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,
#14351
Andrew G. Renehan
#14352
Jeremiah D. M. Ford
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
Jeremiah Denis Mathias Ford was an American educator and author. He was the Smith Professor Emeritus of the French and Spanish Languages and Literature at Harvard University from 1907 to 1943. He was the youngest-ever to be appointed a professor at Harvard, the first Catholic faculty, and the last ever appointed as Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages from 1911 to 1943.
Go to Profile#14353
J. F. Wu
#14354
Masaccio
1401 - 1428 (27 years)
Masaccio , born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was a Florentine artist who is regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at imitating nature, recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of three-dimensionality. He employed nudes and foreshortenings in his figures. This had seldom been done before him.
Go to Profile#14355
Willi Geiger
1878 - 1971 (93 years)
Willi Geiger was a German painter. Biography The son of a teacher, Willi Geiger was born 1878 in Landshut. From 1898-99, he attended the Munich Arts and Crafts School, and later the Technical University, where he passed the state examination to teach drawing. Willi Geiger studied from 1903 with Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy, including together with Hans Purrmann. He was awarded the National prize and the Schack scholarship for some of his early work and he traveled to Spain, Italy, and North Africa. Willi Geiger was awarded the 1910 Villa Romana prize for his success as a graphic designer.
Go to Profile#14356
Holger S. Schwenk
#14357
Peter Lely
1618 - 1680 (62 years)
Sir Peter Lely was a painter of Dutch origin whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court. He became a naturalised British subject and was knighted in 1679.
Go to Profile#14358
Frank Brangwyn
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator, and designer. Brangwyn worked in a wide range of artistic fields. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, glass tableware, mosaics, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was a book illustrator. It has been estimated that during his lifetime Brangwyn produced over 12,000 works. His mural commissions would cover over of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works , over 500 etchings, about 400 wood-e...
Go to Profile#14359
Max Pechstein
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Hermann Max Pechstein was a German expressionist painter and printmaker and a member of the Die Brücke group. He fought on the Western Front during World War I and his art was classified as Degenerate Art by the Nazis. More than 300 paintings were removed from German Museums during the Nazi era.
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Nicos Demetriou Christofides
#14361
Camille Claudel
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Camille Rosalie Claudel was a French sculptor known for her figurative works in bronze and marble. She died in relative obscurity, but later gained recognition for the originality and quality of her work. The subject of several biographies and films, Claudel is well known for her sculptures including The Waltz and The Mature Age.
Go to Profile#14362
Robbert Van Renesse
#14363
Artemisia Gentileschi
1596 - 1654 (58 years)
Artemisia Lomi or Artemisia Gentileschi was an Italian Baroque painter. Gentileschi is considered among the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists, initially working in the style of Caravaggio. She was producing professional work by the age of 15. In an era when women had few opportunities to pursue artistic training or work as professional artists, Gentileschi was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence and she had an international clientele.
Go to Profile#14364
Eva Hesse
1936 - 1970 (34 years)
Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.
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Raoul Dufy
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Raoul Dufy was a French painter associated with the Fauvist movement. He gained recognition for his vibrant and decorative style, which became popular in various forms, such as textile designs, and public building decorations. Dufy is most remembered for his artwork depicting outdoor social gatherings. In addition to painting, he was skilled in various other fields, including drawing, printmaking, book illustration, scenic design, furniture design, and planning public spaces.
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Peter Szolovits
#14367
Serge Elisséeff
1889 - 1975 (86 years)
Serge Elisséeff was a Russian-French scholar, Japanologist, and professor at Harvard University. He was one of the first Westerners to study Japanese at a university in Japan. He began studying Japanese at the University of Berlin, then transferred to Tokyo Imperial University in 1912, becoming the first Westerner to graduate from Tokyo Imperial University in Japanese as well as its first Western graduate student.
Go to Profile#14368
Apelles
370 BC - 306 BC (64 years)
Apelles of Kos was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom much of modern scholars' knowledge of this artist is owed , rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists. He dated Apelles to the 112th Olympiad , possibly because he had produced a portrait of Alexander the Great.
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George Maciunas
1931 - 1978 (47 years)
George Maciunas was a Lithuanian American artist, born in Kaunas. A founding member and the central coordinator of Fluxus, an international community of artists, architects, composers, and designers, he is most famous for organising and performing early happenings and for assembling a series of highly influential artists' multiples.
