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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8601
Ernst Maass
1856 - 1929 (73 years)
Ernst Maass was a German classical philologist. From 1875 he studied at the universities of Tübingen and Greifswald, receiving his doctorate in 1879 as a student of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. After graduation, he took an extended study trip to Italy, Paris and London , and afterwards qualified as a lecturer in Berlin with the habilitation-thesis Analecta Eratosthenica. In 1886, he was named a professor at the University of Greifswald, and from 1895 to 1924, served as a professor and director of the philological seminary at the University of Marburg. In 1910/11 he was rector at the u...
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Aleksandr Evlakhov
1880 - 1966 (86 years)
Aleksandr Mikhailovich Evlakhov was a Russian literary critic and doctor. Professor, Rector of Rostov State University in 1920. Biography Aleksandr Mikhailovich Evlakhov was born on 8 August 1880 in Odessa in the family of a gymnasium teacher. In 1898 he entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of the Saint Petersburg University, but already a year later he moved to the History and Philology Department, which he graduated in 1903. In 1902 he also graduated from the St. Petersburg Archaeological Institute and worked there for a while. In 1907 he became a Master of Literature. Privatdocent of St.
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Thomas Blackburn
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Thomas Eliel Fenwick Blackburn was a British poet. His work is noted for its self-examination and spiritual imagery. His memoir, A Clip of Steel , portrays the effects of a childhood under a repressive clergyman father.
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William Logan
1841 - 1914 (73 years)
William Logan was a Scottish officer of the Madras Civil Service under the British Government. Before his appointment as Collector of Malabar, he had served in the area for about twenty years in the capacity of Magistrate and Judge. He was conversant in Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu. He is remembered for his 1887 guide to the Malabar District, popularly known as the Malabar Manual.
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Vanja Radauš
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Vanja Radauš was a Croatian sculptor, painter and writer. Life After attending elementary and high school in his home town of Vinkovci, he studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb from 1924 to 1930. During World War II he participated in the National Liberation movement. He was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts from 1945 to 1969.
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Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
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Marian Auerbach
1882 - 1941 (59 years)
Marian Auerbach a.k.a. Mayer [Majer] Auerbach was a Polish classical philologist of Jewish background. He graduated from the Philology Department of the University of Lwów, where he received his doctorate in 1911 and his habilitation in 1932. Auerbach lectured there, and was murdered by the Gestapo during the Holocaust in Poland.
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Dion Boucicault
1820 - 1890 (70 years)
Dionysius Lardner "Dion" Boucicault was an Irish actor and playwright famed for his melodramas. By the later part of the 19th century, Boucicault had become known on both sides of the Atlantic as one of the most successful actor-playwright-managers then in the English-speaking theatre. Although The New York Times hailed him in his obituary as "the most conspicuous English dramatist of the 19th century," he and his second wife, Agnes Robertson Boucicault, had applied for and received American citizenship in 1873.
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Tom Brown
1662 - 1704 (42 years)
Thomas Brown , also known as Tom Brown, was an English translator and satirist, largely forgotten today save for a four-line gibe that he may have written concerning John Fell. Biography Early life Brown was born at either Shifnal or Newport in Shropshire; he is identified with the Thomas Brown, son of William and Dorothy Brown, who was recorded christened on 1 January 1663 at Newport. His father, a farmer and tanner, died when Thomas was eight years old. He took advantage of the free schooling offered in the county, attending Adams' Grammar School at Newport, before going up to Christ Churc...
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Jacob Baart de la Faille
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Jacob Baart de la Faille compiled the first catalogue raisonné of the work of Vincent van Gogh, published in 1928. The catalogue was revised and republished by an editorial committee in 1970, and this version is considered to be the definitive catalogue of van Gogh's work.
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Paulin Martin
1840 - 1890 (50 years)
Jean-Pierre-Paulin Martin , often referred to as Abbé Paulin Martin, or simply Abbé Martin or Paulin Martin, was a French Catholic Biblical scholar. Life Paulin Martin's secondary studies were made at Montfaucon, and his theology at St. Sulpice. Here came under the influence of Le Hir. At the end of his course, Martin was too young for ordination; so he went to the French Seminary, Rome, attended the lectures at the Gregorian University, and was raised to the priesthood in 1863.
