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🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Military history 🔗 Death 🔗 Women 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Israel 🔗 Israel Palestine Collaboration 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Military history/Post-Cold War 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography 🔗 Crime and Criminal Biography/Serial Killer

Hind Rami Iyad Rajab (Arabic: هند رامي إياد رجب; 3 May 2018 – 29 January 2024) was a five-year-old Palestinian girl in the Gaza Strip who was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during the Gaza war, which also killed six of her family members and two paramedics coming to her rescue.

Rajab and her family were fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was shelled by the IDF, killing her uncle, aunt and three cousins, with Rajab and another cousin surviving and contacting the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) to ask for help while noting that they were being attacked by an Israeli tank. The cousin was later also killed and Rajab was left stranded in the vehicle for hours on the phone, as paramedics from PRCS attempted to rescue her. Both Rajab and the paramedics were later also found dead on 10 February after an Israeli withdrawal.

Israel claimed that there were not any troops present in the neighborhood and denied carrying out the attack. However, this was refuted by The Washington Post and Sky News's investigations relying on satellite imagery and visual evidence, which concluded that a number of Israeli tanks were indeed present and one had likely fired 335 rounds on the car that Rajab and her family had been in, with tank operators being able to see that the car had civilians including children in it. The Forensic Architecture investigation also concluded that an Israeli tank had also likely attacked the ambulance that came for Rajab.

In the aftermath of the killing, Western media outlets were criticized for their coverage of the incident, including for not attributing who killed Rajab and for their adultification of her. American student protestors occupied and renamed Hamilton Hall in her honor at Columbia University, drawing increased attention to the incident.

🔗 Biography 🔗 New York City 🔗 Law Enforcement

Adrian Schoolcraft (born 1976) is a former New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer who secretly recorded police conversations from 2008 to 2009. He brought these tapes to NYPD investigators in October 2009 as evidence of corruption and wrongdoing within the department. The tapes were used as evidence of arrest quotas leading to police abuses such as wrongful arrests, and that emphasis on fighting crime sometimes resulted in under-reporting of crimes to artificially deflate CompStat numbers.

After voicing his concerns, Schoolcraft was repeatedly harassed by members of the NYPD and reassigned to a desk job. After he left work early one day, an ESU unit illegally entered his apartment, physically abducted him and forcibly admitted him to a psychiatric facility, where he was held against his will for six days. In 2010, he released the audio recordings to The Village Voice, leading to the reporting of a multi-part series titled The NYPD Tapes. The same year, Schoolcraft filed a lawsuit against Jamaica Hospital and the NYPD. In 2012 The Village Voice reported that a 2010 unpublished report of an internal NYPD investigation found the 81st precinct had evidence of quotas and underreporting. Both of Schoolcraft's claims were settled in 2015, with him receiving $600,000 for the NYPD portion of the lawsuit.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Cleo was the pseudonym of an anonymous mathematician active on the mathematics Stack Exchange from 2013 to 2015, who became known for providing precise answers to complex mathematical integration problems without showing any intermediate steps. Due to the extraordinary accuracy and speed of the provided solutions, mathematicians debated whether Cleo was an individual genius, a collective pseudonym, or even an early artificial intelligence system.

During the poster's active period, Cleo posted 39 answers to advanced mathematical questions, primarily focusing on complex integration problems that had stumped other users. Cleo's answers were characterized by being consistently correct while providing no explanation of methodology, often appearing within hours of the original posts. The account claimed to be limited in interaction due to an unspecified medical condition.

The mystery surrounding Cleo's identity and mathematical abilities generated significant interest in the mathematical community, with users attempting to analyze solution patterns and writing style for clues. Some compared Cleo to historical mathematical figures like Srinivasa Ramanujan, known for providing solutions without conventional proofs. In 2025, Cleo was revealed to be Vladimir Reshetnikov, a software developer originally from Uzbekistan.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Business 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Denmark

Agner Krarup Erlang (1 January 1878 – 3 February 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.

By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Germany 🔗 Visual arts

The Master of the Playing Cards (German: Meister der Spielkarten) was the first major master in the history of printmaking. He was a German (or conceivably Swiss) engraver, and probably also a painter, active in southwestern Germany – probably in Alsace, from the 1430s to the 1450s, who has been called "the first personality in the history of engraving."

