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 people in Education,
#2251
Aloys Fischer
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.
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Francis Landey Patton
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Francis Landey Patton was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University. Background, 1843–1871 Patton was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, to a family of Scottish descent. He attended Warwick Academy. As a child, the family relocated to Canada. Patton received collegiate education at the University of Toronto, followed by a theological education at Knox College, Toronto. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865; was ...
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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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Calvin M. Woodward
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Calvin Milton Woodward was a United States educator and professor. As dean of the school of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, he developed a manual training programme . He opened the St. Louis Manual Training School.
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Roland Penrose
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
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Swami Vipulananda
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Swami Vipulananda , also known as Vipulananda Adigal, was a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu social reformer, literary critic, author, poet, teacher and ascetic from the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Vipulananda was an early pioneer associated with the Indian-based Ramakrishna Mission in Sri Lanka. Along with other reformers, Vipulananda was instrumental in the revival of the Hindu religion and native traditions in Sri Lanka after a long period of dormancy and decline during the previous 500 years of colonial rule by various European powers.
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Erwin Panofsky
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. His work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece Early Netherlandish Painting. Many of his books are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , Meaning in the Visual Arts , and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.
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Carl Strehl
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Carl Strehl was a German educator born in Berlin who was influential in the teaching of the blind. History In December 1907, Strehl lost his eyesight while working in a chemical factory in New York. Later, after returning to Europe, he commenced with studies in Hamburg. In 1915, he was hired by University of Marburg ophthalmologist Alfred Bielschowsky to assist with World War I soldiers who had been blinded by shell fragments and poison gas.
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John Calvin Ferguson
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Calvin Ferguson was an American scholar of Chinese art, collector and procurer for American art museums, and a Chinese governmental adviser. Ferguson was the son of John Ferguson and Catherine Matilda Pomeroy . His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Ferguson attended Albert College in Ontario, Canada and then Boston University, where he graduated in 1886. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1887, married Mary Elizabeth Wilson.
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Robert Jameson
1774 - 1854 (80 years)
Robert Jameson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and mineralogist. As Regius Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh for fifty years, developing his predecessor John Walker's concepts based on mineralogy into geological theories of Neptunism which held sway into the 1830s. Jameson is notable for his advanced scholarship, and his museum collection. The minerals and fossils collection of the Museum of Edinburgh University became one of the largest in Europe during Jameson's long tenure at the university.
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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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Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Khan Bahadur Ahsanullah was an educator, litterateur, Islamic theologist and social reformer of pre-partition India. He was instrumental in the formation of the University of Dhaka and is the namesake of Ahsanullah University of Science and Technology.
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Richard Allen
1760 - 1831 (71 years)
Richard Allen was a minister, educator, writer, and one of the United States' most active and influential black leaders. In 1794, he founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church , the first independent Black denomination in the United States. He opened his first AME church in 1794 in Philadelphia.
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Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha
1830 - 1910 (80 years)
Mehmed Tahir Münif Pasha was an Ottoman writer and statesman. A veteran official, he served thrice as Minister of Education and twice as ambassador to Qajar Iran . During his first ambassadorship to Iran, he was awarded the Order of the Lion and the Sun medal. He also served as a trusted advisor to Sultan Abdul Hamid II, until he fell out of grace.
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Arthur Upham Pope
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Arthur Upham Pope was an American scholar, art historian, and architecture historian. He was an expert on historical Persian art, and he was the editor of the Survey of Persian Art . Pope was also a university professor of philosophy and aesthetics, an archaeologist, photographer, museum director, interior designer, and the co-founder of an international scholarly organization.
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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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David Hosack
1769 - 1835 (66 years)
David Hosack was an American physician, botanist, and educator. He remains widely known as the doctor who tended to the fatal injuries of Alexander Hamilton after his duel with Aaron Burr in July 1804, and who had similarly tended to Hamilton's son Philip after his fatal 1801 duel with George Eacker. He established several institutions including Elgin Botanic Garden and a medical school at Rutgers University.
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Ernest Fenollosa
1853 - 1908 (55 years)
Ernest Francisco Fenollosa was an American art historian of Japanese art, professor of philosophy and political economy at Tokyo Imperial University. An important educator during the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Era, Fenollosa was an enthusiastic Orientalist who did much to preserve traditional Japanese art.
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Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub was a German art historian, critic, and curator. He was born in Bremen into a merchant family. He studied with Franz Wickhoff in Vienna and Heinrich Wölfflin in Berlin, among others, until 1910 and then initially worked as assistant to Gustav Pauli at the Kunsthalle Bremen. Hartlaub became the director of the Kunsthalle Mannheim in 1923. He was particularly committed to the promotion of contemporary art.
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Stanislav Shatsky
1878 - 1934 (56 years)
Stanislav Teofilovich Shatsky was an important humanistic educator, writer, and educational administrator in the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union. Shatskii established a number of experimental and progressive educational institutions between 1905 and 1934. A member of the Russian intelligentsia, Shatskii imported many of the values of late tsarist educational experimentation into early Soviet approaches to creating a communist school and constructing 'a new Soviet person'.
