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,
#16151
Nicola Spedalieri
1740 - 1795 (55 years)
Nicola Spedalieri was an Italian priest, theologian, and philosopher. Life He studied and was ordained a priest in the seminary of Monreale, then among the most prominent in Sicily. In Monreale, he was appointed professor of philosophy and mathematics, and later of theology. At the same time he cultivated the arts of poetry, music, and painting. Disgusted at the opposition stirred up by certain theological theses, which were branded as heretical at Palermo, but approved at Rome, he withdrew from Monreale to Rome , where for ten years, while although leading a penurious life, he participated in fruitful study and labour.
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Francesco Bianchini
1662 - 1729 (67 years)
Francesco Bianchini was an Italian philosopher and scientist. He worked for the curia of three popes, including being camiere d'honore of Clement XI, and secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar, working on the method to calculate the astronomically correct date for Easter in a given year.
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Giambattista Toderini
1728 - 1799 (71 years)
Giambattista Toderini was a Venetian philosopher, writer, and former Jesuit abbot. Biography Son of Domenico Maria and Anna Maria Cestari, he was the descendant of the Gagliardis dalla Volta counts palatine. Toderini studied philosophy and archaeology, but tended toward contemplative and religious life since his youth and joined the Society of Jesus. He was employed in teaching, dedicating himself to philosophy in Verona and Forlì.
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Deceneus
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Deceneus or Decaeneus was a priest of Dacia during the reign of Burebista . He is mentioned in the near-contemporary Greek Geographica of Strabo and in the 6th-century Latin Getica of Jordanes, where he is called Dicineus.
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Johannes Schefferus
1621 - 1679 (58 years)
Johannes Schefferus was one of the most important Swedish humanists of his time. He was also known as Angelus and is remembered for writing hymns. Schefferus was born in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He came from the patrician family , studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
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Henry Littlejohn
1826 - 1914 (88 years)
Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn MD LLD FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon, forensic scientist and public health official. He served for 46 years as Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health, during which time he brought about significant improvements in the living conditions and the health of the city's inhabitants. He also served as a police surgeon and medical adviser in Scottish criminal cases.
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Edward Heneage Dering
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Edward Heneage Dering was an English novelist of the Victorian era. He is largely remembered today as a member of "The Quartet" at Baddesley Clinton, with marriages to two artistic women. Biography He was the younger son of Cholmeley Edward John Dering, rector of Pluckley, Kent, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He joined the 68th Foot as an ensign in 1844, and in 1848 was a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. Having caught malaria in Italy, he sold out his commission and left the army in 1851.
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Dionysius of Chalcedon
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Dionysius of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected with the Megarian school. He was a native of Chalcedon on the coast of Bithynia. Dionysius was the person who first used the name Dialecticians to describe a splinter group within the Megarian school "because they put their arguments into the form of question and answer". One area of activity for the dialecticians was the framing of definitions, and Aristotle criticises a definition of life by Dionysius in his Topics: Dionysius is also reported to have taught Theodorus the Atheist.
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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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Joseph von Führich
1800 - 1876 (76 years)
Joseph von Führich was an Austrian painter, one of the Nazarenes. He painted religious pictures almost exclusively. Führich acquired his greatest fame as a draughtsman. Biography He was born at Kratzau in Bohemia. Deeply impressed as a boy by rustic pictures adorning the wayside chapels of his native country, his first attempt at composition was a sketch of the Nativity for the festival of Christmas in his father's house. He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside chu...
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Antonio del Pollaiuolo
1429 - 1498 (69 years)
Antonio del Pollaiuolo , also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo , was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
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Alexander Macalister
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Prof Alexander Macalister FRS Hon.FRSE FSA FRAI was an Irish anatomist, Professor of Anatomy, Cambridge University, from 1883 until his death. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Life He was born in Dublin, the second son of Robert Macalister, secretary of the Sunday School Society of Ireland, and his wife . Alexander was educated locally then studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin.
