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,
#17901
Abu al-Hakam al-Kirmani
970 - 1066 (96 years)
Abu al-Hakam al-Kirmani was a prominent philosopher and scholar from the Muslim al-Andalus. A student of Maslamah Ibn Ahmad al-Majriti, he was a Neoplatonic advocate, and seen as an influence on Ibn 'Arabi, but he also wrote extensively on geometry and logic. His exact date of death is not known as he fled to Morocco in the twelfth century. It is possible that it was he who returned to al-Andalus with the Epistles of the Brethren of Purity.
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Reuben D. Mussey
1780 - 1866 (86 years)
Reuben Dimond Mussey, Sr. was an American physician, surgeon, vegetarian and an early opponent of tobacco. He was the fourth president of the American Medical Association. Biography Mussey was born on June 23, 1780, in Rockingham County, New Hampshire. He was of French Huguenot descent, and his father, John Mussey, was also a medical doctor. Mussey studied at Dartmouth College and then learned medicine under Nathan Smith. He began the practice of medicine in Essex County, Massachusetts. However, he then went to the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine where he did further medical studies, graduating M.D.
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Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein
1788 - 1868 (80 years)
Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein , born Vogel, was a German painter. Life Son of the child and portrait painter Christian Leberecht Vogel, Vogel was trained early in life by his father. From 1804 he visited the Kunstakademie in Dresden, where he copied many paintings in the Gemäldegalerie and also produced the first of his own portraits.
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Johannes Magirus
1560 - 1596 (36 years)
Johannes Magirus was a German physician and natural philosopher. He was born at Fritzlar about 1560; his background was Lutheran. He studied at the University of Padua, and took a medical degree at the University of Marburg in 1585.
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Alfred Pribram
1841 - 1912 (71 years)
Alfred Pribram was an internist born in Prague, Austrian Empire. He was a brother of chemist Richard Pribram . His son was the internist Hugo Pribram . Biography He studied medicine at the University of Prague, earning his doctorate as a general practitioner in 1861 and as a surgeon during the following year. From 1867 to 1871 he worked as an assistant to Anton von Jaksch at the second medical clinic in Prague. In 1871 he received his habilitation, and in 1887 was appointed full professor of special pathology and therapy at the University of Prague. Among his better known students was physi...
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Joseph von Lindwurm
1824 - 1874 (50 years)
Joseph von Lindwurm , was a German physician and dermatologist born in Aschaffenburg. He studied medicine in Würzburg and Heidelberg, obtaining his medical doctorate in 1849. Afterwards, he worked as an assistant in the medical clinic at Würzburg, then furthered his education in Vienna and Paris. In Paris, he demonstrated through inoculation experiments that secondary syphilis was as contagious as primary syphilis. In 1853 he became privat-docent at Munich, followed by an associate professorship several years later . In 1863 he was appointed a full professor of dermatology and venereal disease...
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Alberto Sols
1917 - 1989 (72 years)
Alberto Sols García was a researcher specializing in biochemistry, working especially on hexokinases. He effectively created biochemistry as a major discipline in Spain. Life Alberto Sols was born in Sax, Alicante, on 2 February 1917, the son of Pedro Sols Lluch. He died in Denia, Alicante, on 10 August 1989. The house of his birth is now the Centro de Estudios y Archivo Histórico Municipal Alberto Sols.
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Mark Fax
1911 - 1974 (63 years)
Mark Oakland Fax was an American composer and a professor of music. Child prodigy Born on June 15, 1911, in Baltimore, Maryland, Fax was a child prodigy. By age fourteen, Fax was employed as a theater organist playing scores to silent films in Baltimore's Regent Theater on Saturdays, and gospel music at an African American church on Sundays. Fax enrolled at Syracuse University on the advice of his brother, Elton Fax, an artist, who believed Syracuse faculty would take his aspirations as a classical composer seriously.
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Yun Won-hyeong
1509 - 1565 (56 years)
Yun Won-hyeong was a Korean political figure of the Joseon period. He was the younger brother of Queen Munjeong, the 3rd wife of 11th King Jungjong and was the maternal uncle of the 13th King Myeongjong.
