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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#2151
Frederick Larson
#184697
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Frederick Anthony Heep "Rick" Larson is an American lawyer and law professor who became a filmmaker after he investigated the Star of Bethlehem and became a traveling speaker on the topic, then made his first documentary film The Star of Bethlehem about his findings in 2007. In March 2019 Larson released his second film, the documentary The Christ Quake, which had been in production since 2013.
Go to Profile#2152
Frederick Hartt
#39932
Overall Influence
1914 - 1991 (77 years)
Frederick Hartt was an Italian Renaissance scholar, author and professor of art history. His books include History of Italian Renaissance Art, Art: A History of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture , Michelangelo , The Sistine Chapel and The Renaissance in Italy and Spain . He was also involved with cataloging and repatriating art work looted and stolen by the Third Reich during World War II.
Go to Profile#2153
Danielle Fournier
#154779
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Danielle Fournier is a Quebec educator and writer. She was born in Montreal and received a PhD in literature from the Université de Sherbrooke. She also studied German at the University of New Brunswick. She has taught at the college and university level at various institutions including the Université de Sherbrooke, the University of New Brunswick, at McGill University, the Université du Québec à Montréal, at Concordia University and at the Collège Jean-de-Brébeuf, where she held a permanent position.
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Peter Smith
#107778
Overall Influence
1926 - 2013 (87 years)
Peter Smith was an architectural historian. His most important work, Houses of the Welsh Countryside, has been described as having "a defining influence on the understanding, enjoyment and conservation of Welsh traditional architecture".
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John Walker
#178595
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
John Charles Walker is a Canadian filmmaker and cinematographer. His film Strand: Under the Dark Cloth won the Genie Award for Best Feature-Length Documentary at the 11th Genie Awards in 1990, and he won Gemini Awards in 1992 for Leningradskaya: The Hand of Stalin and 1996 for Utshimassits: Place of the Boss.
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Karen Hearn
#96411
Overall Influence
Karen Hearn is a British art historian and curator. She has Master's degrees from the University of Cambridge and the University of London. She is an Honorary Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University College London. From 1992 to 2012 Hearn was the Curator of 16th & 17th Century British Art at the Tate where she curated major exhibitions on Tudor and Jacobean paintings, Anthony van Dyck, and Rubens. She was co-curator of Royalist Refugees at The Rubenshuis in Antwerp. She has also curated recent exhibitions at The National Portrait Gallery in London, The Harley Gallery, and The Foundling Museum.
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Simon Roy
#185753
Overall Influence
1968 - 2022 (54 years)
Simon Roy was a Canadian author. He was also a professor of literature at the Collège Lionel-Groulx for more than thirty years. Biography Born on 14 June 1968 in Saint-Alexis, Roy married Marianne Marquis-Gravel, with whom he had two children, Romane and Colin. He was known for his 2014 novel Ma vie rouge Kubrick, which received the Prix des libraires du Québec in the category of Québécois novels.
Go to Profile#2158
Johnny Dorelli
#151681
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Giorgio Guidi , known professionally as Johnny Dorelli, is an Italian actor, singer and television host. Early life Dorelli was born in Meda, Italy. In 1946 he moved to New York City with his family, where his father, Nino D'Aurelio , found work as opera singer. Dorelli studied double bass and piano at the High School of Music and Art in New York. He took the stage name Dorelli in imitation of how the surname D'Aurelio was pronounced in English.
Go to Profile#2159
Andrew Watsky
#117514
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Andrew Mark Watsky is an American academic, art historian, author and university professor. Early life Watsky was awarded his bachelor's degree from Oberlin College and his master's degree and doctorate from Princeton University.
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Judith Colton
#187172
Overall Influence
Judith Colton is an American historian of art who is a professor emerita at Yale University. One of her best known works is The Parnasse Franc̈ois: Titon Du Tillet and the Origins of the Monument to Genius , a study of Évrard Titon du Tillet.
