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,
#14451
Federico Zuccari
1539 - 1609 (70 years)
Federico Zuccaro, also known as Federico Zuccari , was an Italian Mannerist painter and architect, active both in Italy and abroad. Biography Zuccaro was born at Sant'Angelo in Vado, near Urbino . His documented career as a painter began in 1550, when he moved to Rome to work under Taddeo, his elder brother. He went on to complete decorations for Pius IV, and help complete the fresco decorations at the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. Between 1563 and 1565, he was active in Venice with the Grimani family of Santa Maria Formosa. During his Venetian period, he traveled alongside Palladio in Friuli. H...
Go to Profile#14452
Lionel Harry Butler
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Lionel Butler FRHistS MA DPhil was an academic and Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London, from 1973 until his death in 1981. Education and war service Butler was educated at Dudley Boys Grammar School. From 1941-43 he did war service with the Royal Air Force . He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner obtaining First Class Honours in Modern History in 1945.
Go to Profile#14453
Russell Drysdale
1912 - 1981 (69 years)
Sir George Russell Drysdale , also known as Tass Drysdale, was an Australian artist. He won the prestigious Wynne Prize for Sofala in 1947, and represented Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He was influenced by abstract and surrealist art, and "created a new vision of the Australian scene as revolutionary and influential as that of Tom Roberts".
Go to Profile#14454
John Varley
1778 - 1842 (64 years)
John Varley was an English watercolour painter and astrologer, and a close friend of William Blake. They collaborated in 1819–1820 on the book Visionary Heads, written by Varley and illustrated by Blake. He was the elder brother of a family of artists: Cornelius Varley, William Fleetwood Varley, and Elizabeth, who married the painter William Mulready.
Go to Profile#14455
John Craig
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
John Douglas Craig was a Scottish classicist, who was Firth Professor of Latin at the University of Sheffield from 1930 to 1952. Life Craig was the son of Rev Robert Craig, minister in Ardentinny in Argyll, Scotland. He was the younger brother of Robert Meldrum Craig FRSE, the geologist, and Prof James Manson Craig of St Andrews University.
Go to Profile#14456
Francesco Albani
1578 - 1660 (82 years)
Francesco Albani or Albano was an Italian Baroque painter who was active in Bologna , Rome , Bologna , Viterbo , Bologna , Rome , Bologna , Mantova , Roma and Florence . Early years in Bologna Albani was born in Bologna, Italy in 1578. His father was a silk merchant who intended his son to go into his own trade. By the age of twelve, however, he had become an apprentice to the competent mannerist painter Denis Calvaert, in whose studio he met Guido Reni. He soon followed Reni to the so-called "Academy" run by Annibale, Agostino, and Ludovico Carracci. This studio fostered the careers of many...
Go to Profile#14457
Paul Sandby
1725 - 1809 (84 years)
Paul Sandby was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolours, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768. Life and work
Go to Profile#14458
Martin von Feuerstein
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Martin Feuerstein was a German painter and art teacher. He was a late adherent of the Nazarene movement, but was also heavily influenced by impressionism and Art Nouveau. Life His father, Johann Martin Feuerstein, was a sculptor. By 1870, he was studying in Munich. He moved to Paris in 1878 for further studies with Luc-Olivier Merson, then worked as a painter of genre scenes in Alsace from 1880 to 1882. The following year, he took a study trip to Italy. His experiences there inspired him to devote himself to religious art when he returned to Munich. From 1898 to 1924, he was the Professor of Religious Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts; the last person to hold that chair.
Go to Profile#14459
Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro
1857 - 1929 (72 years)
Columbano Bordalo Pinheiro , who is usually referred to as Columbano, was a Portuguese Realist painter. Usually considered the greatest Portuguese painter of the 19th century, he has been compared to the likes of Wilhelm Leibl and John Singer Sargent.
