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,
#2751
Homer Sprague
1829 - 1918 (89 years)
Homer Baxter Sprague was an American author, educator, abolitionist, and Lieutenant Colonel of the Union Army. A native of Sutton, Massachusetts, Sprague was a Captain of the 13th Connecticut Infantry Regiment in 1861 when the American Civil War began, and quickly rose to the rank of Colonel before being captured as a prisoner of war by the Confederate Army in 1864. In 1865 he was released in a prisoner exchange, and remained active within the military until the end of the war.
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Carl Oesterley
1805 - 1891 (86 years)
Carl Wilhelm Friedrich Oesterley was a German painter and art historian. He is remembered largely for creating oil paintings with Biblical themes. Biography He was a native of Göttingen, and studied archaeology, philosophy and history at the University of Göttingen, where in 1824 he earned his doctorate in the field of art history. Subsequently he studied drawing in Dresden, where he was a student of Johann Gottlob Matthäi . He then spent several years in Rome .
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Viktor Heikel
1842 - 1927 (85 years)
Frans Viktor Heikel was a Finland-Swedish gymnastics teacher, known as "the father of Finnish school gymnastics". Life Heikel was born in Turku to educator and priest Henrik Heikel and Wilhelmina Johanna Schauman. He had ten siblings, including brother Felix Heikel , a bank manager and politician and sister Anna Heikel, head of the School for the Deaf. In 1873 Heikel married Hanna Kihlman. He was father to doctor Allan Phayllos Heikel and ethnologist Yngvar Heikel . He was also cousin to ethnographer Axel Heikel and philologist Ivar Heikel.
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Alexander Adam
1741 - 1809 (68 years)
Alexander Adam was a Scottish teacher and writer on Roman antiquities. Life Alexander Adam was born near Forres, in Moray, the son of a farmer. From his earliest years he showed uncommon diligence and perseverance in classical studies, notwithstanding many difficulties and privations. In 1757 he went to Edinburgh, where he studied at the University of Edinburgh. During this period he lodged with a Mr Watson on Restalrig.
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Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert
1780 - 1860 (80 years)
Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert was a German physician, naturalist and psychologist. Biography He began his studies with theology, but turned to medicine and established himself as a doctor in Altenburg, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. He soon gave up his practice however and devoted himself to research in Dresden . In 1809, by way of mediation from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, he received the post of rector at a secondary school in Nuremberg.
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Viktor Lazarev
1897 - 1976 (79 years)
Viktor Nikitich Lazarev was a Soviet and Russian art critic and historian who specialized in medieval Byzantine, Russian, and Armenian religious art. He was the son of Nikita Lazarev, a Moscow architect, and was related by blood to Wassily Kandinsky.
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David Smith
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Sir David Stanley Smith was a New Zealand lawyer, judge and educationalist. Smith was born in Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand in 1888. He worked for Charles Morison as an assistant from 1912. He Smith was appointed as a judge to the Supreme Court in 1928, a relatively early appointment based on his performance as counsel for Maori land claims. Smith received a knighthood in the 1948 New Year Honours. A few months later, he resigned as a judge and concentrated on public affairs.
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John Gilbert
1812 - 1845 (33 years)
John Gilbert was an English naturalist and explorer. Gilbert is often cited in the earliest descriptions of many Australian animals, many of which were unrecorded in European literature, and some of these are named for him by those authors. Gilbert was sent to the newly founded Swan River Colony and made collections and notes on the unique birds and mammals of the surrounding region. He later joined expeditions to remote parts the country, continuing to make records and collections until he was killed during a violent altercation at Mitchell River on the Cape York Peninsula.
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John McGilvrey
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
John Edward McGilvrey was an American academic who was the first president of what is now Kent State University. McGilvrey was educated at the Indiana State Normal School, receiving his bachelor of arts and sciences degree in 1895. He also received an honorary doctorate from Miami University in 1915. At the time of his appointment at the Kent State Normal School in 1911, McGilvrey had recently begun his position as head of the education department at the Western Illinois Normal School in Macomb, Illinois. Other positions held included professor of education at Illinois University, princip...
