The Hawking Window

The Hawking Window refers to the period of time from now until it's too late, at some future time, to save Humanity from itself or some natural disaster. About 100 to 200 years, according to Stephen Hawking.

Alan Boyle of Cosmic Log speaks of Stephen's latest speech on this subject here, which is a re-hashing of previous Hawking meditations on the same subject, but updated to 2010.

I'm on board, I think most people are. HOW we are to accomplish this in the face of global politics is beyond me, however. The sheer greed I'm witnessed here in the USA during my lifetime (I was born in 1956) seems to imply that if unchecked, we're going to suicide ourselves. And if so, wouldn't that be for the betterment of the Universe? Natural selection and all, and in this case a Cosmic one?

The altruist in me wishes however that we not give up before the fight begins, much like Clinton and Obama half-compromising before they sit down to talk with Republicans.

Most of the posters and repliers at Cosmic Log seem to favor Mars as the next logical step.

No, the Moon and Mercury should be next. They're closer, and unless you're willing to wait 800 years for Mars to be terraformed, they're not much less inhospitable. In space, closer = cheaper, and yes doing all this will be expensive. So what? That hasn't stopped people before.

The recent discovery of ice on the moon isn't all that great (we'll have to bring our own water for the first century or so, or extract it from our pee, and our animals' pee), but the discovery of caves on Luna is VERY important. Natural caves is how we started on Earth, and the costs saved by not digging a big hole ourselves will be significant.

And underground we shall have to go, at first. The reason is solar and cosmic radiation. Our atmosphere and strong magnetic field here on Earth protects us, spoils us really. In space there is no such protection, save for a whole bunch of rock above our heads.

We can do this, but first we must commit ourselves, and for that we'll need: real Leaders.

And other than Hawking, where are those, exactly?

Ralph Kramden was right. To the moon, Alice!

People Who Aren't Dead Yet ...

... but you may have thought they were, being a collection of Celebrities Science and Celebrities Hollywood who still walk the Earth.

I'm always looking to add to this list, as it is inevitable I will eventually have to remove some. SO COME ON DEAR READERS (all 10 of you ... and it would be 11 but my Mom passed away 2 years ago), HELP ME ADD to this list!

The numbers mean nothing, they're there just for bookkeeping purposes. The 3 people who inspired me to do this were Freeman Dyson, John Nash, and Martin Gardner, although and alas we lost Martin this year, so he doesn't make the list.

The way to play this page is I'll show a picture of the person first, and as you scroll down see if you can guess who the person is. The first pic above these words for example is number 42, if you don't recognize him. Even numbers are Hollywood celebs and odd numbers are Science celebs. And before you ask, yes, it's just a co-incidence that the Math and Science folks are "odd."

Enjoy!


1. Freeman Dyson

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is a British-^[1] American^[2] theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum field theory, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.^[3] Dyson has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, for over fifty years.^[4]

2. Phyllis Diller

Phyllis Diller (born Phyllis Ada Driver; July 17, 1917) is an American actress and comedienne. She created a stage persona of a wild-haired, eccentrically-dressed housewife who makes jokes about a husband named "Fang" while smoking from a long cigarette holder. Diller is credited with opening the doors of stand-up comedy to women.^[2]

3. Chen Ning Yang (Yang–Mills theory is a gauge theory based on the SU(N) group.)

Chen-Ning Franklin Yang (simplified Chinese: 杨振宁; traditional Chinese: 楊振寧; pinyin: Yáng Zhènníng) (born October 1, 1922)^[1] is a Chinese-American physicist who worked on statistical mechanics and particle physics , known for Parity violation, Yang-Mills theory, and the Yang-Baxter equation. He, together with Tsung-dao Lee, received the 1957 Nobel prize in physics for their work on parity nonconservation of weak interaction. Yang naturalized as a United States citizen in 1964.



4. Abe Vigoda

Abraham Charles "Abe" Vigoda (pronounced /vɨˈɡoʊdə/; born February 24, 1921) is an American movie and television actor. Vigoda is well known for his portrayal of Sal Tessio in The Godfather, and for his portrayal of Detective Sgt. Phil Fish on the sitcom television series Barney Miller from 1975–1977 and on its spinoff show Fish that aired from February 1977 to June 1978 on ABC. Vigoda was still also appearing on Barney Miller at the same time as he was on Fish during the 1976–1977 TV season; at the start of the 1977–1978 season, his character retired from the police force and left Barney Miller to focus full time on the spinoff.

Vigoda astounded America during the 2010 Super Bowl, when he appeared in a comical advertisement playing touch football with Betty White. You means he's STILL Alive ?! Apparently so.



5. John Nash

John Forbes Nash, Jr. (born June 13, 1928) is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in market economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the later part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

Nash is the subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind. The film, loosely based on the biography of the same name, focuses on Nash's mathematical genius and struggle with paranoid schizophrenia.^[1][2]

6. Jan-Michael Vincent

Virile, handsome and square-jawed youthful star of the 1970s and 1980s whose early potential at super-stardom fizzled out due to Alcoholism. Jan-Michael Vincent originally made a name for himself portraying rebellious young men bucking the system, as in Tribes (1970) (TV), White Line Fever (1975) and Baby Blue Marine (1976) or as a man of action on either side of the law, as in The Mechanic (1972), Vigilante Force (1976) and "The Winds of War" (1983).

In 1984 Vincent landed the role of Stringfellow Hawke in the helicopter action series "Airwolf" (1984), co-starring Ernest Borgnine. The show wrapped after three seasons and from then on he was primarily appearing in low-budget, B-grade action and sci-fi films, including Alienator (1990), The Divine Enforcer (1992), Deadly Heroes (1993) and Lethal Orbit (1996) (TV). His last film to date was the woeful gang movie White Boy (2002), and ongoing health issues and personal problems seem to preclude his return to the screen.

Vincent will be best remembered by film fans as a smirking, apprentice hit man to Charles Bronson in The Mechanic (1972), as feisty "Matt" in the superb surf movie Big Wednesday (1978) with Gary Busey and William Katt, or as rebel trucker Carol Jo Hummer battling corruption in White Line Fever (1975).




7. Michael Atiyah

Sir Michael Francis Atiyah, OM, FRS, FRSE (born 22 April 1929) is a British mathematician, and one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century.^[1] He grew up in Sudan and Egypt, and spent most of his academic life at Oxford, Cambridge, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has been President of the Royal Society (1990–1995), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge (1990–1997), Chancellor of the University of Leicester (1995–2005), and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2005–2008). He is currently retired and an honorary professor at the University of Edinburgh.



8. Elizabeth Taylor

Dame Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE (born 27 February 1932), also known as Liz Taylor, is an English-American actress.^[1] She is known for her acting talent and beauty, as well as her Hollywood lifestyle, including many marriages. Taylor is considered one of the great actresses of Hollywood's golden age.

The American Film Institute named Taylor seventh on its Female Legends list, and the highest ranked of those still alive. Indeed, of the Top 25 Legends each in both the Male and Female categories, she is one of the last 5 of 50 still alive along with Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Shirley Temple and Lauren Bacall.

9. Is Singer

Isadore Manuel Singer (born April 24, 1924) is an Institute Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is noted for his work with Michael Atiyah proving the Atiyah–Singer index theorem in 1962, which paved the way for new interactions between pure mathematics and theoretical physics.^[1]

He was born in Detroit, Michigan, and received his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan in 1944.^[2] After obtaining his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1948 and 1950 respectively, he taught at UCLA and MIT, where he has spent the majority of his career.^[3]

He was chair of the Committee of Science & Public Policy of the United States National Academy of Sciences, a member of the White House Science Council (1982-88), and on the Governing Board of the United States National Research Council (1995-99).^[4] Singer is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the awards he has received are the Bôcher Memorial Prize (1969) and the Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2000), both from the American Mathematical Society, the Eugene Wigner Medal (1988), the National Medal of Science (1983), the Abel Prize (2004, shared with Michael Atiyah),^[5] and the James Rhyne Killian Faculty Achievement Award from MIT (2005).^[6]

10. Raquel Welch

Raquel Welch (born September 5, 1940) is an American actress, author and sex symbol.

(Author ?!)

Welch was born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois, older sister to brother James and sister Gayle, she was the daughter of Josephine Sarah (née Hall) with English ancestry dating back to John Quincy Adams and the Mayflower and Armando Carlos Tejada Urquizo, a Bolivian.^[1][2][3][4] Her father (1911-1976), an aeronautical engineer, emigrated from La Paz, Bolivia at age 17; her mother (1909-2000) was American, the daughter of architect Emery Stanford Hall and wife Clara Louise Adams.^{[citation needed]} Raquel was raised in the Presbyterian religion and continues to go to church every Sunday.^[5] Raquel changed her family name to that of her first husband, James Welch, in 1959.

(you say: Tejada ... and I say: Te-Hottie!)



