Sun Myung Moon
Isaac Asimov
Roselind Franklin
Pope John Paul II
Mandelbrot
Sun Myung Moon (1920 – 2012)
Sun Myung Moon was a Korean religious leader, also known for his support of business ventures and social and political causes. A messiah claimant, he was the founder of the Unification Church. He was an ardent anti-communist and advocated for Korean reunification, for which he was recognized by the governments of both South and North Korea. Businesses he promoted included News World Communications, an international news media corporation known for its American subsidiary The Washington Times.
Moon was born in North Korea. When he was a child, his family converted to Christianity. In 1947 he was convicted by the North Korean government of spying for South Korea and given a 5-year sentence in a labor camp. When he was excommunicated from the Presbyterian Church in 1954, Sun Myung Moon founded the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity in Seoul, South Korea based on conservative, family-oriented teachings from new interpretations of the Bible. He became well-known after giving a series of public speeches on his beliefs. Reverend Moon told his flock that only he could choose their marriage partners and he became infamous for his mass marriage ceremonies. By the 1970s, Moon, a successful businessman had renamed the cult the Unification Church and moved to New York City, where he gained much attention. Parents filed lawsuits against the cult, and publicized their attempts to deprogram their brainwashed children.
In 1982 he was found guilty of willfully filing false federal income tax returns and sentenced to 18 months in federal prison. His case generated protests from clergy and civil libertarians, who said that the trial was deemed biased against him.
Critics labeled Moon a leader who made high demands on his followers. His wedding ceremonies also drew criticism, especially after they involved members of other churches. He was also criticized for his relationships with political and religious figures, including Presidents of the United States Richard Nixon, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, North Korean President Kim Il Sung, and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Sun Myung Moon was born in North Korea, to a farming family at a time when Korea was under Japanese rule. Moon's family followed Confucianist beliefs until he was around 10 years old, when they converted to Christianity and joined the Presbyterian Church. When he was 15 years old in 1935, he claimed that Jesus anointed him to carry out his unfinished work by becoming parent to all of humanity.
In 1941, when Moon was 21 years old, he began studying electrical engineering in Japan. During this time he cooperated with Communist Party members in the Korean independence movement against Imperial Japan. In 1943, he returned to Seoul and married 2 years later.
In the 1940s Moon attended a church that was led by Kim. Moon later said that Kim was a "John the Baptist figure". Following WWII, Korea was divided into 2 trusteeships: the United States and the Soviet Union. Pyongyang was the center of Christian activity in Korea until 1945. 166 priests and other religious figures were killed or disappeared in concentration camps. In 1947 Moon was convicted by the North Korean government of spying for South Korea and given a 5-year sentence. In 1950, during the Korean War UN troops had raided the concentration camp he was in and the guards fled. Moon escaped and traveled to South Korea.
Moon emerged from his years in the labor camp as a staunch anti-communist. His teachings viewed the Cold War between democracy and communism as the final conflict between God and Satan. In 1954, Moon formally founded the Unification Church as the "Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity" in Seoul. He quickly drew young alter boys who helped to build the foundations of church affiliated business and cultural organizations. At his new church, he preached a conservative, family-oriented value system and his interpretation of the Bible.
"The Divine Principle" is the main theological textbook of the Unification Church. The book lays out the core of Unification theology, and is held to have the status of scripture by believers. Following the format of systematic theology, it includes
- God's purpose in creating human beings,
- the fall of man, and
- the restoration - the process through history by which God works to remove the ill effects of the fall and restore humanity back to the relationship and position that God originally intended.
God is viewed as the creator, whose nature combines both masculinity and femininity, and is the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness. Human beings and the universe reflect God's personality, nature, and purpose. The purpose of human existence is to return joy to God.
Moon incorporated some of the teachings of older Korean minister Kim Baek-moon into his own book. Kim said that he had been approached by Jesus and was given the mission to spread the message of a "new Israel” throughout the world.
In 1957, he divorced his wife and 3 years later, he married his second wife Han soon after she turned 17 years old, in a ceremony called the Holy Marriage. She became to be called "True Mother". She and Moon together are referred to as the "True Parents" by members of the Unification Church and their family as the "True Family". Jesus was divine but not God; he was supposed to be the second Adam who would create a perfect family by joining with the ideal wife and creating a pure family that would have begun humanity's liberation from its sinful condition. When Jesus was crucified before marrying, he redeemed mankind spiritually but not physically. That task was left to the "True Parents", Moon and Han, who would link married couples and their families to God.
Blessing ceremonies attracted a lot of attention in the press and in the public imagination, often labeled "mass weddings". Some couples were already married and those that were engaged were later legally married according to the laws of their own countries. Meant to highlight the church's emphasis on traditional morality, they brought Moon both fame and notoriety.
36 couples participated in the first ceremony in 1961 for members of the early church in Seoul, South Korea. The ceremonies continued to grow in scale; over 2,000 couples participated in the 1982 one in New York, the first outside South Korea. In 1997, about 30,000 couples took part in a ceremony in Washington, DC.
Moon's practice of matching couples for marriage was very unusual in both Christian tradition and in modern Western culture and attracted much attention and controversy. In the 1990s when Moon began to offer the Unification Church marriage blessing ceremony to members of other churches and religions he was criticized for creating possible confusion. Moon matched couples from differing races and nationalities because of his belief that all of humanity should be united.
"International and intercultural marriages are the quickest way to bring about an ideal world of peace. People should marry across national and cultural boundaries with people from countries they consider to be their enemies so that the world of peace can come that much more quickly."
He remained a citizen of the Republic of Korea and maintained a residence in South Korea. In 1972, Moon founded the International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences, a series of scientific conferences. The first conference had 20 participants, while the largest conference in Seoul in 1982, had 808 participants from over 100 countries.
