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,
#2451
Cyrus Nutt
1814 - 1875 (61 years)
Cyrus Nutt served as the fifth president of Indiana University. Biography Cyrus Nutt was born in Southington Township, Trumbull County, Ohio on September 4, 1814. His father was James Nutt and his mother was Mary Viets who married in 1806. Cyrus was the second son, with one brother and two sisters who all lived in a log cabin on a piece of land next to a large farm belonging James father-in-law.
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John D. Whitney
1850 - 1917 (67 years)
John Dunning Whitney was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became the president of Georgetown University in 1898. Born in Massachusetts, he joined the United States Navy at the age of sixteen, where he was introduced to Catholicism by way of a book that accidentally came into his possession and prompted him to become a Catholic. He entered the Society of Jesus and spent the next twenty-five years studying and teaching mathematics at Jesuit institutions around the world, including in Canada, England, Ireland, and around the United States in New York, Maryland, Boston, and Louisiana. ...
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Li Shizeng
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Li Shizeng , born Li Yuying, was an educator, promoter of anarchist doctrines, political activist, and member of the Chinese Nationalist Party in early Republican China. After coming to Paris in 1902, Li took a graduate degree in chemistry and biology, and then along with Wu Zhihui and Zhang Renjie, cofounded the Chinese anarchist movement. He was a supporter of Sun Yat-sen. He organized cultural exchange between France and China, established the first factory in Europe to manufacture and sell beancurd, and created Diligent Work-Frugal Study programs which brought Chinese students to France for work in factories.
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Wilhelm Martin
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Wilhelm Martin was a German-Dutch art historian. Wilhelm Martin was born in 1876 in Quakenbrück, Germany as the son of Karl Martin, a geologist, and Ana Fittica. When his father became a professor at the University of Leiden in 1877, the family moved to the Netherlands. Wilhelm's two younger brothers, Herman Martin and Hans Martin were both born in the Netherlands.
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John Smith
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
John Smith was a Scottish dentist, philanthropist and pioneering educator. The founder of the Edinburgh school of dentistry, he served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and president of the British Dental Association. He was the official surgeon/dentist to Queen Victoria when in Scotland.
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F. Clever Bald
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Frederick Clever Bald was a teacher and authority on early Michigan history and served as director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. Following service in France with an ambulance unit during World War I, Bald completed his college education and embarked on a teaching career in Detroit, Michigan before returning to graduate school to study the history of the Northwest Territory. The subject of his dissertation was Detroit during its first decade under American occupation, subsequently published as Detroit's First American Decade 1796 to 1805. Bald also authored the book Michigan in Four Centuries as well as numerous articles.
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Charles Chauvel
1897 - 1959 (62 years)
Charles Edward Chauvel OBE was an Australian filmmaker, producer and screenwriter and nephew of Australian army General Sir Harry Chauvel. He is noted for writing and directing the films Forty Thousand Horsemen in 1940 and Jedda in 1955. His wife, Elsa Chauvel, was a frequent collaborator on his filmmaking projects.
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Matteo Marangoni
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Matteo Marangoni was an Italian art historian, art critic and composer. Marangoni's art criticism aimed at identifying pure figurative values, in which an artwork's poetic values are identified. His books are positively influenced by the school of Benedetto Croce and Heinrich Wölfflin, clarifying their concepts on the basis of observation and following logic as a science of pure concept.
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Rachel Elfreda Fowler
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Rachel Elfreda Fowler was an English literary scholar and lecturer in art and history at the University of Oxford. Early life Rachel Fowler was born in London on 10 December 1872, the youngest daughter of Sir Robert Fowler , member of parliament and Lord Mayor of London, and his wife Sarah Charlotte Fowler, née Fox. Elfreda was one of eleven children. She received her advanced education at Westfield College and then at the University of Oxford where she studied modern languages.
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Agathon Benary
1807 - 1860 (53 years)
Karl Albert Agathon Benary was a German classical philologist. He was the brother of orientalist Franz Ferdinand Benary . He received his education at the gymnasiums in Göttingen and Erfurt, where he was a student of Franz Ernst Heinrich Spitzner. From 1824 to 1827 he studied classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, obtaining his doctorate with the dissertation "De Aeschyli Prometheo soluto". At Halle he was especially influenced by the teachings of Christian Karl Reisig. After graduation, he worked as a high school teacher in Berlin, and in the meantime, continued his philological studies as a pupil of Franz Bopp.
