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 Education,
#2401
Marshall McLuhan
1911 - 1980 (69 years)
Herbert Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian philosopher whose work is among the cornerstones of the study of media theory. He studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of Cambridge. He began his teaching career as a professor of English at several universities in the United States and Canada before moving to the University of Toronto in 1946, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is known as the "father of media studies".
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Dorothy L. Sayers
1893 - 1957 (64 years)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic. Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel Whose Body? was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love.
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N. F. S. Grundtvig
1783 - 1872 (89 years)
Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig , most often referred to as N. F. S. Grundtvig, was a Danish pastor, author, poet, philosopher, historian, teacher and politician. He was one of the most influential people in Danish history, as his philosophy gave rise to a new form of nationalism in the last half of the 19th century. It was steeped in the national literature and supported by deep spirituality.
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William Pinar
1900 - Present (125 years)
William Frederick Pinar is an American pedagogue. Known for his work in the area of curriculum theory, Pinar is strongly associated with the reconceptualist movement in curriculum theory since the early 1970s. In the early 1970s, along with Madeleine Grumet, Pinar introduced the notion of currere, shifting in a radical manner the notion of curriculum as a noun to curriculum as a verb. Apart from his fundamental contributions to theory, Pinar is notable for establishing the Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, founding the Bergamo Conference on Curriculum Theory and Classroom Practice, and foundi...
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John Holt
1923 - 1985 (62 years)
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling , and a pioneer in youth rights theory. After a six-year stint teaching elementary school in the 1950s, Holt wrote the book How Children Fail , which cataloged the problems he saw with the American school system. He followed it up with How Children Learn . Both books were popular, and they started Holt's career as a consultant to American schools. By the 1970s he decided he would try reforming the school system and began to advocate homeschooling and, later, the form of homeschooling known as unschooling. He ...
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Mary McLeod Bethune
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division.
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Nikolaus Pevsner
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner was a German-British art historian and architectural historian best known for his monumental 46-volume series of county-by-county guides, The Buildings of England .
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Édouard Claparède
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Édouard Claparède was a Swiss neurologist, child psychologist, and educator. Career Claparède studied science and medicine, receiving in 1897 an MD from the University of Geneva, and working 1897–98 at La Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. In 1901 he founded the Archives de psychologie with his cousin, Théodore Flournoy, which he edited until his death. He was based from 1904 onward at the University of Geneva, where he became director of the experimental psychology lab.
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Joseph Jacotot
1770 - 1840 (70 years)
Joseph Jacotot was a French teacher and educational philosopher, creator of the method of "intellectual emancipation." Life Jacotot was born at Dijon on 4 March 1770. He was educated at the university of Dijon, where in his nineteenth year he was made a professor of Latin, after which he studied law, became a lawyer, and at the same time devoted a large amount of his attention to mathematics.
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Louis Agassiz
1807 - 1873 (66 years)
Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz FRS FRSE was a Swiss-born American biologist and geologist who is recognized as a scholar of Earth's natural history. Spending his early life in Switzerland, he received a PhD at Erlangen and a medical degree in Munich. After studying with Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris, Agassiz was appointed professor of natural history at the University of Neuchâtel. He emigrated to the United States in 1847 after visiting Harvard University. He went on to become professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, to head its Lawrence Scientific School, and to foun...
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Wilhelm Rein
1847 - 1929 (82 years)
Wilhelm Rein was a German educational theorist. He was a late representative of the Herbartian school. Biography After graduating from the Eisenach gymnasium in 1866, Rein studied theology in Jena, also listening to lectures on pedagogy by Karl Volkmar Stoy who he followed a year later to Heidelberg. He returned to Jena in 1868 and passed his theological candidacy exam in Weimar in 1869. At this point, he turned his studies exclusively to pedagogy, going on to study under Tuiskon Ziller at Leipzig. In 1871 he became a teacher at Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld's school in Barmen, in 1872 a teacher in Weimar, and moved to Eisenach in 1876.
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Raja Ram Mohan Roy
1772 - 1833 (61 years)
Raja Ram Mohan Roy was an Indian reformer who was one of the founders of the Brahmo Sabha in 1828, the precursor of the Brahmo Samaj, a social-religious reform movement in the Indian subcontinent. He was given the title of Raja by Akbar II, the Mughal emperor. His influence was apparent in the fields of politics, public administration, education and religion. He was known for his efforts to abolish the practices of sati and child marriage. Roy is considered to be the "Father of Indian Renaissance" by many historians.
