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
Rudolf von Willemoes-Suhm
1847 - 1875 (28 years)
Rudolf von Willemoes-Suhm was a German naturalist who served aboard the Challenger expedition. Willemoes-Suhm was born in Glückstadt, Duchy of Holstein. After starting to study law at the University of Bonn, Willemoes-Suhm left Bonn to study zoology at Munich under Professor Karl von Siebold. Beginning in April 1869, he studied at the University of Göttingen, and gained his doctorate there. In 1870, he moved to Kiel, where he met Professor Karl von Kupffer, and there he collected specimens in the Bay of Kiel, which he analysed for his habilitation. In 1871, Willemoes-Suhm began to lecture at the University of Munich.
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Edmund Hildebrandt
1872 - 1939 (67 years)
Edmund Hildebrandt was a German art historian. Hildebrandt was born in Berlin to businessman Georg Franz Hildebrandt and Theone Hildebrandt née Wolkoff . In 1907 he married teacher Ottilie Schlesinger in a civil ceremony, despite Ottilie being from a well known Jewish merchant family. The couple had a son in 1909, Franz, and moved into the affluent Charlottenburg area of Berlin. Hildebrandt considered himself a pantheist, and his son Franz Hildebrandt later became a renowned theologian and pastor. Hildebrandt suffered from agoraphobia, which manifested itself in his choice of small auditori...
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Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff
1884 - 1963 (79 years)
Godefridus Johannes Hoogewerff was a Dutch art historian. Life Born in Amersfoort and studying in that town's gymnasium, from 1903 to 1908 he studied at the University of Utrecht, during which time he catalogued the manuscripts of that city's Aartsbischoppelijk Museum. In 1909 he made his first visit to Rome, basing himself at the Nederlands Historisch Instituut te Rome whilst he researched his doctoral dissertation on Dutch painters working in Italy in the 16th century, supervised by Willem Vogelsang, whose assistant Hoogewerff had become in 1908. He gained his doctorate in 1912 but stayed o...
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Jan Gerrit van Gelder
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Jan Gerrit van Gelder was a Dutch art historian. Life and work Van Gelder was the son of the archivist and museum director, Hendrik Enno van Gelder. He grew up in The Hague. In 1923, he began studying art history at the University of Utrecht. In 1924 he was appointed by the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, where he worked as an assistant and later as curator in the print room and the library. In 1933, he completed his Ph.D. dissertation under Willem Vogelsang on Jan van de Velde. In 1936, he was appointed lecturer in art history at Leiden University and in 1940 acting director of the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague.
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William Birdsall
1854 - 1909 (55 years)
William Wilfred Birdsall was a Quaker educator who was president of Swarthmore College from 1898 to 1902. Birdsall was born in Indiana in 1854, the son of Mary and Thomas Birdsall. His mother, Mary Birdsall, was a premiere suffragist, woman’s rights advocate, and editor in Indiana. She was one of the first women to address the Indiana State Legislature, demanding equal rights to men. Birdsall received a BS from Earlham College in 1873 and then went on to teach at Richmond High School in Indiana. Birdsall became the president of the Boys High School in Wilmington, Delaware. In 1880 at age 26 Birdsall married Viola Isabel McDill.
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William Herbert Carruth
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
William Herbert Carruth was an American educator and poet. He taught at the University of Kansas and Stanford University. Life William Herbert Carruth was born in Osawatomie, Kansas on April 5, 1859. He earned AB and MA degrees in modern languages from the University of Kansas and later two more advanced languages degrees, another MA and a PhD, from Harvard. Carruth taught languages and literature at KU from 1880 until 1913, and was Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University from 1913 to 1924. Carruth was president of the Pacific Coast Conference of the Unitarian Church.
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Hans Kauffmann
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Hans Kauffmann was a German art historian. Life and work The son of a professor of German philology in Kiel, Kauffmann studied art history at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Kiel, where he obtained his doctorate in 1919 with a thesis on Rembrandt's art. In 1922, he completed his Habilitationsschrift on Albrecht Dürer under Adolph Goldschmidt at the University of Berlin.
