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Alexander Mitchell (13 April 1780 – 25 June 1868) was an Irish engineer who from 1802 was blind. He is known as the inventor of the screw-pile lighthouse.
== Early life ==
Born in Dublin, his family moved to Belfast while he was a child, and he received his formal education at Belfast Royal Academy, where he excelled in mathematics.
== Career ==
Originally working in brickmaking in Belfast, he invented machines used in that trade, before patenting the screw-pile in 1833, for which he would later gain some fame. The screw-pile was used for the erection of lighthouses and other structures on mudbanks and shifting sands, including bridges and piers. Mitchell's designs and methods were employed all over the world from Portland breakwater to Bombay bridges. Initially it was used for the construction of lighthouses on Maplin Sands in the Thames Estuary (the first light application, in 1838), the Wyre Light at Fleetwood in Lancashire (the first such beacon lit) completed, in 1839), and at Belfast Lough where his lighthouse was finished in July 1844.
In May 1851 he moved to Cobh to lay the foundation for a lighthouse on the Spit Bank; the success of these undertakings led to the use of his invention on the breakwater at Portland, the viaduct and bridges on the Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway and a broad system of Indian telegraphs.
While in Cork, Mitchell became friendly with astronomer John Thomas Romney Robinson, and mathematician George Boole.
== Awards and honours ==
In 1848, he was elected a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers and received the Telford Medal the same year for a paper on his invention.
== Death ==
Mitchell died at Glen Devis near Belfast on 25 June 1868. His wife and daughter had predeceased him.
== References ==
== External links ==
Mitchell, Alexander - Dictionary of Irish Biography - 2009 doi:10.3318/dib.005835.v1

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Baruch Kimmerling (Hebrew: ברוך קימרלינג‎; 16 October 1939 – 20 May 2007) was an Israeli scholar and professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Upon his death in 2007, The Times described him as "the first academic to use scholarship to reexamine the founding tenets of Zionism and the Israeli State". Though a sociologist by training, Kimmerling was associated with the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who question the official narrative of Israel's creation.
== Biography ==
Baruch Kimmerling was born in the Transylvanian town of Turda, Romania in 1939. He was born with cerebral palsy, a developmental disability which led him using on a wheelchair for the last three decades of his life. His family narrowly avoided the Holocaust by escaping from Turda in a Romani wagon in 1944, after rumors of the imminent deportation of the Jews began circulating. During the journey, the wagon was strafed by a German plane. When the Kimmerling family returned to Turda after the war had ended, they discovered their property had gone. The family immigrated to Israel in 1952, and took up residence in a ma'abara (immigrants' camp), Sha'ar ha-Aliya, before moving to a small apartment on the outskirts of Netanya.
Despite his significant disabilities, which caused Kimmerling to experience motor difficulties and speech problems, his parents raised him as a typical child and encouraged him to strive high. Exempt from conscription into the Israel Defense Forces, Kimmerling enrolled in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1963, and obtained his PhD in 1973 as a sociologist. Kimmerling was known for his work analyzing pre-1948 Jewish settlement in Palestine in terms of colonialism. He lectured widely and wrote nine books and hundreds of essays. He also wrote numerous newspaper articles, in venues such as Haaretz and The Nation. He held a chair at the University of Toronto.
In August 1975, he married Diana Aidan, a Libyan-born immigrant from Italy who had moved to Israel from Naples in 1967, and was a doctoral student under Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz. She gave up her professional career to become a homemaker. The couple had three children.
Kimmerling was an outspoken critic of Israeli policies, and spoke out on issues related to the Arab-Israeli conflict. He was dubbed one of Israel's New Historians, and himself insisted that he was a patriotic Zionist dedicated to celebrating the diversities of cultures within Israel, and to the ideals of a secular state. Kimmerling was an atheist, and lamented the inability of Jews and Arabs to "separate religion from nationality." Unlike some critics of Israeli policy, he publicly opposed the proposed boycott of Israeli academics by the Association of University Teachers in the United Kingdom, arguing that it would "weaken the last public sphere of free thinking and free speech in Israel."
Kimmerling died at the age of 67 after a long battle with cancer. He was buried in the secular cemetery at Kibbutz Mishmarot, leaving his wife, Diana Aidan, and three children.
== Major publications ==
Zionism and Territory: The Socioterritorial Dimensions of Zionist Politics. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of International Studies, 1983, 289 pages.
Zionism and Economy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Schenkman Publishing Company, 1983, 169 pages.
The Interrupted System: Israeli Civilians in War and Routine Times. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1985. [229 pages]
(As editor) The Israeli State and Society: Boundaries and Frontiers. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989, 330 pages
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People. New York: Free Press, 1993, 396 pages. Paperback enlarged edition: Harvard University Press. Italian version: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1994. Enlarged Edition, 2002 [page 512]. Enlarged and revised Hebrew version: Keter, 1998, 300 pages. Arabic: Ramallah, 2001.
The End of Ashkenazi Hegemony. Jerusalem: Keter, 2001, 124 pages (Hebrew).
The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Culture and Military in Israel. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 268 pages.
Politicide: Sharon's War Against the Palestinians. London: Verso, 2003.
Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal, The Palestinian People: A History. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003, 604 pages.
Immigrants, Settlers, Natives: Israel Between Plurality of Cultures and Cultural Wars. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004 (Hebrew, 630 pages).
Sociology of Politics: A Reader. Binyamina: The Open University, 2005 (Hebrew)
Shuli bamerkaz: Sippur hayyim shel sotziolog tzibburi (Marginal in the Center: The Autobiography of a Public Sociologist), Hakibbutz Hameuhad, 2007, 252 pages, (Hebrew)
Clash of Identities: Explorations in Israeli and Palestinian Societies, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, 431 pages.