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John Dawson
1734 - 1820 (86 years)
John Dawson was both an English mathematician and physician. He was born at Raygill in Garsdale, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where "Dawson's Rock" celebrates the site of his early thinking about conic sections. After learning surgery from Henry Bracken of Lancaster, he worked as a surgeon in Sedbergh for a year, then went to study medicine at Edinburgh, walking 150 miles there with his savings stitched into his coat. Despite a very frugal lifestyle, he was unable to complete his degree, and had to return to Garsdale until he earned enough as a surgeon and as a private tutor in Mat...
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Pavle Stefanović
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Pavle Stefanović was a Serbian philosopher, esthetician, essayist, music writer, critic and writer. He was the son of physician writer and poet Svetislav Stefanović who translated Shakespeare, and other English writers.
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Adolf Eugen Fick
1829 - 1901 (72 years)
Adolf Eugen Fick was a German-born physician and physiologist. Early life and education Fick began his work in the formal study of mathematics and physics before realising an aptitude for medicine. He then earned his doctorate in medicine from the University of Marburg in 1851. As a fresh medical graduate, he began his work as a prosector. He died in Flanders at age 71.
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Karl Küpfmüller
1897 - 1977 (80 years)
Karl Küpfmüller was a German electrical engineer, who was prolific in the areas of communications technology, measurement and control engineering, acoustics, communication theory, and theoretical electro-technology.
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George Chatterton-Hill
1883 - 1947 (64 years)
George Chatterton-Hill was the Irish writer of several books on evolution and sociology. He wrote at the start of the 20th century, when the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel's work, had created turmoil over Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. He was also very influenced by the writings of Herbert Spencer regarding evolution and society, and of Benjamin Kidd regarding society and religion.
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Edward Cutbush
1772 - 1843 (71 years)
Edward Cutbush was born in Philadelphia. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1794, where he was resident physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital from 1790 to 1794. Cutbush was surgeon general of the Pennsylvania militia during the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.
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Kurd Lasswitz
1848 - 1910 (62 years)
Kurd Lasswitz was a German author, scientist, and philosopher. He has been called "the father of German science fiction". He sometimes used the pseudonym Velatus. Biography Lasswitz studied mathematics and physics at the University of Breslau and the University of Berlin, and earned his doctorate in 1873. He spent most of his career as a teacher at the Ernestine Gymnasium in Gotha .
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Marino Tartaglia
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Marino Tartaglia was a Croatian painter and art teacher, for many years a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb. From 1948 he was a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He received the Vladimir Nazor Award for lifetime achievement in the arts in 1964.
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Arnold Bax
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Sir Arnold Edward Trevor Bax was an English composer, poet, and author. His prolific output includes songs, choral music, chamber pieces, and solo piano works, but he is best known for his orchestral music. In addition to a series of symphonic poems, he wrote seven symphonies and was for a time widely regarded as the leading British symphonist.
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Masatada Yamasaki
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
was a gynecologist and president of Kumamoto Medical College . He wrote The history of medical education in Higo and Yokoi Shōnan. After retirement, he travelled in Okinawa. Life He was born in Sagawa town, Takaoka gun, Kōchi Prefecture on 11 May 1872. After graduation from Tokyo Imperial University in 1900, he became professor at private Kumamoto Medical School in 1901. In 1909 and 1910, he studied in München and Bonn universities. He was appointed the president of Aichi Medical School in 1916. In 1925, he was appointed the president of Kumamoto Medical College and director of the Hospital.
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Katharine Sharp
1865 - 1914 (49 years)
Katharine Lucinda Sharp gained prominence as a pioneering librarian for her intense engagement with the library profession that spanned 19 years. Having founded the innovative University of Illinois Library School, she resigned from her position and left the library field as rapidly as she had entered it. She is remembered for ‘professionalizing’ the field of library science and for her considerable contribution to the standards of the discipline. In 1999, Sharp was named in the American Library Association's 100 leaders of the 20th century.
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Peter Kaufmann
1800 - 1869 (69 years)
Peter Kaufmann was known as one of the "Ohio Hegelians", along with John Bernhard Stallo, Moncure Daniel Conway and August Willich. His 1858 book titled, The Temple of Truth, or the Science of Ever-Progressing Knowledge, discussed the process and formation of knowledge according to Hegel's dialectical method, and socialist utopian reform ideals for perfecting humankind.
