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 people in Philosophy,
#14451
Gilbert Chase
#52544
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
Gilbert Chase was an American music historian, critic and author, and a "seminal figure in the field of musicology and ethnomusicology. His America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present was the first major work to examine the music of the entire United States and argue that folk traditions were more culturally significant than music for the concert hall. Chase's analysis of a diverse American musical identity has remained the dominant view among the academic establishment. He also "was the first to treat the music of Charles Ives and Carl Ruggles as important additions to the 20th-century repertory".
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J. Scott Yaruss
#138063
Overall Influence
J. Scott Yaruss is a professor of communicative sciences and disorders at Michigan State University. Yaruss was formerly an associate professor at University of Pittsburgh School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and co-director of Stuttering Center of Western Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#14453
Homer R. Warner
#14662
Overall Influence
1911 - 2012 (101 years)
Homer Richards Warner was an American cardiologist who was an early proponent of medical informatics who pioneered many aspects of computer applications to medicine. Author of the book, Computer-Assisted Medical Decision-Making, published in 1979, he served as CIO for the University of Utah Health Sciences Center, as president of the American College of Medical Informatics , and was actively involved with the National Institutes of Health. He was first chair of the Department of Medical Informatics at the University of Utah School of Medicine, the first American medical program to formally of...
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John Brown
1800 - 1859 (59 years)
John Brown was a prominent leader in the American abolitionist movement in the decades preceding the Civil War. First reaching national prominence in the 1850s for his radical abolitionism and fighting in Bleeding Kansas, Brown was captured, tried, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia for a raid and incitement of a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry in 1859.
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Deena Hinshaw
#18128
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (51 years)
Deena Hinshaw is a Canadian doctor who serves as a Deputy Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia and served as Chief Medical Officer of Health for the province of Alberta from January 28, 2019, to November 14, 2022, after being removed by Danielle Smith. She provided daily updates on the COVID-19 pandemic in Alberta to the public throughout most of 2020 and into 2021, though she stopped holding regular briefings in at the end of June 2021. She also provided recommendations to Jason Kenney, the former Premier of Alberta and the Emergency Management Cabinet Committee.
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Nick Yee
#25150
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Nick Yee is an American researcher who studies self-representation and social interaction in virtual environments. Biography Yee earned his bachelor's degree in psychology from Haverford College and received his Ph.D. in communication from Stanford University in 2007. He was a researcher at the Palo Alto Research Center in California from 2005 to 2012.
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Kahlil Gibran
#52234
Overall Influence
1922 - 2008 (86 years)
Kahlil G. Gibran , sometimes known as "Kahlil George Gibran" , was a Lebanese American painter and sculptor from Boston, Massachusetts. A student of the painter Karl Zerbe at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gibran first received acclaim as a magic realist painter in the late 1940s when he exhibited with other emerging artists later known as the "Boston Expressionists". Called a "master of materials", as both artist and restorer, Gibran turned to sculpture in the mid-fifties. In 1972, in an effort to separate his identity from his famous relative and namesake, the author of The ...
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Sen Sōshitsu XV
#32011
Overall Influence
1923 - Present (103 years)
Sen Sōshitsu XV is the 15th-generation Grand Master of Urasenke, which is one of the most widely known schools of Japanese tea, and served in official capacity from 1964 to 2002. In 1949, he received the Zen title Hōunsai . Following his retirement, he adopted the name Sen Genshitsu , with the honorary title Daisōshō, in order to distinguish him from his son and successor, Sen Sōshitsu XVI. For over seven decades, Dr. Sen Genshitsu has traveled across the world in order to promote the ethos of "Peacefulness through a Bowl of Tea".
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Y. Michal Bodemann
#53546
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Y. Michal Bodemann is professor emeritus, University of Toronto, sociologist, best known for his work on German Jewry, the concept of ideological labor and "memory theater" and his contributions to sociological praxis, interventive field work, here in particular, his interventive observation method in qualitative field work. In the approach to interventive observation, Bodemann advocates the reciprocal nature of researcher and the people in a setting, as active participation, against the notion of passive or neutral role of the observer. Bodemann's theoretical foundation continues to be infl...
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Wolfgang Leidhold
#87377
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wolfgang Leidhold is a German political scientist, philosopher and artist. He works as a full professor at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Cologne, with a focus on political theory and the history of ideas. The scope of his work ranges from the Paleolithic to the present day. Since the 1980s he has been exploring the history of experience and its transformations. He recently published the results of his research in The History of Experience: A Study in Experiential Turns and Cultural Dynamics from the Paleolithic to the Present Day . The main focus of his artistic work is painting and drawing.