In 1974, Moon asked church members in the United States to support President Nixon during the Watergate scandal when Nixon was being pressured to resign his office. Church members prayed and fasted in support of Nixon for 3 days. In 1974 Nixon publicly thanked them for their support and officially received Moon. This brought the church into widespread public and media attention. In 1980, Moon asked church members to found CAUSA International as an anti-communist educational organization. CAUSA supported the Nicaraguan Contras and also reportedly helped finance a Bolivian military coup with connections to cocaine cartels which successfully overthrew a democratically elected government.
In 1982, Moon was convicted in the United States of filing false federal income tax returns and conspiracy. Moon was given an 18-month sentence and a $15,000 fine. He served 13 months of the sentence before being released on good behavior to a halfway house. The American Baptist Churches in the U.S.A, the National Council of Churches, the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference filed briefs in support of Moon. Many notable clergy, including Jerry Falwell signed petitions protesting the government's case and spoke out in defense of Moon.
In 1982 The Washington Times read by many Washington DC insiders, was founded by News World Communications, an international media conglomerate associated with Moon which also owned newspapers in South Korea, Japan, and South America. It owns as well United Press International, an international news agency whose newswires, photo, news film, and audio services provided news material to thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations. By 2002 Moon had invested roughly $1.7 billion to support the "Washington Times", which he called "the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world".
In 1991, Moon met with Kim Il Sung, the North Korean President, to discuss ways to achieve peace on the Korean peninsula, as well as on international relations and tourism. 3 years later, Moon was officially invited to the funeral of Kim Il Sung. Moon and his church are known for their efforts to promote Korean unification. In 2000, Moon sponsored a United Nations conference which proposed the formation of "a religious assembly, or council of religious representatives, within the structure of the United Nations."
In 2001, Moon came into conflict with the Roman Catholic Church when a Catholic archbishop married a 43-year-old Korean acupuncturist in a Unification Church Blessing ceremony. Following his marriage the Archbishop was called to the Vatican by Pope John Paul II, where he was asked not to see his wife anymore, and to move to a monastery. The Archbishop's wife went on a hunger strike to protest their separation attracting much media attention.
In 2003, Korean Unification Church members started a political party in South Korea. It was named "The Party for God, Peace, Unification, and Home." In its inauguration declaration, the new party said it would focus on preparing for Korean reunification by educating the public about God and peace. Moon was a member of the Honorary Committee of the Unification Ministry of the Republic of Korea. In 2005, Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his wife, Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, founded the Universal Peace Federation (UPF), an NGO in Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
By 2010, Moon had given much of the responsibility for the Unification Church's religious and business activities to his children, who were then in their 30s and 40s. The South Korean press reported that Moon traveled worldwide in his private jet.
In 2012, after suffering from pneumonia earlier in the month, Moon died at the age of 92.
Moon was criticized by both the mainstream media and the alternative media for his anti-communist activism, which many said could lead to WWIII and a nuclear holocaust. Commentators have criticized the Divine Principle for saying that WWI, WWII, the Holocaust, and the Cold War served as indemnity conditions to prepare the world for the establishment of the Kingdom of God. In 1977 the investigation of the Koreagate scandal found that the South Korean National Intelligence Service (KCIA) had worked with the Unification Church to gain political influence within the United States, with some members working as volunteers in Congressional offices.
"Koreagate" in 1976 involved South Korean political figures seeking influence from 10 Democratic members of Congress. An immediate goal which was unsuccessful was reversing President Nixon's decision to withdraw troops from South Korea. It involved the Korea Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) allegedly funneling bribes and favors in an attempt to gain favor and influence for South Korean objectives.
Moon has held dialogues between members of the Israeli Knesset and the Palestinian Parliament as part of his Middle East Peace Initiatives. Tongil Group is a South Korean business group founded in 1963 by Moon as a nonprofit organization to provide revenue for the church. Its core focus was manufacturing but in the 1970s and 1980s it expanded by founding or acquiring businesses in pharmaceuticals, tourism, and publishing. Among Tongil Group’s products are ginseng and related products, building materials and machine parts including hardware for the South Korean military. The church was the second largest exporter of Korean goods.
Moon was criticized for speaking vehemently against homosexual relationships. He was criticized for a 2004 speech in which he predicted that: "There will be a purge on God's orders, and evil will be eliminated like shadows. Gays will be eliminated, the 3 Israels will unite. If not then they will be burned."
Moon's claim to be the Messiah and the Second Coming of Christ has been disputed by both Christian and Jewish scholars. The Divine Principle was labeled as heretical by Protestant churches in South Korea, including Moon’s own Presbyterian Church. In the United States it was rejected by ecumenical organizations as being non-Christian.
The Divine Principle itself says about Moon:
"With the fullness of time, God has sent one person to this earth to resolve the fundamental problems of human life and the universe. His name is Sun Myung Moon. For several decades he wandered through the spirit world so vast as to be beyond imagining. He trod a bloody path of suffering in search of the truth, passing through tribulations that God alone remembers. Since he understood that no one can find the ultimate truth to save humanity without first passing through the bitterest of trials, he fought alone against millions of devils, both in the spiritual and physical worlds, and triumphed over them all. Through intimate spiritual communion with God and by meeting with Jesus and many saints in Paradise, he brought to light all the secrets of Heaven."
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry. He was known for his works of science fiction and popular science. Asimov was a prolific writer who wrote or edited more than 500 books.
Asimov wrote hard science fiction. Along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. His most famous work is the "Foundation" series. His other major series are the "Galactic Empire" series and the Robot series. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the social science fiction novelette "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time.
Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as much nonfiction. Most of his popular science books explain scientific concepts in a historical way, going as far back as possible to a time when the science in question was at its simplest stage.