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Johannes Wilde
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Johannes Wilde CBE was a Hungarian art historian and teacher of art history. He later became an Austrian, and then a British, citizen. He was a noted expert on the drawings of Michelangelo. Wilde was a pioneer of the use of X-rays as a tool for the study of both the creation and the state of conservation of paintings. From 1948 to 1958 he was deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
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Karl Holzinger
1892 - 1954 (62 years)
Karl John Holzinger was an American educational psychologist known for his work in psychometrics. Education Holzinger received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1915 and 1917, respectively. He then attended the University of Chicago, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1922. He subsequently studied at University College London with both Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman. Holzinger became interested in intelligence testing through his work with Spearman.
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Thomas Cooke Middleton
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Thomas Cooke Middleton was born into a Quaker family on March 30, 1842 in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. At the age of twelve, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith with his mother and five sisters. He became a novice in the Order of St. Augustine in Tolentine, Italy in 1858 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1864.
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Francis Klingender
1907 - 1955 (48 years)
Francis Donald Klingender was a Marxist art historian and exponent of Kunstsoziologie whose uncompromising views meant that he never quite fitted into the British art history establishment. Klingender was born in Goslar, Germany, to British parents. At the start of the first World War, his father, Louis Henry Weston Klingender , was interned near Berlin on suspicion of spying for the British. The family moved back to England in the 1920s and Klingender supported them while attending night classes at the London School of Economics. He subsequently embarked on an academic career in sociology, b...
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Lydia Shattuck
1822 - 1889 (67 years)
Lydia White Shattuck was an American botanist, naturalist, chemist, and professor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . Early life and education Shattuck was born in 1822 in East Landoff , New Hampshire to first cousins Betsey Fletcher and Timothy Shattuck, and she was the only one of their first five children to survive past infancy. When she was a young girl, her mother would take her on excursions through the woods, which inspired a love of nature, particularly wildflowers.
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Henry Baker
1698 - 1774 (76 years)
Henry Baker was a British naturalist. Life He was born in Chancery Lane, London, 8 May 1698, the son of William Baker, a clerk in chancery. In his fifteenth year he was apprenticed to John Parker, a bookseller. At the close of his indentures in 1720, Baker went on a visit to John Forster, a relative, who had a deaf-mute daughter, then eight years old. As a successful therapist of deaf people, he went on to make money, by a system that he kept secret. His work as therapist caught the attention of Daniel Defoe, whose youngest daughter Sophia he married on 30 April 1729.
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Jakob Rosenberg
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Jakob Rosenberg was an art historian, museum curator, and educator who is noted particularly for published work on Rembrandt. He was active in Germany until his 1937 emigration to the United States, where he joined the faculty of Harvard University. In addition to his professorship he was the curator of prints at the Fogg Museum. Rosenberg retired in 1964, but continued his scholarly activities until his 1980 death in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Winifred Lamb
1894 - 1963 (69 years)
Winifred Lamb was a British archaeologist, art historian, and museum curator who specialised in Greek, Roman, and Anatolian cultures and artefacts. The bulk of her career was spent as the honorary keeper of Greek antiquities at the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum from 1920 to 1958, and the Fitzwilliam Museum states that she was a "generous benefactor ... raising the profile of the collections through groundbreaking research, acquisitions and publications."
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Ed Emshwiller
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
Edmund Alexander Emshwiller was an American visual artist notable for his science fiction illustrations and his pioneering experimental films. He usually signed his illustrations as Emsh but sometimes used Ed Emsh, Ed Emsler, Willer and others.
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Jane Bancroft Robinson
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Jane Marie Bancroft Robinson was an author and educator. Early life and education Jane Marie Bancroft was born in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on December 24, 1847. She descended on her mother's side, Caroline J. Orton, from an old Dutch family of New York City, and on her father's side from early English settlers in New Jersey. Her father, Rev. George C. Bancroft, was for over fifty years a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Gerhard Dietrich
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Gerhard Dietrich was a leading German pedagogue and a Trades Union Official. From 1952 till 1980 he worked at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig on the Structuring and Methodology of teaching Biology. Between 1980 and 1986 he was General Secretary of the Berlin based Academy of Pedagogic Sciences.
