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 female people in Education,
#851
Krista Kodres
#122231
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Krista Kodres is an Estonian art historian and former backstroke and freestyle swimmer. From 1971 until 1974, she become 7-times Estonian champion in different swimming disciplines and was a member of Estonian swimming team. She has set 13 national records.
Go to Profile#852
Anne-Catherine Robert-Hauglustaine
#183522
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Anne-Catherine Robert is a Belgian museum professional and lecturer at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne who also served as Director General of the International Council of Museums , from May 2014 through November 2016.
Go to Profile#853
Noushafarin Ansari
#43564
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Noushafarin Ansari is an Iranian librarian, educator, and manager. Life Her parents were diplomats; therefore she was exposed to many languages and cultures in Asia and Europe. In 1958-1960 she studied librarianship in Geneva, a discipline she continued at McGill University and at the University of Toronto. She worked as a librarian at the Delhi Public Library, and Tehran University Central library, and was Library Director at the Faculty of Literature and Humanities at Tehran University. In 1962 she married Mehdi Mohaghegh, a renowned Iranian university professor and scholar.
Go to Profile#854
Ewa Chojecka
#173184
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ewa Sabine Chojecka is a Polish art historian who served as chair of art history at the University of Silesia in Katowice from 1977 to 2003, and chairwoman of the Silesian Museum and the Bielsko-Biała Museum and Castle. She was awarded a Georg Dehio Cultural Prize in 2013, and invested with the Order of Polonia Restituta in 1989.
Go to Profile#855
Joanne Cuthbertson
#192318
Overall Influence
Joanne Cuthbertson was the chancellor of the University of Calgary in Alberta from 2006 until 2010.
Go to Profile#856
Helen Doron
#182312
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Helen Doron is a British-Israeli linguist and educator based in Israel. She is best known as the creator of the Helen Doron Method of teaching and as the Founder of Helen Doron Educational Group, an international pedagogic network for babies, children, and teens learning English and other programs, including Helen Doron Academy Kindergartens, Helen Doron International, MathRiders and Helen Doron Connect.
Go to Profile#857
Debora L. Silverman
#116418
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Debora Leah Silverman is professor and University of California Presidential Chair in Modern European History, Art and Culture at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 1983. She is a specialist in the history of Art Nouveau. She was a Guggenheim fellow in 1992 in fine arts research.
Go to Profile#858
Bette Gordon
#172826
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Bette Gordon is an American filmmaker and professor at Columbia University School of the Arts. She is best known for her films Variety and Handsome Harry both of which received critical acclaim in North America and abroad.
Go to Profile#859
Anna Kortelainen
#87361
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Anna Taina Aleksandra Kortelainen is a Finnish scholar, art historian and non-fiction writer. Life Kortelainen defended her doctoral dissertation in 2002 at the University of Turku about Albert Edelfelt. She teaches art history at the University of Helsinki.
Go to Profile#860
Charlotte Eyerman
#175129
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Charlotte Nalle Eyerman is an American museum director and curator and expert in 19th century French art. She was appointed Director and Chief Curator of the JPMorgan Chase art collection in 2017. She is a member of the board of trustees at Accountability Lab. Eyerman has also served as Director and chief executive officer of the Monterey Museum of Art , and as Director of the Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills.
Go to Profile#861
Laura Malosetti Costa
#164490
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Laura Malosetti Costa is a Uruguayan-born Argentine social and cultural anthropologist, researcher, art historian, and essayist. She is also a curator of art exhibitions and the author of several books on Latin American art. She was recognized with the Konex Award in 2006 and 2016.
Go to Profile#862
Dominga Sotomayor Castillo
#191040
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Dominga Sotomayor Castillo is a Chilean filmmaker. Biography She graduated from Universidad Católica de Chile with a degree on Audiovisual Direction in 2007, followed by a Master at the Escola de Cinema y Audiovisuals de Catalunya in Film direction. She directed several short films that were shown at festivals internationally. Her first feature film, Thursday Till Sunday was developed as part of the program La Résidence by Cinéfondation / Festival de Cannes, and premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam, where it was awarded the Hivos Tiger Award.
