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,
#2501
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.
Go to Profile#2502
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.
Go to Profile#2503
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.
Go to Profile#2504
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.
Go to Profile#2505
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.
Go to Profile#2506
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.
Go to Profile#2507
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.
Go to Profile#2509
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.
Go to Profile#2511
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.
Go to Profile#2514
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 (216 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.
Go to Profile#2519
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.
Go to Profile#2526
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.
Go to Profile#2527
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.
Go to Profile#2528
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.
Go to Profile#2531
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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Hermann Masius
1818 - 1893 (75 years)
Hermann Masius was a German educator who was a native of Trebnitz . He studied theology in Halle, and later was director of a gymnasium in Halberstadt. In 1860 he became director of a Realschule in Dresden, and in 1862 was appointed professor of pedagogy and director of the educational seminar at the University of Leipzig, the first to hold that position.
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Joseph Beech
1867 - 1954 (87 years)
Joseph Beech, or Joe Beech as he was more commonly known , was an American Methodist missionary and educator, member of Psi Upsilon and Phi Beta Kappa, and founding president of the West China Union University. He was a recipient of the Order of Brilliant Jade.
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Volodymyr Sichynskyi
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Volodymyr Sichynskyi was a Ukrainian émigré architect, graphic artist, and art historian. Volodymyr Sichynskyi was born to the family of Ievtym Sitsinskyi in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Podilia guberniya, Russia, which is in present-day Ukraine.
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Vinnie B. Clark
1878 - 1971 (93 years)
Vinnie B. Clark was an educator and author who established and developed the Geography Department at the San Diego State University. Early life Vinnie B. Clark was born in 1878 in Mayville, Wisconsin, the daughter of Dr. Gilbert J. Clark and Mrs. Elva V. Martin.
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Martin Wagenschein
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Martin Wagenschein was a science educator who worked in mathematical and scientific didactics. Wagenschein is best known for his promotion of open learning techniques. He emphasised the importance of teaching students to understand rather than simply learning knowledge for its own sake. As such he was one of precursors of modern teaching techniques such as constructivism, inquiry-based science, and inquiry learning.
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Edward Franklin Buchner
1868 - 1929 (61 years)
Edward Franklin Buchner was an American academic and scholar in education studies. Early life Edward Franklin Buchner was born on September 3, 1868, in Paxton, Illinois. He attended Leander Clark College and graduated from Yale University, where he received a PhD in 1893.
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Richard Lydekker
1849 - 1915 (66 years)
Richard Lydekker was an English naturalist, geologist and writer of numerous books on natural history. Biography Richard Lydekker was born at Tavistock Square in London. His father was Gerard Wolfe Lydekker, a barrister-at-law with Dutch ancestry. The family moved to Harpenden Lodge soon after Richard's birth. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class in the Natural Science tripos . In 1874 he joined the Geological Survey of India and made studies of the vertebrate palaeontology of northern India . He remained in this post until the death of his father in 1881.
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Li Denghui
1873 - 1947 (74 years)
Li Denghui , also Lee Teng Hwee, was the president of Fudan University of Shanghai, 1917–1937. Biography Li's ancestors came from the Tong'an District, Fujian, but he was born in Batavia, Dutch East Indies . He went to study in Singapore at the Anglo-Chinese School, where he became a Christian. He then continued at Yale University, becoming one of the first Nanyang Chinese to study there. He graduated with a BA degree in 1899.
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Langdon Warner
1881 - 1955 (74 years)
Langdon Warner was an American archaeologist and art historian specializing in East Asian art. He was a professor at Harvard and the Curator of Oriental Art at Harvard's Fogg Museum. He is reputed to be one of the models for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones. As an explorer/agent at the turn of the 20th century, he studied the Silk Road. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1927.
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Edwina Whitney
1868 - 1970 (102 years)
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as one of the earliest librarians at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She also served as a German instructor from 1901 to 1926 and an assistant professor of German from 1926 to 1934.
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Alice Blinn
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Alice Blinn was an American educator, home efficiency expert, and magazine editor. Born in Candor, New York, she attended the New York State normal school and became a teacher. After teaching briefly, in 1913, she entered Cornell University and earned a degree in Domestic Science. While in school, she founded and managed the Cornell Women's Review. After graduation in 1917, she became a food conservation demonstrator for the New York Extension Service and then returned after a year to teach and manage the publications office for the Extension Service at Cornell.
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Bowman Foster Ashe
1885 - 1952 (67 years)
Bowman Foster Ashe was a U.S. educator who served as the first president of the University of Miami. Early life and education Bowman Foster Ashe was born in Scottdale, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, on April 3, 1885, one of six sons of a Methodist minister.
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James L. Farmer Sr.
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
James Leonard Farmer Sr. , known as J. Leonard Farmer, was an American author, theologian, and educator. He was a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South and an academic in early religious history as well as theology.
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Frank Deerwester
Frank Deerwester was the first president of Northwest Missouri State University from 1906 to 1907. Butler was born in Bates County, Missouri and attended Butler College, the Second District Normal School, New York University, the University of Chicago and Harvard.
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Michał Walicki
1904 - 1966 (62 years)
Michał Marian Walicki was a Polish art historian and professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and School of Fine Arts . Life and work From 1924 to 1929, Walicki studied art history at the University of Warsaw, where he also wrote his PhD thesis. In 1934 he was appointed associate professor and in 1937 full professor of art history. He worked at the Department of Polish Architecture at the Warsaw Technical University, at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts , at the National Museum, Warsaw, where he was curator of the Gallery of Foreign Painting, and at the Art History Institute of the Unive...
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Thomas Blanchard Stowell
1846 - 1927 (81 years)
Thomas Blanchard Stowell was an American educator. Stowell was born on March 29, 1846, in Perry, New York. In 1865, at the age of 19, he graduated from Genesee College . He went on to earn a Master's degree in 1868 and a Ph.D. in 1881 from the same institution.
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Girish Chandra Bose
1853 - 1939 (86 years)
Girish Chandra Bose was an Indian educator and botanist. Early life and education Bose was born on 29 October 1853 in the village of Berugram in the Burdwan district of India. He attended Hooghly College, and received a BA degree in 1876. After graduation, he was hired as a lecturer of science at Ravenshaw College, where he worked until 1881.
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Albert W. Dent
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Albert Walter Dent was an academic administrator who served initially as business administrator of Flint-Goodridge Hospital and later as president of Dillard University , a predominantly black liberal arts college in New Orleans, Louisiana. In these roles, he was a community leader who improved education and health care for African-Americans and impoverished people in the American South.
Go to Profile#2550
Lorenz Oken
1779 - 1851 (72 years)
Lorenz Oken was a German naturalist, botanist, biologist, and ornithologist. Oken was born Lorenz Okenfuss in Bohlsbach , Ortenau, Baden, and studied natural history and medicine at the universities of Freiburg and Würzburg. He went on to the University of Göttingen, where he became a Privatdozent , and shortened his name to Oken. As Lorenz Oken, he published a small work entitled Grundriss der Naturphilosophie, der Theorie der Sinne, mit der darauf gegründeten Classification der Thiere . This was the first of a series of works which established him as a leader of the movement of "Naturphilo...
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