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 Economics,
#4701
Richard Charles Mills
1886 - 1952 (66 years)
Professor Richard Charles Mills was an Australian economist and academic. He was head of the Faculty of Economics at the University of Sydney for 23 years, and a key member of several Australian government instrumentalities.
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Helen Sumner Woodbury
1876 - 1933 (57 years)
Helen Laura Sumner Woodbury was an American economist, academic, historian and public official. Biography Woodbury was born Helen Laura Sumner on 12 March 1876 to the district attorney and later Colorado judge George True Sumner and Katherine Eudora Marsh in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Woodbury attended Wellesley College where she got her undergraduate degree in 1898 before going on to be one of the first women to earn a PhD in economics, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1908 with her thesis, "The Labor Movement in America, 1827–1837" Woodbury was influenced by her professors, including Katharine Coman and Emily Greene Balch in her undergraduate years as well as Richard T.
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Thomas A. Finlay
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Thomas Aloysius Finlay, S.J. was an Irish Catholic priest, economist, philosopher and editor. Early life He was born on 6 July 1848 near Lanesborough, the son of William Finlay, an engineer, and his wife Maria Magan; the politician Thomas Finlay, named after him, was his nephew. His father, who died in 1864, was from Fifeshire, a Protestant convert to Catholicism; his mother was a Catholic from County Cavan.
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Maria Smith-Falkner
1878 - 1968 (90 years)
Maria Natanovna Smith-Falkner was a Soviet economist, statistician and a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1939 onwards. She was a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, having joined the Bolsheviks in 1918.
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Theresa McMahon
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Theresa Schmid McMahon was an American economist, political scientist, author, and activist. She earned her PhD in sociology at the University of Wisconsin. She taught in the Department of Economics at the University of Washington for 26 years.
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William J. Abernathy
1933 - 1983 (50 years)
William J. Abernathy was an American professor at the Harvard Business School. With his empirical studies of the automobile industry, Abernathy contributed to explaining the industrial decline of the US automobile industry and influenced management thinking to pay more attention to innovation and long-term strategic decision making.
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Vladimir Jovanović
1833 - 1922 (89 years)
Vladimir Jovanović was a Serbian political theorist, economist, politician, philosopher, political and literary writer and activist for the unification of all Serbian lands in the Balkans. Biography Jovanović was educated at the Universities of Vienna, Berlin in agricultural and economic sciences, and Belgrade, where he stayed at the home of his father's relatives, the brothers Dimitrije and Matija Matić. Abroad, he attended the lectures of Karl Heinrich Rau's son Ludwig at Hohenhaven Agricultural Academy and Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher in Vienna. In Belgrade, the Matić house was much more than just a place to stay.
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Jacobus Franciscus Haccoû
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Jacobus Franciscus Haccoû was a Dutch economist, Professor of Business Economics at the University of Amsterdam and first director of SEO Economic Research, known for his work on the futures exchange of goods and the economic situation in Dutch East Indies.
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Elli Saurio
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Elli Saurio was a Finnish economist. She was the first professor of household economics in Europe, the first woman in Finland to hold a doctorate in economics, and the first female professor in the University of Helsinki Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry.
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John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
John Anderson, 1st Viscount Waverley, was a Scottish civil servant and politician who is best known for his service in the War Cabinet during the Second World War, for which he was nicknamed the "Home Front Prime Minister". He served as Home Secretary, Lord President of the Council and Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Anderson shelters are named after him.
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Sydney Chapman
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Sir Sydney John Chapman KCB CBE was an English economist and civil servant. He was Chief Economic Adviser to HM Government from 1927 to 1932. Early life and education Chapman was born in Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk, the son of a merchant. His elder brother was the chemist David Leonard Chapman. The family moved to Manchester and Chapman was educated at Manchester Grammar School and Owens College. He graduated BA in 1891 and worked as a schoolmaster at Sheffield Royal Grammar School from 1893 to 1895 before entering Trinity College, Cambridge in 1895, graduating with a double first in moral sciences in 1898.