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Giorgio Raguseo
1580 - 1622 (42 years)
Giorgio Raguseo was an Italian philosopher, theologist, and orator from the Republic of Venice. Born an illegitimate child in Dubrovnik , Croatia, Raguseo had to beg before being taken to Venice by a gentleman who provided him an education. He became a priest and taught at the University of Padua.
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Louis Tocqué
1696 - 1772 (76 years)
Jean Louis Tocqué was a French painter. He specialized in portrait painting. Biography Jean Louis Tocqué was born on 19 November 1696 in Paris. His father, who was also a painter, died in April 1710, before Louis was even fourteen. He was eventually brought into the care of another artist, Jean-Marc Nattier. Tocqué studied under Nattier, Nicolas Bertin and Hyacinthe Rigaud in the 1720s. He married Jean-Marc Nattier's daughter Marie Nattier in 1747. He died on 10 February 1772 in Paris.
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Jane Clapperton
1832 - 1914 (82 years)
Jane Hume Clapperton was a British philosopher, birth control pioneer, socialist, social reformer and suffragist. Life Her father was Alexander Clapperton and mother Anne Clapperton . She had eleven siblings. Her father ran a company, Clapperton & Co., in Edinburgh and moved from 43 Lauriston Place close to George Heriot's School to 126 George Street in the year Jane was born.
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Claude Beck
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Claude Schaeffer Beck was a pioneer cardiac surgeon, famous for innovating various cardiac surgery techniques, and performing the first defibrillation in 1947. He was the first American professor of cardiovascular surgery, from 1952 through 1965. He was a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1952.
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Johannes Heurnius
1543 - 1601 (58 years)
Johannes Heurnius was a Dutch physician and natural philosopher. Life Heurnius was born in Utrecht, and studied at Leuven and Paris. He went to the University of Padua to study under Hieronymus Fabricius; and graduated M.D. there in 1566, examined by Petrus Ramus and Fabricius.
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Matthew Ferchi
1583 - 1669 (86 years)
Matija Ferkić or Matija Frkić was a Croatian Franciscan Conventual scholastic philosopher from Krk. He was from the island of Krk . He was a Scotist, and wrote a Vita et apologia Scoti, a life of Duns Scotus. He taught at the University of Padua for 35 years, from 1629.
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Valery Chkalov
1904 - 1938 (34 years)
Valery Pavlovich Chkalov was a test pilot awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union . Early life Chkalov was born to a Russian family in 1904 in the upper Volga region, the town of Vasilyevo , which lies near Nizhny Novgorod.
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Thomas Wilton
1270 - 1320 (50 years)
Thomas Wilton was an English theologian and scholastic philosopher, a pupil of Duns Scotus, a teacher at the University of Oxford and then the University of Paris, where he taught Walter Burley. He was a Fellow of Merton College from about 1288.
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Evander
201 BC - 101 BC (100 years)
Evander , born in Phocis or Phocaea, was the pupil and successor of Lacydes, and was joint leader of the Academy at Athens together with Telecles. In the final ten years of Lacydes' life , Evander and Telecles had helped run the Academy due to Lacydes being seriously ill. They continued running the Academy after the death of Lacydes, without formally being elected scholarchs. On Telecles' death in 167/6 BC, Evander remained scholarch for a few more years. Evander himself was succeeded by his pupil Hegesinus. Concerning the opinions and writings of this philosopher nothing is known except t...
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Su Xuelin
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Su Xuelin or Su Hsüeh-lin was a Chinese writer and scholar. Early life Su Xuelin was born to a family of officials native to Anhui province in 1897. Her grandfather, Su Jinxin, served as a magistrate in several counties in Zhejiang province, where Su Xuelin was born. Her mother was surnamed Tu, but had no formal first name, instead going by the nickname To-Ni. Su's father held a minor official position, first under the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China. Su had three brothers and two sisters.
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John Gorham
1783 - 1829 (46 years)
John Gorham was an American physician and educator. Biography He graduated from Harvard in 1801, with a B.A., and later received two medical degrees there . Between his medical degrees, he studied chemistry privately in London with Friedrich Accum, and then with Thomas Hope at the University of Edinburgh. He opened a medical practice in Boston in 1806, and maintained it throughout his academic career. In 1809 he was appointed adjunct professor of chemistry and materia medica in Harvard, and in 1816 was made professor of chemistry and mineralogy. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy...
