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,
#14301
Harvey Fite
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Harvey Fite was a pioneering American sculptor, painter and earth artist best known for his monumental land sculpture Opus 40. A teacher, innovator and Woodstock artist of many talents, he was primarily a sculptor of wood and stone. Fite is also known for founding the fine arts program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Go to Profile#14302
Parmigianino
1503 - 1540 (37 years)
Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola , also known as Francesco Mazzola or, more commonly, as Parmigianino , was an Italian Mannerist painter and printmaker active in Florence, Rome, Bologna, and his native city of Parma. His work is characterized by a "refined sensuality" and often elongation of forms and includes Vision of Saint Jerome and the iconic if somewhat anomalous Madonna with the Long Neck , and he remains the best known artist of the first generation whose whole careers fall into the Mannerist period.
Go to Profile#14303
Robert G. Vignola
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Robert G. Vignola was an Italian-American actor, screenwriter, and film director. A former stage actor, he appeared in many motion pictures produced by Kalem Company and later moved to directing, becoming one of the silent screen's most prolific directors. He directed a handful of films in the early years of sound films, but his career essentially ended in the silent era.
Go to Profile#14304
Calvin Brainerd Cady
1851 - 1928 (77 years)
Calvin Brainerd Cady was an American musician, music teacher, leading educational philosopher and writer of the progressive era of education in his subject area. Cady founded the music department at the University of Michigan, now the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He became known for his pedagogical theories while working with John Dewey at the University Elementary School, today's University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and later at the Cornish School, now Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Cady was a leader in advocating for degree programs in music within u...
Go to Profile#14305
Nicolas de Staël
1914 - 1955 (41 years)
Nicolas de Staël was a French painter of Russian origin known for his use of a thick impasto and his highly abstract landscape painting. He also worked with collage, illustration and textiles. Early life Nicolas de Staël was born Nikolai Vladimirovich Stael von Holstein in Saint Petersburg, into the family of a Russian Lieutenant General, Baron Vladimir Stael von Holstein, and his second wife, Lubov Vladimirovna Berednikova . De Staël's family was forced to emigrate to Poland in 1919 because of the Russian Revolution; both his father and stepmother died in Poland and the orphaned Nicolas de...
Go to Profile#14306
William Powell Frith
1819 - 1909 (90 years)
William Powell Frith was an English painter specialising in genre subjects and panoramic narrative works of life in the Victorian era. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1853, presenting The Sleeping Model as his Diploma work. He has been described as the "greatest British painter of the social scene since Hogarth".
Go to Profile#14307
Nikolai Lunin
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Lunin was a Russian Empire and later Soviet scientist who was the first to discover the existence of vitamins. As a student in Basel, he fed mice on a diet of proteins, fats, sugar, salts and water, but they died. He concluded that in addition to casein, fat, milk sugar and salts, milk must contain other substances that are indispensable for nutrition.
Go to Profile#14308
Betty Parsons
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Betty Parsons was an American artist, art dealer, and collector known for her early promotion of Abstract Expressionism. She is regarded as one of the most influential and dynamic figures of the American avant-garde.
Go to Profile#14309
Franz Kline
1910 - 1962 (52 years)
Franz Kline was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, John Ferren, and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s.
Go to Profile#14310
Alan Trevor Watson
#14311
Gregor von Bochmann
1850 - 1930 (80 years)
Gregor von Bochmann was a Baltic-German landscape and genre painter. Biography His father was a forest warden for the Governorate of Estonia, who had been ennobled due to his service in the Crimean War. Bochmann frequently travelled around the country with him, developing his ability to observe nature. From 1862 to 1868, he studied at the Gustav Adolf Grammar School in Tallinn, where his art teacher, Theodor Albert Sprengel, recognized his talent and obtained a scholarship for him to study at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Go to Profile#14312
Theodore Robinson
1852 - 1896 (44 years)
Theodore Robinson was an American painter best known for his Impressionist landscapes. He was one of the first American artists to take up Impressionism in the late 1880s, visiting Giverny and developing a close friendship with Claude Monet. Several of his works are considered masterpieces of American Impressionism.
Go to Profile#14313
Henry Tonks
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Henry Tonks, FRCS was a British surgeon and later draughtsman and painter of figure subjects, chiefly interiors, and a caricaturist. He became an influential art teacher. He was one of the first British artists to be influenced by the French Impressionists; he exhibited with the New English Art Club, and was an associate of many of the more progressive artists of late Victorian Britain, including James McNeill Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Singer Sargent and George Clausen.
