The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#951
Robert Tracy
#72593
Overall Influence
1955 - 2007 (52 years)
Robert Tracy was an American dancer, writer, and educator in New York City. He taught dance history as an associate professor at Fordham University and published well-reviewed books. During his life, he was better known for his literary work, even though he was a talented dancer; he dedicated his life to academia and writing books. Tracy became, as a secondary duty, the personal assistant to his live-in partner Rudolf Nureyev. After Nureyev's death, Tracy dedicated his life to AIDS awareness and LGBT legal advocacy.
Go to Profile#952
Andrew Ladis
#78128
Overall Influence
1949 - 2007 (58 years)
Andrew Thomas Ladis was a Greek-born American art historian particularly known for his studies on early Italian Renaissance painting. His 1983 book, Taddeo Gaddi: A Critical Review and Catalogue Raisonné, was the first detailed study of Taddeo Gaddi in the English language. At time of his death he was the Franklin Professor of Art History at the University of Georgia's Lamar Dodd School of Art.
Go to Profile#953
William Craft Brumfield
#22800
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
William Craft Brumfield is a contemporary American historian of Russian architecture, a preservationist and an architectural photographer. Brumfield is currently Professor of Slavic studies at Tulane University.
Go to Profile#954
Briony Fer
#42643
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Briony Fer, FBA is a British art historian, critic, and curator; professor of history of art at University College London. She has written extensively on diverse topics of 20th century and contemporary art. She has written essays on numerous contemporary artists, such as Gabriel Orozco, Vija Celmins, Jean-Luc Moulène, Roni Horn, Ed Ruscha, and Rachel Whiteread. A focus of her research is on the art of American sculptor Eva Hesse, as when she wrote for the catalogue for the artist's 2002 retrospective curated by Elisabeth Sussman at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art in 2002.
Go to Profile#955
Adriana Umaña-Taylor
#76487
Overall Influence
Dr. Adriana Janette Umaña-Taylor is a professor of education in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to this, she was a faculty member in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics at Arizona State University, where she worked from 2004 until 2017, starting as an assistant professor and advancing through the ranks of associate professor and full professor, eventually being named a Foundation Professor. Dr. Umaña-Taylor's first position after graduate school was at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in the Human and Community Development Department.
Go to Profile#956
Hannah Higgins
#50200
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Hannah B. Higgins is an American writer and academic living in Chicago, Illinois. Higgins's research examines various post-conceptual art historical subjects in terms of two philosophically and practically entwined terms: information and sensation. She is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a founding Director of IDEAS, an interdisciplinary arts major, at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Go to Profile#957
Janette Gray
#121728
Overall Influence
1952 - 2016 (64 years)
Janette Patricia Gray was an Australian Sister of Mercy who was the first non-Jesuit academic Principal of Jesuit Theological College, Parkville, Melbourne. A fund established in Gray's honour promotes the education and leadership of women in theology and is called the Janette Gray RSM Fund.
Go to Profile#958
Gaea Leinhardt
#155952
Overall Influence
#959
Jaap Scheerens
#156165
Overall Influence
#960
Seymour Slive
#54487
Overall Influence
1920 - 2014 (94 years)
Seymour Slive was an American art historian, who served as director of the Harvard Art Museums from 1975 to 1984. Slive was a scholar of Dutch art, specifically of the artists Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Jacob van Ruisdael.
Go to Profile#961
Troy D. Sadler
#156312
Overall Influence
#962
Daniel J. Crowley
#88890
Overall Influence
1921 - 1998 (77 years)
Daniel J. Crowley was an American art historian and cultural anthropologist who focused on the cultural expressions of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, with particular focus on the interconnectedness of carnivals, festivals, the arts and folklore. Crowley also became a strong advocate for disability studies in anthropology.
