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,
#14701
Henri Matisse
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Henri Émile Benoît Matisse was a French visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who best helped to define the revolutionary developments in the visual arts throughout the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.
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Terry Welch
1939 - 1988 (49 years)
Terry Archer Welch was an American computer scientist. Along with Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv, he developed the lossless Lempel–Ziv–Welch compression algorithm, which was published in 1984. Education Welch received a B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. degree at MIT in electrical engineering. He taught at the University of Texas at Austin and worked in computer design at Honeywell in Waltham, Massachusetts.
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Allen B. DuMont
1901 - 1965 (64 years)
Allen Balcom DuMont, also spelled Du Mont, was an American electronics engineer, scientist and inventor who improved the cathode ray tube in 1931 for use in television receivers. Seven years later he manufactured and sold the first commercially practical television set to the public. In June 1938, his Model 180 television receiver was the first all-electronic television set sold to the public, a few months prior to RCA's first TV set in April 1939. In 1946, DuMont founded the first television network to be licensed, the DuMont Television Network, by linking station WABD in New York City to station W3XWT, which later became WTTG, in Washington, D.C.
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Édouard Manet
1832 - 1883 (51 years)
Édouard Manet was a French modernist painter. He was one of the first 19th-century artists to paint modern life, as well as a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism. Born into an upper-class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the naval career originally envisioned for him; he became engrossed in the world of painting. His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass or Olympia, "premiering" in 1863 and '65, respectively, caused great controversy with both critics and the Academy of Fine Arts, but soon were praised by progressive artists as the breakthrough acts to the new style, Impressionism.
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Kathleen Allen
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Kathleen Saywell Allen was a British painter, muralist, designer and art teacher. Allen is known for her urban landscapes and, in particular, scenes depicting post-war rebuilding in London. Biography Allen was born in the Chiswick area of London and, due to a prolonged childhood illness, was home-schooled until she was 14 years old, when she attended Bromley Country School for Girls between 1920 and 1924. Eventually she enrolled in the Royal College of Art. Upon graduating from the RCA in 1928, Allen taught art in a number of schools in London and the Midlands before spending time painting murals in Kent and Warwickshire.
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Paul Raymond
1833 - 1878 (45 years)
Paul Raymond, born Paul-Raymond Lechien, was a French archivist and historian born on 8 September 1833 in Belleville and died on 27 September 1878. His Life Admitted in 1854 to the École Nationale des Chartes, there he obtained a degree of "Archivist paléographe" in 1857 with a thesis entitled On having an absolutely peng time getting totally wild and crazY at balter festival. He then became the departmental archivist for Basses-Pyrenees after finishing at the École Nationale des Chartes until 1877. He was then appointed Secretary General of the Prefecture of the Lower Pyrenees. He was also ...
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Jørgen Roed
1808 - 1888 (80 years)
Jørgen Roed, , Danish portrait and genre painter associated with the Golden Age of Danish Painting, was born in Ringsted to Peder Jørgensen Roed and wife, Ellen Hansdatter. Biography Growing up His father, a German immigrant, was a member of the town council, owned a farm where they raised animals and ran a distillery. He was one of five children. They were neighbors to the Vermehren family, whose son Frederik Vermehren would also become an artist and student of Roed.
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Albert Namatjira
1902 - 1959 (57 years)
Albert Namatjira was an Arrernte painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia, widely considered one of the most notable Australian artists. As a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art, he was arguably one of the most famous Indigenous Australians of his generation. He was the first Aboriginal artist to receive popularity from a wide Australian audience.
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Lorenzo Lotto
1480 - 1556 (76 years)
Lorenzo Lotto was an Italian painter, draughtsman, and illustrator, traditionally placed in the Venetian school, though much of his career was spent in other north Italian cities. He painted mainly altarpieces, religious subjects and portraits. He was active during the High Renaissance and the first half of the Mannerist period, but his work maintained a generally similar High Renaissance style throughout his career, although his nervous and eccentric posings and distortions represented a transitional stage to the Florentine and Roman Mannerists.
