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,
#2401
Richard S. Rust
1815 - 1906 (91 years)
Richard Sutton Rust was an American Methodist preacher, abolitionist, educator, writer, lecturer, secretary of the Freedmen's Bureau, and founder of the Freedmen's Aid Society. He also helped found multiple educational institutions including his namesake Rust College in Holly Springs, Mississippi, the oldest historically black United Methodist-related college.
Go to Profile#2402
Elmer Ellsworth Brown
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
Elmer Ellsworth Brown was an American educator. Biography Born at Kiantone in Chautauqua County, New York, Elmer Ellsworth Brown studied at New York University , graduated from Illinois State Normal University in 1881 and at the University of Michigan ; then he studied in Germany and received a Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1890.
Go to Profile#2403
Barbara Foxley
1860 - 1958 (98 years)
Barbara Foxley was a British Professor of Education at University College, Cardiff and a campaigner for women's rights. Life Foxley was born in Market Weighton where her father, Reverend Joseph Foxley, was the vicar. Her mother was Lucy born Allen and Barbara was educated at home before attending schools in London and Manchester. She obtained what would have been a second class degree at Newnham College, but Cambridge University only gave degrees to men until 1949. Her historical tripos and a teaching qualification enabled her to gain a master's degree from Trinity College, Dublin who did not...
Go to Profile#2404
Ludwig Karl Schmarda
1819 - 1908 (89 years)
Ludwig Karl Schmarda was an Austrian naturalist and traveler, born at Olmütz, Moravia. Early life and education Schmarda was born at Olmütz where he attended the Grammar School and the Philosophical Course at the University of Olomouc. He graduated in 1841. He studied medicine and science at the Josephinum, now part of the Medical University of Vienna , particularly interested in zoology, graduating in 1843 as "Dr Med et Chir.", as well as Magister of Ophthalmology and Gynecology.
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Aby Warburg
1866 - 1929 (63 years)
Aby Moritz Warburg, better known as Aby Warburg, was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg , a private library, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London. At the heart of his research was the legacy of the classical world, and the transmission of classical representation, in the most varied areas of Western culture through to the Renaissance.
Go to Profile#2406
Fannie Smith Washington
1858 - 1884 (26 years)
Fannie Smith Washington was an American educator, and the first wife of Booker T. Washington. Before her premature death in 1884, Fannie Washington aided her husband in the early development of the Tuskegee Institute.
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Carmelita Hinton
1890 - 1983 (93 years)
Carmelita Hinton was an American progressive educator. She is best known as the founder in 1935 of The Putney School, a progressive boarding school in Vermont. Early life Born in Omaha, Nebraska, Hinton was one of four children. Her father, Clement Chase, who owned a newspaper and a bookstore, was a women's rights advocate and encouraged Hinton's energetic nature and belief that she could do what she wished with her life. Her mother, Lula Belle Edwards, disagreed and tried unsuccessfully to mold Hinton into a more traditional woman's role. During her years at the Omaha's Episcopal School for ...
Go to Profile#2408
Amy Barrington
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Amy Barrington was an Irish teacher and scientist who was closely associated with the practices and beliefs of eugenics. She published several papers on that subject as well as indexing a work on history. She also wrote an account of the family history of the Barringtons. Amy Barrington herself states in 'The Barrington family history' that she occupied herself in learning and travelling for 26 years before deciding to pursue her family's ancestral history. She was the youngest daughter of Edward Barrington of Fassaroe, Bray, County Wicklow, Ireland.
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William Healey Dall
1845 - 1927 (82 years)
William Healey Dall was an American naturalist, a prominent malacologist, and one of the earliest scientific explorers of interior Alaska. He described many mollusks of the Pacific Northwest of North America, and was for many years America's preeminent authority on living and fossil mollusks.
