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
Adolphe Pictet
1799 - 1875 (76 years)
Adolphe Pictet was a Swiss linguist, philologist and ethnologist. Pictet, the cousin of the biologist Francois Jules Pictet, is well known for his research in the field of comparative linguistics. He played a crucial formative role in the development of Ferdinand de Saussure; "it was Pictet who introduced the thirteen-year-old Saussure to the theoretical foundations of Indo-European linguistics." But he was also "a dedicated champion of German Romanticism and idealist philosophy":Like French, English, and Russian Romantics since the beginning of the century, he made a journey to Germany, where he became acquainted with A.
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Paul Gallico
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Paul William Gallico was an American novelist and short story and sports writer. Many of his works were adapted for motion pictures. He is perhaps best remembered for The Snow Goose, his most critically successful book, for the novel The Poseidon Adventure, primarily through the 1972 film adaptation, and for four novels about the beloved character of Mrs. Harris.
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Yehoshua Bar-Hillel
1915 - 1975 (60 years)
Yehoshua Bar-Hillel was an Israeli philosopher, mathematician, and linguist. He was a pioneer in the fields of machine translation and formal linguistics. Biography Born Oscar Westreich in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, he was raised in Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine with the Bnei Akiva youth movement, and briefly joined the kibbutz Tirat Zvi before settling in Jerusalem and marrying Shulamith.
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Irving Berlin
1888 - 1989 (101 years)
Irving Berlin was an American composer and lyricist. His music forms a large part of the Great American Songbook. Berlin received numerous honors including an Academy Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. He also received Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Gerald R. Ford in 1977. Journalist Walter Cronkite stated he "helped write the story of this country, capturing the best of who we are and the dreams that shape our lives".
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Vladimir I. Georgiev
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Vladimir Ivanov Georgiev was a prominent Bulgarian linguist, philologist, and educational administrator. Biography Vladimir Georgiev was born in the Bulgarian village of Gabare, near Byala Slatina and graduated in philology at Sofia University in 1930. He specialized in Indo-European, Slavic and general linguistics at the University of Vienna , and later at the universities of Berlin , Florence and Paris . Assistant Professor at Sofia University , Associated Professor , Professor , head of the department of general and comparative-historical linguistics at the Faculty of History and Philology at Sofia University , Dean of the Faculty of Philology , Vice-Rector , Rector .
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Martin Hattala
1821 - 1903 (82 years)
Martin Hattala was a Slovak pedagogue, Roman Catholic theologian and linguist. He is best known for his reform of the Štúr's Slovak language, so-called Hodža-Hattala reform, in which he introduced the etymological principle to the Slovak language.
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James Blish
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
James Benjamin Blish was an American science fiction and fantasy writer. He is best known for his Cities in Flight novels and his series of Star Trek novelizations written with his wife, J. A. Lawrence. His novel A Case of Conscience won the Hugo Award. He is credited with creating the term "gas giant" to refer to large planetary bodies.
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Mei Lanfang
1894 - 1961 (67 years)
Mei Lan , better known by his stage name Mei Lanfang, was a notable Peking opera artist in modern Chinese theater. Mei was known as "Queen of Peking Opera". Mei was exclusively known for his female lead roles and particularly his "verdant-robed girls" , young or middle-aged women of grace and refinement. He was considered one of the "Four Great Dan", along with Shang Xiaoyun, Cheng Yanqiu, and Xun Huisheng.
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Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
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Dhondo Keshav Karve
1858 - 1962 (104 years)
Dhondo Keshav Karve , popularly known as Maharshi Karve, was a social reformer in India in the field of women's welfare. He advocated widow remarriage and he himself married a widow. Karve was a pioneer in promoting widows' education. He founded the first women's university in India, the SNDT Women's University in 1916. The Government of India awarded him with the highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 1958, the year of his 100th birthday. He organized a conference against the practice of devdasi. He started 'Anath balikashram' an orphanage for girls. His intention was to give education to all women and make them stand on their own feet.
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Leonard Robert Palmer
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Leonard Robert Palmer was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.
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Guido of Arezzo
992 - 1050 (58 years)
Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue of High medieval music. A Benedictine monk, he is regarded as the inventor—or by some, developer—of the modern staff notation that had a massive influence on the development of Western musical notation and practice. Perhaps the most significant European writer on music between Boethius and Johannes Tinctoris, after the former's De institutione musica, Guido's Micrologus was the most widely distributed medieval treatise on music.