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Mihail Cruceanu
1887 - 1988 (101 years)
Mihail Cruceanu was a Romanian poet. He was born in Iași to Mihail Cruceanu, a doctor, and his wife Ecaterina . He attended high school in Ploiești and Pitești, earning his degree in 1906 at Bucharest's Saint Sava High School. Cruceanu enrolled in the University of Bucharest, where he took degrees in law and literature and philosophy . He subsequently taught high school at Alexandria, Craiova and Bucharest. He made his poetic debut in Revista literară in 1904. Although he associated with the Literatorul circle of Alexandru Macedonski, he was closer to Ovid Densusianu's Vieața Nouă group. His first published volume was the 1912 Spre cetatea zorilor.
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Adeline Rittershaus
1876 - 1924 (48 years)
Adeline Rittershaus was a German philologist, a scholar in old Scandinavian literature, and champion for the equality of women. She earned her doctorate in 1898, at the University of Zurich, being one of the first women to do so at that institution, and acquired in 1902, as the first woman, a Venia legendi at the Faculty of Arts of the same university. Her most famous work is a collection of Icelandic folk tales.
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Dumitru Popovici
1902 - 1952 (50 years)
Dumitru Popovici was a Romanian literary historian. Born in Dăneasa, Olt County, his parents were Ioan Popovici, a teacher, and his wife Ioana . After attending primary school in nearby Șerbănești from 1909 to 1914, he studied at Radu Greceanu High School in Slatina from 1914 to 1923. Popovici then went to the literature faculty of the University of Bucharest from 1923 to 1927, earning a doctorate there in 1935. From 1924 to 1926, he was honorific teaching assistant to Dumitru Caracostea. He taught high school in Slatina and Iași . From 1936 until his death, he was a professor in the literature faculty of the University of Cluj.
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D. Gwenallt Jones
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
David James Jones , commonly known by his bardic name Gwenallt, was a Welsh poet, critic, and scholar, and one of the most important figures of 20th-century Welsh-language literature. He created his bardic name by transposing Alltwen, the name of the village across the river from his birthplace.
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Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas
1523 - 1601 (78 years)
Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas , also known as El Brocense, and in Latin as Franciscus Sanctius Brocensis, was a Spanish philologist and humanist. Biography Sanctius was born in Brozas, province of Cáceres. His parents, Francisco Núñez and Leonor Díez, were of noble birth but had little money. Sancius was able to study thanks to the support of relatives, starting in Évora, where he learnt Latin and humanities, and then in Lisbon. There he served Queen Catherine I and King John III of Portugal and remained in the court of the Portuguese kingdom until the death of the princess in 1545. In acco...
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Ștefan Vârgolici
1843 - 1897 (54 years)
Ștefan G. Vârgolici was a Moldavian, later Romanian poet, critic and translator. Born in Borlești, Neamț County, he attended secondary school at Academia Mihăileană in Iași, followed by the literature and philosophy faculty at the University of Iași. After obtaining a degree in 1864, Vârgolici continued his studies at Madrid, Paris , and Berlin. Following his return home, he taught high school in Bârlad and Iași. In 1875, he was hired as a professor at the University of Iași's French language and literature department, which later became the department of the history of modern literatures, particularly Romance.
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Mary Abigail Dodge
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Mary Abigail Dodge was an American writer and essayist, who wrote under the pseudonym Gail Hamilton. Her writing is noted for its wit and promotion of equality of education and occupation for women. She was an abolitionist.
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Patrick Russell
1726 - 1805 (79 years)
Patrick Russell was a Scottish surgeon and naturalist who worked in India. He studied the snakes of India and is considered the "Father of Indian Ophiology". Russell's viper, Daboia russelii, is named after him.
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Terrot R. Glover
1869 - 1943 (74 years)
Terrot Reaveley Glover was a Cambridge University lecturer of classical literature. He was a fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. He was also a Latinist, and is known for translating Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses to Latin.
