Getting a min birth year and max death year from a list of years
What you really want to do is transpose the separate tuples into 2 tuples - one containing all the birth dates, and the other death dates.

Fortunately, python's zip function can do this easily for you, using the *x syntax:

years = [(1804, 1884), (1885,1997), (1902,1975), (1900,1989)]
births, deaths = zip(*years)
# births = (1804, 1885, 1902, 1900)
# deaths = (1884, 1997, 1975, 1989)
print(min(births), max(deaths))
# 1804 1997