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Shakeel Ahmed Qureshi
#114349
Overall Influence
Sir Shakeel Ahmed Qureshi is a British physician who is Consultant Paediatric Cardiologist at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust. He is Chair of the Medical Board of the Charity Chain of Hope.
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Edward Wotton
1492 - 1555 (63 years)
Edward Wotton was an English physician, born in Oxford, credited with starting the modern study of zoology, by separating out much of the fanciful and folkloric additions that had been added over time to the body of zoological knowledge.
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Aslam Jairajpuri
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Aslam Jairajpuri was a scholar of Qur'an, Hadith, and Islamic history who is best known for his books Talimat-e-Qur'an and "History of Qur'an. He was Distinguished Professor of Arabic and Persian at Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia. He was born on 27 January 1882 in Jairajpur, Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh, India, and died on 28 December 1955 in Delhi.
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Stefano Infessura
1436 - 1500 (64 years)
Stefano Infessura was an Italian humanist historian and lawyer. He is remembered through his municipalist Diary of the City of Rome, a partisan chronicle of events at Rome by the Colonna family's point of view. He was in a position to hear everything that circulated in informed Roman circles, for he was the longtime secretary of the Roman Senate. Anecdotes that Infessura relates may be colored by his own partisan nature, but his diary faithfully records news that was making the rounds in the city, whether true or not; "he inserted every fragment of the most preposterous and malevolent gossip ...
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Jenny Heathcote
#170847
Overall Influence
Elizabeth Jane "Jenny" Heathcote was a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto and a gastroenterologist and scientist at University Health Network in Toronto specializing in liver disease. She retired in 2013.
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Philip Gossett
#24961
Overall Influence
1941 - 2017 (76 years)
Philip Gossett was an American musicologist and historian, and Robert W. Reneker Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. His lifelong interest in 19th-century Italian opera began with listening to Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in his youth. Divas and Scholars: Performing Italian Opera, a major work on the subject, won the Otto Kinkeldey Award of the American Musicological Society as best book on music of 2006.
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E. L. Hebden Taylor
#118524
Overall Influence
1925 - 2006 (81 years)
Revd Eustace Lovatt Hebden Taylor was a Reformational Anglican vicar. He was the son of missionaries and born in Katanga, Belgian Congo. He enlisted in the Royal Navy at the start of the Second World War. After the war he returned to England to study at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. After graduation, he worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in Vancouver. There he was married and became an Anglican priest. He subsequently went as a missionary to the Yukon. They returned to England in 1963 where he became vicar at St John's, Greengates, Bradford. He was then offered a place at Dordt College, Iowa, ...
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Ludwig Nohl
1831 - 1885 (54 years)
Ludwig Nohl was a German music scholar and writer best known for discovering and publishing Beethoven's famous bagatelle, "Für Elise". Life After graduation from the Gymnasium in Duisburg, Nohl studied jurisprudence at the universities in Bonn, Heidelberg, and Berlin, where he received instruction in music from Siegfried Dehn and Friedrich Kiel. From 1853 to 1856 he was a referendary and undertook journeys to France and Italy, and he also taught music in Heidelberg. In 1860 he wrote his thesis on Mozart and earned the rank of privatdozent for "History and Aesthetic of Musical Art."
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Peder Severin Krøyer
1851 - 1909 (58 years)
Peder Severin Krøyer , also known as P. S. Krøyer, was a Danish painter. Life Growing up and early training Krøyer was born in Stavanger, Norway, on 23 July 1851 to Ellen Cecilie Gjesdal. He was raised by Gjesdal's sister, Bertha Cecilie and brother-in-law, the Danish zoologist Henrik Nikolai Krøyer, after his mother was judged unfit to care for him. Krøyer moved to Copenhagen to live with his foster parents soon afterward. Having begun his art education at the age of nine under private tutelage, he was enrolled in Copenhagen's Technical Institute the following year.
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Raymond Hoffenberg
#78470
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Sir Raymond Hoffenberg KBE GCOB was an endocrinologist who specialised in the study of the thyroid. Born in South Africa, he was forced to leave in 1968, and settled in the United Kingdom, where he was President of the Royal College of Physicians from 1983 to 1989, and President of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1985 to 1993.
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Salvatore Novo
#172426
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Salvatore Novo is an Italian author, professor and researcher in the field of cardiovascular disease, epidemiology and risk factors of atherosclerosis. He has authored about 550 papers. He is one of the highly cited authors in the field of cardiovascular diseases.
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Debby Bogaert
#146673
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Debby Bogaert is a Dutch physician who is Professor of Paediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Edinburgh. Her research considers the physiology and pathophysiology of respiratory infections.
