List of people known as the father or mother of something

Table of contents

1 The fathers of...

1.1 A to F
1.2 G to L
1.3 M to R
1.4 S to Z

2 The mothers of...

The fathers of...

(alphabetically by surname)

A to F | G to L | M to R | S to Z

A to F

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - The "Three Fathers" (Patriarchs) of the Jewish People
Philip Abelson - The father of the nuclear submarine
Nikolaj Abraham Abildgaard - The father of Danish painting
Samuel Adams - The cofather of the American Revolution
George Agricola - The father of Mineralogy
Steve Allen - The father of the television talk show
Eric Allman - The father of modern Internet e-mail
Peter Artedi - The father of ichthyology
Philip Astley - The father of the modern circus
Stephen F. Austin - The father of Texas
Stephen Moulton Babcock - The father of scientific dairying
Johann Sebastian Bach - The father of music
Leo Baekeland - The father of plastic
George Bancroft - The cofather of American History
Alexander Graham Bell - The father of the telephone
Edward Bernays - The father of public relations
William Bradford - The cofather of American History
Tycho Brahe - The cofather of modern astronomy
William Brown - The father of Argentinian navy
James Busby - The father of the Australian wine industry
Nolan Bushnell - The father of the video arcade industry
Santiago Ramon y Cajal - The father of Neuroscience
John Calvin - The father of Protestantism
Georg Cantor - The father of Set theory
John Cassavetes - The father of American independent film
Vinton G. Cerf - The father of the Internet
Anton Cermak - The father of Chicago's great Democratic machine
Peter Cook - The father of British satire
Nicolaus Copernicus - The cofather of modern astronomy
W. L. "Bill" Creech - The father of the Thunderbirds
John Nelson Darby - The father of dispensationalism
Sheikh Sayid Darwish - The father of Arab popular music
William Morris Davis - The father of American geography
De Chauliac - The father of modern surgery and hospitals
Lee De Forest - self-proclaimed "father of radio" (inventor of Audion amplifier tube, a key element).
Democritus - The father of atomic theory
Rene Descartes - The father of modern philosophy
Diophantus - The father of Algebra
Walt Disney - The father of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disneyland, and Disney Studios of animation
A. Santos Dumont - The father of aviation
Allen B. Dumont - The father of modern TV
John Boyd Dunlop - The father of the modern tire
Albert Einstein - The father of the Theory of Relativity
Quintus Ennius - The father of Roman poetry
Brian Eno - The father of ambient music
Robert Ettinger - The father of cryonics
Luis A. Ferré - The father of the movement for Puerto Rican statehood
Reginald Fessenden - The father of radio broadcasting
Alexander Fleming - The father of penicillin
Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens - The father of experimental brain research
Charles Fort - The father of modern Paranormalism
Gottlob Frege - The father of modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy
Sigmund Freud - The father of psychoanalysis

G to L

Galileo Galilei - The father of modern astronomy and of the scientific method of modern science
Gandhi - The father of the nation of India
Josip Generalić - The father of naive art
Flavio Gioja - The father of scientific navigation
Robert Goddard - The father of rocketry
Gorgias - The father of systematic study of rhetoric
James Gosling - The father of the Java programming language
Ben Graham - The father of modern Security Analysis
Thomas Graham - The father of colloid chemistry
David Wark Griffith - The father of film grammar
WC Handy - The father of the blues
Ben Harney - The father of ragtime
Joseph Haydn - The father of the modern orchestra
Herodotus - The father of history
Herophilus - The cofather of anatomy
William Herschel - The cofather of modern astronomy
Theodor Herzl - The father of modern secular Zionism
Hippocrates - The father of medicine
Reimar Horten - the father of aircraft stealth technology
Emperor Hung Vuong I - The father of Viet Vo Dao martial arts
James Hutton - The father of modern geology
Abraham Jacobi - The father of pediatrics
Fredrick Jahn - The father of gymnastics
Bill James - The father of Sabermetrics
Thomas Jefferson - The father of archaeology
Theodore Judah - The father of the First Transcontinental Railroad (North America)
Karadjordje - The father of Serbia
Kaysone Phomvihane - The founding father of the modern, liberated Lao nation
Mustafa Kemal - The father of modern Turkey
Johannes Kepler - The cofather of modern astronomy
Soren Kierkegaard - The father of existentialism
William Kirby - The father of entomology
Abraham Kuyper - The father of Dutch neo-Calvinism
Jack LaLanne - The godfather of fitness
Sydney M. Lamb - The father of stratificational grammar
Lancist - The father of clinical medicine
Antoine Lavoisier - The father of modern chemistry
Jacques-Donatien Le Ray - The French cofather of the American Revolution
Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt - The father of bibliography
John Lennard-Jones - The father of modern computational chemistry
J.C.R. Licklider - The father of artificial intelligence
Carolus Linnaeus - The father of systematics
Joseph Lister - The father of modern antisepsis
Raymond Loewy - The father of industrial design
Professor Longhair - The father of funk
Ivan Lupis - The father of the torpedo
Martin Luther - The father of the Lutheran Church

