Dionysis Simopoulos

Dionyssis Simopoulos was born in Ioannina, Greece, but he grew up in Patra.

He studied Political Communication and Astrophysics at the Departments of Government and Speech, Physics and Astronomy at the Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  During that period he received several awards and honours in various public speaking and debating competitions.

He started working in January 1968 as an Associate Curator, Assistant Director of Education and Planetarium Directorate at the Louisianna Arts and Science Centre in Baton Rouge as well as a Special Advisor to the Science Committee of the School Board (1970-1973).

He has attended many conferences and seminars and has published hundreds of articles in Greek and international magazines and newspapers. He was the President of the European Association for Astronomy Education and a member of the Executive Council of the International Planetarium Society. He was also the Secretary General of the European-Mediterranean Planetarium Association. Furthermore, he is a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the International Planetarium Society, and a member of many other international scientific organizations.

In 1996 he received the highest honour of the International Planetarium Society for his contribution to the international stronomy education.

In 2006 he was honoured with the Palmes Academiques of the French Republic.

He has written more than 500 scripts and two sets of scripts for special video lessons on astronomy and space science for the Hellenic Ministry of Education, as well as a series of four cd-roms on astronomy. Finally, he has delivered hundreds of lectures on science and Astrophysics all over Greece.

Eugenides Planetarium

The dome of the Eugenides Planetarium in Athens

Since October 1972 works as a Director of the Eugenides Planetarium in Athens.

George Ritsikalis, Grade 2, Level 2, 2nd Junior High School of Athens

Sotiris Kovos

Sotiris Kovos was born in Athens in 1965. He is a Greek car designer. He studied in Greece and the United Kingdom. He worked for Peugeot, Toyota, Mazda. Lexus, and Audi.

The most known model that Sotiris Kovos designed is Toyota Yaris which was nominated ‘Car of the Year 2000’!

Ellie Tzamakou, Grade 2, Level 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Nicolas Ambraseys

 

Nicolas Ambraseys studied Rural and Surveying Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens. He is a Greek professor of Engineering Seismology and the title of his thesis was ‘The seismic stability of earth dams’.

In his thesis he invented the idea of the Newmark’s sliding block method of analysis, which scientists use  to calculate the permanent displacement of soil slopes during an earthquake.

Professor Ambraseys founded and became the first chairman of the British National Committee of Earthquake Engineering.

Elli Tazmakou, Grade 2, Level 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Manolis Andronikos

Manolis Andronikos was a Greek archaeologist. He was born in Proussa on 23 October 1919. Later he moved to Thessaloniki with his family.

He studied at the Philosophical School at the University of Athens. In 1952 he became a professor of classical archaeology in Aristotelio University of Thessaloniki. He completed his studies in Oxford with Sir John D. Beazley. He also served as an archaeologist. He made several excavations in Naoussa, Veria, Kilkis, Halkidiki, Thessaloniki, and Vergina.

                               

He also discovered the grave of Philippos the Second, King of Macedonia.

Angela Nikolaou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Aris Poulianos

Aris Poulianos was born in Ikaria on 24 July 1924. He is a Greek anthropologist who has dealt with old anthropological excavations at the cave of Petralona (which was discovered by Philippos Hatzarides on 10 May 1959) at Triglia.

Professor Poulianos believed that the skull of the Archanthropus found in the Petralona cave was 700.000 years old.

He also believed that the Archanthropus is the ancestor of modern European people.

He has also found other findings from the time of homo erectus trigliensis.

Angela Nikolaou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Joseph Sifakis

Joseph Sifakis is a Greek computer scientist, who won the 2007 Turing Award along with Edmund Clarke and Allen Emerson for his work on model checking.

He was born in Heraklion, Crete in 1946 and studied Electrical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, and Computer Science at the University of Grenoble under a French scholarship.

Professor Sifakis lives in France and works for the Centre National de la Reserche Scientifique at the VERIMAG laboratory near Grenoble, of which he is a founder.

He is also a partner in the Artist2 network.