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Emanuel Goldberg
1881 - 1970 (89 years)
Emanuel Goldberg was an Israeli physicist and inventor. He was born in Moscow and moved first to Germany and later to Israel. He described himself as "a chemist by learning, physicist by calling, and a mechanic by birth." He contributed a wide range of theoretic and practical advances relating to light and media and was the founding head of Zeiss Ikon, the famous photographic products company in Dresden, Germany. His inventions include microdots, the Kinamo movie camera, the Contax 35 mm camera, a very early search engine, and equipment for sensitometry.
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Ōmori Harutoyo
1852 - 1912 (60 years)
Ōmori Harutoyo was a Japanese surgeon who became the first president of the Fukuoka Medical College that was founded in 1903 as a branch of the Medical Faculty of Kyōto University . Ōmori was born in Edo, but he grew up in the domain Kaminoyama where his father Ōmori Kaishun served as a physician to lord Matsudaira Nobumichi. In 1879 he graduated from Tokyo University; the same year he went to a new post in the newly established Fukuoka Medical School. In 1888 when this school was abolished, he was appointed as the first director of the Fukuoka Prefectural Hospital. In 1885, he performed the first cesarean operation in Japan.
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John Cabot
1450 - 1498 (48 years)
John Cabot was an Italian navigator and explorer. His 1497 voyage to the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII, King of England is the earliest known European exploration of coastal North America since the Norse visits to Vinland in the eleventh century. To mark the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Cabot's expedition, both the Canadian and British governments declared Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland as representing Cabot's first landing site. However, alternative locations have also been proposed.
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John Collins Warren
1778 - 1856 (78 years)
John Collins Warren was an American surgeon. In 1846 he gave permission to William T.G. Morton to provide ether anesthesia while Warren performed a minor surgical procedure. News of this first public demonstration of surgical anesthesia quickly circulated around the world. He was a founder of the New England Journal of Medicine and was the third president of the American Medical Association. He was the first Dean of Harvard Medical School and a founding member of the Massachusetts General Hospital.
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John Oswald
1701 - 1793 (92 years)
John Oswald was a Scottish philosopher, writer, poet, social critic, vegetarian and revolutionary. Early life Little is known for certain regarding Oswald's early life. He was born between 1755 and 1760 in Edinburgh. His father is said to have been a coffee-house keeper, or a goldsmith. He became a student goldsmith himself. It is said that Oswald learned Latin and Greek without a tutor, and later learned Arabic.
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Şevket Aziz Kansu
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Şevket Aziz Kansu was a Turkish physician and academic. He specialised in anthropology and archaeology and was the first rector of Ankara University. Education and academic career Kansu was born in Edirne. He studied medicine at Istanbul University, graduating in 1923. In 1927, after completing compulsory government service and working as a medical doctor for two years in Bala, Ankara, he went to Paris to study anthropology. He received a diploma in anthropological sciences from the Sorbonne in 1929.
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Johannes Orth
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Johannes Orth was a German pathologist born in Wallmerod. He studied medicine at the universities of Heidelberg, Würzburg and Bonn, receiving his habilitation in 1872 while an assistant to Eduard von Rindfleisch at Bonn. Afterwards, he served as an assistant under Rudolf Virchow in Berlin. In 1878 he became a professor at the University of Göttingen, and in 1902, following the death of Virchow, he returned to Berlin as director of the clinic of pathology.
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Sujoy B. Roy
Sujoy Bhushan Roy was an Indian cardiologist and the founder Head of the department of the Cardiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. He was the president of the Cardiological Society of India in 1972. He was known for medical research in cardiology and was reported to have coined the name, Juvenile Rheumatic Stenosis. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 1972, for his contributions to medical science.