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Yukari Tamura
#147039
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
is a Japanese voice actress and singer affiliated with Amuleto . She debuted as a voice actress in 1997, releasing her debut single "Yūki o Kudasai" on March 26, 1997. Her role as Nanoha Takamachi in the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha series contributed to a rise in her popularity, as several of her singles were used as the ending themes for the franchise's anime adaptations. Besides Nanoha, she voices the title characters Haruka Minazuki / Red Angel in Kaitō Tenshi Twin Angel, Ringo Kinoshita in No-Rin, Yamada in B Gata H Kei and Kaoru Tsunashi in I Can't Understand What My Husband Is Saying. O...
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Leslie Thornton
#175594
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Leslie Thornton is an American avant-garde filmmaker and artist. Life Leslie Thornton was born in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Schenectady, New York. Both her father and grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project, but due to the project's high level of secrecy, neither knew of the other's involvement until many years later. Thornton learned as an adult, and as a result the atomic bomb and themes of apocalypse appear in some of her works . She first developed an interest in film as a teenager when she frequented experimental cinema screenings at her local Unitarian Church in Schenectady.
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Kim Woods
#188418
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Kim Wilford Woods is an art historian specialising in northern European late Gothic sculpture and is Senior Lecturer in art history at the Open University. Career Woods has a bachelor's degree in history from the University of York. She gained her PhD in art history in 1988 from the Courtauld Institute, University of London with a thesis titled 'Netherlandish Carved Wooden Altarpieces of the 15th and early 16th centuries in Britain'. She joined the Open University in 1999. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 11 November 2005.
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Ioli Kalavrezou
#185896
Overall Influence
Ioli Kalavrezou is Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine Art at Harvard University. Her research focuses on early Christian and Byzantine art. Career Prior to joining Harvard, Kalavrezou taught at UCLA and at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.
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Aleksander Kaczorowski
#142555
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Aleksander Kaczorowski is a Polish bohemist, journalist, editor, writer and translator. Life Kaczorowski has been studying at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Warsaw. In 1998, he graduated from Czech studies at the University of Warsaw.
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Detlef Hoffmann
#102719
Overall Influence
1940 - 2013 (73 years)
Detlef Hoffmann was a German art historian. Life Detlef Hoffmann was born on 2 October 1940 in Hamburg. He studied art history and philosophy in Hamburg, Freiburg, Frankfurt am Main, Munich and Berlin. He was commissioned in 1968 at the University of Freiburg by Willibald Sauerländer with a thesis on the Charlemagne frescoes of Alfred Rethel doctorate. From 1968 to 1971 he did research on the cultural history of playing cards. From 1971 to 1980 he worked at the Historical Museum Frankfurt and as a lecturer at the Frankfurt University.
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Michelle Bubenicek
#122767
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Michelle Bubenicek is a French medievalist historian. She was appointed director of the École Nationale des Chartes on 1 September 2016. Works Books 2002: 2013: 2014: 2016: 2016: Pamphlet 1996: Awards Prix Madeleine-Lenoir 2002 de la Société de l'École des chartes pour Quand les femmes gouvernent, droit et politique au XIV.
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Mika Natif
#192109
Overall Influence
Mika Natif is an Israeli-born American scholar of art history specializing in art of the Islamic World, especially Mongol art. Dr. Natif currently serves as an assistant professor in Art History at the George Washington University. She has previously held a post-doctorate at the College of the Holy Cross and did curatorial work at the Harvard Art Museums on Islamic and Later Indian Art. Dr. Natif is a co-editor of Eros and Sexuality in Islamic Art.
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Caroline Arscott
#168665
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Caroline Arscott is an Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute. Career Arscott studied at Newnham College Cambridge and the University of Leeds. She is an expert on art of the Victorian period and has lectured at The Courtauld since 1988.
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Judith Wechsler
#191731
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Judith Wechsler is an American art historian and filmmaker. She is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor Emerita at Tufts University, specializing in nineteenth-century French painting, drawing, and caricature, and an award-winning documentary filmmaker. She has also taught at MIT and Harvard.