11. Hugh David Politzer

HUGH DAVID POLITZER (b. 1949)
Hugh David Politzer won the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for work he began as a graduate student on how the elementary particles known as quarks are bound together to form the protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei.

Politzer, a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech, shares the prize with David Gross and Frank Wilczek. The key discovery was made in 1973, when Politzer, a Harvard University graduate student at the time, and two physicists working independently from Politzer at Princeton University—Gross and his graduate student Wilczek—theorized that quarks actually become bound more tightly the farther they get from each other.

12. Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr.; January 17, 1942) is a former American boxer and three-time World Heavyweight Champion, who is widely considered one of the greatest heavyweight championship boxers of all time. As an amateur, he won a gold medal in the light heavyweight division at the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome.^[1] After turning professional, he went on to become the first boxer to win the lineal heavyweight championship three times.



13.Benoit Mandelbrot

Benoît B. Mandelbrot^[1] (born 20 November 1924) is a French and American mathematician, best known as the father of fractal geometry. He is Sterling Professor of Mathematical Sciences, Emeritus at Yale University; IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center; and Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Mandelbrot was born in Poland. His family moved to France when he was a child, and he was educated in France. He is a dual French and American citizen. Mandelbrot now lives and works in the United States.

14. Elly May Clampett and Jethro Bodine

Donna Douglas (born September 26, 1933) is a Louisiana-born American character actress and real estate agent. The naturally blonde Douglas is best known for her role as Elly May Clampett, daughter of Jed Clampett (portrayed by Buddy Ebsen), in the long-running television series The Beverly Hillbillies, which made her one of the most popular television stars of the 1960s.

Max Baer, Jr. (born December 4, 1937) is an American actor, screenwriter, producer, and director.

He was born Maximilian Adalbert Baer, Jr. in Oakland, California, the son of boxing champion Max Baer and his wife Mary Ellen Sullivan. His brother and sister are James Baer (born 1941) and Maude Baer (born 1943). .

Baer was cast in the role of the doltish "Jethro Bodine", Jed Clampett's nephew. It would prove to be the high point of his acting career and the one he is best remembered for. He still found time to act elsewhere during the nine-year run of The Beverley Hillbilles, and appeared on Vacation Playhouse, Love, American Style, and in the Western movie A Time for Killing.



15. Ann Druyan

Ann Druyan (born June 13, 1949) is an American author and media producer known for her involvement in many projects aiming to popularize and explain science. She is probably best-known as the last wife of the late Carl Sagan, and co-author of the Cosmos series and book, along with Sagan and Steven Soter.



16. Angie Dickinson

Johnny Carson always liked her legs...

Angie Dickinson (born September 30, 1931) is an American actress. She has appeared in more than 50 films, including Rio Bravo, Ocean's 11, Dressed to Kill and Pay It Forward, and starred on television as Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson on the 1970s crime series Police Woman.



17. Martin Rees

Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, OM, FRS (born 23 June 1942 in York^[1]) is an English cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge since 2004, and President of the Royal Society since 2005.

On 22 July 2005, Rees was elevated to a life peerage, sitting as a crossbencher in the House of Lords. On 6 September, he was created Baron Rees of Ludlow, of Ludlow in the County of Shropshire.^[5] In 2005, he was awarded the Crafoord Prize.^[6] He became President of the Royal Society on 1 December 2005.^{[7] [8]} He is an advocate of the memory of Joseph Rotblat.^[9] He has taken to speaking about humanity's future on Earth.^{[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] [19][20]}

Rees' Six Fundamental Numbers



18. Chuck Berry

Charles Edward Anderson "Chuck" Berry (born October 18, 1926) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter, and one of the pioneers of rock and roll music. With songs such as "Maybellene" (1955), "Roll Over Beethoven" (1956), "Rock and Roll Music" (1957) and "Johnny B. Goode" (1958), Chuck Berry refined and developed rhythm and blues into the major elements that made rock and roll distinctive, with lyrics focusing on teen life and consumerism and utilizing guitar solos and showmanship that would be a major influence on subsequent rock music.^[1]

19. Hal Conklin

Hal Conklin and 3 of his fellow Anthropology grad school program fellows at Stanford University in the early 1950's introduced "Data Collection" and "Phenomenology" into the young field (at the the time) of Social Anthropology. He was their leader and the only one still alive. The young turks stood up to their mentors and held their ground, and won. The field has taken off and continues to take off because of their work.

Hal recently lost his lifelong wife, Jean (Morisuye) Conklin. Condolences may be sent to Yale's Department of Anthropology

Professor Emeritus Harold Colyer Conklin (1926 - ) is an anthropologist who has conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia (particularly the Philippines) and is a pioneer of ethnoscience, documenting indigenous ways of understanding and knowing the world^[1].

Harold C. Conklin, the Franklin Muzzy Crosby Professor Emeritus of the Human Environment and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, is considered one of the world's leading authorities on ethnoscience, the manner in which inhabitants of a particular area perceive and treat their surroundings. He has conducted extensive ethnoecological and linguistic field research in Southeast Asia, especially in the Philippines, and is noted for his pioneering work on indigenous systems of tropical forest and terraced agriculture. Professor Conklin received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1955 and joined the faculty in 1962. He served as chair of the department of anthropology and director of the division of anthropology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, where he continues as Curator Emeritus. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Professor Conklin has authored scores of articles, monographs and books, including the acclaimed Hanunoo Agriculture and Ethnographic Atlas of Ifugao.

Minnesota State University's E-Museum describes his anthropological contribution as follows^[2]:

"Conklin was one of the world's leading authorities in the field of ethnoscience .. He was a pioneer in doing research on the indigenous systems of tropical forests and terraced agriculture... Mindoro (the Hanunoo) and Luzon (the Ifugao) in the Philippines were his main field sites Through his research in the Philippines, Conklin is responsible for amassing one of the largest ethnographic collections from that area. His collection is at Yale, where he was curator from 1974 until 1996, when he retired."

20. Don Rickles - "Mr. Warmth"

Donald Jay "Don" Rickles (born May 8, 1926)^[4] is an American stand-up comedian and actor. A frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Rickles has acted in comedic and dramatic roles, but is best known as an insult comic. However, unlike many insult comics who only find short-lived success, Rickles has enjoyed a sustained career.



21. Gabrielle Veneziano

Gabriele Veneziano (born September 7th, 1942, Florence, Italy) is an Italian theoretical physicist and a founder of string theory. Between 1968 and 1972 he worked at MIT and CERN. In 1972 he became Amos de Shalit Professor of Physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science and in 1976 he was offered a position in the Theory Division at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland where he worked for more than 30 years. He currently holds the chair of Elementary Particles, Gravitation and Cosmology at the College of France in Paris, France.

String theory was formulated in 1968, when the young Gabriele Veneziano could describe the interaction of strongly interacting particles. Veneziano discovered that the Euler Beta function, interpreted as a scattering amplitude, has many of the features needed to explain the physical properties of strongly interacting particles. This amplitude, known as the Veneziano amplitude, is interpreted as the scattering amplitude for four open string tachyons and the founding of String Theory.

Veneziano's work led to intense research to try to explain the strong force by a field theory of strings about one fermi in length. The rise of quantum chromodynamics, a rival explanation of the strong force, led to a temporary loss of interest in string theories until the 1980s when interest was revived.

Recently, Veneziano has developed string cosmology.

22. Ernest Borgnine

Ernest Borgnine (born January 24, 1917)^[1][2] is an American actor of television and the big screen. His career has spanned nearly six decades. He was an unconventional lead in many films of the 1950s, including his Academy Award-winning turn in the 1955 film Marty. On television, he is best known for playing Quinton McHale in the 1962-66 series McHale's Navy, costaring in the mid-1980s action series Airwolf, and voicing the character Mermaid Man in the animated series, SpongeBob SquarePants. Borgnine earned an Emmy nomination at age 92 for his work on the series ER. In August 2009 at age 92 he earned the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rhode Island International Film Festival.



23. James D. Watson

James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist and zoologist, best known as one of co-discoverers of the structure of DNA with Francis Crick, in 1953. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".^[2] He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England where he first met his future collaborator and personal friend Francis Crick.

Curtis, during a signing of his 2008 memoir, American Prince

24. Tony Curtis

UPDATE: Tony passed away Sept. 29, 2010.

Tony Curtis (born Bernard Schwartz; June 3, 1925) is an American film actor. He has played a variety of roles, from light comedy, such as the musician on the run from gangsters in Some Like It Hot, to serious dramatic roles, such as an escaped convict in The Defiant Ones, which earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Since 1949, he has appeared in more than 100 films and has made frequent television appearances.



25. George Sudarshan

Sudarshan currently holds the record of the most-nominated Nobel Prize candidate alive who has yet to receive one.

