Romanians are Smart, Reloaded

Since the last post, my blog has been subject to an uncommon number of visitors. Therefore I decided to make a sequel.

On the campaign’s website there is a section entitled Valuable Romanians. Unfortunately the whole website is in Romanian which is a bit funny since we’re trying to convince the others and not ourselves that we truly are smart. So I decided to pick some names and tell you a bit about them (with the aid of Wikipedia and other internet sources).

• Constantin Brâncuşi (19.02.1876 – 16.03.1957) was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. His abstract style emphasizes clean geometrical lines that balance forms inherent in his materials with the symbolic allusions of representational art. Considered the pioneer of modernism Brâncuşi is called the Patriarch of Modern Sculpture.
• Ştefan Odobleja (13.10.1902 – 4.09.1978) was a Romanian scientist, one of the precursors of cybernetics. His major work, Psychologie consonantiste, first published in 1938 and 1939, in Paris, had established many of the major themes of cybernetics regarding cybernetics and systems thinking ten years before the work of Norbert Wiener was published in 1948.
• Emil Palade (19.11.1912 – 7.10.2008) was a Romanian cell biologist. Described as the most influential cell biologist ever he was awarded in 1974 the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, together with Albert Claude and Christian de Duve. The prize was granted for his innovations in electron microscopy and cell fractionation which together laid the foundations of modern molecular cell biology, the most notable discovery being the ribosomes of the endoplasmic reticulum – which he first described in 1955.
• Maria Tănase (25.09.1913 – 22.06.1963) proved to be a versatile talent, irresistibly drawn towards art. She distinguished herself as a theater and film actress, as an operetta singer, a music hall star but mainly as an interpreter of folk songs. She passed away carried off by an unforgiving illness, lung cancer. In my opinion, she could very well be compared to her French counterpart, Edith Piaf.
• Amza Pellea (7.05.1931 – 12.12.1983) was one of the most important Romanian actors, being remarked both for his theatre and his film acting. Pellea was the creator of a comical character that portrays an archetypal Oltenian peasant. However, he was also noted for his historical characters. He won in 1977 the award for the best male actor at the  Moscow International Film Festival.
• Eugen Pavel is a Romanian scientist and the inventor of the Hyper CD-ROM, a 3D optical data storage medium with a claimed initial capacity of 10 TB and with a theoretical capacity of 1 PB on a single disc. It is considered by some to be the next revolution in computer storage.
• Victor Velculescu is a Romanian/American doctor and scientist. He is Associate Professor of Oncology and Co-Director of Cancer Biology at the Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at The Johns Hopkins University. Velculescu and his team gained international recognition after identifying the genes that cause breast cancer and colon cancer. His research aims have been focused on identifying genes that underlie human cancer and using this information to develop novel approaches for diagnostic and therapeutic intervention. He also invented the SAGE methodology for detecting gene expression from multiple genes in a single experiment.
• Ciprian Manolescu (24.12.1978 – ) is a Romanian mathematician. He is presently an Associate Professor in the mathematics department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is among the handful of recipients of the Clay Research Fellowship (2004–2008). He was the winner of the Morgan Prize in 2002. He has one of the best records ever in mathematical competitions: he holds the sole distinction of writing three perfect papers at the International Mathematical Olympiad. He placed three times in the top 5 on the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition for college undergraduates.