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Romolo Spezioli
1642 - 1723 (81 years)
Romolo Spezioli was an Italian doctor and the personal physician of the Ottoboni family, Queen Christina of Sweden, Cardinal Decio Azzolino and of Pope Alexander VIII. Life After studies initiated in Fermo, graduating in 1664, he worked for a short period nearby Grottammare, Ripatransone and Jesi.
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Julius Vincenz von Krombholz
1782 - 1843 (61 years)
Julius Vincenz von Krombholz was a physician and mycologist born in Oberpolitz , northern Bohemia. He studied medicine at the University of Prague, receiving his doctorate in 1814. In 1828 he was appointed professor of special pathology and therapy. At Prague, he used his influence to help the penniless August Carl Joseph Corda get admitted to the university. In 1831 he was named rector of the university.
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Emil Carl Wilm
1877 - 1932 (55 years)
Emil Carl Kunibert Wilm was an American philosopher. His published scholarship, often written for a popular audience, was mainly in the history of philosophy and psychology. Early life and education Wilm was born in 1877 in Margonin, then part of Prussia and now in Poland. He moved to the United States in 1890, at age 13. He received a bachelor of arts from Southwestern University in 1902, a master of arts from Vanderbilt University in 1903, and a PhD from Cornell University in 1905.
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Irving Pichel
1891 - 1954 (63 years)
Irving Pichel was an American actor and film director, who won acclaim both as an actor and director in his Hollywood career. Career Pichel was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh. He attended Pittsburgh Central High School with George S. Kaufman. The two collaborated on a play, The Failure. Pichel graduated from Harvard University in 1914 and went immediately into the theater. Pichel's first work in musical theatre was as a technical director for the theater of the San Francisco Bohemian Club; he also helped with the annual summer pageant, held at the elite Bohemian Grove, in which up to 300 of its wealthy, influential members from finance and government participate.
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James McCune Smith
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
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Carl Joseph Begas
1794 - 1854 (60 years)
Carl Joseph Begas, or Karl Begas, was a German painter who played an important role in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. He was the first in a multi-generational "dynasty" of artists. Life and work His family came from Belgium, in the region near Verviers and Liège. He was the third child of Franz Anton Begasse , a judge, and his wife, Susanne née Hoffstadt. In 1802, they moved to Cologne, where he received his first artistic training from the miniaturist, . Later, he studied at the Lyceum in Bonn with Clemens August Philippart . In 1813, he went to Paris, where he became a student of Antoine-Jean Gros.
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John Alexander Stewart
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
John Alexander Stewart CIE MC was a classical scholar, colonial public servant, and professor of Burmese. Stewart was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and educated at the University of Aberdeen where he graduated with first-class honours in classics in 1903. He passed the Indian civil service examination in 1904 and went to Myanmar in 1905. He worked for five years in the Settlement Department where he met J S Furnivall. During the First World War, and the Anglo-Afghan War, Stewart served for years with the Burma Sappers and Miners in Mesopotamia and Persia. He returned to Myanmar and was Commissioner of the Magwe Division in the 1930s.
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Hilda Lloyd
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Dr. Dame Hilda Nora Lloyd, DBE was a British physician and surgeon. She was the first woman to be elected as president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Born in Birmingham, the younger of two daughters, she attended King Edward VI High School, Edgbaston before entering Birmingham University .
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Lucius Aemilius Juncus
100 - Present (1926 years)
Lucius Aemilius Juncus was a senator of the Roman Empire, and a philosopher. He was consul suffect in the last three months of 127 with Sextus Julius Severus as his colleague. Life According to John Oliver, Juncus came of an equestrian background. There is a lead tessera found in Beirut attesting to a procurator of Syria named L. Aemilius Juncus , who has been identified with this suffect consul or the suffect consul of 179 who was exiled in 183. In either case, Juncus is likely not related to the patrician Aemilia gens, although he may be descended from a client or freedman of a member of tha...
