- Gordon Brown
Dr James Gordon Brown (born 20 February 1951) is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, the First Lord of the Treasury, the Minister for the Civil Service, the current Member of Parliament for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and the Leader of the Labour Party since 27 June 2007. Before this, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Tony Blair from 1997 to 2007. - Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 - 21 September 1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet popular throughout Europe during his time. In some ways Scott was the first author to have a truly international career in his lifetime, with many contemporary readers all over Europe, Australia, and North America. His novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and specifically, … - David Hume
David Hume (April 26, 1711 - August 25, 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. He is considered one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Although in recent years interest in Hume's work has centred on his philosophical writing, it was as a historian that he first gained recognition and respect. - Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson, was a Scottish novelist, poet, and travel writer, and a leading representative of Neo-romanticism in English literature. He was the man who "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins", as G. K. Chesterton put it. He was also greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling and Vladimir Nabokov. - James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck and 1st Baronet (October 29, 1740 - May 19, 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, 8th Laird of Auchinleck and his wife Euphemia Erskine, Lady Auchinleck. Boswell's mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him. The heir to the estate of Auchinleck in Ayrshire, which he inherited on the death of his father, … - William Robertson
William Robertson was a Scottish historian and Principal of the University of Edinburgh. ("The thirty years during which (he) presided over the University perhaps represent the highest point in its history" according to D.B.Horn's (1967, p.76) "A Short History of the University of Edinburgh:1556-1889".) He was born at Borthwick, Midlothian and educated in Dalkeith and at the University of Edinburgh, where he studied divinity. - John Murray
Sir John Murray KCB (3 March 1841 – 6 March 1914) was a pioneering Scots-Canadian oceanographer and marine biologist. Murray was born at Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, to Scottish parents who had emigrated seven years earlier. He returned to Scotland to study, firstly at Stirling High School, and then at the University of Edinburgh, but soon left to join a whaling expedition to Spitsbergen as ships' surgeon in 1868. - Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, DL (22 May, 1859 - 7 July, 1930) was a Scottish born author most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, which are generally considered a major innovation in the field of crime fiction, and the adventures of Professor Challenger. He was a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, historical novels, plays and romances, poetry, and non-fiction. - James Hutton
James Hutton (3 June 1726 O.S. (14 June 1726 N.S.), Edinburgh, Scotland - 26 March 1797) was a Scottish geologist, noted for formulating uniformitarianism and the Plutonist School of thought. He is considered the father of modern geology. - David Brewster
Sir David Brewster,FRS, (11 December 1781 - 10 February 1868) was a Scottish scientist, inventor and writer. He was born at Jedburgh, where his father, a teacher of high reputation, was rector of the grammar school. At the age of twelve, he was sent to the University of Edinburgh, being intended for the clergy. However, he had already shown a strong inclination for natural science, and this had been fostered by his intimacy with a "self-taught philosopher, … - J. M. Barrie
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM (9 May 1860 - 19 June 1937), more commonly known as J. M. Barrie, was a Scottish novelist and dramatist. He is best remembered for creating Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up, whom he based on his friends, the Llewelyn Davies boys. He is also credited with the popularisation of the name "Wendy", which was little-known in either Britain or America before he gave it to the heroine of "Peter Pan". - Dugald Stewart
Dugald Stewart (November 22, 1753 - June 11, 1828), Scottish philosopher, was born in Edinburgh. His father, Matthew Stewart (1715 - 1785), was professor of mathematics in the University of Edinburgh (1747 - 1772). - James MacPherson
