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,
#16701
Wolfgang Wodarg
#132662
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Wolfgang Wodarg is a German physician and politician. He was a member of the Bundestag for the SPD from 1994 to 2009. As chair of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe Health Committee Wodarg co-signed a proposed resolution on 18 December 2009, which was briefly discussed in January 2010 in an emergency debate and he has called for an inquiry into alleged undue influence exerted by pharmaceutical companies on the World Health Organization’s global H1N1 flu campaign. His comments on the COVID-19 pandemic drew criticism from scientists, politicians, and the media.
Go to Profile#16702
Robert Edmund Scoresby-Jackson
1833 - 1867 (34 years)
Robert Edmund Scoresby-Jackson FRSE FRCPE FRCSE was a short-lived but influential British physician and historian. He specialised in the effects of climate upon health. Life He was born Robert Edmund Jackson on 12 November 1833 in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. He was the son of Captain Thomas Jackson , a merchant mariner and shipowner, and his wife Arabella Scoresby , sister of Rev William Scoresby. Both his parents outlived him. He adopted the name Scoresby-Jackson on the death of his uncle.
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William Adam
1796 - 1881 (85 years)
William Adam was a British Baptist minister, missionary, abolitionist and Harvard professor. Scotland and India Adam was born in Dunfermline in Scotland, and it was after being inspired by the churchman Thomas Chalmers that he decided to go to India. He arranged to be educated at the Baptist College in Bristol and to the University of Glasgow. Adam volunteered to become a missionary and by 1818 he was working hard north of Calcutta trying to master Sanskrit and Bengali. Having learned these he was engaged in creating a translation of the new testament in Bengali. He worked with Ram Mohan Roy ...
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M. Gail Hamner
#152181
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
M. Gail Hamner is an American scholar, author, and a professor at Syracuse University. Hamner is a Professor of Religion, while also an affiliate in the Faculty of Women and Gender Studies and Film and Screen Studies. She is the author of American Pragmatism: A Religious Genealogy.
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Friedrich Kraus
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Friedrich Kraus was an Austrian internist. He was born in Bodenbach, Bohemia and died in Berlin. He is remembered for his achievements in the field of electrocardiography and his work in colloid chemistry.
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Armand Mattelart
#186405
Overall Influence
#16707
Michael J. Adams
1930 - 1967 (37 years)
Michael James Adams was an American aviator, aeronautical engineer, and USAF astronaut. He was one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA.
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Georg Brabant
#186423
Overall Influence
#16709
Christopher Chen
#119815
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Christopher Chen is an obstetrician and gynaecologist in Singapore who in 1986 was the first to successfully freeze a human egg which subsequently led to egg banks being started around the world. In 1998, he successfully produced Singapore's first IVF sextuplets.
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Thomas P. Loughran Jr.
#74411
Overall Influence
Thomas P. Loughran, Jr. is an American physician-scientist who specializes in cancer research and treatment. He became director of the University of Virginia Cancer Center, F. Palmer Weber-Smithfield Foods Professor of Oncology Research and Professor of Medicine at the University of Virginia on August 15, 2013. Between 2003 and 2013, Loughran served as the founding director of the Penn State Hershey Cancer Institute and professor of medicine at the Penn State College of Medicine. His previous appointments included program leader of hematologic malignancies at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center &...
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Maciej Miechowita
1457 - 1523 (66 years)
Maciej Miechowita was a Polish renaissance scholar, professor of Jagiellonian University, historian, chronicler, geographer, medical doctor , alchemist, astrologer and canon in Kraków. Life He studied at the Jagiellonian University , obtaining his master's degree in 1479. Between 1480-1485 he studied abroad. Upon his return to the country, he became a professor at the Jagiellonian University, where he served as a rector eight times , and also twice as a deputy chancellor of the Academia.
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Sharad P. Paul
#170880
Overall Influence
Sharad P. Paul is a New Zealand-based skin cancer specialist, social entrepreneur and author. Currently, he is an adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology and senior lecturer at the School of Medicine, University of Queensland, Australia. He is also senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Surgery at the University of Auckland. He has authored both fiction including novels and poetry as well as non-fiction including medical books, journals and articles.
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Christoph Sramek
#131370
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christoph Sramek is a German music historian and music critic. Life Born in Chemnitz, Sramek passed his Abitur in 1969 in Burgstädt. He also obtained a skilled worker degree as bricklayer. From 1969 to 1973 he studied music education and German studies at the Leipzig University. His teachers included Richard Petzoldt and Werner Wolf in music history, in music theory and Werner Buschnakowski in piano. Bezirksverband Leipzig. Leipzig 1982, . His diploma thesis with Gerd Schönfelder as subject teacher deals with the topic Möglichkeiten aleatorischer musikalischer Gestaltungsweisen für das Musiktheater – untersucht an Fritz Geißlers "Zerbrochenem Krug".
