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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Computer Science,
#14201
A. L. Strand
1894 - 1980 (86 years)
August Leroy Strand was an American entomologist who served as President of Montana State University from 1937 to 1942, and as President of Oregon State University from 1942 to 1961. Life and career Strand was born on February 12, 1894, in Victoria, Texas, to August M. and Christina Strand. His father was born in Sweden about 1855, and his mother in Sweden about 1861. They emigrated to the United States, first taking up residence in Missouri, where their first three children were born: Rose L. in 1885, Ettie C. in 1888, and May F. in 1887. The family moved to Victoria, Texas, where August was born in 1894.
Go to Profile#14202
Dwight Hillis Wilson
1909 - 1962 (53 years)
Dwight Hillis Wilson Sr. was an American archivist, researcher, and teacher. He was the first archivist of Fisk University. Personal life Wilson was born on October 18, 1909, in Raleigh, North Carolina. His father, a Methodist minister, was also born in South Carolina while his mother came from Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#14203
Annette Smith Burgess
1899 - 1962 (63 years)
Annette Smith Burgess was an American medical illustrator and instructor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Early life Annette Smith was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1899 to Richard Henry Smith and his wife. She attended public schools in Baltimore. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under Max Brödel. She attended Johns Hopkins University from 1923 to 1926.
Go to Profile#14204
Henry Rankin Poore
1859 - 1940 (81 years)
Henry Rankin Poore was an American painter and illustrator, known for incorporating human and animal figures into his landscape and genre paintings. He was also a lecturer and critic, and a prolific author on art and composition.
Go to Profile#14205
Friedrich Karrenberg
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Friedrich Karrenberg was a German Evangelical-reformed social ethicist and professor. He was a leading member of the Evangelical Church in the Rhineland. Life Karrenberg was born in Velbert, a manufacturing town a short distance to the east of Düsseldorf. He came from an entrepreneurial family. Hugo Karrenberg, his father, owned a factory making barrels and rivets, in which Friedrich served an apprenticeship. He would take over the business when his father died in 1940. Early on he also involved himself in youth movement activities, one effect of which was to awaken an interest in socio-ethical questions.
Go to Profile#14206
Carl Holty
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Carl Robert Holty was a German-born American abstract painter. Raised in Wisconsin, he was the first major abstract painter to gain notoriety from the state. Harold Rosenberg described Holty as "a figure of our art history," known for his use of color, shape and form.
Go to Profile#14207
Richard Koppe
1916 - 1973 (57 years)
Richard Koppe was an American artist whose work has been exhibited in many museums in America including the MOMA and the Whitney. Koppe was born in St. Paul, Minnesota and moved to Chicago in 1937 to study at the New Bauhaus . In 1950, his work was exhibited at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition "American Painting Today." He headed the Department of Visual Design at the Institute of Design until 1963. In 2015, 70 of his paintings, prints and drawings were exhibited at the Elmhurst Art Museum. Koppe was married to Catherine Hinkle, also an artist.
Go to Profile#14208
Chang Hsin-hai
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Chang Hsin-hai , also known as H. H. Chang, was an early 20th century Chinese scholar and writer. Early life and academic training Chang Hsin‐hai was born June 25, 1898, in Shanghai, China. After studying at Songhua College in Peking from 1916 to 1918, he relocated to the United States to complete his higher education. He received an A.B. from Johns Hopkins University in 1919, an A.M., and a Ph. D. in English literature from Harvard University in 1920 and 1923, respectively. While completing his doctoral work, Chang served as an attache to the Chinese Delegation at the Washington Disarmament ...
Go to Profile#14209
Cecilia Hennel Hendricks
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Cecilia Hennel Hendricks was a faculty member at Indiana University Bloomington, Wyoming homesteaderer, and ran for the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in Wyoming in 1926. Biography Cecilia Hennel was born in Evansville, Indiana, on March 2, 1883, to parents Joseph H. Thuman Hennel and Anna Marie Thuman Hennel. The Hennels moved from Evansville to Bloomington in 1905 so that their daughters Cora, Cecillia, and Edith could attend Indiana University.
