Portal:Atheism/Selected biography

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Selected biographies list

Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/1

Isaac Asimov (January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992), originally Исаак Озимов but now transcribed into Russian as Айзек Азимов) was a Russian-born American Jewish author and professor of biochemistry, a highly successful and exceptionally prolific writer best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards, and has works in nine of the ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (lacking only an entry in the 100s category of Philosophy). Asimov is widely considered a master of the science-fiction genre and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, was considered one of the "Big Three" science-fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov was a long-time member and Vice President of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described the members of that organization as "intellectually combative". He took more joy in being president of the American Humanist Association.

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Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (June 24, 1842 – 1914?) was an American editorialist, journalist, short-story writer and satirist, today best known for his Devil's Dictionary. Bierce's lucid, unsentimental style has kept him popular when many of his contemporaries have been consigned to oblivion. His dark, sardonic views and vehemence as a critic earned him the nickname, "Bitter Bierce." Such was his reputation that it was said his judgment on any piece of prose or poetry could make or break a writer's career. Among the younger writers whom he encouraged were the poet George Sterling and the fiction writer W. C. Morrow.

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Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917–19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, written in collaboration with director Stanley Kubrick, a collaboration which also produced the film of the same name; and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a radar instructor and technician from 1941-1946, proposed satellite communication systems in 1945 which won him the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Gold Medal in 1963. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994. He was the chairman of the British Interplanetary Society from 1947-1950 and again in 1953. Later, he helped fight for the preservation of lowland gorillas. He won the UNESCO-Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science in 1961. Clarke emigrated to Sri Lanka in 1956 largely to pursue his interest in scuba diving, and lived there until his death. He was knighted by the United Kingdom in 1998, and was awarded Sri Lanka's highest civil honour, Sri Lankabhimanya, in 2005.

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Daniel Clement Dennett (b. March 28, 1942 in Boston, Massachusetts), is a prominent American philosopher whose research centers on philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. Dennett is currently the Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies and the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. Dennett is also a noted atheist and advocate of the brights movement.

Dennett self-identifies with a few terms. In Consciousness Explained, he admits "I am a sort of 'teleofunctionalist', of course, perhaps the original teleofunctionalist'". He goes on to say, "I am ready to come out of the closet as a sort of verificationalist". In Breaking the Spell he admits to being "a bright", and defends the term on several occasions. A "qualophile" is Daniel Dennett's nickname for any philosopher who believes in the reality of qualia.

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Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820, Barmen, Prussia – August 5, 1895, London, England) a 19th-century German social scientist and philosopher, developed communist theory alongside his better-known collaborator, Karl Marx, co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848). Engels also edited the second and third volumes of Das Kapital after Marx's death.

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Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988; IPA: /ˈfɑɪnmən/) was an American physicist known for expanding the theory of quantum electrodynamics, the physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, and particle theory. He was also famous as an unscrupulous prankster. He was a proud amateur painter and bongo player. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965, together with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga; he developed a way to understand the behavior of subatomic particles, by using pictorial tools that later became known as Feynman diagrams.

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Ricky Dene Gervais (IPA: [dʒɜːˈveɪz]) (born June 25, 1961) is an Emmy, Golden Globe and BAFTA award-winning English comic writer and performer from Reading, Berkshire. Gervais found mainstream fame with his BBC Two television programme The Office, which he co-wrote and co-directed with his friend and collaborator Stephen Merchant. Besides writing and directing the show, Gervais played the lead role of David Brent. In 2005, Gervais and Merchant returned to BBC Television with their sitcom, Extras.

In an interview given to John Humphrys he said, "Being an atheist makes someone a clearer-thinking, fairer person... They [atheists] are not doing things to be rewarded in heaven; they're doing things because they're right, because they live by a moral code". Andy Millman, the character he plays in his and Merchant's sitcom Extras, also holds this view.

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Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011), born in Portsmouth, England) was a British-born author, journalist and literary critic. He was a columnist at Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate and Free Inquiry; additionally, he was an occasional contributor to other publications and has appeared regularly in the Wall Street Journal. His brother is British journalist Peter Hitchens.

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Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll (August 11, 1833 – July 21, 1899) was a Civil War veteran, American political leader and orator during the Golden Age of Freethought, noted for his broad range of culture and his defense of agnosticism.

He was involved in several prominent trials as an attorney, notably the Star Route trials, a major political scandal in which his clients were acquitted. He also defended a New Jersey man for blasphemy. Although he did not win acquittal, his vigorous defense is considered to have discredited blasphemy laws and few other prosecutions followed.

Ingersoll was most noted as an orator, the most popular of the age, when oratory was public entertainment. He spoke on every subject, from Shakespeare to Reconstruction, but his most popular subjects were agnosticism and the sanctity and refuge of the family. He committed his speeches to memory although they were sometimes more than three hours long. His audiences were said never to be restless.

