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,
#8951
D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson
1860 - 1948 (88 years)
Sir D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson CB FRS FRSE was a Scottish biologist, mathematician and classics scholar. He was a pioneer of mathematical and theoretical biology, travelled on expeditions to the Bering Strait and held the position of Professor of Natural History at University College, Dundee for 32 years, then at St Andrews for 31 years. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was knighted, and received the Darwin Medal and the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal.
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Frank Bigelow Tarbell
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Frank Bigelow Tarbell was a professor of Classic Studies at the University of Chicago from 1893 until 1918. He was also an associate professor of Greek at that institution. A historian and archeologist, Tarbell published numerous books related to his field.
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Robert Vivier
1894 - 1989 (95 years)
Robert Vivier was a French-speaking Belgian poet and writer. He published his first collection, Le Menetrier, in 1924. He then gave: Dechirures , Au bord du temps , Le Miracle enferme , Trace par l'oubli , Chronos reve . His anxious listening to everyday life, his nostalgia for the childhood of the world, his meditations on the "glory of life" and the "very sweet eternity that breathes the world" are expressed in free verses or very classical verses .
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Frans Michael Franzén
1772 - 1847 (75 years)
Frans Michael Franzén was a Swedish-Finnish poet and clergyman. He served as the Bishop of the Diocese of Härnösand. Biography Franzén was born in Oulu , Northern Ostrobothnia, Sweden . At thirteen he entered the Royal Academy of Turku, where he attended the lectures of Henrik Gabriel Porthan , a pioneer in the study of Finnish history and folklore. He graduated in 1789, and became eloquentiae docens in 1792.
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Francesco Dall'Ongaro
1808 - 1873 (65 years)
Francesco Dall'Ongaro was an Italian writer, poet and dramatist. Biography Born in Mansuè, on 19 June 1808, Dall'Ongaro was educated for the priesthood, but abandoned his orders, and taking to political journalism founded the Favilla at Trieste in the Liberal interest.
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Guillaume Budé
1467 - 1540 (73 years)
Guillaume Budé was a French scholar and humanist. He was involved in the founding of Collegium Trilingue, which later became the Collège de France. Budé was also the first keeper of the royal library at the Palace of Fontainebleau, which was later moved to Paris, where it became the Bibliothèque nationale de France. He was an ambassador to Rome and held several important judicial and civil administrative posts.
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Albrecht von Blumenthal
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Albrecht von Blumenthal was a Classicist professor and soldier. Early life Albrecht von Blumenthal was born in Staffelde in Vorpommern, the son of Rittmeister Vally von Blumenthal and Cornelia Kayser. His father was a Prussian nobleman, his mother a descendant of the painters Lucas Cranach the elder and younger. He was educated by a private tutor PWG Gutzke, the Wilhelmsgymnasium at Eberswalde and then nominated by the Kaiser Wilhelm I as a Rhodes Scholar reading Philosophy at Lincoln College from 1907 to 1909. He returned to Berlin University to switch to Classics and complete his degree in 1911.
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John Davidson
1857 - 1909 (52 years)
John Davidson was a Scottish poet, playwright and novelist, best known for his ballads. He also did translations from French and German. In 1909, financial difficulties, as well as physical and mental health problems, led to his suicide.
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Wilhelm Schmid
1859 - 1951 (92 years)
Wilhelm Schmid was a German classical scholar, born at Künzelsau. After studies at the universities of Tübingen and Strassburg, he taught at Tübingen and became a professor there in 1893. His publications include:Kulturgeschichtliche Zusammenhang und Bedeutung der griechischen Renaissance in der Römerzeit – On the cultural and historical context, and the importance of the Greek Renaissance in the Roman period.Zur Geschichte des griechischen Dithyrambus – The history of the Greek dithyramb.Verzeichniss der griechischen Handschriften der Königlichen Universitäts-Bibliothek Tübingen – Direct...
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George Stuart Gordon
1881 - 1942 (61 years)
George Stuart Gordon was a British literary scholar. Life Gordon was educated at the University of Glasgow and Oriel College, Oxford, where he received a First Class in Classical Moderations in 1904, Literae Humaniores in 1906, and the Stanhope Prize in 1905. He was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1907 to 1915.
