Ruth Bader Ginsberg faced difficulties getting a good job and equal pay because of her gender and identity as a mother but eventually found a way to not only transcend the limits placed upon her but free others from theirs as well. This is the story of the life of the tiny legend they call RBG. 

1933 – Joan Ruth Bader Ginsberg is born to immigrant parents from the Ukraine and Poland. She has an older sister who is 4 years older. Her father sells fur hats and coats, her mother is a homemaker. They live in a two-family house in Brooklyn, New York. 

Age 2 – Joan’s elder sister dies at age 6. Her mother teaches her to read. 

Childhood – Joan begins to go by her middle name, Ruth because there are too many Joans in her class. She is a good student who likes to play jump rope and skates. Her mother often takes her to the theatre and library.

High school – She remains physically short. She gets straight As and plays the cello at the high school orchestra. And she joins the Go-Getters Pep Club, edits the school newspaper and dates boys. There are no sports teams for girls in her school. In the meantime her mum is diagnosed with cancer and undergoes treatment. Ruth does her homework by her mother’s bedside at night. 

Age 17 – Her mother dies one day before her graduation. She misses graduation because of this. 

College – Ruth goes to Cornell University using funds her mother saved up for her. She decides to pursue a career in law in university. She meets Marty Ginsburg who she says is the only boy she met who cares that she had a brain. They both apply to Harvard and get in. 

Age 21 – She graduates from university and marries Marty a few days later. Shortly after, he is called to serve 2 years on an army base in Oklahoma and she moves there with him, taking a job at a Social Security office. 

Age 22 – They have a baby daughter and name her Jane. 

Age 23 – They leave the military base and go to Harvard law school together. Of the 500 students in class, Ruth is just one of 9 women. 

Age 24 – While juggling child-care and studying, they discover Marty has cancer and has to begin treatment immediately. Ruth takes on looking after him as well. 

Age 25 – Marty beats cancer and graduates on time. He gets a job in New York City. To be with him, Ruth moves to New York City and completes her last year of law school at Columbia University.  

Age 26 – Ruth graduates as number one in her class. However despite sending in over 40 job applications, not one law firm wants to hire her because she is female and a mother. She ends up working as a clerk to a federal judge. 

Age 30 – She gets a new job as a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. She becomes one of the few female law professors in the country but is paid less than her male colleagues doing the same job. 

Age 32 – Her son, James is born. She transfers to Columbia University Law School and eventually becomes the first woman to receive tenure there. 

Age 39 – She files a lawsuit for equal pay for female professors at her university and they win. Then she volunteers as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Age 40 – She fights to get Air Force housing and medical care benefits for the husband of her client, Sharron Frontiero who was denied such benefits on the basis of being female. She wins and this impacts all women working in the US military from then on. 

Age 42 – She fights for the right for a single father Wiesenfeld to get benefits for staying home to look after his baby son—a right which is usually only paid to women. She wins again. For the next few years, she will go on to pursue more historically significant cases and win most of them.

Age 50 – Ruth is appointed federal judge in Washington D.C.. She has to quit teaching and representing cases as a lawyer as a result. Marty moves along with her and gets himself a new job teaching law in Washington. 

Age 60 – President Clinton picks Ruth to be the next justice at the US Supreme Court, and also its second woman ever. The Senate unanimously votes her in. She becomes one of the nine justices in the Supreme Court. 

Age 63 – She continues to fight for gender equality in Court and is considered part of the Court’s liberal wing. 

Age 66 – She is diagnosed with colon cancer. She continues to work while receiving treatment. 

Age 76 – She is diagnosed with early-stage pancreatic cancer but goes back to work after her operation.

Age 77 – Marty dies of cancer. 

Age 80 – The majority of the justices in the Supreme Court vote to remove parts of the Voting Rights Act. Ruth vehemently disagrees with this. Citizens who agree with her begin seeing her as a hero. She goes viral on the internet and people start calling her RBG. She becomes famous despite not being able to change the ruling.

Age 85 – A documentary about her life, ‘RBG’ is shown nationwide. A film about her called ‘On the Basis of Sex’ follows.

Age 87 – She dies at home from pancreatic cancer.

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Neil Armstrong was born on a farm and would go on to build a career in flying which culminates in him becoming the very first man on the moon. This is the story of what happened before and after he took that giant leap for mankind. 

1930 – Neil Armstrong is born in his grandparents’ farmhouse in Ohio, USA. His father works for the Ohio state government, his mother is a homemaker. He is his parents’ first child and will later have a younger sister and a younger brother. 

