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
Clifford Ulp
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Clifford McCormick Ulp was one of Rochester's foremost professors of the arts during the first half of the 20th century. Early life Clifford Ulp was born in Olean, New York in 1885. He attended Rochester's East High School. He continued his studies at the Rochester Athenaeum and Mechanics Institute, or what is now known as Rochester Institute of Technology and graduated in 1908. He also attended the Art Students League in New York City on scholarship. Some of his more well known teachers included Charles H. Woodbury, Emile Gruppe and William Merritt Chase.
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Anna Meredith
1900 - Present (126 years)
Anna Louise Meredith is Professor of Conservation Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where she has previously served as chairperson of zoological conservation medicine at the Royal School of Veterinary Studies.
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Sturgis Elleno Leavitt
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Sturgis Elleno Leavitt was the Kenan Professor of Spanish at the University of North Carolina, the author of many books on Spanish language and literature, the president of several Spanish language teaching organizations, an adviser to the U.S. State Department and for many years the chairman of the Southern Humanities Conference as well as editor of the Hispanic Review.
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László Kalmár
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
László Kalmár was a Hungarian mathematician and Professor at the University of Szeged. Kalmár is considered the founder of mathematical logic and theoretical computer science in Hungary. Biography Kalmár was of Jewish ancestry. His early life mixed promise and tragedy. His father died when he was young, and his mother died when he was 17, the year he entered the University of Budapest, making him essentially an orphan.
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George Gilmour
1900 - 1963 (63 years)
George Peel Gilmour B.A, M.A, Ph.D. was a Canadian university president. He was the youngest chancellor of McMaster University, serving from 1941 to 1949, then serving under the title of president and vice-chancellor until 1961. Gilmour Hall, the building containing the office of the president and the office of the registrar at McMaster University, is named after him.
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Sonia Saxena
Sonia Saxena FRCGP is a British physician who is a Professor of Primary care and Director of the Child Health Unit at the School of Public Health, Imperial College London. She is a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners and a practises as a GP in Putney, London. She is known for her work in improving healthcare, and a focus on improving child health in the early years of life and reducing social inequalities.
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Winfred Trexler Root
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Winfred Trexler Root was an American historian and educator. Root was born in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania and received his undergraduate education at Princeton University. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1908, thereafter joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin. In 1925 he accepted a position as head of the history department at the University of Iowa, succeeding Arthur M. Schlesinger, and would remain there until his death. George L. Mosse, who was a history professor at Iowa during Root's tenure, described him as a "benevolent dictator". In 1930 Roo...
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Hans Grundig
1901 - 1958 (57 years)
Hans Grundig was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement. He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season .
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Josef Albers
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator who is considered one of the most influential 20th-century art teachers in the United States. Born in 1888 in Bottrop, Westphalia, Germany, into a Roman Catholic family with a background in craftsmanship, Albers received practical training in diverse skills like engraving glass, plumbing, and wiring during his childhood. He later worked as a schoolteacher from 1908 to 1913 and received his first public commission in 1918 and moved to Munich in 1919. In 1920, Albers joined the Weimar Bauhaus as a student and later became a faculty member in 1922, teaching the principles of handicrafts.
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John Singleton Copley
1738 - 1815 (77 years)
John Singleton Copley was an Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. After becoming well-established as a portrait painter of the wealthy in colonial New England, he moved to London in 1774, never returning to America. In London, he met considerable success as a portraitist for the next two decades, and also painted a number of large history paintings, which were innovative in their readiness to depict modern subjects and modern dress. His later years were less successful, and he died heavily in debt.
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Maxfield Parrish
1870 - 1966 (96 years)
Maxfield Parrish was an American painter and illustrator active in the first half of the 20th century. He is known for his distinctive saturated hues and idealized neo-classical imagery. His career spanned fifty years and was wildly successful: the National Museum of American Illustration deemed his painting Daybreak to be the most successful art print of the 20th century.
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Canaletto
1697 - 1768 (71 years)
Giovanni Antonio Canal , commonly known as Canaletto , was an Italian painter from the Republic of Venice, considered an important member of the 18th-century Venetian school. Painter of cityscapes or vedute, of Venice, Rome, and London, he also painted imaginary views , although the demarcation in his works between the real and the imaginary is never quite clearcut. He was further an important printmaker using the etching technique. In the period from 1746 to 1756, he worked in England, where he painted many views of London and other sites, including Warwick Castle and Alnwick Castle. He was h...
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Blake Cady
#14414
Kazimir Malevich
1879 - 1935 (56 years)
Kazimir Severinovich Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing influenced the development of abstract art in the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, to an ethnic Polish family. His concept of Suprematism sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality. Malevich is also sometimes considered to be part of the Ukrainian avant-garde that was shaped by Ukrainian-born artists who worked first in Ukraine and l...
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Edward Ardizzone
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone, , who sometimes signed his work "DIZ", was a British painter, printmaker and war artist, and the author and illustrator of books, many of them for children. For Tim All Alone , which he wrote and illustrated, Ardizzone won the inaugural Kate Greenaway Medal from the Library Association for the year's best children's book illustration by a British subject. For the 50th anniversary of the Medal in 2005, the book was named one of the top ten winning titles, selected by a panel to compose the ballot for public election of an all-time favourite.
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Violet Oakley
1874 - 1961 (87 years)
Violet Oakley was an American artist. She was the first American woman to receive a public mural commission. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, she was renowned as a pathbreaker in mural decoration, a field that had been exclusively practiced by men. Oakley excelled at murals and stained glass designs that addressed themes from history and literature in Renaissance-revival styles.
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Nenghaif Yu
#14418
Robert Delaunay
1885 - 1941 (56 years)
Robert Delaunay was a French artist of the School of Paris movement; who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract. His key influence related to bold use of colour and a clear love of experimentation with both depth and tone.
