Important Historical Personalities of the World

Famous Personalities of the World History

Alexander the Great.

1.         Alexander III of Macedon (20/21 July 356 – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of Macedon or Macedonia.

2.         by the age of thirty was the creator of one of the largest empires in ancient history, stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush.

3.        Born  in  Pella in  356  BC,  Alexander was  tutored  by  the  famed  philosopher

  Aristotle.

4.         In 336 BC he succeeded his father Philip II of Macedon to the throne after he was assassinated.

5.         He  succeeded  in  being  awarded  the  generalship  of  Greece  and,  with  his authority firmly established, launched the military plans for expansion left by his father.

6.         In 334 BC he invaded Persian-ruled Asia Minor and began a series of campaigns lasting ten years.

7.         Alexander broke the power of Persia in a series of decisive battles, most notably thebattles of Issus and Gaugamela.

8.         Subsequently  he  overthrew  the  Persian  king  Darius  III  and  conquered  the entirety of the Persian Empire.

9.         Alexander died in Babylon in 323 BC, without realizing a series of planned campaigns that would have begun with an invasion of Arabia.

Abū Rayhān Al-Bīrūnī

1.         Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni born 5 September 973 in Kath, Khwarezm, died 13 December 1048 in Ghazni.

2.        known as Alberonius in Latin, was a Persian Muslim scholar and polymath of the

11th century.

3.         theology. He was the first Muslim scholar to study India and the Brahminical tradition, and has been described asthe founder of Indology, and"the first anthropologist".

  4.         He was one of the first exponents of an experimental method of investigation, introducing this method into mechanics and what is nowadays called mineralogy, psychology, and astronomy.

5.       The  crater  Al-Biruni  on  the  Moon  is  named  after  him.  Tashkent  Technical University (formerly Tashkent Polytechnic Institute) is  also named after  Abu Rayhan al-Biruni and a university founded by Ahmad Shah Massoud in Kapisa is named after him.

Amir Khusrow

1.        Ab'ul Hasan Yamin ud-Din Khusrow (1253-1325 CE), better known as Amir

Khusrow was an Indian musician, scholar and poet.

2.        He wrote poetry primarily in Persian, but also in Hindavi.

3.        The invention of the tabla is also traditionally attributed to Amīr Khusrow.

Ibn Battuta

1.        Hajji Abu Abdullah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, or simply Ibn Battuta (February 25,

1304–1368 or 1369), was a Moroccan Berber Islamic scholar and traveler who is known for the account of his travels and excursions called the Rihla.

Khalil Gibran

1.       Khalil Gibran (January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) also known as Kahlil Gibran, was a LebaneseAmerican artist, poet, and writer

2.        He is chiefly known in the English speaking world for his 1923 book The Prophet,

a series of philosophical essays written in English prose. An early example of Inspirational fiction, the book sold well  despite a  cool critical reception, and became extremely popular in the 1960s counterculture.

3.       Gibran is the third best-selling poet of alltime, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

Muhammad Ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

1.         Abū Abdallāh Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi  was a Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer, a scholar in theHouse of Wisdom in Baghdad

2.         In the twelfth century, Latin translations of his work on the Indian numerals, introduced the decimal positional number system to the Western world.

3.         His Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations in Arabic.

4.         His contributions had a great impact on language. "Algebra" is derived from al- jabr, one of thetwo operations he used to solve quadratic equations.

5.         Algorism and algorithm stem from Algoritmi, the Latin form of his name. His name is the origin of (Spanish) guarismo and of (Portuguese) algarismo, both meaning digit.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

1.         Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was a  Turkish army officer, revolutionary statesman, writer, and founder of the Republic of Turkey, as well as the first Turkish President.

2.         Atatürk was a military officer during World War I. Following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in WWI, he led the Turkish national movement in the Turkish War of Independence

3.       The principles of Atatürk's reforms, upon which modern Turkey was established, are referred to as Kemalism.

Adolf Hitler

1.         Adolf  Hitler (20  April  1889  –  30  April  1945)  was  an  Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party.

2.         He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and served as head of state asFührer und Reichskanzler from 1934 to 1945.

3.        A decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the precursor of the Nazi Party

(DAP) in 1919, and became leader of NSDAP in 1921.

4.         He attempted a failed coup d'etat known asthe Beer Hall Putsch, which occurred at theBürgerbräukeller beer hall in Munich on November 8–9, 1923.

