Hermann Weyl
1885 - 1955 (70 years)
Hermann Klaus Hugo Weyl, was a German mathematician, theoretical physicist and philosopher. Although much of his working life was spent in Zürich, Switzerland, and then Princeton, New Jersey, he is associated with the University of Göttingen tradition of mathematics, represented by David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski.
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Warren Buffett
1930 - Present (92 years)
Warren Edward Buffett is an American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. He is currently the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. He is considered one of the most successful investors in the world and has a net worth of over $114 billion as of February 2022, making him the world's eighth-wealthiest person.
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Marvin Minsky
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence , co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
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Leo Tolstoy
1828 - 1910 (82 years)
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy , usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906 and for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902, and 1909. That he never won is a major controversy.
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Franz Boas
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Franz Uri Boas was a German-born American anthropologist and a pioneer of modern anthropology who has been called the "Father of American Anthropology". His work is associated with the movements known as historical particularism and cultural relativism.
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Alfred North Whitehead
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
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Jean-Paul Sartre
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of Existentialism , a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, as well as a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies, and continues to do so. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
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Douglas MacArthur
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Douglas MacArthur was an American military leader who served as General of the Army for the United States, as well as a Field Marshal to the Philippine Army. He was Chief of Staff of the United States Army during the 1930s, and he played a prominent role in the Pacific theater during World War II. Macarthur received the Medal of Honor for his service in the Philippines campaign. This made him and his father Arthur MacArthur Jr. the first father and son to be awarded the medal. He was one of only five to rise to the rank of General of the Army in the U.S. Army, and the only one conferred the r...
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Ludwig von Mises
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises was an Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberalism. He is best known for his work on praxeology studies comparing communism and capitalism. He is considered one of the most influential economic and political thinkers of the 20th century.
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Rudolf Carnap
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."
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Évariste Galois
1811 - 1832 (21 years)
Évariste Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra. He was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months.
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John Searle
1932 - Present (90 years)
John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy, he began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959. He was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until 2019.
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George Soros
1930 - Present (92 years)
George Soros is a Hungarian-born American billionaire investor and philanthropist. , he had a net worth of US$8.6 billion, having donated more than $32 billion to the Open Society Foundations, of which $15 billion have already been distributed, representing 64% of his original fortune. Forbes called him the "most generous giver" .
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Hermann von Helmholtz
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz was a German physicist and physician who made significant contributions in several scientific fields. The largest German association of research institutions, the Helmholtz Association, is named after him. In physiology and psychology, he is known for his mathematics of the eye, theories of vision, ideas on the visual perception of space, color vision research, and on the sensation of tone, perception of sound, and empiricism in the physiology of perception. In physics, he is known for his theories on the conservation of energy, work in electrodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, and on a mechanical foundation of thermodynamics.
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Stephen Jay Gould
1941 - 2002 (61 years)
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
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Andrew Carnegie
1835 - 1919 (84 years)
Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history. He became a leading philanthropist in the United States and in the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away around $350 million , almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities. His 1889 article proclaiming "The Gospel of Wealth" called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, expressed support for progressive taxation an...
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Percy Bysshe Shelley
1792 - 1822 (30 years)
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write ...
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Marie Curie
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Marie Salomea Skłodowska Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and the only woman to win the Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win the Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. Her husband, Pierre Curie, was a co-winner on her first Nobel Prize, making them the first ever married couple to win the Nobel Prize and launching the Curie family legacy of five Nobel Prizes. She was, in 1906, the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.
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Andrey Kolmogorov
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov was a Soviet mathematician who contributed to the mathematics of probability theory, topology, intuitionistic logic, turbulence, classical mechanics, algorithmic information theory and computational complexity.
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Alfred Tarski
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.
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Joseph Smith
1805 - 1844 (39 years)
Joseph Smith Jr. was an American religious leader and founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. When he was 24, Smith published the Book of Mormon. By the time of his death, 14 years later, he had attracted tens of thousands of followers and founded a religion that continues to the present with millions of global adherents.