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Robert Witt
1872 - 1952 (80 years)
Sir Robert Clermont Witt was a British art historian, who, along with Samuel Courtauld and Lord Lee of Fareham, was a co-founder of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Witt was born in Camberwell, south London, in 1872, the son of German parents Gustavus Andreas Witt, a merchant born in Hamburg, and Friederike Helene Von Clermont, from Frankfurt. He was educated at Clifton College and read history at New College, Oxford. In 1896, he fought in the Second Matabele War, and worked alongside Cecil Rhodes as a war correspondent.
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António de Gouveia
1505 - 1566 (61 years)
António de Gouveia was a Portuguese humanist and educator during the Renaissance. Gouveia was born in Beja. After graduating in Paris he taught at the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, and then at Toulouse, Avignon, Lyon, Cahors, Valence, Grenoble, Turin and Mondovi. His controversy with Pierre de la Ramée about Aristotle became famous. He wrote literary and philosophical works, having correspondeded with most of the writers of his time. He was brother to André de Gouveia and nephew of Diogo de Gouveia the elder.
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Mary Lowe Dickinson
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Mary Lowe Dickinson was a 19th- and early 20th-century American fiction writer, poet, editor, and educator who also became an advocate for women's rights and anti-war activist. Asked later in life about her decision to pursue the writing life, she observed: "Talent uses us.... If I had had a spark of it, I could not have waited for circumstances to force me to use it."
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Johan Wilhelm Zetterstedt
1785 - 1874 (89 years)
Johan Wilhelm Zetterstedt was a Swedish naturalist who worked mainly on Diptera and Hymenoptera. Biography Zetterstedt studied at the University of Lund, where he was a pupil of Anders Jahan Retzius. He received the title of professor in 1822 and succeeded Carl Adolph Agardh as professor of botany and practical economy in 1836, retiring as emeritus in 1853. In 1831, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
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Richard Delbrück
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Richard Delbrück was a German classical archaeologist who specialized in the field of ancient Roman portraiture. Career In 1899 he graduated from the University of Bonn, where he was a student of Georg Loeschcke. From 1911 to 1915, he was head of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome. He was later a professor of classical archaeology at the Universities of Giessen and Bonn .
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Arthur Kingsley Porter
1883 - 1933 (50 years)
Arthur Kingsley Porter was an American archaeologist, art historian, and medievalist. He was chair of Harvard University’s art history department, and was the first American scholar of Romanesque architecture to achieve international recognition. Porter disappeared in 1933. His most significant scholarly contributions were his revolutionary studies and insights into the spread of Romanesque sculpture. His study of Lombard architecture also remains the first in its class. He left his Cambridge mansion, Elmwood, to Harvard University, where it has served as the official residence of Harvard's p...
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Henry Maundrell
1665 - 1701 (36 years)
Henry Maundrell was an academic at Oxford University and later a Church of England clergyman, who served from 20 December 1695 as chaplain to the Levant Company in Syria. His Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697 , which had its origins in the diary he carried with him on his Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1697, has become an often reprinted "minor travel classic." It was included in compilations of travel accounts from the mid-18th century, and was translated into three additional languages: French , Dutch and German . By 1749, the seventh edition was printed.
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Charles Hanford Henderson
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Charles Hanford Henderson was an American educator and author. Biography Born in Philadelphia, he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1882; was lecturer at the Franklin Institute 1883–86; Professor of Physics and Chemistry in the Philadelphia Manual Training School 1889–91, principal 1893–95; Ph.D. at Zurich in 1892; lecturer on education at Harvard 1897–98; and director Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 1898–99.
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Henry Sylvester Jacoby
1857 - 1955 (98 years)
Henry Sylvester Jacoby was an American educator, born at Springtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, He was graduated from Lehigh University in 1877 and during the season of 1878 was connected with the topographical corps of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey. During 1879–85, he was chief draftsman in the United States Engineer's Office in Memphis, Tenn. In 1886, he returned to Lehigh, where until 1890 he was instructor of civil engineering; he then accepted a call to Cornell University, where in 1897 he became professor of bridge engineering. Professor Jacoby was a fellow of the American Ass...
