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.
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List of the most influential female people in Education,
#951
Maria Brace Kimball
1852 - 1933 (81 years)
Maria Brace Kimball was an American elocutionist who taught, lectured, and wrote on the subject. She was an instructor in elocution and lecturer on dramatic literature in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts; lecturer on French theatre and dramatic literature in schools; teacher of elocution in Brearley School, New York City, 1883–92. She was the author of A Text Book of Elocution and A Soldier-doctor of our army, James P. Kimball , as well as various contributions to periodicals.
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Kate Everest Levi
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Kate Asaphine Everest Levi was an American educator, writer, and social worker. She was the first director of Kingsley House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a settlement house, and the first woman Ph.D. recipient from the University of Wisconsin. Although both Syracuse University and the College of Wooster had granted doctorates in history to women in the 1880s, Everest Levi is considered the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in history from an organized graduate school in the United States. She wrote on topics such as education and German immigration to the Midwest.
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Myrtle Smith Livingston
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Myrtle Smith Livingston was an American educator and playwright. Early life Myrtle Athleen Smith was born in Holly Grove, Arkansas, in 1902, the daughter of Isaac Samuel Smith and Lulu C. Hall Smith. She graduated from high school in 1920. She studied pharmacy at Howard University for two years , and earned a Colorado teaching certificate in 1924. She later earned a master's degree in 1940, from Columbia University.
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Delia E. Wilder Carson
1833 - 1917 (84 years)
Delia E. Wilder Carson was an American educator from the U.S. state of New York. She taught mathematics, and served as preceptress of Ladies' Hall, at the University of Wisconsin . Early years and education Wilder was born in Athens, New York, January 25, 1833. Her father, Thomas Wilder, was one of eight brothers who migrated from Massachusetts when the eldest was a young man. Several were teachers, and all were closely identified with the development and progress of Genesee and Wyoming counties, New York, where they ultimately settled. Her mother's maiden name was Hannah Dow . Her siblings included: Henry Fayette Wilder, Sarah D.
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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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Florence E. Bamberger
1882 - 1965 (83 years)
Florence Eilau Bamberger was an American pedagogue, school supervisor, progressive education advocate, and author. Influenced by the ideas of John Dewey, she researched, lectured, and wrote extensively on the concept of child-centered education. She spent most of her career as a professor of education in the department of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University, and was the first woman to attain a full professorship at that university. From 1937 to 1947 she served as director of Johns Hopkins' College for Teachers. After her retirement, she taught in private elementary schools in Baltimore, Ma...
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Lotte Brand Philip
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Lotte Brand Philip was a German art historian, professor and expert on Netherlandish art, one of the most notable and incisive experts on 14th- and 15th-century art to have studied under Erwin Panofsky. Born a Christian of Jewish descent, she resisted state intimidation to leave Germany, only moving to the United States in 1941. She began her new life as a jewelry designer, before establishing a career as an art historian and writer, and taking professorship at a number of universities, including New York University and Queens College, Flushing. During her long career, Brand wrote highly reg...
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Eleanor McDougall
1873 - 1956 (83 years)
Eleanor McDougall was a Resident Lecturer in Classics at Westfield College, London from 1902, and later one of the pioneers in women's education in India. She was the First Principal of Women's Christian College in Madras, Madras Presidency in British India in 1915.
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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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Jeannette Augustus Marks
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Jeannette Augustus Marks was an American professor at Mount Holyoke College. She is the namesake of the Jeannette Marks Cultural Center , which provides support and programming for LGBT students and allies.
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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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Anna Cox Brinton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Anna Shipley Cox Brinton was an American classics scholar, college administrator, writer, and Quaker leader, active with the American Friends Service Committee . She has credited with being one of those who "reinvented Quakerism" for the 20th century.
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Lucy Donnelly
1870 - 1948 (78 years)
Lucy Martin Donnelly was a teacher of English at Bryn Mawr College. She was head of the English department starting in 1914. Sources James, E. T, Wilson James, J. and Boyer, P. S. 1971, Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary , p. 499Russell, B. and Griffin, N. 1992, The selected letters of Bertrand Russell, p. Lucy Donnelly
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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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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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Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.
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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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Fanny Jackson Coppin
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Fanny Jackson Coppin was an American educator, missionary and lifelong advocate for female higher education. One of the first Black alumnae of Oberlin College, she served as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.