Asimov was born in Russia into a family of Jewish millers. His family emigrated to the United States when he was 3 years old. Since his parents always spoke Yiddish and English with him, he never learned Russian, but he remained fluent in Yiddish as well as English. Growing up in New York, Asimov taught himself to read at the age of 5.
After becoming established in the U.S., his parents owned a succession of candy stores, in which everyone in the family was expected to work. The candy stores sold newspapers and magazines, a fact that Asimov credited as a major influence in his lifelong love of the written word, as it presented him with an unending supply of new reading material as a child that he could not have otherwise afforded. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1928 at the age of 8.
Asimov attended New York City public schools from age 5. Graduating at 15, he went on to Junior College. Originally a zoology major, Asimov switched to chemistry after his first semester as he disapproved of dissecting an alley cat. After 2 rounds of rejections by medical schools, Asimov in 1939 applied to the graduate program in chemistry. He completed his Master degree in chemistry in 1941 and earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in biochemistry in 1948. In between earning these 2 degrees, he spent 3 years during WWII working as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard's Naval Air Experimental Station.
In 1945, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. A bureaucratic error caused his military allotment to be stopped, and he was removed from a task force days before it sailed to participate in a nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
After completing his doctorate and a postdoc year, Asimov joined the faculty of the Boston University School of Medicine in 1949. By 1952, however, he was making more money as a writer than from the university. The difference grew, and in 1958 Asimov stopped teaching to become a full-time writer.
Asimov married in 1942. The couple had 2 children. In 1970, they separated and Asimov moved back to New York. He immediately began seeing Janet and 2 weeks after the divorce, they got married.
Asimov described Carl Sagan as one of only 2 people he ever met whose intellect surpassed his own. The other, he claimed, was the computer scientist and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.
Asimov suffered a heart attack in 1977, and had triple bypass surgery in 1983, during which he contracted HIV from a blood transfusion. When his HIV status was understood, his physicians warned that if he publicized it, the anti-AIDS prejudice would likely extend to his family members.
He died in New York City at the age of 72.
“The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter, as I am doing right now, and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes”.
Asimov`s most enduring contribution was his "3 Laws of Robotics."
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Rosalind Franklin was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognized posthumously.
Born to a prominent British Jewish family, Franklin was educated at a private day school in London. Earning a research fellowship, she joined the University of Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory.
The British Coal Utilization Research Association offered her a research position in 1942, and she started her work on coal. This helped her earn a Ph.D. in 1945. She went to Paris in 1947 where she became an accomplished X-ray crystallographer. She worked on X-ray diffraction studies, which would eventually facilitate the double helix theory of the DNA.
In 1953, after 2 years, owing to disagreement with her director John Randall and more so with her colleague Maurice Wilkins, she was compelled to move. She got offered a separate research team. After finishing her work on DNA, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses. Her team member continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982.
Franklin's vital contributions to the model popularized by Crick and Watson was her suggestion the phosphate units are located in the external part of the molecule. She also specified the amount of water to be found in the molecule in accordance with other parts of it, data that have considerable importance in terms of the stability of the molecule. Franklin was the first to discover and formulate these facts, which in fact constituted the basis for all later attempts to build a model of the molecule.
Franklin was born into an affluent and influential British Jewish family. Her father was a politically liberal London merchant banker who was a professor. Rosalind was the elder daughter and the second child in the family of 5 children. Her father's uncle was a Viscount who was the Home Secretary in 1916 and the first practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. Her aunt was married to the Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. Her uncle was a prominent figure in the suffrage movement. Franklin's parents helped settle Jewish refugees from Europe who had escaped the Nazis, particularly those from the Kindertransport. They took in 2 Jewish children to their home.
From early childhood, Franklin showed exceptional scholastic abilities. At the age of 9 she entered a boarding-school near the seaside, and the family wanted a good environment for her delicate health. She was 11 when she went to one of the few girls' schools in London that taught physics and chemistry. She excelled in science, and learned German, and became fluent in French. She passed her matriculation in 1938, winning a scholarship for university. Her father asked her to give the scholarship to a deserving refugee student.
In 1938 Franklin went to Cambridge and studied chemistry. She studied the porosity of coal using helium to determine its density. Through this, she discovered the relationship between the fine constrictions in the pores of coals and the permeability of the porous space. By concluding that substances were expelled in order of molecular size as temperature increased, she helped classify coals and accurately predict their performance for fuel purposes and for production of wartime devices such as gas masks. Her thesis, "The physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal" awarded her a Ph.D. in 1945.
A colloid is a mixture in which one substance of microscopically dispersed insoluble particles is suspended throughout another substance. There are many types of colloids: solid in solid (solid sol), solid in liquid (sol), solid or liquid in gas (aerosol), liquid in solid (gel), liquid in liquid (emulsion), gas in liquid or solid (foam), gas in solid (aerogel).
Mering was an X-ray crystallographer who applied X-ray diffraction to the study of rayon and other amorphous substances, in contrast to the thousands of regular crystals that had been studied by this method for many years. He taught Franklin the practical aspects of applying X-ray crystallography to amorphous substances. This presented new challenges in the conduct of experiments and the interpretation of results. Franklin applied them to further problems related to coal, in particular the changes to the arrangement of atoms when it is converted to graphite. Mering continued the study of carbon in various forms, using X-ray diffraction and other methods.
In 1950, Franklin was granted a 3-year work originally appointed to work on X-ray diffraction of proteins and lipids in solution, but Randall redirected her work to DNA fibers because of new developments in the field, and she was to be the only experienced experimental diffraction researcher at the time. Randall the laboratory director made this reassignment following pioneering work by Wilkins, a Ph.D. student assigned to help her. Even using crude equipment, Wilkins had obtained an outstanding diffraction picture of DNA which sparked further interest in this molecule. They had been carrying out X-ray diffraction analysis of DNA in the unit since 1950, but Randall had not informed them that he had asked Franklin to take over his DNA diffraction work. Randall's lack of communication about this reassignment significantly contributed to the friction that developed between Wilkins and Franklin.
