The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Education,
#2501
Abdussalam Akhundzadeh
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Abdussalam Akhundzadeh was an Azerbaijani religious educator, Islamic theologian and the fifth Sheikh ul-Islam of the Caucasus. Early life He was born in Salyan on 13 January 1843 to local cleric Akhund Vali Muhammad and his wife Khanum Aliverdi gizi. He learnt Arabic, Persian and Turkish in early periods of his life from his father. He moved to Tbilisi in 1864 and settled in current Gorgasali street, Old Tbilisi. On October 6, 1879, he was allowed to work as a teacher in the Tatar department, beating Seyid Azim Shirvani in competition, and by July 28, 1880, he was officially appointed a teacher in Gori Teachers Seminary.
Go to Profile#2502
Johann Friedrich von Brandt
1802 - 1879 (77 years)
Johann Friedrich von Brandt was a German-Russian naturalist, who worked mostly in Russia. Brandt was born in Jüterbog and educated at a gymnasium in Wittenberg and the University of Berlin. In 1831 he emigrated to Russia, and soon was appointed director of the Zoological Museum of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Brandt encouraged the collection of native animals, many of which were not represented in the museum. Many specimens began to arrive from the expeditions of Severtzov, Przhevalsky, Middendorff, Schrenck and Gustav Radde.
Go to Profile#2503
John M. Mason
1770 - 1829 (59 years)
John Mitchell Mason was an American preacher and theologian who was Provost of Columbia College in the early 1810s, and briefly President of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the early 1820s.
Go to Profile#2504
Peter Forsskål
1732 - 1763 (31 years)
Peter Forsskål, sometimes spelled Pehr Forsskål, Peter Forskaol, Petrus Forskål or Pehr Forsskåhl was a Swedish-speaking Finnish explorer, orientalist, naturalist, and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus.
Go to Profile#2505
Zhao Taimou
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Zhao Taimou was a Chinese educator. He was the president of Shandong University from September 1932 until June 1936, and again from 1946 until 1949. Life Zhao was born in Qingzhou, Shandong in 1889.
Go to Profile#2506
Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton
1824 - 1908 (84 years)
Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and suffragist from the U.S. state of New York. Though she was co-author of a series of arithmetic books, the publishers decided that her name should be withheld. She became an advocate for the enfranchisement of women. She was said to be the "first woman to administer a state normal school". She was an officer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, an active member and director in the New England Women's Educational Club of Boston, and president of the West Newton Woman's Educational Club since its organization in 1880.
Go to Profile#2507
William P. Trowbridge
1828 - 1892 (64 years)
William Petit Trowbridge was a mechanical engineer, military officer, and naturalist. He was one of the first mechanical engineers on the faculties of the University of Michigan, the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, and the Columbia School of Mines. He had a brief military career after graduating from West Point and later served as Adjutant General for the State of Connecticut from 1873 to 1876. During his career as a surveyor on the American Pacific coast he collected thousands of animal specimens, several of which now bear his name.
Go to Profile#2508
Julia Gulliver
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Julia Henrietta Gulliver was an American philosopher, educator and college president. She was only the second woman in America to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a tireless advocate for increased female representation in higher education.
Go to Profile#2509
Charles Augustus Aiken
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Charles Augustus Aiken was an American clergyman and academic. Biography He was born in Manchester, Vermont, on October 30, 1827, to John Aiken and Harriet Adams Aiken. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1846, at the age of nineteen, and went on to Andover Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1853. He married Sarah Noyes on October 17, 1854, and was ordained a pastor of the Congregational church in Yarmouth, Maine, that same year.
Go to Profile#2510
James A. Doonan
1841 - 1911 (70 years)
James Aloysius Doonan was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit, who was the president of Georgetown University from 1882 to 1888. During that time he oversaw the naming of Gaston Hall and the construction of a new building for the School of Medicine. Doonan also acquired two historic cannons that were placed in front of Healy Hall. His presidency was financially successful, with a reduction in the university's burdensome debt that had accrued during the construction of Healy Hall.
