Tutor and fellow of Harvard College, poet, astronomer, and for twenty-four years pastor of the church at Roxbury, Massachusetts, Samuel Danforth was born in Framlingham, Suffolk, England, the second son of Nicholas and Elizabeth Danforth. ...

Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979), English-born American semanticist and literary critic, crusaded to have "Basic" English adopted as a fundamental English vocabulary. On Feb. 26, 1893, Ivor Armstrong Richards was born at Cheshire. He wa...

Chinese-American architect, I. M. Pei (born 1917), directed for nearly 40 years one of the most successful architectural practices in the United States. Known for his dramatic use of concrete and glass, Pei counted among his most famous bu...

The Jewish poet, novelist, and playwright Isaac Loeb Peretz (1851-1915) was the leader of Yiddishism, a cultural movement dedicated to making Yiddish the national language of Jewish people throughout the world. Isaac Peretz was born in Zam...

With more than forty volumes of poetry and prose to his name, in English and Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith is increasingly acknowledged as the elder statesman of modern Scottish letters and Scotland's most distinguished living poet. In 1978 ...

Ian Hamilton defined his poems with clarity in the Bulletin of the Poetry Book Society (Summer 1974) when he characterized them as "dramatic lyrics .... the intense climatic moment of a drama," adding that the reader must supply "the prose...

Ian McEwan is very much a product of the new British universities, those popularly known as "plate-glass universities" to distinguish them from the older "red-brick universities" at which writers such as Kinglsey Amis or Philip Larkin have...

Ian Rankin is one of the most successful crime writers in Great Britain and, increasingly, in the United States. The series of novels featuring Inspector John Rebus has garnered praise from reviewers commensurate to a commercial success so...

According to a reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, Ian Watson is "probably the best thinker" in British science fiction. "I'm attempting to alter the states of mind of my readers, to make them more conscious of the operating progr...

Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), Greek composer and architect, was one of the first to react against the post-Weberian serialists and pointillists who dominated music in the 1950s. Initially, his most notable achievement was the invention of "s...

Nikolai Iazykov would most likely have perceived his role in the development of Russian Romantic literature quite differently than did either his contemporaries or the subsequent generations of critics. He would have placed a greater value...

The poetry of Sara de Ibáñez has been praised throughout the Hispanic world since its first appearance in 1940. Her poems appear in many anthologies, and she has been acclaimed by such giants of Hispanic letters as the Nobel ...

Muhyi al-Din Ibn al-Arabi (1165-1240) was an outstanding Spanish-born Moslem thinker and mystic. One of the most prolific writers of the Islamic Middle Ages on the subject of mysticism, he also wrote love poetry. Ibn al-Arabi was from Murc...

Muhammad ibn Battuta (1304-ca. 1368) was a Moorish traveler whose extensive voyages as far as Sumatra and China, southern Russia, the Maldives, the East African coast, and Timbuktu made him one of the greatest medieval travelers. Muhammad ...

Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) was an Arab historian, philosopher, and statesman whose treatise, the Muqaddima, in which he pioneered a general sociological theory of history, shows him as one of the most original think...

Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Tufayl (ca. 1110-1185) was a Spanish Moslem philosopher and physician, author of the celebrated allegorical tale "Hayy Ibn Yaqzan." Known to medieval Christian scholastics as Abubacer (from Abu Bakr), Ibn Tufayl was b...

The North African religious leader Abdullah ibn Yasin (died 1059) was the founder and spiritual leader of the Moslem Almoravid movement. Little is known of the life of Abdullah ibn Yasin until he stepped into North African history about 10...

Ibrahim Pasha (1789-1848) was an outstanding Turkish military and administrative leader in the eastern Mediterranean area of the Ottoman Empire. Ibrahim Pasha was born in Kavalla in what is now Greek Macedonia but was then an important Ott...

Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), an African American journalist, was an active crusader against lynching and a champion of social and political justice for African Americans. Ida B. Wells was born a slave in Holly Springs, Mississippi, on...

A pioneering neurophysiologist and supporter of allowing women to pursue studies in the sciences despite a prevailing gender bias, Dr. Ida Henrietta Hyde (1857-1945) was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in science at Heidelberg University i...

Working with fellow chemist Walter Noddack (her future husband) and X-ray specialist Otto Berg , Ida Tacke discovered element 75 , rhenium, in 1925, thus solving one of the mysteries of the periodic table of elements introduced by Russian ...

His full name was Sidi Muhammad Idris Al-Mahdi As-sanusi (1889-1983). The first and only king of Libya, he reigned as Idris I from 1950 to 1969. Although he led his country to independence, his conservatism finally brought about his overth...

Ignace Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), Polish pianist, composer, and statesman, was one of the best-known musicians of his time, as well as a very influential statesman who helped create modern Poland after World War I. Jan Paderewski was born...

The letters of the Christian bishop St. Ignatius of Antioch (died ca. 115) are an important source of knowledge about the early Church. Ignatius was overseer (bishop) of the Christians in Antioch in Syria during one of the persecutions tha...

By the early nineteenth century, the field of obstetrics had emerged from the arena of general surgery as an independent area of specialization. Among the contributors to the new field, the Hungarian physician, Ignaz Semmelweis, is general...