Go to Profile#863
Myrtilla Avery
1869 - 1959 (90 years)
Myrtilla Avery was an American classical scholar focused on Medieval art, former chair of the Department of Art at Wellesley College and director of the Farnsworth Art Museum from 1930–1937. Biography Avery graduated in 1891 from Wellesley College, majoring in Greek. After in which she started taking classes at University at Albany, SUNY, while working in the university library. By 1895 she earned a bachelor's degree in Library Science. Her Master of Arts degree from Wellesley was in 1913 and a doctorate in art history from Radcliffe College in 1927.
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Minnie Steckel
1890 - 1952 (62 years)
Minnie Steckel was an American teacher, psychologist, clubwoman, and an activist involved in the women's poll tax repeal movement. Steckel began her career as a school teacher and worked her way up to school principal, superintendent and school psychologist, earning her bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees. From 1932 until her death in 1952, she was the dean of women and counselor at Alabama College. She served as president of the local Montevallo chapter of the American Association of University Women from 1937 to 1939, as president of the state chapter of the Business and Professional Wome...
Go to Profile#865
Margaret Whinney
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Margaret Dickens Whinney was a British art historian who taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her published works included books on British sculpture and architecture. Life Whinney was the daughter of Thomas Bostock Whinney, an architect, and Sydney Margaret Dickens, the granddaughter of Charles Dickens. She was educated at the University of London, graduating in art history in 1935. She had published her first article in 1930, under the supervision of her mentor Tancred Borenius.
Go to Profile#866
Helga Eng
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Helga Kristine Eng was a Norwegian psychologist and educationalist. She was the third woman to receive a doctor's degree in Norway, and the first to do so in psychology. Early life and education She was born in Rakkestad as a daughter of teacher and smallholder Hans Andersen Kirkeng and Johanne Marie Sæves . She had seven siblings. She graduated from Asker Seminary in 1895, and started a career as a primary school teacher. She started in Lier, continued in Moss from 1897 to 1900 when she was hired at Lakkegata School at Tøyen, Oslo.
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Edith Hall Dohan
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Edith Hayward Hall Dohan was an American archaeologist who earned Bryn Mawr College's first classical archaeology Ph.D. Hall was part of an excavation team with Harriet Boyd in her early career that most notably brought the first Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean collection to be displayed in America. Hall later wrote The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age, which was published in 1906 that breaks down the evolution of the art and pottery in Crete from the Bronze Age.
Go to Profile#868
Anna Botsford Comstock
1854 - 1930 (76 years)
Anna Botsford Comstock was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies. The first female professor at Cornell University, her over 900-page work, The Handbook of Nature Study , is now in its 24th edition. Comstock was an American artist and wood engraver known for illustrating entomological text books with her husband, John Henry Comstock including their first joint effort, The Manual for the Study of Insects . Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.
Go to Profile#869
Irene Emery
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .
Go to Profile#870
Margaret Clapp
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Margaret Antoinette Clapp was an American scholar, educator and Pulitzer Prize winner. She was the president of Wellesley College from 1949 to 1966. During her presidency, she was able to make many improvements to the college campus by increasing the number of faculty members and increasing financial aid for students. Other accomplishments of note during her tenure construction and remodeling of major campus buildings as well as increasing the college endowment fund.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Elizabeth Gilmore Holt
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt was an American art historian. Early life and education Elizabeth Basye Gilmore was born in San Francisco, California in 1905, and raised in Madison, Wisconsin; her father Eugene Allen Gilmore was a diplomat and university president. She grew up living at the Eugene A. Gilmore House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908.
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Kathryn Brown
1900 - Present (126 years)
Kathryn Jane Brown is a British art historian and Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture at Loughborough University. Career Educated at Seymour College, Adelaide, and the University of Adelaide, South Australia, Brown was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. As a Rhodes Scholar, she completed a PhD at Balliol College, Oxford under the supervision of Malcolm Bowie. Brown then became a private equity lawyer in the City of London. Trained at Slaughter and May, Brown worked as an associate successively at Slaughter and May and then became an associate, and later Counsel, in the London office of US law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley and McCloy.
Go to Profile#874
Dorothy Burr Thompson
1900 - 2001 (101 years)
Dorothy Burr Thompson was an American classical archaeologist and art historian at Bryn Mawr College and a leading authority on Hellenistic terracotta figurines. Early life Thompson was the elder of two daughters of a prominent Philadelphia family. Her father was attorney Charles Henry Burr Jr. and her mother was novelist and biographer Anna Robeson Brown. Her grandfather was noted orator and lawyer Henry Armitt Brown. Early in life Thompson studied the Classics, attending Miss Hill's School in Center City, Pa., and The Latin School in Philadelphia. She began her study of Latin at age 9 and a...