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Peter Adamson
#111492
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Peter George Adamson was an English actor, best known for playing Len Fairclough in Coronation Street from January 1961 to May 1983. Early life Peter George Adamson was born on 16 February 1930 at 54 Hannan Road in Kensington, Liverpool, the youngest of six children. His father was a manager of a menswear shop. Adamson was evacuated to Wales with his older brother when World War II broke out. He left school at the age of 14 and took an office job in a solicitor's firm, before trying for a career as a commercial artist.
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Kathleen Stock
#92918
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Kathleen Mary Linn Stock is a British philosopher and writer. She was a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex until 2021. She has published academic work on aesthetics, fiction, imagination, sexual objectification, and sexual orientation.
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Kamran Ahmed
#167821
Overall Influence
Kamran Ahmed is a Professor and a Urological Surgeon who is affiliated with Sheikh Khalifa Medical City, Abu Dhabi, UAE, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi and King's College London, United Kingdom. Career Kamran has published more than 300 Medline indeed articles and publications of abstracts in medical journals. He is the editor of a number of medical education, simulation, surgical and urological textbooks and has written a number of book chapters. He has served on the Editorial Board of the British Journal of Urology International . Kamran has a major interest in education, and has been the le...
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Robert Wilson
#133220
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Robert Andrew Wilson is an Australian philosopher who has worked in Canada, the United States, and Australia. He has been professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia since November 2019, after teaching previously at La Trobe University , the University of Alberta , the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign , where he was a member of the Cognitive Science Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, and at Queen's University .
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Christopher Wren
#14478
Thomas James
1573 - 1629 (56 years)
Thomas James was an English librarian and Anglican clergyman, the first librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Life He was born about 1573 at Newport, Isle of Wight. In 1586 he was admitted a scholar of Winchester College and matriculated at New College, Oxford on 28 January 1592. He then graduated B.A. on 3 May 1595, M.A. on 5 February 1599, and B.D. and D.D. on 16 May 1614.
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Martinus Smiglecius
1563 - 1618 (55 years)
Martinus Smiglecius was a Polish Jesuit philosopher and logician, known for his erudite scholastic Logica. Life He was born on 11 November 1564 in Lwów in the Kingdom of Poland . He used the surname Lwowczyk, or Leopolitanus, and later adopted the name Smiglecius . He attended the Jesuit school in Pułtusk and until 1586 studied in Rome, where he joined the Jesuit order in 1581. His education was financed by the prominent Polish statesman Jan Zamojski. He obtained a master's degree in philosophy and a doctor's degree in theology at the Academy of Vilnius, and taught philosophy and theology th...
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Michelle Haber
#94133
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Michelle Haber is an Australian cancer researcher. Haber is an Australian scientist in the field of childhood cancer research. She serves as the Executive Director of Children's Cancer Institute and is a professor at the School of Women’s and Children’s Health, University of New South Wales. She is known for her discoveries in the area of chemotherapy resistance in neuroblastoma and for translating these discoveries into new therapeutics that are currently in clinical trials.
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Donald Lewis Shaw
#33294
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Donald Lewis Shaw , one of the two founding fathers of empirical research on the agenda-setting function of the press, was a social scientist and a Kenan professor emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was born to Luther and Lowell Shaw on October 27, 1936, in Raleigh, North Carolina.
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Leiser Madanes
#172173
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Leiser Madanes is a writer, philosopher and Argentine professor. Throughout his career he has published several books, as the main focus the study of modern philosophy as Hobbes and Spinoza, freedom of expression and the state's relationship with the freedoms of men. Its main areas of study are modern philosophy and political philosophy.
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Abu Sayeed Ayyub
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Abu Sayeed Ayyub was an Indian philosopher, teacher, literary critic and writer in both Bengali and English. Though born into a traditional, Urdu-speaking, Muslim family in Calcutta , he was so deeply captivated in his early teenage by the poems of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore that he taught himself Bengali so as to appreciate Tagore better. Later, when he started to write, it was mostly in his adopted language, Bengali. During the initial part of his writing career, Ayyub wrote on aesthetics, religion and socialism. However, it was his philosophical and scientific analysis ...
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Gotthold Frotscher
1897 - 1967 (70 years)
Gotthold Frotscher was a German music historian and musicologist. Life Born in , Frotscher was the son of Oberkirchenrat Dr. Paul G. Frotscher and his wife Ida H. Berger. Frotscher finished his schooling at the humanistic grammar school in Freiberg in 1916 as . He then began to study mainly musicology, German and philosophy at the University of Leipzig and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. His professors included Hermann Abert, Albert Köster, Felix Krueger, Hugo Riemann, Arnold Schering, Eduard Spranger and Wilhelm Wundt.
