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,
#14651
Janardan Chakravarti
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Professor Janardan Chakravarti was a renowned scholar in Vaishnav literature and a celebrated professor of Bengali. He was awarded the DLitt by the University of Calcutta for his contributions to Bengali literature.
Go to Profile#14652
Villard de Honnecourt
1200 - 1250 (50 years)
Villard de Honnecourt was a 13th-century artist from Picardy in northern France. He is known to history only through a surviving portfolio or "sketchbook" containing about 250 drawings and designs of a wide variety of subjects.
Go to Profile#14653
Norman Rockwell
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Norman Percevel Rockwell was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of the country's culture. Rockwell is most famous for the cover illustrations of everyday life he created for The Saturday Evening Post magazine over nearly five decades. Among the best-known of Rockwell's works are the Willie Gillis series, Rosie the Riveter, The Problem We All Live With, Saying Grace, and the Four Freedoms series. He is also noted for his 64-year relationship with the Boy Scouts of America , during which he produced covers for their publication Boys' Life , calendars, and other illustrations.
Go to Profile#14654
Antonio Sanfilippo
#14655
Louis Daguerre
1787 - 1851 (64 years)
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre was a French artist and photographer, recognized for his invention of the eponymous daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter, scenic designer, and a developer of the diorama theatre.
Go to Profile#14656
Louis Comfort Tiffany
1848 - 1933 (85 years)
Louis Comfort Tiffany was an American artist and designer who worked in the decorative arts and is best known for his work in stained glass. He is the American artist most associated with the Art Nouveau and Aesthetic movements. He was affiliated with a prestigious collaborative of designers known as the Associated Artists, which included Lockwood de Forest, Candace Wheeler, and Samuel Colman. Tiffany designed stained glass windows and lamps, glass mosaics, blown glass, ceramics, jewellery, enamels, and metalwork. He was the first design director at his family company, Tiffany & Co., founded ...
Go to Profile#14657
Amedeo Modigliani
1884 - 1920 (36 years)
Amedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. He is known for portraits and nudes in a modern style characterized by a surreal elongation of faces, necks, and figures that were not received well during his lifetime, but later became much sought-after. Modigliani spent his youth in Italy, where he studied the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. In 1906, he moved to Paris, where he came into contact with such artists as Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. By 1912, Modigliani was exhibiting highly stylized sculptures with Cubists of the Section ...
Go to Profile#14658
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.
Go to Profile#14659
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.
Go to Profile#14660
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...
Go to Profile#14661
Blake Cady
#14662
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...
Go to Profile#14663
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.
Go to Profile#14664
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.
Go to Profile#14665
Nenghaif Yu
#14666
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.
Go to Profile#14667
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 .
Go to Profile#14668
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.
Go to Profile#14669
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.
Go to Profile#14670
David W. Dunstan
#14671
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.
Go to Profile#14672
Leslie Richard Foulds
#14673
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.
Go to Profile#14674
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.
Go to Profile#14675
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.
Go to Profile#14676
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.
Go to Profile#14677
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...
Go to Profile#14678
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.
Go to Profile#14679
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.
Go to Profile#14680
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.
Go to Profile#14681
Kai W. Hwang
#14682
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.
Go to Profile#14683
Douglas M. Templeton
#14684
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".
Go to Profile#14685
Yavin Shaham
#14686
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.
Go to Profile#14687
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...
Go to Profile#14688
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".
Go to Profile#14689
Stephen Sutton
#14690
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.
Go to Profile#14691
En-hong Chen
#14692
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 .
Go to Profile#14693
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.
Go to Profile#14694
Beniah Longley Whitman
1862 - 1911 (49 years)
Rev. Beniah Longley Whitman was the 11th president of Colby College, and later Columbian College . Life Beniah Longley Whitman was born in Wilmot, Nova Scotia on November 21, 1962. He prepared for college at the Worcester Academy in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brown University in the class of 1887, with a B.A. degree, and received an M.A. degree in 1890. He received the honorary degree of D.D. from Bowdoin College in 1894; the degree of LL.D. from Howard University in 1899, and from Furman University in 1906.
Go to Profile#14695
Ernst Posner
1892 - 1980 (88 years)
Ernst Maximilian Posner was a Prussian state archivist who fled to the United States during World War II where he served as the history department chairman, dean of the graduate school, and director of the School of Social Science and Public Affairs at American University. Additionally, he was a frequent archival consultant to the United States government.
Go to Profile#14696
George Hector Percival
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
George Hector Percival FRSE FRCPE was a British dermatologist, academic author and president of the British Association of Dermatologists. Life He was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife the son of E J Percival.
Go to Profile#14697
Iwo Lominski
1905 - 1968 (63 years)
Iwo Robert Waclaw Lominski FRSE was a Polish-born microbiologist working in Britain in the 20th century. In articles he is referred to as I. R. W. Lominski. Life He was born in Kraków in Poland in 1905. He studied medicine at the University of Kraków and gained his doctorate in 1931. He obtained a prestigious position in the Pasteur Institute in Paris.
Go to Profile#14698
Reuben Smeed
1909 - 1976 (67 years)
Reuben Jacob Smeed CBE was a British statistician and transport researcher. He proposed Smeed's law which correlated traffic fatalities to traffic density and predicted that the average speed of traffic in central London would always be nine miles per hour without other disincentives, given that this was the minimum speed that people will tolerate.
Go to Profile#14699
Erik Husfeldt
1901 - 1984 (83 years)
Erik Husfeldt, also spelled Erik Huusfeldt , was a Danish physician who developed groundbreaking practices for the treatment of heart and lung conditions and the development of anesthesia. During World War II, he was a resistance fighter, rescuer, and member of the Danish Freedom Council. He was also the second in command in Frode Jakobsen's Ringen.
Go to Profile#14700
David H. N. Spence
1925 - 1985 (60 years)
David Hugh Neven Spence was a 20th-century Scottish botanist. In authorship he is known as David H. N. Spence or D. H. N. Spence. Life He was born on 2 May 1925 in Sleaford in Lincolnshire the son of Mary Joyce Mallorie Walton and her husband, Dr Thomas Reginald Cardwardine Spence MD. His family moved to Edinburgh and he was educated at Edinburgh Academy 1933 to 1935, then at Clifton Hall School 1935 to 1938 and finally at Glenalmond College in Perthshire 1938 to 1942.
Go to Profile