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William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American singer, pianist, songwriter, and composer. He released his first hit song, "Piano Man", in 1973. According to the RIAA, he is the sixth best selling artist in the United States.

Joel had Top 10 hits in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, is a six-time Grammy Award winner and has sold in excess of 150 million albums worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (Class of 1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Class of 1999), and the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (Class of 2006). Joel retired from recording pop music in 1993 but continued to tour (sometimes with Elton John). In 2001 he subsequently released Fantasies & Delusions, a CD of classical compositions for piano. In 2007 he returned to recording with a single entitled "All My Life", followed by a rather large "World Tour" from 2006-2007, covering many of the major world cities.

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Harry Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey, March 12, 1925) is an American science fiction author best known for his character the Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973).

Harrison was born in Stamford, Connecticut, but has lived in many parts of the world including Mexico, England, Ireland, Denmark and Italy. He is an advocate of Esperanto (the language often appears in his novels, particularly in his Stainless Steel Rat and Deathworld series) and was formerly the honorary president of the Esperanto Association of Ireland, as well as holding memberships in other Esperanto organizations such as the Esperanto League for North America, of which he is an honorary member, and the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (World Esperanto Association), of whose Honorary Patrons' Committee he is a member. He served in the United States Army Air Forces during WWII as a gunsight mechanic and gunnery instructor. He currently lives in the Republic of Ireland and maintains a flat in Brighton for visits to England.

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Emma Goldman (June 27 (NS), 1869 – May 14, 1940) was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

During her life, Goldman was lionized as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and derided by critics as an advocate of politically motivated murder and violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including prisons, atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed new ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism. After decades of obscurity, Goldman's iconic status was revived in the 1970s, when feminist and anarchist scholars rekindled popular interest in her life.

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Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a prominent Canadian-born American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker’s academic specializations are visual cognition and language development in children, and he is most famous for popularizing the idea that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection rather than a by-product of general intelligence. His four books for a general audience — The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules and The Blank Slate — have won numerous awards.

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Madalyn Murray O'Hair (April 13, 1919 – September 29, 1995) was an American who founded American Atheists, and campaigned for the separation of church and state. She was murdered at age 76.

She founded American Atheists, "a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of church and state, and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy." She acted as its first CEO before later handing that office on to her son Jon Garth.

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Avram Noam Chomsky (Hebrew :אברם נועם חומסקי Yiddish: אברם נועם כאמסקי) (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has also affected the philosophy of language and mind (see Harman and Fodor). He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth-most cited scholar in any time period.

Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known — especially internationally — for his media criticism and politics. He is generally considered to be a key intellectual figure within the left wing of United States politics. Chomsky is widely known for his political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (August 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822; pronounced ['pɜːsi bɪʃ 'ʃɛli]) was one of the major English Romantic poets and is widely considered to be among the finest lyric poets of the English language. He is perhaps most famous for such anthology pieces as Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy. However, his major works were long visionary poems including Alastor, Adonais, The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus Unbound and the unfinished The Triumph of Life.

Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism, combined with his strong skeptical voice, made him a notorious and much denigrated figure during his life. He became the idol of the next two or three generations of poets, including the major Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, as well as William Butler Yeats and poets in other languages such as Jibanananda Das and Subramanya Bharathy). He was also admired by Karl Marx, Henry Stephens Salt, Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw. Famous for his association with his equally short-lived contemporaries John Keats and Lord Byron, he was married to novelist Mary Shelley.

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Clinton Richard Dawkins (born March 26, 1941) is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and popular science writer who holds the Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme into the lexicon, helping found memetics. In 1982, he made a widely cited contribution to the science of evolution with the theory, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that phenotypic effects are not limited to an organism's body but can stretch far into the environment, including into the bodies of other organisms. He has since written several best-selling popular books, and appeared in a number of television and radio programmes, concerning evolutionary biology, creationism, and religion.

Dawkins is an outspoken atheist, secular humanist, and sceptic, and he is a prominent member of the Brights movement. In a play on Thomas Huxley's epithet "Darwin's bulldog", Dawkins' impassioned advocacy of evolution has earned him the appellation "Darwin's rottweiler"...

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/39 Albert Camus (IPA: [al'bɛʁ ka'my]) (November 7, 1913 – January 4, 1960) was a French author and philosopher. Although he is often associated with existentialism, Camus preferred to be known as a man and a thinker, rather than as a member of a school or ideology. He preferred persons over ideas. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked....” (Les Nouvelles litteraires, November 15, 1945).