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Sherine Obare
#112564
Overall Influence
Sherine O. Obare is the dean of the Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. She works on nanomaterials for sensing and drug delivery.
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George Pickering
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir George White Pickering, FRS was an English medical doctor and academic. Biography Pickering was Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1968, and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1968 to 1975.
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Japhet Killewo
#71381
Overall Influence
Japhet Killewo is a Tanzanian doctor and epidemiologist in Kagera, Tanzania. He was the former Chair of Tanzanian Public Health Association and currently an epidemiology professor at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences . His research area focuses on HIV/AIDS epidemiology research in Kagera region in Tanzania. As a clinician, he also focuses on AIDS control and mother-to-child intervention in Tanzania. As a scholar, he publishes actively in international journals and participated in many projects across the globe, which are organised and supported by the European Union, as well a...
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Charles Hunter Stewart
1854 - Present (172 years)
Charles Hunter Stewart was a Scottish physician and public health expert. Born in Edinburgh, Stewart studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1884 he became an assistant at the Laboratory of Public Health in Edinburgh under Henry Littlejohn.
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M. V. Padma Srivastava
#76243
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Madakasira Vasantha Padma Srivastava is an Indian neurologist, medical academic and writer, and the professor of neurology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. She is known for pioneering Acute Stroke Programme , a medical initiative for supporting patients afflicted with epilepsy and stroke, incorporating Hyperacute Reperfusion strategies including the thrombolysis program. The Government of India awarded her the fourth highest civilian honour of the Padma Shri, in 2016, for her contributions to medical science.
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Scott Waldman
#61640
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Scott A. Waldman is an MD and biomedical scientist at Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, where he is the Samuel M.V. Hamilton Professor of Medicine, and also tenured professor and chair of the Department of Pharmacology & Experimental Therapeutics. He is author of a pharmacology textbook, and former chief editor of Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics. He is known for his work in atrial natriuretic factor intracellular signaling through guanylate cyclase , and the relation of Guanylyl cyclase C to the pathogenesis of colorectal cancer. Also for his hypotheses concerning the roles of intestinal paracrine hormones in satiety, obesity and cancer risk.
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Charles Baker Adams
1814 - 1853 (39 years)
Charles Baker Adams was an American educator and naturalist. Biography He was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts in 1814, the son of Charles J. Adams and Hannah Baker. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1830 and Amherst College in 1834 with high honors , and became an assistant to Edward Hitchcock in the Geological Survey of New York in 1836. In 1837, he became a tutor and a lecturer in geology at Amherst College. He left to become professor of chemistry and natural history at Middlebury College in 1838, remaining in that position through 1847.
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Irene Vélez Torres
#168920
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
Irene Vélez Torres is a Colombian philosopher and doctor in political geography. Since August 11, 2022 to July 19, 2023, she has held the position of Minister of Mines and Energy. Early life Irene Vélez is the daughter of Hildebrando Vélez, an environmentalist and educator recognized for his activism in the Black Communities Process through which he became very close to Francia Márquez. Vélez Torres studied philosophy at the National University, and a master's degree in cultural studies at the same university. She completed a doctorate in political geography at the University of Copenhagen in...
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August Reinsdorf
1849 - 1885 (36 years)
August Reinsdorf was a German anarchist known for his attempted assassination of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Further reading
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Alejandro Rodriguez
#77170
Overall Influence
1918 - 2012 (94 years)
Alejandro Rodriguez was a Venezuelan-American pediatrician and psychiatrist, known for his pioneering work in child psychiatry. He was the director of the division of child psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and conducted pivotal studies on autism and other developmental disorders in children.
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Jacques Pelletier du Mans
1517 - 1583 (66 years)
Jacques Pelletier du Mans, also spelled Peletier was a humanist, poet and mathematician of the French Renaissance. Life Born in Le Mans into a bourgeois family, he studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where his brother Jean was a professor of mathematics and philosophy. He subsequently studied law and medicine, frequented the literary circle around Marguerite de Navarre and from 1541 to 1543 he was secretary to René du Bellay. In 1541 he published the first French translation of Horace's Ars Poetica and during this period he also published numerous scientific and mathematical treatis...
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Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès
#108296
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès is a French writer. He was born in Sidi bel Abbes in Algeria. He has lived and worked in Brazil, Taiwan and Libya. He is best known for his novel Where Tigers Are at Home which won the Prix du roman Fnac, the Grand prix Jean Giono, and the Prix Médicis. It has been translated into English by Mike Mitchell.
