Short answers, pulled from the story.
Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar, priest, theologian, and philosopher who lived from around 1225 to the 7th of March 1274. He is considered one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Catholic theology and Western philosophy, and the father of the school of thought known as Thomism.
Thomas Aquinas is best known for his unfinished Summa Theologica, written between 1265 and 1274, and for his Five Ways for proving the existence of God. He sought to synthesize Aristotelian philosophy with the principles of Christianity, and is also known for his virtue ethics and sacramental theology.
Fellow students called Thomas Aquinas a dumb ox because he was quiet and did not speak much, leading some to think he was slow. His teacher Albertus Magnus disagreed, saying he would one day produce such a bellowing in his teaching that it would be heard throughout the world.
Thomas Aquinas died on the 7th of March 1274 at the Cistercian Fossanova Abbey while giving commentary on the Song of Songs. It is proposed that he died from a chronic subdural hematoma caused weeks earlier when he struck his head on the branch of a fallen tree while riding a donkey along the Appian Way.
Thomas Aquinas stopped writing after an unusually long ecstasy during mass on the 6th of December 1273. He told his secretary Reginald of Piperno, "Reginald, I cannot, because all that I have written seems like straw to me," and the Summa Theologica was left unfinished.
Pope John XXII pronounced Thomas Aquinas a saint on the 18th of July 1323 in Avignon, fifty years after his death. Pope Pius V later proclaimed him a Doctor of the Church on the 15th of April 1567 with the Papal bull Mirabilis Deus.