Marginal at the Center: The Life Story of a Public Sociologist, Translated from the Hebrew by Diana Kimmerling, Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012, 258 pages.
== References ==
== External links ==
Sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, 'new historian,' dies at age 67 Obituary in Haaretz, 21 May 2007
Controversial critic of Israel's origins and its role in the Middle East Obituary in The Guardian, 26 June 2007
Israeli sociologist who strongly criticised the state's policies Obituary in The Times, 14 June 2007
A life less ordinary Interview by Dalia Karpel in Haaretz, 19 October 2006
Baruch Kimmerling's publications, including abstracts

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David Graham Lloyd (20 June 1937 – 30 May 2006) was an evolutionary biologist and the seventh New Zealander to be elected as a fellow of the Royal Society in London. He did pioneering work in the field of plant reproduction.
In December 1992, Lloyd fell victim to an apparent poisoning by acrylamide, a common laboratory chemical. As a result, he lay in a coma for three months and was left blind, mute, and quadriplegic.
His former partner and fellow molecular biologist Vicky Calder was tried twice for his attempted murder. The first trial ended with a hung jury and the second acquitted her.
== Research ==
Lloyd's major contribution to botany was in the field of plant reproduction. His contributions to the field include a mechanistic treatment of different modes of self-pollination in hermaphroditic plants, a genetically defined continuum of plant gender, early development of theory of the evolution of separate sexes in plants, and with C.J. Webb, a challenge to conventional views of the evolution of heterostyly. Because of his ideas and work on population biology of plants, he is sometimes referred to as the "W.D. Hamilton in plant biology".
== References ==
== External links ==
New Zealand Herald obituary
Acrylamide poisoning trial
Lloyd's 1980 publication: A quantitative method for describing the gender of plants

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Gerrit van der Mey (5 January 1914 – November 2002) was a deafblind Dutch mathematician. He helped create software for PTERA and ZEBRA, some of the first computers designed in the Netherlands, as well as creating compilers for later computers. In 1982 he was made a member of the Order of Orange-Nassau at the grade of knight.
== Early life and education ==
Gerrit van der Mey was born 5 January 1914 in Lisse. He was the son of a well-known bulb grower. When he was four, he contracted meningitis and became completely blind due to an opening between his outer and middle ear. He attended elementary school at a school for the blind in Bussum. He attended high school at Blinden Studien Anstalt in Marburg, Germany, where his mathematics teacher recognized his impressive aptitude for the subject.
After returning to the Netherlands Mey began studying mathematics at Leiden University, but was forced to discontinue his studies when the Nazis shut down the university in 1941. He continued studying at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam under Jurjen Ferdinand Koksma and Johannes Haantjes, where he graduated cum laude in 1943.
In 1945 Mey contracted meningitis again, leading to a total loss of hearing and loss of balance. He had to relearn to walk with the help of a guide dog. He continued his studies in mathematics at Leiden University working under Willem van der Woude; Mey received his Ph.D. in 1947. His dissertation was titled De resultant in de theorie der algebraische krommen, focusing on the theory of algebraic curves.
== Work at PTT ==
In 1951 Mey began working as a calculator (computer programmer) at the Mathematical Department of the PTT (Staatsbedrijf der Posterijen, Telegrafie en Telefonie; the Dutch mail and telephone company), working closely with Willem van der Poel. Computer programming was in its infancy at the time; the advantage for a blind worker was that there was no literature to consult as everything needed to be built from scratch. Large parts of the code and operating systems for some of the first electronic computers designed in the Netherlands, including PTERA (Postal Telecommunications Electronic Automatic Calculator) and ZEBRA (Very Simple Binary Automatic Calculator), were written by Mey. The first programs had to be written to use floating-point arithmetic, with conversions from decimal to binary. The Mathematical Department used his programming for applications such as cable calculations, filters for multiple carrier connections, and celestial mechanics. Mey also created the design of an ALGOL compiler and a LISP system for ZEBRA. For later systems he made IPL V, LISP, SNOBOL3 and ALGOL 68 compilers.
== Communication ==
A typewriter-style keyboard allowed people to type messages to him which would be converted to a specially-constructed braille reading-box. Even after thirty years of total deafness, he retained near perfect speech, allowing him to answer questions with his voice; he collaborated with researchers to investigate his ability to retain speech. A braille telephone and a braille telex were also created by his coworkers for his use. He used the Lorm alphabet to communicate with his wife and close friends.
== Personal life and travels ==
In 1957 Mey, his wife Suzanne Melgerd, and coworker Willem van der Poel attended a conference hosted by the Helen Keller Foundation to share information about his communication devices. They toured the United States and Canada with a group of deafblind people; a highlight of the trip was a visit to the Oval Office to meet President Eisenhower. On the boat trip from Europe, Mey's lack of balance made it impossible for him to walk unassisted, but as a consolation he did not suffer from seasickness.
Mey traveled extensively and memorized the Dutch railway network schedules. Before becoming deaf, he was an excellent pianist and played occasionally even after losing his hearing. He and his wife had three daughters together.
== Later life ==
When his colleague Willem van der Poel became a professor at the Delft University of Technology, Mey went to work with him. He retired in 1978. In 1982 he was designated as a Knight in the Order of Oranje Nassau. His wife unexpectedly died in 1983; he would later remarry and divorce.
Mey spent his final years at the center for the deaf-blind at Beek. He died in November 2002.
== References ==

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Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng (Chinese: 华罗庚; Wade–Giles: Hua Lo-keng; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his contributions to number theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in the People's Republic of China. He was largely responsible for identifying and nurturing the mathematician Chen Jingrun, who proved Chen's theorem, the best-known result on the Goldbach conjecture. Hua's later work on mathematical optimization and operations research made an enormous impact on China's economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1982. He was elected a member of the Standing Committee of the 1st through 6th National People's Congresses, Vice-Chairman of the 6th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (April 1985) and vice-chairman of the China Democratic League (1979). He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1979.