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Ma Xiangbo
1840 - 1939 (99 years)
Ma Xiangbo was a Chinese Jesuit priest, scholar and educator in late-Qing and early-Republican China. He was one of the founders of Aurora University, Fu Jen Catholic University and Fudan University.
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Mary Lyon
1797 - 1849 (52 years)
Mary Mason Lyon was an American pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1834. She then established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837 and served as its first president for 12 years. Lyon's vision fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose. She valued socioeconomic diversity and endeavored to make the seminary affordable for students of modest means.
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Mary Church Terrell
1863 - 1954 (91 years)
Mary Church Terrell was an American civil rights activist, journalist, teacher and one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street School —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Colored Women's League of Washington .
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Roger Fry
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
Roger Eliot Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin ... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".
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Caleb Gattegno
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Caleb Gattegno was an Egyptian educator, psychologist, and mathematician. He is considered one of the most influential and prolific mathematics educatorss of the twentieth century. He is best known for introducing new approaches to teaching and learning mathematics , foreign languages and reading . Gattegno also developed pedagogical materials for each of these approaches, and was the author of more than 120 books and hundreds of articles largely on the topics of education and human development.
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Amédée Jacques
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
Amédée Jacques , often known as Amadeo, was a French-Argentine pedagogue and philosopher and one of the most prestigious educators of his time. Biography Jacques was the son of Marie Gérard and Nicolas Jacques, a Parisian painter of miniatures. He studied at the Lycée Condorcet and the École Normale Supérieure. He received his doctorate in letters from the Sorbonne at the age of twenty-four, and soon afterwards received a degree in natural sciences. He worked as a docent at the École Normale Supérieure and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand.
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Anna J. Cooper
1858 - 1964 (106 years)
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. In 1924, she received her PhD from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
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Maria Grzegorzewska
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Maria Grzegorzewska was a Polish educator who brought the special education movement to Poland. Born to a family from the Żmudź region, she was strongly influenced by her parents' beliefs in humanitarianism. After attending clandestine schools to earn her basic education from Polish rather than Russian educators, she obtained her teaching credentials in Lithuania. She continued her education at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and in 1913 joined her countrywoman, Józefa Joteyko in Brussels to study at the International Paedological Faculty. When her studies in Belgium were interrupted by...
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Janusz Korczak
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Janusz Korczak, the pen name of Henryk Goldszmit , was a Polish Jewish pediatrician, educator, children's author and pedagogue known as Pan Doktor or Stary Doktor . He was an early children's rights advocate, in 1919 drafting a childrens constitution.
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Joseph Banks
1743 - 1820 (77 years)
Joseph Banks, 1st Baronet, was an English naturalist, botanist, and patron of the natural sciences. Banks made his name on the 1766 natural-history expedition to Newfoundland and Labrador. He took part in Captain James Cook's first great voyage , visiting Brazil, Tahiti, and after 6 months in New Zealand, Australia, returning to immediate fame. He held the position of president of the Royal Society for over 41 years. He advised King George III on the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by sending botanists around the world to collect plants, he made Kew the world's leading botanical garden. He i...
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Manuel Bartolomé Cossío
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Manuel Bartolomé Cossío was a Spanish art historian and Krausist teacher. Born in Haro, La Rioja, he entered the Institución Libre de Enseñanza, where he was the godson and favourite pupil of Francisco Giner de los Ríos as well as his inseparable companion and successor. He also wrote a monumental study of El Greco. He was director of the Museo Pedagógico Nacional and president of the Misiones Pedagógicas, becoming "the most eminent figure in Spanish pedagogy in the period 1882 to 1935", two years after his death. He died at Collado Mediano in Madrid.
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Marion McCarrell Scott
1843 - 1922 (79 years)
Marion McCarrell Scott was an American educator and government advisor in Meiji period Japan. Biography Scott was born in Barren County, Kentucky, and graduated from the University of Virginia during the American Civil War. After the war, he moved to California, where he worked as a teacher, and where he met Mori Arinori, an envoy from the Meiji government of Japan, who offered him a post in Japan as a foreign advisor. Scott arrived in Tokyo in 1871, and taught English language at the Daigaku Nankō, the predecessor to Tokyo Imperial University, and later at Tokyo University of Education, wher...
