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 Philosophy,
#14601
Johann Christoph Bohl
1703 - 1785 (82 years)
Johann Christoph Bohl or Bohlius or Bohle was a German physician. Life Born in Königsberg in 1703, Bohl enrolled at the local university on September 25, 1719, in order to study medicine, and continued his studies at the University of Leipzig. On September 20, 1725, he enrolled at the University of Leiden where he became a student of Herman Boerhaave, and a classmate of Albrecht von Haller. He graduated on 26 July 1726 presenting his dissertation titled "De morsu". He spent four years in Amsterdam working with the Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch. He returned to Königsberg on August 15, 1730. ...
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Charles Russell Bardeen
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Charles Russell Bardeen was an American physician and anatomist and the first dean of the University of Wisconsin Medical School. Early years Bardeen was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1871, and grew up in Syracuse, New York. His father, Charles William Bardeen, was an educator and publisher. He attended the Teichmann School in Leipzig, Germany, then completed his B.A. at Harvard University in 1893. By virtue of being in the first medical school class at Johns Hopkins University, and having a last name at the beginning of the alphabet, Bardeen was the first person ever to receive an M.D. fro...
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Edouard Zeckendorf
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Edouard Zeckendorf was a Belgian doctor, army officer and amateur mathematician. In mathematics, he is best known for his work on Fibonacci numbers and in particular for proving Zeckendorf's theorem, though he published over 20 papers, mostly in number theory.
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Yu Zhengxie
1775 - 1840 (65 years)
Yu Zhengxie was a Qing dynasty scholar from Yi county in modern-day Anhui province. Along with his philological work, he was a noted critic of foot binding, female infanticide, and the cult of widow chastity.
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Gasparinus de Bergamo
1360 - 1431 (71 years)
#14606
Oenomaus of Gadara
Oenomaus of Gadara , was a Pagan Cynic philosopher. He is known principally for the long extracts of a work attacking oracles, which have been preserved among the writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Life Oenomaus was a native of Gadara, which was then a partially Hellenized community in northern Jordan. He is listed in the Chronicle of Jerome as flourishing in the 224th Olympiad : "Plutarch of Chaeronea, Sextus, Agathobulus and Oenomaus are considered notable philosophers." He is also mentioned in The Chronography of George Synkellos associated with events from 109 to 120 AD "The philosopher Sex...
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Andrew Smith
1797 - 1872 (75 years)
Sir Andrew Smith was a British surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist. He is considered the father of zoology in South Africa having described many species across a wide range of groups in his major work, Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa.
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Antoni Jurasz
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Antoni Stanisław Jurasz was a Polish laryngologist who was a native of Spławie . He spent most of his life living and working in what was then the German Empire. He was the father of surgeon Antoni Tomasz Jurasz .
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Leo Riemens
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Leonardus Antony Marinus Riemens was a Dutch musicologist and cultural journalist. He wrote a book about Maria Callas, and together with Karl-Josef Kutsch began a reference book about opera singers in 1962, which grew to Großes Sängerlexikon, the standard reference in the field.
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Julius Ludwig Ideler
1809 - 1842 (33 years)
Julius Ludwig Ideler was a German philologist and naturalist. He was the son of astronomer Christian Ludwig Ideler. From 1828 he studied medicine, mathematics and natural sciences at the University of Berlin, where in 1834 he obtained his habilitation for language research. He died on 17 July 1842 in Berlin, age 32.
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Hugh of Newcastle
Hugh of Newcastle was a Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher, a pupil of Duns Scotus. His origin in Newcastle-upon-Tyne is questioned; he may have been from another place called Neufchâtel.
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Carl Hummel
1821 - 1907 (86 years)
Carl Maria Nicolaus Hummel was a German landscape painter and etcher. Life and work He was the son of Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel and the opera singer Elisabeth Röckel. His studies began in 1841 under Friedrich Preller at the Fürstliche freie Zeichenschule Weimar. After graduating, he made several study trips to England, Norway, Rügen and the Tyrol, lingering in Italy and Sicily until 1846.
