The Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, M.C., commonly known as Mother Teresa, was a Roman Catholic Religious Sister and missionary of Albanian origin who lived most of her life in India of which, since 1948, she was a citizen. A controversial figure both during her life and after her death, Mother Teresa was widely admired by many for her charitable works, but also widely criticised, particularly for her campaigns against contraception and for substandard conditions in the hospices for which she ...

Elon Musk is a South African-born, Canadian-American business magnate, inventor and investor. He is currently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX and CEO and Chief Product Architect of Tesla Motors. He was an early investor in SpaceX, PayPal, Inc.Tesla Motors, and Zip2, and is widely considered a co-founder of each. He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop.Tesla Motors was co-founded by Martin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, JB Straubel, Ian Wrig...

Sir Patrick Stewart is an English film, television and stage actor, who has had a distinguished career on stage and screen. He is most widely known for his roles as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successor films, as Professor Charles Xavier in the X-Men film series, and for his prolific stage roles with the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 1993, TV Guide named him the best dramatic television actor of the 1980s, and television's sexiest man in the previous y...

Whoopi Goldberg (/ˈhwʊpi/, born Caryn Elaine Johnson; November 13, 1955) is an American comedian, actress, singer-songwriter, political activist, author and talk show host. Although Goldberg made her film debut in the avant-garde ensemble film Citizen: I'm Not Losing My Mind, I'm Giving It Away (1982), her breakthrough role was playing Celie, a mistreated black woman in the Deep South in the period drama film The Color Purple (1985).Goldberg was born in Manhattan and raised in the ...

Alan Turing was a British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, computer scientist and philosopher. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered as the "Father of Theoretical Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. During World War II, Turing worked for the Government Code a...

Kurt Cobain was an American musician and artist, who was best known as the lead singer, guitarist, and primary songwriter of the grunge band Nirvana. Cobain formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic in Aberdeen, Washington, in 1985 and established it as part of the Seattle music scene, having its debut album Bleach released on the independent record label Sub Pop in 1989.During the last years of his life, Cobain struggled with heroin addiction, illness and depression. He also had difficu...

Robert John Downey, Jr. is an American actor who made his screen debut at the age of five, appearing in his father Robert Downey, Sr.'s film Pound. He has appeared in roles associated with the Brat Pack, such as Less Than Zero and Weird Science. Other films he has starred in include Air America, Soapdish, and Natural Born Killers. He starred as Charlie Chaplin, the title character in the 1992 film Chaplin, earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor. Downey has starred in...

Alanis Morissette is a Canadian-American singer-songwriter, guitarist, record producer and actress. She has won 16 Juno Awards and seven Grammy Awards, was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards. Morissette began her career in Canada, and as a teenager recorded two dance-pop albums, Alanis and Now Is the Time, under MCA Records Canada. Her first international album was the rock-influenced Jagged Little Pill, released in 1995. Jagged has sold more than 33 million units globally. Her followin...

Rosa Parks was an African-American civil rights activist, whom the United States Congress called "the first lady of civil rights" and "the mother of the freedom movement". Her birthday, February 4, and the day she was arrested, December 1, have both become Rosa Parks Day, commemorated in the U.S. states of California and Ohio.On December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks refused to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat in the colored section to a whi...

Tommy Douglas was a Scottish-born Canadian social-democratic politician and Baptist minister. He was elected to the Canadian House of Commons in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). He left federal politics to become the Saskatchewan CCF's leader and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961. His government was the first democratic socialist government in North America, and it introduced the continent's first single-payer, universal health ca...

Mark Shuttleworthis a British-South African entrepreneur, and space tourist who became the first citizen of an independent African country to travel to space. Shuttleworth founded Canonical Ltd. and provides leadership for the Ubuntu operating system. He currently lives on the Isle of Man and holds dual citizenship of South Africa and the United Kingdom.Learn more about him in this informative biography!

Anne Murray is a Canadian singer in pop, country, and adult contemporary music whose albums have sold over 54 million copies worldwide as of 2012. Murray was the first Canadian female solo singer to reach No. 1 on the U.S. charts, and also the first to earn a Gold record for one of her signature songs, "Snowbird" (1970). She is often cited as the one who paved the way for other international Canadian success stories such as Alanis Morissette, Nelly Furtado, Céline Dion, Sarah McLachlan, an...