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,
#14251
Robert W. Blanning
#14252
George Catlin
1794 - 1872 (78 years)
George Catlin was an American lawyer, painter, author, and traveler, who specialized in portraits of Native Americans in the American frontier. Traveling to the American West five times during the 1830s, Catlin wrote about and painted portraits that depicted the life of the Plains Indians. His early work included engravings, drawn from nature, of sites along the route of the Erie Canal in New York State. Several of his renderings were published in one of the first printed books to use lithography, Cadwallader D. Colden's Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of ...
Go to Profile#14253
Robert Henri
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Robert Henri was an American painter and teacher. As a young man, he studied in Paris, where he identified strongly with the Impressionists, and determined to lead an even more dramatic revolt against American academic art, as reflected by the conservative National Academy of Design. Together with a small team of enthusiastic followers, he pioneered the Ashcan School of American realism, depicting urban life in an uncompromisingly brutalist style. By the time of the Armory Show, America's first large-scale introduction to European Modernism , Henri was mindful that his own representational te...
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John Marin
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
John Marin was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors. Biography Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey. His mother died nine days after his birth, and he was raised by two aunts in Weehawken, New Jersey. He attended the Stevens Institute of Technology for a year, and tried unsuccessfully to become an architect.
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Clifford Scott Deutschman
#14256
Francisco de Zurbarán
1598 - 1664 (66 years)
Francisco de Zurbarán was a Spanish painter. He is known primarily for his religious paintings depicting monks, nuns, and martyrs, and for his still-lifes. Zurbarán gained the nickname "Spanish Caravaggio", owing to the forceful use of chiaroscuro in which he excelled.
Go to Profile#14257
J. Harold Williams
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
J. Harold Williams was an American professor and educator. He received his A.B., M.A. and Ph.D degrees from Stanford University, and worked as a lecturer and professor at UCLA from 1923 to 1946. In 1946, Dr. Williams was appointed Provost of the Santa Barbara College of the University of California , succeeding Clarence L. Phelps who had been president of the state college since 1918 and the first provost after the change to university status in 1944.
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John McHale
1922 - 1978 (56 years)
John McHale was a British artist, art theorist, sociologist and future studies searcher. He was a member of the Independent Group, a British movement that originated pop art which grew out of an interest in American mass culture and post–World War II technologies.
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Adamson-Eric
1902 - 1968 (66 years)
Erich Carl Hugo Adamson was an Estonian artist who worked mainly within the medium of painting in applied art. Life Erich Carl Hugo Adamson was born 18 August 1902 in Tartu. He was the fourth child of Jaan and Anna Adamson. Adamson attended schools in his native Estonia before relocating to Berlin to study at the . After studying in Berlin, Adamson then moved to Paris and studied with such artists as Charles Guérin, Roger Bissière, Moise Kisling, and André Lhote before entering the private academy of Russian artist in 1925 and concentrating in the media of art deco and Neue Sachlichkeit.
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Phil Davis
1906 - 1964 (58 years)
Philip Davis was an American artist who illustrated Mandrake the Magician, written by Lee Falk. Davis was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Growing up with one sister and one brother, Davis became interested in drawing when he was six years old. "I had a mania for parades," he recalled. "I drew every parade I could see. My family neither encouraged nor discouraged me. They just accepted my dark fate."
Go to Profile#14261
Franz Marc
1880 - 1916 (36 years)
Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter , a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
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Meir M. Lehman
#14263
Domenico Ferrari
#14264
Christian Wolf
#14265
Mars Ravelo
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Marcial "Mars" Custodio Ravelo was a Filipino comic book cartoonist and graphic novelist. Dubbed as the "King of Philippine Komiks", he is notable for creating Darna, Dyesebel, Captain Barbell, Lastikman, Bondying, Varga, Wanted: Perfect Mother, Hiwaga, Maruja, Mariposa, Roberta, Rita, Buhay Pilipino, Jack and Jill, Flash Bomba, Tiny Tony, and Dragonna among others.
Go to Profile#14266
George Klein
1915 - 1969 (54 years)
George D. Klein was an American comic book artist and cartoonist whose career stretched from the 1930s and 1940s' Golden Age of comic books until his death in 1969. He was best known as an inker for DC Comics, where he was an integral part of the Superman family of titles from 1955 to 1968, and for Marvel Comics, where he was the generally recognized, uncredited inker on Jack Kirby's pencil art for the landmark comic book The Fantastic Four #1.