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Paul Allen
1775 - 1826 (51 years)
Paul Allen was an American poet, historian, and editor. Biography Born in Providence, Rhode Island on February 15, 1775, Allen studied at Brown University, graduating in 1793. He later relocated to Philadelphia, where he served as editor of The Port Folio, the Gazette of the United States, and the Federal Republican.
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David Cranston
1480 - 1512 (32 years)
David Cranston or Cranstoun was a Scottish scholastic philosopher and theologian among the circle of John Mair. Biography Cranston was certainly born in Scotland, possibly in the diocese of Glasgow, ; nothing else is known of his early life. The first record of him comes when he matriculated from the University of Paris in 1495, attending the Collège de Montaigu. He had access to a healthy supply of money during his time at the university, though he indicates in his will he was a "poor student". At the college, Cranston was a student of Scottish philosopher John Mair.
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Menzan Zuihō
1683 - 1769 (86 years)
Menzan Zuihō was a Japanese Sōtō Zen scholar and abbot of the Zenjo-ji and Kuin-ji temples active during the Tokugawa period. Born in Ueki, Kyushu, Menzan was the most influential Sōtō Zen writer of his time and his work continue to influence Sōtō Zen scholarship and practice today. Menzan's scholarship was part of the Tokugawa movement of returning to original historical sources to revitalize Zen , especially the works of Dōgen Zenji. Before Menzan the works of Dōgen were not widely studied or put into practice, he helped revitalize the Sōtō school by analyzing and building on Dogen's writings.
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Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad
648 - 686 (38 years)
Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad was the Umayyad governor of Basra, Kufa and Khurasan during the reigns of caliphs Mu'awiya I and Yazid I , and the leading general of the Umayyad army under caliphs Marwan I and Abd al-Malik .
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Theodor Schuster
1808 - 1872 (64 years)
Carl Wilhelm Theodor Schuster was a German jurist and physician. As a revolutionary, he was one of the prominent figures of the League of Outlaws, a utopian socialist organization of German émigrés in Paris.
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Ion Filotti Cantacuzino
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Ion Filotti Cantacuzino or Ion I. Cantacuzino was a Romanian film producer, writer and psychiatrist. Biographic data Ion Filotti Cantacuzino, born in Bucharest on November 7, 1908, was the son of prince Ion Cantacuzino and of actress Maria Filotti. He studied medicine at the Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy and philosophy at the University of Bucharesthe graduated from the University of Paris' Faculty of Sciences and Faculty of Medicine,
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Johannes Browallius
1707 - 1755 (48 years)
Johannes Browallius , also called John Browall, was a Finnish and Swedish Lutheran theologian, physicist, botanist and at one time friend of Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus. Career He was a Professor of Physics from 1737–46, Professor of Theology 1746–49 and was the Bishop of Turku, then a diocese of the Church of Sweden, and Vice-Chancellor of The Royal Academy of Turku from 1749 until his death in 1755.
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Ludolf von Krehl
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Albrecht Ludolf von Krehl was a German internist and physiologist who was a native of Leipzig. He was the son of Orientalist Christoph Krehl . He studied at the Universities of Heidelberg and Leipzig, and later was an assistant to Ernst Leberecht Wagner and Heinrich Curschmann at the medical clinic in Leipzig. In 1888 he obtained his habilitation, becoming head of the medical clinic at Jena in 1892. In 1899 he became director of the clinic at the University of Marburg, and soon afterwards served as professor of special pathology and therapy of internal diseases in Greifswald .
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Lazarus Buonamici
1479 - 1552 (73 years)
Lazarus Buonamici was an Italian Renaissance humanist. Biography Buonamici was born in Bassano, and studied at the University of Padua. He tutored for the Campeggi family for a time, and later was professor of Belles Lettres at the Sapienza University of Rome. He fled Rome during the sack of 1527, escaping to Padua but losing all his property. He became a professor at Padua, where his lectures acquired for him a great reputation, though he did not commit the results of his scholarship to print, and only a few letters and poems of his survive, published posthumously in 1572.
