Search People Result | Academic Influence

Find the most important people in 24 academic disciplines from 4000 BCE to today

Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our proprietary AI program, we have ranked everyone in Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef based on the number of citations, publications, and academically relevant web presence.

Students and researchers now have the easiest and fastest way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you ever wanted to find famous medieval biologists, or influential engineers during the industrial revolution, now you can!

We’ve also put together our own custom rankings of people by discipline. And speaking of influential people, don’t forget to check out the interviews we do with the influential people of today!

Use the power of AI for your research! Simply select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) most relevant to your research, and the time periods of interest, and get enlightening results.

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List of the most influential people for the years 4000 BC – 2022

Aristotle

#1

Overall Influence

384 BC - 322 BC (62 years)

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy within the Lyceum and the wider Aristotelian tradition. His writings cover many subjects including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theatre, music, rhetoric, psychology, linguistics, economics, politics, meteorology, geology, and government. Aristotle provided a complex synthesis of the various philosophies existing prior to him. It was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry.

Plato

#2

Overall Influence

427 BC - 347 BC (80 years)

Plato was a Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He founded the Platonist school of thought and the Academy, the first institution of higher learning on the European continent.

Jesus

#3

Overall Influence

7 BC - 30 (37 years)

Jesus , also referred to as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ , was a first-century Jewish preacher and religious leader. He is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. Most Christians believe he is the incarnation of God the Son and the awaited messiah , prophesied in the Hebrew Bible.

Karl Marx

#4

Overall Influence

1818 - 1883 (65 years)

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume . Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.

Immanuel Kant

#5

Overall Influence

1724 - 1804 (80 years)

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy.

Muhammad

#6

Overall Influence

570 - 632 (62 years)

Muhammad ibn Abdullah was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of the world religion of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. He is believed to be the Seal of the Prophets within Islam. Muhammad united Arabia into a single Muslim polity, with the Quran as well as his teachings and practices forming the basis of Islamic religious belief.

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

#7

Overall Influence

1879 - 1955 (76 years)

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) was the greatest scientist of the 20th century, bar none. In fact, he’s probably the second-most original and influential scientist of all time-after Isaac Newton... But it’s close. To understand just a bit of his influence and genius, see our most influential people of all time. So, what did Einstein do, exactly? He published pioneering work on several phenomena that were deeply puzzling to physicists of his day, including Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect. Then, he made two startling discoveries that went far beyond anything known at the time that implied matter-energy equivalence (E=mc2).

Sigmund Freud

#8

Overall Influence

1856 - 1939 (83 years)

Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

#9

Overall Influence

1872 - 1970 (98 years)

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Socrates

#10

Overall Influence

470 BC - 399 BC (71 years)

Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem.

Charles Darwin

#11

Overall Influence

1809 - 1882 (73 years)

Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist and biologist, best known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now widely accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has b...

Gautama Buddha

#12

Overall Influence

563 BC - 483 BC (80 years)

Gautama Buddha was an ascetic and spiritual teacher of ancient India who lived during the 6th or 5th century BCE. He was the founder of Buddhism and is revered by Buddhists as a fully enlightened being who taught a path to Nirvana , freedom from ignorance, craving, rebirth and suffering.

Isaac Newton

#13

Overall Influence

1642 - 1727 (85 years)

Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author , widely recognised as one of the greatest mathematicians and physicists of all time and among the most influential scientists. He was a key figure in the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. His book Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica , first published in 1687, established classical mechanics. Newton also made seminal contributions to optics, and shares credit with German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz for developing infinitesimal calculus.

Thomas Aquinas

#14

Overall Influence

1225 - 1274 (49 years)

Thomas Aquinas, OP was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, who was an immensely influential philosopher, theologian, and jurist in the tradition of scholasticism; he is known within the scholastic tradition as the , the , and the . The name Aquinas identifies his ancestral origins in the county of Aquino in present-day Lazio, Italy. Among other things, he was a prominent proponent of natural theology and the father of a school of thought known as Thomism. He argued that God is the source of both the light of natural reason and the light of faith. He has been described as "the most influe...

David Hume

#15

Overall Influence

1711 - 1776 (65 years)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, scepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, positing that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as a British Empiricist.

John Locke

#16

Overall Influence

1632 - 1704 (72 years)

John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.

Homer

#17

Overall Influence

Homer is the legendary author to whom the authorship of the Iliad and the Odyssey is attributed. He is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time. In Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, Virgil refers to him as "Poet sovereign", king of all poets; in the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope acknowledges that Homer has always been considered the "greatest of poets".

René Descartes

#18

Overall Influence

1596 - 1650 (54 years)

René Descartes was a French lay Catholic philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics were central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age.

Adam Smith

#19

Overall Influence

1723 - 1790 (67 years)

Adam Smith was a Scottish economist and philosopher who was a pioneer of political economy and key figure during the Scottish Enlightenment. Also known as "The Father of Economics" or "The Father of Capitalism", he wrote two classic works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . The latter, often abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. In his work, Smith introduced his theory of absolute advantage.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche

#20

Overall Influence

1844 - 1900 (56 years)

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic and philologist whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 45, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia.

David Hilbert

#21

Overall Influence

1862 - 1943 (81 years)

David Hilbert was a German mathematician and one of the most influential mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, 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 .

Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman

#22

Overall Influence

1912 - 2006 (94 years)

Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

#23

Overall Influence

1770 - 1831 (61 years)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He is considered one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy, with his influence extending to the entire range of contemporary philosophical issues, from epistemology, logic, and metaphysics to aesthetics, philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Max Weber

#24

Overall Influence

1864 - 1920 (56 years)

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist regarded as among the most important theorists of the development of modern Western society. His ideas profoundly influence social theory and research. While Weber did not see himself as a sociologist, he is recognized as one of the fathers of sociology along with Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and Émile Durkheim.

Mahatma Gandhi

#25

Overall Influence

1869 - 1948 (79 years)

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was an Indian lawyer, anti-colonial nationalist and political ethicist who employed nonviolent resistance to lead the successful campaign for India's independence from British rule, and to later inspire movements for civil rights and freedom across the world. The honorific Mahātmā , first applied to him in 1914 in South Africa, is now used throughout the world.

Herodotus

#26

Overall Influence

484 BC - 425 BC (59 years)

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire . He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.

Cicero

#27

Overall Influence

106 BC - 43 BC (63 years)

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the establishment of the Roman Empire. His extensive writings include treatises on rhetoric, philosophy and politics, and he is considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the Roman equestrian order, and served as consul in 63 BC.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger

#28

Overall Influence

1889 - 1976 (87 years)

Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century. He has been widely criticized for supporting the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933, and there has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism.

Ptolemy

#29

Overall Influence

100 - 170 (70 years)

Claudius Ptolemy was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist, who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science. The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise. The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world. The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.

Karl Popper

#30

Overall Influence

1902 - 1994 (92 years)

Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first n...

John Dewey

#31

Overall Influence

1859 - 1952 (93 years)

John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.

Galen

#32

Overall Influence

Aelius Galenus or Claudius Galenus , often Anglicized as Galen or Galen of Pergamon, was a Greek physician, surgeon and philosopher in the Roman Empire. Considered to be one of the most accomplished of all medical researchers of antiquity, Galen influenced the development of various scientific disciplines, including anatomy, physiology, pathology, pharmacology, and neurology, as well as philosophy and logic.

Friedrich Engels

Friedrich Engels

#33

Overall Influence

1820 - 1895 (75 years)

Friedrich Engels , sometimes anglicised as Frederick Engels , was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist, whose father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford and Barmen, Prussia .

Thomas Hobbes

#34

Overall Influence

1588 - 1679 (91 years)

Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general.

Adolf Hitler

#35

Overall Influence

1889 - 1945 (56 years)

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Germany from 1933 until his death in 1945. He rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party, becoming the chancellor in 1933 and then assuming the title of in 1934. During his dictatorship, he initiated World War II in Europe by invading Poland on 1 September 1939. He was closely involved in military operations throughout the war and was central to the perpetration of the Holocaust, the genocide of about six million Jews and millions of other victims.

Augustine of Hippo

Augustine of Hippo

#36

Overall Influence

354 - 430 (76 years)

Augustine of Hippo , also known as Saint Augustine, was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings influenced the development of Western philosophy and Western Christianity, and he is viewed as one of the most important Church Fathers of the Latin Church in the Patristic Period. His many important works include The City of God, On Christian Doctrine, and Confessions.

Jürgen Habermas

Jürgen Habermas

#37

Overall Influence

1929 - Present (94 years)

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher mostly associated with the influential Frankurt School in Germany, part of the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, and historically an important center for research on social theory and critical philosophy. Habermas, now 90, earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954. Habermas is a famed philosopher who has taught a number of influential philosophers, including Hans Joas at the University of Chicago. Habermas is known for his work on communicative rationality, a position that place emphasis on rational...

Jacques Derrida

Jacques Derrida

#38

Overall Influence

1930 - 2004 (74 years)

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher best known for developing a philosophical approach that came to be known as deconstruction, an approach he utilized in numerous texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy.

Hippocrates

#39

Overall Influence

460 BC - 370 BC (90 years)

Hippocrates of Kos , also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician of the classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referred to as the "Father of Medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field, such as the use of prognosis and clinical observation, the systematic categorization of diseases, or the formulation of humoural theory. The Hippocratic school of medicine revolutionized ancient Greek medicine, establishing it as a discipline distinct from other fields with which it had traditionally b...

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

#40

Overall Influence

1646 - 1716 (70 years)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat. He is one of the most prominent figures in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history and philology. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science. In addition, he contributed to the field of library science: while serving as overs...

William James

#41

Overall Influence

1842 - 1910 (68 years)

William James was an American philosopher, historian, and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology".

Voltaire

#42

Overall Influence

1694 - 1778 (84 years)

François-Marie Arouet was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his nom de plume Voltaire , he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—especially the Roman Catholic Church—and of slavery. Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

Leon Trotsky

#43

Overall Influence

1879 - 1940 (61 years)

Lev Davidovich Bronstein , better known as Leon Trotsky , was a Russian-Ukrainian Marxist revolutionary, political theorist and politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism.

Charlemagne

#44

Overall Influence

748 - 814 (66 years)

Charlemagne or Charles the Great , a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first Holy Roman Emperor from 800. Charlemagne succeeded in uniting the majority of western and central Europe and was the first recognized emperor to rule from western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire around three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state that Charlemagne founded was the Carolingian Empire. He was canonized by Antipope Paschal III— an act later treated as invalid—and he is now regarded by some as beatified in t...

Euclid

#45

Overall Influence

323 BC - 285 BC (38 years)

Euclid was an ancient Greek mathematician active as a geometer and logician. Considered the "father of geometry", he is chiefly known for the Elements treatise, which established the foundations of geometry that largely dominated the field until the early 19th century. His system, now referred to as Euclidean geometry, involved new innovations in combination with a synthesis of theories from earlier Greek mathematicians, including Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, Thales and Theaetetus. With Archimedes and Apollonius of Perga, Euclid is generally considered among the greatest mathemati...

John von Neumann

John von Neumann

#46

Overall Influence

1903 - 1957 (54 years)

John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest coverage of any mathematician of his time and was said to have been "the last representative of the great mathematicians who were equally at home in both pure and applied mathematics". He integrated pure and applied sciences.

Carl Jung

#47

Overall Influence

1875 - 1961 (86 years)

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung's work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Noam Chomsky

#48

Overall Influence

1928 - Present (95 years)

Noam Chomsky currently holds joint appointments at MIT as Institute Professor Emeritus, and the University of Arizona as Laureate Professor. Chomsky completed his university studies between the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard. The influence of Chomksy in both linguistics and political discourse cannot be overstated; regardless of what aspect of his work you are discussing, his name always perks a few ears. Depending on who is describing him, Chomsky is either one of the most important linguists in modern times, one of the most important political thinkers, or (most often) both. Chomsky began his career squarely in academia as a professor of linguistics at MIT.

Werner Heisenberg

Werner Heisenberg

#49

Overall Influence

1901 - 1976 (75 years)

Werner Karl Heisenberg was a German theoretical physicist and one of the main pioneers of the theory of quantum mechanics. He published his work in 1925 in a breakthrough paper. In the subsequent series of papers with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, during the same year, his matrix formulation of quantum mechanics was substantially elaborated. He is known for the uncertainty principle, which he published in 1927. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the creation of quantum mechanics".

Martin Luther

#50

Overall Influence

1483 - 1546 (63 years)

Martin Luther was a German priest, theologian, author and hymnwriter. A former Augustinian friar, he is best known as the seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation and as the namesake of Lutheranism.

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