The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#16251
Reinhold Glière
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Reinhold Moritzevich Glière was a Russian and Soviet composer of German and Polish descent. He was awarded the title of People's Artist of RSFSR and People's Artist of USSR . Biography Glière was born in the city of Kiev, Russian Empire . He was the second son of the wind instrument maker Ernst Moritz Glier from Saxony , who emigrated to the Russian Empire and married Józefa Korczak , the daughter of his master, from Warsaw. His original name, as given in his baptism certificate, was Reinhold Ernest Glier. About 1900 he changed the spelling and pronunciation of his surname to Glière, which...
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Rudolf Bockelmann
1892 - 1958 (66 years)
Rudolf Bockelmann was a German dramatic baritone and Kammersänger. He built an international career as an outstanding Wagnerian singer but damaged his reputation during the 1930s by joining the Nazi Party.
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Merryle Rukeyser
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Merryle Stanley Rukeyser , was an American journalist and educator in finance and economics. Biography Rukeyser was born to a Jewish family in Chicago and grew up in Manhattan. He graduated from Columbia University's Pulitzer school in 1915, and four years later received a master's degree in economics also from Columbia. He became a financial journalist first for the New York Tribune and then the New York Evening Journal. In 1924, he wrote the well-known book The Common Sense of Money and Investments.
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Abraham Yahuda
1877 - 1951 (74 years)
Abraham Shalom Yahuda was a Jewish Palestinian polymath, teacher, writer, researcher, linguist, and collector of rare documents. Biography Abraham Shalom Yahuda was born in Jerusalem to a Jewish family originally from Baghdad. During his early life he studied under his brother Isaac Ezekial Yahuda. In 1895, at the age of fifteen, he wrote his first book entitled Arab Antiquities. Two years later, in 1897 he attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland. Afterwards he began teaching in Berlin from 1905 to 1914. Later, during the First World War, he relocated to Madrid where he was...
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Yuri Yankelevich
1909 - 1973 (64 years)
Yuri Yankelevich was a Soviet violin pedagogue who taught many internationally known virtuosos during his long tenure at the Moscow Conservatory. Life and career Yuri Yankelevich was born in Basel, Switzerland. His father, Isay Leontyevich Yankelevich, a prominent lawyer, was one of the founders of the Omsk Philharmonic Society. In Omsk, young Yuri studied with Leopold Auer's student, Anisim Berlin, a grandfather of Natalia Gutman. In 1923 he entered Leningrad Conservatory, the class of Hovhaness Nalbandian . On Yankelevich's graduation composer Alexander Glazunov commented: "a career of a virtuoso violinist would certainly be his calling".
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James Friskin
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
James Friskin was a Scottish-born pianist, composer and music teacher who relocated to the United States in 1914. Biography Friskin studied in Glasgow with local organist Alfred Heap, and from 1900—at the precocious age of 14—at the Royal College of Music under Edward Dannreuther for piano and Charles Villiers Stanford for composition. He completed his Piano Quintet in 1907 at age 21; published by Stainer & Bell, Thomas Dunhill assessed it as "one of the most brilliant op.1's in existence". After completing his studies, from 1909 to 1914 Friskin taught at the Royal Normal College for the Blind.
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Carl Clewing
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Theodor Rudolph Carl Clewing was a German operatic tenor/heldentenor, stage and film actor, composer of the song Alle Tage ist kein Sonntag and professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin. Life Born in Schwerin, Clewing originates from an old Westphalian Schulzengeschlecht, which is first mentioned in documents in 1486 on the Schulte-Klevinghof in the parish Pelkum. In his birthplace Schwerin, his father was the owner of the Löwenapotheke there. Clewing studied in Prague and joined the Burschenschaft there, Constantia, which was absorbed into the Munich fraternity Sudetia in 1952. From 19...
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Shinpei Ogura
1882 - 1944 (62 years)
was a Japanese linguist who studied the Korean language. Ogura is well-known in Korea for his contributions to Korean linguistics, with much of his field work and studies considered invaluable resources even in recent years. Ogura made a number of landmark firsts in the field; he was the first person to decipher hyangga poetry documents. He is also considered the first modern researcher of Korean dialects, and traveled throughout the peninsula doing field research. The data he collected on dialects are still widely referred to, especially because the division of Korea in 1945 has made it diffi...