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James Mason
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
James Neville Mason was an English actor. He achieved considerable success in British cinema before becoming a star in Hollywood. He was the top box-office attraction in the UK in 1944 and 1945; his British films included The Seventh Veil and The Wicked Lady . He starred in Odd Man Out , the first recipient of the BAFTA Award for Best British Film.
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Marcel L'Herbier
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Marcel L'Herbier was a French filmmaker who achieved prominence as an avant-garde theorist and imaginative practitioner with a series of silent films in the 1920s. His career as a director continued until the 1950s and he made more than 40 feature films in total. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked on cultural programmes for French television. He also fulfilled many administrative roles in the French film industry, and he was the founder and the first President of the French film school Institut des hautes études cinématographiques .
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Josef Jungmann
1773 - 1847 (74 years)
Josef Jungmann was a Czech poet and linguist, and a leading figure of the Czech National Revival. Together with Josef Dobrovský, he is considered to be a creator of the modern Czech language. The literary award for the best translation into Czech is named after him.
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Modest Mussorgsky
1839 - 1881 (42 years)
Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky was a Russian composer, one of the group known as "The Five". He was an innovator of Russian music in the Romantic period. He strove to achieve a uniquely Russian musical identity, often in deliberate defiance of the established conventions of Western music.
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Bankim Chandra Chatterjee
1838 - 1894 (56 years)
<noinclude> </noinclude> Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay CIE was an Indian novelist, poet, essayist and journalist. He was the author of the 1882 Bengali language novel Anandamath, which is one of the landmarks of modern Bengali and Indian literature. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, written in highly sanskritized Bengali, personifying Bengal as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement. Chattopadhayay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat in Ben...
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Kurt Weill
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Kurt Julian Weill was a German-born American composer active from the 1920s in his native country, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his best-known work, The Threepenny Opera, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose, Gebrauchsmusik. He also wrote several works for the concert hall and a number of works on Jewish themes. He became a United States ci...
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Albert Schweitzer
1875 - 1965 (90 years)
Ludwig Philipp Albert Schweitzer was an Alsatian polymath. He was a theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. A Lutheran minister, Schweitzer challenged both the secular view of Jesus as depicted by the historical-critical method current at this time, as well as the traditional Christian view. His contributions to the interpretation of Pauline Christianity concern the role of Paul's mysticism of "being in Christ" as primary and the doctrine of justification by faith as secondary.
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Vincenzo Bellini
1801 - 1835 (34 years)
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini was an Italian opera composer, who was known for his long-flowing melodic lines for which he was named "the Swan of Catania". Many years later, in 1898, Giuseppe Verdi "praised the broad curves of Bellini's melody: 'there are extremely long melodies as no-one else had ever made before'."
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Matteo Bartoli
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Matteo Giulio Bartoli was an Italian linguist from Istria . He obtained a doctorate at the University of Vienna, where his adviser was Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, in 1898. He was influenced by certain theories of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and the German linguist Karl Vossler. He later also studied with Jules Gilliéron in Paris. From Gilliéron he acquired a penchant for fieldwork, and from 1900 on he published numerous dialectological studies of Istrian dialects.
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Thelonious Monk
1917 - 1982 (65 years)
Thelonious Sphere Monk was an American jazz pianist and composer. He had a unique improvisational style and made numerous contributions to the standard jazz repertoire, including "'Round Midnight", "Blue Monk", "Straight, No Chaser", "Ruby, My Dear", "In Walked Bud", and "Well, You Needn't". Monk is the second-most-recorded jazz composer after Duke Ellington.
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Count Basie
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
William James "Count" Basie was an American jazz pianist, organist, bandleader, and composer. In 1935, he formed the Count Basie Orchestra, and in 1936 took them to Chicago for a long engagement and their first recording. He led the group for almost 50 years, creating innovations like the use of two "split" tenor saxophones, emphasizing the rhythm section, riffing with a big band, using arrangers to broaden their sound, and others. Many musicians came to prominence under his direction, including the tenor saxophonists Lester Young and Herschel Evans, the guitarist Freddie Green, trumpeters Bu...
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Ambroise Thomas
1811 - 1896 (85 years)
Charles Louis Ambroise Thomas was a French composer and teacher, best known for his operas Mignon and Hamlet . Born into a musical family, Thomas was a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, winning France's top music prize, the Prix de Rome. He pursued a career as a composer of operas, completing his first opera, La double échelle, in 1837. He wrote twenty further operas over the next decades, mostly comic, but he also treated more serious subjects, finding considerable success with audiences in France and abroad.
