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 Computer Science,
#14051
Ana Mendieta
1948 - 1985 (37 years)
Ana Mendieta was a Cuban-American performance artist, sculptor, painter, and video artist who is best known for her "earth-body" artwork. She is considered one of the most influential Cuban-American artists of the post-World War II era. Born in Havana, Mendieta left for the United States in 1961.
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Gustave Caillebotte
1848 - 1894 (46 years)
Gustave Caillebotte was a French painter who was a member and patron of the Impressionists, although he painted in a more realistic manner than many others in the group. Caillebotte was known for his early interest in photography as an art form.
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Adriaen van Ostade
1610 - 1685 (75 years)
Adriaen van Ostade was a Dutch Golden Age painter of genre works, showing everyday life of ordinary men and women. Life According to Arnold Houbraken, he and his brother were pupils of Frans Hals and like him, spent most of their lives in Haarlem. He thought they were "Lubekkers" by birth, though this has since found to be false. He was the eldest son of Jan Hendricx Ostade, a weaver from the hamlet of Ostade near Eindhoven. Although Adriaen and his brother Isaack were born in Haarlem, they adopted the name "van Ostade" as painters. According to the RKD, he became a pupil in 1627 of the portrait painter Frans Hals, at that time the master of Jan Miense Molenaer.
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John White
1540 - 1593 (53 years)
John White was an English colonial governor, explorer, artist, and cartographer. White was among those who sailed with Richard Grenville in the first attempt to colonize Roanoke Island in 1585, acting as artist and mapmaker to the expedition. He would most famously briefly serve as the governor of the second attempt to found Roanoke Colony on the same island in 1587 and discover the colonists had mysteriously vanished.
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Gordon Bell
#14056
Carl Schneider
1891 - 1946 (55 years)
Carl Schneider , professor at Heidelberg University, chairman of its department of Psychiatry, director of its clinic, was a senior researcher for the Action T4 euthanasia program. Schneider is said to exemplify the descent of a distinguished academic psychiatrist into the Nazi worldview. Some described him as having once shown great empathy in his psychiatric rehabilitation work, and having a great idealism about transforming the 'horror' of psychiatric patients thought to be regressed, isolated and backward. He would sometimes put forward two possible ways of helping a patient – one of them...
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Henry Ossawa Tanner
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an American artist who spent much of his career in France. He became the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles. His painting Daniel in the Lions' Den was accepted into the 1896 Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Tanner's Resurrection of Lazarus was purchased by the French government after winning the third-place medal at the 1897 Salon. In 1923, the French government elected Tanner cheval...
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Keith Haring
1958 - 1990 (32 years)
Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. In addition to solo gallery exhibitions, he participated in renowned national and international group shows such as documenta in Kassel, the Whitney Biennial in New York, the São Paulo Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. The Whitney Museum held a retrospective of his...
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Hertha Ayrton
1854 - 1923 (69 years)
Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist and inventor, and suffragette. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water.
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Philippe de Champaigne
1602 - 1674 (72 years)
Philippe de Champaigne was a Brabançon-born French Baroque era painter, a major exponent of the French school. He was a founding member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture in Paris, the premier art institution in the Kingdom of France in the eighteenth century.
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Léon Bonnat
1833 - 1922 (89 years)
Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat was a French painter, Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur, art collector and professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Early life Bonnat was born in Bayonne, but from 1846 to 1853 he lived in Madrid, where his father owned a bookshop. While tending his father's shop, he copied engravings of works by the Old Masters, developing a passion for drawing. In Madrid he received his artistic training under Madrazo. He later worked in Paris, where he became known as a leading portraitist, never without a commission. His many portraits show the influence of Velázquez, Jusepe...