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Lorentz Dietrichson
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Lorentz Henrik Segelcke Dietrichson was a Norwegian poet and historian of art and literature. Biography Lorentz Henrik Segelcke Dietrichson was the son of Fredrik Dietrichson and Marie Heiberg Dahl . Dietrichson grew up in Bergen as an only child in a home of cultural officials interested in the parents' social circle. While an undergraduate in the University of Christiania, he composed many clever student songs which were collected and published in 1859. After school graduation in 1853 at the University of Christiania and other exams the following year he began to study theology, but he was more keen to cultivate their literary and artistic interests.
Go to Profile#2411
William Nicholas Hailmann
1836 - 1920 (84 years)
William Nicholas Hailmann was an American educator. He was a progressive educator and helped introduce the kindergarten into the United States. Biography He was educated in the gymnasium at Zürich, studied in Medical College of Louisville, Kentucky, and received a Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1885. He taught natural science in the Louisville high schools from 1856 to 1865, and then directed the German and English Academy from 1865 to 1873, where he built the first kindergarten classroom in the United States. He eventually became president of the Froebel Institute of North America.
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Oswald Heer
1809 - 1883 (74 years)
Oswald Heer , Swiss geologist and naturalist, was born at Niederuzwil in Canton of St. Gallen and died in Lausanne. Biography Oswald Heer was educated as a clergyman at Halle and took holy orders, and he also graduated as Doctor of Philosophy and medicine. Early in life his interest was aroused in entomology, on which subject he acquired special knowledge, and later he took up the study of plants and became one of the pioneers in paleobotany, distinguished for his researches on the Miocene flora.
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Mario Praz
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Mario Praz was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony , was a comprehensive survey of the decadent, erotic and morbid themes that characterised European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries . The book was written and published first in Italian as in 1930; and the most recent edition was published in Florence by Sansoni in 1996.
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François-Alphonse Forel
1841 - 1912 (71 years)
François-Alphonse Forel was a Swiss physician and scientist who pioneered the study of lakes, and is thus considered the founder, and the Father of limnology. Limnology is the study of bodies of fresh water and their biological, chemical, and physical features.
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Mungo Park
1771 - 1806 (35 years)
Mungo Park was a Scottish explorer of West Africa. After an exploration of the upper Niger River around 1796, he wrote a popular and influential travel book titled Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa in which he theorized the Niger and Congo merged to become the same river, though it was later proven that they are different rivers. He was killed during a second expedition, having successfully travelled about two-thirds of the way down the Niger.
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Vladimir Petković
1874 - 1956 (82 years)
Vladimir R. Petković was a Serbian art historian who initiated this scientific discipline in the Serbian cultural milieu. He was also a professor at the University of Belgrade. Biography He received his elementary education in his hometown, Oreovica, Kuseljevo, Svilajnac and in Kragujevac he attended high school. He studied the Department of Philology and History at the Grandes écoles in Belgrade between 1893 and 1897. He attended doctoral studies at the universities of Munich and Halle. Between 1900 and 1905 he served as assistant custodian of the warden of the National Museum in Belgrade, a...
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Thomas Hill
1818 - 1891 (73 years)
Thomas Hill was an American Unitarian clergyman, mathematician, scientist, philosopher, and educator. Biography Taught to read at an early age, Hill read voraciously and was well regarded for his capacious and accurate memory. His father taught him botany, and he took a delight in nature and devised scientific instruments, one that calculated eclipses and was subsequently awarded the Scott Medal by the Franklin Institute.
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Víctor Jara
1932 - 1973 (41 years)
Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was a Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter and Communist political activist. He developed Chilean theater by directing a broad array of works, ranging from locally produced plays to world classics, as well as the experimental work of playwrights such as Ann Jellicoe. He also played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric musicians who established the Nueva canción chilena movement. This led to an uprising of new sounds in popular music during the administration of President Salvador Allende.
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Gustav Friedrich Waagen
1794 - 1868 (74 years)
Gustav Friedrich Waagen was a German art historian. His opinions were greatly respected in England, where he was invited to give evidence before the royal commission inquiring into the condition and future of the National Gallery, for which he was a leading candidate to become director. He died on a visit to Copenhagen in 1868.