Franklin started to apply her expertise in X-ray diffraction techniques to the structure of DNA. She used a new fine-focus X-ray tube and micro camera ordered by Wilkins, but which she refined, adjusted and focused carefully. Drawing upon her physical chemistry background, she also skillfully manipulated the critical hydration of her specimens. Franklin discovered that there were 2 forms of DNA. When wet, the DNA fiber became long and thin. When dry, it became short and fat. Franklin named these two forms “B” and “A” respectively. The biological functions of A-DNA were only discovered 60 years later.
Franklin's habit of intensely looking people in the eye while being concise, impatient and direct unnerved many of her colleagues. In stark contrast, Wilkins was very shy, and slowly calculating in speech and avoided looking anyone directly in the eye. Because of the intense personality conflict developing between Franklin and Wilkins, Randall divided the work on DNA. Franklin chose the data rich "A" form while Wilkins selected the "B" form because his preliminary pictures had hinted it might be helical. He showed tremendous insight in this assessment of preliminary data. The X-ray diffraction pictures, including the landmark taken by Franklin at this time have been called as "among the most beautiful X-ray photographs of any substance ever taken".
In 1953, Crick and Watson had started to build a molecular model of the B form of DNA using data from Wilkins and Franklin. Franklin was opposed to prematurely building theoretical models, until sufficient data were obtained to properly guide the model building. She took the view that building a model was to be undertaken only after enough of the structure was known.
Crick and Watson then published their model in 1953 in an article describing the double-helical structure of DNA with only a footnote acknowledging having been stimulated by a general knowledge of Franklin and Wilkins' unpublished contribution. They had just enough specific knowledge of Franklin's data upon which to base their model.
Weeks later, Franklin wrote to Crick for permission to see their model. Franklin retained her skepticism for premature model building even after seeing the Watson-Crick model, and remained unimpressed. As an experimental scientist, Franklin seems to have been interested in producing far greater evidence before publishing-as-proven a proposed model. As such, her response to the Watson-Crick model was in keeping with her cautious approach to science. Most of the scientific community hesitated several years before accepting the double helix proposal. At first mainly geneticists embraced the model because of its obvious genetic implications.
In mid 1956, while on a work-related trip to the United States, Franklin first began to suspect a health problem. An operation of the same year revealed 2 tumors in her abdomen. After this period and other periods of hospitalization, Franklin spent time convalescing with various friends and family members. Franklin chose not to stay with her parents because her mother's uncontrollable grief and crying upset her too much. Even while undergoing cancer treatment, Franklin continued to work, and her group continued to produce results - 7 papers in 1956 and 6 more in 1957.
Expo 58, the first major international fair after WWII, was held in Brussels. Franklin was invited to make a 5-foot high model of a virus. Her materials included table tennis balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips.
She died of ovarian cancer at the age of 38, one day before the Expo opened.
Pope John Paul II born in Poland as Karol Józef Wojtyła served as Pope and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 1978-2005. He was elected by the second Papal conclave of 1978, which was called after Pope John Paul I, who had been elected to succeed Pope Paul VI who died after 33 days. Cardinal Wojtyła was elected on the third day of the conclave and adopted his predecessor's name in tribute to him. John Paul II is recognized as helping to end Communist rule in his native Poland and eventually all of Europe. John Paul II significantly improved the Catholic Church's relations with Judaism, Islam, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Anglican Communion. John Paul II was praised for condemning anti-Semitism as a sin, which no previous Pope had done. He upheld the Church's teachings on such matters as artificial contraception and the ordination of women, but also supported the Church's Second Vatican Council and its reforms.
He was one of the most traveled world leaders in history, visiting 129 countries during his pontificate. As part of his special emphasis on the universal call to holiness, he beatified 1,340 people and canonized 483 saints, more than the combined tally of his predecessors during the preceding 5 centuries. By the time of his death, he had named most of the College of Cardinals, consecrated or co-consecrated a large number of the world's bishops, and ordained many priests. A key goal of John Paul's papacy was to transform and reposition the Catholic Church. His wish was to place his Church at the heart of a new religious alliance that would bring together Jews, Muslims and Christians in a great religious armada.
John Paul II was the second longest-serving pope in modern history after Pope Pius IX, who served for nearly 32 years from 1846 to 1878. Born in Poland, he was the first non-Italian pope since the Dutch Pope Adrian VI, who served from 1522 to 1523.
John Paul II was born in Poland. He was the youngest of 3 children born to an ethnic Pole and a schoolteacher. His mother died in childbirth when he was 8 years old. As a boy, John Paul II was athletic, often playing football as goalkeeper. During his childhood, he had contact with the large Jewish community. School football games were often organized between teams of Jews and Catholics, and he often played on the Jewish side. At least a third of his classmates at his elementary school were Jews. With some he was on very friendly terms. What struck him about some of them was their Polish patriotism. It was around this time that the young Karol had his first serious relationship with a girl.
In 1938, John Paul II and his father moved to Kraków, where he enrolled at the University. While studying such topics as philology and various languages, he worked as a volunteer librarian and was required to participate in compulsory military training in the Academic Legion, but he refused to fire a weapon. He performed with various theatrical groups and worked as a playwright. During this time, his talent for language blossomed, and he learned as many as 12 languages; Polish, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, German, Ukrainian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak and Esperanto, In 1939, Nazi German occupation forces closed the university after invading Poland. Able-bodied males were required to work, so from 1940 to 1944 Wojtyła variously worked as a messenger for a restaurant, a manual laborer in a limestone quarry to avoid deportation to Germany. In 1940 he was struck by a tram, suffering a fractured skull. The same year he was hit by a lorry in a quarry, which left him with one shoulder higher than the other and a permanent stoop. His father, a former Austro-Hungarian non-commissioned officer and later officer in the Polish Army, died of a heart attack in 1941, leaving John Paul II as the immediate family's only surviving member.