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Mel Krajden
#93713
Overall Influence
Mel Krajden is a physician and professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the medical director of the BCCDC Public Health Laboratory. Dr. Krajden obtained his BSc, MD, and FRCPC at McGill University, followed by a fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Stanford University. He is also the medical director of the Public Health Laboratory at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. His research focuses on the prevention and care of hepatitis, human papillomavirus, and human immunodeficiency virus.
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Joseph Warren
1741 - 1775 (34 years)
Joseph Warren , a Founding Father of the United States, was an American physician who was one of the most important figures in the Patriot movement in Boston during the early days of the American Revolution, eventually serving as President of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Warren enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 18, 1775, to leave Boston and spread the alarm that the British garrison in Boston was setting out to raid the town of Concord and arrest rebel leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Warren participated in the Battles of Lexington and Concord the fo...
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Varaztad Kazanjian
1879 - 1974 (95 years)
Varaztad H. Kazanjian was an Armenian American oral surgeon who pioneered techniques for plastic surgery and is considered to be the founder of the modern practice of plastic surgery. He graduated from Harvard School of Dental Medicine in 1905. He served as professor of oral surgery from 1922 to 1939 and he was the first to hold the title of Professor of plastic surgery at Harvard Medical School. He also co-authored the first concise book on plastic surgery.
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John of Reading
1250 - 1346 (96 years)
John of Reading was an English Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher. He was an early opponent of William of Ockham, and a follower of Duns Scotus. He wrote a commentary on the Sentences around 1320, at the University of Oxford. He argued for the unity of science.
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David M. Brown
#173970
Overall Influence
#14490
Brian Hurwitz
#121185
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Brian Hurwitz BA, MB BS, MA, MSc, MD, FRCP, FRCGP is a British clinician and academic and Professor of Medicine and the Arts at King's College London. He is the director of the Centre of the Humanities and Health at King's College London and is a medical General Practitioner.
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Richard Burkewood Welbourn
#107790
Overall Influence
1919 - 2005 (86 years)
Richard Burkewood Welbourn, FRCS was a British scientist and educator, specializing in surgical endocrinology. He was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Hammersmith Hospital.
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Saveria Campo
#129099
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Maria Saveria Campo FRSE , known as Saveria, is an Italian viral oncologist, known for being the first person to demonstrate an effective papillomavirus vaccine. She developed the vaccine alongside her colleague at the University of Bristol, England, Dr. Richard B.S. Roden. She went on to be recognized for her work and was awarded the position of Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2006. She has worked continuously in the field of Oncology up until her retirement.
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Eugene Gu
#24571
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (40 years)
Eugene Gu is an American physician and social media personality. While he was in medical school, he founded a company called Ganogen to develop methods to use fetal tissue implants in organ transplantation. Work at Ganogen had ceased when he started his residency in 2015, but in 2016 he was subpoenaed as CEO of the company by the United States House Select Investigative Panel on Planned Parenthood following the Planned Parenthood 2015 undercover videos controversy.
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J. R. Illingworth
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
John Richardson Illingworth was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and theologian. He was a notable member of the set of liberal Anglo-Catholic theologians based in Oxford, and he contributed two chapters to the influential Lux Mundi.
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Christine Menias
#108793
Overall Influence
Christine O. "Cooky" Menias is an American radiologist, Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science professor, and editor designate of RadioGraphics, one of the leading educational journals in radiology.
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Camilla Stoltenberg
#22879
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Camilla Stoltenberg is a Norwegian physician and researcher. Since 13 August 2012, she has been Director-General of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. She is the sister of former Prime Minister of Norway and General Secretary of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg.
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Otto Reinhold Jacobi
1812 - 1901 (89 years)
Otto Reinhold Jacobi was a German-Canadian artist. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Life and work Born in 1830 Königsberg, Jacobi studied in Berlin at the Royal Academy of Arts. He then studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. As a landscape and genre painter, he worked in Nassau and Canada. In 1837 he was appointed the court painter to the Duchess of Nassau in Wiesbaden. In those years, Jacobi gave the young Ludwig Knaus his first lessons in oil painting and advised him to study under Karl Ferdinand Sohn at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His ...
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Joseph J. Kockelmans
#155433
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Joseph J. Kockelmans was a Dutch born American philosopher and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University.
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Michael J. Buckley
#78753
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Michael Joseph Buckley was an American Jesuit priest and philosophical theologian. He was the Bea Professor of Theology at Santa Clara University. He also served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America.
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Theodor Kroyer
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Theodor Kroyer was a German musicologist. Life Kroyer was born in Munich. After he won his Abitur in 1893 at the Wilhelmsgymnasium he studied at the University of Munich and the Akademie für Tonkunst in Munich. He received his doctorate in 1897 and habilitated in 1902 at the University of Munich, where he taught from 1907 as a non-permanent associate professor.
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