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,
#14201
Albert von Keller
1844 - 1920 (76 years)
Albert von Keller was a German painter of Swiss ancestry. He specialized in portraits and indoor scenes. Female figures are a prominent feature of his work. Biography Keller was born in Gais, Switzerland. He was one of eight children born to Caroline Keller, who was divorced at the time of his birth. As was customary, she had resumed the use of her maiden name. Her ex-husband's brother may have been his true father. When he was three, after several moves, the family settled in Bayreuth where he attended primary school and took piano lessons. In 1852, his mother became a citizen of Bavaria and, by extension, so did he.
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Edwin C. Norton
1856 - 1943 (87 years)
Edwin Clarence Norton was an American academic. He was the first dean of Pomona College, where he worked from 1888 to 1926.
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George Ludwig
1922 - 1973 (51 years)
George Döring Ludwig, M.D. was an American Professor and Chairman of medicine and medical researcher, noted for developing the first application of ultrasound to the human body for medical purposes at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, in the late 1940s.
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Adelbert Niemeyer
1867 - 1932 (65 years)
Adelbert Hans Gustav Niemeyer was a German painter, craftsman and architect.
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George E. Morrow
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
George Espy Morrow was an American academic from Ohio. Born into a notable political family, he fought in the Civil War, then attended the University of Michigan Law School. After a decade as a newspaper editor, he became a professor at the Iowa Agricultural College, eventually becoming chair of the College of Agriculture. In 1877, he took a similar position at the University of Illinois College of Agriculture. There, he maintained an experimental field now known as the Morrow Plots, a National Historic Landmark. Morrow was president at the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College from 18...
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Nikolaus Geiger
1849 - 1897 (48 years)
Nikolaus Geiger was a German sculptor and painter. Life Born at Lauingen in the Kingdom of Bavaria, he began an apprenticeship as a stonemason. At the age of 16, he went to Munich, to study with Joseph Knabl at the Academy of Fine Arts. After the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871, he moved to Berlin and after some time achieved recognition for his ornamental work in the . After a visit to Italy he again studied painting in Munich and in 1884 returned to Berlin, where he was awarded a gold medal in 1886, was elected member of the Academy in 1893, and was made professor...
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Joseph DeCamp
1858 - 1923 (65 years)
Joseph Rodefer DeCamp was an American painter and educator. Biography Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he studied with Frank Duveneck. In the second half of the 1870s he went with Duveneck and fellow students to the Royal Academy of Munich. He then spent time in Florence, Italy, returning to Boston in 1883.
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Jakob Wilhelm Roux
1771 - 1831 (60 years)
Jakob Wilhelm Roux was a German painter and draughtsman. Roux was born to a Huguenot family. He studied mathematics for a time at the University of Jena. He later enrolled in the university of Christian Immanuel Oehme where his interests and classes turned to the arts. It was while studying there that he met the surgeon Justus Christian Loder, with whom he collaborated. Roux did a number of anatomical illustrations for Loder. Roux later primarily painted portraits.
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Nikolaos Apostolidis
1856 - 1919 (63 years)
Nikolaos Apostolidis , was a biologist, naturalist, professor, dean, author, and politician. He replaced Iraklis Mitsopoulos as the second director of the Zoological Museum of the University of Athens. He served as Dean of the Philosophical School, Rector of the University of Athens, and Minister of Economics. He popularized natural science and was one of the most prolific Greek naturalists of the 20th century. He studied countless species of animals.
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Karl von Blaas
1815 - 1894 (79 years)
Karl von Blaas was an Austrian painter known for his portraits and religious compositions executed on canvas as well as in the form of frescoes. Biography Carl Von Blaas was born to a peasant family at Nauders in the Tyrol on 28 April 1815. He is best known as a history painter and painter of portraits. His first art lessons were in Innsbruck, where he received an education as a writer. But he was more interested in art, and so, like many painters at the time, he aspired to visit Italy to realize his goal of an in-depth art education. His uncle, a judge in Verona, recognized his talent and gave him financial support for study in Venice, which he undertook in 1832.