Hua did not receive a formal university education. Although awarded several honorary PhDs, he never got a formal degree from any university. In fact, his formal education only consisted of six years of primary school and three years of secondary school. For that reason, Xiong Qinglai, after reading one of Hua's early papers, was amazed by his mathematical talent, and in 1931 invited him to study mathematics at Tsinghua University.
== Biography ==
=== Early years (1910–1936) ===
Hua Luogeng was born in Jintan, Jiangsu on 12 November 1910. Hua's father was a small businessman. Hua met a capable math teacher in middle school who recognized his talent early and encouraged him to read advanced texts. After middle school, Hua enrolled in Chinese Vocational College in Shanghai, and there he distinguished himself by winning a national abacus competition. Although tuition fees at the college were low, living costs proved too high for his means, and Hua was forced to leave a term before graduating. After failing to find a job in Shanghai, Hua returned home in 1927 to help in his father's store. In 1929, Hua contracted typhoid fever and was in bed for half a year. The culmination of Hua's illness resulted in the partial paralysis of his left leg, which impeded his movement quite severely for the rest of his life.
After middle school, Hua continued to study mathematics independently with the few books he had, and studied the entire high school and early undergraduate math curriculum. By the time Hua returned to Jintan, he was already engaged in independent mathematics research, and his first publication Some Researches on the Theorem of Sturm, appeared in the December 1929 issue of the Shanghai periodical Science. In the following year Hua showed in a short note in the same journal that a certain 1926 paper claiming to have solved the quintic was fundamentally flawed. Hua's lucid analysis caught the eye of Prof. Xiong Qinglai at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and in 1931 Hua was invited, despite his lack of formal qualification and not without some reservations on the part of several faculty members, to join the mathematics department there.
At Tsinghua, Hua began as a clerk in the library, and then moved to become an assistant in mathematics. By September 1932, he was an instructor, and two years later, after having published another dozen papers, he was promoted to the rank of lecturer.
During 1935–36 Jacques Hadamard and Norbert Wiener visited Tsinghua, and Hua eagerly attended the lectures of both and created a good impression. Wiener visited England soon afterward and spoke of Hua to G. H. Hardy. In this way Hua received an invitation to Cambridge, England, where he stayed for two years.
=== Early middle years (1936–1950) ===
At Cambridge University, Hua worked on applying the Hardy–Littlewood circle method to problems in number theory. He produced seminal work on Waring's problem, which established his reputation in the international math community. In 1938, after the full outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, Hua returned to China to Tsinghua, where he was appointed full professor despite having no degree. At the time, with vast areas of China under Japanese occupation, Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Nankai University had merged into the Southwest Associated University in Kunming, capital of the southern province Yunnan. In spite of the hardships of poverty, enemy bombings, and relative academic isolation from the rest of the world, Hua continued to produce first-rate mathematics. During his eight years there, Hua studied Vinogradov's seminal method of estimating trigonometric sums and reformulated it in sharper form, in what is now known universally as Vinogradov's mean value theorem. This result is central to improved versions of the Hilbert–Waring theorem, and has important applications to the study of the Riemann zeta function. Hua wrote up this work in his booklet Additive Theory of Prime Numbers, which was accepted for publication in Russia as early as 1940, but, owing to the war, did not appear in expanded form until 1947 as a monograph of the Steklov Institute. In the closing years of the Kunming period, Hua turned to algebra and analysis, to which he soon began to make original contributions.
After the war, Hua spent three months in the Soviet Union in the spring of 1946, at Ivan Vinogradov's invitation, after which he departed for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. There, Hua worked on matrix theory, functions of several complex variables, and group theory. At this time civil war was raging in China and it was not easy to travel, and for "convenience of travel," the Chinese authorities assigned Hua the rank of general in his passport.
In the spring of 1948, Hua accepted appointment as full professor at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, but his stay in Illinois was brief. In October 1949, the People's Republic of China was established, and Hua, wanting to be part of a new epoch, returned to China with his wife and children, despite having comfortably settled in the United States.

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=== Later career in China (1950–1985) ===
Back in China, Hua threw himself into educational reform and the organization of mathematical activity at the graduate level, in the schools, and among workers in the burgeoning industry. In July 1952 the Mathematical Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) came into being, with Hua as its first director. In 1953, he was one of a 26-member delegation from CAS to visit the Soviet Union to establish links with Russian science. Later, he was the first chair of the Department of Mathematics and Vice President of University of Science & Technology of China (USTC), a new type of Chinese university established by CAS in 1958, aimed at fostering skilled researchers necessary for the economic development, defense and education in science and technology.
Despite his many teaching and administrative duties, Hua remained active in research and continued to write, not only on topics that had engaged him before but also in areas that were new to him or had been only lightly touched on before. In 1956, his voluminous text Introduction to Number Theory appeared. It was later published in English by Springer. Harmonic Analysis of Functions of Several Complex Variables in the Classical Domains came out in 1958 and was translated into Russian in the same year, followed by an English translation by the American Mathematical Society in 1963.
