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 Political Science,
#4201
August Dillmann
1823 - 1894 (71 years)
Christian Friedrich August Dillmann was a German orientalist and biblical scholar. Life The son of a Württemberg schoolmaster, he was born at Illingen. He was educated at the University of Tübingen, where he became a pupil and friend of Heinrich Ewald, and studied under Ferdinand Christian Baur, though he did not join the new Tübingen school. For a short time he worked as pastor at Sersheim, near his native place, but he soon came to feel that his studies demanded his whole time.
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Tom Pendergast
1872 - 1945 (73 years)
Thomas Joseph Pendergast , also known as T. J. Pendergast, was an American political boss who controlled Kansas City and Jackson County, Missouri, from 1925 to 1939. Pendergast only briefly held elected office, as an alderman, but his capacity as chairman of the Jackson County Democratic Party allowed him to use his large network of Irish family and friends to help the election of politicians, in some cases by voter fraud, and to hand out government contracts and patronage jobs. He became wealthy in the process, but his addiction to gambling, especially horse racing, later led to a large accum...
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Christian Ravis
1613 - 1677 (64 years)
Christian Ravis was an itinerant German orientalist and theologian. It has been questioned whether Ravis really mastered the languages he claimed to teach: whether his competence extended further than Turkish. His reputation with Jacobus Golius was undermined by Nicolaus Petri of Aleppo, who worked for Ravis copying manuscripts.
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George Grafton Wilson
1863 - 1951 (88 years)
George Grafton Wilson was a distinguished professor of International Law during the first half of the 20th century. He served on the faculties of Brown University, Harvard University, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and the U.S. Naval War College.
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Mariano Iberico Rodríguez
1892 - 1974 (82 years)
Mariano Iberico Rodríguez was a Peruvian philosopher. Life and education He was born in Cajamarca, Peru on April 11, 1892 and received his higher education at the National University of San Marcos in Lima. In 1919 he was awarded doctorates in Literature, Political Science and Administration, and Jurisprudence. After completing his training, he became a professor in the School of Arts at the University of San Marcos, the same center of Lima where he had completed his studies. Throughout his career he would teach History of Modern Philosophy, Subjective Philosophy, History of Ancient Philosophy, Aesthetics and Contemporary Philosophers.
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Giuseppe Luigi Assemani
1710 - 1782 (72 years)
Giuseppe Luigi Assemani was a Lebanese Catholic priest, an orientalist and a Professor of Oriental languages in Rome. Assemani came from a well known family of Lebanese Maronites that included several notable Orientalists. His uncle was Archbishop Giuseppe Simone Assemani whom he helped with his writings; besides assisting his uncle he also studied in Rome and was appointed by the Pope, firstly as the Professor of Syriac at the Sapienza and later as the Professor of liturgy by Pope Benedict XIV. The Pope also made Assemani a member of the Academy for Historic Research which had just been esta...
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Simone Assemani
1752 - 1821 (69 years)
Simone Assemani , grand-nephew of Giuseppe Simone Assemani, was born in Rome. He was professor of Oriental languages in Padua. He is best known by his masterly detection of the literary imposture of Giuseppe Vella, a Maltese priest, which claimed to be a history of the Saracens in Syria.
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Ruth Lawson
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
Ruth Catherine Lawson was an American political scientist. Lawson specialized in international law and European affairs. She was a professor of political science at Mount Holyoke College from 1942 to 1976. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1956, and is the namesake for the Ruth C. Lawson Chair in International Politics and the Ruth C. Lawson Fellowships at Mount Holyoke.
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Louise Holborn
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Louise Wilhelmine Holborn was a German-American political scientist. She was a professor at Connecticut College from the late 1940s until 1970. She specialized in the politics of refugees and migration, conducting a number of studies on the topic for organizations like the United Nations, and she was also an advocate for refugees.
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Li Hsi-mou
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Li Hsi-mou was a notable Chinese educator, electrical engineer, and politician in Taiwan. Biography Li was born in Jiashan, Jiangxi, Zhejiang province, Qing Dynasty China. Li's courtesy name was Zhenwu . Li studied electrical engineering at Shanghai Industrial and Vocational College . Li later was qualified and obtained Zhejaing provincial finance support to study in the United States.
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Hartwig Hirschfeld
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Hartwig Hirschfeld was a Prussian-born British Orientalist, bibliographer, and educator. His particular scholarly interest lay in Arabic Jewish literature and in the relationship between Jewish and Arab cultures. He is best known for his editions of Judah Halevi's Kuzari—which he published in its original Judeo-Arabic and in Hebrew, German and English translations—and his studies on the Cairo Geniza.