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Adolf Kiessling
1837 - 1893 (56 years)
Adolf Kiessling was a German philologist born in Culm . He was a specialist in the field of Roman literature. Biography He obtained his classical education at the University of Bonn as a student of Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, Franz Bücheler and Otto Jahn. In 1863, he became a professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, and in 1869 began teaching classes at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. In 1872 he relocated to the University of Greifswald, where from a scientific standpoint, he spent the most important years of his life. In 1889 he b...
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Richard Steele
1671 - 1729 (58 years)
Sir Richard Steele was an Anglo-Irish writer, playwright, and politician, remembered as co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator. Early life Steele was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1671 to Richard Steele, a wealthy attorney, and Elinor Symes ; his sister Katherine was born the previous year. He was the grandson of Sir William Steele, Lord Chancellor of Ireland and his first wife Elizabeth Godfrey. His father lived at Mountown House, Monkstown, County Dublin. His mother, of whose family background little is known, was described as a woman of "great beauty and no...
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Guo Moruo
1892 - 1978 (86 years)
Guo Moruo , courtesy name Dingtang , was a Chinese author, poet, historian, archaeologist, and government official. Biography Family history Guo Moruo, originally named Guo Kaizhen, was born on November 10 or 16, in the small town of Shawan, located on the Dadu River some southwest from what was then called the city of Jiading , and now is the central urban area of the prefecture level city of Leshan in Sichuan Province.
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Shen Congwen
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Shen Congwen , formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung-wen, was a Chinese writer who is considered one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, on par with Lu Xun. Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers. He was known for combining the vernacular style with classical Chinese writing techniques. Shen is the most important of the "native soil" writers in modern Chinese literature. Shen Congwen published many excellent compositions in his life, the most famous of which is the novella Border Town. This story is about the old ferryman and his granddaughter Cuicui's love story.
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Elias von Steinmeyer
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Elias von Steinmeyer was a German philologist. He studied philology at the University of Berlin, and from 1870 worked as an assistant in the private state archives in Berlin. In 1873 he was named an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, and in 1877 became a full professor of German philology at the University of Erlangen. From 1874 to 1890 he was the editor of the Zeitschrift für deutsches Altertum. He is best known for Die kleineren althochdeutschen Sprachdenkmaler and the Althochdeutsche Glossen .
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Ilia Abuladze
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Ilia Vladimiri dze Abuladze was a distinguished Georgian historian, philologist and public figure, a Corresponding Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Meritorious Science Worker of Georgia , Doctor of Philological Sciences , and professor .
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Ludwig Uhland
1787 - 1862 (75 years)
Johann Ludwig Uhland was a German poet, philologist and literary historian. Biography He was born in Tübingen, Württemberg, and studied jurisprudence at the university there, but also took an interest in medieval literature, especially old German and French poetry. Having graduated as a doctor of laws in 1810, he went to Paris for eight months to continue his studies of poetry; and from 1812 to 1814 he worked as a lawyer in Stuttgart, in the bureau of the minister of justice.
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Alfred John Church
1829 - 1912 (83 years)
Alfred John Church was an English classical scholar. Church was born in London and was educated at King's College, London, and Lincoln College, Oxford. He took holy orders and was an assistant-master at Merchant Taylors' School from 1857 to 1870. He subsequently served as headmaster of Henley-on-Thames Royal Grammar School from 1870 to 1873, and then of King Edward VI School, Retford, from 1873 to 1880. From 1880 until 1888 he was professor of Latin at University College, London.
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Rudolf Schöll
1844 - 1893 (49 years)
Rudolf Schöll was a German classical scholar. He specialized in the fields of Greek and Roman legal history, classical archaeology and Greek epigraphy. He received his education at the University of Göttingen as a student of Hermann Sauppe and Ernst Curtius, followed by studies in Bonn, where his instructors included Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn. In 1865 he obtained his doctorate of philosophy. Later on, he worked in Italy and Greece , first as an aide to Theodor Mommsen in the development of inscriptions and manuscripts, afterwards as a private secretary to Guido von Usedom, the Prussian ...
