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,
#1001
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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Mary Harriott Norris
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Mary Harriott Norris was an American author and educator. Born in Boonton, New Jersey to Charles Bryan Norris and Mary Lyon Kerr, she was educated at Vassar College, where she graduated with honor, receiving an A.B. degree in 1870. Two years later in 1872 she was invited back to deliver the annual commencement address to the college. She became a writer of short stories, novels, and educational articles; she edited several works and gave a number of lectures. Norris was a regular contributor to the Boston Journal of Education.
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Mary Mitchell Birchall
1846 - 1898 (52 years)
Mary Mitchell Birchall, born Mary Wheelwright Mitchell , was the first woman in New England to earn a bachelor's degree when she graduated from Bates College in 1869. She later served as a professor at Vassar College and founded a girls' school in Boston.
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María Teresa Babín Cortés
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
María Teresa Babín Cortés was a Puerto Rican educator, literary critic, and essayist. She also wrote poetry and plays. Among her best-known works is Panorama de la Cultura Puertorriqueña and several essays on Federico García Lorca.
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Anna Cheney Edwards
1835 - 1930 (95 years)
Anna Cheney Edwards was a 19th-century American educator from the U.S. state of Massachusetts. She served as Associate Principal of Mount Holyoke Seminary, 1872–1888; and as Professor of Theism and Christian Evidences, 1888–1890.
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Maya Deren
1917 - 1961 (44 years)
Maya Deren was a Ukrainian-born American experimental filmmaker and important part of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. Deren was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
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Mary Lowe Dickinson
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Mary Lowe Dickinson was a 19th- and early 20th-century American fiction writer, poet, editor, and educator who also became an advocate for women's rights and anti-war activist. Asked later in life about her decision to pursue the writing life, she observed: "Talent uses us.... If I had had a spark of it, I could not have waited for circumstances to force me to use it."
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Mary Bigelow Ingham
1832 - 1923 (91 years)
Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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Srbui Lisitsian
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Srbuhi Stepanova Lisitsian was an Armenian-Soviet ethnographer known for her development of a novel mathematical method for describing folk dance precisely using film techniques. Lisitsian spent her career at the Armenian Institute of Archeology and Ethnology as an ethnologist, after earning her Ph.D. at the Armenian Institute of History. In 1980, the Armenian Institute of Archeology and Ethnology was renamed after her and her father, another noted ethnologist.
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Lois Lampe
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Lois Lampe was an American botanist and educator. She taught at various levels for nearly 50 years at the Ohio State University before retiring and becoming assistant professor emerita in 1966. She was a member of six scientific societies and four honors societies during her teaching career.
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Hulda Margaret Lyttle
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Hulda Margaret Lyttle Frazier was an American nurse educator and hospital administrator who spent most of her career in Nashville, Tennessee at Meharry Medical College School of Nursing and affiliated Hubbard Hospital. Lyttle advocated for the modernization and professionalization of African American nurses' training programs, and improved practice standards in hospitals that served African Americans.
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Lucy Washburn
1848 - 1939 (91 years)
Lucy M. Washburn was a high school education pioneer in the San Francisco Bay Area and one of the founders of the San Jose State Normal School. Early life Lucy Washburn was born on April 23, 1848, in Fredonia, New York, south of Lake Erie. She was the daughter of a regimental surgeon with the Union forces who died during the Civil War. She had a younger brother, Arthur H. Washburn, a mechanical engineer and on the faculty of the San Jose State Normal School with her.
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Elizabeth Denio
1842 - 1922 (80 years)
Dr. Elizabeth Harriet Denio was an American teacher who was the first woman to teach at the University of Rochester. She retired as Professor Emeritus in 1917. Life Denio was born in Albion, New York, in 1842.
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Gertrud Otto
1895 - 1970 (75 years)
Gertrud Otto was a German art historian who researched sculpture of the 15th and 16th centuries, in particular the late Gothic Memmingen and Ulm schools. Life Gertrud Otto was born in Memmingen, the daughter of Gustav Otto and Berta Otto, née Derpsch, Her father was the publisher of the Memminger Zeitung as well as a print shop owner. After elementary school she attended the secondary school for girls in Memmingen. In 1910 at the age of 15 she left Memmingen and went to Munich, which at the time was the only place where it was possible for girls to take their Abitur. In July 1916 she passed the Abitur at the Ludwigsgymnasium.
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Alice Huntington Bushee
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Alice Huntington Bushee was an American librarian and early pioneer in Hispanic studies. She was a professor at Wellesley College and wrote several books, including Fundamentals of Spanish Grammar. Early years and education Bushee was born on December 4, 1867, in Worcester, Massachusetts. She grew up in Morrisville, Vermont. Bushee graduated from the Peoples Academy in 1886. In 1891, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College. She was the class valedictorian.
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Elizabeth English Benson
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Elizabeth English Benson was an American educator for deaf students who taught at Gallaudet College for two decades before being named Dean of Women there. During World War II, she temporarily joined the military so she could help newly deafened soldiers injured in the war. Later she was an occasional interpreter for two U.S. presidents.
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Grace Foster Herben
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Grace Ida Foster Herben was an American educator and missionary. The daughter of a minister and the wife of another, her career became intertwined with that of Rev. Stephen J. Herben after their marriage. Beforehand she served as the dean of women at Allegheny College, and afterwards she worked with the Northwestern Branch of the Methodist Woman's Foreign Missionary Society. She was a delegate to the 1910 World Missionary Conference, and was the only woman to serve on the New Jersey Council of National Defense during World War I.
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Annie Riley Hale
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Annie Riley Hale was an American teacher, writer, and social critic. In her lifetime she was known for her criticism of Theodore Roosevelt and her anti-suffrage and anti-vaccine activity. Family Annie Riley Hale was born in Rogersville, Tennessee in 1859. Hale was married to James Richards Hale, a lawyer, who died in 1897. She had three children, including the feminist Ruth Hale who as an adult opposed many of her mother's views. Hale was also a cousin of John K. Shields, a justice on the Tennessee Supreme Court and U.S. Senator.
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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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