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Grace Coyle
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Grace Longwell Coyle was a highly influential American thinker in the area of social work with groups. She wrote important books on the subject, and had great influence on the development of teaching group work concepts.
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Jessie P. Guzman
1898 - 1996 (98 years)
Jessie Parkhurst Guzman was a writer, archivist, historian, educator, and college administrator, primarily at the Tuskegee Institute in Tuskegee, Alabama. In her work at the Tuskegee Institute, particularly in the Department of Research and Records, she documented the lives of African Americans and maintained the Institute's lynching records.
Go to Profile#877
Gabriela Mistral
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga , known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral , was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order.She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.
Go to Profile#878
Agnes L. Rogers
1884 - 1943 (59 years)
Agnes Low Rogers was a Scottish educator and educational psychologist. Early life Agnes Low Rogers was born in Dundee, the daughter of William Thomson Rogers and Janet Low Rogers. She earned a master's degree at the University of St. Andrews in 1908. She passed the Moral Sciences Tripos at Cambridge in 1911, and completed doctoral studies at Teachers College, Columbia University in 1917. Her dissertation, published the following year, was titled Experimental Tests of Mathematical Ability and their Prognostic Value .
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Charlotte Towle
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Charlotte Helen Towle was an American social worker, academic and writer. Early life and education Towle was born and raised in Butte, Montana. In 1919, she received a BA in Education from Goucher College. After graduation, she worked at the American Red Cross and became increasingly interested in social work. With financial support from a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, she attended New York School of Social Work . She earned a degree in Psychiatric Social Work in 1926.
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Lottlisa Behling
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Lottlisa Behling was a German art historian and botanist. Biography Lottlisa Behling was born on 15 July 1909 in Neustettin, Pomerania. She was a double major in art history and botany at the universities of Greifswald, Halle and Berlin. She received her doctorate degree 1937 in Berlin. Her doctoral thesis was titled Das ungegenständliche Bauornament der Gotik. Versuch einer Geschichte des Maßwerks.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
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Maria Montessori
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, becoming one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy; she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
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Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Aurelia Henry Reinhardt
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Aurelia Isabel Henry Reinhardt was an American educator, activist, and prominent member and leader of numerous organizations. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, her doctoral dissertation at Yale, and studied as a fellow at Oxford. After teaching at the University of Idaho, the Lewiston State Normal School, and with the Extension Division of the University of California, Reinhardt was elected president of Mills College in 1916, and held the position until 1943, making her the longest serving president in the history of the school.
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Margarete Bieber
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Margarete Bieber was a Jewish German-American art historian, classical archaeologist and professor. She became the second woman university professor in Germany in 1919 when she took a position at the University of Giessen. She studied the theatre of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the sculpture and clothing in ancient Rome and Greece.
Go to Profile#886
Tsuda Umeko
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
was a Japanese educator who founded Tsuda University. She was the daughter of Tsuda Sen, an agricultural scientist, and at the age of 7, she became Japan's first female exchange student, traveling to the U.S. on the same ship as the Iwakura Mission.
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Anna Maria Brizio
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Anna Maria Brizio was professor of art history at the University of Milan, a member of the Commissione Vinciana and an authority on the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Selected publications Italian Per il quarto centenario dalla nascita di Paolo Caliari detto Paolo Veronese. Note per una definizione critica dello stile di Paolo Veronese, in «L'arte. Rivista bimestrale di storia dell'arte medioevale e moderna», 31 , fasc. 1Un'opera giovanile del Botticelli, in «L'arte. Rivista bimestrale di storia dell'arte medioevale e moderna», marzo 1933, fasc. 2, pp. 108–119Per il quinto centenario Verrocchiesco , in «Emporium», dicembre 1935, pp. 293–303Vercelli.
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Stella Kramrisch
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Stella Kramrisch was an American pioneering art historian and curator who was the leading specialist on Indian art for most of the 20th century. Her scholarship remains a benchmark to this day. She researched and taught Indian art history for more than six decades on three continents. After writing her dissertation on the essence of early-buddhist sculpture in India, she was invited to teach at Kala Bhavana in Shantiniketan and went on to teach at Calcutta University from 1924 to 1950. In Europe, Kramrisch worked at the Courtauld Institute, London . From 1950, she was professor at the Univer...
