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,
#14601
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#14602
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#14603
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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Antonio da Correggio
1489 - 1534 (45 years)
Antonio Allegri da Correggio , usually known as just Correggio , was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the High Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the sixteenth century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Baroque art of the seventeenth century and the Rococo art of the eighteenth century. He is considered a master of chiaroscuro.
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Đuro Daničić
1825 - 1882 (57 years)
Đuro Daničić , born Đorđe Popović and also known as Đura Daničić , was a Serbiann philologist, translator, linguistic historian and lexicographer. He was a prolific scholar at the Belgrade Lyceum.
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David Burliuk
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
David Davidovich Burliuk was a Ukrainian poet, artist and publicist associated with the Futurist and Neo-Primitivist movements. Burliuk has been described as "the father of Russian Futurism." Biography
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John Trumbull
1756 - 1843 (87 years)
John Trumbull was an American artist of the early independence period, notable for his historical paintings of the American Revolutionary War, of which he was a veteran. He has been called the "Painter of the Revolution".
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Robert M. Balzer
#14617
Richard Westmacott
1775 - 1856 (81 years)
Sir Richard Westmacott was a British sculptor. Life and career Westmacott studied with his father, also named Richard Westmacott, at his studio in Mount Street, off Grosvenor Square in London before going to Rome in 1793 to study under Antonio Canova. Westmacott devoted all his energies to the study of classical sculpture, and throughout his life his real sympathies were with pagan rather than with Christian art. Within a year of his arrival in Rome he won the first prize for sculpture offered by the Florentine Academy of Arts, and in the following year he gained the papal gold medal awarded by the Academy of St Luke with his bas-relief of Joseph and his brothers.
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George Luks
1867 - 1933 (66 years)
George Benjamin Luks was an American artist, identified with the aggressively realistic Ashcan School of American painting. After travelling and studying in Europe, Luks worked as a newspaper illustrator and cartoonist in Philadelphia, where he became part of a close-knit group, led by Robert Henri, that set out to defy the genteel values imposed by the influential National Academy of Design. His best-known paintings reflect the life of the poor and hard-pressed on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Thomas Moran
1837 - 1926 (89 years)
Thomas Moran was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains. Moran and his family, wife Mary Nimmo Moran and daughter Ruth took residence in New York where he obtained work as an artist. He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio. A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly. During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as ...
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Johann Wilhelm Schirmer
1807 - 1863 (56 years)
Johann Wilhelm Schirmer was a German landscape artist born in Jülich, within the Prussian Duchy of Jülich. Biography Schirmer was started as a student of historical painting under Schadow at the academy of Düsseldorf. Later, he came under the influence of Carl Friedrich Lessing and landscape painting and began painting historical landscapes in the manner of Nicolas Poussin. He became known as one of the first of the Düsseldorf school of painting.
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Jan Wohlfahrt
#14622
Kenneth E. Batcher
#14623
Julia Kastner
#14624
Clark G. Kuebler
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Clark G. Kuebler was an American professor and educator. He received his A.B. from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He became a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity during his college years.
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Albert Marquet
1875 - 1947 (72 years)
Albert Marquet was a French painter, associated with the Fauvist movement. He initially became one of the Fauve painters and a lifelong friend of Henri Matisse. Marquet subsequently painted in a more naturalistic style, primarily landscapes, but also several portraits and, between 1910 and 1914, several female nude paintings.
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Luca Signorelli
1450 - 1523 (73 years)
Luca Signorelli was an Italian Renaissance painter from Cortona, in Tuscany, who was noted in particular for his ability as a draftsman and his use of foreshortening. His massive frescos of the Last Judgment in Orvieto Cathedral are considered his masterpiece.
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Robert Leroy Mercer
#14628
Arthur Dove
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinations, to produce his abstractions and his abstract landscapes. Me and the Moon from 1937 is a good example of an Arthur Dove abstract landscape and has been referred to as one of the culminating works of his career. Dove made a series of experimental collages in the 1920s. He also experimented with techniques, combining paints like hand mixed oil or tempera over a wax emulsion as exemplified i...
