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,
#2651
John Charles Van Dyke
1856 - 1932 (76 years)
John Charles Van Dyke was an American art historian, critic, and nature writer. Biography John Charles Van Dyke was born at New Brunswick, New Jersey on April 21, 1856. He studied at Columbia, and for many years in Europe. He was admitted to the New York State Bar Association in 1877, but never practiced law.
Go to Profile#2652
Coy Cornelius Carpenter
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Coy Cornelius Carpenter M.D. , was first dean of the School of Medicine of Wake Forest University from 1936 to 1967 and vice president for health affairs from 1963 to 1967. He guided the school through the transition from a two-year to a four-year program and the move from Wake Forest to Winston-Salem in 1941. He also authored The Story of Medicine at Wake Forest University . He resided in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Go to Profile#2653
Ludwig von Baldass
1887 - 1963 (76 years)
Ludwig von Baldass was an Austrian art historian, professor and acclaimed author who specialised in Early Netherlandish painting. He studied under Max Dvořák at the University of Vienna and began to lecture there in 1926, gaining the position of professor in 1934. Von Baldass' 1942 treatise on Hans Memling was instrumental in the re-evaluation of his artistic importance. Other publications include articles and books on Jan van Eyck , Hieronymus Bosch , Giorgione and Albrecht Altdorfer .
Go to Profile#2654
Gordon B. Hancock
1884 - 1970 (86 years)
Gordon Blaine Hancock was a professor at Virginia Union University and a leading spokesman for African American equality in the generation before the civil rights movement. Hancock was a nationally syndicated columnist for the Norfolk Journal and Guide whose columns were published in 114 black newspapers. He was one of the organizers of the 1942 Southern Conference on Race Relations and gave the opening keynote address. This conference led to the publication of "A Basis for Inter-Racial Cooperation and Development in the South: A Statement by Southern Negroes," known as the Durham Manifesto, ...
Go to Profile#2655
Axel Romdahl
1880 - 1951 (71 years)
Axel Ludvig Romdahl was a Swedish art historian and museum curator. Biography Axel Ludvig, known as Ludde, was the son of P.A.C. Romdahl and Clara Theresia Brogren. He married Gudrun Biller in 1906 in Stockholm.
Go to Profile#2656
John Williston Cook
1844 - 1922 (78 years)
John Williston Cook was an educator during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States, specifically in Illinois. His work in education, specifically in association with the Herbartianism movement, had a lasting impact on the field at the time.
Go to Profile#2657
Jeannette Augustus Marks
1875 - 1964 (89 years)
Jeannette Augustus Marks was an American professor at Mount Holyoke College. She is the namesake of the Jeannette Marks Cultural Center , which provides support and programming for LGBT students and allies.
Go to Profile#2658
Gerald Warner Brace
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Gerald Warner Brace was an American novelist, writer, educator, sailor and boat builder. His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England. Biography Early life and ancestors He was born on September 24, 1901, in Islip, Long Island, Suffolk County, New York, and died on July 20, 1978, at Blue Hill, Maine.
Go to Profile#2659
Anna Cox Brinton
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Anna Shipley Cox Brinton was an American classics scholar, college administrator, writer, and Quaker leader, active with the American Friends Service Committee . She has credited with being one of those who "reinvented Quakerism" for the 20th century.
Go to Profile#2660
Hubert Winkler
1875 - 1941 (66 years)
Hubert Winkler was a German botanist, who specialized in tropical flora research. From 1895 he studied theology and botany at the University of Breslau, where in 1901/02 he worked as an assistant at the botanical garden. Afterwards, he worked at the Botanical Museum in Berlin and at the botanic garden in Victoria, Kamerun. In 1921 he became an associate professor of phytogeography at the University of Breslau, where in 1927 he attained a full professorship.
Go to Profile#2661
Werner Weisbach
1873 - 1953 (80 years)
Werner Weisbach was a German-Swiss art historian. He studied art history, archaeology, history and philosophy at the universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich and Leipzig, receiving his promotion from the latter institution in 1896 . Following a study trip through Europe, he served as a volunteer at the Museum of Berlin under the directorship of Wilhelm von Bode. From 1903 onward, he worked as a lecturer at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where from 1921 to 1933 he taught classes as an associate professor of art history. During the era of National Socialism he emigrated to Basel, Swi...
Go to Profile#2662
Willard Van Dyke
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Willard Ames Van Dyke was an American filmmaker, photographer, arts administrator, teacher, and former director of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art. Early life Van Dyke went to the University of California, Berkeley, circa 1927 dropping out for a time to avoid taking an ROTC course, left in 1929 and did not graduate.
Go to Profile#2663
Franz Roh
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Franz Roh , was a German historian, photographer, and art critic. Roh is perhaps best known for his 1925 book Nach-Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei he coined the term magic realism.
