#16001
Gaius Julius Solinus
300 - Present (1726 years)
Gaius Julius Solinus, better known simply as Solinus, was a Latin grammarian, geographer, and compiler who probably flourished in the early 3rd century AD. Historical scholar Theodor Mommsen dates him to the middle of the 3rd century.
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Yevgeny Polivanov
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Yevgeny Dmitrievich Polivanov was a Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot who wrote major works on the Chinese, Japanese, Uzbek and Dungan languages and on theoretical linguistics and poetics. Life He participated in the development of writing systems for the peoples of the Soviet Union and also designed a cyrillization system for Japanese language, which was officially accepted in the Soviet Union and is still the standard in modern Russia. He also translated the Kyrgyz national Epic of Manas into Russian. Polivanov is credited as the scholar who initiated the comparative study of Japane...
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Arnold Schoenberg
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg was an Austrian-American composer, music theorist, teacher, writer, and painter. He is widely considered one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. He was associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School. As a Jewish composer, Schoenberg was targeted by the Nazi Party, which labeled his works as degenerate music and forbade them from being published. He emigrated to the United States in 1933, becoming an American citizen in 1941.
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Margery Allingham
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Margery Louise Allingham was an English novelist from the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", and considered one of its four "Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.
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James Planché
1796 - 1880 (84 years)
James Robinson Planché was a British dramatist, antiquary and officer of arms. Over a period of approximately 60 years he wrote, adapted, or collaborated on 176 plays in a wide range of genres including extravaganza, farce, comedy, burletta, melodrama and opera. Planché was responsible for introducing historically accurate costume into nineteenth century British theatre, and subsequently became an acknowledged expert on historical costume, publishing a number of works on the topic.
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Muhammad Shahidullah
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Muhammad Shahidullah was a Bengali linguist, philologist, educationist, and writer. In 2004, he was ranked number 16 in BBC's poll of the Greatest Bengali of all time. Early life and education Shahidullah was born on 10 July 1885 to a Bengali Muslim family in the village of Peyara in the erstwhile Bengal Presidency's 24 Parganas district. His father, Mafizuddin Ahmed, was the guardian of a mazar, and his mother, Marguba Khatun, was a housewife.
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Adolf Noreen
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Adolf Gotthard Noreen was a Swedish linguist who served as a member of the Swedish Academy from 1919 until his death. Noreen studied at Uppsala University and focused on Swedish dialectology in his earlier works, later shifting to the wider field of historical linguistics. He was a Neogrammarian and supported spelling reform.
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Edward Johnston
1872 - 1944 (72 years)
Edward Johnston, CBE was a British craftsman who is regarded, with Rudolf Koch, as the father of modern calligraphy, in the particular form of the broad-edged pen as a writing tool. He is best known as the designer of Johnston, a sans-serif typeface that was used throughout the London Underground system until the 1980s. He also redesigned the famous roundel symbol used throughout the system.
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Francis Grose
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Francis Grose was an English antiquary, draughtsman, and lexicographer. He produced A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and A Provincial Glossary, with a Collection of Local Proverbs, and Popular Superstitions .
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František Čelakovský
1799 - 1852 (53 years)
František Ladislav Čelakovský was a Czech poet, translator, linguist, and literary critic. He was a major figure in the Czech "national revival". His most notable works are Ohlas písní ruských and Ohlas písní českých .
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Joseph Roth
1894 - 1939 (45 years)
Moses Joseph Roth was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March , about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" , a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.
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Bette Davis
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
Ruth Elizabeth "Bette" Davis was an American actress with a career spanning more than 50 years and 100 acting credits. She was noted for playing unsympathetic, sardonic characters, and was famous for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical films, suspense horror, and occasional comedies, although her greater successes were in romantic dramas. A recipient of two Academy Awards, she was the first thespian to accrue ten nominations.
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Harold E. Palmer
1877 - 1949 (72 years)
Harold Edward Palmer, usually just Harold E. Palmer , was an English linguist, phonetician and pioneer in the field of teaching English as a second language. Especially he dedicated himself to Oral Method. He stayed in Japan for 14 years and reformed its English education. He contributed to the development of the applied linguistics of the 20th century.
