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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#16551
Joseph Kosma
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Joseph Kosma was a Hungarian composer emigrated to France. Biography Kosma was born József Kozma in Budapest, where his parents taught stenography and typing. He had a brother, Ákos. A maternal relative was the photographer László Moholy-Nagy, and another was the conductor Georg Solti. He started to play the piano at age five, and later took piano lessons. At the age of 11, he wrote his first opera, Christmas in the Trenches. After completing his education at the Secondary Grammar School Franz-Josef, he attended the Academy of Music in Budapest, where he studied with Leo Weiner. He also studied with Béla Bartók at the Liszt Academy, receiving diplomas in composition and conducting.
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Stephen Foster
1826 - 1864 (38 years)
Stephen Collins Foster , known as "the father of American music", was an American composer known primarily for his parlour and minstrel music during the Romantic period. He wrote more than 200 songs, including "Oh! Susanna", "Hard Times Come Again No More", "Camptown Races", "Old Folks at Home" , "My Old Kentucky Home", "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", "Old Black Joe", and "Beautiful Dreamer", and many of his compositions remain popular today.
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Johann Andreas Schmeller
1785 - 1852 (67 years)
Johann Andreas Schmeller was a German philologist who initially studied the Bavarian dialect. From 1828 until his death he taught in the University of Munich. He is considered the founder of modern dialect research in Germany. His lasting contribution is the four-volume , which is currently in the process of revision by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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George M. McCune
1908 - 1948 (40 years)
George McAfee "Mac" McCune was an American scholar of Korea who developed the McCune–Reischauer romanization system of Korean with Edwin O. Reischauer. He taught Korean history and language at Occidental College and the University of California, Berkeley.
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Veikko Antero Koskenniemi
1885 - 1962 (77 years)
Veikko Antero Koskenniemi was a Finnish poet born in Oulu. From 1921 to 1948, Koskenniemi served as Professor of Literary History at the University of Turku. He was the university's rector from 1924 to 1932. In 1948 he became a member of the Finnish Academy. He died in Turku.
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Magnus Olsen
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Magnus Bernhard Olsen was a Norwegian philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Born and raised in Arendal, Olsen received his degrees in philology at Royal Frederick University in Kristiania, where he became a protége of Sophus Bugge. After Bugge's death, Olsen succeeded him in 1908 as Professor of Old Norwegian and Icelandic Literature at Royal Frederick University. In this capacity, Olsen taught generations of Norwegian academics and teachers. His field of research centered on runology and Old Norse toponymy. Olsen was particularly interested in using evidence from runes and toponymy for the study of Old Norse religion.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini
1922 - 1975 (53 years)
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, film director, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. He is considered one of the defining public intellectuals in 20th-century Italian history, influential both as an artist and a political figure.
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Yasujirō Ozu
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
was a Japanese filmmaker. He began his career during the era of silent films, and his last films were made in colour in the early 1960s. Ozu first made a number of short comedies, before turning to more serious themes in the 1930s. The most prominent themes of Ozu's work are family and marriage, and especially the relationships between generations. His most widely beloved films include Late Spring , Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon .
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Paul Monroe
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Paul Monroe, Ph.D., LL.D. was an American educator. He specialized in the history of education, and in comparative syudies. Biography He was born at North Madison, Indiana. He graduated at Franklin College, Franklin, Indiana in 1890, studied at the University of Heidelberg and took his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1897. He became professor at Columbia in 1899, his research involving education in its historic aspect. As well as Columbia, he lectured at Yale University and the University of California. During 1912–1913, he reported on the condition of education in the Philippines.
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François-Joseph Fétis
1784 - 1871 (87 years)
François-Joseph Fétis was a Belgian musicologist, critic, teacher and composer. He was among the most influential music intellectuals in continental Europe. His enormous compilation of biographical data in the Biographie universelle des musiciens remains an important source of information today.
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Andrés Segovia
1893 - 1987 (94 years)
Andrés Segovia Torres, 1st Marquis of Salobreña was a Spanish virtuoso classical guitarist. Many professional classical guitarists were either students of Segovia or students of Segovia's students. Segovia's contribution to the modern-romantic repertoire included not only commissions but also his own transcriptions of classical or baroque works. He is remembered for his expressive performances: his wide palette of tone, and his distinctive musical personality, phrasing and style.
