Julius Robert Oppenheimer was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is the only person whose baby picture was flown into space, and whose body has been preserved for decades after his death. He pushed his version of Communism so far, and for so long, that he was able to overthrow the government of the largest country in the world. To some, he is a hero, and to others, he is one of the most evil villains in history. On Today’s Biographics, we are talking about Vladimir Lenin- The man behind the Bolshevik Revolution, and the founder of the Soviet Union.

During the thirteenth century, a merchant named Marco Polo returned home to Italy after spending 24 years living in the Mongolian Empire. He had the bad luck of getting arrested in Genoa, while they were at war with his hometown of Venice. He was a prisoner for two years, and he just so happened to share his cell with a famous writer named Rustichello da Pisa. The two of them shared stories with one another- as you do, when you’re stuck in a prison cell with absolutely no form of entertainment. Rustichello was so captivated by the stories of Marco Polo’s journey, that he knew it would make a great book. So they spent those two years in captivity writing the manuscript together. When they were finally released from prison, they published The Travels of Marco Polo, and it became an overnight best-seller.

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is widely considered the wealthiest American of all time, and the richest person in modern history.

He is known as one of the most intelligent men to walk this earth, yet his private life was nothing short of chaotic. He was the world’s most celebrated scientist, yet he shunned the limelight. He ushered in the atomic age, yet he was a lifelong pacifist. In this week’s Biographics, we delve into the contradictory life of Albert Einstein.

Edward Joseph Snowden is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency employee and subcontractor.

His writings inspired the great revolutionary movements of the 20th Century, leading to the dictatorial rise of men like Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. He lived a life of poverty and obscurity, content to let others take the limelight and aware that his ideas would not be realized during his lifetime. We remember him as the Father of Communism, yet the version that took hold in Soviet Union and China bore little resemblance to what he had envisioned. In this week’s Biographics, we discover the man who was Karl Marx.

Socrates is considered the father of Western philosophy. He was a man who questioned everything and everyone. With no regard for how his opinions would be received, he imposed his views with a dogmatic superiority that sealed his eventual fate. Sill, his great legacy to the world was the method of questioning to arrive at the truth known as the Socratic method. Today on Biographics, we discover the man who was Socrates.

Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle was a French army officer and statesman who led the French Resistance against Nazi Germany in World War II and chaired the Provisional Government of the French Republic from 1944 to 1946 in order to reestablish democracy in France.

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his invention of the Haber–Bosch process, a method used in industry to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas. This invention is of importance for the large-scale synthesis of fertilizers and explosives.