PEOPLE KNOWN FOR: education
Chinese philosopher
Confucius China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, whose ideas have profoundly influenced the civilizations of China and other East Asian countries. Confucius was born near the...
English physicist and mathematician
Isaac Newton English physicist and mathematician who was the culminating figure of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. In optics, his discovery of the composition of white light integrated the...
United States jurist
Clarence Thomas associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1991, the second African American to serve on the Court. Appointed to replace Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), the Court’s first...
British mathematician and philosopher
Alfred North Whitehead English mathematician and philosopher who collaborated with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1910–13) and, from the mid-1920s, taught at Harvard University and developed...
French chemist
Antoine Lavoisier prominent French chemist and leading figure in the 18th-century chemical revolution who developed an experimentally based theory of the chemical reactivity of oxygen and coauthored the...
Swedish botanist
Carolus Linnaeus Swedish naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature)....
Persian philosopher and scientist
Avicenna was a Muslim physician, the most famous and influential of the philosopher-scientists of the medieval Islamic world. He was particularly noted for his contributions in the fields of Aristotelian...
German chemist
Justus, baron von Liebig German chemist who made significant contributions to the analysis of organic compounds, the organization of laboratory-based chemistry education, and the application of chemistry...
French social scientist
Émile Durkheim was a French social scientist who developed a vigorous methodology combining empirical research with sociological theory. He is widely regarded as the founder of the French school of sociology....
Scottish geologist
Charles Lyell Scottish geologist largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth’s surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through...
German-American architect
Walter Gropius was a German American architect and educator who, particularly as director of the Bauhaus (1919–28), exerted a major influence on the development of modern architecture. His works, many...
American philosopher and educator
John Dewey was an American philosopher and educator who was a cofounder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism, a pioneer in functional psychology, an innovative theorist of democracy, and a...
pope
Sylvester II French head of the Roman Catholic church (999–1003), renowned for his scholarly achievements, his advances in education, and his shrewd political judgment. He was the first Frenchman to become...
Czech educator
John Amos Comenius was a Czech educational reformer and religious leader, remembered mainly for his innovations in methods of teaching, especially languages. He favoured the learning of Latin to facilitate...
Persian scholar and scientist
Al-Bīrūnī was a Muslim astronomer, mathematician, ethnographist, anthropologist, historian, and geographer. Al-Bīrūnī lived during a period of unusual political turmoil in the eastern Islamic world. He...
British nurse, statistician, and social reformer
Florence Nightingale British nurse, statistician, and social reformer who was the foundational philosopher of modern nursing. Nightingale was put in charge of nursing British and allied soldiers in Turkey...
French scientist
Claude Bernard French physiologist known chiefly for his discoveries concerning the role of the pancreas in digestion, the glycogenic function of the liver, and the regulation of the blood supply by the...
American inventor
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born American inventor, scientist, and teacher of the deaf whose foremost accomplishments were the invention of the telephone (1876) and the refinement of the phonograph...
German philosopher
Johann Gottlieb Fichte was a German philosopher and patriot, one of the great transcendental idealists. Fichte was the son of a ribbon weaver. Educated at the Pforta school (1774–80) and at the universities...
French biologist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck pioneering French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern genetics and evolutionary...
Greek orator and rhetorician
Isocrates ancient Athenian orator, rhetorician, and teacher whose writings are an important historical source on the intellectual and political life of the Athens of his day. The school he founded differed...
English philosopher and scientist
Roger Bacon was an English Franciscan philosopher and educational reformer who was a major medieval proponent of experimental science. Bacon studied mathematics, astronomy, optics, alchemy, and languages....
American biologist
E.O. Wilson American biologist recognized as the world’s leading authority on ants. He was also the foremost proponent of sociobiology, the study of the genetic basis of the social behaviour of all animals,...
Greek physician
Galen was a Greek physician, writer, and philosopher who exercised a dominant influence on medical theory and practice in Europe from the Middle Ages until the mid-17th century. His authority in the Byzantine...
French philosopher and humanist
Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet was a French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform and women’s rights. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators...
Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer
Ptolemy an Egyptian astronomer, mathematician, and geographer of Greek descent who flourished in Alexandria during the 2nd century ce. In several fields his writings represent the culminating achievement...
