Newest Portraits

In secondary school, matrices don’t get anything near a fair shake. In case it has been a while, matrices were those rectangular grids of numbers that look something like this: In most secondary schools, you learn in your sophomore year the rules for adding them together, multiplying them, and for using them to represent systems of equations (the above matrix, for example, could represent the system 5x + 2y = 3, 1x + 4y = -2), and that is basically it. Throughout all of cal

In 1956, the All India Institutes of Medical Science, or AIIMS, was established thanks to the efforts of Health Minister Amrit Kaur to create a center that would serve a crucial triple purpose - not only to heal the sick, but to allow research to be carried out on the diseases unique to the Indian subcontinent, and most importantly, to train the medical personnel needed to bring a high standard of medical care to those remote regions of the nation that had effectively no mode

On April 10, 1862, Union brigadier general Quincy Gillmore asked for the surrender of the Confederate stronghold, Fort Pulaski. When they refused, he used his newly arrived rifled cannons to decimate the stone wall of the fort, causing its quick surrender, and changing the local momentum of the war in the process. One of the great unspoken consequences of this victory was that it convinced the uncle of a fourteen year old girl named Susan Ann Baker (1848-1912) to leave the pl

Two Stinsons. One named Katherine, the other named Katharine. Both pioneers in aviation, Katherine as a world-famous aviator, Katharine as an internationally respected aviation engineer, their legacies forever fated to be mingled and conflated with each other. Katherine Stinson (1891-1977), otherwise known as “The Flying Schoolgirl” or “The Queen of the Air”, is, of the two, the individual who has lived most fixedly in our memory. This is virtually unavoidable, because every

Prior to the arrival of C. Everett Koop (1916-2013) as Surgeon General of the United States in 1982, the position was a relatively low profile affair held by career officers dedicated to the task of gathering data on matters related to public health and suggesting policies to address problems uncovered thereby. In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published a report on the dangers of tobacco, and before him, in 1959, Leroy Burney released an important report on environmental