People Library

John Eric Ensign (English: John Eric Ensign; March 25, 1958 -) is an American politician and physicist. He was one of Nevada's two Senate members from 2001 to 2011. He was born in California to an Italian father. Ensign's main location is Las Vegas.

John Davison Rockefeller (English: John Davison Rockefeller, July 8, 1839 - May 23, 1937) was an American industrialist and philanthropist, famous for revolutionizing the oil industry and shaping the modernization of philanthropy. In 1870, Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, which monopolized 90% of the U.S. oil market during its heyday, becoming the first billionaire in history and the richest man in the world. At its peak in 1914, his total wealth reached 2.4% of US GDP (US$900 million, US GDP was US$36.5 billion), which is equivalent to more than US$400 billion today. He is generally regarded as the richest man in the history of the Western world. He was attacked by journalists and public opinion throughout his career. Standard Oil was eventually found guilty of violating antitrust laws and was split into 34 companies in 1911. It was so large that one of its successors, ExxonMobil, is still one of the U.S. oil giants today. On the other hand, Rockefeller devoted the last 40 years of his life to philanthropy, mainly in the fields of education and medicine, and ended his direct management of Standard Oil in 1897. He funded the establishment of the Rockefeller Institute to fund medical research. His main contributions include: establishing the Harvard School of Public Health, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, Denison University, and the Peking Union Medical College, eradicating hookworm and yellow fever in North America, sponsoring Hideyoshi Noguchi's research on syphilis pathogens, and Alexander Fleming's penicillin research. He also paid special attention to the black community and spent huge sums of money to improve black education. He was a devout North American Baptist and supported many institutions with a church background. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University. Today, New York City also has many landmarks funded by the Rockefeller family, such as the United Nations Headquarters and Rockefeller Center. Rockefeller firmly believed that his purpose in life was to "make as much money as possible, save as much money as possible, and give as much money as possible." He became an unprecedented millionaire, but he lived a rigorous private life, never smoked or drank, and was diligent and self-sustaining throughout his life. In his later years, he donated most of his property to fund charities, setting a precedent for American rich people to do good, setting a precedent for today's rich people such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and becoming one of the most legendary and controversial figures in modern American history.

John Stuart Mill (English: John Stuart Mill; May 20, 1806 - May 7, 1873), also translated as John Stuart Mill, was a British utilitarian, liberal philosopher, political economist, and member of the British Parliament. His philosophical works are world-famous, and his research scope includes political philosophy, political economics, ethics, logic, etc. His book "On Liberty" is a masterpiece of classical liberalism, and the classical liberal school had a huge influence in the 19th century. Mill was one of the post-Benthamite utilitarians. In politics, Mill succeeded his father James Mill to work for the British East India Company. In his later years, he represented the Liberal Party and won the election of the British House of Commons and became a member of the House of Commons. He was the second member of Parliament, after Henry Hunt, to introduce a motion to grant women the right to vote.

John Steiner (English: John Steiner, January 7, 1941 - July 31, 2022) was a British actor.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Jr. (February 27, 1902 - December 20, 1968) was an American writer and war correspondent in the 20th century. He was the winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature and the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His main representative works include "The Grapes of Wrath", "East of Eden" and "Of Mice and Men".

John Robert Schrieffer (English: John Robert Schrieffer, May 31, 1931 – July 27, 2019) was an American physicist. He jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1972 for co-creating the microscopic theory of superconductivity, or BCS theory, with John Bardeen and Leon Cooper.

John Dewey (English: John Dewey, October 20, 1859 - June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, educator, and psychologist. Together with Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, he is considered an important representative of American pragmatism philosophy. He is also regarded as one of the founders of modern education and one of the founders of functionalist psychology. During his academic career, Dewey taught for a long time at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Columbia University, and retired at Columbia University. Throughout his life, Dewey strongly advocated the democratic system and emphasized the complementarity of science and democracy. Democratic thought was the theme of many of his works. At the same time, he is also regarded as one of the greatest educational reformers of the twentieth century. While teaching at the University of Chicago, he founded the Experimental School Affiliated to the University of Chicago in 1896 as an experimental base for his educational theories, and his wife served as the principal of the school. Dewey's thought had a significant impact on China's educational and ideological circles in the early twentieth century, and he cultivated a number of Chinese masters and scholars including Hu Shi, Feng Youlan, Tao Xingzhi, Guo Bingwen, Zhang Boling, Jiang Menglin and others. He also visited China and held hundreds of lectures across the country in two years. He witnessed the May Fourth Movement and met with Sun Yat-sen, which promoted the spread of democratic and scientific ideas in China. Dewey was one of the most famous scholars in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. In December 2006, the well-known American magazine "The Atlantic Monthly" ranked Dewey 40th among "The 100 Most Influential Figures in American History".