Go to Profile#14210
Ichiro Fukuzawa
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Ichiro Fukuzawa was a Japanese modernist painter credited with the establishment of Surrealism in Japan's artistic communities during the early 1930s. While Surrealist artists are known for their distinct focus on the human subconsciousness and dreams, Fukuzawa's Western-style paintings depart from such conventions by instead providing sharply satirical commentaries on human behavior and systemic social issues in Japan, including the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the adverse impacts of the 1973 Oil Crisis on the Japanese economy. Since he was associated with Surrealism's progressive i...
Go to Profile#14211
Hassan Suhrawardy
1884 - 1946 (62 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel Hassan Suhrawardy CStJ, FRCS was a Bengali surgeon, military officer in the British Indian Army, politician, and a public official. He was the former chairman of the executive committee of the East London Mosque. Knighted in 1932, he renounced his British honours a month before his death.
Go to Profile#14212
John Edwin Windrow
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
John Edwin Windrow was an American educator. He became known as "Mr. Peabody" for his five-decade career at Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a critic of Nashville's social ills and intellectual segregation.
Go to Profile#14213
Shina Inoue Kan
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Shina Inoue Kan , also seen as "Shina Inouye", "Shina Kan", and "Shinako Kan", was a Japanese college professor. Early life Shina Inoue was born on 25 July 1899 in Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. In 1921, her mother Hideko Inoue attended the Conference on Limitation of Armament in Washington D.C., representing the women's peace movement in Japan, with Yajima Kajiko and plant scientist Marian Irwin Osterhout. In 1931, Hide Inoue became the first woman president of Japan Women's University.
Go to Profile#14214
Katherine R. Whitmore
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Katherine R. Whitmore was a Spanish literature professor at Smith College. She majored in Spanish language and literature at the University of Kansas, and received her doctorate from Berkeley. She taught at a college in Richmond and, from 1930 on, at Smith College. She married Brewer Whitmore, another professor at Smith, in 1939.
Go to Profile#14215
Maximilian Salzmann
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Maximilian Salzmann was an Austrian ophthalmologist. In 1887 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, where he later worked as an assistant to Ernst Fuchs at the eye hospital. In 1906 he became an associate professor, then in 1911 was appointed professor of ophthalmology at the University of Graz. In 1918/19 he served as dean to the faculty of medicine.
Go to Profile#14216
Elena Freda
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Elena Freda was an Italian mathematician and mathematical physicist known for her collaboration with Vito Volterra on mathematical analysis and its applications to electromagnetism and biomathematics.
Go to Profile#14217
John McCrae
1872 - 1918 (46 years)
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during the First World War and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war. His famous poem is a threnody, a genre of lament.
Go to Profile#14218
Georges Dwelshauvers
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Georges Dwelshauvers, who also wrote under the pseudonym Georges Mesnil was a Flemish Belgian philosopher and psychologist. He was the brother of the art critic and anarchist Jacques Mesnil. Dwelshauvers studied philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles before studying in Germany, where he was attracted to the new experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. His attempt to submit a psychological thesis for a Brussels doctorate was blocked by Guillaume Tiberghien in what became known as the Dwelshauvers affair, and Dwelshauvers only started lecturing in philosophy after Tiberghien's retire...
Go to Profile#14219
Igor Grabar
1871 - 1960 (89 years)
Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar was a Russian post-impressionist painter, publisher, restorer and historian of art. Grabar, descendant of a wealthy Rusyn family, was trained as a painter by Ilya Repin in Saint Petersburg and by Anton Ažbe in Munich. He reached his peak in painting in 1903–1907 and was notable for a peculiar divisionist painting technique bordering on pointillism and his rendition of snow.
Go to Profile#14220
J. C. P. Miller
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Jeffrey Charles Percy Miller was an English mathematician and computing pioneer. He worked in number theory and on geometry, particularly polyhedra, where Miller's monster refers to the great dirhombicosidodecahedron.