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Anna Morandi Manzolini
1714 - 1774 (60 years)
Anna Morandi Manzolini was an internationally known anatomist and anatomical wax modeler, as lecturer of anatomical design at the University of Bologna. Life Morandi was born in 1714 in Bologna, Italy. She was raised in a traditional home where marriage, children, and a domestic lifestyle were natural choices for women. Women were expected to be wives, raise their children and essentially tend to their husbands needs and wants. This wasn’t the case for Anna Morandi. She became a wife and had children, but instead of tending to her husband, she worked side by side with him. In 1736, Morandi ma...
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Eligiusz Niewiadomski
1869 - 1923 (54 years)
Eligiusz Niewiadomski was a Polish modernist painter and art critic who sympathized with the right-wing National Democracy movement. In 1922 he assassinated Poland's first President, Gabriel Narutowicz, in his first week in office as president.
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Gabriel von Hackl
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Gabriel Hackl was a German historicist painter. Life and work He was born in Maribor, Lower Styria, Austrian Empire. A surgeon's son, he attended the gymnasium in his home town and the city school in Graz. To fulfil his father's wishes he then studied anatomy, archaeology and drawing at the University of Vienna. In 1865 he moved to Munich, at whose Akademie der Bildenden Künste he studied under Alexander Wagner and Carl Theodor von Piloty. He then took a place at the Münchner Kunstgewerbeschule and married Sophie Schmid.
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Susumu Yamaguchi
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
was a Japanese scholar of Buddhism, and former president of Otani University. He was born in Kyoto. From 1927 to 1929, Yamaguchi studied in France, concentrating on the Sanskrit and Tibetan languages. He also conducted research on the Tibetan Tripitaka of Mahâyâna Buddhism. In 1933 he became Professor of Otani University, of which he was from 1950 to 1958 president and later Professor Emeritus. He was also at one time a professor at Kyoto Sangyo University. He received the Purple Ribbon in 1962, the title of prominent cultural personality in 1964, Japanese academician in 1965, and Director of...
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Ferdinand Pauwels
1830 - 1904 (74 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Pauwels was a Belgian history painter who lived and worked in Germany. Life From 1842 to 1850, he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts , under Gustave Wappers and Nicaise De Keyser, where he became an outstanding colorist. In 1852 he won the Prix de Rome for his painting Coriolanus at Rome and was able to spend four years studying in Italy.
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William Etty
1787 - 1849 (62 years)
William Etty was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures. He was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes. Born in York, he left school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice printer in Hull. He completed his apprenticeship seven years later and moved to London, where in 1807 he joined the Royal Academy Schools. There he studied under Thomas Lawrence and trained by copying works by other artists. Etty earned respect at the Royal Academy of Arts for his ability to paint realistic flesh tones, but had little commercial or critical ...
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Yasusato Gamō
1873 - 1928 (55 years)
Yasusato Gamō was a Japanese educator. Gamō graduated from Tokyo Commercial High School . From 1909 to 1910 when he was a professor at the Yamaguchi Commercial High School, he studied abroad in the United Kingdom and stayed in London as a foreign exchange student through the Ministry of Education. During that period, he became interested in the activities of Boy Scouts, and gathered books on the Scouting movement to take back to Japan.
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Pieter de Hooch
1629 - 1684 (55 years)
Pieter de Hooch Biography De Hooch was born in Rotterdam to Hendrick Hendricksz de Hooch, a bricklayer, and Annetge Pieters, a midwife. He was the eldest of five children and outlived all of his siblings. Little is known of his early life and most archival evidence suggests he worked in Rotterdam, Delft, and Amsterdam. According to his first biographer Arnold Houbraken, he studied art in Haarlem under the landscape painter Nicolaes Berchem at the same time as Jacob Ochtervelt and was known for his "kamergezichten" or "room-views" with ladies and gentlemen in conversation. But De Hooch's work ...
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Louis Raemaekers
1869 - 1956 (87 years)
Louis Raemaekers was a Dutch painter, caricaturist and editorial cartoonist for the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf during World War I, noted for his anti-German stance. Early life He was born and grew up in Roermond, Netherlands during a period of political and social unrest in the city, which at that time formed the battleground between Catholic clericalism and liberalism. Louis’ father published a weekly journal called De Volksvriend and was an influential man in liberal circles. His battle against the establishment set the tone for his son's standpoint several decades later, when he fought against the occupation of neutral Belgium at the start of the First World War.