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Georges Bizet
1838 - 1875 (37 years)
Georges Bizet was a French composer of the Romantic era. Best known for his operas in a career cut short by his early death, Bizet achieved few successes before his final work, Carmen, which has become one of the most popular and frequently performed works in the entire opera repertoire.
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Grace Frick
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Grace Marion Frick was a translator and researcher for her lifelong partner French writer Marguerite Yourcenar. Grace Frick taught languages at US colleges and was the second academic dean to be appointed to Hartford Junior College.
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Erik Satie
1866 - 1925 (59 years)
Eric Alfred Leslie Satie , who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an undistinguished student and obtained no diploma. In the 1880s he worked as a pianist in café-cabaret in Montmartre, Paris, and began composing works, mostly for solo piano, such as his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. He also wrote music for a Rosicrucian sect to which he was briefly attached.
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Leonard Bernstein
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Leonard Bernstein was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first American conductor to receive international acclaim. Bernstein was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history" according to music critic Donal Henahan. Bernstein received numerous honors and accolades including seven Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, and 16 Grammy Awards as well as an Academy Award nomination. He received the Kennedy Center Honor in 1981.
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Milman Parry
1902 - 1935 (33 years)
Milman Parry was an American Classicist whose theories on the origin of Homer's works have revolutionized Homeric studies to such a fundamental degree that he has been described as the "Darwin of Homeric studies". In addition, he was a pioneer in the discipline of oral tradition.
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William Allen White
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
William Allen White was an American newspaper editor, politician, author, and leader of the Progressive movement. Between 1896 and his death, White became a spokesman for middle America. At a 1937 banquet held in his honor by the Kansas Editorial Association, he was called "the most loved and most distinguished member" of the Kansas press.
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Izaak Walton
1593 - 1683 (90 years)
Izaak Walton was an English writer. Best known as the author of The Compleat Angler, he also wrote a number of short biographies including one of his friend John Donne. They have been collected under the title of Walton's Lives.
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Berthold Delbrück
1842 - 1922 (80 years)
Berthold Gustav Gottlieb Delbrück was a German linguist who devoted himself to the study of the comparative syntax of the Indo-European languages. Early life Delbrück was born in Putbus. He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, receiving his doctorate at Halle in 1863. In 1870 he succeeded August Leskien as an associate professor at the University of Jena, where in 1873 he was named a full professor of Sanskrit and comparative linguistics.
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Frank Brangwyn
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator, and designer. Brangwyn worked in a wide range of artistic fields. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, glass tableware, mosaics, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was a book illustrator. It has been estimated that during his lifetime Brangwyn produced over 12,000 works. His mural commissions would cover over of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works , over 500 etchings, about 400 wood-e...
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Carl von Ossietzky
1889 - 1938 (49 years)
Carl von Ossietzky was a German journalist and pacifist. He was the recipient of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in exposing the clandestine German rearmament. As editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Weltbühne, Ossietzky published a series of exposés in the late 1920s, detailing Germany's violation of the Treaty of Versailles by rebuilding an air force and training pilots in the Soviet Union. He was convicted of treason and espionage in 1931 and sentenced to eighteen months in prison but was granted amnesty in December 1932.
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Johannes Itten
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Johannes Itten was a Swiss expressionist painter, designer, teacher, writer and theorist associated with the Bauhaus school. Together with German-American painter Lyonel Feininger and German sculptor Gerhard Marcks, under the direction of German architect Walter Gropius, Itten was part of the core of the Weimar Bauhaus.
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Adele Astaire
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Adele Astaire Douglass , was an American dancer, stage actress, and singer. After beginning work as a dancer and vaudeville performer at the age of nine, Astaire built a successful performance career with her younger brother, Fred Astaire.
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Jacques Delille
1738 - 1813 (75 years)
Jacques Delille was a French poet who came to national prominence with his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and made an international reputation with his didactic poem on gardening. He barely survived the slaughter of the French Revolution and lived for some years outside France, including three years in England. The poems on abstract themes that he published after his return were less well received.