James Macpherson (October 27, 1736 - February 17, 1796) was a Scottish poet, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of poems. - Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell (3 March 1847 - 2 August 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and innovator. Born and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, he emigrated to Canada in 1870, and then to the United States in 1871, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1882. Bell was awarded the U.S. patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876; although other inventors had claimed the honor, the Bell patent remained in effect. - Robert Brown
Robert Brown (December 21, 1773-June 10, 1858) is acknowledged as the leading British botanist to collect in Australia during the first half of the 19th century. Brown was born in Montrose, Scotland on 21 December 1773. He studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he was a classmate of Thomas Dick. He joined the army as a surgeon in 1795. - Robbie Coltrane
Robbie Coltrane, OBE (born Anthony Robert McMillan on March 30, 1950) is a Scottish television and film actor. - J. K. Rowling
Joanne "Jo" Rowling BA (Exon.) OBE is an English fiction writer who writes under the pen name J. K. Rowling. Rowling is the author of the "Harry Potter" fantasy series, which has gained worldwide attention, won multiple awards, and sold over 325 million copies worldwide. In 2007, "The Sunday Times Rich List" estimated her fortune at £545 million (about US$1 billion), … - James Clerk Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 - 5 November 1879) was a Scottish mathematician and theoretical physicist. His most significant achievement was formulating a set of equations - eponymously named Maxwell's equations - that for the first time expressed the basic laws of electricity and magnetism in a unified fashion. He also developed the Maxwell distribution, a statistical means to describe aspects of the kinetic theory of gases. - Robert Jameson
Professor Robert Jameson (1774-1854) was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist, born in Leith, near Edinburgh, in July 1774. As Regius Professor at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship in natural history, his superb museum collection, and his tuition of Charles Darwin. Darwin attended Robert Jameson's natural history course at the University of Edinburgh in his teenage years, … - Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson Cook (28 February 1946 - 6 August 2005) was a politician in the British Labour Party. He was known as Robin Cook. He was Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2001. He resigned from his post as Leader of the House of Commons and Lord President of the Council on 17 March 2003 in protest against the 2003 invasion of Iraq. - William Hamilton
William Hamilton was a Scottish Presbyterian theologian. Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh 1709 to 1732, and the Principal of the University from 1730 to 1732. He began in 1694 as a minister at Cramond. He was also a Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. :"The elder Hamilton was an influential figure in the growth of “early moderatism”, and several of his students, including Wishart, were prominent Rankenians." - Robert Adam
Robert Adam (3 July 1728 - 3 March 1792) was a Scottish neoclassical architect, interior designer and furniture designer. - Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was hugely influential during the Victorian era. Coming from a strictly Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected by his parents to become a preacher. However, while at the University of Edinburgh, he lost his Christian faith; nevertheless, Calvinist values remained with him throughout his life. - James Wilson
James Wilson (September 14, 1742 - August 21, 1798), was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, twice elected to the Continental Congress, a major force in the drafting of the nation's Constitution, a leading legal theoretician and one of the six original justices appointed by George Washington to the United States Supreme Court in 1789. - Robert Stephenson
Robert Stephenson FRS (16 October 1803 - 12 October 1859) was an English civil engineer. He was the only son of George Stephenson, the famed locomotive builder and railway engineer; many of the achievements popularly credited to his father were actually the joint efforts of father and son. - Thomas Dick
Thomas Dick (November 24, 1774 in Hilltown, Dundee - July 29, 1857), was a Scottish scientific teacher and writer known for his works on astronomy. Thomas was a religious man, he also wrote ethical and theological works. - Peter Guthrie Tait