Go to Profile#14460
Leopold Müller
1834 - 1892 (58 years)
Leopold Carl Müller was an Austrian genre painter noted for his Orientalist works. Biography Born in Dresden to Austrian parents, he was a pupil of Karl von Blaas and of Christian Ruben at the Academy in Vienna. Obliged to support his family after his father's death, he worked eight years as an illustrator for the Vienna Figaro. Continuing his studies subsequently, he visited repeatedly Italy and Egypt, and made his name favorably known through a series of scenes from popular life in Italy and Hungary.
Go to Profile#14461
Donald Forster
1934 - 1983 (49 years)
Donald Forster was a Canadian academic. He was president of the University of Guelph, and was appointed president of the University of Toronto just before his death. Born in Toronto, Ontario, he was a graduate of the University of Toronto and of Harvard University. Later, he was a professor of economics in the department of political economy at the University of Toronto. He was also a vice-president and provost. From 1975 to 1983, he was president of the University of Guelph.
Go to Profile#14462
Cimabue
1240 - 1302 (62 years)
Cimabue , – 1302, was an Italian painter and designer of mosaics from Florence. He was also known as Cenni di Pepo or Cenni di Pepi. Although heavily influenced by Byzantine models, Cimabue is generally regarded as one of the first great Italian painters to break from the Italo-Byzantine style. While medieval art then was scenes and forms that appeared relatively flat and highly stylized, Cimabue's figures were depicted with more advanced lifelike proportions and shading than other artists of his time. According to Italian painter and historian Giorgio Vasari, Cimabue was the teacher of Giotto, the first great artist of the Italian Proto-Renaissance.
Go to Profile#14463
John Linnell
1792 - 1882 (90 years)
John Linnell was an English engraver, and portrait and landscape painter. He was a naturalist and a rival to the artist John Constable. He had a taste for Northern European art of the Renaissance, particularly Albrecht Dürer. He also associated with the amateur artist Edward Thomas Daniell, and with William Blake, to whom he introduced the painter and writer Samuel Palmer and others of the Ancients.
Go to Profile#14464
George Bridgman
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
George Brant Bridgman was a Canadian-American painter, writer, and teacher in the fields of anatomy and figure drawing. Bridgman taught anatomy for artists at the Art Students League of New York for some 45 years.
Go to Profile#14465
John Gregory
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
John Clements Gregory was an American sculptor. Life When he was about 12 years old his family immigrated to the United States where he began his sculptural studies at the Art Students League in New York City. He continued these at both the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and at the American Academy in Rome. At various times he studied with J. Massey Rhind, George Grey Barnard, Hermon MacNeil, Gutzon Borglum, Herbert Adams, and Antonin Mercié. He became a United States citizen in 1912 and during the First World War served in the camouflage section of the U.S. Navy.
Go to Profile#14466
William A. Finley
1839 - 1912 (73 years)
William Asa Finley was an American academic and the first president of Corvallis College, known today as Oregon State University. Born in Missouri in 1839, Finley moved to California in 1852. He went to California Wesleyan College in Santa Clara for three years and Pacific Methodist College for one year, where he received the degree of Artium Magister. Thereafter, he received the honorary Doctor of Divinity from Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina in 1871.
Go to Profile#14467
Max Robinson
1939 - 1988 (49 years)
Maxie Cleveland Robinson Jr. was an American broadcast journalist, most notably serving as co-anchor on ABC World News Tonight alongside Frank Reynolds and Peter Jennings from 1978 until 1983. Robinson is noted as the first African-American broadcast network news anchor in the United States. Robinson was a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Go to Profile#14468
Sebastiano del Piombo
1485 - 1547 (62 years)
Sebastiano del Piombo was an Italian painter of the High Renaissance and early Mannerist periods famous as the only major artist of the period to combine the colouring of the Venetian school in which he was trained with the monumental forms of the Roman school. He belongs both to the painting school of his native city, Venice, where he made significant contributions before he left for Rome in 1511, and that of Rome, where he stayed for the rest of his life, and whose style he thoroughly adopted.
Go to Profile#14469
Antonello da Messina
1430 - 1479 (49 years)
Antonello da Messina , properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio, but also called Antonello degli Antoni and Anglicized as Anthony of Messina, was an Italian painter from Messina, active during the Italian Early Renaissance.