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Adela Rogers St. Johns
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Adela Nora Rogers St. Johns was an American journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. She wrote a number of screenplays for silent movies, but is best remembered for her groundbreaking exploits as "The World's Greatest Girl Reporter" during the 1920s and 1930s and her celebrity interviews for Photoplay magazine.
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William McGonagall
1825 - 1902 (77 years)
William Topaz McGonagall was a Scottish poet of Irish descent. He gained notoriety as an extremely bad poet who exhibited no recognition of, or concern for, his peers' opinions of his work. He wrote about 200 poems, including "The Tay Bridge Disaster" and "The Famous Tay Whale", which are widely regarded as some of the worst in English literature. Groups throughout Scotland engaged him to make recitationss from his work, and contemporary descriptions of these performances indicate that many listeners were appreciating McGonagall's skill as a comic music hall character. Collections of his vers...
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Margaret Wilson
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Margaret Wilhelmina Wilson was an American novelist. She was awarded the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for The Able McLaughlins. Early years and education Born in Traer, Iowa, Wilson grew up on a farm and attended the University of Chicago, earning degrees in 1903 and 1904.
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Johan Peter Weisse
1832 - 1886 (54 years)
Johan Peter Weisse was a Norwegian philologist. Personal life He was born in Fluberg as a son of physician Joachim Frederik Weisse and his wife Grethe Fleischer. His grandfather had migrated to Norway from Brandenburg. The family moved to Trondhjem in 1833.
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Richard Fariña
1937 - 1966 (29 years)
Richard George Fariña was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist. Early years and education Fariña was born in Brooklyn, New York, United States, the son of an Irish mother, Theresa Crozier, and a Cuban father of Galician origin, also named Richard Fariña. He grew up in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn and attended Brooklyn Technical High School. He earned an academic scholarship to Cornell University, starting as an engineering major, but later switching to English. While at Cornell he published short stories for local literary magazines and for national periodicals, including Transatlantic Review and Mademoiselle.
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Marcus Musurus
1470 - 1517 (47 years)
Marcus Musurus was a Greek scholar and philosopher born in Candia, Venetian Crete . Life The son of a rich merchant, Musurus became at an early age a pupil of Janus Lascaris in Venice. In 1505, Musurus was made professor of Greek language at the University of Padua. Erasmus, who had attended his lectures there, testifies to his knowledge of Latin. However, when the university was closed in 1509 during the War of the League of Cambrai, he returned to Venice where he filled a similar post.
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Ji Kang
223 - 262 (39 years)
Ji Kang , sometimes referred to as Xi Kang, courtesy name Shuye , was a Chinese writer, poet, Daoist philosopher, musician and alchemist of the Three Kingdoms period. He was one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove who held aloof from the dangerous politics of third-century China to devote themselves to art and refinement.
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Catharine Trotter Cockburn
1674 - 1749 (75 years)
Catharine Trotter Cockburn was an English novelist, dramatist and philosopher who wrote on various subjects, including moral philosophy and theology, and maintained a prolific correspondence. Trotter's writings encompass a wide range of topics, such as necessity, the infinitude of space and substance. However, her primary focus was on moral issues. She believed that moral principles were not inherent but could be discovered by each individual through the use of reason, a faculty bestowed by God. In 1702, she published her first significant philosophical work, titled "A Defence of Mr. Lock's [...
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John of Garland
1195 - 1300 (105 years)
Johannes de Garlandia or John of Garland was a medieval grammarian and university teacher. His dates of birth and death are unknown, but he probably lived from about 1190 to about 1270. Life John of Garland was born in England, and studied at Oxford and then at the medieval University of Paris, where he was teaching by 1220. He lived and taught on the Left Bank at the Clos de Garlande, after which Rue Galande is named. This is the origin of the name by which he is usually known. The main facts of his life are stated in his long poem De triumphis ecclesiae .
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Antonio Alcalá Venceslada
1883 - 1955 (72 years)
Antonio Alcalá Venceslada was a Spanish writer and scholar of Andalusia. He studied variously in Málaga, Jaen, Granada and Sevilla. As an archivist/librarian, he worked in Compostela, Cádiz, Huelva and Jaén. He also taught at the Instituto Virgen del Carmen in Jaén.
