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
George S. Wise
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
George Schneiweis Wise was an American sociologist who served as the first president of Tel Aviv University in Ramat Aviv, Israel from 1963 to 1971. Early life George Schneiweis was born in Pinsk, White Russia, Russian Empire in 1906. He emigrated to the United States in 1926. He graduated from Furman University in 1928 and got his advanced studies at Columbia University.
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Spyros G. Tzafestas
#14153
Umberto Boccioni
1882 - 1916 (34 years)
Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death. His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.
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Robert W. Kling
#14155
Paolo Uccello
1397 - 1475 (78 years)
Paolo Uccello , born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. In his book Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, Giorgio Vasari wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. Uccello used perspective to create a feeling of depth in his paintings. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano, which were wrongly entitled the Battle of Sant'Egidio of 1...
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Jean-Antoine Houdon
1741 - 1828 (87 years)
Jean-Antoine Houdon was a French neoclassical sculptor. Houdon is famous for his portrait busts and statues of philosophers, inventors and political figures of the Enlightenment. Houdon's subjects included Denis Diderot , Benjamin Franklin , Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Voltaire , Molière , George Washington , Thomas Jefferson , Louis XVI , Robert Fulton , and Napoléon Bonaparte .
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Raja Ravi Varma
1848 - 1906 (58 years)
Raja Ravi Varma was an Indian painter and artist. His works are one of the best examples of the fusion of European academic art with a purely Indian sensibility and iconography. Especially, he was notable for making affordable lithographs of his paintings available to the public, which greatly enhanced his reach and influence as a painter and public figure. His lithographs increased the involvement of common people with fine arts and defined artistic tastes among the common people. Furthermore, his religious depictions of Hindu deities and works from Indian epic poetry and Puranas have received profound acclaim.
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Paul Nash
1889 - 1946 (57 years)
Paul Nash was a British surrealist painter and war artist, as well as a photographer, writer and designer of applied art. Nash was among the most important landscape artists of the first half of the twentieth century. He played a key role in the development of Modernism in English art.
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Naum Gabo
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner , was an influential sculptor, theorist, and key figure in Russia's post-Revolution avant-garde and the subsequent development of twentieth-century sculpture. His work combined geometric abstraction with a dynamic organization of form in small reliefs and constructions, monumental public sculpture and pioneering kinetic works that assimilated new materials such as nylon, wire, lucite and semi-transparent materials, glass and metal. Responding to the scientific and political revolutions of his age, Gabo led an eventful and peripatetic life, moving to Berli...
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Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
1696 - 1770 (74 years)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo , also known as Giambattista Tiepolo, was an Italian painter and printmaker from the Republic of Venice who painted in the Rococo style, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school. He was prolific, and worked not only in Italy, but also in Germany and Spain.
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Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
1796 - 1875 (79 years)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot , or simply Camille Corot, was a French landscape and portrait painter as well as a printmaker in etching. A pivotal figure in landscape painting, his vast output simultaneously referenced the Neo-Classical tradition and anticipated the plein-air innovations of Impressionism.
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Marsden Hartley
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin. Early life and education Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha Marsden. His birth name was Edmund Hartley; he later assumed Marsden as his first name when he was in his early twenties. A few years after his mother's death when Hartley was 14, his sisters moved to Ohio, leaving him behind in Maine with his father where he worked in a shoe factory for a year.
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Dean A Fergusson
#14164
Tintoretto
1518 - 1594 (76 years)
Tintoretto was an Italian painter identified with the Venetian school. His contemporaries both admired and criticized the speed with which he painted, and the unprecedented boldness of his brushwork. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso . His work is characterised by his muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective, in the Mannerist style.
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John L. McNulty
1898 - Present (128 years)
The Very Right Reverend Monsignor John L. McNulty, Ph.D., was an American Roman Catholic Domestic prelate and the 13th President of Seton Hall University. McNulty received an A.B. and an M.A. from Seton Hall. He received his Ph.D. from NYU in 1935 and a Dipl. from d’ Écoles Supérieures at the Lille Catholic University in 1937. McNulty was ordained a priest of the Roman Catholic Church in 1925. He was an educator at Seton Hall University from 1928 and its president from 1949 - 1959, succeeding James F. Kelley. McNulty was invested as a Domestic Prelate of His Holiness Pius XII in 1950. Seton...
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Bronzino
1503 - 1572 (69 years)
Agnolo di Cosimo , usually known as Bronzino or Agnolo Bronzino, was an Italian Mannerist painter from Florence. His sobriquet, Bronzino, may refer to his relatively dark skin or reddish hair. He lived all his life in Florence, and from his late 30s was kept busy as the court painter of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. He was mainly a portraitist but also painted many religious subjects, and a few allegorical subjects, which include what is probably his best-known work, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1544–45, now in London. Many portraits of the Medicis exist in several versions ...
