1898 births

Maurits Cornelis Escher (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈmʌurɪt͡s kɔrˈneːlɪs ˈɛʃər]; 17 June 1898 – 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics.
Despite wide popular interest, for most of his life Escher was neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.
His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Donald Coxeter, and the crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.
Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. He traveled in Italy and Spain, sketching buildings, townscapes, architecture and the tilings of the Alhambra and the Mezquita of Cordoba, and became steadily more interested in their mathematical structure.
Escher's art became well known among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture, especially after it was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1966 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Apart from being used in a variety of technical papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. He was one of the major inspirations for Douglas Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Nikolaus Gross (German: Groß) (30 September 1898 – 23 January 1945) was a German Roman Catholic. Gross first worked in crafts requiring skilled labor before becoming a coal miner like his father while joining a range of trade union and political movements. But he soon settled on becoming a journalist before he got married while World War II prompted him to become a resistance fighter in the time of the Third Reich and for his anti-violent rhetoric and approach to opposing Adolf Hitler. He was also one of those implicated and arrested for the assassination attempt on Hitler despite not being involved himself.His cause for sainthood saw it acknowledged that Gross had died in 1945 "in odium fidei" (in hatred of the faith) which allowed for Pope John Paul II to preside over the beatification for the murdered journalist on 7 October 2001 in Saint Peter's Square.

Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known professionally as Bertolt Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a playwright in Munich and moved to Berlin in 1924, where he wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill and began a life-long collaboration with the composer Hanns Eisler. Immersed in Marxist thought during this period, he wrote didactic Lehrstücke and became a leading theoretician of epic theatre (which he later preferred to call "dialectical theatre") and the Verfremdungseffekt.
During the Nazi Germany period, Brecht fled his home country, first to Scandinavia, and during World War II to the United States, where he was surveilled by the FBI. After the war he was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Returning to East Berlin after the war, he established the theatre company Berliner Ensemble with his wife and long-time collaborator, actress Helene Weigel.

René François Ghislain Magritte (French: [ʁəne fʁɑ̃swa ɡilɛ̃ maɡʁit]; 21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.

Hans Josef Maria Globke (10 September 1898 – 13 February 1973) was a German administrative lawyer, who worked in the Prussian and Reich Ministry of the Interior in the Reich, during the Weimar Republic and the time of National Socialism and was later the Under-Secretary of State and Chief of Staff of the German Chancellery in West Germany from 28 October 1953 to 15 October 1963 under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. He is the most prominent example of the continuity of the administrative elites between Nazi Germany and the early West Germany.
In 1936, Globke wrote a legal annotation on the antisemitic Nuremberg Race Laws that did not express any objection to the discrimination against Jews, placing the Nazi Party on a firmer legal ground and setting the path to the Holocaust during World War II. By 1938, Globke had been promoted to Ministerialdirigent in the Office for Jewish Affairs in the Ministry of the Interior, where he produced the Name Change Ordinance, a law that forced Jewish men to take the middle name Israel and Jewish women Sara for easier identification. In 1941, during the Nazi period, he issued another statute that stripped Jews in occupied territories of their statehood and possessions. Globke was identified as the author of an interior ministry report from France, written in racist language, that complained of "coloured blood into Europe" and called for the "elimination" of its "influences" on the gene pool.Globke later had a controversial career as Secretary of State and Chief of Staff of the West German Chancellery. A strident anti-communist, Globke became a powerful éminence grise of the West German government, and was widely regarded as one of the most influential public officials in the government of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Globke had a major role in shaping the course and structure of the state and West Germany's alignment with the United States. He was also an important figure in West Germany's anti-communist policies at the domestic and international level and in the Western intelligence community, and was the German government's main liaison with NATO and other Western intelligence services, especially the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Leif Andreas Larsen (2 January 1898 – 29 April 1978) was a Norwegian telegrapher and politician for the Labour Party.
He was born in Kristiania, and moved to Bærum in 1926. He had an education as a telegrapher, and also took the cand.jur. degree in 1924. He chaired of the Labour Party chapter in Bærum from 1930 to 1935, and was elected to serve in Bærum municipal council in 1932. During the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany he was imprisoned in Bredtveit concentration camp from 30 March 1943, then in Berg concentration camp from 26 July 1944 to 26 March 1945.In May 1945, when Norway was liberated from the five-year-long German occupation, Larsen became deputy mayor of Bærum. After the 1945 Norwegian local elections he became mayor. He was the first mayor of Bærum to represent the Labour Party. He left the municipal council in 1951, but returned for the years 1956 to 1963, when he was again deputy mayor. From 1962 to 1968 he was the director of Telegrafverket, which would change its name to Televerket in 1969 and Telenor in 1995.Larsen was decorated as a Commander of the Order of St. Olav. A road in Sandvika, Leif Larsens vei, has been named after him.

Kirsten Sinding-Larsen (4 August 1898 – 10 December 1978) was a Norwegian architect.She was born in Kristiania (now Oslo), Norway. She was the daughter of colonel Birger Fredrik Sinding-Larsen (1867–1941) and Emilie Rustad (1871–1904). She was a paternal granddaughter of jurist and writer Alfred Sinding-Larsen, niece of physician Christian Magnus Sinding-Larsen, architect Holger Sinding-Larsen and painter Kristofer Sinding-Larsen, first cousin of journalist Henning Sinding-Larsen and grandniece of architect Balthazar Lange.She finished her secondary education in 1912, and studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry (now Oslo National Academy of the Arts) from 1915 to 1917. She worked as an apprentice to architect Sigurd Lunde in Bergen from 1919 to 1921. She worked with architect Håkon Ahlberg in Stockholm from 1923 to 1925 and Tage William-Olsson to 1927. She studied architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology from 1927 to 1929. She was employed by architects Gustav Classon and Wolter Gahn in Stockholm from 1929 to 1932. She returned to Oslo in 1932 and worked for a short time with her uncle architect Holger Sinding-Larsen before establishing her own practice in 1933.During the period 1933–38, she designed a number of homes in Moss and Jeløy in Østfold. Her most notable single work was the design of Sunnaas Hospital at Nesodden in the mid-1950s. She is also remembered as a debater of housing policy.

Clara Bracken McMillen (October 2, 1898 – April 30, 1982) was an American researcher. The wife of Alfred Kinsey, whose nickname for her was "Mac", she contributed to the Kinsey Reports on human sexuality.

Étienne Michelin (4 January 1898 – 27 August 1932) was a French industrialist.
As the eldest son of Édouard Michelin (1859–1940), there was a strong likelihood that he would take over as head of the Michelin tyre company, where he worked as a member of the top management team. His early death ruled out this possibility, however.

Wilhelm Haspel (1898 - 6 January 1952) was a German business executive. He served as the chairman and chief executive officer of Daimler AG from 1942 to 1952.