Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Calvin was a French theologian, pastor, and reformer in Geneva during the Protestant Reformation. He was the principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism, including its doctrines of predestination and God's absolute sovereignty in salvation.
John Calvin was born as Jehan Cauvin on the 10th of July 1509, in Noyon, a town in Picardy in the Kingdom of France. He was the second of three sons who survived infancy, born to Gérard Cauvin, the cathedral notary, and Jeanne le Franc.
John Calvin first published the Institutes of the Christian Religion in March 1536 in Basel as a defence of his faith and an instruction book for Christians. The first edition had only six chapters, and he expanded it over his life until the final 1559 edition reached four books of eighty chapters.
Michael Servetus was condemned as a heretic by the Geneva council and burnt alive on the 27th of October 1553 at the Plateau of Champel for rejecting the Trinity and predestination in his book Christianismi Restitutio. Calvin denounced him, and some scholars say Calvin asked that Servetus be beheaded instead of burnt, a plea that was refused.
John Calvin died on the 27th of May 1564, aged 54, after bursting a blood vessel in his lungs while preaching. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Cimetière des Rois in Geneva, its exact location now unknown.
John Calvin returned to Geneva on the 13th of September 1541, and the council passed his Ordonnances ecclésiastiques on the 20th of November 1541, creating the Consistory and four orders of ministry. After an influx of French refugees and the February 1555 elections, his opponents the libertines were forced out, leaving his authority practically uncontested.
Calvinism spread through Calvin's missionary work and refugees, reaching France, the Netherlands, England, and Scotland, where John Knox carried his ideas. It produced the Heidelberg Catechism in 1563 and the Belgic Confession in 1561, and later reached North America, South Africa, and Korea.