Russian author and scientist
Mikhail Lomonosov Russian poet, scientist, and grammarian who is often considered the first great Russian linguistics reformer. He also made substantial contributions to the natural sciences, reorganized...
German-Swiss physician
Paracelsus German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine. He published Der grossen Wundartzney (Great Surgery Book) in 1536 and a clinical description of syphilis...
Greek physician
Hippocrates ancient Greek physician who lived during Greece’s Classical period and is traditionally regarded as the father of medicine. It is difficult to isolate the facts of Hippocrates’ life from the...
French naturalist
Georges-Louis Leclerc, count de Buffon was a French naturalist, remembered for his comprehensive work on natural history, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (begun in 1749). He was created a...
American educator
Samuel Gridley Howe American physician, educator, and abolitionist as well as the founding director of the New-England Institution for the Education of the Blind (later known as the Perkins School for...
German-American anthropologist
Franz Boas was a German-born American anthropologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the founder of the relativistic, culture-centred school of American anthropology that became dominant in...
Canadian physician
Sir William Osler, Baronet Canadian physician and professor of medicine who practiced and taught in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain and whose book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892)...
German scholar and scientist
Georgius Agricola was a German scholar and scientist known as “the father of mineralogy.” While a highly educated classicist and humanist, well regarded by scholars of his own and later times, he was yet...
Australian author
Catherine Helen Spence was a writer and activist who sought to improve educational and welfare programs in Australia and to reform the country’s voting system. An immigrant from Scotland, she was a major...
Muslim alchemist
Abū Mūsā Jābir ibn Ḥayyān Muslim alchemist known as the father of Arabic chemistry. He systematized a “quantitative” analysis of substances and was the inspiration for Geber, a Latin alchemist who developed...
Swiss educator
Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi Swiss educational reformer, who advocated education of the poor and emphasized teaching methods designed to strengthen the student’s own abilities. Pestalozzi’s method became...
American geologist and mineralogist
James D. Dana was an American geologist, mineralogist, and naturalist who, in explorations of the South Pacific, the U.S. Northwest, Europe, and elsewhere, made important studies of mountain building,...
French mathematician and public official
Gaspard Monge, count de Péluse French mathematician who invented descriptive geometry, the study of the mathematical principles of representing three-dimensional objects in a two-dimensional plane; no...
Canadian political leader
Michael Ignatieff Canadian author, literary critic, and politician who represented the Etobicoke-Lakeshore riding in the Canadian House of Commons (2006–11) and who served as leader of the Liberal Party...
German physiologist
Johannes Müller German physiologist and comparative anatomist, one of the great natural philosophers of the 19th century. His major work was Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen für Vorlesungen, 2 vol....
prime minister of Malaysia
Mahathir bin Mohamad is a Malaysian politician who served as prime minister of Malaysia (1981–2003; 2018–20), overseeing the country’s transition to an industrialized nation. Mahathir, the son of a schoolmaster,...
English naturalist
John Ray leading 17th-century English naturalist and botanist who contributed significantly to progress in taxonomy. His enduring legacy to botany was the establishment of species as the ultimate unit...
American actor and acting teacher
Sanford Meisner was an actor and one of the most influential teachers of acting in the United States after World War II (1939–45). His students acted on the screen and the stage across the United States...
Muslim scholar
Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan was a Muslim educator, jurist, and author, founder of the Anglo-Mohammedan Oriental College at Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India, and the principal motivating force behind the revival...
Indian religious leader
Ram Mohan Roy Indian religious, social, and educational reformer who challenged traditional Hindu culture and indicated lines of progress for Indian society under British rule. He is sometimes called the...
Russian statesman
Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev Russian civil servant and conservative political philosopher, who served as tutor and adviser to the emperors Alexander III and Nicholas II. Nicknamed the “Grand Inquisitor,”...
Swiss physician and naturalist
Conrad Gesner was a Swiss physician and naturalist best known for his systematic compilations of information on animals and plants. Noting his learning ability at an early age, his father, an impecunious...
American educator
Horace Mann American educator, the first great American advocate of public education who believed that, in a democratic society, education should be free and universal, nonsectarian, democratic in method,...
American educator
Frances Willard American educator, reformer, and founder of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (1883). An excellent speaker, a successful lobbyist, and an expert in pressure politics, she was...