Michael Bolton (born Michael Bolotin on February 26, 1953), is an American singer-songwriter, best known for his soft rock ballads and tenor vocals. He is the descendant of observant Jewish grandparents who kept a kosher home Bolton, raised very liberal-minded, having both a Christmas tree and a menorah in his house. As a young man, his house was often filled with politicians. While his father worked for the City of New Haven and helped politicians get re-elected, his mother played the perfect hostess and also worked with women’s organizations. Bolton had never imagined then, as the city’s elite congregated on the wraparound porch of his childhood home, that one day he, himself, would be dining in the White House With that same open-mindedness, Bolton has explored many spiritual paths that departed from his own religion. At the age of 15, he began studying Buddhism and in later years took a serious interest in ancient forms of Eastern practice and meditation. He has written over 100 songs for an impressive array of artists This man of abundant creativity and energy has produced 19 albums. Deaf in one ear, his achievements include selling 53 million albums, eight top ten albums, two number one singles on the Billboard charts, and awards from both the American Music Awards and Grammy Awards. He says,

“Oh, for as long as I am breathing,

Till the stars fall from the sky,

You’re the one thing I believe in,

My every reason why.”

John Milton (9 December, 1608 – 8November,1674) was an English poet, prose, polemicist and civil servant for the Commonwealth of England. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost. Milton was writing at a time of religious and political flux in England. His poetry and prose reflect deep convictions.After Milton was born, on 9 December 1608, his father’s prosperity provided his eldest son with a private tutor, Thomas Young, and then a place at St Paul’s School in London. There he began the study of Latin and Greek, and the classical languages left an imprint on his poetry in English (he wrote also in Italian and Latin). His first datable compositions are two psalms done at age 15 at Long Bennington.At Cambridge he developed a reputation for poetic skill and general erudition, but experienced alienation from his peers and university life as a whole. He read both ancient and modern works of theology, philosophy, history, politics, literature and science, in preparation for a prospective poetical career Milton had command of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, and Italian from his school and undergraduate days; he also added Old English to his linguistic repertoire. The probable onset of glaucoma finally resulted in total blindness by 1654, forcing him to dictate his verse and prose to amanuenses, one of whom was the poet Andrew Marvell. He was impoverished and yet unrepentant for his political choices. he died in 1674 

Napoleon Bonaparte, (15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821) later known as Napoleon I, was a French military and political leader who had a significant impact on the history of Europe. He was a general during the French Revolution, the ruler of France as First Consul of the French Republic and Emperor of the First French Empire. Napoleon was imprisoned and then exiled to the island of St. Helena in the Atlantic Ocean, 2,000 km from any major landmass.In the early years of exile Napoleon received visitors but, as the restrictions placed on him were increased, his life became that of a recluse.Napoleon married Joséphine in 1796, when he was 26; she was a 32-year old widow whose first husband had been executed during the revolution. Until she met Bonaparte, she had always been Rose, a name which he disliked. He called her ‘Joséphine.When Napoleon joins his army in March 1796, he found himself in command of 37,000 men who are demoralized, badly fed and unpaid. During April he led them in a series of rapid victories which vastly raised the soldiers’ spirits and held out the promise of rich loot under this energetic young commander.In fifteen days he gained six victories, took twenty-one colours and fifty-five pieces of artillery, seized several fortresses and conquered the richest parts of Piedmont. In time he met with the fateful battle of waterloo.On August 7  Napoleon was transferred to the Northumberland for the long journey to St Helena, the rocky island in the Atlantic which Britain used as a staging post for ships sailing to and from the east. Here, living with a small staff of his own in the island’s main house, Longwood, Napoleon spent the remaining six years of his life.The visitors became fewer and his life much bleaker for two reasons – the arrival in 1816 of Hudson Lowe as the governor of the island (antipathy between him and Napoleon is exacerbated by Lowe’s many acts of pettiness), and the onset of disease. From the end of 1817 Napoleon was increasingly ill – officially from cancer of the stomach, which the doctors declared to be the cause of his death in 1821. But the circumstances make possible, and perhaps inevitable, frequent claims that he was the victim of poisoning (modern scientific tests on strands of his hair, kept as mementoes, are said to reveal an unusually high level of arsenic). Napoleon, by contrast,was a provincial boy in Europe‘s largest and most sophisticated kingdom. He first achieved the apparently impossible task of rising to become head of state, with almost limitless power. He then imposed his will on the rest of continental Europe, maintaining a dominant role for France through his military, administrative and diplomatic skills and by the sheer power of his personality.