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Lee Krasner
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Lenore "Lee" Krasner was an American Abstract Expressionist painter and visual artist active primarily in New York. She received her early academic training at the Women's Art School of Cooper Union, and the National Academy of Design from 1928 to 1932. Krasner's exposure to Post-Impressionism at the newly opened Museum of Modern Art in 1929 led to a sustained interest in modern art. In 1937, she enrolled in classes taught by Hans Hofmann, which led her to integrate influences of Cubism into her paintings. During the Great Depression, Krasner joined the Works Progress Administration's Federa...
Go to Profile#14371
Hubert Robert
1733 - 1808 (75 years)
Hubert Robert was a French painter in the school of Romanticism, noted especially for his landscape paintings and capricci, or semi-fictitious picturesque depictions of ruins in Italy and of France.
Go to Profile#14372
Theodor Hagen
1842 - 1919 (77 years)
Theodor Joseph Hagen was a German painter and art teacher. Life He was born into an old, established Rhenish merchant family. From 1863 to 1868, he studied with Oswald Achenbach at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 1871, he was summoned to the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School to teach landscape painting as a replacement for Max Schmidt, who had left to take another position. Three years later, he received a permanent appointment. He was head of the art department from 1876 to 1881, but grew tired of his administrative duties and returned to teaching. His best-known students were Christian ...
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Jan van Goyen
1596 - 1656 (60 years)
Jan Josephszoon van Goyen was a Dutch landscape painter. The scope of his landscape subjects was very broad as he painted forest landscapes, marine paintings, river landscapes, beach scenes, winter landscapes, cityscapes, architectural views and landscapes with peasants. The list of painters he influenced is much longer. He was an extremely prolific artist who left approximately twelve hundred paintings and more than one thousand drawings.
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Nandalal Bose
1882 - 1966 (84 years)
Nandalal Bose was one of the pioneers of modern Indian art and a key figure of Contextual Modernism. A pupil of Abanindranath Tagore, Bose was known for his "Indian style" of painting. He became the principal of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1921. He was influenced by the Tagore family and the murals of Ajanta; his classic works include paintings of scenes from Indian mythologies, women, and village life.
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Bernardino Luini
1480 - 1532 (52 years)
Bernardino Luini was a north Italian painter from Leonardo's circle during the High Renaissance. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described as having taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently, many of his works were attributed to Leonardo. He was known especially for his graceful female figures with elongated eyes, called Luinesque by Vladimir Nabokov.
Go to Profile#14376
Ahmad Awada
#14377
Michael A. Harrison
#14378
Augustus Saint-Gaudens
1848 - 1907 (59 years)
Augustus Saint-Gaudens was an American sculptor of the Beaux-Arts generation who embodied the ideals of the American Renaissance. From an Irish-French family, Saint-Gaudens was raised in New York City. He traveled to Europe for further training and artistic study. After he returned to New York, he achieved major critical success for his monuments commemorating heroes of the American Civil War, many of which still stand. Saint-Gaudens created works such as the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial on Boston Common, Abraham Lincoln: The Man, and grand equestrian monuments to Civil War generals: General J...
Go to Profile#14379
Bruce Guthrie
#14380
Nikolai Nasonov
1855 - 1939 (84 years)
Nikolai Viktorovich Nasonov was a Russian Empire and later Soviet zoologist. In 1879 he graduated from the Imperial Moscow University and became an assistant at its Zoological Museum. After defending his PhD in 1887 he lectured at his alma mater, and later worked in Trieste, Marseille and Warsaw. In 1890 he defended a habilitation on the evolution of anteaters. In December 1897 he was elected as a corresponding and in March 1906 as a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In addition to his studies in zoology Nasonov also dealt with the race problem based on Marxism and published art...
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Wilhelm Leibl
1844 - 1900 (56 years)
Wilhelm Maria Hubertus Leibl was a German realist painter of portraits and scenes of peasant life. Biography Leibl was born in Cologne, where his father was the director of the Cathedral choir. He was apprenticed to a locksmith before beginning his artistic training with the local painter Hermann Becker in 1861. He entered the Munich Academy in 1864, subsequently studying with several artists including Carl Theodor von Piloty. He set up a group studio in 1869, with Johann Sperl, Theodor Alt, and Rudolf Hirth du Frênes. At about the same time, Gustave Courbet visited Munich to exhibit his wor...
