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,
#2701
Friedrich Dannemann
1859 - 1936 (77 years)
Friedrich Dannemann was a German physicist, high school teacher and historian of science. In the judgment of George Sarton, Dannemann's four-volume Natural sciences in their development and context was "the first satisfactory textbook dealing with the history of science as a whole". In 1927, aged sixty-eight, Dannemann became an unsalaried professor in the history of science at the University of Bonn. Dannemann also helped Abraham Wolf with his A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
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Graham Wallas
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.
Go to Profile#2703
Fanny Jackson Coppin
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Fanny Jackson Coppin was an American educator, missionary and lifelong advocate for female higher education. One of the first Black alumnae of Oberlin College, she served as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.
Go to Profile#2704
Kenneth Clark
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.
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Hans Sedlmayr
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Hans Sedlmayr was an Austrian art historian. From 1931 to 1932 and from 1938 onwards, he was a member of the Nazi Party. Positions as a University Professor Sedlmayr held a chair in Art History at the University of Vienna from 1936 until 1945, then at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1951 until 1964.
Go to Profile#2706
Alec Peterson
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Alexander Duncan Campbell Peterson OBE was a British teacher and headmaster, greatly responsible for the birth of the International Baccalaureate educational system. He was instrumental in the formation of the International Baccalaureate Organisation in 1968, and served as the organisation's first director-general until 1977. He was also the first honorary member of the organisation's Council of Foundation from 1983 until his death in 1988.
Go to Profile#2707
Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
Go to Profile#2708
Ulisse Aldrovandi
1522 - 1605 (83 years)
Ulisse Aldrovandi was an Italian naturalist, the moving force behind Bologna's botanical garden, one of the first in Europe. Carl Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon reckoned him the father of natural history studies. He is usually referred to, especially in older scientific literature in Latin, as Aldrovandus; his name in Italian is equally given as Aldroandi.
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Edward C. Elliott
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Edward Charles Elliott was an American educational researcher and administrator. He was the chancellor of the public university system of Montana from 1916 to 1922 and the president of Purdue University from 1922 to 1945.
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Laurence J. Peter
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Laurence Johnston Peter was a Canadian educator and "hierarchiologist" who is best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter principle. Biography Peter was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the grandson of William Herbert Steves, the founder of Steveston, British Columbia. Peter began his career as a teacher in Vancouver in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963.
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Miguel Covarrubias
1904 - 1957 (53 years)
Miguel Covarrubias, also known as José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist and art historian. Along with his American colleague Matthew W. Stirling, he was the co-discoverer of the Olmec civilization.
Go to Profile#2712
Matthew the Apostle
10 - 74 (64 years)
Matthew the Apostle is named in the New Testament as one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. According to Christian traditions, he was also one of the four Evangelists as author of the Gospel of Matthew, and thus is also known as Matthew the Evangelist.
Go to Profile#2713
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1717 - 1768 (51 years)
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications.
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Alice Freeman Palmer
1855 - 1902 (47 years)
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
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Franz Xaver Schmid
1819 - 1883 (64 years)
Franz Xaver Schmid; name sometimes given as Franz Xaver Schmid-Schwarzenberg was an Austrian-German educator and philosopher born in Schwarzenberg am Böhmerwald. From 1840 to 1844 he studied Catholic theology in Salzburg, receiving his doctorate of philosophy several years later in Freiburg im Breisgau. Afterwards he taught classes in history and philosophy at the Lyceum in Rastatt. In 1856 he became a lecturer at the University of Erlangen, where he subsequently became an associate professor of philosophy and pedagogy. During the 1850s, Schmid left the Catholic faith and embraced Protestantism.
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Bernard Berenson
1865 - 1959 (94 years)
Bernard Berenson was a Lithuanian Jew origin an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. His book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters was an international success. His wife Mary is thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings.
Go to Profile#2717
George Trumbull Ladd
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
George Trumbull Ladd was an American philosopher, educator and psychologist. Biography Early life and ancestors Ladd was born in Painesville, Ohio, on January 19, 1842, the son of Silas Trumbull Ladd and Elizabeth Williams.
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Everett Franklin Lindquist
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Everett Franklin Lindquist was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.
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Aloys Fischer
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.
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Francis Landey Patton
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Francis Landey Patton was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University. Background, 1843–1871 Patton was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, to a family of Scottish descent. He attended Warwick Academy. As a child, the family relocated to Canada. Patton received collegiate education at the University of Toronto, followed by a theological education at Knox College, Toronto. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865; was ...