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Hugo Crola
1841 - 1910 (69 years)
Hugo Crola was a German portrait, landscape and genre painter, associated with the Düsseldorfer Malerschule. Life and work He was the first of five children born to the landscape painting couple, . In 1847, his parents bought what is now known as the "Crola-Haus", near Ilsenburg Castle, and that is where he grew up. Despite having so many children, they found time to travel together; visiting Switzerland, Italy, Norway, and several places in Germany.
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Gerard David
1450 - 1523 (73 years)
Gerard David was an Early Netherlandish painter and manuscript illuminator known for his brilliant use of color. Only a bare outline of his life survives, although some facts are known. He may have been the Meester gheraet van brugghe who became a master of the Antwerp guild in 1515. He was very successful in his lifetime and probably ran two workshops, in Antwerp and Bruges. Like many painters of his period, his reputation diminished in the 17th century until he was rediscovered in the 19th century.
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Anton von Werner
1843 - 1915 (72 years)
Anton Alexander von Werner was a German painter known for his history paintings of notable political and military events in the Kingdom of Prussia. One of the most famous painters of his time, he is regarded a main protagonist of the Wilhelmine period.
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David Stuart
1765 - Present (261 years)
David Stuart was a fur trader who worked primarily for the North West and Pacific Fur companies throughout his varied career. Fort Astoria In the official Fort Astoria logbook maintained by station manager Duncan McDougall, Stuart was recorded in May 1811 as suffering overexertion and potentially a hernia from clearing timber. In the same month, the Chinookans reported sighting a merchant vessel near their settlements on the coast. Rather than lose the beaver skins to rival Maritime fur traders, McDougall sent Stuart on 22 May to Comcomly's village across the Columbia River. The reported vessel never actually appeared after its existence was announced by Chinookan traders.
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Keith Henderson
1883 - 1982 (99 years)
Keith Henderson was a Scottish painter who worked in both oils and watercolours, and who is known for his book illustrations and his poster work for London Transport and the Empire Marketing Board. He had a long professional career that included periods as a war artist in both the First World War, in which he served in the trenches, and in the Second World War.
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Nancy Elizabeth Prophet
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Nancy Elizabeth Prophet was an American artist of African-American and Native American ancestry, known for her sculpture. She was the first African-American graduate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1918 and later studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the early 1920s. She became noted for her work in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1934, Prophet began teaching at Spelman College, expanding the curriculum to include modeling and history of art and architecture. Prophet died in 1960 at the age of 70.
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Leonard Ross
1945 - 1985 (40 years)
Leonard "Lenny" M. Ross, was an American teacher, lawyer, and government official who was famous for his celebrity as a child prodigy and television game show contestant. Ross's game show winnings, totaling $164,000 , were for two months in the spring of 1957 the highest ever earned on a United States television game show.
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Wifredo Lam
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Wifredo Óscar de la Concepción Lam y Castilla , better known as Wifredo Lam, was a Cuban artist who sought to portray and revive the enduring Afro-Cuban spirit and culture. Inspired by and in contact with some of the most renowned artists of the 20th century, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Lam melded his influences and created a unique style, which was ultimately characterized by the prominence of hybrid figures. This distinctive visual style of his also influences many artists. Though he was predominantly a painter, he also worked with sculpture, ceramic...
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Theresa Pollak
1899 - 2002 (103 years)
Theresa Pollak was an American artist and art educator born in Richmond, Virginia. She was a nationally known painter, and she is largely credited with the founding of Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a teacher at VCU's School of the Arts between 1928 and 1969. Her art has been exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. She died at the age of 103 on September 18, 2002 and was given a memorial exhibition at Anderson Gallery of Virginia Commonwealth University.
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Ferdinand Hodler
1853 - 1918 (65 years)
Ferdinand Hodler was one of the best-known Swiss painters of the nineteenth century. His early works were portraits, landscapes, and genre paintings in a realistic style. Later, he adopted a personal form of symbolism which he called "parallelism".
