1853 births

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [ˈvɪnsɛnt ˈʋɪləɱ‿vɑŋ‿ˈɣɔx] ; 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created approximately 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold, symbolic colours, and dramatic, impulsive and highly expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art. Only one of his paintings was known by name to have been sold during his lifetime. Van Gogh became famous after his suicide at age 37, which followed years of poverty and mental illness.
Born into an upper-middle-class family, Van Gogh drew as a child and was serious, quiet and thoughtful, but showed signs of mental instability. As a young man, he worked as an art dealer, often travelling, but became depressed after he was transferred to London. He turned to religion and spent time as a missionary in southern Belgium. Later he drifted into ill-health and solitude. He was keenly aware of modernist trends in art and, while back with his parents, took up painting in 1881. His younger brother, Theo, supported him financially, and the two of them kept up a long correspondence by letter.
Van Gogh's early works consisted of mostly still lifes and depictions of peasant labourers. In 1886, he moved to Paris, where he met members of the artistic avant-garde, including Émile Bernard and Paul Gauguin, who were seeking new paths beyond Impressionism. Frustrated in Paris and inspired by a growing spirit of artistic change and collaboration, in February 1888, Van Gogh moved to Arles in southern France, to establish an artistic retreat and commune. Once there, Van Gogh's art changed. His paintings grew brighter and he turned his attention to the natural world, depicting local olive groves, wheat fields and sunflowers. Van Gogh invited Gauguin to join him in Arles and eagerly anticipated Gauguin's arrival in the fall of 1888.
Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions. Though he worried about his mental stability, he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor when, in a rage, he severed part of his left ear. He spent time in psychiatric hospitals, including a period at Saint-Rémy. After he discharged himself and moved to the Auberge Ravoux in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, he came under the care of the homeopathic doctor Paul Gachet. His depression persisted, and on 27 July 1890, Van Gogh is believed to have shot himself in the chest with a revolver, dying from his injuries two days later.
Van Gogh's art gained critical recognition after his death and his life story captured the public imagination as an emblem of misunderstood genius, due in large part to the efforts of his widowed sister-in-law Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. His bold use of color, expressive line and thick application of paint inspired avant garde artistic groups like the Fauves and German Expressionists in the early 20th century. Van Gogh's work gained widespread critical and commercial success in the following decades, and he has become a lasting icon of the romantic ideal of the tortured artist. Today, Van Gogh's works are among the world's most expensive paintings to have ever sold, and his legacy is honoured by a museum in his name, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which holds the world's largest collection of his paintings and drawings.

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (; 18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect. He derived the Lorentz transformation of the special theory of relativity, as well as the Lorentz force, which describes the combined electric and magnetic forces acting on a charged particle in an electromagnetic field. Lorentz was also responsible for the Lorentz oscillator model, a classical model used to describe the anomalous dispersion observed in dielectric materials when the driving frequency of the electric field was near the resonant frequency, resulting in abnormal refractive indices.
According to the biography published by the Nobel Foundation, "It may well be said that Lorentz was regarded by all theoretical physicists as the world's leading spirit, who completed what was left unfinished by his predecessors and prepared the ground for the fruitful reception of the new ideas based on the quantum theory." He received many other honours and distinctions, including a term as chairman of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, the forerunner of UNESCO, between 1925 and 1928.

Samuel-Alexandre Rousseau (Neuve-Maison, 11 June 1853 - Paris, 1 October 1904) was a French composer.

Karl Hugo Freiherr von Weizsäcker (25 February 1853 – 2 February 1926) was a German politician who served as Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg, and a member of the prominent Weizsäcker family.

Hans Horst Meyer (17 March 1853 – 6 October 1939) was a German pharmacologist. He studied medicine and did research in pharmacology. The Meyer-Overton hypothesis on the mode of action on general anaesthetics is partially named after him. He also discovered the importance of glucuronic acid as a reaction partner for drugs, and the mode of action of tetanus toxin on the body.

Karl Höchberg (8 September 1853 – 21 June 1885) was a German social-reformist writer, publisher and economist, of Jewish background, who acted under the pseudonyms Dr. Ludwig Richter and R.F. Seifert.
In 1876, he became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP). From 1877 to 1878, he was responsible for editing the Zukunft ("Future") magazine. He was in exile in Switzerland from 1878 onwards, first to avoid conscription to the Prussian military, and then due to the anti-socialist laws. Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky were his secretaries and pupils in Zurich. Afterwards, between 1879 and 1881, he was editor of the Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik ("Yearbook for Social Science and Social Politics").

Charles Edmond Alfred Riquier (19 November 1853, Amiens – 17 January 1929, Caen) was a French mathematician.Riquier matriculated in 1873 at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) where he received his agrégé in mathematics in 1876. He taught from 1876 to 1878 at the Lycée de Brest and then from 1878 to 1886 at the Lycée de Caen and from 1886 to 1924 at the Université de Caen, where he retired as a professor emeritus.
After a brief leave of absence from the Lycée de Caen, Riquier received his doctorate in mathematics in 1886 from ENS at Paris with dissertation Extension à l’hyperespace de la méthode de M. Carl Neumann pour la résolution de problèmes relatifs aux fonctions de variables réelles à laplacien nul. His thesis committee consisted of Hermite (as chair), Darboux, and Picard.In 1910 he was awarded the Poncelet Prize. In 1920 he was elected to the French Academy of Sciences as the successor to Hieronymus Zeuthen. (Eugène Fabry was elected Riquier's successor in 1931.)
Riquier, Maurice Janet, Joseph Miller Thomas, Joseph Fels Ritt, and Ellis Kolchin were among the greatest pioneers of differential algebra and symbolic computation for systems of partial differential equations.

Léon-Gervais-Marie Maquenne (2 December 1853 – 10 January 1925) was a French chemist and plant physiologist born in Paris.
From 1871 he worked in the laboratory of agricultural chemistry at the Ecole d'agriculture in Grignon. Here, he was a student of Pierre Paul Dehérain (1830-1902). In 1883 he became préparateur at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, where from 1885 to 1898 he served as an assistant to the chair of Physiologie végétale. In 1898 he succeeded Georges Ville (1824-1897) as chair of Physique végétale, a position he held on to until 1925. In 1904 he became a member of the Académie des sciences.
Among Maquenne's contributions was research involving the chemical make-up of sugar alcohols. He was able to resolve the chemical constitution of inositol and demonstrated it to be a hexahydroxycyclohexane.He is credited with invention of the so-called "Maquenne block", an apparatus used for determining the melting point of chemical compounds.

Stéphane Leduc (1 November 1853 – 8 March 1939) was a French biologist who sought to contribute to understanding of the chemical and physical mechanisms of life. He was a scientist in the fledgling field of synthetic biology, particularly in relation to diffusion and osmosis. He was a professor at the École de Médecine de Nantes and worked on osmotic crystallisation and the physiological effects of electric current. He was an Officier de la Légion d'honneur.

Félix de Lapersonne (29 September 1853, Toulouse – 4 July 1937) was a French ophthalmologist.
Born in Toulouse, he served as interne and chef de clinique (i.e. residency) under Photinos Panas (1832–1903) in the ophthalmology clinic at the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. In 1890 he was appointed professor of ophthalmology to the faculty at Lille, serving as dean until 1901. Afterwards, he returned to Paris, where he worked as professor of clinical ophthalmology. He was a member of the Académie de Médecine, and a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.As an ophthalmologist, Lapersonne made contributions in his investigations of syphilitic optic neuritis, and ophthalmoneuromyelitis (Devic's disease). "De Lapersonne's capsulo-iridotome", a punch forceps used in eye surgery, is named after him.