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 female people in Philosophy,
#2351
Flora Belle Ludington
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Flora Belle Ludington was an American librarian and author. Ludington served as the head librarian for Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, from 1938 until 1964. Life Born in Huron County, Michigan, Ludington moved to Wenatchee, Washington, as a young girl. At fourteen, she began her library career as a volunteer in the Carnegie public library in Wanatchee. She worked as an assistant in the University of Washington library, where she received a bachelor's degree in librarianship in 1920. She left Washington to be a reference librarian at Mills College, where she went on to study and receive a master's degree in history fin 1925.
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Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
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Margaret Elizabeth Egan
1905 - 1959 (54 years)
Margaret Elizabeth Egan was an American librarian and communication scholar who is best known for “Foundations of a Theory in Bibliography,” published in Library Quarterly in 1952 and co-authored with Jesse Hauk Shera. This article marked the first appearance of the term "social epistemology" in connection with library science.
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Ruth Shaw Wylie
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Ruth Shaw Wylie was a U.S.-born composer and music educator. She described herself as “a fairly typical Midwestern composer,” pursuing musical and aesthetic excellence but not attracting much national attention: “All good and worthy creative acts do not take place in New York City,” she wrote in 1962, “although most good and worthy rewards for creative acts do emanate from there; and if we can’t all be on hand to reap these enticing rewards we can take solace in the fact that we are performing good deeds elsewhere.” She was among the many twentieth-century American composers whose work contri...
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Naomi Scheman
1900 - Present (126 years)
Naomi Scheman is a Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is also a guest professor at the Umeå Center for Gender Studies in Sweden. Scheman was one of the first scholars to bring Wittgenstein's thoughts in to feminist philosophy.
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Janina Hurynowicz
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Janina Hurynowicz was a Polish medical doctor, neurophysiologist and neurologist. She was the author of many works on Chronaxie and the influence of insulin on the autonomic nervous system and became a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Agnes Fogo
Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.
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Elsie Gerlach
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Dr. Elsie Gerlach was named the first superintendent of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry Children's Clinic in 1927 after having served as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerlach stayed for 38 years and became nationally known and respected as a pioneer in the teaching and development of pediatric dentistry. In the early years of the clinic, she looked for children on the street who needed dental care and brought them to the clinic.
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May Brodbeck
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
May Brodbeck was an American philosopher of science. Biography Brodbeck was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied chemistry at New York University, attending evening courses while working, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. Thereafter, she worked as a high-school chemistry teacher, before being recruited into the Manhattan Project. Following the war, she studied philosophy at the University of Iowa, completing a Ph.D. supervised by Gustav Bergmann in 1947, on the subject of John Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
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Dorothy Price
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Dorothy Price was an American physiologist and endocrinologist. She is best known for her discovery of the principle of negative feedback in endocrine axis regulation, in work done alongside Carl Moore. She is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of neuroendocrinology.
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Helen Hart
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Helen Hart was an American plant pathologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Hart was the first woman president of the American Phytopathological Society, and was instrumental in making the University of Minnesota's Department of Plant Pathology a world-leader in stem rust.
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Timycha
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Timycha of Sparta , was a Pythagorean philosopher mentioned by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras: The temperance also of those men, and how Pythagoras taught this virtue, may be learnt from what Hippobotus and Neanthes narrate of Myllias and Timycha who were Pythagoreans. For they say that Dionysius the tyrant could not obtain the friendship of any one of the Pythagoreans, though he did every thing to accomplish his purpose; for they had observed, and carefully avoided his monarchical disposition. He sent therefore to the Pythagoreans, a troop of thirty soldiers, under the command of Eurym...
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Winifred Cullis
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.
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Margaret Masterman
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
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Hilda D. Oakeley
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Hilda Diana Oakeley was a British philosopher, educationalist and author. Life and career Hilda Oakeley was born in 1867 in Durham, UK. She was from a privileged upper-middle-class background. Her father, Sir Evelyn Oakeley was a member of a Shropshire gentry family. He and his wife Caroline had five children. In 1878 her father was promoted and the family moved to Manchester. Hilda attended the private Ellerslie Ladies' College. After finishing school she moved to London and independently studied philosophy and psychology. She attended some of the lectures of the philosopher Bernard Bosanqu...