Go to Profile#14314
John Phillips
1719 - 1795 (76 years)
John Phillips was an early American educator and the cofounder of Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, along with his wife, Elizabeth Phillips. He was a major donor to Dartmouth College, where he served as a trustee. He also made significant donations to Harvard College and Princeton University.
Go to Profile#14315
Lyonel Feininger
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Lyonel Charles Feininger was a German-American painter, and a leading exponent of Expressionism. He also worked as a caricaturist and comic strip artist. He was born and grew up in New York City, traveling to Germany at 16 to study and perfect his art. He started his career as a cartoonist in 1894 and met with much success in this area. He was also a commercial caricaturist for 20 years for magazines and newspapers in the US and Germany. At the age of 36, he started to work as a fine artist. He also produced a large body of photographic works between 1928 and the mid 1950s, but he kept these primarily within his circle of friends.
Go to Profile#14316
Peter J Fleming
#14317
Thomas Nast
1840 - 1902 (62 years)
Thomas Nast was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist often considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon". He was a sharp critic of "Boss" Tweed and the Tammany Hall Democratic party political machine. He created a modern version of Santa Claus and the political symbol of the elephant for the Republican Party . Contrary to popular belief, Nast did not create Uncle Sam , Columbia , or the Democratic donkey, although he did popularize those symbols through his artwork. Nast was associated with the magazine Harper's Weekly from 1859 to 1860 and from 1862 until 1886.
Go to Profile#14318
Antoine Bourdelle
1861 - 1929 (68 years)
Antoine Bourdelle , born Émile Antoine Bordelles, was an influential and prolific French sculptor and teacher. He was a student of Auguste Rodin, a teacher of Giacometti and Henri Matisse, and an important figure in the Art Deco movement and the transition from the Beaux-Arts style to modern sculpture.
Go to Profile#14319
William Richard Joseph Cook
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Sir William Richard Joseph Cook, was a British civil servant and mathematician. A graduate of Bristol University, he joined the staff of the Woolwich Arsenal in 1928, working on the 6-inch naval guns and the 3-inch antiaircraft rocket. During the Second World War he was deputy controller of the Projectile Development Establishment. After the war he became director of the Ministry of Supply's Rocket Propulsion Establishment at Westcott, Buckinghamshire. In 1947 he joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service, serving as its chief from 1950 to 1954, when he became deputy head of the Weapons Group of the newly created United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority .
Go to Profile#14320
Joseph Wright of Derby
1734 - 1797 (63 years)
Joseph Wright , styled Joseph Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution".
Go to Profile#14321
Mark Gertler
1891 - 1939 (48 years)
Mark Gertler was a British painter of figure subjects, portraits and still-life. His early life and his relationship with Dora Carrington were the inspiration for Gilbert Cannan's novel Mendel. The characters of Loerke in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and Gombauld in Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow were based on him.
Go to Profile#14322
Józef Mroszczak
1910 - 1975 (65 years)
Józef Mroszczak was a Polish graphic designer and representative of the Polish School of Posters. Education After graduating from high school in his hometown in 1928, he started his studies at Cracow’s School of Decorative Arts and Art Industry , and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule and the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchtanstalt in Vienna’s Academy of Graphic Arts .
Go to Profile#14323
Amy Marie Charles
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Amy Marie Charles was professor of English literature at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a scholar of the seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert. Charles wrote a biography of the Herbert .
Go to Profile#14324
Aelbert Cuyp
1620 - 1691 (71 years)
Aelbert Jacobszoon Cuyp or Cuijp was one of the leading Dutch Golden Age painters, producing mainly landscapes. The most famous of a family of painters, the pupil of his father, Jacob Gerritszoon Cuyp , he is especially known for his large views of Dutch riverside scenes in a golden early morning or late afternoon light. He was born and died in Dordrecht.
Go to Profile#14325
Birger Sandzén
1871 - 1954 (83 years)
Sven Birger Sandzén , known more commonly as Birger Sandzén, was a Swedish painter best known for his landscapes. He produced most of his work while working as an art professor at Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas.
Go to Profile#14326
George Stubbs
1724 - 1806 (82 years)
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. He enjoyed royal patronage. His painting, Whistlejacket hangs in the National G...
Go to Profile#14327
Adolph Gottlieb
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Adolph Gottlieb was an American abstract expressionist painter, sculptor and printmaker. Early life and education Gottlieb, one of the "first generation" of Abstract Expressionists, was born in New York City in 1903 to Jewish parents. From 1920–1921 he studied at the Art Students League of New York, after which, having determined to become an artist he left high school at the age of 17 and worked his passage to Europe on a merchant ship. He traveled in France and Germany for a year. He lived in Paris for six months during which time he visited the Louvre Museum every day and audited classes at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.
