Six degrees of separation from Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci (right), born in 1452, was a leading figure of the Italian Renaissance and is widely considered one of the greatest painters of all time. An ambidextrous, paranoid dyslexic, he could simultaneously draw forwards with one hand and backwards with the other, producing a mirror-image script. He stoked the fantasy of flight with his fantastic drawings and is one of the subjects profiled in Dream to Fly, showing today at the Hong Kong Space Museum, in Tsim Sha Tsui. The 35-minute 3D film explores significant aviation milestones and also features the Wright Brothers …

Born in 1930, Armstrong - on the moon mission and almost 400,000km from Earth - spoke these words to more than one billion people listening below: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." As his lunar vehicle touched down on the moon's surface, Armstrong's heart rate was much slower than expected; it only spiked to 160 beats per minute after he'd been spacewalking on the moon's surface for 2½ hours. Last year, Berlin-based singer Louise Gold used a recording of the astronaut's slow, steady heartbeat as the bassline for her cover of Oh My Love, originally written by Yoko Ono and John Lennon …

Born in 1890, the bushy-browed, cigar-smoking wisecracker with the painted-on moustache and stooped walk was the leader of the Marx Brothers, the sibling comedy act that was a hit on both stage and screen. In 1958, after learning that the Jewish section of the cemetery in his mother's German hometown had been destroyed, the actor went to East Berlin and performed a two-minute Charleston on top of the bunker where Hitler had committed suicide. In 1980, Marx was depicted in Ten Portraits of Jews of the 20th Century by a leading figure in the US pop-art movement, Andy Warhol …