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,
#901
Alice Gordon Gulick
1847 - 1903 (56 years)
Alice Gordon Gulick was an American missionary teacher in Spain. Early life Alice Winfield Gordon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts, the daughter of James M. Gordon and Mary Clarkson Gordon. Her parents were active in the abolition movement; her sisters Anna Adams Gordon and Elizabeth Putnam Gordon were temperance activists. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary from 1863 to 1867.
Go to Profile#902
Cynthia S. Burnett
1840 - 1932 (92 years)
Cynthia S. Burnett was an American educator, temperance reformer, and newspaper editor. She passed her early life in Ohio, but her first temperance movement work was done in Illinois, in 1879, later answering calls for help in Florida, Tennessee, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In 1885, she was made state organizer of Ohio, and the first year of this appointment, she lectured 165 times, besides holding meetings in the daytime and organizing over 40 unions. Her voice failing, she accepted a call to Utah as teacher in the Methodist Episcopal College, in Salt Lake City. While living there, she was made ...
Go to Profile#903
Lilian Wyckoff Johnson
1864 - 1956 (92 years)
Lilian Wyckoff Johnson was an American teacher of history and an advocate for rural reform and civil rights. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee to John Cumming Johnson and Elizabeth Fisher. Both of her parents valued education and were strong proponents of community service. Her mother headed up the Memphis Women's Christian Association and was the first president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. After an early education in private schools, in 1878 Lilian was sent to Dayton, Ohio to take refuge during a yellow fever outbreak; while there, she attended the Cooper Academy. Her parents...
Go to Profile#904
Harriet Newell Haskell
1835 - 1907 (72 years)
Harriet Newell Haskell was an American educator and school administrator from the U.S. state of Maine. She taught from 1855 to 1860 in Waldoboro, Maine and Boston, Massachusetts. From 1860 to 1868, she was a teacher and principal at Castleton Collegiate Seminary, Vermont. Thereafter, for 39 years, she served as principal at Monticello Seminary of Godfrey, Illinois.
Go to Profile#905
Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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May Gorslin Preston Slosson
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
May Gorslin Preston Slosson was an American educator and suffragist. She was the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree in Philosophy in the United States. Life May Gorslin Preston was the daughter of Reverend Levi Campbell Preston and the former Mary Gorslin. Her family moved to Kansas from New York State. She earned Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees from Hillsdale College in Michigan. In 1880 she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and the first woman to obtain a doctoral degree in Philosophy in the United States. Her thesis was entitled Different Theories of Beauty.
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Yoshi Kajiro
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Yoshi Kajiro was a Japanese educator, the longtime principal of the in Okayama. Early life Yoshi Kajiro was born in Matsuyama, in Ehime Prefecture, the daughter of Kajiro Tomoyoshi , a Christian convert who later established a Japanese church in the Kakaako district of Honolulu. She was educated at Baika Girls' School, which was founded by Japanese Christians.
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Laura Drake Gill
1860 - 1926 (66 years)
Laura Drake Gill was the third dean of Barnard College. She graduated in 1881 from Smith College with a degree in mathematics. She became an educator, in particular the third dean of Barnard College. In 1898, she left for Cuba among the first group of nurses sent by the Red Cross. According to Britannica, she is "remembered particularly for her role in establishing organized placement assistance for educated women".
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Lois Knowles
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Lois Knowles was the first woman to become a full professor in the College of Education at the University of Missouri. Dr. Knowles advocated for more women in higher education and co-authored an innovative textbook at the time, Seeing Through Arithmetic.
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Ninetta May Runnals
1885 - 1980 (95 years)
Ninetta May "Nettie" Runnals was an American academic and college administrator. She served as Dean of Women at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, her alma mater, for 27 years, advocating for gender equality for women students and faculty members. She also helped raise significant funding for a Women's Union on the Mayflower Hill campus, which was renamed Runnals Union in her honor in 1959. She was inducted into the Maine Women's Hall of Fame in 1992.
