Branches of Mathematics

Pure mathematics

• Algebra
• Calculus
• Geometry
• Topology
• Trignometry
• Combinatorics
• Logic
• Number theory

Applied mathematics

• Dynamical systems and differential equations
• Mathematical physics
• Computing
• Information theory and signal processing
• Probability and statistics
• Game theory
• Operations research

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• Electromagnetic Spectrum
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  Brandeis University
  Brandeis University ( /ˈbrændaɪs/) is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles (14 km) west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it was ranked by the U.S. News and World Report as the number 31 national university in the United States.Forbes listed Brandeis University as number 57 among all national universities and liberal arts colleges combined in 2010.
  Brandeis was founded in 1948 as a nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored coeducational institution on the site of the former Middlesex University. The university is named for Louis Brandeis (1856–1941), the first Jewish Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
  Names associated with the conception of Brandeis include Israel Goldstein, George Alpert, C. Ruggles Smith, Albert Einstein, and Abram L. Sachar.
  C. Ruggles Smith was the son of Dr. John Hall Smith, founder of Middlesex University, who had died in 1944. In 1946, the university was on the brink of financial collapse. At the time, it was one of the few medical schools in the U. S. that did not impose a Jewish quota; but it had never been able to secure AMA accreditation—in part, its founder believed, due to institutional antisemitism in the AMA—and, as a result, Massachusetts had all but shut it down.
  
  wn.com/Brandeis_University
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  Colby College
  Colby College is a private liberal arts college located on Mayflower Hill in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1813, it is the 12th-oldest independent liberal arts college in the United States. Colby was the first all-male college in New England to accept female students, the first of whom was Mary Caffrey Low-- valedictorian of the Class of 1875.
  Approximately 1,800 students from more than 60 countries are enrolled annually. The college offers 54 major fields of study and 30 minors. More than two thirds of Colby students participate in study abroad programs. Colby College competes in the NESCAC conference and is one of the "Little Ivies".
  File:The formative period in Colby's history.djvu
  On February 27, 1813, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts adopted a petition to establish the Maine Literary and Theological Institution, the 33rd chartered college in the United States. The petition was led by Baptists who had come to the region for missionary work, and who wanted to train their own ministers, to end the reliance on England for providing men of learning. From 1816-1818, the new institution found a home in Waterville on 179 acres of land donated by citizens. In 1818, trustees assigned the institution to Rev. Jeremiah Chaplin, a Baptist theologian. Chaplin arrived in Waterville in the summer of 1818 with his family and seven students, including George Dana Boardman, the institution's first graduate. They were put up in a vacant Waterville home, and in that home the first classes were held.
  
  wn.com/Colby_College
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  Cornell College
  Cornell College is a private liberal arts college in Mount Vernon, Iowa. Originally called the Iowa Conference Seminary, the school was founded in 1853 by Reverend Samuel M. Fellows. Four years later, in 1857, the name was changed to Cornell College, in honor of iron tycoon William Wesley Cornell, who was a distant relative of Ezra Cornell (founder of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York).
  Cornell students study one course at a time (commonly referred to as "the block plan" or "OCAAT"). Since 1978, school years have been divided into nine "blocks" of three-and-a-half weeks each (usually followed by a four-day "block break" to round out to four weeks), during which students are enrolled in a single class; what would normally be covered in a full semester's worth of class at a typical university is covered in just seventeen-and-one-half Cornell class days. While schedules vary from class to class, most courses consist of around 30 hours of lecture, along with additional time spent in the laboratory, studying audio-visual media, or other activities. Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado; Quest University in Squamish, British Columbia; Tusculum College in Tusculum, Tennessee; and The University of Montana - Western are the only other colleges operating under this academic calendar. Beginning academic year 2012–2013, Cornell will be changing to an eight block calendar.
  
  wn.com/Cornell_College
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  Cornell University
  Cornell University ( /kɔrˈnɛl/ kor-NEL) is a private Ivy League research university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell's motto, a popular 1865 Ezra Cornell quotation: "I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study."
  The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its own admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar. Cornell is one of two private land grant universities, and its seven undergraduate colleges include three private, state-supported statutory or contract colleges. As a land grant college, it also operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York.
  
  wn.com/Cornell_University
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  Greece
  Greece ⁱ/ˈɡriːs/ (Greek: Ελλάδα, Ellada, IPA: [eˈlaða] ( listen) historically in Katharevousa and Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, Hellas, IPA: [eˈlas] and [helːás] respectively), officially the Hellenic Republic (Ελληνική Δημοκρατία, Elliniki Dimokratia, IPA: [eliniˈci ðimokraˈtia]), is a country in Southern Europe, politically considered part of Western Europe.Athens is the capital and the largest city in the country (its urban area also including Piraeus). The population of the country is around 11 million.
  Greece has land borders with Albania, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the east. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of mainland Greece, the Ionian Sea to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km (8,498 mi) in length, featuring a vast number of islands (approximately 1,400, of which 227 are inhabited), including Crete, the Dodecanese, the Cyclades, and the Ionian Islands among others. Eighty percent of Greece consists of mountains, of which Mount Olympus is the highest at 2,917 m (9,570 ft).
  
