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,
#14851
Joseph Cornell
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and film-maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. He was largely self-taught in his artistic efforts, and improvised his own original style incorporating cast-off and discarded artifacts. He lived most of his life in relative physical isolation, caring for his mother and his disabled brother at home, but remained aware of and in contact with other contemporary artists.
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Diego Rivera
1886 - 1957 (71 years)
Diego María de la Concepción Juan Nepomuceno Estanislao de la Rivera y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez, known as Diego Rivera , was a prominent Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the mural movement in Mexican and international art.
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Diego Velázquez
1599 - 1660 (61 years)
Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Knight of the Order of Santiago was a Spanish painter, the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal, and of the Spanish Golden Age.
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Len Lye
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Leonard Charles Huia Lye was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley. Lye's sculptures are found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum. Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Antonio Sanfilippo
#14859
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.
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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 ...
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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 ...
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András F. Varró
#14863
John C. Snidecor
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
John Clifton Snidecor was an American professor and educator. He joined the faculty at Santa Barbara College of the University of California in 1940 and served as acting provost from February to June 1956.
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Edward Catich
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Edward M. Catich was an American Roman Catholic priest, teacher, and calligrapher. He is noted for the fullest development of the thesis that the inscribed Roman square capitals of the Augustan age and afterward owed their form wholly to the use of the flat brush, rather than to the exigencies of the chisel or other stone cutting tools.
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Alexander Graham Bell
1847 - 1922 (75 years)
Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish-born inventor, scientist and engineer who is credited with patenting the first practical telephone. He also co-founded the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1885.
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Bev Littlewood
#14867
Vanessa Bell
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Vanessa Bell was an English painter and interior designer, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and the sister of Virginia Woolf . Early life and education Vanessa Stephen was the elder daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Duckworth. The family included her sister Virginia, brothers Thoby and Adrian , half-sister Laura whose mother was Harriett Thackeray and half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth; they lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Westminster, London. She was educated at home in languages, mathematics and history, and took drawing lessons from Ebenezer Cook before she attended Sir Arthur Cope's art school in 1896.
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James Clifford
1936 - 1987 (51 years)
James Clifford was an Australian painter who borrowed styles from other artists, in the manner of psychedelic rock music artists who came after the major pop artists and were forerunners of the postmodern appropriation movement of the 1980s.
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Juan Merlo
#14870
Nazmi Ziya Güran
1881 - 1937 (56 years)
Nazmi Ziya Güran was a Turkish Impressionist painter and art teacher. Biography He was born in Istanbul. His father was a civil servant. He attended Vefa Lisesi, Turkey's first non-military high school, then studied at the Civil Service Academy . Having been interested in art since he was a child, he asked his family to let him attend classes at the Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts, but his request was denied and he graduated from the Academy in 1901.
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Antonio Capone
#14872
Rogier van der Weyden
1390 - 1464 (74 years)
Rogier van der Weyden or Roger de la Pasture was an early Netherlandish painter whose surviving works consist mainly of religious triptychs, altarpieces, and commissioned single and diptych portraits. He was highly successful in his lifetime; his paintings were exported to Italy and Spain, and he received commissions from, amongst others, Philip the Good, Netherlandish nobility, and foreign princes. By the latter half of the 15th century, he had eclipsed Jan van Eyck in popularity. However his fame lasted only until the 17th century, and largely due to changing taste, he was almost totally forgotten by the mid-18th century.
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Jusepe de Ribera
1591 - 1652 (61 years)
Jusepe de Ribera was a Spanish painter and printmaker who, along with Francisco de Zurbarán, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, and the singular Diego Velázquez, is regarded as one of the major artists of Spanish Baroque painting. Referring to a series of Ribera exhibitions held in the late 20th century, Philippe de Montebello wrote "If Ribera's status as the undisputed protagonist of Neapolitan painting had ever been in doubt, it was no longer. Indeed, to many it seemed that Ribera emerged from these exhibitions as not simply the greatest Neapolitan artist of his age but one of the outstanding Europ...
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Filippino Lippi
1457 - 1504 (47 years)
Filippino Lippi was an Italian painter working in Florence, Italy during the later years of the Early Renaissance and first few years of the High Renaissance. Biography Filippino Lippi was born in 1457 at Prato, Tuscany, the illegitimate son to Lucrezia Buti and the painter Fra Filippo Lippi. His sister, Alessandra, was born in 1465. Filippino first trained under his father in his workshop.