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Mary Julia Baldwin
1829 - 1897 (68 years)
Mary Julia Baldwin was an American educator in Staunton, Virginia. For thirty-four years she ran Mary Baldwin College, which was named in her honor in 1895 and later became Mary Baldwin University. Early and family life Born to Margaret Sarah Sowers Baldwin Heiskell and her husband William Daniel Baldwin in Winchester, Virginia at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley on October 4, 1829, Mary Julia Baldwin never knew her father, who died when she was a baby. Raised by her maternal grandparents in Staunton, Virginia after her mother remarried, in 1842 Mary became a member of the first class of sixty girls at the Augusta Female Seminary.
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Helen M. Robinson
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Helen M. Robinson was an American writer and educator who became the lead writer of the Dick and Jane series of readers after the death of William S. Gray in 1960, a status she retained through the late 1970s. She was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1944 to 1968, and was nationally recognized in the field of reading education. She served as first President of the Reading Hall of Fame.
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Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton
1824 - 1908 (84 years)
Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and suffragist from the U.S. state of New York. Though she was co-author of a series of arithmetic books, the publishers decided that her name should be withheld. She became an advocate for the enfranchisement of women. She was said to be the "first woman to administer a state normal school". She was an officer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, an active member and director in the New England Women's Educational Club of Boston, and president of the West Newton Woman's Educational Club since its organization in 1880.
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Julia Gulliver
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Julia Henrietta Gulliver was an American philosopher, educator and college president. She was only the second woman in America to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a tireless advocate for increased female representation in higher education.
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Lucy Rider Meyer
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Lucy Jane Rider Meyer was an American social worker, educator, physician, and author who cofounded the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions in Illinois. She is credited with reviving the office of the female deacon in the U.S. Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Millicent Carey McIntosh
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Millicent Carey McIntosh was an educational administrator and American feminist who led the Brearley School , and most prominently Barnard College . The first married woman to head one of the Seven Sisters, she was "considered a national role model for generations of young women who wanted to combine career and family," advocating for working mothers and for child care as a dignified profession.
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Annie Webb Blanton
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Annie Webb Blanton was an American suffragist from Texas, educator, and author of a series of grammar textbooks. Blanton was elected Superintendent of Texas Public Instruction in 1918, making her the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office.
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Moina Michael
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Moina Belle Michael was an American professor and humanitarian who conceived the idea of using poppies as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in World War I. Early life Michael was born in 1869 and lived on what is now known as 3698 Moina Michael Road in Good Hope, in Walton County, Georgia. She was the eldest daughter and second of the seven children of John Marion Michael, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, and Alice Sherwood Wise. She was distantly related to General Francis Marion on her father's side, and the Wise family of Virginia state governors on her mother's side.
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Helen Stuart Campbell
1839 - 1918 (79 years)
Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
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Frances St John Chappelle
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John Chappelle was an Assistant in Psychology at the University of Nevada. Biography Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John was born on July 2, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lettie Willoughby St. John, a direct descendant of the first Lord Willoughby and one of the first women to graduate from a medical college. She was also an artist and magazine illustrator.
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May L. Cheney
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
May Lucretia Shepard Cheney was born during the American Civil War in Garden Grove, Iowa, and was named after the month in which she was born, and her maternal grandmother who influenced her childhood. May's early school attendance was in her hometown. She attended high schools in Oakland and Chico, California before enrolling at UCB in 1879. With her widowed mother, she settled at 2020 Hearst Avenue , in a house with a watermill in the rear yard. Residing in the same house was Lemuel Warren Cheney , a law student.
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Chloe Clark Willson
1818 - 1874 (56 years)
Chloe Aurelia Clark Willson was an early pioneer of what became the U.S. state of Oregon, and one of the first teachers of the Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley. In 1850, she owned half of the land in Oregon's state capital Salem.