Go to Profile#963
Carey Jewitt
#156554
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
#964
Abdul Ali Khan
#71738
Overall Influence
1922 - 1997 (75 years)
Khan Abdul Ali Khan was a Pakistani educationist, former Principal of Islamia College Peshawar, The FazleHaq College Mardan, Aitchison College, former Vice Chancellor of Peshawar University, Gomal University and former Education Secretary of NWFP.
Go to Profile#965
Hill M. Walker
#156883
Overall Influence
#966
Mark R. Wolery
#156885
Overall Influence
#967
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
#60245
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac is a French art historian specializing in contemporary art, a professor and an author. She was elected president of the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques in May 2021. She is located in Boulogne-Billancourt, France.
Go to Profile#968
Rodger Wayne Bybee
#156958
Overall Influence
#969
Edwin-Michael Cortez
#92943
Overall Influence
1951 - 2018 (67 years)
Edwin-Michael Cortez was a library science professor and director of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee. Early life Cortez was born in New York City the son of Michael and Cecilia Cortez. He graduated from Wagner College in 1972, received his Master of Library Science from University of Arizona in 1973 and Doctor of Philosophy in Information Science and Management Communication from the University of Southern California in 1980.
Go to Profile#970
Crystal Williams
#110902
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Crystal Ann Williams is an American university president, educator, and poet. Williams is the current President of Rhode Island School of Design. She was raised in both Detroit, and in Madrid, Spain. She has earned degrees at New York University , and Cornell University .
Go to Profile#971
Thomas Hines
#48579
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Thomas "Tom" Spight Hines, Jr. is an American architectural historian and educator. Hines is Professor Emeritus of History, as well as Architecture and Urban Design, at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#972
Nigel Glendinning
#48533
Overall Influence
1929 - 2013 (84 years)
Oliver Nigel Valentine Glendinning , known as Nigel Glendinning, was a scholar and authority on Goya and 18th Century Spanish literature. He wrote a history of Spanish literature in the age of the Enlightenment and his analytical approach to Goya combined the artist's work with an understanding of its historical context.
Go to Profile#973
Mary F. Eastman
#42248
Overall Influence
Mary F. Eastman was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and suffragist of the long nineteenth century. A native of Lowell, Massachusetts, she resided in Tewksbury for many years. She taught in the high and normal school for girls in Boston, and was among the first to be thought competent to teach and control the students of a winter school in Lowell. Her later teaching was in Boston's Charlestown and also Somerville, Massachusetts. At the request of Horace Mann, she went to Ohio to aid in the work of education which he had undertaken at Antioch College. Eastman thought that suffrage was the highway to all other reforms.
Go to Profile#974
Joel H. Spring
#157512
Overall Influence
#975
Raymond W. Alden III
#37289
Overall Influence
Raymond W. Alden III is the current Provost of Touro University Nevada. Alden attended the Stetson University for his bachelor's degree in biology, and he received his Doctorate in Zoology from the University of Florida. He began his academic career on the faculty at Old Dominion University, spending 21 years there. Later Alden went to the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and served for 10 years as the Provost. In January 2006, Alden accepted the position as Provost at Northern Illinois University. In April 2015, Alden left NIU and joined Touro University Nevada as Provost.
Go to Profile#976
Gunnar Handal
#157669
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Gunnar Handal is a Norwegian educationalist. He was born in Bergen. He took the mag.art. degree in pedagogy at the University of Oslo in 1964, but was hired at at the University of Oslo already in 1963. From 1992 to his retirement he served as professor of university pedagogy. He had then led the "Study Quality Committee" from 1989 to 1990, which highlighted quality in university studies. In 2003 he was awarded the Kristian Ottosen Prize for promoting student welfare.
Go to Profile#977
Freda Briggs
#95836
Overall Influence
1930 - 2016 (86 years)
Freda Briggs was an Australian academic, author and child protection advocate. In 2000, she was named Senior Australian of the Year for her pioneering work in child protection. Early life and education Briggs was born Freda Akeroyd on 1 December 1930 in Huddersfield, England. She has one brother, nine years her junior. She attended Deighton Council School and Royds Hall School.
