Category Personalities

          ‘The diary of Anne Frank’ is a touching record of a young girl’s life in the backdrop of Nazi cruelty. Annie Frank was born to an upper class Jewish family in Germany. They moved to Amsterdam, to escape from the clutches of Adolf Hitler, but Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940. On her thirteenth birthday, Anne was gifted a small book by her father Otto Frank. ‘Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away. We assume that most of them are being murdered’, wrote Anne Frank.

            Three weeks after Anne’s birthday, the family went into hiding. The daily life in the secret shelter, Anne’s deepest thoughts about life, war, and her longing for peace are recorded in the diary. The Frank family and their friends were betrayed, and Anne Frank died in a German concentration camp. Anne Frank’s diary sold over 25 million copies worldwide.

           Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first female prime minister, and served three consecutive terms in office. She was born on 13th October 1925. She went to Oxford University, and then became a research chemist, retraining to become a barrister in 1954. In 1951, she married a businessman, Denis Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher became Conservative Member of Parliament in 1959. In1979, she became prime minister.

           Thatcher introduced many reforms, like privatization of state owned industries, during her first term, which helped the economy grow. Then there was an unpredicted event- a war began over the Falklands Islands, off the coast of South America. The islands were British, and the people living there wanted things to stay that way. But, the government of Argentina claimed, the islands were theirs, and invaded them in April 1982. Britain swung into action, and soon the islands were under British control again. This victory impressed the people in Britain and they elected the government again. Margaret became a very well known international figure. At home, her government introduced huge reforms in all sectors, all of them very controversial. Thatcher’s time as PM was very important in British history. 

       Dr. Chien Shiung Wu was a physicist who performed a historic experiment, overturning what had been considered a fundamental law of nature. In her most famous experiment, announced in 1957, she and her colleagues overthrew a law of symmetry in physics called the principle of conservation of parity that had been considered unshakeable for 30 years.

       Chien-Shiung Wu was born in Shanghai, China, in 1912. She received her Bachelor of Science degree in China in 1934, and came to the United States in 1936. As a nuclear physicist, Dr. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War. She became a professor of physics at Columbia, and later held honorary professorships at several Chinese Universities.

       She did receive numerous honours and awards, Including being the first woman elected president of the American Physical Society. She died in New York in February 1997.

            Rosa Parks is an example of how the actions of one person can start a chain reaction of events that have far-reaching results. Her refusal to give up her seat on a city bus inspired other African-Americans to demand better treatment in all areas of their lives.

            This is what happened to Rosa Parks. When she was asked to give up her seat for a white man, she refused. She was tired after a hard day’s work- and tired of the way her people were being treated.

           Her refusal became a key part of the modern movement for civil rights, and her actions sparked further action, and set an example for many.

        Dorothy Hodgkin studied chemistry at Somerville College, but moved to Cambridge University to work on the development of x-ray crystallography. In 1934, Hodgkin returned to Oxford and carried out research into the structure of penicillin. Hodgkin was eventually able to establish that penicillin consisted of a ring of three carbons and nitrogen. She then went on to determine the structure of the antibiotic cephalosporin C.

         Hodgkin became the first scientist in Britain, to use a computer to analyze the molecular structure of complex chemicals. This enabled her to produce three-dimensional models. In 1948, Hodgkin began her work on vitamin B12. Hodgkin and her team took eight years to determine its structure. Later, she carried out research into the structure of insulin.

        Dorothy won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1964. She was also awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1987. She was a great chemist, and a tolerant lover of people. 

Born and educated in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir was among the first women permitted to complete a programme of study at the Ecole Normale Superieure. Through her lifelong friendship with Sartre, another philosopher, she contributed significantly to the development and expression of a philosophy known as existentialist philosophy.

Simone de Beauvoir is best known as the foremother of contemporary feminism. Born in 1908, she rejected religion and conformity in her teens, and then turned to philosophy, becoming a professor in 1929. Her landmark book ‘The Second Sex’, was published in 1949, and later translated into at least a dozen languages. By the time of her death in 1986, the book had sold more than a million copies in the US alone. Her works of fiction focus on women who take responsibility for themselves by making life-altering decisions. The many volumes of her own autobiography exhibit the application of similar principles.