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Nikolai Korotkov
1874 - 1920 (46 years)
Nikolai Sergeyevich Korotkov was a Russian Empire surgeon, a pioneer of 20th-century vascular surgery, and the inventor of auscultatory technique for blood pressure measurement. Biography Nikolai Korotkov was born to a merchant family at 40 Milenskaia Street in Kursk on February 26, 1874. He attended the Kursk Gymnasium . He entered the medical faculty of Kharkiv University in 1893 and transferred to Moscow University in 1895, where he graduated with distinction in 1898. He was appointed resident intern to professor Alexander Bobrov at the surgical clinic of Moscow University.
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Eyvind Mehle
1895 - 1945 (50 years)
Eyvind Mehle was a Norwegian radio personality, media professor and Nazi collaborator. Background He was born as Eyvind Mæhle, but changed his last name in 1930. He was hired in 1925 in Kringkastingsselskapet, the first broadcaster of Norwegian radio. One of his specialities were half-hour lectures in the form of travel descriptions. He later joined the Norwegian Fascist party Nasjonal Samling in its first year of existence, 1933, and served as its press spokesperson for some years.
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James Eights
1798 - 1882 (84 years)
James Eights was an American physician, scientist, and artist. He was born in Albany, New York, the son of physician Jonathan Eights and Alida Wynkoop. James also became a physician and was appointed an examiner at a local engineering school which is now known as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
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Otto Friedrich Gruppe
1804 - 1876 (72 years)
Otto Friedrich Gruppe was a German philosopher, scholar-poet and philologist who served as secretary of the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin. Poems by Gruppe were set to music by Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, Karl Löwe, Elise Schmezer, and Franz Schreker. He rediscovered the cycle of Latin elegies by the Augustan poet Sulpicia and demonstrated their poetic value.
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Christian Ludwig Ideler
1766 - 1846 (80 years)
Christian Ludwig Ideler was a German chronologist and astronomer. Life He was born in Gross-Brese near Perleberg. His earliest work was the editing in 1794 of an astronomical almanac for the Prussian government. He taught mathematics and mechanics in the school of woods and forests, and also in the military school. In 1821, he became professor at the University of Berlin, and in 1829 became a foreign member of the Institute of France. From 1816 to 1822 he was tutor to the young princes William Frederick and Charles. He died in Berlin on 10 August 1846.
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Solomon Drowne
1753 - 1834 (81 years)
Dr. Solomon Drowne was a prominent American physician, academic and surgeon during the American Revolution and in the history of the fledgling United States. Early life Drowne was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1753. His father was a merchant and was heavily involved in the civic affairs of the town. The Drowne family was also active in the First Baptist Church in America. Drowne's great-uncle Shem Drowne made the famous grasshopper weather vane atop of Faneuil Hall in Boston. In 1772, Drown witnessed the burning of a British ship in an event known as the Gaspée Affair. The following y...
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Sidney Toler
1874 - 1947 (73 years)
Sidney Toler was an American actor, playwright, and theatre director. The second European-American actor to play the role of Charlie Chan on screen, he is best remembered for his portrayal of the Chinese-American detective in 22 films made between 1938 and 1946. Before becoming Chan, Toler played supporting roles in 50 motion pictures, and was a highly regarded comic actor on the Broadway stage.
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Francesco Piccolomini
1520 - 1604 (84 years)
Francesco Piccolomini was senior chair of natural philosophy at the University of Padua from 1560–1598, moving there from previous professorial positions at the University of Siena, Macerata, and Perugia. His best-known work, Universa philosophia de moribus , systematizes and extends Aristotle's work on ethics and politics. He sparred intellectually with his fellow Aristotelian professor Jacopo Zabarella.
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Wacker von Wackenfels
1550 - 1619 (69 years)
Johannes Matthaeus Wacker von Wackenfels was an active diplomat, scholar and author, with an avid interest in history and philosophy. A follower of Neostoicism, he sought to resolve the doubts he still had about his conversion to Catholicism, according to STUDIA RUDOLPHINA - Bulletin of the Research Center for Visual Arts and Culture in the Age of Rudolf II. He was born in Konstanz in 1550 in a Lutheran Protestant family and studied in Strasbourg, Geneva and Padua. He was supported and promoted by Johannes Crato von Krafftheim, who put his way into the circle of Renaissance humanism in Northern Europe in Breslau.
