Paula Rego (born 1935) is a painter born in Portugal although she is a naturalised British citizen.

Rego was born in the Portuguese capital Lisbon, the daughter of an electrical engineer who worked for the Marconi Company. Although this gave her a comfortable middle class home, the family was divided in 1936 when her father was posted to work in the United Kingdom. Accompanied by Rego's mother, they left Rego behind in Portugal in the care of her grandmother until 1939. Her grandmother was to become a significant figure in Rego's life as she learnt many of the traditional folktales that would one day make their way into her art work from her grandmother and the family maid.

Rego's family were keen Anglophiles, and Rego was sent to the only English language school in Portugal at the time, Saint Julian's School in Carcavelos from 1945 to 1951. Although nominally a Catholic and living in a devoutly Catholic country, St Julian's School was Anglican and this combined with the hostility of Rego's father for the Catholic Church to create a distance between her and full blooded Catholic belief. Rego has described herself as having become a 'sort of Catholic', but equally she possessed as a child a sense of Catholic guilt and a very real belief that the Devil is real.

Eduardo Elísio Machado Souto de Moura (Portuguese pronunciation: [eˈðwaɾðu ˈsowtu dɨ ˈmowɾɐ]; born 25 July 1952, better known as Eduardo Souto de Moura, is a Portuguese architect. Son of medical doctor José Alberto Souto de Moura and wife Maria Teresa Ramos Machado, he is the brother of José Souto de Moura, former 9th Attorney-General of Portugal. Along with Fernando Távora and Álvaro Siza, he is one of the references of the Porto School of Architecture, where he was appointed Professor. Souto de Moura was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2011.

Souto de Moura was born in Porto, and studied sculpture before switching to architecture at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, the current FAUP - Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto, and receiving his degree in 1980. From 1974 to 1979 he worked with Álvaro Siza Vieira at his architectural practice, who encouraged him to start his own firm. He began his career as an independent architect in 1980, after winning a design competition for the Casa das Artes, a culture center with an auditorium and an exhibition gallery in the gardens of a neo-classical mansion, in his native city of Porto. However, Souto de Moura collaborated with Siza on the Portuguese pavilion at the Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, and Serpentine Gallery's annual summer pavilion in 2004.

Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.

In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.