Age 6 – Neil takes his first plane ride.

Childhood – Because of his father’s job, Neil and his family constantly have to move homes. His hobbies are building model planes, playing with planes, and reading about planes. He is a Boy Scout and becomes an Eagle Scout, the highest level of Scout possible. He also loves to read. 

Age 13 – His family finally sets up a permanent home in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio. 

Teenage years – Neil takes part-time jobs to pay for flying lessons. He works at a cemetery and doughnut company. He also plays the baritone horn in a jazz band called the Mississippi Moonshiners. His favourite subjects in school are science and math. 

Age 15 – Neil gets his pilot’s license. 

Age 17 – Neil gets a Navy scholarship to study aeronautic engineering at Purdue University. He moves away from his family for the first time. 

Age 19 – After 2 years in college, Neil has to serve three years in the Navy in return for his scholarship. He is stationed in Florida where he learns to fly fighter planes. 

Age 20 – He graduates from the Navy flight training school and becomes a licensed Navy aviator. He is supposed to return to Purdue University to complete his last 2 years of college but the Korean War breaks out and Neil is enlisted to fight in it. His job is to fly over enemy bridges and railroad lines and bomb them. He completes 78 such missions and cracks his tailbone once in the process. 

Age 22 – He returns home with many medals and goes back to Purdue University. He also falls in love for the very first time. 

Age 26 – Neil graduates and marries his first love, fellow student Janet Shearon. Jan gives up her degree to move to California with Neil. He takes at job as a test pilot in the Mojave Desert and buys a small cabin to live in high up in the San Gabriel Mountains. 

Age 27 – Their first child, Eric is born. 

Age 29 – Their second child Karen is born. 

Age 31 – Neil’s daughter Karen is diagnosed with brain cancer after repeatedly tripping and running fevers. 

Age 32 – Karen dies at home. Neil stops talking about his daughter. A week later, he goes back to work. A few months later, he applies to be an astronaut. As a healthy young man under 6 feet who is both a highly skilled pilot and engineer, Neil qualifies for the job. He and 8 other men are chosen and suddenly, he and his family become famous. They and the other astronaut families move to a suburb in Texas to be near the NASA space centre in Houston. Their house now has a swimming pool. Neil begins training 12 hours a day. He also travels the country giving speeches on why the space program is important.

Age 33 – Neil’s second son, Mark is born.

Age 36 – Neil is appointed command pilot of the Gemini 8 space shuttle. His mission is to dock on another satellite already in space. The mission fails because of a faulty thruster and Neil becomes depressed. 

Age 38 – Neil has another close shave will piloting a test flight. He ejects and parachutes away just before his flight goes up in flames. 

Age 39 – He is appointed commander of Apollo 11 and begins training with his 2-men crew, Buzz Aldrin and Micheal Collins. Then, they journey to the moon. And land on it. As commander of the mission, Neil gets the honour of stepping onto the moon first. And when he does, he plants a camera for earth viewers and says, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” They spend 2 hours there then make the 60-hour trip back home. Neil and his crew are now world famous but he doesn’t really enjoy the attention. 

Age 40 – Neil leaves the NASA program.

Age 41 – He becomes a professor at the University of Cincinnati and buys a farm.

Age 42 – NASA’s Apollo space program ends. 

Age 64 – Neil and Jane divorce. In the same year, Neil marries a woman named Carol Knight who also enjoys flying. 

Age 82 – Neil dies in Ohio. 

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Louis Braille went blind at age 3 and ended up spending most of his life living at a school for blind boys. There, he invented a new way for blind people to read and write with, which came to be used by blind people around the world centuries on. This is the story of the inventor of the Braille writing system.

1809 – Louis Braille is born in a small farming village called Coupvray in France. They are not rich but the family has a cow, chickens, a vegetable garden, fruit trees and a small vineyard. His father is a harness and saddle maker. His mother is a homemaker who looks after the family’s garden. He has older sisters and a brother.

Age 3 – While playing with his father’s tools, Louis accidentally pierces his own eye. As the hospital is too far away, they can only get help from locals. Louis goes blind in one eye. The infection of his first eye spreads to his second eye and he goes blind in that eye too. 

Age 4 – His parents give him a cane to use to move around with. His father also teaches him how to make harnesses with his hands and uses nails in the shape of alphabets to teach him the alphabet. A village priest begins to tutor Louis. 

