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🔗 Biography

Daniel D. McCracken (July 23, 1930 – July 30, 2011) was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming, with an emphasis on guides to programming in widely used languages such as Fortran and COBOL. His A Guide to Fortran Programming (Wiley, 1961) and its successors were the standard textbooks on that language for over two decades. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 United States/Arizona 🔗 Solar System 🔗 California/California State University

Carolyn Jean Spellmann Shoemaker (June 24, 1929 – August 13, 2021) was an American astronomer and a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. She once held the record for most comets discovered by an individual.

Although Shoemaker earned degrees in history, political science and English literature, she had little interest in science until she met and married geologist Eugene M. ("Gene") Shoemaker in 1950–51. She later said that his explanations of his work thrilled her. Despite her relative inexperience and lack of a science degree, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) had no objection to her joining Gene's team there as a research assistant. She had already shown herself to be unusually patient, and demonstrated exceptional stereoscopic vision, which were particularly valuable qualities for looking for objects in near-Earth space.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/sports and games 🔗 Gambling/Poker 🔗 Gambling

Stuart Errol Ungar (September 8, 1953 – November 22, 1998) was an American professional poker, blackjack, and gin rummy player, widely regarded to have been the greatest Texas hold 'em and gin player of all time.

He is one of two people in poker history to have won the World Series of Poker Main Event three times. He is the only person to win Amarillo Slim's Super Bowl of Poker three times, the world's second most prestigious poker title during its time. He is one of four players in poker history to win consecutive titles in the WSOP Main Event, along with Johnny Moss, Doyle Brunson and Johnny Chan.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/Spanish military history 🔗 Spain 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

Juan Pujol García (Spanish: [ˈxwan puˈʝol ɣaɾˈθi.a]; 14 February 1912 – 10 October 1988), also known as Joan Pujol i García (Catalan: [ʒuˈan puˈʒɔl i ɣəɾˈsi.ə]), was a Spanish spy who acted as a double agent loyal to Great Britain against Nazi Germany during World War II, when he relocated to Britain to carry out fictitious spying activities for the Germans. He was given the codename Garbo by the British; their German counterparts codenamed him Alaric and referred to his non-existent spy network as "Arabal".

After developing a loathing of political extremism of all sorts during the Spanish Civil War, Pujol decided to become a spy for Britain as a way to do something "for the good of humanity". Pujol and his wife contacted the British Embassy in Madrid, which rejected his offer.

Undeterred, he created a false identity as a fanatically pro-Nazi Spanish government official and successfully became a German agent. He was instructed to travel to Britain and recruit additional agents; instead he moved to Lisbon and created bogus reports about Britain from a variety of public sources, including a tourist guide to Britain, train timetables, cinema newsreels and magazine advertisements.

Although the information would not have withstood close examination, Pujol soon established himself as a trustworthy agent. He began inventing fictitious sub-agents who could be blamed for false information and mistakes. The Allies finally accepted Pujol when the Germans expended considerable resources attempting to hunt down a fictitious convoy. Following interviews by Desmond Bristow of Section V MI6 Iberian Section, Juan Pujol was taken on. The family were moved to Britain and Pujol was given the code name "Garbo". Pujol and his handler Tomás Harris spent the rest of the war expanding the fictitious network, communicating to the German handlers at first by letters and later by radio. Eventually the Germans were funding a network of 27 agents, all fictitious.

Pujol had a key role in the success of Operation Fortitude, the deception operation intended to mislead the Germans about the timing, location and scale of the invasion of Normandy in 1944. The false information Pujol supplied helped persuade the Germans that the main attack would be in the Pas de Calais, so that they kept large forces there before and even after the invasion. Pujol had the distinction of receiving military decorations from both sides of the war – being awarded the Iron Cross and becoming a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography project 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire

Lagâri Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman aviator who, according to the account written by traveller Evliya Çelebi, made a successful crewed rocket flight.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Energy

James Ephraim Lovelock (26 July 1919 – 26 July 2022) was a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He was best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.

With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). He invented the electron capture detector, and using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis.

In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide–consuming algae. He was an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear, asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. He authored several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 United States/Washington

Stanley Irving Lippmann is a disbarred lawyer, anti-vaccination activist and a perennial candidate from the U.S. state of Washington.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Florida

Marvin Pipkin (November 18, 1889 – January 7, 1977) was an American chemist. During his time in the United States Army he worked on gas masks. In his civilian life he invented a process for frosting the inside of incandescent light bulbs to cut down on the sharp glare and diffuse the light. He went on to make many other inventions and innovative improvements to the light bulb.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Vienna

Edward Louis Bernays (; German: [bɛɐ̯ˈnaɪs]; November 22, 1891 − March 9, 1995) was an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, referred to in his obituary as "the father of public relations". Bernays was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life. He was the subject of a full length biography by Larry Tye called The Father of Spin (1999) and later an award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC by Adam Curtis called The Century of the Self.

His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom" and his work for the United Fruit Company connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and non-profit organizations.

Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and his own double uncle Sigmund Freud, he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desirable ways.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Anti-war

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, “…the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. … Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began.” Jaynes's solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and analysis of ancient texts.