E. C. George Sudarshan is an internationally acclaimed physicist who has made seminal contributions in areas related to quantum mechanics and particle theory. Notable among his contributions are the V-A Theory of Weak Interactions and the Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence, which laid the basic foundations for these topics and also predicted the existence of Tachyons, particles traveling faster than light, contrary to established wisdom. A faculty member at The University of Texas at Austin since 1969, he established and directed the Center for Particle Theory, which has helped to build the University's world renowned reputation in physics. In 2006, a George Sudarshan Festschrift Conference took place in Spain, where physicists from around the world gathered to honor him for his work. Also in 2006, a UT-sponsored international symposium focused on his contributions to science. He has published several books and more than 500 scientific papers, and he has won many prestigious awards, including the Padma Bhusan decoration from the government of India and membership in the American Physical Society and the Indian National Science Academy. He has been awarded honorary degrees from universities around the world.

E. C. George Sudarshan's Web Site,

Friends of George Sudarshan Web Site

26. Sidney Poitier

Along with Elizabeth Taylor, Shirley Temple, Lauren Bacall, and Kirk Douglas, Poitier is one of 5 of 50 living 25 greatest Male Stars and 25 Greatest Female Stars in the History of Hollywood.

Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE (pronounced /ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ or /ˈpwɑːti.eɪ/; born February 20, 1927), is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat. He broke through as a star in acclaimed performances in American films and plays, which, by consciously defying racial stereotyping, gave a new dramatic credibility for black actors to mainstream film audiences in the Western world.

In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor^[1] for his role in Lilies of the Field.^[2] The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three well-received films—To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—making him the top box office star of that year.^[3] In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.

27. Jocelyn Bell

Dame Susan Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born Susan Jocelyn Bell on 15 July 1943), known as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, is a British astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, for which Hewish shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle. She is the current president of the Institute of Physics.

The paper announcing the discovery had five authors, Hewish's name being listed first, Bell's second. Dr. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Dr. Ryle, without the inclusion of Bell as a co-recipient, which was controversial, and was roundly condemned by Hewish's fellow astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.^[1] The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in their press release announcing the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics^[2], cited Ryle and Hewish for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis technique, and Hewish's decisive role in the discovery of pulsars. Dr. Iosif Shklovsky, recipient of the 1972 Bruce Medal, had sought out Bell at the 1970 International Astronomical Union's General Assembly, to tell her "Miss Bell, you have made the greatest astronomical discovery of the twentieth century."^[3]

28. Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple, or Shirley Jane Temple (born April 23, 1928) is an American film and television actress, autobiographer, and public servant. She began her screen career in 1932 at the age of three, and, in 1934, skyrocketed to superstardom in Bright Eyes, a feature film designed specifically for her talents. She received a special Academy Award in February 1935, and blockbusting super hits such as Curly Top and Heidi followed year after year during the mid to late 1930s. Licensed merchandise that capitalized on her wholesome image included dolls, dishes, and clothing. Temple's box office popularity waned as she reached adolescence and she left the film industry at the age of twelve to attend high school. She appeared in a few films of varying quality in her mid to late teens, and retired completely from the silver screen in 1950 at the age of twenty-one. She was the top box-office draw four years in a row (1935–1938) in a Motion Picture Herald poll.^[1][2]

In 1958, Temple returned to show biz with a two-season television anthology series of fairy tale adaptations. She made guest appearances on various television shows in the early 1960s and filmed a sitcom pilot that was never released. She sat on the boards of many corporations and organizations including The Walt Disney Company, Del Monte Foods, and the National Wildlife Federation. In 1967, she ran unsuccessfully for United States Congress, and was appointed United States Ambassador to Ghana in 1974 and to Czechoslovakia in 1989. In 1988, she published her autobiography, Child Star. Temple is the recipient of many awards and honors including Kennedy Center Honors and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award.

29. Norman Ramsey

Norman Foster Ramsey, Jr. (born August 27, 1915, in Washington, DC) is an American physicist. A physics professor at Harvard University since 1947, Ramsey also held several posts with such government and international agencies as NATO and the United States Atomic Energy Commission. He was awarded a half share of the 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics for the invention of the separated oscillatory field method, which had important applications in the construction of atomic clocks. The other half of the Prize was shared between Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul.

Ramsey earned his B.A. and Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University in 1935 and 1940, respectively. He stayed on as a member of the Columbia faculty until 1947, when he moved to Harvard.

Among his other accomplishments are helping to found the United States Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Fermilab.

30. Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas (born Issur Danielovitch or И́сер Даниело́вич;^[1] December 9, 1916) is an American actor and film producer recognized for his prominent cleft chin, his gravelly voice and his recurring roles as the kinds of characters Douglas himself once described as "sons of bitches". He is the father of Hollywood actor and producer Michael Douglas and is #17 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest male American screen legends of all time.



31. Townes

Charles Townes, with Norm Ramsey a close second, are far as I know the oldest living recipients of The Nobel Prize in Physics. If there are older ones, please let me know.

Charles Hard Townes (born July 28, 1915) is an American Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educator. Townes is known for his work on the theory and application of the maser, on which he got the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics connected with both maser and laser devices. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov.



32. Lauren Bacall

Lauren Bacall (born Betty Joan Perske; September 16, 1924) is an American film and stage actress and model, known for her husky voice and sultry looks.

She first emerged as leading lady in the film noir genre, including appearances in The Big Sleep (1946) and Dark Passage (1947), as well as a comedian in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Designing Woman (1957). Bacall has also worked in the Broadway musical, gaining Tony Awards for Applause in 1970 and Woman of the Year in 1981. Her performance in the movie The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) earned her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination.

In 1999, Bacall was ranked as one of the 25 actresses on the AFI's 100 Years... 100 Stars list by the American Film Institute. In 2009, she was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Academy Honorary Award at the inaugural Governors Awards.

33. Ray Gosling

Raymond Gosling (born 1926) is a distinguished scientist who worked with both Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King's College London in deducing the structure of DNA, under the direction of Sir John Randall. His other KCL colleagues included Alex Stokes and Herbert Wilson.



34. Jonathan Winters

Jonathan Harshman Winters III (born November 11, 1925) is an American comedian and actor.

As a stand-up comic with a madcap wildness^{[citation needed]}, Winters recorded many classic comedy albums for the Verve Records label, starting in 1960. Probably the best-known of his characters from this period is Maude Frickert, the seemingly sweet old lady with the barbed tongue. He was a favorite of Jack Paar and appeared frequently on his television programs, even going so far as to impersonate then-US President John F. Kennedy over the phone as a prank on Paar. In addition, he would often appear on the The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, usually in the guise of some character. Carson often did not know what Winters had planned and usually had to tease out the character's back story during a pretend interview. (Carson invented a character called "Aunt Blabby" that was an impression of Maude Frickert).

Winters has appeared in nearly 50 movies and several television shows, including particularly notable roles in the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and in the dual roles of Henry Glenworthy and his dark, scheming brother, the Rev. Wilbur Glenworthy, in the film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One. Fellow comedians who starred with him in "Mad World," such as Arnold Stang, claimed that in the long periods while they waited between scenes, Winters would entertain them for hours in their trailer by becoming any character that they would suggest to him.

On television, in the late sixties, he appeared as a regular (along with Woody Allen and Jo Anne Worley) on the Saturday morning children's program Hot Dog. In the seventies, he appeared in his own show, The Wacky World of Jonathan Winters (1972–74). Winters has also done some dramatic work, as evidenced in The Twilight Zone episode "A Game of Pool" (episode #3.5, October 13, 1961). He recorded Ogden Nash's The Carnival of the Animals poems to Camille Saint-Saëns' classical opus. He also made an appearance on a Dean Martin Comedy Roast. Winters appeared on ABC's The American Sportsman, hosted by Grits Gresham, who took celebrities on hunting, fishing, and shooting trips to exotic places around the world. Winters also appeared regularly as a panelist on The Hollywood Squares.

In the fourth and last season of the sci-fi-based TV comedy Mork & Mindy, Jonathan Winters (one of Robin Williams' idols) was brought in as Mork & Mindy's child, Mearth. Due to the different Orkan physiology, Mork laid an egg, which grew and hatched into the much older Winters. It had been previously explained that Orkans aged "backwards," thus explaining Mearth's appearance and that of his teacher, Miss Geezba (portrayed by then-11-year-old actress Louanne Sirota). Mork's infant son Mearth in Mork & Mindy was created in hopes of improving ratings and as an attempt to capitalize on Williams' comedic talents. Winters had previously guest-starred in Season 3, Episode 18 as Dave McConnell, Mindy's uncle. Although Robin Williams calls Jonathan Winters his greatest influence, the idea of Mearth didn't work, and the show was soon canceled, in 1982.

35. Gordon Moore

Gordon Earle Moore (born 3 January 1929) is the co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation and the author of Moore's Law (published in an article 19 April 1965 in Electronics Magazine).

Moore was born in San Francisco, California, but his family lived in nearby Pescadero where he grew up. He received a B.S. degree in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry and minor in Physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1954. Prior to studying at Berkeley, he spent his freshman and sophomore years at San José State University, where he met his future wife Betty.

