Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose

Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose was born in Bikrampur, Bengal, (now Munshiganj District of Bangladesh) on 30 November 1858. His father, Bhagawan Chandra Bose, was a Brahmo and leader of the Brahmo Samaj and worked as a deputy magistrate/ assistant commissioner in Faridpur, Bardhaman and other places. His family hailed from the village Rarikhal, Bikrampur, in the current day Munshiganj District of Bangladesh.
Bose's education started in a vernacular school, because his father believed that one must know one's own mother tongue before beginning English, and that one should know also one's own people. Speaking at the Bikrampur Conference in 1915, Bose said:

“At that time, sending children to English schools was an aristocratic status symbol. In the vernacular school, to which I was sent, the son of the Muslim attendant of my father sat on my right side, and the son of a fisherman sat on my left. They were my playmates. I listened spellbound to their stories of birds, animals and aquatic creatures. Perhaps these stories created in my mind a keen interest in investigating the workings of Nature. When I returned home from school accompanied by my school fellows, my mother welcomed and fed all of us without discrimination. Although she was an orthodox old-fashioned lady, she never considered herself guilty of impiety by treating these ‘untouchables’ as her own children. It was because of my childhood friendship with them that I could never feel that there were ‘creatures’ who might be labelled ‘low-caste’. I never realised that there existed a ‘problem’ common to the two communities, Hindus and Muslims.”^[9]

Bose joined the Hare School in 1869 and then St. Xavier's School at Kolkata. In 1875, he passed the Entrance Examination (equivalent to school graduation) of University of Calcutta and was admitted to St. Xavier's College, Calcutta.
 At St. Xavier's, Bose came in contact with Jesuit Father Eugene Lafont, who played a significant role in developing his interest to natural science.He received a bachelor's degree from University of Calcutta in 1879.
Bose wanted to go to England to compete for the Indian Civil Service. 
 However, his father, a civil servant himself, cancelled the plan. He wished his son to be a scholar, who would “rule nobody but himself.”
 Bose went to England to study Medicine at the University of London. However, he had to quit because of ill health.^[13] The odour in the dissection rooms is also said to have exacerbated his illness.
Through the recommendation of Anandamohan Bose, his brother-in-law (sister's husband) and the first Indian wrangler, he secured admission in Christ's College, Cambridge to study Natural Science. 
He received the Natural Science Tripos from the University of Cambridge and a BSc from the University of London in 1884.
Among Bose's teachers at Cambridge were Lord Rayleigh, Michael Foster, James Dewar, Francis Darwin, Francis Balfour, and Sidney Vines.
 At the time when Bose was a student at Cambridge, Prafulla Chandra Roy was a student at Edinburgh. They met in London and became intimate friends.
Later he was married to Abala Bose, the renowned feminist, and social worker.
On the second day of a two-day seminar held on the occasion of 150th anniversary of Jagadish Chandra Bose on 28–29 July at The Asiatic Society, Kolkata Professor Shibaji Raha, Director of the Bose Institute, Kolkata told in his valedictory address that he had personally checked the register of the Cambridge University to confirm the fact that in addition to Tripos he received an MA as well from it in 1884.

Thomas Edison

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman.
 He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. Dubbed "The Wizard of Menlo Park".
He was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production and large-scale teamwork to the process of invention, and because of that, he is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.
Edison is the fourth most prolific inventor in history, holding 1,093 US patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. More significant than the number of Edison's patents, are the impacts of his inventions, because Edison not only invented things, his inventions established major new industries world-wide, notably, electric light and power utilities, sound recording and motion pictures. Edison's inventions contributed to mass communication and, in particular, telecommunications. These included a stock ticker, a mechanical vote recorder, a battery for an electric car, electrical power, recorded music and motion pictures.

His advanced work in these fields was an outgrowth of his early career as a telegraph operator. Edison developed a system of electric-power generation and distribution^[4] to homes, businesses, and factories – a crucial development in the modern industrialized world. His first power station was on Pearl Street in Manhattan, New York.
In 1877–78, Edison invented and developed the carbon microphone used in all telephones along with the Bell receiver until the 1980s.
 After protracted patent litigation, in 1892 a federal court ruled that Edison and not Emile Berliner was the inventor of the carbon microphone. The carbon microphone was also used in radio broadcasting and public address work through the 1920s.
Thomas Edison was an advocate for monetary reform in the United States. He was ardently opposed to the gold standard and debt-based money. Famously, he was quoted in the New York Times stating "Gold is a relic of Julius Caesar, and interest is an invention of Satan."
In the same article, he expounded upon the absurdity of a monetary system in which the taxpayer of the United States, in need of a loan, be compelled to pay in return perhaps double the principal, or even greater sums, due to interest. His basic point was that if the Government can produce debt-based money, it could equally as well produce money that was a credit to the taxpayer.

