Marsilio Ficino
Marsilio Ficino was an Italian scholar and Catholic priest who was one of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance. He was an astrologer, a reviver of Neoplatonism in touch with the major academics of his day, and the first translator of Plato's complete extant works into Latin.[2] His Florentine Academy, an attempt to revive Plato's Academy, influenced the direction and tenor of the Italian Renaissance and the development of European philosophy.
Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was a Florentine diplomat, author, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. He is best known for his political treatise The Prince (Il Principe), written around 1513 but not published until 1532, five years after his death. He has often been called the father of modern political philosophy and political science.
For many years he served as a senior official in the Florentine Republic with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry.
Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (/ˌdɛzɪˈdɪəriəs ɪˈræzməs/ DEZ-i-DEER-ee-əs irr-AZ-məs; Dutch: [ˌdeːziˈdeːrijʏs eːˈrɑsmʏs]; 28 October c. 1466 – 12 July 1536), commonly known in English as Erasmus of Rotterdam or simply Erasmus, was a Dutch Christian humanist, Catholic priest and theologian, educationalist, satirist, and philosopher. Through his works, he is considered one of the most influential thinkers of the Northern Renaissance and one of the major figures of Dutch and Western culture.
Pope Pius IX
Pope Pius IX (Italian: Pio IX; born Giovanni Maria Battista Pietro Pellegrino Isidoro Mastai-Ferretti; 13 May 1792 – 7 February 1878) was head of the Catholic Church from 1846 to 1878. His reign of nearly 32 years is the longest verified of any pope in history; if including unverified reigns, his reign was second to that of Peter the Apostle. He was notable for convoking the First Vatican Council in 1868 and for permanently losing control of the Papal States in 1870 to the Kingdom of Italy. Thereafter, he refused to leave Vatican City, declaring himself a "prisoner in the Vatican".
Thomas Cranmer
homas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – 21 March 1556) was a theologian, leader of the English Reformation and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He is honoured as a martyr in the Church of England.
Cranmer helped build the case for the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon, which was one of the causes of the separation of the English Church from union with the Holy See.
Richard Hooker
Richard Hooker (25 March 1554 – 2 November 1600)[2] was an English priest in the Church of England and an influential theologian. He was one of the most important English theologians of the sixteenth century. His defence of the role of redeemed reason informed the theology of the seventeenth-century Caroline Divines and later provided many members of the Church of England with a theological method which combined the claims of revelation, reason and tradition.
Scholars disagree regarding Hooker's relationship with what would later be called "Anglicanism" and the Reformed theological tradition. Traditionally, he has been regarded as the originator of the Anglican via media between Protestantism and Catholicism.
Huldrych Zwingli
Huldrych or Ulrich Zwingli was a Swiss Christian theologian, musician, and leader of the Reformation in Switzerland. Born during a time of emerging Swiss patriotism and increasing criticism of the Swiss mercenary system, he attended the University of Vienna and the University of Basel, a scholarly center of Renaissance humanism. He continued his studies while he served as a pastor in Glarus and later in Einsiedeln, where he was influenced by the writings of Erasmus. During his tenures at Basel and Einsiedeln, Zwingli began to familiarize himself with many criticisms Christian institutions were facing regarding their reform guidance and garnered scripture which aimed to address such criticisms.
Menno Simons
Menno Simons 1496 – 31 January 1561) was a Roman Catholic priest from the Friesland region of the Low Countries who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church and became an influential Anabaptist religious leader. Simons was a contemporary of the Protestant Reformers and it is from his name that his followers became known as Mennonites.
Jacobus Arminius
Jacobus Arminius was a Dutch Reformed minister and theologian during the Protestant Reformation period whose views became the basis of Arminianism and the Dutch Remonstrant movement. He served from 1603 as professor in theology at the University of Leiden and wrote many books and treatises on theology.
Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius was a Dutch humanist, diplomat, lawyer, theologian, jurist, statesman, poet and playwright. A teenage prodigy, he was born in Delft and studied at Leiden University. He was imprisoned in Loevestein Castle for his involvement in the controversies over religious policy of the Dutch Republic, but escaped hidden in a chest of books that was regularly brought to him and was transported to Gorinchem. Grotius wrote most of his major works in exile in France.
Gaspard Monge
Gaspard Monge, Comte de Péluse was a French mathematician, commonly presented as the inventor of descriptive geometry, (the mathematical basis of) technical drawing, and the father of differential geometry. During the French Revolution he served as the Minister of the Marine, and was involved in the reform of the French educational system, helping to found the École Polytechnique.
Augustin-Louis Cauchy
Baron Augustin-Louis Cauchy was a French mathematician, engineer, and physicist. He was one of the first to rigorously state and prove the key theorems of calculus (thereby creating real analysis), pioneered the field complex analysis, and the study of permutation groups in abstract algebra. Cauchy also contributed to a number of topics in mathematical physics, notably continuum mechanics.
Évariste Galois
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.
David Hilbert
David Hilbert was a German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics and one of the most influential mathematicians of his time.
Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas including invariant theory, the calculus of variations, commutative algebra, algebraic number theory, the foundations of geometry, spectral theory of operators and its application to integral equations, mathematical physics, and the foundations of mathematics (particularly proof theory). He adopted and defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers. In 1900, he presented a collection of problems that set a course for mathematical research of the 20th century.
Felix Klein
Felix Christian Klein was a German mathematician and mathematics educator, known for his work in group theory, complex analysis, non-Euclidean geometry, and the associations between geometry and group theory. His 1872 Erlangen program classified geometries by their basic symmetry groups and was an influential synthesis of much of the mathematics of the time.
During his tenure at the University of Göttingen, Klein was able to turn it into a center for mathematical and scientific research through the establishment of new lectures, professorships, and institutes. His seminars covered most areas of mathematics then known as well as their applications.
Camille Jordan
Marie Ennemond Camille Jordan ( French: [ʒɔʁdɑ̃] ; 5 January 1838 – 22 January 1922) was a French mathematician, known both for his foundational work in group theory and for his influential Cours d'analyse .
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. Durkheim formally established the academic discipline of sociology and is commonly cited as one of the principal architects of modern social science, along with both Karl Marx and Max Weber.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies can maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity, an era in which traditional social and religious ties are much less universal, and in which new social institutions have come into being.