He joined Caltech alumnus William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the "Traitorous Eight", when Sherman Fairchild agreed to back them and created the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation.

Moore co-founded Intel Corporation in July 1968, serving as Executive Vice President until 1975 when he became President and Chief Executive Officer. In April 1979, Dr. Moore became Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, holding that position until April 1987, when he became Chairman of the Board. He was named Chairman Emeritus of Intel Corporation in 1997.

Moore has joined Gilead Sciences’ Board of Directors since 1996, after serving as a member of the company’s Business Advisory Board from 1991 until 1996. ^[1]. It has also been reported that Moore is a former Chairman and present Life Trustee of the California Institute of Technology, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Engineering (UK). He is the recipient of the National Medal of Technology and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor.

In 2001, Moore and his wife donated $600 million to Caltech, the largest gift ever to an institution of higher education. He said that he wants the gift to be used to keep Caltech at the forefront of research and technology. Moore was chairman of Caltech's board of trustees from 1994 to 2000, and continues as a trustee today. In 2002, he received the Bower Award for Business Leadership. In 2003, he was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The library at the Centre for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge is named after him and his wife Betty, as is the Moore Laboratories building (dedicated 1996) at Caltech.

With his wife he endowed the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

On December 6, 2007, Gordon Moore and his wife donated $200 million to Caltech and the University of California for the construction of the world's largest optical telescope. The telescope will have a mirror 30 meters across. This is nearly three times the size of the current record holder, Large Binocular Telescope.

Moore was awarded the 2008 IEEE Medal of Honor for "pioneering technical roles in integrated-circuit processing, and leadership in the development of MOS memory, the microprocessor computer and the semiconductor industry."^[2]

Moore enjoys many different recreational activities, including car painting and making model airplanes. He has said his conservation efforts are partly inspired by his interest in fishing ^[3].

36. Katharine Ross

Katharine Juliet Ross (born January 29, 1940)^[6] is an American film and stage actress. Trained at the San Francisco Workshop, she is perhaps best known for her role as Elaine Robinson in the 1967 film The Graduate, opposite Dustin Hoffman, and her role as Etta Place in 1969's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, opposite Paul Newman and Robert Redford. She has also established herself as an author, publishing several children's books.

37. Andrei Linde

Andrei Dmitriyevich Linde (b. March 2, 1948 in Moscow, USSR) is a Russian-American theoretical physicist and professor of Physics at Stanford University. Dr. Linde is best known for his work on the concept of the inflationary universe. He received his Bachelor of Science degree from Moscow State University. In 1975, Linde was awarded a Ph.D. from the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow. Among the various awards he's received for his work on inflation, in 2002 he was awarded the Dirac Medal, along with Alan Guth of MIT and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University.




38. Wavy Gravy

Wavy Gravy (born Hugh Nanton Romney 15 May 1936) is an entertainer and activist for peace, best known for his hippie appearance, personality, and beliefs. His moniker (which is the name he uses on a day to day basis) was given to him by B.B. King at the Texas International Pop Festival in 1969.^[1] "It's worked pretty well through my life," he says, "except with telephone operators – I have to say 'Gravy, first initial W." ^[2]

Romney's clown persona resulted from his political activism. Frequently being arrested at demonstrations, he decided he would be less likely to be arrested if he dressed as a clown. "Clowns are safe," he said.^[3] He does, however, enjoy traditional clown activities such as jokes, magic tricks and entertaining children.

Romney founded and co-founded several organizations, including Camp Winnarainbow, the Seva Foundation and the Hog Farm, an activist commune.^[4]

He is also the official clown of the Grateful Dead^[5], and has two radio shows on Sirius Satellite Radio's Jam On station.^[6]

39. Goro Shimura

Goro Shimura (Japanese: 志村 五郎 Shimura Gorō; born 23 February 1930) is a Japanese mathematician, and currently a professor emeritus of mathematics (former Michael Henry Strater Chair) at Princeton University.

Shimura was a colleague and a friend of Yutaka Taniyama. They wrote a book (the first book treatment) on the complex multiplication of abelian varieties, an area which in collaboration they had opened up.

Shimura then wrote a long series of major papers, extending the phenomena found in the theory of complex multiplication and modular forms to higher dimensions (amongst other results). This work (and other developments it provoked) provided some of the 'raw data' later incorporated into the Langlands program. It equally brought out the concept, in general, of Shimura variety; which is the higher-dimensional equivalent of modular curve. Even to define in general a Shimura variety is quite a formidable task: they bear, roughly speaking, the same relation to general Hodge structures as modular curves do to elliptic curves.

Shimura himself has described his approach as 'phenomenological': his interest is in finding new types of interesting behaviour in the theory of automorphic forms. He also argues for a 'romantic' approach, something he finds lacking in the younger generation of mathematician. The central 'Shimura variety' concept has been tamed (by application of Lie group and algebraic group theory, and the extraction of the concept 'parametrises interesting family of Hodge structures' by reference to the algebraic geometry theory of 'motives', which is still largely conjectural). In that sense his work is now "mainstream-for-Princeton"; but this assimilation (through David Mumford, Pierre Deligne and others) hardly includes all of the content.

He is known to a wider public through the important Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (proven in the 1990s); Kenneth Ribet has shown that the famous Fermat's last theorem follows from a special case of this conjecture. Shimura dryly commented that his first reaction on hearing of Wiles's proof of the semistable case of the conjecture was 'I told you so'.^[1]

Among many honors and awards, Shimura received the Cole Prize for number theory in 1976 and the Steele Prize for lifetime achievement in 1996, both from the American Mathematical Society. His Collected Works have been published, in five volumes.

His hobbies are shogi problems of extreme length and collecting Imari porcelain. The Story of Imari: The Symbols and Mysteries of Antique Japanese Porcelain is a non-fiction work by Goro Shimura published by Ten Speed Press in 2008.

40. John Kay

John Kay (born Joachim Fritz Krauledat, 12 April 1944, Tilsit, Germany) is a Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist known as the frontman of Steppenwolf.^[1]

In the Evacuation of East Prussia in early 1945, in harsh winter conditions, his mother first had to flee with the baby boy from the advancing Soviet troops. In 1948, the two also fled from Arnstadt in the East German Soviet occupation zone to resettle in Hanover, West Germany (as recounted in his song "Renegade" on the album Steppenwolf Seven). Located in the British occupation zone, teen aged Joachim, suffering from eyesight problems, listened to music broadcast by the British Forces Broadcasting Service before his family moved to Canada in 1958.

He joined a blues rock and folk music group known as The Sparrows in 1965, which had moderate success in Canada before moving to California, augmenting its line-up and changing its name to Steppenwolf in 1967. With music that pioneered hard rock and heavy metal, Kay's Steppenwolf had international success with songs such as "Born to Be Wild", "Magic Carpet Ride", "Monster", "The Pusher", and "Rock Me". This was multiplied by the use of "Born to Be Wild" and "The Pusher" in the 1969 movie Easy Rider.

Kay recorded both as a solo artist and with Steppenwolf during the late 1970s, and wrapped up Steppenwolf's 40th year of touring with what was to be a final gig in October 2007. However, Kay and Steppenwolf were scheduled to appear July 24, 2010, at the three-day HullabaLOU music festival in Louisville, Ky.^[2]

In 2004 he was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame, in recognition of his early years as a Canadian citizen and the beginnings of his musical career in Toronto. http://www.hollywoodchamber.net/icons/history.asp], inductees to Canada's Walk of Fame are only selected via a supervising committee. John Kay was present at the induction ceremony in Toronto, and reiterated his strong affection for Canada.

Kay suffers from increased sensitivity to light, so he wears his trademark sunglasses. He also has congenital achromatopsia, complete colorblindness, a defect of the eyes which causes legal blindness^{[citation needed]}. Despite this condition, he is an avid videographer.

41. Bill Gosper

First picture: Bill Gosper. Second picture and lone animation: Gosper's Gliding Gun, from cellular automata and John Conway's "The Game of Life".

Ralph William Gosper, Jr., (born 1943) known as Bill Gosper, is an American mathematician and programmer from Pennsauken Township, New Jersey.^[1] Along with Richard Greenblatt, he may be considered to have founded the hacker community, and holds a place of pride in the Lisp community. Perhaps his most profound contribution is that he was the first person to realize the possibilities of symbolic computation on a computer as a mathematics research tool, whereas computer methods were previously limited to purely numerical methods. In particular, this research resulted in his work on continued fraction representations of real numbers, and for more famously, developing Gosper's algorithm for finding closed form hypergeometric identities. Because his mathematics is largely self-taught and a number of his completely original formulas have inspired professional mathematicians to write papers developing them into full fledged theories, he has been considered a modern day Ramanujan.


42. Pete Best

Pete Best (born 24 November 1941) is a British musician, best known as the original drummer in The Beatles.

