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
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 ...
Go to Profile#2502
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 .
Go to Profile#2503
Stella Kramrisch
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
Stella Kramrisch was an American pioneering art historian and curator who was the leading specialist on Indian art for most of the 20th century. Her scholarship remains a benchmark to this day. She researched and taught Indian art history for more than six decades on three continents. After writing her dissertation on the essence of early-buddhist sculpture in India, she was invited to teach at Kala Bhavana in Shantiniketan and went on to teach at Calcutta University from 1924 to 1950. In Europe, Kramrisch worked at the Courtauld Institute, London . From 1950, she was professor at the Univer...
Go to Profile#2504
Ronald Edmonds
1935 - 1983 (48 years)
Ronald R. Edmonds was an American educator, author, and pioneer of effective schools research. Early life and career Edmonds was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan. He received a B.A. in American history from the University of Michigan, an M.A. in American history from Eastern Michigan University, and a certificate of advanced study from Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Go to Profile#2505
George I. Sánchez
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
George Isidore Sánchez was a pioneer in American educational scholarship and civil rights activism, originally from the state of New Mexico. He served on the faculty of the University of New Mexico, held several concurrent teaching, chair, and dean positions at The University of Texas at Austin from 1940 until his death. Sanchez also acted as the 13th president of the League of United Latin American Citizens , while spearheading several landmark civil right aimed court cases focusing on equal educational opportunities for Chicano Americans and opposing the use of racially-biased standardized...
Go to Profile#2506
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.
Go to Profile#2507
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.
Go to Profile#2508
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 .
Go to Profile#2509
Benjamin Mays
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual pursuits focused on Black self-determination. Mays' commitment to social justice through nonviolence and civil resistance were cultivated from his youth through the lessons imbibed from his parents and eldest sister. The peak of his public i...
Go to Profile#2510
William Bagley
1874 - 1946 (72 years)
William Chandler Bagley , was an American educator and editor. He graduated in 1895 from Michigan State Agricultural College, currently called Michigan State University; completed MS, in 1898, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1898; and was awarded PhD by Cornell University in 1900.
Go to Profile#2511
Sigfried Giedion
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Sigfried Giedion was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. Giedion was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin. He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the ETH-Zurich.
Go to Profile#2512
Bernard Ashmole
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Bernard Ashmole, CBE, MC was a British archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in ancient Greek sculpture. He held a number of professorships during his lifetime; Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of London from 1929 to 1948, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at University of Oxford from 1956 to 1961, and Greek Art and Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen from 1961 to 1963. He was also Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.
Go to Profile#2513
Fred Schonell
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Sir Fred Joyce Schonell was an Australian educationist, and vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland from 1960 to 1969. Career Schonell graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1925, at the same time as his wife-to-be, Florence Eleanor de Bracey Waterman; the couple married the next year. Eleanor, as she was always known, was a close collaborator with Schonell, and a noted educationalist in her own right. In 1928 they left for England. Schonell studied at King's College London and the London Day Training College, University of London; his Ph.D. thesis was on the diagnosis and remediation of difficulties in spelling.
Go to Profile#2514
Clifton F. Conrad
1900 - Present (126 years)
Clifton F. Conrad is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Conrad was president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 1987–1988. He has consulted, taught, or both in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
Go to Profile#2515
Robert Branner
1927 - 1973 (46 years)
Robert Branner was an American art historian, archaeologist, and educator. A scholar of medieval art, specializing in Gothic architecture and illuminated manuscripts, Branner was Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
Go to Profile#2516
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.
Go to Profile#2517
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.
Go to Profile#2518
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.
Go to Profile#2519
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.
Go to Profile#2520
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.
Go to Profile#2521
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.
Go to Profile#2522
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...
Go to Profile#2523
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.
Go to Profile#2524
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...
Go to Profile#2525
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.
Go to Profile#2526
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. ...
Go to Profile#2527
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.
Go to Profile#2528
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...
Go to Profile#2529
A. Y. Campbell
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Archibald Young Campbell was a classical scholar, translator, and published poet of the 1920s and 1930s. Life Campbell was born at Blantyre, near Hamilton, Lanarkshire, Scotland in 1885, and received his education at Hamilton Academy and Fettes College, in Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#2530
Edith Clara Batho
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Dr. Edith Clara Batho was Principal of Royal Holloway College, University of London from 1945 to 1962. Education She was educated at Highbury Hill High School, now Highbury Fields School in Islington, London. She then went on to University College, London and graduated in English in 1915.
Go to Profile#2531
Caroline Beaumont Zachry
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Caroline Beaumont Zachry was an educational psychologist born in New York City to James Greer Zachry and Elise Clarkson Thompson. Her maternal grandfather was Hugh Smith Thompson the Governor of South Carolina from 1882 to 1886.
Go to Profile#2532
Osvald Sirén
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Osvald Sirén was a Finnish-born Swedish art historian, whose interests included the art of 18th century Sweden, Renaissance Italy and China. Biography Sirén was born in Helsinki. He held the J.A. Berg Professorship of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Stockholm 1908-1923 and was Keeper of painting and sculpture at Nationalmuseum 1928–1945. He died in Stockholm, aged 87.
Go to Profile#2533
Fritz Novotny
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Fritz Novotny , was an Austrian art historian. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. Biography Novotny studied art history at the University of Vienna under Josef Strzygowski, and wrote his dissertation on the Romanesque architectural sculpture in the apse of the Pfarrkirche in Schöngrabern, in Lower Austria. Beginning in 1927 he worked as an assistant at Strzygowski's institute. In 1937 he received his habilitation with a study of Cézanne und das Ende der wissenschaftlichen Perspektive , which became a standard study of the French painter and established Novotny as an internationally recognized expert on his work.