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Hilda of Whitby
614 - 680 (66 years)
Hilda of Whitby was a saint of the early Church in Britain. She was the founder and first abbess of the monastery at Whitby which was chosen as the venue for the Synod of Whitby in 664. An important figure in the Christianisation of Anglo-Saxon England, she was abbess in several convents and recognised for the wisdom that drew kings to her for advice.
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Grant Wood
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Grant DeVolson Wood was an American painter and representative of Regionalism, best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest. He is particularly well known for American Gothic , which has become an iconic example of early 20th-century American art.
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Duke Ellington
1899 - 1974 (75 years)
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards.
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Richard Norman Shaw
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
Richard Norman Shaw RA , also known as Norman Shaw, was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings. He is considered to be among the greatest of British architects; his influence on architectural style was strongest in the 1880s and 1890s.
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Edith Skinner
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Edith Skinner was a vocal coach and a consultant to actors. Her book, Speak With Distinction, has been reprinted several times, promoting actors' use of what she called "Good American Speech". Life Skinner was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, in eastern Canada, on 22 September 1902, to Herbert Havelock Warman and his wife Agnes Lynn, née Orr. She attended the Leland Powers School for the Spoken Word in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States, and graduated in 1923. There she met Margaret Prendergast McLean, and through her, William Tilly, whose assistant she became in 1926. She studied at ...
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Aeschines
389 BC - 314 BC (75 years)
Aeschines was a Greek statesman and one of the ten Attic orators. Biography Although it is known he was born in Athens, the records regarding his parentage and early life are conflicting; but it seems probable that his parents, though poor, were respectable. Aeschines' father was Atrometus, an elementary school teacher of letters. His mother Glaukothea assisted in the religious rites of initiation for the poor. After assisting his father in his school, he tried his hand at acting with indifferent success, served with distinction in the army, and held several clerkships, amongst them the office of clerk to the Boule.
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Henry Purcell
1659 - 1695 (36 years)
Henry Purcell was an English composer of Baroque music. Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Generally considered among the greatest English opera composers, Purcell is often linked with John Dunstaple and William Byrd as England's most important early music composers. No later native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, William Walton and Benjamin Britten in the 20th century.
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Edward Elgar
1857 - 1934 (77 years)
Sir Edward William Elgar, 1st Baronet, was an English composer, many of whose works have entered the British and international classical concert repertoire. Among his best-known compositions are orchestral works including the Enigma Variations, the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, concertos for violin and cello, and two symphonies. He also composed choral works, including The Dream of Gerontius, chamber music and songs. He was appointed Master of the King's Musick in 1924.
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Gaetano Donizetti
1797 - 1848 (51 years)
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti was an Italian composer, best known for his almost 70 operas. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the bel canto opera style during the first half of the nineteenth century and a probable influence on other composers such as Giuseppe Verdi. Donizetti was born in Bergamo in Lombardy. At an early age he was taken up by Simon Mayr who enrolled him with a full scholarship in a school which he had set up. There he received detailed musical training. Mayr was instrumental in obtaining a place for Donizetti at the Bologna Ac...
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Rudolf Thurneysen
1857 - 1940 (83 years)
Eduard Rudolf Thurneysen was a Swiss linguist and Celticist. Biography Born in Basel, Thurneysen studied classical philology in Basel, Leipzig, Berlin and Paris. His teachers included Ernst Windisch and Heinrich Zimmer. He received his promotion in 1879 and his habilitation, in Latin and the Celtic languages, followed at the University of Jena in 1882.
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Thomas Francis Wade
1818 - 1895 (77 years)
Sir Thomas Francis Wade, was a British diplomat and sinologist who produced an early Chinese textbook in English, in 1867, that was later amended, extended and converted into the Wade-Giles romanization system for Mandarin Chinese by Herbert Giles in 1892. He was the first professor of Chinese at Cambridge University.