  wn.com/Greece
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  Harvard University
  Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation (officially The President and Fellows of Harvard College) chartered in the country. Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
  Harvard was named after its first benefactor, John Harvard. Although never formally affiliated with a church, the college primarily trained Congregationalist and Unitarian clergy. Harvard's curriculum and students became secular throughout the 18th century and by the 19th century had emerged as the central cultural establishment among Boston elites. Following the American Civil War, President Charles W. Eliot's forty year tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a centralized research university, and Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.James Bryant Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II and began to reform the curriculum and liberalize admissions after the war. The undergraduate college became coeducational after its 1977 merger with Radcliffe College. Drew Gilpin Faust was elected the 28th president in 2007 and is the first woman to lead the university. Harvard has the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world, standing at $32 billion as of September 2011.
  
  wn.com/Harvard_University
• Hendrix College
  Hendrix College is a private liberal arts college located in Conway, Arkansas. The student body averages around 1,400 and currently represents forty-three states and fourteen foreign countries. In US News and World Report's America's Best Colleges, Hendrix is ranked annually in the top tier of liberal arts colleges. In the 2008 edition Hendrix is ranked 71st in the nation. In 2009, Forbes ranked it 81st of America's Best Colleges. The college is affiliated with the United Methodist Church; however, the curriculum is secular and the student body is composed of people from many different religious backgrounds. Hendrix is a member of the Associated Colleges of the South. Its current president is Dr. James Timothy Cloyd. Hendrix College is listed in Loren Pope's Colleges That Change Lives.
  Hendrix College was founded as a primary school called Central Institute in 1876 at Altus, Arkansas, by Rev. Isham L. Burrow. In 1881 it was renamed Central Collegiate Institute when secondary and collegiate departments were added. By 1886, three conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South purchased the school. This began the school's relationship with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and later The Methodist Church, and United Methodist Church. The Central Collegiate Institute was renamed Hendrix College in 1889 after Rev. Eugene Russell Hendrix, a presiding bishop over three Arkansas Methodist conferences. This same year, the primary school was discontinued.
  
  wn.com/Hendrix_College
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  Japan
  Japan ⁱ/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国  Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
  Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.
  Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.
  
  wn.com/Japan
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  Korea
  Korea (/kəˈriːə/ kə-REE-ə; Korean: 한국 Hanguk [hanɡuːk] or 조선 Joseon [tɕosʌn] – (see etymology) is an East Asian region that is divided into two separate sovereign states — North Korea and South Korea. Located on the Korean Peninsula, Korea is bordered by China to the northwest, Russia to the northeast, and is separated from Japan to the east by the Korea Strait and the Sea of Japan (East Sea), and separated from Taiwan to the south by the East China Sea.
  Archaeological and linguistic evidence suggest the origins of the Korean people might have been Altaic language-speaking people from south-central Siberia,^{[dubious – discuss]} who populated ancient Korea in successive waves from the Neolithic age to the Bronze Age. The adoption of the Chinese writing system ("Hanja" in Korean) in the 2nd century BC, and Buddhism in the 4th century AD, had profound effects on the Three Kingdoms of Korea.
  The Three Kingdoms of Korea was first united during the Silla dynasty under the king Munmu of Silla. The united Silla dynasty fell to Goryeo Dynasty in 935 at the end of Later Three Kingdoms of Korea era. Goryeo was a highly cultural state and created the Jikji in the 14th century, using the world's first movable metal type printing press. The Mongol invasions in the 13th century, however, greatly weakened the nation which was forced to become a tributary state. After the Mongol Empire's collapse, severe political strife followed and Goryeo was replaced by the Joseon Dynasty in 1388.
  
  wn.com/Korea
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  Marist College
  Coordinates: 41°43′34″N 73°56′01″W / 41.725974°N 73.93354°W / 41.725974; -73.93354
  Marist College is a private liberal arts college on the east bank of the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, New York. The site was established in 1905 by the Marist Brothers, and the college was chartered in 1929. The college offers over 60 bachelors and masters degree programs and 20 certificates across the traditional undergraduate, graduate, adult education, and distance learning environments including online.
  Approximately 5,000 undergraduate students attend the Poughkeepsie campus (41°43′22″N 73°56′0″W / 41.72278°N 73.933333°W / 41.72278; -73.933333). Marist College study sites also exist in 26 countries abroad including Egypt, China, England, Italy, and Australia. In 2006, Marist opened a branch campus in Florence, Italy, by partnering with the Lorenzo de' Medici School. In 2009, the school was bequeathed a mansion with an estimated value of $65 million in Esopus, New York, which will be used as a leadership institute.
  