After his father's death, he started thinking seriously about the priesthood. In 1942, while the war continued, he knocked on the door of the Bishop's Palace in Kraków and asked to study for the priesthood. Soon after, he began courses in the clandestine underground seminary run by the Archbishop of Kraków. In 1944, John Paul II was hit by a German truck. It seemed to him that this accident and his survival was a confirmation of his vocation. In 1944, a day known as "Black Sunday", the Gestapo rounded up young men in Kraków to curtail the uprising there, similar to the recent uprising in Warsaw. John Paul II escaped by hiding in the basement of his uncle's house while the German troops searched above. More than 8,000 men and boys were taken that day, while John Paul II escaped to the Archbishop's Palace, where he remained until after the Germans had left.
In 1945, the Germans fled the city, and the students reclaimed the ruined seminary. John Paul II and another seminarian volunteered for the task of clearing away piles of frozen excrement from the toilets. He also helped a 14-year-old Jewish refugee girl who had escaped from a Nazi labor camp.
B'nai B'rith and other authorities have said that John Paul II helped protect many other Polish Jews from the Nazis. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, a Jewish family sent its son to be hidden by a Gentile Polish family. His Jewish parents died during the Holocaust, and after the war his new Christian parents asked the future Pope to baptize the boy. He refused, claiming that the child should be raised in the Jewish faith of his birth parents and nation, not as a Catholic. After the war, this boy's Christian adopted parents asked the future Pope John Paul II to baptize the boy, yet once again he refused. After the war, John Paul II did everything he could to ensure that this Jewish boy he saved leave Poland to be raised by his Jewish relatives in the United States. John Paul II described the 12 years of the Nazi régime as "bestiality".
After finishing his studies at the seminary in Kraków, John Paul II was ordained as a priest.
In 1967, he was instrumental in formulating the encyclical Humanae vitae, which dealt with the issues that forbid abortion and artificial birth control. In 1978, following the death of Pope Paul VI, he voted in the papal conclave, which elected Pope John Paul I. John Paul I died after only 33 days as pope, triggering another conclave.
In 1978, John Paul II became the 264th pope, the first non-Italian in 455 years. At only 58 years of age, he was the youngest pope since Pope Pius IX in 1846, who was 54. Like his predecessor, John Paul II dispensed with the traditional Papal coronation and instead received ecclesiastical investiture with a simplified Papal inauguration. During his pontificate from 1978-2005, Pope John Paul II made trips to 129 countries, traveling more than 1,100,000km while doing so. He consistently attracted large crowds, some among the largest ever assembled in human history, such as the Manila World Youth Day, which gathered up to 4 million people, the largest Papal gathering ever, according to the Vatican.
Starting in 1979, John Paul II's traveled to the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Irland, Poland, US and UK. On his travel to Poland ecstatic crowds constantly surrounded him. This first papal trip to Poland uplifted the nation's spirit and sparked the formation of the Solidarity movement in 1980, which later brought freedom and human rights to his troubled homeland. On later trips to Poland, he gave tacit support to the Solidarity organization. These visits reinforced this message and contributed to the collapse of East European Communism that took place in 1990 with the reintroduction of democracy in Poland, and which then spread through Eastern Europe and South-Eastern Europe.
In 1979 John Paul II visited the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where many of his compatriots mostly Jews had perished during the Nazi occupation in WWII, the first pope to do so.
As he entered St. Peter's Square to address an audience in 1981, Pope John Paul II was shot and critically wounded by an expert Turkish gunman who was a member of the militant fascist group. On the way to the hospital, he lost consciousness. He lost nearly three-quarters of his blood. He underwent 5 hours of surgery to treat his wounds. A second assassination attempt was made in 1982, just a day before the anniversary of the first attempt on his life, in Portugal when a man tried to stab John Paul II with a bayonet. He was stopped by security guards.
He traveled to Haiti in 1983, where he spoke in Creole to thousands of impoverished Catholics gathered to greet him at the airport. His message, "things must change in Haiti," referring to the disparity between the wealthy and the poor, was met with thunderous applause.
John Paul II was considered a conservative on doctrine and issues relating to human sexual reproduction and the ordination of women. He was an outspoken opponent of apartheid in South Africa. He was also an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, although previous popes had accepted the practice. Although generally accepting the theory of evolution, John Paul II made one major exception - the human soul.
He was the first pontiff to actively fight against Mafia violence in Southern Italy.
While taking a traditional position on human sexuality, maintaining the Church's moral opposition to homosexual acts, John Paul II asserted that people with homosexual inclinations possess the same inherent dignity and rights as everybody else.
Pope John Paul II has been credited with inspiring political change that not only led to the collapse of Communism in his native Poland and eventually all of Eastern Europe, but also in many countries ruled by dictators. The single fact of John Paul II's election in 1978 changed everything. Everything began in Poland and not in East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Then the whole thing spread. He was in Chile and Pinochet was out. He was in Haiti and Duvalier was out. He was in the Philippines and Marcos was out.
Before John Paul II's pilgrimage to Latin America, during a meeting with reporters, he criticized Pinochet's regime as "dictatorial". He used unusually strong language to criticize Pinochet and asserted that the Church in Chile must not only pray, but actively fight for the restoration of democracy in Chile. He asked Chile's 31 Catholic bishops to campaign for free elections in the country and encouraged Pinochet to accept a democratic opening of the regime, and called for his resignation. John Paul's words to Pinochet had a profound impact on the Chilean dictator.
No country the Pope has visited has remained the same after his departure.