Go to Profile#14328
Daniel P. Friedman
#14329
Natalia Goncharova
1881 - 1962 (81 years)
Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds , Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail , and with Larionov invented Rayonism . She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.
Go to Profile#14330
Evangelinos Apostolides Sophocles
1807 - 1883 (76 years)
Evangelinos Apostolides Sophocles was a professor of classics and Modern Greek at Harvard University, and lexicographer. He was born in Tsangarada, Thessaly, Ottoman Empire, and he died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is considered to be a pioneer of Modern Greek studies.
Go to Profile#14331
Egon Schiele
1890 - 1918 (28 years)
Egon Leo Adolf Ludwig Schiele was an Austrian Expressionist painter. His work is noted for its intensity and its raw sexuality, and for the many self-portraits the artist produced, including nude self-portraits. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism. Gustav Klimt, a figurative painter of the early 20th century, was a mentor to Schiele.
Go to Profile#14332
David Wilkie
1785 - 1841 (56 years)
Sir David Wilkie was a Scottish painter, especially known for his genre scenes. He painted successfully in a wide variety of genres, including historical scenes, portraits, including formal royal ones, and scenes from his travels to Europe and the Middle East. His main base was in London, but he died and was buried at sea, off Gibraltar, returning from his first trip to the Middle East. He was sometimes known as the "people's painter".
Go to Profile#14333
Albert George Latham
1864 - 1940 (76 years)
Albert George Latham was the first Professor of Modern Languages at Newcastle University. He was educated at the Universities of London, Bonn, Caen, Paris and Florence and joined the staff in 1893 as a lecturer in French and Italian. In 1899, he married the daughter of A D Murray, editor of the Newcastle Daily Journal . He was a specialist in French and German literature and also an accomplished translator for several European languages, mainly German, French and Italian, translating, among other things, choral works set by his colleague at Newcastle, W G Whittaker. In 1910/11, he was appoint...
Go to Profile#14334
Chaïm Soutine
1893 - 1943 (50 years)
Chaïm Soutine was a French painter of Belarusian-Jewish origin who made a major contribution to the expressionist movement while living and working in Paris. Inspired by classic painting in the European tradition, exemplified by the works of Rembrandt, Chardin and Courbet, Soutine developed an individual style more concerned with shape, color, and texture than representation, which served as a bridge between more traditional approaches and the developing form of Abstract Expressionism.
Go to Profile#14335
Adelaide Alsop Robineau
1865 - 1929 (64 years)
Adelaide Alsop Robineau was an American china painter and potter, and is considered one of the top ceramists of American art pottery in her era. Early life and education Adelaide Alsop was born in 1865 in Middletown, Connecticut. She developed an early interest in both drawing and the then–popular pursuit of china painting. As a young woman, she helped to support her family by teaching drawing at the boarding school where she had formerly been a student. During one summer break, she enrolled in the painter William Merritt Chase's summer school, her only experience of advanced training in painting and drawing.
Go to Profile#14336
John Mansbridge
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
John Mansbridge was a British artist. He was an official war artist during World War II and Head of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College in London. Biography Mansbridge was the son of Albert Mansbridge, the founder of the Workers Educational Association and was educated at Manchester Grammar School. He attended the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where he was taught by Henry Tonks. From 1927 to 1935, he designed posters for the Underground Electric Railways Company of London and then the London Passenger Transport Board. In 1929, Mansbridge began teaching at Goldsmiths' College School of Art and became the senior lecturer in painting there after World War II.
Go to Profile#14337
Rosalba Carriera
1675 - 1757 (82 years)
Rosalba Carriera was a Venetian Rococo painter. In her younger years, she specialized in portrait miniatures. Carriera would later become known for her pastel portraits, helping popularize the medium in eighteenth-century Europe. She is remembered as one of the most successful women artists of any era.
Go to Profile#14338
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
1884 - 1976 (92 years)
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a German expressionist painter and printmaker; he was one of the four founders of the artist group Die Brücke. Life and work Schmidt-Rottluff was born in Rottluff, nowadays a district of Chemnitz, on 1 December 1884. He attended the humanistische gymnasium in Chemnitz, where he befriended Erich Heckel. He enrolled in architecture at the Sächsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden in 1905, following in Heckel's footsteps, but gave up after one term. Whilst he was there, however, Erich Heckel introduced him to Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Fritz Bleyl. They all passionately shared similar artistic interests and used architecture as a front to study art.