Go to Profile#14470
Pietro Lorenzetti
1280 - 1348 (68 years)
Pietro Lorenzetti or Pietro Laurati was an Italian painter, active between and 1345. Together with his younger brother Ambrogio, he introduced naturalism into Sienese art. In their artistry and experiments with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, the brothers foreshadowed the art of the Renaissance.
Go to Profile#14471
Morris Ankrum
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Morris Ankrum was an American radio, television, and film character actor. Early life Born in Danville in Vermilion County in eastern Illinois, Ankrum originally began a career in academics. After graduating from The University of Southern California with a law degree, he went on to an associate professorship in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. While at Berkeley he became involved in the drama department and eventually began teaching drama and directing at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Go to Profile#14472
Karl E. Young
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Karl Egbert Young was a professor of English and related subjects at Brigham Young University who wrote several books, primarily dealing with the Mormon colonies in northern Mexico and the flight of these colonists back to the United States in 1912.
Go to Profile#14473
Aleš Ušeničnik
1868 - 1952 (84 years)
Aleš Ušeničnik was a Slovene Roman Catholic priest, philosopher, sociologist and theologian. He was one of the main philosophers of neo-Thomism in Slovenia and in Yugoslavia. Ušeničnik was born in the village of Poljane near the Upper Carniolan town of Škofja Loka, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire . He studied theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In 1897, he became a professor at the Theological Seminary in Ljubljana. In 1919, he became a professor at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Ljubljana, where he taught philosophy. In 1922 and 1923, he served as the fourth chancellor of the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#14474
John Reith, 1st Baron Reith
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, , was a British broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom. In 1922, he was employed by the BBC, then the British Broadcasting Company Ltd., as its general manager; in 1923 he became its managing director, and in 1927 he was employed as the Director-General of the British Broadcasting Corporation created under a royal charter. His concept of broadcasting as a way of educating the masses marked for a long time the BBC and similar organisations around the world. An engineer by...
Go to Profile#14475
Leonard D. Jungwirth
1903 - 1963 (60 years)
Leonard D. Jungwirth American sculptor born in Detroit, Michigan. He studied with his father Joachim Jungwirth, a Detroit wood carver. His formal education was furthered at the School of Fine Arts and Wayne State University both in Detroit. He spent 1929 through 1933 studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany.
Go to Profile#14476
Suzanne Scheuer
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Suzanne Scheuer was an American fine artist, best known for her New Deal-era murals. She painted one of the murals in Coit Tower, Newsgathering. Biography Suzanne Scheuer was born in San Jose, California on February 11, 1898. Scheuer was of Dutch descent.
Go to Profile#14477
Gregory Ivy
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Gregory Ivy was chairman of the art department at Woman's College, now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from 1935 to 1961. He was born on May 7, 1904, in Clarksburg Missouri, to Bennet Monroe Ivy and Fanni B. Dowler.
Go to Profile#14478
Frank Duveneck
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Frank Duveneck was an American figure and portrait painter. Early life Duveneck was born in Covington, Kentucky, the son of German immigrant Bernhard Decker. Decker died in a cholera epidemic when Frank was only a year old, and his widow remarried Joseph "Squire" Duveneck. By the age of 15, Frank had begun the study of art under the tutelage of a local painter, Johann Schmitt, and had been apprenticed to a German firm of church decorators.
Go to Profile#14479
John Glover
1767 - 1849 (82 years)
John Glover was an English-born artist. In later life he migrated to Van Diemen’s Land and became a pastoralist during the early colonial period. He has been dubbed "the father of Australian landscape painting."
Go to Profile#14480
Adam Kossowski
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Adam Kossowski was a Polish artist, born in Nowy Sącz, notable for his works for the Catholic Church in England, where he arrived in 1943 as a refugee from Soviet labour camps and was invited in 1944 to join the Guild of Catholic Artists and Craftsmen.
Go to Profile#14481
John Heartfield
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
John Heartfield was a 20th-century German visual artist who pioneered the use of art as a political weapon. Some of his most famous photomontages were anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements. Heartfield also created book jackets for book authors, such as Upton Sinclair, as well as stage sets for contemporary playwrights, such as Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator.