Go to Profile#14221
Henry Thew Stephenson
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Henry Thew Stephenson was a teacher and writer. Stephenson was born in Cincinnati to Reuben Henry and Louise Stephenson. He attended Woodward High School before gaining degrees from Ohio State University, Harvard University. and Indiana University. He spent a year doing research at the British Museum.
Go to Profile#14222
Jerry Bywaters
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Williamson Gerald Bywaters , known as Jerry Bywaters, was an American artist, university professor, museum director, art critic and a historian of the Texas region. Based in Dallas, Bywaters worked to elevate the quality of Texas art, attracting national recognition to the art of the region.
Go to Profile#14223
Arthur Illies
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Karl Wilhelm Arthur Illies was a German painter and graphic artist. Life and work He was born to Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Illies, a merchant, and his wife, Albertine Mathilde née Schwarze. He attended the Johanneum then, at sixteen, began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter at the firm of . In the evenings he studied nude drawing with and, on Sundays, he studied animal drawing at the zoo with . In 1889, after passing his journeyman examination, he went to Munich for studies at the Königlichen Kunstgewerbeschule, where his primary instructor was Ludwig Lesker . The following year, he enrolled at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts.
Go to Profile#14224
Kaj Franck
1911 - 1989 (78 years)
Kaj Gabriel Franck was one of the leading figures of Finnish design and an influential figure in design and applied arts between 1940 and 1980. Franck's parents were Kurt Franck and Genéviève "Vevi" Ahrenberg. He was a Swedish-speaking Finn, and he was of German descent through his father.
Go to Profile#14225
Ernest A. Batchelder
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Ernest Allan Batchelder was an American artist and educator who made Southern California his home in the early 20th century. He created art tiles and was a leader in the American Arts and Crafts Movement.
Go to Profile#14226
Franciszek Misztal
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Franciszek Misztal - Polish aircraft designer. He studied at Lviv Polytechnic and received his doctorate in 1929 at the Technical University in Aachen. From 1928 he worked in the PZL in Warsaw as a constructor. Contributor to the design of aircraft PZL.23 Karaś , PZL.19, PZL.26 and the chief designer of PZL.38 Wilk. Inventor of the caisson structure with corrugated wings.
Go to Profile#14227
Ritchie Girvan
1877 - Present (149 years)
Ritchie Girvan was a Scottish literary scholar, author, and academic; throughout his career he was associated with the University of Glasgow, where he made his name studying the Old English poem Beowulf. He is best known for his 1935 book Beowulf and the Seventh Century: Language and Content.
Go to Profile#14228
Lucien March
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Lucien March was a French demographer, statistician, and engineer. In 1878 Lucien March enrolled in l'École polytechnique and after graduation in 1880 served in the naval artillery corps. He was the director of the from 1896 to 1920. In 1896, he introduced Hollerith punched card tabulating machines into France and later invented an improved machine, the classifier-counter-printer, which was used until the 1940s. He also arranged a sorting process using the workplace addresses of the people counted in the French population census to generate valuable economic data and labor statistics.
Go to Profile#14229
Hale Woodruff
1900 - 1980 (80 years)
Hale Aspacio Woodruff was an American artist known for his murals, paintings, and prints. Early life, family and education Woodruff was born in Cairo, Illinois, on August 26, 1900. He grew up in a black family in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended the local segregated schools. He studied at the Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Harvard Fogg Art Museum.
Go to Profile#14230
James Goldschmidt
1874 - 1940 (66 years)
James Paul Goldschmidt was a German jurist who made important contributions to German criminal law and criminal procedure law. He studied legal science in Heidelberg and Berlin. Of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, Goldschmidt was a professor at the University of Berlin from 1919 until his retirement in 1934 due to racial policy of Nazi Germany. In 1938 he eventually emigrated to the United Kingdom, and later Uruguay, where he died in 1940.