Go to Profile#978
Ian Gatley
#39296
Overall Influence
Ian Gatley was the former Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs of New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey.He is also a Distinguished Professor of Physics in the department of Physics at the College of Science and Liberal Arts in NJIT. He is a prolific scholar well known in Astronomy and Imaging Science.
Go to Profile#979
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
#111867
Overall Influence
Debdeep Mukhopadhyay is an Indian cryptographer and professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. He was awarded the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Science and Technology, the highest science award in India, in 2021 for his contributions to micro-architectural security and cryptographic engineering. Debdeep Mukhopadhyay's research interests include Hardware security, Cryptographic Engineering, Design Automation of Cryptosystems, VLSI of Cryptosystems, and Cryptography. He has authored several textbooks, including Cryptography and network security , which has been cited 1227 times, according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#980
Ric Burns
#51774
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ric Burns is an American documentary filmmaker and writer. He has written, directed and produced historical documentaries since the 1990s, beginning with his collaboration on the celebrated PBS series The Civil War , which he produced with his older brother Ken Burns and wrote with Geoffrey Ward.
Go to Profile#981
Elena Sliepcevich
#127492
Overall Influence
1919 - 2008 (89 years)
Elena M. Sliepcevich was one of the leading figures in the development of health education as an academic discipline and profession. Biography A 1939 graduate of the University of Idaho, Sliepcevich received her master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1949 and her doctorate in physical education from Springfield College in 1955. She was a professor of health education at the Ohio State University in 1961, when she was selected to direct the School Health Education Study . Most health education curricula developed since have been based on the 10 conceptual areas identified by the Sc...
Go to Profile#982
Timothy Law Snyder
#81167
Overall Influence
Timothy Law Snyder is an American educator, mathematician, academic administrator, and musician. He serves as the 16th president of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. Snyder is well known for his academic research, publications and speeches on computational mathematics, data structures, combinatorial optimization, geometric probability, computer music, HIV diagnosis and prevention, and airline flight safety.
Go to Profile#983
Jean-Christophe Ammann
#47249
Overall Influence
1939 - 2015 (76 years)
Jean-Christophe Ammann was a Swiss art historian and curator. Early life and education Born in Berlin, Ammann, son of a chemist, grew up in a German-speaking family in Fribourg. He actually wanted to become a doctor, but after his Matura in 1959 at the Collège Saint-Michel he studied history of art, Biblical archaeology and German literature. In 1966, he received his doctorate from the University of Fribourg on the work of Louis Moilliet.
Go to Profile#984
Joanna Woodall
#71933
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Joanna Woodall is an art historian at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she is a specialist in portraiture and Netherlandish art. Education Woodall has a BA degree in history from the University of York and an MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute.
Go to Profile#985
Robert A. Levine
#104710
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert Alan Levine is an American anthropologist best known for his multidisciplinary and cross-cultural work on child development. He spent much of his academic career at Harvard University in the Graduate School of Education, where he has been emeritus professor since 1998.
Go to Profile#986
Mark Tribe
#33212
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Mark Tribe is an American artist. He is the founder of Rhizome, a not-for-profit arts organization based in New York City. In 2013, he was appointed chair of the MFA program of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Formerly, he was Assistant Professor of Modern Culture and Media Studies at Brown University, Director of the Digital Media Center at the Columbia University School of the Arts, and Visiting Assistant Professor and Artist in Residence at Williams College. He is the author of The Port Huron Project: Reenactments of Historic Protest Speeches and the co-author of New Media Art .
Go to Profile#987
Shaun Tan
#67287
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include The Red Tree and The Arrival.
Go to Profile#988
Ellen Swepson Jackson
#114055
Overall Influence
1935 - 2005 (70 years)
Ellen Swepson Jackson was an American educator and activist. She is best known for founding Operation Exodus, a program that bused students from overcrowded, predominantly black Boston schools to less crowded, predominantly white schools in the 1960s. The program paved the way for the desegregation of Boston's public schools.