 

John Forbes Nash,Jr.  (born June 13, 1928),

 is an American mathematician and economist. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.In Princeton campus legend, Nash became “The Phantom of Fine Hall” (Fine Hall is Princeton’s mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night.Nash’s recent work involves ventures in advanced game theory, including partial agency, that show that, as in his early career, he prefers to select his own path and problems. Between 1945 and 1996, he published 23 scientific studies.In 1951, Nash went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty. There, he met Alicia López-Harrison de Lardé (born January 1, 1933), a physics student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. Alicia admitted Nash to a mental hospital in 1959 for schizophrenia. He began to show signs of extreme paranoia and his wife later described his behavior as becoming increasingly erratic, stating that he began speaking of characters who were putting him in danger. Nash mailed letters to foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. declaring that he was establishing a world government.He was involuntarily admitted into the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild clinical depression.He was in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being involuntarily committed. After 1970 he was never committed to the hospital again and never took antipsychotic medication again.Nash recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that “I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.”Nash is also the subject of the Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, which was nominated for eight Oscars (winning four), and was based on the biography of the same name about him, his mathematical genius and his struggle with schizophrenia. His theories are still used today in market economics, computing, accounting and military theory.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945), often referred to by his initialsFDR, was the thirty-second President of the United States.He was a central figure of the 20th century during a time of worldwide economic crisis and world war.He is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms.In August 1921, while the Roosevelts were vacationing at Campobello Island, New Brunswick, Roosevelt contracted an illness, at the time believed to be polio, which resulted in Roosevelt‘s total and permanent paralysis from the waist down. For the rest of his life, Roosevelt refused to accept that he was permanently paralyzed. He tried a wide range of therapies, including hydrotherapy, and, in 1926, he purchased a resort at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he founded a hydrotherapy center for the treatment of polio patients which still operates as the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation. After he became President, he helped to found the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes). His leadership in this organization is one reason he is commemorated on the dime. At the time, Roosevelt was able to convince many people that he was in fact getting better, which he believed was essential if he was to run for public office again. Fitting his hips and legs with iron braces, he laboriously taught himself to walk a short distance by swiveling his torso while supporting himself with a cane. In private, he used a wheelchair, but he was careful never to be seen in it in public. He usually appeared in public standing upright, supported on one side by an aide or one of his sons.Roosevelt, only 62 in 1944, was in declining health since at least 1940. The strain of his paralysis and the physical exertion needed to compensate for it for over 20 years had taken their toll, as had many years of stress and a lifetime of chain-smoking. By this time, Roosevelt had numerous ailments including chronic high blood pressure, emphysema, atherosclerosis, angina pectoris and end-stage heart disease.On March 30, 1945, Roosevelt went to Warm Springs to rest before his anticipated appearance at the founding conference of the United Nations. On the afternoon of April 12, Roosevelt said, “I have a terrific headache” and was carried into his bedroom. The doctor diagnosed that he had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Later that day, he died. As Allen Drury later said, “so ended an era, and so began another.” An editorial by The New York Times declared, “Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House,” after Roosevelt’s death.

Roosevelt’s death was met with shock and grief across the U.S. and around the world. His declining health had not been known to the general public. Roosevelt had been president for more than 12 years, longer than any other person, and had led the country through some of its greatest crises to the impending defeat of Nazi Germany and to within sight of the defeat of Japan as well.At the time he collapsed, Roosevelt had been sitting for a portrait painting by the artist Elizabeth Shoumatoff, resulting in the famous Unfinished Portrait of FDR.

Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist, and lecturer. She was the first deaf  blind person to graduate from collegeHelen Keller was born at an estate called Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, Alabama, on June 27, 1880, to Captain Arthur H. Keller, a former officer of the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams Keller, Keller had a particular form of the disease that brought blindness and retardation. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. Later Keller learned Braille and used it to read not only English but also French, German, Greek, and Latin. Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and authorOne of Keller’s earliest pieces of writing, at the age of eleven, was The Frost King (1891). Keller wrote The World I Live In in 1908 giving readers an insight into how she felt about the world. Out of the Dark, a series of essays on Socialism, was published in 1913. In total Keller wrote 12 books and numerous articles. Keller suffered a series of strokes in 1961 and spent the last years of her life at her home.

Ludwig van Beethoven , 16 December 1770 – 26 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most respected and influential composers of all time.

Beethoven was born in Bonn, Electorate of Cologne, in 1770. Of the seven children born to Johann Beethoven, himself the only survivor of three, only second-born Ludwig and two younger brothers survived infancy. Beethoven’s mother died on 17 July 1787, when Beethoven was 16.

Due to his father’s worsening alcohol addiction, Beethoven became responsible for raising his two younger brothers. 

Around 1796, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. He suffered a severe form of  tinnitus, a “ringing” in his ears that made it hard for him to perceive and appreciate music; he also avoided conversationOver time, his hearing loss became profound: there is a well-attested story that, at the end of the premiere of his Ninth Symphony, he had to be turned around to see the tumultuous applause of the audience; hearing nothing, he began to weep.

Beethoven’s hearing loss did not prevent his composing music, but it made concerts—lucrative sources of income—increasingly hard. Beethoven used a special rod attached to the soundboard on a piano that he could bite—the vibrations would then transfer from the piano to his jaw to increase his perception of the sound. A large collection of his hearing aids such as special ear horns can be viewed at the Beethoven House Museum in Bonn, Germany. Despite his obvious distress, however, Czerny remarked that Beethoven could still hear speech and music normally until 1812. By 1814 however, Beethoven was almost totally deaf. A great Composer who proved that earthly obstacles can be overcome and produced everlasting Musical symphonies.