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Marguerite Long
1874 - 1966 (92 years)
Marguerite Marie-Charlotte Long was a French pianist, pedagogue, lecturer, and an ambassador of French music. Life Early life: 1874–1900 Marguerite Long was born to Pierre Long and Anne Marie Antoinette on November 13, 1874, in Nîmes, an old Roman town in the south of France. Long's parents were not musicians, but her mother highly emphasized the importance of music and "little Marguerite was not allowed to play wrong notes." Her sister, Claire Long, eight years older, was actually the person who influenced her in the pursuit of music. In 1883, at age seventeen, Claire was appointed Professo...
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Kenny Clarke
1914 - 1985 (71 years)
Kenneth Clarke Spearman , nicknamed Klook, was an American jazz drummer and bandleader. A major innovator of the bebop style of drumming, he pioneered the use of the ride cymbal to keep time rather than the hi-hat, along with the use of the bass drum for irregular accents .
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Nacio Herb Brown
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Ignacio Herbert "Nacio Herb" Brown was an American writer of popular songs, movie scores and Broadway theatre music in the 1920s through the early 1950s. Amongst his most enduring work is the score for the 1952 musical film Singin' in the Rain.
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Aram Khachaturian
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Aram Ilyich Khachaturian was a Soviet Armenian composer and conductor. He is considered one of the leading Soviet composers. Born and raised in Tbilisi, the multicultural capital of Georgia, Khachaturian moved to Moscow in 1921 following the Sovietization of the Caucasus. Without prior music training, he enrolled in the Gnessin Musical Institute, subsequently studying at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Nikolai Myaskovsky, among others. His first major work, the Piano Concerto , popularized his name within and outside the Soviet Union. It was followed by the Violin Concerto and the Cello Concerto .
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Hugo Wolf
1860 - 1903 (43 years)
Hugo Philipp Jacob Wolf was an Austrian composer of Slovene origin, particularly noted for his art songs, or Lieder. He brought to this form a concentrated expressive intensity which was unique in late Romantic music, somewhat related to that of the Second Viennese School in concision but diverging greatly in technique.
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Dziga Vertov
1895 - 1954 (59 years)
Dziga Vertov was a Soviet pioneer documentary film and newsreel director, as well as a cinema theorist. His filming practices and theories influenced the cinéma vérité style of documentary movie-making and the Dziga Vertov Group, a radical film-making cooperative which was active from 1968 to 1972. He was a member of the Kinoks collective, with Elizaveta Svilova and Mikhail Kaufman.
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Kenji Mizoguchi
1898 - 1956 (58 years)
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese filmmaker who directed roughly one hundred films during his career between 1923 and 1956. His most acclaimed works include The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums , The Life of Oharu , Ugetsu , and Sansho the Bailiff , with the latter three all being awarded at the Venice International Film Festival. A recurring theme of his films was the oppression of women in historical and contemporary Japan. Together with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu, Mizoguchi is seen as a representative of the "golden age" of Japanese cinema.
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Coleman Hawkins
1904 - 1969 (65 years)
Coleman Randolph Hawkins , nicknamed "Hawk" and sometimes "Bean", was an American jazz tenor saxophonist. One of the first prominent jazz musicians on his instrument, as Joachim E. Berendt explained: "there were some tenor players before him, but the instrument was not an acknowledged jazz horn". Hawkins biographer John Chilton described the prevalent styles of tenor saxophone solos prior to Hawkins as "mooing" and "rubbery belches". Hawkins denied being first and noted his contemporaries Happy Caldwell, Stump Evans, and Prince Robinson, although he was the first to tailor his method of improvisation to the saxophone rather than imitate the techniques of the clarinet.
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Jean Harlow
1911 - 1937 (26 years)
Jean Harlow was an American actress. Known for her portrayal of "bad girl" characters, she was the leading sex symbol of the early 1930s and one of the defining figures of the pre-Code era of American cinema. Often nicknamed the "Blonde Bombshell" and the "Platinum Blonde", Harlow was popular for her "Laughing Vamp" screen persona. Harlow was in the film industry for only nine years, but she became one of Hollywood's biggest movie stars, whose image in the public eye has endured. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Harlow number 22 on its greatest female screen legends of classical Ho...
