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,
#2901
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
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Charles Duncan McIver
1860 - 1906 (46 years)
Charles Duncan McIver was the founder and first president of the institution now known as The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Life and career He was born 1860 in Lee County, North Carolina and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, in 1881. McIver became a teacher in Durham and Winston North Carolina until 1889 when he and Edwin A. Alderman were chosen by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to hold teacher institutes across the state.
Go to Profile#2903
John Milton Gregory
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
John Milton Gregory was an American educator and the first president of the University of Illinois, then known as Illinois Industrial University. Early life John Milton Gregory was born on July 16, 1822, in Sand Lake, New York. He graduated from Union College in 1846. He then spent two years studying law, but ultimately entered the ministry and became a Baptist clergyman.
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David Yellin
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
David Yellin was an educator, a researcher of the Hebrew language and literature, a politician, one of the leaders of the Yishuv, the founder of the first Hebrew College for Teachers, one of the founders of the Hebrew Language Committee and the Israel Teachers Union, and the Zikhron Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#2905
Auguste Angellier
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Auguste Angellier was the first teacher of language and English literature at the Faculté de Lettres of Lille, before becoming its dean from 1897 to 1900. A literary critic and historian of literature, he was also a poet, and made sensation at the Sorbonne attacking the theories of Hippolyte Taine in his thesis about Robert Burns in 1893.
Go to Profile#2906
John Langalibalele Dube
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
John Langalibalele Dube OLG was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet. He was the founding president of the South African Native National Congress , which became the African National Congress in 1923. He was an uncle to Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, with whom he founded SANNC. Dube served as the president of SANNC between 1912 and 1917. He was brought to America by returning missionaries and attended Oberlin Preparatory Academy.
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Otto Pächt
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Otto Pächt was an Austrian art historian and one of the representatives of the second wave of the Vienna School of Art History. He mostly wrote on the medieval and Renaissance art of Europe. An exile from the Nazis, he taught in England and United States, before returning to Austria in 1963.
Go to Profile#2908
Madan Mohan Malaviya
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Madan Mohan Malaviya was an Indian scholar, educational reformer and politician notable for his role in the Indian independence movement. He was president of the Indian National Congress four times and the founder of Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha. He was addressed as Pandit, a title of respect, and also as Mahamana .
Go to Profile#2909
Cesare Brandi
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Cesare Brandi was an art critic and historian, specialist in conservation-restoration theory. In 1939 he became the first director of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. His main books on art interpretation are Le due vie , and Teoria generale della critica . Le due vie was presented and debated in Rome by Roland Barthes, Giulio Carlo Argan and Emilio Garroni. The philosopher he felt mostly closer to was Heidegger, although their positions didn't coincide; for this, he felt also closer to Derrida, particularly to his theorization of Différance.
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Fritz Lang
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Friedrich Christian Anton Lang , better known as Fritz Lang , was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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Peter Noikov
1868 - 1921 (53 years)
Peter Noikov was a Bulgarian educator and the first Bulgarian professor in pedagogic. Noikov was born in Yambol. He worked as a teacher and graduated from a secondary school in Sofia. In 1893 the Ministry of Education sent him to a course in Switzerland. The same year, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig, studying philosophy and pedagogy under Wilhelm Wundt, Friedrich Paulsen, Johannes Volkelt and Carl Stumpf. He made PhD in 1898 .
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John M. Bloss
1839 - 1905 (66 years)
John McKnight Bloss was an American Civil War soldier who had an influence on the Battle of Antietam and was later President of Oregon Agricultural College from 1892 until 1896. Early life and education He was born in New Philadelphia, Indiana in 1839.
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Manolis Triantafyllidis
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Manolis A. Triantafyllidis was a major representative of the demotic movement in education in Greece. He was mostly active in Thessaloniki, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is well known for his comprehensive grammar of Modern Greek.
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Louis P. Bénézet
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Louis Paul Bénézet was an American educator and writer who pioneered the reform of school education in the early twentieth century. Early career Bénézet was principal and football coach of Central High School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, from 1907 to 1908. From 1916 to 1924, Bénézet was superintendent of schools in Evansville, Indiana and, from 1924 to 1938, in Manchester, New Hampshire.
