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,
#2501
Virginia M. Alexander
1900 - 1949 (49 years)
Virginia M. Alexander was an American physician, public health researcher, and the founder of the Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Early life Virginia M. Alexander was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 4, 1899, to Hilliard Alexander and Virginia Pace, who were both born into slavery in the US. She had four siblings, including the prominent attorney Raymond Pace Alexander. Alexander's mother died when she was 4 years old, and at age 13 her father's riding academy closed. Alexander withdrew from school to help relieve the resulting economic strain on her family...
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Susan McKinney Steward
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Susan Maria McKinney Steward was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. McKinney-Steward's medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1911, she...
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Jessie Gray
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jessie Catherine Gray was a Canadian cancer surgeon, educator, and researcher. Known as the Canadian "First Lady of Surgery", Gray is described as a trailblazer for women surgeons and an example that women could excel in the male-dominated field of general surgery. During her career, she was considered one of the top four cancer surgeons in North America, and she earned many firsts and fellowships in her field.
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Ellen Bliss Talbot
1867 - 1968 (101 years)
Ellen Bliss Talbot was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, chairing the department of philosophy and psychology for 32 years. She is considered one of the first professional academic women philosophers.
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Jane Clapperton
1832 - 1914 (82 years)
Jane Hume Clapperton was a British philosopher, birth control pioneer, socialist, social reformer and suffragist. Life Her father was Alexander Clapperton and mother Anne Clapperton . She had eleven siblings. Her father ran a company, Clapperton & Co., in Edinburgh and moved from 43 Lauriston Place close to George Heriot's School to 126 George Street in the year Jane was born.
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Su Xuelin
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Su Xuelin or Su Hsüeh-lin was a Chinese writer and scholar. Early life Su Xuelin was born to a family of officials native to Anhui province in 1897. Her grandfather, Su Jinxin, served as a magistrate in several counties in Zhejiang province, where Su Xuelin was born. Her mother was surnamed Tu, but had no formal first name, instead going by the nickname To-Ni. Su's father held a minor official position, first under the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China. Su had three brothers and two sisters.
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Hilda Lloyd
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Dr. Dame Hilda Nora Lloyd, DBE was a British physician and surgeon. She was the first woman to be elected as president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Born in Birmingham, the younger of two daughters, she attended King Edward VI High School, Edgbaston before entering Birmingham University .
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Laura Bentivolgio Davia
1689 - Present (337 years)
Laura Bentivoglio Davia was an Italian aristocratic philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and natural philosophy. She was known primarily for creating relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze .
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Emilia Rensi
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Emilia Rensi was an Italian philosopher, free thinker, writer and teacher. She wrote for anarchist and progressive magazines, such as Flavia Steno's La Chiosa, Volontà , Umanità Nova and Franco Leggio's Sicilia Libertaria . She began publishing books on social, cultural and ethical subjects from the late 1960s onwards.
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Theodora Kimball Hubbard
1887 - 1935 (48 years)
Theodora Kimball Hubbard was the first librarian of the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture, and a contemporary of and collaborator with many significant figures in landscape architecture in expanding the body of knowledge in that subject area.
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Themista of Lampsacus
300 BC - 260 BC (40 years)
Themista of Lampsacus , the wife of Leonteus, was a student of Epicurus, early in the 3rd century BC. Epicurus' school was unusual in the 3rd century, in that it allowed women to attend, and we also hear of Leontion attending Epicurus' school around the same time. Cicero ridicules Epicurus for writing "countless volumes in praise of Themista," instead of more worthy men such as Miltiades, Themistocles or Epaminondas. Themista and Leonteus named their son Epicurus.
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Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider was a German-Australian physicist and philosopher. She is best known for her collaboration and correspondence with physicists Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and Max Planck. Rosenthal-Schneider earned a PhD in philosophy in 1920 at the University of Berlin, where she first met Albert Einstein. After leaving Nazi Germany and emigrating to Australia in 1938, she became a tutor in the German department at the University of Sydney in 1945 and taught history and philosophy of science. In the 1940s and 1950s, she exchanged a series of letters with Albert Einstein about philo...
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Eta Harich-Schneider
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Eta Harich-Schneider was a German harpsichordist, musicologist, Japanologist and writer. Life Born in Oranienburg, Harich-Schneider later gave her year of birth as 1897, whereas her gravestone in Vienna-Hietzing reads "1894".
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Jane Anne Russell
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Jane Anne Russell was an endocrinologist. She researched pituitary extract. Education Russell graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, California, in 1928, as the second best student in her class. At age 17, she entered the University of California Berkeley, and graduated in 1932 as first in her class. She was awarded the California Fellowship in Biochemistry in 1934 and the Rosenburg Fellowship in 1935.
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Jacqueline Cochran
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Jacqueline Cochran was an American pilot and business executive. She pioneered women's aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation. She set numerous records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. Cochran was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots , which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities. Cochran was later a sponsor of the Mercury 13 women astronaut program.