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Margaret Haley
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Margaret A. Haley was a teacher, unionist, and Georgist land value tax activist, who was dubbed the "lady labor slugger". Haley was the first business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation and a pioneer leader in organizing schoolteachers. During her long career with the CTF, Haley fought to correct tax inequalities, increase the salaries of teachers, and expose unfair land leasing by the Chicago Board of Education.
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Calvin M. Woodward
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Calvin Milton Woodward was a United States educator and professor. As dean of the school of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, he developed a manual training programme . He opened the St. Louis Manual Training School.
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Roland Penrose
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
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Swami Vipulananda
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Swami Vipulananda , also known as Vipulananda Adigal, was a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu social reformer, literary critic, author, poet, teacher and ascetic from the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Vipulananda was an early pioneer associated with the Indian-based Ramakrishna Mission in Sri Lanka. Along with other reformers, Vipulananda was instrumental in the revival of the Hindu religion and native traditions in Sri Lanka after a long period of dormancy and decline during the previous 500 years of colonial rule by various European powers.
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Erwin Panofsky
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. His work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece Early Netherlandish Painting. Many of his books are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , Meaning in the Visual Arts , and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.
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Carl Strehl
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Carl Strehl was a German educator born in Berlin who was influential in the teaching of the blind. History In December 1907, Strehl lost his eyesight while working in a chemical factory in New York. Later, after returning to Europe, he commenced with studies in Hamburg. In 1915, he was hired by University of Marburg ophthalmologist Alfred Bielschowsky to assist with World War I soldiers who had been blinded by shell fragments and poison gas.
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John Calvin Ferguson
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Calvin Ferguson was an American scholar of Chinese art, collector and procurer for American art museums, and a Chinese governmental adviser. Ferguson was the son of John Ferguson and Catherine Matilda Pomeroy . His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Ferguson attended Albert College in Ontario, Canada and then Boston University, where he graduated in 1886. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1887, married Mary Elizabeth Wilson.
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Robert Jameson
1774 - 1854 (80 years)
Robert Jameson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist. As Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, developing his predecessor John Walker's concepts based on mineralogy into geological theories of Neptunism which held sway into the 1830s. Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship, and his museum collection. The minerals and fossils collection of the Museum of Edinburgh University became one of the largest in Europe during Jameson's long tenure at the university.
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Catherine Isabella Dodd
1860 - 1932 (72 years)
Catherine Isabella or Isabel Dodd was an English academic, novelist and education writer. In 1892 she became the first woman on the academic staff of Victoria University of Manchester, as a lecturer in education.
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Maria Sanford
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Maria Louise Sanford was an American educator. She was a professor of history at Swarthmore College from 1871 to 1880 and a professor of rhetoric and elocution at the University of Minnesota from 1880 to 1909.
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Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was an educator, litterateur, Islamic theologist and social reformer of pre-partition India. He was instrumental in the formation of the University of Dhaka and is the namesake of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
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Richard Allen
1760 - 1831 (71 years)
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church , the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
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Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha
1830 - 1910 (80 years)
Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha was an Ottoman writer and statesman. A veteran official, he served thrice as Minister of Education and twice as ambassador to Qajar Iran . During his first ambassadorship to Iran, he was awarded the Order of the Lion and the Sun medal. He also served as a trusted advisor to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, until he fell out of grace.
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Arthur Upham Pope
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Arthur Upham Pope was an American scholar, art historian, and architecture historian. He was an expert on historical Persian art, and he was the editor of the Survey of Persian Art . Pope was also a university professor of philosophy and aesthetics, an archaeologist, photographer, museum director, interior designer, and the co-founder of an international scholarly organization.
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Margaret Scolari Barr
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Margaret Scolari Barr was an art historian, art critic, educator, translator, and curator. Life Margaret Scolari Barr was born in 1901 in Rome to the Italian antiquities dealer, Virgilio Scolari and his Irish wife Mary Fitzmaurice Scolari. She attended the University of Rome from 1919 to 1922 before moving to the United States in 1925. She taught Italian at Vassar College until 1929, where she also started her MA in art history in 1927. There she was introduced to the young art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by her colleague Henry-Russell Hitchcock. At this time, she was offered a position at the Smith College Art Museum, but turned it down to move closer to Barr.
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David Hosack
1769 - 1835 (66 years)
David Hosack was an American physician, botanist, and educator. He remains widely known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker. He established several institutions including Elgin Botanic Garden and a medical school at Rutgers University.
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Ernest Fenollosa
1853 - 1908 (55 years)
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was an American art historian of Japanese art, professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. An important educator during the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Era, Fenollosa was an enthusiastic Orientalist who did much to preserve traditional Japanese art.