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Munier Choudhury
1925 - 1971 (46 years)
Munier Choudhury was a Bangladeshi educationist, playwright, literary critic and political dissident. He was a victim of the mass killing of Bangladeshi intellectuals in 1971. He was awarded Independence Day Award in 1980, by the then president Ziaur Rahman's government, posthumously.
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John Canaday
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
John Edwin Canaday was a leading American art critic, author and art historian. Early life and education John Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, to Franklin and Agnes F. Canaday. His family moved to Dallas when Canaday was seven and later moved to San Antonio, where he attended Main Avenue High School.
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Richard Copley Christie
1830 - 1901 (71 years)
Richard Copley Christie was an English lawyer, university teacher, philanthropist and bibliophile. Early life and education He was born at Lenton in Nottinghamshire, the son of a mill owner. He was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford where he was tutored by Mark Pattison, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1857. He also held numerous academic appointments, notably the professorships of history from 1854 to 1856 and of political economy from 1855 to 1866 at Owens College.
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Ben Bowen Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Sir Ben Bowen Thomas was a Welsh civil servant and university President. He served as Permanent Secretary to the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Education from 1945 to 1963, and was President of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1964 to 1975. In June 1977 Thomas was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University.
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John Huston
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics. Many of his films involved themes such as religion, meaning, truth, freedom, psychology, colonialism, and war. He received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and the BAFTA Fellowship in 1980.
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Edwin C. Hewett
1828 - 1905 (77 years)
Edwin C. Hewett was a professor and president at Illinois State Normal University, now known as Illinois State University. He was a prominent president in the early years of the university and an outspoken advocate for equal education.
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Alois Riegl
1858 - 1905 (47 years)
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He was one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline, and one of the most influential practitioners of formalism.
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Syed Ahmad Khan
1817 - 1898 (81 years)
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan , also spelled Sayyid Ahmad Khan, was an Indian Muslim reformer, philosopher, and educationist in nineteenth-century British India. Though initially espousing Hindu–Muslim unity, he later became the pioneer of Muslim nationalism in India and is widely credited as the father of the two-nation theory, which formed the basis of the Pakistan movement. Born into a family with strong ties to the Mughal court, Ahmad studied science and the Quran within the court. He was awarded an honorary LLD from the University of Edinburgh in 1889.
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Niels Laurits Høyen
1798 - 1870 (72 years)
Niels Laurits Andreas Høyen is considered to be the first Danish art historian and critic. He promoted a Danish nationalistic art through his writings and lectures, and exerted a far reaching effect on contemporary artists. His work in various cultural institutions helped steer the development of Danish art during the mid-19th century.
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Cynthia S. Burnett
1840 - 1932 (92 years)
Cynthia S. Burnett was an American educator, temperance reformer, and newspaper editor. She passed her early life in Ohio, but her first temperance movement work was done in Illinois, in 1879, later answering calls for help in Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In 1885, she was made state organizer of Ohio, and the first year of this appointment, she lectured 165 times, besides holding meetings in the daytime and organizing over 40 unions. Her voice failing, she accepted a call to Utah as teacher in the Methodist Episcopal College, in Salt Lake City. While living there, she was made ...
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William Miller
1838 - 1923 (85 years)
William Miller was a Scottish educationalist and Free Church of Scotland missionary to Madras. He was also a member of Madras Legislative Council for four terms—in 1893, 1895, 1899, and 1902. He was chiefly notable for transforming Madras Christian College into an ecumenical enterprise and imbuing the minds of Madras Province South Indians with Fulfilment theology, with an idea of "Christ the fulfiller"—in a sense, he is considered not only the pioneer of Fulfilment theology, but also of Hindu Renaissance by making Indian converts to think Christianity in Indian context. He was the recipient...
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Ingebrikt Grose
1862 - 1939 (77 years)
Ingebrikt Fredrick Grose or Ingebricks F. Grose was an author, college professor and founding president of Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota. Background Inglebrikt was the first child of Johan and Ingeborg Grose. His father, Johan had arrived in the United States during 1854 from Stetten, then a part of Prussia. His mother, Ingeborg emigrated to the United States from the western Norway during the same year. His parents were married in Wisconsin in 1860 and moved to Kenyon, Minnesota, where Grose was born in 1862. Grose attended primary school in Kenyon, after which he traveled to St.
