Notable People
Aesop was a legendary Greek who is attributed with over 600 fables. The information on his birth and life contain many contrary details, and some scholars including Martin Luther deny his existence. Some refer to the term Aesopic--which is sometimes used for ambiguous or allegorical political reference due to censorship; or for stories in the literary tradition given no attribution to a specific author.
Aristotle was born in Stagira, Greece Aristotle received his education from the eductional program designed by Plato. After educating Alexander the Great's son he started his own school at Lyceum, and spent the rest of his life there doing research, teaching, and writing. Although the surviving works of Aristotle probably represent only a fragment of the whole, they include his investigations of an amazing range of subjects, from logic, philosophy, and ethics to physics, biology, psychology, politics, and rhetoric.
George Washington Carver was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri on the farm of Moses Carver. He was born into difficult and changing times near the end of the Civil War. The infant George and his mother kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders and possibly sent away to Arkansas. Moses Carver found and reclaimed George after the war but his mother had disappeared forever. The identity of Carver's father remains unknown, although he believed his father was a slave from a neighboring farm. Moses and Susan Carver reared George and his brother as their own children. It was on the Moses' farm where George first fell in love with nature, where he earned the nickname 'The Plant Doctor' and collected in earnest all manner of rocks and plants.
W. Edwards Deming conducted a thriving worldwide consulting practice for more than forty years. His clients included manufacturing companies, telephone companies, railways, carriers of motor freight, consumer researchers, census methodologists, hospitals, legal firms, government agencies, and research organizations in universities and in industry.
Edison was the most prolific inventor in American history. He amassed a record 1,093 patents covering key innovations and minor improvements in wide range of fields, including telecommunications, electric power, sound recording, motion pictures, primary and storage batteries, and mining and cement technology. As important, he broadened the notion of invention to encompass what we now call innovation-invention, research, development, and commercialization-and invented the industrial research laboratory. Edison's role as an innovator is evident not only in his two major laboratories at Menlo Park and West Orange in New Jersey but in more than 300 companies formed worldwide to manufacture and market his inventions, many of which carried the Edison name, including some 200 Edison illuminating companies.
Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706. He was the tenth son of soap maker, Josiah Franklin. Benjamin's mother was Abiah Folger, the second wife of Josiah. In all, Josiah would father 17 children.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm known as The Grimm Brothers were born at Hanau in Hasse-Kassel, Germany. Jacob Grimm the second son, was born on January 4, 1785 and Wilhelm Grimm the third son, was born on February 24, 1786. The Grimms were a large family of nine children, eight boys and one girl. Their father was a lawyer and after his death they set out to Kassel to attend law school and to follow in their father’s footsteps.
John Locke was born in the small Somerset village of Wrington on August 29th 1632. His mother died while he was an infant and his father, a country lawyer, died a few years thereafter.
He was educated at the famous Westminster school from 1646 and the University of Oxford from 1652 where his early training was in the classics (Greek, Rhetoric, moral philosophy etc.) and part of his later training was in medicine and experimental science. In 1659 he was elected to a senior studentship (i.e. fellowship) at Christ Church, Oxford.
Humanistic theory emerged in the 1950's as something of a backlash against the behavioral and psychodynamic theories. The principal charge hurled at these two models was that they are dehumanizing. Freudian theory was criticized for its belief that behavior is dominated by primitive, animalistic drives. Behaviorism was criticized for its preoccupation with animal research and for its mechanistic, fragmented view of personality. Critics argued that both schools of thought are too deterministic and that both fail to recognize the unique qualities of human behavior.
"A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act, and without pangs of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority."
Stanley Milgram was born on August 15, 1933, in New York City, and was the middle of three children. Milgram attended James Monroe High School in New York City, and was a member of the honor society, Arista, and became the editor of the school newspaper, the Science Observer. He was also involved in his schools theater productions, which later influenced the realistic experiences his subjects underwent in his experiments. Stanley Milgram attended Queens College in New York City and majored in political science. He then applied to Harvard’s department of social relations Ph.D. program, but was rejected on the basis of never having any experience in psychology. He was later accepted when he reapplied, after taking 6 undergraduate courses in psychology. His dissertation was on cross-cultural comparisons of conformity, implemented in Norway and France in the years 1957-1959, where he used a version of a technique developed by psychologist Solomon Asch. Milgram later was assigned to Asch as a research assistant, and became quite familiar with his conformity experiments. Milgram received his Ph.D. in June of 1960, and became an assistant professor at Yale the following fall. Stanley Milgram received grant support from the National Science Foundation, and went far beyond Asch’s conformity research, and conducted experiments to determine the power of social influence.
Anglo-American political theorist and writer, b. Thetford, Norfolk, England. He was the son of a Quaker. An excise officer, he was dismissed from the service after leading (1772) agitation for higher salaries. Paine emigrated to America in 1774, bearing letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, who was then in England. He soon became involved in the clashes between England and the American colonies and published the enormously successful pamphlet Common Sense (Jan., 1776), in which he argued that the colonies had outgrown any need for English domination and should be given independence. In Dec., 1776, Paine wrote the first of a series of 16 pamphlets called The Crisis (1776–83). These essays were widely distributed and did much to encourage the patriot cause throughout the American Revolution.
William Paley was born in Peterborough in July 1743. His father, William, was vicar of Helpston, Northamptonshire, and, later, headmaster of the Giggleswick School. William attended Giggleswick prior to entering Christ's College, Cambridge, in 1759, where he had a brilliant career, excelling in mathematics and debating. After a brief period as a school-teacher Paley was elected a fellow at his college in 1766 and tutor in 1768. He remained at Cambridge until his marriage in 1776. Subsequently Paley, who had been ordained in 1767, accepted a series of ecclesiastical appointments which were less distinguished than his abilities because of his liberal political views.
With The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith installed himself as the fountainhead of contemporary economic thought. Currents of Adam Smith ran through David Ricardo and Karl Marx in the nineteenth century, and through Keynes and Friedman in the twentieth.
Adam Smith was born in a small village in Kirkcaldy, Scotland. There his widowed mother raised him until he entered the University of Glasgow at age fourteen, as was the usual practice, on scholarship. He later attended Balliol College at Oxford, graduating with an extensive knowledge of European literature and an enduring contempt for English schools.
Hernando de Soto is president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima and director of several Peruvian companies. He has worked as managing director of Universal Engineering Corporation, as a member of the Swiss Bank Corporation Consultant Group, and as a director of Peru's Central Reserve Bank. He was also President Alberto Fujimori's personal representative and principal advisor, and as such initiated Peru's re-insertion into the international economic system and its macroeconomic reform programs in June 1990.
Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, was born on March 20, 1865, into an upper class liberal Philadelphia family. His father, a Princeton graduate and lawyer, made enough money from mortgages and did not have to keep a regular job. His mother was a spirited abolitionist and feminist who was said to have run an underground railroad station for runaway slaves. Both parents were Quakers and believed in high thinking and plain living. Parental authority was not questioned and children were seen and not heard in the Taylor family. Family members referred to each other as "thee" and "thou". At an early age Taylor learned self-control and his Quaker upbringing helped him to avoid conflicts with his peers and to resolve disagreements among them.
Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, at Anchiano, a hamlet near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of Florence. He was the illegitimate son of Ser Piero da Vinci, a Florentine notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Little is known about his early life, which has been the subject of historical conjecture by Vasari and others.