Go to Profile#14482
John Calvin Stevens
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
John Calvin Stevens was an American architect who worked in the Shingle Style, in which he was a major innovator, and the Colonial Revival style. He designed more than 1,000 buildings in the state of Maine.
Go to Profile#14483
Lew Landers
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Lew Landers was an American independent film and television director. Biography Born as Louis Friedlander in New York City, Lew Landers began his movie career as an actor. In 1914, he appeared in two features: D.W. Griffith's drama The Escape and the comedy short Admission – Two Pins, under his birth name. He became an assistant director at Universal Pictures in 1922. He began making films in the 1930s, one of his early ones being the Boris Karloff / Bela Lugosi thriller The Raven . After directing a few more features, he changed his name to Lew Landers and directed more than 100 films in a variety of genres, including Westerns, comedies, and horror movies.
Go to Profile#14484
Wilhelm Camphausen
1818 - 1885 (67 years)
Wilhelm Camphausen , was a German painter who specialized in historical and battle scenes. Biography He studied under Alfred Rethel and Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow. As an historical and battle painter he rapidly became popular, and in 1859 was made professor of painting at the Düsseldorf Academy, together with other later distinctions. His Flight of Tilly , Prince Eugene of Savoy at the Battle of Belgrade , Flight of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester , Cromwell's Cavalry , are his principal earlier pictures; and his Frederick the Great at Potsdam, Frederick II and the Bayreuth Dragoons at Hohenfriedburg.
Go to Profile#14485
John McLaughlin
1898 - 1976 (78 years)
John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalism and hard-edge painting. Considered one of the most significant Californian postwar artists, McLaughlin painted a focused body of geometric works that are completely devoid of any connection to everyday experience and objects, inspired by the Japanese notion of the void. He aimed to create paintings devoid of any object hood including but not limited to a gestures, representations and figuration. This led him to the rectangle. Leveraging a technique of layering rectangular bars...
Go to Profile#14486
Charles Yardley Turner
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Charles Yardley "C. Y." Turner was an American painter, illustrator, muralist and teacher. His genre scenes and American historical paintings were popularized through engravings and book illustrations.
Go to Profile#14487
John Jackson
1778 - 1831 (53 years)
John Jackson was a British portraitist. John Jackson was baptised on 31 May 1778 in Lastingham, Yorkshire, and started his career as an apprentice tailor to his father, also John Jackson, who opposed the artistic ambitions of his son. John Jackson’s mother was Ann Warrener and he had at least one brother, Roger Jackson.
Go to Profile#14488
Camilo Egas
1889 - 1962 (73 years)
Camilo Egas was an Ecuadorian master painter and teacher, who was also active in the United States and Europe. Egas was married in Paris 1927 to dancer and artist Margarita Gibbons. Camilo Egas museum in Quito illustrates a self portrait of the artist of 1946 that is on the cover of a pamphlet published by them then used for a book Jan 2003 edition by del Banco central del Ecuador.
Go to Profile#14489
Mabel May Woodward
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Mabel May Woodward was a prominent Rhode Island impressionist painter during the late 19th and early 20th century. She was active from 1896 until 1943, primarily in Rhode Island and in Maine. Early life and education Woodward was born on September 28, 1877, to a stable, affluent family in Providence, Rhode Island, where she spent most of her life, except for a brief period in San Francisco and many summers in Ogunquit, Maine. Her family gave her the "finest domestic art education then available."
Go to Profile#14490
Ed Begley
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Edward James Begley was an American actor of theatre, radio, film, and television. He won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the film Sweet Bird of Youth and appeared in such classics as 12 Angry Men , Odds Against Tomorrow and The Unsinkable Molly Brown . He was nominated for an Emmy Award for his portrayal of Matthew Harrison Brady in a television adaptation of Inherit the Wind. He is the father of actor and environmental activist Ed Begley Jr.