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Ruth Boynton
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota. She worked in public health and student health services. At that time, there were few women in any of these fields. She was director of the University Student Health Service from 1936 to 1961and it was renamed the Boynton Health Service in her honor in 1975. She served as the acting dean of the School of Public Health from 1944 to 1946.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Virginia Apgar
1909 - 1974 (65 years)
Virginia Apgar was an American physician, obstetrical anesthesiologist and medical researcher, best known as the inventor of the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child immediately after birth in order to combat infant mortality. In 1952, she developed the 10-point Apgar score to assist physicians and nurses in assessing the status of newborns. Given at one minute and five minutes after birth, the Apgar test measures a child's breathing, skin color, reflexes, motion, and heart rate. A friend said, "She probably did more than any other physician to bring the problem ...
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Virginia Barbour
Virginia M. Barbour is a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and serves as the Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group. She is best known for being one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine, and her various roles in championing the open access movement.
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Penelope Mackie
1900 - Present (126 years)
Penelope Mackie was a British philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and philosophical logic, and was best known for her work on essence and modality. Mackie spent the majority of her career in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham , having also held appointments at the University of Birmingham, Virginia Commonwealth University, and New College, Oxford.
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
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Susan Ofori-Atta
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Susan Barbara Gyankorama Ofori-Atta, also de Graft-Johnson, was a Ghanaian medical doctor – the first female doctor on the Gold Coast. She was the first Ghanaian woman and fourth West African woman to earn a university degree. Ofori-Atta was also the third West African woman to become a physician after the Nigerians Agnes Yewande Savage and Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi . In 1933, Sierra Leonean political activist and higher education pioneer, Edna Elliot-Horton became the second West African woman university graduate and the first to earn a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. Eventually Of...
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Alice Weld Tallant
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Alice Weld Tallant was an American physician and medical school professor. When her employment as a professor of obstetrics was terminated at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, it sparked the "Tallant Affair", in which students staged a strike and several colleagues resigned their positions in protest.
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Annette Lewis Phinazee
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Alethia Annette Lewis Hoage Phinazee was the first woman and the first black American woman to earn the doctorate in library science from Columbia University. She was called a trailblazer for her work as a librarian and educator.
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Althea Warren
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Althea Hester Warren was the director of the Los Angeles Public Library from 1933 to 1947 and president of the American Library Association in 1943-1944. She was inducted into the California Library Association's Library Hall of Fame in 2013.
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Helena Blavatsky
1831 - 1891 (60 years)
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , often known as Madame Blavatsky, was a Russian and American mystic and author who co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. She gained an international following as the leading theoretician of Theosophy.
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Simone Weil
1909 - 1943 (34 years)
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Since 1995, more than 2,500 scholarly works have been published about her, including close analyses and readings of her work.
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Raya Dunayevskaya
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Raya Dunayevskaya , later Rae Spiegel, also known by the pseudonym Freddie Forest, was the American founder of the philosophy of Marxist humanism in the United States. At one time Leon Trotsky's secretary, she later split with him and ultimately founded the organization News and Letters Committees and was its leader until her death.
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Susanne Langer
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Susanne Katherina Langer was an American philosopher, writer, and educator known for her theories on the influences of art on the mind. She was one of the earliest American women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best remembered for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key which was followed by a sequel Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art in 1953. In 1960, Langer was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Helena Roerich
1879 - 1955 (76 years)
Helena Ivanovna Roerich was a Russian theosophist, writer, and public figure. In the early 20th century, she created, in cooperation with the Teachers of the East, a philosophic teaching of Living Ethics . She was an organizer and participant of cultural activity in the U.S., conducted under the guidance of her husband, Nicholas Roerich. Along with her husband, she took part in expeditions of hard-to-reach and little-investigated regions of Central Asia. She was an Honorary President-Founder of the Institute of Himalayan Studies "Urusvati" in India and co-author of the idea of the International Treaty for Protection of Artistic and Scientific Institutions and Historical Monuments .
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Maria Ossowska
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Maria Ossowska was a Polish sociologist and social philosopher. Life A student of the philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbiński, she originally in 1925 received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Warsaw with a thesis on Bertrand Russell. In her later work, she focused on the philosophy and sociology of ethics. Ossowska is often mentioned as a member of the Lwów–Warsaw school.