He thought at length about the subject of money over 1921 and 1922. In May 1922, he published a proposal, entitled "A Proposed Amendment to the Federal Reserve Banking System".
 In it, he detailed an explanation of a commodity-backed currency, in which the Federal Reserve would issue interest-free currency to farmers, based on the value of commodities they produced. 
During a publicity tour that he took with friend and fellow inventor, Henry Ford, he spoke publicly about his desire for monetary reform.
 For insight, he corresponded with prominent academic and banking professionals. In the end, however, Edison's proposals failed to find support, and were eventually abandoned.

Richard R. Ernst

Richard Robert Ernst (born August 14, 1933) is a Swiss physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.
Born in Winterthur, Switzerland, Ernst was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991 for his contributions towards the development of Fourier Transform nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy while at Varian Associates, Palo Alto and the subsequent development of multi-dimensional NMR techniques.
These underpin applications of NMR both to chemistry (NMR spectroscopy) and to medicine (MRI). He also received the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University in 1991.After he had finished high school, Ernst started with high expectations and enthusiasm to study chemistry at the famous Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). 
But he was disappointed by the state of chemistry in the early 1950s as it was taught at ETH Zurich; the students had to memorize uncountable facts that even the professors did not understand. 
The physical chemistry lectures did not reveal much insight either, they were limited just to classical thermodynamics. So, Ernst had to return to reading in order to get the knowledge he wanted. 
He often read the book "Theoretical Chemistry" by S. Glasstone. In it he learned about the fundamentals of quantum mechanics, spectroscopy, statistical mechanics, and statistical thermodynamics.

He studied and served as faculty at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from which he is now retired. 
He is Honorary Doctor of the Technical University of Munich and University of Zurich. Ernst received both his diploma in chemistry (1957) and his Ph.D. in physical chemistry (1962) from ETH Zurich.
Then, from 1963 to 1968 he worked as a research chemist in Palo Alto, California. In 1966, working with an American colleague, Ernst discovered that the sensitivity of NMR techniques (hitherto limited to analysis of only a few nuclei) could be dramatically increased by replacing the slow, sweeping radio waves traditionally used in NMR spectroscopy with short, intense pulses. His discovery enabled analysis of a great many more types of nuclei and smaller amounts of materials.
In 1968 he returned to Switzerland to teach at his alma mater. He was made assistant professor in 1970 and full professor in 1976.
 His second major contribution to the field of NMR spectroscopy was a technique that enabled a high-resolution, “two-dimensional” study of larger molecules than had previously been accessible to NMR. 
With Ernst's refinements, scientists were able to determine the three-dimensional structure of organic and inorganic compounds and of biological macromolecules such as proteins; to study the interaction between biological molecules and other substances such as metal ions, water, and drugs; to identify chemical species; and to study the rates of chemical reactions.
Ernst also was credited with many inventions and held several patents in his field.

John Bardeen

John Bardeen (May 23, 1908 – January 30, 1991) was an American physicist and electrical engineer, the only person to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
The transistor revolutionized the electronics industry, allowing the Information Age to occur, and made possible the development of almost every modern electronic device, from telephones to computers to missiles.
 Bardeen's developments in superconductivity, which won him his second Nobel, are used in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) or its medical sub-tool magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
In 1990, John Bardeen appeared on LIFE Magazine's list of "100 Most Influential Americans of the Century."
Bardeen attended the University High School at Madison for several years, but graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923.
 He graduated from high school at age fifteen, even though he could have graduated several years earlier. His graduation was postponed due to taking additional courses at another high school and also partly because of his mother's death.
 He entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1923. While in college he joined the Zeta Psi fraternity. He raised the needed membership fees partly by playing billiards. 
He was initiated as a member of Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society. He chose engineering because he didn't want to be an academic like his father and also because it is mathematical. He also felt that engineering had good job prospects.