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Walter Livingston Wright
1872 - 1946 (74 years)
Walter Livingston Wright was an American educator and academic administrator who served as president of Lincoln University from 1936 to 1945. He had been a professor of mathematics at Lincoln since 1893 and served as acting president from 1924 to 1926. His successor was Lincoln's first Black president, Horace Mann Bond.
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Max Hermann Maxy
1895 - 1971 (76 years)
Max Hermann Maxy was a Romanian painter, art professor, scenographer, and professor of German-Jewish descent. Early life and education Maxy was born in Brăila in 1895, into a Jewish family. In 1902, following his mother's early death, he and his family moved to the national capital Bucharest. Between 1913 and 1916, Maxy studied at the School of Fine Arts, where Camil Ressu and Frederic Storck were among his teachers. He fought in World War I, an experience which significantly influenced his painting.
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Eleanor Miller
Eleanor Miller was a teacher and state legislator in California. A Republican, she was the fifth woman elected to the California legislature. She was elected in 1922, 1924, 1926, 1928, 1930, 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1940. She founded the Eleanor Miller School of Expression. She wrote the memoir When Memory Calls about her life, including her travels to Europe and the Near East. The book includes pen drawings by Lewis D. Johnson.
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Rex Vicat Cole
1870 - 1940 (70 years)
Reginald George Vicat Cole was an English landscape painter. Life Vicat Cole was the son of the artist George Vicat Cole and Mary Ann Chignell. He was educated at Eton and began to exhibit in London in 1890. In 1900 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists.
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Marcus Sachs
1812 - 1869 (57 years)
Marcus Sachs was a Polish Jew who emigrated to Scotland and became Professor of Hebrew at the Free Church Divinity Hall in Aberdeen Life He was born the son of an engineer in Inowroclaw in the Grand Duchy of Posen in what is now central Poland. He studied at Berlin University.
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Paul Sample
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Paul Starrett Sample was an American artist who portrayed life in New England in the middle of the 20th Century with a style that showed elements of "Social Realism and Regionalism." Early life Sample was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1896. After having moved across the country with his family on several occasions, Sample attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. There he studied architecture and graduated in 1921 after a year in the Naval Reserve during World War I. While visiting his brother, Donald, at a sanatorium in Saranac Lake, New York, Sample contracted tuberculosis. He stayed for treatment of that disease in Saranac Lake for four years.
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Frederick Edward Hulme
1841 - 1909 (68 years)
Frederick Edward Hulme was known as a teacher and an amateur botanist. He was the Professor of Freehand and Geometrical Drawing at King's College London from 1886. His most famous work was Familiar Wild Flowers, which was issued in nine volumes.
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Christian Samuel Theodor Bernd
1775 - 1854 (79 years)
Christian Samuel Theodor Bernd was a German linguist and heraldist, one of the founders of scientific heraldry. Bernd studied theology at the Jena University. Between 1807 and 1811 he served as editor of the dictionary of German language, then he was a librarian in Breslau. He was the professor of diplomatics, sphragistics and heraldry at the Bonn University from 1822 and was one of the founders of modern scientific heraldry.
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Angelo de Gubernatis
1840 - 1913 (73 years)
Count Angelo De Gubernatis , Italian man of letters, was born in Turin and educated there and at Berlin, where he studied philology. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature fourteen times.
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Allame Mohammad Qazvini
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Mohammad Qazvini was a prominent figure in modern Iranian culture and literature. Education and activities Qazvini was born in Tehran. Qazvini studied at literary and philosophical seminaries, studying culture, jurisprudence, principles, theology, ancient wisdom and gained knowledge of the various branches of Arabic literature.
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Dudley Pratt
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Dudley Pratt was an American sculptor. He was born in Paris, France to Boston sculptors Bela and Helen Pratt. His sculptural education included study under Charles Grafly, Antoine Bourdelle, and Alexander Archipenko.
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Yu Xingwu
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Yu Xingwu was a Chinese philologist and exegesis interpreter. He was born in Haicheng, Liaoning, and graduated from Shenyang National Normal School in 1919. During the 1930s and 1940s he was a professor at Peking University, Yenching University and Fu Jen Catholic University, and from 1955 he taught at People's University of Northeast China .