Camus was the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature (after Rudyard Kipling) when he became the first African-born writer to receive the award, in 1957. He is also the shortest-lived of any literature laureate to date, having died in a car crash only three years after receiving the award.

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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie (Devanagari : अख़्मद सल्मान रश्दी Nastaliq:سلمان رشدی; born 19 June 1947) is a British-Indian novelist and essayist. He first achieved fame with his second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the long, rich and often fraught story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the East and the West.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), provoked violent reactions from Muslims in several countries. Faced with death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Supreme Leader of Iran, which called for him to be killed, he spent nearly a decade largely underground, appearing in public only sporadically. In June 2007, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor for "services to literature", which "thrilled and humbled" him. The announcement met with disapproval from some Muslim nations and communities, with some claiming that it "may spark terrorism". In 2007, he began a five-year term as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Emory University.

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/41 Arthur Asher Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) was an American playwright and essayist. He was a prominent figure in American literature and cinema for over 61 years, writing a wide variety of plays, including celebrated plays such as The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, All My Sons, and Death of a Salesman, which are still studied and performed worldwide.

Miller was often in the public eye, most famously for refusing to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee, being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama among other awards, and because of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe. At the time of his death, Miller was considered one of the greatest American playwrights.

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Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. He is best known as the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Hitchhiker's began on radio, and developed into a "trilogy" of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a comic book series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams' death. The series has also been adapted for live theatre using various scripts; the earliest such productions used material newly written by Adams. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible signature), or by his initials "DNA".

In addition to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams wrote or co-wrote three stories of the science fiction television series Doctor Who and served as Script Editor during the seventeenth season. His other written works include the Dirk Gently novels, and co-author credits on two Liff books and Last Chance to See, itself based on a radio series. Adams also originated the idea for the computer game Starship Titanic, which was realized by a company that Adams co-founded, and adapted into a novel by Terry Jones. A posthumous collection of essays and other material, including an incomplete novel, was published as The Salmon of Doubt in 2002.

His fans and friends also knew Adams as an environmental activist, a self-described "radical atheist", and a lover of fast cars, cameras, the Macintosh computer, and other "techno gizmos." Acclaimed biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated his book The God Delusion to Douglas Adams and in it describes how Adams came to understand evolution, thereby "converting" to atheism. Douglas was a keen technologist, writing about such inventions as e-mail and Usenet before they became widely popular, or even widely known.

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Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philologist and philosopher, produced critiques of religion, morality, contemporary culture, and philosophy, centered around what he viewed as a fundamental question regarding the life-affirming and life-denying qualities of different attitudes and beliefs. Nietzsche's works feature unique, free-form stylization – combined with a wide philosophical breadth – through the use of, for example, analyses, etymologies, punning, parables, paradoxes, aphorisms, and contradictions, employed to demonstrate the inadequacies of normative modes of thought. Although largely overlooked during his short yet productive working life, which ended with a mental collapse in 1889, Nietzsche received recognition during the first half of the 20th century in German, French, and English intellectual circles, and by the second half of the 20th century he became regarded as a highly significant and influential figure in modern philosophy...

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/44 Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell OM FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician and advocate for social reform.

A prolific writer, he was also a populariser of philosophy and a commentator on a large variety of topics, ranging from very serious issues to those much less so. Continuing a family tradition in political affairs, he was a prominent anti-war activist, championing free trade between nations and anti-imperialism.

Russell was born at the height of Britain's economic and political ascendancy. He died of influenza nearly a century later, at a time when the British Empire had all but vanished, its power dissipated by two world wars and the end of the imperial system. As one of the world's best-known intellectuals, Russell's voice carried great moral authority, even into his mid 90s. Among his political activities, Russell was a vigorous proponent of nuclear disarmament and an outspoken critic of the American military intervention in Vietnam. His strong opinions and political activism rendered him an often highly controversial figure.

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Sam Harris

Sam Harris, Ph.D (born 1967) is an American writer and CEO. He is the author of The End of Faith (2004), which was inspired by the September 11, 2001 attacks, and which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), a rejoinder to the criticism the first book attracted. His articles have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times, and The Boston Globe.

Harris's writing focuses on neuroscience; philosophy, particularly philosophy of mind; and criticism of religion, which is what he is best known for. He has a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a doctorate in neuroscience from UCLA where he conducted research into the neural basis of belief, disbelief and uncertainty using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Harris is the Co-Founder and CEO of Project Reason, a nonprofit foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.

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Ernst Walter Mayr (July 5, 1904, Kempten, Germany – February 3, 2005, Bedford, Massachusetts U.S.), was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.