Pope John Paul II visited Haiti in 1983, when the country was ruled by Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier. He bluntly criticized the poverty of the country, directly addressing Baby Doc in front of a large crowd of Haitians: “Yours is a beautiful country, rich in human resources, but Christians cannot be unaware of the injustice, the excessive inequality, the degradation of the quality of life, the misery, the hunger, the fear suffered by the majority of the people.”
He outlined the basic human rights that most Haitians lacked: "the opportunity to eat enough, to be cared for when ill, to find housing, to study, to overcome illiteracy, to find worthwhile and properly paid work; all that provides a truly human life for men and women, for young and old."
He called for social change in Haiti by saying: "Lift up your heads, be conscious of your dignity of men created in God's image...."
860 Catholic priests and Church workers signed a statement committing the Church to work on behalf of the poor. In 1986, Duvalier was deposed in an uprising.
The collapse of the dictatorship of General Stroessner of Paraguay was linked, among other things, to Pope John Paul II's visit to the South American country in 1989. Since Stroessner's taking power through a coup d'état in 1954, Paraguay's bishops increasingly criticized the regime for human rights abuses, rigged elections, and the country's feudal economy. During his private meeting with Stroessner, John Paul II told the dictator:
“Politics has a fundamental ethical dimension because it is first and foremost a service to man. The Church can and must remind men - and in particular those who govern - of their ethical duties for the good of the whole of society”.
During a Mass, Pope John Paul II criticized the regime for impoverishing the peasants and the unemployed, claiming that the government must give people greater access to the land.
John Paul II has been credited with being instrumental in bringing down Communism in Central and Eastern Europe, by being the spiritual inspiration behind its downfall and catalyst for "a peaceful revolution" in Poland. Lech Wałęsa, the founder of Solidarity and the first post-Communist President of Poland, credited John Paul II with giving Poles the courage to demand change. The Vatican Bank covertly funded Solidarity.
Without the Polish Pope, there would not have been a Solidarity revolution in Poland in 1980. Without Solidarity, there would not have been a dramatic change in Soviet policy towards eastern Europe under Gorbachev. Without that change, no velvet revolutions would have occurred in 1989.
In 1989, John Paul II met with the Soviet leader Gorbachev at the Vatican and each expressed his respect and admiration for the other. Gorbachev once said "The collapse of the Iron Curtain would have been impossible without John Paul II."
The Dalai Lama, visited John Paul II 8 times. The 2 men held many similar views and understood similar plights, both coming from nations affected by Communism and both serving as heads of major religious bodies. As Archbishop of Kraków, long before the Dalai Lama was a world-famous figure, John Paul II held special Masses to pray for the Tibetan people's non-violent struggle for freedom from Maoist China. During his 1995 visit to Sri Lanka, a country where a majority of the population adheres to Buddhism, John Paul II expressed his admiration for Buddhism:
“In particular I express my highest regard for the followers of Buddhism, the majority religion in Sri Lanka, with its … four great values of … loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and equanimity."
The pope met with the head of the Church of Greece. After a private 30-minute meeting, the 2 spoke publicly. The Archbishop read a list of 13 offenses of the Catholic Church against the Eastern Orthodox Church since the Great Schism, including the pillaging of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, and bemoaned the lack of apology from the Catholic Church, saying "Until now, there has not been heard a single request for pardon for the maniacal crusaders of the 13th century".
The pope responded by saying: "For the occasions past and present, when sons and daughters of the Catholic Church have sinned by action or omission against their Orthodox brothers and sisters, may the Lord grant us forgiveness".
John Paul II said that the sacking of Constantinople was a source of profound regret for Catholics. They issued a 'common declaration', saying "We shall do everything in our power, so that the Christian roots of Europe and its Christian soul may be preserved.... We condemn all recourse to violence, proselytism and fanaticism, in the name of religion."
The 2 leaders then said the Lord's Prayer together, breaking an Orthodox taboo against praying with Catholics.
The Pope said throughout his pontificate that one of his greatest dreams was to visit Russia, but this never occurred. He attempted to solve the problems that had arisen over centuries between the Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches.
John Paul II made considerable efforts to improve relations between Catholicism and Islam.
John Paul II was the first world leader to describe as genocide the massacre by Hutus of Tutsis in the mostly Catholic country of Rwanda, which started in 1990 and reached its height in 1994. He called for a ceasefire and condemned the massacres in 1990. The Tutsis were the minority rich animal farmers, while the Hutus were the majority poor crop farmers.
In 1991, John Paul II called for the international community to "lend an ear to the long-ignored aspirations of oppressed peoples". He specifically named the Kurds, a people who were fighting a civil war against Saddam Hussein's troops in Iraq, as one such people, and referred to the war as a "darkness menacing the earth". During this time, the Vatican had expressed its frustration with the international ignoring of the Pope's calls for peace in the Middle East.
In 1990, a 34-nation coalition led by the United States waged a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which had invaded and annexed Kuwait. Pope John Paul II was a staunch opponent of the Gulf War. Throughout the conflict, he appealed to the international community to stop the war, and after it was over led diplomatic initiatives to negotiate peace in the Middle East.
In 1993 John Paul II established formal diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the State of Israel, acknowledging its centrality in Jewish life and faith. In 1994 he hosted the Papal Concert to Commemorate the Holocaust. It was the first-ever Vatican event dedicated to the memory of the 6 million Jews murdered in WWII.
In 1995, during his third visit to Kenya before an audience of 300,000, John Paul II pleaded for an end to the violence in Rwanda and Burundi, pleading for forgiveness and reconciliation as a solution to the genocide.
In 1995, Pope John Paul II held a meeting with 21 Jains, a sect that broke away from mainstream Hinduism in 600 BC. He praised Gandhi for his unshakable faith in God, assured the Jains that the Catholic Church will continue to engage in dialogue with their religion and spoke of the common need to aid the poor.
