Renzo Shamey

• PhD, CCol, FSDC
• CIBA Professor at North Carolina State University

Although black is an important color, the perception of black objects has not been systematically examined. The purpose of this work was to determine the influence of hue on the perception of preferred blackness. A set of 20 glossy low chroma Munsell sheets were purchased comprising a complete hue circle with a value and chroma of two and one, resp...

Reported are results of an experiment involving perceptual assessment of very large color differences using samples representing approximate mean Hering opponent generic unique hues (guHs) based on subject selections, intermediate hues (iHs) using Munsell samples intermediate between guHs, and pairings of both guHs and iHs with a neutral gray. Samp...

Presented are intra- and inter-observer variability data comparing the unique-hue (UH) selections of sets of males and females, using two different visual experimental procedures incorporating Munsell color chips of varying hue but identical chroma and value. Although 34 of the 40 Munsell hue chips were selected by at least one observer as a UH, se...

The aim of this study was twofold, first to determine the effect of field view size and second of illumination conditions on the selection of unique hue samples (UHs: R, Y, G & B) from two rotatable trays, each containing forty highly chromatic Natural Color System (NCS) samples, on one tray corresponding to 1.4(o) and on the other to 5.7(o) field...

Two psychophysical experiments were conducted at North Carolina State University (NCSU) and Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) to obtain replicated perceived saturation data from color normal observers on the order of one unit of saturation. The same 37 Munsell sample sheets, including up to four references that had similar perceived saturatio...

Plastics are commonly produced and sold in pellet form due to their superior handling characteristics. However, due to their small size, it is often impractical, if not unfeasible, to determine the transmittance of a single pellet instrumentally. Moreover, such measurements may be highly variable. Therefore, translucent films of certain thickness,...

Color gradients constitute an important component in the evaluation of the color quality of multicolored patterns that contain color transitions. A two-part psychophysical study was designed and employed to test the appearance of a set of hue-, chroma-, or lightness-based color gradients. The influence of several parameters on the visual determinat...

Publisher Description This fully revised and expanded 2nd edition provides a single authoritative resource describing the concepts of color and the application of color science across research and industry. Significant changes for the 2nd edition include: New and expanded sections on color engineering More entries on fundamental concepts of colo...

The present study investigated whether the clothing color of female stimuli and the perceived attractiveness judgments of Caucasian and Chinese male observers for own-and other-ethnicity are correlated. Results indicate that Caucasian observers evaluated stimuli in white and black as the most attractive while giving low ratings for stimuli in orang...

The application of image retrieval techniques in industrial settings aims at rapid and accurate retrieval of the same or similar products from an archive to facilitate the production process. Content-based image retrieval and its applications on fabrics focused on the appearance differences and ignored the delicate differences, thus the retrieval f...

The objectives of this study were two‐fold; to determine how variations in practical illuminance range (from ~300 to ~2300 lx) affect the perception of suprathreshold small color differences for a range of object stimuli across the color space, and to investigate the role of variations in luminance on intra‐ and inter‐observer variability in repeat...

Azurite blue (shi qin, 石青) was one of the most important colors in the Qing (清) dynasty; however, most people, even those familiar with color description, may find it difficult to describe its exact appearance. To determine and offer a more precise description of azurite blue, nine formal items of clothing, including three ceremonial robes of emper...

Azurite blue (shi qin, 石青) was one of the most important colors in the Qing (清) dynasty; however, most people, even those familiar with color description, may find it difficult to describe its exact appearance. To determine and offer a more precise description of azurite blue, nine formal items of clothing, including three ceremonial robes of emper...

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the historical development of color science, told through the stories of more than 90 of the most prominent figures in the field and their contributions. The text comprises an extensive set of biographical essays about pioneering scientists, describing their most significant achievements and explaini...