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Walter Friedländer
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
Walter Ferdinand Friedlaender was a German art historian . Walter Friedlaender was the son of Sigismund Friedlaender and Anna Joachimsthal. Born in Glogau, he was taught art history by Heinrich Wölfflin and others. Among his first students was Erwin Panofsky.
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Mieczysław Gębarowicz
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Mieczysław Jan Gębarowicz was a Polish art historian, soldier, dissident, museum director and custodian of cultural heritage. He studied history and the history of art at Lwów University During the 1940s and 1950s he was responsible for saving many Polish cultural works in Lviv, including books and manuscripts, from being destroyed or dispersed.
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Sidney Franklin
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Sidney Arnold Franklin was an American film director and producer. Franklin, like William C. deMille, specialized in adapting literary works or Broadway stage plays. His brother Chester Franklin also became a director during the silent film era, best known for directing the early Technicolor film The Toll of the Sea.
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E. E. Speight
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Ernest Edwin Speight , usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan and also at the Fourth Higher School, Kanazawa, then for a further twenty years at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. In India he made a study of the Nilgiri hill tribes and was working on a Toda grammar at his death
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Iraklis Mitsopoulos
1816 - 1892 (76 years)
Iraklis Mitsopoulos was an author, biologist, archaeologist, physicist, zoologist, paleontologist, mineralogist, geologist, and professor. He is considered the father of modern natural sciences in Greece. He taught classes for over forty-seven years of his life. His nephew world renowned Greek geologist Konstantinos M. Mitsopoulos became the first student to receive a doctorate degree in the natural sciences at the University of Athens. His son Maximos Mitsopoulos also became a geologist. Hercules co-founded the Museum of Physical Geography in Athens, Greece, and directed its Zoological Department.
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LeRoy D. Brown
1848 - 1898 (50 years)
LeRoy D. Brown was the first president of University of Nevada. History Nevada became a state in 1864. Its constitution mandated the establishment of a state university with departments in agriculture, the mechanic arts, and mining, along with a state normal school for teacher training. The constitution specified that the state university would be controlled by an elected Board of Regents. The Nevada Legislature established the first State University campus in Elko, Nevada. Its Preparatory Department opened for enrollment in October 1874 with the goal of enhancing Nevada's young people to be ready for college-level study.
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Christian Leberecht Vogel
1759 - 1816 (57 years)
Christian Leberecht Vogel was a German painter, draughtsman and writer on art theory. His pupils included Louise Seidler, and he was the father of court painter and art professor Carl Christian Vogel.
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André Jolles
1874 - 1946 (72 years)
Johannes Andreas Jolles, known as André Jolles was a Dutch-German art historian, literary critic and linguist who was affiliated with the Nazi Party. He is best known for his work Simple Forms. Life Jolles was born on August 7, 1874, in Den Helder. His father, Hendrik Jolle Jolles, died on February 25, 1888, in Naples. Jolles grew up as an only child with his mother Jacoba Cornelia Singles in Amsterdam.
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Sergei Lemeshev
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Sergei Yakovlevich Lemeshev was a Soviet and Russian opera singer and director. People's Artist of the USSR . Biography Early life and career Lemeshev was born into a peasant family, and his father wanted him to become a cobbler. In 1914, he left a parish school and was sent to be trained to make shoes in Saint Petersburg. In 1917, he graduated from school in Tver, where he received vocal training. He began first at a local workers' club and later moved to Moscow.
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Ludger Alscher
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Ludger Alscher was a German classical archaeologist, who could be considered the most significant scholar of his subject area in the DDR. Life Ludger Alscher studied ancient history and classical archaeology from 1936, first at the University of Münster and then at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1939. Archaeology quickly became the primary focus of his studies, thanks especially to the influence of his teacher at Münster, Friedrich Matz the Younger. In Munich he was mainly influenced by Ernst Buschor. In 1942 he received his doctorate for a work on depictions of Nike in the round...
