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Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#16201

Haskell Curry

1900 - 1982 (82 years)

Haskell Brooks Curry was an American mathematician and logician. Curry is best known for his work in combinatory logic, which initial concept is based on a paper by Moses Schönfinkel, for which Curry did much of the development. Curry is also known for Curry's paradox and the Curry–Howard correspondence. Named for him are three programming languages: Haskell, Brook, and Curry, and the concept of currying, a method to transform functions, used in mathematics and computer science.

#16202

Carl Richard Moore

1892 - 1955 (63 years)

Carl Richard Moore was an American endocrinologist. He was born in rural farm region of Greene County, Missouri and received his early education in nearby Springfield. After graduating from High School, he attended Drury College where he acquired an interest in biology. In 1913, he obtained his B.S. degree, then worked as an assistant at Drury to earn his M.S. in 1914. With the granting of a fellowship, he attended the University of Chicago where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1916, with a thesis on the fertilization and parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs. He became an associate in the universit...

#16203

Erwin Ackerknecht

Erwin Ackerknecht

1906 - 1988 (82 years)

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.

#16204

Dallas B. Phemister

1882 - 1951 (69 years)

Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.

#16205

Sidney Hook

1902 - 1989 (87 years)

Sidney Hook was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism. A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism. After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of publ...

#16206

Kenneth Burke

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."

#16207

Eugene Floyd DuBois

1882 - 1959 (77 years)

Eugene Floyd DuBois was an American physician and teacher, remembered for his work on the physiology of fever and heat production. His grandmother Mary Ann Delafield DuBois founded a hospital in New York City in 1854.

#16208

Wolf W. Zuelzer

1909 - 1987 (78 years)

Wolf William Zuelzer was a German-American pediatric pathologist. He worked at the Children's Hospital of Michigan for 35 years, where he oversaw a large amount of pediatric research, particularly in the field of hematology. He received the John Howland Award in 1985.

#16209

Jerome Groopman

1900 - Present (126 years)

Jerome E. Groopman has been a staff writer in medicine and biology for The New Yorker since 1998. He is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and author of five books, all written for a general audience.

#16210

Harry Bakwin

1894 - 1973 (79 years)

Harry Bakwin was a New York pediatrician, and also a Professor of Pediatrics at New York University. Biography Born in 1894 to a Jewish family, Bakwin graduated with a M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1917. In 1925, Bakwin married Ruth Morris Bakwin who was an heir to some of the fortunes made by the Chicago meat-packing industry as the daughter of Edward Morris, son of the founder of Morris & Company; and Helen Swift Morris, the daughter of Gustavus Swift, founder of Swift & Company. Her sister was psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner who was married to the Austri...

#16211

Torsten Haferlach

1900 - Present (126 years)

#16212

John Caffey

1895 - 1978 (83 years)

John Patrick Caffey was an American pediatrician and radiologist who is often referred to as one of the founders of pediatric radiology. He was the first to describe shaken baby syndrome, infantile cortical hyperostosis, and Kenny-Caffey syndrome.

#16213

Mircea Eliade

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. A leading interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but actually parti...

#16214

Hideyo Noguchi

1876 - 1928 (52 years)

Hideyo Noguchi, also known as Seisaku Noguchi, was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Early life Noguchi Hideyo, whose childhood name was Seisaku Noguchi, was born to a family of farmers for generations in Inawashiro, Fukushima prefecture in 1876. When he was one and a half years old, he fell into a fireplace and suffered a burn injury on his left hand. There was no doctor in the small village, but one of the men examined the boy. "The fingers of the left hand are mostly gone," he said, "and the left a...

#16215

Sidney Farber

1903 - 1973 (70 years)

Sidney Farber was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him.

#16216

Kurt Gödel

1906 - 1978 (72 years)

Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege.

#16217

John P. Merrill

John P. Merrill

1917 - 1984 (67 years)

John Putnam Merrill was an American physician and medical researcher. He led the team which performed the world's first successful kidney transplant. He generally credited as the "father of nephrology" or "the founder of nephrology," which is the scientific study of the kidney and its diseases.