Go to Profile#2534
Mehmet Aga-Oglu
1896 - 1949 (53 years)
Mehmet Aga-Oglu , was an Azerbaijani-Turkish Islamic art historian. Born in Erivan, Russian Caucasia , Mehmet earned a doctorate history, philosophy, and Islamic languages from the University of Moscow. By 1921 he was at the University of Istanbul, where he studied Islamic art and Ottoman history. Whilst in Berlin, Aga-Oglu would study under Dr. Ernst Herzfeld in Near Eastern architecture.
Go to Profile#2535
Howard Hibbard
1928 - 1984 (56 years)
Benjamin Howard Hibbard, Jr. was an American art historian and educator. Hibbard was Professor of Italian Baroque Art at Columbia University. Career A native of Madison, Hibbard was born to Margaret and Benjamin, Sr., an agricultural economics professor at the University of Wisconsin. Hibbard received both a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and a Master of Arts in art history from the University of Wisconsin in 1949 and 1952, respectively. His master's thesis was on the Basilica of Notre-Dame du Port. Hibbard then continued on to Harvard University, where he earned a PhD in art history in 1958. His doctoral dissertation on the Palazzo Borghese in Rome.
Go to Profile#2536
Carl R. Woodward
1890 - 1974 (84 years)
Carl Raymond Woodward, Sr. was an American educator and college administrator who served from 1915 to 1941 in various positions at Rutgers University, and from 1941 to 1958 as the fifth president of the University of Rhode Island.
Go to Profile#2537
Gabriela Mistral
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Lucila Godoy Alcayaga , known by her pseudonym Gabriela Mistral , was a Chilean poet-diplomat, educator, and Catholic. She was a member of the Secular Franciscan Order or Third Franciscan order.She was the first Latin American author to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945, "for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world". Some central themes in her poems are nature, betrayal, love, a mother's love, sorrow and recovery, travel, and Latin American identity as formed from a mixture of Native American and European influences.
Go to Profile#2538
Merle Middleton Odgers
1922 - 1983 (61 years)
Merle Middleton Odgers was president of Bucknell University from 1954 until his retirement in 1964, when he was named president emeritus. Biography Born in Philadelphia on April 21, 1900, Odgers was a son of David Odgers and Elizabeth Odgers. He graduated with first academic honors from Central High School in Philadelphia in 1918 and then from the University of Pennsylvania with class honors in 1922. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Go to Profile#2539
Percy Nunn
1870 - 1944 (74 years)
Sir Thomas Percy Nunn was a British educationalist, Professor of Education, 1913–36 at Institute of Education, University of London. He was knighted in 1930. Early life Nunn was born in Bristol in 1870. His grandfather and father were schoolmasters. He was interested in making of mathematical instruments and writing plays. He got his education at Bristol University College. He received his B.A in 1895.
Go to Profile#2540
Heinrich Lützeler
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Heinrich Lützeler was a German philosopher, art historian, and literary scholar. He presided over a number of institutes and was dean at the department of philosophy at the University of Bonn. Biography Heinrich Lützeler was born the son of a porcelain painter in Bonn. He studied philosophy, art history, and literature at the University of Bonn with Paul Clemen and Wilhelm Worringer, and in 1924 earned his doctorate with a dissertation on art perception under the direction of the philosopher Max Scheler. He made a living writing theater reviews and giving lectures, while working on his habilitation, Grundstile der Kunst.
Go to Profile#2541
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.
Go to Profile#2542
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 .
Go to Profile#2543
John Beazley
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Sir John Davidson Beazley, was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style. He was professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1956.
Go to Profile#2544
William Groves
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
William Charles Groves was an Australian educator and public servant. He served as Director of Education in Nauru and Papua and New Guinea between 1937 and 1958, also serving on the Legislative Council in Papua and New Guinea as part of the role.
Go to Profile#2545
Grace Coyle
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Grace Longwell Coyle was a highly influential American thinker in the area of social work with groups. She wrote important books on the subject, and had great influence on the development of teaching group work concepts.
Go to Profile#2546
Claude Colleer Abbott
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Claude Colleer Abbott was an English poet, scholar and university lecturer, the 'C. C. Abbott' of academic publications. He is principally known as the editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins' correspondence.
Go to Profile#2547
Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl
1880 - 1936 (56 years)
Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl was a German art historian and specialist in Islamic art who spent the majority of his career in America where he moved in 1915. His numerous obituaries attest to his distinguished career and the loss felt in his field of study at his sudden and early death from pneumonia.
Go to Profile#2548
Charles L. Kuhn
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Charles Louis Kuhn II was an American art historian and curator. Kuhn was the Director of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University from 1930 to 1968. Career Kuhn graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts in 1923, and then continued on to Harvard University to earn a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1924 and 1929, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was on Romanesque murals in Catalonia.
Go to Profile#2549
Horace Dutton Taft
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Horace Dutton Taft was an American educator, and the founder of The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, United States. Early life He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the younger brother of William Howard Taft of the powerful Taft family. He graduated from Yale University in 1883, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and won the Townsend Prize.
Go to Profile#2550
Wolfgang Rosenthal
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Wolfgang Rosenthal was a German oral surgeon. Until the mid-1930s, he also pursued a parallel career as a bass-baritone singer. After the destructive bombing of the in Leipzig it became necessary to identify the physical remains of Johann Sebastian Bach before they could be reburied at the Thomaskirche nearby: Rosenthal was able to combine his knowledge of anatomy with his insights into the physical effect of a lifetime of organ playing on a musician's legs to provide the necessary identification.
Go to Profile