  wn.com/Marist_College
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  Monash University
  Monash University (or simply Monash) is a public university based in Melbourne, Victoria. It was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. Monash is a member of Australia's Group of Eight and the ASAIHL.
  Monash enrolls approximately 39,000 undergraduate and 16,000 graduate students, making it the university with the largest student body in Australia. It also has more applicants than any university in the state of Victoria.
  Monash is home to major research facilities, including the Australian Synchrotron, the Monash Science Technology Research and Innovation Precinct (STRIP), the Australian Stem Cell Centre, 100 research centres and 17 co-operative research centres. In 2008, Monash University attracted more than $210 million of research investment and grants from various Government bodies and external organisations.
  The university has eight campuses: six in Victoria (Clayton, Caulfield, Berwick, Peninsula, Parkville and Gippsland), one in Malaysia and one in South Africa. Monash also has a research and teaching centre in Prato, Italy, and a graduate research school in Mumbai, India.
  
  wn.com/Monash_University
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  Princeton University
  Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States.
  It is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution. Princeton provides undergraduate and graduate instruction in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. Princeton does not have schools of medicine, law, divinity, or business, but it does offer professional degrees through the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Architecture.
  Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, as the College of New Jersey, the university moved to Newark in 1747, then to Princeton in 1756 and was renamed Princeton University in 1896. The present-day College of New Jersey in nearby Ewing, New Jersey, is an unrelated institution. Princeton was the fourth chartered institution of higher education in the American colonies. Princeton had close ties to the Presbyterian Church, but has never been affiliated with any denomination and today imposes no religious requirements on its students.
  
  wn.com/Princeton_University
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  United States
  The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
  At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.
  
  wn.com/United_States
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  University of Essex
  The University of Essex is a British campus university whose original and largest campus is near the town of Colchester, England. It was established in 1963 and received its Royal Charter in 1965. The University is a member of the 1994 Group. It has 18 main teaching departments and 36 centres and institutes in subjects including biological sciences, computer science, acting, economics, business, health/human sciences, history, language and linguistics, mathematical sciences, human rights, law, literature, film studies, theatre studies, philosophy, art history, psychology, psychoanalytic studies, sociology and government.
  The university's main campus is located within Wivenhoe Park in the English county of Essex, less than a mile (1.6 km) from the town of Wivenhoe & 2 miles (3.2 km) from the town of Colchester. Apart from the Wivenhoe Park campus, there is a rapidly developing campus in Southend-on-Sea (Essex's largest town), and the East 15 Acting School is based in Loughton. The University's motto, Thought the harder, heart the keener, is adapted from the Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon.
  
  wn.com/University_of_Essex
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  Ursinus College
  Ursinus College is a liberal arts college in Collegeville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
  1867 Members of the German Reformed Church begin plans to establish a college where "young men could be liberally educated under the benign influence of Christianity." These founders were hoping to establish an alternative to the seminary at Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a school they believed was increasingly heretical to traditional Reformed faith.
  1869 The college is granted a charter by the Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin operations in its current location on the grounds of Todd’s School (founded 1832) and the adjacent Freeland Seminary (founded 1848). Dr. John Henry Augustus Bomberger, for whom the campus' signature Romanesque building is named (see Gallery, below), served as the college’s first president until his death in 1890. Bomberger had proposed naming the college after Zacharias Ursinus, a 16th-century German theologian and an important figure in the Protestant Reformation, in order to declare the Reformed orthodoxy of the College.
  
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  Wesleyan University
  Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, United States founded in 1831. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and sciences, also provides graduate research in many academic disciplines, and grants PhD degrees primarily in the sciences and mathematics. Wesleyan is the second most productive liberal arts college in the United States with respect to the number of undergraduates who go on to earn PhDs in all fields of study.
  Founded under the auspices of the Methodist Episcopal Church and with the support of prominent residents of Middletown, the now secular university was the first institution of higher education to be named after John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. About 20 unrelated colleges and universities were subsequently named after Wesley. Wesleyan, along with Amherst College and Williams College, is a member of the historic Little Three colleges and has long been known as one of the Little Ivies.
  
  wn.com/Wesleyan_University

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  Alexander Hamilton
  Alexander Hamilton (January 11, 1755 or 1757  – July 12, 1804) was a Founding Father, soldier, economist, political philosopher, one of America's first constitutional lawyers and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.
  As Secretary of the Treasury, Hamilton was the primary author of the economic policies of the George Washington Administration, especially the funding of the state debts by the Federal government, the establishment of a national bank, a system of tariffs, and friendly trade relations with Britain. He became the leader of the Federalist Party, created largely in support of his views, and was opposed by the Democratic-Republican Party, led by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
  Hamilton served in the American Revolutionary War. At the start of the war, he organized an artillery company and was chosen as its captain. He later became the senioraide-de-camp and confidant to General George Washington, the American commander-in-chief. He served again under Washington in the army raised to defeat the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt of western farmers in 1794. In 1798, Hamilton called for mobilization against France after the XYZ Affair, and secured an appointment as commander of a new army, which he trained for a war. However, the Quasi-War, although hard-fought at sea, was never officially declared. In the end, President John Adams found a diplomatic solution that avoided war.
  