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Rachel Carson
1907 - 1964 (57 years)
Rachel Louise Carson was an American marine biologist, writer, and conservationist whose influential book Silent Spring and other writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement.
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Christine Ladd-Franklin
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Christine Ladd-Franklin was an American psychologist, logician, and mathematician. Early life and education Christine Ladd, sometimes known by the nickname "Kitty", was born on December 1, 1847, in Windsor, Connecticut, to Eliphalet, a merchant, and Augusta Ladd. During her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger brother Henry in New York City. In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year. Family correspondence shows that Augusta and one of her sisters were both staunch supporters of women's rights.
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Diotima of Mantinea
450 BC - 300 BC (150 years)
Diotima of Mantinea is the name or pseudonym of an ancient Greek character in Plato's dialogue Symposium, possibly an actual historical figure, indicated as having lived circa 440 B.C. Her ideas and doctrine of Eros as reported by the character of Socrates in the dialogue are the origin of the concept today known as Platonic love.
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Julie Favre
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Julie Velten Favre , sometimes called Madame Jules Favre, was a French philosopher and educator. She is known for her work educating young women and for advancing a moral philosophy that advocated living a virtuous life, rather than one based on rules and punishment.
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Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Sosipatra
400 - 400 (0 years)
Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography
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Clémence Royer
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Clémence Royer was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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Alice Paul
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
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Ruth Nanda Anshen
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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Christine de Pizan
1363 - 1430 (67 years)
Christine de Pizan or Pisan , was an Italian-born French poet and court writer for King Charles VI of France and several French dukes. Christine de Pizan served as a court writer in medieval France after the death of her husband. Christine's patrons included dukes Louis I of Orleans, Philip the Bold of Burgundy, and his son John the Fearless. Considered to be some of the earliest feminist writings, her work includes novels, poetry, and biography, and she also penned literary, historical, philosophical, political, and religious reviews and analyses. Her best known works are The Book of the City...
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Marie Laurencin
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Marie Laurencin was a French painter and printmaker. She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d'Or. Biography Laurencin was born in Paris, where she was raised by her mother and lived much of her life. At 18, she studied porcelain painting in Sèvres. She then returned to Paris and continued her art education at the Académie Humbert, where she changed her focus to oil painting. During the early years of the 20th century, Laurencin was an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde. A member of both the circle of Pablo P...
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Bertha Reynolds
1887 - 1978 (91 years)
Bertha Capen Reynolds was an American social worker who was influential in the creation of strength-based practice, radical social work and critical social work, among others. Early life and education Bertha Capen Reynolds born in Brockton, Massachusetts, on December 11, 1887 to Mary Reynolds and Franklin Stewart Reynolds. Her father died while she was a young child, and she moved with her mother to Boston to work as a teacher.
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Hipparchia of Maroneia
350 BC - 280 BC (70 years)
Hipparchia of Maroneia was a Cynic philosopher, and wife of Crates of Thebes. She was the sister of Metrokles, the cynic philosopher. She was born in Maroneia, but her family moved to Athens, where Hipparchia came into contact with Crates, the most famous Cynic philosopher in Greece at that time. She fell in love with him, and, despite the disapproval of her parents, she married him. She went on to live a life of Cynic poverty on the streets of Athens with her husband.
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Eugénie Ginsberg
1870 - 1944 (74 years)
Eugénie Ginsberg or Eugénie Ginsberg-Blaustein was a Polish philosopher and psychologist noted for her works on descriptive psychology and her analysis of existential dependence, independence, and related concepts as applied in the area of psychology.
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Elsie Whetnall
1897 - 1998 (101 years)
Elsie Matilda Maude Whetnall was a British analytic philosopher. Life and career Elsie Whetnall was the daughter of Thomas William Ward Whetnall, a Staff Officer for the Board of Education, and Emma Cox. She was educated at Southall County Secondary School, then at Bedford College, London University, where she obtained a first-class degree in 1921. Whetnall was an external doctoral student of Susan Stebbing, at Bedford College where she wrote her thesis on the theory of symbols. They were friends, and Stebbing, in the preface to her book A Modern Introduction to Logic , wrote: "...in personal discussion I owe more than I can say to my friend, Miss E.M.
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