More Famous People with Asperger Syndrome

Heather Kuzmich

(born 19 April 1986)

is an art student and American fashion model.Heather is best known for being a contestant of America’s Next Top Model, where she was the fourth runner-up of the show. During the show, it was revealed that Kuzmich has Asperger syndrome and ADHD Kuzmich was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome when she was fifteen years old Heather signed to the women’s division of Elite Model Management in Chicago and Hong Kong She has also appeared on the cover and inside of Spectrum Magazine, a magazine for families and individuals who have autism.

Just shows people with Asperger Syndrome can have both Beauty and brains…

William Henry Gates III KBE

(born 28 October 1955)

is an American entrepreneur and chairman of Microsoft, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential. Microsoft had revenues of US$51.12 billion for the fiscal year ending June 2007, and employs more than 78,000 people in 105 countries and regions.

Peter Howson OBE

(born 1958)

is a Scottish painter. He was an official war artist in the 1993 Bosnian Civil War. He has produced some of his most shocking and controversial work detailing the atrocities which were taking place at the time. One painting in particular Croatian and Muslim, detailing a rape created controversy partly because of its explicit subject matter but also because Howson had painted it from the accounts of its victims rather than witnessing it firsthand. Much of his work cast stereotypes on the lower social groups; he portrayed brawls including drunken, even physically deformed men and women.
His work is exhibited in many major collections and is in the private collection of celebrities such as David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Madonna who inspired a number of paintings in 2002
Howson was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honour

 

Michael Edward Palin, CBE

(born 5 May 1943)

is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries. Palin wrote most of his material with Terry Jones. Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows such as The Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including “The Dead Parrot”, “The Lumberjack Song”, “The Spanish Inquisition” and “Spam”. Palin continued to work with Jones, co-writing Ripping Yarns. He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role

 

Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE

(August 13, 1899 – April 29, 1980)

was an iconic and highly influential director and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and thriller genres. After a substantial film career in his native Britain he moved to Hollywood and became an American citizen in 1956, although he also remained a British subject. He ultimately directed more than fifty feature films in a career spanning six decades, from the silent film era, through the invention of talkies, to the colour era. Hitchcock was among the most consistently successful and publicly recognizable world directors during his lifetime, and remains one of the best known and most popular of all time.

Sir Isaac Newton FRS  

(4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727)

was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, theologian, natural philosopher, and alchemist to be the greatest single work in the history of science, described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, laying the groundwork for classical mechanics, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries and is the basis for modern engineering. He showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the scientific revolution.

 

Jane Austen

(16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817)

was a British novelist whose realism, biting social commentary, and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely-read and best-loved writers in British literature

Albert Einstein

(March 14, 1879 – April 18, 1955)

was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E = mc². Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

 

Hans Christian Andersen or simply H.C. Andersen

(April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875)

was a Danish author and poet, most famous for his fairy tales. Among his best-known stories “The Snow Queen”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling”. During Andersen’s lifetime he was feted by royalty and acclaimed as having brought joy to children across Europe. His fairy tales have been translated into well over a hundred languages and continue to be published in “millions of copies all over the world”.

Henry Cavendish

(October 10, 1731 – February 24, 1810)

was a British scientist noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called “inflammable air”. He described the density of inflammable air, which formed water on combustion, in a 1766 paper “On Factitious Airs”. Antoine Lavoisier later reproduced Cavendish’s experiment and gave the element its name. Cavendish is also known for his measurement of the Earth’s density and early research into electricity.

Charles Robert Darwin

(12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882)

was an English naturalist After becoming eminent among scientists for his field work and inquiries into geology, he proposed and provided scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of natural selection The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution in the 1930s, and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. In modified form, Darwin’s scientific discovery remains the foundation of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life. 

Satoshi Tajiri

(born on August 28, 1965)

is a Japanese electronic game designer and the creator of Pocket Monsters, better known as Pokémon. Tajiri went to work for Nintendo and spent the next six years working on Pokémon. He became friends with Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario,The Legend of Zelda, Pikmin, and Donkey Kong, who also became a mentor to Tajiri. As a tribute to Tajiri and Miyamoto, Ash Ketchum (the anime counterpart of “Red” in the games) is named Satoshi and Gary Oak (the anime counterpart of “Blue” in the English games, and “Green” in the original Japanese version) is named Shigeru in the Japanese version of Pokémon. Most recently, Tajiri (along with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata) served as an executive producer for the Game Boy Advance game ScrewBreakerreleased outside of Japan as Drill Dozer. 

