Curated category
Honorary members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences
- Voltaire"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan.
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a…
- Joseph-Louis LagrangeJoseph-Louis Lagrange was born Giuseppe Lodovico Lagrangia in Turin on the 25th of January 1736, the firstborn of eleven children.
- Louis PasteurOn the 6th of July 1885, Louis Pasteur faced a choice that could have ended in his prosecution. A 9-year-old boy named Joseph Meister had been badly mauled…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years.
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
- Joseph FourierJoseph Fourier fell down a flight of stairs on the 4th of May 1830. He had been living with a heart condition since his days in Egypt and Grenoble, but that…
- Vasily ZhukovskyVasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems.
- Élie MetchnikoffÉlie Metchnikoff inserted tiny citrus thorns into the larvae of starfish and then waited. What he saw in 1882 would alter the course of medicine.
- Barthold Georg NiebuhrBarthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer.
- Ivan BuninIvan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living…
- Nikolay KaramzinNikolay Karamzin once said his surname traced back to a baptized Tatar called Kara-mirza, an ancestor so distant that no records survived his name.
- Vladimir Solovyov (philosopher)Vladimir Solovyov was born in Moscow in 1853, the second son of one of Russia's most prominent historians, yet he spent his final days as what witnesses…