Famous Academics a to z

Award-winning, bestselling American novelist John Irving is known for works like The Cider House Rules and The World According to Garp.

J.B.S. Haldane was a British geneticist who helped found the theories of population genetics.

Stonewall Jackson was a leading Confederate general during the U.S. Civil War, commanding forces at Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville.

The writings of psychologist and philosopher William James had a major impact on the way we look at the mind, the body, and the world.

James Weldon Johnson was an African-American writer, politician, educator and lawyer. He was also an early civil rights activist and leader of the NAACP.

Philip Johnson was an American architect best known for the design for his own home, the Glass House, in New Canaan, CT.

Lois Mailou Jones was a painter whose works reflect a command of widely varied styles, from traditional landscape to African-themed abstraction.

June Jordan was an African American author who investigated both social and personal concerns through poetry, essays, and drama.

Daniel J. Boorstin was a writer and historian known for his Americans trilogy and The Discoverers.

African-American chemist Percy Julian was a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs such as cortisone, steroids and birth control pills.

First female politician,attorney to serve as solicitor general of the United States of America.

Jerome Kagan is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and is regarded as key pioneer in the field of developmental psychology.

Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes was a Dutch scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his production of liquid helium. He also discovered superconductivity.

Russian-born painter Wassily Kandinsky is credited as a leader in avant-garde art as one of the founders of pure abstraction in painting in the early 20th century.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher during the Enlightenment era of the late 18th century. His best known work is the Critique of Pure Reason.

American educator Helen Keller overcame the adversity of being blind and deaf to become one of the 20th century's leading humanitarians, as well as co-founder of the ACLU.

Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher who wrote about Christian belief systems and helped birth existentialism.

A gifted mathematician, Ada Lovelace is considered to have written instructions for the first computer program in the mid-1800s.

Biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, which was based on research he and his colleagues conducted at the Institute for Sex Research.

Paul Klee was a prolific Swiss and German artist best known for his large body of work, influenced by cubism, expressionism and surrealism.

Julia Kristeva is a psychoanalyst, critic and novelist, known for her writings in structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis and philosophical feminism.

Stanley Kunitz was an American poet who served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1974; 2000). He won the Pulitzer Prize for his work Selected Poems 1928-1958 (1958).

Jacob Lawrence was an American painter, and the most widely acclaimed African-American artist of the 20th century. He is best known for his Migration Series.

Louis Leakey, with wife Mary, was a famed paleoanthropologist who greatly contributed to world knowledge about humanity’s early ancestors.

Mary Leakey was a paleoanthropologist who, along with husband Louis, made several prominent scientific discoveries. Skull fossils found by the Leakeys advanced our understanding of human evolution.

Rita Levi-Montalcini shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for her part in the discovery of a protein that stimulates nerve cell growth.

Actor, writer and producer James Lipton founded the Actors Studio Drama School and has hosted Bravo TV's Inside the Actors Studio since 1994.

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian pianist and composer of enormous influence and originality. He was renowned in Europe during the Romantic movement.

English philosopher John Locke's works lie at the foundation of modern philosophical empiricism and political liberalism.

Henry Cabot Lodge was an American politician from Massachusetts and the first U.S. Senate majority leader.

Mary Lyon was an educator and founder of the first women's college, which is now known as Mount Holyoke College.

A leading twentieth century philosopher, Jean-Francois Lyotard was noted for his analysis of postmodernity and its impact on humankind.

Alfred Thayer Mahan was an American naval officer and historian who was an exponent of sea power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

William Manchester was a historian who notably wrote about American president John F. Kennedy and Winston Churchill.

Horace Mann was an American politician and education reformer, best known for promoting universal public education and teacher training in "normal schools."

Professor Peter Mansfield received the Nobel Prize for further developing magnetic resonance (MRI) technology, leading to its widespread use in hospitals.

Rudolph A. Marcus is a Canadian chemist known for his research in electron-transfer reactions. He established what is known as the Marcus Theory, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1992.

Herbert Marcuse was an American political philosopher whose Marxists theories of 20th-century Western society influenced liberal student groups in the 1960s.

German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, anticapitalist works that form the basis of Marxism.

U.S. Psychologist Abraham Maslow was a practitioner of humanistic psychology. He is known for his theory of “self-actualization.”

Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell originated the idea of electromagnetic radiation. His ideas formed the basis for quantum mechanics.

Robert C. Maynard was a journalist and publisher best known for being the first African-American to own and publish a major daily newspaper (Tribune).

Architect Thom Mayne helped found the architectural design firm Morphosis, and co-founded the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Ornithologist Ernst Mayr demonstrated that the development of separate species in higher animals depends on the geographical isolation of precursor populations.

High school teacher Christa McAuliffe was the first American civilian selected to go into space. She died in the space shuttle Challenger’s explosion in 1986.

Cindy McCain is an Arizona businesswoman, a philanthropist who works with international nonprofit organizations, and the wife of U.S. Senator John McCain.

American politician Eugene J. McCarthy challenged Lyndon B. Johnson in the race for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination, which led to Johnson's withdrawal.

William McGuffey was a 19th-century educator remembered chiefly for his series of elementary readers.

Jackie McLean was an American jazz alto saxophonist and also an educator. His personal style included short phrases or irregular length.

Margaret Mead is best known for her studies and publications on cultural anthropology.

Dmitri Mendeleyev was a Russian chemist who developed the periodic classification of the elements.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher and man of letters, the leading exponent of phenomenology in France.

James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, and philosopher. He supported the radical philosophical belief called Utilitarianism.

John Stuart Mill, who has been called the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the 19th century, was a British philosopher, economist, and moral and political theorist. His works include books and essays covering logic, epistemology, economics, social and political philosophy, ethics, and religion, among them A System of Logic, On Liberty, and Utilitarianism.

Abby Lee Miller, who runs a Pittsburgh dance studio, is known for her tirades and tough training as star of Lifetime TV's reality show Dance Moms.

Mohammed was the founder of the religion of Islam, accepted by Muslims throughout the world as the last of the prophets of God.

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter, photographer and art teacher who took charge of the metal workshop of the Bauhaus.

Italian physician Maria Montessori was a pioneer of theories in early childhood education, which are still implemented in Montessori schools all over the globe.

Thomas More is known for his 1516 book Utopia and for his untimely death in 1535, after refusing to acknowledge King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England. He was canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint in 1935.

Barbara Morgan was the first teacher-astronaut to complete a shuttle mission on board the Endeavor in 2007.

Dr. Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor, author and media commentator who is executive director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Prolific novelist Iris Murdoch won a Booker Prize for The Sea, the Sea. In 2001, she was portrayed by Kate Winslet and Judy Dench in the biographical film Iris.

Reverend Pauli Murray was an American civil rights advocate and ordained priest. She is best known for furthering the civil rights and feminist causes.

Nobel Prize-winning Swedish economist and sociologist Gunner Myrdal is regarded as a major theorist of international relations and developmental economics.

Twice appointed the United States' poet laureate, Howard Nemerov was a writer with wit and illuminating irony.

English physicist and mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, most famous for his law of gravitation, was instrumental in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.