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,
#17951
Paul Dudley White
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Paul Dudley White was an American physician and cardiologist. He was considered one of the leading cardiologists of his day, and a prominent advocate of preventive medicine. Early life and education White was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the son of Herbert Warren White and Elizabeth Abigail Dudley. White's interest in medicine was sparked early in life, when he accompanied his father, a family practitioner, on rounds and house calls in a horse and buggy. A 1903 graduate of the Roxbury Latin School, his undergraduate education at Harvard College encompassed history and forestry as well as pre-medical courses.
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Charles Norris Cochrane
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Charles Norris Cochrane was a Canadian historian and philosopher who taught at the University of Toronto. He is known for his writings about the interaction between ancient Rome and emerging Christianity.
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Émile Bréhier
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
Émile Bréhier was a French philosopher. His interest was in classical philosophy, and the history of philosophy. He wrote a Histoire de la Philosophie, translated into English in seven volumes. This work inspired Freddie Copleston's own History of Philosophy , initially comprising nine volumes.
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Dineshchandra Sircar
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Dineshchandra Sircar , also known as D. C. Sircar or D. C. Sarkar, was an epigraphist, historian, numismatist and folklorist, known particularly in India and Bangladesh for his work deciphering inscriptions. He was the Chief Epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India , Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the University of Calcutta and the General President of the Indian History Congress. In 1972, Sircar was awarded the Sir William Jones Memorial Plaque.
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Joachim Ritter
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Joachim Ritter was a German philosopher and founder of the so-called Ritter School of liberal conservatism. Biography Born in Geesthacht, Ritter studied philosophy, theology, German literature and history in Heidelberg, Marburg, Freiburg and Hamburg. A disciple of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, he obtained his doctorate at Hamburg with a dissertation on Nicolas of Cusa in 1925, and was both Cassirer's assistant and a lecturer there. A Marxist in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937 and an officer of the German Wehrmacht in 1940. After World W...
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Carleton B. Joeckel
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Carleton Bruns Joeckel , was an American librarian, advocate, scholar, decorated soldier, and co-writer, with Enoch Pratt Free Library Assistant Director Amy Winslow, A National Plan for Public Library Service that provided the foundation for nationwide public library services.
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Cyril Hopkirk
1894 - 1987 (93 years)
Cyril Spottiswoode Moy Hopkirk was a New Zealand animal science administrator and veterinary scientist. He was a world authority on bovine mastitis. Early career Born at Hamua, north of Eketāhuna, in 1894, Hopkirk started his scientific career as a cadet in the laboratory of the Biology Department of Victoria University College and in 1912 became a laboratory assistant at the Wallaceville Animal Diagnostic and Research Laboratory.
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Arthur Hutchings
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Arthur James Bramwell Hutchings was an English musicologist, composer and professor of music. Life Born in Sunbury-on-Thames, Hutchings had no formal musical education but played piano and violin to a high standard and sang as a chorister. He taught, performed and composed, and was appointed organist at All Saints Church, East Sheen in 1929. While training as a teacher in London he made some key musical friendships during the 1930s: with Constant Lambert, Cecil Gray, Sorabji, Cyril Rootham and Edmund Rubbra .
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Harvey E. Jordan
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Harvey Ernest Jordan was a professor of anatomy and dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Harvey Jordan was born in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania to Genaah and Emma Jordan. Jordan earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Lehigh University, and his doctorate from Princeton University. He joined the faculty at UVA in 1907. He became Dean of the School of Medicine in 1939. Jordan was president of the American Genetic Association and the Virginia Academy of Science, which awarded him its Science Research Prize in 1931. He was well recognized for his research in histology and e...
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Karl Evang
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Karl Evang was a Norwegian physician and civil servant. He was born in Kristiania as a son of assisting secretary Jens Ingolf Evang and Anna Beate Wexelsen . He was a brother of Vilhelm Evang, and a relative of Vilhelm Andreas Wexelsen, Per Kvist and Gunnar Jahn. His sister Anne Beate married another civil servant, Karl Ludvig Bugge. Karl Evang met physician Gerda S. Landmark Moe in 1926, and married her in 1929.
