Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Bradman


Sir Donald George Bradman (27 August 1908—25 February 2001), often called The Don, was an Australian cricketer, administrator and writer on the game, and generally acknowledged as the greatest batsman of all time. He is one of Australia's most popular sporting heroes, and one of the most respected past players in other cricketing nations. His career Test batting average of 99.94 is by many measures the greatest statistical performance in any major sport.
The story of the young Don practising alone with a cricket stump and a golf ball is part of Australian folklore. Bradman’s meteoric rise from bush cricket to the Australian Test team took just over two years. Before his 22nd birthday, he set myriad records for high scoring (many of which stand even today) and became Australia's sporting idol at the height of the Great Depression. A controversial set of tactics, known as Bodyline, were devised by the England team to curb his batting brilliance.

Subhas Chandra Bose


Subhas Chandra Bose, (January 23, 1897 – presumably August 18, 1945 [although this is disputed]), generally known as Netaji (lit. "Respected Leader"), was one of the most prominent and highly respected leaders of the Indian Independence Movement against the British Raj.
Bose was elected president of the Indian National Congress for two consecutive terms but resigned from the post following ideological conflicts with Mahatma Gandhi. Bose believed that Mahatma Gandhi's tactics of non-violence would never be sufficient to secure India's independence, and advocated violent resistance. He established a separate political party, the All India Forward Bloc and continued to call for the full and immediate independence of India from British rule. He was imprisoned by the British authorities eleven times.

Maradona


Diego Armando Maradona (born October 30, 1960) is an Argentine former association football player. He played in four World Cups and received the people's choice FIFA Player of the Century award, after being voted in 2000 in an international public poll on the organisation's website to decide the best player of the 20th century.
Maradona won many trophies with Boca Juniors, FC Barcelona and SSC Napoli over the course of his career. During an international career that included 91 caps and 34 goals, he played in four FIFA World Cup tournaments, leading the Argentina national team to its victory over West Germany in 1986 World Cup, in which he collected the Golden Ball award as the tournament's best player. His second goal against England in the quarter-finals of the '86 tournament -- a spectacular 60-meter weave through six England players -- is commonly referred to as "The Goal of the Century." or, in Argentina, "The Cosmic Kite"
He is also considered one of the sport's most controversial figures. Maradona was suspended for 15 months in 1991 after a failed doping test for cocaine in Italy, and then again for ephedrine during the 1994 World Cup in USA.

Dhyan Chand


Major Dhyan Chand Singh (August 29, 1905 – December 3, 1979) was a former Indian hockey player and is regarded as the greatest ever hockey player of all times. He was part of the Gold winning Indian team in three Olympic Games (1928 Amsterdam , 1932 Los Angeles, 1936 Berlin). He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third highest civilian honour, in 1956. He got the title "Chand" or (moon) from his first coach, Pankaj Gupta, who had predicted that he would one day shine like a chand or moon. Dhyan Chand was affectionately called Dadda. Even today Dhyan Chand is to hockey what Bradman is to cricket, Mohammed Ali to boxing and Pele to football — the unchallenged masters of their sport and the only Indian sportsperson who can lay claim to such an honour.


Dhyan Chand was an extraordinary man. To hear tales of his craftsmanship was to wonder whether his stick was designed by Merlin himself.They broke his stick in Holland to check if there was a magnet inside; in Japan they decided it was glue; in Germany, Adolf Hitler even wanted to buy it.

Bill Gates


William Henry Gates III (born 28 October 1955) is an American entrepreneur, software executive, philanthropist and chairman of Microsoft, the software company he founded with Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft he has held the positions of CEO and chief software architect, and he remains the largest individual shareholder with more than 9% of the common stock
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution. Although he is widely admired, his business tactics have been criticized as anti-competitive and in some instances ruled as such in court. Since amassing his fortune, Gates has pursued a number of philanthropic endeavors, donating large amounts of money to various charitable organizations and scientific research programs through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, established in 2000.
The annual Forbes magazine's list of The World's Billionaires has ranked Gates as the richest person in the world from 1995 to 2007, with recent estimates putting his net worth over $56 billion USD. When family wealth is considered, his family ranks second behind the Walton family, heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton. In July 2007, Fortune magazine reported that the increase in value of Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim's holdings of stock caused him to surpass Bill Gates as the world's richest man. Forbes maintains that Slim is second to Gates as of its last calculation of billionaire fortunes. Forbes does not plan to recalculate Slim's wealth until next year.

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Albert Einstein


Albert Einstein: (March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2. Einstein received the 1921 Nobe Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effet."
Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which extended the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion, creating a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

Abraham Lincoln


Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was the sixteenth President of the United States, serving from March 4, 1861 until his assassination. As an outspoken opponent of the expansion of slavery in the United States, Lincoln won the Republican Party nomination in 1860 and was elected president later that year. During his term, he helped preserve the United States by leading the defeat of the secessionist Confederate States of America in the American Civil War. He introduced measures that resulted in the abolition of slavery, issuing his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and promoting the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865.