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David McCutchion
1930 - 1972 (42 years)
David McCutchion was an English-born academic, and a pioneer in a number of original strands of scholarship in Indian studies before his early death at age 41. Popularly known as "Davidbabu", in his short life, he made a major contribution to the study of Hindu terracotta and brick temples of Bengal and was also one of the first scholars to write a study of the emerging field of Indian writing in English.
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Joachim von Sandrart
1606 - 1688 (82 years)
Joachim von Sandrart was a German Baroque art-historian and painter, active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. He is most significant for his collection of biographies of Dutch and German artists the Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680.
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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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Leopoldo Sabbatini
1861 - 1914 (53 years)
Leopoldo Sabbatini was an Italian lawyer, the first dean and president of Bocconi University, the first business school in Italy. His parents were Eugenio Sabbatini and Silvia Piermarini. He started to study law in 1879 at the University of Pisa, graduating with a thesis on commercial law in 1883. He also married very young, in 1880. Soon after that, he was admitted as vice-secretary of the Commerce Chamber of Milano, where he was instrumental in achieving the first comprehensive survey and publication of statistics about commerce and industry in Milano. In his free time, Sabbatini collaborat...
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Richard Edwards
1822 - 1908 (86 years)
Richard Edwards was a Welsh American educator from Ceredigion . Emigrating to the United States with his family when he was a child, Edwards studied at the State Normal School in Bridgewater, Massachusetts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He then led a number of schools: the Boys' High School in Salem, Massachusetts ; the State Normal School in Salem ; the Normal School in St. Louis, Missouri ; Illinois State Normal University ; and Blackburn University. From 1887 to 1891, he served as the Illinois Superintendent of Public Instruction.
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Johnny Roosval
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
John August Emanuel Roosval was a Swedish art historian, Medieval ecclesiastical art specialist, and university professor. Biography Johnny Roosval was born in a bourgeois family in Kalmar, but grew up in Stockholm from the age of five and went to school there.
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Fritz Saxl
1890 - 1948 (58 years)
Friedrich "Fritz" Saxl was the art historian who was the guiding light of the Warburg Institute, especially during the long mental breakdown of its founder, Aby Warburg, whom he succeeded as director.
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Frank Jewett Mather
1868 - 1953 (85 years)
Frank Jewett Mather Jr. was an American art critic and professor. He was the first "modernist" professor at the Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. He was a direct descendant of Richard Mather a Puritan minister in 17th century Boston.
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Nikolay Likhachyov
1862 - 1936 (74 years)
Nikolay Petrovich Likhachyov , alternatively transliterated as Likhachev was the first and foremost Russian sigillographer who also contributed significantly to an array of auxiliary historical disciplines, including palaeography, epigraphy, diplomatics, genealogy, and numismatics. He was elected a member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1925 and was put in charge of the Archaeographic Commission in 1929.
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Hermann Theodor Hettner
1821 - 1882 (61 years)
Hermann Julius Theodor Hettner , was a German literary historian and museum director. Biography He was born at Leisersdorf , near Goldberg , in Silesia. At the universities of Berlin, Halle and Heidelberg he concentrated on the study of philosophy, but in 1843 turned his attention to aesthetics, art and literature. In order to progress with these studies, he spent three years in Italy, and, on his return, published a Vorschule zur bildenden Kunst der Alten and an essay on Die neapolitanischen Malerschulen.
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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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Max Yergan
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Max Yergan was an African-American activist notable for being a Baptist missionary for the YMCA, then a Communist working with Paul Robeson, and finally a staunch anti-Communist who complimented the government of apartheid-era South Africa for that part of their program. He was a mentor of Govan Mbeki, who later achieved distinction in the African National Congress. He served as the second president of the National Negro Congress, a coalition of hundreds of African-American organizations created in 1935 by religious, labor, civic and fraternal leaders to fight racial discrimination, establish...