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Charu Chandra Bhattacharya
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Charu Chandra Bhattacharya was a prominent science teacher and writer of various scientific articles mainly for children in Bengali. Early life and career Bhattacharya was born to Basanta Kumar Bhattacharya and Menaka Devi on 29 June 1883 . His ancestral house was at Harinavi, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India. From childhood, he was an extraordinary student. He passed the "Entrance Examination" with first class from Metropolitan Institution, Calcutta in 1899. In 1901, Bhattacharya stood 12th place in the F. A. examination. He did his graduation with an Honours from Presidency College ...
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Samuel Stehman Haldeman
1812 - 1880 (68 years)
Samuel Stehman Haldeman was an American naturalist and philologist. During a long and varied career he studied, published, and lectured on geology, conchology, entomology and philology. He once confided, "I never pursue one branch of science more than ten years, but lay it aside and go into new fields."
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Hasuda Zenmei
1904 - 1945 (41 years)
was a Japanese nationalist, Shinto fundamentalist, and scholar of kokugaku as well as classical Japanese literature. He was also a historian, author, and military officer. Biography Hasuda was born in 1904 into the family of , abbot of the Ōtani Jōdo temple in the town of Ueki. His father possessed a sword that once belonged to Katō Kiyomasa.
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Alberto Moravia
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Alberto Moravia was an Italian novelist and journalist. His novels explored matters of modern sexuality, social alienation and existentialism. Moravia is best known for his debut novel Gli indifferenti and for the anti-fascist novel Il Conformista , the basis for the film The Conformist directed by Bernardo Bertolucci. Other novels of his adapted for the cinema are Agostino, filmed with the same title by Mauro Bolognini in 1962; Il disprezzo , filmed by Jean-Luc Godard as Le Mépris ; La Noia , filmed with that title by Damiano Damiani in 1963 and released in the US as The Empty Canvas in 1964 and La ciociara, filmed by Vittorio De Sica as Two Women .
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Son Sohui
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Son Sohui was a South Korean writer of novels and short stories. A leading woman writer in the colonial and postwar periods, she is considered one of the first Korean authors to address women's psychological struggles in fiction.
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Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg
1802 - 1872 (70 years)
Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg was a German philosopher and philologist. Life He was born at Eutin, near Lübeck. He was placed in a gymnasium in Eutin, which was under the direction of , a philologist influenced by Immanuel Kant.
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Joseph Campbell
1879 - 1944 (65 years)
Joseph Campbell was an Irish poet and lyricist. He wrote under the Gaelic form of his name Seosamh Mac Cathmhaoil Campbell being a common anglicization of the old Irish name MacCathmhaoil. He is now remembered best for words he supplied to traditional airs, such as My Lagan Love and Gartan Mother's Lullaby; his verse was also set to music by Arnold Bax and Ivor Gurney.
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Arthur Ludwich
1840 - 1920 (80 years)
Arthur Ludwich was a German classical philologist who specialized in Homeric studies. He is remembered for his observations involving the metric and prosody of Homer. He studied theology and classical philology at the University of Königsberg, where his instructors included Karl Lehrs and Ludwig Friedlander. In 1874–75 he conducted Homeric research in Italy, and during the following year, became an associate professor at the University of Breslau. In 1878 he succeeded Lehrs as professor of Greek philology at Königsberg.
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Josef Pekař
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Josef Pekař was a prominent Czech historian of the turn of 19th and 20th century, professor and rector of Charles University in Prague. Life and work After graduating at high school in Mladá Boleslav, which now bears his name, Pekař studied history in Prague. He started the career of historian already during studies, when his article, published in 1890 in Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk's magazine Athenaeum, proved by historical findings, that so called "Manuscript of Králův Dvůr" , allegedly from the 13th century, whose authenticity has long led disputes in the Czech society, is a counterfeit. Pekař ...
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Victor Serge
1890 - 1947 (57 years)
Victor Serge , born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich , was a Russian revolutionary Marxist, novelist, poet and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best remembered for his Memoirs of a Revolutionary and series of seven "witness-novels" chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century.