Go to Profile#2664
Will Grohmann
1887 - 1968 (81 years)
Will Grohmann was a German art critic and art historian specialized in German Expressionism and abstract art. He was known as the "godfather of modernism". Life and work From 1908 to 1913 Grohmann studied oriental languages with special emphasis on Sanskrit at the universities of Paris and Leipzig. Though he wrote his PhD thesis in Germanic literature, entitled Vers oder Prosa im hohen Drama des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts , and taught languages at school, where Erich Kästner was one of his pupils, he devoted his life to art research and publishing. He was interested in the painters of Die Brücke and supported the Bauhaus.
Go to Profile#2665
Richard Offner
1889 - 1965 (76 years)
Richard Offner was an Austrian-American art historian dedicated to the study of Florentine paintings from the Renaissance. Biography Offner was born in Vienna, Austria, on June 30, 1889. In 1891, his family emigrated to New York City. He pursued his undergraduate degree at Harvard University from 1909 to 1912, continuing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1912 to 1914. In 1914, he submitted his dissertation in art history under Max Dvořák at the University of Vienna. He was granted his Doctorate, however, his dissertation is now lost.
Go to Profile#2666
Jean Alazard
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Jean Alazard was a French art historian who was an expert on the art of the Renaissance and Orientalism. Early life Alazard was born in Lacalm in the Aveyron. He attended the Lycée and moved to Italy, where he became an authority on the art of the Renaissance.
Go to Profile#2667
Charles Picard
1883 - 1965 (82 years)
Charles Picard was a prominent Classical archaeologist and historian of ancient Greek art. He is best known for his multi-volume, monumental survey, Manuel d'archéologie grecque: La sculpture. Volume I , was published in 1935. He completed the second fascicule of Volume IV in 1963. Picard was elected member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in 1932.
Go to Profile#2668
Lucy Donnelly
1870 - 1948 (78 years)
Lucy Martin Donnelly was a teacher of English at Bryn Mawr College. She was head of the English department starting in 1914. Sources James, E. T, Wilson James, J. and Boyer, P. S. 1971, Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary , p. 499Russell, B. and Griffin, N. 1992, The selected letters of Bertrand Russell, p. Lucy Donnelly
Go to Profile#2669
Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth
1905 - 1969 (64 years)
Wilhelmina van Ingen Elarth was an archaeologist and art history and classical studies professor. She studied at Vassar and received her doctorate at Radcliffe. In addition to her research contributions to the classics, she also bridged her interest to contemporary art and architecture. Her grandfather was Henry van Ingen.
Go to Profile#2670
Leonard Wild
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Leonard John Wild was a New Zealand teacher, agricultural scientist, lecturer, principal, educationalist, and writer. Early life Born at Oraki near Riverton in Southland in 1889, he received his secondary education at Southland Boys' High School. He received his tertiary education from the University of Otago and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1910, a Bachelor of Science in 1917 and a Master of Arts in 1921. During the 1910s, he published several papers on geology in the Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, which resulted in him being elected fellow of the Geologi...
Go to Profile#2671
Frederick Hilgendorf
1874 - 1942 (68 years)
Frederick William Hilgendorf was a New Zealand teacher, lecturer and agricultural scientist. He was born in Waihola, South Otago, New Zealand on 23 January 1874. In 1935, he was awarded the King George V Silver Jubilee Medal. The Hilgendorf Wing at Lincoln University was named after him.
Go to Profile#2672
Friedrich Dannemann
1859 - 1936 (77 years)
Friedrich Dannemann was a German physicist, high school teacher and historian of science. In the judgment of George Sarton, Dannemann's four-volume Natural sciences in their development and context was "the first satisfactory textbook dealing with the history of science as a whole". In 1927, aged sixty-eight, Dannemann became an unsalaried professor in the history of science at the University of Bonn. Dannemann also helped Abraham Wolf with his A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
Go to Profile#2673
Graham Wallas
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.
Go to Profile#2674
Fanny Jackson Coppin
1837 - 1913 (76 years)
Fanny Jackson Coppin was an American educator, missionary and lifelong advocate for female higher education. One of the first Black alumnae of Oberlin College, she served as principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia and became the first African American school superintendent in the United States.
Go to Profile#2675
Kenneth Clark
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, Baron Clark was a British art historian, museum director, and broadcaster. After running two important art galleries in the 1930s and 1940s, he came to wider public notice on television, presenting a succession of programmes on the arts during the 1950s and 1960s, culminating in the Civilisation series in 1969.
Go to Profile#2676
Hans Sedlmayr
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Hans Sedlmayr was an Austrian art historian. From 1931 to 1932 and from 1938 onwards, he was a member of the Nazi Party. Positions as a University Professor Sedlmayr held a chair in Art History at the University of Vienna from 1936 until 1945, then at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich from 1951 until 1964.