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William Kent
1684 - 1748 (64 years)
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
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Costantino Nivola
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Costantino Nivola was an Italian sculptor, architectural sculptor, muralist, designer, and teacher. Born in Sardinia, Nivola had already started his career when he fled Fascism for Paris in 1938, going to the U.S. in 1939. His major sculptural work is abstract, large-scale architectural reliefs in concrete, made in his own sandcasting and cement carving processes. These were erected in and on American buildings between the late 1950s and early 1970s. Creatively busy and while remaining active in Italy, Nivola also taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, and elsewhere.
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Millard Sheets
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Millard Owen Sheets was an American artist, teacher, and architectural designer. He was one of the earliest of the California Scene Painting artists and helped define the art movement. Many of his large-scale building-mounted mosaics from the mid-20th century are still extant in Southern California. His paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the National Gallery in Washington D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum.
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Arthur Streeton
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Sir Arthur Ernest Streeton was an Australian landscape painter and a leading member of the Heidelberg School, also known as Australian Impressionism. Early life Streeton was born in Mount Duneed, Victoria, south-west of Geelong, on 8 April 1867 the fourth child of Charles Henry and Mary Streeton. His family moved to Richmond in 1874. His parents had met on the voyage from England in 1854. In 1882, Streeton commenced art studies with G. F. Folingsby at the National Gallery School. On 2 June 1890, he sailed to Sydney, and stayed there with his sister in the suburb of Summer Hill.
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Shirley Carew Titus
1892 - 1967 (75 years)
Shirley Carew Titus was a nurse educator at the University of Michigan and Vanderbilt University School of Nursing. Titus was the executive director of the California Nurses' Association from 1942 until 1956. She successfully advocated for and achieved the first collective bargaining for nurses. In 1982, Titus was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame. She died on March 21, 1967. She was survived by her sister, Adele B. Titus.
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Carl Larsson
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
Carl Olof Larsson was a Swedish painter representative of the Arts and Crafts movement. His many paintings include oils, watercolors, and frescoes. He is principally known for his watercolors of idyllic family life. He considered his finest work to be Midvinterblot , a large painting now displayed inside the Swedish National Museum of Fine Arts.
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Alexej von Jawlensky
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky , surname also spelt as Yavlensky, was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist's Association , Der Blaue Reiter group and later the Die Blaue Vier .
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Sibyl M. Rock
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Sibyl Martha Rock was an American inventor who was a pioneer in mass spectrometry and computing. Rock was a key person in Consolidated Engineering Corporation's mass spectrometry team at a time when mass spectrometers were first being commercialized for use by researchers and scientists. Rock was instrumental in developing mathematical techniques for analyzing the results from mass spectrometers, in developing an analog computer with Clifford Berry for analysis of equations, and in sustaining an ongoing dialog between engineers and customers involved in development of both the mass spectrome...
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John Duncan
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Duncan was a Scottish Symbolist painter. Much of his work, apart from portraits, depicted Arthurian legends, Celtic folklore, and other mythological subjects. Biography Duncan was born in the Hilltown area of Dundee on 19 July 1866, the son of a butcher and cattleman. John, however, had no interest in the family business and preferred the visual arts. By the age of 15 he was submitting cartoons to the local magazine The Wizard of the North and was later taken on as an assistant in the art department of the Dundee Advertiser. At the same time he was also a student at the Dundee School of Art, then based at the High School of Dundee.
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Robert W. Chambers
1865 - 1933 (68 years)
Robert William Chambers was an American artist and fiction writer, best known for his book of short stories titled The King in Yellow, published in 1895. Life Chambers was born in Brooklyn, New York, to William P. Chambers , a corporate and bankruptcy lawyer, and Caroline Smith Boughton . His parents met when his mother was twelve years old and William P. was interning with her father, Joseph Boughton, a prominent corporate lawyer. Eventually the two formed the law firm of Chambers and Boughton which continued to prosper even after Joseph's death in 1861. Robert Chambers's great-grandfather, ...