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Pauline Viardot
1821 - 1910 (89 years)
Pauline Viardot was a French dramatic mezzo-soprano, composer and pedagogue of Spanish descent. Born Michelle Ferdinande Pauline García, she came from a musical family and took up music at a young age. She began performing as a teenager and had a long and illustrious career as a star performer.
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Frederick Gibberd
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Sir Frederick Ernest Gibberd CBE was an English architect, town planner and landscape designer. He is particularly known for his work in Harlow, Essex, and for the BISF house, a design for a prefabricated council house that was widely adopted in post-war Britain.
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Maria Callas
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Maria Callas was an American-born Greek soprano who was one of the most renowned and influential opera singers of the 20th century. Many critics praised her bel canto technique, wide-ranging voice and dramatic interpretations. Her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further to the works of Verdi and Puccini, and in her early career to the music dramas of Wagner. Her musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed as La Divina .
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Hermann Möller
1850 - 1923 (73 years)
Hermann Möller was a Danish linguist noted for his work in favor of a genetic relationship between the Indo-European and Semitic language families and his version of the laryngeal theory. Möller grew up in North Frisia after its conquest by Germany in the German–Danish War of 1864 and attended German universities . He began teaching Germanic philology at the University of Copenhagen in 1883 and continued to do so for over thirty-five years . Also in 1883, he published Das altenglische Volksepos in der ursprünglichen strophischen Form, 'The Old English Folk Epic in the Original Strophic Form',...
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Georg Philipp Telemann
1681 - 1767 (86 years)
Georg Philipp Telemann was a German Baroque composer and multi-instrumentalist. He is one of the most prolific composers in history, at least in terms of surviving oeuvre. Telemann was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the leading German composers of the time, and he was compared favourably both to his friend Johann Sebastian Bach, who made Telemann the godfather and namesake of his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, and to George Frideric Handel, whom Telemann also knew personally.
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Charles-André Julien
1891 - 1991 (100 years)
Charles-André Julien was a French journalist and historian specialised in the history of the Maghreb, his most famous work is Histoire de l'Afrique du Nord : Des origines à 1830 . Charles-André Julien was born in Caen, northern France and emigrated with his family to Algeria at the age of 15, where he picked up an interest in the history of the region. Julien's History of North Africa served as the standard reference work on the subject for decades. His political commitments and specialized knowledge of North Africa contributed to his place on the Popular Front's Haut Comité méditerranéen et...
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Charles-Marie Widor
1844 - 1937 (93 years)
Charles-Marie-Jean-Albert Widor was a French organist, composer and teacher of the late Romantic era. As a composer he is known for his ten organ symphonies, especially the toccata of his fifth organ symphony, which is frequently played as recessional music at weddings and other celebrations.
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Franz Lehár
1870 - 1948 (78 years)
Franz Lehár was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas, of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow . Life and career Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary , the eldest son of Franz Lehár , an Austrian bandmaster in the Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Christine Neubrandt , a Hungarian woman from a family of German descent. He grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of 12. Later he put an acute accent above the "a" of his father's surname "Lehár" to indicate the vowel in the correspond...
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Clifford D. Simak
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Clifford Donald Simak was an American science fiction writer. He won three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award. The Science Fiction Writers of America made him its third SFWA Grand Master, and the Horror Writers Association made him one of three inaugural winners of the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is associated with the pastoral science fiction subgenre.
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Georg von der Gabelentz
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz was a German general linguist and sinologist. His , according to a critic, "remains until today recognized as probably the finest overall grammatical survey of the Classical Chinese language to date."
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Eric Frank Russell
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Eric Frank Russell was a British writer best known for his science fiction novels and short stories. Much of his work was first published in the United States, in John W. Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction and other pulp magazines. Russell also wrote horror fiction for Weird Tales and non-fiction articles on Fortean topics. Up to 1955 several of his stories were published under pseudonyms, at least Duncan H. Munro and Niall Wilde.
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Gil Evans
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Ian Ernest Gilmore Evans was a Canadian–American jazz pianist, arranger, composer and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the greatest orchestrators in jazz, playing an important role in the development of cool jazz, modal jazz, free jazz, and jazz fusion. He is best known for his acclaimed collaborations with Miles Davis.
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Jacques Tati
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Jacques Tati was a French mime, filmmaker, actor and screenwriter. In an Entertainment Weekly poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time , although he directed only six feature-length films.