Age 7 –  The village priest convinces a teacher at the village school to let Louis attend classes. A neighbour walks him to school every day. 

Age 9 – The village priest and Louis’ teacher suggest that he go to the only school for blind children in the country. The priest goes to see the lord of Coupvray who writes a letter to the director of the school for the blind asking him to give Louis a scholarship to study there. The school approves their request. 

Age 10 – Louis moves to the Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris and lives in the dormitory. He meets a new friend, Gabriel Gauthier who would end up as his friend for life. School is 15 hours long every day. Mornings are for academics, afternoons are for learning a trade. The students learn by memorising because there is no way for them to read and write. Louis also joins the school orchestra and the chorus. There are only 14 books for the blind at the school, all made with giant letters. 

Age 12 – An officer from the French army introduces a system of reading and writing to Louis’ school called ‘night reading’. He invented it for soldiers to use in the dark in battlefields and thought it would help the blind too. It helps the boys write to each other but it doesn’t help them write to people who don’t know ‘night reading’. The officer doesn’t take the feedback Louis gives him so Louis decides to improve the system on his own. Over the next 3 years, he and his friends will discuss how to make the system better.

Age 14 – Louis is put in charge of the slipper workshop. 

Age 15 – He creates the alphabet using six dots that can be read using one hand and shows it to the principal. It works and his method is soon used in the school. Students can now take notes instead of having to memorise everything.  

Age 19 – Louis graduates. The principal asks him to stay on as a student teacher. His friend Gabriel is also staying on as a student teacher. Louis agrees and begins teaching geography and grammar. For the first time in his life, Louis gets his own room. In the evening, he works on a paper describing his raised-dot reading system. 

Age 20 – The Institute publishes his paper and the principal asks the French government to adopt it for the blind in the country. The government refuses, preferring to stick to the old method of using giant embossed words. 

Age 22 – His brother writes to him saying that his father is dangerously ill. His father soon dies. Louis himself develops bad health. 

Age 24 – Louis gets promoted to full teacher and begins wearing the teacher’s uniform. He teaches geography, history, grammar, arithmetic and algebra.

Age 25 – The principal of the Institute gets Louis to demonstrate his code at the Paris Exposition of Industry. This exposes his system to many government officials and even the King of France but still, his system goes nowhere.

Age 26 – Louis is diagnosed with tuberculosis. 

Age 30 – Louis gets the idea to use 10 dots instead of 6 to improve his writing system so that the blind and sighted can use it together. He calls it the decapoint. He and a former student, Pierre start building a machine to write these dots faster. 

Age 31 – The principal of the Institute retires and is replaced by a cold and disagreeable man with different ideas. He changes many things at the Institute and stops the school from using Louis’ writing system, going so far as to punish students for using it. However, the students who have been using it for so long now refuse to stop. When the new principal removes their writing tools, they use forks and nails to keep writing. Older boys even make sure the younger boys know how to use Louis’ writing system. Eventually the new principal’s assistant convinces the principal to just allow the students to use it. 

Age 33 – Louis and Pierre’s machine is done. They call it the raphigraphe.

Age 34 – The Institute moves to new premises. At the opening, the new principal’s assistant showcases Louis’ writing system to the general public. They are impressed. Louis however begins to spend more time away from school as his tuberculosis is taking a toll and he needs to rest. 

Age 38 – Louis’ health improves and he begins translating books into his writing system. 

Age 41 – His health becomes poor again and he decides to retire. The director approves his retirement but asks him to continue living at the Institute. 

Age 42 – Louis begins coughing blood towards the end of the year. 

Age 43 – Louis dies of tuberculosis. He is buried next to his father and sister at Coupvray cemetery. 

2 years after death – The French Government finally decides to use Louis’ writing system as the official system for the blind in France to read and write with. It soon comes to be known as “braille” and is adopted around the world. 

100 years after death – Louis is finally recognised and honoured by France for his work. His remains are moved from Coupvray to the Pantheon in Paris—the resting place for French heroes. 

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At age 47, country physician Edward Jenner decides to prove the folklore that milkmaids who contract cowpox will never contract small pox. What follows next is the development of the vaccine that will eventually bring about the eradication of small pox. This is the summarised life of the man who made vaccines popular in the Western world. 

1749 – Edward Jenner is born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England to a clergyman. He has 7 older siblings.

Age 5 – His mother dies during childbirth. His father dies 2 months later. His older brother, also a clergyman, raises him. 