After moving from India to Liverpool in 1945, Best's mother, Mona Best (1924–1988) started The Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of the Bests' house in Liverpool, which became very popular—the membership list grew to over a thousand—and where The Beatles (then known as The Quarrymen) played some of their first concerts. The club was also known as The Casbah Club, or simply The Casbah. Best played there with his first band, The Black Jacks, and later with The Beatles.

Best joined The Beatles on 12 August 1960, only one day before they were to go to Hamburg to play a season of club dates. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, who were the co-founders and nucleus of the group, elected to dispense with his service two years later, on 16 August 1962, and he was replaced by Ringo Starr. Best states that he was never given a full explanation as to the reason he was let go.

He later worked as a civil servant for 20 years, before starting The Pete Best Band. Best has been married for over 45 years to Kathy Best; they have two daughters and four grandchildren.

43. Al Cho

If you like CD's and DVD's, then THIS is the one of the guys most responsible for our having them. Also, if "Mr. Spock's Tricorder" is to become a reality, Al and QCL's will very much be one of the reasons why.

Alfred Yi Cho (Chinese: 卓以和;) (born July 10, 1937^[1]) is the Adjunct Vice President of Semiconductor Research at Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs. He is known as the "father of molecular beam epitaxy"; a technique he developed at that facility in the late 1960s. He is also the co-inventor, with Federico Capasso of quantum cascade lasers QCL's at Bell Labs in 1994.

Cho was born in Beijing. He and his grandfather escaped Mao's regime by walking overland to Hong Kong in 1949, and he had his secondary education in Pui Ching Middle School there. Cho holds B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois. He joined Bell Labs in 1968. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, as well as a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In June 2007 he was honoured with the U.S. National Medal of Technology, the highest honor awarded by the President of the United States for technological innovation.^[2]

Cho received the award for his contributions to the invention of molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) and his work to commercialize the process.

He already has many awards to his name, including: the American Physical Society International Prize for New Materials in 1982, the Solid State Science and Technology Medal of the Electrochemical Society in 1987, the World Materials Congress Award of ASM International in 1988, the Gaede-Langmuir Award of the American Vacuum Society in 1988, the Industrial Research Institute Achievement Award of the Industrial Research Institute Inc in 1988, the New Jersey Governor's Thomas Alva Edison Science Award in 1990, the International Crystal Growth Award of the American Association for Crystal Growth in 1990, the National Medal of Science in 1993^[3], the Von Hippel Award of the Materials Research Society in 1994, the Elliott Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in 1995, the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1994, and the Computers & Communications Prize of the C&C Foundation, Japan in 1995.In 2009, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame^[4].

In 1985, Bell Labs became the first organization to be honoured with a U.S. Medal of Technology, awarded for “contributions over decades to modern communications systems.” Cho’s honour marks the eighth time Bell Labs and its scientists have received the award.

44. Peter Falk

Peter Michael Falk (born September 16, 1927) is an American actor, best known for his role as Lieutenant Columbo in the television series Columbo. He appeared in numerous films and television guest roles, and has been nominated for an Academy Award twice, and won the Emmy Award on five occasions and the Golden Globe award once. Director William Friedkin, when discussing Falk's role in his 1978 film The Brink's Job said that "Peter has a great range from comedy to drama. He could break your heart or he could make you laugh."^[1]:263

As the star of the TV series Columbo, which aired from 1971 to 1978, he was "everyone's favorite rumpled television detective", writes historian David Fantle. Describing his role, Variety columnist Howard Prouty writes, "The joy of all this is watching Columbo dissemble the fiendishly clever cover stories of the loathsome rats who consider themselves his better."^[2]

45. Burton Richter

Burton Richter (born March 22, 1931) is a Nobel Prize-winning American physicist. He led the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) team which co-discovered the J/ψ meson in 1974, alongside the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) team lead by Samuel Ting. This discovery was part of the so-called November Revolution of particle physics. He was the SLAC director from 1984 to 1999.



46. Dave Chappelle

I consider Dave Chappelle to be THE funniest man of all time, having wrested that title from his mentor and admirer, Richard Pryor ("Mudbone" forever!). Coming from me, that says a lot, because I grew up on the incredible comedy of Jackie Gleason, Red Skelton, and Abbott and Costello, and also The Marx Brothers and Hal Roach's Little Rascals/Our Gang comedies.

Chappelles's "Charlie Murphy Stories" about Rick James are incredible. Amazingly, he quit at the height of his fame! He's making a comeback, I hear. Good, I hope so. This old world of ours is in serious need of a good laugh.

David Khari Webber "Dave" Chappelle^[4] (pronounced /ʃəˈpɛl/; born August 24, 1973)^[1] is an American comedian, screenwriter, television/film producer and actor. Chappelle began his film career in the film Robin Hood: Men in Tights in 1993 and continued to star in minor roles in the films The Nutty Professor, Con Air, and Blue Streak. His first lead role in a film was in Half Baked in 1998. In 2003, he became widely known for his popular sketch comedy television series, Chappelle's Show, which ran until 2006. Comedy Central ranked him forty-third in its list of the 100 greatest stand-up comedians.^[5]

47. Sam Ting

Samuel Chao Chung Ting (Chinese: 丁肇中; pinyin: Dīng Zhàozhōng; Wade-Giles: Ting¹ Chao⁴-chung¹) (born January 27, 1936) is an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in 1976, with Burton Richter, for discovering the subatomic J/ψ particle. He is the principal investigator for the international $1.5 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project scheduled for installation on the International Space Station in 2011.



48. Jaclyn Smith

Jaclyn Ellen Smith^[1] (born October 26, 1947)^[2][3] is an American actress. She is best known for the role of Kelly Garrett in the television series Charlie's Angels, and was the only original female lead to remain with the series for its complete run (1976–81). She became a well known face on television starring in over thirty made for TV movies and more recently was the hostess of Bravo's weekly competitive reality television show Shear Genius for its first two seasons. Beginning in the 1980s, she began developing and marketing her own brands of clothing and perfume. She has often been voted one of the most beautiful women in the world.



49. Phil Anderson

Philip Warren Anderson (born December 13, 1923) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate. Anderson has made contributions to the theories of localization, antiferromagnetism and high-temperature superconductivity.

Anderson was born in Indianapolis, Indiana and grew up in Urbana, Illinois. He graduated from University Laboratory High School in Urbana in 1940. Afterwards, he went to Harvard University for undergraduate and graduate work, with a wartime stint at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in-between. In graduate school he studied under John Hasbrouck van Vleck.

From 1949 to 1984 he worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he worked on a wide variety of problems in condensed matter physics. During this period he discovered the concept of localization, the idea that extended states can be localized by the presence of disorder in a system; the Anderson Hamiltonian, which describes electrons in a transition metal; the "Higgs" mechanism for generating mass in elementary particles; and the pseudospin approach to the BCS theory of superconductivity.

From 1967 to 1975, Anderson was a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge University. In 1977 Anderson was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his investigations into the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, which allowed for the development of electronic switching and memory devices in computers. Co-researchers Sir Nevill Francis Mott and John van Vleck shared the award with him. In 1982, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. He retired from Bell Labs in 1984 and is currently Joseph Henry Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

Anderson's writings include Concepts of Solids, Basic Notions of Condensed Matter Physics and The Theory of Superconductivity in the High-Tc Cuprates. Anderson currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. He is a certified first degree-master of the Chinese board game Go.

A 2006 statistical analysis of scientific research papers by José Soler, comparing number of references in a paper to the number of citations, declared Anderson to be the "most creative" physicist in the world.^[1]

50. George Martin

Sir George Henry Martin CBE (born 3 January 1926) is an English record producer, arranger, composer and musician. He is sometimes referred to as "the Fifth Beatle"—a title that he owes to his work as producer of all but one of The Beatles' original records ("Let It Be"), as well as playing piano on some of The Beatles tracks—and is considered one of the greatest record producers of all time.

In 1965 he established the Associated Independent Recording (AIR) Studios. Although officially retired, he is still the chairman of the AIR board.^[1]

In recognition of his services to the music industry and popular culture, he was made a Knight Bachelor in 1996. He is the father of producer Giles Martin, and actor Gregory Paul Martin.

51. John Horton Conway

John Horton Conway (born 26 December 1937, Liverpool, England) is a prolific mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics, notably the invention of the cellular automaton called the Game of Life.

52. Liza Minnelli

Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American singer and actress. She is the daughter of legendary singer and actress, Judy Garland, and film director Vincente Minnelli.

Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969) and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970). Minnelli rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical, Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.

After years of chronic health problems, including a serious infection with viral encephalitis, she returned with a new concert show, Liza's Back, in 2002. She did several well-received guest appearances in the sitcom Arrested Development and had a small role in the movie The OH in Ohio, while continuing to tour internationally. In 2008/09 she performed the Broadway show Liza's at The Palace...! which earned a Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event^[1].