  wn.com/Alexander_Hamilton
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  Aristophanes
  Aristophanes (English pronunciation: /ˌærɨˈstɒfəniːz/; Ancient Greek: [aristopʰánɛːs]; Ἀριστοφάνης, ca. 446 BC – ca. 386 BC), son of Philippus, of the deme Cydathenaus, was a comic playwright of ancient Athens. Eleven of his 40 plays survive virtually complete. These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and they are in fact used to define the genre. Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author. His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander contributing to the trial and execution of Socrates although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher. His second play, The Babylonians (now lost), was denounced by the demagogue Cleon as a slander against the Athenian polis. It is possible that the case was argued in court but details of the trial are not recorded and Aristophanes caricatured Cleon mercilessly in his subsequent plays, especially The Knights, the first of many plays that he directed himself. "In my opinion," he says through the Chorus in that play, "the author-director of comedies has the hardest job of all." (κωμῳδοδιδασκαλίαν εἶναι χαλεπώτατον ἔργον ἁπάντων)
  
  wn.com/Aristophanes
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  Aristotle
  Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
  Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
  
  wn.com/Aristotle
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  Augustine of Hippo
  Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
  According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
  When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.
  
  wn.com/Augustine_of_Hippo
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  Averroes
  ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد‎), better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد‎), and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
  Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
  Averroes' name is also seen as Averroës, Averroès or Averrhoës, indicating that the "o" and the "e" form separate syllables. Averroes is a Latinisation of a Hebrew transcription of the Arab name Ibn Rushd.
  
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  Avicenna
  Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Persian پورسينا Pur Sina [ˈpuːr ˈsiːnɑː] "son of Sina"; c. 980, Afshana near Bukhara– 1037, Hamadan, Iran), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persianpolymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.
  His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
  His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.
  
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  Benjamin Franklin
  Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
  Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
  
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• Bernard Berelson
  Bernard Reuben Berelson (1912–1979) was an American behavioral scientist, known for work on communication and mass media.
  He was a leading proponent of the broad idea of the "behavioral sciences", a field he saw as including areas such as public opinion. In Chapter 14 of Voting (1954), he enunciated what has become known as Berelson's paradox on democracy: while classical theories of its success assume voters committed to interest in public life, this fails to correspond with practical politics, while the system itself functions.
  Berelson wrote a summary entitled The Great Debate on Cultural Democracy regarding the confrontation between mass society theorists and researchers for the media industries. Berelson asserted that the resolution of the debate was simple: just listen to mass communication researchers like himself as they develop useful answers to the issues raised by others.
  He was born in Spokane, Washington. He majored in English at Whitman College, graduating in 1934. He took a library science degree at the University of Washington in 1936, and an English master's there in 1937. A doctoral degree in the Graduate Library School at the University of Chicago, under the influence of Douglas Waples and completed in 1941, led him into the field of public opinion. From 1944 he was working in applied social research at Columbia University. He returned to Chicago in 1946, and in 1952 became head of the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences set up by the Ford Foundation at Stanford University. He moved back to Chicago in 1957 and to Columbia in 1960.
  
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  Chanakya
  Chānakya (Sanskrit: चाणक्य Cāṇakya) (c. 370–283 BCE) was a teacher to the first Maurya Emperor Chandragupta (c. 340–293 BCE) - the first emperor in the archaeologically recorded history to rule the complete Indian Subcontinent. Chanakya is generally considered to be the architect of Chandragupta's rise to power at a young age. Traditionally, he is also identified by the names Kautilya and Vishnu Gupta, who authored the ancient Indian political treatise called Arthaśāstra. Chanakya is considered as the pioneer of the field of economics and political science and his work is thought of as an important precursor to Classical Economics. Chanakya's works predate Machiavelli's by about 1,800 years. Chanakya was a teacher in Takṣhaśhila, now in Pakistan, an ancient centre of learning, and was responsible for the creation of Mauryan empire, the first of its kind on the Indian subcontinent. His works were lost near the end of the Gupta dynasty and not rediscovered until 1915.
  Chanakya's birthplace is a matter of controversy, and there are multiple theories about his origin. According to some scholars he was born in a family of Brahmin as the son of Acharya Chanak in Patliputra (near present-day Patna), the capital of Magadh.^{[citation needed]} According to Jaina accounts, Chānakya was born in the village of Patliputra, a (maithil) Brahmin couple. According to the Buddhist text Mahavamsa Tika, his birthplace was Patliputra. The Jain scriptures like Adbidhana Chintamani mention his birth place as South India possibly present-day Kerala.
  