Age 13 – After graduating from grammar school, he becomes the apprentice of a nearby surgeon. 

Age 19 – Various physicians in England begin to notice that those who’ve had cowpox before never contract smallpox but none of them manage to get widespread recognition for that theory.

Age 21 – Edward completes his apprenticeship and becomes the house pupil of John Hunter, one of the most prominent surgeons in London, who tells him, “Why think? Why not try the experiment?” 

Age 24 – Edward finishes his studies in London and returns to Berkeley to be a doctor in his native town. He also joins 2 medical groups to share medical knowledge and writes medical papers. He has an interest in natural science, studies geology and experiments on human blood. He also plays the violin and writes poetry. 

Age 29 – Edward experiences a disappointment in love. 

Age 35 – After hot air balloons become popular, he builds his own hydrogen balloon. 

Age 39 – He marries a woman named Catherine Kingscote and writes a paper on observations of cuckoo birds. He is elected as a fellow of the Royal Society for this work but naturalists dismiss his work as nonsense.

Age 40 – His son Edward is born.

Age 44 – His former teacher, John Hunter dies.

Age 45 – His daughter Catherine is born.

Age 47 – He decides to test the local belief that milkmaids who suffer cowpox never contract small pox. He takes matter from the lesions of a milkmaid with cowpox and inoculates an 8-year-old boy with it. The boy becomes ill for 9 days then gets well. Less than 2 months later, Edward inoculates the same boy with smallpox matter and observes that no disease develops. He proceeds to try this again with 22 other people. 

Age 48 – His son Robert is born. 

Age 49 – He publishes a paper titled ‘An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae’, naming the solution ‘vaccine’ after the Latin word for cow, Vacca. He then goes to London to seek volunteers for vaccination but nobody buys into his theory. To promote his solution, Edward gives the inoculant to other doctors who at first ignore or dismiss it, then try to take credit for coming up with it instead. 

Age 51 – His vaccine is now available in most European countries. 

Age 53 – The obvious effects of the protection vaccination become obvious and more people start getting vaccinated. Edward is now famous and continues to research and develop his vaccine. Parliament gives him £10,000 for his efforts to promote vaccination. He is elected honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Age 54 – Vaccinations are now popular in Europe too. He becomes president of the Jennerian Society in London which promotes vaccines to eradicate smallpox. 

Age 57 – Parliament gives him another £20,000 for his vaccination efforts. 

Age 59 – Edward becomes a director of the National Vaccine Establishment that is funded by the government but soon resigns when he feels dishonoured by the men selected to run it. 

Age 61 – His oldest son dies of tuberculosis. His sister, Mary soon follows. 

Age 63 – His sister, Anne also dies of tuberculosis. 

Age 66 – His wife dies of tuberculosis. He withdraws from public life. 

Age 71 – He has a stroke but recovers. 

Age 72 – Edward is appointed physician extraordinary to King George IV, and also mayor of Berkeley and Justice of the Peace. 

Age 73 – He publishes a paper titled ‘Observations on the Migration of Birds’ then has a massive stroke in his study in the wee hours of the night and is paralysed on one side. The next day, he dies. He is laid to rest near the rest of his family at the Berkeley church. 

1840 – 17 years after his death, the British government begins to provide smallpox vaccination made from cowpox free of charge. 

1896 – 73 years after his death, a statue of Edward is erected at the Tokyo National Museum to commemorate the centenary of his vaccination discovery. 

1980 – 157 years after his death, the World Health Organisation declares smallpox eradicated. 

1985 – 162 years after his death, the house he lived in becomes the Jenner Museum.

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Louis Cha was expelled from high school for criticising the Chinese government, watched his father get executed for counterrevolutionary behaviour, yet would manage to get the next leader of China to become a fan of his wuxia novels, along with millions in Chinese-speaking territories around the world. This is the life of one of the most popular authors in Chinese literature. 

1924 – Zha Liangyong is born in Zhejiang Province, China to an “outstanding” family of scholars. He is the second child with an older brother, Liangjian who is 8 years older than he. 

Age 2 – His sister, Liangxiu is born. 

Age 4 – His second sister and third sibling, Liangxuan is born. 

Age 10 – His second brother and fourth sibling, Lianghao is born.

Age 11 – His brother, Liangdong is born.

Age 12 – His fourth brother and sixth sibling, Liangyu is born. He spends his childhood reading many novels. 

