we have heard the name mentioned in the harry potter movie and story...well ...
turns out he was a real man!!!! the following information i found on line ...the following link u just need to cut and paste and it should take you there...but here is a little of the info i found...enjoy!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Flamel
Nicolas Flamel
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This imaginative portrait of Nicolas Flamel dates from the nineteenth century.Nicolas Flamel (traditionally c. 1330 – 1418) was a successful scrivener and manuscript-seller who developed a posthumous reputation as an alchemist due to his reputed work on the Philosopher's Stone.
An alchemical book, published in Paris in 1612 as Livre des figures hiéroglypiques and in London in 1624 as Exposition of the Hieroglyphicall Figures was attributed to Flamel.[1] It is an exposition of figures purportedly commissioned by Flamel for a tympanum at the Cimetière des Innocents in Paris, long disappeared at the time the work was published. In its publisher's introduction Flamel's search for the Philosopher's Stone was described. According to it, Flamel made it his life's work to understand the text of a mysterious twenty-one-page book he had purchased; the introduction recounts that around 1378, he traveled to Spain for assistance with translation. On the way back, he reported that he met a sage, who identified Flamel's book as being a copy of the original Book of Abraham. With this knowledge, over the next few years Flamel and his wife allegedly decoded enough of the book to successfully replicate its recipe for the Philosopher's Stone, producing first silver in 1382, and then gold.
According to the introduction to his work and the additional details that have accrued since its publication, Flamel would thus have been the most accomplished of the European alchemists, who would have learned his art from a Jewish converso on the road to Santiago de Compostela. "Others thought Flamel was the creation of seventeenth-century editors and publishers desperate to produce modern printed editions of supposedly ancient alchemical treatises then circulating in manuscript for an avid reading public," Deborah Harkness put it succinctly.[2] The modern assertion that many references to him or his writings appear in alchemical texts of the 1500s, however, has not been linked to any particular source. The essence of his reputation is that he succeeded at the two magical goals of alchemy -- that he made the Philosopher's Stone which turns lead into gold, and that he and his wife Perenelle achieved immortality.
