French teacher.

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The school was an institution attached to the University of Bristol, which emphasized scientific subjects and modern languages. This was an unusual arrangement at a time when secondary education in Britain was still dedicated largely to the classics, and something for which Dirac would later express gratitude.

Dirac studied electrical engineering at the University of Bristol, completing his degree in 1921. He then decided that his true calling lay in the mathematical sciences and, after completing a BA in applied mathematics at Bristol in 1923, he received a grant to conduct research at St John's College, Cambridge, where he would remain for most of his career. At Cambridge, Dirac pursued his interests in the theory of general relativity (an interest he gained earlier as a student in Bristol) and in the nascent field of quantum physics, under the supervision of Ralph Fowler.

Dirac's first remarkable contribution came before he earned his doctorate in 1926. In his paper "The Fundamental Equations of Quantum Mechanics" (1925), Dirac decided to extricate the fundamental point in Heisenberg's now famous paper. But the most startling result of Dirac's equation for the electron was the recognition of the possibility of negative kinetic energy. In other words, his equations implied for the electron an entirely novel type of motion whereby energy had to be put into the electron in order to bring it to rest. The most startling consequences of Dirac's theory of the electron consisted in the opening up of the world of antimatter. Clearly, if negative electrons had their counterparts in positrons, it was natural to assume that protons had their counterparts as well.

This contribution of Dirac came during a marvelously creative period in his life, from 1925 to 1930. Its crowning conclusion was the publication of his Principles of Quantum Mechanics, a work still unsurpassed for its logical compactness and boldness.

A telling measure of Dirac's main achievements in physics was the recognition that greeted his work immediately. In 1932 he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and given the most prestigious post in British science, the Lucasian chair of mathematics at Cambridge. He received the Royal Society's Royal Medal in 1939 and its Copley Medal in 1952. He was a member of many academies, held numerous honorary degrees, and was a guest lecturer in universities all over the world. He married Margaret Wigner, sister of Nobel laureate Eugene P. Wigner, in 1937.

The second half of Dirac's working life was occupied mainly with cosmology and the subject of "large numbers," or numbers with cosmic significance. In the 1972, he accepted a post as professor of physics at Florida State University, and he continued there until his death in Tallahassee on October 20, 1984.

Norman Borlaug - Biography

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:24:43 -0700

(1914 -2009)

Borlaug, the icon of war on hunger, is no more

The death of crop scientist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, an enduring icon for the war on hunger who had helped steer India away from recurrent famines towards self- sufficiency in food, has compelled me to return to SU after 2 months, to pen a tribute.

Borlaug, whose research to improve wheat varieties, initiated in Mexico in 1945, led to the Green Revolution and helped save millions of people from starvation worldwide, died from cancer complications in Texas on 12th.of September 2009. He was 95.

M.S. Swami- nathan, the Indian scientist who had taken the first steps to initiate Borlaug's lasting association with India 48 years ago, was today in a hotel in Blacksburg, Virginia, in transit to visit the ailing scientist for a final meeting on Wednesday.

He was the greatest hunger fighter of all time," said Swaminathan, who had in 1961 proposed to the government that it invite Borlaug to apply his ideas of developing high-yielding wheat varieties in India.The country faced the threat of recurrent famines during the 1960s and pulled through with food aid brought in by ships. "It was a ship-to-mouth existence," said Swaminathan, who was at the time a scientist in the genetics division at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI).But Borlaug, who arrived at the IARI, New Delhi, in 1963, helped India develop high-yielding and disease-resistant varieties of wheat that quickly doubled wheat productivity.

In Mexico, Borlaug had developed a dwarf variety with substantially increased grain yields. "This trait was passed on to Indian wheat varieties and our yields began to rise," said Kailash Bansal, a plant biotechnologist at the IARI. Scientists also applied the technology to rice and India's grain production soared, allowing the nation to export grains. Wheat yields increased from 800kg per hectare in the 1960s to 2,800kg per hectare by the early 2000s. Rice yields have shown similar gains.

Borlaug, who received the Nobel in 1970 for his work to increase crop productivity among other honours including Padma Vibhushan in 2006, was born on a farm in Iowa where he spent his childhood attending a one-room school. Borlaug failed his first attempt to enter the University of Minnesota where he was told his high school education had not prepared him properly in Science and Maths.