Neither Darwin nor anyone else in his time knew the answer to the "species problem": how multiple species could evolve from a single common ancestor. Ernst Mayr approached the problem with a new definition for the concept 'species'. In his book Systematics and the Origin of Species (1942) he wrote that a species is not just a group of morphologically similar individuals, but a group that can breed only among themselves, excluding all others. When populations of organisms get isolated, the sub-populations will start to differ by genetic drift and natural selection over a period of time, and thereby evolve into new species. The most significant and rapid genetic reorganization occurs in extremely small populations that have been isolated.

His theory of peripatric speciation (a more precise form of allopatric speciation which he advanced) based on his work on birds, is still considered a leading mode of speciation, and was the theoretical underpinning for the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Mayr is generally credited with inventing the modern philosophy of biology, particularly of evolutionary biology, which he distinguished from physics, for its introduction of (natural) history into science.

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/47 Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer.

Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church–Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine. With the Turing test, he made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He later worked at the National Physical Laboratory, creating one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, although it was never actually built. In 1948 he moved to the University of Manchester to work on the Manchester Mark I, then emerging as one of the world's earliest true computers.

During the Second World War Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre, and was for a time head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

In 1952, Turing was convicted of "acts of gross indecency" after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy. Turing died after eating an apple laced with cyanide in 1954. His death was ruled a suicide.

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Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was an English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, who is most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He, James D. Watson, and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". His later work, until 1977, at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, has not received as much formal recognition. During the remainder of his career, he held the post of J.W. Kieckhefer Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. He remained in this post until his death; "he was editing a manuscript on his death bed, a scientist until the bitter end" said his close associate Christof Koch. His wife, Odile Crick died on July 5th, 2007.

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Herbert George Wells (September 21, 1866 – August 13, 1946), better known as H. G. Wells, was an English writer best known for such science fiction novels as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, The First Men in the Moon and The Island of Doctor Moreau. He was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, and produced works in many different genres, including contemporary novels, history, and social commentary. He was also an outspoken socialist. His later works become increasingly political and didactic, and only his early science fiction novels are widely read today. Both Wells and Jules Verne are sometimes referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction".

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/50 Joseph Conrad (born Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski, 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. Some of his works have been labelled romantic: Conrad's supposed "romanticism" is heavily imbued with irony and a fine sense of man's capacity for self-deception. Many critics regard Conrad as an important forerunner of Modernist literature.

Conrad's narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller and Jerzy Kosiński, as well as inspiring such films as Apocalypse Now (which was drawn from Conrad's Heart of Darkness).

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David Hume (April 26, 1711 – August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Although in recent years interest in Hume's work has centred on his philosophical writing, it was as an historian that he first gained recognition and respect. His The History of England was the standard work on English history for sixty or seventy years until Macaulay's.

Hume was the first great philosopher of the modern era to carve out a thoroughly naturalistic philosophy. This philosophy partly consisted in the rejection of the historically prevalent conception of human minds as being miniature versions of the Divine mind; a notion Edward Craig has entitled the ‘Image of God’ doctrine. This doctrine was associated with a trust in the powers of human reason and insight into reality, which powers possessed God’s certification. Hume’s scepticism came in his rejection of this ‘insight ideal’, and the (usually rationalistic) confidence derived from it that the world is as we represent it. Instead, the best we can do is to apply the best explanatory and empirical principles available to the investigation of human mental phenomena, issuing in a quasi-Newtonian project, Hume's ‘Science of Man’.

Hume was heavily influenced by empiricists John Locke and George Berkeley, along with various Francophone writers such as Pierre Bayle, and various figures on the Anglophone intellectual landscape such as Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Joseph Butler.

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Portal:Atheism/Selected biography/52 Leon Trotsky (Russian: <phonos file="ru-Leon Trotsky.ogg">Лeв Давидович Трóцкий</phonos>, Lev Davidovich Trotsky, also transliterated Leo, Lyev, Trotskii, Trotski, Trotskij, Trockij and Trotzky) (November 7 [O.S. October 26] 1879 – August 21, 1940), born Lev Davidovich Bronstein (Лeв Давидович Бронштéйн), was an Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union, first as People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs and later as the founder and commander of the Red Army and People's Commissar of War. He was also among the first members of the Politburo.

After leading the failed struggle of the Left Opposition against the policies and rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s and the increasing bureaucratization of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was expelled from the Communist Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the head of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to oppose the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, and was eventually assassinated in Mexico by Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent. Trotsky's ideas form the basis of Trotskyism, a variation of communist theory, which remains a major school of Marxist thought that is opposed to the theories of Stalinism.

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Nominations

Adding articles

• Feel free to add WP:FA or WP:GA articles to the above list. Other Atheism-related biography articles may be nominated here.
  • See also Atheism articles by quality
• If you are unsure or do not know how to add an entry, feel free to post a question, suggestion or nomination here below, or at the talk page Portal talk:Atheism.

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