Outside of pure math, Hua first proposed in 1952 the development of China's electronic computer, and in early 1953, an initial research team for this project was formed under Hua's leadership by the Mathematical Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The start of the Great Leap Forward in 1958 came with a vehement attack on pure mathematics and intellectuals, prompting Hua to shift to applied mathematics. He and Wang Yuan developed a broad interest in linear programming, operations research, and multidimensional numerical integration. In connection with the last of these, the study of the Monte Carlo method and the role of uniform distribution led them to invent an alternative deterministic method based on ideas from algebraic number theory. Their theory was set out in Applications of Number Theory to Numerical Analysis, which was published in 1978, and by Springer in English translation in 1981. The newfound interest in applicable mathematics took him in the 1960s, accompanied by a team of assistants, all over China to show workers of all kinds how to apply their reasoning to shop-floor and everyday problems. Whether in ad hoc problem-solving sessions in factories or open-air teachings, he touched his audiences with the spirit of mathematics to such an extent that he became a national hero and even earned an unsolicited letter of commendation from Mao Zedong, a valuable protection in uncertain times. Hua had a commanding presence, a genial personality, and a talent for putting things simply, and his travels spread his fame and the popularity of mathematics across the land.
After the Cultural Revolution, Hua resumed contact with Western mathematicians. In 1980 Hua became a cultural ambassador of China charged with re-establishing links with Western academics, and over the next five years he traveled extensively in Europe, the United States, and Japan. In 1979 he was a visiting research fellow of the then Science Research Council of the United Kingdom at the University of Birmingham and during 1983–84 he was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He died of a heart attack at the end of a lecture he gave in Tokyo on 12 June 1985.
Hua Luogeng Park in Jintan, Jiangsu, is named after him.
== Works ==
Additive Theory of Prime Numbers (Translations of Mathematical Monographs : Vol 13). Amer Mathematical Society. 1966. ISBN 978-0-8218-1563-2.
Introduction to Number Theory. Springer. 1987. ISBN 978-3-540-10818-4.
Hua, Loo-keng (1981). Starting with the Unit Circle: Background to Higher Analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 978-0-387-90589-1.
Loo-keng Hua: Selected Papers. Berlin: Springer Verlag. 1983. ISBN 978-0-387-90744-4.
== References ==
== External links ==
Hua Luogeng at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Hua Luogeng", MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews
Biographical memoir – by Heini Halberstam
Biography of Loo-Keng Hua – from MacTutor History of Mathematics from University of St Andrews
Hua Loo-Keng : a biography by Wang Yuan
Heini Halberstam, "Loo-Keng Hua", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2002)

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Lee Sang-Mook (born October 18, 1962) is a South Korean marine geologist and computational scientist. He has worked as a researcher at the Korean Ocean Research and Development Institute from 1998 to 2003, and as a professor and researcher at Seoul National University since 2003.
As an associate professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, he specializes in Marine Geology and Geophysics. He heads the Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Program in Computational Sciences and the graduate program in Computational Science and Technology.
His research focuses on tectonic plates, underwater earthquakes, and volcanoes. He has advocated successfully at the national level for the use of Korean survey ships for basic scientific research.
After being injured in a car accident on July 2, 2006, Dr. Lee became a quadriplegic. He was able to return to work in less than a year, and continues to teach, do research, and travel.
He has helped in the development of assistive technologies such as the DOWELL smartphone program by Samsung.
He is an advocate for the education of students with physical disabilities, and has introduced a "Calculative science collaboration major" focusing on the use of supercomputers, mathematics and digital modeling techniques, suitable for disabled science students. Lee served as Chair of the Preparation Committee of the "PyeongChang Forum for the Earth and its Citizens" prior to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang.
== Education ==
1985, B.S., Seoul National University, College of Natural Sciences, Dept of Oceanography
1995, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering
1996–1998, Post-doctoral Research, Department of Geological Sciences, University of Durham, England
== Awards ==
2008 Commendation (Certificate of Honor), The Board of Supervisors of the City and County of San Francisco
2009 Medal of Merit, Republic of Korea
2010 2010 DO-IT Trailblazer Award, DO-IT Center, University of Washington
2011 Grand Prize, Seoul City Welfare Award
== Research Area ==
Oceanography, Marine Geology and Geophysics, Geodynamics, Plate Tectonics, High-resolution Investigation of Deep Sea, Underwater Acoustics, Seafloor Topography, Underwater Volcanoes and Earthquakes, Gravity and Magnetics, Structure of Earth Interior, Numerical Modeling, Computational Sciences, Rock Magnetics, Assistive Technology
== Bibliography ==
Lee, SM (2008) 0.1 Grams of Hope (0.1그램의 희망) Random House Korea. 341 pages. ISBN 9788925530284
Lee, SM (1995). Tectonics of the East Pacific Rise: Studies of Faulting Characteristics and Magnetic and Gravity Anomalies. PhD Thesis. Woods Hole Mass: Mass. Inst. of Technol./ Woods Hole Oceanogr. Inst.
== References ==

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Motoo Kimura (木村 資生, Kimura Motō) (November 13, 1924 – November 13, 1994) was a Japanese biologist best known for introducing the neutral theory of molecular evolution in 1968. He became one of the most influential theoretical population geneticists. He is remembered in genetics for his innovative use of diffusion equations to calculate the probability of fixation of beneficial, deleterious, or neutral alleles. Combining theoretical population genetics with molecular evolution data, he also developed the neutral theory of molecular evolution in which genetic drift is the main force changing allele frequencies. James F. Crow, himself a renowned population geneticist, considered Kimura to be one of the two greatest evolutionary geneticists, along with Gustave Malécot, after the great trio of the modern synthesis, Ronald Fisher, J. B. S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright.
== Life and work ==
Kimura was born on November 13, 1924, in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture. From an early age he was very interested in botany, though he also excelled at mathematics (teaching himself geometry and other maths during a lengthy convalescence due to food poisoning). After entering a selective high school in Nagoya, Kimura focused on plant morphology and cytology; he worked in the laboratory of M. Kumazawa studying the chromosome structure of lilies. With Kumazawa, he also discovered how to connect his interests in botany and mathematics: biometry
Due to World War II, Kimura left high school early to enter Kyoto Imperial University in 1944. On the advice of the prominent geneticist Hitoshi Kihara, Kimura entered the botany program rather than cytology because the former, in the Faculty of Science rather than Agriculture, allowed him to avoid military duty. He joined Kihara's laboratory after the war, where he studied the introduction of foreign chromosomes into plants and learned the foundations of population genetics.
