Antoine Laumet de La Mothe Cadillac was a French soldier, explorer, and administrator in French North America, founder of the city of Detroit (1701), and governor of Louisiana (1710 to 1716 or 1717). Going to Canada in 1683, he fought against the Iroquois Indians, lived for a time in Maine, and
Leif Erikson, Norse explorer widely held to have been the first European to reach the shores of North America. The 13th- and 14th-century Icelandic accounts of his life show that he was a member of an early voyage to eastern North America, although he may not have been the first to sight its coast.
Johannes Kepler, German astronomer who discovered three major laws of planetary motion. His discoveries turned Nicolaus Copernicus’s Sun-centered system into a dynamic universe, with the Sun actively pushing the planets around in noncircular orbits. Learn more about Kepler’s life and discoveries...
Sir Patrick Manson was a British parasitologist who founded the field of tropical medicine. He was the first to discover (1877–79) that an insect (mosquito) can be host to a developing parasite (the worm Filaria bancrofti) that is the cause of a human disease (filariasis, which occurs when the