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Alexander Stirling Calder
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Alexander Stirling Calder was an American sculptor and teacher. He was the son of sculptor Alexander Milne Calder and the father of sculptor Alexander Calder. His best-known works are George Washington as President on the Washington Square Arch in New York City, the Swann Memorial Fountain in Philadelphia, and the Leif Eriksson Memorial in Reykjavík, Iceland.
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Jayant S. Vaidya
Jayant S. Vaidya is a British-Indian surgeon-oncologist and clinical academic who, together with Michael Baum and Jeffrey Tobias, developed the technique called targeted intra-operative radiotherapy . He is a professor of surgery and oncology at the University College London, London and the author of two books on breast cancer, one on tobacco eradication, and over 200 academic articles.
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Carlo Carrà
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Carlo Carrà was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number of books concerning art. He taught for many years in the city of Milan.
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Lee Greene Richards
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Lee Greene Richards was a famous Utah portrait artist. Many of his works can be found at the City and County Building in Salt Lake City, Utah. Biography Richards was the son of Levi W. and Lula Greene Richards. His father was the son of Levi Richards who was the brother of Joseph Smith's physician in Nauvoo, Illinois. He was actually named Levi after his father but went by Lee. Levi W. Richards and his mother Sarah Griffith Richards had been painters. Lee Richards was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and in 1895 he served as an LDS missionary in England....
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T. Earl Pardoe
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
Thomas Earl Pardoe was the first head of the Brigham Young University drama program. One of the main theaters in the Harris Fine Arts Center at BYU is named for him and his wife, Kathryn Bassett Pardoe, who was also an influential drama teacher at BYU.
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Bernardo Bellotto
1721 - 1780 (59 years)
Bernardo Bellotto , was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedute of European cities – Dresden, Vienna, Turin, and Warsaw. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. In Germany and Poland, Bellotto called himself by his uncle's name, Canaletto. This caused some confusion, however Bellotto’s work is more sombre in color than Canaletto's and his depiction of clouds and shadows brings him closer to Dutch painting.
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Fritz von Uhde
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Fritz von Uhde was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay in-between Realism and Impressionism, he was once known as "Germany's outstanding impressionist" and he became one of the first painters to introduce plein-air painting in his country.
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Peter Janssen
1844 - 1908 (64 years)
Johann Peter Theodor Janssen was a German historical painter. Biography Janssen was born in Düsseldorf, son of the engraver , by whom he was first instructed before studying at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Karl Ferdinand Sohn and Eduard Bendemann. He is principally known through a series of decorative works whose monumental style and sound naturalism won him a reputation as one of the foremost historical painters of his time. He became a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1877 and its director in 1895, and was elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1885. In Berli...
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Liu Haisu
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Liu Haisu was a prominent twentieth-century Chinese painter and a noted art educator. He excelled in Chinese painting and oil painting. He was one of the four pioneers of Chinese modern art who earned the title of "The Four Great Academy Presidents".
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Domenico Ghirlandaio
1448 - 1494 (46 years)
Domenico di Tommaso Curradi di Doffo Bigordi , professionally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, also spelt as Ghirlandajo, was an Italian Renaissance painter born in Florence. Ghirlandaio was part of the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, along with Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers and Sandro Botticelli. Ghirlandaio led a large and efficient workshop that included his brothers Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio, his brother-in-law Bastiano Mainardi from San Gimignano, and later his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. Many apprentices passed through Ghirlandaio's workshop, including the famous Michelangelo.
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Kræsten Iversen
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Kristen "Kræsten" Iversen was a Danish artist who is remembered both for his paintings and his painted glass windows. He was a member of the Bornholm school of painters and a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts .
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Wilhelm Trübner
1851 - 1917 (66 years)
Wilhelm Trübner was a German realist painter of the circle of Wilhelm Leibl. Biography Trübner was born in Heidelberg. He was the third son of a silver- and goldsmith, Johann Georg Trübner, and his wife Anna Maria. In 1867 he began training as a goldsmith in Hanau, and met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting. In that year he began studies at the Kunstschule in Karlsruhe under Karl Friedrich Schick. He was influenced by artists he met in Karlsruhe, such as Hans Canon and Feodor Dietz. In 1869 he began studying at the Kunstacademie in Munich, where he was greatly impressed by an international exhibition of paintings by Leibl and Gustave Courbet.