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  Cicero
  Marcus Tullius Cicero ( /ˈsɪsɨroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkɪkɛroː]; January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC; sometimes anglicized as Tully), was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
  He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.
  Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic.
  
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  Euripides
  Euripides (Ancient Greek: Εὐριπίδης) (ca. 480 – 406 BC) was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived complete (there has been debate about his authorship of Rhesus, largely on stylistic grounds) and there are also fragments, some substantial, of most of the other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly due to mere chance and partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined — he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes and Menander.
  Euripides is identified with theatrical innovations that have profoundly influenced drama down to modern times, especially in the representation of traditional, mythical heroes as ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. This new approach led him to pioneer developments that later writers adapted to comedy, some of which are characteristic of romance. Yet he also became "the most tragic of poets", focusing on the inner lives and motives of his characters in a way previously unknown. He was "the creator of...that cage which is the theatre of Shakespeare's Othello, Racine's Phèdre, of Ibsen and Strindberg," in which "...imprisoned men and women destroy each other by the intensity of their loves and hates", and yet he was also the literary ancestor of comic dramatists as diverse as Menander and George Bernard Shaw.
  
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  Ferdowsi
  Hakīm Abu'l-Qāsim Ferdowsī Tūsī (Persian: حکیم ابوالقاسم فردوسی توسی‎) known as Ferdowsi (فردوسی; also spelled as Firdausi; 940–1020 CE) was a highly revered Persian poet. He was the author of the Shahnameh, the national epic of Iran and related societies.
  The Shahnameh was originally composed by Ferdowsi for the princes of the Samanid dynasty, who were responsible for a revival of Persian cultural traditions after the Arab invasion of the seventh century. The Shahnameh chronicles the legendary history of the pre-Islamic kings of Iran from Keyumars to Yazdegerd III. Ferdowsi continued work on the poem after the Samanids were conquered by the Ghaznavids. The new ruler Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turk, may have lacked the interest in Ferdowsi's work shown by the Samanids, resulting in him losing favor with the royal court. In later passages of his poem, Ferdowsi complains about poverty and the ravages of old age. Ferdowsi spent over three decades (from 977 to 1010) working on the Shahnameh, which became one of the most influential works of Persian literature.
  
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  Herodotus
  Herodotus ( /hɨˈrɒdətəs/; Ancient Greek: Ἡρόδοτος Hēródotos) was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria (modern day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (circa 484 – 425 BC). He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a well-constructed and vivid narrative.The Histories—his masterpiece and the only work he is known to have produced—is a record of his "inquiry" (or ἱστορία historía, a word that passed into Latin and acquired its modern meaning of "history"), being an investigation of the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars and including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information. Although some of his stories were fanciful, he claimed he was reporting only what had been told to him. Little is known of his personal history.
  The Histories, otherwise known as The Researches or The Inquiries, were divided by later Alexandrian editors into nine books, named after the nine Muses: the "Muse of History", Clio, representing the first book, then Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania and Calliope for books 2 to 9, respectively. At its simplest and broadest level of meaning, The Histories is structured as a dynastic history of four Persian kings:
  
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  Hesiod
  Hesiod ( /ˈhiːsiəd/ or /ˈhɛsiəd/;Ancient Greek: Ἡσίοδος, Hēsíodos) was a Greek oral poet generally thought by scholars to have been active between 750 and 650 BC, around the same time as Homer. His is the first European poetry in which the poet regards himself as a topic, an individual with a distinctive role to play. Ancient authors credited him and Homer with establishing Greek religious customs. Modern scholars refer to him as a major source on Greek mythology, farming techniques, early economic thought (he is sometimes identified as the first economist), archaic Greek astronomy and ancient time-keeping.
  Hesiod practised various styles of traditional verse, including gnomic, hymnic, genealogical and narrative poetry, but he was not able to manipulate them all fluently. Comparisons with Homer can be unflattering. As one modern scholar observed: "It is as if an artisan with his big, awkward fingers were patiently, fascinatedly, imitating the fine seam of the professional tailor."
  The dating of his life is a contested issue in scholarly circles and it is covered below in Dating.
  
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  Homer
  In the Western classical tradition, Homer ( /ˈhoʊmər/; Ancient Greek: Ὅμηρος, Hómēros) is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.
  When he lived is unknown. Herodotus estimates that Homer lived 400 years before Herodotus' own time, which would place him at around 850 BC; while other ancient sources claim that he lived much nearer to the supposed time of the Trojan War, in the early 12th century BC. Modern researchers appear to place Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC.
  The formative influence played by the Homeric epics in shaping Greek culture was widely recognized, and Homer was described as the teacher of Greece. Homer's works, which are about fifty percent speeches, provided models in persuasive speaking and writing that were emulated throughout the ancient and medieval Greek worlds. Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek literary papyrus finds.
  