Thomas Diedrich Robert Luther was born on January 2, 1868, in Moscow to German parents. His father Alexander was a lawyer. Among his direct ancestors was Hans Luther (1492–1558), a late cousin of the reformer Martin Luther. From 1885 to 1889, he studied chemistry at the University of Dorpat in Russia.

Calvin Samuel McCamy was an optical scientist who contributed greatly to color technology and standardization, most notably in useful monographs, test hardware and methodologies, and closed-form approximations. Calvin McCamy was born on September 22, 1924 in St. Joseph, MO.

Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, ابن الهیثم (Latinized name: Alhazen), was born in Basra (in current Iraq) in 965 AD, but details of his ancestry remain uncertain. He made important discoveries in astronomy, mathematics, and optics. He died in Cairo in 1040.

Dorothy Nickerson (August 5, 1900–April 25, 1985) was an American color scientist and technologist who made important contributions in the fields of color quality control, technical use of colorimetry, the relationship between color stimuli and color perceptions, standardization of light sources, color tolerance specification, and others.

Faber Bernard Birren was an American author, historian and consultant on color theory [1]. He was born in Chicago, Illinois, on September 11, 1900, to artistic parents, Joseph P. Birren, a successful landscape painter and a native of Luxembourg, and Crescentia (Lang) Birren, who was a skilled pianist and had two siblings. He is credited as the orig...

Gunter Wyszecki was a German–Canadian mathematician/physicist who made important contributions to the fields of colorimetry, color discrimination, color order, and color vision (Robertson in Necrology of G. Wyszecki AIC Newslett. 3:18–20, 1986). He was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, Germany (today Sovetsk, Russia), in 1925. He attended the Technisch...

The philosopher and mathematician known as Plato lived in Classical Greece and was an influential figure of the Classical Greek period. Primary sources available from the period are rare, and thus our understanding of Plato’s life is based on constructions by historians and scholars from scant sources that are available. It is estimated that Plato...

Richter was born on August 7, 1905, in Dresden, Germany, where he studied technical physics under Robert Luther at the Technical University from 1924 to 1933. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was Goethe’s Farbenlehre as related to scientific problems [1]. In 1927, as an assistant in the department of color research of the German Institute o...

David Hubel was born on February 27, 1926 in Windsor, Ontario, Canada to American parents. His father was a chemical engineer. The family moved to Montreal where Hubel attended public schools and privately experimented with chemistry and participated in his father’s hobby of photography.

William de Wiveleslie Abney was an English scientist who made significant contributions to several fields of science including photography and vision science. He was a pioneering photographer with an interest in chemistry and was able to use these skills to advance knowledge in other fields that interested him, including astronomy.

Harry Helson was an American psychologist and professor of psychology (Bevan in Harry Helson: 1898–1977. Am. J. Psychol. 92(1):153–160, 1979) who is best known for his adaptation-level theory. He was born on November 9, 1898, in Chelsea, Massachusetts in USA and died on October 13, 1977, in Berkeley, USA (Bevan in Harry Helson: 1898–1977 Am. J. Psy...

Stanley Smith Stevens was an American experimental psychologist perhaps best known in the world of color science for introducing the psychophysical power law and for collecting data on brightness perception as a function of adaptation. He was even more well known in the general field of experimental psychology and psychophysics for many accomplishm...

Philipp Otto Runge was born on July 23, 1777, the ninth of 11 children of a tradesman and cargo shipowner and his wife in Wolgast, Pomerania, on the Baltic Sea, then under Swedish rule. As a child, he was frequently ill with tuberculosis, being often educated at home. In 1795, he began a commercial apprenticeship at his older brother Daniel’s firm...

Kamal al-Din Hasan ibn Ali ibn Hasan al-Farisi, کمال الدین فارسی, was born in 1267 in Iran. The exact location of his birth is uncertain with Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan listed as possible locations. It is known that he traveled to these cities and studied with a number of scholars of the time. The exact details of his ancestry, however, are also u...