Relations between Catholicism and Judaism improved dramatically during the pontificate of John Paul II. He spoke frequently about the Church's relationship with the Jewish faith.
The Al-Qaeda planned to kill John Paul II during a visit to the Philippines during World Youth Day 1995 celebrations. However, a chemical fire inadvertently started by the cell alerted police to their whereabouts, and all were arrested a week before the pope's visit, and confessed to the plot.
John Paul II apologized to many groups that had suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church through the years. As pope, he officially made public apologies for over 100 wrongdoings, including:
- The legal process on the Italian scientist and philosopher Galileo Galilei, himself a devout Catholic, around 1633.
- Catholics' involvement with the African chiefs who sold their subjects and captives in the African slave trade.
- The Church Hierarchy's role in burnings at the stake and the religious wars that followed the Protestant Reformation.
- The injustices committed against women, the violation of women's rights and the historical denigration of women.
During an audience in 2000, John Paul II issued a statement condemning the Armenian genocide.
In 2000 John Paul II visited the national Holocaust memorial in Israel, and later made history by touching one of the holiest sites in Judaism, the Western Wall in Jerusalem, placing a letter inside it in which he prayed for forgiveness for the actions against Jews. In part of his address he said:
"I assure the Jewish people the Catholic Church is deeply saddened by the hatred, acts of persecution and displays of anti-Semitism directed against the Jews by Christians at any time and in any place, and there were no words strong enough to deplore the terrible tragedy of the Holocaust. We are deeply saddened by the behavior of those who in the course of history have caused these children of yours to suffer, and asking your forgiveness we wish to commit ourselves to genuine brotherhood with the people of the Covenant. With Judaism, therefore, we have a relationship which we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way, it could be said that you are our elder brothers.”
In 2000, he was the first modern pope to visit Egypt, where he met with the Coptic pope and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria. He was the first Catholic pope to visit and pray in an Islamic mosque, in Damascus, Syria, in 2001. He visited the Umayyad Mosque, a former Christian church where John the Baptist is believed to be interred, where he made a speech calling for Muslims, Christians and Jews to live together.
In 2001 he became the first Catholic pope to enter and pray in a mosque, namely the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, Syria. Respectfully removing his shoes, he entered the former Byzantine era Christian church dedicated to John the Baptist, who is also revered as a prophet of Islam. He gave a speech including the statement:
"For all the times that Muslims and Christians have offended one another, we need to seek forgiveness from the Almighty and to offer each other forgiveness."
He kissed the Qur'an in Syria, an act that made him popular among Muslims but that disturbed many Catholics.
In 2001, from a laptop in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II sent his first e-mail apologizing for:
- the Catholic sex abuse cases,
- the Church-backed "Stolen Generations" of Aboriginal children in Australia, and
- China for the behavior of Catholic missionaries in colonial times.
When he became Pope in 1978 at the age of 58, John Paul II was an avid sportsman. He was extremely healthy and active, jogging in the Vatican gardens, weight training, swimming, and hiking in the mountains. He was fond of football. However, after over 25 five years as pope, 2 assassination attempts, one of which injured him severely, and a number of cancer scares, John Paul's physical health declined.
John Paul II was criticized by representatives of the victims of clergy sexual abuse for failing to respond quickly enough to the Catholic sex abuse crisis. In his response, he stated that "there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young." The Church instituted reforms to prevent future abuse by requiring background checks for Church employees and, because a significant majority of victims were boys, disallowing ordination of men with "deep-seated homosexual tendencies". They now require dioceses faced with an allegation to alert the authorities, conduct an investigation and remove the accused from duty. In 2008, the Church asserted that the scandal was a very serious problem and estimated that it was "probably caused by no more than 1% " , or 5,000 of the over 500,000 Catholic priests worldwide.
The pope read a statement intended for the American cardinals, calling the sex abuse "an appalling sin" and said the priesthood had no room for such men. In 2002, an Archbishop was accused of molesting seminarians. Pope John Paul II accepted his resignation, and placed sanctions on him, prohibiting him from exercising his ministry as bishop. These restrictions were lifted in 2010 by Pope Benedict XVI.
John Paul II's position against artificial birth control, including the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV, was harshly criticized by doctors and AIDS activists, who said that it led to countless deaths and millions of AIDS orphans. Critics have also claimed that large families are caused by lack of contraception and exacerbate Third World poverty and problems such as street children in South America.
There was strong criticism of the Pope for the controversy surrounding the alleged use of charitable social programmes as a means of converting people in the Third World to Catholicism. The Pope created an uproar in the Indian subcontinent when he suggested that a great harvest of faith would be witnessed on the subcontinent in the third Christian millennium.
In 2001 he was diagnosed as suffering from Parkinson's disease. Despite difficulty speaking more than a few sentences at a time, trouble hearing, and severe osteoarthrosis, he continued to tour the world although rarely walking in public.
In 2003 John Paul II criticized the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, saying in his State of the World address "No to war! War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity." He claimed that it was up to the United Nations to solve the international conflict through diplomacy and that a unilateral aggression is a crime against peace and a violation of international law.
In 2005 following a urinary tract infection, he developed septic shock, a form of infection with a high fever and low blood pressure.
He died at the age of 85.
Mandelbrot was a Polish-born, French and American mathematician and polymath with broad interests in the practical sciences, especially regarding what he labeled as "the art of roughness" of physical phenomena and "the uncontrolled element in life". He referred to himself as a "fractalist". He is recognized for his contribution to the field of fractal geometry, which included coining the word "fractal", as well as developing a theory of "roughness and self-similarity" in nature.