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Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
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Alice Freeman Palmer
1855 - 1902 (47 years)
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
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Margaret Haley
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Margaret A. Haley was a teacher, unionist, and Georgist land value tax activist, who was dubbed the "lady labor slugger". Haley was the first business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation and a pioneer leader in organizing schoolteachers. During her long career with the CTF, Haley fought to correct tax inequalities, increase the salaries of teachers, and expose unfair land leasing by the Chicago Board of Education.
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Catherine Isabella Dodd
1860 - 1932 (72 years)
Catherine Isabella or Isabel Dodd was an English academic, novelist and education writer. In 1892 she became the first woman on the academic staff of Victoria University of Manchester, as a lecturer in education.
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Maria Sanford
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
Maria Louise Sanford was an American educator. She was a professor of history at Swarthmore College from 1871 to 1880 and a professor of rhetoric and elocution at the University of Minnesota from 1880 to 1909.
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Margaret Scolari Barr
1901 - 1987 (86 years)
Margaret Scolari Barr was an art historian, art critic, educator, translator, and curator. Life Margaret Scolari Barr was born in 1901 in Rome to the Italian antiquities dealer, Virgilio Scolari and his Irish wife Mary Fitzmaurice Scolari. She attended the University of Rome from 1919 to 1922 before moving to the United States in 1925. She taught Italian at Vassar College until 1929, where she also started her MA in art history in 1927. There she was introduced to the young art historian Alfred H. Barr, Jr. by her colleague Henry-Russell Hitchcock. At this time, she was offered a position at the Smith College Art Museum, but turned it down to move closer to Barr.
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Karolina Lanckorońska
1898 - 2002 (104 years)
Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, philanthropist, and historian. Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now, for the most part, be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.
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Louisa Macdonald
1858 - 1949 (91 years)
Louisa Macdonald was an educationist and women's suffragist. Early life and education Louisa Macdonald was born in 1858 in Arbroath, Scotland, the eleventh child of Ann and John Macdonald, town clerk and lawyer. Louisa and her sister Isabella enrolled at the University College, London, where they were among the first residents in College Hall. Macdonald graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1884 with first class honours in classics and honours in German. She graduated with a Master of Arts in classics in 1886 and took up an immediate career in education by providing lectures and private lesso...
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Janet Erskine Stuart
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ , also known as Mother Janet Stuart, was an English Roman Catholic nun and educator. She founded a number of schools. Stuart left the Church of England and converted to the Catholic Church in 1879. She joined the Society of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton three years later and, in 1911, became Superior General of the Society.
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Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.
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Chandramukhi Basu
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Chandramukhi Bose , a Bengali from Dehradun, which was located in the United Provinces of Agra and OudhBA Early life The daughter of Bhuban Mohan Bose, she passed the First Arts examination from Dehradun Native Christian School in 1880. At that time Bethune School, to which she wanted to enter; did not admit non-Hindu girls, and as such she had to be admitted at the First Arts level in Reverend Alexander Duff's Free Church Institution . In 1876, because of the discriminatory official stances towards gender, she had to be given special permission to appear for the F.A. examination. As the onl...
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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Margaret Tuke
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Dame Margaret Janson Tuke was a British academic and educator. She was the youngest child of the philanthropist James Hack Tuke. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1932.
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Mary Ann Shadd
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
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Julia Ettie Crane
1855 - 1923 (68 years)
Julia Ettie Crane , also known as Julia Etta Crane, was an American music educator and the founder of the Crane School of Music. This was the first school specifically created for the training of public school music teachers. She is among the most important figures in the history of American music education. Crane was a student of Manuel García.
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Kawai Michi
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Kawai Michi was a Japanese educator, Christian activist, and proponent of Japanese-Western ties before, during, and after World War II. She served as the first Japanese National Secretary of the YWCA of Japan and founded Keisen University.
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Mary Nourse
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Mary Augusta Nourse was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.
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Georgiana Goddard King
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Georgiana Goddard King was an American pioneer Hispanist and medievalist, as well as a photographer and teacher at Bryn Mawr College, where she was educated , and later taught creating the Department of Art History, the first in the United States that specialized in Spanish art.