5.         Hitler was imprisoned for one year due to the failed coup, and wrote his memoir, "My Struggle", while imprisoned.

6.         After his release on December 20, 1924, he gained support by promoting Pan- Germanism, anti-semitism, anti-capitalism, and anti-communism with charismatic oratory and propaganda.

7.         He was appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933, and transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism.

8.         To achieve this, he pursued a foreign policy with the declared goal of seizing Lebensraum ("living space") for the Aryan people; directing the resources of the state towards this goal. This included the rearmament ofGermany, which culminated in 1939 when the Wehrmacht invaded Poland.

9.         However, with the reversal of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the Allies gained the upper hand from 1942 onwards.

10.       In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun and, to avoid capture by Soviet forces, the two committed suicide less than two days later on 30 April 1945.

11.     While Hitler is most remembered for his central role in World War II and the Holocaust,  his  government left  behind  other  legacies  as  well,  including  the Volkswagen, the Autobahn, jet aircraft and rocket technology.

Archimedes.

1.         Archimedes  of  Syracuse  was  a  Greek  mathematician,  physicist,  engineer, inventor, and astronomer.

2.         Among his advances in physics are the foundations of hydrostatics, statics and anexplanation of the principle of the lever.

3.         He is credited with designing innovative machines, including siege engines and thescrew pump that bears his name.

4.         He also defined the spiral bearing his name, formulae for thevolumes of surfaces of revolution and an ingenious system for expressing very large numbers

5.         Archimedes died during the Siege of Syracuse when he was killed by a Roman soldier despite orders that he should not be harmed

6.         Archimedes had proven that the sphere hastwo thirds of the volume and surface area of the cylinder (including thebases of the latter), and regarded this as the greatest of his mathematical achievements.

7.       The relatively few copies of Archimedes' written work that survived through the Middle Ages were an influential source of ideas for scientists during the Renaissance.

8.       Previously unknown works by Archimedes in the Archimedes Palimpsest has provided new insights into how he obtained mathematical results.

Aristotle.

1.         Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great

2.         His  writings  cover  many  subjects,  including  physics,  metaphysics,  poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, andzoology.

3.         Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy.

4.         Aristotle's   views   on   the   physical   sciences   profoundly   shaped   medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics.

5.       Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.

George Bernard Shaw

1.         George  Bernard  Shaw  (26  July  1856  –  2  November  1950)  was  an  Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics.

2.         Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays.

3.         He became an  accomplished orator in  the furtherance of  its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the

working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles.

4.         In 1898, Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend, a fellow Fabian, whom he survived.

5.         He is the only person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938), for his contributions to literature and for his work on thefilm Pygmalion (adaption of his play of the same name), respectively.

6.       Shaw wanted to refuse his Nobel Prize outright because he had no desire for public honours, but accepted it at his wife's behest: she considered it a tribute to Ireland. He did reject the monetary award, requesting it be used to finance translation of Swedish books to English.

William Shakespeare.

1.         William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poetand playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist

2.        He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon".

3.         His surviving works, including some collaboration, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems.

4.         At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith.

5.         . Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men.

6.         He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later.

7.        Shakespeare produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613.

8.         He then wrote mainly tragedies until about 1608, including Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, considered some of thefinest works in theEnglish language.

9.         Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, two of his former theatrical colleagues published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of theplays now recognized as Shakespeare.

10.     The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence.

Ashoka

1.         Ashoka (304–232 BC), popularly known as Ashoka the Great, was an Indian emperor of the Maurya Dynasty who ruled almost all of the Indian subcontinent from 269 BC to 232 BC

2.         His empire stretched from present-day Pakistan, Afghanistan in the west, to the present-day Bangladesh and the Indian state of Assam in the east, and as far south as northern Kerala and Andhra.

3.        He conquered the kingdom named Kalinga

4.         Ashoka  was  a  devotee  of  ahimsa  (nonviolence), love,  truth,  tolerance  and vegetarianism.

5.         His name "aśoka" means "painless, without sorrow" in Sanskrit (the privativum and śoka "pain, distress").

6.        Along with the Edicts of Ashoka, his legend is related in the later 2nd century

Aśokāvadāna ("Narrative of Asoka").