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Germán Bernácer
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Germán Bernácer Tormo was an economist from Spain. See also Germán Bernácer Prize
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Melvin G. deChazeau
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Melvin G. de Chazeau was an American economist and the second Dean of Cornell's S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management following Paul O'Leary's return to teaching. De Chazeau joined the university's College of Arts & Sciences Economics Department in 1948 and he retired from the Cornell Faculty in 1967. As a professor emeritus, de Chazeau taught at Cornell and Dartmouth College through AY 1969–1970.
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Costin Murgescu
1919 - 1989 (70 years)
Costin Ion Murgescu was a Romanian economist, jurist, journalist and diplomat. A supporter of fascism during his youth, he switched to communism by the end of World War II, and became an editor of the Communist Party daily organ, România Liberă. He taught at the University of Bucharest and worked for the Economic Research Institute. Having campaigned for multilateralism in world affairs as early as 1944, he helped to distance Romania from the Soviet Union after 1964, and later represented his country at the United Nations. He wrote extensively, publishing works on the effects of land reform a...
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Henryk Korowicz
1888 - 1941 (53 years)
Henryk Korowicz was a Polish economist, professor and rector of the Academy of Foreign Trade in Lwów. His father was Joachim Kornreich-Korowicz . He studied in Munich and Strasbourg. Before 1918, he published under the name Dr. Henryk Kornreich. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army and, after Polish independence, in the Polish Army, during the Polish-Soviet War, on the Volhynia front. He worked for several years at Bank Polski in Warsaw. After his marriage to Olga Pawłowska, a colleague and noblewoman from Bukovina, he lived in Lwów.
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John V. Van Sickle
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
John Valentine Van Sickle was a professor of economics at Vanderbilt University and Wabash College. He wrote and co-authored a number of articles on the economy of the American south. He also co-authored a principles of economics textbook with Benjamin Rogge. He was the author of Freedom in Jeopardy.
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Eiichi Sugimoto
1901 - 1952 (51 years)
Eiichi Sugimoto was a Japanese economist and professor at the Tokyo University of Commerce who was a pioneer of mathematical economics in Japan. He participated in the Tokuzō Fukuda Seminar, and majored in Marxist economics at the Tokyo University of Commerce and went on to study in Germany before returning to Japan.
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Kuo Ping-Wen
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Kuo Ping-Wen or Guo Bingwen , courtesy name Hongsheng , was an influential Chinese educator. Biography Kuo was born in Shanghai, Jiangsu province, and his father was an elder in the Presbyterian Church. He attended Lowrie Institute , which was connected with the First Presbyterian Church in Shanghai , graduating in 1896. Kuo Ping-wen then served in the customs and postal bureaus before coming to the United States in 1906 under the sponsorship of the Presbyterian Church, at first attending the Preparatory Academy at the University of Wooster, now the College of Wooster, in Ohio, and later, in 1...
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John Pringle Nichol
1804 - 1859 (55 years)
John Pringle Nichol FRSE FRAS was a Scottish educator, phrenologist, astronomer and economist who did much to popularise astronomy in a manner that appealed to nineteenth century tastes. Early life Born at Huntly Hill, near Brechin, Angus, Nichol was the son of a gentleman farmer and was educated at the local grammar school and then studied mathematics and natural philosophy at King's College, University of Aberdeen. He then changed to study divinity. He was licensed as a preacher and became a highly effective communicator, but the impact of phrenological thinking led him to abandon the Chur...
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Claude Lucien Bergery
1787 - 1863 (76 years)
Claude Lucien Bergery was a French economist and management theorist. He was a founder of scientific management. Life The son of an innkeeper, Bergery was born in Orléans. He was a student at the École Polytechnique which he entered in 1806, He became an artillery captain, serving in Spain, and was decorated by Napoleon I during the Hundred Days. Demobilised, he taught applied science at the École royale de l'artillerie in Metz from 1817, then transferred to teacher training in the same city.