M to R

Niccolo Machiavelli - The father of Machiavellian philosophy
James Madison - The father of the United States Constitution
Ramon Magsaysay - The father of civic action in the Philippines
Carl Oscar Malm - The father of Finnish Sign Language
Marcello Malpighi - The father of comparative physiology
Thomas Malthus - The father of the Malthusian Theory on Population
Herbert Marcuse - The father of the New Left
Karl Marx - The father of Marxism
George Mason - The father of the Bill of Rights
John McLoughlin - The father of Oregon (by vote of the Oregon legislature)
George E. McNeill - The father of the eight hour work day
Gregor Mendel - The father of genetics
Spike Milligan - The father of modern British comedy
Billy Mitchell - The father of United States Air Force
Andrija Mohorovičić - The father of seismology
Bill Monroe - The father of Bluegrass music
Claudio Monteverdi - The father of opera
Robert Moon - The father of the ZIP code
Muddy Waters - The father of Chicago blues
Johannes Peter Muller - The father of modern physiology
John von Neumann - The father of game theory
Isaac Newton - The cofather of modern astronomy
Abu Nidal - "The father of (Arab) struggle"
Sondre Norheim - The father of skiing
Hermann Oberth - The father of space flight
Fredrik Pacius - The father of Finnish music
Henry Parkes - The father of Australian Federation
Louis Pasteur - The father of bacteriology
Charles Peirce - The father of modern semiotics
Eduard Slavoljub Penkala - The father of the ink pen
Phan Boi Chau - The cofather of modern Vietnamese nationalism
Phan Chu Trinh - The cofather of modern Vietnamese nationalism
Jozef Pilsudski - The grandfather of the modern Poles
Camille Pissarro - The father of Impressionism
Henri Poincaré - The father of Topology
Christopher Polhem - The father of Swedish engineering
Casimir Pulaski - The father of the United States Army Cavalry
Pythagoras - The father of numbers
Damrong Rajanubhab - The father of the Thai history, educational system, modern health system and provincial administration
S. R. Ranganathan - The father of library science in India
Regiomontanus - The cofather of modern astronomy
Mikołaj Rej; - The father of Polish literature
Hyman G. Rickover The father of the Unites States Nuclear Navy
Louis Riel - The father of Manitoba
Jimmie Rodgers - The father of country music
Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The father of Romanticism

S to Z

Paul Sandby - The father of English watercolor painting
Ferdinand de Saussure - The father of modern linguistics
Moritz Schlick - The father of logical positivism
Ivan Schwartz - The father of the airplane (Croatia)
Ambrose Sevier - The father of Arkansas Statehood
King Mohammed Zahir Shah - The father of the nation of Afghanistan
Claude E. Shannon - The father of information theory
Adam Smith - The father of modern economics
Shinji Sogo - The father of the Bullet Train, the Shinkansen
Niels Steensen - The father of geology
John C. Stennis - The father of the modern United States Navy
Georg Stiernhielm - The father of Swedish poetry
Sun Yat-sen - The father of the nation of the Republic of China
Edward Teller - The father of the hydrogen bomb
Tertullian - The father of the Western Church
Nikola Tesla - The father of ?
LaMarcus Adna Thompson - The "Father of Gravity" or "Father of the Gravity Ride" (i.e. the rollercoaster)
J. R. R. Tolkien - The father of the modern high fantasy genre
Franjo barun Trenk - The father of military music
Leon Trotsky - The father of the Red Army (army of the USSR)
Andre Thi Truong - The father of the personal computer
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky - The father of astronautics
Charles Tupper - The father of Canadian Confederation
Alan Turing - The father of computer science
Paolo Uccello - The father of the art of perspective
Rustom Jal Vakil - The father of modern cardiology
Edgard Varèse - The father of electronic music
Andreas Vesalius - The cofather of anatomy
Carl Vinson - The father of the two-ocean navy of the United States Navy
Faust Vrančić - The father of the parachute
John Wanamaker - The father of the U.S. department store
George Washington - The father of the United States of America
John B. Watson - The father of behaviorism
Isaac Watts - The father of English Hymnody
Arthur Gordon Webster - The father of the American Physical Society
Alfred Wegener - The father of plate tectonics
President Woodrow Wilson - The father of the League of Nations
Johann Winckelmann - The cofather of archaeology
Wright brothers - The fathers of aviation
Wilhelm Wundt - The father of modern psychology
Rouzbeh Yassini - The father of the cable modem
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda - The father of the modern Hebrew language spoken in Israel

The mothers of...

Jane Addams - The mother of Social Work
Susan B. Anthony - "The Mother of Us All" (title of Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera)
Isadora Duncan - The mother of modern dance
Mary Harris Jones or Mother Jones - The "Grandmother of All Agitators".
Winnie Madikizela-Mandela - The "mother of the nation" (of post-Apartheid South Africa)
Mary- The mother of Jesus
Lillian Moller Gilbreth - The mother of modern management
Phoebe Palmer - The mother of the holiness movement
Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel and Leah - The "Four Mothers" (Matriarchs) of the Jewish people
Alice Waters - The mother of California cuisine