Chris Kyriakopoulos, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Leonidas J. Guibas

Leonidas John Guibas is a professor of computer science at Stanford University where he heads the geometric computation group and is a member of the computer graphics and artificial intelligence laboratories.

He was a programme chair for the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Symposium on Computation Geometry in 1996.

He is a Fellow of the ACM and he was awarded the Allen Newell award in 2007 for his pioneering contributions in applying algorithms to a wide range of computer science disciplines.

Chris Kyriakopoulos, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Michael Dertouzos

Michael Dertouzos was born on 5 November 1936 and died on 27 August 2001. He was a great professor and director of the Computers Science Laboratory in Massachousetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

         

He predicted that the electronic computers will be used a lot in the future. He managed to do things earlier than other people and he helped technology to be improved such as the wordwide web.

Demetres Proskefalas, Grade 2, 2nd Juinir High School of Paralia

Constantinos Daskalakis

Constantinos Daskalakis was born in 1981. He is a university professor. He has also got a lot of degrees. He became famous when he solved the John Forbes Nash puzzle.

John Forbes Nash proved that if there are a lot of general situations, there is always a point of balance. John Forbes Nash won a prize for this invention. He had created a simpler system of relations of the people who have different benefits, such as when playing games. Daskalakis, however, proved that, if we buy something, even if there are different benefits, we can find a balance. However, sometimes this balance is impossible.

For this proof he won a prize by the international organization ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) in 2008.

Demetres Proskefalas, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Valerios Stais

Valerios Stais was a Greek archaeologist of the 19th century. He was born in 1857 in Kythera.

He studied medicine in Athens and later archaeology in Germany. He carried out excavations at Epidauros, in Thessaly, Antikythera, and elsewhere.

Excavation of 1890 by the Greek Archaeological Service under Valerios Stais.

In Antikythera, the world’s first marine archaeological excavation, he recognized the importance of an initially thought as an insignificant finding, and which was later named the Antikythera Mechanism.

Photo of Valerios Stais in diving suit in 1902.

That finding was very interesting and it was the first computational mechanism built around 1500 to 100 BC.

Valerios Stais published many studies and died in 1923.

Bessy Karapataki, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia.

Victor Sarianidi

Victor Sarianidi is an archaeologist of the diaspora from Pontos. He was born in 1929 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is contemporary of Andronicus and he carried out excavations in Asia looking for the route of Alexander the Great and the lost civilizations of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan.

Excavations at Tillya Tepe in 1978 by Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi. Six golden burials from the second quarter of the 1st century AD were found amongst the ruins of an older Bronze Age fortress. Photograph courtesy Viktor Sarianidi.

Bessy Karapataki, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Eugene Michel Antoniadi

Eugene Michel Antoniadi was a Greek astronomer. He spent most of his life in France. So, on the internet we can find him as a French and Turkish astronomer. Antoniadi was also a very successful chess player.

He studied architecture and he drafted  archaeological drawings of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

Antoniadi became a reputed observer of planet Mars. His top observations  were straight canals on planet Mars, which looked like dark lines. Antoniadi concluded that the canals were optical illusions, something that was confirmed by the spacecraft missions to the planet several years later.

Through countless hours of observations he made the first detailed map of the surface of the ‘red planet’. This project was completed by John E. Fokas and the main features of Mars (mountains, areas, craters) have got greek names.

Eugene Antoniadi observed the inside planets Venus and Mercury and tried to draw a map of Mercury. But his efforts were flawed and based on the assumption that Mercury turned always the same hemisphere towards the sun. He invented the scale for the quality of seeing widely used today by amateur astronomers.

Eugene Antoniadi played chess against great players of his time. In the 1907 tournament in Paris he won the first place.

The craters Antoniadis on Mars and

Antoniadi on the southern hemisphere of the Moon have taken their names from this famous astronomer!

Mary Tourkodimitri, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia. 

Spyros Marinatos

Spyros Marinatos was a Greek archaeologist and academic who was born at Cephalonia on the 4th of  November 1901 and died at Akrotiri in Santorini on the 1st of October 1974.