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Romesh Chunder Dutt
1848 - 1909 (61 years)
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism. Early life and education Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Maulika Kayastha family. His parents were Thakamani and Isan Chunder Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. He was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at Hare School, Calcutta. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861.
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Johan Vogt
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Johan Herman Vogt was a Norwegian social economist, author and journal editor. Biography Vogt was born in Kristiania , Norway. He was a son of Johan Herman Lie Vogt and Martha Johanne Abigael Kinck . His father was a professor in geology at Norwegian Institute of Technology in Trondheim. His twin brother Jørgen Herman Vogt was a newspaper editor and member of the Norwegian Parliament. His brother Fredrik Vogt was an engineer and rector at the Norwegian Institute of Technology. His brother Thorolf Vogt was a geologist and Arctic explorer.
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Luigi Amoroso
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Luigi Amoroso was an Italian neoclassical economist influenced by Vilfredo Pareto. He provided support for and influenced the economic policy during the fascist regime. Work The microeconomical concept of the Amoroso–Robinson relation is named after him : according to paper he is one of the first economists to have studied the dynamical equilibrium theory by using an analogy between economic systems and classical mechanics, thus applying to theories of economical behaviour mathematical tools as the calculus of variation. In his young years he contributed to the theory of functions of several...
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Ruth Allen
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Ruth Alice Allen was an American economist and academic who specialized in institutional economics. Personal life and education Allen was born on July 28, 1889, in Cameron, Texas, and earned her B.A. degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1921 and her M.A. from the same university two years later. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1931. Her doctoral advisor was Harry A. Millis and her dissertation committee included Frank Knight and Paul Douglas.
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Karl Diehl
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Karl Diehl was a German economist and professor who taught from 1908 until his death in Freiburg. He taught at the universities of Heidelberg and Freiburg, known for teaching on the subject of Anarchism.
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Ewald Bosse
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Ewald Theodor Alfred Bosse was a Swedish-Norwegian sociologist and economist. He was born in Stockholm as a son of bookseller and publisher Johan Heinrich Wilhelm Bosse and Anne-Marie Lehmann . He was a brother of Alma Fahlstrøm and Harriet Bosse. He took the doctorate in Kiel in 1914 on the thesis Norwegens Stellung im internationalen Wirtschaftsleben vom 16. Jarhundert bis zur Gegenwart. He was a professor in Kiel from 1920 to 1926 and 1948 to his death. He died in September 1956 in Oslo.
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Charles F. Marsh
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Charles Franklin Marsh was an American economist and academic who became the seventh president of Wofford College on September 1, 1958, and served until his retirement in 1968. A 1925 graduate of Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, he earned the Master of Arts from the University of Illinois in 1926, and the Ph.D. from Illinois in 1928. He was a faculty member at American University, and from 1930 to 1958, a professor of economics at the College of William and Mary. In his last six years at William and Mary, he was Dean of the Faculty. He was involved in civic affairs in Williamsburg, serving on several economic planning agencies.
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Gasparo Scaruffi
1519 - 1584 (65 years)
Gasparo Scaruffi , from Reggio Emilia was an Italian economist who proposed a universal currency in order to facilitate an open, objective and just economic system, which, he argued, was the essential foundation of a just society.
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Abul Fazal Atwar Husain
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Abul Fazal Atwar Husain was a Bangladeshi economist. Early life Husain was born on 21 August 1918 in Noakhali, Noakhali District, East Bengal, British India. His father was from Bogra and was in Noakhali working as the deputy magistrate. He graduated from Noakhali Zilla School and then Dhaka College. He graduated from Dhaka University with a double major in economics and political science. He moved to London in 1938. He studied at the London School of Economics, finished another undergrad degree and a master's degree, and graduated in 1943. He worked as an extended lecturer at the India House...