7.        Ashoka played a critical role in helping make Buddhism a world religion.

8.         The emblem of the modern Republic of India is an adaptation of the Lion Capital of Ashoka.

Gautama Buddha.

1.        Siddhārtha Gautama was a spiritual teacher from ancient India who founded

Buddhism.

2.         The time of his birth and death are uncertain: most early 20th-century historians dated his lifetime as 563 BCE to 483 BCE, but more recent opinion dates his death to between 486 and 483 BCE or, according to some, between 411 and 400

BCE.

Christopher Columbus.

1.         Christopher Columbus ( 31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506) was an explorer, colonizer, and  navigator from the  Republic of  Genoa, in  northwestern Italy,

whose voyages across the Atlantic Ocean led to general European awareness of theAmerican continents in the Western Hemisphere.

2.         With his four voyages of exploration and several attempts at  establishing a settlement on the island of Hispaniola, allfunded by Isabella I of Castile, he initiated the process of Spanish colonization which foreshadowed general European colonization of the "New World".

3.         With his four voyages of exploration and several attempts at  establishing a settlement on the island of Hispaniola, allfunded by Isabella I of Castile, he initiated the process of Spanish colonization which foreshadowed general European colonization of the "New World".

4.        His name in his native 15th century Genoese language was Christoffa Corombo

and the Italian language version of the name is Cristoforo Colombo.

5.        In this sociopolitical climate, Columbus's far-fetched scheme won the attention of

Isabella I of Castile.

6.         Severely underestimating the circumference of the Earth, he estimated that a westward route from Iberia to the Indies would be shorter than the overland trade route through Arabia.

7.         Following his plotted course, he instead landed within the Bahamas Archipelago at a locale he named San Salvador. Mistaking the lands he encountered for Asia, he referred to the inhabitants as "indios" (Spanish for "Indians").

8.       The anniversary of Columbus's 1492 landing in the Americas is usually observed asColumbus Day on 12 October in Spain and throughout the Americas, except

Canada. In the United States it is observed annually on the second Monday in

October.

Dalai Lama

1.        The Dalai Lama is a Buddhist leader of religious officials of the Gelug or "Yellow

Hat" branch of Tibetan Buddhism

2.         The name is a combination of the Mongolian word "Dalai" meaning "Ocean"and the Tibetan word "Blama"(with a silent b) meaning "chief" or "high priest."

3.        "Lama" is a general term referring to Tibetan Buddhist teachers.

4.         In religious terms, theDalai Lama is believed by his devotees to be the rebirth of a long line of tulkus who are considered to be manifestations of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteśvara.

5.         For certain periods of time between the 17th century and 1959, the Dalai Lamas sometimes directed the  Tibetan Government, which administered portions of Tibet from Lhasa

6.        The  14th  Dalai  Lama  remains  the  head  of  state  for  the  Central  Tibetan

Administration ("Tibetan government in exile").

7.       He has indicated that the institution of the Dalai Lama may be abolished in the future, and also that the next Dalai Lama may befound outside Tibet and may be female.

Genghis Khan

1.         Genghis Khan  was  the  founder, Khan  (ruler)  and  Khagan (emperor) of  the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death.

2.         After founding the Mongol Empire and being proclaimed "Genghis Khan", he started the Mongol invasions thatwould ultimately result in the conquest of most of Eurasia.

3.         These  included  raids  or  invasions  of  the  Kara-Khitan  Khanate,  Caucasus, Khwarezmid Empire, Western Xia and Jin dynasties.

4.         These  campaigns were  often  accompanied by  wholesale  massacres of  the civilian populations – especially in Khwarezmia.

5.        By the end of his life, the Mongol Empire occupied a substantial portion of

Central Asia and China.

6.         Before Genghis Khan died, he assigned Ögedei Khan as his successor and split his empire into khanates among his sons and grandsons.

7.        He died in 1227 after defeating the Western Xia.

8.         He was buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in Mongolia at an unknown location.

9.         Beyond his great military accomplishments, Genghis Khan also advanced the Mongol Empire in other ways. He decreed the adoption of the Uyghur script as the Mongol Empire's writing system.

10.       It has been estimated that his campaigns killed as many as 40 million people based on census data of the times.

11.      Present-day Mongolians regard him highly as the founding father of Mongolia.

Mao Zedong

1.        Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung             (26 December 1893 – 9

September 1976), was a Chinese revolutionary, political theorist and communist leader.