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Otto Kurz
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Otto Kurz FBA was a historian and Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford. Education University of Vienna Career Fleeing to London from the Nazis, he was Librarian at the Warburg Institute, 1944–65 and Professor of the History of Classical Tradition with special reference to the Near East, University of London, 1965–75. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 1971–72.
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T. S. R. Boase
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase was a British art historian, university teacher, and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Early life and education Thomas Boase was born in Dundee, Scotland, to Charles Millet Boase , operator of a bleaching mill at Claverhouse, outside Dundee, of which the Boase family were part-owners, and his wife Anne. Boase was educated at a day preparatory school and then at Rugby School in England .
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Adolph Goldschmidt
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Adolph Goldschmidt was a Jewish German art historian. He taught at University of Berlin from 1892 to 1903, and University of Halle from 1904 to 1912. Biography He was born on 15 January 1863 in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. His family was Jewish and in the banking business. After a short business career he devoted himself to the study of the history of art at the universities of Jena, Kiel, and Leipzig. He took his degree in 1889 with the dissertation, Lübecker Malerei und Plastik bis 1530 , the first detailed analysis of the medieval art of northeast Germany.
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Thomas I. Gasson
1859 - 1930 (71 years)
Thomas Ignatius Gasson was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit. Born in England, he emigrated to the United States at the age of 13, and was taken under the care of two Catholic women in Philadelphia, which led to his conversion to Catholicism soon thereafter. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1875, and studied theology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, where he was ordained a priest. Upon his return to the United States, he became a professor at Boston College, before being named President of Boston College in 1907.
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Richard Taylor
1781 - 1858 (77 years)
Richard Taylor was an English naturalist and publisher of scientific journals. He became joint editor of the Philosophical Magazine in 1822 and went on to publish the Annals of Natural History in 1838. From 1837 to 1852, he edited and published Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science. In 1852, he was joined by the chemist Dr William Francis to form Taylor and Francis.
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Henry Thode
1857 - 1920 (63 years)
Henry Thode was a German art historian. He was born in Dresden and died in Copenhagen. Biography He was an art historian at the time of the Weimar republic. He wrote against the prevailing ideas of the time that art from outside of Germany, such as French Impressionism was superior to traditional academic or native art.
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Bernhard Wosien
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Bernhard Wosien was a German Ballet master, choreographer and professor of expression education and dance. Wosien is the founder of the modern form of sacred dance; he was assisted by his daughter, Maria-Gabriele Wosien.
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Hans Peter L'Orange
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Hans Peter L'Orange was a Norwegian art historian and classical archaeologist. Biography L'Orange was born in Kristiania , Norway. He was a son of Major General Hans Wilhelm L'Orange and Ginni Gulbranson . His family had its origin from among the French Huguenots. He was a paternal grandson of military officer Hans Peter L'Orange , maternal grandson of businessowner Carl August Gulbranson and brother-in-law of journalist and writer, Gunnar Larsen .
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Lilian Wyckoff Johnson
1864 - 1956 (92 years)
Lilian Wyckoff Johnson was an American teacher of history and an advocate for rural reform and civil rights. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee to John Cumming Johnson and Elizabeth Fisher. Both of her parents valued education and were strong proponents of community service. Her mother headed up the Memphis Women's Christian Association and was the first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. After an early education in private schools, in 1878 Lilian was sent to Dayton, Ohio to take refuge during a yellow fever outbreak; while there, she attended the Cooper Academy. Her parents...
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John Anderson
1726 - 1796 (70 years)
John Anderson was a Scottish natural philosopher and liberal educator at the forefront of the application of science to technology in the industrial revolution, and of the education and advancement of working men and women. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was the posthumous founder of Anderson's College , which ultimately evolved into the University of Strathclyde.
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Harriet Newell Haskell
1835 - 1907 (72 years)
Harriet Newell Haskell was an American educator and school administrator from the U.S. state of Maine. She taught from 1855 to 1860 in Waldoboro, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. From 1860 to 1868, she was a teacher and principal at Castleton Collegiate Seminary, Vermont. Thereafter, for 39 years, she served as principal at Monticello Seminary of Godfrey, Illinois.
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René Clair
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
René Clair , born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Clair's best know...