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Ruth St. Denis
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Ruth St. Denis was an American pioneer of modern dance, introducing eastern ideas into the art and paving the way for other women in dance. She was inspired by the Delsarte advocate Genevieve Stebbins. St. Denis was the co-founder in 1915 of the American Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts. She taught notable performers including Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. In 1938, she founded the pioneering dance program at Adelphi University. She published several articles on spiritual dance and the mysticism of the body.
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Hermann Grassmann
1809 - 1877 (68 years)
Hermann Günther Grassmann was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mathematical work was little noted until he was in his sixties. His work preceded and exceeded the concept which is now known as a vector space. He introduced the Grassmannian, the space which parameterizes all k-dimensional linear subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space V.
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Alfred Döblin
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Bruno Alfred Döblin was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz . A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politi...
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Giacomo Puccini
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Giacomo Puccini was an Italian composer known primarily for his operas. Regarded as the greatest and most successful proponent of Italian opera after Verdi, he was descended from a long line of composers, stemming from the late-Baroque era. Though his early work was firmly rooted in traditional late-19th-century Romantic Italian opera, he later developed his work in the realistic verismo style, of which he became one of the leading exponents.
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Christoph Willibald Gluck
1714 - 1787 (73 years)
Christoph Willibald Gluck was a composer of Italian and French opera in the early classical period. Born in the Upper Palatinate and raised in Bohemia, both part of the Holy Roman Empire, he gained prominence at the Habsburg court at Vienna. There he brought about the practical reform of opera's dramaturgical practices for which many intellectuals had been campaigning. With a series of radical new works in the 1760s, among them Orfeo ed Euridice and Alceste, he broke the stranglehold that Metastasian opera seria had enjoyed for much of the century. Gluck introduced more drama by using orchestral recitative and cutting the usually long da capo aria.
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Kumārajīva
344 - 413 (69 years)
Kumārajīva was a Buddhist monk, scholar, missionary and translator from Kucha . Kumārajīva is seen as one of the greatest translators of Chinese Buddhism. According to Lu Cheng, Kumarajiva's translations are "unparalleled either in terms of translation technique or degree of fidelity".
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Giorgio Morandi
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and printmaker who specialized in still lifes. His paintings are noted for their tonal subtlety in depicting simple subjects, mainly vases, bottles, bowls, flowers, and landscapes.
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Nikolai Marr
1864 - 1934 (70 years)
Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr was a Georgian-born historian and linguist who gained a reputation as a scholar of the Caucasus during the 1910s before embarking on his "Japhetic theory" on the origin of language , now considered as pseudo-scientific, and related speculative linguistic hypotheses.
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Ben Jonson
1572 - 1637 (65 years)
Benjamin Jonson was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays Every Man in His Humour , Volpone, or The Fox , The Alchemist and Bartholomew Fair and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I."
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Arthur Capell
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Arthur Capell was an Australian linguist, who made major contributions to the study of Australian languages, Austronesian languages and Papuan languages. Early life Capell was born in Newtown, New South Wales in 1902, the only child of Sarah Ann and her husband, Henry Capell. He attended North Sydney Boys' High School.
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Edward Thomas
1878 - 1917 (39 years)
Philip Edward Thomas was a British writer of poetry and prose. He is sometimes considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. He only started writing poetry at the age of 36, but by that time he had already been a prolific critic, biographer, nature writer and travel writer for two decades. In 1915, he enlisted in the British Army to fight in the First World War and was killed in action during the Battle of Arras in 1917, soon after he arrived in France.
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Jacob Wackernagel
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Jacob Wackernagel was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel . Biography Jacob Wackernagel was born on 11 December 1853 in Basel to Wilhelm Wackernagel, a Professor of German Language and Literature in Basel, and his second wife, Maria Salome . He was named after his godfather, Jacob Grimm of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob's father died when he was sixteen.
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Louis Armstrong
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Louis Daniel Armstrong , nicknamed "Satchmo", "Satch", and "Pops", was an American trumpeter and vocalist. He was among the most influential figures in jazz. His career spanned five decades and several eras in the history of jazz. He received numerous accolades including the Grammy Award for Best Male Vocal Performance for Hello, Dolly! in 1965, as well as a posthumous win for the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1972, and induction into the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame in 2017.
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