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Jacobus Golius
1596 - 1667 (71 years)
Jacob Golius born Jacob van Gool was an Orientalist and mathematician based at the University of Leiden in Netherlands. He is primarily remembered as an Orientalist. He published Arabic texts in Arabic at Leiden, and did Arabic-to-Latin translations. His best-known work is an Arabic-to-Latin dictionary, Lexicon Arabico-Latinum , which he sourced for the most part from the Sihah dictionary of Al-Jauhari and the Qamous dictionary of Fairuzabadi.
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Wilhelm Max Müller
1862 - 1919 (57 years)
Wilhelm Max Müller was a German-born American orientalist. Biography Müller was born at Gleißenberg, Germany. He received his higher education in Erlangen, Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig, where he received his Ph.D. He was one of the last students of the Egyptologist Georg Ebers.
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John O'Brien
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
John Bernard O'Brien was a political candidate and party leader of Social Credit in New Zealand. Biography O'Brien was the Social Credit Party candidate for the Manawatu electorate in the 1957 and 1960 general election placing third. Following the sudden death of Bill Brown, O'Brien unsuccessfully contested the electorate in the .
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John Reynolds
1625 - 1657 (32 years)
John Reynolds was a soldier in the English Civil War and during the Commonwealth. Reynolds may have been a member of the Middle Temple. He joined the parliamentary army, and in 1648 he commanded a regiment of horse. He took part in the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland. He was a member of the Westminster-based Protectorate Parliament for Galway and Mayo in 1654 and Waterford and Tipperary in 1656. He was knighted in 1655. In 1657 he commanded the English force which cooperated with the French in Flanders in the Anglo-Spanish War and was lost at sea when returning to England.
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John Henderson Jr.
1870 - 1923 (53 years)
John Brooks Henderson Jr. was an American diplomat, educator, and malacologist. Early life Henderson was born in Pike County, Missouri on February 18, 1870. He was the son of United States Senator John Brooks Henderson and social activist Mary Foote Henderson, who was known as "The Empress of Sixteenth Street." His father was known as the Senator who introduced the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery and one of seven Republicans who voted against the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson in May 1868.
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Hiob Ludolf
1624 - 1704 (80 years)
Hiob or Job Ludolf , also known as Job Leutholf, was a German orientalist, born at Erfurt. Edward Ullendorff rates Ludolf as having "the most illustrious name in Ethiopic scholarship". Life After studying philology at the Erfurt academy and at Leiden, he travelled in order to increase his linguistic knowledge. While searching in Rome for some documents at the request of the Swedish Court , he became friends with Abba Gorgoryos, a monk from the Ethiopian province of Amhara, and acquired from him an intimate knowledge of the Ethiopian language of Amhara.
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George W. Kirchwey
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
George Washington Kirchwey was an American lawyer, politician, journalist and legal scholar. He was one of the co-founders of the New York Peace Society in 1906 and the Warden of Sing Sing State Prison from 1915 to 1916. He was president of the American Peace Society in 1917.
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Georgy Aleksandrov
1908 - 1961 (53 years)
Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov was a Marxist philosopher and a Soviet politician. Biography Childhood and education Aleksandrov was born in 1908 in Saint Petersburg in a worker's family of Russian ethnicity, but became homeless during the Russian Civil War. In 1924-1930, he studied Communist philosophy in Borisoglebsk and Tambov and then transferred to the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1928. After graduating in 1932, Aleksandrov remained with the Institute for graduate studies, eventually becoming a professor, a deputy director and th...
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Georg Sabinus
1508 - 1560 (52 years)
Georg Sabinus or Georg Schuler was a German poet, diplomat and academic. Sabinus was born at Brandenburg an der Havel. He served as Professor of Poetry and Eloquence and first-ever rector of the Albertina . He died, aged 52, in Frankfurt .
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Robert Disque
1883 - 1968 (85 years)
Robert C. Disque was a professor of electrical engineering and interim president of what is now Drexel University. Early life Born in Burlington, Iowa, Disque went on to attend the University of Wisconsin where he received his Bachelor of Letters in 1903. He furthered his education, receiving his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin in 1908. After his graduation Disque accepted a teaching position at his Alma Mater, and served as an instructor until 1917.
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James McBride
1802 - 1875 (73 years)
James McBride was an American politician, educator, and patriarch of a political family in the state of Oregon. A native of Tennessee, he served in the Oregon Territorial Legislature and as United States Minister to Hawaii, as well as one of the founders of the Oregon Republican Party. Two of his sons served in the United States Congress, while a third served on the Oregon Supreme Court.
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Johannes Cuspinian
1473 - 1529 (56 years)
Johannes Cuspinianus , born Johan Spießhaymer , was a German-Austrian humanist, scientist, diplomat, and historian. Born in Spießheim near Schweinfurt in Franconia, of which Cuspinianus is a Latinization, he studied in Leipzig and Würzburg. He went to Vienna in 1492 and became a professor of medicine at the University of Vienna. He became Rector of the university in 1500 and also served as Royal Superintendent until his death.
