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 Mathematics,
#8851
Moon Shin
#108780
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Moon Shin was a South Korean painter and sculptor whose childhood name was Moon Ahn-shin. His date of birth was reported late and is erroneously stated as 1923 in most publications. When an international exhibition was held in France in 1989 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, Moon was one of 24 artists who were invited. One of his pieces can be found in SOMA sculptor park celebrating the 1988 Summer Olympics Seoul.
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Suzan Rose Benedict
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Suzan Rose Benedict was the first woman awarded a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan and had a long teaching career at Smith College. Early life and education Suzan Benedict was born in Norwalk, Ohio, the youngest of seven children of David DeForrest Benedict, MD and Harriott Melvina Benedict . Dr. Benedict had been a Union Surgeon in the American Civil War. She was a niece of oil magnate and philanthropist, Louis Severance.
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Ellen Burrell
1850 - 1938 (88 years)
Ellen Louisa Burrell was an American mathematics professor, head of the Department of Pure Mathematics at Wellesley College from 1897 to 1916. Early life Burrell was born in Lockport, New York, the daughter of Myron Louis Burrell and Mary Jones Burrell. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley College in 1880, in the same class as her future colleagues Katharine Lee Bates and Charlotte Fitch Roberts. She went to Germany for further studies at Göttingen in 1896 and 1897.
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Robert Allan Smith
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Robert Allan Smith CBE FRS PRSE was a British mathematician and physicist. Biography Smith was born in Kelso on 14 May 1909, the elder of two sons of George J T Smith, a tailor, and his wife, Elisabeth , a ladies' dressmaker. His education was initially at local village schools, followed by Kelso High School. In 1926 he entered the University of Edinburgh to study mathematics and natural philosophy, and gained his MA with first-class honours in 1930. He was also awarded a scholarship that took him to Emmanuel College, Cambridge where he read for the Maths Tripos Part II, obtaining his MA in ...
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Helen Almira Shafer
1839 - 1894 (55 years)
Helen Almira Shafer was an American educator and president of Wellesley College. Life Helen Almira Shafer was born Newark, New Jersey on the 23 September 1839. Her father was a clergyman of the Congregational Church. She was educated in a seminary in Albion, New York, afterwards attending Oberlin College.
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Johannes Werner
1468 - 1522 (54 years)
Johann Werner was a German mathematician. He was born in Nuremberg, Germany, where he became a parish priest. His primary work was in astronomy, mathematics, and geography, although he was also considered a skilled instrument maker.
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Eugenius Nulty
1790 - 1871 (81 years)
Eugenius Nulty was an Irish born American mathematician of the 19th century. He served on the faculty of Dickinson College from 1814 to 1816, and later taught and tutored prominent Philadelphians, including the brothers Mathew Carey Lea and Henry Charles Lea.
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Nikolai Nikolaevich Yanenko
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
#8859
Frederick John Kiesler
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Frederick Jacob Kiesler was an Austrian-American architect, theoretician, theater designer, artist and sculptor. Biography Kiesler was born Friedrich Jacob Kiesler in Czernowitz, Austro-Hungarian Empire .
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Ignatz Mühlwenzel
1690 - 1766 (76 years)
Ignatz Heinrich Mühlwenzel was a Bohemian mathematician. Life Ignatz Heinrich Mühlwenzel was a member of the Jesuit order and a professor of mathematics at the University of Prague. He was of minority German ethnicity in western Czech border. He was a skilled optician who ground lenses for his own telescopes. Mühlwenzel is notable because his mathematical "descendants," which include Johann Radon, number more than 10,000.
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Edward Carey Francis
1897 - 1966 (69 years)
Edward Carey Francis OBE, was a British mathematician and Anglican missionary to Kenya, where he became "arguably the most influential educationist in Kenya's modern history". He was born in Hampstead, London. He was educated first at William Ellis School, becoming head-boy of the school and captain of the cricket, football, tennis and athletics teams. After school he enlisted in the British Army, serving in the First World War with the Royal Artillery and being mentioned in despatches. On completion of the war he took up a scholarship to read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge.