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Eric Ravilious
1903 - 1942 (39 years)
Eric William Ravilious was a British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver. He grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, Castle Hedingham and other English landscapes, which examine English landscape and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. He served as a war artist, and was the first British war artist to die on active service in World War II when the aircraft he was in was lost off Iceland.
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Léopold Leau
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Léopold Leau was a French mathematician, primarily known for his ties to international auxiliary languages. The Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language was founded on 7 January 1901 on Leau's initiative. He co-wrote with Prof. Louis Couturat the monumental Histoire de la Langue Universelle and its supplement Les Nouvelles Langues Internationales .
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Wilhelm Streitberg
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Wilhelm August Streitberg was a German Indo-Europeanist, specializing in Germanic languages. Together with Karl Brugmann, he founded the Indogermanische Forschungen journal. He studied Germanistics and Indo-European philology at Münster Academy and at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig, receiving his habilitation for Indo-European linguistics at Münster in 1889. In 1906, he became a full professor, and three years later relocated to the University of Munich as a professor of Indo-European linguistics. In 1920, he returned to Leipzig, where he taught classes up until his death in 1925. Fro...
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Enrico Caruso
1873 - 1921 (48 years)
Enrico Caruso was an Italian operatic first lyric tenor then dramatic tenor. He sang to great acclaim at the major opera houses of Europe and the Americas, appearing in a wide variety of roles that ranged from the lyric to the dramatic. One of the first major singing talents to be commercially recorded, Caruso made 247 commercially released recordings from 1902 to 1920, which made him an internationally popular entertainment star.
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Pierre Laporte
1921 - 1970 (49 years)
Pierre Laporte was a Canadian lawyer, journalist and politician. He was deputy premier of the province of Quebec when he was kidnapped and murdered by members of the Front de libération du Québec during the October Crisis.
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Léon Fleuriot
1923 - 1987 (64 years)
Léon Fleuriot was a French linguist and Celtic scholar, specializing in Celtic languages and the history of Gallo-Roman and Early Medieval Brittany. Biography Born in Morlaix, Brittany, in a family originating in the region of Quintin and having studied Breton in his youth, Fleuriot passed his university history agrégation in 1950. He taught at lycées and collèges in Paris and the surrounding suburbs, as well as at the Prytanée National Militaire in La Flèche. He entered the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in 1958 and earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne University in 1964, defen...
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Jean Gebser
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Jean Gebser was a Swiss philosopher, linguist, and poet who described the structures of human consciousness. Biography Gebser was born Hans Karl Hermann Rudolph Gebser in Posen in Imperial Germany . His father was lawyer Frederich Gebser and mother was Margaretha Grundmann. He was a cousin of World War I-era chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg.
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Wolfgang Krause
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Wolfgang Krause was a German philologist and linguist. A professor at the University of Göttingen for many years, Krause specialized in comparative linguistics, and was an authority on Celtic studies, Tocharian languages, Germanic studies, Old Norse and particularly runology.
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Ōtsuki Fumihiko
1847 - 1928 (81 years)
Ōtsuki Fumihiko was a Japanese lexicographer, linguist, and historian. He is best known for two Japanese-language dictionaries that he edited, Genkai and its successor Daigenkai , and for his studies of Japanese grammar.
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Marianne Brandt
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
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Wilhelm Scherer
1841 - 1886 (45 years)
Wilhelm Scherer was a German philologist and historian of literature. He was known as a positivist because he based much of his work on "hypotheses on detailed historical research, and rooted every literary phenomenon in 'objective' historical or philological facts". His positivism is different due to his involvement with his nationalist goals. His major contribution to the movement was his speculation that culture cycled in a six-hundred-year period.
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Pietro Mascagni
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Pietro Mascagni was an Italian composer primarily known for his operas. His 1890 masterpiece Cavalleria rusticana caused one of the greatest sensations in opera history and single-handedly ushered in the Verismo movement in Italian dramatic music. While it was often held that Mascagni, like Ruggero Leoncavallo, was a "one-opera man" who could never repeat his first success, L'amico Fritz and Iris have remained in the repertoire in Europe since their premieres.
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Michael Redgrave
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave CBE was an English actor, director, producer, screenwriter, manager and author. He received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Mourning Becomes Electra , as well as two BAFTA nominations for Best British Actor for his performances in The Night My Number Came Up and Time Without Pity .
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