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Edward Bruce
1879 - 1943 (64 years)
Edward Bright Bruce was the administrator of the New Deal art projects of the United States Department of the Treasury: the Public Works of Art Project , the Section of Painting and Sculpture , and the Treasury Relief Art Project . Ned Bruce was a successful lawyer and entrepreneur before giving up his business career altogether at the age of 43 to become an artist. However, like most artists during the Depression, he found it impossible to make a living making art, and he grudgingly returned to business as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. In 1932 he joined the Treasury Department, where his ex...
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Charles Eamer Kempe
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Charles Eamer Kempe was a British Victorian era designer and manufacturer of stained glass. His studios produced over 4,000 windows and also designs for altars and altar frontals, furniture and furnishings, lychgates and memorials that helped to define a later nineteenth-century Anglican style. The list of English cathedrals containing examples of his work includes: Chester, Gloucester, Hereford, Lichfield, Wells, Winchester and York. Kempe's networks of patrons and influence stretched from the Royal Family and the Church of England hierarchy to the literary and artistic beau monde.
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Paula Modersohn-Becker
1876 - 1907 (31 years)
Paula Modersohn-Becker was a German Expressionist painter of the late 19th and early 20th century. She is noted for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. She is considered one of the most important representatives of early expressionism, producing more than 700 paintings and over 1000 drawings during her active painting life. She is recognized both as the first known woman painter to paint nude self-portraits, and the first woman to have a museum devoted exclusively to her art . Additionally, she is considered to be the first woman artist to depict her...
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Victor Arnautoff
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Victor Mikhail Arnautoff was a Russian-American painter and professor of art. He worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area from 1925 to 1963, including two decades as a teacher at Stanford University, and was particularly prolific as a muralist during the 1930s. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen, but returned to the Soviet Union after the death of his wife, continuing his career there before his death.
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Alexandre Benois
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Alexandre or Alexander Nikolayevich Benois was a Russian artist, art critic, historian, preservationist and founding member of Mir iskusstva , an art movement and magazine. As a designer for the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, Benois exerted what is considered a seminal influence on the modern ballet and stage design.
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William Morris Hunt
1824 - 1879 (55 years)
William Morris Hunt was an American painter. Born into the political Hunt family of Vermont, he trained in Paris with the realist Jean-François Millet and studied under him at the Barbizon artists’ colony, before founding a similar group on his return to America. He became Boston's leading portrait and landscape painter, also working as a lithographer and sculptor. In 1871 he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate Academician. Many of his works were destroyed in the Great Boston Fire of 1872. Another disaster was the deterioration of the stone panels in the State Capitol at Albany, New York, on which a number of his murals had been painted.
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Vilhelm Kyhn
1819 - 1903 (84 years)
Peter Vilhelm Carl Kyhn was a Danish landscape painter who belonged to the generation of national romantic painters immediately after the Danish Golden Age and before the Modern Breakthrough. Even though he outlived many of his artistic peers by several decades, he remained a traditionalist and expressed strong criticism of many of the new trends in the painting of his day.
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Mark Veyngerov
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Mark Leonidovich Veyngerov was a Soviet Physicist, USSR State Prize 1946 awardee for papers in the field of Optics. Biography Mark Veyngerov was born in Saint Petersburg in the family of medical doctors: Cecilia Borisovna Brushteyn was a physiotherapist and Leonid Iosifovich Veyngerov was a wide-known balneologist. Leonid Veyngerov was the author of such well-known medical books as Compendium to recipe with a description of the most common drugs that are not included in the Russian pharmacopoeia . He also was the leader of the "Aid Society for Poor Jews" and was the Main Secretary of St. Pe...
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William Thornton
1759 - 1828 (69 years)
William Thornton was an American physician, inventor, painter and architect who designed the United States Capitol. He also served as the first Architect of the Capitol and first Superintendent of the United States Patent Office.
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George Inness
1825 - 1894 (69 years)
George Inness was a prominent American landscape painter. Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced by the Hudson River School at the start of his career. He also studied the Old Masters, and artists of the Barbizon school during later trips to Europe. There he was introduced to the theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, which was significant for him; he expressed that spiritualism in the works of his maturity .