Go to Profile#2511
Richard Henry Beddome
1830 - 1911 (81 years)
Colonel Richard Henry Beddome was a British military officer and naturalist in India, who became chief conservator of the Madras Forest Department. In the mid-19th century, he extensively surveyed several remote and then-unexplored hill ranges in Sri Lanka and south India, including those in the Eastern Ghats such as Yelandur, Kollegal, Shevaroy Hills, Yelagiri, Nallamala Hills, Visakhapatnam hills, and the Western Ghats such as Nilgiri hills, Anaimalai hills, Agasthyamalai Hills and Kudremukh. He described many species of plants, amphibians, and reptiles from southern India and Sri Lanka, an...
Go to Profile#2512
Lucy Rider Meyer
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Lucy Jane Rider Meyer was an American social worker, educator, physician, and author who cofounded the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions in Illinois. She is credited with reviving the office of the female deacon in the U.S. Methodist Episcopal Church.
Go to Profile#2513
Edgar Wind
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Edgar Wind was a German-born British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute as well as the first Professor of art history at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#2514
Carl Justi
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Carl Justi was a German art historian, who practised a biographical approach to art history. Professor of art history at the University of Bonn, he wrote three major critical biographies: of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, of Diego Velázquez and of Michelangelo.
Go to Profile#2515
Howard B. Meek
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Howard Bagnall Meek was an American professor who founded Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. He began teaching hotel management at Cornell during 1922, when the subject was part of the university's agricultural college, which operated its home-economics school, rather than a separate unit within the university.
Go to Profile#2516
Millicent Carey McIntosh
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Millicent Carey McIntosh was an educational administrator and American feminist who led the Brearley School , and most prominently Barnard College . The first married woman to head one of the Seven Sisters, she was "considered a national role model for generations of young women who wanted to combine career and family," advocating for working mothers and for child care as a dignified profession.
Go to Profile#2517
Slavko Vorkapich
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Slavoljub "Slavko" Vorkapić , known in English as Slavko Vorkapich, was a Serbian-born Hollywood montagist, an independent cinematic artist, chair of USC School of Cinematic Arts, chair of the Belgrade Film and Theatre Academy, painter, and illustrator. He was a prominent figure of modern cinematography and motion picture film art during the early and mid-20th century and was a cinema theorist and lecturer.
Go to Profile#2518
Johann Adam von Ickstatt
1702 - 1776 (74 years)
Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt was a German educator and director of the University of Ingolstadt. Born in Vockenhausen, he was a major proponent of the Enlightenment in Bavaria. He died in Waldsassen. He was a godfather to Adam Weishaupt.
Go to Profile#2519
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1945 - 1982 (37 years)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder , sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder, was a German filmmaker, actor, and dramatist. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema movement. Versatile and prolific, his over 40 films span a variety of genres, most frequently blending elements of Hollywood melodrama with social criticism and avant-garde techniques. His films, according to him, explored "the exploitability of feelings". His work was deeply rooted in post-war German culture: the aftermath of Nazism, the German economic miracle, and the terror of the Red Army Faction.
Go to Profile#2520
Annie Webb Blanton
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Annie Webb Blanton was an American suffragist from Texas, educator, and author of a series of grammar textbooks. Blanton was elected Superintendent of Texas Public Instruction in 1918, making her the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office.
Go to Profile#2521
Francis Anderson
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
Sir Francis Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher and educator. Early life Francis Anderson was born in Glasgow, the son of Francis Anderson, a manufacturer, and his wife Elizabeth Anna Lockart, née Ellison. Anderson was educated at Old Wynd and Oatlands public schools and became a pupil-teacher at the age of 14. He went on to the University of Glasgow, matriculating in 1876 and graduated M.A. in 1883. He was awarded Sir Richard Jebb's prize for Greek literature, took first place in the philosophical classes of Professors Veitch and Caird, and won two scholarships. For two years...