Age 13 – He enrols into Jiaxing No.1 Middle School. 

Age 17 – He is expelled for criticising the government as autocratic. He continues his education at Quzhou No.1 Secondary school. 

Age 19 – He graduates from Jiaxing High School and enrols in the School of Foreign Languages at Central University. He later drops out and transfers to Soochow University to major in international law. 

Age 23 – He joins Shanghai’s Da Gong Pao newspaper as a journalist. 

Age 24 – He is posted to Hong Kong to be a copyeditor. He is later transferred to New Evening Post to be a deputy editor and meets a new friend, Chen Wentong there. He marries Du Zhifen. 

Age 25 – His father, Zha Suqing is arrested and executed by the communist government in China for allegedly being a counterrevolutionary and the family’s estate is seized. Louis is safe because he lives in Hong Kong, then a British crown colony.  

Age 29 – Louis’ friend Wentong writes a wuxia (a genre involving the stories of martial artists in ancient China, usually with fantastical elements) novel under a pseudonym. By this time Louis has divorced his first wife and marries his second, Zhu Mei—a newspaper journalist. They will have 2 sons and 2 daughters together. 

Age 31 – Louis himself begins to write his first serialised wuxia novel under the pseudonym, Jin Yong. The Romance of the Book and Sword is published in New Evening Post. 

Age 32 – His second serialised wuxia novel—Sword Stained with Royal Blood—is published in the Hong Kong Commercial Daily.

Age 33 – He quits journalism and goes to work as a scenarist-director and scriptwriter for a movie company. He continues to work on serialised wuxia novels on the side and his third serialised wuxia novel—The Legend of the Condor Heros—is published in Hong Kong Commercial Daily.

Age 34 – He co-directs a film, The Nature of Spring, under the name Cha Jing-Yong, his official name in Hong Kong.  

Age 35 – He founds the newspaper Ming Pao together with his high-school friend. He works as its Editor-in-Chief and writes both serialised novels and editorials for it at the rate of approximately 10,000 words a day. His Flying Fox of Snowy Mountain and The Return of the Condor Heros are published that year in New Evening Post and Ming Pao respectively. 

Age 36 – He publishes Other Tales of the Flying Fox in Wuxia and History. He co-directs another film called Bride Hunter. 

Age 37 – He publishes 3 other wuxia serials in Ming Pao. 

Age 39 – He publishes 2 more wuxia serials in Southeast Asia Weekly. 

Age 41 – He publishes one more wuxia serial in Southeast Asia Weekly. 

Age 43 – He publishes his 13th wuxia serial in Ming Pao and Nanyang Siang Pao. He receives death threats from China’s communist underground for his anti-Maoist editorials and briefly hides out in Singapore. 

Age 45 – He publishes his 14th wuxia serial in Ming Pao and will continue to work on it for the next 3 years. 

Age 46 – He publishes his 15th and last wuxia serial—Sword of the Yue Maiden—in Ming Pao. By this time, Ming Pao has gained the reputation as one of Hong Kong’s most highly-rated press. 

Age 48 – Louis retires from writing and spends his time editing and revising his previous works. 

Age 52 – He divorces his second wife and marries his third, Lin Leyi who is 23 years of age. His son commits suicide while studying at Columbia University after a quarrel with his girlfriend. China’s leader Mao Zedong dies. 

Over the next years – Louis becomes involved in Hong Kong politics. His novels are banned in China because the Chinese think they are satires of Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. His novels are also banned in Taiwan because the Taiwanese think they are in support of the Communist Party of China. 

Age 55 – He finishes revisions of all his previous works. His revised versions are known as “New Editions” in contrast to the “Old Editions”. A complete collection of all his works is published by Taiwan’s Yuenching Publishing House. 

Age 56 – The Wulin magazine in Guangzhou is the first magazine to publish his work. His novels by this time are very popular in Chinese-speaking areas around the world. They would later go on to be adapted into films, TV series and radio dramas in almost all Chinese-speaking territories. 

Age 57 – He is invited to meet China’s new leader Deng Xiaoping over dinner and the latter declares himself a fan of Louis’ work. He returns the compliment by saying good things about Deng in front of reporters. 

Age 69 – He sells all his shares in Ming Pao to prepare for retirement. 

Age 70 – His complete collection is published by Sanlian Shu Dian in Beijing, China. 

Age 71 – His complete collection is published in Southeast Asia by the Ming He Shi Singapore-Malaysia Company. 