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H. A. Hodges
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Herbert Arthur Hodges was a British philosopher and theologian. He was Professor of Philosophy at Reading University from 1934 to 1969. He was a member of The Moot, the discussion and study group begun by J. H. Oldham. Its purpose was "to continue, in an informal, confidential but serious way, exploration of the relation between church and society and the realisation of Christian ethics in the public sphere." Other members included T. S. Eliot, with whom Hodges corresponded. Eliot suggested to Karl Mannheim that Hodges was closer to Mannheim than others in the Moot, in at least some areas of ...
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Franklin David Keim
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Franklin David Keim was a professor at the University of Nebraska where he studied plant genetics, grasses, and grazing. He served as the chair of the University of Nebraska Department of Agronomy for 22 years from 1930 to 1952. He was elected a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy in 1937 and served as the president of the American Society of Agronomy in 1943. The University of Nebraska's Keim Hall is named in his honor.
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Harold Foster Hallett
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Harold Foster Hallet , was a British philosopher Work He is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophy; most noteworthy is his seminal work in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. His "Spinoza The Elements of His Philosophy" stands as the most comprehensive and erudite analysis of Spinoza's system in the entire extant.
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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a historian and social philosopher, whose work spanned the disciplines of history, theology, sociology, linguistics and beyond. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, the son of a prosperous banker, he converted to Christianity in his late teens, and thereafter the interpretation and reinterpretation of Christianity was a consistent theme in his writings. He met and married Margrit Hüssy in 1914. In 1925, the couple legally combined their names. They had a son, Hans, in 1921.
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Paul Pulewka
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Paul Pulewka was a German pharmacologist from Elbing . Pulewka graduated from the Königsberg Medical Faculty in 1923 and earned doctorates in pharmacology and toxicology from the Pharmacology Institute of the same university in 1927. Pulewka was appointed Docent at the University of Tübingen in 1929. In May 1933, he was promoted to Professor Extraordinarius of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Tübingen where he lectured on the toxicology of poisonous gases and the protection against them. He was elected to the university's Senate. However, Behrend Behrens, Pulewka's former assistant whom he and ...
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Éric Weil
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Éric Weil was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy. Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country. The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual. Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was...
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Ernst Fritz Schmid
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Ernst Fritz Schmid was a German musicologist and Mozart scholar. Life Born in Tübingen, Schmid was the son of Wilhelm Schmid from Graz and grandson of Karl Emil Kauffmann. Initially, Schmid studied violin, viola and viola d'amore at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich from 1924 to 1927 and was also active as a violist in Düsseldorf in 1927. He then studied musicology in Freiburg, Tübingen and Vienna. He received his doctorate in 1929 and his habilitation in 1934. From 1935 to 1937 he was Extraordinarius for Musicology at the University of Tübingen and its university music director. Around 193...
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Matila Ghyka
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Prince Matila Costiescu Ghyka , was a Romanian naval officer, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher, academic and diplomat. He did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora. His first name is sometimes written as Matyla.
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Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
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Robert Bruce Raup
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Robert Bruce Raup , was a Professor in the Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a well-known writer in the 1930s, whose writings were influenced by his own teacher and mentor, the American philosopher John Dewey. Like his mentor, Professor Raup is often associated with the pedagogical concept of promoting practical judgment as something appropriate and necessary within the context of a modern democratic society. He was best known for his criticism of the American public education system, which he claimed was inadequate and ineffective in its methods.
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Penelope Mackie
1900 - Present (126 years)
Penelope Mackie was a British philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and philosophical logic, and was best known for her work on essence and modality. Mackie spent the majority of her career in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham , having also held appointments at the University of Birmingham, Virginia Commonwealth University, and New College, Oxford.
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Bernhard Fischer-Wasels
1877 - 1941 (64 years)
Bernhard Fischer-Wasels , known as Bernhard Fischer until 1926, was a German physician and anatomical pathologist, who served as Director of the Senckenberg Institute of Pathology , Professor of Pathology and Rector of the Goethe University Frankfurt . He was a leading cancer researcher and is world-renowned as the father of petrochemical carcinogenesis.
