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,
#2551
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.
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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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Alice Ravenhill
1859 - 1954 (95 years)
Alice Ravenhill was an educational pioneer, a developer of Women's Institutes, and one of the first authors to propound aboriginal rights in B.C. She is also the author of numerous articles and books, including her autobiography which she wrote when she was 92.
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Alice Mary Dowd
1855 - 1943 (88 years)
Alice Mary Dowd was an American educator and author. She was born in Virginia in 1855 and began teaching at the age of seventeen. Dowd taught for more than three decades before retiring in 1926, having had experience in almost all phases of the work, including district school substitute, evening school, private school, high school, college, and Sunday school. Besides numerous uncollected poems, she published a volume entitled Vacation Verses in 1890. In 1906, she published Our Common Wild Flowers. With her sister, Luella Dowd Smith, she co-authored another book of poetry, Along the Way, in 1938.
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Matthew Digby Wyatt
1820 - 1877 (57 years)
Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt was a British architect and art historian who became Secretary of the Great Exhibition, Surveyor of the East India Company and the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. From 1855 until 1859 he was honorary secretary of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and in 1866 received the Royal Gold Medal.
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Elizabeth Piper Ensley
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Elizabeth Piper Ensley , was an educator and an African-American suffragist. Born in Massachusetts, Ensley was a teacher on the eastern coast of the country. She moved to Colorado where she achieved prominence as a leader in the Colorado suffrage movement. She was also a journalist, activist, and a leader and founder of local women's clubs.
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Aleksander Zawadzki
1798 - 1868 (70 years)
Aleksander Zawadzki born Józef Antoni Zawadzki was a Polish naturalist, author of flora and fauna lists of the Galicia region and the neighbourhood of Lviv . He was also the first scientist who studied and catalogued the beetles and butterflies of Eastern Galicia. He was responsible for encouraging Gregor Mendel to study genetics at Brno.
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George Turnbull
1698 - 1748 (50 years)
George Turnbull was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, teacher, writer on education and an early but little-known figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He taught at Marischal College, Aberdeen, worked as a tutor and became an Anglican clergyman. Aside from his published writings on moral philosophy, he is also known for the influence he exerted on Thomas Reid and as the first member of the Scottish Enlightenment to publish a formal treatise on the theory and practice of education.
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Rachel Wischnitzer
1885 - 1989 (104 years)
Rachel Bernstein Wischnitzer , was a Russian-born architect and art historian. Biography Wischnitzer was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Minsk, in Russian Empire, the daughter of Wladimir and Sophie Bernstein. Rachel's father was for a time in the insurance business. She had one sibling, a younger brother, Gustave, who later became a chemist. She learned Hebrew as a child, and her family observed the major Jewish holidays. After her family moved to Warsaw, she attended a state gymnasium there. At school she became interested in mathematics and the natural sciences. She learned French and German, and took private lessons in Polish.
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Joris Ivens
1898 - 1989 (91 years)
Georg Henri Anton "Joris" Ivens was a Dutch documentary filmmaker. Among the notable films he directed or co-directed are A Tale of the Wind, The Spanish Earth, Rain, ...A Valparaiso, Misère au Borinage , 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, The Seine Meets Paris, Far from Vietnam, Pour le Mistral and How Yukong Moved the Mountains.
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T. N. Srikantaiah
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Theerthapura Nanjundaiah Srikantaiah commonly known as 'Thee. Nam. Shree. , was a Kannada poet, essayist, editor, translator, linguist and teacher. He was awarded the Pampa Prashasthi for his work on the history and tradition of Indian poetics spanning two millennia titled Bharathiya Kavyamimamse. T. N. Srikantaiah was instrumental in preparing and publishing the Kannada version of Constitution of India in 1952. He is credited with the use of the vernacular equivalent of Rashtrapathi for the English 'President', a usage which is still in vogue. Srikantaiah was responsible for guiding the doctoral theses of Kannada litterateurs like S.
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Otto Benesch
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Otto Benesch was an Austrian art historian. He was taught by Max Dvořák and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He is well known for his catalogue of Rembrandt's drawings. In 1942 he was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.
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Rashidul Hasan
1932 - 1971 (39 years)
SMA Rashidul Hasan was a Bengali educationist. He was born in the district of Birbhum, West Bengal. In 1949, he migrated to East Pakistan. He was awarded Independence Day Award in 2018 posthumously by the Government of Bangladesh.
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Edward W. Forbes
1873 - 1969 (96 years)
Edward Waldo Forbes was an American art historian. He was the Director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University from 1909 to 1944. Early life Edward Waldo Forbes, of the Forbes family, was born on July 16, 1873, on Naushon Island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. His father, William Hathaway Forbes, was a co-founder of the Bell Telephone Company with Alexander Graham Bell. His mother, Edith Emerson Forbes, was the daughter of poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. His paternal grandfather, John Murray Forbes, was a French-born railroad magnate, merchant, and abolitionist. His brother, William Cameron For...