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Thomas Heath
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Sir Thomas Little Heath was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. He was educated at Clifton College. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.
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Antanas Kriščiukaitis
1864 - 1933 (69 years)
Antanas Kriščiukaitis also known by his pen name Aišbė was a Lithuanian writer and judge, who served as the chairman of the Lithuanian Tribunal from 1918 to his death. Kriščiukaitis was born in Suvalkija to a family of well-off Lithuanian farmers. Already as a student at the Marijampolė Gymnasium, he started contributing articles to the Lithuanian press. He studied law at the University of Moscow and joined a secret society of Lithuanian students, chaired by Petras Leonas. After the graduation in 1890, he worked as interrogator and judge in Moscow, Mitau , Tikhvin and Novgorod raising to the rank of State Councillor.
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Elisabeth Jastrow
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Elisabeth Jastrow was a German-born American classical archaeologist. Her research focus included arulae . Early life and education Elisabeth Anna Marie Jastrow was born October 7, 1890, in Berlin. She came from a family of assimilated German Jews. Her father was the historian and social scientist, Ignaz Jastrow. Through her father, she grew up in a world full of scholars and artists, the sister Lotte Beate Jastrow Hahn later combined education and horticulture.
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Gregory Foster
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
Sir Thomas Gregory Foster was the Provost of University College London from 1904 to 1929, and Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1928 to 1930. Early life He was born in London and attended University College School and graduated from University College London in 1888 with a degree in English. He obtained a PhD from Strasbourg University in 1892 with his dissertation on the Anglo-Saxon poem Judith .
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Antonio Porta
1935 - 1989 (54 years)
Antonio Porta was an author and poet and one of the founders of the Italian literary movement Gruppo 63. Biography Antonio Porta was born Leo Paolazzi in Vicenza in 1935. In 1958, he became an editor of the literary magazine Il Verri under Luciano Anceschi. During his time as an editor, he wrote a collection of poems to be included in the anthology I novissimi , which included works by Elio Pagliarani, Edoardo Sanguineti, Alfredo Giuliani, and Nanni Balestrini.
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Eric Williams
1911 - 1983 (72 years)
Eric Williams was an English writer and former Second World War RAF pilot and prisoner of war who wrote several books dealing with his escapes from prisoner-of-war camps, most famously in his 1949 novel The Wooden Horse, made into a 1950 movie of the same name.
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Jacques Gousset
1635 - 1704 (69 years)
Jacques Gousset was a French Protestant theologian and philologist, after 1685 in exile in the Netherlands. Life He was born in Blois, the son of Pierre Gousset and Marguerite Papin; he was a cousin of Denis Papin. He was a student of Louis Cappel at Saumur Academy, and then became pastor at Poitiers.
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Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin
1715 - 1795 (80 years)
Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin , known in English as Timothy O'Sullivan, was a composer of mostly Christian poetry in the Irish language whose Pious Miscellany was reprinted over 40 times in the early 19th century.
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Girolamo Mercuriale
1530 - 1606 (76 years)
Girolamo Mercuriale or Mercuriali was an Italian philologist and physician, most famous for his work De Arte Gymnastica. Biography Born in the city of Forlì, the son of Giovanni Mercuriali, also a doctor, he was educated at Bologna, Padua and Venice, where he received his doctorate in 1555. Settling in Forli, he was sent on a political mission to Rome. The pope at the time was Paul IV.
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Gely Abdel Rahman
1931 - 1990 (59 years)
Gely Abdel Rahman was one of the leading Sudanese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Early life Gely Abdel Rahman was born in Gez'irat Saay, or Saï , a small island in the Nile river in northern Sudan. Ethnically from Mahas Skoot, his father migrated to Egypt in the 1920s, where he worked in Royal Palaces as Guard or in Ansh'as Elramel . Gely came to Egypt with his mother when he was two years old. He has four sisters and three brothers. He began writing poems when he was 7. When he was nine years old, he learned the whole book of Qur'an by heart, for which he has been awarded a Royal prize.
