Vishwanath Pratap Singh (born 1931) became India's eighth prime minister on December 2, 1989, heading a minority National Front coalition government that ended a decade of continuous Congress Party rule. However, he was ousted less than a ...

V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was an English short story writer, novelist, literary critic, journalist, travel writer, biographer, and autobiographer. Though not an innovator in terms of style, he was nevertheless an interesting and highly c...

Ekman was a member of a consortium of Scandinavian scientists who transformed the study of oceanography and meteorology at the turn of the twentieth century. Ekman's father, Fredrik Laurentz Ekman, was an oceanographer, but Vagn Ekman's gr...

Valdemar Poulsen was a Danish engineer who invented the magnetic recorder in 1898. His ideas were the basis of magnetic recording and led to crucial developments in communications and computer technology. Born in Copenhagen on November 23,...

Valentina Tereshkova (born 1937) was the first woman in space, orbiting the earth 48 times in Vostok VI in 1963. Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space. Tereshkova took off from the Tyuratam Space Station in the Vostok VI in 196...

Victor Manuel Valle is a poet, translator, editor, activist, and investigative journalist whose creative vision is rooted in the history of the valley of Los Angeles. Although Valle's poetry has motivated the rest of his work, his journali...

Sutton Vane is remembered for one notable dramatic work, Outward Bound, that received a great deal of critical attention and substantial runs in London and New York in 1923 and 1924. In 1938 the play was revived in New York for another lon...

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) was a leader of American science and engineering during and after World War II. He was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb and the analogue computer, as well as an administrator of government scient...

Évariste Galois discovered mathematics as an adolescent and published his first original work at age 17. In his short life, Galois originated algebraic applications of finite groups, now known as Galois groups, and developed the fou...

The Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (ca. 1460-1524) was the first to travel by sea from Portugal to India. The term "Da Gama epoch" is used to describe the era of European commercial and imperial expansion launched by his navigational e...

The Russian historian Vasily Osipovich Klyuchevsky (1841-1911) explored the socioeconomic fundament of Russian cultural and political development; his writings have become the basis of modern Russian historiography. Vasily Klyuchevsky was ...

Victor Paz Estenssoro (born 1907) was a reformer, political thinker, and president of Bolivia. He instituted a series of widespread reforms that revolutionized Bolivian society. Victor Paz was born to a middle-class family of mixed Spanish...

The German sculptor Veit Stoss (ca. 1445-1533) perfected the expressive late Gothic style in his early masterpiece, the high altar of the Virgin Mary in Cracow, Poland. His late sculpture shows his mastery of a new, abstract, Renaissance-i...

Margie Velma Barfield, who confessed to poisoning four people with arsenic, died by lethal injection in 1984. The "Death Row Grandma" was the first woman executed in the United States since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976. B...

The Australian prehistorian and archeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892-1957) pioneered in the systematic study of European prehistory of the 3d and 2d millenniums B.C. and showed how technological advances marked the birth of human civiliza...

The Swedish author Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam (1859-1940) is known for his lyric poetry and historical novels. He received the 1916 Nobel Prize in literature. Verner von Heidenstam was born on July 6, 1859, the son of aristocratic p...

Vernon M. Ingram, currently the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been referred to as "The father of molecular medicine." While he has provided a large amount of important resear...

The American historian Vernon Louis Parrington (1871-1929) is known for his three-volume intellectual history of America, Main Currents in American Thought. Born at Aurora, Ill., on Aug. 3, 1871, Vernon Parrington was of Scotch and Irish d...

The Belgian anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was the founder of modern anatomy. His major work, "De humani corporis fabrica," is a milestone in scientific progress. Andreas Vesalius was born on Dec. 31, 1514, in Brussels, the son of ...

When Vesto Slipher was born, it was commonly accepted that the universe was composed of a single galaxy. Everything that was visible, whether a star or a mysterious, wispy nebula, was a part of the Milky Way. This opinion had not altered i...

Vicente Guerrero (1783-1831) was a hero of the Mexican fight for independence from Spain. The second president of the Mexican Republic, he was an ardent defender of Indian rights and a harsh opponent of social and economic inequalities in ...

Victor A. McKusick has been called the "father of medical genetics" due his major contributions to the field that have spanned the second half of the twentieth century. From cardiologist, to geneticist, to educator, administrator, and auth...

The French educator and philosopher Victor Cousin (1792-1867) helped to reorganize the French primary school system. He also established the study of philosophy as a major intellectual pursuit of the French secondary and higher schools. Vi...

Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947) was king of Italy from 1900 to 1946. His cooperation with Mussolini helped bring an end to the Italian monarchy. Victor Emmanuel was born on Nov. 11, 1869, in Naples. After his father, Umberto I, was assassi...

Victor Goldschmidt, called the founding father of modern geochemistry, helped lay the foundations for the field of crystal chemistry. He was a highly esteemed mineralogist, petrologist, and geochemist who devoted the bulk of his research t...