Go to Profile#14339
Eleanor Layfield Davis
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
Eleanor Layfield Davis , also called ELDA, was an American painter. She served on the Board of Trustees for Meredith College and both Meredith and Wake Forest University award art scholarships in her memory.
Go to Profile#14340
Henryk Siemiradzki
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki was a Polish painter. He spent most of his active creative life in Rome. Best remembered for his monumental academic art. He was particularly known for his depictions of scenes from the ancient Greek-Roman world and the New Testament, owned by many national galleries of Europe.
Go to Profile#14341
Elaine de Kooning
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Elaine Marie Catherine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist and Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era. She wrote extensively on the art of the period and was an editorial associate for Art News magazine.
Go to Profile#14342
Ferdynand Ruszczyc
1870 - 1936 (66 years)
Ferdynand Ruszczyc was Polish painter, printmaker, and stage designer. He was a member of the aristocratic Ruszczyc de Lis family. Biography Born in the village of Bohdanów , Ruszczyc spent his childhood in Minsk. He graduated from gymnasium in Minsk in 1890 with a gold medal. Ruszczyc originally studied law at the University of St. Petersburg, but later switched majors and began taking painting classes at the Imperial Academy of Arts. He was a student of the famous Russian landscape painters Ivan Shishkin and Arkhip Kuindzhi. Ruszczyc travelled to the Crimea to paint seascapes, and later to the Baltic islands and Sweden to paint northern landscapes.
Go to Profile#14343
Milton Avery
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Milton Clark Avery was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband of artist Sally Michel Avery and the father of artist March Avery.
Go to Profile#14344
Gino Severini
1883 - 1966 (83 years)
Gino Severini was an Italian painter and a leading member of the Futurist movement. For much of his life he divided his time between Paris and Rome. He was associated with neo-classicism and the "return to order" in the decade after the First World War. During his career he worked in a variety of media, including mosaic and fresco. He showed his work at major exhibitions, including the Rome Quadrennial, and won art prizes from major institutions.
Go to Profile#14345
James Sturgis Pray
1871 - 1929 (58 years)
James Sturgis Pray was an American educator. Pray was president of the American Society of Landscape Architects from 1914 to 1918 and held the post of chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#14346
Karl Ferdinand Sohn
1805 - 1867 (62 years)
Karl Ferdinand Sohn was a German painter of the Düsseldorf school of painting. Biography He was born in Berlin and started his studies at the age of eighteen under Wilhelm von Schadow, whom he followed to Düsseldorf. He focused on mythical and poetic subjects of a highly romantic character, and painted in the idealistic manner of the Düsseldorf school.
Go to Profile#14347
Karl Hofer
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Karl Christian Ludwig Hofer or Carl Hofer was a German expressionist painter. He was director of the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. One of the most prominent painters of expressionism, he never was a member of one of the expressionist painting groups, like "Die Brücke", but was influenced by their painters. His work was among those considered degenerate art by the Nazis, but after World War II he regained recognition as one of the leading German painters.
Go to Profile#14348
Frederick McCubbin
1855 - 1917 (62 years)
Frederick McCubbin was an Australian artist, art teacher and prominent member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism. Born and raised in Melbourne, Victoria, McCubbin studied at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School under a number of artists, notably Eugene von Guerard and later George Folingsby. One of his former classmates, Tom Roberts, returned from art training in Europe in 1885, and that summer they established the Box Hill artists' camp, where they were joined by Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder. These artists formed the nucleus of what bec...
Go to Profile#14349
Morris Louis
1912 - 1962 (50 years)
Morris Louis Bernstein , known professionally as Morris Louis, was an American painter. During the 1950s he became one of the earliest exponents of Color Field painting. While living in Washington, D.C., Louis, along with Kenneth Noland and other Washington painters, formed an art movement that is known today as the Washington Color School.
Go to Profile#14350
Vittore Carpaccio
1465 - 1526 (61 years)
Vittore Carpaccio Carpaccio's works ranged from single pieces painted on canvas to altarpieces and large pictorial cycles. Several of the altarpieces, including St. Thomas Aquinas Enthroned , Presentation of Christ in the Temple , and Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand , were commissioned by churches in Venice, while the pieces following the year 1510 were primarily commissioned by individual patrons in Venice. One of his largest pictorial series, The Legend of Saint Ursula, was begun in 1490.
Go to Profile