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,
#14801
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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Lindley Fraser
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Lindley Macnaghten Fraser was a Scottish academic, author, broadcaster and economist. After an academic career, during which he successfully switched from classics to economics, holding university posts in America, England and Scotland, Fraser was recruited by the BBC to join, and later head, its German service, in which his broadcasts to listeners in Nazi Germany won him a large following.
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Ellis O. Knox
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Ellis O'Neal Knox was the first African American to be awarded a PhD in California. Knox received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1922 from the University of California, Berkeley and his doctorate in the history and philosophy of education from the University of Southern California in the 1931.
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Edward Poynter
1836 - 1919 (83 years)
Sir Edward John Poynter, 1st Baronet was an English painter, designer, and draughtsman, who served as President of the Royal Academy. Life Poynter was the son of architect Ambrose Poynter. He was born in Paris, France, though his parents returned to Britain soon after his birth. He was educated at Brighton College and Ipswich School, but left school early for reasons of ill health, spending winters in Madeira and Rome. In 1853, he met Frederick Leighton in Rome, who made a great impression on the 17-year-old Poynter. On his return to London he studied at Leigh's Academy in Newman Street and...
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Salma Sultana
Salma Sultana is a veterinarian, entrepreneur, and researcher. She is the recipient of the 2020 The Norman E. Borlaug Award for field research and application. She has also been honored by World Food Prize Foundation. Sultana has received this award for her innovative model of providing veterinary outreach, treatment, and education to thousands of small-scale farmers in Bangladesh.
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Rudolf Heinrich
1926 - 1975 (49 years)
Rudolf Heinrich was a German stage designer. Life and career Born in Halle , Heinrich attended the painting class of the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design in Halle from 1946 to 1948 with Charles Crodel, Max Elten and others. Afterwards, he was assistant stage designer in Leipzig in 1948.
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John Weeks
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
John Weeks was a New Zealand artist who was one of the most influential staff members at the Elam Art School of the University of Auckland, where he taught from 1930 to 1954. Born in Sydenham Damerel, Devon, England, on 8 June 1886, Weeks came to New Zealand as a child with his parents in 1892. He commenced part-time study at the Elam School of Fine Art in 1908, with further training at Sydney Technical College just prior to World War I. During the war he served in France with the New Zealand Medical Corps and some small watercolours from this time are held by the Auckland Museum. He broke his arms and one leg.
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Arthur Lee
1881 - 1961 (80 years)
Arthur Lee was an American sculptor, born in Trondheim, Norway. His family immigrated to the United States in 1888, settling in St. Paul, Minnesota. He studied at the Art Students League in New York City before returning to Europe to study the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, as well as in Rome and London.
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Jeremy Moon
1934 - 1973 (39 years)
John Jeremy Kenrick Moon was a British abstract painter. He read law at the University of Cambridge and worked in advertising before becoming an artist in 1961. He lived and worked in Kingston upon Thames, Surrey between 1966 and 1973. He died following a motorcycle accident near Kingston in November 1973.
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Clare Leighton
1898 - 1989 (91 years)
Clare Marie Veronica Leighton, sometimes Clara Ellaline Hope Leighton or Clare Veronica Hope Leighton, was an English/American artist, writer and illustrator, best known for her wood engravings. Early life and education Clare Leighton was born in London on 12 April 1898, the daughter of Robert Leighton and Marie Connor Leighton , both authors. She was baptised with the name Clare Marie Veronica Leighton on 26 May 1898 at All Saints' Church in St John's Wood. Clare lived her early life in the shadow of her older brother, Roland – her mother's favorite; the family nickname for Clare was "the bystander".
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Harry Edward Stinson
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Harry Edward Stinson was a noted 20th-century sculptor. He grew up in Winfield, Iowa. In 1918 he enlisted in the US Army and was discharged in 1919. In 1920 he attended the University of Iowa, Iowa City and received his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1921. He studied art at the Cummings School of Art, Des Moines, Iowa, and then at the National Academy of Design, and Art Students League of New York between 1926 and 1928. In 1923, he was a resident painter member of The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation at Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York.
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Barbara Morgan
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Barbara Morgan was an American photographer best known for her depictions of modern dancers. She was a co-founder of the photography magazine Aperture. Morgan is known in the visual art and dance worlds for her penetrating studies of American modern dancers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, José Limón, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman and others. Morgan's drawings, prints, watercolors and paintings were exhibited widely in California in the 1920s, and in New York and Philadelphia in the 1930s.
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John Ellis
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
John Ellis was a British executioner for 23 years, from 1901 to 1924. His other occupations were as a Rochdale hairdresser and newsagent. Personal life Born in Balderstone, Rochdale on 4 October 1874, he first worked in a series of jobs as a casual labourer in and around Manchester before gaining a job at a spinning mill in Bury. After another stint in a factory he decided to follow his father's trade by becoming a barber and hairdresser in Rochdale, where he subsequently also opened a newsagent's shop, which he ran with his wife and children.
