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“There are three kinds of people,” Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator, “Commonplace Men, Remarkable Men, and Lunatics.”

I’ve met a bunch of the former in the course of my library career and have often found them the most heartening. The latter faction, while making themselves more known than I prefer, are often entertaining.

That smaller, middle group stands out, though its remarkable members include commoners and loonies, and the public library seems to attract them as well. Some of the remarkable people I’ve encountered at the library have come alive from books. Take Avicenna, for example. More correctly known in the Muslim world as Ibn Sina, he was a renowned Persian child prodigy a few years after his birth in 981 CE.

But before we go on, let’s clarify this “CE” business.

“CE” stands for “Common Era,” and it’s a more culturally sensitive way of designating dates, especially when describing non-Christian events.

“AD,” or “anno Domini,” means “Year of the Lord,” and it’s still commonly used to designate the Western calendar. The system was invented in Rome in 525 CE by a Balkan monk named Dionysius Exiguus, but it wasn’t adopted throughout Europe for nearly 1,000 years.

Meanwhile, in 622 CE Muhammad and his followers fled persecution in Mecca and went to Medina, and this event became known as the Hijra, the Arabic word for “migration.” Consequently, Muslims began using the Arabic equivalent of “AH,” or “anno Hejirae” as the Catholic monks wrote it in Latin, and their calendar began in 622 AD. So Avicenna, perhaps the most remarkable Arabic scientist and scholar, was born around 370 AH. He was brilliant from the get-go, memorizing the Quran at age 7, and while still a small child he began studying metaphysics, particularly the works of Aristotle.

Avicenna took up medicine at 16 and was a full-fledged doctor at 18. He wrote over 450 books on subjects ranging from astronomy, chemistry, logic, mathematics, philosophy, physics, poetry, science and theology, but his greatest contribution was to medicine with his Book of Healing and Canon of Medicine.

The latter book alone introduced experimental medicine, systematic experimentation, physiological quantification, and the contagious nature of infectious diseases.

The scope and importance of his discoveries rivals that of Thomas Young, the subject of Andrew Robinson’s “The Last Man Who Knew Everything.”

Young lived in London in the early 1800s, and the 1816 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica gives a glimpse of his multifaceted mind by listing him as author of the articles on the alphabet, annuities, capillary action, cohesion, color, dew, Egypt, eye, focus, friction, hieroglyphic, hydraulics, motion, ships, sound, tides, waves and “anything of a medical nature,” among others.

Like much of his research, several of these articles broke new scientific ground, such as the term “Indo-European,” which he coined after comparing the vocabularies and grammars of 400 languages and identifying their common ancestry.

Robinson says readers will find mention of Young by opening any textbook on engineering (“Young’s modulus,” the measure of elasticity), eyes (describing astigmatism and the three-color theory of how retinas respond to light), and hieroglyphics (seminal detective work in deciphering the Rosetta Stone).

There’s also “Young’s rule” (used to adjust medication dosages for children), “Young’s temperament” (a method of tuning keyboard instruments) and Young’s principles of life insurance.

Such people are called “polymaths,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “a person of great or varied learning.”

“Math” comes from the Greek term, “mathema,” which meant “learning,” just like its ancient Indo-European root word, “mendh.” A different sort of remarkable men made the library’s Guys Read program possible and showed fourth-grade boys that books can be fun and men like to read.

From John Hill, whose Auto Service Company convinced Toyota to help sponsor the program, to the 30 volunteers who donated their lunch hours for a month to read to the boys, some truly remarkable Fairbanks men gave hundreds of boys the chance to discover for themselves how pleasurable reading can be.

They know, as Mark Twain said, “The man who doesn’t read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.”