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Karel Pravoslav Sádlo
1898 - 1971 (73 years)
Karel Pravoslav Sádlo was a Czech cellist and significant cello pedagogue. Between 1929–1961, he was the teacher of the majority of Czech cellists and tutored a large number of leading soloists and chamber music performers . He was a teacher at the Conservatoire, dean of the Faculty of Music of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and a juror at prestigious performers' competitions.
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Martin Brewer Anderson
1815 - 1890 (75 years)
Rev. Martin Brewer Anderson was the first president of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. Biography Anderson was born February 12, 1815, in Brunswick, Maine. His father was of Scotch-Irish descent and his mother of English origin, a woman of marked intellectual qualities. He graduated from Waterville College in 1840 and then attended Newton Theological Institution in Newton, Massachusetts. He married Elizabeth Gilbert, of New York.
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William Stephens
1829 - 1890 (61 years)
William John Stephens , FGS, was headmaster at Sydney Grammar School, a professor at the University of Sydney and museum administrator. Stephens was born in Levens, Westmorland, the son of the Rev. William Stephens, of Heversham, Westmorland, and his wife Alicia, née Daniell. William, junior, was an elder brother of Thomas Stephens. William was educated at Marlborough College, and at The Queen's College, Oxford, where he was scholar from 1848 to 1853; Fellow from 1853 to 1860; Lecturer in 1854; and Tutor from 1855 to 1856.
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Charles Lamont
1895 - 1993 (98 years)
Charles Lamont was a prolific filmmaker, directing over 200 titles and producing and writing many others. He directed nine Abbott and Costello comedies and many Ma and Pa Kettle films. Biography Lamont was born in San Francisco. Lamont came from a family of actors, being the fourth generation to be an actor. He appeared onstage while a teenager and started appearing in films from 1919. He worked as a prop man before becoming assistant director.
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Peter Agricola
1525 - 1585 (60 years)
Peter Agricola was a German Renaissance humanist, educator, classical scholar and theologian, diplomat and statesman, disciple of Martin Luther, friend and collaborator of Philipp Melanchthon. Successively tutor to several young princes of German sovereign states and rector of schools in Ulm and Lauingen, where he created and developed the Gymnasium Illustre, he became an important councilor and State minister of the Dukes of Zweibrücken and Palatinate-Neuburg, carrying out many missions in the German Holy Roman Empire and supporting the Protestant Reformation.
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John Fryer
1839 - 1928 (89 years)
John Fryer , also known as Fu Lanya , was an English sinologist who was first Louis Agassiz Professor of Oriental Languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was professor of English at Tung-Wen College , Peking, China and head of the Anglo-Chinese School in Shanghai, China, and established the Shanghai Polytechnic and Institute for the Chinese Blind there. He was president of the Oriental Institute of California, United States.
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Hippolyte Fierens-Gevaert
1870 - 1926 (56 years)
Hippolyte Gevaert or Fierens-Gevaert was a Belgian art historian, philosopher, art critic, singer, and writer. Life He had studied at the Conservatoire royal de Bruxelles in 1890 and won first prize for singing. That same year he married Jacqueline Marthe Gevaert, daughter of the musician François-Auguste Gevaert . He then joined the Opéra de Lille, but an accident with his voice ended his singing career. He moved to Paris, where he began working as a journalist, writer and art critic and changed his surname to Fierens-Gevaert.
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Ernst August Hagen
1797 - 1880 (83 years)
Ernst August Hagen was a Prussian writer on art and novelist. He taught at Königsberg University and was the first Prussian scholar to hold a teaching chair in Art history and Aesthetics. Family provenance and connections Ernst August Hagen was born in Königsberg, at that time the administrative capital of East Prussia . His father, Karl Gottfried Hagen was a distinguished chemist and the court apothecary.
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Nikolai Tarabukin
1889 - 1956 (67 years)
Nikolai Mikhailovich Tarabukin was an art theoretician active in the Soviet Union. He was one of major theorists of Proletkult. Tarabukin's first book was Опыт теории живописи which although started in 1916 was not published until 1923. He was influenced by influence of Heinrich Wölfflin.