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Fats Waller
1904 - 1943 (39 years)
Thomas Wright "Fats" Waller was an American jazz pianist, organist, composer, and singer. His innovations in the Harlem stride style laid much of the basis for modern jazz piano. His best-known compositions, "Ain't Misbehavin'" and "Honeysuckle Rose", were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1984 and 1999. Waller copyrighted over 400 songs, many of them co-written with his closest collaborator, Andy Razaf. Razaf described his partner as "the soul of melody... a man who made the piano sing... both big in body and in mind... known for his generosity... a bubbling bundle of joy". It is like...
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Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas
1632 - 1698 (66 years)
Francisco de Aguiar y Seijas y Ulloa was a Spanish cleric and bishop, notable as bishop of Michoacán and archbishop of Mexico. Life The son of Alonso Vázquez de Seixas y Lobera, regidor perpetuo of the city of Betanzos, and his wife Mariana de Ulloa, he initially studied at the Latin cathedral in Betanzos. On his father's death, he came under the protection of Fernando de Andrade, archbishop of Santiago, serving him as a page. He studied at the university of Santiago de Compostela and became its rector between 1668 and 1674. He was a magistral canon of the cathedral of Astorga. On 8 March 166...
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Raymond Bernard
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Raymond Bernard was a French film director and screenwriter whose career spanned more than 40 years. He is best remembered for several large-scale historical productions, including the silent films Le Miracle des loups and Le Joueur d'échecs and in the 1930s Les Croix de bois and a highly regarded adaptation of Les Misérables.
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W. C. Fields
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
William Claude Dukenfield , better known as W. C. Fields, was an American actor, comedian, juggler, and writer. Fields's comic persona was a comedically crude and hard-drinking egotist who remained a sympathetic character despite his supposed contempt for children and dogs.
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John George Robertson
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
John George Robertson, FBA was a philologist and professor of German language and literature. Biography Robertson graduated with M.A. and B.Sc. from the University of Glasgow and then Ph.D. from Leipzig University. From 1896 to 1903 he was a lecturer in English at the University of Strassburg. At the University of London, he became in 1903 Professor of German Language and Literature and in 1924 Director of the Department of Scandinavian Studies. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the Modern Language Review. He wrote several books dealing with the literature of Germany and about a dozen articles for the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Frederick Loewe
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Frederick Loewe was an American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on a series of Broadway musicals, including Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, all of which were made into films, as well as the original film musical Gigi , which was first transferred to the stage in 1973.
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Ezequiel Uricoechea
1834 - 1880 (46 years)
Ezequiel Uricoechea Rodríguez was a Colombian linguist and scientist. He is considered one of the first Colombian scientists and a pioneer in Spanish-language linguistics. Biography Uricoechea was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá in what was then the Republic of New Granada, his family being of Basque origin. His father was José María de Uricoechea y Zornoza, and his mother Mariana Rodríguez Moreno. He had a brother, Sabas María, and a sister; Filomena. He graduated from Yale Medical School in 1852. In 1853 he became Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, after which he went to Brussels where he assisted Adolphe Quetelet at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
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Niccolò Giani
1909 - 1941 (32 years)
Niccolò Giani was an Italian Fascist philosopher and journalist who was the founder of Fascist mysticism. Biography After attending the "Dante Alighieri" High School in Trieste he moved to Milan, where in 1928 he enrolled in the Faculty of Law, graduating in 1931. While at the University of Milan he also joined the Fascist University Groups . On 4 April 1930 Giani announced the imminent founding of the School of Fascist Mysticism, which he opened in Milan a few weeks later along with Arnaldo Mussolini. In 1931 Giani became director of the school, a post he left at the end of the following yea...
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Otto Stoll
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Otto Stoll was a Swiss linguist and ethnologist. Otto Stoll was a professor of ethnology and geography at the University of Zurich who specialized in research of Mayan languages. From 1878 to 1883 he conducted scientific studies in Guatemala. He was the author of several treatises on Guatemala, including important works in the fields on ethnography and ethno-linguistics. Stoll also published on neotropical Acari with a major work being the volume in the Biologia Centrali-Americana between Dec. 1886 and Jan. 1893.