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Ibn Shaprut
1400 - Present (626 years)
Shem-Tob ben Isaac Shaprut of Tudela was a Spanish Jewish philosopher, physician, and polemicist. He is often confused with the physician Shem-Tob ben Isaac of Tortosa, who lived earlier. He may also be confused with another Ibn Shaprut, Hasdai Ibn Shaprut, who corresponded with the king of the Khazars in the 900's.
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Xu Guangqi
1562 - 1633 (71 years)
Xu Guangqi or Hsü Kuang-ch'i , also known by his baptismal name Paul, was a Chinese agronomist, astronomer, mathematician, politician, and writer during the Ming dynasty. Xu was appointed by the Chinese Emperor in 1629 to be the leader of the ShiXian calendar reform, which he embarked on with the assistance of Jesuits. Xu was a colleague and collaborator of the Italian Jesuits Matteo Ricci and Sabatino de Ursis and assisted their translation of several classic Western texts into Chinese, including part of Euclid's Elements. He was also the author of the Nong Zheng Quan Shu, a treatise on agriculture.
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Alexander Savvas
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Alexander Savvas was a Greek Professor of Medicine at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Anatomy. He wrote a number of anatomy books and research protocols, and was influential among Greek physicians for his educational method and proficient use of Greek language and medical terminology.
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Alfred Sokołowski
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Alfred Marcin Sokołowski was a Polish pulmonologist and professor of the University of Warsaw. He specialised in the field of Phthisiatry and he was one of the pioneers of modern treatment to diseases of the respiratory system.
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Abul Hasan Hankari
1018 - 1093 (75 years)
Abul Hasan Hankari Abu Al Hasan Ali Bin Mohammad Qureshi Hashmi Hankari Harithi , town of Mosul , died 1st Moharram 486 AH , in Baghdad, was a Muslim mystic also renowned as one of the most influential Muslim scholar, philosopher, theologian and jurist of his time and Sufi based in Hankar.
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Philip Syng Physick
1768 - 1837 (69 years)
Philip Syng Physick was an American physician and professor born in Philadelphia. He was the first professor of surgery and later of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania medical school from 1805 to 1831 during which time he was a highly influential teacher. Physick invented a number of surgical devices and techniques including the stomach tube and absorbable sutures. He has been called the "Father of American Surgery."
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Deng Xi
545 BC - 501 BC (44 years)
Deng Xi was a Chinese philosopher and rhetorician who was associated with the Chinese philosophical tradition School of Names. Once a senior official of the Zheng state, and a contemporary of Confucius, he is regarded as China's earliest known lawyer, with clever use of words and language in lawsuits. The Zuo Zhuan and Annals of Lü Buwei critically credit Deng with the authorship of a penal code, the earliest known statute in Chinese criminology entitled the "Bamboo Law". This was developed to take the place of the harsh, more Confucian criminal code developed by the Zheng statesman Zichan.
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Károly Ferenczy
1862 - 1917 (55 years)
Károly Ferenczy was a Hungarian painter and leading member of the Nagybánya artists' colony. He was among several artists who went to Munich for study in the late nineteenth century, where he attended free classes by the Hungarian painter, Simon Hollósy. Upon his return to Hungary, Ferenczy helped found the artists colony in 1896, and became one of its major figures. Ferenczy is considered the "father of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism" and the "founder of modern Hungarian painting".
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Robert Tuttle Morris
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Robert Tuttle Morris , also known as Bob Morris, was an American surgeon and writer. Life Early life and the call of medicine Robert Tuttle Morris was born in Seymour, Connecticut on May 14, 1857, the eldest of six children. His father was a lawyer, probate judge, and Governor of Connecticut. His mother Eugenia was an author. He attended Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven before studying biology at Cornell University in Ithaca from 1875-1879. As a child he developed an acute interest in nature and animals and continually observed the phenomena of the natural world. While still in high school in New Haven he planned to attend the biology program organised by Dr.
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