In 1949, Kimura joined the National Institute of Genetics in Mishima, Shizuoka. In 1953 he published his first population genetics paper (which would eventually be very influential), describing a "stepping stone" model for population structure that could treat more complex patterns of migration than Sewall Wright's earlier "island model". After meeting visiting American geneticist Duncan McDonald (part of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission), Kimura arranged to enter graduate school at Iowa State College in the summer 1953 to study with J. L. Lush.
Kimura soon found Iowa State College too restricting; he moved to the University of Wisconsin to work on stochastic models with James F. Crow and to join a strong intellectual community of like-minded geneticists, including Newton Morton and most significantly, Sewall Wright. Near the end of his graduate study, Kimura gave a paper at the 1955 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium; though few were able to understand it (both because of mathematical complexity and Kimura's English pronunciation) it received strong praise from Wright and later J.B.S. Haldane.
His accomplishments at Wisconsin included a general model for genetic drift, which could accommodate multiple alleles, selection, migration, and mutations, as well as some work based on R.A. Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. He also built on the work of Wright with the Fokker–Planck equation by introducing the Kolmogorov backward equation to population genetics, allowing the calculation of the probability of an allele to become fixed in a population. He received his PhD in 1956, before returning to Japan (where he would remain for the rest of his life, at the National Institute of Genetics).
Kimura worked on a wide spectrum of theoretical population genetics problems, many of them in collaboration with Takeo Maruyama. He introduced the "infinite alleles", "infinite sites", and "stepwise" models of mutation, all of which would be used widely as the field of molecular evolution grew alongside the number of available peptide and genetic sequences. The stepwise mutation model is a "ladder model" that can be applied to electrophoresis studies where homologous proteins differ by whole units of charge. An early statement of his approach was published in 1960, in his An Introduction to Population Genetics. He also contributed an important review article on the ongoing controversy over genetic load in 1961.
1968 marked a turning point in Kimura's career. In that year he introduced the neutral theory of molecular evolution, the idea that, at the molecular level, the large majority of genetic change is neutral with respect to natural selection—making genetic drift a primary factor in evolution. The field of molecular biology was expanding rapidly, and there was growing tension between advocates of the expanding reductionist field and scientists in organismal biology, the traditional domain of evolution. The neutral theory was immediately controversial, receiving support from many molecular biologists and attracting opposition from many evolutionary biologists.
Kimura spent the rest of his life developing and defending the neutral theory. As James Crow put it, "much of Kimura's early work turned out to be pre-adapted for use in the quantitative study of neutral evolution". As new experimental techniques and genetic knowledge became available, Kimura expanded the scope of the neutral theory and created mathematical methods for testing it against the available evidence. Kimura produced a monograph on the neutral theory in 1983, The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution, and also worked to promote the theory through popular writings such as My Views on Evolution, a book that became a best-seller in Japan.
Though difficult to test against alternative selection-centered hypotheses, the neutral theory has become part of modern approaches to molecular evolution.
In 1992, Kimura received the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society, and the following year he was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.
Kimura suffered from progressive weakening caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis later in life. In an accidental fall at his home in Shizuoka, Japan, Kimura struck his head and died on November 13, 1994, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was married to Hiroko Kimura. They had one child, a son, Akio, and a granddaughter, Hanako.
== Honors ==
1959 – Genetics Society of Japan Prize
1965 – Weldon Memorial Prize, Oxford
1968 – Japan Academy Prize
1973 – Foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA
1976 – Person of Cultural Merit
1976 – Order of Culture
1982 – Member of the Japan Academy
1986 – Chevalier de l'Ordre Nationale de Merite
1986 – Asahi Prize
1987 – John J. Carty Award of the National Academy of Sciences in evolutionary biology
1988 – International Prize for Biology
1992 – Darwin Medal
1993 – Foreign member of Royal Society
== See also ==
History of biology
History of evolutionary thought
History of molecular biology
Molecular evolution
== References ==

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Per Eugen Kristiansen (born 8 April 1969) is a Norwegian sailor from Bekkestua who won a bronze medal at the 2012 Summer Paralympics in the Sonar class, together with Marie Solberg and Aleksander Wang-Hansen. He has sailed since he was 7. In 1994, he was involved in a climbing accident, and since then has been reliant on a wheelchair. Nine months later, he was an active sailor again. In 1998, he competed for the first time after a disabled sailor invited him to an event, and from then on, he has been an active regatta sailor. In January 2012, he won the World Sailing Championship in Florida.
In 1993, Kristiansen got his cand.scient. in organic chemistry from the University of Oslo. On 22 October 1999, he received his doctorate, and from 2000 to 2002, he undertook postdoctorate studies at Washington State University. From 2002 to 2005, he worked at the University of Oslo, where he is now a senior engineer in the department for biochemistry and molecular biology.
== References ==
== External links ==
Per Eugen Kristiansen at World Sailing (archived, alternate link)
Per Eugen Kristiansen at the International Paralympic Committee
Homepage at the Institute for Molecular Biological Science
Deprecated link at archive.today (archived 5 January 2013)

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Richard Erskine Frere Leakey (19 December 1944 – 2 January 2022) was a Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician. Leakey held a number of official positions in Kenya, mostly in institutions of archaeology and wildlife conservation. He was director of the National Museum of Kenya, founded the NGO WildlifeDirect, and was the chairman of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Leakey served in the powerful office of cabinet secretary and head of public service during the tail end of President Daniel Toroitich Arap Moi's government.