John Grisham (English: John Grisham, February 8, 1955 -) is an American best-selling author who writes mostly legal thrillers. His books have sold more than 3 billion copies worldwide, and many of his books, such as "The Firm", "The Pelican Brief", and "The Client", have been made into movies. His works were very popular in the 1990s and have a large number of fans in the United States. His latest work is The Disappearance of Fitzgerald 2017, and he has been selected into the top ten writers in the world for many years.

John Gray (English: John Nicholas Gray, born April 17, 1948) is a British political philosopher and writer whose research involves analytic philosophy, intellectual history and philosophical pessimism. He served as professor at the School of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science, retiring in 2008. Gray is a frequent contributor to The Guardian, Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, for which he is a leading book reviewer. John Gray is an atheist.

John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes (English: John Maynard Keynes, 1st Baron Keynes, June 5, 1883 - April 21, 1946), commonly known as Keynes (or translated as Keynes), was a British economist. Keynes went against the economic thought of respecting market mechanisms and opposing human intervention since Adam Smith in the 18th century. He advocated that the government should actively play the role of economic helmsman and fight economic recession and even economic depression through fiscal and monetary policies. Keynes's ideas are not only theories in books, but also became effective countermeasures during the global economic depression in the 1920s and 1930s, and formed the policy thinking that led to the prosperity of many capitalist societies in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore, Keynes has been praised as "the 'savior' (or savior) of capitalism" and "the father of postwar prosperity". Keynes's thought, which once dominated capitalism, also became one of the economic theories and schools, known as the "Keynesian School", and spawned several branches, and its influence continues to this day. In his career, Keynes held public office, served as a director of the Bank of England, and was an advisor to several charitable trusts. He also made investments himself and was a successful investor. Therefore, Keynes can be said to be a model economist with both theory and application. In life, Keynes was an elegant person. He sponsored art and collected art, and he was fond of fine wine, especially champagne. Keynes was very good at words and eloquent; his writing style was also excellent, as can be seen from the fact that Paul Kluman, a famous economist of later generations, was praised by Fortune magazine as "the best-written economist since Keynes." In 1999, Time magazine recalled Keynes as "tall, charming, and full of confidence."

John Hancock (English: John Hancock, January 23, 1737 - October 8, 1793), American businessman, revolutionary, politician, and one of the founding fathers of the United States. He served as president of the Continental Congress from 1775 to 1777 and as governor of Massachusetts from 1780 to 1785 and 1787 to 1793. Due to his gorgeous signature on the American Declaration of Independence, "John Hancock" has become synonymous with autographs in the United States. Before the American Revolution, Hancock inherited a lucrative business company from his uncle and was one of the wealthiest men in thirteen North American states. He began his political career as a protégé of Samuel Adams, a well-known Boston politician, but the two gradually became estranged. In the 1760s, as relations between the North American colonies and Britain became increasingly tense, Hancock began to use his wealth to support the cause of colonial independence. He became even more popular in Massachusetts after British officials seized his sloop Liberty in 1768 and charged him with smuggling. The British charges against him were eventually dropped. He is often described as a smuggler in historical records, but the accuracy of this description has been questioned. Hancock was one of Boston's leaders during the American Revolution. He served for more than two years in the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, and as president of the convention was the first to sign the American Declaration of Independence. Thereafter, he returned to his native Massachusetts and was elected its first governor, a position he held for much of the rest of his life. He used his influence to secure Massachusetts' ratification of the United States Constitution in 1788.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, pronounced: [ˈjoːhan ˈvɔlfɡaŋ fɔn ˈɡøːtə] ; August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832), a German writer, philosopher, esthetician, natural scientist, critic and political figure. Together with Friedrich Schiller, he was a representative figure of the Sturm und Drang movement and Weimar classicism. Goethe is considered one of the greatest and most influential writers in the history of German literature. His works have had a profound impact on Western literature, politics and philosophical thought.

