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,
#14151
Martin Mortensen
1872 - 1953 (81 years)
Martin Mortensen was a Danish-born American professor who headed of the Department of Dairy Industry at Iowa State College in Ames, Iowa. Early life and education Martin Mortensen was born on North Jutlandic Island in Sindal, Denmark. He was the son of Peder Christian Mortensen and Juliane Marie Mortensen . He completed a three-year course at the Royal Teachers Seminary and then emigrated to the United States in 1893. After working in and managing dairies in the Midwest and on the Pacific Coast, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in agriculture at Iowa State College and a LLD from Kans...
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Stan Frankel
1919 - 1978 (59 years)
Stanley Phillips Frankel was an American computer scientist. He worked in the Manhattan Project and developed various computers as a consultant. Early life He was born in Los Angeles, attended graduate school at the University of Rochester, received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, and began his career as a post-doctoral student under J. Robert Oppenheimer at University of California, Berkeley in 1942.
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Masahiro Yasuoka
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Masahiro Yasuoka was a Japanese scholar of yangmingism who, through his philosophy, reportedly exerted considerable influence on many Japanese politicians, including postwar prime ministers of Japan. He has been considered a backroom power broker or eminence grise.
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William D. Travis
#14155
El Greco
1541 - 1614 (73 years)
Domḗnikos Theotokópoulos , most widely known as El Greco , was a Greek painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. El Greco was a nickname, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, often adding the word , which means "Cretan".
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Edward Hopper
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Hopper created subdued drama out of commonplace subjects layered with a poetic meaning, inviting narrative interpretations. He was praised for "complete verity" in the America he portrayed. His career benefited significantly from his marriage to fellow artist Josephine Nivison, who contributed much to his work, both as a life-model and as a creative partner.
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Dionizy Smoleński
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Dionizy Smoleński was a specialist in the theory of combustion, explosives, and internal ballistics. Smoleński was professor at the Wrocław and the Warsaw University of Technology. He was also rector of those universities, in 1951–1960 and 1965–1969, respectively. Smoleński was a member of Polish Academy of Sciences, and held the post of scientific secretary, then vice-chairman of this organization. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he was an officer of the Home Army, vice-chief of arming of the Supreme Command of the Home Army. He was also a member of Sejm of the Polish People's Republic...
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Thomas Gainsborough
1727 - 1788 (61 years)
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
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Barnes Wallis
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Sir Barnes Neville Wallis was an English engineer and inventor. He is best known for inventing the bouncing bomb used by the Royal Air Force in Operation Chastise to attack the dams of the Ruhr Valley during World War II.
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Thomas Hart Benton
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Thomas Hart Benton was an American painter, muralist, and printmaker. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. The fluid, sculpted figures in his paintings showed everyday people in scenes of life in the United States.
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John Lord Cameron
#14162
Gilbert Stuart
1755 - 1828 (73 years)
Gilbert Stuart was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, begun in 1796, which is usually referred to as the Athenaeum portrait. Stuart retained the original and used it to paint scores of copies that were commissioned by patrons in America and abroad. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century and on various postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
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K. D. Tocher
1921 - 1981 (60 years)
Keith Douglas "Toch" Tocher was a computer scientist known for contributions to computer simulation. Tocher received a first-class BSc in Mathematics in 1941 from University College London, a BSc in Statistics in 1946 from University of London, and a PhD in 1952 at Imperial College London.
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Joshua Reynolds
1723 - 1792 (69 years)
Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter who specialised in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting, which depended on idealisation of the imperfect. He was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts and was knighted by George III in 1769.
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Otto Dix
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Wilhelm Heinrich Otto Dix was a German painter and printmaker, noted for his ruthless and harshly realistic depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic and the brutality of war. Along with George Grosz and Max Beckmann, he is widely considered one of the most important artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit.
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Berthold K.p. Horn
#14167
Nicolas Poussin
1594 - 1665 (71 years)
Nicolas Poussin was a French painter who was a leading painter of the classical French Baroque style, although he spent most of his working life in Rome. Most of his works were on religious and mythological subjects painted for a small group of Italian and French collectors. He returned to Paris for a brief period to serve as First Painter to the King under Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, but soon returned to Rome and resumed his more traditional themes. In his later years he gave growing prominence to the landscape in his paintings. His work is characterized by clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color.
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Ivan Edward Sutherland
#14169
Jean-Michel Basquiat
1960 - 1988 (28 years)
Jean-Michel Basquiat was an American artist who rose to success during the 1980s as part of the Neo-expressionism movement. Basquiat first achieved notoriety in the late 1970s as part of the graffiti duo SAMO, alongside Al Diaz, writing enigmatic epigrams all over Manhattan, particularly in the cultural hotbed of the Lower East Side where rap, punk, and street art coalesced into early hip-hop music culture. By the early 1980s, his paintings were being exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. At 21, Basquiat became the youngest artist to ever take part in Documenta in Kassel, Germany.