On December 23, 1947, Bardeen and Brattain—working without Shockley—succeeded in creating a point-contact transistor that achieved amplification. By the next month, Bell Labs' patent attorneys started to work on the patent applications.
Bell Labs' attorneys soon discovered that Shockley's field effect principle had been anticipated and patented in 1930 by Julius Lilienfeld, who filed his MESFET-like patent in Canada on October 22, 1925.
Shockley took the lion's share of the credit in public for the invention of transistor, which led to a deterioration of Bardeen's relationship with Shockley.
 Bell Labs management, however, consistently presented all three inventors as a team. Shockley eventually infuriated and alienated Bardeen and Brattain, and he essentially blocked the two from working on the junction transistor.
 Bardeen began pursuing a theory for superconductivity and left Bell Labs in 1951. Brattain refused to work with Shockley further and was assigned to another group. Neither Bardeen nor Brattain had much to do with the development of the transistor beyond the first year after its invention.
The "transistor" (a combination of "transfer" and "resistor") was 1/50 as large as the vacuum tubes it replaced in televisions and radios and allowed electrical devices to become more compact.

Wolfgang Pauli

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 – 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics.
In 1945, after having been nominated by Albert Einstein, Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle." The discovery involved spin theory, which is the basis of a theory of the structure of matter.

Pauli made many important contributions in his career as a physicist, primarily in the field of quantum mechanics. He seldom published papers, preferring lengthy correspondences with colleagues such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, with whom he had close friendships. Many of his ideas and results were never published and appeared only in his letters, which were often copied and circulated by their recipients.
Pauli proposed in 1924 a new quantum degree of freedom (or quantum number) with two possible values, in order to resolve inconsistencies between observed molecular spectra and the developing theory of quantum mechanics. 
He formulated the Pauli exclusion principle, perhaps his most important work, which stated that no two electrons could exist in the same quantum state, identified by four quantum numbers including his new two-valued degree of freedom. 
The idea of spin originated with Ralph Kronig. George Uhlenbeck and Samuel Goudsmit one year later identified Pauli's new degree of freedom as electron spin.
In 1926, shortly after Heisenberg published the matrix theory of modern quantum mechanics, Pauli used it to derive the observed spectrum of the hydrogen atom. This result was important in securing credibility for Heisenberg's theory.

he Pauli effect was named after the anecdotal bizarre ability of his to break experimental equipment simply by being in the vicinity. Pauli was aware of his reputation and was delighted whenever the Pauli effect manifested. These strange occurrences were in line with his investigations into the legitimacy of parapsychology, particularly his collaboration with C. G. Jung on the concept of synchronicity.
Regarding physics, Pauli was famously a perfectionist.

Niels Bohr

Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish: [ˈnels ˈboɐ̯ˀ]; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.

Bohr developed the Bohr model of the atom, in which he proposed that energy levels of electrons are discrete, and that the electrons revolve in stable orbits around the atomic nucleus, but can jump from one energy level (or orbit) to another. 

Although the Bohr model has been supplanted by other models, its underlying principles remain valid. He conceived the principle of complementarity: that items could be separately analysed in terms of contradictory properties, like behaving as a wave or a stream of particles. 

The notion of complementarity dominated Bohr's thinking on both science and philosophy.

Bohr founded the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Copenhagen, now known as the Niels Bohr Institute, which opened in 1920. Bohr mentored and collaborated with physicists including Hans Kramers, Oskar Klein, George de Hevesy and Werner Heisenberg.

 He predicted the existence of a new zirconium-like element, which was named hafnium, after the Latin name for Copenhagen, where it was discovered. Later, the element bohrium was named after him.

During the 1930s, Bohr helped refugees from Nazism. After Denmark was occupied by the Germans, he had a famous meeting with Heisenberg, who had become the head of the German nuclear energy project. In September 1943, word reached Bohr that he was about to be arrested by the Germans, and he fled to Sweden.

 From there, he was flown to Britain, where he joined the British Tube Alloys nuclear weapons project, and was part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. After the war, Bohr called for international cooperation on nuclear energy. 

He was involved with the establishment of CERN and the Research Establishment Risø of the Danish Atomic Energy Commission, and became the first chairman of theNordic Institute for Theoretical Physics in 1957.

