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
Henry Highland Garnet
1815 - 1882 (67 years)
Henry Highland Garnet was an American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educated at the African Free School and other institutions, and became an advocate of militant abolitionism. He became a minister and based his drive for abolitionism in religion.
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James Wilford Garner
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
James Wilford Garner was an American professor of political science. Biography He graduated from the Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1892 and studied at the University of Chicago and at Columbia University , where he was a member of the Dunning School. His dissertation, Reconstruction in Mississippi, though critical of Reconstruction, was regarded by W. E. B. Du Bois as the fairest of the works of the Dunning School.
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Malcolm H. Kerr
1931 - 1984 (53 years)
Malcolm Hooper Kerr was a university professor specializing in the Middle East and the Arab world. An American citizen, he was born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon, where he died. He served as president of the American University of Beirut until he was killed by gunmen in 1984.
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Thomas Wolsey
1473 - 1530 (57 years)
Thomas Wolsey was an English statesman and Catholic bishop. When Henry VIII became King of England in 1509, Wolsey became the king's almoner. Wolsey's affairs prospered and by 1514 he had become the controlling figure in virtually all matters of state. He also held important ecclesiastical appointments. These included the Archbishop of York—the second most important role in the English church—and that of papal legate. His appointment as a cardinal by Pope Leo X in 1515 gave him precedence over all other English clergy.
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Theodor Heuss
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Theodor Heuss was a German liberal politician who served as the first president of West Germany from 1949 to 1959. His cordial nature – something of a contrast to the stern character of chancellor Konrad Adenauer – largely contributed to the stabilization of democracy in West Germany during the Wirtschaftswunder years. Before beginning his career as a politician, Heuss had been a political journalist.
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Ziauddin Barani
1285 - 1357 (72 years)
Ziauddin Barani was an Indian Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi , a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq to the first six years of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq; and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, although according to M. Athar Ali it was not based on race or even like the caste system, but taking as a model of ...
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Richard Bourke
1777 - 1855 (78 years)
General Sir Richard Bourke, KCB , was an Irish soldier, who served in the British Army and was Governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837. As a lifelong Whig , he encouraged the emancipation of convicts and helped bring forward the ending of penal transportation to Australia. In this, he faced strong opposition from the landlord establishment and its press. He approved a new settlement on the Yarra River, and named it Melbourne, in honour of the incumbent British prime minister, Lord Melbourne.
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A. J. Muste
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Abraham Johannes Muste , usually cited as A. J. Muste, was a Dutch-born American clergyman and political activist. He is best remembered for his work in the labor movement, pacifist movement, antiwar movement, and civil rights movement.
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Carlos P. Romulo
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Carlos Peña Romulo Sr. was a Filipino diplomat, statesman, soldier, journalist and author. He was a reporter at the age of 16, a newspaper editor by 20, and a publisher at 32. He was a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, a general in the US Army and the Philippine Army, university president, and president of the United Nations General Assembly.
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Rasmus B. Anderson
1846 - 1936 (90 years)
Rasmus Bjørn Anderson was an American author, professor, editor, businessman and diplomat. He brought to popular attention the fact that Viking explorers were the first Europeans to arrive in the New World and was the originator of Leif Erikson Day.
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Georgiy Afanasyev
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Georgiy Afanasyev was a Ukrainian historian, politician, and diplomat. Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Ukrainian State . Received a master's degree for his thesis: "The main points of the ministerial Turgot" ; and his doctoral dissertation was: "The Conditions of the Grain Trade in France at the End of the 18th Century" . From 1888 he lectured at the Odessa University. He read in Odessa and Kiev.
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Väinö Tanner
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Väinö Tanner was a Finnish geographer, geologist, professor and diplomat. Tanner is best known for his studies on the Quaternary geology of northern Finland. He was a vocal opponent to the Finnicization of the University of Helsinki.
