Allan Gotthelf (born Brooklyn NY, 1942) is an American philosopher, and a recognized authority on the philosophies of both Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

Gotthelf received his masters degree in mathematics from Pennsylvania State University, and his masters and PhD in philosophy from Columbia University in 1975, where he studied under professors such as the noted Aristotelian scholar John Herman Randall, Jr.. An essay based on his doctoral dissertation (both titled Aristotle's Conception of Final Causality) won first prize in the Dissertation Essay Competition of The Review of Metaphysics and was published in that journal in December 1976. He began his teaching career at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

He is an emeritus professor of philosophy at The College of New Jersey, a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and visiting professor of the history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he has held the university's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism since 2003. He was one of the founders of the Ayn Rand Society (founded in 1987), affiliated with the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, and has held the position of secretary of the Society and chairman of its Steering Committee since 1990.

Hans Henny Jahnn (17 December 1894, Stellingen – 29 November 1959, Hamburg) was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder.

As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1917), which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III (1922; "equally lurid"); and a version of Medea (1926). Later works include the novel Perrudja, an unfinished trilogy of novels River without Banks (Fluss ohne Ufer), the drama Thomas Chatterton (1955; staged by Gustaf Gründgens in 1956), and the novella The Night of Lead. Erwin Piscator staged Jahnn's The Dusty Rainbow (Der staubige Regenbogen) in 1961.

Jahnn was also a music publisher, focusing on 17th-century organ music. He was a contemporary of organ-builder Rudolf von Beckerath.

He met Gottlieb Friedrich Harms at school (St. Pauli's Realschule) which he united in a "mystical wedding" in 1913, and they lived together between 1914 and 1918. They met Ellinor Philips in 1918. In 1919, Jahnn founded the community of Ugrino with a sculptor, Franz Buse. In 1926, Jahnn married Ellinor, and Harms married Sybille Philips, Ellinor's sister, in 1928.

Kurd Lasswitz (German: Kurd Laßwitz, IPA: [ˈkʊʁt ˈlasvɪt͡s]; April 20, 1848 – October 17, 1910) was a German author, scientist, and philosopher. He has been called the father of German science fiction^{[citation needed]} He sometimes used the pseudonym Velatus.

Lasswitz studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin, and earned his doctorate in 1873. He spent most of his career as a teacher at the Gymnasium Ernestinum in Gotha.

His first published science fiction story was "Bis zum Nullpunkt des Seins" ("To the Zero Point of Existence", 1871), depicting life in 2371, but he earned his reputation with his 1897 novel Two Planets, which describes an encounter between humans and a Martian civilization that is older and more advanced. The book has the Martian race running out of water, eating synthetic foods, travelling by rolling roads, and utilising space stations. His spaceships use anti-gravity, but travel realistic orbital trajectories, and use occasional mid-course corrections in travelling between Mars and the Earth; the book depicted the technically correct transit between the orbits of two planets, something poorly understood by other early science fiction writers. It influenced Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun.^{[citation needed]} The book was not translated into English until 1971 (as Two Planets, and the translation is incomplete). A story from Lasswitz's Traumkristalle served as the basis for The Library of Babel, a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.

Karin Slaughter (born January 6, 1971) is an American crime writer, whose first novel Blindsighted (2001) became an international success, was published in almost 30 languages, and made the Crime Writers' Association's Dagger Award shortlist for "Best Thriller Debut" of 2001. She has sold more than 30 million copies of her books, and is published in 32 languages.

Fractured, the second novel in the Will Trent series, debuted at number one in the UK and the Netherlands, and was the number one adult fiction title in Australia.  At the same time, Faithless (Gottlos) published in Germany at number one.  All told, Slaughter has sold more than 16 million books worldwide.

Slaughter was born in a small southern Georgia community. Now residing in Atlanta, she is widely credited with coining the term "investigoogling" in 2006.

Slaughter is currently part of a "Save the Libraries" event that benefits the DeKalb Public Library.

In 2009, Slaughter brought together characters from her two main series Grant County and Will Trent/Atlanta in her novel Undone, called Genesis internationally. Will Trent and other characters from that series work a case set in Atlanta with Sara Linton, of Grant County. Also intertwining the characters Will Trent and Sara Linton from her two series is her book "Broken," published in 2010. It is set in the fictitious Grant County.

Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.

Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.

Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.