To begin with, he was a bad-ass xc skiier, winning the Norwegian national championships twelve times in a row. Then he skiied across Greenland in 1888, spent six years doing zoological research on the central nervous system and helped come up with the idea that the neural network consists of individual cells communicating with each other.
Next he designed a bad-ass ship called the Fram, which is Norwegian for ‘forward,’ and sailed along the Siberian coast before heading into the pack ice, to test the idea that idea moved on an east-west current. After a year and a half in the ice, he got bored and headed towards the north pole by dogsled. After five months he and his companion hadn’t made it, so they spent the next nine months living in a hut made out of rocks and eating walrus. After that they headed south, luckily met up with some British scientists, and rejoined the Fram shortly after it broke free of the ice (after 35 months) and went back to Norway. He did research for a while more then became a diplomat, and lent the Fram to Roald Amundsen, who took it to Antarctica, and successfully reached the South Pole.
He was involved in the League of Nations (aka United Nations v1.0) and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for helping 400,000 prisoners of war get home after WWI, trying to relieve the famine in the USSR in 1922, providing indentification and legal status for those who fled the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and for resettling displaced Greeks and Turks after fighting down there. After 1925 he was trying to help the Armenians (who got a super raw deal, being the first victims of 20th century genocide), but was unable to gain the League’s support, and then he died (peacefully) in 1930, in his home outside of Oslo.
So – 1. Athlete, 2. amazing oceanographer (see also: Nansen bottles), 3. helped refugees
Oh, and where did he get his skiing from? His mother. His mother was an avid skiier. In the 1860s!