James Maury “Jim” Henson

(September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990)

was the most widely known puppeteer in American television history. He was the creator of The Muppets and the leading force behind their long creative run in the television series Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and films such as The Muppet Movie (1979) and The Dark Crystal (1982). He was also an Oscar-nominated film director, Emmy Award-winning television producer, and the founder of The Jim Henson Company, the Jim Henson Foundation, and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. Henson is widely acknowledged for the ongoing vision of faith, friendship, magic, and love which infused nearly all of his work 

Charles Monroe Schulz

(November 26, 1922 – February 12, 2000)

was a 20th-century American cartoonist best known worldwide for his Peanutscomic strip.Schulz’s drawings were first published by Robert Ripley in his Ripley’s Believe It or Not!. His first regular cartoons, Li’l Folks, were published from 1947 to 1950 by the St. Paul Pioneer Press; he first used the name Charlie Brown for a character there, although he applied the name in four gags to three different boys and one buried in sand. The series also had a dog that looked much like Snoopy. In 1948, Schulz sold a cartoon to the Saturday Evening Post; the first of seventeen single-panel cartoons by Schulz that would be published there. In 1948, Schulz tried to have Li’l Folks syndicated through the Newspaper Enterprise Association. Schulz would have been an independent contractor for the syndicate, unheard of in the 1940s, but the deal fell through. Li’l Folks was dropped in January, 1950 

Thomas Jefferson

(April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826)

As a political philosopher, Jefferson was a man of the Enlightenment and knew many intellectual leaders in Britain and France. He idealized the independent yeoman farmer as exemplar of republican virtues, distrusted cities and financiers, and favored states’ rights and a strictly limited federal government. Jefferson supported the separation of church and state and was the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (1779, 1786). He was the eponym of Jeffersonian democracy and the co-founder and leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, which dominated American politics for a quarter-century. Jefferson served as the wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781), first United States Secretary of State (1789–1793) and second Vice President (1797–1801). 

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

(March 6, 1475 – February 18, 1564)

commonly known as Michelangelo, was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet and engineer. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with his rival and fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci. 

Wolfgang Mozart

(27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791)

was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. His output of over 600 compositions includes works widely acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music. Mozart is among the most enduringly popular of classical composers, and many of his works are part of the standard concert repertoire.

Authors of fictional works have found Mozart’s life a compelling source of raw material.An especially popular case is the supposed rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri, particularly the idea that it was poison received from the latter that caused Mozart’s death; this is the subject of Aleksandr Pushkin’s play Mozart and Salieri and Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera Mozart and Salieri. The idea receives no support at all from modern scholars.Modern audiences have been gripped by the account of Mozart’s life given in Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus, as well as the film based on the play. Shaffer seems to have been especially taken by the contrast between Mozart’s enjoyment of vulgarity (noted above) and the sublime character of his music. The scene in Shaffer’s work in which Mozart dictates music to Salieri on his deathbed is entirely an author’s fancy; for the question of whether Mozart did any dictation on his deathbed at all see 

George Orwell

(25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950)

who was an English writer and journalist well-noted as a novelist, critic, and commentator on politics and culture, George Orwell is one of the most admired English-language essayists of the twentieth century, and most famous for two novels critical of totalitarianism in general (Nineteen Eighty-Four), and Stalinism in particular (Animal Farm), which he wrote and published towards the end of his life 

Dan Aykroyd

(July 1, 1952)

is an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy Award-winning Canadian-American comedian, actor, screenwriter, musician, and ufologist. He was an original cast member of Saturday Night Live, an originator of the Blues Brothers (with John Belushi), and has had a long career as a film actor and screenwriter. Some of his well known films are Ghostbusters, The Blue Brothers, My Girl and many many more.

Aykroyd described himself (in a radio interview with Terry Gross) as having mild Tourette syndrome that was successfully treated with therapy when he was a preteen, as well as mild Asperger syndrome.The diagnosis of Asperger syndrome did not exist in the 1960s, when Aykroyd was a preteen. It is unclear if Aykroyd received the diagnoses of TS or AS from a medical source, whether he was speaking in his role as a comic, or whether the diagnoses were self-made. It was an audio interview, so the audience could not see Aykroyd’s facial expressions, but the interviewer indicated uncertainty about whether Aykroyd was kidding. 

Ludwig Van Beethoven

(December 16, 1770 – March 26, 1827)

was a German composer and virtuoso pianist. He was a crucial figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras in Western classical music, and remains one of the most respected and influential composers of all time. 

Thomas Edison

(February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931)

was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb. he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory. 

Woody Allen

(December 1, 1935)

is a three-time Academy Award-winning American film director, writer, actor, jazz musician, comedian and playwright. His large body of work and cerebral film style, mixing satire, wit and humor, have made him one of the most respected and prolific filmmakers in the modern era. Woody has said the following in a interview

“I am a neurotic in a more benign way. I mean I have a lot of neurotic habits,” the quirky American director and actor told Reuters Television. “

“I don’t like to go into elevators, I don’t go through tunnels, I like the drain in the shower to be in the corner and not in the middle,” Allen said in an interview after showing his new comedy “Anything Else” at the 60th Venice Film Festival”  

Craig Nicholls

(August 31, 1977)

is a Australian Singer, Songwriter and Guitarist of the alternative rock group the Vines. During a promotional show for Triple M radio, bass player Patrick Matthews walked off stage after Nicholls bleated at the audience and demanded that the crowd not talk during the performance. Nicholls said to the crowd,”Why the fuck are you laughing? You’re all a bunch of sheep. Can you go baa?” Nicholls was even accused of kicking a photographer and charges were pressed. As a result, Patrick Matthews never played with The Vines again (he has since joined Youth Group and Triple M banned The Vines from being played on their radio station indefinitely. Nicholls was accompanied by his brother Matt, and his manager and friend Andy Kelly in Balmain Local Court in Sydney on 19 November 2004. There it was revealed that Nicholls has Asperger syndrome   

Gary Numan

(March 8, 1958)

Born Gary Webb and is a English singer, composer, and musician. Numan has Asperger syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder which causes restricted social and communication skills. In a 2001 interview, he said: “Polite conversation has never been one of my strong points. Just recently I actually found out that I’d got a mild form of Asperger’s syndrome which basically means I have trouble interacting with people. For years, I couldn’t understand why people thought I was arrogant, but now it all makes more sense 

Gary Mckinnon

(February 10, 1966)

is a Scottish hacker facing extradition to the United States on charges of perpetrating what one US prosecutor claims is the “biggest military computer hack of all time” McKinnon had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. His diagnosis was made in August 2008 by the Cambridge University psychologist Prof Simon Baron-Cohen. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force. If he is extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon faces up to 70  years in jail and has expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay. 

Michael Jackson

(August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)

known as the King of Pop, was an American musician and one of the most commercially successful and influential entertainers of all time. His unique contributions to music and dance, along with a highly publicized personal life, made him a prominent figure in popular culture for over four decades.

Michael Jackson certainly shows signs of Asperger’s Syndrome (AS). His unusual behaviour has often been blamed on his upbringing, however his siblings are relatively normal, with a similar upbringing, so I do not feel this is the cause. Michael is often seen as shy, and has difficulty relating to many people. His friends are a few people with whom he has common interests, especially the background of being a child star. He mostly seems to be able to relate to children, however, perhaps reflecting the social immaturity which may be seen in Asperger’s. Regardless of maturity level, people with Asperger’s seem to be more comfortable with those older or younger than their peer group. This has never been confirmed but many sources feel there was a posiblity he might of had Asperger Syndrome. 

Mark Twain

(November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910)

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens Better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which has since been called the Great American Novel and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is extensively quoted. During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain enjoyed immense public popularity. His keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature” 

Henry Ford

(July 30, 1863 – April 7, 1947)

was the American founder of the Ford Motor Company and father of modern assembly lines used in mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry. He was a prolific inventor and was awarded 161 U.S. patents. As owner of the Ford Motor Company he became one of the richest and best-known people in the world  

Luke Jackson

(August 18, 1988)

Luke Christopher Jackson is an author who rose to fame at the age of 13, when he wrote a book from first-hand experience about what it is like to have Asperger syndrome. The book, titled Freaks, Geeks, and Asperger Syndrome’: A User Guide to Adolescence created a sensation and greatly increased general awareness of the condition

The follow people you may or may not Know but all are very important regarding Asperger Syndrome

 

Hans Aspergers

(February 18, 1906 – October 21, 1980)

was an Austrian pediatrician, after whom Asperger syndrome (AS) was named. He wrote over 300 publications, mostly concerning autism in children.

 

Lorna Wing

(October 7, 1928)

is an English psychiatrist and physician. As a result of having an autistic daughter, she became involved in researching developmental disorders, particularly autism spectrum disorders. She joined with other parents of autistic children to found the National Autistic Society (NAS) in the United Kingdom in 1962. She currently works part-time as a consultant psychiatrist at the NAS Centre for Social and Communication Disorders at Elliot House   

 

Tony Attwood

(February 9, 1952)

is an English psychologist who lives in Queensland, Australia and is an author of several books on Asperger’s Syndrome. Attwood also has a clinical practice at his diagnostic and treatment clinic for children and adults with Asperger’s Syndrome, in Brisbane, begun in 1992   

Leo Kanner

(June 13, 1894 – April 3 1981)

,was born in Klekotow, Austria.He was an famous psychiatrist and physician known for his work about to autism.
He studied at the University of Berlin from 1913, his studies broken by service with the Austrian Army in World War I, finally receiving his MD in 1921.
He emigrated to the United States in 1924 to take a position as an Assistant Physician at the State Hospital in Yankton County, South Dakota. In 1930 he was selected to develop the first child psychiatry service in a pediatric hospital at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore. He became Associate Professor of Psychiatry in 1933

In academical means, he was the first physician in the world to be identified as a child psychiatrist, founder of the first academic child psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins University Hospital and his first textbook, Child Psychiatry in 1935, was the first English language textbook to focus on the psychiatric problems of children. His seminal 1943 paper, “Autistic Disturbances of Affective Contact”, together with the work of Hans Asperger, forms the basis of the modern study of autism.

Here’s a bit of fun with fictional people who show some signs of Asperger Syndrome

1. Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese in Faulty Towers)
2. Mr Bean (played by Rowan Atkinson)
3. Mr Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek)
4. Data (played by Brett Spiner in Star Trek the Next Generation)
5. Reginald Barclay (played by Dwight Schultz in Star Trek the Next Generation)
6. Andrew Martin (the Robot played by Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man)
   

   See, autism is not barrier to success! You can if you want!

Posted by Liana Sofiani

Source: http://www.asperger-syndrome.me.uk/people.htm