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William Scott
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
William Scott was a prominent abstract painter from Northern Ireland, known for his themes of still life, landscape and female nudes. He is the most internationally celebrated of 20th-century Ulster painters. His early life was the subject of the film Every Picture Tells a Story, made by his son James Scott.
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Constantin Hansen
1804 - 1880 (76 years)
Carl Christian Constantin Hansen was one of the painters associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting. He was deeply interested in literature and mythology, and inspired by art historian Niels Laurits Høyen, he tried to recreate a national historical painting based on Norse mythology. He painted also many altarpieces and portraits, including the monumental oil painting The Danish Constituent Assembly between 1861 and 1865.
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Avard Fairbanks
1897 - 1987 (90 years)
Avard Tennyson Fairbanks was a 20th-century American sculptor. Over his eighty-year career, he sculpted over 100 public monuments and hundreds of artworks. Fairbanks is known for his religious-themed commissions for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints including the Three Witnesses, Tragedy of Winter Quarters, and several Angel Moroni sculptures on LDS temple spires. Additionally, Fairbanks sculpted over a dozen Abraham Lincoln-themed sculptures and busts among which the most well-known reside in the U.S. Supreme Court Building and Ford's Theatre Museum.
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Johannes Cornelis van Rooy
1890 - 1954 (64 years)
Johannes Cornelis van Rooy was Rector of the Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education and Chairman of the Afrikaner Broederbond. Roots Van Rooy was born in Steynsburg in the North Eastern Cape. His parents were Henri Charles van Rooy and Hester Hendriena Coetsee. He married Rachel Aletta Lion Cachet, daughter of Jan Lion Cachet and Martha Sophia Viljoen. He died 29 August 1954 in Potchefstroom.
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Wright S. Ludington
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Wright Saltus Ludington was an art collector, artist and one of the founding members of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Early life and education Wright Saltus Ludington was born in New York City on June 10, 1900, to Charles and Ethel Ludington. He had two brothers: Charles Townsend Ludington, who was born in New York City in 1896, and Nicholas Saltus Ludington, born in Bryn Mawr in 1904.
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Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz , commonly known as Witkacy, was a Polish writer, painter, philosopher, theorist, playwright, novelist, and photographer active before World War I and during the interwar period.
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Carlo Crivelli
1430 - 1490 (60 years)
Carlo Crivelli was an Italian Renaissance painter of conservative Late Gothic decorative sensibility, who spent his early years in the Veneto, where he absorbed influences from the Vivarini, Squarcione, and Mantegna. He left the Veneto by 1458 and spent most of the remainder of his career in the March of Ancona, where he developed a distinctive personal style that contrasts with that of his Venetian contemporary Giovanni Bellini.
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Félicien Rops
1833 - 1898 (65 years)
Félicien Victor Joseph Rops was a Belgian artist associated with Symbolism and the Parisian Fin-de Siecle. He was a painter, illustrator, caricaturist and a prolific and innovative print maker, particularly in intaglio . Although not well known to the general public, Rops was greatly respected by his peers and actively pursued and celebrated as an illustrator by the publishers, authors, and poets of his time. He provided frontispieces and illustrations for Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Charles De Coster, Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Stéphane Mallarmé, Joséphin Péladan, Paul Verlaine, Voltaire, and many others.
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Ad Reinhardt
1913 - 1967 (54 years)
Adolph Friedrich Reinhardt was an abstract painter active in New York for more than three decades. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and part of the movement centered on the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as abstract expressionism. He was also a member of The Club, the meeting place for the New York School abstract expressionist artists during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote and lectured extensively on art and was a major influence on conceptual art, minimal art and monochrome painting. Most famous for his "black" or "ultimate" paintings, he claimed to be painting the "last paintings" that anyone can paint.