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Hans Schuler
1874 - 1951 (77 years)
Hans K. Schuler was a German-born American sculptor and monument maker. He was the first American sculptor ever to win the Salon Gold Medal. His works are in several important museum collections, and he also created many public monuments, mostly for locations in Baltimore, Maryland and in the Washington, D.C. area. For over a quarter of a century he served as president of the Maryland Institute College of Art.
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Luca Giordano
1634 - 1705 (71 years)
Luca Giordano was an Italian late-Baroque painter and printmaker in etching. Fluent and decorative, he worked successfully in Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice, before spending a decade in Spain. Early life and training Born in Naples, Giordano was the son of the painter Antonio Giordano. In around 1650 he was apprenticed to Ribera on the recommendation of the viceroy of Naples and his early work was heavily influenced by his teacher. Like Ribera, he painted many half-length figures of philosophers, either imaginary portraits of specific figures, or generic types.
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Franklin C. Crow
#14644
Anders Zorn
1860 - 1920 (60 years)
Anders Leonard Zorn was a Swedish painter. He attained international success as a painter, sculptor, and etching artist. Among Zorn's portrait subjects include King Oscar II of Sweden and three American Presidents: Grover Cleveland, William H. Taft, and Theodore Roosevelt. At the end of his life, he established the Swedish literary Bellman Prize in 1920.
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Eli Whitney
1765 - 1825 (60 years)
Eli Whitney Jr. was an American inventor, widely known for inventing the cotton gin in 1793, one of the key inventions of the Industrial Revolution that shaped the economy of the Antebellum South. Whitney's invention made upland short cotton into a profitable crop, which strengthened the economic foundation of slavery in the United States and prolonged the institution. Despite the social and economic impact of his invention, Whitney lost much of his profits in legal battles over patent infringement for the cotton gin. Thereafter, he turned his attention to securing contracts with the government in the manufacture of muskets for the newly formed United States Army.
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Tom Thomson
1877 - 1917 (40 years)
Thomas John Thomson was a Canadian artist active in the early 20th century. During his short career, he produced roughly 400 oil sketches on small wood panels and approximately 50 larger works on canvas. His works consist almost entirely of landscapes, depicting trees, skies, lakes, and rivers. He used broad brush strokes and a liberal application of paint to capture the beauty and colour of the Ontario landscape. Thomson's accidental death by drowning at 39 shortly before the founding of the Group of Seven is seen as a tragedy for Canadian art.
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Joseph Médard Carrière
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Joseph Médard Carrière , was an award-winning Franco-Ontarian French-language scholar. He was most noted as a collector of French folklore from the Midwest of the United States. He also served as a President of the American Folklore Society.
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William de Leftwich Dodge
1867 - 1935 (68 years)
William de Leftwich Dodge was an Americann artist best known for his murals, which were commissioned for both public and private buildings. Early life and education Dodge was born at Liberty, Virginia in the Piedmont near Lynchburg. In 1879, his mother, Mary de Leftwich Dodge, an aspiring artist, moved her family to Europe. After living initially in Munich they moved to Paris, where she worked on art. Dodge later followed her example and became an artist. He spent most of his childhood years in France, where his mother was working on art. He studied at the École des Beaux Arts and took first place in the examinations in 1881.
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Józef Peszka
1767 - 1831 (64 years)
Józef Peszka was a Polish painter and art professor; known mostly for his portraits and watercolor landscapes. Biography His first drawing lessons were with , an Austrian painter living in Kraków. He then studied painting in Warsaw with Franciszek Smuglewicz. After doing a portrait of Hugo Kołłątaj, he was introduced to members of the Great Sejm and earned a commission to do portraits of other prominent political figures; work which kept him occupied until 1792.
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Robert Anning Bell
1863 - 1933 (70 years)
Robert Anning Bell was an English artist and designer. Early life Robert Anning Bell was born in London on 14 April 1863, the son of Robert George Bell, a cheesemonger, and Mary Charlotte Knight. He studied at University College School, the Westminster School of Art, and the Royal Academy Schools, followed by a time in Paris.
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