The inventor of basketball was Dr. James Naismith. He was born in 1861 in Almonte, Ontario, Canada. When he invented Basketball in 1893, he devised a set of 13 rules. Basketball was introduced in the Berlin Olympics in 1936. Dr. James Naismith, besides inventing basketball,  graduated as a medical doctor, very interested in sports physiology. He died in 1939 in Lawrence, Kansas.

Picture courtesy of   http://www.kshs.org/portraits/naismith_james.htm