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Friedrich August Brand
1735 - 1806 (71 years)
Friedrich August Brand was an Austrian painter. The son of Christian Hülfgott Brand, he was born at Vienna. He was a member of the Imperial Academy, and died at Vienna in 1806. He painted several historical subjects and landscapes, which are favourably spoken of by the German authors, and engraved some plates, both with the point and with the graver, in the use of which he was instructed by Schmutzer. His known works include the following:The Breakfast; after TorenvlietA View near NuisdorfView of the Garden of SchoenbrunnBanditti attacking a CarriageThe Entrance to the Town of CremsAmong his ...
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Konstantinos M. Mitsopoulos
1844 - 1911 (67 years)
Konstantinos M. Mitsopoulos was a writer, geologist, mineralogist, chemist, and professor. His uncle Iraklis Mitsopoulos was the father of modern natural sciences in Greece. He followed in his uncle's footsteps, and was the first student to receive a doctorate degree in the natural sciences at the University of Athens in 1868. He was one of the first scientists in Greece to publicly promote Darwin's theory of evolution. He edited and published the periodical known as Prometheus in 1890, promoting Darwinist views. The publication was shut down by the church two years later.
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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.
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Frank S. Fox
1861 - 1920 (59 years)
Frank S. Fox was an American academic and college president, a noted public speaker, and an educator. He was a popular lecturer who was in great demand. He founded the Capitol College of Columbus which was located in Columbus, Ohio and later renamed Dominion University when it relocated to Westerville.
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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.
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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.
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Herbert Read
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Sir Herbert Edward Read, was an English art historian, poet, literary critic and philosopher, best known for numerous books on art, which included influential volumes on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. As well as being a prominent English anarchist, he was one of the earliest English writers to take notice of existentialism. He was co-editor with Michael Fordham of the British edition in English of The Collected Works of C. G. Jung.
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Oladele Ajose
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Oladele Adebayo Ajose was a Lagos prince who was the vice-chancellor of the Obafemi Awolowo University. He was an early advocate of primary health care in Nigeria and the first tenured African professor at the University of Ibadan and in Nigeria. He was one of the earliest Africans to hold a professorial chair.
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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.
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Nico H.J. van den Boogaard
1938 - 1982 (44 years)
Nicolaas Hendricus Johannes van den Boogaard was a medievalist scholar, professor, and dean of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Amsterdam. Career In addition to his work as a teacher and administrator, he published widely on medieval French literature. His doctoral dissertation, Rondeaux et refrains du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe: Collationnement, introduction et notes , continues to be cited. This dissertation built a corpus of Old French lyric poetry that Van den Boogaard then put into a computer database. In 1970, he enlarged the database and generated statistical information about several genres of medieval French literature.
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Ulrich Hütter
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Ulrich Hütter was an Austro-German aeronautical engineer and university teacher who came to wider prominence through his second career as a pioneer of wind power technology. Life Ulrich Hütter was born in Pilsen in Bohemia, Austria-Hungary . Eduard Hütter , his father, was an architect originally from Salzburg, whose professional career increasingly focused on monument conservation on behalf of the government. The family relocated to Salzburg in connection with Eduard Hütter's work after the war ended, and Ulrich Hütter enrolled at the classics-focused "Humanistisches Gymnasium" there in 192...
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Herman Lukoff
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
Herman Lukoff was a computer pioneer and fellow of the IEEE. Formative years Lukoff was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Aaron and Anna Lukoff. He graduated from the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943. While at the Moore School, he helped to develop the ENIAC and EDVAC computers.
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Alfred Rusescu
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
Alfred Rusescu was a Romanian pediatrician. Born in Bucharest into a family of intellectuals, he attended Gheorghe Lazăr High School. In 1913, Rusescu entered the Medicine faculty of the University of Bucharest. Following graduation, he studied medicine at the University of Paris from 1920 to 1925. His thesis dealt with the development of waistlines in infants. From 1922 to 1926, he was an intern at Notre-Dame de Bon Secours Hospital in Paris, under the noted pediatrician .