Go to Profile#14231
Louis Bouché
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Louis George Bouché was an American artist, muralist, and decorator. He was a 1933 Guggenheim Fellow. Life Bouché was born in New York City. He traveled to Paris at age thirteen in 1909 to live with family and studied at the Lycée Carnot, Académie Colarossi, and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He studied at the Art Students League of New York in 1915, with Dimitri Romanovsky and Frank Vincent DuMond. In 1921 he married Marian. Bouché curated an art gallery in Wanamaker's department store, from 1922 to 1926.
Go to Profile#14232
Clifford Ulp
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Clifford McCormick Ulp was one of Rochester's foremost professors of the arts during the first half of the 20th century. Early life Clifford Ulp was born in Olean, New York in 1885. He attended Rochester's East High School. He continued his studies at the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, or what is now known as Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated in 1908. He also attended the Art Students League in New York City on scholarship. Some of his more well known teachers included Charles H. Woodbury, Emile Gruppe and William Merritt Chase.
Go to Profile#14233
George Gilmour
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
George Peel Gilmour B.A, M.A, Ph.D. was a Canadian university president. He was the youngest chancellor of McMaster University, serving from 1941 to 1949, then serving under the title of president and vice-chancellor until 1961. Gilmour Hall, the building containing the office of the president and the office of the registrar at McMaster University, is named after him.
Go to Profile#14234
Hans Grundig
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Hans Grundig was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement. He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season .
Go to Profile#14235
Josef Albers
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919. In 1920, Albers joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student and later became a faculty member in 1922, teaching the principles of handicrafts.
Go to Profile#14236
Petros Kokkalis
1896 - 1962 (66 years)
Professor Petros Kokkalis , a distinguished professor of Medicine in the University of Athens has been one of the leading figures of Medicine in pre WWII Greece, introducing pioneering methods in thoracic surgery and neurosurgery. His main medical achievements include the introduction of thoracoplasty in Greece and removal of the phrenic nerve for the treatment of tuberculosis, as well as the first pneumonectomy with the Tourniquet method and the first pericardiectomy for the release of compressive pericarditis.
Go to Profile#14237
James Melvin Rhodes
1916 - 1976 (60 years)
James Melvin Rhodes was an American educational scientist, assistant professor of education and creativity researcher who was the originator of the pioneering concept of the 4 "P"s of creativity. Biography Mel Rhodes was born on June 14, 1916, to Waldo and Grace Rhodes in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, as the second eldest of 7 siblings.
Go to Profile#14238
Charles Comfort
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Charles Fraser Comfort, LL. D. was a Scotland-born Canadian painter, sculptor, teacher, writer and administrator. Career and biography Early life Born near Edinburgh, Scotland, Comfort moved to Winnipeg in 1912 with his family. His father found work with the treasury department for the city of Winnipeg. Comfort, as the eldest child, had to work from a young age to help support his family. In 1914, he began work as a commercial artist at the newly established Brigdens commercial art branch office in Winnipeg established by Frederick Henry Brigden, and by 1916 Comfort started attending eveni...
Go to Profile#14239
Lyon Blease
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Prof. Walter Lyon Blease , was a British Liberal Party politician, barrister and academic. Background He was born in Liverpool, the son of Walter and Mary Cecilia Blease. He was educated at Parkfield School, Liverpool; Shrewsbury School and Liverpool University. He was awarded the Studentship at Bar Final Examination, 1906. He married, in 1918, Harriott Davies. They had three daughters.
Go to Profile#14240
Howard Besser
1900 - Present (126 years)
Howard Besser is a scholar of digital preservation, digital libraries, and preservation of film and video. He is Professor of Cinema Studies and the founding director of the NYU Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program , a graduate program in the Tisch School. Besser also worked as a Senior Scientist at New York University's Digital Library Initiative. He conducted extensive research in image databases, multimedia operation, digital library, and social and cultural influence of the latest Information Technology. Besser is a prolific writer and speaker, and has consulted with many governments, educational institutions, and arts agencies on digital preservation matters.