In 1936, while he was a child, Mandelbrot's family emigrated to France from Warsaw, Poland. After WWII ended, Mandelbrot studied mathematics, graduating from universities in Paris and the United States and receiving a master's degree in aeronautics. He spent most of his career in both the United States and France, having dual French and American citizenship. In 1958, he began a 35-year career at IBM, where he took leaves of absence to teach at Harvard University. At Harvard, following the publication of his study of U.S. commodity markets in relation to cotton futures, he taught economics and applied sciences.
Because of his access to IBM's computers, Mandelbrot was one of the first to use computer graphics to create and display fractal geometric images, leading to his discovering the Mandelbrot set in 1979. He showed how visual complexity can be created from simple rules. He said that things typically considered to be "rough", a "mess" or "chaotic", like clouds or shorelines, actually had a "degree of order".
His math and geometry-centered research career included contributions to such fields as statistical physics, meteorology, hydrology, geomorphology, anatomy, taxonomy, neurology, linguistics, information technology, computer graphics, economics, geology, medicine, physical cosmology, engineering, chaos theory, econophysics, metallurgy and the social sciences. During his career, he received over 15 honorary doctorates and served on many science journals, along with winning numerous awards.
Mandelbrot was born in Warsaw. His family was Jewish. Although his father made his living trading clothing, the family had a strong academic tradition and his mother was a dental surgeon. He was first introduced to mathematics by 2 of his uncles.
The family emigrated from Poland to France in 1936, when he was 11. He was helped by a Rabbi to continue his studies. Mandelbrot recalls this period when much of France was occupied by the Nazis:
“Our constant fear was that a sufficiently determined foe might report us to an authority and we would be sent to our deaths. This happened to a close friend from Paris, Zina Morhange, a physician in a nearby county seat. Simply to eliminate the competition, another physician denounced her ... We escaped this fate. Who knows why?”
In 1955 when he was 31, he married and moved to Geneva, Switzerland, and later to the Université Lille Nord de France. In 1958 the couple moved to the United States where Mandelbrot joined the research staff at IBM. He remained at IBM for 35 years.
From 1951 onward, Mandelbrot worked on problems and published papers not only in mathematics but in applied fields such as information theory, economics, and fluid dynamics. Mandelbrot saw financial markets as an example of "wild randomness", characterized by concentration and long range dependence. He developed several original approaches for modeling financial fluctuations.
Mandelbrot began to study fractals called Julia sets that were never changing under certain transformations of the complex plane. Building on previous work, Mandelbrot used a computer to plot images of the Julia sets. In 1975, Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures. While investigating the topology of these Julia sets, he studied the Mandelbrot set which was introduced by him in 1979. In 1982, Mandelbrot expanded and updated his ideas in The Fractal Geometry of Nature. This influential work brought fractals into the mainstream of professional and popular mathematics, as well as silencing critics, who had dismissed fractals as "program artifacts".
Mandelbrot ended up doing a great piece of science and identifying a much stronger and more fundamental idea, put simply, that there are some geometric shapes, which he called "fractals", that are equally "rough" at all scales. No matter how close you look, they never get simpler, much as the section of a rocky coastline you can see at your feet looks just as jagged as the stretch you can see from space.
Fractals are a form of geometric repetition, in which smaller and smaller copies of a pattern are successively nested inside each other, so that the same intricate shapes appear no matter how much you zoom in to the whole. Fern leaves and Romanesco broccoli are two examples from nature.
One might have thought that such a simple and fundamental form of regularity would have been studied for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But it was not. In fact, it rose to prominence only over the past 30 or so years, almost entirely through the efforts of one man, Mandelbrot.
Using the newly developed IBM computers at his disposal, Mandelbrot was able to create fractal images using graphic computer code, images looking like "the delirious exuberance of the 1960s psychedelic art with forms hauntingly reminiscent of nature and the human body." Mandelbrot, however never felt he was inventing a new idea. He describes his feelings in a documentary with science writer Arthur C. Clarke:
“Exploring this set I certainly never had the feeling of invention. I never had the feeling that my imagination was rich enough to invent all those extraordinary things on discovering them. They were there, even though nobody had seen them before. It's marvelous, a very simple formula explains all these very complicated things. So the goal of science is starting with a mess, and explaining it with a simple formula, a kind of dream of science.”
Mandelbrot created the first-ever "theory of roughness", and he saw "roughness" in the shapes of mountains, coastlines and river basins; the structures of plants, blood vessels and lungs; the clustering of galaxies. His personal quest was to create some mathematical formula to measure the overall "roughness" of such objects in nature. He began by asking himself various kinds of questions related to nature. Mandelbrot emphasized the use of fractals as realistic and useful models for describing many "rough" phenomena in the real world. He concluded that "real roughness is often fractal and can be measured."
Mandelbrot brought these objects together for the first time and turned them into essential tools for the long-stalled effort to extend the scope of science to explaining non-smooth, "rough" objects in the real world.
Fractals are also found in human pursuits, such as music, painting, architecture, and stock market prices. Mandelbrot believed that fractals, far from being unnatural, were in many ways more intuitive and natural than the artificially smooth objects of traditional Euclidean geometry.
“Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.”
Mandelbrot has been called a work of art, and a visionary and a maverick. His informal and passionate style of writing and his emphasis on visual and geometric intuition supported by the inclusion of numerous illustrations made The Fractal Geometry of Nature accessible to non-specialists. The book sparked widespread popular interest in fractals and contributed to chaos theory and other fields of science and mathematics.
Mandelbrot also put his ideas to work in cosmology. He offered in 1974 a new explanation of the "dark night sky" riddle. The "dark night sky paradox", is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang model. Otherwise any line of sight from Earth must end at a surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. Mandelbrot demonstrated that fractal theory was a resolution of the paradox by showing that if the stars in the universe were fractally distributed it would not be necessary to rely on the Big Bang theory to explain the paradox. His model did not rule out a Big Bang, but allowed for a dark sky even if the Big Bang had not occurred.
Mandelbrot died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 85.
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