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Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough
1658 - 1735 (77 years)
Charles Mordaunt, 3rd Earl of Peterborough and 1st Earl of Monmouth, was an English Army officer, Whig politician and peer. He was the son of John Mordaunt, 1st Viscount Mordaunt, and his wife Elizabeth, the daughter and sole heiress of Thomas Carey, the second son of Robert Carey, 1st Earl of Monmouth. Mordaunt's father, John Mordaunt, was created Viscount Mordaunt of Avalon and Baron Mordaunt of Reigate, Surrey, in 1659.
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John Cook
1730 - 1789 (59 years)
John Cook was an American planter and politician from Smyrna, in Kent County, Delaware. He served in the Delaware General Assembly and as Governor of Delaware. Early life and family Cook was born in Duck Creek, now Smyrna, son of Michal and Lois Cook. He was first cousin to Thomas Collins . He supposedly married Elizabeth Collins, the sister of Thomas Collins, and if so, married his first cousin. They had five children: Sarah, Margaret, Elizabeth, Michael, and Robert. He was a prosperous farmer and tanner and gradually acquired a considerable amount of land in the area. Included in the property at one time was Belmont Hall,.
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Alastair Francis Buchan
1918 - 1976 (58 years)
Alastair Francis Buchan, was a leading British writer on defence studies in the 1970s. Career The son of John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Alastair Buchan was given the same forename as his father's brother, who had been killed in the First World War. He was educated at Eton College and at Christ Church, Oxford, Buchan joined the Canadian Army and saw active service in the Second World War.
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Jacques Bacot
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Jacques Bacot was an explorer and pioneering French Tibetologist. He travelled extensively in India, western China, and the Tibetan border regions. He worked at the École pratique des hautes études. Bacot was the first western scholar to study the Tibetan grammatical tradition, and along with F. W. Thomas belonged to the first generation of scholars to study the Old Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts. Bacot made frequent use of Tibetan informants. He acquired aid from Gendün Chöphel in studying Dunhuang manuscripts.
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Carl Bezold
1859 - 1922 (63 years)
Carl Bezold was a German orientalist. Known primarily for his research in Akkadian , he also researched other Semitic languages: Syriac, Ge'ez and Arabic. Biography He was educated at the Universities of Munich and Leipzig, where he studied with Assyrologist Friedrich Delitzsch. In 1883, he obtained his habilitation at Munich with a thesis titled Die Schatzhöhle; aus dem syrischen texte dreier unedirten Handschriften . Later on, he spent several years working at the British Museum in London. In 1894, he became a full professor at the University of Heidelberg.
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Arnolds Spekke
1887 - 1972 (85 years)
Arnolds Spekke received a doctorate in philology from the University of Latvia in 1927. In 1932 he received a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and went studying in Poland and Italy. From 1933 to 1939 he was the Latvian envoy to Italy, Greece, Bulgaria and Albania with permanent residence in Rome, Italy.
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Ilija Garašanin
1812 - 1874 (62 years)
Ilija Garašanin was a Serbian statesman who served as the prime minister of Serbia between 1852 and 1853 and again from 1861 to 1867. Ilija Garašanin was conservative in internal politics. He believed that bureaucracy was the only way for administration to work. In foreign politics, he was the first pro-Yugoslavia statesman among Serbs. He believed that a great Yugoslav state had to maintain its independence from both Russia and Austria. He was one of the more influential Serbian politicians of the 19th century.
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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
1809 - 1865 (56 years)
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was a French socialist, politician, philosopher, and economist who founded mutualist philosophy and is considered by many to be the "father of anarchism". He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of anarchism's most influential theorists. Proudhon became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist. Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as "the synthesis of community and property". Some consider his mutualism to be part of individualist...
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Adolf Grabowsky
1880 - 1969 (89 years)
Adolf Grabowsky was a German political scientist and author of several books about geopolitics and political theory, including "Democracy and Dictatorship" . He was a Jewish convert to Protestantism, and founder and editor of the Zeitschrift für Politik. He was a supporter of the Weimar democracy.