Walter Stanley Stiles, OBE, FRS, was a physicist and mathematician who made significant contributions to the field of colorimetry and visual science. He was born on June 15, 1901, in London to Elizabeth Catherine and Walter Stiles, and due to the abundance of this family forename, W. S. Stiles was known as “Stanley” throughout his life to family an...

Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Hasan al-Tusi, نصیر الدین طوسی, usually known as Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, or Tusi, was born in Tus (today Iran) in 1201. During his life, he worked in Maragha (Iran) and Baghdad (Iraq). His influence reaches into many fields [1]. Tusi died in Baghdad (Iraq) in 1274.

James Clerk Maxwell was born on June 13, 1831, in Edinburgh, Scotland, to a family of comfortable means, and was the only child of his parents. He is considered a pioneer in several fields of science. Maxwell contributed greatly to the field of optics and the study of color vision and helped lay the foundations for practical color photography.

Cohen was born in Brookline, M.A on July 21, 1921. He attended grade and high schools in Brookline and obtained an undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Chicago. He moved on to Cornell University where he got involved in the psychophysics of color. In 1945, he graduated with a Ph.D. in psychology.

Russell De Valois was born on December 14, 1926 in Ames, IA, to missionary parents with whom he spent much of his early years in India. In 1947, he received a degree in zoology and physiology at Oberlin College in Ohio and in 1948 an MA degree in psychology. At Oberlin, he also was a player and for a year the coach of the soccer team.

The classic Greek philosopher known as Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece to a father who was the physician to the local king. At 18 years of age, he joined philosopher Plato’s Academy in Athens where he stayed until Plato’s death in 347 BCE. At that time, the ruler of Greece, Philip II of Macedon, requested him to tutor his son Alexa...

Ernst Waldfried Josef Wenzel Mach was born on 18 February 1838 in Chrlice, near Brno, currently in the Czech Republic. While Mach was a talented child, he had difficulties with classical languages, and his initial schooling was not trouble free. He began his schooling at the age of nine at a gymnasium, but he did not complete the curriculum.

William Albert Hugh Rushton was a British neurophysiologist who made important contributions to our understanding of color vision and perception. He is perhaps best known now for his development of the principle of univariance.

Johann Friedrich Wilhelm von Bezold was born on June 21, 1837, in München where his father was a minister of state in the Kingdom of Bavaria. He studied natural sciences in München and Göttingen from 1856 to 1860. Already as a child, he was interested in painting, and during his studies at the University of Göttingen, he attended lectures in optics...

Norman Macbeth Sr. was a pioneer in the art and science of illumination engineering and color and best known for inventing the Macbeth Illuminometer system in 1915 [Macbeth in Color identifying apparatus, US Patent 1408109A, 1922, 1]. He was a British citizen born in 1873 in Canada and lived in New York, USA.

Edwin Land was born on May 7, 1909, in Bridgeport, CT, to Harry and Martha Land. He was educated at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich, CT, where he graduated with honors. He spent one year at Harvard University studying chemistry, dropped out and moved to New York City. He educated himself at the New York Public Library and experimented after hours a...

Arthur Cobb Hardy was born on July 24, 1895, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a physicist best known for his work with spectrometers and color analyzers. He co-authored a classic optics book with Fred H. Perrin entitled The Principles of Optics. After WWI Hardy worked at Kodak Research Labs and then transferred to Massachusetts Institute of Tech...

Henry Hemmendinger, an eminent authority in color science and standardization, was a pioneer in computer-directed colorant formulation and also was for many years the sole source of transfer standards for aligning the measurements of US spectrophotometers nationwide.

Jan Evangelista Purkyně was born sometime between December 17 and December 19, 1787, in the castle in Libochovice near Litomeřice, Bohemia (then part of the Austrian monarchy), now in the Czech Republic. Purkyně died on July 28, 1869.

Fred Wallace Billmeyer, Jr., was an American chemist who contributed through industrial research and academia to the developing fields of polymer chemistry and color science during the second half of the twentieth century.