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Émile Legouis
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Émile Hyacinthe Legouis was a French scholar of English literature and translator. Biography Son of a haberdasher, member of a family of five children, he began his career teaching one year at the college in Avranches. He became a student at the École pratique des hautes études in 1883, he subsequently received first at the agrégation of English in 1885. He was then appointed lecturer in English language and literature at the University of Lyon. Between 1904 and 1932, he taught English language and literature at the Sorbonne , first as a lecturer in 1904, then as a professor in 1906 and he obtained the chair in 1919.
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Wang Li
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Wang Li , courtesy name Wang Liaoyi and birth name Wang Xiangying , was a Chinese linguist, educator, translator and poet, described as "the founder of Chinese Linguistics". His work expands a wide range in Chinese linguistics, including phonology, grammar and lexicography, historical linguistics and dialectal studies. He was also the founder of the first Chinese Linguistics Department at Tsinghua University. He brought the western modern linguistic methodologies back to China and strove for the modernization and reformation of Chinese grammar throughout his whole life. His most famous books ...
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David Oistrakh
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
David Fyodorovich Oistrakh was a Soviet Russian violinist, violist, and conductor. He was also Professor at the Moscow Conservatory, People's Artist of the USSR , and Laureate of the Lenin Prize Oistrakh collaborated with major orchestras and musicians from many parts of the world and was the dedicatee of numerous violin works, including both of Dmitri Shostakovich's violin concerti and the violin concerto by Aram Khachaturian. He is considered one of the preeminent violinists of the 20th century.
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Paul Constantinescu
1909 - 1963 (54 years)
Paul Constantinescu was a Romanian composer. Two of his main influences are Romanian folk music and Byzantine chant, both of which he used in his teaching. One of his students was composer Margareta Xenopol.
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Franzpeter Goebels
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Franzpeter Goebels was a German pianist, harpsichordist and music educator. Life and career Goebels was born in Mülheim an der Ruhr, the son of a church musician. He received piano lessons, and then studied piano and harpsichord at the Musikhochschule Köln with teachers including Karl Hermann Pillney. He also studied musicology, Romance studies and philosophy at the University of Cologne. He was a solo pianist with the Deutschlandsender broadcaster from 1940, and studied piano further with Raoul von Koczalski. He was drafted for military service in 1942, but due to an injury he was soon transferred to Prague where he led a symphony orchestra of the Wehrmacht.
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T. F. O'Rahilly
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Thomas Francis O'Rahilly was an influential Irish scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly in the fields of historical linguistics and Irish dialects. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and died in Dublin in 1953. He is the creator of O'Rahilly's historical model, which has since been discredited.
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Anton Constandse
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Anton Levien Constandse was a Dutch anarchist author and journalist. Biography The son of a Baptist hotelier, Constandse completed the normal school between 1914 and 1918 and in this period came into contact with the teetotalers' movement. In response to World War I, he developed anti-militarist ideas. He joined the Social-Anarchist Youth Organisation in 1919. Within this organisation, he chose the side of the individualist faction when factional struggles erupted, denouncing even trade organizations as counterrevolutionary. Instead of taking a job as a teacher, Constandse devoted himself to spreading anarchist ideas.
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Ernst Krenek
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Ernst Heinrich Krenek was an Austrian, later American, composer. He explored atonality and other modern styles and wrote a number of books, including Music Here and Now , a study of Johannes Ockeghem , and Horizons Circled: Reflections on my Music . Krenek wrote two pieces using the pseudonym Thornton Winsloe.
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Seymour Shifrin
1926 - 1979 (53 years)
Seymour Shifrin was an American composer. He was described by Time Magazine as "one of the most significant composers of his generation." Shifrin's Satires of Circumstance received the Koussevitzky International Recording Award for 1970. He received the Naumburg Award, Columbia University's Bearns Prize , the Copley Award, the Horblit Prize , and two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1956 and 1959. A graduate of Columbia University , he was a member of the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley and at Brandeis University from 1966 until his death in 1979.