Leakey co-founded the "Turkana Basin Institute" in an academic partnership with Stony Brook University, where he was an anthropology professor. He served as the chair of the Turkana Basin Institute until his death.
== Early life ==
=== Earliest years ===
Richard Erskine Frere Leakey was born on 19 December 1944 in Nairobi. As a small boy, Leakey lived in Nairobi with his parents: Louis Leakey, curator of the Coryndon Museum, and Mary Leakey, director of the Leakey excavations at Olduvai, and his two brothers, Jonathan and Philip. The Leakey brothers had a very active childhood. All the boys had ponies and belonged to the Langata Pony Club. Sometimes the whole club were guests at the Leakeys' for holidays and vacations. Leakey's parents founded the Dalmatian Club of East Africa and won a prize in 1957. Dogs and many other pets shared the Leakey home. The Leakey boys participated in games conducted by both adults and children, in which they tried to imitate early humans, catching springhare and small antelope by hand on the Serengeti. They drove lions and jackals from the kill to see if they could do it.
=== Fractured skull ===
In 1956, aged eleven, Leakey fell from his horse, fracturing his skull and nearly dying as a result. Incidentally, it was this incident that saved his parents' marriage. Louis was seriously considering leaving Mary for his secretary, Rosalie Osborn. As the battle with Mary raged in the household, Leakey begged his father from his sickbed not to leave. That was the deciding factor. Louis broke up with Rosalie and the family lived in happy harmony for a few years more.
=== Teenage entrepreneur ===
Leakey chose to support himself, borrowed £500 from his parents for a Land Rover and went into the trapping and skeleton supply business with Kamoya Kimeu. Already a skilled horseman, outdoorsman, Land Rover mechanic, amateur archaeologist, and expedition leader, he learned to identify bones, skills which all pointed to a path he did not yet wish to take, simply because his father was on it.
The bone business turned into a safari business in 1961. In 1962, he obtained a private pilot licence and took tours to the Olduvai Gorge. It was from a casual aerial survey that he noted the potential of Lake Natron's shores for palaeontology. He went looking for fossils in a Land Rover, but could find none, until his parents assigned Glynn Isaac to go with him. Louis was so impressed with their finds that he gave them National Geographic money for a month's expedition. They explored in the vicinity of Peninj near the lake, where Leakey was in charge of the administrative details. Bored, he returned to Nairobi temporarily, but at that moment, Kamoya Kimeu discovered a fossil of Australopithecus boisei. A second expedition left Leakey feeling that he was being excluded from the most significant part of the operation, the scientific analysis.
=== Marriage ===
In 1964, on his second Lake Natron expedition, Leakey met an archaeologist named Margaret Cropper. When Margaret returned to England, Leakey decided to follow suit to study for a degree and become better acquainted with her. He completed his high school requirements in six months; meanwhile Margaret obtained her degree at the University of Edinburgh. He passed the entrance exams for admission to college, but in 1965 he and Margaret decided to marry and return to Kenya. His father offered him a job at the Centre for Prehistory and Palaeontology. He worked excavating at Lake Baringo and continued his photographic safari business, making enough money to buy a house in Karen, a pleasant suburb of Nairobi. Their daughter Anna was born in 1969, the same year that Leakey and Margaret divorced. He married his colleague Meave Epps in 1970 and they had two daughters, Louise (born 1972) and Samira (1974).
== Palaeontology ==
Richard formed the Kenya Museum Associates (now Kenya Museum Society) with influential Kenyans in 1955. They aimed to "Kenyanise" and improve the National Museum. They offered the museum £5000, one-third of its yearly budget, if it would place Leakey in a responsible position, and he became an observer on the board of directors. Joel Ojal, the government official in charge of the museum, and a member of the Associates, directed the chairman of the board to start placing Kenyans on it.

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=== The Omo ===
Plans for the museum had not matured when Louis, intentionally or not, found a way to remove his confrontational son from the scene. Louis attended a lunch with Emperor Haile Selassie and President Jomo Kenyatta. The conversation turned to fossils, and the Emperor wanted to know why none had been found in Ethiopia. Louis developed this inquiry into permission to excavate on the Omo River.
The expedition consisted of three contingents: French, under Camille Arambourg, American, under F. Clark Howell, and Kenyan, led by Richard. Louis could not go because of his arthritis. Crossing the Omo in 1967, Leakey's contingent was attacked by crocodiles, which destroyed their wooden boat. Expedition members barely escaped with their lives. Richard radioed Louis for a new, aluminium boat, which the National Geographic Society was happy to supply.
On site, Kamoya Kimeu found a hominid fossil. Leakey took it to be Homo erectus, but Louis identified it as Homo sapiens. It was the oldest of the species found at that time, dating to 160,000 years, and was the first find contemporaneous with Homo neanderthalensis. During the identification process, Leakey came to feel that the college men were patronising him.
=== Koobi Fora ===
During the Omo expedition of 1967, Leakey visited Nairobi and on the return flight the pilot flew over Lake Rudolph (renamed Lake Turkana from 1975) to avoid a thunderstorm. The map led Leakey to expect volcanic rock below him but he saw sediments. Visiting the region with Howell by helicopter, he saw tools and fossils everywhere. In his mind, he started formulating a new enterprise.
In 1968 Louis and Richard attended a meeting of the Research and Exploration Committee of the National Geographic Society to ask for money for Omo. Catching Louis by surprise, Richard asked the committee to divert the $25,000 intended for Omo to new excavations to be conducted under his leadership at Koobi Fora. Richard won, but chairman Leonard Carmichael told him he had better find something or never "come begging at our door again". Louis graciously congratulated Richard.