#16218

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse

1898 - 1979 (81 years)

Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim , Inge Neumann , and Erica Sherover . In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represen...

#16219

Thomas Francis Jr.

Thomas Francis Jr.

1900 - 1969 (69 years)

Thomas Francis Jr. was an American physician, virologist, and epidemiologist who guided the discovery and development of the polio vaccine being worked on by his student Jonas Salk. Francis was the first person to isolate influenza virus in the United States, and in 1940 showed that there are other strains of influenza, and took part in the development of influenza vaccines.

#16220

Alfred Blalock

1899 - 1964 (65 years)

Alfred Blalock was an American surgeon most noted for his work on the medical condition of shock as well as tetralogy of Fallot – commonly known as blue baby syndrome. He created, with assistance from his research and laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas and pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig, the Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt, a surgical procedure to relieve the cyanosis from tetralogy of Fallot. This operation ushered in the modern era of cardiac surgery. He worked at both Vanderbilt University and Johns Hopkins University, where he studied medicine and later served as chief of surgery. He i...

#16221

Leslie John Witts

Leslie John Witts

1898 - 1982 (84 years)

Leslie John Witts was a British physician and pioneering haematologist. Biography L. J. Witts received secondary education at Boteler Grammar School, where he won in 1916 a scholarship to the University of Manchester. During WWI when he reached the age of 18 he joined the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps and then the Royal Field Artillery. Serving on the western front, he suffered a leg wound and was invalided back to civilian life. From 1919 to 1923 he studied at the University of Manchester, graduating there MB ChB in 1923. After house appointments, he became Dickinson travelling scho...

#16222

Dennis Robert Hoagland

1884 - 1949 (65 years)

Dennis Robert Hoagland was an American chemist and plant and soil scientist working in the fields of plant nutrition, soil chemistry, agricultural chemistry, biochemistry, and physiology. He was Professor of Plant Nutrition at the University of California at Berkeley from 1927 until his death in 1949.

#16223

Max Black

1909 - 1988 (79 years)

Max Black was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies of the work of philosophers such as Frege. His translation of Frege's published philosophical writing is a classic text.

#16224

Carl J. Wiggers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.

#16225

Rudolf Carnap

1891 - 1970 (79 years)

Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."

#16226

Charles Best

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...

#16227

Francis Peyton Rous

Francis Peyton Rous

1879 - 1970 (91 years)

Francis Peyton Rous was an American pathologist at the Rockefeller University known for his works in oncoviruses, blood transfusion and physiology of digestion. A medical graduate from the Johns Hopkins University, he was discouraged to become a practicing physician due to severe tuberculosis. After three years of working as an instructor of pathology at the University of Michigan, he became dedicated researcher at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research for the rest of his career.

#16228

Maxwell Finland

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Maxwell Finland was an American scientist, medical researcher, an expert on infectious diseases. Finland led seminal research of antibiotic treatment of pneumonia. Early life and education Finland was born on March 15, 1902, in Zhashkiv near Kyiv, Ukraine. He immigrated as a child to the United States at the age of 4. Finland graduated from the Boston English High School and cum laude from Harvard College in 1922. He then graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1926.

#16229

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

#16230

Loren Lomasky

Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

#16231

Hans Reichenbach

Hans Reichenbach

1891 - 1953 (62 years)

Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin in 1928, also known as the "Berlin Circle". Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling all became members of the Berlin Circle.

#16232

Alan Moncrieff

1901 - 1971 (70 years)

Sir Alan Aird Moncrieff, was a British paediatrician and professor emeritus at University of London. He was most notable for developing the first premature-baby unit in 1947. It was Moncrief who recognised and developed the concept of daily parental visits to the ward, which he developed while at Great Ormond Street, well before the need for this became recognised, and with his ward sister, published an article on Hospital Visiting for Children in 1949.

#16233

Harold Jeghers

1904 - 1990 (86 years)

Harold Joseph Jeghers was an American internist, best known for his description of Peutz–Jeghers syndrome, a disorder of gastrointestinal polyps and hyperpigmentation of the mouth and lips. Life and scientific career Jeghers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1904. In 1928, he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. He graduated from medical school at Western Reserve University in 1932. He worked as a consultant at Boston City Hospital before being appointed chairman of the Medicine Department at Georgetown University in 1946. In 1956, he become a professor at Seton Hall College.