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Ida Mann
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Professor Dame Ida Caroline Mann, Mrs Gye, DBE, FRCS was "a distinguished ophthalmologist ... equally well known for her pioneering research work on embryology and development of the eye, and on the influences of genetic and social factors on the incidence and severity of eye disease throughout the world". Only six other women were Fellows at this time.
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Públia Hortênsia de Castro
1548 - 1595 (47 years)
Públia Hortênsia de Castro was a scholar and humanist in the court of Catherine of Austria, Queen of Portugal. Born in 1548 in Vila Viçosa, Portugal, she was named for Hortensia, the famous Roman orator and daughter of Quintus Hortensius, suggesting that her parents intended for her to become a well-educated woman. She evidently studied Greek and Latin, and by the time she was seventeen she was engaged in public debates on Aristotle. There are stories that, dressed as a boy and chaperoned by her brother, she attended the University of Coimbra, in Lisbon, but historians consider this unlikely....
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Laura Alberta Linton
1853 - 1915 (62 years)
Laura Alberta Linton was an American chemist and physician. Early life and education Linton was born in Mahoning County, Ohio, on April 8, 1853, the oldest child of Joseph and Christina Linton. The family were Quakers. The family farmed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey before settling in Wabasha County, Minnesota. Linton graduated from the Winona Normal School in 1872, and went on to the University of Minnesota, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry.
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Bertha Van Hoosen
1863 - 1952 (89 years)
Bertha Van Hoosen was an American surgeon devoted to women's health issues and the advancement of fellow women surgeons. Among other notable achievements, Van Hoosen was the first president and a founder of the American Medical Women's Association in 1915 and the first woman to be head of a medical division at a coeducational university. She published an autobiography detailing her personal experiences in medicine, Petticoat Surgeon.
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Grace Arabell Goldsmith
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Grace Arabell Goldsmith was a U.S. physician best known for her research on nutritional deficiency diseases, B-complex vitamins, and the vitamin enrichment of foods. She identified the cause of the disease pellagra.
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Eliza Maria Mosher
1846 - 1928 (82 years)
Eliza Maria Mosher was a United States physician, inventor, medical writer, and educator whose wide-ranging medical career included an educational focus on physical fitness and health maintenance. She was the first Dean of Women at the University of Michigan, and the first woman professor to be recognized by the university.
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Joice NanKivell Loch
1887 - 1982 (95 years)
Joice NanKivell Loch MBE was an Australian author, journalist and humanitarian worker who worked with refugees in Poland, Greece and Romania after World War I and World War II. Biography Joice Mary NanKivell was born at Farnham sugar cane plantation in Ingham in far north Queensland in 1887. Her father acted as manager of the plantation for Fanning, NanKivell, a company run by the Fanning brothers and her wealthy grandfather, Thomas NanKivell. The family fortune was lost however when Kanaka labour was abolished and Joice and her parents walked off the property virtually penniless. Her father,...
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Frances Clarke Sayers
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Clarke Sayers was an American children's librarian, author of children's books, and lecturer on children's literature. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Ethel Collins Dunham
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Ethel Collins Dunham , and her life partner, Martha May Eliot, devoted their lives to the care of children. Dunham focused on premature babies and newborns, becoming chief of child development at the Children's Bureau in 1935. She established national standards for the hospital care of newborn children and expanded the scope of health care for growing youngsters by monitoring their progress in regular home visits by Children's Bureau staff.
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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Grace de Laguna
1878 - 1978 (100 years)
Grace Mead de Laguna was an American philosopher who taught at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Life Grace Mead Andrus was born on 28 September 1878 in East Berlin, Connecticut. She was the youngest child, and only daughter, of Wallace R. Andrus and Annis Andrus . Both parents were of Connecticut ancestry dating back to the 17th century. Her mother, Annis, had been a school teacher. Her father had served with the 17th Connecticut Volunteers during the Civil War, He would later work as a land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway whilst it was being built. This led to the family moving, wh...
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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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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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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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Hilary Cass
Hilary Dawn Cass is a British medical doctor and a consultant in paediatric disability at St Thomas' Hospital, London. She was the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health from 2012 to 2015.
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Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a Jewish bacteriologist and physician, known for her research on tuberculosis and public health. She was the second woman to become a Professor in Prussia. Biography Lydia Rabinowitsch was born at Kovno, Russian Empire . She was educated at the girls' gymnasium of her native city, and privately in Latin and Greek, subsequently studying natural sciences at the universities of Zurich and Bern . After graduation she went to Berlin, where Professor Robert Koch permitted her to pursue her bacteriological studies at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. She became t...
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Anna Botsford Comstock
1854 - 1930 (76 years)
Anna Botsford Comstock was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies. The first female professor at Cornell University, her over 900-page work, The Handbook of Nature Study , is now in its 24th edition. Comstock was an American artist and wood engraver known for illustrating entomological text books with her husband, John Henry Comstock including their first joint effort, The Manual for the Study of Insects . Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.
