Joseph B. Danquah (1895-1965) was a Ghanaian political leader and a principal founder of the Gold Coast nationalist movement. As a scholar, he sought to accommodate the best of his country's tribal past to modernity. Joseph B. Danquah was ...

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) was an English biologist who utilized mathematical analysis to study genetic phenomena and their relation to evolution. Born at Oxford on Nov. 5, 1892, J. B. S. Haldane was the son of John Scott Ha...

Although John Desmond Bernal was highly instrumental in the pioneering stages of x-ray crystallography and microbiology, he is perhaps most well-known for his philosophical studies of the social aspects of science. Marxist in thinking and ...

John Henry Constantine Whitehead (known commonly as Henry Whitehead), had a large influence on the development of homotopy theory, which is based on a certain kind of mapping of topological spaces. With Oswald Veblen, he also wrote the cla...

James Howard McGrath served as U.S. attorney general from 1949 to 1952 under President Harry S. Truman. McGrath, a former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator, also served as U.S. solicitor general. Despite these many accomplishments, Mc...

The English physicist Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856-1940) is credited with the discovery of the electron. On Dec. 18, 1856, J. J. Thomson was born at Cheetham Hill near Manchester. His father, a bookseller and publisher, planned a career i...

If Sir James M. Barrie had written no play other than Peter Pan (1904), the extraordinary and enduring popularity of this single work would testify to his talents as a dramatist. As it stands, however, the more than forty plays he wrote al...

James Marion Sims, was born on January 25, 1813 in Lancaster, SC; he died on November 13, 1883 in New York, NY. Sims was the son of John and Mahala Sims, and the husband of Eliza Theresa Jones (parents of five surviving children). An Ameri...

The literary career of J.P. Donleavy (born 1926) has spanned nearly 50 years, though he is most famous for his first novel, The Ginger Man. James Patrick Donleavy was born on April 23, 1926, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Irish im...

John Pierpont Morgan II (1867-1943), American banker, headed J. P. Morgan & Company, one of the most prestigious private banking firms in the world. Born in Irvington, New York, on Sept. 7, 1867, J. P. Morgan II was the only son of the...

Electrical engineer J. Presper Eckert (1919-1995)invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, with John William Mauchly. Further collaboration between the two engineers led to the development of the first comm...

James William Fulbright (1905-1995) was as educator and politician, who, while a United States senator, sponsored the Fulbright Act of 1946, providing funds for the exchange of students, scholars, and teachers between the United States and...

J. C. R. Licklider was a computer scientist best known for his pioneering research in artificial intelligence and whose work established the technological basis for the concepts of time sharing and resource sharing. Licklider was the only ...

John Frederick Charles Fuller (1878-1966) was a prodigious writer of world and military history, and one of the progenitors of tank warfare strategy during and after World War I. John Frederick Charles Fuller's career in the British milita...

The American politician Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (1815-1903) was the main force behind improved education in the South in the latter half of the 19th century. Born on June 5, 1815, in Lincoln County, Ga., J. L. M. Curry was the son of a sl...

Jack Henry Abbott is a convicted murderer who, upon winning parole through the efforts of author Norman Mailer, murdered another man one month later. Abbott's own collected writings, In the Belly of the Beast, were later discounted by many...

Jack B. Dennis is a computer science educator and researcher who is best known for his pioneering work in computer timesharing and dataflow technology. His early mechanical and electrical engineering interests led him to study computer tec...

A conservative on economic issues and a liberal on social questions, Jack French Kemp, Jr. (born 1935), was an articulate spokesperson for the Republican Party for many years. He was the vice presidential candidate on the Republican Party'...

Jack Kevorkian (born 1928) became known as "Dr. Death," in part, because he assisted many people in committing suicide. Kevorkian considered the right to die to be a basic personal right, having nothing to do with government laws. He felt ...

Jack London has been recognized as one of the most dynamic figures in American literature. Sailor, hobo, Klondike argonaut, social crusader, war correspondent, scientific farmer, self-made millionaire, global traveler, and adventurer, Lond...

Jack Ruby was an unknown nightclub owner who became instantly famous in November 1963 as the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald two days after Oswald was arrested for assassinating President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. The app...

An unidentified man, nicknamed "Jack the Ripper," was held responsible for murdering five London prostitutes in 1888. The five prostitutes were stabbed to death between August 31 and November 9. Jack the Ripper, so named for his skill with...

Jack W. Szostak, a professor of genetics and a biochemist at Massachusetts General Hospital developed the Yeast Artificial Chromosome (YAC), in collaboration with Harvard biochemist Andrew Murray. The YAC, developed in 1980s, was the first...

Jack Roosevelt Robinson (1919-1972) was the first African American of the 20th century to play major league baseball. Jackie Robinson was born on January 31, 1919, in Cairo, Georgia, the son of a sharecropper. After his father deserted his...

Jacob Abbott (14 November 1803-31 October 1879), known today primarily for his juvenile works, was born and raised in Hallowell, Maine. After graduating from Bowdoin College, he taught briefly at the Portland Academy, where Henry Wadsworth...