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Albert Micajah Shipp
1819 - 1887 (68 years)
Albert Micajah Shipp was an American Methodist minister and university administrator. Biography Early life Albert Micajah Shipp was born on June 15, 1819, in Stokes County, North Carolina. His father was John Shipp and his mother, Elizabeth Wade Ogilvie . He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
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Alexander Neville
1544 - 1614 (70 years)
Alexander Neville was an English scholar, known as a historian and translator and a Member of the House of Commons. Life Alexander Neville was the brother of Thomas Neville, Dean of Canterbury, and son of Richard Neville of South Leverton, Nottinghamshire, by Anne Mantell, daughter of Sir Walter Mantell of Nether Heyford, Northamptonshire. His mother's sister, Margaret Mantell, was the mother of the poet Barnabe Googe.
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Auguste Götze
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Auguste Götze was a German classical singer, actress, playwright, and a distinguished voice teacher. Götze was born in Weimar where she initially trained in music with her father, the tenor Franz Götze. In her later years, she had her own singing school in Leipzig as well as teaching in the conservatory there. She died in Leipzig at the age of 68 after several years of increasingly poor health.
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Richard Hamann
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Heinrich Richard Hamann was a German art historian. He attended the Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen in Magdeburg, and later studied Germanistics, art history and philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1902 he received his promotion with the dissertation-thesis Das Symbol as a student of Wilhelm Dilthey. In 1911 he obtained his habilitation at Berlin, and subsequently became a professor of art history at Posen Academy. In 1913 he relocated to the University of Marburg, where he founded the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg . From 1947 to 1957 he served as a guest professor at the University of Berlin. ...
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August L. Mayer
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
August Liebmann Mayer was a German curator, art historian and art collector specializing in Spanish Golden Age painting. He was fired from his job, his art collection was looted and he was murdered by Nazis because he was Jewish.
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John Smith
1781 - 1855 (74 years)
John Smith was a 19th-century British art dealer who developed the concept of the catalogue raisonné. Smith was born in London. He began dealing in art as a framemaker, specializing in wood-carving and gilding. He became an art dealer and art consultant known for his "reasoned catalog" of painters that he wrote in 8 volumes and sold by subscription to his art clients during the years 1829 to 1837, and to which he added a 9th volume as a supplement in 1842.
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Jean Victor Audouin
1797 - 1841 (44 years)
Jean Victor Audouin , sometimes Victor Audouin, was a French naturalist, an entomologist, herpetologist, ornithologist, and malacologist. Biography Audouin was born in Paris and was educated in the field of medicine. In 1824 he was appointed assistant to Pierre André Latreille, professor of entomology at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, where in 1833 he became Latreille's successor. In 1838 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
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Oscar Clute
1837 - 1902 (65 years)
Oscar Clute was president of the U.S. state of Michigan's State Agricultural College from 1889 to 1893. Early years Oscar Clute was born in Albany, New York. Career 1855–1859 From 1855 to 1859 Clute taught high school.
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Frederick S. Jones
1862 - 1944 (82 years)
Frederick Scheetz Jones was an American university professor, dean, and college football coach. He was the first physics teacher at the University of Minnesota and the school's second football coach, known as the "father of Minnesota football". Following his time as coach, Jones continued his involvement in athletics. He helped secure land and funding for Northrop Field, the program's first true home field. He also signed Henry L. Williams to be the new head football coach at Minnesota in 1900.
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August Kalkmann
1853 - 1905 (52 years)
August Kalkmann was a German classical archaeologist and art historian. He studied under Franz Bücheler, Hermann Usener and Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz at the University of Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1881 with a dissertation on Euripides' Hippolytus. In 1885 he qualified as a lecturer, and in 1900 became an associate professor at the University of Berlin.
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Johannes Gessner
1709 - 1790 (81 years)
Johannes Gessner was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, botanist, mineralogist and physician. He is seen as the founder of the "Naturforschende Gesellschaft in Zürich". Gessner was born and died in Zürich, where he trained under the physician Johannes von Muralt. He moved to Basel to study medicine, continuing his studies in 1726 and 1727 at the University of Leiden. There he became friendly with Albrecht von Haller, with whom he made a grand tour to Paris to finish their medical studies. There he wrote his diary, later published as Pariser Tagebuch. The two friends in 1728 studied mathematics...
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Millard Meiss
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Millard Lazare Meiss was an American art historian, one of whose specialties was Gothic architecture. Meiss worked as an art history professor at Columbia University from 1934 to 1953. After teaching at Columbia, he became a professor at Harvard until 1958, when he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. Meiss has edited several leading art journals and has also written articles and books on medieval and Renaissance painting. Among his many important contributions are Italian style in Catalonia and a fourteenth century Catalan workshop , Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death and French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry .
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Ivan Paskvić
1753 - 1829 (76 years)
Ivan Paskvić was an Austro-Hungarian astronomer, physicist and mathematician. Biography Paskvić was born in Senj. He was educated in Zagreb, from 1778 in Graz and from 1782 in Buda. In Buda he was an adjunct professor of physics, professor of mathematics, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and director of Buda Observatory. His Slovakian colleague Daniel M. Kmeth accused him in several scientific journals of forging observational data of Buda Observatory. After examining the data many prominent scientists in Europe stood in Paskvić's defense, such as Carl Friedrich Gauss, Friedrich Bessel, Johann Franz Encke, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers, Heinrich Christian Schumacher.
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Anthony Blunt
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...
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George F. Zook
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
George Frederick "Fred" Zook was an American educator who was President of the University of Akron, U.S. Commissioner of Education, and President of the American Council on Education. Life and career Zook was born on April 22, 1885, on a farm near Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Stephen Douglas Zook and Helen Follenius. He enrolled at the University of Kansas in 1902, funding his education by driving a hearse. After graduation he was a fellow at the University of Kansas, then an assistant at Cornell University, and a faculty member at Penn State University, where he advanced from instructor to full professor.
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Margarete Bieber
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Margarete Bieber was a Jewish German-American art historian, classical archaeologist and professor. She became the second woman university professor in Germany in 1919 when she took a position at the University of Giessen. She studied the theatre of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the sculpture and clothing in ancient Rome and Greece.
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Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Charles Rufus Morey
1877 - 1955 (78 years)
Charles Rufus Morey was an American art historian, professor, and chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University from 1924 to 1945. He had expertise in medieval art and founded the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in 1917. He was one of the founders of the College Art Association.
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Harold Rugg
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Harold Ordway Rugg was an educational reformer in the early to mid 1900s, associated with the Progressive education movement. Originally trained in civil engineering at Dartmouth College , Rugg went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois where he completed a doctoral dissertation titled "The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies."
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Georges Daux
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Georges Daux was a French archaeologist and a leading scholar of Greek inscriptions. Born in Bastia and educated at the École normale supérieure, Daux headed the French School at Athens from 1950 to 1969.
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Charlotte Towle
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Charlotte Helen Towle was an American social worker, academic and writer. Early life and education Towle was born and raised in Butte, Montana. In 1919, she received a BA in Education from Goucher College. After graduation, she worked at the American Red Cross and became increasingly interested in social work. With financial support from a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, she attended New York School of Social Work . She earned a degree in Psychiatric Social Work in 1926.
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William Bell Dinsmoor
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
William Bell Dinsmoor Sr. was an American architectural historian of classical Greece and a Columbia University professor of art and archaeology. Biography He was born on July 29, 1886, in Windham, New Hampshire.
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Eduard C. Lindeman
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Eduard C. Lindeman was an American educator, notable for his pioneering contributions in adult education. He introduced many concepts of modern adult education in his book, The Meaning of Adult Education.
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Paul Dressel
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Paul Dressel was an American educational psychologist. He was the founding director of the Counseling Center at Michigan State University, and the author of several books. Early life Dressel was born on November 29, 1910. He graduated from Wittenberg University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1931. He earned a master's degree from Michigan State University in 1934, and a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1939.
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Edwin Broun Fred
1887 - 1981 (94 years)
Edwin Broun Fred was an American bacteriologist and academic who was the 15th president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serving from 1945 to 1958. Born in Virginia, Fred studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Göttingen. After briefly teaching at Virginia Polytechnic, Fred took a position with Wisconsin. He was dean of the graduate school from 1934 until 1943, then was dean of the College of Agriculture until 1945. He ascended to the presidency and was known for his response to the postwar growth in admissions. Fred was the president of the Society of Ameri...
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Robert Goldwater
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Robert Goldwater was an art historian, African arts scholar and the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, New York, from 1957 to 1973. He was married to the French-born American artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois.