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Hilary Putnam
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
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Ernst Haeckel
1834 - 1919 (85 years)
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel was a German zoologist, naturalist, eugenicist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist and artist. He discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and connected many terms in biology, including ecology, phylum, phylogeny, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises it...
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Ernest Rutherford
1871 - 1937 (66 years)
Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson, was a New Zealand physicist who came to be known as the father of nuclear physics. Encyclopædia Britannica considers him to be the greatest experimentalist since Michael Faraday . Apart from his work in his homeland, he spent a substantial amount of his career abroad, in both Canada and the United Kingdom.
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Rupert Murdoch
1931 - Present (91 years)
Keith Rupert Murdoch is an Australian-born American billionaire businessman, media tycoon, and investor. Through his company News Corp, he is the owner of hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world, including in the UK , in Australia , in the US , book publisher HarperCollins, and the television broadcasting channels Sky News Australia and Fox News . He was also the owner of Sky , 21st Century Fox , and the now-defunct News of the World. With a net worth of $22.4 billion as of 28 July 2021, Murdoch is the 31st richest person in the United States and th...
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Rudolf Steiner
1861 - 1925 (64 years)
Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian occultist, philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist, and claimed clairvoyant. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. At the beginning of the twentieth century he founded an esoteric spiritual movement, anthroposophy, with roots in German idealist philosophy and theosophy. His ideas are largely pseudoscientific. He was also prone to pseudohistory.
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Richard Dawkins
1941 - Present (81 years)
Areas of Specialization: Urban and Media Anthropology Richard Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and former University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science, but he is best known for his work in evolutionary biology. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a bachelor’s degree, MA, and PhD. Dawkins is a pioneer in the role of genes in evolution. His most well-known book, The Selfish Gene, is an examination of how genetics drive evolutionary change. He also coined the term meme in this book, to describe the behavioral equivalent of a gene. A m...
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14th Dalai Lama
1935 - Present (87 years)
The 14th Dalai Lama , known as Gyalwa Rinpoche to the Tibetan people, is the current Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and former head of state of Tibet. Born on 6 July 1935, or in the Tibetan calendar, in the Wood-Pig Year, 5th month, 5th day, he is considered a living Bodhisattva; specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara. He is also the leader of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959. On 29 April 1959, th...
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Roger Penrose
1931 - Present (91 years)
Sir Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, England in 1931. He is best known for his significant contributions to the mathematical physics of general relativity and cosmology. Penrose attended University College London where he earned his bachelor’s in mathematics. He received a PhD studying algebraic geometry at St John’s College, Cambridge in 1958. In his free time at Cambridge, he attended a few lectures led by Hermann Bondi and Paul Dirac, which lent some of his curiosity in the direction of physics. Penrose went on to become an innovator in the field of mathematical physics, and is now widely regarded as among the greatest living mathematical physicists.
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Karl Weierstrass
1815 - 1897 (82 years)
Karl Theodor Wilhelm Weierstrass was a German mathematician often cited as the "father of modern analysis". Despite leaving university without a degree, he studied mathematics and trained as a school teacher, eventually teaching mathematics, physics, botany and gymnastics. He later received an honorary doctorate and became professor of mathematics in Berlin.
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Gregor Mendel
1822 - 1884 (62 years)
Gregor Johann Mendel was a meteorologist, mathematician, biologist, Augustinian friar and abbot of St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, Margraviate of Moravia. Mendel was born in a German-speaking family in the Silesian part of the Austrian Empire and gained posthumous recognition as the founder of the modern science of genetics. Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...
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Murray Rothbard
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, economic historian and political theorist. Rothbard was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
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Robert E. Lee
1807 - 1870 (63 years)
Robert Edward Lee was an American Confederate general best known for his service to the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War, during which he was appointed the overall commander of the Confederate States Army. He led the Army of Northern Virginia, the Confederacy's most powerful army, from 1862 until its surrender in 1865. During the war, Lee earned a solid reputation as a skilled tactician, for which he was revered by his officers and men as well as respected and feared by his Union Army adversaries.
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Ludwig Boltzmann
1844 - 1906 (62 years)
Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann was an Austrian physicist and philosopher. His greatest achievements were the development of statistical mechanics, and the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1877 he provided the current definition of entropy, interpreted as a measure of statistical disorder of a system. Max Planck named the constant the Boltzmann constant.