Go to Profile#14267
Selwyn Image
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Selwyn Image was a British artist, designer, writer and poet associated with the Arts and Crafts Movement. He designed stained-glass windows, furniture, embroidery, and was an illustrator of books. Image was the seventh Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford from 1910 to 1916.
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Albert Henry Krehbiel
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Albert Henry Krehbiel , was the most decorated American painter ever at the French Academy, winning the Prix De Rome, four gold medals and five cash prizes. He was born in Denmark, Iowa and taught, lived and worked for many years in Chicago. His masterpiece is the programme of eleven decorative wall and two ceiling paintings / murals for the Supreme and Appellate Court Rooms in Springfield, Illinois . Although educated as a realist in Paris, which is reflected in his neoclassical mural works, he is most famously known as an American Impressionist. Later in his career, Krehbiel experimented in ...
Go to Profile#14269
Thomas Lawrence
1769 - 1830 (61 years)
Sir Thomas Lawrence was an English portrait painter and the fourth president of the Royal Academy. A child prodigy, he was born in Bristol and began drawing in Devizes, where his father was an innkeeper at the Bear Hotel in the Market Square. At age ten, having moved to Bath, he was supporting his family with his pastel portraits. At 18, he went to London and soon established his reputation as a portrait painter in oils, receiving his first royal commission, a portrait of Queen Charlotte, in 1790. He stayed at the top of his profession until his death, aged 60, in 1830.
Go to Profile#14270
Herman Schneider
1872 - 1939 (67 years)
Herman Schneider , engineer, architect, and educator, was the main founder of cooperative education in the United States and president of the University of Cincinnati. Biography While at Lehigh University at the beginning of the 20th century, he concluded that the traditional classroom was insufficient for technical students. Schneider observed that several of the more successful Lehigh graduates had worked to earn money before graduation. Gathering data through interviews of employers and graduates, he devised the framework for cooperative education . About that time, Carnegie Technical Sc...
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Ingo Schubert
#14272
Rockwell Kent
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Rockwell Kent was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer, sailor, adventurer and voyager. Biography Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York. Kent was of English descent. He lived much of his early life in and around New York City, where he attended the Horace Mann School. Kent studied with several influential painters and theorists of his day. He studied composition and design with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Art Students League in the fall of 1900, and he studied painting with William Merritt Chase each of the three summers between 1900 and 1902 at the Shinnecock Hills Summe...
Go to Profile#14273
Eduardo B. Fernández
#14274
Paul Signac
1863 - 1935 (72 years)
Paul Victor Jules Signac was a French Neo-Impressionist painter who, with Georges Seurat, helped develop the artistic technique Pointillism. Biography Paul Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863. Signac studied architecture until, at the age of 18, he decided to pursue a career as a painter after attending an exhibition of Claude Monet's work. He sailed on the Mediterranean Sea, visiting the coasts of Europe and painting the landscapes he encountered. In later years, he also painted a series of watercolors of French harbor cities.
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Suzanne Valadon
1865 - 1938 (73 years)
Suzanne Valadon was a French painter who was born Marie-Clémentine Valadon at Bessines-sur-Gartempe, Haute-Vienne, France. In 1894, Valadon became the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. She was also the mother of painter Maurice Utrillo.
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John Trumbull
1756 - 1843 (87 years)
John Trumbull was an American artist of the early independence period, notable for his historical paintings of the American Revolutionary War, of which he was a veteran. He has been called the "Painter of the Revolution".
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Robert M. Balzer
#14278
Richard Westmacott
1775 - 1856 (81 years)
Sir Richard Westmacott was a British sculptor. Life and career Westmacott studied with his father, also named Richard Westmacott, at his studio in Mount Street, off Grosvenor Square in London before going to Rome in 1793 to study under Antonio Canova. Westmacott devoted all his energies to the study of classical sculpture, and throughout his life his real sympathies were with pagan rather than with Christian art. Within a year of his arrival in Rome he won the first prize for sculpture offered by the Florentine Academy of Arts, and in the following year he gained the papal gold medal awarded by the Academy of St Luke with his bas-relief of Joseph and his brothers.
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George Luks
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
George Benjamin Luks was an American artist, identified with the aggressively realistic Ashcan School of American painting. After travelling and studying in Europe, Luks worked as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist in Philadelphia, where he became part of a close-knit group, led by Robert Henri, that set out to defy the genteel values imposed by the influential National Academy of Design. His best-known paintings reflect the life of the poor and hard-pressed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Thomas Moran
1837 - 1926 (89 years)
Thomas Moran was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist. He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio. A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly. During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as ...