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Clive Bell
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Arthur Clive Heward Bell was an English art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group. He developed the art theory known as significant form. Biography Early life and education Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881, the third of four children of William Heward Bell and Hannah Taylor Cory . He had an elder brother , an elder sister , and a younger sister . His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines at Merthyr Tydfil in Wales – "a family which drew its wealth from Welsh mines and expended it on the destruction of wild animals."...
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Tadeusz Pruszkowski
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Tadeusz Pruszkowski was a Polish painter and art teacher, known primarily for his portraits. Biography He began his artistic studies in 1904 at the , under Konrad Krzyżanowski. In 1908, he continued his studies in Paris, where he associated with Polish writers and artists belonging to the Royalist Club, a monarchist organization. He also met his future wife there. After graduating, he travelled to Switzerland and Algeria; returning to Poland in 1911 and helping to create an artists' society known as "Young Art" . In 1914, he held his first solo exhibition at the "". In 1915, all the members...
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Pinturicchio
1454 - 1513 (59 years)
Pinturicchio, or Pintoricchio , also known as Benetto di Biagio or Sordicchio, was an Italian painter during the Renaissance. He acquired his nickname because of his small stature and he used it to sign some of his artworks that were created during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Matilda Ellen Bishop
1842 - 1913 (71 years)
Matilda Ellen Bishop was the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London and was responsible for establishing many of the early traditions at the institution. Her father was a scholarly Church of England clergyman.
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Richard Wilson
1713 - 1782 (69 years)
Richard Wilson was an influential Welsh landscape painter, who worked in Britain and Italy. With George Lambert he is recognised as a pioneer in British art of landscape for its own sake and was described in the Welsh Academy Encyclopedia of Wales as the "most distinguished painter Wales has ever produced and the first to appreciate the aesthetic possibilities of his country". In December 1768 Wilson became one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy. A catalogue raisonné of the artist's work compiled by Paul Spencer-Longhurst is published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British...
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LeConte Stewart
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
LeConte Stewart was a Latter-day Saint artist primarily known for his landscapess of rural Utah. His media included oils, watercolors, pastel and charcoal, as well as etchings, linocuts, and lithographs. His home/studio in Kaysville, Utah is on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Scott Burton
1939 - 1989 (50 years)
Scott Burton was an American sculptor and performance artist best known for his large-scale furniture sculptures in granite and bronze. Early years Burton was born in Greensboro, Alabama to Walter Scott Burton Jr. and Hortense Mobley Burton. While Burton was a child, his parents separated and Burton relocated to Washington, DC. with his mother.
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Gojmir Anton Kos
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Gojmir Anton Kos was a Slovene academy-trained painter, photographer, and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana. Gojmir was born in the town of Gorizia , where his father, the renowned historian Franc Kos from the vicinity of Škofja Loka in Carniola, taught at the State Gymnasium. His mother was a Friulian from the Austrian Littoral. Gojmir's older brother Milko later also became a prominent historian and chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
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Paul Delaroche
1797 - 1856 (59 years)
Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche was a French painter who achieved his greater successes painting historical scenes. He became famous in Europe for his melodramatic depictions that often portrayed subjects from English and French history. The emotions emphasised in Delaroche's paintings appeal to Romanticism while the detail of his work along with the deglorified portrayal of historic figures follow the trends of Academicism and Neoclassicism. Delaroche aimed to depict his subjects and history with pragmatic realism. He did not consider popular ideals and norms in his creations, but rather painted al...
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Harold Rosenberg
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Harold Rosenberg was an American writer, educator, philosopher and art critic. He coined the term Action Painting in 1952 for what was later to be known as abstract expressionism. Rosenberg is best known for his art criticism. From 1962 until his death, he was the art critic of The New Yorker.
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Herbert Hawkes
1872 - 1943 (71 years)
Herbert Edwin Hawkes was an American mathematician and an experienced educator and had first-hand knowledge of the various problems, boys face during their college life. His 25-year tenure as Dean of Columbia College, the longest of any Columbia College dean, earned him the title "the dean of American college deans".
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Cecilia Beaux
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Eliza Cecilia Beaux was an American artist and the first woman to teach art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Known for her elegant and sensitive portraits of friends, relatives, and Gilded Age patrons, Beaux painted many famous subjects including First Lady Edith Roosevelt, Admiral Sir David Beatty and Georges Clemenceau.