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Eugene Wigner
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner was a Hungarian theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He obtained American citizenship in 1937, and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
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Swami Vivekananda
1863 - 1902 (39 years)
Swami Vivekananda , born Narendranath Datta , was an Indian Hindu monk and philosopher. He was a chief disciple of the 19th-century Indian mystic Ramakrishna. Influenced by Western esotericism, he was a key figure in the introduction of the Indian darsanas of Vedanta and Yoga to the Western world, and is credited with raising interfaith awareness, bringing Hinduism to the status of a major world religion during the late 19th century. He was a major force in the contemporary Hindu reform movements in India, and contributed to the concept of nationalism in colonial India. Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Math and the Ramakrishna Mission.
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Heinrich Heine
1797 - 1856 (59 years)
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of lieder by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Heine's later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered a member of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities—which, however, only added to his fame. He spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.
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Peter Singer
1946 - Present (76 years)
Peter Singer is a well-known Australian moral philosopher, Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne, and Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He studied at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. Peter Singer first arrived on the scene of international prominence with the publication of Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement in 1975. In this book, he makes a compelling case for eschewing the eating of animals for a life of veganism. His critical essay, “Famine, A...
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Alonzo Church
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician and logician who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem, Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language . Alongside Alan Turing, Church has been considered one of the founders of computer science.
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Walter Benjamin
1892 - 1940 (48 years)
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her fir...
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Paul Krugman
1953 - Present (69 years)
Paul Krugman is one of the most highly respected and well-known economists in the world. He is a professor emeritus of the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University as well as a distinguished professor of the Graduate Center Economics Ph.D program and scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center, both at Graduate Center, CUNY. Krugman’s work in examining international trade patterns and the global distribution of economic activity and resources was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2008. His academic work has focused on economic geography, international finance and trade, and currency fluctuations.
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Henri Bergson
1859 - 1941 (82 years)
Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.
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Ezra Pound
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an expatriate American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a fascist collaborator in Italy during World War II. His works include Ripostes , Hugh Selwyn Mauberley , and his 800-page epic poem, The Cantos .
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Charles, Prince of Wales
1948 - Present (74 years)
Charles, Prince of Wales , is the heir apparent to the British throne as the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II. He has been heir apparent as well as Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay since 1952 and is both the oldest and the longest-serving heir apparent in British history. He is also the longest-serving Prince of Wales, having held the title since July 1958. Upon the death of his father, Prince Philip, on 9 April 2021, Charles also inherited the title of Duke of Edinburgh.
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William Wordsworth
1770 - 1850 (80 years)
William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads . Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".
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Daniel Dennett
1942 - Present (80 years)
Currently appointed as the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University (and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies) Daniel Dennett is a philosopher concerned with questions of the mind and cognitive science, and is colloquially known as one of the “Four Horsemen of New Atheism.” As an undergraduate, Dennett studied at Wesleyan University and Harvard University before earning his PhD in philosophy at Oxford University in 1965. Whether discussing consciousness, perception, or free will, the philosophy of mind is central to Dennett’s work. In particular, Dennett is kno...
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Roland Barthes
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Roland Gérard Barthes was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.
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Florence Nightingale
1820 - 1910 (90 years)
Florence Nightingale was an English social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during the Crimean War, in which she organised care for wounded soldiers at Constantinople. She gave nursing a favourable reputation and became an icon of Victorian culture, especially in the persona of "The Lady with the Lamp" making rounds of wounded soldiers at night.
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Giuseppe Peano
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Giuseppe Peano was an Italian mathematician and glottologist. The author of over 200 books and papers, he was a founder of mathematical logic and set theory, to which he contributed much notation. The standard axiomatization of the natural numbers is named the Peano axioms in his honor. As part of this effort, he made key contributions to the modern rigorous and systematic treatment of the method of mathematical induction. He spent most of his career teaching mathematics at the University of Turin. He also wrote an international auxiliary language, Latino sine flexione , which is a simplified version of Classical Latin.
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Willard Van Orman Quine
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.
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