Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, in the small village of Vinci, Italy. Sensing his artistic talent, his father sent young Leonardo, then sixteen years old, to cosmopolitan Florence. There, Leonardo started to work as an apprentice in the workshop of painter / sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio. During his time with Verrocchio, Leonardo picked up and improved such skills as painting, sculpting, making fine mechanical objects and musical instruments, designing and making jewelry, repairing works of art, as well as lifting, carrying and digging. At the age of twenty, he became a member of the Florentine Guild of Painters. After spending fourteen years perfecting his artistic and engineering skills, he wrote to Francesco Sforza, the duke of Milan, and offered to help Milan's army with his designs of such military artifacts as cannons, catapults, war ships, drain moats, as well as techniques to dig tunnels and scale castle walls. Although Sforza hired Leonardo, their conflicting motivations forced this collaboration to end prematurely. During his time in Milan, Leonardo, besides his other occupations, also worked as a court entertainer, playing the lute, singing and reciting poetry. Three years after he returned to Florence, he completed the famous Mona Lisa. In 1506, he returned to Milan to work for Charles d'Amboise, the commander of the French troops, who had by then taken over the city. He devoted much of his next seven years to studying mechanics, optics, anatomy and mathematics. He drew his self-portrait at the age of sixty, at which point he was partly paralyzed due to a minor stroke. He spent his last couple of years at Amboise, working for King Francis I of France. This provided him with a comfortable environment where he continued to pursue his art and to conduct his scientific experiments. Leonardo da Vinci passed away on May 2, 1519 at the age of sixty seven.

Vannevar Bush was born on March 11, 1890 in Everett, Massachusetts to Richard Perry and Emma Linwood (Paine) Bush. He completed his undergraduate education at Tufts College in 1913 before spending two years working for the U.S. Navy and later for Tufts College. He continued his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Harvard University. During World War I, he contributed to the research and development efforts of the U.S. Navy in submarine detection systems. It may be interesting to note that Leonardo da Vinci is acknowledged to have designed the first submarine although he never built a working prototype himself. Bush then began work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on what came to be known as the Rockefeller Differential Analyzer, the first completely functional analog calculator which drew its inspiration from Lord Kelvin's analog integrator and Neumann's torque amplifier. In 1938, he was elected as the president of the Carnegie Institute of Washington D.C., where he authored the proposal to President Roosevelt entitled: "Science: The Endless Frontier." He played a central role in the Manhattan Project while contributing to other research in military technologies, conductivity in gases, and theoretical cybernetics. He pioneered the establishment of the National Science Foundation and produced technical papers as well as essays discussing the interaction of science and human civilization. He passed away in June 1974 in Belmont, Massachusetts.

Sophie Marceau, born Sophie Maupu on November 17, 1966 in Paris, began acting in films at the age of fourteen. Up until that point, she had grown up far away from movie studios, having spent her childhood in the Paris suburb region known as Gentilly. When she found out from one of her friends that the famous French movie director Claude Pinoteau was looking for new faces for a teenager movie called La Boum, she applied and was accepted. The movie turned out to be a huge success. This led to the sequel La Boum 2 for which Marceau received the 1983 Caesar for Most Promising Actress. At the age of sixteen, she bought back her contract with Gaumont Studios for one milion French francs, so that she could go on to work on such projects as L'Amour Braque with Andrzej Zulawski. Her role in Mel Gibson's Braveheart was her first English-speaking part. In the spring of 1995, she directed her first film, L'Aube a L'Envers, an eight-minute short based on a screenplay she wrote while filming Braveheart. It was well received at the Cannes Film Festival of 1996. On July 24, 1995, Sophie had her first child, a boy named Vincent. She is unmarried, and lives in Paris with Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish director who is 24 years her senior. Her nickname is flatfoosie.

Incidentally, Sophie Marceau remains entirely irrelevant to our immediate discussion, although clearly, nothing can be completely unrelated to any other arbitrary concept.