Minnelli has won a total of four Tony Awards awards, including a Special Tony Award,^[2]. She has also won an Oscar, an Emmy Award, two Golden Globes and a Grammy Legend Award for her contributions and influence in the recording field, along with many other honors and awards.

53. Toshihide Masukawa

Toshihide Maskawa (or Masukawa) (益川 敏英, Masukawa Toshihide^?) (born February 7, 1940 in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."^[1]

54. Jack Klugman

Jacob Joachim "Jack" Klugman (born April 27, 1922) is an American stage, film, and television actor known for his roles in sitcoms, movies, television, and on Broadway. He is perhaps best-known for his role as actor Tony Randall's sloppy roommate Oscar Madison in the American television series The Odd Couple during the 1970s and for his starring role in Quincy, M.E. in the 1970s and 1980s. Klugman attended Carnegie Mellon University and graduated in 1948. In 1957, he appeared in the film 12 Angry Men as Juror #5 and is the last surviving actor who played a juror in that movie.



55. Sabine Hossenfelder

Reports of her demise have been greatly exaggerated. She has simply and recently fallen temporarily ill, likely because of exhaustion. Best of wishes you recover soon, Bee.

Dr. Sabine Hossenfelder, Assistant Professor for High Energy Physics at Nordita in Stockholm, Sweden, is a noted German Theoretical Physicist in the field of Quantum Gravity (a field dedicated to uniting General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics), and a primary promoter of the field of Phenomenology in Physics, that is the use of Experimental results to either develop new Theory, or back up previous to-date speculative Theory. She is also notable for being the hostess (along with husband Stefan Scherer) of one of the top 4 Science Blogs in Mathematical Physics: BackReAction

(The other 3 blogs (weblogs)of note, according to Scientific American magazine Physics and Astronomy Editor George Musser, are DISCOVER's Cosmic Variance, Peter Woit's Not Even Wrong, and The Reference Frame. I have not linked the last of the four in promotion of good taste, as it is unintentionally popular for "Entertainment" purposes, as its host is an otherwise intelligent yet a notorious failed academic and shameless immature name-caller who promotes Climate Change Denial and is a general embarrassment to the Professional String Theorists whose field he promotes in spite of said field's to-date failure to suggest a provable test proving itself above all comers.)

Click here for more.



56. Bob Newhart

George Robert "Bob" Newhart (born September 5, 1929) is an American stand-up comedian and actor. Noted for his deadpan and slightly stammering delivery, Newhart is best known for playing psychologist Dr. Robert "Bob" Hartley on the 1970s sitcom The Bob Newhart Show and as innkeeper Dick Loudon on the 1980s sitcom Newhart.

Newhart also appeared in film roles such as Major Major in Catch-22, and Papa Elf in Elf. He provided the voice of Bernard in the Walt Disney animated films The Rescuers and The Rescuers Down Under

57. Dr. Leila Denmark

Leila Alice Denmark, M.D. (née Daughtry; born February 1, 1898) is, at &0000000000000112.000000112 years, &0000000000000214.000000214 days, an American pediatrician who became the oldest practicing pediatrician in the world, retiring at the age of 103 in May 2001.^[1] She is one of very few supercentenarians that have been known for reasons other than for longevity. She is currently one of the 15 oldest living people. ^[2]

Born in Portal, Georgia, Denmark was the third of 12 children born to Elerbee and Alice Cornelia Hendricks Daughtry. She is the only one still living. She attended Tift College in Forsyth, Georgia, where she trained to be a teacher, but decided to attend medical school when her fiancé, John E. Denmark, was posted to Java, Indonesia, by the United States Department of State and no wives were allowed. She was the only woman in the 1928 graduating class of the Medical College of Georgia, and married soon after graduation. Denmark is credited as co-developer of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine in the 1920s and 1930s.

Denmark outlined her views on child-rearing in her book Every Child Should Have A Chance, published in 1971. She was among the first doctors to object to cigarette smoking around children, and drug use in pregnant women. She believes that drinking cow's milk is harmful, and that children (and adults) should eat fruit instead of drinking fruit juices, and drink only water. On her 100th birthday in 1998, she refused cake due to the fact that there was too much sugar in it. On her 103rd birthday she refused birthday cake, telling the restaurant's server she had not had any food with sugar in it (other than natural sugar like fruit) in 70 years.



58. Rip Taylor

Charles Elmer "Rip" Taylor, Jr. (born January 13, 1934) is an American comedian and actor.
Taylor is known for his high-voiced yells, wacky toupée, and handlebar moustache over a perpetually toothy grin. He often enters a venue tossing handfuls of confetti from a paper bag onto his audience and laughing hysterically, while the band plays his theme song, "Happy Days Are Here Again."

Taylor's comedic style includes puns, often in conjunction with props (for example, holding up a plastic fish full of holes and exclaiming "Holy Mackerel!") and miming along to novelty records (including the works of Spike Jones). If he gets little or no reaction following one of his jokes, he stops for a moment and yells at the audience: "I don't dance, folks! This is it!" Or, "Hello? Can you people hear me?"

59. Maurice Goldhaber

Maurice Goldhaber (born April 18, 1911) is an American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity.

He was born in Lemberg, Austria. In 1934, working at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England he and James Chadwick, through what they called the nuclear photo-electric effect, established that the neutron has a great enough mass over the proton to decay. In the 1940s with his wife Gertrude Scharff-Goldhaber he established that beta particles are identical to electrons. With Edward Teller he proposed that the so-called "giant-dipole nuclear resonance" was due to the neutrons in a nucleus vibrating as a group against the protons as a group (Goldhaber-Teller model).

He made a well-known bet with Hartland Snyder in about 1955 that anti-protons could not exist; when he lost the bet, he speculated that the reason anti-matter does not appear to be abundant in the universe is that before the Big Bang, a single particle, the "universon" existed that then decayed into "cosmon" and "anti-cosmon," and that the cosmon subsequently decayed to produce the known cosmos. In the 1950s also he speculated that all fermions^[1] such as electrons, protons and neutrons are "doubled," that is that each is associated with a similar heavier particle. He also speculated that in what became known as the Goldhaber-Christie model, the so-called strange particles were composites of just 3 basic particles. He was Director of Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1961 to 1973.

Among his many other awards, he won the National Medal of Science in 1985, the Wolf Prize in 1991, the J. Robert Oppenheimer Memorial Prize in 1992, and the Fermi Award in 1998.

Maurice Goldhaber's brother Gerson Goldhaber was a professor of physics at Berkeley; his son Alfred Scharff Goldhaber is a professor of physics at SUNY Stony Brook; his grandson (son of Alfred) David Goldhaber-Gordon is a professor of physics at Stanford.

60. B.B. King

Riley B. King (born September 16, 1925), known by the stage name B.B. King, is an American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter acclaimed for his expressive singing and guitar playing.

Rolling Stone magazine ranked him at #3 on its list of the "100 greatest guitarists of all time".^[1] According to Edward M. Komara, King "introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that would influence virtually every electric blues guitarist that followed."^[2]

61. Richard Garfield

Richard Channing Garfield (born 26 June 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a mathematics professor and game designer who created the card games Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner, BattleTech CCG, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (originally known as Jyhad), The Great Dalmuti, Star Wars Trading Card Game, and the board game RoboRally. He also created a variation of the game Hearts called Complex hearts. The development of Magic: The Gathering is credited with popularizing the collectible card game genre.

Garfield spent his childhood in many locations throughout the world as a result of his father's work in architecture. His family eventually settled in Oregon when he was twelve. While always having an interest in puzzles and games, his passion for games began when he was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons.^[1] Garfield designed his first game by the time he was 13.^[2]

In 1985, he received a Bachelor of Science degree in computer mathematics. He joined Bell Laboratories, then decided to continue his education and attended the University of Pennsylvania, and studied combinatorial mathematics.^[1]

He began designing Magic: The Gathering as a Penn graduate student. A group of playtesters, comprising mostly fellow Penn students, formed around the developing game.^[3] While searching for a publisher for RoboRally, which he designed in 1985^[1], Garfield found Peter Adkison of Wizards of the Coast, who expressed interest in Magic.^[2]

Garfield studied under Herbert Wilf and earned a Ph.D. in combinatorial mathematics from Penn in 1993. He became a professor of mathematics at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington.

Magic: The Gathering launched in 1993. Playtesters began independently developing expansion packs, which were then passed to Garfield to edit.^[3] Garfield left academia to join Wizards of the Coast as a full-time game designer in June 1994.^[1] He was a primary play tester for the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition bookset, released by Wizards in 2000. He eventually left Wizards to become an independent game designer.^[1]

He still sporadically contributes to Magic: The Gathering.^[4] More recently, he has created the board games Pecking Order (2006)^[5] and Rocketville (2006). The latter was published by Avalon Hill, a subsidiary of Wizards of the Coast.^[6] He has shifted more of his attention to computer games, having worked on the design and development of Schizoid and Spectromancer.^[1]

62. Luise Rainer

Luise Rainer (born 12 January 1910)^[2] is a German film actress. Known as The "Viennese Teardrop", she is the first woman to win two Academy Awards, and the first person to win them back to back. She was discovered by MGM talent scouts while acting on stage in Austria and Germany and after appearing in Austrian films.^[3]

63. Rita Levi-Montalcini

Rita Levi-Montalcini (born April 22, 1909^[1]), Cavaliere di Gran Croce OMRI^[2] is an Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). Since 2001, she has also served in the Italian Senate as a Senator for Life.

