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,
#15051
Edward Blore
1787 - 1879 (92 years)
Edward Blore was a 19th-century English landscape and architectural artist, architect and antiquary. Early career He was born in Derby, the son of the antiquarian writer Thomas Blore. Blore's background was in antiquarian draughtsmanship rather than architecture, in which he had no formal training. Nevertheless, he designed a large palace for Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov in Alupka, Crimea, and important ecclesiastical furnishings designed by him included organ cases for Winchester Cathedral and Peterborough Cathedral and the choir stalls in Westminster Abbey. Charles Locke Eastl...
Go to Profile#15052
William Hunter
1937 - 1986 (49 years)
William Gordon Hunter, or Bill Hunter, was a statistician at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was co-author of the classic book Statistics for Experimenters, and co-founder of the Center for Quality and Productivity Improvement with George E. P. Box.
Go to Profile#15053
Franciszek Smuglewicz
1745 - 1807 (62 years)
Franciszek Smuglewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian draughtsman and painter. Smuglewicz is considered a progenitor of Lithuanian art in the modern era. He was precursor of historicism in Polish painting. He was also a founder of Vilnius school of art, his most prominent students were Jan Rustem, Jan Krzysztof Damel, Gaspar Borowski and Józef Oleszkiewicz. His father Łukasz Smuglewicz and brother Antoni were also painters.
Go to Profile#15054
Alexander Nasmyth
1758 - 1840 (82 years)
Alexander Nasmyth was a Scottish portrait and landscape painter, a pupil of Allan Ramsay. He also undertook several architectural commissions. Biography Nasmyth was born in Edinburgh on 9 September 1758. He studied at the Royal High School and the Trustees' Academy and was apprenticed to a coachbuilder. Aged sixteen, he was taken to London by portrait painter Allan Ramsay where he worked on subordinate parts of Ramsay's works. Nasmyth returned to Edinburgh in 1778, where he worked as a portrait painter. Offered a loan by Patrick Miller of Dalswinton, Nasmyth left in 1782 for Italy, where he remained two years furthering his studies.
Go to Profile#15055
George Sotter
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
George W. Sotter was an American painter best known for Impressionist-style works. He was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania but eventually made his name in Philadelphia. He is also known for his work in stained glass, some of which are still installed in numerous churches. In the August 5, 2006 episode of Antiques Roadshow on PBS, filmed in Philadelphia, a Sotter oil painting was appraised at $120,000 to $180,000, much to the delight of its visibly stunned owner. Sotter studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy with artist and teacher Edward Redfield, 1869–1965, member of the regional New Hope group.
Go to Profile#15056
George Eastman
1854 - 1932 (78 years)
George Eastman was an American entrepreneur who founded the Eastman Kodak Company and helped to bring the photographic use of roll film into the mainstream. After a decade of experiments in photography, he patented and sold a roll film camera, making amateur photography accessible to the general public for the first time. Working as the treasurer and later president of Kodak, he oversaw the expansion of the company and the film industry.
Go to Profile#15057
Saburo Hasegawa
1906 - 1957 (51 years)
was a Japanese calligrapher, painter, art writer, curator, and teacher. He was an early advocate of abstract art in Japan and an equally vocal supporter of the Japanese traditional arts and Zen Buddhism. Throughout his career he argued for the connection between East Asian classical arts and Western abstract painting.
Go to Profile#15058
Theo van Gogh
1857 - 1891 (34 years)
Theodorus van Gogh was a Dutch art dealer, the younger brother of Vincent van Gogh. Theo's unfailing financial and emotional support allowed his brother to devote himself entirely to painting. Theo died at the age of 33, six months after his brother died at the age of 37. At his death Theo owned practically all of his brother's artwork. Theo's widow Johanna van Gogh-Bonger worked tirelessly to promote the work of Vincent and keep the memory of her husband alive. Theo made a significant impact on the art world as an art dealer, playing a crucial role in the introduction of contemporary French art to the public.
Go to Profile#15059
Michael George Cooke
1934 - 1990 (56 years)
Michael George Cooke was an American academic. Cooke graduated from Yale University in 1957, and completed doctoral studies at the University of California, Berkeley in 1962. He then began teaching at Yale, accepting an assistant professorship at his alma mater in 1968. Cooke later taught at the University of Iowa and at Boston University, before returning to Yale in 1971. Cooke was a defendant named for sexual harassment in the famous lawsuit Alexander v. Yale that helped established the legal responsibility of universities to curtail sexual misconduct. Cooke was later appointed by Yale as the Bird White Housum Professor of English Literature in 1987.
Go to Profile#15060
Herbert W. Schooling
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Dr. Herbert W. Schooling was an American educator and former chancellor of the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri. He is the 16th chief executive officer of the Columbia campus and second since the creation of the University of Missouri System. Before becoming chancellor Schooling served as dean of faculties and Dean of the college of education. During his tenure the Hearnes Center was constructed.
Go to Profile#15061
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
1290 - 1348 (58 years)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti or Ambruogio Laurati was an Italian painter of the Sienese school. He was active from approximately 1317 to 1348. He painted The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Sala dei Nove in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. His elder brother was the painter Pietro Lorenzetti.
Go to Profile#15062
Chen Mengjia
1911 - 1966 (55 years)
Chen Mengjia was a Chinese scholar, poet, paleographer and archaeologist. He was considered the foremost authority on oracle bones and was Professor of Chinese at Tsinghua University in Beijing. He was married to the poet and translator Zhao Luorui . Chen died in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution after being labeled a "capitalist intellectual" and Rightist and being persecuted by officials.
Go to Profile#15063
Leo Kahn
1894 - 1983 (89 years)
Leo Kahn was a German-Israeli painter. Biography Kahn was born in 1894 in Bruchsal, Germany. He served in the German army in 1914, then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe between 1919-1920 under the tutelage of Albert Hueinsen. Kahn travelled to Berlin , Holland, and France in search of artistic inspiration. In 1926, he was commissioned for the decoration of an important synagogue in Bruchsal. Kahn exhibited in Karlsruhe, Munich, Ulm, Zurich, and Paris. In 1928, Kahn lived in the south of France where he befriended the important Fauve artist André Derain. He then moved to Paris ...
Go to Profile#15064
Rembrandt Peale
1778 - 1860 (82 years)
Rembrandt Peale was an American artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale's style was influenced by French neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.
Go to Profile#15065
Allan Ramsay
1713 - 1784 (71 years)
Allan Ramsay was a prominent Scottish portrait-painter. Life and career Ramsay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the eldest son of Allan Ramsay, poet and author of The Gentle Shepherd. From the age of twenty he studied in London under the Swedish painter Hans Hysing, and at the St. Martin's Lane Academy; leaving in 1736 for Rome and Naples, where he worked for three years under Francesco Solimena and Imperiali .
Go to Profile