John Podesta (English: John Podesta, January 8, 1949 -), an American Democratic politician, served as the White House Chief of Staff in the Clinton administration from 1998 to 2001, and served as a presidential adviser in the Obama administration from 2014 to 2015. From 2022 to 2025, he will serve as a senior adviser to the President in the Biden administration. From 2024, he will also serve as the U.S. President's special climate envoy. In 2003, Podesta founded the Center for American Progress. In October 2016, approximately 20,000 of Podesta's emails were leaked by WikiLeaks.

John Locke (English: John Locke, August 29, 1632 - October 28, 1704, FRS), a famous British philosopher, one of the most influential Enlightenment philosophers, and is widely described as the father of liberalism. In the theory of knowledge, Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume are listed as representatives of British empiricism. Locke also made important contributions to the theory of social contract. He developed a theory that was different from Thomas Hobbes's state of nature, arguing that government could only be justified if it obtained the consent of the governed and guaranteed the people's natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Locke believed that a social contract could only be established with the consent of the governed, and in the absence of such consent, the people had the right to overthrow the government. John Locke divided state power into legislative power, executive power and external power, and advocated the separation of legislative power and executive power, and the unification of administrative power and external power; legislative power is the highest power of the country. Locke's ideas had a huge impact on the development of political philosophy in later generations, and he is widely regarded as the most influential thinker and liberal during the Enlightenment era. His writings also greatly influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, as well as many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and the American Founding Fathers. The American Declaration of Independence was also influenced by his classical republican and liberal ideas. Locke's theory of spiritual philosophy is generally regarded as the founder of "ontology" and self-theory in modernism, and also influenced the later works of David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. Locke was the first philosopher to define the concept of self in terms of continuous "consciousness". He also proposed the hypothesis that the mind is a "blank slate". Unlike Descartes or Christian philosophy, Locke believed that humans are born without any memory or thought.

John Joseph Travolta (English: John Joseph Travolta, February 18, 1954 -), American actor, producer, screenwriter, director, singer, dancer and pilot, Scientologist (Scientology). In the 1970s, he was famous for the TV series "Come Back, Kurt" (1975-1979), the movies "Saturday Night Fever" (1977) and "The Hustler" (1978). His acting career declined in the 1980s, but he was revived in Quentin Tarantino's film Blackjack (1994). Among them, Travolta was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for "Saturday Night Fever" and "Black Lives Matter" and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy for his performance in "Little People" (1995). In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Indian Film Awards. In 2016, he participated in the crime drama "The Public vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story", playing the role of attorney Rob Shapiro. In 2026, he won the Honorary Palme d'Or at the 79th Cannes Film Festival.

John Pierpont Morgan (April 17, 1837 - March 31, 1913), often called J. P. Morgan, was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate financing on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age. As leader of J.P. Morgan & Co., he was a driving force in the wave of industrial consolidation in the United States that spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During his career on Wall Street, J.P. Morgan spearheaded the founding of several well-known multinational companies, including U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General Electric, all of which later came under J.P. Morgan's supervision. He and his partners also owned controlling interests in many other U.S. businesses, including Aetna Life Insurance Co., Western Union, Pullman Co., and 21 railroad companies. Because J.P. Morgan's influence extends to top U.S. financial officials and members of Congress, his degree of dominance over U.S. finance allows him to exert huge influence on the country's policies and the market forces that support its economy. During the Panic of 1907, he organized a coalition of financiers to save the U.S. monetary system from collapse. As a leading financier of the Progressive Era, J.P. Morgan's dedication to efficiency and modernization helped transform the American economy. Adrian Waldridge describes J.P. Morgan as America's "greatest banker." In 1913, J.P. Morgan died in his sleep in Rome, Italy, at the age of 75. His body was later returned to New York, and flags on Wall Street were flown at half-mast as a mark of respect. He left his wealth and career to his son, J.P. Morgan Jr. Biographer Ron Chernow estimates his wealth at $80 million (equivalent to $2.61 billion in 2025).

John William Peers OAM (English: John William Peers, July 25, 1988 -) is an Australian professional tennis player who mainly participates in singles and doubles competitions in the ATP Challenger Tour. Since 2013, he has focused on doubles events and started participating in the ATP World Tour.