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Hannah Keziah Clapp
1824 - 1908 (84 years)
Hannah Keziah Clapp was a teacher, activist and feminist in Nevada, US. She organized the state's first private school and was co-founder of the state's first kindergarten. She served as principal of the Lansing Female Seminary; taught at Michigan Female College; and was the first instructor and librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno. Clapp co-founded Reno's 20th Century Club, which in 1983 was added to the National Register of Historic Places listings in Washoe County, Nevada. She was born in Albany, New York in 1824, and arrived in Carson City in 1860, where she established the Sierra Seminary.
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Queena Mario
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Queena Marian Tillotson , known professionally as Queena Mario, was an American soprano opera singer, newspaper columnist, voice teacher, and fiction writer. Early life Queena Marian Tillotson was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of James Knox Tillotson and Rose Tillotson. Queena was raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she graduated from Plainfield High School. She studied voice with Marcella Sembrich, who advised her name change. She paid for voice lessons by writing newspaper advice columns under the name Florence Bryant, including childrearing advice; "You know a lot when you're 16, y...
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Lucy Langdon Wilson
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Lucy Langdon Wilson was an American educator and ethnographer who became widely known for her models of progressive education and for using laboratory methods to teach natural science to young school children. She was also a published ethnographer.
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Olive Cowell
1887 - 1984 (97 years)
Olive Thompson Cowell was a patron of the arts and music, and a professor of International Relations. Career Cowell graduated from Barnard College in 1910. She taught in high schools for several years before becoming professor at San Francisco State University. She went on to found the International Relations department as part of the Government program at San Francisco State University in 1927, the first International Relations department in the USA. She taught at the university until 1956.
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Rose Zeller
1891 - 1975 (84 years)
Rose Margaret Zeller was a New Zealand artist. Biography Zeller was born at the family home at 325 Cashel Street, Christchurch, New Zealand, where she lived until her death. Her parents were Hubert Andrew Zeller and Sarah Ann Zeller, who had arrived in New Zealand from London in 1890.
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Miriam E. Carey
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Miriam Eliza Carey was an American librarian who helped establish the first libraries in prisons and hospitals in Iowa and Minnesota. Education and career Carey studied at Rockford Seminary , Oberlin College, Ohio and the library school of the University of Illinois, .
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Ora Brown Stokes Perry
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Ora Brown Stokes Perry was an American educator, probation officer, temperance worker, suffragist, and clubwoman based in Richmond, Virginia. Early life Ora E. Brown was born in Chesterfield County, Virginia, the daughter of Rev. James E. Brown and Olivia Knight Quarles Brown. She trained as a teacher at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, graduating in 1900. She also studied at Hartshorn Memorial College and the University of Chicago. In 1917, she was refused admission to the newly organized Richmond School of Social Economy because of her race.
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Myra Carroll Winkler
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
Myra Carroll Winkler was an American educator and was the first woman to hold elected office in El Paso County. Biography Winkler was born in Corsicana, Texas and her father, Clinton M. Winkler, was one of the first judges on the Texas State Court of Appeals. Winkler's mother, A.V. Winkler, was active in collecting Confederate artifacts. Winkler attended and graduated from the Sam Houston Teacher's College, and moved to El Paso, Texas in 1902. In El Paso, Winkler taught at several El Paso public schools, including El Paso High School.
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Marika Cifor
Marika Cifor is an American archivist and feminist academic known for her work in archival science, library science, and digital studies. Her research focuses on community archives, HIV/AIDS, affect theory, and approaches to archival practice rooted in social justice. She is an assistant professor at the University of Washington Information School. She also holds an adjunct faculty appointment in UW's Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies department.