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Édouard Séguin
1812 - 1880 (68 years)
Édouard Séguin was a French physician and educationist born in Clamecy, Nièvre. He is remembered for his work with children having cognitive impairments in France and the United States. Background and career in France He studied at the Collège d’Auxerre and the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, and from 1837 studied and worked under Jean Marc Gaspard Itard, who was an educator of deaf-mute individuals, that included the celebrated case of Victor of Aveyron, also known as "The Wild Child". It was Itard who persuaded Séguin to dedicate himself to study the causes, as well as the training of individuals with intellectual disabilities.
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John Celivergos Zachos
1820 - 1898 (78 years)
John Celivergos Zachos was a Greek-American physician, literary scholar, elocutionist, author, lecturer, inventor, and educational pioneer. He was an early proponent of equal education rights for African Americans and women. During the American Civil War, he was the superintendent at Port Royal and a main figure in the Port Royal Experiment. In his book, Phonic Primer and Reader he developed a special system to educate freed slaves. He advocated and expanded the oratory systems of François Delsarte and James Rush.
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Charles De Garmo
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Charles De Garmo was an American educator, education theorist and college president. Biography DeGarmo was born in Mukwonago, Wisconsin on January 7, 1849. His parents moved to Sterling, Illinois in 1852 and later to Lebanon, Illinois. In 1865, at the age of sixteen, DeGarmo enlisted in the Union Army. Upon his return from service, DeGarmo enrolled at Illinois State Normal University in 1870, where he would graduate in 1873. Following his graduation in 1873, DeGarmo moved to Naples, Illinois, where he was principal of an Illinois graded school. In 1876, DeGarmo returned to Normal, Illinois, ...
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Christa McAuliffe
1948 - 1986 (38 years)
Sharon Christa McAuliffe was an American teacher and astronaut from Concord, New Hampshire who was killed on the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission STS-51-L, where she was serving as a payload specialist.
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Nadezhda Krupskaya
1869 - 1939 (70 years)
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was a Russian revolutionary and the wife of Vladimir Lenin. Krupskaya was born in Saint Petersburg to an aristocratic family that had descended into poverty, and she developed strong views about improving the lives of the poor. She embraced Marxism and met Lenin at a Marxist discussion group in 1894. Both were arrested in 1896 for revolutionary activities and after Lenin was exiled to Siberia, Krupskaya was allowed to join him in 1898 on the condition that they marry. The two settled in Munich and then London after their exile, before briefly returning to Rus...
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Anna Leonowens
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Anna Harriette Leonowens was an Anglo-Indian or Indian-born British travel writer, educator, and social activist. She became well known with the publication of her memoirs, beginning with The English Governess at the Siamese Court , which chronicled her experiences in Siam , as teacher to the children of the Siamese King Mongkut. Leonowens's own account was fictionalised in Margaret Landon's best-selling novel Anna and the King of Siam , as well as adaptations for other media such as Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1951 musical The King and I.
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Harold R. W. Benjamin
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was an American educator and writer; known for his publications The Saber-Tooth Curriculum and Higher Education in the American Republics . Biography Early life and education Harold Raymond Wayne Benjamin was born March 27, 1893, in Gilmanton, Wisconsin, to Harold and Harriet Benjamin. He moved to Oregon with his family in 1904, and graduated from Tualatin Academy in 1910. Benjamin earned degrees from both the Oregon Normal School and the University of Oregon. He later received a Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Education in 1927 .
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Tao Xingzhi
1891 - 1946 (55 years)
Tao Xingzhi , was a renowned Chinese educator and reformer in the Republic of China mainland era. He studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, and returned to China to champion progressive education. His career in China as a liberal educator was not derivative of John Dewey, as some have alleged, but creative and adaptive. He returned to China at a time when the American influence was zesty and self-confident, and his very name at that time meant "knowledge-action," reflecting the catch-phrase of the Neo-Confucian philosopher Wang Yangming which implied that once knowledge had been o...
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Egerton Ryerson
1803 - 1882 (79 years)
Adolphus Egerton Ryerson was a Canadian educator, author, editor, and Methodist minister who was a prominent contributor to the design of the Canadian public school system. Ryerson is considered to be the founder of the Ontario public school system.
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William Holmes McGuffey
1800 - 1873 (73 years)
William Holmes McGuffey was an American college professor and president who is best known for writing the McGuffey Readers, the first widely used series of elementary school-level textbooks. More than 120 million copies of McGuffey Readers were sold between 1836 and 1960, placing its sales in a category with the Bible and Webster's Dictionary.
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Fatima Sheikh
1831 - 1900 (69 years)
Fatima Sheikh was an Indian educator and social reformer, who was a colleague of the social reformers Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule She is widely considered to be India’s first Muslim woman teacher.