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Maria Brace Kimball
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Maria Brace Kimball was an American elocutionist who taught, lectured, and wrote on the subject. She was an instructor in elocution and lecturer on dramatic literature in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; lecturer on French theatre and dramatic literature in schools; teacher of elocution in Brearley School, New York City, 1883–92. She was the author of A Text Book of Elocution and A Soldier-doctor of our army, James P. Kimball , as well as various contributions to periodicals.
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Bellamkonda Ramaraya Kavindrulu
1875 - 1914 (39 years)
Bellamkonda Ramaraya Kavindrulu was an Indian poet, author, yogi, Sanskrit scholar and a philosopher. Ramaraya Kavi wrote nearly 148 classic works in Sanskrit . All but 45 are missing. While some are available in part, the remaining are available full length.
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Kate Everest Levi
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Kate Asaphine Everest Levi was an American educator, writer, and social worker. She was the first director of Kingsley House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a settlement house, and the first woman Ph.D. recipient from the University of Wisconsin. Although both Syracuse University and the College of Wooster had granted doctorates in history to women in the 1880s, Everest Levi is considered the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in history from an organized graduate school in the United States. She wrote on topics such as education and German immigration to the Midwest.
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Franklin Carter
1837 - 1910 (73 years)
Franklin Carter was an American professor of Germanic and romance languages and served as President of Williams College from 1881 to 1901. Carter was born September 30, 1837, in Waterbury, Connecticut, the third son of Deacon Preserve Wood Carter and Ruth Holmes Carter. He attended Phillips Academy Andover, then matriculated at Yale College in 1855. He became sick and retreated to Florida, until 1860, when he entered Williams College. Graduating in 1862, he received a professorship in French and German the following year.
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Ibuka Kajinosuke
1854 - 1940 (86 years)
Ibuka Kajinosuke was a Japanese samurai of the late Edo period, who became a Christian during the Meiji period. He was born in Aizu, and fought in the Boshin War. In his adult life, he also became an ordained minister, and was an educator.
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Pierre Francastel
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Pierre Francastel was a French art historian, best known for his use of sociological method. Francastel's initial period of study was in literature, at the Sorbonne. He worked in building conservation at Versailles while undertaking research toward his doctoral degree, which was on the sculpture of Versailles, and in 1928 he published a monograph, including a critical catalogue, on the seventeenth-century French sculptor François Girardon. In 1930, he was appointed director of the Warsaw Institut français, and in 1936 he was appointed professor at the University in Strasbourg. In 1948, he was...
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Myrtle Smith Livingston
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Myrtle Smith Livingston was an American educator and playwright. Early life Myrtle Athleen Smith was born in Holly Grove, Arkansas, in 1902, the daughter of Isaac Samuel Smith and Lulu C. Hall Smith. She graduated from high school in 1920. She studied pharmacy at Howard University for two years , and earned a Colorado teaching certificate in 1924. She later earned a master's degree in 1940, from Columbia University.
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Aubrey Moore
1848 - 1890 (42 years)
Aubrey Lackington Moore was an English Anglo-Catholic priest and one of the first Christian Darwinians. He has been described as "the clergyman who more than any other man was responsible for breaking down the antagonisms towards Evolution then widely felt in the English Church".
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Delia E. Wilder Carson
1833 - 1917 (84 years)
Delia E. Wilder Carson was an American educator from the U.S. state of New York. She taught mathematics, and served as preceptress of Ladies' Hall, at the University of Wisconsin . Early years and education Wilder was born in Athens, New York, January 25, 1833. Her father, Thomas Wilder, was one of eight brothers who migrated from Massachusetts when the eldest was a young man. Several were teachers, and all were closely identified with the development and progress of Genesee and Wyoming counties, New York, where they ultimately settled. Her mother's maiden name was Hannah Dow . Her siblings included: Henry Fayette Wilder, Sarah D.
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Barker Fairley
1887 - 1986 (99 years)
Barker Fairley, was a British-Canadian painter, and scholar who made a significant contribution to the study of German literature, particularly for the work of Goethe, and was an early champion and friend of the Group of Seven.
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