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Elechukwu Njaka
1921 - 1975 (54 years)
Mazi Elechukwu Nnadibuagha Njaka was a Nigerian political scientist, known for the book Igbo Political Culture. Family background E.N. Njaka was born in Okwaejiaku, Umukegwu, Akokwa on 23 June 1921. His father, Mazi George Maduneme Njaka, was one of the earliest Christian converts of the Catholic Denomination in Orlu province. His mother, Mrs. Mary Nwaku Njaka , also from Umukegwu, was one of the earliest seamstresses to come from Mbanasaa clan. Elechukwu was their second child.
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Johann Fück
1894 - 1974 (80 years)
Johann Wilhelm Fück was a German Orientalist. Starting in 1913, Fück studied classical and Semitic philology at Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and Goethe University Frankfurt. From 1919 to 1921 he was a member of the German National People's Party. His promotion took place in 1921 as part of the Orientalist Seminar at Goethe University Frankfurt, where he had lectureships in Hebrew language from 1921 to 1930, and in Arabic philology and Islamic studies from 1935 to 1938. He attained his habilitation in 1929. In the interim from 1930 to 1935, he was a professor at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.
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Karl Friedrich Neumann
1793 - 1870 (77 years)
Karl Friedrich Neumann was a German orientalist. Life Neumann was born, under the name of Bamberger, at Reichsmannsdorf, near Bamberg. He studied philosophy and philology at Heidelberg, Munich and Göttingen, became a convert to Protestantism and took the name of Neumann. From 1821 to 1825 he was a teacher in Würzburg and Speyer; then he learned Armenian in Venice at the San Lazzaro degli Armeni and visited Paris and London.
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William Jones
1809 - 1873 (64 years)
William Jones was a political Radical and Chartist, who was a former actor, working as a watchmaker at Pontypool in Monmouthshire and also kept a beer house. He was prosecuted for his part in the Chartist Newport Rising at Newport, Monmouthshire on 4 November 1839.
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Edward Stevens
1755 - 1834 (79 years)
Dr Edward Stevens FRSE was an American physician and diplomat. He was a close friend of American soldier and statesman Alexander Hamilton. Stevens' date of birth was unclear due to lack of records, with the year 1752 being published by Kristian Caroe, without sources, in his 1905 book Den danske lægestand, 1479-1900 until historian Michael E. Newton published contemporary records establishing Stevens birthplace and date.
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Ian Turner
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
Ian Alexander Hamilton Turner was an Australian political activist, serving important roles in both the Communist Party of Australia and Australian Labour Party. As a leading historian, he wrote the book Industrial Labour and Politics, which examined the Australian labour politics.
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James Allen
1855 - 1942 (87 years)
Sir James Allen was a prominent New Zealand politician and diplomat. He held a number of the most important political offices in the country, including Minister of Finance and Minister of Foreign Affairs. He was also New Zealand's Minister of Defence during World War I.
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Ferdinand Wüstenfeld
1808 - 1899 (91 years)
Heinrich Ferdinand Wüstenfeld was a German orientalist, known as a literary historian of Arabic literature, born at Münden, Hanover. He studied theology and oriental languages at Göttingen and Berlin. He taught at Göttingen, becoming a professor there . He published many important Arabic texts and valuable works on Arabic history.
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Albert Socin
1844 - 1899 (55 years)
Albert Socin was a Swiss orientalist, who specialized in the research of Neo-Aramaic, Kurdish and contemporary Arabic dialects. He also made contributions to the geography, archaeology, religion, art and literature of the Middle East.
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Milan Kujundžić Aberdar
1842 - 1893 (51 years)
Milan Kujundžić Aberdar was a Serbian poet, philosopher and politician. Biography He was born in Belgrade and given the name Janićije but later he changed it to Milan. His pseudonym Aberdar came from his collected poems.