Jonas Ferdinand Gabriel Lippmann was a French inventor and physicist (born in Luxembourg) who created the first color photographs using what was certainly the first spectral imaging system.

Karl Ewald Konstantin Hering was born on August 5, 1834, in Alt-Gersdorf in Saxony, son of a Lutheran pastor and his wife. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, obtaining an MD degree in 1860. For the next five years, he practiced medicine in Leipzig and pursued personal interests in vision on the side, publishing five Beiträge zur Phys...

Yoshinobu Nayatani was a Japanese color scientist who made significant contributions to the development of color appearance models and contributed diligently to the color research community. He was born in 1927 and passed away on May 29, 2009, in Hyogo prefecture in Japan [1].

George Palmer, also known as “George Giros de Gentilly named Palmer,” was an English dye chemist, color theorist, inventor, and soldier. According to his obituary, Palmer was born ca. 1746 on a ship to English Catholic parents. Due to the eighteenth-century restrictions on activities of English Catholics, Palmer lived a double life between England...

Ignaz Schiffermüller was born on November 2, 1727 in Hellmonsödt near Linz in Austria and was educated in Linz. When 19 he joined the Jesuit order and studied theology in Wien, as well as botany, ornithology, and mineralogy. In 1759, he became a lecturer at the Theresianum Institute in Wien, a private boarding school founded in 1746, where he remai...

John Dalton was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist who is best known for his work in the development of modern atomic theory and his research into color blindness.

W. David Wright was a British physicist and color scientist who made very important contributions to colorimetry and visual science. In fact, he is generally regarded as one of the fathers of colorimetry as it is practiced today. David Wright was born on July 6, 1906, in England and died on June 4, 1997, in England.

Robert M. Boynton was born on October 28, 1924, in Evanston, IL. He attended Amherst College in Massachusetts where he received an undergraduate degree. At Brown University in Providence, RI, he received in 1952 his Ph.D. degree in psychology. Soon after, he became an assistant professor of psychology at Rochester University, NY where, in 1963, he...

Johannes von Kries was a German physiological psychologist, or what might now be called a neuroscientist, and student of Helmholtz. In color science, he is known as the father of chromatic adaptation models for his work on the coefficient theory of adaptation.

Robert Boyle was born on January 25, 1627, in Lismore Castle in Ireland, his father being the first Earl of Cork, his mother Catharine Fenton, the daughter of a secretary of state in Ireland. He was educated at home and when he was eight years old and after the death of his mother, he went to Eton College and then spent extended stays in France, It...

C. James Bartleson was an American color scientist who made very important contributions to colorimetry and visual science.

Tobias Mayer, born February 17, 1723 in Marbach, Germany, a mathematician, astronomer, cartographer, and physicist, was the only child of a fountain builder and his wife. Mayer was 10-years-old when his father passed away and he grew up in impoverished circumstances in the nearby city of Esslingen, spending some years in an orphanage.

Erwin Schrödinger was born in Erdberg, Austria, to a father of Austrian and a mother of mixed Austrian-English descent. He studied physics in Vienna under Franz Exner, whose assistant he became in 1911. He was influenced early by the writings of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer resulting, among other things, in his interest in color theor...

Matthew Luckiesh (pronounced loo’kish) [Funk in The Literary Digest “What’s the Name, Please?”, Funk & Wagnalls, 1936, 1] was an American physicist who made significant contributions to the field of colorimetry. In his day, he was known as the “Father of the Science of Seeing” [Covington in A Man from Maquoketa—A Biography of Matthew Luckiesh, Grap...

Isaac Newton was an English physicist and mathematician, who made seminal contributions to several domains of science, and was considered a leading scientist of his era and one of the most influential scientists of all time. He was born prematurely on December 25, 1642, in Lincolnshire.

