Nobel Prize

Mother Teresa was born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in Uskup, Ottoman Empire (now Skopje, North Macedonia), on August 26, 1910. Her family was of Albanian descent. At the age of twelve, she felt strongly the call of God. She knew she had to be a missionary to spread the love of Christ. At the age of…

Eugene Paul Wigner, born in Budapest, Hungary, on November 17, 1902, naturalized a citizen of the United States on January 8, 1937, has been since 1938 Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics at Princeton University – he retired in 1971. His formal education was acquired in Europe; he obtained the Dr. Ing. degree at…

As the children of immigrants, my parents were raised in Scandinavian Minnesota. My mother, Verna Ecklund, was a university student for only one year but my father, Thomas Peter Mortensen, graduated from the School of Forestry at the University of Minnesota in 1936. They were married shortly after and moved to Enterprise, Oregon, where I…

I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher. At the end of the World War II most of the province of Gorizia was overtaken by Yugoslavia and my family fled to…

I was born in 1925, in The Hague, the Netherlands, as the third child of Pieter van der Meer and Jetske Groeneveld, both of Frisian origin. I had three sisters. My father was a schoolteacher and my mother came from a teacher’s family. Under these conditions it is not astonishing that learning was highly prized;…

Frederik Willem de Klerk was born in Johannesburg on March 18, 1936. He is the son of Senator Jan de Klerk, a leading politician, who became minister in the South African government. His brother Willem is a liberal newspaperman and one of the founders of the Democratic Party. F.W. de Klerk graduated with a law…

Enrico Fermi was born in Rome on 29th September, 1901, the son of Alberto Fermi, a Chief Inspector of the Ministry of Communications, and Ida de Gattis. He attended a local grammar school, and his early aptitude for mathematics and physics was recognized and encouraged by his father’s colleagues, among them A. Amidei. In 1918,…

Frederick Sanger was born on August 13, 1918, at Rendcombe in Gloucestershire, the second son of Frederick Sanger, M.D., a medical practitioner and his wife Cicely. He was educated at Bryanston School and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in natural sciences in 1939. Since 1940 he has carried out…

I was born on 13th August 1918 in the village of Rendcombe in Gloucestershire, where my father, also Frederick Sanger, was a medical practitioner. Influenced by him, and probably even more so by my brother Theodore (a year older than me), I soon became interested in biology and developed a respect for the importance of…

From the old stone house where I was born were views of the mountains with snow on them, and of the dusty plains that surround the little town. A high dry place. My mother said that the washing, put out to dry at eight in the morning was dry long before lunchtime. The outside world…