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John Wilson
1804 - 1875 (71 years)
John Wilson FRS was a Scottish Christian missionary, orientalist and educator in the Bombay presidency, British India. In 1828, he married Margaret Bayne and together they went as Christian missionaries of the Scottish Missionary Society to Bombay, India, arriving on 13 February 1829. He is the founder of Wilson College, Mumbai and one of the founders of Bombay University, along with the Hon. Jugonnath Sunkersett and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad. He was also the president of the Asiatic Society of Bombay from 1835 to 1842; and was elected Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in 1870.
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Edward Pococke
1604 - 1691 (87 years)
Edward Pococke was an English Orientalist and biblical scholar. Early life The son of Edward Pococke , vicar of Chieveley in Berkshire, he was brought up at Chieveley and educated from a young age at Lord Williams's School, Thame, Oxfordshire. He matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1619, and later was admitted to Corpus Christi College, Oxford . He was ordained a priest of the Church of England on 20 December 1629.
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Jean Monnet
1888 - 1979 (91 years)
Jean Omer Marie Gabriel Monnet was a French civil servant, entrepreneur, diplomat, financier, administrator, and political visionary. An influential supporter of European unity, he is considered one of the founding fathers of the European Union.
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Thomas Hollis
1720 - 1774 (54 years)
Thomas Hollis FRS FRSA was an English political philosopher and author. Early life Hollis was educated at Adams Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire, until the age 10, and then in St. Albans until 15, before learning French, Dutch and accountancy in Amsterdam. After the death of his father in 1735, his guardian was a John Hollister. He was trained in this time in public service by John Ward of Gresham College, London. He took Chambers with Lincoln's Inn from 1740 to 1748, though without ever reading law. By this time he was a man of considerable wealth having inherited from his father, grand...
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Vasily Struve
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Vasily Vasilievich Struve was a Soviet orientalist from the Struve family, the founder of the Soviet scientific school of researchers on Ancient Near East history. In 1907 he entered the Department of History at the Faculty of History and Philology of the Petersburg University, where he studied the Ancient Greek and Latin languages, and Ancient Egyptian language under the leadership of the famous Russian Egyptologist Boris Turaev. He became proficient in all types of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing, including Demotic. He graduated from the Petersburg University in 1911 and continued research w...
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John Williamson
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
John Williamson was a Scottish-born radical best remembered as a top leader of the Communist youth movement in the 1920s in the United States. Biography Early years John Williamson was born on June 23, 1903, in Glasgow, Scotland, the son of a marine engineer who was severely injured in an accident at sea shortly after his child was born. A woodworker and shipbuilder by trade, Williamson only had 8 years of formal education, later attending high school at night. He came to the United States in July 1913, settling in Seattle.
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Rudolf Hoernlé
1841 - 1918 (77 years)
Augustus Frederic Rudolf Hoernlé CIE , also referred to as Rudolf Hoernle or A. F. Rudolf Hoernle, was a German Indologist and philologist. He is famous for his studies on the Bower Manuscript , Weber Manuscript and other discoveries in northwestern China and Central Asia particularly in collaboration with Aurel Stein. Born in India to a Protestant missionary family from Germany, he completed his education in Switzerland, and studied Sanskrit in the United Kingdom. He returned to India, taught at leading universities there, and in the early 1890s published a series of seminal papers on ancient manuscripts, writing scripts and cultural exchange between India, China and Central Asia.
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Vasile Alecsandri
1821 - 1890 (69 years)
Vasile Alecsandri was a Romanian patriot, poet, dramatist, politician and diplomat. He was one of the key figures during the 1848 revolutions in Moldavia and Wallachia. He fought for the unification of the Romanian Principalities, writing "Hora Unirii" in 1856 and giving up his candidacy for the title of prince of Moldavia, in favor of Alexandru Ioan Cuza. He became the first minister of foreign affairs of Romania and was one of the founding members of the Romanian Academy. Alecsandri was a prolific writer, contributing to Romanian literature with poetry, prose, several plays, and collections...