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Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub was a German art historian, critic, and curator. He was born in Bremen into a merchant family. He studied with Franz Wickhoff in Vienna and Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin, among others, until 1910 and then initially worked as assistant to Gustav Pauli at the Kunsthalle Bremen. Hartlaub became the director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1923. He was particularly committed to the promotion of contemporary art.
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Stanislav Shatsky
1878 - 1934 (56 years)
Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky was an important humanistic educator, writer, and educational administrator in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. Shatskii established a number of experimental and progressive educational institutions between 1905 and 1934. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, Shatskii imported many of the values of late tsarist educational experimentation into early Soviet approaches to creating a communist school and constructing 'a new Soviet person'.
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Andrew D. Holt
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Andrew David Holt was an American educator who was the 16th president of the University of Tennessee, filling that position from 1959 to 1970. Holt was born in Milan, Tennessee in 1904, the son of two schoolteachers. He graduated from Milan High School and Emory University. After his college graduation in 1927, he became a teacher in West Tennessee, first in Milan, where he taught grades five through eight, and then in Humboldt, where he taught high school. He also worked as a coach, a school principal, and a school superintendent. After less than 10 years of teaching, he joined the faculty ...
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Edgar Allison Peers
1891 - 1952 (61 years)
Edgar Allison Peers , also known by his pseudonym Bruce Truscot, was an English Hispanist and education management scholar. He was Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool and is notable for founding the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies .
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Cai Yuanpei
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Cai Yuanpei was a Chinese philosopher and politician who was an influential figure in the history of Chinese modern education. He made contributions to education reform with his own education ideology. He was the president of Peking University, and founder of the Academia Sinica. He was known for his critical evaluation of Chinese culture and synthesis of Chinese and Western thinking, including anarchism. He got involved in the New Culture, May Fourth Movements, and the feminist movement. His works involve aesthetic education, politics, education reform, etc.
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Saint Timothy
17 - 97 (80 years)
Timothy or Timothy of Ephesus was an early Christian evangelist and the first Christian bishop of Ephesus, who tradition relates died around the year AD 97. Timothy was from the Lycaonian city of Lystra or of Derbe in Asia Minor, born of a Jewish mother who had become a Christian believer, and a Greek father. The Apostle Paul met him during his second missionary journey and he became Paul's companion and missionary partner along with Silas. The New Testament indicates that Timothy traveled with Paul the Apostle, who was also his mentor. He is addressed as the recipient of the First and Second Epistles to Timothy.
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Raymond B. Allen
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Raymond B. Allen was an American educator. He served as the president of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, from 1946 to 1951, and as the first chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles from 1951 to 1959.
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Karolina Lanckorońska
1898 - 2002 (104 years)
Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, philanthropist, and historian. Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now, for the most part, be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.
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Helmuth Theodor Bossert
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Helmuth Theodor Bossert was a German art historian, philologist and archaeologist. He is best known for his excavations of the Hittite fortress city at Karatepe, Turkey, and the discovery of bilingual inscriptions, which enabled the translation of Hittite hieroglyphs.
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Julius Sachs
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Julius Sachs was an American educator, founder of the Sachs Collegiate Institute who belongs to the Goldman–Sachs family of bankers. Sachs was born on July 6, 1849, in Baltimore. After taking his A.B. at Columbia in 1867 and his A.M. in 1871, he studied at several European universities. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1871 by the University of Rostock. He married Rosa Goldman, daughter of investment banker Marcus Goldman, in 1874.
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John Erskine
1879 - 1951 (72 years)
John Erskine was an American educator and author, pianist and composer. He was an English professor at Amherst College from 1903 to 1909, followed by Columbia University from 1909 to 1937. He was the first president of the Juilliard School of Music. During his tenure at Columbia University he formulated the General Honors Course—responsible for inspiring the influential Great Books movement. He published over 100 books, novels, criticism, and essays including his most important essay, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent .
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Samuel Henry Dickson
1798 - 1872 (74 years)
Samuel Henry Dickson was an American poet, physician, writer and educator born in Charleston, South Carolina. Dickson graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Medical College of South Carolina. He also taught at NYU and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dickson was a popular published poet and a leader in Charleston intellectual circles. He was friends with Charleston poet William Gilmore Simms and William Cullen Bryant. He and his brother Dr. John Dickson played a significant role in the medical education of the US's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
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Anton Heinrich Springer
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Anton Heinrich Springer was a German art historian and writer. Early life Springer was born in Prague, where he studied philosophy and history at Charles University, earning a Ph.D. Taking an interest in art, he made several educational journeys, travelling to Munich, Dresden and Berlin, and spent some months in Italy. After his Ph.D. he addressed himself to art history. He wrote a second Ph.D. thesis on Hegel's theory of history in Tübingen, where he also was involved in the political activities of the Revolution of 1848.
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