2.         He led the People's Republic of China (PRC) from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976.

3.         His  theoretical  contribution  to  Marxism-Leninism, military  strategies,  and  his brand of Communist policies are now collectively known as Maoism.

4.         Mao remains a controversial figure to this day, with a contentious legacy that is subject to fierce debate.

5.         Many  Chinese also believe that  through his  policies, he laid  the  economic, technological and cultural foundations of modern China, transforming the country from an agrarian society into a major world power.

6.         Mao's rule from 1949 to 1976 is widely believed to have caused the deaths of 40 to 70 million people.

7.         Since Deng Xiaoping assumed power in 1978, many Maoist policies have been abandoned in favour of economic reforms.

8.       Mao is regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern world history, and named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the

20th century.

Marco Polo.

1.        Marco Polo was a Christian merchant from the Venetian Republic who wrote Il

Milione, which introduced Europeans to Central Asia and China.

2.         He  learned  about  trading  whilst  his  father  and  uncle,  Niccolò  and  Maffeo, travelled through Asia and met Kublai Khan.

3.         In 1269, they returned to Venice to meet Marco for the first time. The three of themembarked on an epic journey to Asia, returning after 24 years to find Venice at war with Genoa; Marco was imprisoned, and dictated his stories to a cellmate.

4.         He was released in 1299, became a  wealthy merchant, married and had 3 children. He died in 1324, and was buried in San Lorenzo.

5.         It documents his father's journey to meet the Kublai Khan, who asked them to become ambassadors, and communicate with the pope.

6.         It documents his father's journey to meet the Kublai Khan, who asked them to become ambassadors, and communicate with the pope.

7.         He also had an influence on European cartography, leading to the introduction of the Fra Mauro map.

Napoleon I.

1.         Napoleon Bonaparte (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) was a military and political leader of France and Emperor of the French as Napoleon I, whose actions shaped European politics in theearly 19th century.

2.         Napoleon was born in Corsica, France to parents of minor noble Italian ancestry and trained as an artillery officer in mainland France.

3.         In 1799, he staged a coup d'état and installed himself as First Consul; five years later the French Senate proclaimed him emperor.

4.         The French invasion of Russia in 1812 marked a turning point in Napoleon's fortunes.

5.         In 1813, the Sixth Coalition defeated his forces at Leipzig; the following year the Coalition invaded France, forced Napoleon to abdicate and exiled him to the island of Elba.

6.         Less than a year later, he escaped Elba and returned to power, but was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in June 1815.

7.         Napoleon spent the last six years of his life in confinement by the British on the island of Saint Helena.

8.         An autopsy concluded he died of stomach cancer, though Sten Forshufvud and other scientists have since conjectured he was poisoned with arsenic.

9.       he is also remembered for the establishment of the Napoleonic code, which laid theadministrative and judicial foundations for much of Western Europe.

Pablo Picasso

1.         Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, draughtsman, and sculptor who lived most of his adult life in France.

2.         Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937), his portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War

3.       making him one of thebest-known figures in 20th century art.

Plato

1.         Plato  (428/427  BC  –  348/347  BC),  was  a  Classical  Greek  philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world.

2.         Plato was originally a student of Socrates, and was as much influenced by his thinking as by his apparently unjust execution.

3.         Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him.

4.         Plato's  dialogues  have  been  used  to  teach  a  range  of  subjects,  including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.

Socrates

1.        Socrates (469 BC–399 BC) was a Classical Greek Athenian philosopher.

2.       A Saint, a prophet of the 'Sun-God', a teacher condemned for his teachings asa heretic."Yet, the 'real' Socrates, like many of the other Ancient philosophers, remains, at best, enigmatic and, at worst, unknown.

Vasco Da Gama.

1.         Vasco  da  Gama  (1460  or  1469  –  24  December  1524)  was  a  Portuguese explorer, one of the most successful in the Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India.

2.       For a short time in 1524 he was Governor of Portuguese India under the title of

Viceroy.

Winston Churchill.

1.         Sir Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill  (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British politician and statesman known for his leadership of the United Kingdom during the Second World War (WWII).

2.         He is widely regarded as one of the great wartime leaders. He served as prime minister twice (1940–45 and 1951–55).

3.         To date, he is the only British prime minister to have received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was the first person created an honorary citizen of the United States.

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