Go to Profile#14241
Georges Hostelet
1875 - 1960 (85 years)
Georges Hostelet was a Belgian chemist, sociologist, mathematician, and philosopher. He was born in the municipality of Chimay in 1875. He attended the Royal Military Academy, and reached the rank of lieutenant. In 1897, he left the academy and enrolled in the University of Liège, where he received his doctorate in 1905. two years later, Hostelet began work with the Solvay & Cie Company as a chemical engineer and worked closely with Ernest Solvay. In 1911, he attended the First Solvay Conference, eventually becoming its last surviving participant.
Go to Profile#14242
Z. T. Johnson
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Zachary Taylor Johnson was born June 18, 1897, in Athens, Georgia, to a farmer's family. While working as a printer for the Macon News in 1913, Johnson converted to Christianity and felt called of God to preach. He entered Asbury University in September 1913 and transferred to Trevecca College in 1914.
Go to Profile#14243
Arvi Grotenfelt
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Arvid Grotenfelt , was a Finnish philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the founders of the Finnish Science Academy and the chairman of the Finnish Philosophical society 1905–36. He was also founder and first chairman of the Sällskapet för Psykisk Forskning . He has studied for Wilhelm Wundt and Rudolf Eucken, and written on the subject of history philosophy. In his mind historiography is always estimating, as when it comes to the selection of sources, and this can be connected to weltanschauung.
Go to Profile#14244
Heloise Hersey
1855 - Present (171 years)
Heloise Edwina Hersey was an American scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature. A graduate of Vassar College and the first female professor of Anglo-Saxon studies in the United States, she was appointed at Smith College in 1878.
Go to Profile#14245
Robert d'Escourt Atkinson
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was a British astronomer, physicist and inventor. Biography Robert d'Escourt Atkinson was born in Wales on April 11, 1898. He went to Manchester Grammar School and received a degree in physics from Oxford in 1922. He worked in the Clarendon Laboratory and then went to Göttingen, where he received a Ph.D. in physics in 1928. After teaching physics at the Berlin Technische Hochscule for a year, Atkinson was appointed Assistant Professor of Physics at Rutgers University. He taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey from 1929 to 1937, when he became Chief Assistant at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
Go to Profile#14246
David Park
1935 - 1990 (55 years)
David Michael Ritchie Park was a British computer scientist. He worked on the first implementation of the programming language Lisp. He became an authority on the topics of fairness, program schemas and bisimulation in concurrent computing. At the University of Warwick, he was one of the earliest members of the computer science department, and served as chairperson.
Go to Profile#14247
Xavier Gonzalez
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Xavier Gonzalez was an American artist. He was born in Almeria, Spain. He lived in Argentina and Mexico for some time, and was planning on becoming an engineer in a gold mine. In 1925, he immigrated to the United States.
Go to Profile#14248
Lloyd Lozes Goff
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Lloyd Lozes Goff was an American painter. Goff was born in 1908 in Dallas, Texas. He studied at the Art Students League and the University of New Mexico. His academic work at the University of New Mexico led to his becoming Assistant Professor of Art and Acting Head of the Art Department from 1944 to 1947. He illustrated two books published in 1949, New Mexico Village Arts and Golden Footlight's. He also wrote and illustrated two children's books about migratory birds, Run, Sandpiper, Run and Fly, Redwing, Fly.
Go to Profile#14249
Ruth Stokes
1890 - 1968 (78 years)
Ruth Wyckliffe Stokes was an American mathematician, cryptologist, and astronomer. She earned the first doctorate in mathematics from Duke University, made pioneering contributions to the theory of linear programming, and founded the Pi Mu Epsilon journal.
Go to Profile#14250
May Lansfield Keller
1877 - 1964 (87 years)
May Lansfield Keller was a college professor and dean. Born in Baltimore, Maryland to Wilmer Lansfield Keller and Jeanie née Simonton, May Lansfield Keller received an early private school education at the Little Dames' School in the Baltimore area. From 1888 to 1894, she studied at the Girls' Latin School, then matriculated to Goucher College in 1894. She joined Pi Beta Phi, and would remain active in the sorority past her graduation in 1898. At this point she became interested in taking graduate studies in Germany, but her father was opposed so she instead enrolled at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1898.
Go to Profile