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Adrian Krzyżanowski
1788 - 1852 (64 years)
Adrian Krzyżanowski was a Polish mathematician and translator of German literature. Life From 1805 to 1810 he taught in a school in Warsaw, then was a professor of mathematics in Radzyń and Płock before studying from 1817 to 1820 in Paris. He was also a professor at the Warsaw Lyceum, which had been founded by Prussia, and at the University of Warsaw.
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Dieter Rödding
1937 - 1984 (47 years)
Dieter Rödding was a German mathematician who main research interest was mathematical logic. Dieter Rödding was born on 24 August 1937 in Hattingen, Ruhr, Germany. In 1956, Rödding began his studies at the Westphalian Wilhelms-University in Münster, Germany. In 1961, he received his doctorate with the dissertation "Representative sentences about elementary functions", supervised by Gisbert Hasenjaeger. In 1964, he completed his habilitation at Münster with the thesis "Theory of recursivity over the domain of finite sets of finite rank". In 1966, he succeeded Hans Hermes as the Chair and Dire...
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Vladimir Vranić
1896 - 1976 (80 years)
Vladimir Vranić was a Croatian mathematician. He was one of the most renowned professors at the University of Zagreb. The amount of his scientific work was very large, and his most important work was in probability and statistics.
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George Adam Pfeiffer
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
George Adam Pfeiffer was an American mathematician. Pfeiffer received in 1910 his master's degree in engineering from Stevens Institute of Technology and then his A.M. in 1911 and in 1914 his Ph.D. in mathematics from Columbia University. He spent the academic year 1914–1915 as a Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University and then in 1915 became an instructor at Princeton University. During WW I, he was in the U.S. army and at Princeton University taught meteorology to army aviation students. After the war he taught, starting as an instructor in February 1919, at Columbia University. Th...
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Hettie Belle Ege
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
Hettie Belle Ege was an American professor of mathematics. From 1914 to 1916, she was the acting president of Mills College. Early life Ege was born in Erie, Illinois on March 31, 1861, the daughter of Joseph Arthur Ege and his second wife, Catherine Rebecca Reisch Ege. Her parents were both from Pennsylvania; her father died the year she was born, and her mother remarried in 1869. She attended Western College in Oxford, Ohio, graduating in 1886; she later graduated from Mills College in 1903, with further studies at the University of Chicago, the University of Munich, and the University of C...
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Cataldo Agostinelli
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Cataldo Agostinelli was an Italian mathematician who wrote 218 papers and several treatises in various disciplines which include dynamics of rigid systems, celestial mechanics, dynamics of non-holonomic systems and magnetohydrodynamics about which he wrote , commissioned by C.N.R., a broad monograph in which also the magnetohydrodynamics waves, the vortexes and the plasma theory are dealt with. He was member of the Accademia dei Lincei, President of the Accademia delle Scienze of Turin and member of several other local Academies.
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Roy Chapman Andrews
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He led a series of expeditions through the politically disturbed China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. Chapman's popular writing about his adventures made him famous.
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Wilhelm Fuhrmann
1833 - 1904 (71 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Fuhrmann was a German mathematician. The Fuhrmann circle and the Fuhrmann triangle are named after him. Biography Fuhrmann was born on 28 February 1833 in Burg bei Magdeburg. Fuhrmann had shortly worked as sailor before he returned to school and attended the Altstadt Gymnasium in Königsberg, where his teachers noticed his interest and talent in mathematics and geography. He graduated in 1853 and went on to study mathematics and physics at the University of Königsberg. One of his peers later remembered him as the most talented and diligent student of his class. Fuhrmann howev...