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Carol Neuman de Vegvar
#117328
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Carol L. Neuman de Vegvar is an art historian and Professor of Fine Arts at Ohio Wesleyan University. Career De Vagvar undertook undergraduate study at Bryn Mawr College before completing her PhD on Anglo-Saxon art in Northumbria in 1981 at the University of Pennsylvania. She was elected as a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London on 5 June 2003.
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Charlotte Bolland
#121345
Overall Influence
Charlotte Bolland is senior curator for sixteenth century collections at the National Portrait Gallery, London. Career Bolland has a degree in history from the University of Durham and a master's degree in history of art from the Courtauld Institute of Art. She completed her PhD at the Queen Mary University of London in 2011 on "Italian Material Culture at the Tudor Court".
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Jean-Claude Lebensztejn
#78716
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Jean-Claude Lebensztejn is a French art historian and art critic, formerly a professor at University of Paris I-Pantéon-Sorbonne. Lebensztejn is one of the most remarkable representatives of the now older generation of French art theorists, sometimes cited as a pioneer of structuralism. His contribution to a historically critical evaluation of sources for 20th-century art is considerable; see his recent book on Cézanne .
Go to Profile#2174
Alf Bøe
#126772
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Alf Bøe was a Norwegian art historian, educator, curator and author. Biography Bøe was born in Bergen, Norway. He was a son of professor Johannes Bøe and Dagny Godager . His father was a professor of archeology at the University Museum of Bergen.
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Lewis Watts
#181638
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Lewis Watts is an American photographer, archivist curator, art historian, author, lecturer, and educator. He is a Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz . Career Lewis Watts was born in 1946 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He has a BA degree in political science, as well as a MA degree in photography and design from University of California, Berkeley . He had taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Berkeley, as well as other institutions for over 40 years.
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Mercedes Bunz
#20243
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Mercedes Bunz is a German art historian, journalist, and the Professor of Digital Culture and Society at King's College London. Biography Early career Bunz studied philosophy and art history at the Freie Universität Berlin, after passing her final exams at the Celtis-Gymnasium secondary school in the German town of Schweinfurt in 1991. Together with Sascha Kösch, Riley Reinhold, and Benjamin Weiss she founded the Berlin music monthly De:Bug in 1997, becoming its co-editor and editor-in-chief from 1999 until 2001.
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Benita Raphan
#189951
Overall Influence
1962 - 2021 (59 years)
Benita Raphan was an American filmmaker and designer. She was known for directing short documentary films about "eccentric and unusual minds", including John Nash, Buckminster Fuller, Edwin Land and Emily Dickinson.
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Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann
#99501
Overall Influence
1923 - 2017 (94 years)
Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann OON was a Dutch American art historian and professor. Career Born in Naarden, Haverkamp-Begemann spent most of his childhood in Kemerovo and Moscow in Russia, where his father worked as an engineer. After a year in Morocco, the family returned to the Netherlands in the late 1930s. Haverkamp-Begemann finished high school in Dordrecht, and initially studied law, but soon turned to art history. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History with honors at Utrecht University in 1958. Haverkamp-Begemann's dissertation was on the Dutch Golden Age painter Willem Pieters...
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Michela Magas
#190467
Overall Influence
Michela Magas is a designer, entrepreneur and innovation specialist, of Croatian-British nationality, and is the first woman from the Creative Industries to receive the European Woman Innovator of the Year award by the European Commission.
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Yvonne Ciannella
#121220
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Yvonne Regina Ciannella was an American coloratura soprano in opera and concert. She began her career performing and recording with the Robert Shaw Chorale in the early 1950s. After graduate voice studies at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, she embarked on a career as an opera singer; working mainly in Germany at the Staatstheater Braunschweig, Theater Bonn, and Theater Dortmund during the 1960s. She also appeared as a guest artist with opera companies in Berlin, Cologne, Florida, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Vienna. For many years she was a member of the voice faculty of the College of Music at Florida...
