Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Czech sociologist and politician, 1st President of Czechoslovakia (b. 1850)
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (7 March 1850 – 14 September 1937) was a Czechoslovak politician, statesman, sociologist, and philosopher. Until 1914, he advocated restructuring the Austro-Hungarian Empire into a federal state. With the help of the Allied Powers, Masaryk gained independence for a Czechoslovak Republic as World War I ended in 1918. He co-founded Czechoslovakia together with Milan Rastislav Štefánik and Edvard Beneš and served as its first president.