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Hans Krahe
1898 - 1965 (67 years)
Hans Krahe was a German philologist and linguist, specializing over many decades in the Illyrian languages. He was born in Gelsenkirchen. Work Between 1936 and 1946 he was a professor at the University of Würzburg, where he founded the Archiv für die Gewässernamen Deutschlands in 1942. Between 1947 and 1949 he held a chair at Heidelberg and from 1949 to the time of his death he was Professor für vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft und Slavistik and Leiter des indologischen und slavischen Seminars in the University of Tübingen.
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Pura Belpré
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. Life Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies...
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Charles Bally
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist from the Geneva School. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like Ferdinand de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parents were Jean Gabriel, a teacher, and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first to Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915, and finally with Alice Bellicot. In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics , Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics.
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Ingolf Dahl
1912 - 1970 (58 years)
Ingolf Dahl was a German-born American composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Biography Dahl was born Walter Ingolf Marcus in Hamburg, Germany, to a German Jewish father, attorney Paul Marcus, and his Swedish wife Hilda Maria Dahl. He had two brothers, Gert Marcus , and Holger, and one sister Anna-Britta.
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Moissaye Joseph Olgin
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Moissaye Joseph Olgin was a Ukrainian-born writer, journalist, and translator in the early 20th century. He began his career writing for the Jewish press in support of the Russian Revolution in 1910. During the First World War, he moved to the United States in 1915, settling in New York City, where he continued his career in journalism. Much of his work was in support of communism, and he was a founding member of the Workers Party. In 1922, he founded The Morning Freiheit, and served as its editor until his death in 1939.
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Suniti Kumar Chatterji
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Bhashacharya Acharya Suniti Kumar Chatterjee was an Indian linguist, educationist and litterateur. He was a recipient of the second-highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Vibhushan. Life Childhood Chatterji was born on 26 November 1890 at Shibpur in Howrah. He was the son of Haridas Chattopadhyay, an affluent Bengali Kulin Brahmin. According to the family history, their ancestors were originally residents of a village named chatuti in the Rarh region of present-day West Bengal. During the Turkic invasion of Bengal in the thirteenth century, the Chatterji family left their ancestral village in West Bengal and took shelter in East Bengal.
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Thomas Church
1902 - 1978 (76 years)
Thomas Dolliver Church was a 20th century landscape architect based in California. He is a nationally recognized as one of the pioneer landscape designers of Modernism in garden landscape design known as the 'California Style'. His design studio was in San Francisco from 1933 to 1977.
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Willis Laurence James
1900 - 1966 (66 years)
Willis Laurence James was an American musician, composer and educator. He was on the faculty of Spelman College for more than three decades. Biography Willis James was born in Montgomery, Alabama, United States, and was raised in Pensacola and Jacksonville, Florida. Educated at the Florida Baptist Academy in Jacksonville, he studied violin with Sidney Woodward. Woodward recognized his musical talent and took James for further study to Atlanta, Georgia, where from the age of 16 he was the protégé of Kemper Harreld, a concert violinist and head of the Morehouse College music department. James e...
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Edward Bailey Birge
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Edward Bailey Birge was a founding member of the Music Supervisors National Conference, which later became the Music Educators National Conference . Birge served as president of the organization from 1910–1911, and also as chairmen of the editorial board for the Music Educators Journal for many years. He originated the "MEJ Clubs" on college campuses that made possible student memberships. Though the clubs, the Journal was used in classes with prospective teachers. This greatly increased the circulation of the magazine. In recognition of his long service to the Journal and to the Conference, the MENC board of directors named him chairman emeritus.
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Rudolf Vleeskruijer
1916 - 1966 (50 years)
Rudolf Vleeskruijer was a Dutch professor in the English language and Old English literature at the Utrecht University. Vleeskruijer spent a part of his youth in England. From August 1945 to May 1946, he was an interpreter for the Allied Forces as a conscript NCO in the Dutch Army.
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Ildebrando Pizzetti
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Ildebrando Pizzetti was an Italian composer of classical music, musicologist, and music critic. Biography Pizzetti was born in Parma in 1880. He was part of the "Generation of 1880" along with Ottorino Respighi, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Alfredo Casella. They were among the first Italian composers in some time whose primary contributions were not in opera. The instrumental and a cappella traditions had never died in Italian music and had produced, for instance, the string quartets of Antonio Scontrino and the works of Respighi's teacher Giuseppe Martucci; but with the "Generation of 1880...
