Born on December 2

English pirate of the early 18th century, active in the Caribbean during the “Golden Age of Piracy.” He owes his fame to his flag — a skull above two crossed cutlasses — and to the presence in his crew of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read.

Georges Seurat (1859-1891) was a French painter and a major figure of Post-Impressionism. He invented Pointillism (or Divisionism), a technique based on the scientific juxtaposition of small dabs of pure color.

Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, a leading figure of the New Objectivity movement (Neue Sachlichkeit). Deeply affected by his experience in the trenches of the First World War, he produced a body of work of stark realism that denounced the horrors of war and the failings of German society between the two world wars.

La Divina, the most celebrated opera soprano of the 20th century

American economist of the Chicago school, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992. He extended economic analysis to fields previously reserved for sociology, such as the family, education, crime, and discrimination.

Britney Spears (born 1981) is an American singer, actress, and pop icon. Launched in the late 1990s, she became one of the best-selling artists in the world. Her career illustrates the excesses of the entertainment industry and the challenges of fame in the media age.