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Yitzhak Danziger
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Yitzhak Danziger was an Israeli sculptor. He was one of the pioneer sculptors of the Canaanite Movement, and later joined the "Ofakim Hadashim" group. Early life Danziger was born in Berlin in 1916 to a Zionist family. His father was a surgeon and served in the German Army during World War I.
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Peter Watson
1908 - 1956 (48 years)
Victor William Watson was a wealthy English art collector and benefactor. He funded the literary magazine, Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly. Life and work Watson was the son of William George Watson, later Sir George Watson, 1st Baronet, and was the youngest of three children—his brother Norman was born in 1897 and sister Florence in 1894. He was educated at Lockers Park School, Eton College and St John's College, Oxford.
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Sofonisba Anguissola
1535 - 1625 (90 years)
Sofonisba Anguissola , also known as Sophonisba Angussola or Sophonisba Anguisciola, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Cremona to a relatively poor noble family. She received a well-rounded education that included the fine arts, and her apprenticeship with local painters set a precedent for women to be accepted as students of art. As a young woman, Anguissola traveled to Rome where she was introduced to Michelangelo, who immediately recognized her talent, and to Milan, where she painted the Duke of Alba. The Spanish queen, Elizabeth of Valois, was a keen amateur painter and in 1559 Anguissola was recruited to go to Madrid as her tutor, with the rank of lady-in-waiting.
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Polykleitos
490 BC - 420 BC (70 years)
Polykleitos was an ancient Greek sculptor, active in the 5th century BCE. Alongside the Athenian sculptors Pheidias, Myron and Praxiteles, he is considered as one of the most important sculptors of classical antiquity. The 4th century BCE catalogue attributed to Xenocrates , which was Pliny's guide in matters of art, ranked him between Pheidias and Myron. He is particularly known for his lost treatise, the Canon of Polykleitos , which set out his mathematical basis of an idealised male body shape.
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Anton Wassmuth
1844 - 1927 (83 years)
Anton Wassmuth was an Austrian physicist. He studied mathematics, philosophy and natural sciences at the University of Prague, where he subsequently became an assistant to Ernst Mach . In 1871 he obtained his habilitation on electricity and magnetism from the University of Vienna. In 1876 became an associate professor at the recently established University of Czernowitz, where in 1882 he was appointed a full professor of theoretical physics. In 1890 he relocated to Innsbruck as a professor and director at the institute of mathematical physics. Here he served as dean to the faculty in 1891. From 1893 to 1914 he served as chair of theoretical physics at the University of Graz.
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Sebastiano Ricci
1659 - 1734 (75 years)
Sebastiano Ricci was an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice. About the same age as Piazzetta, and an elder contemporary of Tiepolo, he represents a late version of the vigorous and luminous Cortonesque style of grand manner fresco painting. He was the uncle of Marco Ricci , who trained with him, and became an innovator in landscape painting.
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Francis Kilcoyne
Francis P. Kilcoyne was an American professor of English and the third President of Brooklyn College, from 1966 to 1967. He was consecrated a Roman Catholic priest in the Brooklyn diocese at St. James Cathedral in 1980, when he was 78 years old.
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Antoine-Jean Gros
1771 - 1835 (64 years)
Antoine-Jean Gros was a French painter of historical subjects. He was given the title of Baron Gros in 1824. Gros studied under Jacques-Louis David in Paris and began an independent artistic career during the French Revolution. Forced to leave France, Gros moved to Genoa. His portrait of the French commander Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Arcole brought Gros to public attention and gained the patronage of Napoleon.
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Mark Tobey
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Mark George Tobey was an American painter. His densely structured compositions, inspired by Asian calligraphy, resemble Abstract expressionism, although the motives for his compositions differ philosophically from most Abstract Expressionist painters. His work was widely recognized throughout the United States and Europe. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, Morris Graves, and William Cumming, Tobey was a founder of the Northwest School. Senior in age and experience, he had a strong influence on the others; friend and mentor, Tobey shared their interest in philosophy and Eastern religions.
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