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Stuart Browning
#191265
Overall Influence
Stuart Browning is a political commentator, writer, film director, film producer and entrepreneur. Browning produced The Free Market Cure series, a collection of short films arguing against collectivized medicine and for the benefits of free markets in health care. He is a fellow of the Moving Picture Institute, and a producer of Indoctrinate U, and its predecessor Brainwashing 101. Browning was President and co-founder of Embarcadero Technologies from 1995 until February 2000, a leading database software vendor in San Francisco.
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Stanley K. Abe
#192196
Overall Influence
Stanley K. Abe is an art historian with Duke University and a specialist in Chinese art and Buddhist art. He received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. His book Ordinary images won the Freer Gallery/Smithsonian Institution: Shimada Prize.
Go to Profile#2183
Wachtang Djobadze
#97481
Overall Influence
1917 - 2007 (90 years)
Wachtang Djobadze was a Georgian art historian and Professor at the California State University, Los Angeles. During the Soviet Union, he lived as an émigré in the United States, and was the only Georgian scholar to have opportunity to travel to Turkey where a number of medieval Georgian churches and monasteries lay in ruins in the historical Tao-Klarjeti region and Antioch. He studied and described these monuments in several works, including Materials for the Study of Georgian Monasteries in the Western Environs of Antioch on the Orontes , Archeological Investigations in the Region West of ...
Go to Profile#2184
Jadwiga Lipińska
#109679
Overall Influence
1932 - 2009 (77 years)
Jadwiga Lipińska née Freyer was a Polish Egyptologist. Biography Lipińska was the daughter of Edward Freyer and Zofia Kodis, an artist. She graduated from the University of Warsaw with her masters and her doctorate as a student of Prof. Kazimierz Michalowski. Following her studies, she went on to work at the National Museum, Warsaw from 1958. She began as an assistant in the Gallery of Ancient Art and by 1991, she became curator of the Gallery of Ancient Art, a position she held until she retired in 2002. She also lectured at University of Warsaw, and Akademii Teologii Katolickiej in Warsaw and the University of Lodz.
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Christa Grössinger
#134945
Overall Influence
1942 - 2008 (66 years)
Christa Grössinger was a German academic specialising in late medieval and early Renaissance art in northern Europe. She was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. Grössinger was an expert on misericords and medieval church furniture. Her work included the role of women in medieval and Renaissance art and on women and women's writings from antiquity to the late Middle Ages. She joined the University of Manchester in 1972 where she became a Senior Lecturer.
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Ellen Beer
#177319
Overall Influence
1926 - 2004 (78 years)
Ellen Judith Beer was a Swiss art historian. She focused on Medieval art. Biography Beer received her doctorate degree at the University of Zurich with her publication about the "Rose der Kathedrale von Lausanne", the rose window in the Lausanne Cathedral. In 1965, she became associate professor and 1971 full professor at the University of Bern. The Ellen-J.-Beer Foundation was created in her memory; it supports young researchers and medieval art history projects.
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Adelbert Van de Walle
#130117
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Adelbert Van de Walle was a Flemish-Belgian architect, art historian and professor in the History of Art and Archaeology at the University of Ghent . Life Van de Walle obtained successively academic degrees in Architecture, Master's and Doctorate in the History of Art and Archaeology, specialising in the Middle Ages, at UGent. During his studies, his tutors in history were François-Louis Ganshof, Hans Van Werveke and Jan Dhondt. In the History of Art, he was taught by Broeder Firmin De Smidt and Jozef Duverger, Herman Bouchery and R. Roggen.
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Philippe Roberts-Jones
#105617
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
Baron Philippe Roberts-Jones was a Belgian art historian who was the head of conservation of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. A member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium, of which he was president in 1980, he was also a member of the Free Academy of Belgium and a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles. He was also a published poet.
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Joseph McCann
#170875
Overall Influence
1940 - 2015 (75 years)
Joseph E. McCann III was an American academic and academic administrator. McCann earned an MA and PhD from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, following an MBA and BA from the University of Washington.