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Andrew D. Holt
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Andrew David Holt was an American educator who was the 16th president of the University of Tennessee, filling that position from 1959 to 1970. Holt was born in Milan, Tennessee in 1904, the son of two schoolteachers. He graduated from Milan High School and Emory University. After his college graduation in 1927, he became a teacher in West Tennessee, first in Milan, where he taught grades five through eight, and then in Humboldt, where he taught high school. He also worked as a coach, a school principal, and a school superintendent. After less than 10 years of teaching, he joined the faculty ...
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Edgar Allison Peers
1891 - 1952 (61 years)
Edgar Allison Peers , also known by his pseudonym Bruce Truscot, was an English Hispanist and education management scholar. He was Professor in Hispanic Studies at the University of Liverpool and is notable for founding the Modern Humanities Research Association and the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies .
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Cai Yuanpei
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Cai Yuanpei was a Chinese philosopher and politician who was an influential figure in the history of Chinese modern education. He made contributions to education reform with his own education ideology. He was the president of Peking University, and founder of the Academia Sinica. He was known for his critical evaluation of Chinese culture and synthesis of Chinese and Western thinking, including anarchism. He got involved in the New Culture, May Fourth Movements, and the feminist movement. His works involve aesthetic education, politics, education reform, etc.
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Saint Timothy
17 - 97 (80 years)
Timothy or Timothy of Ephesus was an early Christian evangelist and the first Christian bishop of Ephesus, who tradition relates died around the year AD 97. Timothy was from the Lycaonian city of Lystra or of Derbe in Asia Minor, born of a Jewish mother who had become a Christian believer, and a Greek father. The Apostle Paul met him during his second missionary journey and he became Paul's companion and missionary partner along with Silas. The New Testament indicates that Timothy traveled with Paul the Apostle, who was also his mentor. He is addressed as the recipient of the First and Second Epistles to Timothy.
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Raymond B. Allen
1902 - 1986 (84 years)
Raymond B. Allen was an American educator. He served as the president of the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, from 1946 to 1951, and as the first chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles from 1951 to 1959.
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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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Helmuth Theodor Bossert
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Helmuth Theodor Bossert was a German art historian, philologist and archaeologist. He is best known for his excavations of the Hittite fortress city at Karatepe, Turkey, and the discovery of bilingual inscriptions, which enabled the translation of Hittite hieroglyphs.
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Julius Sachs
1849 - 1934 (85 years)
Julius Sachs was an American educator, founder of the Sachs Collegiate Institute who belongs to the Goldman–Sachs family of bankers. Sachs was born on July 6, 1849, in Baltimore. After taking his A.B. at Columbia in 1867 and his A.M. in 1871, he studied at several European universities. He was awarded a Ph.D. in 1871 by the University of Rostock. He married Rosa Goldman, daughter of investment banker Marcus Goldman, in 1874.
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John Erskine
1879 - 1951 (72 years)
John Erskine was an American educator and author, pianist and composer. He was an English professor at Amherst College from 1903 to 1909, followed by Columbia University from 1909 to 1937. He was the first president of the Juilliard School of Music. During his tenure at Columbia University he formulated the General Honors Course—responsible for inspiring the influential Great Books movement. He published over 100 books, novels, criticism, and essays including his most important essay, The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent .
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Samuel Henry Dickson
1798 - 1872 (74 years)
Samuel Henry Dickson was an American poet, physician, writer and educator born in Charleston, South Carolina. Dickson graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Medical College of South Carolina. He also taught at NYU and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dickson was a popular published poet and a leader in Charleston intellectual circles. He was friends with Charleston poet William Gilmore Simms and William Cullen Bryant. He and his brother Dr. John Dickson played a significant role in the medical education of the US's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
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Anton Heinrich Springer
1825 - 1891 (66 years)
Anton Heinrich Springer was a German art historian and writer. Early life Springer was born in Prague, where he studied philosophy and history at Charles University, earning a Ph.D. Taking an interest in art, he made several educational journeys, travelling to Munich, Dresden and Berlin, and spent some months in Italy. After his Ph.D. he addressed himself to art history. He wrote a second Ph.D. thesis on Hegel's theory of history in Tübingen, where he also was involved in the political activities of the Revolution of 1848.
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Pehr Kalm
1716 - 1779 (63 years)
Pehr Kalm , also known as Peter Kalm, was a Finnish-Swedish explorer, botanist, naturalist, and agricultural economist. He was one of the most important apostles of Carl Linnaeus. In 1747, he was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to travel to the North American colonies in order to bring back seeds and plants that might be useful to agriculture. Among his many scientific accomplishments, Kalm can be credited with the first description of Niagara Falls written by a trained scientist. In addition, he published the first scientific paper on the North American 17-year periodica...