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Paulius Galaunė
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Paulius Galaunė was a Lithuanian art historian, museum curator, and graphic artist. He was one of the first professional museum curators in Lithuania and was well-published on topics of Lithuanian folk art. The apartment of Galaunė and his wife Adelė Nezabitauskaitė, an opera singer, was converted into the Galaunė Family Museum in 1995, and contains his personal belongings as well as his works. It is part of the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum. He was buried in Petrašiūnai Cemetery.
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Fukuzawa Yukichi
1835 - 1901 (66 years)
Fukuzawa Yukichi was a Japanese educator, philosopher, writer, entrepreneur and samurai who founded Keio University, the newspaper Jiji-Shinpō, and the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases. Fukuzawa was an early advocate for reform in Japan. His ideas about the organization of government and the structure of social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji period. He appears on the current 10,000-Japanese yen banknote.
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Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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Efrem Zimbalist
1889 - 1985 (96 years)
Efrem Zimbalist was a Russian and American concert violinist, composer, conductor and director of the Curtis Institute of Music. Early life Efrem Zimbalist Sr. was born on April 9, 1889, O.S., equivalent to April 21, 1889, in the Gregorian calendar, as reported in many newspaper obituaries, in the southwestern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, the son of Jewish parents Maria and Aron Zimbalist , who was a conductor. By the age of nine, Efrem Zimbalist was first violin in his father's orchestra. At age 12 he entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and studied under Leopold Auer. He graduated f...
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Isaac Fisher
1877 - 1957 (80 years)
Isaac Fisher was an American educator who graduated from Tuskegee Institute, served as principal at Branch Normal College, and taught at several other Historically Black Colleges and Universities. A protege of Booker T. Washington, he advocated vocational education.
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Porter Garnett
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Porter Garnett was a playwright, critic, editor, librarian, teacher, and printer. Biography Porter Garnett was born in 1871 in San Francisco. He was an active member in San Francisco's literary scene and a member of the Bohemian Club, writing and directing plays at Bohemian Grove. In 1896, he joined The Lark, founded the previous year by Gelett Burgess and Bruce Porter. In 1907 he became assistant curator of Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Emilio Cornalia
1824 - 1882 (58 years)
Emilio Cornalia was an Italian naturalist. He was born in Milan and died in the same city. He was conservator from 1851 to 1866, and director from 1866 till his death, of the Milan Museum of Natural History, and was interested in all areas of biology.
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Karol Estreicher
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
Karol Estreicher was a Polish historian of art, writer and bibliographer, recipient of the Order of Polonia Restituta, son of Stanisław Estreicher. He was a professor at Jagiellonian University and served as the head of the university's museum. He was engaged in the restitution of Polish works of art looted during World War II. In 1944, after nearly three years of intensive research, Estreicher published Poland's Cultural Losses: An Index of Polish Cultural Losses During the German Occupation, 1939–1944, which provided the basis for detailed restitution efforts in Poland at the end of the war...
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Sergey Tolstov
1907 - 1976 (69 years)
Sergey Pavlovich Tolstov was a Russian and Soviet archaeologist and ethnographer. Tolstov was the organizer and the first director of the Chorasmian Expedition credited with discovery and investigation of archeological monuments of Khwarezm. He is also the author of the book Old Khwarezm, the seminal work in the field. In 1953, Tolstov was elected the corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
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Pi Zongshi
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Pi Zongshi was a Chinese educator and politician who served as president of Hunan University from July 1936 to September 1940. Biography Pi was born into a family of farming background in Changsha, Hunan. In 1903 he went to study in Japan, and graduated from the University of Tokyo. He joined the Tongmenghui in 1905 while he studied at Tokyo. He returned to China in 1902 and that year he established the Republic of China Daily with Zhou Gengsheng, Yang Duanliu, and Ren Kainan. The Beiyang government closed down the newspaper when its articles against Yuan Shikai's restoration of monarchy. In ...
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William Gilbert Anderson
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
William Gilbert Anderson was an American pioneer of physical education, physician and writer. Anderson was born in St. Joseph, Michigan. He was educated at Amherst College and the University of Wisconsin. He studied at Cleveland Medical College and received his M.D. in 1883. From 1883 to 1892 he worked as a physician at the Adelphi Academy and directed the Brooklyn Normal School for Physical Education . In 1885, he was appointed director of the gymnasium at the Adelphi Academy.
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