Age 72 – He becomes part of the Preparatory Committee set up to supervise Hong Kong’s transition to the Chinese government. 

Age 73 – He suffers a stroke and is unable to walk, write or speak well. 

Age 74 – The asteroid 10930 Jinyong is named after him. 

Age 75 – Louis begins revising his novels again. 

Age 80 – An excerpt from his novel, Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils are included in senior high school text books in China. Other excerpts are included in text books in Singapore for secondary and junior college students. 

Age 81 – He applies for a doctorate in Asian Studies at Cambridge University.

Age 82 – The revisions of all his novels are complete. These are known as the “New Century Editions”.

Age 85 – He applies for a doctorate in Chinese Literature at Peking University. 

Age 86 – He obtains his doctorate from Cambridge University. 

Age 89 – He earns his doctorate from Peking University. 

Age 94 – He dies in Hong Kong Sanatorium and Hospital of organ failure after a long illness. He is survived by his wife and 3 children. Famous writers, producers, actors, politicians and even Alibaba’s founder Jack Ma (a huge fan of his) attend his funeral. His ashes are kept at a columbarium in a monastery on Hong Kong’s Lantau Island. By this time, over 300 million copies of his works have been sold worldwide. His personal wealth is estimated to be around HK$600million (US$77million).

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Photographs: 浙江省舟山市普陀区桃花岛旅游管委会, Hong Kong Heritage Museum. Compiler: Sy
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Blaise Pascal was not allowed to study Mathematics until age 15 and as a result, developed a lifelong curiosity for the subject. He eventually went on to invent the calculator, Pascal’s law, and probability theory, amongst many other mathematical things. This is the timeline of the man who changed the world of computing and mathematics forever. 

1623 – Blaise Pascal is born to a civil servant who serves as the King’s counsellor. He has 2 sisters. 

Age 3 – His mother dies. 

Age 8 – The family moves to Paris, France. Blaise’s father homeschools all his kids because he doesn’t like the way school is run. He emphasises education on Latin and Greek and doesn’t want his son to begin learning Mathematics too soon because he thinks it too enticing. This makes Blaise all the more interested in Mathematics.

Age 12 – Blaise’s curiosity leads him to start studying geometry on his own.  

Age 14 – He starts accompanying his father to mathematical meetings. 

Age 15 – Blaise is finally allowed to study Mathematics. 

Age 16 – The family moves to Rouen, France. Blaise studies hard but is often in poor health. He develops a theorem in geometry that he calls the “mystic hexagram”. He then writes a book, Essay on Conics, that discusses the geometry of cones and talks about his “mystic hexagram” in it. 

Age 19 – His father gets Blaise to help him calculate taxes for the King. To make their lives easier, Blaise invents a calculating machine that can add and subtract by moving a series of gears and cylinders. He calls the machine the Pascaline. He will continue to improve this design over the next decade. 

Age 23 – His father has an accident and is confined at home. Their neighbours who are Jansenists come to visit him and manage to convert the family to Jansenist beliefs. 

Age 24 – Blaise conducts a barrel experiment to prove that hydrostatic pressure depends on elevation difference. This will eventually be known as Pascal’s barrel experiment. He also does New Experiments With A Vacuum to describe how various liquids can be supported by air pressure.

Age 28 – His father dies. His sister joins a Jansenist convent. Blaise continues to enjoy secular life, paid for by his inheritance. 

Age 30 – Blaise writes the Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids and explains what he calls Pascal’s Law of Pressure. He also finishes The Generation of Conic Sections. 

Age 31 – Blaise writes the Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle which describes a convenient tabular presentation for binomial coefficients. Through his correspondence with a friend, the theory of probabilities is also born. This will eventually be called Pascal’s Triangle in the future. After a religious experience though, Blaise gives up Mathematics, converts fully to Jensenism and joins his sister at the convent. 

Age 32 – He releases a series of pamphlets called the Provincial Letters poking fun of the Jesuits. They are popular and the Jesuits try to hunt down the author but are unable to.

Age 35 – He works on solving the problems of volume and surface area of the cycloid. 

Age 36 – He becomes seriously ill and from then on spends his last years giving to the poor and going from church to church to attend services. 

Age 39 – Blaise dies in great pain after a growth in his stomach spreads to the brain. Unfinished and unpublished works of his are released, including more mathematical theorems and a piece of work called the Pensées that defends the Christian religion, in which he tries to prove that belief in God is rational by writing “If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing.” This will come to be known as Pascal’s wager.