Go to Profile#2522
Kenneth John Conant
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Kenneth John Conant was an American architectural historian and educator, who specialized in medieval architecture. Conant is known for his studies of Cluny Abbey. Career Born in Neenah, Conant received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1915. He was considered the academic heir of Herbert Langford Warren, a teacher at Harvard, and through him, of the art historians Charles Eliot Norton and John Ruskin. He served in the 42nd Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Conant later returned to Harvard.
Go to Profile#2523
William Edward Zeuch
1892 - Present (133 years)
William Edward Zeuch was an American socialist, educator, and academic who is best known as a founder and first director of the Commonwealth College in Arkansas. This college is the most well known attempt in Arkansas at establishing a radical labor educational school.
Go to Profile#2524
Kurt Martin
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Kurt Martin was a German art historian. Martin was a professor of art history. His career began in 1927 as curator of the . From 1934 to 1956, he was director of the Staatlichen Kunsthalle Karlsruhe . In 1940 he was appointed Head of the Municipal Museums of Strasbourg as well as Chief Commissioner of the Alsatian Museums. In 1956 he became Director of the Karlsruher Kunstakademie , and in 1957 General Director of the Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen .
Go to Profile#2525
Moina Michael
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Moina Belle Michael was an American professor and humanitarian who conceived the idea of using poppies as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in World War I. Early life Michael was born in 1869 and lived on what is now known as 3698 Moina Michael Road in Good Hope, in Walton County, Georgia. She was the eldest daughter and second of the seven children of John Marion Michael, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, and Alice Sherwood Wise. She was distantly related to General Francis Marion on her father's side, and the Wise family of Virginia state governors on her mother's side.
Go to Profile#2526
Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu was a Romanian pedagogue. Biography Born in 1870 in Pogoanele, Buzău County, he studied for six years at Leipzig University, obtaining his doctorate in philosophy in July 1901 with thesis Über das Leben und die Philosophie Contas. He then became a professor at the University of Bucharest, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1919. A contributor to Convorbiri Literare and România Jună magazines, he helped popularize knowledge of pedagogy in his country. Among his works are a biography of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a book on the phenomenon of education, and one on the problems of Romanian culture.
Go to Profile#2527
Helen Stuart Campbell
1839 - 1918 (79 years)
Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
Go to Profile#2528
Frances St John Chappelle
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John Chappelle was an Assistant in Psychology at the University of Nevada. Biography Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John was born on July 2, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lettie Willoughby St. John, a direct descendant of the first Lord Willoughby and one of the first women to graduate from a medical college. She was also an artist and magazine illustrator.
Go to Profile#2529
Ali al-Qari
Nur ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sultan Muhammad al-Hirawi al-Qari , known as Mulla Ali al-Qari was an Islamic scholar. He was born in Herat, where he received his basic Islamic education. Thereafter, he travelled to Mecca and studied under the scholar Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Haytami Makki, and al-Qari eventually decided to remain in Mecca where he taught, died and was buried.
Go to Profile#2530
William George Constable
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
William George Constable Education Distantly related to the landscape painter John Constable, William George Constable was educated at Derby School, where his father was headmaster, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history, law and economics. In 1909, he was awarded the Whewell Scholarship for International Law. After gaining a First in economics in 1910, he was awarded the McMahon Law Studentship by St John's for four years, then entered the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in May, 1914.
Go to Profile#2531
Thomas Percival Creed
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Sir Thomas Percival Creed, KBE, MC, QC was a lawyer and educationist. Principal of Queen Mary College London from 1952 to 1967, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1964 to 1967.
Go to Profile#2532
May L. Cheney
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
May Lucretia Shepard Cheney was born during the American Civil War in Garden Grove, Iowa, and was named after the month in which she was born, and her maternal grandmother who influenced her childhood. May's early school attendance was in her hometown. She attended high schools in Oakland and Chico, California before enrolling at UCB in 1879. With her widowed mother, she settled at 2020 Hearst Avenue , in a house with a watermill in the rear yard. Residing in the same house was Lemuel Warren Cheney , a law student.