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Caroline Herford
1860 - 1945 (85 years)
Caroline Herford MBE, later Caroline Herford Blake was an English educationist. Life Herford was born in Lancaster on 1 November 1860, the daughter of Unitarian minister William Henry Herford and Elizabeth Anne Davis . She was at Newnham College in 1885 and a year later she had a Mabchester University masters degree. From 1886 to 1907 she was headmistress of the Froebelian Lady Barn House School, which her father had founded in 1873. She was said to be one of the founders of Withington Girls' School in Manchester where she taught biology.
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Ticasuk Brown
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Ticasuk Brown was an Iñupiaq educator, poet and writer. She was the recipient of a Presidential Commission and was the first Native American to have a school named after her in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 2009, she was placed in the Alaska Women's Hall of Fame.
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Alice Van Vechten Brown
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Alice Van Vechten Brown was an art educator and historian, notable for the creation of the first courses in museum training and modern art in the United States. The modern art course was taught by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who would later claim the departmental headings he developed for the Museum of Modern Art were merely "the subject headings of the Wellesley course".
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Vinnie B. Clark
1878 - 1971 (93 years)
Vinnie B. Clark was an educator and author who established and developed the Geography Department at the San Diego State University. Early life Vinnie B. Clark was born in 1878 in Mayville, Wisconsin, the daughter of Dr. Gilbert J. Clark and Mrs. Elva V. Martin.
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Edwina Whitney
1868 - 1970 (102 years)
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as one of the earliest librarians at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She also served as a German instructor from 1901 to 1926 and an assistant professor of German from 1926 to 1934.
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Alice Ravenhill
1859 - 1954 (95 years)
Alice Ravenhill was an educational pioneer, a developer of Women's Institutes, and one of the first authors to propound aboriginal rights in B.C. She is also the author of numerous articles and books, including her autobiography which she wrote when she was 92.
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Alice Mary Dowd
1855 - 1943 (88 years)
Alice Mary Dowd was an American educator and author. She was born in Virginia in 1855 and began teaching at the age of seventeen. Dowd taught for more than three decades before retiring in 1926, having had experience in almost all phases of the work, including district school substitute, evening school, private school, high school, college, and Sunday school. Besides numerous uncollected poems, she published a volume entitled Vacation Verses in 1890. In 1906, she published Our Common Wild Flowers. With her sister, Luella Dowd Smith, she co-authored another book of poetry, Along the Way, in 1938.
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Elizabeth Piper Ensley
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Elizabeth Piper Ensley , was an educator and an African-American suffragist. Born in Massachusetts, Ensley was a teacher on the eastern coast of the country. She moved to Colorado where she achieved prominence as a leader in the Colorado suffrage movement. She was also a journalist, activist, and a leader and founder of local women's clubs.
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Rachel Wischnitzer
1885 - 1989 (104 years)
Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer , was a Russian-born architect and art historian. Biography Wischnitzer was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Minsk, in Russian Empire, the daughter of Wladimir and Sophie Bernstein. Rachel's father was for a time in the insurance business. She had one sibling, a younger brother, Gustave, who later became a chemist. She learned Hebrew as a child, and her family observed the major Jewish holidays. After her family moved to Warsaw, she attended a state gymnasium there. At school she became interested in mathematics and the natural sciences. She learned French and German, and took private lessons in Polish.
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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.
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Elizabeth Powell Bond
1841 - 1926 (85 years)
Elizabeth Powell Bond was an educator and social activist who was the first Dean of Women at Swarthmore College. Family and education Elizabeth Powell was born in 1841 in Clinton, New York, to a Quaker couple, Catherine Macy Powell and Townsend Powell. Her father was a farmer, and when she was four, the family moved to a farm in Ghent. By the age of 15, she was serving as an assistant teacher at a Friends’ School in the county. She graduated at the age of seventeen from the State Normal School in Albany.
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Jennie Fowler Willing
1834 - 1916 (82 years)
Jennie Fowler Willing was a Canadian-born American educator, author, preacher, social reformer, and suffragist. She married a lawyer and Methodist pastor at age 19. In 1873, she and her husband became professors at Illinois Wesleyan University. In addition to teaching, she was a leader in the temperance movement. Willing came to notice when she joined the Illinois Woman's State Temperance Union, serving as its leader for some years. She and Emily Huntington Miller were involved with creating and presiding over the First Woman's National Temperance Convention of 1874 in Cleveland where the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed.
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