By that time the board of the National Museum was packed with Kenyan supporters of Richard. They appointed him administrative director. The curator, Robert Carcasson, resigned in protest, and Leakey was left with the museum at his command, which he, like Louis before him, used as a base of operations. Although there was friendly rivalry and contention between Louis and Richard, relations remained good. Each took over for the other when one was busy with something else or incapacitated, and Richard continued to inform his father immediately of hominid finds.
In the first expedition to Allia Bay on Lake Turkana, where the Koobi Fora camp came to be located, Leakey hired primarily young researchers. The students included John Harris and Bernard Wood. Also present was a team of Africans under Kamoya: a geochemist, Paul Abel, and a photographer, Bob Campbell. Margaret was the archaeologist. In contrast to his father, Richard ran a disciplined and tidy camp, although, in order to find fossils, he did push the expedition harder than it wished.
In 1969 the discovery of a cranium of Paranthropus boisei caused great excitement. A Homo rudolfensis skull (KNM ER 1470) and a Homo erectus skull (KNM ER 3733), discovered in 1972 and 1975, respectively, were among the most significant finds of Leakey's earlier expeditions. In 1978 an intact cranium of Homo erectus (KNM ER 3883) was discovered.
Donald Johanson and Leakey held different views about human evolution. They held a debate on Cronkite's Universe, a talk show hosted by Walter Cronkite, in 1981.
=== West Turkana ===
Turkana Boy, discovered by Kamoya Kimeu, a member of the Leakeys' team, in 1984, was the nearly complete skeleton of a Homo ergaster (though some, including Leakey, call it erectus) who died 1.6 million years ago at about age 9–12. Leakey and Roger Lewin describe the experience of this find and their interpretation of it, in their book Origins Reconsidered (1992). Shortly after the discovery of Turkana Boy, Leakey and his team made the discovery of a skull (KNM WT 17000, known as "Black Skull") of a new species, Australopithecus aethiopicus (or Paranthropus aethiopicus).
Richard shifted away from palaeontology in 1989, but his wife Meave Leakey and daughter Louise Leakey continue to conduct palaeontological research in Northern Kenya.
== Conservation ==
In 1989 Richard Leakey was appointed the head of the Wildlife Conservation and Management Department (WMCD) by President Daniel Arap Moi in response to the international outcry over the poaching of elephants and the impact it was having on the wildlife of Kenya. The department was replaced by the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) in 1990, and Leakey became its first chairman. With characteristically bold steps Leakey created special, well-armed anti-poaching units that were authorised to shoot poachers on sight. The poaching menace was dramatically reduced. Impressed by Leakey's transformation of the Kenya Wildlife Service, the World Bank approved grants worth $140 million. Richard Leakey, President Moi, and the WMCD made the international news headlines when a stockpile of 12 tons of ivory was burned in 1989 in Nairobi National Park.
Richard Leakey's confrontational approach to the issue of human–wildlife conflict in national parks did not win him friends. His view was that parks were self-contained ecosystems that had to be fenced in and the humans kept out. Leakey's bold and incorruptible nature also offended many local politicians.
In 2016, Leakey was named Conservationist of the Year by The Perfect World Foundation and won "The Fragile Rhino" prize at the Elephant Ball in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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=== Plane crash ===
In 1993, a small propeller-driven plane piloted by Richard Leakey crashed, crushing his lower legs, both of which were later amputated. Sabotage was suspected but never proven. While in the hospital, Leakey told President Moi, a religious man, not to pray for him, but act on matters pending for the Kenya Wildlife Service. Thereafter, Richard Leakey walked on artificial limbs. Around this time the Kenyan government announced that a secret probe had found evidence of corruption and mismanagement in the Kenya Wildlife Service. An annoyed Leakey resigned publicly in a press conference in January 1994. He was replaced by David Western as the head of the Kenya Wildlife Service.
Richard Leakey wrote about his experiences at the Kenya Wildlife Service in his book Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (2001).
== Politics ==
In May 1995, Richard Leakey joined some Kenyan intellectuals in launching a new political party—the Safina Party, which in Swahili means "Noah's Ark". The Safina party was routinely harassed and even its application to become an official political party was not approved until 1997.
In 1997, international donor institutions froze their aid to Kenya because of widespread corruption. To placate the donors, Moi appointed Richard Leakey as Cabinet Secretary and head of the civil service in 1999. Leakey's second stint in the civil service lasted two years. He sacked 25,000 civil servants and obtained £250 million of funds from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. However, Leakey found himself sidelined after the money arrived, and his reforms were blocked in the courts. He was sacked from his cabinet post in 2001.
== United States ==
Leakey left Kenya for the U.S. in 2002 and became a professor of anthropology at Stony Brook University, New York. He was also Chair of the Turkana Basin Institute. In 2004, Leakey founded and chaired WildlifeDirect, a Kenya-based charitable organisation. The charity was established to provide support to conservationists in Africa directly on the ground via the use of blogs. This enables individuals anywhere to play a direct and interactive role in the survival of some of the world's most precious species. The organisation played a significant role in the saving of the Democratic Republic of Congo's mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in January 2007 after a rebel uprising threatened to eliminate the highly vulnerable population.
In April 2007, he was appointed interim chairman of Transparency International's Kenya branch. The same year, Leakey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In June 2013, Leakey was awarded the Isaac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Association.
== Contribution ==
Leakey's groundbreaking work contributed to the recognition of Africa as the birthplace of humankind, that contributed as evidence that the earliest humans had lived on the African continent. He was known to have spearheaded campaigns to stop poaching in Kenya. Aside from his contributions to public service, he was known to have contributed immensely to the civil service; "Besides his distinguished career in public service, Dr Leakey is celebrated for his prominent role in Kenya's civil society where he founded and successfully ran a number of institutions," Mr Kenyatta said.