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Krista Kodres
#122231
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Krista Kodres is an Estonian art historian and former backstroke and freestyle swimmer. From 1971 until 1974, she become 7-times Estonian champion in different swimming disciplines and was a member of Estonian swimming team. She has set 13 national records.
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Anne-Catherine Robert-Hauglustaine
#183522
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Anne-Catherine Robert is a Belgian museum professional and lecturer at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne who also served as Director General of the International Council of Museums , from May 2014 through November 2016.
Go to Profile#2192
Boris Wastiau
#182821
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Boris Wastiau has been Director of the Musée d'ethnographie de Genève since February 2009. He is also a Tenured professor at the University of Geneva. Born in Belgium, he was educated at the Université libre de Bruxelles, University of Coimbra and the University of East Anglia .
Go to Profile#2193
Noushafarin Ansari
#43564
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Noushafarin Ansari is an Iranian librarian, educator, and manager. Life Her parents were diplomats; therefore she was exposed to many languages and cultures in Asia and Europe. In 1958-1960 she studied librarianship in Geneva, a discipline she continued at McGill University and at the University of Toronto. She worked as a librarian at the Delhi Public Library, and Tehran University Central library, and was Library Director at the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at Tehran University. In 1962 she married Mehdi Mohaghegh, a renowned Iranian university professor and scholar.
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Udo Mainzer
#115987
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Udo Mainzer is a German art historian and monument conservator. He held office until September 2011. as director of the and of the . Career Born in Witterda, Thuringia, Mainzer studied history, art history and archaeology at the University of Cologne from 1968 and obtained his doctorate there in 1973 under Günther Binding with a dissertation on Stadttore im Rheinland. Since 1976, he has been a lecturer in art history and monument preservation at the Faculty of Philosophy there and was appointed honorary professor in 1983.
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Ewa Chojecka
#173184
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Ewa Sabine Chojecka is a Polish art historian who served as chair of art history at the University of Silesia in Katowice from 1977 to 2003, and chairwoman of the Silesian Museum and the Bielsko-Biała Museum and Castle. She was awarded a Georg Dehio Cultural Prize in 2013, and invested with the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1989.
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Joanne Cuthbertson
#192318
Overall Influence
Joanne Cuthbertson was the chancellor of the University of Calgary in Alberta from 2006 until 2010.
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Jiří Fajt
#172029
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Jiří Fajt is a Czech art historian living in Berlin and in Prague. From July 2014 to April 2019 he served as a Director General of the National Gallery in Prague. He is particularly interested in mediaeval and early modern arts of Central and Central-Eastern Europe. He is the author of a number of publications and successful international exhibitions.
Go to Profile#2198
Helen Doron
#182312
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Helen Doron is a British-Israeli linguist and educator based in Israel. She is best known as the creator of the Helen Doron Method of teaching and as the Founder of Helen Doron Educational Group, an international pedagogic network for babies, children, and teens learning English and other programs, including Helen Doron Academy Kindergartens, Helen Doron International, MathRiders and Helen Doron Connect.
Go to Profile#2199
Erling Lars Dale
#183061
Overall Influence
1947 - 2011 (64 years)
Erling Lars Dale was a Norwegian educationalist. He took his doctor's degree in 1987, and was an associate professor at the University of Oslo. He was hired as professor in 1993. Selected bibliography This is a list of his most notable works:Pedagogikk og samfunnsforandring De strategiske pedagoger: pedagogikkens vitenskapshistorie i Norge Rom for alle - blikk for den enkelte Vurdering og læring i en elevaktiv skole
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Peter Edgar Corbett
#182203
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Professor Peter Edgar Corbett , was a British art historian and classical scholar. Biography Born in Preston, Hertfordshire on 19 June 1920, Peter Corbett was educated at Bedford School and at St John's College, Oxford. He was Thomas Whitcombe Greene Scholar and Macmillan Student in the British School at Athens between 1947 and 1949, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum between 1949 and 1961, Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London between 1961 and 1982, and President of the Society for the Promotion of H...
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