Today she is the oldest living Nobel laureate and the first ever to reach a 100th birthday^[3]. On April 22, 2009 she was feted with a 100th birthday party at Rome's city hall.^{[dead link][4]}

64. Dave Brubeck

Is it just me, or does that TIME cover of Brubeck look more than a little like actor Jeff Goldblum? Hey, any Hollywood producers paying attention? There's an idea and casting for ya. :-)

David Warren "Dave" Brubeck (born December 6, 1920)^[1] is an American jazz pianist. He has written a number of jazz standards, including "In Your Own Sweet Way" and "The Duke". Brubeck's style ranges from refined to bombastic, reflecting his mother's attempts at classical training and his improvisational skills. His music is known for employing unusual time signatures, and superimposing contrasting rhythms, meters, and tonalities.

His long-time musical partner, alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, wrote the Dave Brubeck Quartet's best remembered piece, "Take Five",^[1] which is in 5/4 time and has endured as a jazz classic. Brubeck experimented with time signatures throughout his career, recording "Pick Up Sticks" in 6/4, "Unsquare Dance" in 7/4, and "Blue Rondo à la Turk" in 9/8. He is also a respected composer of orchestral and sacred music, and wrote soundtracks for television such as Mr. Broadway and the animated mini-series This Is America, Charlie Brown.

65. Arno Penzias

Arno Allan Penzias (born 26 April 1933) is an American physicist and Nobel laureate in physics.

Penzias was born in Munich, Germany. At age six he was among the Jewish children evacuated to Britain as part of the Kindertransport rescue operation. Six months later his parents also fled Nazi Germany for the U.S., and the family settled in the Garment District of New York City in 1940. In 1946, Penzias became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He graduated from Brooklyn Technical High School in 1951 and received a bachelor's degree from the City College of New York in 1954. From Columbia University, he received his Master's degree in 1958 and his Ph.D. in 1962.

He went on to work at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey where, with Robert Woodrow Wilson, he worked on ultra-sensitive cryogenic microwave receiver, intended for radio astronomy observations. In 1964, on building their most sensitive antenna/receiver system, the pair encountered radio noise which they could not explain. It was far less energetic than the radiation given off by the Milky Way, and it was isotropic, so they assumed their instrument was subject to interference by terrestrial sources. They tried, and then rejected, the hypothesis that the radio noise emanated from New York City. An examination of the microwave horn antenna showed it was full of pigeon droppings (which Penzias described as "white dielectric material"). After the pair removed the guano buildup, and the pigeons were shot (each physicist says the other ordered the deed), the noise remained. Having rejected all sources of interference, the pair published a paper announcing their findings. This was later identified by Robert Dicke ^[1] as the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB), the radio remnant of the Big Bang. This allowed astronomers to confirm the Big Bang, and to correct many of their previous assumptions about it.

Penzias and Wilson received the 1978 Nobel Prize, sharing it with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (Kapitsa's work was unrelated to Penzias and Wilson's). The two had received the Henry Draper Medal the previous year. Penzias is also the recipient of The International Center in New York's Award of Excellence.

Penzias has been a resident of Highland Park, New Jersey.^[2] He currently serves as a venture partner at New Enterprise Associates.

66. Starland Vocal Band

In honor of all one-hit wonders, everywhere. Hey, at least that had a hit! That's one more than I ever had! And one more than most people. Also, I used to hang out with Jon Carroll in our freshman year of college, heh. Good guy.

Starland Vocal Band was an American pop band, known primarily for "Afternoon Delight", one of the biggest-selling singles in 1976.

The group began as 'Fat City', a husband/wife duo of Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert. The band was also composed of Jon Carroll (keyboards and vocals) and Margot Chapman (vocals). Carroll and Chapman were also married after meeting as members of the group, but later divorced. Their son Ben Carroll is also a musician.

The group's debut album was the self-titled Starland Vocal Band and included “Afternoon Delight”. The song was the #1 hit in America during the summer of 1976, and the album also charted. The group was nominated for five Grammy Awards and won two — Best arrangement (voices) and Best New Act. The follow-up album Rear View Mirror was a failure in comparison, although it was a minor chart entry, spending 13 weeks on the Billboard 200 (reaching a peak of #104). In 2010 Billboard named "Afternoon Delight" the 20th sexiest of all time.[1]

The band hosted a self-titled variety show that ran on CBS for six weeks in the summer of 1977. David Letterman, then still unknown, also participated in the show, as did Mark Russell, Jeff Altman, and Proctor and Bergman.

The band broke up in 1981, unable to match their previous success. Danoff and Nivert divorced shortly afterwards. Each of the band members went on to a solo career.

In 1998 the Starland Vocal Band reunited for a few concerts, often featuring the children of the four original members as vocalists. In 2007, they appeared on a 1970s special on the New Jersey Network (NJN), singing "Afternoon Delight".

Danoff and Nivert co-wrote the hit song "Take Me Home, Country Roads" with John Denver. Denver subsequently signed them to his label Windsong Records.

67. Jerome Friedman

Jerome Isaac Friedman (born March 28, 1930) is an American physicist. He was born in Chicago, Illinois to parents who emigrated to the US from Russia, and excelled particularly in art while growing up. He became interested in physics after reading a book on relativity written by Albert Einstein, and as a result he turned down a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago to study physics at the University of Chicago. Whilst there he worked under Enrico Fermi, and eventually received his Ph.D. in physics in 1956. In 1960 he joined the physics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In 1968-1969, he conducted experiments with Henry W. Kendall and Richard E. Taylor at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which gave the first experimental evidence that protons had an internal structure, later known to be quarks. For this, Friedman, Kendall and Taylor shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physics. He is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prof. Friedman is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists[1].

In 2008, Friedman received honorary PhD from University of Belgrade (Belgrade, Serbia). He is honorary professor at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Physics [2] and Faculty's world famous institutes: Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics [3], Institute of Physics Zemun [4] and Institute for Nuclear Sciences Vinča [5].^[1]

In 2003, he was interviewed by the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, in his guise as Ali G.

Governor William J. Le Petomane, and his Chief of Staff, in "Blazing Saddles"

68. Mel Brooks

Melvin "Mel" Kaminsky (born June 28, 1926 age 84),^[1] better known by his stage name Mel Brooks, is an American film director, screenwriter, composer, lyricist, comedian, actor, and producer. He is best known as a creator of broad film farces and comic parodies. Brooks is a member of the short list of entertainers with the distinction of having won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony award. Three of his films ranked in the Top 20 on the American Film Institute's list of the Top 100 comedy films of all-time: Blazing Saddles, The Producers and Young Frankenstein.^[2]

69. Richard Taylor

Richard Edward Taylor, CC, FRS, FRSC (born November 2, 1929 in Medicine Hat, Alberta) is a Canadian-American professor (Emeritus) at Stanford University.^[1] In 1990, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall "for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics."^[2]

70. Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis (born Joseph Levitch, March 16, 1926) is an American comedian, actor, film producer, writer, film director and singer. He is best-known for his slapstick humor in stage, radio, screen, recording and television. He was originally paired up with Dean Martin in 1946, forming the comedy team of Martin and Lewis. In addition to the team's popular nightclub work, they starred in a successful series of comedy films for Paramount Pictures. As an innovative filmmaker, Lewis is credited with inventing the video assist system in cinematography.^[1] Lewis is also known for his charity fund-raising telethons and position as national chairman for the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA).

Lewis has won several awards for lifetime achievements from The American Comedy Awards, The Golden Camera, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and The Venice Film Festival, and he has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2005, he received the Governors Award of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Board of Governors, which is the highest Emmy Award presented.^[2] On February 22, 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded Lewis the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

71. Dr. Einstein (Albert Einstein's Oldest Living Descendant)

That's a picture of Albert Einstein's great-grandson, a Medical Doctor, who is also Albert Einstein's oldest living descendant. That makes him 1/8 Albert, and 1/8 Mileva Maric, and how cool is that ?!

I know a LOT more about the guy, but I won't tell you (except that he's in his 40's), out of respect to the Einstein family, who would rather be left alone. OK, cool, but .... the Einstein genes .... march on!

There may be hope for us yet. :-)

72. Harry Morgan

Dragnet. M*A*S*H. Inherit the Wind. I always liked this guy. Good to see he's still kickin'.