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Clive Carey
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Francis Clive Savill Carey CBE , known as Clive Carey, was an English baritone, singing teacher, composer, opera producer and folk song collector. Biography Clive Carey was born at Sible Hedingham, Essex, in 1883. He was a chorister in the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, and then attended Sherborne School before becoming an Organ Scholar at Clare College in 1901. He then entered the Royal College of Music under the auspices of the Grove Scholarship in Composition, studying under Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and James H. Ley . He had further study with Jean de Reszke in Paris and Nice.
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Fran Ramovš
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Fran Ramovš was a Slovenian linguist. He studied the dialects and onomastics of Slovene. Early life and education Fran Ramovš was born in Ljubljana, the capital of the Duchy of Carniola, Austria-Hungary. He studied linguistics in Vienna and in Graz . While in Graz he selected the topic of his dissertation and completed it in 1912; he submitted it in 1914 to receive his PhD.
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George Sherman Lane
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
George Sherman Lane was an American linguist. His research focus was the Tocharian language. Life Lane began his studies in 1922 at the University of Iowa, where he studied under Henning Larsen and received his first award, the Early English Text Society Prize. In 1926, he graduated first of his class, and in 1927 obtained a Master of Arts in English. This was followed by studies in Reykjavík, where he learned Sanskrit, as well as in Paris, where he studied under Meillet, Vendryes and Benveniste. At the University of Chicago he collaborated with Carl Darling Buck on the latter's Dictionary of selected synonyms in the principal Indo-European languages.
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Henri Ramirez
Henri Ramirez is a French-Brazilian linguist known especially for his research on Arawakan languages and other language families of the Amazonian region. He is currently a professor at the Federal University of Rondônia, Guajará-Mirim.
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Cecil Effinger
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Cecil Effinger was an American composer, oboist, and inventor. Life Effinger was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado and resided in the state for most of his life. Reversing the usual cliché, he was the son of musicians and teachers, but initially studied mathematics at Colorado College, receiving a BA in 1935, before deciding to follow in his parents' footsteps. In the meantime, he had studied harmony and counterpoint with Frederick Boothroyd in 1934–36, and went to Paris in 1939 to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. He was first oboe in the orchestras of Colorado Springs and Denver and taught at the Colorado College before the Second World War .
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Frank Luther Mott
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Frank Luther Mott was an American academic, historian and journalist, who won the 1939 Pulitzer Prize for History for Volumes II and III of his series, A History of American Magazines. Early life and education Mott was born in Rose Hill, Iowa. His parents were Mary E. and David Charles Mott, publishers of the weekly What Cheer, Iowa Patriot. The Mott family owned a print shop in Keokuk County. He was a practicing Quaker. When he was 10 his father began publishing the Audubon, Iowa Republican and he assisted in the typesetting.
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Charles Cushing
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Charles Cook Cushing was an American composer, band director, and professor of music. Biography Charles Cushing, a native Californian, studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Encouraged by visiting French Composer Charles Koechlin during the summers of 1928 and 1929, he received his bachelor's degree in 1928 and Master's in 1929. He won the George Ladd Prix de Paris prize, allowing him to study with Nadia Boulanger at the École Normale de Musique in Paris for two years.
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Raymond Aron
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. Aron is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people; he argues that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in post-war France. In the book, Aron chastised French intellectuals for what he described as their harsh criticism of capitalism and democracy and their simultaneous defense of the actions of the communist governments of the East.
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Paul R. Farnsworth
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Paul R. Farnsworth was an American music psychologist. He had a forty-year career at Stanford University where he researched the psychology of music preference. In addition to authoring three books, he was the editor of the Annual Review of Psychology from 1955 to 1968.
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Vladimir Fere
1902 - 1971 (69 years)
Vladimir Georgievich Fere was a Russian composer. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory in 1925 and later taught there. He was a member of a Kirghiz Republic collective assigned by the Soviet government under a plan to integrate national cultures into the arts. Kyrgyz composer Abdylas Maldybaev provided folk melodies and composed music which was organized and prepared by Fere and Russian composer Vladimir Vlasov into six Soviet state opera and other works. Their first full opera was Ai-churek. The collective is usually hypenated as Vlasov-Fere-Maldi'bayev and also composed the Kirghiz nationa...