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A. Leo Oppenheim
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Adolf Leo Oppenheim , one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of his generation was editor-in-charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute from 1955 to 1974 and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies at the University of Chicago.
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Rudolf Tschudi
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Rudolf Tschudi was a Swiss philologist, historian, and Orientalist. Life Tschudi studied classical philology as well as eastern philology in Basel, Erlangen , and Tübingen and was a member of the Schwizerhüsli Basel, Erlanger, and Tübingen Wingolf fraternities. He then became an assistant professor in 1910 and a professor at the Hamburgisches Kolonialinstitut in 1914.
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Martin Wight
1913 - 1972 (59 years)
Robert James Martin Wight was one of the foremost British scholars of international relations in the twentieth century. He was the author of Power Politics , as well as the seminal essay "Why Is There No International Theory?" . He was a teacher of some renown at both the London School of Economics and the University of Sussex, where he served as the founding Dean of European Studies.
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Louise Overacker
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Louise Overacker was an American political scientist. She specialized in the study of money in politics, United States presidential primaries, and comparative party systems, particularly those of Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. She was one of the first professors to teach government at Wellesley College, where she was a faculty member from 1925 until 1957, and helped to establish the Wellesley Department of Political Science in 1940.
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Franz Neumann
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Franz Leopold Neumann was a German political activist, Western Marxist theorist and labor lawyer, who became a political scientist in exile and is best known for his theoretical analyses of Nazism. He studied in Germany and the United Kingdom, and spent the last phase of his career in the United States, where he worked for the Office of Strategic Services from 1943 to 1945. During the Second World War, Neumann spied for the Soviet Union under the code-name "Ruff". Together with Ernst Fraenkel and Arnold Bergstraesser, Neumann is considered to be among the founders of modern political scienc...
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Walter Rice Sharp
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Walter Rice Sharp was an American political scientist. He was born on January 25, 1896. Sharp attended Wabash College. Upon graduation, he served in the United States military as an infantry captain. After the end of World War I, Sharp enrolled at Yale University. Further graduate study at the University of Bordeaux in France was funded by the American Field Service Fellowship awarded in 1920. Sharp received a doctorate in law in 1922, and returned to the United States. He taught at Washington and Lee University from 1923 to 1924, then joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty for fifteen years.
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Elmer Eric Schattschneider
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Elmer Eric Schattschneider was an American political scientist. Life and career Schattschneider was born in Bethany, Minnesota. He received his B.A. and M.A. at the University of Pittsburgh and his Ph.D. at Columbia University. He taught at Columbia, the New Jersey College for Women , and Wesleyan University . Schattschneider was president of the American Political Science Association for 1956–1957 and is the namesake of its award for the best dissertation in the field of American politics. He died in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
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Godfrey Rolles Driver
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Sir Godfrey Rolles Driver , known as G. R. Driver, was an English Orientalist noted for his studies of Semitic languages and Assyriology. He is considered the "most distinguished British Hebraist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries".
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Stein Rokkan
1921 - 1979 (58 years)
Stein Rokkan was a Norwegian political scientist and sociologist. He was the first professor of sociology at the University of Bergen and a principal founder of the discipline of comparative politics. He founded the multidisciplinary Department of Sociology at the University of Bergen, which encompassed sociology, economics and political science and which had a key role in the postwar development of the social sciences in Norway.
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Karl Loewenstein
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Karl Loewenstein was a German lawyer and political scientist, regarded as one of the prominent figures of Constitutional law in the twentieth century. His research and investigations into the typology of the different constitutions have had some impact on the Western constitutional thought. Loewenstein is credited with establishing the theoretical foundations of militant democracy to battle anti-democratic mass movements.
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Harold Innis
1894 - 1952 (58 years)
Harold Adams Innis was a Canadian professor of political economy at the University of Toronto and the author of seminal works on media, communication theory, and Canadian economic history. He helped develop the staples thesis, which holds that Canada's culture, political history, and economy have been decisively influenced by the exploitation and export of a series of "staples" such as fur, fish, lumber, wheat, mined metals, and coal. The staple thesis dominated economic history in Canada from the 1930s to 1960s, and continues to be a fundamental part of the Canadian political economic trad...
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Edwin Borchard
1884 - 1951 (67 years)
Edwin Montefiore Borchard was an American international legal scholar, jurist, and Sterling Professor at the Yale Law School. He was a leading advocate of innocence reform and compensation for victims of wrongful conviction as well as the use of declaratory judgments. His work in international law emphasized non-intervention and neutrality.