Peter Guthrie Tait (April 28, 1831 - July 4, 1901) was a Scottish mathematical physicist, best known for the seminal energy physics textbook "Treatise on Natural Philosophy", which he co-wrote with Kelvin. - John Home
John Home (22 September 1722 - 5 September 1808) was a Scottish poet and dramatist. He was born at Leith, near Edinburgh, where his father, Alexander Home, a distant relation of the earls of Home, was town clerk. John was educated at the Leith Grammar School, and at the University of Edinburgh, where he graduated MA, in 1742. Though interested in being a soldier, he studied divinity, and was licensed by the presbytery of Edinburgh in 1745. - Charles Bell
Sir Charles Bell (November 1774, in Doun in Monteath, Edinburgh - April 28, 1842, in North Hallow, Worcestershire) was a Scottish anatomist, surgeon, physiologist and natural theologian. He was the younger brother of John Bell (1763-1820), also a noted surgeon and writer. - Malcolm Chisholm
Malcolm Chisholm (born 7 March 1949) is a Scottish Labour Party politician, and a former Scottish Executive minister. Chisholm was educated at George Watson's College and the University of Edinburgh and became an English teacher. He is married with three children. Chisholm was Member of Parliament for Edinburgh Leith from 1992, then Edinburgh North and Leith from 1997. - John Russell 1st Earl Russell
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, KG, GCMG, PC (18 August 1792 - 28 May 1878), known as Lord John Russell before 1861, was an English Whig and Liberal politician who served twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in the mid-19th century, and gave the latter party its name. - Malcolm Rifkind
Sir Malcolm Leslie Rifkind, KCMG, QC (born 21 June 1946) is a Scottish Conservative and Unionist politician and Member of Parliament for the constituency of Kensington and Chelsea. He is a patron of the Tory Reform Group. He was a candidate in the 2005 Conservative Party leadership election, but withdrew before the voting commenced. - James David Forbes
James David Forbes (April 20, 1809 - December 31, 1868) was a Scottish physicist who worked extensively on the conduction of heat, seismology and glaciology. Forbes was a resident of Edinburgh for his entire life, educated at the University and a professor there from 1833. He was born in Edinburgh, the fourth son of Sir William Forbes, 7th Baronet, of Pitsligo. He entered the University of Edinburgh in 1825, … - Iain Gray
Iain Gray (born June 7 1957, Edinburgh) is a Scottish Labour politician, and Member of the Scottish Parliament for East Lothian from 2007. Previously he was MSP for Edinburgh Pentlands constituency from 1999 to 2003. - Ian Rankin
Ian Rankin OBE, DL. (born April 28 1960, in Cardenden, Fife, Scotland) is one of the best-selling crime writers in the United Kingdom. His best known books are the "Inspector Rebus" novels. - Susan Deacon
Susan Deacon (born February 2 1964, Musselburgh) is a Scottish Labour Party politician and was a MSP for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh from 1999 to 2007. She attended the University of Edinburgh for her degree in Social Policy and Politics, as well as for her MBA. She was minister for Health and Community Care until 2001 when she was offered an alternative portfolio by incoming Jack McConnell, but instead resigned her post. - John Pringle
Sir John Pringle, 1st Baronet, FRS, (April 10, 1707 - January 18, 1782) was a Scottish physician who has been called the "father of military medicine" (although Ambroise Pare (1510-90) and Jonathan Letterman (1824-72) have also been accorded this sobriquet). - Kenny MacAskill
Kenny MacAskill (born 28 April 1958) is an Scottish National Party politician, the Cabinet Secretary for Justice and Member of the Scottish Parliament for Edinburgh East and Musselburgh since 2007. MacAskill was born in Edinburgh and was educated at Linlithgow Academy before studying law at the University of Edinburgh. Afterwards he worked as a solicitor and became a partner of his firm. - Eric Liddell
Eric Henry Liddell was a Scottish athlete and Rugby Union international and the winner of the Men's 400 metres at the Olympic Games of 1924 held in Paris. He then served as a Protestant Christian missionary to China. He was immortalised in the film "Chariots of Fire". His surname is pronounced and rhymes with "fiddle". - William Turner
Sir William Turner (born 7 January 1832 in Lancaster, died 15 February 1916 in Edinburgh) was a British anatomist and was the Principal of Edinburgh University from 1903 to 1916. Turner was educated at various private schools, and afterwards studied medicine at St. Bartholomew's hospital, and graduated M.B. at London University. In 1854 he became senior demonstrator in anatomy at Edinburgh University.
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