Go to Profile#14281
Johann Wilhelm Schirmer
1807 - 1863 (56 years)
Johann Wilhelm Schirmer was a German landscape artist born in Jülich, within the Prussian Duchy of Jülich. Biography Schirmer was started as a student of historical painting under Schadow at the academy of Düsseldorf. Later, he came under the influence of Carl Friedrich Lessing and landscape painting and began painting historical landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin. He became known as one of the first of the Düsseldorf school of painting.
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Jan Wohlfahrt
#14283
Kenneth E. Batcher
#14284
Julia Kastner
#14285
Clark G. Kuebler
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Clark G. Kuebler was an American professor and educator. He received his A.B. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He became a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity during his college years.
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Albert Marquet
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Albert Marquet was a French painter, associated with the Fauvist movement. He initially became one of the Fauve painters and a lifelong friend of Henri Matisse. Marquet subsequently painted in a more naturalistic style, primarily landscapes, but also several portraits and, between 1910 and 1914, several female nude paintings.
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Luca Signorelli
1450 - 1523 (73 years)
Luca Signorelli was an Italian Renaissance painter from Cortona, in Tuscany, who was noted in particular for his ability as a draftsman and his use of foreshortening. His massive frescos of the Last Judgment in Orvieto Cathedral are considered his masterpiece.
Go to Profile#14288
Robert Leroy Mercer
#14289
Arthur Dove
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove made a series of experimental collages in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified i...
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Alexander Stirling Calder
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
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Jayant S. Vaidya
Jayant S. Vaidya is a British-Indian surgeon-oncologist and clinical academic who, together with Michael Baum and Jeffrey Tobias, developed the technique called targeted intra-operative radiotherapy . He is a professor of surgery and oncology at the University College London, London and the author of two books on breast cancer, one on tobacco eradication, and over 200 academic articles.
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Carlo Carrà
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
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Lee Greene Richards
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Lee Greene Richards was a famous Utah portrait artist. Many of his works can be found at the City and County Building in Salt Lake City, Utah. Biography Richards was the son of Levi W. and Lula Greene Richards. His father was the son of Levi Richards who was the brother of Joseph Smith's physician in Nauvoo, Illinois. He was actually named Levi after his father but went by Lee. Levi W. Richards and his mother Sarah Griffith Richards had been painters. Lee Richards was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1895 he served as an LDS missionary in England....
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T. Earl Pardoe
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
Thomas Earl Pardoe was the first head of the Brigham Young University drama program. One of the main theaters in the Harris Fine Arts Center at BYU is named for him and his wife, Kathryn Bassett Pardoe, who was also an influential drama teacher at BYU.
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Bernardo Bellotto
1721 - 1780 (59 years)
Bernardo Bellotto , was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto. This caused some confusion, however Bellotto’s work is more sombre in color than Canaletto's and his depiction of clouds and shadows brings him closer to Dutch painting.
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Fritz von Uhde
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Fritz von Uhde was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay in-between Realism and Impressionism, he was once known as "Germany's outstanding impressionist" and he became one of the first painters to introduce plein-air painting in his country.
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Peter Janssen
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Johann Peter Theodor Janssen was a German historical painter. Biography Janssen was born in Düsseldorf, son of the engraver , by whom he was first instructed before studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Eduard Bendemann. He is principally known through a series of decorative works whose monumental style and sound naturalism won him a reputation as one of the foremost historical painters of his time. He became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1877 and its director in 1895, and was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1885. In Berli...
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Liu Haisu
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Liu Haisu was a prominent twentieth-century Chinese painter and a noted art educator. He excelled in Chinese painting and oil painting. He was one of the four pioneers of Chinese modern art who earned the title of "The Four Great Academy Presidents".
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Domenico Ghirlandaio
1448 - 1494 (46 years)
Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi , professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, also spelt as Ghirlandajo, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, along with Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers and Sandro Botticelli. Ghirlandaio led a large and efficient workshop that included his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Many apprentices passed through Ghirlandaio's workshop, including the famous Michelangelo.
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Kræsten Iversen
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Kristen "Kræsten" Iversen was a Danish artist who is remembered both for his paintings and his painted glass windows. He was a member of the Bornholm school of painters and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts .
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