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John S. Richards
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
John S. Richards was a librarian who served as the president of the American Library Association from 1955 to 1956. Early life and career John Stewart Richards was born February 16, 1892, in Chicago, Illinois. His family moved to the Pacific Northwest when he was four years old, and he grew up in Yakima Valley. In 1912 Richards began his studies at the University of Washington; under the tutelage of University Librarian William E. Henry, Richards studied library science and became the first alumnus to graduate from the University of Washington Library School with an A.B. degree in 1916.
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Walker Percy
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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Max Seiffert
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Maximilian Seiffert was a German musicologist and editor of Baroque music. Biography Seiffert was born in Beeskow an der Spree, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a teacher. He was first educated at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, in Berlin, where he studied under Philipp Spitta, and then at the University of Berlin where he received a Ph.D. in 1891 for his dissertation J. P. Sweelinck und seine direkten deutschen Schüler .
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Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Andrew Seth, FBA, DCL , who changed his name to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in 1898 to fulfill the terms of a bequest, was a Scottish philosopher. His brother was James Seth, also a philosopher. Early life and education Their father, Smith Kinmont Seth, was the son of a farmer from Fife and a bank clerk in the head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Their mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Andrew Little a farmer from Berwickshire. An elder brother died in infancy.
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Gerald Heard
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Henry FitzGerald Heard , commonly called Gerald Heard, was a British-born American historian, science writer and broadcaster, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Taro Takemi
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Taro Takemi, , was a Japanese physician who served as 11th President of the Japan Medical Association for 25 years from 1957 to 1982, and also served as president of the World Medical Association from 1975 to 1976.
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John Macmurray
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher. His thought both moved beyond and was critical of the modern tradition, whether rationalist or empiricist. His thought may be classified as personalist, as his writings focused primarily on the nature of human beings. He viewed persons in terms of their relationality and agency, rather than the modern tendency to characterize them in terms of individualism and cognition.
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Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera, OBE, JP, was a Sri Lankan academic, scholar and diplomat best known for his Malalasekara English-Sinhala Dictionary. He was Ceylon's first Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Ceylon's High Commissioner to Canada, the United Kingdom and Ceylon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. He was the Professor Emeritus in Pali and Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
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Peter Choong
Peter Fook Meng Choong is an Australian doctor and professor who specializes in orthopaedics. He is the Director of Orthopaedics at St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne and the Hugh Devine Chair of Surgery at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, he became the first surgeon to perform a 3D-printed heel transplant.
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Ernst Gräfenberg
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Ernst Gräfenberg was a German-born physician and scientist. He is known for developing the intra-uterine device , and for his studies of the role of the woman's urethra in orgasm. The G-spot is named after him.
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Henry M. Sheffer
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Henry Maurice Sheffer was an American logician. Life and career Sheffer was a Polish Jew born in the western Ukraine, who immigrated to the USA in 1892 with his parents and six siblings. He studied at the Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University, learning logic from Josiah Royce, and completing his undergraduate degree in 1905, his master's in 1907, and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1908.
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Richard Kroner
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Richard Kroner was a German neo-Hegelian philosopher, known for his Von Kant bis Hegel , a classic history of German idealism written from the neo-Hegelian point of view. He was a Christian, from a Jewish background. He is known for his formulation of Hegel as 'the Protestant Aquinas'.
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Ray Farquharson
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Ray Fletcher Farquharson was a Canadian medical doctor, university professor, and medical researcher. Born in Claude, Ontario, he attended and taught at the University of Toronto for most of his life, and was trained and employed at Toronto General Hospital. With co-researcher Arthur Squires, Farquharson was responsible for the discovery of the Farquharson phenomenon, an important principle of endocrinology, which is that administering external hormones suppresses the natural production of that hormone.
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Gunnar Dahlberg
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Gunnar Dahlberg was a Swedish physician, eugenist and geneticist. From 1922 to 1924 he was the assistant of Herman Lundborg at Statens institut för rasbiologi. In 1935, when Lundborg retired, Dahlberg succeeded him as the head of the institute. Dahlberg held the post until his death in 1956 and was succeeded by the geneticist Jan Arvid Böök.
