Percival Lawrence Lowell (March 13, 1855 – November 12, 1916) was an American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death. The choice of the name Pluto and its symbol were partly influenced by his initials PL.

Percival Lowell was a descendant of the Boston Lowell family. His brother A. Lawrence was the president of Harvard University, and his sister Amy was an imagist poet, critic, and publisher.

Percival graduated from the Noble and Greenough School in 1872 and Harvard University in 1876 with distinction in mathematics. At his college graduation, he gave a speech, considered very advanced for its time, on the "Nebular Hypothesis." He was later awarded honorary degrees from Amherst College and Clark University.

In the 1880s, Lowell traveled extensively in the Far East. In August 1883, he served as a foreign secretary and counsellor for a special Korean diplomatic mission to the United States. He also spent significant periods of time in Japan, writing books on Japanese religion, psychology, and behavior. His texts are filled with observations and academic discussions of various aspects of Japanese life, including language, religious practices, economics, travel in Japan, and the development of personality. Books by Percival Lowell on the Orient include Chosön: The Land of the Morning Calm (1886, Boston), Noto: An Unexplored Corner of Japan (1891) and Occult Japan, or the Way of the Gods (1894); the latter from his third and final trip to the region. The most popular of Lowell's books on the Orient, The Soul of the Far East, (1888) contains an early synthesis of some of his ideas, that in essence, postulated that human progress is a function of the qualities of individuality and imagination.

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS (30 August 1871 – 19 October 1937) was a New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation, proving that the former was essentially helium ions. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

Rutherford performed his most famous work after he had moved to the Victoria University of Manchester in the UK in 1907 and was already a Nobel laureate. In 1911, he theorized that atoms have their positive charge concentrated in a very small nucleus, and thereby pioneered the Rutherford model of the atom, through his discovery and interpretation of Rutherford scattering in his gold foil experiment. He is widely credited with first "splitting the atom" in 1917 in a nuclear reaction between nitrogen and alpha particles, in which he also discovered (and named) the proton. This led to the first experiment to split the nucleus in a fully controlled manner, performed by two students working under his direction, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton, in 1932. 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.

Clyde William Tombaugh (February 4, 1906 – January 17, 1997) was an American astronomer. Although he is best known for discovering the dwarf planet Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper Belt, Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids; he also called for serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects.

Tombaugh was born in Streator, Illinois. After his family moved to Burdett, Kansas, Tombaugh's plans for attending college were frustrated when a hailstorm ruined their crops. Starting in 1926, he built several telescopes with lenses and mirrors he ground himself. He sent drawings of Jupiter and Mars, as well as his telescopes to the Lowell Observatory. These resulted in a job offer. Tombaugh was employed at the Lowell Observatory from 1929 to 1945.

Following his discovery of Pluto, Tombaugh earned bachelor's and master's degrees in astronomy from the University of Kansas in 1936 and 1938. During World War II he taught naval personnel navigation at Northern Arizona University. He worked at White Sands Missile Range in the early 1950s, and taught astronomy at New Mexico State University from 1955 until his retirement in 1973. He died in Las Cruces, New Mexico in 1997, aged 90. He was survived by his widow, Patricia and their children: daughter Annette and son Alden. Tombaugh was the great-uncle of Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Clayton Kershaw. Tombaugh was an active Unitarian-Universalist.

Kevin Schindler (born 21 May 1988 in Delmenhorst) is a German footballer who currently plays for FC St. Pauli.

He previously played on loan for Hansa Rostock and FC Augsburg.

Greg Mortenson, is an American humanitarian, professional speaker, writer, and former mountaineer. He is the co-founder and executive director of the non-profit Central Asia Institute as well as the founder of the educational charity Pennies for Peace. Mortenson is the author or co-author of the New York Times Bestsellers Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Books, Not Bombs, in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In April 2011, he was accused of using literary license in his non-fiction books and of financial improprieties at his charity, Central Asia Institute.

Greg Mortenson was born to Lutheran missionary parents in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Through the leadership of the Lutheran Church, Mortenson's father, Irvin ("Dempsey"), was a fundraiser for and development director of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania's first teaching hospital. Mortenson's mother, Jerene, was the founding principal of International School Moshi. Mortenson spent his early childhood and adolescence in Tanzania, East Africa, where he learned to speak Swahili fluently. In the early 1970s, when he was 15 years old, Mortenson and his family left Tanzania and moved back to Minnesota. He attended Ramsey High School in Roseville, Minnesota from 1973 to 1975. After high school, Mortenson served in the U.S. Army in Germany from 1975 to 1977 as a medic and was awarded the Army Commendation Medal. Following his discharge, he attended Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota from 1977 to 1979 on an athletic (football) scholarship. Mortenson graduated from the University of South Dakota in 1993 with a bachelor's degree in liberal studies and an associate's degree in nursing.