Simone de Beauvoir
1908 – 1986 · 78 years · Paris · Europe
Existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) showed how society makes woman the "Other": "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman". It became a founding text of second-wave feminism.
Wikipedia (Russian) · Wikipedia (English) · 20th century
Portrait: Moshe Milner · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Contemporaries around the world
Europe
- Pablo Picasso — painter and sculptor, 27 years older
- Winston Churchill — Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 34 years older
- Albert Einstein — physicist, creator of relativity, 29 years older
- Adolf Hitler — dictator of Nazi Germany, 19 years older
- Marie Curie — physicist and chemist, twice Nobel laureate, 41 years older
- Jean-Paul Sartre — French philosopher and writer, 3 years older
Eastern Europe & Russia
- Joseph Stalin — leader of the Soviet Union, 30 years older
- Yuri Gagarin — cosmonaut, first human in space, 26 years younger
- Vladimir Lenin — revolutionary, head of the Soviet government, 38 years older
- Leonid Brezhnev — Soviet leader of the Era of Stagnation, 2 years older
- Dmitri Shostakovich — composer, 2 years older
- Nikita Khrushchev — Soviet leader who denounced Stalin's personality cult, 14 years older
Middle East
- Mustafa Kemal Atatürk — founder and first President of Turkey, 27 years older
- Golda Meir — Prime Minister of Israel, 10 years older
- Gamal Abdel Nasser — President of Egypt, 10 years younger
- Mehmed VI — last Ottoman sultan, 47 years older
- Abdul Hamid II — the 'Red Sultan' who dissolved the first parliament, 66 years older
- Naguib Mahfouz — novelist, Nobel laureate, 3 years younger
Africa
- Nelson Mandela — first Black President of South Africa, 10 years younger
- Haile Selassie — Emperor of Ethiopia, 16 years older
- Patrice Lumumba — first prime minister of Congo, 17 years younger
- Léopold Sédar Senghor — poet, first president of Senegal, 2 years older
- Julius Nyerere — first president of Tanzania, 14 years younger
- Kwame Nkrumah — first President of Ghana, 1 year younger
Asia
- Mao Zedong — Chairman of the CCP, founder of the PRC, 15 years older
- Mahatma Gandhi — leader of the Indian independence movement, 39 years older
- Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) — WWII-era emperor who announced Japan's surrender, 7 years older
- Mother Teresa — nun, founder of the Missionaries of Charity, 2 years younger
- Indira Gandhi — Prime Minister of India, 9 years younger
- Sukarno — first president of Indonesia, 7 years older
Americas
- Charlie Chaplin — comic actor and filmmaker, 19 years older
- Neil Armstrong — astronaut, first person on the Moon, 22 years younger
- Martin Luther King Jr. — minister and civil rights leader, 21 years younger
- Nikola Tesla — inventor and electrical engineer, 52 years older
- Thomas Edison — inventor and businessman, 61 years older
- Jorge Luis Borges — writer, 9 years older
Oceania
- Ernest Rutherford — physicist who discovered the atomic nucleus, 37 years older
- Edmund Hillary — mountaineer and explorer, 11 years younger
- Howard Florey — pharmacologist who made penicillin a drug, 10 years older
- Eddie Mabo — land-rights campaigner, 28 years younger
- Don Bradman — cricketer, born the same year
- Sālote Tupou III — Queen of Tonga, 8 years older
The world in their lifetime
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — aged 0, Middle East
- 1908 Tunguska event — aged 0, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1908 Young Turk Revolution — aged 0, Middle East
- 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution — aged 2, Americas
- 1911–1912 Xinhai Revolution — aged 3, Asia
- 1914–1918 World War I — aged 6, Whole world
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — aged 6, Americas
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — aged 7, Middle East
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — aged 8, Middle East
- 1917 October Revolution — aged 9, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — aged 9, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — aged 10, Whole world
- 1919 Treaty of Versailles — aged 11, Europe
- 1928 Discovery of penicillin — aged 20, Europe
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — aged 21, Americas
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — aged 21, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1933 Hitler comes to power — aged 25, Europe
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — aged 28, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1936–1939 Spanish Civil War — aged 28, Europe
- 1939–1945 World War II — aged 31, Whole world
- 1941–1944 Siege of Leningrad — aged 33, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1941–1945 The Holocaust — aged 33, Europe
- 1942–1943 Battle of Stalingrad — aged 34, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1945 Atomic bombing of Hiroshima — aged 37, Asia
- 1945 German surrender and Victory Day — aged 37, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1947–1991 Cold War — aged 39, Whole world
- 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights — aged 40, Whole world
- 1949 Founding of NATO — aged 41, Whole world
- 1953 Discovery of the DNA double helix — aged 45, Europe
- 1953 First ascent of Everest — aged 45, Asia
- 1957 Sputnik 1, the first satellite — aged 49, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1961 Gagarin's flight — aged 53, Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1966–1976 Cultural Revolution in China — aged 58, Asia
- 1969 Moon landing — aged 61, Americas
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — aged 62, Americas
- 1975–1979 The Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian genocide — aged 67, Asia
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — aged 72, Whole world
- 1981 AIDS first described — aged 73, Whole world
- 1983 Birth of the Internet: ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — aged 75, Americas
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — aged 77, Eastern Europe & Russia