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Gustavo Sannia
1875 - 1930 (55 years)
Gustavo Sannia was an Italian mathematician working in differential geometry, projective geometry, and summation of series. He was the son of Achille Sannia, mathematician and senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Henrik Petrini
1863 - 1957 (94 years)
Henrik Petrini was a Swedish mathematician. His mathematical contributions are mainly connected with the theory of partial differential equations, in particular potential theory. He was born in Falun and received his PhD in 1890 from Uppsala University in mechanics, where he subsequently held a position as professor. In 1901 he moved to Växjö, where he worked as a lektor for mathematics and physics at the gymnasium. In 1914 he finally moved to Stockholm. He is best known for his counterexample of a continuous function for which the Newton potential is not twice differentiable. He was also int...
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Emanuels Grīnbergs
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Emanuels Donats Frīdrihs Jānis Grinbergs was a Latvian mathematician, known for Grinberg's theorem on the Hamiltonicity of planar graphs. Biography Grinbergs was born on January 25, 1911, in St. Petersburg, the son of a Lutheran bishop from Latvia. Latvia became independent from Russia in 1917, and on the death of his father in 1923, Grinbergs' family returned to Riga, taking Grinbergs with them.
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Johann Friedrich Weidler
1691 - 1755 (64 years)
Johann Friedrich Weidler was a German jurist and mathematician. Biography At the age of fifteen Weidler moved to the University of Jena, enrolled on June 10, 1712 at the University of Wittenberg, obtained the academic degree of Magister on April 30, 1712 and became an adjunct at the philosophical faculty of the Wittenberg Academy on April 19, 1715. After he had been given the professorship of lower mathematics in 1715, he took over the professorship of higher mathematics in 1719.
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Abraham bar Hiyya
1070 - 1136 (66 years)
Abraham bar Ḥiyya ha-Nasi , also known as Abraham Savasorda, Abraham Albargeloni, and Abraham Judaeus, was a Catalan Jewishish mathematician, astronomer and philosopher who resided in Barcelona. Bar Ḥiyya was active in translating the works of Islamic science into Latin, and was likely the earliest to introduce Arabic algebra into Christian Europe. He also wrote several original works on mathematics, astronomy, Jewish philosophy, chronology, and land surveying. His most influential work is his Ḥibbur ha-Meshiḥah ve-ha-Tishboret, translated in 1145 into Latin as Liber embadorum. A Hebrew treati...
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Florimond de Beaune
1601 - 1652 (51 years)
Florimond de Beaune was a French jurist and mathematician, and an early follower of René Descartes. R. Taton calls him "a typical example of the erudite amateurs" active in 17th-century science. In a 1638 letter to Descartes, de Beaune posed the problem of solving the differential equationnow seen as the first example of the inverse tangent method of deducing properties of a curve from its tangents.
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Lysander
401 BC - 395 BC (6 years)
Lysander was a Spartan military and political leader. He destroyed the Athenian fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami in 405 BC, forcing Athens to capitulate and bringing the Peloponnesian War to an end. He then played a key role in Sparta's domination of Greece for the next decade until his death at the Battle of Haliartus.
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John Torrence Tate Sr.
1889 - 1950 (61 years)
John Torrence Tate Sr. was an American physicist noted for his editorship of Physical Review between 1926 and 1950. He is the father of mathematician John Torrence Tate Jr. Biography Tate was born on 28 July 1889 in Lenox, Iowa. He attended the University of Nebraska, studying electrical engineering, earning a BS in 1910. He continued at the University of Nebraska, shifting his focus to physics and earning an MA in 1912. Like many American students interested in pursuing advanced degrees in physics, he departed for Germany to further his studies, earning a PhD under James Franck in 1914, with...