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Peter Paul Maria Alberdingk Thijm
1827 - 1904 (77 years)
Peter Paul Maria Alberdingk Thijm was a Dutch academic and writer. Life He made his studies in his home city, at first at the Gymnasium and later at the Athenaeum, from which he graduated in letters and history in 1857. For some years he was instructor in history in Maastricht. After being called to a professorship in the Catholic University of Leuven in 1870, he succeeded in establishing a chair for the special study of the history of the literature of the Netherlands.
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J. Dover Wilson
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
John Dover Wilson CH was a professor and scholar of Renaissance drama, focusing particularly on the work of William Shakespeare. Born at Mortlake , he attended Lancing College, Sussex, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He taught at King's College London before becoming Regius Professor of English literature at the University of Edinburgh.
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Ali-Shir Nava'i
1441 - 1501 (60 years)
'Ali-Shir Nava'i , also known as Nizām-al-Din ʿAli-Shir Herawī was a Timurid poet, writer, statesman, linguist, Hanafi Maturidi mystic and painter who was the greatest representative of Chagatai literature.
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Nicholas Moore
1918 - 1986 (68 years)
Nicholas Moore was an English poet, associated with the New Apocalyptics in the 1940s, whose reputation stood as high as Dylan Thomas’s. He later dropped out of the literary world. Biography Moore was born in Cambridge, England, the elder child of the philosopher G. E. Moore and Dorothy Ely. His paternal uncle was the poet, artist and critic Thomas Sturge Moore, his maternal grandfather was OUP editor and author George Herbert Ely and his brother was the composer Timothy Moore .
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William Whitehead
1715 - 1785 (70 years)
William Whitehead was an English poet and playwright. He became Poet Laureate in December 1757 after Thomas Gray declined the position. Life The son of a baker, Whitehead was born in Cambridge and through the patronage of Henry Bromley, afterwards Baron Montfort, was admitted to Winchester College aged fourteen.
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Bin Ueda
1874 - 1916 (42 years)
Bin Ueda was a Japanese writer. Born in Tsukiji, Tokyo, he graduated from Tokyo Imperial University. His major work is Kaichoon 海潮音 , a collection of translations from Western poets by Ueda himself.
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Robert Dwyer Joyce
1830 - 1883 (53 years)
Robert Dwyer Joyce was an Irish poet, writer, and collector of traditional Irish music. Life He was born in County Limerick, Ireland, where his parents, Garret and Elizabeth Joyce, lived in the northern foothills of the Ballyhoura Mountains, west of Ballyorgan. Robert had three brothers: Michael, John and Patrick, a noted scholar. The family claimed descent from one Seán Mór Seoighe , a stonemason from Connemara, County Galway.
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Charles, Duke of Orléans
1394 - 1465 (71 years)
Charles of Orléans was Duke of Orléans from 1407, following the murder of his father, Louis I, Duke of Orléans. He was also Duke of Valois, Count of Beaumont-sur-Oise and of Blois, Lord of Coucy, and the inheritor of Asti in Italy via his mother Valentina Visconti.
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Josep Romaguera
1642 - 1723 (81 years)
Josep Romaguera is the author of the only emblem book ever published in the Catalan language, the Atheneo de Grandesa. His work consists of prose, poetry and sermons. His writing is typical of Baroque style.
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Paul Friedländer
1882 - 1968 (86 years)
Paul Friedländer was a German philologist specializing in classical literature. He studied under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff at the University of Berlin. In 1911 he became a Privatdozent and from 1914 Associate Professor in Berlin, becoming a Professor at Marburg University , University of Halle . In 1935, the Nazi regime forced him to resign and in 1938 he was detained in a concentration camp. After his release, he came to the United States, where he taught first at and Johns Hopkins University , as a lecturer and at UCLA .
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Paddy Chayefsky
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Sidney Aaron "Paddy" Chayefsky was an American playwright, screenwriter and novelist. He is the only person to have won three solo Academy Awards for writing both adapted and original screenplays. He was one of the most renowned dramatists of the Golden Age of Television. His intimate, realistic scripts provided a naturalistic style of television drama for the 1950s, dramatizing the lives of ordinary Americans. Martin Gottfried wrote in All His Jazz that Chayefsky was "the most successful graduate of television's slice of life school of naturalism."