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Otto Demus
1902 - 1990 (88 years)
Otto Demus was an Austrian art historian and Byzantinist. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. Between 1921 and 1928, Demus studied art history at the University of Vienna under Josef Strzygowski, receiving his Ph.D. summa cum laude. In the following years Demus travelled throughout Greece, photographing the mosaics of its Byzantine churches in color, a project that resulted in his first major publication, Byzantine mosaics in Greece , written together with Ernst Diez. He also worked for Austria's historical preservation service, documenting and restoring the medieval monuments of Carinthia.
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Ignacio Jordán Claudio de Asso y del Río
1742 - 1814 (72 years)
Ignacio Jordán Claudio de Asso y del Río was a Spanish diplomat, naturalist, lawyer and historian. He sometimes used the pseudonym of Melchor de Azagra. Biography Of noble birth, he received an excellent education, studying Classical Greek and Latin in the college known as the Escuelas Pías of Zaragoza and philosophy under the Jesuits at the Real e Imperial Colegio de Nobles de Nuestra Señora y Santiago de Cordellas, located in Barcelona . He studied at the University of Cervera, where he graduated with a bachelor of arts in 1760, and at the University of Zaragoza, where he studied jurispru...
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Theophilus C. Abbot
1826 - 1892 (66 years)
Theophilus Capen Abbot was an American educator and the third President of the State Agricultural College , serving from 1863 until 1885. Early life He was born in Vassalboro, Maine, and spent his early life in Augusta, Maine. At the age of fifteen he entered Colby University in Waterville, Maine. He graduated in 1845 with his bachelor's degree, and received his A.M. degree from Colby four years later.
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August Zeune
1778 - 1853 (75 years)
Johann August Zeune was a German teacher of geography and Germanic languages, as well as the founder of the Berlin Foundation for the Blind. Life Zeune was born on 12 May 1778 in Lutherstadt Wittenberg as the son of Johann Karl Zeune, professor of Greek at the University of Wittenberg. In his parents' house, he was educated by his father and tutor. In 1798 Zeune started studying at the Wittenberg University. He graduated with his thesis on the history of geography, and was awarded for a short time the dignity of an academic faculty, as a Quasi-professor of Geography. His novel „Höhenschichte...
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John Wood
1775 - Present (249 years)
John Wood was a professor of mathematics at the College of William & Mary, political writer, and cartographer, who tutored the grandchildren of Thomas Jefferson. Life A native of Scotland, Wood spent much of his early years in France and Switzerland before immigrating to New York City in 1800. Upon arriving in the United States, he soon met Aaron Burr and wrote a number of pamphlets supporting Burr's political stance. One of Wood’s efforts, The History of the Administration of John Adams was deemed so controversial that Burr unsuccessfully attempted to suppress it. Wood briefly lived in Kentucky in 1806 and resided thereafter in Richmond, Virginia.
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John Hiram Lathrop
1799 - 1866 (67 years)
John Hiram Lathrop was a well-known American educator during the early 19th century. He served as the first President of both the University of Missouri and the University of Wisconsin as well as president of Indiana University.
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Josef Strzygowski
1862 - 1941 (79 years)
Josef Rudolph Thomas Strzygowski was a Polish-Austrian art historian known for his theories promoting influences from the art of the Near East on European art, for example that of Early Christian Armenian architecture on the early Medieval architecture of Europe, outlined in his book, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History.
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Gustave Larroumet
1852 - 1903 (51 years)
Louis Barthélemy Gustave Paul Larroumet was a French art historian, literary critic, and administrator. Biography His father was an army officer. After completing his secondary education at the lycée in Cahors, he initially considered a military career, then began studying medicine, but was forced to quit, due to poor health. Despite this, he volunteered at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, serving with the Army of the Loire as a sniper. After the war, he was presented with the Médaille Militaire
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Anders Sparrman
1748 - 1820 (72 years)
Anders Sparrman was a Swedish naturalist, abolitionist and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus. Biography Sparrman was the son of a clergyman. At the age of nine he enrolled at Uppsala University, beginning medical studies at fourteen and becoming one of the outstanding pupils of Linnaeus. In 1765 he went on a voyage to China as ship's doctor, returning two years later and describing the animals and plants he had encountered. On this voyage he met Carl Gustaf Ekeberg.
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George Pierce Baker
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
George Pierce Baker was a professor of English at Harvard and Yale and author of Dramatic Technique, a codification of the principles of drama. Biography Baker graduated in the Harvard College class of 1887, served as Editor-in-Chief of The Harvard Monthly, and taught in the English Department at Harvard from 1888 until 1924. He started his "47 workshop" class in playwriting in 1905. He was instrumental in creating the Harvard Theatre Collection at Harvard University Library. In 1908 he began the Harvard Dramatic Club, acting as its sponsor, and in 1912 he founded Workshop 47 to provide a forum for the performance of plays developed within his English class.