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Candidus
701 - 805 (104 years)
Candidus was the name given to the Anglo-Saxon Wizo or Witto by Alcuin, whose scholar he was and with whom he went in 782 to Gaul. He is author of several philosophical texts wrongly attributed by earlier scholars to the benedictinian monk Brun Candidus of Fulda, the author of the vita of Abott Eigil of Fulda. But recent research into the manuscript tradition furnishing clear evidence attested the authorship of Candidus Wizo, the learned disciple of Alcuin. Based on his deep knowledge of the works of Saint Augustine of Hippo he tried to give proof of god's existence, to demonstrate that the in...
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Mae Murray
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Mae Murray was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen".
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Basanta Kumar Mallik
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Basanta Kumar Mallik was a Bengali tutor, author and philosopher. He spent two extended periods in England, and is known for his influence in the 1920s on the poet Robert Graves. Mallik used as his family name derives from an honorific given by the Moghul Empire, and he preferred not to use it.
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Alexander Griboyedov
1795 - 1829 (34 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Griboyedov , formerly romanized as Alexander Sergueevich Griboyedoff, was a Russian diplomat, playwright, poet, and composer. His one notable work was the 1823 verse comedy Woe from Wit. He was Russia's ambassador to Qajar Persia, where he and all the embassy staff were massacred by an angry mob as a result of the rampant anti-Russian sentiment that existed through Russia's imposing of the Treaty of Gulistan and Treaty of Turkmenchay , which had forcefully ratified for Persia's ceding of its northern territories comprising Transcaucasia and parts of the North Caucasus. G...
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Adelaide Underhill
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Adelaide Underhill was an American librarian. She was hired to catalog and update the organization of volumes in the Vassar College library. She used the Dewey Decimal System and, along with help from her lifelong companion, Lucy Maynard Salmon, built Vassar's into one of the most impressive collections for a liberal arts college at the time.
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Frank Harold Cleobury
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Frank Harold Cleobury was British idealist philosopher and priest. Cleobury was born in London. He joined the British Civil Service in 1908. He studied philosophy and theology and obtained his BA and PhD from University of London. He was a conscientious objector and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit. In 1950, he retired from public service as a principal in the administrative grade. He became an ordained priest in the Church of England in 1951. He was Rector of Hertingfordbury until his retirement in 1964.
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Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs
1511 - 1579 (68 years)
Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs was an Austrian humanist, astronomer and Hebraist. Life He was born in Merckenstein, near Bad Vöslau in Lower Austria, and studied in Vienna, Ingolstadt and Tübingen. He became a student and friend of Sebastian Münster. Together they translated the Form of the Earth of Abraham bar Hiyya, with work of Elijah ben Abraham Mizrahi.
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Stephen Tuttle
1907 - 1954 (47 years)
Stephen Davidson Tuttle was a musicologist and chairman of the department of music at the University of Virginia , and an associate professor of music at Harvard University . While at Virginia he directed the Virginia Glee Club, and commissioned Randall Thompson to write The Testament of Freedom for the Glee Club in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson.
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Elizabeth Smith Shortt
1859 - 1949 (90 years)
Elizabeth Smith Shortt was one of the first three women to earn a medical degree in Canada. She was one of the women medical students expelled from Queen's University, Ontario following a hostile backlash from male staff and students at the presence of women in the medical school. Shortt went on to complete her studies at a newly established women's college and practised medicine in Hamilton, Ontario. She was a long-serving and active member of the National Council of Women of Canada and spearheaded a number of public health and women's welfare initiatives.
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Diogenes of Tarsus
200 BC - 160 BC (40 years)
Diogenes of Tarsus was an Epicurean philosopher, who is described by Strabo as a person clever in composing improvised tragedies. He was the author of several works, which, however, are lost. Among them are:Select lectures , which was probably a collection of essays and dissertations.Epitome of Epicurus’ ethical doctrines , of which Diogenes Laërtius quotes the 12th book.On poetical problems , poetical problems which he endeavoured to solve, and which seem to have had special reference to the Homeric poems.
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Ludwig Rehn
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Ludwig Wilhelm Carl Rehn was a German surgeon. Rehn was born in 1849, in the village of Allendorf, the youngest of five children. After the visiting the convent school in Bad Hersfeld, he studied medicine at the University of Marburg from 1869 to 1874, where he became a member of the student corps Hasso-Nassovia.His current ancestors include Bodo Rehn.