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James Martin
1550 - 1584 (34 years)
James Martin was a Scottish philosophical writer and early Ramist. Life He was a native of Dunkeld, Perthshire, and is said to have been educated at the University of Oxford. A James Martin, whose college is not mentioned, commenced M.A. at Oxford on 31 March 1522.
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Sölvi Helgason
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Sölvi Helgason was an artist, philosopher and drifter in Iceland. If he hadn't been arrested, we might not know anything more about Sölvi than folk tales about his life. He never went to school, but was known to always be painting and writing. It is posited from his writings that he was mentally ill and suffered from paranoia; he was known to accuse people of stealing his work. He often referred to himself by made-up names as well as names of playwrights, artists, musicians and philosophers: Sókrates, Plato, Sólon, Melanchthon, Sölvi Spekingur, Sjúlvi, Húsfriður, Sjúlvi Hinn Vitri, Húmboldt, ...
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Carlo Cignani
1628 - 1719 (91 years)
Carlo Cignani was an Italian painter. His innovative style referred to as his 'new manner' introduced a reflective, intimate mood of painting and presaged the later pictures of Guido Reni and Guercino, as well as those of Simone Cantarini. This gentle manner marked a break with the more energetic style of earlier Bolognese classicism of the Bolognese School of painting.
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Alexander of Lycopolis
300 - Present (1726 years)
Alexander of Lycopolis was the writer of a short treatise, in twenty-six chapters, against the Manicheans . He says in the second chapter of this work that he derived his knowledge of Manes' teaching apo ton gnorimon .
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Arthur McGill
1926 - 1980 (54 years)
Arthur Chute McGill was a Canadian-born American theologian and philosopher. Biography Born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on August 7, 1926, McGill moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, later that year where he attended Rivers Country Day School, still extant today. He is mentioned in The Lustre of Our Country The American Experience of Religious Freedom, by prominent Senior Circuit Judge John T. Noonan Jr. The two men prayed and sung Protestant hymns together at the school, and Noonan refers to him as a boyhood rival: "... my River's classmate, Arthur Chute McGill, who later became a professor at Harvard Divinity School.
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Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus
113 - 200 (87 years)
Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus was a senator and philosopher who lived in the Roman Empire. Life Severus was the son of the consul and first Roman Governor of Arabia Petraea, Gaius Claudius Severus, by an unnamed mother. Severus was of Pontian Greek descent. He was born and raised in Pompeiopolis, a city in the Roman province of Galatia.
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David Martin
1737 - 1797 (60 years)
David Martin was a Scottish painter and engraver. Born in Fife, he studied in Italy and England, before gaining a reputation as a portrait painter. Early life Born in Anstruther Easter, he was the first of the five children of John Martin , Anstruther Easter's parish schoolmaster, and his second wife, Mary Boyack .
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Petre P. Negulescu
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Petre Paul Negulescu was a Romanian philosopher and conservative politician, known as a disciple and continuator of Titu Maiorescu. Affiliated with Maiorescu's Junimea society from his early twenties, he debuted as a positivist and monist, attempting to reconcile art for art's sake with an evolutionist philosophy of culture. He was a lecturer and tenured professor at the University of Iași, where he promoted the Junimist lobby against left-wing competitors, and formalized his links with the Conservative Party in 1901. From 1910, he taught at the University of Bucharest, publishing works on Re...
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Hawley Harvey Crippen
1862 - 1910 (48 years)
Hawley Harvey Crippen , colloquially known as Dr. Crippen, was an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser who was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, for the murder of his wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen. He was one of the first criminals to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.
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Bob Fosse
1927 - 1987 (60 years)
Robert Louis Fosse was an American actor, choreographer, dancer, and film and stage director. He directed and choreographed musical works on stage and screen, including the stage musicals The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees , How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , Sweet Charity , Pippin , and Chicago . He directed the films Sweet Charity , Cabaret , Lenny , All That Jazz , and Star 80 .
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Erwin Bälz
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Erwin Otto Eduard von Bälz , often simply known as Erwin Bälz without the noble "von" particle, was a German internist, anthropologist, and personal physician to the Japanese Imperial Family and cofounder of modern western medicine in Japan.