Go to Profile#14382
Nanjo Bunyu
1849 - 1927 (78 years)
Nanjō Bun'yū was a Buddhist priest and one of the most important modern Japanese scholars of Buddhism. Nanjō was born to the abbot of Seiunji Temple , part of the Shinshu Ōtani sect of the Higashi Honganji branch of Jodo Shinshu.
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Hiroshi Yoshida
1876 - 1950 (74 years)
Hiroshi Yoshida was a 20th-century Japanese painter and woodblock printmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the shin-hanga style, and is noted especially for his landscape prints. Yoshida travelled widely, and was particularly known for his images of non-Japanese subjects done in traditional Japanese woodblock style, including the Taj Mahal, the Swiss Alps, the Grand Canyon, and other National Parks in the United States.
Go to Profile#14384
William Dobell
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Sir William Dobell was an Australian portrait and landscape artist of the 20th century. Dobell won the Archibald Prize, Australia's premier award for portrait artists on three occasions. The Dobell Prize is named in his honour.
Go to Profile#14385
Clyfford Still
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.
Go to Profile#14386
Philip Guston
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Philip Guston , was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising painters in either the US or Mexico," in reference to his antifascist fresco The Struggle Against Terror, which "includes the hooded figures that became a lifelong symbol of bigotry for the artist." "Guston worked in a number of artistic modes, from Renaissance-inspired figuration to formally accomplished abstraction," and is now regarded one of the "most important, powerful, and influential American painters ...
Go to Profile#14387
Shari Lawrence Pfleeger
#14388
Francesco Guardi
1712 - 1793 (81 years)
Francesco Lazzaro Guardi was an Italian painter, nobleman, and a member of the Venetian School. He is considered to be among the last practitioners, along with his brothers, of the classic Venetian school of painting.
Go to Profile#14389
Gianni Cesareni
#14390
Wesley W. Chu
#14391
Thomas W. Sederberg
#14392
Tom Roberts
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Thomas William Roberts was an English-born Australian artist and a key member of the Heidelberg School art movement, also known as Australian impressionism. After studying in Melbourne, he travelled to Europe in 1881 to further his training, and returned home in 1885, "primed with whatever was the latest in art". A leading proponent of painting en plein air, he joined Frederick McCubbin in founding the Box Hill artists' camp, the first of several plein air camps frequented by members of the Heidelberg School. He also encouraged other artists to capture the national life of Australia, and whil...
Go to Profile#14393
James Montgomery Flagg
1877 - 1960 (83 years)
James Montgomery Flagg was an American artist, comics artist, and illustrator. He worked in media ranging from fine art painting to cartooning, but is best remembered for his political posters, particularly his 1917 poster of Uncle Sam created for United States Army recruitment during World War I.
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Eric Maschwitz
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
Albert Eric Maschwitz OBE , sometimes credited as Holt Marvell, was an English entertainer, writer, editor, broadcaster and broadcasting executive. Life and work Born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, England, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish father, Eric Maschwitz was educated at Arden House preparatory school, Henley in Arden, Repton School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#14395
George S. Fishman
#14396
Kazuto Nishio
#14397
Jean-François Millet
1814 - 1875 (61 years)
Jean-François Millet was a French artist and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his paintings of peasant farmers and can be categorized as part of the Realism art movement. Toward the end of his career, he became increasingly interested in painting pure landscapes. He is known best for his oil paintings but is also noted for his pastels, Conté crayon drawings, and etchings.
Go to Profile#14398
Jacek Malczewski
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Jacek Malczewski was a Polish symbolist painter who is one of the most revered painters of Poland, associated with the patriotic Young Poland movement following a century of Partitions. He is regarded as the father of Polish Symbolism. His creative output combined the predominant style of his times with historical motifs of Polish martyrdom, the romantic ideals of independence, Christian and Greek mythology, folk tales, as well as his love of the natural world. He was the father of painter Rafał Malczewski.
Go to Profile#14399
Antonín Svoboda
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Antonín Svoboda was a Czech computer scientist, mathematician, electrical engineer, and researcher. He is credited with originating the design of fault-tolerant computer systems, and with the creation of SAPO, the first Czech computer design.
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