== Return to Kenya ==
In 2015, President Uhuru Kenyatta appointed Leakey chairman of the board of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Although he was chairman rather than director, Leakey played an active role in KWS policies. He brokered a deal on the extension of the Mombasa–Nairobi Standard Gauge Railway, allowing the railway to pass over Nairobi National Park on an 18-metre-tall viaduct. Leakey felt that the viaduct would set an example for the rest of Africa in balancing economic development with environmental protection. However, other Kenyan conservationists have opposed railway construction in the park.
Angelina Jolie was to direct a film about Leakey's life, with Leakey in early 2016 expressing his confidence that the film would be shot in Kenya.
== Personal life and death ==
Leakey spoke fluent Kiswahili and moved effortlessly between white and black communities. While he rarely talked about race in public, racism and gender inequality infuriated him. Leakey stated that he was an atheist and a humanist.
Leakey came from a family of renowned archeologists. His mother, Mary Leakey, discovered evidence in 1978 that man walked upright much earlier than had been thought. She and her husband, Louis Leakey, unearthed skulls of ape-like early humans, shedding fresh light on our ancestors.
Leakey was diagnosed with a terminal kidney disease in 1969. Ten years later he became seriously ill but received a kidney transplant from his brother, Philip, and recovered to full health.
He died at his home outside Nairobi, on 2 January 2022, less than a month after his 77th birthday. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried on a hill along the Rift Valley.
== Bibliography ==
Leakey's early published works include Origins and The People of the Lake (both with Roger Lewin as co-author), The Illustrated Origin of Species, and The Making of Mankind (1981).
Origins (with Roger Lewin) (Dutton, 1977)
People of the Lake: Mankind and its Beginnings (with Roger Lewin) (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978)
The Making of Mankind (Penguin USA, 1981)
One Life: An Autobiography (Salem House, 1983)
Origins Reconsidered (with Roger Lewin) (Doubleday, 1992)
The Origin of Humankind (Perseus Books Group, 1994)
The Sixth Extinction (with Roger Lewin) (Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1995)
Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures (with Virginia Morell) (St. Martin's Press, 2001)
== See also ==
List of fossil sites (with link directory)
List of human evolution fossils (with images)
== References ==
== Works cited ==
Morell, Virginia (1995). Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind's Beginnings. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-80192-2. OCLC 32310794.
== External links ==
Leakey Foundation
Leakeyjourneys.org
Koobi Fora Research Project
Richard Leakey's Blog on WildlifeDirect
Turkana Basin Institute
Richard Leakey discography at Discogs
Richard Leakey at IMDb

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Sheena S. Iyengar is the S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Department at Columbia Business School, widely and best known as an expert on choice. Her research focuses on the many facets of decision making, including: why people want choice, what affects how and what we choose, and how we can improve our decision making. She has presented TED talks on choice and is the author of The Art of Choosing (2010).
== Early life and education ==
Iyengar was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Her parents were immigrants from Delhi, India. As a child, she was diagnosed with a rare form of retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited disease of retinal degeneration. By the age of nine, she could no longer read. By the age of sixteen, she was completely blind, although able to perceive light. She remains blind as an adult.
Iyengar's father died of a heart attack when she was thirteen. This change in family circumstances, and Iyengar's loss of vision, prompted Iyengar's mother to steer her towards higher education and self-sufficiency, saying to Iyengar: "I don't want to hear about men or boys, you've got to stand on your own two feet."
In 1992, she graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.S. in economics from the Wharton School and a B.A. in psychology from the College of Arts and Sciences. She then earned her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University in 1997.
For her dissertation "Choice and its Discontents," Iyengar received the Best Dissertation Award for 1998 from the Society of Experimental Social Psychology.
== Academic career ==
Iyengar's first faculty appointment was at the Sloan School of Management at MIT from July 1997 to June 1998. In 1998, Iyengar joined the faculty at the Columbia Business School, starting as an assistant professor. She has been a full professor at Columbia from July 2007 onward and, since November 2009, the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business.
Her principal line of research concerns the psychology of choice, and she has been studying how people perceive and respond to choice since the 1990s. She has authored or coauthored over 30 journal articles. Her research and statements have been cited often in the print media, including by Bloomberg Business Week, CityLab, Money Magazine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Media appearances include The Diane Rehm Show (NPR), Marketplace (APM).
Iyengar was the recipient of the 2001 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers for, as the NSF said, "helping lead to a better understanding of how cultural, individual, and situational dimensions of human decision-making can be used to improve people's lives." In 2011, Iyengar was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. In 2012, she was awarded the Dean's Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School.
== Non-academic works ==
In addition to the journal articles mentioned above, Iyengar has written non-academic articles, including for CNN and Slate, and many book chapters. She has also presented two TED talks: "The Art of Choosing" (2010) and "How to Make Choosing Easier" (2012).
The book she is most known for, The Art of Choosing (2010), explores the mysteries of choice in everyday life. It was listed third in Amazon's top ten books in Business & Investing of 2010 and was shortlisted for the 2010 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
In the Afterword of the 2011 edition of The Art of Choosing, Iyengar distills one aspect of her work explaining and advocating for choice, arguing for people to take responsibility for their lives and not rely on a supposed fate determined by some "greater force out there." She says: "Choice allows us to be architects of our future."
In 2023, Iyengar published her second book titled Think Bigger: How to Innovate.
== Personal life ==
Iyengar is divorced from Garud Iyengar, another Columbia University professor, with whom she has one child.
== See also ==
Choice: judgement and decision-making
Choice overload
Cultural identity
Decision theory
Social psychology
Daniel Kahneman
== References ==
== External links ==
Official website
List of media coverage from official website
Columbia Business School directory entry