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Ignacio González-Llubera
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Ignacio Miguel González-Llubera was a Spanish literary scholar, specialising in Judaeo-Spanish literature. Born in Barcelona, he was educated at the Colegio del Sagrado Corazón, the University of Barcelona and the University of Madrid . He then studied in Madrid, Paris, London and Cambridge before he was appointed the first lecturer in Spanish at Queen's University Belfast in 1920. He was appointed its first Professor of Spanish in 1926, a chair he held until he retired in 1960.
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Esther Ballou
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Esther Williamson Ballou was an American music educator, organist and composer. She was born in Elmira, New York, began organ lessons at age 13, and began composing in her twenties. She studied at Bennington College, Mills College and The Juilliard School of Music in 1943.
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Mario Pei
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Mario Andrew Pei was an Italian-born American linguist and polyglot who wrote a number of popular books known for their accessibility to readers without a professional background in linguistics. His book The Story of Language was acclaimed for its presentation of technical linguistics concepts in ways that were entertaining and accessible to a general audience.
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Albert C. Baugh
1891 - 1981 (90 years)
Albert Croll Baugh was a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, best known as the author of a textbook for History of the English language . His A History of the English Language was first published in 1935 and praised as "worthy to take a place with the other great histories of single languages". It was revised by Baugh for a second edition published in 1957 and it remains in print, edited by Thomas Cable .
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Hermann Wolfgang von Waltershausen
1882 - 1954 (72 years)
Hermann Wolfgang Sartorius Freiherr von Waltershausen was a German composer, conductor, teacher and writer. Life and career He was the son of the economist August Sartorius von Waltershausen and his wife Charlotte Freiin von Kapherr, a descendant of the historian Georg Friedrich Sartorius. He studied composition with Ludwig Thuille in Munich from 1901 until 1907. He also studied piano with August Schmid-Lindner from 1905 to 1915.
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Clement Martyn Doke
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Clement Martyn Doke was a South African linguist working mainly on African languages. Realizing that the grammatical structures of Bantu languages are quite different from those of European languages, he was one of the first African linguists of his time to abandon the Euro-centric approach to language description for a more locally grounded one. A most prolific writer, he published a string of grammars, several dictionaries, comparative work, and a history of Bantu linguistics.
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Mandy Simons
Mandy Simons is a linguist and professor in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University . She researches semantics and pragmatics, in particular phenomena like presupposition and projection.
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Bernard Groethuysen
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Bernard Groethuysen was a French writer and philosopher. His works, which transgressed the confines of history and sociology, concern the history of mentalities and representations and the interpretation of the experience of the world. In the interwar period, he made the works of Hölderlin and Kafka and the sociology of Germany available in France.
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Arnold Elston
1907 - 1971 (64 years)
Arnold Elston was an American composer and educator. Though he studied with Anton Webern, he did not himself use the twelve-tone technique. Early life and career Elston was born in New York on September 30, 1907. He became a private pupil of Rubin Goldmark in 1928, and continued to study with him until 1930, in which year he received his A.B. from the College of the City of New York. He went on to take an M.A. from Columbia University in 1932, in which year he also won a Joseph H. Bearns Prize and the Mosenthal Traveling Fellowship. Using the funds from these prizes Elston was able to study with Anton Webern in Vienna.
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Carl Dair
1912 - 1967 (55 years)
Harris Carleton Dair , known as Carl Dair, was a Canadian graphic designer, teacher, type designer, and author. Primarily a self-taught designer, Dair was internationally known and developed visual design principles for typography which are still in use today.
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Gladys Turquet-Milnes
1889 - 1977 (88 years)
Gladys Rosaleen Turquet-Milnes was a British academic and author. She was Professor of French Language and Literature at Bedford College, University of London, from 1934 to 1952, having been Head of the French Department at Westfield College from 1916 to 1934.
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Ernst Lubitsch
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Ernst Lubitsch was a German-born film director, producer, writer, and actor. His urbane comedies of manners gave him the reputation of being Hollywood's most elegant and sophisticated director; as his prestige grew, his films were promoted as having "the Lubitsch touch". Among his best known works are Trouble in Paradise , Design for Living , Ninotchka , The Shop Around the Corner , To Be or Not to Be and Heaven Can Wait .
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