Born on February 10

A wealthy Russian widow and businesswoman, patron of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whom she supported financially for thirteen years. Their relationship, kept strictly to letters by mutual agreement, produced more than 1,200 letters.

First woman to earn an electrical engineering degree from MIT (1919) and the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the United States. She invented the Clarke graphical calculator, which greatly simplified electrical power transmission calculations.

A Soviet Russian writer and poet, Boris Pasternak is the author of the novel *Doctor Zhivago*, a sweeping portrait of Russia swept up in the 1917 revolution and the civil war. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, he was forced by the Soviet authorities to decline it.

Bertolt Brecht was a 20th-century German playwright, director, and poet. A theorist of *epic theatre* and of the distancing effect, he profoundly renewed dramatic art and tied his work to a Marxist political commitment.

Chaval, whose real name was Yvan Le Louarn (1915-1968), was a French cartoonist and humorist. Famous for his dark, absurd and deeply pessimistic humor, he left his mark on the press and post-war editorial cartooning.

An African-American lyric soprano born in 1927, Leontyne Price was the first Black woman to achieve the rank of prima donna at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Celebrated for her interpretations of Verdi, she embodied both artistic excellence and triumph over racial segregation.

American swimmer born in 1950, considered one of the greatest in the history of swimming. At the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, he won seven gold medals, each accompanied by a world record, a feat that remained unmatched until Michael Phelps.