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Virginia Gildersleeve
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve was an American academic, the long-time dean of Barnard College, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, and the only woman delegated by United States to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the charter for and creation of the United Nations.
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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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Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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Sophie Germain
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Marie-Sophie Germain was a French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher. Despite initial opposition from her parents and difficulties presented by society, she gained education from books in her father's library, including ones by Euler, and from correspondence with famous mathematicians such as Lagrange, Legendre, and Gauss . One of the pioneers of elasticity theory, she won the grand prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her essay on the subject. Her work on Fermat's Last Theorem provided a foundation for mathematicians exploring the subject for hundreds of years after. Because o...
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Ruth L. Saw
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Ruth Lydia Saw was a British philosopher and aesthetician. Education and career Ruth Saw attended the County School for Girls in Wallington, Surrey, followed in 1926 by Bedford College, University of London, where she studied under Susan Stebbing. She accepted a position as lecturer in philosophy at Smith College and remained there for several years. She then returned to England and was appointed to a Lecturership in Philosophy at Bedford College in 1939 and remained there for the rest of her career. She became Reader in Philosophy in 1946 and then Professor of Aesthetics from 1961 to 1964. S...
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Constance Jones
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones known as Constance Jones or E.E. Constance Jones, was an English philosopher and educator. She worked in logic and ethics. Life and career Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones was born at Langstone Court, Llangarron, Herefordshire, to John Jones and his wife, Emily, daughter of Thomas Oakley JP, of Monmouthshire. She was the eldest of ten children. Constance was mostly tutored at home. She spent her early teenage years with her family in Cape Town, South Africa, and when they returned to England in 1865 she attended a small school, Miss Robinson's, in Cheltenham, fo...
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Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum
1899 - 1942 (43 years)
Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum was a Polish logician and philosopher. She published some twenty research papers along with translations into Polish of three books by Bertrand Russell. The main focus of her writings was on foundational problems related to probability, induction and confirmation. She is noted especially for authoring the first printed discussion of the Raven Paradox which she credits to Carl Hempel and the probabilistic solution she outlined to it. Shot by the Gestapo in 1942, she, like her husband Adolf Lindenbaum, and many other eminent representatives of Polish logic, shared t...
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Helen Knight
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Helen Knight was a British philosopher. She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics. Life and education Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead. She began her BA at Bedford College, London, before coming to Cambridge University in 1921 where she took Part II Moral Sciences in 1923 and obtained a first class degree. From 1923 to 1925 she was a Research Student at Newnham College. She married psychologist Rex Knight on 30 January 1926 , and then appears to have taken a break from academic philosophy until 1932 when she returned to Newnham as Sarah Smithson Research Fellow.
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Margaret MacDonald
1907 - 1956 (49 years)
Margaret MacDonald was a British analytic philosopher. She worked in the areas of philosophy of language, political philosophy and aesthetics. Life and education Margaret MacDonald was born in London and abandoned as a child.
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Arignote
530 BC - 450 BC (80 years)
Arignote or Arignota was a Pythagorean philosopher from Croton, Magna Graecia, or from Samos. She was known as a student of Pythagoras and Theano and, according to some traditions, their daughter as well.
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Anna Willess Williams
1857 - 1926 (69 years)
Anna Willess Williams was a teacher and philosophical writer best known as the model for George T. Morgan's silver dollar design, popularly known as the Morgan dollar. Morgan dollar In 1876, George T. Morgan began creating a series of new coin designs at the behest of Director of the Mint, Dr. Henry R. Linderman. Morgan opted to use the profile of an American girl to depict the Goddess of Liberty instead of simply creating an imaginary figure for the obverse of his new design. After he rejected several possible candidates, Morgan's friend, artist Thomas Eakins, recommended Anna Williams of Philadelphia.
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Asclepigenia
500 - 485 (-15 years)
Asclepigenia was an Athenian philosopher and mystic. Biography Asclepigenia was the daughter of Plutarch of Athens. She studied and taught, alongside her brother Hierius, at the Neoplatonic school of Athens. The school contended with the more scientific school in Alexandria. Like other Neoplatonists of the time, she mainly studied Aristotle and Plato, but also her father's own philosophy. She lived in a historical context of turmoil due to the conflict between Neoplatonic metaphysics, which was taught in Plutarch's academy, and Christianity, which had been gaining in popularity at the time.
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Matilda Joslyn Gage
1826 - 1898 (72 years)
Matilda Joslyn Gage was an American writer and activist. She is mainly known for her contributions to women's suffrage in the United States but she also campaigned for Native American rights, abolitionism , and freethought . She is the eponym for the Matilda effect, which describes the tendency to deny women credit for scientific invention. She influenced her son-in-law L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
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