Madison Who’s Who Blog

A who’s who of royalty most certainly will list Princess Diana as the most loved and most contentious of royals.  A new biography by Tina Brown, like all biographies seem to, promises to tell the world details about Diana that no one else has yet revealed.

“I think there’s been a huge amount of coverage on Diana, but not a huge amount of understanding of who she was,” Brown says. “The context of her life has been obscured by the craziness of her death. What about the woman before that? How did she become the woman we saw dying in the car crash? I wanted to show people the evolution of how this girl from a torn family with a sad background became an international icon.”

One of the assertions made by Ms. Brown is that Diana continuously colluded with the press, using her influence with the media to push Prince Charles out of the headlines or divert criticism directed at her from the royal family, or, in the beginning, to catch Prince Charles.

“Brown asserts that Diana changed the way the media covered the royals, and even used the press to help her get Charles to propose.
[..]
“But, more important, she realized, she had this other, huge power base, which was the press. She had to win the press, because the press had always destroyed Charles’ girlfriends, and she set out to woo them.’”
(Source)

For an online Who’s Who of the “110,000 important people from antiquity to the present time”, OmniBiography.com promises to deliver biographies from the web’s most important sites in all languages. It is indeed a thorough undertaking, each famous person linked to all the online references available.

Another quick and easy Who’s Who compilation is Whos2 , offering “2,943 famous people,characters and creatures, curious collections of famous people, plus a blog that covers “factual issues and oddities”.

One oddity is a collection of famous folks who lost their heads and their heads went on to become even more famous.

“A good juicy beheading is nothing unusual in world history. (Just ask Robespierre, who oversaw hundreds of beheadings and then went to the guillotine himself.) But a few separated skulls have gone on to take a special place in history all by themselves. Herewith we present Heads With a Life of Their Own.”

Since beheading is back in vogue with those barbarians still amongst us, a few more famous heads might soon join these discombobulated personages which include: Sir Walter Raleigh, Cicero,John the Baptist, Medusa and Sir Oliver Cromwell.

“The head of Oliver Cromwell — what a tale. Cromwell helped get King Charles I imprisoned, tried and finally beheaded in 1649, then ran Britain as Lord Protector until his own death in 1658. When Charles II reclaimed the monarchy a few years later, it was payback time. The new king had Cromwell’s body exhumed from Westminster Abbey, hung from a gallows, and then publicly beheaded. The head was then stuck atop a tall pole at Westminster Hall, where it remained for over 20 years. Eventually the head disappeared (some say it blew off during a storm), only to reappear in the 1770s in the possession of a thespian named Samuel Russell. The gruesome artifact passed from owner to owner to until the 1930s, when scientific analysis determined that the head really was that of Cromwell. (X-rays showed the stake still embedded in his skull.) In 1960 the head was given to Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge, where it was finally laid to rest in an unmarked spot near the college chapel.
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Our Who’s Who selection today comes from the The Oxford Dictionary of National Biographies which covers ” ‘55,000 biographies of people who shaped the history of the British Isles and beyond, from the earliest times to the year 2003.’

If you are a connoisseur of fascinating and influential personnages, you’ll want to take advantage of their free subscrition to the”Biography of the Day“. An example follows.

“Jean Metcalfe (1923–2000), broadcaster, was born on 2 March 1923 at 34 Howard Road, Reigate, Surrey, the eldest child of Guy Vivian Metcalfe, a clerk at the Southern Railway’s Waterloo terminus, and his wife, Gwendoline Annie, née Reed. She described her family as ‘Ovaltiney people’, after the popular malted milk bedtime drink. They were lower middle-class, without a bathroom, and used Southern Railway privilege tickets to get them to their most ambitious holiday destination, Cornwall.
[…]
Metcalfe was auditioned as an announcer for the new General Forces programme, a joint BBC–War Office venture which was the BBC’s first worldwide service and the first to use women announcers. Shortly afterwards she began her period of service with the programme that made her famous: Forces Favourites, a request programme in which members of the armed forces abroad could ask the ‘compère’, as presenters were called, to play their favourite music, and families at home (though no girlfriends or boyfriends) could ask for music for members of the forces serving abroad. She began the job after five hours of studying the programme under its editor, Margaret Hubble. It was while doing the programme from London that she ‘met’ her male colleague at the Hamburg end of the operation, Squadron Leader Arthur Clifford (Cliff) Michelmore (b. 1919). They married on 4 March 1950 (after the programme had been converted to the peacetime Two-Way Family Favourites) and had a son, Guy, who became a television presenter, and a daughter, Jenny, who studied to be an actress.”

Thee are no lack of biographies commemorating who’s who among women but some particularly interesting surveys of accomplished woman are those commemorating the lives of women in mathematics. Quite a few more that todays current assessment of feminine representatives in the discipline would have one believe.

One who’s who is the Women in Math Project;”a collection of publications about gender and mathematics, feminist theories of science, selected publications on gender and science”, including a compilation of biographies focusing on women mathematical scientists.

The Association for Women in Mathematics concentrates on biographies of women in mathematics today and serves to encourage aspiring feminine mathematicians from elementary school on up.

One such remarkable woman, listed in another who’s who of women mathematicians, Biographies of Women Mathematicians, is Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an inspiration for any young girl, especially since she achieved her fame in the 17th century.

“Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan on May 16, 1718, to a wealthy and literate family” [Osen, 39]. She was the oldest of 21 children. Her father was a professor of mathematics and provided her a profound education. “She was recognized as a child prodigy very early; spoke French by the age of five; and had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and several modern languages by the age of nine. At her teens, Maria mastered mathematics” [Osen, 40]. The Agnesi home was a gathering place of the most distinguished intellectuals of the day. Maria participated in most of the seminars, engaging with the guests in abstract philosophical and mathematical discussions. Maria was very shy in nature and did not like these meetings. She continued participating in the home gatherings to please her father until the death of her mother. Her mothers death provided her the excuse to retire from public life. She took over management of the household. Her father did not oppose this, because it was difficult and expensive to find a housekeeper to take care of 21 children and a lonely man. It is possible that this heavy duty job was one of the reasons why she never married.”

From the bizarre to the eccentric to the purely whacky, if there is not a who’s who of elite eccentrics in our time, there ought to be. CNN has a good start with their online collection of biographies covering the lives of America’s wealthy eccentrics; “Sometimes the rich are a little different.”

From Hetty Green, who in today’s money was worth 2 billion when she died, yet abjured heat and hot water while she lived, to former Microsoft co-founder Paul Ellen’s search for extra-terrestrials,to the rather tragic Huntington Hartford,heir to the A&P grocery fortune, (depicted above) who proved “the adage that it takes three generations to go from rags to riches and back to rags.”

“It was his grandfather who founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, and little Hunt himself, with a nine-figure fortune, never much saw the point of working. He dabbled in this and that - models, Paradise Island, Show magazine, once even clerking at an A&P. He dated Lana Turner and raced speedboats with Sean Connery. In 1964, he built the odd 10-story building that housed his Gallery of Modern Art (it closed after five years). Hartford made a fetish of hating abstract impressionism and his serial marriages drained his fortune. His Manhattan townhouse became so squalid that the Health Department sent warnings; He filed for bankruptcy in 1992. He now lives on Paradise Island.”
CNN Money.com