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Louis Adolphus Duhring
1845 - 1913 (68 years)
Louis Adolphus Duhring was an American physician and professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is best remembered for having delineated dermatitis herpetiformis ; but he also described pruritus hiemalis , and seborrheic dermatitis.
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Kofi Boahene
#30093
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kofi Owusu Boahene is a Ghanaian-born American physician, writer, researcher, and academic. He is a professor of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a facial plastic surgeon in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. As a facial plastic surgeon, Boahene specializes solely in plastic surgery of the face, head and neck.
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Holly Willis
#81319
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Holly Willis is a Professor and Chair of the Media Arts and Practice division in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Previously, she served as Associate Dean of Research and Founding Chair of Media Arts and Practice, as well as Director of Academic Programs at USC's Institute for Multimedia Literacy. She is former editor of the magazines RES and Filmmaker, of which she is a co-founder. Willis was also the co-curator of the international digital media festival RESFest.
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Abraham Solomon ben Isaac ben Samuel Catalan
1401 - 1492 (91 years)
Abraham Solomon ben Isaac ben Samuel Catalan was the author of a work treating the eternity of the world, providence, prophecy, immortality, and the resurrection, and also dealing with mathematical, physical, and cabalistic subjects. It appeared under the title Neweh Shalom , Constantinople, 1538; Venice, 1574, with a preface by Moses Almosnino, who cites it several times in his work, Me'ammetz Koach.
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Paul Maas
#169160
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Paulus Johannes Maria "Paul" Maas is a botanist from the Netherlands and a specialist in the flora of the neotropics. Maas has identified and named about two hundred fifty plants from the Burmanniaceae, the Costus Family , the Gentian Family , the Bloodwort Family , the Banana Family , the Olacaceae, the Triuridaceae, and the Ginger Family .
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Pythagoras
#27239
Overall Influence
Pythagoras was a freedman of the Roman emperor Nero, whom he married in a public ceremony in which the emperor took the role of bride. Life Little is known about Pythagoras' background except that he was a freedman who accompanied Nero.
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Ivana Rentsch
#163258
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Ivana Rentsch is a Swiss musicologist and teacher at the University of Hamburg. Life Born in Olten, Rentsch studied musicology, media and linguistics at the University of Zürich. From 2000, she spent five years as a research assistant at the Musicological Institute of the University of Bern. In 2004 she received her doctorate with her thesis on Bohuslav Martinů's operas of the interwar period. In 2005 she was granted a research scholarship at the Austrian universities of Graz and Salzburg for the project Dance in Score .
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Françoise Blime-Dutertre
#80387
Overall Influence
1939 - 2016 (77 years)
Françoise Blime was a French philosopher. She was a disciple of Raymond Aron and a lifelong admirer of Levi-Strauss’ s structural anthropology, Françoise Blime was one of the few French students to have been accepted in the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship at Brandeis University, where she was trained along some of the leading thinkers behind the US social revolution of the late 1960s such as Angela Davis. Back in France, she worked relentlessly to elaborate and apply new paradigms in the French state educational systems, initially by the insertion of institutional psychopedagogy in t...
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Arthur Knight
#96935
Overall Influence
1916 - 1991 (75 years)
Arthur Knight was an American movie critic, film historian, professor and TV host. His book The Liveliest Art, first published in 1957, is a history of the cinema used as a textbook at colleges and universities throughout the world.
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W. R. Wayne Martin
#186518
Overall Influence
#16736
George Michael Wickens
#70261
Overall Influence
1918 - 2006 (88 years)
George Michael Wickens was a distinguished Canadian-British Persianist as well as Arabist, translator and a University lecturer. Wickens was born in London, England and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he received his BA in 1939 and MA in 1946, respectively. During the Second World War, he served with the Royal Army Pay Corp from 1939 to 1941 and the Intelligence Corps from 1941 to 1946, rising to the rank of captain. Following his wartime service — most of which was spent in Iran — Wickens resumed academic life, teaching at the University of London for three years before accepting an invitation to return to Cambridge.
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John Hennig
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
John Hennig was a German theologian, businessman and scholar of Irish and German Literature. Origins Hennig was born in Leipzig on 3 March 1911, the son of a teacher, Max Hennig, and his wife Johanna Clemen. Like his brother Karl , later to be a theologian and pastor, Hans, as he was known, frequented the Thomasschule in Leipzig. The family was Lutheran. Hennig's mother was a deaconess at her marriage and his father had a doctorate in the psychology of religious perception and was an ordained minister, though he had chosen to become a high-school religion teacher rather than a pastor. A brot...
