Articles with PLWABN identifiers

Mirra Alfassa (21 February 1878 – 17 November 1973), known to her followers as The Mother or La Mère, was a French-Indian spiritual guru, occultist and yoga teacher, and a collaborator of Sri Aurobindo, who considered her to be of equal yogic stature to him and called her by the name "The Mother". She founded the Sri Aurobindo Ashram and established the town of Auroville; she was influential on the subject of Integral Yoga.
Mirra Alfassa (Mother) was born in Paris in 1878 to a Sephardi Jewish bourgeois family. In her youth, she traveled to Algeria to practice occultism along with Max Théon. After returning, while living in Paris, she guided a group of spiritual seekers. In 1914, she traveled to Pondicherry, India and met Sri Aurobindo and found in him "the dark Asiatic figure" of whom she had visions and called him Krishna. During this first visit, she helped publish a French version of the periodical Arya, which serialized most of Sri Aurobindo's post-political prose writings.
During the First World war she was obliged to leave Pondicherry. After a 4-year stay in Japan, in 1920 she returned to Pondicherry. Gradually, as more and more people joined her and Sri Aurobindo, she organised and developed Sri Aurobindo Ashram. In 1943, she started a school in the ashram and in 1968 established Auroville, an experimental township dedicated to human unity and evolution. She died on 17 November 1973 in Pondicherry.
Satprem, who was one of her followers, captured the last thirty years of Alfassa's life in the 13-volume work, Mother's Agenda.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (; German pronunciation: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁœntɡən] ; 27 March 1845 – 10 February 1923) was a German mechanical engineer and physicist, who, on 8 November 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range known as X-rays or Röntgen rays, an achievement that earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. In honour of Röntgen's accomplishments, in 2004 the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) named element 111, roentgenium, a radioactive element with multiple unstable isotopes, after him. The unit of measurement roentgen was also named after him.

George Frederic Watts (23 February 1817 – 1 July 1904) was a British painter and sculptor associated with the Symbolist movement. He said "I paint ideas, not things." Watts became famous in his lifetime for his allegorical works, such as Hope and Love and Life. These paintings were intended to form part of an epic symbolic cycle called the "House of Life", in which the emotions and aspirations of life would all be represented in a universal symbolic language.

Sir Isaac Pitman (4 January 1813 – 22 January 1897) was a teacher of the English language who developed the most widely used system of shorthand, known now as Pitman shorthand. He first proposed this in Stenographic Soundhand in 1837. He was also the vice-president of the Vegetarian Society. Pitman was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1894.

Otto Moritz Walter Model (IPA: [ˈmoːdəl]; 24 January 1891 – 21 April 1945) was a German Generalfeldmarschall during World War II. Although he was a hard-driving, aggressive panzer commander early in the war, Model became best known as a practitioner of defensive warfare. His relative success as commander of the Ninth Army in the battles of 1941–1942 determined his future career path.
Model first came to Hitler's attention before World War II, but their relationship did not become especially close until 1942. His tenacious style of fighting and loyalty to the Nazi regime won him plaudits from Hitler, who considered him one of his best field commanders and repeatedly sent him to salvage apparently desperate situations on the Eastern Front as commander of Army Group North, Army Group North Ukraine and
Army Group Centre.
In August 1944 Model was sent to the Western Front as commander of OB West and Army Group B. His relationship with Hitler broke down by the end of the war after the German defeat at the Battle of the Bulge. In the aftermath of the defeat of Army Group B and its encirclement in the Ruhr Pocket, Model took his own life on 21 April 1945.

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.

Charles-Valentin Alkan (French: [ʃaʁl valɑ̃tɛ̃ alkɑ̃]; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys (Op. 39). The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 4–7) and Concerto for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 8–10), which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity. Alkan emerged from self-imposed retirement in the 1870s to give a series of recitals that were attended by a new generation of French musicians.
Alkan's attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He was the first composer to incorporate Jewish melodies in art music. Fluent in Hebrew and Greek, he devoted much time to a complete new translation of the Bible into French. This work, like many of his musical compositions, is now lost. Alkan never married, but his presumed son Élie-Miriam Delaborde was, like Alkan, a virtuoso performer on both the piano and the pedal piano, and edited a number of the elder composer's works.
Following his death (which according to persistent but unfounded legend was caused by a falling bookcase), Alkan's music became neglected, supported by only a few musicians including Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri and Kaikhosru Sorabji. From the late 1960s onwards, led by Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith, many pianists have recorded his music and brought it back into the repertoire.

René Crevel (French: [kʁəvɛl]; 10 August 1900 – 18 June 1935) was a French writer involved with the surrealist movement.

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.

Irène Joliot-Curie (French: [iʁɛn ʒɔljo kyʁi] ; née Curie; 12 September 1897 – 17 March 1956) was a French chemist, physicist and politician, the elder daughter of Pierre Curie and Marie Skłodowska–Curie, and the wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie. Jointly with her husband, Joliot-Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, while adding to the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. This made the Curies the family with the most Nobel laureates to date. In addition to the following honours in the family: the first ever woman Nobel Prize laureate, the first ever person and, to this day, only woman double Nobel Prize laureate, the sole person to this day with two Nobel Prizes in different sciences, thanks to her mother.
Her mother Marie Skłodowska–Curie and herself also form the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes whilst Pierre and Irène Curie form the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes by the same occasion, whilst there are 6 father-son pairs who have won Nobel Prizes by comparison.She was also one of the first three women to be a member of a French government, becoming undersecretary for Scientific Research under the Popular Front in 1936. Both children of the Joliot-Curies, Hélène and Pierre, are also prominent scientists.In 1945, she was one of the six commissioners of the new French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) created by de Gaulle and the Provisional Government of the French Republic. She died in Paris on 17 March 1956 from an acute leukemia linked to her exposure to polonium and X-rays.