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William Hogarth
1697 - 1764 (67 years)
William Hogarth was an English painter, engraver, pictorial satirist, social critic, editorial cartoonist and occasional writer on art. His work ranges from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects", and he is perhaps best known for his series A Harlot's Progress, A Rake's Progress and Marriage A-la-Mode. Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian".
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Johannes Vermeer
1632 - 1675 (43 years)
Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch Baroque Period painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. He is considered one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age along with Rembrandt. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. He produced relatively few paintings, primarily earning his living as an art dealer. He was not wealthy at his death, leaving his wife in debt.
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Frank Malina
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Frank Joseph Malina was an American aeronautical engineer and painter, known for his pioneering work in early rocketry. Early life Malina was born in Brenham, Texas. His father came from Moravia. Frank's formal education began with a degree in mechanical engineering from Texas A&M University in 1934. The same year he received a scholarship to study mechanical engineering at the California Institute of Technology , where he obtained his doctoral degree in 1940.
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José García Santesmases
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
José García Santesmases was a physicist and pioneer of computer science in Spain. He built the first analog computer and the first microprocessor made in Spain. Biography José García Santesmases was born on May 2, 1907, in Barcelona. In 1930 he obtained the title of engineer for the École supérieure d'électricité in Paris. He continued his training and in 1935 he obtained the Extraordinary Prize of the University of Barcelona, graduating as a physicist. He obtained his doctorate at the University of Madrid in 1943 and later moved to the University of Granada, where he taught for two years, after which he returned to Madrid as a professor.
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Edward Joseph Mccluskey
#14175
Praxiteles
395 BC - 330 BC (65 years)
Praxiteles of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubitably attributable sculpture by Praxiteles is extant, numerous copies of his works have survived; several authors, including Pliny the Elder, wrote of his works; and coins engraved with silhouettes of his various famous statuary types from the period still exist.
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Daniel Chester French
1850 - 1931 (81 years)
Daniel Chester French was an American sculptor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is best known for his 1874 sculpture The Minute Man in Concord, Massachusetts, and his 1920 monumental statue of Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
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Hans Richter
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Hans Richter was a German Dada painter, graphic artist, avant-garde film producer, and art historian. In 1965 he authored the book Dadaism about the history of the Dada movement. He was born in Berlin into a well-to-do family and died in Minusio, near Locarno, Switzerland.
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Jean Dubuffet
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet was a French painter and sculptor of the Ecole de Paris . His idealistic approach to aesthetics embraced so-called "low art" and eschewed traditional standards of beauty in favor of what he believed to be a more authentic and humanistic approach to image-making. He is perhaps best known for founding the art movement art brut, and for the collection of works—Collection de l'art brut—that this movement spawned. Dubuffet enjoyed a prolific art career, both in France and in America, and was featured in many exhibitions throughout his lifetime.
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Andrea Mantegna
1431 - 1506 (75 years)
Andrea Mantegna was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g. by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.
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Gustave Doré
1832 - 1883 (51 years)
Paul Gustave Louis Christophe Doré was a French printmaker, illustrator, painter, comics artist, caricaturist, and sculptor. He is best known for his prolific output of wood-engravings illustrating classic literature, especially those for the Vulgate Bible and Dante's Divine Comedy. These achieved great international success, and he became renowned for printmaking, although his role was normally as the designer only; at the height of his career some 40 block-cutters were employed to cut his drawings onto the wooden printing blocks, usually also signing the image.
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Arthur Scherbius
1878 - 1929 (51 years)
Arthur Scherbius was a German electrical engineer who invented the mechanical cipher Enigma machine. He patented the invention and later sold the machine under the brand name Enigma. Scherbius offered unequalled opportunities and showed the importance of cryptography to both military and civil intelligence.
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David A. Atchison
#14183
Frans Hals
1591 - 1666 (75 years)
Frans Hals the Elder was a Dutch Golden Age painter, chiefly of individual and group portraits and of genre works, who lived and worked in Haarlem. Hals played an important role in the evolution of 17th-century group portraiture. He is known for his loose painterly brushwork.
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Emil Nolde
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Emil Nolde was a German-Danish painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.
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Matthias Grünewald
1480 - 1528 (48 years)
Matthias Grünewald was a German Renaissance painter of religious works who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century. His first name is also given as Mathis and his surname as Gothart or Neithardt.
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Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
1780 - 1867 (87 years)
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a French Neoclassical painter. Ingres was profoundly influenced by past artistic traditions and aspired to become the guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style. Although he considered himself a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, it is his portraits, both painted and drawn, that are recognized as his greatest legacy. His expressive distortions of form and space made him an important precursor of modern art, influencing Picasso, Matisse and other modernists.