Go to Profile#989
H. Richard Milner, IV
#110708
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
H. Richard Milner, IV is an American teacher educator and scholar of urban teacher education on the tenured faculty at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University, where he is Professor of Education and Cornelius Vanderbilt Endowed Chair of Education at the Department of Teaching and Learning. Formerly, he was the Director of the Center for Urban Education, Helen Faison Endowed Chair of Urban Education, Professor of Education, Professor of Social Work , Professor of Sociology and Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Since 2012, Milner has served as the editor of the journal Urban Education.
Go to Profile#990
John Tyler Caldwell
#43131
Overall Influence
1911 - 1995 (84 years)
John Tyler Caldwell was an American educator who presided over three universities, including North Carolina State University. Early life John Tyler Caldwell was born on December 19, 1911 in Yazoo City, Mississippi. He received a B.S. from Mississippi State College in 1932, an M.A. from Duke University in 1936, and a Ph.D. in political science from Princeton University in 1939 as a Julius Rosenwald Fellow.
Go to Profile#991
Jon Stratton
#53424
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jon Stratton is an Australian academic and scholar in the field of cultural studies. He has authored 11 sole books, edited five collections, and written over 80 journal articles. For over 25 years, he has been a media commentator in print, radio, and television.
Go to Profile#992
A. N. N. P. Turnbull
#159647
Overall Influence
#993
Michael Kitson
#70270
Overall Influence
1926 - 1998 (72 years)
Michael William Lely Kitson was a British art historian who became an international authority on the work of the painter Claude Lorrain. His teaching career took in the Slade School of Fine Art and Courtauld Institute in London; he was at the latter from 1955 to 1985, ending as Professor of the History of Art from 1978 and deputy director from 1980. He then moved to be Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. In 1969, he organized the first major exhibition ever dedicated to Lorrain at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, followed by the H...
Go to Profile#994
Cyril Orvin Houle
#159923
Overall Influence
#995
Richard Cork
#44014
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard Cork is a British art historian, editor, critic, broadcaster and exhibition curator. He has been an art critic for the Evening Standard, The Listener, The Times and the New Statesman. Cork was also editor for Studio International. He is a past Turner Prize judge.
Go to Profile#996
Brenda Almond
#61789
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Brenda Margaret Almond was a British philosopher, known for her work on philosophy of education and applied ethics. She was an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Biography Almond co-founded the Society for Applied Philosophy in 1982 with her then colleague at Surrey University Anthony O'Hear and co-founded the International Journal of Applied Philosophy in 1983 part of a conscious strategy of moving philosophy away from abstract and abstruse debates towards issues that affect people in their everyday lives. Almond’s writing highlights issues like health and family and social relations.
Go to Profile#997
Babatunde Lawal
#30041
Overall Influence
Babatunde Lawal is an art historian and scholar of the arts of Nigeria. His research is focused on the visual culture of the Yoruba and its influences in the Americas. He is currently a professor of Art History at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Go to Profile#998
Ching‐sing Chai
#160076
Overall Influence
#999
William Vaughan
#58045
Overall Influence
William Vaughan is a British art historian and has been Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London since 2003. He is also a printmaker, and regularly exhibits in London and Bristol under the name Will Vaughan. He is Chair of the Bruton Art Society.
Go to Profile#1000
Sudhir Kumar Sopory
#68894
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Sudhir Kumar Sopory is an Indian educationist, plant physiologist, scientist and former vice chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is known to be the first to purify a protein kinase C activity from plants and is credited with the identification of topoisomerase as a substrate of protein kinase C. He is an elected Fellow of several major Indian science academies and The World Academy of Sciences and is a recipient of many honours, including the 1987 Shanti Swarup Bhatangar Prize, the highest Indian award in the science and technology categories. The Government of India awa...
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