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Hyacinthe Rigaud
1659 - 1743 (84 years)
Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra , known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud , was a Catalan-French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility. Biography Rigaud was born in Perpignan, then part of the Crown of Aragon, a few months before Spain ceded the city to France under the Treaty of the Pyrenees . His family, the Rigau, were Catalan; he was the son of a tailor, the grandson of painter-gilders from Roussillon, and the elder brother of another painter .
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Thomas Ender
1793 - 1875 (82 years)
Thomas Ender was an Austrian landscape painter and watercolorist. Life and work He was born to Johann Ender, a junk dealer, and was the twin brother of Johann Nepomuk Ender, a history painter. He and his brother were both enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he began by studying history painting with Hubert Maurer, but switched to landscape painting with Laurenz Janscha then, after Janscha's death in 1812, with Joseph Mössmer. He was awarded the Academy's first prize for landscape drawing.
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Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi
766 - 874 (108 years)
Ahmad ibn 'Abdallah Habash Hasib Marwazi was a Persian astronomer, geographer, and mathematician from Merv in Khorasan, who was the first to describe the trigonometric ratios sine, cosine, tangent, and cotangent.
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David W. Dunstan
#14423
Barbara Hepworth
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.
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Leslie Richard Foulds
#14425
Alexandre Cabanel
1823 - 1889 (66 years)
Alexandre Cabanel was a French painter. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well known as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of L'art pompier, and was Napoleon III's preferred painter.
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Thomas Rowlandson
1756 - 1827 (71 years)
Thomas Rowlandson was an English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era, noted for his political satire and social observation. A prolific artist and printmaker, Rowlandson produced both individual social and political satires, as well as a large number of illustrations for novels, humorous books, and topographical works. Like other caricaturists of his age such as James Gillray, his caricatures are often robust or bawdy. Rowlandson also produced highly explicit erotica for a private clientele; this was never published publicly at the time and is now only found in a small number of collections.
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Charles Willson Peale
1741 - 1827 (86 years)
Charles Willson Peale was an American painter, soldier, scientist, inventor, politician, and naturalist. In 1775, inspired by the American Revolution, Peale moved from his native Maryland to Philadelphia, where he set up a painting studio and joined the Sons of Liberty. During the American Revolutionary War, Peale served in the Pennsylvania Militia and the Continental Army, participating in several military campaigns. In addition to his military service, Peale also served in the Pennsylvania State Assembly from 1779 to 1780.
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Alexander Rodchenko
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko was a Russian and Soviet artist, sculptor, photographer, and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.
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Kate Greenaway
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning holiday card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer, Edmund Evans, printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evan...
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Antonio Canova
1757 - 1822 (65 years)
Antonio Canova was an Italian Neoclassical sculptor, famous for his marble sculptures. Often regarded as the greatest of the Neoclassical artists, his sculpture was inspired by the Baroque and the classical revival, and has been characterised as having avoided the melodramatics of the former, and the cold artificiality of the latter.
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James Miller
1860 - 1947 (87 years)
James Miller was a Scottish architect, recognised for his commercial architecture in Glasgow and for his Scottish railway stations. Notable among these are the American-influenced Union Bank building at 110–20 St Vincent Street; his 1901–1905 extensions to Glasgow Central railway station; and Wemyss Bay railway station on the Firth of Clyde. His lengthy career resulted in a wide range of building types, and, with the assistance of skilled draughtsmen such as Richard M Gunn, he adapted his designs to changing tastes and new architectural materials and technologies.
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Mary Cassatt
1844 - 1926 (82 years)
Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania , but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar Degas and exhibited with the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
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Kai W. Hwang
#14434
Eižens Ārinš
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Eižens Ārinš was a mathematician and computer scientist. He was one of those who contributed to the return of Emanuel Grinberg to the University of Latvia. Education and career Ārinš was born on 16 May 1911 in Krasnojarsk, Siberia, where his father was in exile. In 1920 the family returned to Riga. He graduated from the University of Latvia in 1941 during the German occupation of Latvia. After Second World War, Ārinš had to graduate again because the Soviet authorities refused to recognise his degree. He graduated again in 1946 from the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of the Latvian State University.
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Douglas M. Templeton
#14436
Edward Steichen
1879 - 1973 (94 years)
Edward Jean Steichen was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator, renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography. Steichen was credited with transforming photography into an art form. His photographs appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking magazine Camera Work more often than anyone else during its publication run from 1903 to 1917. Stieglitz hailed him as "the greatest photographer that ever lived".
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Yavin Shaham
#14438
Pisanello
1395 - 1455 (60 years)
Pisanello , born Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto, also erroneously called Vittore Pisano by Giorgio Vasari, was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was acclaimed by poets such as Guarino da Verona and praised by humanists of his time, who compared him to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.
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Simon Vouet
1590 - 1649 (59 years)
Simon Vouet was a French painter who studied and rose to prominence in Italy before being summoned by Louis XIII to serve as Premier peintre du Roi in France. He and his studio of artists created religious and mythological paintings, portraits, frescoes, tapestries, and massive decorative schemes for the king and for wealthy patrons, including Richelieu. During this time, "Vouet was indisputably the leading artist in Paris," and was immensely influential in introducing the Italian Baroque style of painting to France. He was also according to Pierre Rosenberg, "without doubt one of the outstan...
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James McNeill Whistler
1834 - 1903 (69 years)
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American painter in oils and watercolor, and printmaker, active during the American Gilded Age and based primarily in the United Kingdom. He eschewed sentimentality and moral allusion in painting and was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake".
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Stephen Sutton
#14442
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
#14444
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
#14448
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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