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,
#14401
Benjamin West
1738 - 1820 (82 years)
Benjamin West, was a British-American artist who painted famous historical scenes such as The Death of Nelson, The Death of General Wolfe, the Treaty of Paris, and Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky.
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En-hong Chen
#14403
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Charles Rennie Mackintosh was a Scottish architect, designer, water colourist and artist. His artistic approach had much in common with European Symbolism. His work, alongside that of his wife Margaret Macdonald, was influential on European design movements such as Art Nouveau and Secessionism and praised by great modernists such as Josef Hoffmann. Mackintosh was born in Glasgow and died in London. He is among the most important figures of Modern Style .
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Vladimir Tatlin
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin was a Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet painter, architect and stage-designer. Tatlin achieved fame as the architect who designed The Monument to the Third International, more commonly known as Tatlin's Tower, which he began in 1919. With Kazimir Malevich he was one of the two most important figures in the Soviet avant-garde art movement of the 1920s, and he later became an important artist in the constructivist movement.
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Francesco Bartolozzi
1728 - 1815 (87 years)
Francesco Bartolozzi was an Italian engraver, whose most productive period was spent in London. He is noted for popularizing the "crayon" method of engraving. Early life Bartolozzi was born in Florence in 1727. He was originally destined to follow the profession of his father, a gold- and silver-smith, but he manifested so much skill and taste in designing that he was placed under the supervision of two Florentine artists, including Ignazio Hugford and Giovanni Domenico Ferretti who instructed him in painting. After devoting three years to that art, he went to Venice and studied engraving. H...
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Giovanni Vigna
#14407
Rosa Bonheur
1822 - 1899 (77 years)
Rosa Bonheur was a French artist known best as a painter of animals . She also made sculptures in a realist style. Her paintings include Ploughing in the Nivernais, first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, and now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and The Horse Fair , which was exhibited at the Salon of 1853 and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Bonheur was widely considered to be the most famous female painter of the nineteenth century.
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Antoine-Louis Barye
1795 - 1875 (80 years)
Antoine-Louis Barye was a Romantic French sculptor most famous for his work as an animalier, a sculptor of animals. His son and student was the known sculptor Alfred Barye. Biography Born in Paris, France, Barye began his career as a goldsmith, like many sculptors of the Romantic Period. He first worked under his father Pierre, and around 1810 worked under the sculptor Martin-Guillaume Biennais, who was a goldsmith to Napoleon. After studying under sculptor Francois-Joseph Bosio in 1816, and painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, he was in 1818 admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. But it was not u...
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Hiroshige
1797 - 1858 (61 years)
Utagawa Hiroshige , born Andō Tokutarō , was a Japanese ukiyo-e artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō and for his vertical-format landscape series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. The subjects of his work were atypical of the ukiyo-e genre, whose typical focus was on beautiful women, popular actors, and other scenes of the urban pleasure districts of Japan's Edo period . The popular series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji by Hokusai was a strong influence on Hiroshig...
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Giorgione
1478 - 1510 (32 years)
Giorgione was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties. He is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are firmly attributed to him. The uncertainty surrounding the identity and meaning of his work has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European art.
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Peter von Cornelius
1783 - 1867 (84 years)
Peter von Cornelius was a German painter; one of the main representatives of the Nazarene movement. Life Early years Cornelius was born in Düsseldorf. From the age of twelve he attended drawing classes at the Düsseldorf Academy. His father, who was superintendent of the Düsseldorf gallery and professor at the academy, died in 1799, after which Cornelius supported his family by his work as a portraitist and illustrator. In a letter to the Count Raczynski he wrote:It fell to the lot of an elder brother and myself to watch over the interests of a numerous family. It was at this time that it was...
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Gertrude Jekyll
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Gertrude Jekyll was a British horticulturist, garden designer, craftswoman, photographer, writer and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States, and wrote over 1000 articles for magazines such as Country Life and William Robinson's The Garden. Jekyll has been described as "a premier influence in garden design" by British and American gardening enthusiasts.
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Herman Hollerith
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Herman Hollerith was a German-American statistician, inventor, and businessman who developed an electromechanical tabulating machine for punched cards to assist in summarizing information and, later, in accounting. His invention of the punched card tabulating machine, patented in 1884, marks the beginning of the era of mechanized binary code and semiautomatic data processing systems, and his concept dominated that landscape for nearly a century.