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François Boucher
1703 - 1770 (67 years)
François Boucher was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher, who worked in the Rococo style. Boucher is known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories, and pastoral scenes. He was perhaps the most celebrated painter and decorative artist of the 18th century.
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Duccio
1255 - 1319 (64 years)
Duccio di Buoninsegna , commonly known as just Duccio, was an Italian painter active in Siena, Tuscany, in the late 13th and early 14th century. He was hired throughout his life to complete many important works in government and religious buildings around Italy. Duccio is considered one of the greatest Italian painters of the Middle Ages, and is credited with creating the painting styles of Trecento and the Sienese school. He also contributed significantly to the Sienese Gothic style.
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Charles Grafly
1862 - 1929 (67 years)
Charles Allan Grafly, Jr. was an American sculptor, and teacher. Instructor of Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for 37 years, his students included Paul Manship, Albin Polasek, and Walker Hancock.
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Juan Gris
1887 - 1927 (40 years)
José Victoriano González-Pérez , better known as Juan Gris , was a Spanish painter born in Madrid who lived and worked in France for most of his active period. Closely connected to the innovative artistic genre Cubism, his works are among the movement's most distinctive.
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Jean Metzinger
1883 - 1956 (73 years)
Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907, Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.
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Dragomir Hurmuzescu
1865 - 1954 (89 years)
Dragomir M. Hurmuzescu was a Romanian physicist and inventor, teacher at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, and a correspondent member at the Romanian Academy. He is the founder of the electrotechnics science in Romania and a scientific collaborator of Marie and Pierre Curie.
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Morton Lippmann
#14174
Albert Laessle
1877 - 1954 (77 years)
Albert Laessle was an American sculptor and educator. He taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts for more than twenty years and is best remembered as an animalier. He won the 1918 Widener Gold Medal.
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William John Swainson
1789 - 1855 (66 years)
William John Swainson FLS, FRS , was an English ornithologist, malacologist, conchologist, entomologist, and artist. Life Swainson was born in Dover Place, St Mary Newington, London, the eldest son of John Timothy Swainson the Second , an original fellow of the Linnean Society. He was cousin of the amateur botanist Isaac Swainson. His father's family originated in Lancashire, and both grandfather and father held high posts in Her Majesty's Customs, the father becoming Collector at Liverpool.
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Robert Fulton
1765 - 1815 (50 years)
Robert Fulton was an American engineer and inventor who is widely credited with developing the world's first commercially successful steamboat, the . In 1807, that steamboat traveled on the Hudson River with passengers from New York City to Albany and back again, a round trip of , in 62 hours. The success of his steamboat changed river traffic and trade on major American rivers.
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Jean-Baptiste Greuze
1725 - 1805 (80 years)
Jean-Baptiste Greuze was a French painter of portraits, genre scenes, and history painting. Biography Early life Greuze was born at Tournus, a market town in Burgundy. He is generally said to have formed his own talent; at an early age his inclinations, though thwarted by his father, were encouraged by a Lyonnese artist named Grandon, or Grondom, who enjoyed during his lifetime considerable reputation as a portrait-painter. Grandon not only persuaded Greuze's father to give way to his son's wishes, and permit the boy to accompany him as his pupil to Lyon, but, when at a later date he left Ly...
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Denis Papin
1647 - 1713 (66 years)
Denis Papin FRS was a French physicist, mathematician and inventor, best known for his pioneering invention of the steam digester, the forerunner of the pressure cooker and of the steam engine. Early life and education Born in Chitenay , Papin attended a Jesuit school there. In 1661, he attended the University of Angers, from which he graduated with a medical degree in 1669.
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Giovanni Bellini
1430 - 1516 (86 years)
Giovanni Bellini was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father, but now that familial generational relationship is questioned. An older brother, Gentile Bellini was more highly regarded than Giovanni during his lifetime, but the reverse is true today. His brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna.
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David Alfaro Siqueiros
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
David Alfaro Siqueiros was a Mexican social realist painter, best known for his large public murals using the latest in equipment, materials and technique. Along with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco, he was one of the most famous of the "Mexican muralists".
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Albrecht Altdorfer
1480 - 1538 (58 years)
Albrecht Altdorfer was a German painter, engraver and architect of the Renaissance working in Regensburg, Bavaria. Along with Lucas Cranach the Elder and Wolf Huber he is regarded to be the main representative of the Danube School, setting biblical and historical subjects against landscape backgrounds of expressive colours. He is remarkable as one of the first artists to take an interest in landscape as an independent subject. As an artist also making small intricate engravings he is seen to belong to the Nuremberg Little Masters.
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Gutzon Borglum
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was an American sculptor best known for his work on Mount Rushmore. He is also associated with various other public works of art across the U.S., including Stone Mountain in Georgia, statues of Union General Philip Sheridan in Washington D.C. and in Chicago, as well as a bust of Abraham Lincoln which was exhibited in the White House by Theodore Roosevelt and which is now held in the United States Capitol crypt in Washington, D.C.