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Margarethe Kahn
1880 - 1942 (62 years)
Margarethe Kahn was a German mathematician and Holocaust victim. She was among the first women to obtain a doctorate in Germany. Her doctoral work was on the topology of algebraic curves. Life and work Margarethe Kahn was the daughter of Eschwege merchant and flannel factory owner Albert Kahn and his wife Johanne . She had an older brother Otto . Five years after the untimely death of his wife Johanne, their father married her younger sister Julie , with whom he had a daughter, Margaret's half-sister Martha .
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H. W. Lloyd Tanner
1851 - 1915 (64 years)
Henry William Lloyd Tanner was Professor of Mathematics at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire from 1883 to 1909. Life Tanner was born on 17 January 1851 at Burham, Kent and was educated at Bristol Grammar School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he was taught by John Griffiths. He was appointed Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in 1883, and held the post until 1909. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. Tanner published various papers on differential equatio...
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Ivan Privalov
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Ivan Ivanovich Privalov was a Russian mathematician best known for his work on analytic functions. Biography Privalov graduated from Moscow State University in 1913 studying under Dimitri Egorov and Nikolai Lusin. He obtained his master's degree from MSU in 1916 and became professor at Imperial Saratov University . In 1922 he was appointed as Professor at MSU and worked there for the rest of his life.
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William Fleetwood Sheppard
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
William Fleetwood Sheppard FRSE LLM Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.
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Giacomo Candido
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Giacomo Candido was an Italian mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career In 1897 Candido received his Laurea from the University of Pisa and started to teach mathematics: first, at the Liceo of Galatina, then at the Liceo of Campobasso and from 1927 at the Liceo of Brindisi.
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Christoph Rudolff
1499 - 1546 (47 years)
Christoph Rudolff was a German mathematician, the author of the first German textbook on algebra. From 1517 to 1521, Rudolff was a student of Henricus Grammateus at the University of Vienna and was the author of a book computing, under the title: .
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Charlotte Mary Yonge
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist, who wrote in the service of the church. Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and show her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.
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F. H. Jackson
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
The Reverend Frank Hilton Jackson was an English clergyman and mathematician who worked on basic hypergeometric series. He introduced several q-analogs such as the Jackson–Bessel functions, the Jackson-Hahn-Cigler q-addition, the Jackson derivative, and the Jackson integral.
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Ernst Fiedler
1861 - 1954 (93 years)
Ernst Fiedler was a Swiss mathematician. Life and work Fiedler was the son of Wilhelm Fiedler, mathematics professor at ETH Zurich from 1867. From 1879 to 1882 he studied mathematics at ETH Zurich; in 1882 he moved to Berlin where he studied under Weierstrass, Frobenius and other outstanding mathematicians. In 1885 he moved to Leipzig, where he was awarded a doctorate under Felix Klein in 1885.
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Alexander G. Burgess
1873 - 1932 (59 years)
Alexander G. Burgess was a Scottish mathematician. He served as president of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society. He is noted for his work on Tripolar Co-ordinates. Biography He was born in Wishaw, Lanarkshire in southern Scotland in 1872.
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Julius Wolff
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Julius Wolff was a Dutch-Jewish mathematician, known for the Denjoy–Wolff theorem and for his boundary version of the Schwarz lemma. With his family he was arrested in Utrecht by the Nazi occupation forces of the Netherlands on 8 March 1943 and transported to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 13 September 1944, where he died of epidemic typhus on 8 February 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated.
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Jedediah Smith
1799 - 1831 (32 years)
Jedediah Strong Smith was an American clerk, transcontinental pioneer, frontiersman, hunter, trapper, author, cartographer, mountain man and explorer of the Rocky Mountains, the Western United States, and the Southwest during the early 19th century. After 75 years of obscurity following his death, Smith was rediscovered as the American whose explorations led to the use of the -wide South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.
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Kurushima Kinai
1650 - 1757 (107 years)
Kurushima Kinai, also known as Kurushima Yoshita and Kurushima Yoshihiro, was a Japanese mathematician in the Edo period. The Japanese board game of shogi attracted Kurushima's interest; and he was recognized in his own time as a master player. Among shogi players, he continues today to be well known for seven "puzzle ring" gambits with subsequent sequenced maneuvers—including the "silver puzzle ring."