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Sigmund Spaeth
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth was an American musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music for the general public. His extensive knowledge of both the classical repertoire and popular song enabled him to trace the melodies of current hits back to earlier sources; this talent garnered him fame as the "Tune Detective," a role he played as an entertainer, educator, and as an expert witness in cases of plagiarism and infringement of copyrighted music.
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Paul Grice
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle , which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
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Heinrich Frenkel
1860 - 1931 (71 years)
Heinrich Simon Frenkel was a Swiss physician and neurologist born in Heiden, a town overlooking Lake Constance. He was an early practitioner of neuro-rehabilitation, advocating a regimen of special exercises for patients with neurological disorders.
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J. L. Mackie
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy.
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Leon Tochowicz
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Leon Tochowicz was a Polish internist and cardiologist. For three terms he was a rector of the Medical Academy in Kraków , and was referred to as the "founder of the Kraków school of cardiology". He was the author of nearly one hundred original research papers, mostly in the field of clinical cardiology, and was the initiator of the construction of the Institute of Pediatrics in Kraków-Prokocim, nowadays the University Children's Hospital in Kraków.
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Zoltán Gárdonyi
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Zoltán Gárdonyi was a Hungarian composer and musicologist. He taught at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music for 26 years. Life and work Gárdonyi was born in Budapest. His mother, the pianist Maria Weigl, studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music with Liszt's pupil, István Thomán, at the same time and in the same class as Béla Bartók. At the age of 17, Gárdonyi began his studies in composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. After studying with Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schering in Berlin, he taught as a professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from 1941 until 1967.
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Sara Josephine Baker
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially in the immigrant communities of New York City. Her fight against the damage that widespread urban poverty and ignorance caused to children, especially newborns, is perhaps her most lasting legacy. In 1917, she noted that babies born in the United States faced a higher mortality rate than soldiers fighting in World War I, drawing a great deal of attention to her cause. She also is known for tracking down Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary.
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Oswald Jonas
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Oswald Jonas was a music theorist and musicologist and student of Heinrich Schenker. Despite Schenker's conservative nationalist views Jonas was an admirer of Karl Kraus. In 1935, Jonas founded the Schenker Institut and began publishing Der Dreiklang with Felix Salzer. The Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, housed at the University of California, Riverside Library, holds the complete diaries of Schenker and much of the correspondence and manuscripts of Erwin Ratz, Jonas's first student. His primary students include Felix Salzer, Ernst Oster, and Sylvan Kalib.
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Ernesto Buonaiuti
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Ernesto Buonaiuti was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists. As a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current.
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Johannes Nobel
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Johannes Nobel was a German indologist and Buddhist scholar. Early life and education Johannes Nobel was born on 25 June 1887 in Forst . He studied Indo-European languages, Arabic, Turkish and Sanskrit at the University of Greifswald from 1907, then from 1908 at the Friedrich Wilhelms University Berlin. In 1911 he completed his PhD thesis on the history of the Alamkãraśāstra, and decided to work as a librarian. In 1915 he passed the library examinations and found employment at the Old Royal Library in Berlin. In the First World War, Nobel joined the Landsturm and was temporarily employed by t...
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Robert Aim Lennie
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Robert Aim Lennie was Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow from 1946 to 1955. Lennie was born at Cambuslang, Glasgow in 1889 the son of Ritchie Lennie , an oil and colour manufacturer, from Kincardine, Perthshire, and his wife Isabella Crawford Smith, daughter of Brodie Smith, a drapery merchant, from Leslie, Fife. R.A. Lennie graduated MB from the University of Glasgow in 1912, and was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1936.
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Ferdinand Sauerbruch
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch was a German surgeon. His major work was on the use of negative-pressure chambers for surgery. Biography Sauerbruch was born in Barmen , Germany. He studied medicine at the Philipps University of Marburg, the University of Greifswald, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Leipzig, from the last of which he graduated in 1902. He went to Breslau in 1903, where he developed the Sauerbruch chamber, a pressure chamber for operating on the open thorax, which he demonstrated in 1904. This invention was a breakthrough in thorax medicine and allowed heart and lung operations to take place at greatly reduced risk.
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