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Gottfried Sellius
1704 - 1767 (63 years)
Gottfried Sellius was a German academic and translator. He is known for his work on Teredo navalis. and to be one of the three original initiators of an encyclopedia project, which subsequently turned into the Encyclopédie.
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Gregorio Mayans
1699 - 1781 (82 years)
Gregorio Mayans y Siscar was a Spanish historian, linguist and writer of the Enlightenment in Spain. Early life Gregorio Mayans was born on 9 May 1699 in Oliva, Valencia, Spain. His father, Pasqual Maians, fought on the Austrian side in the War of the Spanish Succession and accompanied archduke Charles VI to Barcelona in 1706; this resulted in the later marginalization of Gregorio Mayans, who lived in Spain when it was dominated by the House of Bourbon. Until 1713, when he returned to Oliva, Mayans studied with the Jesuits of Cordelles, but his grandfather, a mayor named Juan Siscar, encouraged him in the study of law.
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Wolcott Gibbs
1902 - 1958 (56 years)
Wolcott Gibbs was an American editor, humorist, theatre critic, playwright and writer of short stories, who worked for The New Yorker magazine from 1927 until his death. He is notable for his 1936 parody of Time magazine, which skewered the magazine's inverted narrative structure. Gibbs wrote, "Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind"; he concluded the piece, "Where it all will end, knows God!" He also wrote a comedy, Season in the Sun, which ran on Broadway for 10 months in 1950–51 and was based on a series of stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker.
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Clifford Odets
1906 - 1963 (57 years)
Clifford Odets was an American playwright, screenwriter, and actor. In the mid-1930s, he was widely seen as the potential successor to Nobel Prize–winning playwright Eugene O'Neill, as O'Neill began to withdraw from Broadway's commercial pressures and increasing critical backlash. From January 1935, Odets's socially relevant dramas were extremely influential, particularly for the remainder of the Great Depression. His works inspired the next several generations of playwrights, including Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Neil Simon, and David Mamet. After the production of his play Clash by Nigh...
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Malcolm Sargent
1895 - 1967 (72 years)
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy.
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John Harington Gubbins
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
John Harington Gubbins was a British linguist, consular official and diplomat. He was the father of Sir Colin McVean Gubbins. Education Gubbins attended Harrow School and would have gone on to Cambridge University, had family finances allowed.
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Eugene Ormandy
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Eugene Ormandy was a Hungarian-born American conductor and violinist, best known for his association with the Philadelphia Orchestra, as its music director. His 44-year association with the orchestra is one of the longest enjoyed by any conductor with any American orchestra. Ormandy made numerous recordings with the orchestra, and as guest conductor with European orchestras, and achieved three gold records and two Grammy Awards. His reputation was as a skilled technician and expert orchestral builder.
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André Jolivet
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
André Jolivet was a French composer. Known for his devotion to French culture and musical thought, Jolivet drew on his interest in acoustics and atonality, as well as both ancient and modern musical influences, particularly on instruments used in ancient times. He composed in a wide variety of forms for many different types of ensembles.
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Marian Anderson
1897 - 1993 (96 years)
Marian Anderson was an American contralto. She performed a wide range of music, from opera to spirituals. Anderson performed with renowned orchestras in major concert and recital venues throughout the United States and Europe between 1925 and 1965.
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Eleonora Duse
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Eleonora Giulia Amalia Duse , often known simply as Duse, was an Italian actress, rated by many as the greatest of her time. She performed in many countries, notably in the plays of Gabriele D'Annunzio and Henrik Ibsen. Duse achieved a unique power of conviction and verity on the stage through intense absorption in the character, "eliminating the self" as she put it, and letting the qualities emerge from within, not imposed through artifice.
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Johann Nepomuk Hummel
1778 - 1837 (59 years)
Johann Nepomuk Hummel was an Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist. His music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. He was a pupil of Mozart, Salieri and Clementi. He also knew Beethoven and Schubert.
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Enrique Granados
1867 - 1916 (49 years)
Pantaleón Enrique Joaquín Granados Campiña , commonly known as Enrique Granados in Spanish or Enric Granados in Catalan, was a Spanish composer of classical music, and concert pianist from Catalonia, Spain. His most well-known works include Goyescas, the , and María del Carmen.
