1860-1906 English biologist and statistician recognized as one of the founders of biometrics. Welson used statistical methods to test Darwinian ideas, and published a number of classic papers on the statistical variation of various charact...

1904-1981 German-Irish-Swiss physicist best known for his work with Fritz London in providing the first quantum mechanical treatment of the hydrogen molecule (1927). The Heitler-London theory, as it is known, successfully deployed wave mec...

The American physicist Walter H. Brattain (1902-1987), a co-inventor of the transistor, devoted much of his life to research on surface states. Although he was born in Amoy, China (February 10, 1902), Walter Houser Brattain spent the early...

"A good private-eye novel . . . is not really about violence; it's about the fallibility of people, about the grotesqueries of modern life, and not least it is about one man, the detective, who defines the moral order." This statement, fro...

For all the opportunism, self-promotion, misjudgment, and personal failure that undeniably mark his long career, Sir Walter Ralegh remains the most credible embodiment that Tudor-Stuart England has to offer of the ideal of the Renaissance ...

Walter Reed (1851-1902), American military surgeon and head of the U.S. Army Yellow Fever Commission, is widely known as the man who conquered yellow fever by tracing its origin to a particular mosquito species. Walter Reed was born on Sep...

1914-1995 African American Astrophysicist As mathematician for the U.S. Army's Project Diana in 1946, Walter S. McAfee helped advance lunar exploration in its earliest stages. His calculations made it possible to bounce a radar sign...

Walter Sutton spent most of his childhood on the family farm in Kansas with his parents and six brothers. He entered the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1896 to study engineering. The following year, after his youngest brother died of ...

Walter Winchell developed the modern gossip column, employing a brash, sensational style to deal more intimately with the personal affairs of celebrities than other journalists had ever dared. His breezy, racy style came from his vaudevill...

Walther Nernst (1864-1941) made a significant breakthrough with his statement of the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that it should be impossible to attain the temperature of absolute zero in any real experiment. For this accompli...

d. c. 1500 Chinese rocketry pioneer. Wan Hu was reportedly a government official, though some sources identify him as a legendary or semi-legendary figure. In about 1500, he attached some 47 "fire-arrow rockets" or fireworks ...

Wang Ch'ung (27-ca. 100) was a Chinese philosopher who questioned the validity of contemporary belief and applied a new standard of critical inquiry to the problems of the natural world. Wang Ch'ung may be described as a rationalist in the...

fl. c. 625 Chinese mathematician whose Ch'i-ku Suan-ching includes the first known use of cubic equations in a Chinese text. The work offers 20 problems involving mensuration, but does not provide any rule for solving cubic equation...

Wang Pi (226-249) was one of the most brilliant Chinese philosophers. He reinterpreted the Tao-te ching and the I ching and laid the basis for an entirely new metaphysics that inspired Chinese philosophers for centuries to come. The year 2...

(1867–1938), painter and businessperson. Wang Yiting was born in Shanghai and began life as an apprentice in a picture-mounting shop, later becoming a comprador for a Japanese company. He was extremely successful in his business car...

Soon after the invention of the conventional internal combustion engine, engineers realized that a tremendous savings in both weight and energy could be realized if the combustion of gasoline could be used to produce rotary motion directly...

WAQF. The Arabic term waqf (pl. awqāf) denotes in Islamic law the act of founding an endowment, the endowment itself, and also the endowment institution. A synonym, mainly used by Mālikī jurists, and hence in North Afr...

War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - 1865 Introduction War and Peace, by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, is often called the greatest novel ever written. It is certainly one of the longest, and its great length is one source of its enduring fame and r...

Since 1812 more than 1,400 journalists around the world have died on the job. Like soldiers, journalists often work in hostile environments and accept a certain risk, but they do not carry weapons, have no training in warfare, no one watc...

Film makers use many historical events to spark up and idea for a movie. One historical event that is commonly used is war. One advantage a film maker has when using war as a movie plot is that there is already a lot of drama in war. This ...

Consequences of the War of 1812 America's decision to go to war with England in 1812 was considered foolish, because Britain was a major trade partner and because the United States had weak military forces.  However, the consequences ...

I'm sorry to my teacher because unfortunately I cannot write the paper that he assigned. I have seen the reasons of why people care to keep drugs out of this country. I have read everything that I could find on this subject along with prohi...

Throughout the nineteenth century the U.S. Supreme Court had little direct involvement in the administration of military or naval forces. However, as the ultimate authority on international law in the United States, and as an appellate cou...

WARAO RELIGION. The Orinoco Delta, a landscape of swamps, islands, and waterways, is the territory of the Warao. Located between the modern republics of Venezuela, Guyana, and Surinam, the Warao today number approximately sixteen thousand....

(c. 1710–1780), Punjabi literary figure. Renowned for his contributions to Punjabi literature, Waris Shah created a version of the tale of Hir and Ranjha that is popular to this day and considered by many the Punjab's greates...