All articles starting with W
11,426 articles
William Dampier
William Dampier (1651–1715) was an English buccaneer, navigator, and naturalist who circumnavigated the world three times and led the 1699 Roebuck voyage to chart Australia's northwest coast.
William Daniel Hillis
W. Daniel Hillis, born 1956 in Baltimore, is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur who designed the Connection Machine supercomputer and co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation to build it.
William Daniels
William Daniels (born March 31, 1927, Brooklyn) is an American actor, not the singer Billy Daniels: Emmy-winning Dr. Mark Craig on St. Elsewhere, voice of KITT in Knight Rider, and Mr. Feeny in Boy Meets World, married 75 years to Bonnie Bartlett.
William Davenant
William Davenant was an English poet and dramatist, Poet Laureate after Ben Jonson, who staged The Siege of Rhodes in 1656, generally regarded as the first English opera.
William David Coolidge
William David Coolidge was an American engineer and physical chemist at General Electric who developed the ductile tungsten lamp filament and the hot-cathode X-ray tube, holding about 80 patents.
William David Powell
William David Powell (1925–1968), American television writer, story editor, and associate producer for Warner Bros. and Universal; only child of actor William Powell; credited on Bonanza, Rawhide, 77 Sunset Strip.
William Davison (environmental geochemist)
William Davison is an environmental geochemist and Emeritus Professor of Environmental Chemistry at Lancaster University, known for developing the DGT and DET in-situ measurement techniques in 1994.
William De Berniere MacNider
William De Berniere MacNider (1881–1951) was an American pharmacologist at the University of North Carolina who founded its pharmacology department and won the 1941 Kober Medal.
William de Longchamp
William de Longchamp (d. 1197), bishop of Ely, chancellor, papal legate, and chief justiciar under Richard I, governed England 1190–1191 during the Third Crusade, was deposed in October 1191, and later negotiated Richard's release from captivity.
William De Morgan
William De Morgan was an English ceramicist and tile designer of the Arts and Crafts movement, and a close colleague of William Morris, who later became a successful novelist.
William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey
William de Warenne, 1st Earl of Surrey (died 1088 or 1089) was a Norman baron who fought at the Battle of Hastings and founded Lewes Priory, the first Cluniac house in Britain.
William de Warenne, 2nd Earl of Surrey
William de Warenne, 2nd Earl of Surrey (d. 11 May 1138), Anglo-Norman earl, son of the 1st Earl and Gundrada; married Isabel de Vermandois, rebelled with Duke Robert in 1101, was restored in 1103, and served Henry I at Tinchebray and Brémule.
William De Witt Hyde
William De Witt Hyde was an American Congregationalist minister, philosopher, and educator who served as the seventh president of Bowdoin College from 1885 until his death in 1917.
William de Wiveleslie Abney
William de Wiveleslie Abney (1843–1920) was a British Royal Engineer, chemist, and photographer who made rapid gelatine emulsions practical, introduced hydroquinone developer, and invented the Abney level.
William Dean Howells
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was an American novelist, critic, and editor of the Atlantic Monthly who championed literary realism; his major novels include The Rise of Silas Lapham.
William DeBello
William DeBello is an American neuroscientist and Associate Professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies how learning physically rewires the brain using barn owls.
William Demarest
William Demarest (Carl William Demarest, 1892–1983), American character actor of vaudeville, film, and TV; Sturges stock company regular, Oscar-nominated for The Jolson Story, and Uncle Charley on My Three Sons (1965–1972).
William Denny and Brothers
William Denny and Brothers was a Scottish shipbuilding firm in Dumbarton, operating from 1844 until 1963 and known for scientific ship design and the Denny-Brown stabilizer.
William Desmond Taylor
William Desmond Taylor, born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner, was an Irish-born American silent film director who made about 60 films for Paramount before his unsolved 1922 murder in Los Angeles.
William Devane
William Devane (born September 5, 1939, Albany, New York) is an American actor known as Greg Sumner on Knots Landing (1983-93), JFK in The Missiles of October (1974), and James Heller on 24 and 24: Live Another Day.
William Ding
William Lei Ding (丁磊) is the Chinese billionaire founder and CEO of NetEase, the Hangzhou internet company he built into one of the world's largest online games firms.
William Dod
William Dod (Willy Dod, 1867–1954), British archer who won gold in the men's Double York Round at the 1908 London Olympics with 815 points; brother of silver medallist Lottie Dod; also a champion golfer.
William Donald Schaefer
William Donald Schaefer (1921–2011), Democratic mayor of Baltimore 1971–1986, 58th governor of Maryland 1987–1995, and 32nd Comptroller of Maryland 1999–2007, known for Baltimore's Inner Harbor redevelopment and his "Do It Now" motto.
William Dool Killen
William Dool Killen (1806–1902) was an Irish Presbyterian minister and church historian who taught for forty-eight years at the Assembly's College in Belfast and completed James Seaton Reid's history of Irish Presbyterianism.
William Dove
William F. Dove was an American geneticist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison best known for creating the Min mouse, the first animal model of familial colon cancer.
William Dowhan
William Dowhan is an American biochemist known for his work on phospholipids and cardiolipin in mitochondrial membranes, who spent fifty years at the University of Texas Medical School before retiring in 2022.
William Draper Harkins
William Draper Harkins (1873–1951) was an American physical chemist at the University of Chicago who first described nuclear fusion, identified it as the source of stellar energy, and introduced the packing fraction.
William Duane (physicist)
William Duane (1872–1935) was an American physicist and biophysicist at Harvard, a pioneer of X-ray research in the United States known for the Duane–Hunt law.
William Dudley Pelley
William Dudley Pelley (1885 or 1890–1965), American writer, occultist, and fascist who founded the Silver Legion of America (Silver Shirts) on January 31, 1933, led the Christian Party, and was convicted of sedition in 1942.
William Durandus
William Durandus, also known as Guillaume Durand, was a Provençal canonist and bishop of Mende who wrote the Speculum iudiciale and the Rationale divinorum officiorum.