Called "the priest who stayed out in the cold" and "holy outlaw," Father Daniel J. Berrigan (born 1921) never came to terms with the conservatism of the Catholic Church or with the militarism of the American nation. He lived his life as a ...

A gifted researcher in therapeutic chemistry, Daniele Bovet was born in Neuchatel, Switzerland, one of four children of a professor of experimental education. Bovet studied zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Geneva, recei...

Daniel Cohn-Bendit (born 1946) only occupied center stage in French politics for a few weeks in 1968. Still, more than anyone else, Cohn-Bendit came to personify the new left that swept Western Europe and North America in the late 1960s an...

1639?-1710 French soldier and discoverer who led explorations of the expansive Lake Superior. Born into French nobility, Dulhut set sail for New France (Canada) in 1674 and settled in Montreal the following year. In 1678, he formed an expe...

1740-1791 Irish explorer whose travels in Africa were both valuable and fatal. Houghton traveled inland along the Gambia River to the Niger River, one of Africa's great rivers. In the process he helped initiate efforts to identify a...

1652-1728 Swiss physician who practiced medicine in Geneva and wrote extensively on the subject of medicine. His published works include Surgery (1695), History of Medicine (1696), and Historia naturalis . . . nascentium (1715). Le Clerc b...

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (born 1927), United States senator from New York, was a politician and scholar whose career marked him as one of America's most influential public figures in the second half of the 20th century. Daniel Patrick Moyni...

An uncle of the great novelist Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Rutherford was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. Following in the footsteps of his father, who had been a professor of medicine at the University of Edinburgh for nearly 40 years, Rut...

Daniel Shays (ca. 1747-1825), American Revolutionary War captain, is best known for leading a rebellion of western Massachusetts farmers in 1786-1787 seeking relief from oppressive economic conditions. Daniel Shays was born in Middlesex Co...

1619-1684 English physician who in 1645 provided the first scientific description of a vitamin D deficiency, or rickets. Whistler described the condition, wherein "the whole bony structure is as flexible as softened wax," in ...

Specializing in tongue-twisting patter songs, Danny Kaye was a consummate entertainer and comic. He is well remembered for a string of comedies for Samuel Goldwyn in the 1940s, as well as his persistent and honorable efforts for charities,...

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote "The Divine Comedy," the greatest poetic composition of the Christian Middle Ages and the first masterpiece of world literature written in a modern European vernacular. Dante lived in a re...

DAO'AN (312–385), also known as Shi Dao'an, Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, and gifted exegete whose organizational abilities and doctrinal acumen helped shape the direction of early Chinese Buddhism. Dao'an was...

DAOSHENG (360?–434), also Zhu Daosheng; Chinese Buddhist monk, student of the Nirvāṇa Sūtra, and early proponent of a doctrine of sudden enlightenment. The precise age at which Daosheng entered the religious lif...

French engineer Henry Philibert Gaspard Darcy (1803–1858) was an accomplished French engineer, researcher, and civil servant, who is credited with building roads, water systems, and railroads. He is best known for a number of major ...

The Dardanelles is a 61-kilometer-long strait separating European and Asian Turkey, linking the Aegean Sea with the Sea of Marmara. Its widest point is 7 kilometers, its narrowest only 1,600 meters. During classical antiquity the strait wa...

(2000 pop. 66,000). The city of Darhan (elevation 700 meters ) located some 219 kilometers north of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, is the third largest city in Mongolia. Before 1961 the site where Darhan now stands ...

Darius I (558-486 BC), called "the Great," was a Persian king. A great conqueror and the chief organizer of the Persian Empire, he is best known for the unsuccessful attack on Greece which ended at Marathon. A member of a collateral branch...

The earliest dated stone inscription in the Khmer language, which could be regarded as the beginning of Khmer, or Cambodian, literature, is from 611 CE and was found in Takeo province. Over a thousand inscriptions in Old Khmer and Sanskrit...

Dark matter is defined to be any form of matter whose existence can be determined only through its gravitational interaction with visible matter. Dark matter is not visible because, by definition, it emits no detectable electromagnetic rad...

In the world of continuing daytime drama, or "the soaps," Dark Shadows remains an anomaly. Unlike any other day or evening television show, Dark Shadows' increasing popularity over the course of its five year run from ...

Darryl Strawberry's life reads like a soap opera. This major league ballplayer was the first pick overall in the 1980 free-agent draft, selected by the New York Mets. Without a doubt, he possessed the raw talent that could have earn...

Darwinism is the concept of organic evolution, from a common ancestor, by means of natural selection. The theory was popularized by its namesake, English naturalist Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin's theory first appeared in his b...

DASAM GRANTH. The Dasam Granth (Tenth book) is a collection of writings attributed to Gurū Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh gurū (1666–1708). It was compiled sometime after his death by Bhāī Manī Singh...

The general definition of data, according to the United States Federal Acquisition Regulations, is "recorded information, regardless of form or the media of which it may be recorded." This definition includes computer software and technica...