He studied archaeology and graduated (1921) from the Philosophical School of the University of Athens. Between 1927 and 1939 he did his post-graduate studies in Germany. Between 1937 and 1939 he became general manager of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of the Ministry of Education. In 1955 he became a member of the Academy of Athens. Between 1955 and 1958 he became a general manager of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of the Ministry of Education for a second time. In 1958 he became rector of the University of Athens. In 1967 he became manager of the  General Inspectorate of Antiquities . Between 1967 and 1974 he realized excavations at the Akrotiri settlement in Santorini.

On the 1st of October 1974 he died in an accident at the Triangular Square of the Akrotiri archaeological settlement.

At first Spyros Marinatos was buried at the place of Group D in the ancient settlement at Akrotiri in Santorini and stayed there until 2005.

Then he was carried at the south entrance of the archaeological site, but in future his body will be moved to a monument which is going to be built especially for him.

Jenny Kipourgou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Nikolaos Platon

Nikolaos Platon was a renowned Greek archaeologist.

He discovered the Minoan palace at Zakros in Crete.

He was born in 1909 in Cephalonia, but his family was from Crete. He studied philosophy and archaeology at the University of Athens and he finished his doctorate degree in Paris.

In 1930 he started his archaeological career as an assistant at the Museum of Heraklion. In 1937 he returned to Paris to study, and in 1939 he returned to Crete where he became the director of the Museum of Heraklion. From 1960 to 1962 he was appointed director of the Archaeological Region of Athens and of the Acropolis museum. In 1965 he became a professor of prehistoric archaeology at the Aristotle University in Thessaloniki, and in 1974 at the University in Rethymnon.

He died in Athens on 28 March 1992.

Nicole Panayiotatou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Kyriakos Pittakis

Kyriakos Pittakis was born in Psiri of Athens.

In 1821 he was in the revolution against the Ottomans. In 1824 he studied in the Ionian Academy of Corfu. In 1833, together with other prominent personalities, he founded the Archaeological Society.

He helped greatly with the establishment of the New Acropolis Museum.

He died on 23 October 1863. He was married to Catherine Makri, sister of Theresia.

Nicole Panayiotatou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Demetrios Pandermalis

Demetrios Pandermalis is a professor of Archaeology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

He studied at the Historical and Archaeological School of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and then at the School of German Language  and Literature of the Philosophical School.

He excavated large parts at the ancient city of Dion in Pieria.

He is also the founder and director of the New Acropolis Museum.

Mary Roboti, Grade 2, 2nd Junior HIgh School of Paralia

Anthony Keramopoulos

Anthony Keramopoulos was a Greek academic, writer, and archaeologist.

He was born in 1870 and died in 1960. He studied in the Philosophical School of Athens and he taught History of Art to students of the School of Arts.

After his studies he went to Germany, Italy, and Austria to study further. He worked as a professor of archaeology in the University of Athens.

He was a member of the Academy of Athens since 1926 and he also represented Greece in the deliberation of peace in Paris.

As an archaeologist he participated in many excavations and he discovered the Dispilio neolithic settlement of 7 houses open to the public in Kastoria.

Chryssa Panagopoulou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia

Michael Kosmopoulos

Michael Kosmopoulos is an archaeologist and a university professor of Greek Studies and Anthropology at University of Missouri – St. Louis.

He was born in Athens in 1963 and he graduated from the school of Anavrita. He also studied History and Archaeology in the Phisolophical School of Athens University, in Sorbonne – Paris IV University and in Washington University of St. Louis.

He received a diploma in underwater archaeology in 1984.

He has done many excavations all over Greece and Ukraine and he’s been running the Iklaina excavations in Messinia, Greece, since 1999.

He is known worldwide for, among other things,  the discovery of a Linear B tablet from Iklaina which changes everything we know about the origins of literacy and bureaucracy in Europe as scientists believe that it is the first known written record in Europe from as back as between 1450 and 1350 B.C. (Read more: http://www.stltoday.com/news/multimedia/image_2032964a-0fd7-5482-b0e5-64676be76c1c.html#ixzz1r5lqgH2K)

Chryssa Panagopoulou, Grade 2, 2nd Junior High School of Paralia