John Forbes Nash Jr. (English: John Forbes Nash Jr., June 13, 1928 - May 23, 2015), often called John Nash, was an American mathematician and former Moore Honorary Lecturer at MIT. He mainly studied game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations. In his later years, he was a senior research mathematician at Princeton University. In 1950, Nash received a doctorate from Princeton University in the United States. He proposed an important concept in a doctoral thesis of only 28 pages, which became an important breakthrough in game theory. This concept is called "Nash equilibrium" and is widely used in economics, computer science, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, policy and military theory. In 1994, he and two other game theorists, John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. Nash's most important mathematical achievements were in the fields of differential geometry and partial differential equations, especially the results of isometric embedding of Riemannian manifolds into Euclidean space. For his contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations, he jointly received the 2015 Abel Prize with Louis Nirenberg. Geometer Mikhail Gromov commented on Nash's work: "He had tremendous analytical (referring to mathematical analysis) ability combined with geometric insight. ... His geometric work, whether it is his results, techniques, or ideas used, were contrary to anyone's original expectations. ... What he did in geometry, in my opinion, is incomparably much greater than what he did in economics, by many orders of magnitude." After 1959, his research career was interrupted due to the emergence of mental symptoms. He entered the hospital for recuperation twice in 1959 and 1961 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nash refused to receive psychotropic medication. After 1970, his symptoms gradually improved and he returned to academic research. His experiences during this period were written as a biography by Sylvia Nasa and remade into the movie "Beautiful Realm", making his deeds widely known.

John Rawls (English: John Rawls, February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was an American political philosopher and ethicist who believed in liberalism. He graduated with a doctorate in philosophy from Princeton University and served as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University. He is the author of "A Theory of Justice" (1971), "Political Liberalism", "Justice as Fairness: A New Theory of Justice", "The Law of Peoples" and other famous works. Rawls was one of the leading representatives of political philosophy in the 1970s, and many of his students have now become important figures in moral and political philosophy, such as Thomas Nagel and Joshua Cohen.

John E. Roemer (English: John E. Roemer, born February 1, 1945), American economist, political scientist, currently professor of political economics at Yale University. In 1966, Romer graduated summa cum laude with a major in mathematics from Harvard University, and later entered the University of California, Berkeley for graduate education. During this period, due to his opposition to the Vietnam War, he transferred to a doctoral program in economics and was suspended from the university for participating in political activities. On November 28, 2018, in order to oppose mainland China’s suppression of students organizing pro-labor groups, more than 30 left-wing scholars including John Romer and Noam Chomsky jointly called for a boycott of the World Marxist Congress hosted by China. Romer issued a statement saying that relevant actions exposed China's political leadership as fake Marxists.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, abbreviated as JFK, was the 35th President of the United States. On November 22, 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, becoming the fourth U.S. president to be assassinated. Kennedy's death changed the development direction of American politics and is regarded as a key turning point in American history.

John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV (English: John Jacob "Jack" Astor IV; July 13, 1864 - April 15, 1912), a German-American businessman and investor, a member of the Astor family, and one of the richest Americans. In the early morning of April 15, 1912, he died in the sinking of the Titanic. He was the richest passenger on the Titanic and one of the richest men in the world at the time, with a net worth of nearly $87 million at the time of his death (equivalent to $2.21 billion in 2017 currency).

John Howard Northrop (English: John Howard Northrop, July 5, 1891 - May 27, 1987), American chemist, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946.

John Wayne (English: John Wayne, May 26, 1907 - June 11, 1979) was an American film actor who won the Academy Award for Best Actor. The character he plays is very masculine and has a distinctive personal style. His tone of voice and the way he walks are distinctive. His nickname is Duke. In 1999, the American Film Institute selected the 100 Greatest Stars of the 20th Century, and John Wayne ranked 13th among actors. According to the results of the Harris Poll released on January 16, 2007, Wayne ranked third among the most popular American movie stars in 2006. The survey dates back to 1994, and Wayne is the only deceased star to appear in the top 10 every year. Wayne's screen career began in silent films in the 1920s, and he was one of the major movie stars from the 1940s to the 1970s. His name is closely associated with westerns and war films, but he is also competent in roles in various other types of films, such as biographical films, romantic comedies, police films, etc. He collaborated with director John Ford for 35 years and 21 times.