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George Miksch Sutton
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
George Miksch Sutton was an American ornithologist and bird artist. He published numerous technical papers in ornithology as well as more popular works illustrated with his own art. His early artistic work was inspired and tutored by Louis Agassiz Fuertes. In 1931, he was the first ornithologist to find the eggs of the Harris's sparrow, one of the last North American birds to have its nest and eggs described. In 1935. he was part of the team of Arthur Augustus Allen during an expedition to the Singer Tract in Louisiana to make sketches of ivory-billed woodpecker. He did extensive field work in the Arctic , Oklahoma, Labrador, and Mexico.
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Russell Clark
1905 - 1966 (61 years)
Russell Stuart Cedric Clark was a New Zealand artist, illustrator, sculptor and university lecturer. He was born in Christchurch, North Canterbury, New Zealand, on 27 August 1905. He attended Canterbury College School of Art from 1922 to 1928. He was an Official War Artist for New Zealand during the Second World War. Colin McCahon and Doris Lusk were among his students. Clark worked as an illustrator at the New Zealand School Journal both before and after the war, and was "the first unofficial art editor". By the 1950s, he was working for both the School Journal and the Listener. Many of Clar...
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Will Burtin
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Will Burtin was a graphic designer from Cologne, Germany, known for interrelating design and scientific concepts within his exhibits. He was an influential designer, educator, and theorist in Germany and the United States. He arrived in the United States in 1939 after fleeing Nazism in Germany. In the U.S., he worked for Fortune Magazine and as an educator at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design. He designed many exhibits for companies, such as Eastman Kodak, IBM, the Smithsonian, Mead Paper, Union Carbide, Herman Miller Furniture, and United States Information Agency. He received many awards and recognition for his work including a gold medal from AIGA.
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Michael Damaskinos
1530 - 1593 (63 years)
Michael Damaskenos or Michail Damaskenos was a leading post-Byzantine Cretan painter. He is a major representative of the Cretan School of painting that flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries. Painters Georgios Klontzas and Damaskenos were major contributors to the Cretan School during the same period. Damaskinos traveled all over the Venetian Empire painting. He remained loyal to his Greek roots stylistically but incorporated some Italian elements in his work. He was strongly influenced by the Venetian school. He painted parts of the Cathedral of San Giorgio dei Greci. Damaskenos has 100 known works.
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Paul Diepgen
1878 - 1966 (88 years)
Paul Diepgen was a German gynecologist and historian of medicine. He was born in Aachen. Diepgen studied medicine at the universities of Tübingen, Leipzig, Bonn and Freiburg, receiving his doctorate in 1902 with the dissertation Über zwei Fälle von Thorakopagus. From 1905 he worked as an assistant at the university women's clinic in Freiburg, and in 1910 he obtained his habilitation under the direction of Ludwig Aschoff. In 1915 he became an associate professor, and from 1919 to 1929 he served as chief physician at the Lorettokrankenhaus in Freiburg.
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Austin M. Purves Jr.
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Austin Montgomery Purves Jr. was a twentieth-century American artist and educator. His works include painting, mosaic, fresco, and sculpture. Among his most notable works were the mural decoration of the World War II Rhone American Cemetery and Memorial battle monument in Draguignan, France; bas reliefs for the SS America, the SS United States, and Grace Line ships Santa Rosa and Santa Paula; mosaic work located in the East Apse of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC.; the decorative map in the Boston Federal Reserve Bank; and the spandrel sculpture on the barra...
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Francis Focer Brown
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Francis Focer Brown was an American Impressionist painter, as well as professor and head of the Fine Arts Department at Ball State Teachers College in Muncie, Indiana from 1925 until his retirement as Professor Emeritus in 1957, and was director of the Ball State Art Gallery until 1946. He exhibited his work at the Hoosier Salon shows between 1922 and 1964, winning several awards for his oils, pastels, and watercolors between 1925 and 1945. He also won prizes for works he exhibited at the John Herron Art Institute and the Richmond Art Museum in 1922. In addition, he exhibited his work at th...
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Herman Maril
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Herman Maril was an artist and emeritus professor of painting at the University of Maryland. Biography Maril was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1908 and studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine Arts. He had 40 one-man exhibitions in his career with his first in 1935 at the Howard University Gallery of Art, and taught at the University of Maryland for more than 31 years. Examples of his work are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum as well as National Portrait Gallery and The Phillips Collection, all in Washington D.C., as well as numerous national and international museums including The Whitney Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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Ben Cunningham
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Ben Cunningham was an American artist and teacher whose works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Cunningham, known for his manipulation of color, served as supervisor of mural painting for Northern California under the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project.
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Ture Bengtz
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Ture Bengtz was a Finnish-American artist associated with the Boston Expressionist School, an influential teacher at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and director of the Art Complex Museum in Duxbury, Massachusetts. He also had a television show, "Bengtz on Drawing," on Boston's PBS station in the late 1950s.
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