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Earl Hines
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Earl Kenneth Hines, also known as Earl "Fatha" Hines , was an American jazz pianist and bandleader. He was one of the most influential figures in the development of jazz piano and, according to one source, "one of a small number of pianists whose playing shaped the history of jazz".
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Stefan Mladenov
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Stefan Mladenov was a Bulgarian linguist and dialectologist, a specialist in Indo-European linguistics, Slavic studies, Balkan studies, Bulgarian studies and a scientist of world renown and authority.
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Adelina Patti
1843 - 1919 (76 years)
Adelina Patti was an Italian opera singer, earning huge fees at the height of her career in the music capitals of Europe and America in the 19th century. She first sang in public as a child in 1851, and gave her last performance before an audience in 1914. Along with her near contemporaries Jenny Lind and Thérèse Tietjens, Patti remains one of the most famous sopranos in history, owing to the purity and beauty of her lyrical voice and the unmatched quality of her bel canto technique.
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Victor Fleming
1889 - 1949 (60 years)
Victor Lonzo Fleming was an American film director, cinematographer, and producer. His most popular films were Gone with the Wind, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Director, and The Wizard of Oz . Fleming has those same two films listed in the top 10 of the American Film Institute's 2007 AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list.
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Chauncey A. Goodrich
1790 - 1860 (70 years)
Chauncey Allen Goodrich was an American clergyman, educator and lexicographer. He was the son-in-law of Noah Webster and edited his Dictionary after his father-in-law's death. Family Goodrich was the son of Elizur and Anne Willard Goodrich. His father was a lawyer and member of the United States House of Representatives. He was also the grandson of the Reverend Elizur Goodrich. His uncle, also named Chauncey Goodrich, was also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a U.S. senator from Connecticut.
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Carl Schachter
1900 - Present (126 years)
Carl E. Schachter is an American music theorist noted for his expertise in Schenkerian analysis. Born in Chicago, he attended Austin High School, graduating at age 16. Beginning in 1948 he began studies at the Mannes School of Music. He studied piano with Sara Levee, Isabelle Vengerova and Israel Citkowitz, and conducting with . Most significantly he studied with Felix Salzer, who was later co-author with Schachter of the influential text Counterpoint in Composition. He received a Bachelor of Science from Mannes; an MA from New York University ; and a DM from Mannes College of Music.
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Eugène Ysaÿe
1858 - 1931 (73 years)
Eugène-Auguste Ysaÿe was a Belgian virtuoso violinist, composer, and conductor. He was regarded as "The King of the Violin", or, as Nathan Milstein put it, the "tsar". Legend of the Ysaÿe violin Eugène Ysaÿe came from a background of "artisans", though a large part of his family played instruments. As violinist Arnold Steinhardt recounts, a legend was passed down through the Ysaÿe family about the first violin brought to the lineage:
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August Hjalmar Edgren
1840 - 1903 (63 years)
August Hjalmar Edgren was a Swedish-American linguist, professor, and author. Background August Hjalmar Edgren was born in Östanås, Älvsbacka parish in Värmland, Sweden. He was the son of Axel Edgren and Mathilda Berger . He was educated in Karlstad and Stockholm. He was a graduate of the University of Uppsala and the royal military school of Sweden. Edgren passed the officer's exam in Stockholm in 1860, and subsequently served during the American Civil War in the Union Army, where he entered the 99th New York Regiment as 2d lieutenant in January 1862. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant, and in August 1863 he was assigned to the engineer corps.
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Bernard Borderie
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Bernard Borderie was a French film director and screenwriter. His father, Raymond Borderie, was one of the producers of Les Enfants du Paradis . Selected filmography Wolves Hunt at Night La môme vert-de-gris The Women Couldn't Care Less Ces dames préfèrent le mambo The Mask of the Gorilla Sergeant X Women Are Like That The Three Musketeers Lemmy pour les dames Your Turn, Darling Hardi Pardaillan! Angélique, Marquise des Anges Marvelous Angelique Angelique and the King Brigade antigangs Sept hommes et une garce Untamable Angelique Angelique and the Sultan The Gallant Lords of Bois-Doré
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