Much later – The computer programming language ‘Pascal’ is named after him to honour his contributions to the beginnings of computing. The SI unit of pressure and an important principle of hydrostatics is also named after him. His theory of probability eventually becomes important in economics too. 

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Malala Yousafzai was banned from going to school at age 11 but ended up getting into Oxford University at age 20. This is the story of the young girl who survived being shot by the Taliban and used her experience to devote her life to advocate for the education of girls all around the world.

1997 – Malala Yousafzai is born at home in Mingora, Pakistan—a tourist spot known for its summer festivals. Her father is an educator and owner of a chain of private schools. She will later have 2 younger brothers and 2 pet chickens.

Age 10 – Taliban forces begin fighting the Pakistani Army in a battle for the Swat Valley area of Pakistan which Mingora is a part of. 

Shortly after – The Taliban gains control of most of the Swat Valley and begin banning women from going to school or the shops, along with banning television and music for everybody. Malala gives a speech titled “How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?” in response to it. 

Age 11 – Her father is asked by the BBC to get one of his students to blog about being a schoolgirl under the Taliban’s control. He can’t find any other students willing to do so so he offers his own daughter. She begins blogging for the BBC about what it’s like living with Taliban’s threats to deny girls their education. She goes by the name Gul Makai for it. 

Age 12 – After her BBC diary ends, she and her family are approached by the New York Times to be filmed in a documentary. In the meanwhile, the war in Swat Valley leads to Mingora being evacuated. Malala moves to the countryside to live with relatives. After the documentary, she is interviewed by more people for more television shows. She begins to publicly advocate for female education. 

Age 14 – Malala is nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and wins Pakistan’s National Youth Peace Prize. Her family starts getting death threats from the Taliban but they do not actually believe that the Taliban would harm a child.  

Age 15 – She is shot by a gunman when on the way home from school in a bus. The bullet goes into the left of her head and travels down her neck. She is flown to a military hospital in Peshawar in critical condition. Her skull is removed to help her swelling brain. She is then flown to England for more care while in a medically-induced coma. She survives after more surgeries. The Pakistani government pays for all of her treatment. She gets worldwide recognition after outrage brews over the incident. 

Age 16 – She starts going to school in England. She also gives a speech to the United Nations and publishes her first book, I Am Malala. Her birthday is now known as Malala Day around the world. She wins the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. She launches the Malala Fund with her father which works to make sure girls around the world have access to education for 12 years. 

Age 17 – She wins the Nobel Peace Prize for surviving an assassination attempt by the Taliban. 

Age 18 – She opens a school in Lebanon for Syrian refugee girls. A documentary on her, He Named Me Malala, is released. She receives 6 A*s and 4 As for her GCSE O-Levels and 3 As for her A-Levels. In the meantime, in Pakistan, her book I Am Malala is banned in all private schools and her father is denounced as a traitor and an agent of the west.

Age 20 – She gets honorary Canadian citizenship—the youngest person to be awarded that in history. She publishes Malala’s Magic Pencil, a picture book about her childhood in Pakistan. She goes to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics.

Age 21 – She returns to Pakistan for the first time since being shot and meets with the Prime Minister to deliver a speech at his office. The next day, the group representing private schools in Pakistan organises an “I am not Malala Day”. She publishes “We Are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls Around the World.” 

2020 – Malala is presently 23 years old and is still a student at Oxford. 

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Photographs: Claude Truong-Ngo. Compiler: Sy
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Bobby Fischer began playing chess at age 6 and quickly became a grandmaster by age 15. Although he spent most of his teens and 20s blowing the chess world away with his skills, he ended up a recluse in exile with no interest in competitive chess in his later years. This is the life of the only man to have ever won 11 out of 11 games in the history of the US Chess Championship.

1943 – Robert James Fischer is born in Chicago, USA to a Jewish schoolteacher mother. His mother is homeless at the time of his birth and the man listed on his birth certificate may not be his actual father. He has an older sister who is 5 years older.

Age 2 – His parents divorce and his father leaves the USA for good. His mother moves them to California, then Arizona before settling in Brooklyn. 

Age 6 – His older sister buys him his first chess set and they learn to play together. His mother begins a master’s degree in nursing and eventually will end up working as a nurse.

Age 8 – He starts taking lessons at the Brooklyn Chess Club and plays chess against a Scottish chess champion at an exhibition. He meets the president of the Brooklyn Chess Club through that and the president becomes his chess teacher.

