a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, (the mathematical basis of) technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry.

an Italian politician, journalist, and activist for the unification of Italy and spearhead of the Italian revolutionary movement

a German pathologist and bacteriologist, discoverer of the typhoid bacillus

an Italian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

a Greek poet, journalist and civil servant from Alexandria. His work, as one translator put it, "holds the historical and the erotic in a single embrace."

an Irish mathematician, astronomer, and physicist. He made major contributions to optics, classical mechanics and abstract algebra