Little is known about the life of Moses Harris, who was born on April 15, 1730, in England. Like Ignaz Schiffermüller, Harris was an entomologist and engraver who engraved his own copperplate illustrations. He was introduced at an early age to the study of insects by his uncle who was a member of the Society of Aurelians, a group of people in Londo...

Abu ‘Ali al-Husayn ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Sina, ابوعلئ ابن سینا (Latinized name: Avicenna), was a Persian polymath and probably the most influential natural philosopher in Islamic history [1]. He was born near Bukhara (present-day Uzbekistan) in 980. His mother, Sitāra, was from Bukhara; and his father, Abdullāh, was an Ismaili scholar from Balkh (pres...

Arthur Peter König was born in Krefeld, Germany on September 13, 1856. His father was a teacher; his mother died when he was 2 years old, and he was mainly raised by an aunt. König suffered from birth from congenital kyphosis and was physically handicapped. However, he was an excellent pupil. After graduating from gymnasium, he began a merchant’s a...

Christine Ladd was born on December 1, 1847 in Windsor, CT. Her father Eliphalet Ladd and her mother Augusta Niles both came from distinguished New England families. Ladd attended Wesleyan Academy for two years, graduating in 1865. She then entered Vassar College from which she graduated in 1869.

Arnt Kohlrausch was born on October 30, 1884, in Hannover, Germany, a member of an extended family of scientists from the early nineteenth century to the present. His father was professor of electrical technology at the Technical College of Hannover. Arnt Kohlrausch studied medicine at the universities of Marburg, München, and Rostock, graduating i...

Jacob Christoph Le Blon was born on May 2, 1667, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, a descendant of Huguenots fleeing France in 1576, who had settled there. His maternal grandmother was a daughter of the artist and engraver Matthaeus Merian the Elder (1593–1650). Showing an early interest in engraving and painting he had, sometime between 1696 and 1702...

It is generally assumed that Dietrich (Theodoric) was from and active in Freiberg in Saxony, Germany. However, it is known that he also spent a considerable amount of time elsewhere in Europe including France and Italy.

Munsell was born on January 6, 1858, in Boston MA where his father was in the piano business. After high school, he attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston. In 1879, he studied Ogden Rood’s influential book Modern Chromatics. In 1881, he was named an instructor and later a lecturer at this school, positions he held for 25 years. He w...

Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz was born on August 31, 1821, in Potsdam near Berlin, Germany, into a well-educated family. His father, an educator, taught him the classical languages and introduced him to philosophy. Helmholtz studied medicine in Berlin under physiologist Johannes Müller, at the same time attending lectures in physics and mathematics....

Brian Hewson Crawford was a British physicist who made important contributions to the science of vision, colorimetry, lighting, and color rendering. He was born on March 26, 1906, in Hornsey, London, to Andrew Crawford and Marian Hewson (Fairweather) Crawford. He was married to Margarethe Bettina “Marga” Nagel, who was a native German from Darmstad...

Max Saltzman was a chemist, educator, and scholar. As a steadfast member of the color community in the USA, he often mentored colleagues with thoughtful and generous encouragement, resulting in him having a profound influence in the field of color science in both industry and the art community.

Tarow Indow was born in Tokyo, Japan, on August 22, 1923. He attended Keio University where he obtained a Ph.D. degree in psychology in 1959, together with an annual award for excellence. While working on his thesis, he had an opportunity to spend some time at Princeton University where he was introduced to the concept of multi-dimensional scaling,...

Ralph Merrill Evans was born in 1908 in Massachusetts. After schooling at the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, he attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology from which he graduated in 1928 with a B.S. degree in optics and photography. He worked briefly for Kodak Corporation, moving on to Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in New York in 192...

Isaac Hahn Godlove was born on June 13, 1892, in St. Louis, MO to Louis and Lillie Godlove. His father was a photographer working for the J. C. Strauss Studio in St. Louis. I. H. Godlove, one of the four children, studied at Washington University of St. Louis where he received a B.S. degree in 1914 and an M.A. degree a year later.

