ĪJĪ, ʿAḌUD AL-DĪN AL- (AH 680?–756/1281?–1356 CE) was a Muslim theologian and jurist of the Il-khanid period. He originated from a well-to-do family of notables and judges living in the town...

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 ...

The death of Becker's father, a Protestant minister, left him at the age of eight with the need to help support his mother and brothers. The lack of money for a formal education forced Johann to educate himself, mainly by traveling through...

Known today mainly as the author of a paradox designed to prove the unreality of time--which, even if it has not convinced many, nonetheless served as the starting point for the great majority of philosophical discussions about time in the...

Inventor who developed the double-acting water pump in 1716. This seemingly simply invention produces a continuous stream of water by pumping on both the "up" stroke and the "down" stroke. Previous pumps, using ...

The driving passion of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's literary life was to make his "fairystories" so complete in description and detail, so varied in character and action, so expansive in philosophy and religion, as to be "real." He was in e...

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 ...

Moderately famous during his lifetime, recording artist J. P. (Jiles Perry) Richardson, better known as the Big Bopper, gained lasting notoriety through his death in the airplane crash that killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens near Mason ...

(1005–1089), Sufi religious figure. Khwaja Abdullah Ansari was a Sufi sheikh from Heart, Afghanistan, and a Hanbali traditionist, renowned for his sermons in rhymed prose and for his polemics against rationalist theology (kalam). An...

In perhaps the longest high school career on record, Jack Armstrong remained an All-American Boy for close to two decades. For the greater part of its radio life, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy was a 15-minute-a-day children's...

One of the world's greatest heavyweight boxers, William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey (1895-1983) was so popular that he drew more million-dollar gates than any prizefighter in history. William Harrison Dempsey, more commonly known as "Jack" aft...

Jack Johnson (1878-1946) became the first African American heavyweight champion after winning the crown from Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia on December 26, 1908. As a result of this victory, he became the center of a bitter racial contro...

When he coinvented the integrated circuit, or microchip, Jack Kilby also co-launched the age of modern electronics. He was born in Jefferson City, Missouri, and spent most of his childhood in Great Bend, Kansas. Following in his father's f...

"Stop! Look! Listen! It's time for The Jack LaLanne Show. " So began Jack LaLanne's daily exercise program, syndicated on television stations nationwide from 1959 to 1985. The muscular man in the jumpsuit led si...

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 Spicer was a San Francisco poet who rejected the traditional centers for poetry--academia and the established publishing houses, using the phrase "English Department" as a derogatory description for analytical approaches to poetry and...

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...

Multitalented athlete Jackie Joyner-Kersee (born 1962) was one of the top American track stars of the 1980s and 1990s, winning numerous Olympic medals and setting or tying records in several events. She was the first American ever to win a...

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...

Romantic balladeer turned political activist, Jackson Browne is one of America's most enduring singer-songwriters. Raised in Southern California, Browne joined the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band while in high school, but quit to pursue a so...

JACOB, or, in Hebrew, Yaʿaqov, also called Israel; the son of Isaac and grandson of Abraham. The name Yaʿaqov is generally regarded as an abbreviation of yaʿaqov el, which probably means "God protects" an...

1236-1312 French Jewish mathematician and astronomer who translated several key works into Hebrew, and wrote a number of mathematical and astronomical treatises. Among the texts Jacob translated from Arabic were Euclid's (c. 325-c. ...

American physician and radiologist whose work in the detection of breast cancer culminated with the development of mammography in 1964. Mammography, a technique that uses periodic x-ray examinations to detect breast cancer, has been a sign...

1882-1954 American physician who, with Evarts Graham, was the first to successfully remove an entire lung in the treatment of lung cancer. This procedure, radical at the time, later proved one of the more successful treatments for lung can...