Go to Profile#2677
Alec Peterson
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Alexander Duncan Campbell Peterson OBE was a British teacher and headmaster, greatly responsible for the birth of the International Baccalaureate educational system. He was instrumental in the formation of the International Baccalaureate Organisation in 1968, and served as the organisation's first director-general until 1977. He was also the first honorary member of the organisation's Council of Foundation from 1983 until his death in 1988.
Go to Profile#2678
Alice Mabel Bacon
1858 - 1918 (60 years)
Alice Mabel Bacon was an American writer, women's educator and a foreign advisor to the Japanese government in Meiji period Japan. Early life Alice Mabel Bacon was the youngest of the three daughters and two sons of Reverend Leonard Bacon, pastor of the Center Church in New Haven, Connecticut, professor at the Yale Divinity School, and his second wife, Catherine Elizabeth Terry. In 1872, when Alice was fourteen, Japanese envoy Mori Arinori selected her father's home as a residence for Japanese women being sent overseas for education by the Meiji government, as part of the Iwakura Mission. Alice received twelve-year-old Yamakawa Sutematsu as her house-guest.
Go to Profile#2679
Ulisse Aldrovandi
1522 - 1605 (83 years)
Ulisse Aldrovandi was an Italian naturalist, the moving force behind Bologna's botanical garden, one of the first in Europe. Carl Linnaeus and the comte de Buffon reckoned him the father of natural history studies. He is usually referred to, especially in older scientific literature in Latin, as Aldrovandus; his name in Italian is equally given as Aldroandi.
Go to Profile#2680
Edward C. Elliott
1874 - 1960 (86 years)
Edward Charles Elliott was an American educational researcher and administrator. He was the chancellor of the public university system of Montana from 1916 to 1922 and the president of Purdue University from 1922 to 1945.
Go to Profile#2681
Laurence J. Peter
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Laurence Johnston Peter was a Canadian educator and "hierarchiologist" who is best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter principle. Biography Peter was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the grandson of William Herbert Steves, the founder of Steveston, British Columbia. Peter began his career as a teacher in Vancouver in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963.
Go to Profile#2682
Miguel Covarrubias
1904 - 1957 (53 years)
Miguel Covarrubias, also known as José Miguel Covarrubias Duclaud was a Mexican painter, caricaturist, illustrator, ethnologist and art historian. Along with his American colleague Matthew W. Stirling, he was the co-discoverer of the Olmec civilization.
Go to Profile#2683
Matthew the Apostle
10 - 74 (64 years)
Matthew the Apostle is named in the New Testament as one of the twelve apostles of Jesus. According to Christian traditions, he was also one of the four Evangelists as author of the Gospel of Matthew, and thus is also known as Matthew the Evangelist.
Go to Profile#2684
Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1717 - 1768 (51 years)
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications.
Go to Profile#2685
Alice Freeman Palmer
1855 - 1902 (47 years)
Alice Freeman Palmer was an American educator. As Alice Freeman, she was president of Wellesley College from 1881 to 1887, when she left to marry the Harvard professor George Herbert Palmer. From 1892 to 1895 she was dean of women at the newly founded University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2686
Franz Xaver Schmid
1819 - 1883 (64 years)
Franz Xaver Schmid; name sometimes given as Franz Xaver Schmid-Schwarzenberg was an Austrian-German educator and philosopher born in Schwarzenberg am Böhmerwald. From 1840 to 1844 he studied Catholic theology in Salzburg, receiving his doctorate of philosophy several years later in Freiburg im Breisgau. Afterwards he taught classes in history and philosophy at the Lyceum in Rastatt. In 1856 he became a lecturer at the University of Erlangen, where he subsequently became an associate professor of philosophy and pedagogy. During the 1850s, Schmid left the Catholic faith and embraced Protestantism.
Go to Profile#2687
Bernard Berenson
1865 - 1959 (94 years)
Bernard Berenson was a Lithuanian Jew origin an American art historian specializing in the Renaissance. His book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters was an international success. His wife Mary is thought to have had a large hand in some of the writings.
Go to Profile#2688
George Trumbull Ladd
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
George Trumbull Ladd was an American philosopher, educator and psychologist. Biography Early life and ancestors Ladd was born in Painesville, Ohio, on January 19, 1842, the son of Silas Trumbull Ladd and Elizabeth Williams.
Go to Profile#2689
Everett Franklin Lindquist
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Everett Franklin Lindquist was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.
Go to Profile#2690
Aloys Fischer
1880 - 1937 (57 years)
Aloys Fischer was a German educationalist and worked on the foundations of a modern theory of education. Life Fischer was born in Furth im Wald, Bavaria on 10 April 1880. He attended the local elementary school. In 1891 he was awarded a scholarship to the grammar school based at the Benedictine Metten Abbey. He finished there 1899 and then attended the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich studying Classical Philology, German and history. After passing the First State Exam in 1902 he studied for a doctorate under Theodor Lipps. From 1903 to 1906 Fischer tutored the children of Adolf von Hildebrand.