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Wolfgang Stechow
1896 - 1974 (78 years)
Wolfgang Ferdinand Ernst Günther Stechow was a German American art historian. Life He was the son of Prussian prosecutor Waldemar Stechow and the concert singer Bertha Deutschmann. He attended the in Göttingen until 1913 and then volunteered in 1914. He was captured in Russia, in 1915 and spent two years in a Siberian camp.
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Diego Angulo Íñiguez
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Diego Angulo Iñiguez was an art historian, a university professor, writer and Director of the Prado Museum in Madrid from 1968 to 1970. Complementing his career as a curator an academic, he served as one of the founding members of the Art advisory council of the International Foundation for Art Research .
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Tamezo Mori
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
, was a Japanese naturalist in Chōsen . He taught at a preparatory school for Keijō Imperial University in Seoul from 1909 until he was expelled by the American forces in 1945. Primarily an ichthyologist, he published numerous works on the zoology of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Some of these, such as his Checklist of the Fishes of Korea and the 1934 Coloured Butterflies from Korea, are still in print.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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Stanley B. Freeborn
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.
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Louis Grodecki
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Louis Grodecki was a French art historian. A disciple of Henri Focillon since 1929, shortly after his arrival in France, and naturalized French in 1935, he met art historian Erwin Panofsky in 1949 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Grodecki is famous for his work on romanesque stained glass, of Paris, Picardy and the Nord-Pas de Calais region. His most notable works are about the stained glasses of Chartres Cathedral, in particular a complete catalogue which he never finished. He was a reviewer for the doctoral dissertation of E. Wayne Craven.
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Jodie Hunter
Jodie Margaret Roberta Hunter is a New Zealand academic, of Cook Island Māori descent, and is a full professor at Massey University. Hunter researches mathematics pedagogy, with a particular interest in culturally responsive teaching of mathematics to Pasifika students. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar.
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John Berryman
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Sirarpie Der Nersessian was an Armenian art historian, who specialized in Armenian and Byzantine studies. Der Nersessian was a renowned academic and a pioneer in Armenian art history. She taught at several institutions in the United States, including Wellesley College in Massachusetts and as Henri Focillon Professor of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. She was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, its deputy director from 1954–55 and 1961–62, and a member of its Board of Scholars. Der Nersessian was also a member of several international institutions such as the British Academy , the Ac...
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Walter William Spencer Cook
1888 - 1962 (74 years)
Walter William Spencer Cook, also known as Walter W. S. Cook in citation was an American art historian and professor. He specialized in Spanish Medieval art history. He was an emeritus professor from New York University and he helped found the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. He had a prominent role in introducing eminent German art historians to the United States.
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Franklin S. Harris
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Franklin Stewart Harris was president of Brigham Young University from July 1921 until June 1945, and president of Utah State University from 1945 to 1950. His administration was the longest in BYU history and saw the granting of the first master's degrees. Under his administration the school became an accredited university. He set up several colleges, such as the College of Fine and Performing Arts with Gerrit De Jong as the founding dean. Harris was an agricultural scientist, holding a doctorate in agronomy from Cornell University. He had served as the agriculture department head and head...
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Elbert K. Fretwell
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Elbert K. Fretwell was an American academic and early leader in the field of youth development through recreation and extracurricular activity. He served as the second Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America , serving from 1943 to 1948. Upon his retirement from the BSA, Fretwell was given the title of Chief Scout.
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Otto Brendel
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...
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Françoise Henry
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Françoise Henry was a scholar of early Irish art, archaeologist, and art historian. While at University College Dublin , she founded the Department of History of European Painting in 1965, and was head until she retired in 1974.
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Harold Wethey
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Harold Edwin Wethey was an American art historian and educator. From 1940 to 1972, Wethey was a professor of art history at the University of Michigan. Career Born in Port Byron, Wethey received a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages from Cornell University in 1923, and then a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Harvard University in 1931 and 1934, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was on the sculptor Gil de Siloé and was titled "Gil de Siloé and Sculpture in Burgos under the Catholic Kings." He taught at Bryn Mawr College and Washington University in St. Loui...
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Ellis Waterhouse
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Sir Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse was an English art historian and museum director who specialised in Roman baroque and English painting. He was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland and held the Barber chair at Birmingham University until his official retirement in 1970.
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Heinrich Wölfflin
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Heinrich Wölfflin was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that saw German art history's rise to pre-eminence. His three most important books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock , Die Klassische Kunst , and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe .
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