Go to Profile#2533
Chester Lyman
1814 - 1890 (76 years)
Chester Smith Lyman was an American teacher, clergyman and astronomer. Early life and education He was born in Manchester, Connecticut, to Chester and Mary Smith Lyman. Chester is the descendant of Richard Lyman, a settler who arrived in America in 1631. Chester's early education was in a country school, but at an early age he showed a strong interest in astronomy and the sciences. By 1833 he had gained admittance to Yale, and graduated in 1837. In his junior year he became editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and he was a member of Skull and Bones. He served for two years as Superintendent of Ellington School, then studied theology at the Union and Yale seminaries.
Go to Profile#2534
Chloe Clark Willson
1818 - 1874 (56 years)
Chloe Aurelia Clark Willson was an early pioneer of what became the U.S. state of Oregon, and one of the first teachers of the Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley. In 1850, she owned half of the land in Oregon's state capital Salem.
Go to Profile#2535
Benson Dillon Billinghurst
Benson Dillon Billinghurst, often known using his initials as B.D. Billinghurst, was an American educator in Nevada during the early 20th century. Born in Ohio in 1869, he served as the Superintendent of Schools of the Washoe County School District from 1908 until his death in 1935, and was famous for his school building projects, his expansion of the availability and quality of Reno education, the introduction of junior high schools to Nevada, and his influence in education laws and the establishment of the Nevada State Textbook Commission.
Go to Profile#2536
Sailendra Sircar
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Sailendranath Sircar was the fifth and the youngest son of Peary Charan Sircar, he was the founder head master of Swaraswati Institution, established in 1920, now renamed as Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya, situated at north Kolkata. He was the head examiner in English under Calcutta University, and a gold medalist of the university.
Go to Profile#2537
John Harrison Minnick
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
John Harrison Minnick was an American educator, born at Somerset, Indiana, and educated at Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and other universities. For several years he taught in high schools in Indiana and Illinois, and from 1911 to 1913 he was critic teacher of mathematics at Indiana University. For two years following he was instructor in mathematics at the Horace Mann School at New York City. In 1916 he became instructor of mathematics in the University of Pennsylvania and was successively assistant professor of education, professor of education, and dean of the school of education at that university.
Go to Profile#2538
James Orton
1830 - 1877 (47 years)
James Orton was an American naturalist who contributed much to the knowledge of South America and the Amazon basin. Biography Orton was the son of Presbyterian clergyman and theologian Azariah Giles Orton. Four of his seven brothers died in infancy, and the family's financial resources were very meager. Early in life he developed an interest in natural history and writing. Financial difficulties and poor health delayed his matriculation at Williams College, where he graduated in 1855. In 1858, he graduated from Andover Theological Seminary. After spending some time in travel in Europe and the East, he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church in Greene, New York, on July 11, 1860.
Go to Profile#2539
William T. B. Williams
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
William Taylor Burwell Williams was Dean of the College Department at Tuskegee Institute and two-time president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools . He was a member of U.S. Commissions on Education in Haiti and the Virgin Islands, and a member of the U.S. War Department Committee on Education and Special Training. Williams worked as a field agent of the Slater and Jeanes Fundss and the General Education Board. He taught at Hampton Institute and was a member of the editorial staff of its journal Southern Workman. In 1934, he was the recipient of the NAACP's Spingarn Med...
Go to Profile#2540
John William Adamson
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
John William Adamson was a British educationist and historian of education. From 1903 to 1924 he was Professor of Education at King's College London. He was the most distinguished historian of education of his day.
Go to Profile#2541
Huang Binhong
1865 - 1955 (90 years)
Huáng Bīnhóng was a Chinese literati painter and art historian born in Jinhua, Zhejiang province. His ancestral home was She County, Anhui province. He was the grandson of artist Huang Fengliu. He would later be associated with Shanghai and finally Hangzhou. He is considered one of the last innovators in the literati style of painting and is noted for his freehand landscapes.