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Rudolf Berlin
1833 - 1897 (64 years)
Rudolf August Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Berlin , also known as Rudolph Berlin, was a German ophthalmologist. Life and work Rudolf Berlin was born to August Berlin , a physician, and his wife Amalie in Friedland . His grandfather, George Ludwig Berlin , had been a mayor of that city.
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George Him
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
George Him was a Polish born British designer responsible for a number of notable posters, book illustrations and advertising campaigns for a wide range of clients. Biography Him was born Jerzy Himmelfarb in 1900 to a Polish-Jewish family in Lodz, Poland which was then occupied by the Russian Empire After schooling and further education in Warsaw Him studied Roman Law in Moscow but left in 1917 when the Russian Revolution forced the closure of the university he was attending. He moved to Bonn and by 1924 had completed a PhD at the University of Bonn on the comparative history of religions before deciding to study graphic art in Leipzig.
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Abraham Cornelius Benjamin
1897 - 1968 (71 years)
Abraham Cornelius Benjamin was an American philosopher of science who taught at University of Chicago and University of Missouri. A. C. Benjamin was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He attended the University of Michigan, graduating with a B.A. in 1920. Continuing there, he studied "the logical atomism of Bertrand Russell", submitted his thesis on the topic, graduating Ph.D. in 1924.
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Euthymius the Athonite
955 - 1028 (73 years)
Euthymius the Athonite was a Georgian monk, philosopher and scholar, who is venerated as a saint. His feast day in the Orthodox Church is May 13. Euthymius was a Georgian, the ethnonym used by the Byzantines as Iberian, that came from the Kingdom of the Iberians. The son of John the Iberian and nephew of the Tornike Eristavi, Euthymius was taken as a political hostage to Constantinople but was later released and became a monk joining the Great Lavra of Athanasios on Mount Athos. He subsequently became the leader of the Georgian Iviron monastery, which had been founded by his father, and emerged as one of the finest Eastern Christian theologians and scholars of his age.
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Kurt Roesch
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Kurt Ferdinand Roesch was a German born American painter. Biography Roesch was born on December 12, 1905 in Berlin and studied painting with the expressionist Karl Hofer. Roesch immigrated to the United States in 1933, living first in Katonah, New York, and then in New Canaan, Connecticut. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1934 to 1972, and died October 8, 1984, at his home in New Canaan.
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Ferdinand Keller
1842 - 1922 (80 years)
Ferdinand Keller, or von Keller was a German genre and history painter. Life He was born in Karlsruhe to the family of a civil engineer. In 1857, when he was fifteen, his father was awarded a contract to design bridges, roads and dams in Brazil. Ferdinand and his brother Franz were able to accompany him. Over the course of a four-year stay, he was able to teach himself drawing by sketching the tropical landscape. Shortly after their return, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Karlsruhe, where he studied with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, the former Director of the Academy. After Schirmer's de...
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Blasius Merrem
1761 - 1824 (63 years)
Blasius Merrem was a German naturalist, zoologist, ornithologist, mathematician, and herpetologist. In 1804, he became the professor of political economy and botany at the University of Marburg. Early life Merrem was born at Bremen, and studied at the University of Göttingen under Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. He developed an interest in zoology, particularly ornithology.
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Felix Pollak
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Felix Pollak was an American librarian, translator, and poet. Pollak was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909 to Geza Pollak and Helene Schneider Pollak. A Jew and liberal anti-fascist, he studied law and theater at the University of Vienna before emigrating to the United States in 1938 following the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich. He briefly worked as a door-to-door salesman in New York City before enrolling at the University of Buffalo, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in library science in 1941.
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Lambertus de Monte
1430 - 1499 (69 years)
Lambertus de Monte, also Lambertus de Monte Domini or Lambert of Cologne , was a medieval scholastic and Thomist. Originally from 's-Heerenberg , he went to the University of Cologne in 1450, where he was taught by his uncle Gerhardus de Monte, and received his Master of Arts in 1454, holding an arts professorship there from 1455 until 1473, when he became a doctor of theology. He then taught in the faculty of theology until his death.
