Jean-François Champollion was born in France in 1790 and is the man credited with deciphering the Rosetta Stone. The stone was found by Napolean’s forces in 1799 in the Nile Delta and has three versions of the same text in Ancient Greek, Demotic script, and Ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs.

Champollion displayed a natural ability for languages at a young age and eventually learned to speak (in addition to French): Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Ethiopic, Arabic, Syriac, Chaldean, and eventually Coptic. Coptic is a form of the Egyptian language, preceded by another version of the Egyptian language known as Demotic. His passion for the Coptic language was of particular significance because it led to his deciphering of Egyptian heiroglyphs.

At the age of sixteen he proposed that the Coptic language was closely related to Ancient Egyptian, which is what was represented in the heiroglyphs. (Imagine being the last person to know the Ancient Egyptian language… now there’s an idea for a book!) Following this line of thought, he postulated that the Demotic script present on the Rosetta Stone represented the Coptic language.

His breakthrough in deciphering the heiroglyphs came when he realized the characters were a combination of phonetic and symbolic. Armed with this knowledge he was able to use the names of rulers to crack the code presented by the heiroglyphs.

Évariste Galois was born in 1811 and died in 1832 after being shot in the abdomen in a duel at the age of twenty.

Beginning in 1829 he composed multiple papers (and published one) on mathematics but was still denied entrance to the prestigious École Polytechnique, the leading French school of the time. He instead enrolled in the École Normale but was expelled after criticizing the school’s director for actions taken during a period of political unrest.  His protests continued and he found himself imprisoned. Upon his release he was coaxed into a duel, supposedly over a love affair.

The night before his duel, convinced of his impending death, he stayed up all night pouring out his mathematical ideas in three manuscripts. The first laid out what would come to be known as Galois Theory, a condition for equations to be solved by racials. The second concerned finding roots of continuous functions, and the third concerned the study of finite fields (which would come to be known as Galois fields.

In Mastery, Robert Greene claims that his impending death was the impetus for Galois to focus on the task of leaving behind his mathematical ideas. Before this his studies had taken a backseat to his political activities but with the self-imposed deadline looming he was able to achieve clarity of thought and change the future of algebra.

Santiago Calavatra is a Spanish architect born in 1951. He knew he wanted to draw from an early age and began to study art at the age of 6. Finished with art school at the age of 17, he stumbled upon an architecture book and realized his future was in this profession. He received his diploma as an architect from the Polytechnic School of Valencia and soon realized an education in civil engineering would allow him to become a better architect. By 1981 he received his doctorate in architecture from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at the age of thirty.

All of this education served him well. He opened his first office in Zurich and was soon on his way to having structures built all over the world. He is best known for bridges, museums, railway stations, and stadiums, having designed the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Velodrome for the 2004 Summer Olympics.