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John Sell Cotman
1782 - 1842 (60 years)
John Sell Cotman was an English marine and landscape painter, etcher, illustrator, and a leading member of the Norwich School of painters. Born in Norwich, the son of a silk merchant and lace dealer, Cotman was educated at the Norwich Grammar School. He showed an early talent for art. It was intended that he followed his father into the family business but, intent on a career in art, he moved to London in 1798, where he met artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Peter de Wint and Thomas Girtin, whose sketching club he joined, and whom he travelled with to Wales and Surrey. By 1800 he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy, showing scenes of the Welsh countryside there in 1801 and 1802.
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Valentin Serov
1865 - 1911 (46 years)
Valentin Alexandrovich Serov was a Russian painter and one of the premier portrait artists of his era. Life and work Youth and education Serov was born in Saint Petersburg, son of the Russian composer and music critic Alexander Serov and his wife and former student Valentina Serova, also a composer in her own right. Raised in a highly artistic milieu he was encouraged to pursue his talents by his parents and in his childhood he studied in Paris and Moscow under Ilya Repin and in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts under Pavel Chistyakov. Serov's early creativity was sparked by the realistic art of Repin and strict pedagogical system of Chistyakov.
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Henry Fuseli
1741 - 1825 (84 years)
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
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Cedric Gibbons
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Austin Cedric Gibbons was an Irish-American art director for the film industry. He also made a significant contribution to motion picture theater architecture from the 1930s to 1950s. Gibbons designed the Oscar statuette in 1928, but tasked the sculpting to George Stanley, a Los Angeles artist. He was nominated 39 times for the Academy Award for Best Production Design and won the Oscar 11 times, both of which are records.
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Thomas Cole
1801 - 1848 (47 years)
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas. His paintings are typically allegoric and often depict small figures or structures set against moody and evocative natural landscapes. They are usually escapist, framing the New World as a natural eden ...
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Henri Rousseau
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.
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Francesco Hayez
1791 - 1882 (91 years)
Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter. He is considered one of the leading artists of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, and is renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories, and portraits.
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W. Harry Vaughan
1900 - Present (126 years)
William Harry Vaughan, Jr. was a professor of ceramic engineering at the Georgia School of Technology and the founder and first director of what is now the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Education Vaughan graduated from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering chemistry in 1923. While at Georgia Tech, Vaughan was a member of Phi Kappa Phi and Pi Delta Epsilon; a contributor to The Technique in 1918 and 1919; Assistant Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Blue Print; Captain, R.O.T.C; and President, Emerson Chemical Society. Vaughan subsequently earned a Master of Scienc...
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Wu Wenzao
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Wu Wenzao was a Chinese sociologist, anthropologist, ethnologist. He was born in Jiangyin, Jiangsu. He was admitted into Tsinghua University at 1917. In 1923, his schoolmate Pan Guangdan persuaded him to go abroad to study at Dartmouth College after his graduation from Tsinghua. The classes in biology, chemistry, and the other natural sciences at Dartmouth greatly influenced him, and he later attempted to have his students use the scientific methods in their social studies. In 1925, he was admitted into Columbia University, and in 1928 he got his PhD in the Department of Sociology. In 1929, he married Bing Xin, when they were studying in the United States.
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Gwen Lux
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Gwen Lux Creighton professionally Gwen Lux, was an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She was among America's pioneer women sculptors.
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Peter Achermann
#14194
Jason D. Christie
#14195
John Flaxman
1755 - 1826 (71 years)
John Flaxman was a British sculptor and draughtsman, and a leading figure in British and European Neoclassicism. Early in his career, he worked as a modeller for Josiah Wedgwood's pottery. He spent several years in Rome, where he produced his first book illustrations. He was a prolific maker of funerary monuments.
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Frederic Littman
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Frederic Littman was a Hungarian-American sculptor, whose large sculpted public artwork, frequent collaborations with architect Pietro Belluschi, and four decades of teaching "left a towering artistic legacy in Oregon".
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Gordon Matta-Clark
1943 - 1978 (35 years)
Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He was also a pioneer in the field of socially engaged food art. Life and work Matta-Clark's parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American artist, and Roberto Matta, a Chilean Surrealist painter, of Basque, French and Spanish descent. He was the godson of Marcel Duchamp's wife, Teeny. His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, died by suicide in 1976.
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Andrew G. Renehan
#14199
Jeremiah D. M. Ford
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
Jeremiah Denis Mathias Ford was an American educator and author. He was the Smith Professor Emeritus of the French and Spanish Languages and Literature at Harvard University from 1907 to 1943. He was the youngest-ever to be appointed a professor at Harvard, the first Catholic faculty, and the last ever appointed as Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages from 1911 to 1943.
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