Go to Profile#14491
Graham MacGregor Bull
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Sir Graham MacGregor Bull was a South African-British physician, nephrologist, medical administrator, and director of medical research. Biography Graham MacGregor Bull grew up in South Africa. After education at Cape Town's Diocesan College, he attended the University of Cape Town, where he graduated MB ChB in 1939. After briefly engaging in general practice, he was appointed tutor and medical assistant at the Groote Schuur Hospital.
Go to Profile#14492
Nikolaos Gyzis
1842 - 1901 (59 years)
Nikolaos Gyzis was considered one of Greece's most important 19th century painters. He was most famous for his work Eros and the Painter, his first genre painting. It was auctioned in May 2006 at Bonhams in London, being last exhibited in Greece in 1928. He was the major representative of the Munich School, the major 19th-century Greek art movement.
Go to Profile#14493
Palma il Giovane
1544 - 1628 (84 years)
Iacopo Negretti , best known as Jacopo or Giacomo Palma il Giovane or simply Palma Giovane , was an Italian painter from Venice and a notable exponent of the Venetian school. After Tintoretto's death , Palma became Venice's dominant artist perpetuating his style. Outside Venice, he received numerous commissions in the area of Bergamo, then part of the Venetian Domini di Terraferma, and in Central Europe, most prominently from the connoisseur emperor Rudolph II in Prague.
Go to Profile#14494
Joseph S. Illick
1884 - 1967 (83 years)
Joseph S. Illick was Dean of the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University, from 1944 to 1951. He was a graduate of Lafayette College , and the Biltmore Forest School ; he studied at the University of Munich, as well. Prior to coming to New York, Illick was State Forester, in Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#14495
William Macadam
1783 - 1853 (70 years)
William Macadam was an industrialist, a burgess and bailie of Glasgow. He owned a weaving mill and calico printing works in Kilmarnock near Glasgow. He was the patriarch of a small dynasty of chemical scientists including his sons William Macadam, John Macadam and Stevenson Macadam, grandsons William Ivison Macadam and Stevenson J. C. G. Macadam and great granddaughter Elison A. Macadam.
Go to Profile#14496
Otis Oldfield
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Otis William Oldfield was a San Francisco painter, printmaker and art educator. Early life and education Otis William Oldfield was born on July 3, 1890, in Sacramento, California. He attended Sutter High School but at age 16 he dropped out of school in order to work.
Go to Profile#14497
Karl Gurakuqi
1895 - 1971 (76 years)
Karl Gurakuqi was an Albanian linguist and folklorist. Life Born in Shkodër in 1895 he first studied in the Jesuit Saverian College of Shkodër and later Salzburg. In the mid 1910s he graduated from the faculty of humanities of the University of Graz. In 1921 in Vlorë, he was elected general secretary of the Fatherland Federation, a democratic organization led by Avni Rustemi. Later he worked as a professor of Albanian and Latin in the Queen Mother Pedagogical Institute in Tiranë. From 1940 to 1944 he was a member of the Institute of Albanian Studies, the predecessor of the Academy of Sciences of Albania.
Go to Profile#14498
Barbara Bodichon
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an English educationalist and artist, and a leading mid-19th-century feminist and women's rights activist. She published her influential Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women in 1854 and the English Woman's Journal in 1858. Bodichon co-founded Girton College, Cambridge . Her brother was the Arctic explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.
Go to Profile#14499
Leo Valledor
1936 - 1989 (53 years)
Leo Valledor was a Filipino-American painter who pioneered the hard-edge painting style. During the 1960s he was a member of the Park Place Gallery in Soho, New York City, which exhibited many influential and significant artists of the period. He was a leader of the minimalist movement in the 1970s.
Go to Profile#14500
George Marshall
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
George E. Marshall was an American actor, screenwriter, producer, film and television director, active through the first six decades of film history. Relatively few of Marshall's films are well-known today, with Destry Rides Again , The Ghost Breakers , The Blue Dahlia , The Sheepman , and How the West Was Won being the biggest exceptions. John Houseman called him "one of the old maestros of Hollywood ... he had never become one of the giants but he held a solid and honorable position in the industry."
Go to Profile