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  John Locke
  John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
  Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.
  
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  Julius Caesar
  Gaius Julius Caesar (Classical Latin: [ˈɡaː.i.ʊs ˈjuː.lɪ.ʊs ˈkaj.sar], July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC) was a Roman general and statesman and a distinguished writer of Latin prose. He played a critical role in the gradual transformation of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire.
  In 60 BC, Caesar, Crassus and Pompey formed a political alliance that was to dominate Roman politics for several years. Their attempts to amass power through populist tactics were opposed by the conservative elite within the Roman Senate^{[citation needed]}, among them Cato the Younger with the frequent support of Cicero. Caesar's conquest of Gaul, completed by 51 BC, extended Rome's territory to the English Channel and the Rhine. Caesar became the first Roman general to cross both when he built a bridge across the Rhine and conducted the first invasion of Britain.
  These achievements granted him unmatched military power and threatened to eclipse Pompey's standing. The balance of power was further upset by the death of Crassus in 53 BC. Political realignments in Rome finally led to a standoff between Caesar and Pompey, the latter having taken up the cause of the Senate. Ordered by the Senate to stand trial in Rome for various charges, Caesar marched on Rome with one legion—legio XIII—from Gaul to Italy, crossing the Rubicon in 49 BC. This sparked a civil war from which he emerged as the unrivaled leader of the Roman world.
  
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  Livy
  Titus Livius Patavinus (59 BC – AD 17) — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Books from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own time. He was on familiar terms with the Julio-Claudian family, advising Augustus's grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, as a young man not long before 14 AD in a letter to take up the writing of history. Livy and Augustus's wife, Livia, were from the same clan in different locations, although not related by blood.
  Livy was born as Titus Livius in Patavium in northern Italy, now modern Padua. There is a debate about the year of Titus Livius' birth, 64 BC or more likely 59 BC. At the time of Livy’s birth, his home city of Patavium was the second wealthiest city in the Italian peninsula. Patavium was a part of the province of Cisalpine Gaul at the time. In his works, Livy often expressed his deep affection and pride for Patavium, and the city was well known for its conservative values in morality and politics.
  
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  Maimonides
  Mosheh ben Maimon משה בן מימון‎, called Moses Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn (Arabic: موسى بن ميمون‎), or RaMBaM (רמב"ם – Hebrew acronym for "Rabbi Mosheh Ben Maimon"), was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the most prolific and followed Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages. He was born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) on Passover Eve, 1135, and died in Egypt (or Tiberias) on 20th Tevet, December 12, 1204. He was a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt.
  Although his writings on Jewish law and ethics were met with acclaim and gratitude from most Jews even as far off as Spain, Iraq and Yemen, and he rose to be the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, there were also vociferous critics of some of his rulings and other writings particularly in Spain. Nevertheless, he was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history, his copious work a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries canonical authority as a codification of Talmudic law. In the Yeshiva world he is known as "haNesher haGadol" (the great eagle) in recognition of his outstanding status as a bona fide exponent of the Oral Torah.
  
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  Marcus Aurelius
  Marcus Aurelius (Latin: Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus; 26 April 121 – 17 March 180 AD), was Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD. He ruled with Lucius Verus as co-emperor from 161 until Verus' death in 169. He was the last of the "Five Good Emperors", and is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers. During his reign, the Empire defeated a revitalized Parthian Empire; Aurelius' general Avidius Cassius sacked the capital Ctesiphon in 164. Aurelius fought the Marcomanni, Quadi, and Sarmatians with success during the Marcomannic Wars, but the threat of the Germanic tribes began to represent a troubling reality for the Empire. A revolt in the East led by Avidius Cassius failed to gain momentum and was suppressed immediately.
  Marcus Aurelius' Stoic tome Meditations, written in Greek while on campaign between 170 and 180, is still revered as a literary monument to a philosophy of service and duty, describing how to find and preserve equanimity in the midst of conflict by following nature as a source of guidance and inspiration.
  
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  Niccolò Machiavelli
  Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Italian pronunciation: [nikkoˌlɔ makjaˈvɛlli], 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian historian, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. A founder of modern political science, he was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his masterpiece, The Prince after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence, and is respectively interpreted by many as a satire of these powers.
  Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, the first son and third child of attorney, Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli, and his wife, Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli. The Machiavelli family are believed to be descended from the old marquesses of Tuscany and to have produced thirteen Florentine Gonfalonieres of Justice, one of the offices of a group of nine citizens selected by drawing lots every two months, who formed the government, or Signoria. Machiavelli, like many people of Florence, was however not a full citizen of Florence, due to the nature of Florentine citizenship in that time, even under the republican regime.
  