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Zhao Jingshen
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Zhao Jingshen was a popular Chinese novelist. Born in Lishui, Zhejiang, he was a member of the Seminar in literature. He also contributed to the field of translation and folk opera, and funded other writers.
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Archibald MacMechan
1862 - 1933 (71 years)
Archibald McKellar MacMechan was a Canadian academic at Dalhousie University and writer. His works deal mainly with Nova Scotia and its history. The Halifax Disaster was an official history of the Halifax Explosion.
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Johann Jakob Reiske
1716 - 1774 (58 years)
Johann Jakob Reiske was a German scholar and physician. He was a pioneer in the fields of Arabic and Byzantine philology as well as Islamic numismatics. Biography Reiske was born at Zörbig, in the Electorate of Saxony.
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Walther von der Vogelweide
1170 - 1230 (60 years)
Walther von der Vogelweide was a Minnesänger who composed and performed love-songs and political songs in Middle High German. Walther has been described as the greatest German lyrical poet before Goethe; his hundred or so love-songs are widely regarded as the pinnacle of Minnesang, the medieval German love lyric, and his innovations breathed new life into the tradition of courtly love. He was also the first political poet to write in German, with a considerable body of encomium, satire, invective, and moralising.
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Augusta Webster
1837 - 1894 (57 years)
Augusta Webster born in Poole, Dorset as Julia Augusta Davies, was an English poet, dramatist, essayist, and translator. Biography Augusta was the daughter of Vice-admiral George Davies and Julia Hume, she spent her younger years on board the ship he was stationed, the Griper.
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Graham Hough
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Graham Goulden Hough was an English literary critic, poet, and Professor of English at Cambridge University from 1966 to 1975. Life Graham Hough was born in Great Crosby, Lancashire, the son of Joseph and Clara Hough. He was educated at Prescot Grammar School, the University of Liverpool, and Queens' College, Cambridge. He became a lecturer in English at Raffles College, Singapore, in 1930. In World War II he served as a volunteer with the Singapore Royal Artillery, until taken prisoner and interned in a Japanese prison-camp. After further travelling and teaching in the Far East, Hough returned to Cambridge as a fellow of Christ's College in 1950.
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Herman Grimm
1828 - 1901 (73 years)
Herman Grimm was a German academic and writer. Family and education Grimm's father was Wilhelm Grimm , and his uncle Jakob Grimm , the philologist compilers of indigenous folk tales . His other uncle was the painter engraver Ludwig Emil Grimm . Herman Grimm is believed to have had only one child at a young age, Martin Grimm. From 1841 Herman attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. He belonged to a clique associated with Bettina von Arnim , wife of the late poet Achim von Arnim , and started publishing drama and novels. He began legal and philological studies at the universitie...
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John Davies
1569 - 1626 (57 years)
Sir John Davies was an English poet, lawyer, and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1597 and 1621. He became Attorney General for Ireland and formulated many of the legal principles that underpinned the British Empire.
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Johann Friedrich Gronovius
1611 - 1671 (60 years)
Johann Friedrich Gronovius was a German classical scholar, librarian and critic. Born in Hamburg, he studied at several universities and travelled in England, France and Italy. In 1643, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and history at Deventer, and in 1658 to the Greek chair at Leiden, where he remained until his death. In 1665, Gronovius succeeded Antonius Thysius the Younger as the 6th Librarian of Leiden University .
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Karl Elze
1821 - 1889 (68 years)
Karl Friedrich Elze was a German scholar and Shakespearean critic. Life He was the son of Pastor Karl August Wilhelm Elze. He studied classical philology, and modern, but especially English, literature at the University of Leipzig where he obtained his PhD. He was a master for a time in the gymnasium at Dessau, and in 1875 was appointed extraordinary, and in 1876 ordinary, professor of English philology at the University of Halle. The course catalogue for the winter 1875/76 has a four-hour lecture on the history of English literature one hour each day on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
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