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Albert Gleizes
1881 - 1953 (72 years)
Albert Gleizes was a French artist, theoretician, philosopher, a self-proclaimed founder of Cubism and an influence on the School of Paris. Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger wrote the first major treatise on Cubism, Du "Cubisme", 1912. Gleizes was a founding member of the Section d'Or group of artists. He was also a member of Der Sturm, and his many theoretical writings were originally most appreciated in Germany, where especially at the Bauhaus his ideas were given thoughtful consideration. Gleizes spent four crucial years in New York, and played an important role in making America aware of modern art.
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Anthony van Dyck
1599 - 1641 (42 years)
Sir Anthony van Dyck was a Flemish Baroque artist who became the leading court painter in England after success in the Spanish Netherlands and Italy. The seventh child of Frans van Dyck, a wealthy Antwerp silk merchant, Anthony painted from an early age. He was successful as an independent painter in his late teens and became a master in the Antwerp guild in 1618. By this time, he was working in the studio of the leading northern painter of the day, Peter Paul Rubens, who became a major influence on his work.
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Antoine Watteau
1684 - 1721 (37 years)
Jean-Antoine Watteau was a French painter and draughtsman whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement, as seen in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens. He revitalized the waning Baroque style, shifting it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical, Rococo. Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes, scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with a theatrical air. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
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Phidias
490 BC - 430 BC (60 years)
Phidias or Pheidias was an Ancient Greek sculptor, painter, and architect, active in the 5th century BC. His Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Phidias also designed the statues of the goddess Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, namely the Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon, and the Athena Promachos, a colossal bronze which stood between it and the Propylaea, a monumental gateway that served as the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens. Phidias was the son of Charmides of Athens. The ancients believed that his masters were Hegias and Ageladas.
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Donatello
1386 - 1466 (80 years)
Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi , better known as Donatello , was an Italian sculptor of the Renaissance period. Born in Florence, he studied classical sculpture and used his knowledge to develop an Early Renaissance style of sculpture. He spent time in other cities, where he worked on commissions and taught others; his periods in Rome, Padua, and Siena introduced to other parts of Italy the techniques he had developed in the course of a long and productive career. His David was the first freestanding nude male sculpture since antiquity; like much of his work it was commissioned by the Medic...
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Lee Pierce Butler
1884 - 1953 (69 years)
Lee Pierce Butler was a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. He was one of the first to use the term "library science" , by which he meant the scientific study of books and users, and was a leader in the new social-scientific approach to the field in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Asger Jorn
1914 - 1973 (59 years)
Asger Oluf Jorn was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark, and baptized Asger Oluf Jørgensen.
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Agnes Meyer Driscoll
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Agnes Meyer Driscoll , known as "Miss Aggie" or "Madame X'", was an American cryptanalyst during both World War I and World War II and was known as "the first lady of naval cryptology." Early years Born Agnes May Meyer in Geneseo, Illinois, in 1889, Driscoll moved with her family to Westerville, Ohio, in 1895 where her father, Gustav Meyer, had taken a job teaching music at Otterbein College. In 1909, he donated the family home to the Anti-Saloon League, which had recently moved its headquarters to Westerville. The home was later donated to the Westerville Public Library and is now home to the...
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Hans Hofmann
1880 - 1966 (86 years)
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American painter, renowned as both an artist and teacher. His career spanned two generations and two continents, and is considered to have both preceded and influenced Abstract Expressionism. Born and educated near Munich, he was active in the early twentieth-century European avant-garde and brought a deep understanding and synthesis of Symbolism, Neo-impressionism, Fauvism, and Cubism when he emigrated to the United States in 1932. Hofmann's painting is characterized by its rigorous concern with pictorial structure and unity, spatial illusionism, and use of bold color for expressive means.
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Charlotte Perkins Gilman
1860 - 1935 (75 years)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman , also known by her first married name Charlotte Perkins Stetson, was an American humanist, novelist, writer, lecturer, advocate for social reform, and eugenicist. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story "The Yellow Wallpaper", which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis.
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Nicéphore Niépce
1765 - 1833 (68 years)
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce was a French inventor and one of the earliest pioneers of photography. Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825 . In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, one of the world's first internal combustion engines, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.
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Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney
1875 - 1942 (67 years)
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptress, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.
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Graham Sutherland
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Graham Vivian Sutherland was a prolific English artist. Notable for his paintings of abstract landscapes and for his portraits of public figures, Sutherland also worked in other media, including printmaking, tapestry and glass design.
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Edward Lear
1812 - 1888 (76 years)
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, who is known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to make illustrations of birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems.
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