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Frederic George Young
1858 - 1929 (71 years)
Frederic George Young was an educator in the U.S. state of Oregon. He was born in Burnett, Wisconsin on June 3, 1858, and after graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1886, he taught in Wisconsin and South Dakota. He moved to Portland in 1890, and served as principal at its high school and as president of Albany College before being appointed professor of economics and history at the University of Oregon in 1895. He was a founding officer of the Oregon Historical Society in 1898, and as editor of its Oregon Historical Quarterly from its founding in 1900 through the December 1928 issue. He served on the Oregon Commission for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition.
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Faith M. Williams
1893 - 1958 (65 years)
Faith Moors Williams was an American economist who became Director of the Office of Foreign Labor Conditions in the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Williams graduated from Wellesley College in 1915, and earned a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University in 1924. Her doctoral dissertation was The Food Manufacturing Industries in New York and its Environs: Present Trends and Probable Future Developments. She then worked on rural nutrition as an assistant professor in the College of Home Economics at Cornell University, and assisted with the economic components of the Middletown studies.
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Garfield V. Cox
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Garfield Vestal Cox was a leading authority on business fluctuations and forecasting. He was one of the first people to study the performance of experts versus novices in forecasting stock prices. He was also the Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business.
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Kate Claghorn
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Kate Holladay Claghorn was an American sociologist, economist, statistician, legal scholar, and Progressive Era activist, who became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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Grace Raymond Hebard
1861 - 1936 (75 years)
Grace Raymond Hebard was an American historian, suffragist, scholar, writer, political economist, and noted University of Wyoming educator. Hebard's standing as a historian in part rose from her years trekking Wyoming's high plains and mountains seeking first-hand accounts of Wyoming's early pioneers. Today, her books on Wyoming history are sometimes challenged due to her romanticization of the Old West, spurring questions regarding accuracy of her research findings. In particular, her conclusion after decades of field research that Sacajawea was buried in Wyoming's Wind River Indian Reserva...
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William Amasa Scott
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
William Amasa Scott was an American economist and one of the leading representatives of the marginalist school. He received his B.A. from the University of Rochester in 1886, and his PhD under supervision of Richard T. Ely from Johns Hopkins University in 1892. Scott was a professor of Political Economy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison until 1931, and a contributor to John Kells Ingram’s A History of Political Economy.
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Bernhard Steinberger
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Bernhard Steinberger was a German engineer and economist. After 1945 he became an East German political dissident and / or victim, spending most of the period between 1949 and 1960 in prisons and labour camps. He had, by this time, already spent the war years accommodated in a succession of "emigrants' camps" in Switzerland, where he had arrived from Milan with his mother and sister in 1938 in order to escape the effects of newly introduced antisemitic legislation in Italy.
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Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez
1797 - 1869 (72 years)
Antoine-Elisée Cherbuliez was a Swiss liberal thinker. My mission is to influence the world, he wrote in 1844. While his economic though stimulated some responses, that is hardly the case for his political ideas, in effect stillborn. Unlike his compatriots Benjamin Constant and Jean de Sismondi, Cherbuliez has had little attention from contemporary historians. His thoughts were spread thinly over various publications, with no major work of synthesis. He was a retiring academic and somewhat isolated.
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Thomas Roderick Dew
1802 - 1846 (44 years)
Thomas Roderick Dew was a professor and public intellectual, then president of The College of William & Mary . Although he first achieved national stature for opposing protective tariffs, today Dew may be best known for his pro-slavery advocacy.
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Mieczysław Witold Gutkowski
1893 - 1943 (50 years)
Mieczysław Witold Gutkowski was a Polish lawyer, a world-renowned economist who specialized in public finance, and one of the first scholars of economic analysis of law in Poland. He was a professor at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. He was murdered by German SS units and Lithuanian collaborators in the Ponary massacre.
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Robert Wallace
1697 - 1771 (74 years)
Robert Wallace was a minister of the Church of Scotland and writer on population. Life He was the only son of Margaret Stewart, wife of Rev Matthew Wallace, the parish minister of Kincardine-in-Menteith , where he was born on 7 January 1697. Educated at Stirling grammar school, he then attended the University of Edinburgh in 1711, and acted for a time as assistant to James Gregory, the University professor of mathematics. He was one of the founders of the Rankenian Club in 1717.