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Esther Baker Steele
1835 - 1911 (76 years)
Esther Baker Steele was an American educator, author, editor, and philanthropist of the long nineteenth century. She aided her husband, Dr. J. Dorman Steele in his fourteen-week Barnes' Brief Histories series of books, these publications being, Brief History of the United States, 1871; France, 1875; Centenary History of United States, 1875; Ancient Peoples, 1881; Mediaeval and Modern Peoples, 1883; General History, 1883; Greece, with Selected Readings, 1884; Rome, with Selected Readings, 1885; and Revised United States, 1885. She did most of the work upon Brief History of the United States, which proved a phenomenal success.
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Liane Haid
1895 - 2000 (105 years)
Juliane "Liane" Haid was an Austrian actress and singer. She has often been referred to as Austria's first movie star. Biography Juliane Haid was born in Vienna on 16 August 1895, the first child to Georg Haid and Juliane Haid . She had two younger sisters, Grit, who also became an actress, and Johanna .
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Helen Louise Babcock
1867 - 1929 (62 years)
Helen Louise B. Babcock was an American educator, elocutionist, and dramatic reader. Early years and education Helen Louise Bailey was born in Galva, Illinois. August 13, 1867. She early displayed a marked talent for elocution and on reaching woman's estate she decided to make dramatic reading her profession. With that aim she became a pupil in the Cumnock School of Oratory of the Northwestern University, and, being an earnest student, she was graduated with the highest honors.
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Sophia D. Stoddard
1820 - 1891 (71 years)
Sarah D. Stoddard was an American educator who served as the fourth president of Mount Holyoke College from 1865 to 1867. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1841 and taught there for eight years before becoming Head.
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Lindsay Errington
1900 - Present (126 years)
Lindsay Margaret Errington is a Scottish art historian and former keeper for over 20 years at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, where she worked to establish a representative collection of Scottish art.
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Marion Walker Spidle
1897 - 1983 (86 years)
Marion Walker Spidle was an American educator. She was inducted into the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame. Biography Born on July 18, 1897, to parents Letford William Walker and Georgeina Young Walker, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Spidle attended public schools in New Jersey and in Tennessee, and later graduating from the University of Montevallo in 1916. She also gained a B.S. and M.A. from Columbia University, and completed Graduate Studies at the University of Oregon. Spidle worked for the Alabama Polytechnic Institute from 1928 until it became Auburn University in 1960. She worked for Auburn, from 1960 until retiring in 1966.
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Mary W. Chapin
1820 - 1889 (69 years)
Mary W. Chapin was an American educator who served as the third president of Mount Holyoke College from 1850 to 1852 and Principal from 1852 to 1865. She graduated from Mount Holyoke in 1841 and taught there for seven years before becoming Head.
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Elizabeth Blanchard
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Elizabeth Blanchard was an American educator who was the seventh president of Mount Holyoke College . Blanchard graduated from Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1858, and taught there for twelve years before becoming the Associate Principal from 1872-1883. She served as Principal from 1883-1888. When Mount Holyoke Female Seminary received its collegiate charter and became Mount Holyoke College, she served as Acting President from 1888-1889.
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Gertrude Powicke
1887 - Present (139 years)
Gertrude Powicke was a teacher and relief worker. She was one of the first women graduates of Manchester University. She was a suffrage campaigner and worked with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee in France during the First World War.
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Beth Lydy
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Beth Lydy , who also used the name Lyda Betti, was an American actress, operetta singer, writer, educator, and theatrical producer; she was the wife of violinist and broadcaster Eddy Brown. Early life Lydy was born in Indiana and raised in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, where her father John W. Lydy worked as a government teacher on a Sioux reservation. She and her sister Ruth Lydy attended school in Frankfort, Indiana, and in Chicago.
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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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Auguste Götze
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Auguste Götze was a German classical singer, actress, playwright, and a distinguished voice teacher. Götze was born in Weimar where she initially trained in music with her father, the tenor Franz Götze. In her later years, she had her own singing school in Leipzig as well as teaching in the conservatory there. She died in Leipzig at the age of 68 after several years of increasingly poor health.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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