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Caspar David Friedrich
1774 - 1840 (66 years)
Caspar David Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. He is best known for his allegorical landscapes, which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, re...
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Yuji Goto
#14416
Joaquín Sorolla
1863 - 1923 (60 years)
Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida was a Spanish Valencian painter. Sorolla excelled in the painting of portraits, landscapes, and monumental works of social and historical themes. His most typical works are characterized by a dexterous representation of the people and landscape under the bright sunlight of Spain and sunlit water.
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Arnold Houbraken
1660 - 1719 (59 years)
Arnold Houbraken was a Dutch painter and writer from Dordrecht, now remembered mainly as a biographer of Dutch Golden Age painters. Life Houbraken was sent first to learn threadtwisting from Johannes de Haan, who introduced him to engraving. After two years he then studied art with Willem van Drielenburch, who he was with during the rampjaar, the year 1672. He then studied 9 months with Jacobus Leveck and finally, four years with Samuel van Hoogstraten. In 1685 he married Sara Sasbout, and around 1709 he moved from Dordrecht to Amsterdam. Arnold Houbraken painted mythological and religious paintings, portraits and landscapes.
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Anthony M. Ralston
#14419
Algirdas Anthony Avizienis
#14420
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
1749 - 1832 (83 years)
Johann Wolfgang Goethe is widely regarded as the greatest and most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a profound and wide-ranging influence on Western literary, political, and philosophical thought from the late 18th century to the present day. Goethe was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as treatises on botany, anatomy, and color.
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William W Murdoch
#14422
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
1732 - 1806 (74 years)
Jean-Honoré Fragonard was a French painter and printmaker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings , of which only five are dated. Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.
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Pontormo
1494 - 1556 (62 years)
Jacopo Carucci or Carrucci , usually known as Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo , was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine School. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.
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Sophie Taeuber-Arp
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Sophie Henriette Gertrud Taeuber-Arp was a Swiss artist, painter, sculptor, textile designer, furniture and interior designer, architect, and dancer. Born in 1889 in Davos, and raised in Trogen, Switzerland, she attended a trade school in St. Gallen and, later, art schools in Germany, before moving back to Switzerland during the First World War. At an exhibition in 1915, she met for the first time the German-French artist Hans/Jean Arp, whom she married shortly after. It was during these years that they became associated with the Dada movement, which emerged in 1916, and Taeuber-Arp's most famous works – Dada Head – date from these years.
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Charles Le Brun
1619 - 1690 (71 years)
Charles Le Brun was a French painter, physiognomist, art theorist, and a director of several art schools of his time. He served as a court painter to Louis XIV, who declared him "the greatest French artist of all time". Le Brun was a dominant figure in 17th-century French art and was influenced by Nicolas Poussin.
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Ludo Waltman
#14427
Guercino
1591 - 1666 (75 years)
Giovanni Francesco Barbieri , better known as Guercino , was an Italian Baroque painter and draftsman from Cento in the Emilia region, who was active in Rome and Bologna. The vigorous naturalism of his early manner contrasts with the classical equilibrium of his later works. His many drawings are noted for their luminosity and lively style.
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Léon Bakst
1866 - 1924 (58 years)
Léon Bakst – born as Leyb-Khaim Izrailevich Rosenberg, Лейб-Хаим Израилевич Розенберг was a Russian painter and scene and costume designer of Jewish origin. He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes. He designed the décor for such productions as Carnaval , Spectre de la rose , Daphnis and Chloe , The Sleeping Princess and others.
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Walter Crane
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.
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Alexander Archipenko
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Alexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian-American avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist, active in France and the United States. He was one of the first to apply the principles of Cubism to architecture, analyzing human figure into geometrical forms.
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Francesco Solimena
1657 - 1747 (90 years)
Francesco Solimena was a prolific Italian painter of the Baroque era, one of an established family of painters and draughtsmen. Biography Francesco Solimena was born in Canale di Serino in the province of Avellino.
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Bartolomé Esteban Murillo
1617 - 1682 (65 years)
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo was a Spanish Baroque painter. Although he is best known for his religious works, Murillo also produced a considerable number of paintings of contemporary women and children. These lively realistic portraits of flower girls, street urchins, and beggars constitute an extensive and appealing record of the everyday life of his times. He also painted two self-portraits, one in the Frick Collection portraying him in his 30s, and one in London's National Gallery portraying him about 20 years later. In 2017–18, the two museums held an exhibition of them.