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August Hermann Niemeyer
1754 - 1828 (74 years)
August Hermann Niemeyer was a German Protestant theologian, teacher, a librettist, a poet, a travel writer, a Protestant church song poet and a Prussian political educator. He was professor of theology in 1780, then vice-chancellor of the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
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Millicent Mackenzie
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
Millicent Hughes Mackenzie was a British professor of education at University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, the first female professor in Wales and the first appointed to a fully chartered university in the United Kingdom. She wrote on the philosophy of education, founded the Cardiff Suffragette branch, became the only woman candidate in Wales in the 1918 general election, and was a key initiator of Steiner-Waldorf education in the United Kingdom.
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Charles Eliot Norton
1827 - 1908 (81 years)
Charles Eliot Norton was an American author, social critic, and Harvard professor of art based in New England. He was a progressive social reformer and a liberal activist whom many of his contemporaries considered the most cultivated man in the United States. He was from the same notable Eliot family as the 20th-century poet T. S. Eliot, who made his career in the United Kingdom.
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Gustav Friedrich Waagen
1794 - 1868 (74 years)
Gustav Friedrich Waagen was a German art historian. His opinions were greatly respected in England, where he was invited to give evidence before the royal commission inquiring into the condition and future of the National Gallery, for which he was a leading candidate to become director. He died on a visit to Copenhagen in 1868.
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David McCutchion
1930 - 1972 (42 years)
David McCutchion was an English-born academic, and a pioneer in a number of original strands of scholarship in Indian studies before his early death at age 41. Popularly known as "Davidbabu", in his short life, he made a major contribution to the study of Hindu terracotta and brick temples of Bengal and was also one of the first scholars to write a study of the emerging field of Indian writing in English.
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Joachim von Sandrart
1606 - 1688 (82 years)
Joachim von Sandrart was a German Baroque art-historian and painter, active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. He is most significant for his collection of biographies of Dutch and German artists the Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680.
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Margaret Tuke
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Dame Margaret Janson Tuke was a British academic and educator. She was the youngest child of the philanthropist James Hack Tuke. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1932.
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Mary Ann Shadd
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
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Julia Ettie Crane
1855 - 1923 (68 years)
Julia Ettie Crane , also known as Julia Etta Crane, was an American music educator and the founder of the Crane School of Music. This was the first school specifically created for the training of public school music teachers. She is among the most important figures in the history of American music education. Crane was a student of Manuel García.
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Kawai Michi
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Kawai Michi was a Japanese educator, Christian activist, and proponent of Japanese-Western ties before, during, and after World War II. She served as the first Japanese National Secretary of the YWCA of Japan and founded Keisen University.
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Leopoldo Sabbatini
1861 - 1914 (53 years)
Leopoldo Sabbatini was an Italian lawyer, the first dean and president of Bocconi University, the first business school in Italy. His parents were Eugenio Sabbatini and Silvia Piermarini. He started to study law in 1879 at the University of Pisa, graduating with a thesis on commercial law in 1883. He also married very young, in 1880. Soon after that, he was admitted as vice-secretary of the Commerce Chamber of Milano, where he was instrumental in achieving the first comprehensive survey and publication of statistics about commerce and industry in Milano. In his free time, Sabbatini collaborat...
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Richard Edwards
1822 - 1908 (86 years)
Richard Edwards was a Welsh American educator from Ceredigion . Emigrating to the United States with his family when he was a child, Edwards studied at the State Normal School in Bridgewater, Massachusetts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He then led a number of schools: the Boys' High School in Salem, Massachusetts ; the State Normal School in Salem ; the Normal School in St. Louis, Missouri ; Illinois State Normal University ; and Blackburn University. From 1887 to 1891, he served as the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction.
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Johnny Roosval
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
John August Emanuel Roosval was a Swedish art historian, Medieval ecclesiastical art specialist, and university professor. Biography Johnny Roosval was born in a bourgeois family in Kalmar, but grew up in Stockholm from the age of five and went to school there.
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Fritz Saxl
1890 - 1948 (58 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Saxl was the art historian who was the guiding light of the Warburg Institute, especially during the long mental breakdown of its founder, Aby Warburg, whom he succeeded as director.
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Frank Jewett Mather
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Frank Jewett Mather Jr. was an American art critic and professor. He was the first "modernist" professor at the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. He was a direct descendant of Richard Mather a Puritan minister in 17th century Boston.
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