Cheikh Anta Diop (29 December 1923 in Thieytou, Diourbel Region – 7 February 1986 in Dakar) was a historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Cheikh Anta Diop University, in Dakar, Senegal is named after him.

Diop was born to an aristocratic Muslim Wolof family in Senegal where he was educated in a traditional Islamic school. Diop's family was part of the Mouride sect, the only independent Muslim group in Africa according to Diop. He obtained a bachelor's degree in Senegal before moving to Paris for graduate studies where he ended his scholastic education.

In 1946, at the age of 23, Diop went to Paris to become a physicist. He remained there for 15 years, studying physics under Frédéric Joliot-Curie, Marie Curie's son-in-law, and ultimately translating parts of Einstein's Theory of Relativity into his native Wolof.

Diop's education included History, Egyptology, Physics, Linguistics, Anthropology, Economics, and Sociology. While studying in Paris, Diop studied under André Aymard, professor of History and later Dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Paris through which he "gained an understanding of the Greco-Latin world. As a student of Gaston Bachelard, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, André Leroi-Gourhan, and others" Diop "acquired proficiency in such diverse disciplines as rationalism, dialectics, modern scientific techniques, prehistoric archeology and so on." Diop was also "the only Black African of his generation to have received training as an Egyptologist." "More importantly" he "applied this encyclopedic knowledge to his researches on African history."