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,
#14301
Jock Douglas Mackinlay
#14302
Sam Peckinpah
1925 - 1984 (59 years)
David Samuel Peckinpah was an American film director and screenwriter. His 1969 Western epic The Wild Bunch received an Academy Award nomination and was ranked No. 80 on the American Film Institute's top 100 list. His films employed a visually innovative and explicit depiction of action and violence as well as a revisionist approach to the Western genre.
Go to Profile#14303
Romare Bearden
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Romare Bearden was an American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New York University in 1935.
Go to Profile#14304
Guan Liang
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
Guan Liang , courtesy name Lianggong , was a Chinese painter. He was an important representative of the first generation of oil painters in China and was known for blending Western and Chinese art styles.
Go to Profile#14305
Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah
1894 - 1935 (41 years)
Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah was a Lebanese electrical and electronics research engineer, mathematician and inventor. He was born in Nabatieh in present-day Lebanon. Biography He studied at the American University of Beirut. In 1916, he was conscripted into the Ottoman army, and worked as a telegraph operator. He later taught mathematics in Damascus, Syria, and at the American University of Beirut.
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Arshile Gorky
1904 - 1948 (44 years)
Arshile Gorky was an Armenian-American painter who had a seminal influence on Abstract Expressionism. He spent the last years of his life as a national of the United States. Along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, Gorky has been hailed as one of the most powerful American painters of the 20th century. The suffering and loss he experienced in the Armenian genocide had crucial influence at Gorky's development as an artist.
Go to Profile#14307
Liu Yizheng
1880 - 1956 (76 years)
Liu Yizheng was a Chinese historian, calligrapher, librarian, cultural scholar, educator, and academic leader. He is known for his personal charisma, spirit and eruditeness. In modern Chinese academic field, it is said that the number of famous experts in various fields including in literature, history, geography, philosophy and even natural science he educated and enlighted was the most. Liu Yizheng and Wang Bohang were honorifically called Nanyong Double Pillars during the early period of the Republic of China.
Go to Profile#14308
Bernard Leach
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Bernard Howell Leach was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery". Biography Early years Leach was born in Hong Kong. His mother Eleanor died in childbirth. He spent his first three years in Japan with his father, Andrew Leach, until he moved back to Hong Kong in 1890.
Go to Profile#14309
Lee Lawrie
1877 - 1963 (86 years)
Lee Oscar Lawrie was an American architectural sculptor and a key figure in the American art scene preceding World War II. Over his long career of more than 300 commissions Lawrie's style evolved through Modern Gothic, to Beaux-Arts, Classicism, and, finally, into Moderne or Art Deco.
Go to Profile#14310
Daniel Cozzolino
#14311
Tamara de Lempicka
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Tamara Łempicka , better known as Tamara de Lempicka, was a Polish painter who spent her working life in France and the United States. She is best known for her polished Art Deco portraits of aristocrats and the wealthy, and for her highly stylized paintings of nudes.
Go to Profile#14312
Mohammad Moin
1914 - 1971 (57 years)
Mohammad Moin was a prominent Iranian scholar of Persian literature and Iranian Studies. Education Moin studied at the Higher Institute of Science in Tehran and obtained his BA in literature and philosophy in 1934. He subsequently went to Belgium and graduated in applied psychology, anthropology and cognitive science under Elmer Knowles. On returning to Iran he carried out his doctoral research under Ebrahim Pourdavoud at the University of Tehran, culminating in a thesis with the title "Mazdayasna and its Influence on Persian Literature" for which he received a PhD with honors in Persian literature and linguistics.
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Hermann Anschütz
1802 - 1880 (78 years)
Hermann Anschütz was a German painter and professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Anschütz was born in Koblenz. His father Joseph Andreas Anschütz was an eminent musician and was in charge of a school for vocal and instrumental instruction, and Hermann's younger brother Karl Anschütz ended up as an opera conductor in the United States.
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Martin Schmelz
#14315
Walter Stewart Scacchi
#14316
Filippo Lippi
1406 - 1469 (63 years)
Filippo Lippi , also known as Lippo Lippi, was an Italian painter of the Quattrocento and a Carmelite priest. He was an early Renaissance master of a painting workshop, who taught many painters. Sandro Botticelli and Francesco di Pesello were among his most distinguished pupils. His son, Filippino Lippi, also studied under him and assisted in some late works.
Go to Profile#14317
Albert Bierstadt
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Albert Bierstadt was a German American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. He joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion to paint the scenes. He was not the first artist to record the sites, but he was the foremost painter of them for the remainder of the 19th century.
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Bernardo Strozzi
1581 - 1644 (63 years)
Bernardo Strozzi, named il Cappuccino and il Prete Genovese , was an Italian Baroque painter and engraver. A canvas and fresco artist, his wide subject range included history, allegorical, genre and portrait paintings as well as still lifes. Born and initially mainly active in Genoa, he worked in Venice in the latter part of his career. His work exercised considerable influence on artistic developments in both cities. He is considered a principal founder of the Venetian Baroque style. His powerful art stands out by its rich and glowing colour and broad, energetic brushstrokes.
