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,
#15001
Andy Warhol
1928 - 1987 (59 years)
Andy Warhol was an American visual artist, film director, producer, and leading figure in the pop art movement. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings Campbell's Soup Cans and Marilyn Diptych , the experimental films Empire and Chelsea Girls , and the multimedia events known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable .
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Michael S. Montalbano
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Michael S. Montalbano was a computer scientist most noted for authoring "APL Blossom Time", a poem about the early days of the APL programming language, performed to the tune of The Battle of New Orleans. He published this poem and a few other articles under the pseudonym "J. C. L. Guest".
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Joseph Beuys
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Joseph Heinrich Beuys was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism, sociology, and, with Heinrich Böll, Johannes Stüttgen, Caroline Tisdall, Robert McDowell, and Enrico Wolleb, created the Free International University for Creativity & Interdisciplinary Research . He previously in his talks and performances also formed The Party for Animals and The Organisation for Direct Democracy. He was a member of a Dadaist art movement Fluxus and singularly inspirational in developing of Performance Art, called Kunst Aktionen, alongside Wiener Aktionismus that Allan Kaprow and Carolee Schneemann termed Art Happenings.
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Hans Holbein the Younger
1497 - 1543 (46 years)
Hans Holbein the Younger was a German-Swiss painter and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style, and is considered one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire, and Reformation propaganda, and he made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school.
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Wassily Kandinsky
1866 - 1944 (78 years)
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odesa, where he graduated from Odesa Art School. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession, he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat . Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30.
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Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1841 - 1919 (78 years)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."
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Frida Kahlo
1907 - 1954 (47 years)
Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderón was a Mexican painter known for her many portraits, self-portraits, and works inspired by the nature and artifacts of Mexico. Inspired by the country's popular culture, she employed a naïve folk art style to explore questions of identity, postcolonialism, gender, class, and race in Mexican society. Her paintings often had strong autobiographical elements and mixed realism with fantasy. In addition to belonging to the post-revolutionary Mexicayotl movement, which sought to define a Mexican identity, Kahlo has been described as a surrealist or magical realist.
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Titian
1488 - 1576 (88 years)
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio , known in English as Titian , was an Italian Renaissance painter of Lombard origin, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, 'from Cadore', taken from his native region.
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Otto Pankok
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Otto Pankok was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Biography Pankok was born in Mülheim on the Ruhr. In 1912 he began his formal training as an artist at the Art Academies in Düsseldorf and Weimar. After only a few months he left the Weimar Academy, where his teachers were Fritz Mackensen and Albin Egger-Lienz, and went on a study trip to the Netherlands with Werner Gilles. Afterwards , he spent two months in Paris, where he attended the Académie russe and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. Between 1914 and 1917 he was a soldier in France in World War I.
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Henryk Zygalski
1908 - 1978 (70 years)
Henryk Zygalski was a Polish mathematician and cryptologist who worked at breaking German Enigma ciphers before and during World War II. Life Zygalski was born on 15 July 1908 in Posen, German Empire . He was, from September 1932, a civilian cryptologist with the Polish General Staff's Biuro Szyfrów , housed in the Saxon Palace in Warsaw. He worked there with fellow Poznań University alumni and Cipher Bureau cryptology-course graduates Marian Rejewski and Jerzy Różycki. Together they developed methods and equipment for breaking Enigma messages. In late 1938, in response to growing complexit...
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Ernest Thompson Seton
1860 - 1946 (86 years)
Ernest Thompson Seton was an English-born Canadian-American author, wildlife artist, founder of the Woodcraft Indians in 1902 , and one of the founding pioneers of the Boy Scouts of America in 1910.
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Sandro Botticelli
1445 - 1510 (65 years)
Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi , better known as Sandro Botticelli or simply Botticelli, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century, when he was rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites who stimulated a reappraisal of his work. Since then, his paintings have been seen to represent the linear grace of late Italian Gothic and some Early Renaissance painting, even though they date from the latter half of the Italian Renaissance period.
