Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859 – January 4, 1941) was a major French philosopher influential in the first half of the twentieth century. He was born in Paris the son of a pianist from a prominent Polish Jewish family and the daughter of a Yorkshire doctor. He lost his faith in his early teens and discovered Darwin's theory of evolution. He won prizes at the Lycée Fontanes for science and for his solution to a mathematical problem, which was published in Annales de Mathematiques in 1878. He entered the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, earning two degrees. Upon graduation he taught first in Anjou and then Auverge, and published a critical study of the materialist cosmology of Lucretius in 1884. His dissertation, Time and Free Will, earned a doctoral degree from the University of Paris and was published in 1889. He published his second major work in 1896, Matter and Memory, an analysis of perception and memory with a focus on the biological function of the brain. In 1898 he became a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. Introduction to Metaphysics was published in 1903 in Revue de métaphysique et de morale. Creative Evolution, his third major work and the best known, appeared in 1907. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1927 “in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented”. In 1930 he was awarded France's highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur.