The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
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 influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#14001
Miner Searle Bates
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Miner Searle Bates was an American scholar. Life Bates was educated at numerous prestigious institutions such as the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; Yale University, where he earned a Ph.D. in Chinese history; and Hiram College, in Ohio. He worked with YMCA in India and Mesopotamia before finally beginning work at the University of Nanking sponsored by American churches, where he taught history from 1920 to 1950. In 1923 he married Lilliath Robbins, a teacher at nearby Ginling College.
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John Lambrick Vivian
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel John Lambrick Vivian , Inspector of Militia and Her Majesty's Superintendent of Police and Police Magistrate for St Kitts, West Indies, was an English genealogist and historian. He edited editions of the Heraldic Visitations of Devon and of Cornwall, standard reference works for historians of these two counties. Both contain an extensive pedigree of the Vivian family of Devon and Cornwall, produced largely by his own researches.
Go to Profile#14003
Stevenson Macadam
1829 - 1901 (72 years)
Stevenson Macadam was a Scottish scientist, analytical chemist, lecturer, and academic author. He was a founding member of the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and a founding member of the Society of Chemical Industry. He was also a President of the Royal Scottish Society of the Arts. He was a prominent lecturer in chemistry at institutions in Edinburgh, including Edinburgh University and the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and the Edinburgh veterinary colleges. He also had a large analytical chemical consulting practise.
Go to Profile#14004
Edward Blore
1787 - 1879 (92 years)
Edward Blore was a 19th-century English landscape and architectural artist, architect and antiquary. Early career He was born in Derby, the son of the antiquarian writer Thomas Blore. Blore's background was in antiquarian draughtsmanship rather than architecture, in which he had no formal training. Nevertheless, he designed a large palace for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in Alupka, Crimea, and important ecclesiastical furnishings designed by him included organ cases for Winchester Cathedral and Peterborough Cathedral and the choir stalls in Westminster Abbey. Charles Locke Eastl...
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William Hunter
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
William Gordon Hunter, or Bill Hunter, was a statistician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was co-author of the classic book Statistics for Experimenters, and co-founder of the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement with George E. P. Box.
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Franciszek Smuglewicz
1745 - 1807 (62 years)
Franciszek Smuglewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian draughtsman and painter. Smuglewicz is considered a progenitor of Lithuanian art in the modern era. He was precursor of historicism in Polish painting. He was also a founder of Vilnius school of art, his most prominent students were Jan Rustem, Jan Krzysztof Damel, Gaspar Borowski and Józef Oleszkiewicz. His father Łukasz Smuglewicz and brother Antoni were also painters.
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Alexander Nasmyth
1758 - 1840 (82 years)
Alexander Nasmyth was a Scottish portrait and landscape painter, a pupil of Allan Ramsay. He also undertook several architectural commissions. Biography Nasmyth was born in Edinburgh on 9 September 1758. He studied at the Royal High School and the Trustees' Academy and was apprenticed to a coachbuilder. Aged sixteen, he was taken to London by portrait painter Allan Ramsay where he worked on subordinate parts of Ramsay's works. Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh in 1778, where he worked as a portrait painter. Offered a loan by Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, Nasmyth left in 1782 for Italy, where he remained two years furthering his studies.
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George Sotter
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
George W. Sotter was an American painter best known for Impressionist-style works. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but eventually made his name in Philadelphia. He is also known for his work in stained glass, some of which are still installed in numerous churches. In the August 5, 2006 episode of Antiques Roadshow on PBS, filmed in Philadelphia, a Sotter oil painting was appraised at $120,000 to $180,000, much to the delight of its visibly stunned owner. Sotter studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy with artist and teacher Edward Redfield, 1869–1965, member of the regional New Hope group.
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George Eastman
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
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Saburo Hasegawa
1906 - 1957 (51 years)
was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
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Theo van Gogh
1857 - 1891 (34 years)
Theodorus van Gogh was a Dutch art dealer, the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh. Theo's unfailing financial and emotional support allowed his brother to devote himself entirely to painting. Theo died at the age of 33, six months after his brother died at the age of 37. At his death Theo owned practically all of his brother's artwork. Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger worked tirelessly to promote the work of Vincent and keep the memory of her husband alive. Theo made a significant impact on the art world as an art dealer, playing a crucial role in the introduction of contemporary French art to the public.
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Michael George Cooke
1934 - 1990 (56 years)
Michael George Cooke was an American academic. Cooke graduated from Yale University in 1957, and completed doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. He then began teaching at Yale, accepting an assistant professorship at his alma mater in 1968. Cooke later taught at the University of Iowa and at Boston University, before returning to Yale in 1971. Cooke was a defendant named for sexual harassment in the famous lawsuit Alexander v. Yale that helped established the legal responsibility of universities to curtail sexual misconduct. Cooke was later appointed by Yale as the Bird White Housum Professor of English Literature in 1987.
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Herbert W. Schooling
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Dr. Herbert W. Schooling was an American educator and former chancellor of the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He is the 16th chief executive officer of the Columbia campus and second since the creation of the University of Missouri System. Before becoming chancellor Schooling served as dean of faculties and Dean of the college of education. During his tenure the Hearnes Center was constructed.
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Ambrogio Lorenzetti
1290 - 1348 (58 years)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti or Ambruogio Laurati was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active from approximately 1317 to 1348. He painted The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti.
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Chen Mengjia
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Chen Mengjia was a Chinese scholar, poet, paleographer and archaeologist. He was considered the foremost authority on oracle bones and was Professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was married to the poet and translator Zhao Luorui . Chen died in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution after being labeled a "capitalist intellectual" and Rightist and being persecuted by officials.
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Leo Kahn
1894 - 1983 (89 years)
Leo Kahn was a German-Israeli painter. Biography Kahn was born in 1894 in Bruchsal, Germany. He served in the German army in 1914, then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe between 1919-1920 under the tutelage of Albert Hueinsen. Kahn travelled to Berlin , Holland, and France in search of artistic inspiration. In 1926, he was commissioned for the decoration of an important synagogue in Bruchsal. Kahn exhibited in Karlsruhe, Munich, Ulm, Zurich, and Paris. In 1928, Kahn lived in the south of France where he befriended the important Fauve artist André Derain. He then moved to Paris ...
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Rembrandt Peale
1778 - 1860 (82 years)
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
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Allan Ramsay
1713 - 1784 (71 years)
Allan Ramsay was a prominent Scottish portrait-painter. Life and career Ramsay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the eldest son of Allan Ramsay, poet and author of The Gentle Shepherd. From the age of twenty he studied in London under the Swedish painter Hans Hysing, and at the St. Martin's Lane Academy; leaving in 1736 for Rome and Naples, where he worked for three years under Francesco Solimena and Imperiali .
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Carl Hanson
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Carl Arnold Hanson was an American scholar in industrial and labor relations and college administrator who served as dean of faculty at Cornell University from 1957 to 1961 and as 10th president of Gettysburg College from 1961 to 1977.
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David Kakabadze
1889 - 1952 (63 years)
Davit' Kakabadze was a leading Georgian avant-garde painter, graphic artist and scenic designer. A multi-talent, he was also an art scholar and innovator in the field of cinematography as well as an amateur photographer. Kakabadze's works are notable for combining innovative interpretation of European "Leftist" art with Georgian national traditions, on which he was an expert. Kakabadze was born into a poor peasant family in the village of Kukhi near the town of Khoni. Sponsored by local philanthropists, he studied natural sciences at St. Petersburg University from which he graduated in 1916.
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Giovanni Lanfranco
1582 - 1647 (65 years)
Giovanni Lanfranco was an Italian painter of the Baroque period. Biography Giovanni Gaspare Lanfranco was born in Parma, the third son of Stefano and Cornelia Lanfranchi, and was placed as a page in the household of Count Orazio Scotti. His talent for drawing allowed him to begin an apprenticeship with the Bolognese artist Agostino Carracci, brother of Annibale Carracci, working alongside fellow Parmese Sisto Badalocchio in the local Farnese palaces. When Agostino died in 1602, both young artists moved to Annibale's large and prominent Roman workshop, which was then involved in working on the Galleria Farnese in the Palazzo Farnese gallery ceiling.
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George Bell
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
George Frederick Henry Bell was an Australian painter and teacher, critic, portraitist, violinist and war artist who contributed significantly to the advancement of the local Modern movement from the 1920s to the 1930s.
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Andrea Sacchi
1599 - 1661 (62 years)
Andrea Sacchi was an Italian painter of High Baroque Classicism, active in Rome. A generation of artists who shared his style of art include the painters Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Battista Passeri, the sculptors Alessandro Algardi and François Duquesnoy, and the contemporary biographer Giovanni Bellori.
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Stasys Ušinskas
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Stasys Ušinskas was a Lithuanian artist of multiple creative fields: modern painting, stained glass, scenography, animation, puppetry and decorative glass artworks. He is widely regarded as the "father of Lithuanian stained glass art".
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Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal
1936 - 1989 (53 years)
Abu Hena Mustafa Kamal was a Bangladeshi songwriter, poet, essayist, critic and presenter. In his early life, he was a singer on East Bengal radio and television. He was a professor of Bengali literature at the University of Rajshahi and worked for the government as the Director General of the Bangla Academy from 1986 until his death. He was awarded Ekushey Padak by the Government of Bangladesh in 1987. He published only three collections of poetry before he died of a heart attack in 1989.
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Anathon Aall
1867 - 1943 (76 years)
Anathon August Fredrik Aall was a Norwegian academic, philosopher and psychologist. Originally educated as a theologian, he became a professor of philosophy at University of Oslo. Background He was born at Nesseby in Finnmark, Norway. He was a son of vicar Niels Anton Aall and his wife Mathilde Susanne Dahl . His grandfather, Hans Cato Aall , was a Member of Parliament and mayor of Hammerfest. He was also a great-great-great-grandson of Nicolai Benjamin Aall, and a great-great-grandnephew of Niels, Jørgen and Jacob Aall.
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Theodor Puschmann
1844 - 1899 (55 years)
Theodor Puschmann was a German psychiatrist and one of the founders of the history of medicine as a discipline. His "diagnosis" of Richard Wagner's supposed mental illness was a significant contribution to the idea of degenerate music.
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Lane Mitchell
1907 - 1988 (81 years)
Lane Mitchell was an American ceramic engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the head of the Department of Ceramic Engineering there, now known as Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering.
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John White
Sir John White or Whyte of Aldershot and London was Lord Mayor of London 1563-64. He was knighted by Elizabeth I in 1564. He lived during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Lady Jane Grey, Mary I, and Elizabeth I.
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Frank Dengler
1853 - 1879 (26 years)
Franz Xavier Dengler was an American sculptor. Biography He went abroad while young, studied in the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and received there in 1874 a silver medal for his group the "Sleeping Beauty." He was for a short time an instructor in modeling in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, but resigned in 1877 on account of failing health, and moved to Covington, Kentucky, and afterward to Cincinnati. Among his works are "Azzo and Melda" , an ideal head of "America," and several portrait busts.
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De Scott Evans
1847 - 1898 (51 years)
De Scott Evans was an American painter known for working in a number of genres. Raised in Indiana, he spent much of his career in Ohio and then moved to New York City. His posthumous reputation is largely based on a number of trompe-l'œil still lifes that have been attributed to him.
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John Bascom Crenshaw
1861 - 1942 (81 years)
John Bascom Crenshaw was the head of the Department of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 38 years, and also served as the school's first athletic director, in which capacity he started Georgia Tech's lacrosse team.
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A. Diedrich Wackerbarth
1813 - 1884 (71 years)
Athanasius Francis Diedrich Wackerbarth was a translator and hymnwriter, but he is known especially for his 1849 translation of Beowulf. While working at the Astronomical Observatory in Uppsala, Sweden, he published several papers on astronomy.
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Henry Lee Graves
1813 - 1881 (68 years)
Henry Lee Graves was the president of Baylor University from 1846 to 1851. Biography Henry Lee Graves, son of Thomas Graves, was born in Yanceyville, North Carolina in 1813. He married Rebecca Williams Graves on February 3, 1836. Rebecca, from Caswell County, North Carolina, was Graves's first cousin once-removed. Graves and Rebecca had four daughters as well as two sons . Rebecca died in 1865. Seven years later, Graves married Myra Lusk Crumpler, a wealthy widow who survived him by twenty-one years.
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Domenico Morelli
1823 - 1901 (78 years)
Domenico Morelli was an Italian painter, who mainly produced historical and religious works. Morelli was immensely influential in the arts of the second half of the 19th century, both as director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Naples, but also because of his rebelliousness against institutions: traits that flourished into the passionate, often patriotic, Romantic and later Symbolist subjects of his canvases. Morelli was the teacher of Vincenzo Petrocelli and Ulisse Caputo.
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Adam Abramowicz
1710 - 1776 (66 years)
Adam Abramowicz was a Polish Jesuit. He taught eloquence, philosophy and moral theology, and also contributed to the construction of several churches and colleges. He entered the Society of Jesus on August 20, 1726, in Vilnius. In the years 1743–1744 he was a prefect of the Jesuit schools and in the years 1744–1748 was a professor of philosophy at Vilnius University.
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Samuel Train Dutton
1849 - 1919 (70 years)
Samuel Train Dutton was the superintendent of schools at Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a founder of the New York Peace Society and the treasurer of the American College for Girls at Constantinople.
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Piotr Buchkin
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Piotr Dmitrievich Buchkin was a Soviet and Russian painter, watercolorist, graphic artist, illustrator, and art teacher, Honored Arts Worker of the RSFSR. Buchkin lived and worked in Leningrad and was a member and one of the founders of the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of Russian Federation and representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for his portrait painting.
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John W. Gilmore
1872 - 1942 (70 years)
John Washington Gilmore was an American agronomist, educator and academic administrator who served as the first president of the University of Hawaii from 1908 to 1913. Biography He was born May 9, 1872, in White County, Arkansas, to Thomas Griffin and Emily Landrum Gilmore. He received his elementary and secondary education in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended Cornell University, obtaining the B.S. degree in 1898 and the M.S.A. degree in 1906.
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Thomas Ball
1819 - 1911 (92 years)
Thomas Ball was an American sculptor and musician. His work has had a marked influence on monumental art in the United States, especially in New England. Life He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to Thomas Ball, a house and sign painter and Elizabeth Wyer Hall. His father died when he was twelve. After several odd jobs to help support his family he spent three years working at the New England Museum, the precursor to the Boston Museum. There he entertained the visitors by drawing portraits, playing the violin, and singing, and repaired mechanical toys. He then became an apprentice for the museum wood-carver Abel Brown.
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Josef Václav Myslbek
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Josef Václav Myslbek was a Czech sculptor and medalist credited with founding the modern Czech sculpting style. Life Josef grew up poor in a suburb of Prague. His family pushed him to become a shoemaker but he shirked the duty by getting a job with a succession of Czech sculptors. There was no school program for sculpting so he studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague instead. Afterwards he opened his own sculpting studio. He became greatly inspired by the French sculpting style as well as related arts such as photography and literature. Josef Václav Myslbek influenced an entire...
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Lorus Pratt
1855 - 1923 (68 years)
Lorus Bishop Pratt was an American landscape painter and missionary. In 1890, he was one of a group of painters who studied in Paris under the sponsorship of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , in preparation for painting murals at the nearly completed Salt Lake Temple.
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Thomas Jones
1742 - 1803 (61 years)
Thomas Jones was a Welsh landscape painter. He was a pupil of Richard Wilson and was best known in his lifetime as a painter of Welsh and Italian landscapes in the style of his master. However, Jones's reputation grew in the 20th century when more unconventional works by him, not originally intended for exhibition, came to light. Most notable among these is a series of views of Naples which he painted from 1782 to 1783. By breaking with the conventions of classical landscape painting in favour of direct observation, they look forward to the work of Camille Corot and the Barbizon School in the 19th century.
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François Gérard
1770 - 1837 (67 years)
François Pascal Simon Gérard , titled as Baron Gérard in 1809, was a prominent French painter. He was born in Rome, where his father occupied a post in the house of the French ambassador, and his mother was Italian. After he was made a baron of the Empire in 1809 by Emperor Napoleon, he was known formally as Baron Gérard.
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J. David Arnold
J. David Arnold is an American academic who is president and professor of psychology at Eureka College in Eureka, Illinois. Arnold has been vice president for academic and student affairs at Missouri Western State College, St. Joseph, Missouri. He also served as vice president for academic affairs and provost at Salve Regina University. In addition he has served as provost at St. John Fisher College and as a dean and grants officer at Clarion University. He started his academic career teaching psychology and writing at St. Lawrence University, a residential liberal arts college where he was te...
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Pitt Cobbett
1853 - 1919 (66 years)
William Pitt Cobbett was an Australian academic, jurist, and editor. Cobbett was the founding Challis Chair of Law of the University of Sydney Faculty of Law. Early life and education Born to Pitt Cobbett and Caroline , William Pitt Cobbett was born on 26 July 1853 in Adelaide, South Australia. Pitt Cobbett was a wine merchant and, after returning to England, in 1864, was an ordained priest. The senior Pitt Cobbett, after filling various curacies, was vicar of the Church of the Holy Rood, Crofton, Hampshire, between 1874 and 1901.
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Abram Grushko
1918 - 1980 (62 years)
Abram Borisovich Grushko was a Soviet painter and art teacher that lived and worked in Leningrad. He was a member of the Leningrad branch of Union of Artists of Russian Federation and was one of the representatives of the Leningrad school of painting. He was most famous for his many landscape paintings.
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Reidar Aulie
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Reidar Aulie was a Norwegian artist. Biography Reidar Aulie was born in Kristiania , the son of Nils Baltazar Aulie and Martha Valstad . He grew up in a middle-class home in Oslo. Reider Aulie was the younger brother of Andreas Aulie , a lawyer who was the Norwegian attorney general from 1946 until 1967. Aulie graduated in 1927 and traveled to Paris in the autumn with fellow student, Bjarne Ness, who died of tuberculosis just before Christmas that year, only 25 years old. His death made a strong impression on the younger Aulie who had shared lodgings with Ness. Aulie debuted at the Autumn Exhibition in 1927.
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Hugo Magnus
1842 - 1907 (65 years)
Hugo Magnus was a German ophthalmologist and historian of medicine. He was of Jewish ancestry. He studied medicine at the University of Breslau, where he was a pupil of Albrecht Theodor Middeldorpf and Hermann Lebert. In 1867 he received his medical doctorate, and in 1873 qualified as a lecturer in ophthalmology. In 1883 he became an associate professor at the University of Breslau.
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John Reed
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
John Harford Reed was an Australian art editor and patron, notable for supporting and collecting of Australian art and culture with his wife Sunday Reed. Biography Early life Reed was born at 'Logan', near Evandale near Launceston, Tasmania, one of six children of wealthy English-born grazier Henry Reed and his wife Lila Borwick, born Dennison in the Orkney Islands, Scotland. Reed's youngest sister, Cynthia later married artist and printmaker Sidney Nolan. In 1911 the Reeds left Launceston for England to enhance their children's education. When World War I broke out they returned to Tasmania to settle with John Reed's grandmother at Mount Pleasant, a mansion in Prospect, Tasmania.
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