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Georg Theodor August Gaffky
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Georg Theodor August Gaffky was a Hanover-born bacteriologist best known for identifying bacillus salmonella typhi as the cause of typhoid disease in 1884. Early life and career Gaffky's parents were the shipping agent Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Gaffky, and Emma Schumacher. His medical studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin were completed in 1873 after an interruption by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. His dissertation postulated a relationship between lead poisoning and kidney disease. He worked as an assistant at the Berlin Charité hospital and passed the state medical exams in 1875.
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Isaac Abarbanel
1437 - 1508 (71 years)
Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel , commonly referred to as Abarbanel , also spelled Abravanel, Avravanel, or Abrabanel, was a Portuguese Jewish statesman, philosopher, Bible commentator, and financier. Name Some debate exists over whether his last name should be pronounced Abarbanel or Abravanel. The traditional pronunciation is Abarbanel. Modern scholarly literature, since Graetz and Baer, has most commonly used Abravanel, but his own son Judah insisted on Abarbanel, and Sefer HaTishbi by Elijah Levita, who was a nearby contemporary, twice vowels the name as Abarbinel .
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Rudolf Kaltenbach
1842 - 1893 (51 years)
Rudolf Kaltenbach was a German gynecologist who was a native of Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1865 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, and afterwards trained under Johann von Dumreicher at the surgical hospital in Vienna. From 1867 to 1873 he was an assistant to Alfred Hegar in Freiburg, and was later a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the University of Giessen. In 1887 he became an OB/GYN professor at Halle, where he succeeded Robert Michaelis von Olshausen . Kaltenbach served in the military during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars.
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Mordaunt Hall
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
Mordaunt Hall was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for The New York Times, working from October 1924 to September 1934. His writing style was described in his Times obituary as "chatty, irreverent, and not particularly analytical. […] The interest of other critics in analyzing cinematographic techniques was not for him."
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George Skene
1741 - Present (285 years)
Prof George Skene of Rubislaw was an 18th-century Scottish physician who co-founded the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. Life He was born in Rubislaw House in Aberdeen in 1741 the son of Francis Skene, Regent of Marischal College and great grandson of George Skene, Provost of Aberdeen.
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Walter Mackenzie
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Walter Campbell Mackenzie was a Canadian surgeon and academic. Born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Mackenzie received his BSc in 1927 and MD in 1932 from Dalhousie University and was honoured as one of two Malcolm Honour Society Medal winners. He began surgery training at McGill University then moved to the Mayo Clinic in 1933 to complete his MSc. From 1940 to 1945 served in the Royal Canadian Navy where he was promoted to surgeon-commander.
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Juan de Mal Lara
1524 - 1571 (47 years)
Juan de Mal Lara was a Spanish humanist, poet, playwright and paremiologue at the University of Seville during the period of the Spanish Renaissance in the reign of Philip II of Spain. Biography Mal Lara studied Latin and Greek grammar at the College of San Miguel in Sevilla. His teacher was Pedro Fernandez de Castilleja and later Mal Lara taught humanities to Mateo Alemán. It was a decade later, after studying at the University of Salamanca, where he was student of Hernán Núñez one of classmates was Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, known as the "Brocense"; later he went to Valencia and Barcelona, where he completed his studies with Francisco Escobar before returning again to Salamanca.
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Laura Bentivolgio Davia
1689 - Present (337 years)
Laura Bentivoglio Davia was an Italian aristocratic philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and natural philosophy. She was known primarily for creating relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze .
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Walter Channing
1786 - 1876 (90 years)
Walter Channing was an American physician and professor of medicine. He was the brother of preacher William Ellery Channing and of fellow Harvard professor , Edward Tyrrel Channing. He was also the father of the poet William Ellery Channing. He was married to Eliza Wainwright Channing from 1831 until her death in 1834.
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Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid was a Scottish humanist and philosopher who became Latin secretary to King James VI and I. Life He was second son of James Reid, minister of Banchory Ternan, Kincardineshire, a cadet of the Pitfoddels family. Alexander Reid the surgeon, was a younger brother. Thomas was educated at the grammar school, Aberdeen, and at Marischal College and University, where he appears to have graduated M.A. about 1600. In 1602 he was appointed to a mastership in the grammar school, which he resigned in the following year on being chosen one of the regents in Marischal College.
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