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Tadeusz Kantor
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Tadeusz Kantor was a Polish painter, assemblage and Happenings artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad. Laureate of Witkacy Prize – Critics' Circle Award .
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John La Farge
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
John La Farge was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics. La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years. La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass. That patent would be key in his dispu...
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Abanindranath Tagore
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Abanindranath Tagore was the principal artist and creator of the "Indian Society of Oriental Art". He was also the first major exponent of Swadeshi values in Indian art. He founded the influential Bengal school of art, which led to the development of modern Indian painting. He was also a noted writer, particularly for children. Popularly known as 'Aban Thakur', his books Rajkahini, Buro Angla, Nalak, and Khirer Putul were landmarks in Bengali language children's literature and art.
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Jacques Charles
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Jacques Alexandre César Charles was a French inventor, scientist, mathematician, and balloonist. Charles wrote almost nothing about mathematics, and most of what has been credited to him was due to mistaking him with another Jacques Charles, also a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, entering on 12 May 1785. He was sometimes called Charles the Geometer.
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Jan Matejko
1838 - 1893 (55 years)
Jan Alojzy Matejko was a Polish painter, a leading 19th-century exponent of history painting, known for depicting nodal events from Polish history. His works include large scale oil paintings such as Rejtan , the Union of Lublin , the Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God , or the Battle of Grunwald . He was the author of numerous portraits, a gallery of Polish monarchs in book form, and murals in St. Mary's Basilica, Kraków. He is considered by many as the most celebrated Polish painter, and sometimes as the "national painter" of Poland. Matejko was among the notable people to re...
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Chittoor V. Ramamoorthy
#14439
Leiv Sandvik
#14440
Laura H. Carnell
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Laura Horner Carnell was an American educator and the first dean of Temple University. Formative years Born in Philadelphia on September 7, 1867, Carnell graduated from the Philadelphia Normal School in 1866. In 1895, she was asked by Temple University founder Russell Conwell to join Temple's faculty. During her tenure, she helped found the Women's Department, and was named acting dean in 1897. In 1905, she was named dean, and served in that post until 1925; she then became associate president. Carnell was also named to the Philadelphia Board of Public Education in 1923. In 1924 she was presi...
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Stuart Davis
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Edward Stuart Davis was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz-influenced, proto-pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful, as well as his Ashcan School pictures in the early years of the 20th century. With the belief that his work could influence the sociopolitical environment of America, Davis' political message was apparent in all of his pieces from the most abstract to the clearest. Contrary to most modernist artists, Davis was aware of his political objectives and allegiances and did not waver in loyalty via artwork during the course of his career.
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Lorenzo Ghiberti
1378 - 1455 (77 years)
Lorenzo Ghiberti , born Lorenzo di Bartolo, was an Italian Renaissance sculptor from Florence, a key figure in the Early Renaissance, best known as the creator of two sets of bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery, the later one called by Michelangelo the Gates of Paradise. Trained as a goldsmith and sculptor, he established an important workshop for sculpture in metal. His book of Commentarii contains important writing on art, as well as what may be the earliest surviving autobiography by any artist.
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Norbert Pfeiffer
#14444
Nikos Engonopoulos
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
Nikos Egonopoulos was a Greek painter and poet. He is one of the most important members of "Generation of the '30s", as well as a major representative of the surrealist movement in Greece. His work as a writer also includes critique and essays.
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Pompeo Batoni
1708 - 1787 (79 years)
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni was an Italian painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures. The high number of foreign visitors travelling throughout Italy and reaching Rome during their "Grand Tour" led the artist to specialize in portraits.
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Alessandro Gronchi
#14447
Harold Stuart Stone
#14448
Konstantin Korovin
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Konstantin Alekseyevich Korovin was a leading Russian Impressionist painter. Biography Youth and education Konstantin was born into a wealthy merchant family of Old Believers and his mother was from the nobility, although they were officially registered as "peasants" from Vladimir Gubernia". His father, Aleksey Mikhailovich Korovin, earned a university degree and was more interested in arts and music than in the family business established by Konstantin's grandfather. Konstantin's older brother Sergei Korovin was a notable realist painter. Konstantin's relative Illarion Pryanishnikov was als...
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Peter G. Neumann
#14450
Andrea del Sarto
1486 - 1530 (44 years)
Andrea del Sarto was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. He was known as an outstanding fresco decorator, painter of altar-pieces, portraitist, draughtsman, and colorist. Although highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist , his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
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