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Josef Laurenz Kunz
1890 - 1970 (80 years)
Josef Laurenz Kunz was an Austrian American jurist. He was a Professor of International Law at the University of Toledo from 1934 to 1960, after having emigrated from Austria in 1932. Kunz earned his doctorate degree in 1920 from the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Hans Kelsen.
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Rupert Emerson
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Rupert Emerson was a professor of political science and international relations. He served on the faculty of Harvard University for forty-three years and served in various U.S government positions. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1917–1918, he received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1922, then a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in 1927. He was a member of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Asian Studies , the African Studies Association , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.
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F. Gregory Gause, III
#4239
C. B. Macpherson
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Crawford Brough Macpherson was an influential Canadian political scientist who taught political theory at the University of Toronto. Life Macpherson was born on 18 November 1911 in Toronto, Ontario. After graduating from the University of Toronto Schools, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto in 1933. He then earned a Master of Science degree in economics at the London School of Economics where he studied under the supervision of Harold Laski, he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto in 1935. At that time a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the social sci...
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Paul H. Appleby
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Paul Henson Appleby was an American journalist, public servant, and educator. He was the editor of Iowa Magazine in Waterloo, Iowa from 1920 to 1924. The four years following saw him as an editorial writer for the Des Moines Register and Tribune. In 1928, he moved to Virginia and published the News-Journal in Radford, Virginia. In 1933, he became Assistant to the Secretary of Agriculture, Henry A. Wallace. By 1940, he was the Undersecretary of Agriculture and in 1944 he became Assistant Director of the Budget for the United States. He left Washington DC to work for the radio station KIRO, ret...
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Bernard B. Fall
1926 - 1967 (41 years)
Bernard B. Fall was a prominent war correspondent, historian, political scientist, and expert on Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s. Born in Austria, he moved with his family to France as a child after the Anschluss. He started fighting for the French Resistance at the age of 16 and later for the French Army during World War II.
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Vera Micheles Dean
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Vera Micheles Dean was a Russian American political scientist. She was the head of research for the Foreign Policy Association, one of the leading think tanks of the 1940s and 1950s, where she became one of the leading authorities in international affairs during that period.
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Joel Andreas
1900 - Present (126 years)
Joel Andreas is an American author and college professor. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California in Los Angeles, and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which he joined in 2003. His research interests include political contention, social inequality, and social change in China today.
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Eleanor Lansing Dulles
1895 - 1996 (101 years)
Eleanor Lansing Dulles was an American writer, professor, and United States government employee. Her background in economics and her familiarity with European affairs enabled her to fill a number of important State Department positions.
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George Hubbard Blakeslee
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
George Hubbard Blakeslee was an academic, professor of history and international relations at Clark University, and a founder of the Journal of Race Development, the first American journal devoted to international relations. This journal was later renamed the Journal of International Relations, which in turn was merged with Foreign Affairs.
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Roy Peel
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Roy Victor Peel was a political scientist and academic, and the director of the United States Census Bureau from 1950 to 1953. Early life and education Born in Des Moines, Iowa in 1896, Peel's service in World War I interrupted his college education; he was a second lieutenant in the Army Air Service. After the war, he completed his B.A., graduating from Augustana College in 1920. From there, Peel moved between teaching and post-graduate education, eventually earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1927.
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Walter Liebenthal
1886 - 1982 (96 years)
Walter Liebenthal , was a German philosopher and sinologist who specialized in Chinese Buddhism. He translated many philosophical works from Pali, Sanskrit and specially from Chinese into German. Based upon his extensive research in Indian Buddhism and Chinese religion, one of his main conclusions was that early Chinese Buddhism through Ch'an was not a Chinese version of Indian Buddhism, but rather, that it developed from Taoism, a Chinese religion. Indian concepts are present, but at the core it represents a Chinese perspective.
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Edward J. Bloustein
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Edward Jerome Bloustein was the 17th President of Rutgers University serving from 1971 to 1989. Biography He was born in New York City, and he graduated from James Monroe High School in the Bronx in 1942. He served in the United States Army from 1943 to 1946. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree from New York University in 1948 and subsequently traveled to the University of Oxford as a Fulbright scholar and received a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1950. Returning to the United States, he taught philosophy briefly at Brooklyn College and spent close to a year in Washington, DC with the O...
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Manning J. Dauer
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Manning Julian Dauer was an American political scientist. Early life Dauer was born in 1909 in North Carolina. He received his bachelor's degree and master's degree from the University of Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois .
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John Bellerby
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
John Rotherford Bellerby was a British economist. Born in York, Bellerby was educated at York Grammar School, the University of Leeds, and Harvard University. He served in World War I with the York Rifles and Machine Gun Corps, becoming a major.
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