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William Howard Brett
1846 - 1918 (72 years)
William Howard Brett was head librarian for the Cleveland Public Library from 1884 to 1918. American Libraries described him as one of the "100 most important leaders had in the 20th century" His efforts to provide lifelong learning was the basis for the Cleveland Public Library to be recognized as the "People's University."
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Jonathan Dymond
1796 - 1828 (32 years)
Jonathan Dymond was an English Quaker and an ethical philosopher who is known for his monograph An Enquiry into the Accordancy of War with the Principles of Christianity. Life Jonathan Dymond was the son of a Quaker linen-draper of Exeter, County Devon in England. Both his parents were 'Recorded Ministers' of the Society of Friends. He had little formal education but used his time off from working in his father's shop to read and to write essays on religious and moral problems, as well as composing poetry. He determined that he should devote his energies to 'the honour of advocating peace'. In his view war was "an evil before which, in my estimation, slavery sinks into insignificance".
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Georg Richard Lewin
1820 - 1896 (76 years)
Georg Richard Lewin was a German dermatologist. Biography He was born in Sondershausen and died in Berlin. He was educated at the universities of Halle and Berlin, graduating as doctor of medicine in 1845. After a postgraduate course at the universities of Vienna, Würzburg, and Paris he settled in Berlin, where he practised as a specialist first in otology, and later in dermatology and syphilis. In 1862 Lewin was admitted to the medical faculty of his alma mater as privat-docent in otology. In 1865 he became chief physician in the department of dermatology and syphilis at the Charité Hospital...
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Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti
1822 - 1876 (54 years)
Alfonso Giacomo Gaspare Corti was an Italian anatomist. He born at Gambarana, near Pavia in 1822. Education A famous friend of Corti's father, Antonio Scarpa, may have kindled his boyhood interest in anatomy and medicine. As a medical student he enrolled first at the University of Pavia. Corti's favorite study there was microanatomy with Bartolomeo Panizza and Mario Rusconi. In 1845, against paternal wishes, Corti moved to Vienna to complete his medical studies and to work in the anatomical institute of Joseph Hirtl. There he received the degree in medicine in 1847 under the supervision of pr...
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Johann Nestroy
1801 - 1862 (61 years)
Johann Nepomuk Eduard Ambrosius Nestroy was a singer, actor and playwright in the popular Austrian tradition of the Biedermeier period and its immediate aftermath. He participated in the 1848 revolutions and his work reflects the new liberal spirit then spreading throughout Europe.
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Johann Jakob Bernhardi
1774 - 1850 (76 years)
Johann Jakob Bernhardi was a German doctor and botanist. Biography Johann J. Bernhardi studied Medicine and Botany at the University of Erfurt, and after graduation practiced medicine for a time in his native city. In 1799 he was named director of the botanical garden at Gartenstraße, and in 1809 was appointed professor of botany, zoology, mineralogy and materia medica at the university. He served as director of the botanical garden until his death in 1850, being buried in the central avenue of this botanical garden.
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Ahamed Muhyudheen Noorishah Jeelani
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Sheikh Noor Ul Mashaikh Sayyid Ahmed Muhiyuddin Jeelani NooriShah Arabic: , known more commonly as NooriShah Jeelani, was a renowned 20th-century muslim, sufi, wali, mystic, orator, faqeeh, theologian, mujaddid and highly acclaimed Islamic scholar of the Qadri, Chisti order from the Indian sub continent. He was the 21st grand son of the famous Sufi saint Ghous-e-Azam Sheikh Mohiyudheen Abdul Qadir Jilani of Baghdad. He was also widely known by his title Noor-ul-Mashaikh. He was the Eponymous founder of the Silsila-e-Nooriya tariqa which is a sub-branch of Qadiriyya and Chistiyya in India.
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Muhammad Amkanagi
#14650
Darwish Muhammad
Khwaja Darwish Muhammad famous Sufi of Naqshbandī Sufi order . He was the nephew of Khwaja Muhammad Zahid Wakhshi.Khwaja Darwish Muhammad died on 1562 AD in Kitab, Uzbekistan, 100 km from Samarkand in the Shakhrisabz region of Uzbekistan. He passed his spiritual order to his son, Khwaja Muhammad Amkanagi. His shrine is in Kitab, Uzbekistan.
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