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Albert LeRoy Andrews
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Albert LeRoy Andrews was a professor of Germanic philology and an avocational bryologist, known as "one of the world’s foremost bryologists and the American authority on Sphagnaceae." From 1922 to 1923 he was the president of the Sullivant Moss Society, renamed in 1970 the American Bryological and Lichenological Society.
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Abai Qunanbaiuly
1845 - 1904 (59 years)
Ibrahim Qunanbaiūly was a Kazakh poet, composer and Hanafi Maturidi theologian philosopher. He was also a cultural reformer toward European and Russian cultures on the basis of enlightened Islam. Among Kazakhs he is known simply as Abai.
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Agostino Mascardi
1590 - 1640 (50 years)
Agostino Mascardi was an Italian rhetorician, historian and poet. Expelled from the Jesuit Order by his superiors, Mascardi pursued a successful career as a secretary for various important figures, and became a renowned writer and professor of rhetoric at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was a member of several learned societies and wrote a seminal treatise, "Dell'arte historica" advocating history as a powerful instrument of ethical and religious persuasion and largely focusing on the interplay between truth and believability.
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Jack Snow
1907 - 1956 (49 years)
John Frederick Snow , born Piqua, Ohio was an American radio writer, writer of ghost stories, and scholar, primarily of the works of L. Frank Baum. When Baum died in 1919, the twelve-year-old Snow offered to be the next Royal Historian of Oz, but was politely turned down by a staffer at Baum's publisher, Reilly & Lee. Snow eventually wrote two Oz books: The Magical Mimics in Oz and The Shaggy Man of Oz , as well as Who's Who in Oz , a thorough guide to the Oz characters, all of which Reilly & Lee published.
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Bernadotte Perrin
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Bernadotte Perrin was an American classicist. Life He was born in Goshen, Connecticut on September 15, 1847. He was the son of Lavalette Perrin, a Congregational minister, and Ann Eliza Perrin. He died on August 31, 1920, at Saratoga Springs, New York.
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Henry James
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Henry James III was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1931. James, who was described as "delightful, rather pedantic, crisp, and humorous," was the son of William James and the nephew of novelist Henry James.
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Heinrich Meibom
1555 - 1625 (70 years)
Heinrich Meibom , German historian and poet, was born at Barntrup in Westphalia. He held the chair of history and poetry at Helmstedt from 1583 until his death. He was a writer of Latin verses ; and his talents in this direction were recognized by the emperor Rudolph II, who ennobled him; but his claim to be remembered rests on his services in elucidating the medieval history of Germany.
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Carel Gabriel Cobet
1813 - 1889 (76 years)
Carel Gabriel Cobet was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography He was born in Paris, but educated in the Netherlands, at the Gymnasium Haganum and the University of Leiden. The university conferred on him an honorary degree, and recommended him to the government for a travelling pension. The ostensible purpose of his journey was to collate the texts of Simplicius of Cilicia, which, however, engaged but little of his time. He contrived to study almost every Greek manuscript in the Italian libraries, and returned after five years with an intimate knowledge of palaeography.
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Gerald Gould
1885 - 1936 (51 years)
Gerald Gould was an English writer, known as a journalist and reviewer, essayist and poet. Life He was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and brought up in Norwich, and studied at University College London and Magdalen College, Oxford. He had a position at University College from 1906, and was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1909 to 1916.
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Nicolae Quintescu
1841 - 1913 (72 years)
Nicolae Chiriac Quintescu was a Wallachian, later Romanian philologist, essayist and translator. He was born in Craiova; his father seems to have been Chiriac Chintescu, who farmed a nearby plot of land given to him on lease. Chiriac appears in a petition of 1831 and was on the city council in 1848. Nicolae later described himself as a "son of Oltenia" who grew up "in the fortifying atmosphere.... in which Ioan Maiorescu had worked". He graduated from Saint Sava College in Bucharest, and in 1861 left for Germany. There, he took a degree in classical philology from Bonn University and, in 1867, a doctorate in literature from the University of Berlin.
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