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William Wilson Hudson
1808 - Present (218 years)
William Wilson Hudson was an American educator and third President of the University of Missouri. He was born in Orange County, Virginia in 1808 and graduated from Yale University with an A.B. in 1827 and an A.M. in 1830. He was a professor of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Alabama before moving to Columbia, Missouri in 1838. After teaching at the University of Missouri for some years, he was elected president of the university in 1856 and served until his death in 1859. He is buried in Columbia at the Columbia Cemetery.
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John Wilson
1804 - 1875 (71 years)
John Wilson FRS was a Scottish Christian missionary, orientalist and educator in the Bombay presidency, British India. In 1828, he married Margaret Bayne and together they went as Christian missionaries of the Scottish Missionary Society to Bombay, India, arriving on 13 February 1829. He is the founder of Wilson College, Mumbai and one of the founders of Bombay University, along with the Hon. Jugonnath Sunkersett and Dr. Bhau Daji Lad. He was also the president of the Asiatic Society of Bombay from 1835 to 1842; and was elected Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in 1870.
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Cleo W. Blackburn
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Cleo Walter Blackburn was an American educator. He was the founder and CEO for The Fundamental Board of Education and a member of the fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Indianapolis Urban League. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation.
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John S. Hougham
1821 - 1894 (73 years)
John Scherer Hougham , was Purdue University’s first appointed professor, first acting President after Purdue's first President Richard Dale Owen resigned on March 1, 1874, and later an official acting President between the administrations of Abraham C. Shortridge and Emerson E. White.
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Edwin Redslob
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Edwin Redslob was a German art historian who served as Reichskunstwart under the Weimar Republic. Appointed in 1920, he was the only person to fulfil this role as the position was abolished following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933.
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John O. Moseley
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
John Ohleyer Moseley was an American educator, a Rhodes Scholar, and a Professor of Latin at the University of Oklahoma in the 1920s. He was also the President of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity in the 1930s. He served as the President of Central State College from 1935 to 1939, and the University of Nevada, Reno from 1944 to 1949.
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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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Nikodim Kondakov
1844 - 1925 (81 years)
Nikodim Pavlovich Kondakov , was an art historian with special expertise in the history of Russian and Serbian Christian icons. He is remembered as a pioneer among art historian who studied the treasures of Mount Athos like Frenchman Gabriel Millet.
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Hugh Edwin Strickland
1811 - 1853 (42 years)
Hugh Edwin Strickland was an English geologist, ornithologist, naturalist and systematist. Through the British Association, he proposed a series of rules for the nomenclature of organisms in zoology, known as the Strickland Code, that was a precursor of later codes for nomenclature.
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John Clark Ridpath
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
John Clark Ridpath was an American educator, historian, and editor. His mother was a descendant of Samuel Matthews, a colonial governor of Virginia. Among his most notable works is a series of volumes on a history of the world, titled Cyclopedia of Universal History.
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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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A. B. Graham
1868 - 1960 (92 years)
Albert Belmont Graham was born near Lena, Ohio. He was a country schoolmaster and agriculture extension pioneer at Ohio State University. Graham taught at an integrated rural school in Brown Township, Miami County.
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Fred Clarke
1880 - 1952 (72 years)
Sir Frederick Clarke was an English educationist who was Director of the Institute of Education in the University of London between 1936 and 1945. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was also a strong advocate for educational reform in England and Wales. Clarke was fully involved in the public educational debate at the time and a member of a private group of leading educational thinkers known as 'The Moot'. He is known particularly for his book Education and Social Change: an English interpretation from 1940. Other books include the collection of essays Essays in the Politics of Education and ...
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Adolf Behne
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Adolf Bruno Behne was a German critic, art historian, architectural writer, and artistic activist. He was one of the leaders of the Avant Garde in the Weimar Republic. Behne was born in Magdeburg and studied architecture briefly, then the history of art in Berlin. He joined the Deutscher Werkbund and was a guiding light of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in 1918. In a 1913 critique of Bruno Taut, Behne helped coin the term "Expressionist architecture", and soon became one of the leading promoters of expressionism. He was close to the members of the Magdeburg artist collective 'The ball' and demanded the creation of a new closeness between art and architecture.
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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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