Various attempts to identify him have not been generally accepted, so he remains known only through his 106 engravings, which include the set of playing cards in five suits from which he takes his name. The majority of the set survives in unique impressions, most of which are in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. A further 88 engravings are regarded as sufficiently close to his style to be by his pupils.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers

John "Walking" Stewart (19 February 1747 – 20 February 1822) was an English philosopher and traveller. Stewart developed a unique system of materialistic pantheism.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Biography/Actors and Filmmakers

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (28 August 1841 – disappeared 16 September 1890, declared dead 16 September 1897) was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion-picture camera, possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film. He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography", but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing at least in part to the great secrecy surrounding it.

A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in Leeds, England. In October of that year, he filmed moving-picture sequences of family members in Roundhay Garden and his son playing the accordion, using his single-lens camera and Eastman's paper negative film. At some point in the following eighteen months he also made a film of Leeds Bridge. This work may have been slightly in advance of the inventions of contemporaneous moving-picture pioneers, such as the British inventors William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe, and was years in advance of that of Auguste and Louis Lumière and William Kennedy Dickson (who did the moving image work for Thomas Edison).

Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration of his camera in the US because he mysteriously vanished; he was last known to be boarding a train on 16 September 1890. Multiple conspiracy theories have emerged about the reason for his disappearance, including: a murder set up by Edison, secret homosexuality, disappearance in order to start a new life, suicide because of heavy debts and failing experiments, and a murder by his brother over their mother's will. No conclusive evidence exists for any of these theories. In 2004, a police archive in Paris was found to contain a photograph of a drowned man bearing a strong resemblance to Le Prince who was discovered in the Seine just after the time of his disappearance, but it has been claimed that the body was too short to be Le Prince.

In early 1890, Edison workers had begun experimenting with using a strip of celluloid film to capture moving images. The first public results of these experiments were shown in May 1891. However, Le Prince's widow and son Adolphe were keen to advance Louis's cause as the inventor of cinematography. In 1898, Adolphe appeared as a witness for the defence in a court case brought by Edison against the American Mutoscope Company. This suit claimed that Edison was the first and sole inventor of cinematography, and thus entitled to royalties for the use of the process. Adolphe was involved in the case but was not allowed to present his father's two cameras as evidence, although films shot with cameras built according to his father's patent were presented. Eventually the court ruled in favour of Edison. A year later that ruling was overturned, but Edison then reissued his patents and succeeded in controlling the US film industry for many years.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 France 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Évariste Galois (; French: [evaʁist ɡalwa]; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

Galois was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, shortly after his release from prison, Galois fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (Russian: Григорий Яковлевич Перельман, IPA: [ɡrʲɪˈɡorʲɪj ˈjakəvlʲɪvʲɪtɕ pʲɪrʲɪlʲˈman] (listen); born 13 June 1966) is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology.

In the 1990s, partly in collaboration with Yuri Burago, Mikhael Gromov, and Anton Petrunin, he made influential contributions to the study of Alexandrov spaces. In 1994, he proved the soul conjecture in Riemannian geometry, which had been an open problem for the previous 20 years. In 2002 and 2003, he developed new techniques in the analysis of Ricci flow, thereby providing a detailed sketch of a proof of the Poincaré conjecture and Thurston's geometrization conjecture, the former of which had been a famous open problem in mathematics for the past century. The full details of Perelman's work were filled in and explained by various authors over the following several years.

In August 2006, Perelman was offered the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow", but he declined the award, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame; I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." On 22 December 2006, the scientific journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.

On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he rejected the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considered the decision of the board of the Clay Institute to be unfair, in that his contribution to solving the Poincaré conjecture was no greater than that of Richard S. Hamilton, the mathematician who pioneered the Ricci flow partly with the aim of attacking the conjecture. He had previously rejected the prestigious prize of the European Mathematical Society, in 1996.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Literature 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Barbara Newhall Follett (March 4, 1914 – disappeared December 7, 1939) was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in January 1927, when she was twelve years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D.w, received critical acclaim when she was fourteen.

In December 1939, aged 25, Follett reportedly became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment, never to be seen again.