William Richard Lethaby was born on January 18, 1857, in Barnstaple, Devon, England.

He was an English architect, designer, educator, and architectural theorist and historian. After studies at Barnstaple Art School and an early apprenticeship with a local architect, he found work in London in 1879 as Chief Clerk to architect Richard Norman Shaw. Shaw quickly recognized Lethaby's talent as a designer. He contributed significant pieces of work to major Shaw-designed buildings, e.g., Scotland Yard in London and Cragside in Northumberland. Lethaby became involved in the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which campaigned to preserve the integrity and authenticity of older buildings. He was a co-founder of the Art Workers Guild in 1884. In 1889, he started to practice independently, designing a wide range of products, e.g., books, furniture, stained glass as well as many buildings, exploring the mystical symbolism of medieval and non-European design and architecture. He published the book "Architecture, Mysticism, and Myth" (1891). In 1894, Lethaby was appointed Art Inspector to the Technical Education Board of the newly formed London County Council. He founded the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1896. In 1901, he was appointed the first Professor of Design at the Royal College of Art. He also served as Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1902 and Surveyor of Westminster Abbey in 1906. He became increasingly devoted to the academic study of the theory and history of architecture and design.

In 1901, he married Edith Rutgers Crosby (1851-1927). He died on July 17, 1931, in Bayswater, Middlesex, England.

Elias Letelier-Ruz was born in 1957 in Santiago, Chile, of Jewish and French ancestry.

He is a Chilean poet. He studied anthropological linguistics and psychology. Following the coup d'état that overthrew President Salvador Allende in 1973, he joined the resistance, lived in hiding and organized literary workshops in the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile. In November 1981, he left Chile and served as Director of the newspaper El Siglo and Human Rights Commissioner of the Canadian Maritime universities. He was also a correspondent for different press media, editor of the National Council of Culture of Nicaragua, First Lieutenant of the Sandinista Popular Army of Nicaragua, and a member of the Guatemalan guerrilla army. He currently directs the Red de Familiares y Amigos de los Presos Políticos de Chile (Network of Relatives and Friends of Political Prisoners of Chile) and serves as President of the Research and Development Division of CdPoetry Multimedia. His poems have been translated into several languages. His first collection “Silence” was published in French in 1997, followed by "Histoire de la nuit" (Montreal, 1998). Montreal-born composer Tim Brady, inspired by Elias Letelier-Ruz’s book of poems “Symphony” (1988), composed "Atacama: symphonie no 3" (2012).

Léo Lesquereux, a palaeobotanist, grew up in Fleurier, a small Swiss town where his father was one of a Huguenot community of watchmakers. Young Leo loved roaming the cliffs and bogs of the region. At age seven, one of his explorations ended in a fall from a precipice; he survived but spent two weeks in a coma. He nevertheless persisted in his interest in bogs and devised a sort of augur to investigate their stratification that led to an understanding of the causes of peat formation and eventually to its relationship to the geology of coal.
He went to the University of Neuchatel where his theory met with skepticism but where he benefitted from the teaching of Louis Agassiz. He was appointed to chair at La Chaux de Fonds when tragedy struck: a Parisian doctor bungled treatment of an ear infection, leaving Lesguereux stone deaf for life and unemployed. He fell back on the family métier of watch-engraving but soon became despondent. His wife, the daughter of a Prussian general, not only nursed him but taught herself watch-engraving to support the family. After his recovery, he taught himself to lip-read in French, English and German so well that people often did not realize he was deaf.
His fortunes turned when the king of Prussia commissioned him to report on the peat bogs of the kingdom. He also examined bogs in the United States and Canada, and decided to follow his former teacher Agassiz to North America. He and his family moved to Columbus, Ohio, in 1848 where he began a watch business with his sons. Though poor at first, he was soon doing well enough to devote his energies to science. He became recognized as a pioneer of palaeobotany, contributing 12 important works. He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1861 and of the National Academy of Sciences in 1864. At his death in 1883 at the age of 83, J. P. Lesley wrote his obituary for the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.