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• Paul Lazarsfeld
  Paul Felix Lazarsfeld (February 13, 1901 – August 30, 1976) was one of the major figures in 20th-century American sociology. The founder of Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research, he exerted a tremendous influence over the techniques and the organization of social research. "It is not so much that he was an American sociologist," one colleague said of him after his death, "as it was that he determined what American sociology would be."
  Lazarsfeld's many contributions to sociological method have earned him the title of the "founder of modern empirical sociology". Lazarsfeld made great strides in statistical survey analysis, panel methods, latent structure analysis, and contextual analysis. He is also considered a co-founder of mathematical sociology. Many of his ideas have been so influential as to now be considered self-evident. He is also noted for developing the two-step flow of communication model.
  Lazarsfeld also made significant contributions by training many younger sociologists. One of Lazarsfeld's biographers, Paul Nerauth, writes that there are "dozens of books and hundreds of articles by his students and the students of his students, all of which still breathe the spirtit of this man's work". One of Lazarsfeld's successful students was Barney Glaser - propounder of grounded theory (GT) - the world's most quoted method for analyzing qualitative data. Index formations and qualitative mathematics were subjects taught by Lazarsfeld and are important components of the GT method according to Glaser. James Samuel Coleman, an important contributor to social theories of education and a future president of the American Sociological Association, was also a student of Lazarsfeld's at Columbia.
  
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• Philip Converse
  Philip Ernest Converse (born 1928) is an American political scientist. He is a professor emeritus in political science at the University of Michigan, is a seminal figure in the field of public opinion. His article "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics" (Ideology and Discontent, edited by David E. Apter, 1964) held that public opinion tended to be not very consistent across issues, not very stable over time, and not very understanding of ideology. With Angus Campbell, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, he co-wrote The American Voter, an instrumental work of political science using data from National Election Studies, a set of important surveys of American public opinion carried out by the University of Michigan Survey Research Center and the Center for Political Studies. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.
  
  
  
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  Plato
  Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
  The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
  Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
  
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  Plutarch
  
  Plutarch (English pronunciation: /'pluːtɑːk/; Greek: Πλούταρχος, Ploútarkhos, Koine Greek: [plŭːtarkʰos]) then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Μέστριος Πλούταρχος),c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He was born to a prominent family in Chaeronea, Boeotia, a town about twenty miles east of Delphi.
  Plutarch was born in 46 AD in the small town of Chaeronea, in the Greek region known as Boeotia. His family was wealthy. The name of Plutarch's father has not been preserved, but it was probably Nikarchus (Greek: Nίκαρχoς), from the common habit of Greek families to repeat a name in alternate generations. The name of Plutarch's grandfather was Lamprias, as he attested in Moralia and in his Life of Antony.
  His brothers, Timon and Lamprias, are frequently mentioned in his essays and dialogues, where Timon is spoken of in the most affectionate terms. Rualdus, in his 1624 work Life of Plutarchus, recovered the name of Plutarch's wife, Timoxena, from internal evidence afforded by his writings. A letter is still extant, addressed by Plutarch to his wife, bidding her not give way to excessive grief at the death of their two year old daughter, who was named Timoxena after her mother. Interestingly, he hinted at a belief in reincarnation in that letter of consolation.
  
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  Polybius
  Polybius^{[pronunciation?]} (ca. 200–118 BC), Greek Πολύβιος) was a Greek historian of the Hellenistic Period noted for his work, The Histories, which covered the period of 220–146 BC in detail. The work describes in part the rise of the Roman Republic and its gradual domination over Greece. Polybius is also renowned for his ideas concerning the separation of powers in government, later used in Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws and in the drafting of the United States Constitution.
  Polybius was born in Arcadia around 200 BC. He was the son of Lycortas, a Greek politician who became Cavalry Commander of the Achaean League. His father's opposition to Roman control of Macedonia resulted in his imprisonment. Polybius was then deported to Rome, where Lucius Aemilius Paulus employed him to tutor his two sons.
  Polybius had the opportunity to return to Macedonia in 152 BC; he elected to stay, however, in Rome, as by that time he had placed his allegiance in the Roman Republic. He became a close friend of the Roman military commander Scipio Aemilianus, accompanying the general to Hispania and Africa. Polybius's The Histories provides a detailed account of Rome's ascent to empire and included his eyewitness accounts of the Roman victory over Hannibal and the Sack of Carthage in 146 BC. Polybius held that historians should only chronicle events whose participants the historian was able to interview, and was among the first to champion the notion of having factual integrity in historical writing, while avoiding bias.
  