Harry Morgan (born April 10, 1915) is an American actor. Morgan is perhaps best known as Colonel Sherman T. Potter on M*A*S*H (1975-83), Pete Porter on both Pete and Gladys (1960-62) and December Bride (1954-1959), Detective Bill Gannon on Dragnet (1967-70), and Amos Coogan on Hec Ramsey (1972-74). He has appeared in more than 100 films.



73. Hans Dehmelt

Hans Georg Dehmelt (born September 9, 1922 in Görlitz, Germany) is a German-born American physicist, who co-developed the ion trap technique with Wolfgang Paul, for which they shared one-half of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989^[1] (the other half of the Prize in that year was awarded to Norman Foster Ramsey). Their technique was used for high precision measurement of the electron g-factor.

At the age of ten Dehmelt enrolled in the Berlinisches Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, a Latin school in Berlin, where he was admitted on a scholarship. After graduating in 1940, he volunteered for service in the German army, which ordered him to attend the University of Breslau to study physics in 1943. After a year of study he returned to army service and was captured during the Battle of the Bulge.

After his release from an American prisoner of war camp in 1946, Dehmelt returned to his study of physics at the University of Göttingen, where he supported himself by repairing and bartering old, pre-war radio sets. He completed his master's thesis in 1948 and received his Ph.D. in 1950, both from the University of Göttingen. He was then invited to Duke University as a postdoctoral associate, emigrating in 1952.

Dehmelt became an assistant professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington in 1955, an associate professor in 1958, and a full professor in 1961. He conducted his work on ion traps from the University of Washington, where he remained until his retirement in October 2002. He was married to Irmgard Lassow, now deceased, and the couple had a son Gerd. Later Dr. Dehmelt married Diana Dundore, a practising physician.

In 1979 he led a team that took the first photo of a single atom.

74. Super Dave

Super Dave Osborne is a character created and played by comedian Bob Einstein.^[1] The character is an inept, greedy and self-absorbed stuntman who is frequently injured when his stunts go wrong.

Super Dave made his first appearance on the 1972 TV series The John Byner Comedy Hour. Einstein then regularly played the character on the short-lived 1976 variety show Van Dyke and Company starring Dick Van Dyke.

Super Dave received his first significant exposure as a regular on the Canadian 1980s series Bizarre. He was also a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

In 1987, a variety show titled Super Dave began airing, followed in 1992 by the animated series Super Dave: Daredevil for Hire that aired on FOX. The character was featured in the television specials Super Dave's Vegas Spectacular in 1995 and Super Dave's All Stars in 1997. Super Dave was also the lead character in a movie released in 2000, The Extreme Adventures of Super Dave. Late 2008, Super Dave also released Super Dave's Super Stunt Spectacular on DVD, a collection of videos of his stunts.

75. Makoto Kobayashi

Makoto Kobayashi (小林 誠, Kobayashi Makoto^?) (born April 7, 1944 in Nagoya, Japan) is a Japanese physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."^[3]

After completing his PhD at Nagoya University in 1972, Kobayashi worked as a research associate on particle physics at Kyoto University. Together, with his colleague Toshihide Maskawa, he worked on explaining CP-violation within the Standard Model of particle physics. Kobayashi and Maskawa's theory required that there were at least three generations of quarks, a prediction that was confirmed experimentally four years later by the discovery of the bottom quark.

Kobayashi and Maskawa's article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction"^[4], published in 1973, is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2008.^[5] The Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, which defines the mixing parameters between quarks was the result of this work. Kobayashi and Maskawa were jointly awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, with the other half going to Yoichiro Nambu.^[3]

76. Albert Einstein

Albert Brooks (born July 22, 1947) is an American actor, voice actor, writer, comedian and director. He received an Academy Award nomination in 1987^[1] for his role in Broadcast News. His voice acting credits include the character Marlin—the clownfish father in Finding Nemo—and recurring guest voices for the animated television series The Simpsons.

Brooks was born Albert Lawrence Einstein in Beverly Hills, California, the son of Thelma Leeds (née Goodman), a singer and actress, and Harry Parke (né Einstein), a radio comedian who performed on Eddie Cantor's radio program and was known as Parkyarkarkus.^[2] His brothers are comedic actor Bob Einstein, better known by his stage name "Super Dave Osborne", and Cliff Einstein, a partner and longtime chief creative officer at Los Angeles advertising agency Dailey & Associates. His half-brother was Charles Einstein (1926–2007), a writer who wrote for such television programs as Playhouse 90 and Lou Grant. Brooks is Jewish.^[3] He grew up among show business royalty in southern California, attending Beverly Hills High School with the likes of Richard Dreyfuss and Rob Reiner.^[4]

Brooks attended Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, but dropped out after one year to focus on his comedy career. He changed his surname from Einstein (to avoid confusion with the famous physicist) and began a stand-up comedy career that quickly made him a regular on variety and talk shows during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Brooks led a new generation of self-reflective baby-boomer comics appearing on NBC's The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. His onstage persona, that of an egotistical, narcissistic, nervous comic, an ironic showbiz insider who punctured himself before an audience by disassembling his mastery of comedic stagecraft, influenced other '70s post-modern comedians, including Steve Martin, Martin Mull and Andy Kaufman.

After two successful comedy albums, Comedy Minus One (1973) and the Grammy Award-nominated A Star Is Bought (1975), Brooks left the stand-up circuit to try his hand as a filmmaker; his first film, The Famous Comedians School, was a satiric short that appeared on PBS and was an early example of the mockumentary sub-genre.

77. Sergey Nikolsky

Sergey Mikhailovich Nikolsky (Russian: Сергей Михайлович Никольский) (born April 30, 1905) is a Russian mathematician. He was born in Talitsa, which was at that time located in the Governorate of Perm, Russia. He has been an Academician since November 28, 1972. He has won many scientific prizes. At the age of 92 was still giving lectures in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. As of 2005, he only gives talks at scientific conferences, but still works in MIPT.

Professor Nikolsky made fundamental contributions to functional analysis, approximation of functions, quadrature formulas, enclosed functional spaces and their applications to variational solutions of partial differential equations. He created a large scientific school of functions' theory and its applications. He authored over 100 scientific publications, including 3 monographs, 2 college textbooks and 7 school textbooks.

78. Yogi Berra

Lawrence Peter "Yogi" Berra (born May 12, 1925) is a former American Major League Baseball player and manager. He played almost his entire career for the New York Yankees and was elected to the baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. Berra was one of only four players to be named the Most Valuable Player of the American League three times and one of only six managers to lead both American and National League teams to the World Series.

Berra is widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. According to the win shares formula developed by sabermetrician Bill James, Berra is the greatest catcher of all time and the 52nd greatest non-pitching player in major-league history.

Berra is also well known for his pithy comments and witticisms, known as Yogiisms. Yogiisms very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology, or a paradoxical contradiction.

• As a general comment on baseball: "90% of the game is half mental."^[15]
• On why he no longer went to Ruggeri's, a St. Louis restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."^[16]
• On catching a game with Warren Spahn (acquired by the Mets in 1965) pitching: "I don't think we're the oldest battery, but we're certainly the ugliest."^{[citation needed]}
• "It ain't over till it's over." In July 1973, when Berra's Mets trailed the Chicago Cubs by 9½ games in the National League East; the Mets rallied to win the division title on the final day of the season.^[17]
• When giving directions to Joe Garagiola to his New Jersey home, which is accessible by two routes: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."^[18]
• On being the guest of honor at an awards banquet: "Thank you for making this day necessary."^[19]
• "It's déjà vu all over again". Berra explained that this quote originated when he witnessed Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back to back home runs in the Yankees' seasons in the early 1960s.^[20]
• "You can observe a lot by watching."^[21]
• "Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't go to yours."^[22]
• Responding to a question about remarks attributed to him that he did not think were his: "I really didn't say everything I said!"^[23]
• On the death of George Steinbrenner, the New York Times quotes Berra as saying "George and I had our differences, but who didn't?"^[24]

79. Scott Carpenter

Malcolm Scott Carpenter (born May 1, 1925, in Boulder, Colorado) is an engineer, former test pilot, astronaut, and aquanaut. He is best known as one of the original seven astronauts selected for NASA's Project Mercury in April 1959.

Scott Carpenter was the second American to orbit the Earth and the fourth American in space, following Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn. Carpenter and Glenn are the last living members of the Mercury Seven.

80. Ray Bradbury

Raymond Douglas "Ray" Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.



81. Irwin Corey - The World's Foremost Authority

"Professor" Irwin Corey (born July 29, 1914, Brooklyn, New York) is an American comic, film actor and left-wing political activist, who is often billed as "The World's Foremost Authority". He introduced his unscripted, improvisational style of stand-up comedy at Enrico Banducci's San Francisco club the hungry i.

Lenny Bruce once described Corey as "one of the most brilliant comedians of all time".^[2]

"I was not, and was conceived. I loved and did a little work. I am not and grieve not." - epitaph of William Kingdon Clifford


Work in progress ... to be continued until I kick the bucket myself (then hopelessly out of date thereafter). :-)