Go to Profile#14319
Behrooz Parhami
#14320
András F. Varró
#14321
John C. Snidecor
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
John Clifton Snidecor was an American professor and educator. He joined the faculty at Santa Barbara College of the University of California in 1940 and served as acting provost from February to June 1956.
Go to Profile#14322
Edward Catich
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Edward M. Catich was an American Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and calligrapher. He is noted for the fullest development of the thesis that the inscribed Roman square capitals of the Augustan age and afterward owed their form wholly to the use of the flat brush, rather than to the exigencies of the chisel or other stone cutting tools.
Go to Profile#14323
Alexander Graham Bell
1847 - 1922 (75 years)
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885.
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Bev Littlewood
#14325
Vanessa Bell
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf . Early life and education Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth. The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian , half-sister Laura whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896.
Go to Profile#14326
James Clifford
1936 - 1987 (51 years)
James Clifford was an Australian painter who borrowed styles from other artists, in the manner of psychedelic rock music artists who came after the major pop artists and were forerunners of the postmodern appropriation movement of the 1980s.
Go to Profile#14327
Juan Merlo
#14328
Nazmi Ziya Güran
1881 - 1937 (56 years)
Nazmi Ziya Güran was a Turkish Impressionist painter and art teacher. Biography He was born in Istanbul. His father was a civil servant. He attended Vefa Lisesi, Turkey's first non-military high school, then studied at the Civil Service Academy . Having been interested in art since he was a child, he asked his family to let him attend classes at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, but his request was denied and he graduated from the Academy in 1901.
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Antonio Capone
#14330
Rogier van der Weyden
1390 - 1464 (74 years)
Rogier van der Weyden or Roger de la Pasture was an early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly successful in his lifetime; his paintings were exported to Italy and Spain, and he received commissions from, amongst others, Philip the Good, Netherlandish nobility, and foreign princes. By the latter half of the 15th century, he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. However his fame lasted only until the 17th century, and largely due to changing taste, he was almost totally forgotten by the mid-18th century.
Go to Profile#14331
Jusepe de Ribera
1591 - 1652 (61 years)
Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish painter and printmaker who, along with Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and the singular Diego Velázquez, is regarded as one of the major artists of Spanish Baroque painting. Referring to a series of Ribera exhibitions held in the late 20th century, Philippe de Montebello wrote "If Ribera's status as the undisputed protagonist of Neapolitan painting had ever been in doubt, it was no longer. Indeed, to many it seemed that Ribera emerged from these exhibitions as not simply the greatest Neapolitan artist of his age but one of the outstanding Europ...
Go to Profile#14332
Filippino Lippi
1457 - 1504 (47 years)
Filippino Lippi was an Italian painter working in Florence, Italy during the later years of the Early Renaissance and first few years of the High Renaissance. Biography Filippino Lippi was born in 1457 at Prato, Tuscany, the illegitimate son to Lucrezia Buti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. His sister, Alessandra, was born in 1465. Filippino first trained under his father in his workshop.
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Walter Sickert
1860 - 1942 (82 years)
Walter Richard Sickert was a German-born British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the mid and late 20th century.
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William Holman Hunt
1827 - 1910 (83 years)
William Holman Hunt was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour, and elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen ...
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Julian Trevelyan
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Julian Otto Trevelyan was an English artist and poet. Early life Trevelyan was the only child to survive to adulthood of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven. His grandfather was the liberal politician Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and his uncle the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan; he is the great-uncle of his namesake, Julian Trevelyan the pianist.
Go to Profile#14336
Dennis Mcleod
#14337
Piero Manzoni
1933 - 1963 (30 years)
Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, better known as Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything...
Go to Profile#14338
John Edward Fletcher
#14339
Mattia Preti
1613 - 1699 (86 years)
Mattia Preti was an Italian Baroque artist who worked in Italy and Malta. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Saint John. Life Born in the small town of Taverna in Calabria, Preti was called Il Cavalier Calabrese after appointment as a Knight of the Order of St. John in 1660. His early apprenticeship is said to have been with the "Caravaggist" Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, which may account for his lifelong interest in the style of Caravaggio.
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George Bellows
1882 - 1925 (43 years)
George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. He became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
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Grinling Gibbons
1648 - 1721 (73 years)
Grinling Gibbons was an Anglo-Dutch sculptor and wood carver known for his work in England, including Windsor Castle, the Royal Hospital Chelsea and Hampton Court Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and other London churches, Petworth House and other country houses, Trinity College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Gibbons was born to English parents in Holland, where he was educated.
Go to Profile#14342
John Ely Burchard
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
John Ely Burchard was an American professor and dean at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . He was a historian and architectural critic. He was President of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1954 to 1957.
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Alexander Boyd Stewart
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Prof Alexander Boyd Stewart CBE FRSE FRIC was a 20th century Scottish organic chemist and agriculturalist. He was President of the British Society of Soil Science. Life He was born on 3 November 1904 at Tarland in Aberdeenshire, the son of Donald Stewart, a farmer. He was educated at Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen. He then studied Science at Aberdeen University graduating MA in 1925 and BSc in 1928. He then continued as a postgraduate, gaining his doctorate in 1932. He immediately obtained a post as Head of the Soil Fertility Department at the Macaulay Institute. Remaining at the instit...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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