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  Seneca the Younger
  Lucius Annaeus Seneca (often known simply as Seneca; ca. 4 BC – AD 65) was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, dramatist, and in one work humorist, of the Silver Age of Latin literature. He was tutor and later advisor to emperor Nero. While he was later forced to commit suicide for alleged complicity in the Pisonian conspiracy to assassinate Nero, the last of the Julio-Claudian emperors, he may have been innocent. His father was Seneca the Elder and his elder brother was Gallio.
  Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in Cordoba, in the Baetica, the southern highly romanized province of Spain. One of his revisionist modern biographers, however, Miriam Griffin says in her biography of Seneca that "the evidence for Seneca's life before his exile in 41 is so slight, and the potential interest of these years, for social history as well as for biography, is so great that few writers on Seneca have resisted the temptation to eke out knowledge with imagination." Griffin also states, apparently inferring from ancient sources, that Seneca was born in either 8, 4, or 1 BC. She thinks he was born between 4 and 1 BC and was a resident in Rome by AD 5. Seneca says that he was carried to Rome in the arms of his mother's stepsister. Griffin says that, allowing for rhetorical exaggeration, means "it is fair to conclude that Seneca was in Rome as a very small boy." Be that as it may, it is clear that he was in Rome at a relatively early stage in his life.
  
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  Socrates
  Socrates ( /ˈsɒkrətiːz/; Greek: Σωκράτης, Ancient Greek pronunciation: [sɔːkrátɛːs], Sōkrátēs; c. 469 BC – 399 BC) was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary Aristophanes. Many would claim that Plato's dialogues are the most comprehensive accounts of Socrates to survive from antiquity.
  Through his portrayal in Plato's dialogues, Socrates has become renowned for his contribution to the field of ethics, and it is this Platonic Socrates who also lends his name to the concepts of Socratic irony and the Socratic method, or elenchus. The latter remains a commonly used tool in a wide range of discussions, and is a type of pedagogy in which a series of questions are asked not only to draw individual answers, but also to encourage fundamental insight into the issue at hand. It is Plato's Socrates that also made important and lasting contributions to the fields of epistemology and logic, and the influence of his ideas and approach remains strong in providing a foundation for much western philosophy that followed.
  
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  Sophocles
  Sophocles ( /ˈsɒfəkliːz/; Ancient Greek: Σοφοκλῆς, Sophoklēs, Greek pronunciation: [sopʰoklɛ̂ːs]; c. 497/6 BC – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 123 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-fêted playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in around 30 competitions, won perhaps 24, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won 14 competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles, while Euripides won only 4 competitions.
  The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, although each play was actually a part of a different tetralogy, the other members of which are now lost. Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third actor, thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights such as Aeschylus.
  
  wn.com/Sophocles
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  Thomas Hobbes
  Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
  Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
  He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Hobbes
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  Thomas Jefferson
  Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743 O.S.) – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). At the beginning of the American Revolution, Jefferson served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia. He then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris, initially as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France. He was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) during the administration of President George Washington. Upon resigning his office, with his close friend James Madison he organized the Democratic-Republican Party. Elected Vice-President in 1796, under his opponent John Adams, Jefferson with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts.
  
  wn.com/Thomas_Jefferson
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  Thucydides
  Thucydides (/θ[unsupported input]ˈsɪdɪˌdiz/; Greek: Θουκυδίδης, Thoukydídēs; c. 460 BC – c. 395 BC) was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history", because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
  He has also been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the relations between nations as based on might rather than right. His text is still studied at advanced military colleges worldwide, and the Melian dialogue remains a seminal work of international relations theory.
  More generally, Thucydides showed an interest in developing an understanding of human nature to explain behaviour in such crises as plague, massacres, as in that of the Melians, and civil war.
  
  wn.com/Thucydides
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  Xenophon
  Xenophon (Ancient Greek: Ξενοφῶν, Xenophōn; c. 430 – 354 BC), son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, philosopher and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates. He is known for his writings on the history of his own times, the 4th century BC, preserving the sayings of Socrates, and descriptions of life in ancient Greece and the Persian Empire.
  Xenophon's birth date is uncertain, but most scholars agree that he was born around 431 BC near the city of Athens. Xenophon was born into the ranks of the upper classes, thus granting him access to certain privileges of the aristocracy of ancient Attica. While a young man, Xenophon participated in the expedition led by Cyrus the Younger against his older brother, king Artaxerxes II of Persia, in 401 BC. Xenophon writes that he had asked the veteran Socrates for advice on whether to go with Cyrus, and that Socrates referred him to the divinely inspired Delphic oracle. Xenophon's query to the oracle, however, was not whether or not to accept Cyrus' invitation, but "to which of the gods he must pray and do sacrifice, so that he might best accomplish his intended journey and return in safety, with good fortune". The oracle answered his question and told him to which gods to pray and sacrifice. When Xenophon returned to Athens and told Socrates of the oracle's advice, Socrates chastised him for asking so disingenuous a question.
  
  wn.com/Xenophon

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