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Henry Layton
1622 - 1705 (83 years)
Henry Layton was a minor British philosopher, theological writer, and contemporary of John Locke. Life He was the eldest son of Francis Layton of Rawdon, West Riding of Yorkshire. His father was one of the masters of the jewel-house to Charles I and Charles II. In accordance with his father's will, Layton built the chapel at Rawdon, a chapelry in the parish of Guiseley. He died at Rawdon on 18 October 1705, aged 83. By his wife Elizabeth , daughter of Sir Nicholas Yarborough, he left no issue.
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Heather McRobie
#83262
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Heather Katharine McRobie, also known professionally as Heather Allansdottir, is a British-Australian writer and academic. Biography She studied Modern History and Politics at Oxford University before going on to pursue further studies at the University of Sarajevo and McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Her move from Oxford to Montreal, aged 22, was allegedly inspired by her love of the Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen.
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Alexander Leaf
#53638
Overall Influence
1920 - 2012 (92 years)
Alexander Leaf was a physician and research scientist best known for his work linking diet and exercise to the prevention of heart disease. He also contributed significantly to establishing the relationship between longer, hotter summers and outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria in regions previously unaffected by them.
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Pierre Kory
#29177
Overall Influence
Pierre Kory is an American critical care physician who gained attention during the COVID-19 pandemic for advocating widespread off-label use of certain drugs as treatments for COVID-19, as president and co-founder of the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance . Kory testified twice to the U.S. Senate regarding COVID-19. During his testimony in December 2020, Kory erroneously claimed that the antiparasitic medication ivermectin was a "wonder drug" with "miraculous effectiveness" against COVID-19.
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Josef Servas d'Outrepont
1775 - 1845 (70 years)
Josef Servas d'Outrepont; name also given as Joseph Servatius von d'Outrepont was a German obstetrician born in Malmedy. He studied medicine at the universities of Mainz, Würzburg and Halle, earning his doctorate at the latter institution in 1798. Afterwards, he continued his education in Vienna under Johann Lucas Boër , and in 1799 settled in Salzburg, where in 1804 he became an associate professor of obstetrics.
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Ye Shi
1150 - 1223 (73 years)
Ye Shi , courtesy name Zhengze , pseudonym Mr. Shuixin , was a Chinese neo-Confucian of the Song dynasty. A native of Wenzhou, Zhejiang, he was the most famous figure of the Yongjia School, a neo-Confucianism School composed mostly of philosophers from Wenzhou Prefecture in Zhejiang province. In contrast to other scholars in the same period like Zhu Xi and Lu Jiuyuan, he stressed practical learning and applying Confucian doctrine to real world problems. This school had important influence on later thinkers from Zhejiang province, including Wang Shouren and Huang Zongxi, who were the most imp...
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Erik Adolf von Willebrand
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Erik Adolf von Willebrand was a Finnish physician who made major contributions to hematology. Von Willebrand disease and von Willebrand factor are named after him. He also researched metabolism, obesity and gout, and was one of the first Finnish physicians to use insulin to treat a diabetic coma.
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David R. Nelson
#186546
Overall Influence
#16746
Jill Macleod Clark
#115412
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Professor Dame Jill Macleod Clark, DBE, RGN, FRCN has held key leadership roles in Nursing and Health care and was Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences University of Southampton. She is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Southampton and holds Visiting Professor positions in the UK, Canada and Australia.
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Chelsea Pinnix
#117824
Overall Influence
Chelsea Camille Pinnix is an American oncologist who is an Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology and Director of the Residency Program at the MD Anderson Cancer Center . Having joined the faculty 2012, her research looks to improve the outcomes of patients who suffer from lymphoma.
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Alexander Ogston
1844 - 1929 (85 years)
Sir Alexander Ogston MD CM LLD was a British surgeon, famous for his discovery of Staphylococcus. Life Ogston was the eldest son of Amelia Cadenhead and her husband Prof. Francis Ogston , Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Aberdeen. He had a brother who was also a professor.
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Stafford L. Warren
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Stafford Leak Warren was an American physician and radiologist who was a pioneer in the field of nuclear medicine and best known for his invention of the mammogram. Warren developed the technique of producing stereoscopic images of the breast with X-rays while working in the Department of Radiology at the University of Rochester School of Medicine.
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Louis Sigurd Fridericia
1881 - 1947 (66 years)
Louis Sigurd Fridericia was a Danish hygienist born in Copenhagen. Fridericia's family moved to Denmark in the 1750s and took as a name a form of the name of the Jutland town, Fredericia, where they settled. He attended the University of Copenhagen and graduated in medicine in 1906.
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