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Edvard Munch
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Edvard Munch was a Norwegian painter. His 1893 work, The Scream, has become one of Western art's most acclaimed images. His childhood was overshadowed by illness, bereavement and the dread of inheriting a mental condition that ran in the family. Studying at the Royal School of Art and Design in Kristiania , Munch began to live a bohemian life under the influence of the nihilist Hans Jæger, who urged him to paint his own emotional and psychological state ; from this emerged his distinctive style.
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Jacques-Louis David
1748 - 1825 (77 years)
Jacques-Louis David was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s, his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling, harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
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Georges Seurat
1859 - 1891 (32 years)
Georges Pierre Seurat was a French post-Impressionist artist. He devised the painting techniques known as chromoluminarism and pointillism and used conté crayon for drawings on paper with a rough surface.
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John Constable
1776 - 1837 (61 years)
John Constable was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
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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
#15025
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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John Sell Cotman
1782 - 1842 (60 years)
John Sell Cotman was an English marine and landscape painter, etcher, illustrator, and a leading member of the Norwich School of painters. Born in Norwich, the son of a silk merchant and lace dealer, Cotman was educated at the Norwich Grammar School. He showed an early talent for art. It was intended that he followed his father into the family business but, intent on a career in art, he moved to London in 1798, where he met artists such as J. M. W. Turner, Peter de Wint and Thomas Girtin, whose sketching club he joined, and whom he travelled with to Wales and Surrey. By 1800 he was exhibiting at the Royal Academy, showing scenes of the Welsh countryside there in 1801 and 1802.
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Valentin Serov
1865 - 1911 (46 years)
Valentin Alexandrovich Serov was a Russian painter and one of the premier portrait artists of his era. Life and work Youth and education Serov was born in Saint Petersburg, son of the Russian composer and music critic Alexander Serov and his wife and former student Valentina Serova, also a composer in her own right. Raised in a highly artistic milieu he was encouraged to pursue his talents by his parents and in his childhood he studied in Paris and Moscow under Ilya Repin and in the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts under Pavel Chistyakov. Serov's early creativity was sparked by the realistic art of Repin and strict pedagogical system of Chistyakov.
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Henry Fuseli
1741 - 1825 (84 years)
Henry Fuseli was a Swiss painter, draughtsman, and writer on art who spent much of his life in Britain. Many of his works depict supernatural experiences, such as The Nightmare. He painted works for John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and created his own "Milton Gallery". He held the posts of Professor of Painting and Keeper at the Royal Academy. His style had a considerable influence on many younger British artists, including William Blake.
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Cedric Gibbons
1893 - 1960 (67 years)
Austin Cedric Gibbons was an Irish-American art director for the film industry. He also made a significant contribution to motion picture theater architecture from the 1930s to 1950s. Gibbons designed the Oscar statuette in 1928, but tasked the sculpting to George Stanley, a Los Angeles artist. He was nominated 39 times for the Academy Award for Best Production Design and won the Oscar 11 times, both of which are records.
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Thomas Cole
1801 - 1848 (47 years)
Thomas Cole was an English-born American artist and the founder of the Hudson River School art movement. Cole is widely regarded as the first significant American landscape painter. He was known for his romantic landscape and history paintings. Influenced by European painters, but with a strong American sensibility, he was prolific throughout his career and worked primarily with oil on canvas. His paintings are typically allegoric and often depict small figures or structures set against moody and evocative natural landscapes. They are usually escapist, framing the New World as a natural eden ...
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Henri Rousseau
1844 - 1910 (66 years)
Henri Julien Félix Rousseau was a French post-impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier , a humorous description of his occupation as a toll and tax collector. He started painting seriously in his early forties; by age 49, he retired from his job to work on his art full-time.
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Francesco Hayez
1791 - 1882 (91 years)
Francesco Hayez was an Italian painter. He is considered one of the leading artists of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, and is renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories, and portraits.
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W. Harry Vaughan
1900 - Present (126 years)
William Harry Vaughan, Jr. was a professor of ceramic engineering at the Georgia School of Technology and the founder and first director of what is now the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Education Vaughan graduated from Georgia Tech with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering chemistry in 1923. While at Georgia Tech, Vaughan was a member of Phi Kappa Phi and Pi Delta Epsilon; a contributor to The Technique in 1918 and 1919; Assistant Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Blue Print; Captain, R.O.T.C; and President, Emerson Chemical Society. Vaughan subsequently earned a Master of Scienc...