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Herschel Levit
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Herschel "Harry" Levit was an American social realist artist, designer, illustrator, author, and educator. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was active in the Federal Art Project sponsored by the Works Progress Administration . He was a Professor emeritus at Pratt Institute, teaching from 1947 to 1977 and teaching at Parsons School of Design, from 1977 to 1986.
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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...
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Albert Wurts Whitney
1870 - 1943 (73 years)
Albert Wurts Whitney was a statistician and actuarial scientist, known for his role in the application of Bayes' rule to the development of standards in setting insurance premiums for workmen's compensation. He was a pioneer in accident prevention work and public safety education.
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Frederick W. Hilles
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Frederick Whiley "Ted" Hilles was Bodman Professor of English Literature at Yale University. He was a noted authority on the literary career of Sir Joshua Reynolds and edited the 1929 edition of Reynolds letters that was published by Cambridge University Press. During the Second World War he worked in intelligence for the U.S. Army at Bletchley Park in England.
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Marco Mincoff
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Marco Mincoff Shakespearean scholar and professor of English Studies at the University of Sofia. Mincoff was born July 15 , 1909 in Chamkorya . With a Humboldt grant he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin in 1933. From 1951 to 1974 he was head of the department of English at the University of Sofia. Over the years, teaching courses in grammar, phonetics, stylistics and the history of English literature, he wrote various textbooks and monographs. However his main subject was English Renaissance drama, on which he wrote numerous articles. His work earned him recognit...
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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.
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Rene d'Harnoncourt
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
René d'Harnoncourt was an Austrian-born American art curator. He was Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 1949 to 1967. Background Of Austrian, Czech, and French descent, Count Rene d'Harnoncourt was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Count Hubert d'Harnoncourt and his wife, the former Julie Mittrowsky. Although he showed an interest in art as a child, he received a technical education. After his family suffered severe financial losses, he moved to Paris in 1924, and went to Mexico in 1926. D'Harnoncourt initially eked out a minimal living as a commercial artist, but quickly ...
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William Henry Schofield
1870 - 1920 (50 years)
William Henry Schofield was an American academic, founder of the Harvard Studies in Comparative Literature. He was professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, and president of the American-Scandinavian Foundation .
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Horace Day
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Horace Day , also Horace Talmage Day, was an American painter of the American scene who came to maturity during the Thirties and was active as a painter over the next 50 years. He traveled widely in the United States and continued to explore throughout his life subjects that first captured his attention as an artist in the Thirties. He gained early recognition for his portraits and landscapes, particularly his paintings in the Carolina Lowcountry.
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Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz
1906 - 1967 (61 years)
Hieronymus Christoph Jan Eugen Franz Gottfried Maria Freiherr von Pölnitz, known as Götz Freiherr von Pölnitz was a German social historian, economic historian and archivist.
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Oscar Craig
1846 - Present (180 years)
Oscar J. Craig was the first president of the University of Montana. Craig served as the president between July 1895 to October 1908, and he managed the university almost single-handedly for those thirteen years. Craig taught a few classes each semester, as well as helping to establish the campus itself. He also founded a significant amount of the programs at the university that still persist today. Prior to graduating from DePauw University in 1884, Craig served in the position of Superintendent of City Schools in Sullivan, Indiana for a few years. In 1883, he became a professor at Purdue University, teaching political economy and history before moving to Montana to found the University.
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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.
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Pratul Chandra Gupta
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Pratul Chandra Gupta was an Indian historian, writer and the author of Nana Sahib and the Rising at Cawnpore, a historical account of the siege of Cawnpore. Considered by many as an authority on Maratha history, he translated The Maharashta Purana, an 18th-century Bengali text written by Gangaram into English, Edward C. Dimock, a known Indologist, being his co-translator. One of his books, INA in Military Operation, was commissioned by Jawaharlal Nehru but the book could not be published, reportedly due to political objections. The Last Peshwa and the English Commissioners, 1818-1851 and Shah Alam II and His Court are some of his other notable works.
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Jack Roderick
1913 - 1990 (77 years)
Jack William Roderick, FIStructE, FICE, FASCE FTSE, FAA was Challis Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney from 1951 until his retirement in 1978. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta.
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Giorgio de Chirico
1888 - 1978 (90 years)
Giuseppe Maria Alberto Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His best-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace.
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