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John James Walker
1825 - 1900 (75 years)
John James Walker FRS was an English mathematician. He was the president of the London Mathematical Society from 1888 to 1890. Life and work His father was headmaster in the schools where he studied: London High School and Plymouth New Grammar School. As his family was of Irish descent, he went to study mathematics and physics to Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1846 and mastered in 1857.
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Ralph Lent Jeffery
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Ralph Lent Jeffery was a Canadian mathematician working on analysis. He taught at several institutions including Acadia University, the University of Saskatchewan and Queen's University. Jeffery Hall at Queen's was named for him. In 1937 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
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Annie MacKinnon
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Annie Louise MacKinnon Fitch was a Canadian-born American mathematician who worked with Felix Klein and became a professor of mathematics at Wells College. She was the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate at an American university.
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Gu Deng
1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Gu Deng was a mathematician and politician at the end of Qing Dynasty and in the early Republic of China. His courtesy name was Yangwu . Biography Gu Deng was born in Wuxi, Jiangsu. In the end of Qing Dynasty He graduated the department of mathematics, the Gezhi Academy . In 1909 Gu translated the book about quaternions, this is the first introduction about quaternions in Chinese history.
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Georgii Polozii
1914 - 1968 (54 years)
Georgii Nikolaevich Polozii was a Soviet mathematician who mostly worked in pure mathematics such as complex analysis, approximation theory and numerical analysis. He also worked on elasticity theory, which is used in applied math and physics. He was Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences , Head of the Department of Computational Mathematics of the Kyiv Cybernetics Faculty University .
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William Guy
1810 - 1885 (75 years)
William Augustus Guy was a British physician and medical statistician. Life He was born in Chichester and educated at Christ's Hospital and Guy's Hospital; he then studied at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Paris before getting a Bachelor of Medicine degree from the University of Cambridge, 1837.
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Maximilien Winter
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Maximilien Winter was a French philosopher of mathematics. In 1893 Winter helped Xavier Léon to found the Revue de métaphysique et de morale. After the First World War Winter ran the Supplément of the Revue until his death in 1935.
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John Arndt Eiesland
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Johan "John" Arndt Eiesland was a Norwegian-American mathematician, specializing in differential geometry. Eiesland immigrated to the US in 1888 after completing his secondary education in Christiansand. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of South Dakota in 1891. He was a mathematics professor from 1895 to 1903 at Thiel College in Pennsylvania. On a leave of absence, he studied mathematics as a Johns Hopkins Scholar at Johns Hopkins University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1898. From 1903 to 1907 he was a mathematics instructor at the United States Naval Academy. In 1907...
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Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza
1852 - 1905 (53 years)
Pierre Paul François Camille Savorgnan de Brazza was an Italian-French explorer. With his family's financial help, he explored the Ogooué region of Central Africa, and later with the backing of the Société de Géographie de Paris, he reached far into the interior along the right bank of the Congo. He has often been depicted as a man of friendly manner, great charm and peaceful approach towards the Africans he met and worked with on his journeys, but recent research has revealed that he in fact alternated this kind of approach with more calculated deceit and at times relentless armed violence towards local populations.
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Domenico Montesano
1863 - 1930 (67 years)
Domenico Alfonso Emmanuele Montesano was an Italian mathematician. He influenced and developed theory on linear congruences and on conic bilinear complexes. Family life Domenico was born in Potenza, Italy in 1863 to Leonardo Antonio Montesano and the duchess Isabella Schiavone of Aragona, Italy. They had nine children, five boys and four girls. Two sons became lawyers, two became medical doctors, and Domenico studied mathematics. The daughters studied through to high school, learning music and painting. Domenico's brother, Giuseppe Ferruccio Montesano, became one of the founders of psychology...
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