Abu Sa’d al-’Ala’ ibn Sahl, ابن سهل, (c. 940–1000 AD) lived and worked as a geometer at the Abbasid court in Baghdad. The exact details of his biography and ancestry are unknown. He wrote important works on geometric optics, mathematics, and astronomy [1].

Leo Maurice Hurvich was born in Malden, Massachusetts on September 11, 1910. He obtained his undergraduate and doctoral degrees (1936) from Harvard University. He remained at Harvard as a researcher until 1947, investigating distance perception with his future wife Dorothea Jameson and others, a subject of particular interest during the Second Worl...

Dorothea Jameson was born November 16, 1920, in Newton, M.A. Her father was educated in electrical engineering as well as law. Her mother taught her to believe she could achieve whatever she wanted to do. Her early education was in small private schools for girls. She then attended Wellesley College and also attended by her older sister. She began...

The first, hand-illuminated, color circle appeared in public in 1708 in a Dutch edition of a popular French small book on miniature painting, Traité de la mignature, first published in 1673 simultaneously in Paris and Rouen.

Abu’l-Walid Muhammad bin Ahmad Ibn Rushd, ابن رشد, (Latinized name: Averroes) was born in Córdoba (Spain) to a family with a long and respected tradition of legal and public service in 1126. His father Abu al-Qasim was the chief judge of Córdoba [1]. Ibn Rushd died in Marrakech (Morocco) in the year 1198 AD, and his body was returned to Córdoba for...

Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, and teacher, and one of the main pedagogical forces behind the Bauhaus in its earliest phase. Itten was born in Südern-Linden (Switzerland) on November 11, 1888. His 1961 book The Art of Color presented color theory in a simplified form that largely excluded scientific developments from th...

Deane Brewster Judd was an American physicist who contributed to the fields of colorimetry, color discrimination, color order, and color vision. Born in South Hadley Falls, Massachusetts on November 15, 1900, he attended Ohio State University and received an A.B. in 1922 and an M.A. in 1923 (https://www.osa.org/en-us/history/biographies/deane-b–jud...

Hugh R. Davidson is best known for his work in computer color matching and for his educational seminars, but he also has many accomplishments in the areas of instrumental developments for industrial color control, color differences, and color-order spacings.

Abu-Rayhan al-Biruni, ابوریحان بیرونی, was a Muslim scholar and a Persian polymath. He was born in the outer district of Kath, the capital of the Afrighid dynasty of Khwarezm (modern-day Uzbekistan) in 973. Details of his ancestry remain uncertain. He died in Ghazni (modern-day Afghanistan) in 1048 and is buried there.

René du Perron Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye en Touraine, Indre-et-Loire, (now called Descartes in his honor) in France, was an important philosopher and mathematician, and is dubbed the father of modern philosophy. Descartes was born into the noblesse de robe, whose members contributed considerably to intellectual life in the se...

Paul Kubelka was a Czechoslovakian chemical engineer whose many accomplishments include a theory of light absorption and scattering by a layer of paint. Kubelka was born in 1900 to Austrian parents in Czechoslovakia.

Ralph A. Stanziola, a consultant and teacher of color technology, was born in Philadelphia in 1931, received his B.S. degree in Chemistry from the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Philadelphia University), and resided most of his life in New Jersey. In his early years, at the Research and Technical Service for the Dyes Department o...

Claudius Ptolemy, known in Arabic as Batlamyus, بطلمیوس, was one of the most influential scientists of his time who made significant contributions to several fields including mathematics, geography, astronomy, astrology, and literature. His name is a mixture of the Greek Egyptian “Ptolemy” and the Roman “Claudius.” The name Claudius indicates he li...

Ogden Nicholas Rood was an American physicist, best known for his work in color theory. He was a descendant of Scottish immigrants arriving in America in the seventeenth century and was born on February 3, 1831, in Danbury, CT. His father was an ordained minister [Rood in Modern chromatics with application to art and industry, Appleton & Co, New Yo...