Age 9 – The man who may be Bobby’s real father, who had been paying for Bobby’s schooling and making monthly child support payments to his mother, dies.

Age 12 – He starts to win against adult players at chess clubs. 

Age 13 – He wins the United States Junior Championship, being the youngest player ever to win. He later wins the Lessing J. Rosenwald Trophy Tournement by defeating an international chess master. The Chess Review calls it “The Game of the Century”. His chess teacher moves away and they lose contact. He gets a new mentor from the Hawthorne Chess Club. 

Age 14 – He wins the United States Junior Championships again and his first United States Championship, making him the youngest person to hold that title. He will go on to win it 7 more times.

Age 15 – He attains the rank of grandmaster of chess—the game’s highest designation of skill. 

Age 16 – He drops out of high school because it takes his time away from chess. His mother moves out of their apartment for medical training and leaves her son to live on his own.  

Age 17 – He gets involved with the Worldwide Church of God and begins to believe that the world is coming to an end. Shortly after, he tells a magazine that women cannot be great chess players. 

Age 21 – In the United States Championships, he wins 11 games, loses and draws none. It is the only perfect score in the history of the tournament and blows the chess world away. From then on, he begins demanding special treatment from tournament directors—special seating, special lighting, quiet. He begins to worry that opponents are trying to poison his food and that hotel rooms may be bugged. He starts being afraid of flying in case Russians hide booby traps on the plane. He starts playing less chess. 

Age 26 – He publishes My 60 Memorable Chess Games for serious players. 

Age 29 – Bobby competes against world champion, Boris Spassky in Iceland. He refused to play the match in front of cameras and insisted the match take place in an isolated room. He wins $250,000. He is invited to the White House, interviewed for television and magazines and pursued by commerce. His bodyguard, Saemi Palsson will go on to be a lifelong friend of his.

Age 30 – He turns down millions of dollars of financial offers to play new matches and associates himself with the Worldwide Church of God, contributing to them significantly. He believes that the world is coming to an end.

Age 32 – He is asked to defend his title at the World Championships but refuses and is stripped of the world champion title. He then becomes a recluse and disappears from competitive chess. 

Age 34 – Bobby leaves the Worldwide Church of God and begins attacking its methods and leadership.

Age 38 – He stays with grandmaster Peter Biyiasas for 4 months and wins him in chess continuously. He begins openly criticising Jews.

Age 45 – Searching for Bobby Fischer—a book about him—is published by Fred Waitzkin. He meets German chess player Petra Stadler and begins a relationship with her.

Age 47 – His relationship with Petra ends. 

Age 49 – He wins $5m in a rematch against his old nemesis, Boris Spassky. Before the match, he presents a letter from the US Treasury Department saying that his participation in the match constitutes defiance against American sanctions in Yugoslavia and spits on it in front of reporters. He goes into exile after that and moves to Hungary. 

Age 54 – His mother dies.

Age 56 – He talks about an international Jewish conspiracy in telephone interviews with a radio station in the Philippines, and says that the conspiracy is bent on destroying him and the world. 

Age 57 – He moves to the Philippines. He meets a 22-year-old who later has a baby girl, Jinky, who she claims to be his daughter.

Age 58 – When 9/11 happens, he tells a radio talk show host in the Philippines that it is “wonderful news” and he hopes the country will soon be taken over by the military and that they will arrest all Jews. In response to his statements, the US Chess Federation cancels his membership. 

Age 60 – The USA revokes his passport. 

Age 61 – He is arrested by Japanese authorities when trying to board a plane to Manila and jailed for 9 months for trying to leave the country on an invalid passport. He claims then to be married to Miyoko Watai, president of the Japanese chess federation. Japan wants to deport him. Fischer writes to Germany and Iceland asking for citizenship. Iceland grants him citizenship and he is released.  

Age 62 – He moves to Iceland.

Age 64 – He dies of degenerative kidney failure in Iceland. He is buried in Iceland. A legal battle over his estate soon begins between his supposed Japanese wife, his supposed Filipino daughter, his 2 American nephews, and the US government (because of unpaid taxes).

2 years after his death – His body is exhumed for DNA testing at the request of his supposed daughter. The test conclude he is not her father. The Icelandic district court rules that Miyoko Watai and Fischer were married in 2004 and she thus inherits his estate. His nephews are to pay her legal costs. 

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Photographs: Dutch National Archives, German Federal Archive. Compiler: Sy
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