J. J. Thomson

Joseph John Thomson was born in 1856 in Cheetham Hill, Manchester, England. His mother, Emma Swindells, came from a local textile family. His father, Joseph James Thomson, ran an antiquarian bookshop founded by a great-grandfather. He had a brother two years younger than him, Frederick Vernon Thomson.
His early education was in small private schools where he demonstrated great talent and interest in science. In 1870 he was admitted to Owens College at the unusually young age of 14. His parents planned to enroll him as an apprentice engineer to Sharp-Stewart & Co, a locomotive manufacturer, but these plans were cut short when his father died in 1873.
Several scientists, such as William Prout and Norman Lockyer, had suggested that atoms were built up from a more fundamental unit, but they envisioned this unit to be the size of the smallest atom, hydrogen. 
Thomson, in 1897, was the first to suggest that the fundamental unit was over 1000 times smaller than an atom, suggesting the subatomic particles now known as electrons. Thomson discovered this through his explorations on the properties of cathode rays. Thomson made his suggestion on 30 April 1897 following his discovery that Lenard rays could travel much further through air than expected for an atom-sized particle.
He estimated the mass of cathode rays by measuring the heat generated when the rays hit a thermal junction and comparing this with the magnetic deflection of the rays. His experiments suggested not only that cathode rays were over 1000 times lighter than the hydrogen atom, but also that their mass was the same whatever type of atom they came from. He concluded that the rays were composed of very light, negatively charged particles which were a universal building block of atoms. He called the particles "corpuscles", but later scientists preferred the name electron which had been suggested by George Johnstone Stoney in 1891, prior to Thomson's actual discovery.
In 1912, as part of his exploration into the composition of canal rays, Thomson and his research assistant F. W. Aston channelled a stream of neon ions through a magnetic and an electric field and measured its deflection by placing a photographic plate in its path.

In 1905 Thomson discovered the natural radioactivity of potassium.In 1906 Thomson demonstrated that hydrogen had only a single electron per atom. Previous theories allowed various numbers of electrons.

Thomson imagined the atom as being made up of corpuscles orbiting in a sea of positive charge; this was his plum pudding model. This model was later proved incorrect when his studentErnest Rutherford showed that the positive charge is concentrated in the nucleus of the atom.

Ahmed Zewail

Ahmed Hassan Zewail, was born on February 26, 1946 in Damanhour, Egypt and was raised in Alexandria. His father Hassan assembled bicycles and motorcycles and later became a government official. His parents remained married for 50 years, until Hassan died on October 22, 1992.

He received a bachelor's and an MS degree from the University of Alexandria before moving from Egypt to the United States to complete his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania with advisor Robin Hochstrasser. While at the University of Alexandria he met his wife, Mervat. She accompanied him to the University of Pennsylvania. At the university, Ahmed completed his Ph.D. and they had their first child. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley with advisor Charles B. Harris.

After some post doctorate work at UC-Berkeley, he was awarded a faculty appointment at Caltech in 1976, where he has remained since, and in 1990, he was made the first Linus Pauling Chair in Chemical Physics. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1982.

Zewail's key work has been as a pioneer of femtochemistry—i.e. the study of chemical reactions across femtoseconds. Using a rapid ultrafast laser technique (consisting of ultrashort laser flashes), the technique allows the description of reactions on very short time scales - short enough to analyse transition states in selected chemical reactions.

They wanted to see the process from birth to death of a molecule. In this experiment the isolated anthracene molecule was unexpected and contrary to popular wisdom. During redistribution the population was oscillating coherently back and forth. There was no decay, but there was rebirth and all molecules moved coherently in a phase. In a large molecule, each vibrational motion is like a pendulum, but there are many motions because a molecules has many atoms. If the motions were not coherent, the observation would have been much different.

The results of this experiment revealed the significance of coherence and its existence in complex molecular systems. The finding of coherence were significant because it showed that through the expected chaotic motions in molecules, ordered motion can be found, despite the presence of a "heat sink", which can destroy coherence and drain energy. Coherence in molecules had not been observed before not because of a lack of coherence, but because of a lack of proper probes. In the anthracene experiments, time and energy resolutions were introduced and correlated.

Though Zewail continued studies on vibrational-energy redistributions, he started new studies on shorter time resolutions for molecules showing different chemical processes and rotational motions.

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, OM FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand-born physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics.
Encyclopedia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday (1791–1867).
He studied at Havelock School and then Nelson College and won a scholarship to study at Canterbury College, University of New Zealand where he participated in the debating society and played rugby.
After gaining his BA, MA and BSc, and doing two years of research during which he invented a new form of radio receiver, in 1895 Rutherford was awarded an 1851 Research Fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, to travel to England for postgraduate study at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
He was among the first of the 'aliens' (those without a Cambridge degree) allowed to do research at the university, under the inspiring leadership of J. J. Thomson, and the newcomers aroused jealousies from the more conservative members of the Cavendish fraternity.
He was knighted in 1914. During World War I, he worked on the practical problems of submarine detection.
 In 1916 he was awarded the Hector Memorial Medal. In 1919 he returned to the Cavendish succeeding J. J. Thomson as the Cavendish professor and Director. Under him, Nobel Prizes were awarded to James Chadwick for discovering the neutron (in 1932), John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton for an experiment which was to be known as splitting the atom using a particle accelerator, and Edward Appleton for demonstrating the existence of the ionosphere.
 Between 1925 and 1930 he served as President of the Royal Society, and later as president of the Academic Assistance Council which helped almost 1,000 university refugees from Germany.
 He was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1925 and raised to the peerage as Baron Rutherford of Nelson, in 1931, a title that became extinct upon his unexpected death in 1937.
Rutherford became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in 1919. Under his leadership the neutron was discovered byJames Chadwick in 1932 and in the same year the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton.
 After his death in 1937, he was honoured by being interred with the greatest scientists of the United Kingdom, near Sir Isaac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey. The chemical element rutherfordium (element 104) was named after him in 1997.