Aron Sigfrid Forsius was a mathematician, astronomer, and clergyman of Finnish descent. He moved to Sweden and was named Royal Astronomer having exclusive rights to issue almanacs and cast horoscopes.

Michel-Eugène Chevreul was one of the most important chemists of nineteenth century in France. He also made significant contributions to the domain of color science. He was born on August 31, 1786, in Angers, France, to a family of surgeons and his father, Michel, was a well-known physician and the dean of the local medical school (Chisholm in Chev...

Eugene Allen was born on November 7, 1916, in Newark, NJ to Celia and Mitchell Kaplan. He attended Columbia College in New York, receiving a bachelor’s degree. He transferred to Stevens Institute of Technology where in 1944 he received a master’s degree in mathematics while working at the military research facility Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, NJ.

Joseph Lovibond was a British chemist, brewer, and is credited with inventing the commercial colorimetry, the Lovibond Tintometer.

Frederic Eugene Ives was an American inventor and scientist who made significant contributions to the field of colorimetry.

Josef Albers was born on March 19, 1888, into a Roman Catholic family of craftsmen in the industrial Ruhr district of Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany [1]. He was the only child of a house painter, Lorenz Albers. His Westphalian family tradition was crafts, blacksmiths on his mother’s side, carpenters, and handymen on his father’s side.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born on August 28, 1749, in Frankfurt, Germany, to a lawyer and the daughter of the mayor of Frankfurt. He studied law in Leipzig and Strasbourg (France). Based on his early fame as a poet and novelist, Goethe, at age 26, was invited by the 18-year-old Duke of Sachsen-Weimar to join his court as an advisor. He moved t...

D’Aguilon was born on January 15, 1567, in Brussels, Belgium, during the time of the revolution of the Flemish people against the Spanish occupation. His father, Pedro d’Aguillòn, was from an aristocratic family in Salamanca, Spain, and his mother, Anna Pels, was a Flemish woman from Brussels. Pedro was secretary to Phillip II of Spain during his s...

Johann Heinrich Lambert was born on August 26, 1728 in the city of Mulhouse, then an enclave of Switzerland (now part of France). He was largely self-educated, going to school only until age 12. By age 17 he assumed the job of secretary to a newspaper publisher in nearby Basel, Switzerland. He also began to work as a private tutor. At age 20 he bec...

Thomas Young was an English polymath with interests ranging from physics to Egyptology. He was born in 1773, in Somerset, England into a large Quaker family (The Quakers are a group of Christians who use no scripture and believe in great simplicity and that truth is continuously revealed directly to individuals from God. They were formed in England...

Roger Bacon was born ca. 1214 near Ilchester in Somerset, England, into a family of landowners. Details and dates of his biography remain quite uncertain with opinions often varying widely. He spent eight years at Oxford University, where he received an advanced degree. It is likely that one of his professors at the time was Robert Grossteste who h...

Hermann Gunther Grassmann was born on April 15, 1809, in Stettin in Pomerania, near the Baltic Sea (today Szczecin in Poland), the third of 11 children of a pastor and high school mathematics teacher and his wife. After passing through high school, Grassmann moved to Berlin to study theology, with later addition of mathematics and sciences. In 1844...

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in Danzig (today Gdańsk, Poland) on February 22, 1788. Both his parents were descendants of wealthy German families, active in trade. Their business was moved to Hamburg, and Arthur’s father died soon after. His mother, an author of books, moved in 1805 to Weimar where she continued her writing career and hosted a liter...

Gustav Theodor Fechner was a German experimental psychologist and philosopher. He is also considered by many to be the father of modern psychophysics. Initially, Fechner took a degree in medicine and worked in that area for a while. During that time, he began publishing a series of humorous and satirical articles and poems lampooning the medical pr...