David Kellogg Lewis was born on September 28, 1941, in Oberlin, Ohio, and became one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the late twentieth century. His work reshaped metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, philosophy of mind, decision theory, ethics,…

Alfred North Whitehead was born on February 15, 1861, in Ramsgate, Kent, England, into a family shaped by education, religion, and public service. His father was an Anglican clergyman and schoolmaster, and Whitehead grew up in an atmosphere where discipline,…

Willard Van Orman Quine was born on June 25, 1908, in Akron, Ohio, and became one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. Known professionally as W. V. Quine, he worked at the intersection of logic, language,…

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born on October 1, 1915, in New York City, and became one of the most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. His career helped transform psychology from a science focused mainly on behavior into a science…

Herbert Alexander Simon was born on June 15, 1916, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and became one of the rare modern thinkers whose work changed several fields at once. He was trained in political science, honored with the Nobel Memorial Prize in…

Harry Frederick Harlow was born Harry Frederick Israel on October 31, 1905, in Fairfield, Iowa. He became one of the most famous and controversial psychologists of the twentieth century, known for experiments that changed how scientists, physicians, and parents understood…

Donald Olding Hebb was born on July 22, 1904, in Chester, Nova Scotia, and became one of the most important figures in the history of psychology and neuroscience. At a time when many psychologists were still cautious about explaining the…

Albert Bandura was born on December 4, 1925, in Mundare, Alberta, Canada, a small farming community shaped by immigration, hard work, and limited formal educational opportunity. He was the youngest of six children, and his early life did not resemble…

Martin E. P. Seligman was born on August 12, 1942, in Albany, New York, and became one of the most influential psychologists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. His work is unusual because it spans two emotional poles…

Steven Pinker was born on September 18, 1954, in Montreal, Quebec, into a Jewish family in a city shaped by language, politics, and competing cultural identities. That setting was fitting for a thinker who would later spend much of his…

Daniel Kahneman was born on March 5, 1934, in Tel Aviv, then part of the British Mandate of Palestine, while his mother was visiting family. His childhood, however, was shaped largely in Paris, where his family lived during the German…

Few psychologists have shaped modern intelligence assessment as deeply as David Wechsler. Best known for creating the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence, Wechsler changed how psychologists…