Go to Profile#2691
Francis Landey Patton
1843 - 1932 (89 years)
Francis Landey Patton was a Bermudan-American educator, Presbyterian minister, academic administrator, and theologian, and served as the twelfth president of Princeton University. Background, 1843–1871 Patton was born in Warwick Parish, Bermuda, to a family of Scottish descent. He attended Warwick Academy. As a child, the family relocated to Canada. Patton received collegiate education at the University of Toronto, followed by a theological education at Knox College, Toronto. He graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1865; was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in June 1865; was ...
Go to Profile#2692
Margaret Haley
1861 - 1939 (78 years)
Margaret A. Haley was a teacher, unionist, and Georgist land value tax activist, who was dubbed the "lady labor slugger". Haley was the first business representative of the Chicago Teachers Federation and a pioneer leader in organizing schoolteachers. During her long career with the CTF, Haley fought to correct tax inequalities, increase the salaries of teachers, and expose unfair land leasing by the Chicago Board of Education.
Go to Profile#2693
Calvin M. Woodward
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Calvin Milton Woodward was a United States educator and professor. As dean of the school of engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, he developed a manual training programme . He opened the St. Louis Manual Training School.
Go to Profile#2694
Roland Penrose
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Sir Roland Algernon Penrose was an English artist, historian and poet. He was a major promoter and collector of modern art and an associate of the surrealists in the United Kingdom. During the Second World War he put his artistic skills to practical use as a teacher of camouflage.
Go to Profile#2695
Swami Vipulananda
1892 - 1947 (55 years)
Swami Vipulananda , also known as Vipulananda Adigal, was a Sri Lankan Tamil Hindu social reformer, literary critic, author, poet, teacher and ascetic from the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. Vipulananda was an early pioneer associated with the Indian-based Ramakrishna Mission in Sri Lanka. Along with other reformers, Vipulananda was instrumental in the revival of the Hindu religion and native traditions in Sri Lanka after a long period of dormancy and decline during the previous 500 years of colonial rule by various European powers.
Go to Profile#2696
Erwin Panofsky
1892 - 1968 (76 years)
Erwin Panofsky was a German-Jewish art historian, whose academic career was pursued mostly in the U.S. after the rise of the Nazi regime. His work represents a high point in the modern academic study of iconography, including his hugely influential Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art and his masterpiece Early Netherlandish Painting. Many of his books are still in print, including Studies in Iconology: Humanist Themes in the Art of the Renaissance , Meaning in the Visual Arts , and his 1943 study The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer.
Go to Profile#2697
Carl Strehl
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Carl Strehl was a German educator born in Berlin who was influential in the teaching of the blind. History In December 1907, Strehl lost his eyesight while working in a chemical factory in New York. Later, after returning to Europe, he commenced with studies in Hamburg. In 1915, he was hired by University of Marburg ophthalmologist Alfred Bielschowsky to assist with World War I soldiers who had been blinded by shell fragments and poison gas.
Go to Profile#2698
John Calvin Ferguson
1866 - 1945 (79 years)
John Calvin Ferguson was an American scholar of Chinese art, collector and procurer for American art museums, and a Chinese governmental adviser. Ferguson was the son of John Ferguson and Catherine Matilda Pomeroy . His father was a Methodist minister and his mother a schoolteacher. Ferguson attended Albert College in Ontario, Canada and then Boston University, where he graduated in 1886. He was ordained in the Methodist Episcopal Church and, in 1887, married Mary Elizabeth Wilson.
Go to Profile#2699
Rachel Elfreda Fowler
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Rachel Elfreda Fowler was an English literary scholar and lecturer in art and history at the University of Oxford. Early life Rachel Fowler was born in London on 10 December 1872, the youngest daughter of Sir Robert Fowler , member of parliament and Lord Mayor of London, and his wife Sarah Charlotte Fowler, née Fox. Elfreda was one of eleven children. She received her advanced education at Westfield College and then at the University of Oxford where she studied modern languages.
Go to Profile#2700
Agathon Benary
1807 - 1860 (53 years)
Karl Albert Agathon Benary was a German classical philologist. He was the brother of orientalist Franz Ferdinand Benary . He received his education at the gymnasiums in Göttingen and Erfurt, where he was a student of Franz Ernst Heinrich Spitzner. From 1824 to 1827 he studied classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, obtaining his doctorate with the dissertation "De Aeschyli Prometheo soluto". At Halle he was especially influenced by the teachings of Christian Karl Reisig. After graduation, he worked as a high school teacher in Berlin, and in the meantime, continued his philological studies as a pupil of Franz Bopp.
Go to Profile