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Walter Murdoch
1874 - 1970 (96 years)
Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch, was a prominent Australian academic and essayist famous for his intelligence and wit. He was a founding professor of English and former Chancellor of the University of Western Australia in Perth, Western Australia.
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Lajos Fülep
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Lajos Fülep was a Hungarian art historian, philosopher of art, pastor of the Reformed Church in Hungary and university professor. Life and career He was born in to the family of a veterinarian. Fülep received his primary education in the countryside and later returned to Budapest for university studies. During this period he wrote on art and history for various newspaper such as Népszava which made him well known in intellectual circles.
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Witter Bynner
1881 - 1968 (87 years)
Harold Witter Bynner , also known by the pen name Emanuel Morgan, was an American poet and translator. He was known for his long residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and association with other literary figures there.
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David Murray
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
David Murray was an American educator and government adviser in Meiji period Japan. Early life Murray graduated from Union College in 1852. Educator In 1857-1863, Murray was as principal of The Albany Academy in New York. From 1863 to 1873, he was a professor of mathematics, natural philosophy and astronomy at Rutgers College in New Jersey. Together with George Cook, Murray developed a full science curriculum at Rutgers, and successfully lobbied for Rutgers to be named the state's land grant college. Their 1864-67 surveys established the marine boundary between New York and New Jersey, and their 1872 survey fixed the land boundary between New York and New Jersey.
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Seiichi Tejima
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Incorporates translated material from the article in the Japanese Wikipedia Seiichi Tejima was a Japanese educator of the Meiji period. Principal of the Tokyo Technical School, Tokyo Technical High School and Tokyo Higher Technical School, the former constituent parts of the current Tokyo Institute of Technology. A prominent advocate for technical education, Tejima became the second president of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and served in this capacity from 1890-1898, 1899-1901 and 1901-1916.
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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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Johann Weikhard von Valvasor
1641 - 1693 (52 years)
Johann Weikhard Freiherr von Valvasor or Johann Weichard Freiherr von Valvasor or simply Valvasor was a natural historian and polymath from Carniola, present-day Slovenia, and a fellow of the Royal Society in London.
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Carlos Albizu Miranda
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Carlos Albizu Miranda is the first Hispanic educator to have a North American University renamed in his honor and one of the first Hispanics to earn a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States. Early years Albizu Miranda, cousin of the Puerto Rican Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, was born in Ponce, the second largest city in Puerto Rico located in the southern region of the island. His family moved to New York City where he received his primary and secondary education. Albizu Miranda and his family returned to Puerto Rico and he enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico where in 1943 h...
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William Johnson
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
William Harding Johnson was an American educator who served as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools. His decade-long tenure as superintendent was controversial, and ended with him being pressured to resign after the National Education Association released a report which detailed corrupt and unethical actions by Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education, which resulted in the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools threatening to revoke its accreditation of Chicago Public Schools' high schools. Despite his controversy, he had a number of successes, such as being credited with decreased school truancy.
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Peary Charan Sarkar
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
Peary Charan Sircar , was an educationist and textbook writer in nineteenth century Bengal. His series of Reading Books introduced a whole generation of Bengalis to the English language, sold in the millions and were translated into every major Indian language. He was also a pioneer of women's education in Bengal and was called 'Arnold of the East'.
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Alexis F. Lange
1862 - 1924 (62 years)
Alexis Frederick Lange was the Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and led the effort to found the community college system in the state of California. External links Lange bust in Haviland Hall
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Robert Kibbee
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
Robert Joseph Kibbee was an American university administrator who was Chancellor of the City University of New York. Biography Kibbee was born on Staten Island, New York. His father was Hollywood actor Guy Kibbee and his mother was Helen Shay Kibbee; his parents separated when he was a young boy. He attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, New York, and earned a bachelor's degree at Fordham University in 1943.
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Ernst Meumann
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann was a German educator, pedagogist and psychologist, the founder of experimental pedagogy. Works Die Sprache des Kindes Über Ökonomie und Technik des Lernens Der Verzug des Schuldners nach dem Recht des BGB für das Deutsche Reich Intelligenz und Wille. Ökonomie und Technik des Gedächtnisses Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die experimentelle Pädagogik System der Ästhetik Abriss der experimentellen Pädagogik The psychology of learning: an experimental investigation of the economy and technique of memory. 2012, Nabu press. ISBN 9781279520284
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Samuel Silas Curry
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
Samuel Silas Curry was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Early life and education Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when ...
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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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William Jasper Kerr
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
William Jasper Kerr was an American academic in the states of Oregon and Utah. A native of Utah, he served as president of Oregon State Universitynot to be confused with Brigham Young University Early life and education Kerr was born on November 17, 1863, in Richmond in the then Utah Territory. He received a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah in 1885. He planned to study law, and turned down appointment to West Point in order to go into law, but never did go into the profession. He married Leonora Hamilton in 1885, and had four daughters and two sons.
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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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