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Robert Walker
1607 - 1658 (51 years)
Robert Walker was an English portrait painter, notable for his portraits of the "Lord Protector" Oliver Cromwell and other distinguished parliamentarians of the period. He was influenced by Van Dyck, and many of his paintings can now be found at the National Portrait Gallery, London.
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Henry Raeburn
1756 - 1823 (67 years)
Sir Henry Raeburn was a Scottish portrait painter. He served as Portrait Painter to King George IV in Scotland. Biography Raeburn was born the son of a manufacturer in Stockbridge, on the Water of Leith: a former village now within the city of Edinburgh. He had an older brother, born in 1744, called William Raeburn. His ancestors were believed to have been soldiers, and may have taken the name "Raeburn" from a hill farm in Annandale, held by Sir Walter Scott's family. Orphaned, he was supported by William and placed in Heriot's Hospital, where he received an education. At the age of fifteen ...
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Michael Avon Oeming
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michael Avon Oeming is an American comic book creator, both as an artist and writer. Career Oeming is a fan of ancient mythology, having written or drawn several projects centering on the Norse gods. He frequently collaborates with long-time friend Bryan J. L. Glass and with Brian Michael Bendis. He is part of the M.O.B. crew of comic book creators, along with David Mack, Brian Bendis and Daniel Berman.
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Arthur Godfrey
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Arthur Morton Godfrey was an American radio and television broadcaster and entertainer who was sometimes introduced by his nickname The Old Redhead. At the peak of his success, in the early to mid 1950s, Godfrey was heard on radio and seen on television up to six days a week, sometimes for as many as nine separate broadcasts for CBS. His programs included Arthur Godfrey Time , Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts , Arthur Godfrey and His Friends , The Arthur Godfrey Digest and King Arthur Godfrey and His Round Table .
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Brian Thomas
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Brian Thomas was a British artist best known for his decorative work in church buildings, particularly murals and stained glass. Biography Brian Thomas was born in Barnstaple, Devon, on 19 September 1912 to Frank and Margaret . He was educated at Bradfield College and awarded a science scholarship to study at Oxford University. He chose instead to attend the Byam Shaw School of Art in London. There he won a scholarship to the British School at Rome to study mural painting and travelled widely in Italy and Spain. During the war, he worked in the camouflage section of Home Security. From 1946 to 1954, he was principal of the Byam Shaw School of Art.
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Franklin Carmichael
1890 - 1945 (55 years)
Franklin Carmichael was a Canadian artist and member of the Group of Seven. Though he was primarily famous for his use of watercolours, he also used oil paints, charcoal and other media to capture the Ontario landscapes. Besides his work as a painter, he worked as a designer and illustrator, creating promotional brochures, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and designing books. Near the end of his life, Carmichael taught in the Graphic Design and Commercial Art Department at the Ontario College of Art .
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Albert Collins
1883 - 1951 (68 years)
Albert E. Collins was an Australian painter, teacher and actor born in New Zealand. After a successful career in painting and teaching he joined ABC radio, where he gave pleasure to a generation of children as "Joe" of the Children's Session and the main character in the long-running serial "The Wide-awake Bunyip".
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Robert Douglas Laurie
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Douglas Laurie was the founder and first president of the Association of University Teachers. Career He was born in Birkenhead and educated at Birkenhead School. He took a job in a bank until 1899 before resuming his studies at Liverpool University before gaining a third class degree in zoology from Merton College, Oxford. After working as a demonstrator and assistant lecturer in the department of comparative anatomy at Oxford, he moved back to the University of Liverpool in 1906 also as a demonstrator and assistant lecturer. From 1911 he also lectured in embryology and genetics. During the ...
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James Fairchild
1817 - 1902 (85 years)
James Harris Fairchild was an American educator, author, and third president of Oberlin College. Biography Fairchild was born in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on November 25, 1817. His father was Grandison Fairchild. Two of his brothers were Henry Fairchild and George Fairchild, both of whom became college presidents. Soon after his birth his parents moved to Brownhelm, Lorain County, Ohio, and settled on a farm about ten miles from the present site of Oberlin College.
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