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Walter Sickert
1860 - 1942 (82 years)
Walter Richard Sickert was a German-born British painter and printmaker who was a member of the Camden Town Group of Post-Impressionist artists in early 20th-century London. He was an important influence on distinctively British styles of avant-garde art in the mid and late 20th century.
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William Holman Hunt
1827 - 1910 (83 years)
William Holman Hunt was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour, and elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign and fact. Of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt remained most true to their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen ...
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Julian Trevelyan
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Julian Otto Trevelyan was an English artist and poet. Early life Trevelyan was the only child to survive to adulthood of Robert Calverley Trevelyan and his wife Elizabeth van der Hoeven. His grandfather was the liberal politician Sir George Trevelyan, 2nd Baronet, and his uncle the historian George Macaulay Trevelyan; he is the great-uncle of his namesake, Julian Trevelyan the pianist.
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Dennis Mcleod
#14879
Piero Manzoni
1933 - 1963 (30 years)
Piero Manzoni di Chiosca e Poggiolo, better known as Piero Manzoni was an Italian artist best known for his ironic approach to avant-garde art. Often compared to the work of Yves Klein, his own work anticipated, and directly influenced, the work of a generation of younger Italian artists brought together by the critic Germano Celant in the first Arte Povera exhibition held in Genoa, 1967. Manzoni is most famous for a series of artworks that call into question the nature of the art object, directly prefiguring Conceptual Art. His work eschews normal artist's materials, instead using everything...
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John Edward Fletcher
#14881
Mattia Preti
1613 - 1699 (86 years)
Mattia Preti was an Italian Baroque artist who worked in Italy and Malta. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Saint John. Life Born in the small town of Taverna in Calabria, Preti was called Il Cavalier Calabrese after appointment as a Knight of the Order of St. John in 1660. His early apprenticeship is said to have been with the "Caravaggist" Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, which may account for his lifelong interest in the style of Caravaggio.
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George Bellows
1882 - 1925 (43 years)
George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. He became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".
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Grinling Gibbons
1648 - 1721 (73 years)
Grinling Gibbons was an Anglo-Dutch sculptor and wood carver known for his work in England, including Windsor Castle, the Royal Hospital Chelsea and Hampton Court Palace, St Paul's Cathedral and other London churches, Petworth House and other country houses, Trinity College, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Gibbons was born to English parents in Holland, where he was educated.
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Peter Schmidt
1931 - 1980 (49 years)
Peter Schmidt was a Berlin-born British artist, painter, theoretician of color and composition, pioneering multimedia exhibitor and an influential teacher at Watford College of Art. He was part of a generation of art school teachers in the 1960s and 1970s who had great impact on some students who later went on to work in art and music. He worked with Hansjörg Mayer, Brian Eno, Mark Boyle, Dieter Roth and had associations with Russell Mills, David Toop and Tom Phillips.
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Alexander Hammers
#14886
Krishna Kumar Mitra
1852 - 1936 (84 years)
Krishna Kumar Mitra was an Indian freedom fighter, journalist and leader of the Brahmo Samaj. He is remembered for his contributions to the Swadeshi movement through his journal Sanjibani. Early life and education Krishna Kumar was born in the village of Baghil in the Mymensingh district of Bengal in what is today Bangladesh in 1852. He was a Hindu Kayastha by birth and his father Guruprasad Mitra was a landholder who led an agitation against oppression by British indigo planters.
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Arthur Lismer
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Arthur Lismer, LL. D. was an English-Canadian painter, member of the Group of Seven and educator. He is known primarily as a landscape painter and for his paintings of ships in dazzle camouflage. Early life Lismer was born in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, the son of Harriet and Edward Lismer, a draper's buyer. At age thirteen, he apprenticed at a photo-engraving company. He was awarded a scholarship, and used this time to take evening classes at the Sheffield School of Art from 1898 until 1905. In 1905, he moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where he studied art at the Academie Royale.
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Lucas van Leyden
1494 - 1533 (39 years)
Lucas van Leyden , also named either Lucas Hugensz or Lucas Jacobsz, was a Dutch painter and printmaker in engraving and woodcut. Lucas van Leyden was among the first Dutch exponents of genre painting and was a very accomplished engraver.