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Jodie Hunter
Jodie Margaret Roberta Hunter is a New Zealand academic, of Cook Island Māori descent, and is a full professor at Massey University. Hunter researches mathematics pedagogy, with a particular interest in culturally responsive teaching of mathematics to Pasifika students. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Sirarpie Der Nersessian was an Armenian art historian, who specialized in Armenian and Byzantine studies. Der Nersessian was a renowned academic and a pioneer in Armenian art history. She taught at several institutions in the United States, including Wellesley College in Massachusetts and as Henri Focillon Professor of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. She was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, its deputy director from 1954–55 and 1961–62, and a member of its Board of Scholars. Der Nersessian was also a member of several international institutions such as the British Academy , the Ac...
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Caroline Hazard
1856 - 1945 (89 years)
Caroline Hazard was an American educator, philanthropist, and author. She served as the fifth president of Wellesley College, from 1899 to 1910. Early life Caroline Hazard was born in Peace Dale, Rhode Island in 1856. Her father was industrialist Rowland Hazard II and her mother was Margaret A. Hazard, née Rood. She was educated at the Mary A. Shaw School in Providence and received private tutoring at Brown University and in Europe. She conducted welfare programs in Peace Dale, and wrote on a variety of topics, including biography, poetry, and Rhode Island history. She was the founder of the...
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Renate Wagner-Rieger
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
Renate Wagner-Rieger was an Austrian art historian and educator, with significant research in the fields of architecture and historicism. Education and career Renate Rieger was born January 10, 1921, in Vienna. In 1942 she studied art history at the University of Vienna, under Hans Sedlmayr and Karl Oettinger and received her PhD in 1947 under Karl Maria Swoboda on the architectural facade of the Viennese apartments from the 16th to the mid-18th century. In 1956 she became a lecturer at University of Vienna and in the same year married historian Walter Wagner.
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Françoise Henry
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Françoise Henry was a scholar of early Irish art, archaeologist, and art historian. While at University College Dublin , she founded the Department of History of European Painting in 1965, and was head until she retired in 1974.
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Edith Clara Batho
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Dr. Edith Clara Batho was Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London from 1945 to 1962. Education She was educated at Highbury Hill High School, now Highbury Fields School in Islington, London. She then went on to University College, London and graduated in English in 1915.
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Caroline Beaumont Zachry
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.
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Dorothy L. Sayers
1893 - 1957 (64 years)
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was an English crime novelist, playwright, translator and critic. Born in Oxford, Sayers was brought up in rural East Anglia and educated at Godolphin School in Salisbury and Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with first class honours in medieval French. She worked as an advertising copywriter between 1922 and 1929 before success as an author brought her financial independence. Her first novel Whose Body? was published in 1923. Between then and 1939 she wrote ten more novels featuring the upper-class amateur sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. In 1930, in Strong Poison, she introduced a leading female character, Harriet Vane, the object of Wimsey's love.
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Mary McLeod Bethune
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Mary Jane McLeod Bethune was an American educator, philanthropist, humanitarian, womanist, and civil rights activist. Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, established the organization's flagship journal Aframerican Women's Journal, and presided as president or leader for a myriad of African American women's organizations including the National Association for Colored Women and the National Youth Administration's Negro Division.
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Mary Lyon
1797 - 1849 (52 years)
Mary Mason Lyon was an American pioneer in women's education. She established the Wheaton Female Seminary in Norton, Massachusetts, in 1834. She then established Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley, Massachusetts, in 1837 and served as its first president for 12 years. Lyon's vision fused intellectual challenge and moral purpose. She valued socioeconomic diversity and endeavored to make the seminary affordable for students of modest means.
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Mary Church Terrell
1863 - 1954 (91 years)
Mary Church Terrell was an American civil rights activist, journalist, teacher and one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street School —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1895, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Colored Women's League of Washington .
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Anna J. Cooper
1858 - 1964 (106 years)
Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history. Born into slavery in 1858, Cooper went on to receive a world-class education and claim power and prestige in academic and social circles. In 1924, she received her PhD from the Sorbonne, University of Paris. Cooper became the fourth African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree. She was also a prominent member of Washington, D.C.'s African-American community and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
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