Jacob Leisler (1640-1691), colonial political leader, became de facto governor of the New York colony after leading a revolt against British officials and colonial aristocrats. Jacob Leisler, son of a Calvinist clergyman, was born in Frank...

Moleschott, Jacob(1822–1893) Jacob Moleschott, a physiologist and philosopher often regarded as the founder of nineteenth-century materialism, was born in Holland. After studying at Heidelberg, Moleschott practiced medicine in Utrec...

In 1961, François Jacob and Jaques Monod, two French biologists, publicized their two part theory that was later coined the Jacob-Monod hypothesis. They postulated that ribosomes were not manufactured anew each time a protein was ma...

The Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609) criticized the orthodox Calvinist position on the doctrine of predestination. The result was a split in the Dutch Reformed Church, and followers of his position came to be known as Arminian...

1707-1775 Italian mathematician and engineer best known for his work on hyperbolic functions. Riccati, the son of a mathematician, used hyperbolic functions to find the roots of cubic equations, among other uses. In fact, Riccati was the f...

Punched cards, used today to provide data and instructions to computers, were invented in the late eighteenth century by French inventor Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834) and were used to automate the weaving industry in France. Jac...

An internationally famous First Lady, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994) raised her two children after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. After a seven-year remarriage she turned to a career as a book e...

1762-1834 French gem cutter and fur trader who was part of a two-man team to first reach the top of the highest peak in western Europe. Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard reached the summit of the 15,771-foot-tall (4,807-m) Mont Bla...

1788-1868 French archaeologist who determined that humans had existed millions of years ago, after finding flint axes and other tools in deposits with the bones of extinct animals. While his theory met with disbelief in his day, it advance...

1677-1756 Italian astronomer who fervently supported René Descartes' prediction that Earth is a prolate spheroid—elongated polar axis—against Isaac Newton's prediction that it is an oblate spheroid—b...

1803-1855 Swiss mathematician and physicist who is best known for his part of the Sturm-Liouville problem in differential equations. Sturm worked in a number of mathematical specialties, including duplicating some of Augustin Cauchy'...

1696-1762 French ophthalmologist who performed the first known cataract surgery. In 1748 Daviel performed the first "modern" cataract surgery when he removed the entire cataract from the lens of a patient's eye while l...

Jacques Ellul (1912–1994) was born in Bordeaux on January 6 and spent his academic career as Professor of the History and Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux Law Faculty and Professor in its Institute of Politica...

Widely considered the preeminent French mathematician of the 20th century, Jacques Hadamard has made an impact on many fields of mathematics. Although an analyst and a student of theoretical calculus by training, he has influenced topology...

After World War II French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) became a cult hero, a formidable intellectual superstar whose "structural psychoanalysis," first in France and later at American elite universities, dominated much of intell...

The French Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was the leading figure in the 20th century renascence of Thomism. Jacques Maritain was born in Paris on Nov. 18, 1882. Under the auspices of his mother, Mauritain's religio...

Jacques Francis Albert Pierre Miller is mainly known by his seminal contributions to the understanding of the physiologic role of the thymus gland in the development and maturation of the immune system. He was born in Nice, France, and edu...

One of a remarkable family of record-setting explorer/scientists, Jacques Piccard (born 1922) is one of the fathers of marine exploration and a pioneer of ocean engineering. Explorer Jacques Piccard comes from a family known for their dari...

1851-1940 French inventor known for his idea called "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion" (OTEC). OTEC uses the temperature difference between the warm surface of seawater and the colder deeper layers of ocean water to generate e...

Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910-1997) was an undersea explorer, photographer, inventor of diving devices, writer, television producer, and filmmaker. He was also active in the movement to safeguard the oceans from pollution. "Calypso acquired ...

YUHUANG, the Jade Emperor, has been the supreme deity of the Chinese popular pantheon since at least the tenth century CE. An essential and deeply rooted feature of Chinese culture is the concept of a single, centralized empire under the s...

Kim, Jaegwon(1934–) Jaegwon Kim is a Korean American philosopher born in Taegu (Korea) and educated at Seoul National University, Dartmouth College, and Princeton University. He has taught at Cornell University, University of Michig...

787-886 Arab astrologer, also known as Albumasar or Albumazar, who influenced Western thinking on cosmology during the Middle Ages. In his Introductorium in astronomiam and De magnis coniunctionibus, he maintained that the world was create...

Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose (1858-1937) was an Indian physicist and plant physiologist who did pioneering work in the measurement of plant growth and the responsiveness of plants to external stimuli. The life and scientific career of Jagadis ...

JAGUARS. The jaguar (Panthera onca) is the largest native American cat, and for over three thousand years it has been one of Central and South America's most important symbolic animals. Sometimes associated with the puma (Felis conc...