Yuan Tseh Lee was born on November 19, 1936 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. His father is an accomplished artist and his mother a school teacher. He started his early education while Taiwan was under Japanese occupation – a result of a war between China and Japan in 1894. His elementary education was disrupted soon after it…

I was born during the war, on October 20, 1942, as the second of five children. My father, Rolf Volhard, was an architect. He was the eighth of ten children of Franz Volhard, a professor of medicine in Frankfurt, and specialist for heart and kidney. My mother’s mother, Lies Haas-Möllmann, was a painter but had…

I was born on September 11th 1944 in Casablanca, Morocco, in a Jewish family with mixed Sephardic and Ashkenazi origins. My father’s parents were teachers at the Alliance Israëlite universelle (AIU), which operated a network of schools dedicated to the dissemination of French language and culture throughout Jewish communities in North African and Mid-Eastern countries.…

Early Years I was born in November 1939 in Harlem, New York to Irish immigrant parents and grew up in the South Bronx. My parents had landed in New York on the eve of the depression; my father’s hope was that I would never have to live through one myself. My mother’s passage was funded…

Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman was born at Tiruchirappalli in Southern India on November 7th, 1888. His father was a lecturer in mathematics and physics so that from the first he was immersed in an academic atmosphere. He entered Presidency College, Madras, in 1902, and in 1904 passed his B.A. examination, winning the first place and the…

Martin Luther King, Jr., (January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968) was born Michael Luther King, Jr., but later had his name changed to Martin. His grandfather began the family’s long tenure as pastors of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, serving from 1914 to 1931; his father has served from then until the present, and from…

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where he later on began his schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School…

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) was the youngest son of Debendranath Tagore, a leader of the Brahmo Samaj, which was a new religious sect in nineteenth-century Bengal and which attempted a revival of the ultimate monistic basis of Hinduism as laid down in the Upanishads. He was educated at home; and although at seventeen he was sent…

I was born in Superior, Wisconsin on September 27, 1932 as the second child of Scott and Lucille Williamson. Both of my parents had been high school teachers but my father left teaching when he married my mother and joined my grandfather, Oliver E. Dunn, in the family real estate business. My father was a…

Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett was born on 18th November, 1897, the son of Arthur Stuart Blackett. He was originally trained as a regular officer for the Navy (Osborne Naval College, 1917; Dartmouth, 1912), and started his career as a naval cadet (1914), taking part, during the First World War, in the battles of Falkland Islands…