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Wu Wenzao
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Wu Wenzao was a Chinese sociologist, anthropologist, ethnologist. He was born in Jiangyin, Jiangsu. He was admitted into Tsinghua University at 1917. In 1923, his schoolmate Pan Guangdan persuaded him to go abroad to study at Dartmouth College after his graduation from Tsinghua. The classes in biology, chemistry, and the other natural sciences at Dartmouth greatly influenced him, and he later attempted to have his students use the scientific methods in their social studies. In 1925, he was admitted into Columbia University, and in 1928 he got his PhD in the Department of Sociology. In 1929, he married Bing Xin, when they were studying in the United States.
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Gwen Lux
1908 - 1986 (78 years)
Gwen Lux Creighton professionally Gwen Lux, was an American sculptor known for her abstraction and frequently constructed from polyester resin concrete and metals. She was among America's pioneer women sculptors.
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Peter Achermann
#15039
Jason D. Christie
#15040
John Flaxman
1755 - 1826 (71 years)
John Flaxman was a British sculptor and draughtsman, and a leading figure in British and European Neoclassicism. Early in his career, he worked as a modeller for Josiah Wedgwood's pottery. He spent several years in Rome, where he produced his first book illustrations. He was a prolific maker of funerary monuments.
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Frederic Littman
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Frederic Littman was a Hungarian-American sculptor, whose large sculpted public artwork, frequent collaborations with architect Pietro Belluschi, and four decades of teaching "left a towering artistic legacy in Oregon".
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Gordon Matta-Clark
1943 - 1978 (35 years)
Gordon Matta-Clark was an American artist best known for site-specific artworks he made in the 1970s. He was also a pioneer in the field of socially engaged food art. Life and work Matta-Clark's parents were artists: Anne Clark, an American artist, and Roberto Matta, a Chilean Surrealist painter, of Basque, French and Spanish descent. He was the godson of Marcel Duchamp's wife, Teeny. His twin brother Sebastian, also an artist, died by suicide in 1976.
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Andrew G. Renehan
#15044
Jeremiah D. M. Ford
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
Jeremiah Denis Mathias Ford was an American educator and author. He was the Smith Professor Emeritus of the French and Spanish Languages and Literature at Harvard University from 1907 to 1943. He was the youngest-ever to be appointed a professor at Harvard, the first Catholic faculty, and the last ever appointed as Chairman of the Department of Romance Languages from 1911 to 1943.
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J. F. Wu
#15046
Masaccio
1401 - 1428 (27 years)
Masaccio , born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was a Florentine artist who is regarded as the first great Italian painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at imitating nature, recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of three-dimensionality. He employed nudes and foreshortenings in his figures. This had seldom been done before him.
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Willi Geiger
1878 - 1971 (93 years)
Willi Geiger was a German painter. Biography The son of a teacher, Willi Geiger was born 1878 in Landshut. From 1898-99, he attended the Munich Arts and Crafts School, and later the Technical University, where he passed the state examination to teach drawing. Willi Geiger studied from 1903 with Franz von Stuck at the Munich Academy, including together with Hans Purrmann. He was awarded the National prize and the Schack scholarship for some of his early work and he traveled to Spain, Italy, and North Africa. Willi Geiger was awarded the 1910 Villa Romana prize for his success as a graphic designer.
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Holger S. Schwenk
#15049
Peter Lely
1618 - 1680 (62 years)
Sir Peter Lely was a painter of Dutch origin whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court. He became a naturalised British subject and was knighted in 1679.
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Frank Brangwyn
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Sir Frank William Brangwyn was a Welsh artist, painter, watercolourist, printmaker, illustrator, and designer. Brangwyn worked in a wide range of artistic fields. As well as paintings and drawings, he produced designs for stained glass, furniture, ceramics, glass tableware, mosaics, buildings and interiors, was a lithographer and woodcutter and was a book illustrator. It has been estimated that during his lifetime Brangwyn produced over 12,000 works. His mural commissions would cover over of canvas, he painted over 1,000 oils, over 660 mixed media works , over 500 etchings, about 400 wood-e...
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