Go to Profile#2542
Maximilian Perty
1804 - 1884 (80 years)
Josef Anton Maximilian Perty was a German naturalist and entomologist. He was a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Bern. His first name is sometimes spelled as "Joseph".
Go to Profile#2543
Max Imdahl
1925 - 1988 (63 years)
Max Imdahl was a German art historian specialized in art historical methodology and the interpretation of modern art after World War II. Life and work Imdahl studied studio painting, art history, archaeology and German literature at the University of Münster. For his paintings he won the Blevins Davis Prize, the most prestigious art contest of the postwar period in Germany, in 1950. In 1951 he completed his Ph.D. dissertation on the treatment of color in late Carolingian book illustration under Werner Hager. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Münster for some years and wrote his Habilitationsschrift on Ottonian Art in 1961.
Go to Profile#2544
Du Zuozhou
1895 - 1974 (79 years)
Du Zuozhou was a Chinese educator, writer and psychologist. Biography Du was born in Dongyang, Jinhua of Zhejiang province in late Qing Dynasty China. Du's courtesy name was Jitang . Du graduated from Zhejiang Provincial No.7 High School in Jinhua. In 1915, Du went to Wuhan and studied at Wuchang Advanced Normal College . Du graduated in 1919 and taught for one year at the college.
Go to Profile#2545
John Adams
1772 - 1863 (91 years)
John Adams was an American educator noted for organizing several hundred Sunday schools. He was the 4th Principal of Phillips Academy. His life was celebrated by Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in his poem, "The School Boy", which was read at the centennial celebration of Phillips Academy in 1878, thus recalls him:
Go to Profile#2546
Ludwig von Schorn
1793 - 1842 (49 years)
Johann Karl Ludwig Schorn, after 1838 von Schorn was a German art historian and university Professor. His second wife was the poet, . Biography From 1811 to 1814, he studied evangelical theology at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität in Erlangen. After graduating, he moved to Munich, where he came under the influence of the intellectual circle associated with Friedrich Thiersch; developing an interest in art history and archaeology.
Go to Profile#2547
Hannah Keziah Clapp
1824 - 1908 (84 years)
Hannah Keziah Clapp was a teacher, activist and feminist in Nevada, US. She organized the state's first private school and was co-founder of the state's first kindergarten. She served as principal of the Lansing Female Seminary; taught at Michigan Female College; and was the first instructor and librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno. Clapp co-founded Reno's 20th Century Club, which in 1983 was added to the National Register of Historic Places listings in Washoe County, Nevada. She was born in Albany, New York in 1824, and arrived in Carson City in 1860, where she established the Sierra Seminary.
Go to Profile#2548
John James Tigert III
1856 - 1906 (50 years)
John James Tigert III was an American clergyman, editor and academic. He was a professor of Moral Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, and a Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Early life Tigert was born on November 25, 1856, in Louisville, Kentucky.
Go to Profile#2549
Queena Mario
1896 - 1951 (55 years)
Queena Marian Tillotson , known professionally as Queena Mario, was an American soprano opera singer, newspaper columnist, voice teacher, and fiction writer. Early life Queena Marian Tillotson was born in Akron, Ohio, the daughter of James Knox Tillotson and Rose Tillotson. Queena was raised in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she graduated from Plainfield High School. She studied voice with Marcella Sembrich, who advised her name change. She paid for voice lessons by writing newspaper advice columns under the name Florence Bryant, including childrearing advice; "You know a lot when you're 16, y...
Go to Profile#2550
Lucy Langdon Wilson
1864 - 1937 (73 years)
Lucy Langdon Wilson was an American educator and ethnographer who became widely known for her models of progressive education and for using laboratory methods to teach natural science to young school children. She was also a published ethnographer.
Go to Profile