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Joseph Lowe
Joseph Lowe was a Scottish journalist and political economist, well known for his pioneer treatment of indexation. Maurice Kendall called him the generally recognised "father of index numbers". In the debate on the Corn Laws in 1839, Sir Robert Peel cited the views of Lowe and Thomas Tooke, to argue against imposing a low fixed rate of import duty on corn.
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Gian Domenico Romagnosi
1761 - 1835 (74 years)
Gian Domenico Romagnosi was an Italian philosopher, economist and jurist. Biography Gian Domenico Romagnosi was born in Salsomaggiore Terme. He studied law at the University of Parma from 1782 to 1786. In 1791 he became the chief civil magistrate of Trento. In the late 18th and early 19th century Trento was successively under the rule of France, Italy and Austria. In 1799 Romagnosi was arrested in Innsbruck during fifteen months by the Austrians on account of his alleged sympathy with the French, but he was acquitted. In 1801 the French occupied Trento, and he was raised to the position of Secretary of the Higher Council.
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Dimitar Dobrev
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Dimitar Dobrev was one of Bulgaria’s leading economists and academicians. He worked in the field of accountancy as science, a theoretician, economist, lecturer, second Rector of the Free University of Political and Economic Sciences, professor at the State High School of Finance and administrative sciences and the Higher Economics Institute "Karl Marx".
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Helene Reynard
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Helene Reynard or Helene Reinherz was a United Kingdom economist and college administrator. She created as a separate entity King's College of Household and Social Science in London and then ran it.
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Marion Parris Smith
1879 - Present (147 years)
Marion Parris Smith was a professor of economics at Bryn Mawr College. Biography She was born as Marion Parris on 22 May 1879 in Manhattan to Edward Lowden Parris and Mary Ida Dubois She married William Roy Smith on 11 June 1912 in Manhattan, New York.
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Melchiorre Gioia
1767 - 1829 (62 years)
Melchiorre Gioja was an Italian writer on philosophy and political economy. His name is spelled Gioia in modern Italian. Biography Gioja was born at Piacenza, in what is now northern Italy. Originally intended for the church, he took orders, but renounced them in 1796 and went to Milan, where he devoted himself to the study of political economy. Having obtained the prize for an essay on "the kind of free government best adapted to Italy" he decided upon the career of a publicist.
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Elizabeth Baker
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Elizabeth Faulkner Baker was an American economist and academic who specialized in scientific management and the relationship between employment and technological change, especially the role of women.
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Harmon White Caldwell
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Harmon White Caldwell was President of the University of Georgia in Athens from 1935 until 1948 and Chancellor of the University System of Georgia from 1948 to 1964. Caldwell was born in the Carmel Community of Meriwether County, Georgia, in 1899. He earned an A.B. from UGA in 1919 after only two years and was a member of the Chi Phi Fraternity and the Phi Kappa Literary Society. Upon graduation, he taught public school in both Sasser, Georgia and Taylorsville, Georgia. In 1921, Caldwell entered the Harvard Law School and graduated with the degree Bachelor of Law in 1924. That same year he ...
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William Rollo
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
William Rollo Jr. was a Scottish-born South African academic. History Rollo was born in 1892 in Glasgow and graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA in classics in 1915. After the war he completed his DLitt in linguistics at Leiden University. His thesis was on the Marquina dialect of the Basque language. He immigrated to South Africa in 1925, where he was professor of classics, then Head of the Classics Department and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Cape Town until 1953, when he was invited to take up the post of interim principal of the University College of Rhod...
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Siegfried Becher
1806 - 1873 (67 years)
Siegfried Becher was an Austrian political economist, Biography Becher was born in Planá . He studied at Prague and Vienna. In 1831, he entered government service. He was appointed professor at the Polytechnic Institute, Vienna, in 1835. From 1848 to 1852, he was employed in the ministry of commerce, for which he made a trip of investigation in Germany and Belgium in 1849. He died in Vienna.
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