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Sonia Delaunay
1885 - 1979 (94 years)
Sonia Delaunay was a French artist, who spent most of her working life in Paris. She was born in the Russian Empire, in the area which is now Ukraine, and formally trained in Russian Empire and Germany before moving to France and expanding her practice to include textile, fashion, and set design. She co-founded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others. She was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964, and in 1975 was named an officer of the French Legion of Hon...
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Max Weber
1881 - 1961 (80 years)
Max Weber was a Jewish-American painter and one of the first American Cubist painters who, in later life, turned to more figurative Jewish themes in his art. He is best known today for Chinese Restaurant , in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, "the finest canvas of his Cubist phase," in the words of art historian Avis Berman.
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Rosso Fiorentino
1494 - 1540 (46 years)
Giovanni Battista di Jacopo , known as Rosso Fiorentino , or Il Rosso, was an Italian Mannerist painter who worked in oil and fresco and belonged to the Florentine school. Biography Born in Florence with the red hair that gave him his nickname, Rosso first trained in the studio of Andrea del Sarto alongside his contemporary, Pontormo. His early works include Holy Family with the Infant Saint John the Baptist , Cherub Playing a Lute and The Infant Saint John the Baptist , all produced around 1521. In late 1523, Rosso moved to Rome, where he was exposed to the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, a...
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Piero di Cosimo
1462 - 1522 (60 years)
Piero di Cosimo , also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He is most famous for the mythological and allegorical subjects he painted in the late Quattrocento; he is said to have abandoned these to return to religious subjects under the influence of Savonarola, the preacher who exercised a huge sway in Florence in the 1490s, and had a similar effect on Botticelli. The High Renaissance style of the new century had little influence on him, and he retained the straightforward realism of his figures, which combines with an often whimsical treatment of his subjects...
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F. Gao
#14894
Gentile Bellini
1429 - 1507 (78 years)
Gentile Bellini was an Italian painter of the school of Venice. He came from Venice's leading family of painters, and at least in the early part of his career was more highly regarded than his younger brother Giovanni Bellini, the reverse of the case today. From 1474 he was the official portrait artist for the Doges of Venice, and as well as his portraits he painted a number of very large subjects with multitudes of figures, especially for the Scuole Grandi of Venice, wealthy confraternities that were very important in Venetian patrician social life.
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Sha Menghai
1900 - 1992 (92 years)
Sha Menghai , born Shi Wenruo , was a great master of calligraphy in China. He also was a master of Chinese seal carving , a theoretician of traditional Chinese art, and a master of Shanghai School art. Sha Wenhan is his brother.
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Cima da Conegliano
1459 - 1517 (58 years)
Giovanni Battista Cima, also called Cima da Conegliano , was an Italian Renaissance painter, who mostly worked in Venice. He can be considered part of the Venetian school, though he was also influenced by Antonello da Messina, in the emphasis he gives to landscape backgrounds and the tranquil atmosphere of his works. Once formed his style did not change greatly. He mostly painted religious subjects, often on a small scale for homes rather than churches, but also a few, mostly small, mythological ones.
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Róbert Berény
1887 - 1953 (66 years)
Róbert Berény was a Hungarian painter, one of the avant-garde group known as The Eight who introduced cubism and expressionism to Hungarian art in the early twentieth century before the First World War. He had studied and exhibited in Paris as a young man and was also considered one of the Hungarian Fauves.
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Gian Lorenzo Bernini
1598 - 1680 (82 years)
Gian Lorenzo Bernini was an Italian sculptor and architect. While a major figure in the world of architecture, he was more prominently the leading sculptor of his age, credited with creating the Baroque style of sculpture. As one scholar has commented, "What Shakespeare is to drama, Bernini may be to sculpture: the first pan-European sculptor whose name is instantaneously identifiable with a particular manner and vision, and whose influence was inordinately powerful ..." In addition, he was a painter and a man of the theatre: he wrote, directed and acted in plays , for which he designed stage sets and theatrical machinery.
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Berthe Morisot
1841 - 1895 (54 years)
Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot was a French painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. In 1864, Morisot exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government and judged by Academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley.
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Henry Moss Traquair
1875 - 1954 (79 years)
Henry Moss Traquair, FRSE, PRCSE was a Scottish ophthalmic surgeon who made important contributions to the science of perimetry and the use of visual field testing in the diagnosis of disease. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1939/40 and President of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom.
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