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Ahmad Huseinzadeh
1812 - 1887 (75 years)
Ahmad Huseinzadeh also known as Sheikh Ahmad Salyani — third Sheikh ul-Islam of the Caucasus, maternal grandfather of Ali bey Huseynzade. Early life He was born in Salyan in 1812 to Ali Huseynzadeh. He was brought up initially from 1822 to 1832 in his hometown by his uncle Akhund Molla Muhammad Hussein. Then he became a student of the Baku mujtahid Akhund Molla Ramazan, and studied with him for another six years, until 1838 when he completed the full course of Arabic sciences.
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Giulio Mancini
1559 - 1630 (71 years)
Giulio Mancini was a seicento physician, art collector, art dealer and writer on a range of subjects. His writings on contemporary artists like Caravaggio and Annibale Carracci remain one of our earliest sources of biographical information; his Considerazioni being an important source on art in early 17th-century Rome.
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Ying Qianli
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Ying Qianli , also known as Ying Jiliang , was a Manchu Bannerman, a prominent Catholic layman who devoted himself to education. He was proficient in English, French, Spanish and Latin. Biography Ying was born in Beijing on November 11, 1900, to Ying Lianzhi, founder of Ta Kung Pao and Fu Jen Catholic University, and Aisin Gioro Shuzhong, a member of the Qing dynasty royal family. At the age of 14, Ying was taken to the United Kingdom by Roman Catholic missionary Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe. After graduating from University of London in 1924 he returned to China, he helped his father to establish t...
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Richard Muther
1860 - 1909 (49 years)
Richard Muther was a German critic and historian of art, born at Ohrdruf in Germany. He studied at Heidelberg and at Leipzig, where he took his doctor's degree. In 1895 he became professor of art history at the University of Breslau.
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Henry Coppée
1821 - 1895 (74 years)
Henry Coppée was an American educator and author. From 1885 to 1887 he was a vice president, from 1887 to 1888 he was president of the Aztec Club of 1847. Early life and education Coppée was born in Savannah, Georgia. His family was initially from France and settled in Haiti.
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Alice Gordon Gulick
1847 - 1903 (56 years)
Alice Gordon Gulick was an American missionary teacher in Spain. Early life Alice Winfield Gordon was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in Auburndale, Massachusetts, the daughter of James M. Gordon and Mary Clarkson Gordon. Her parents were active in the abolition movement; her sisters Anna Adams Gordon and Elizabeth Putnam Gordon were temperance activists. She attended Mount Holyoke Seminary from 1863 to 1867.
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John Whelan Sterling
1816 - 1885 (69 years)
John Whelan Sterling was a pioneer faculty member of the University of Wisconsin - Madison. When the first university chancellor John Hiram Lathrop opened the school in 1849, he and Sterling were the only two professors. As an early faculty member and in his capacity as dean of faculty and vice chancellor from 1861 to 1867, Sterling was often called the "father of the university", despite never holding the office of president or chancellor.
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Henri Focillon
1881 - 1943 (62 years)
Henri Focillon was a French art historian. He was the son of the printmaker Victor-Louis Focillon. He was Director of the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lyon. Professor of Art History at the University of Lyon, at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Lyon, at the Sorbonne, at the Collège de France and then in the United States, where he went into exile and taught at Yale University. A poet, printmaker, and teacher, Focillon trained generations of art historians including George Kubler. He remains best known for his works on medieval art, most of which were translated into English.
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Robert Blackburn
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
Robert Blackburn was an Irish educationalist. He was an early pioneer of the International Baccalaureate Organisation and was instrumental in establishing the first United World College in the early 1960s. In 1968, Blackburn was appointed United World College International Secretary.
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Johannes du Plessis Scholtz
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Johannes du Plessis Scholtz was a South African philologist, art historian, and art collector. Scholarly life Scholtz studied first at the University of Stellenbosch, completing an M.A. in 1920. He then took a job assisting the philologist in editing Die Huisgenoot, but he moved shortly thereafter over to the Nasionale Pers to be head of the publication department. In 1924 he went to Amsterdam and in 1927 he received a PhD from the Gemeentelijke Universiteit. He returned to the Netherlands for two years to pursue further studies in Dutch dialectology and structural linguistics, studies whic...
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John Charles Alderson
#2599
James Donaldson
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Sir James Donaldson was a Scottish classical scholar, and educational and theological writer. Life Donaldson was born in Aberdeen on 26 April 1831. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, Marischal College, Aberdeen, New College, London, and Berlin University. In 1854 he was appointed Rector of the Stirling High School where he remained for two years, before leaving for the Royal High School of Edinburgh, of which he was appointed Rector in 1866.
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Lorenzo D. Harvey
1848 - 1922 (74 years)
Lorenzo Dow Harvey was an American educator who served as Superintendent of Public Instruction of Wisconsin in the late 1880s and early 1900s. Early life and career Harvey was born in Deerfield, New Hampshire, and moved with his parents to Wisconsin in 1850, settling in Fulton, Wisconsin. Harvey earned his bachelor's degree from Milton College in 1872, and earned his master's degree from Milton in 1876.
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