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Joseph Gelders
1891 - 1951 (60 years)
Joseph Sidney Gelders was an American physicist who later became an antiracist, civil rights activist, labor organizer, and communist. In the mid-1930s, he served as the secretary and southern-U.S. representative of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners. In September 1936, Gelders was kidnapped, beaten, and nearly killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan for his civil rights and labor organizing activities. After his recovery, Gelders continued his activism and cofounded the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax. He collaborated closely with other activists including Lucy Randolph Mason and Virginia Foster Durr.
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John Finley Crowe
1787 - 1860 (73 years)
John Finley Crowe was a Presbyterian minister and the founder of Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. His residence from 1824 to 1860, the Crowe-Garritt House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
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Giovanni Vacca
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Giovanni Enrico Eugenio Vacca was an Italian mathematician, Sinologist and historian of science. Vacca studied mathematics and graduated from the University of Genoa in 1897 under the guidance of G. B. Negri. He was a politically active student and was banished for that from Genoa in 1897. He moved to Turin and became an assistant to Giuseppe Peano. In 1899 he studied, at Hanover, unpublished manuscripts of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, which he published in 1903. Around 1898 Vacca became interested in Chinese language and culture after attending a Chinese exhibition in Turin. He took private lessons of Chinese and continued to study it at the University of Florence.
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J. Don Boney
1928 - 1979 (51 years)
Jew Don Boney was a Texas educator who served as an administrator in the Houston Independent School District. He assisted in the planning and establishment of two colleges in Houston, and was president of the .
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David Bailey
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
David Haworth Bailey was an American diplomat who served for 10 years in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Early life Bailey was born September 27, 1830, in Wilmington, Ohio, the son of Macajah Bailey and Phebe Haworth.
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Franciszek Salezy Jezierski
1740 - 1791 (51 years)
Franciszek Salezy Jezierski was a Polish writer, social and political activist of the Enlightenment period. A Catholic priest, he was involved with the creation of the Commission of National Education. Member of the Hugo Kołłątaj's Forge. Librarian of the Jagiellonian University. Supporter of the radical reforms, he attacked the privileges of the nobility and supporter the causes of burghers and peasants.
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Franz Babinger
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Franz Babinger was a well-known German orientalist and historian of the Ottoman Empire, best known for his biography of the great Ottoman emperor Mehmed II, known as "the Conqueror", originally published as Mehmed der Eroberer und seine Zeit. An English translation by Ralph Manheim is available from Princeton University Press under the title Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time. His many doctrines were speculative and not supported with evidence.
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Yevgeny Polivanov
1891 - 1938 (47 years)
Yevgeny Dmitrievich Polivanov was a Soviet linguist, orientalist and polyglot who wrote major works on the Chinese, Japanese, Uzbek and Dungan languages and on theoretical linguistics and poetics. Life He participated in the development of writing systems for the peoples of the Soviet Union and also designed a cyrillization system for Japanese language, which was officially accepted in the Soviet Union and is still the standard in modern Russia. He also translated the Kyrgyz national Epic of Manas into Russian. Polivanov is credited as the scholar who initiated the comparative study of Japane...
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Lionel Giles
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Lionel Giles CBE was a British sinologist, writer, and philosopher. Lionel Giles served as assistant curator at the British Museum and Keeper of the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books. He is most notable for his 1910 translations of The Art of War by Sun Tzu and The Analects of Confucius.
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Paul B. Johnson Jr.
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Paul Burney Johnson Jr. was an American attorney and Democratic politician from Mississippi, serving as 54th governor from January 1964 until January 1968. He was a son of former Mississippi Governor Paul B. Johnson Sr.
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Jean Herbert
1897 - 1980 (83 years)
Jean Herbert was one of the first generation of interpreters for the United Nations organization. He was a former chief interpreter of the United Nations interpretation service in New York City. Biography Herbert was one of the pioneer, veteran and model consecutive interpreters from the League of Nations and the International Labor Office. His father was an English-speaking Frenchman. He was married to an English woman, with whom he had two daughters, Janine Yates and Yvette Renoux.
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