#16234

Erich Urbach

1893 - 1946 (53 years)

Erich Urbach was an Austrian dermatologist from Vienna who, in conjunction with Camillo Wiethe, an otorhinolaryngologist, first described lipoid proteinosis. Biography As a lieutenant in the Austrian army during World War I, he was a member of a surgical group serving under professor Anton von Eiselsberg. In 1919 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna. He worked in the internal medicine and dermatology departments at Vienna General Hospital and also at the Breslau skin clinic, where he was an assistant to Josef Jadassohn. From 1936 to 1938, he was head physician in th...

#16235

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.

#16236

Jesse Shera

1903 - 1982 (79 years)

Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

#16237

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.

#16238

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.

#16239

Otto Erich Deutsch

Otto Erich Deutsch

1883 - 1967 (84 years)

Otto Erich Deutsch was an Austrian musicologist. He is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Franz Schubert's compositions, first published in 1951 in English, with a revised edition published in 1978 in German. It is from this catalogue that the D numbers used to identify Schubert's works derive.

#16240

J. C. C. McKinsey

1908 - 1953 (45 years)

John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic. Biography McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" th...

#16241

Chassar Moir

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Chassar Moir CBE was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Oxford. "One whose contributions were so outstanding as to make Chassar Moir’s an immortal name in the history of Obstetrics and Gynaecology". Sir Norman Jeffcoate

#16242

Lawrence S. Thompson

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.

#16243

A. C. Ewing

1899 - 1973 (74 years)

Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.

#16244

Edwin Arthur Burtt

1892 - 1989 (97 years)

Edwin Arthur Burtt , usually cited as E. A. Burtt, was an American philosopher who wrote extensively on the philosophy of religion. His doctoral thesis published as a book under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science has had a significant influence upon the history of science that is not generally recognized, according to H. Floris Cohen.

#16245

Andreas Speiser

Andreas Speiser

1885 - 1970 (85 years)

Andreas Speiser was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher of science. Life and work Speiser studied in Göttingen, starting in 1904, notably with David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski. In 1917 he became full-time professor at the University of Zurich but later relocated in Basel. During 1924/25 he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Association.

#16246

Bernard Lonergan

Bernard Lonergan

1904 - 1984 (80 years)

Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology , as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. The projected 25-volume Collected Works with the University of Toronto Press is now complete. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; Regis College, T...

#16247

John Elof Boodin

1869 - 1950 (81 years)

John Elof Boodin was a Swedish-born American philosopher and educator. He was the author of numerous books proposing a systematic interpretation of nature. Boodin's work preserved the tradition of philosophical idealism within the framework of contemporary science. Boodin also focused on the social nature of human behavior believing an understanding required an appreciation of individual participation in social life and interpersonal relationship.

#16248

Felix Fleischner

1893 - 1969 (76 years)

Felix G. Fleischner was an Austrian-American radiologist from Boston. The Fleischner Society for thoracic imaging and diagnosis is named after him. Biography Felix Fleischner was born in Vienna. He became an expert in the field of radiology, and most of his work centered on the chest x-ray. He served as professor and head of radiology of the Second Medical Clinic of the University of Vienna.

#16249

Boyd Henry Bode

1873 - 1953 (80 years)

Boyd Henry Bode was an American academic and philosopher, notable for his work on philosophy of education. Bode was born in Ridott, Illinois. He grew up in rural areas of Iowa and South Dakota and attended Pennsylvania College in Iowa and later the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1900.

#16250

David Weyhe Smith

1926 - 1981 (55 years)

David Weyhe Smith was an American pediatrician and dysmorphologist, best known for his pioneering book Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation and for describing fetal alcohol syndrome. Early life and education David Weyhe Smith was born in Oakland, California. He gained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and undertook postdoctoral studies during 1950-51 and 1953-56 in the Department of Pediatrics. He worked with Lawson Wilkins in the field of pediatric endocrinology.

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