Thomas H. Morgan

Thomas Hunt Morgan (September 25, 1866 – December 4, 1945) was an American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and embryologist and science author who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries elucidating the role the chromosome plays in heredity.

Morgan received his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in zoology in 1890 and researched embryology during his tenure at Bryn Mawr. Following the rediscovery of Mendelian inheritance in 1900, Morgan's research moved to the study of mutation in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In his famous Fly Room at Columbia University, Morgan demonstrated that genes are carried on chromosomes and are the mechanical basis of heredity. These discoveries formed the basis of the modern science of genetics.

During his distinguished career, Morgan wrote 22 books and 370 scientific papers. As a result of his work, Drosophila became a major model organism in contemporary genetics. The Division of Biology which he established at the California Institute of Technology has produced seven Nobel Prize winners.

In 1890, Morgan was appointed associate professor (and head of the biology department) at Johns Hopkins' sister school Bryn Mawr College, replacing his colleague Edmund Beecher Wilson.

 Morgan taught all morphology-related courses, while the other member of the department, Jacques Loeb, taught the physiological courses. Although Loeb stayed for only one year, it was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.

Morgan lectured in biology five days a week, giving two lectures a day. He frequently included his own recent research in his lectures. 

Although an enthusiastic teacher, he was most interested in research in the laboratory. During the first few years at Bryn Mawr, he produced descriptive studies of sea acorns, ascidian worms and frogs.

Morgan was interested in evolution throughout his life. He wrote his thesis on the phylogeny of sea spiders (pycnogonids) and wrote four books about evolution.

 In Evolution and Adaptation (1903), he argued the anti-Darwinist position that selection could never produce wholly new species by acting on slight individual differences.

 He rejected Darwin's theory of sexual selection^[24] and the Neo-Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characters.

Alfred Nobel

Alfred Bernhard Nobelwas a Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer.
He was the inventor of dynamite. Nobel also owned Bofors, which he had redirected from its previous role as primarily an iron and steel producer to a major manufacturer of cannon and other armaments.
 Nobel held 350 different patents, dynamite being the most famous. He used his fortune posthumously to institute the Nobel Prizes.
The synthetic element nobelium was named after him. His name also survives in modern-day companies such as Dynamit Nobel and Akzo Nobel, which are descendants of or mergers with companies Nobel himself established.
Nobel travelled for much of his business life, maintaining companies in various countries in Europe and North America and keeping a permanent home in Paris from 1873 to 1891.
He remained a solitary character, given to periods of depression.Though Nobel remained unmarried, his biographers note that he had at least three loves.
 Nobel's first love was in Russia with a girl named Alexandra, who rejected his proposal. In 1876 Austro-Bohemian Countess Bertha Kinsky became Alfred Nobel's secretary. But after only a brief stay she left him to marry her previous lover, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner.
 Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that she was a major influence in his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will. Bertha von Suttner was awarded the 1905 Nobel Peace prize, 'for her sincere peace activities'.
Nobel found that when nitroglycerin was incorporated in an absorbent inert substance like kieselguhr (diatomaceous earth) it became safer and more convenient to handle, and this mixture he patented in 1867 as 'dynamite'. Nobel demonstrated his explosive for the first time that year, at a quarry in Redhill, Surrey, England. In order to help reestablish his name and improve the image of his business from the earlier controversies associated with the dangerous explosives, Nobel had also considered naming the highly powerful substance "Nobel's Safety Powder", but settled with Dynamite instead, referring to the Greek word for 'power'.
In 1888 Alfred's brother Ludvig died while visiting Cannes and a French newspaper erroneously published Alfred's obituary.
 It condemned him for his invention of dynamite and is said to have brought about his decision to leave a better legacy after his death. The obituary stated, Le marchand de la mort est mort ("The merchant of death is dead") and went on to say, "Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday."Alfred was disappointed with what he read and concerned with how he would be remembered.