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William H. Bennett
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
William Hunter Bennett was a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1970 until his death. Bennett was born in Taber, Alberta, Canada. He attended the School of Agriculture in Raymond, Alberta, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculture from Utah State University in the US, followed by a Ph.D. in agriculture from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He joined the faculty of USU as a professor of agronomy.
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Richard Malcolm Johnston
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
Richard Malcolm Johnston was an American author. Biography Johnson was born in Powelton, Hancock County, Georgia. His father was a Baptist minister, and his early education was received at a country school and finished at Mercer University. After graduating there he spent a year teaching and then took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1843. In 1857, he accepted an appointment to the chair of belles-lettres and oratory at the University of Georgia in Athens, retaining it until the opening of the Civil War, when he began a school for boys on his farm near Sparta. This he kept going during the war, serving also for a time on the staff of Confederate general Joseph E.
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Mary Bigelow Ingham
1832 - 1923 (91 years)
Mary Bigelow Ingham was an American author, educator, and religious worker. Dedicated to teaching, missionary work, and temperance reform, she served as professor of French and belles-lettres in the Ohio Wesleyan College; presided over and addressed the first public meeting ever held in Cleveland conducted exclusively by religious women; co-founded the Western Reserve School of Design ; and was a charter member of the order of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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Julius Lange
1838 - 1896 (58 years)
Julius Henrik Lange was a Danish art historian and critic. Life In 1858, he began his studies at the University of Copenhagen. A few years later, he accompanied a wealthy gentleman to Italy and, while there, developed an interest in art history. In 1870, he became a lecturer at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and, a year later, transferred to the University. In 1877, he became a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
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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.
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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".
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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.
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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.
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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:
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Craven Laycock
1866 - 1940 (74 years)
Craven Laycock was the dean of Dartmouth College from 1911 to 1934. He is perhaps best known as the dean who suspended Theodor Seuss Geisel from editing the Dartmouth humor magazine, after which Geisel wrote under the pen name Dr. Seuss.
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George Dana Boardman Pepper
1833 - 1913 (80 years)
George Dana Boardman Pepper was an American academic administrator who served as the 9th president of Colby College from 1882 to 1889. Early life and education Pepper was born in Ware, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. He attended the Williston Seminary for three years before entering Amherst College at the age of 21 in 1853. In 1857, he attended the Andover Theological Seminary .
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Abby Lillian Marlatt
1869 - 1943 (74 years)
Abby Lillian Marlatt was an American educator. Born in Manhattan, Kansas, Marlatt graduated from Kansas State College with a B.S. in 1888. receiving her M.S. from the same institution in 1890. After graduation, she taught home economics, beginning in Utah before going to Rhode Island. In 1909, she came to the University of Wisconsin, where she became the first director of the home economics department. She remained in this capacity until retiring, in 1939, with the title of professor emeritus. She established a regular curriculum and provided students with more specialized work; besides e...
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Charles Herbert Moore
1840 - 1930 (90 years)
Charles Herbert Moore was an American university professor, painter, and architectural historian, known as the first director of Harvard University's Fogg Art Museum. He was one of many followers of the works of John Ruskin, and was known as an American Pre-Raphaelite. In 1871, Moore left painting to begin teaching at Harvard, where he led its new art department. There, Moore was among the first art historians at an academic institution in the United States. After retirement, Moore moved to Hampshire, England where he wrote many books on medieval and Renaissance architecture. He died in Hamps...
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Lloyd N. Morrisett Sr.
1892 - 1981 (89 years)
Lloyd N. Morrisett was an American educator. Born in Barretville, Tennessee, he graduated from high school in Edmond, Oklahoma, and received an A.B. degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1917. He earned an A.M. degree and Ph.D. degree from Columbia University.
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Moritz Thausing
1838 - 1884 (46 years)
Moritz Thausing was an Austrian art historian, and counts among the founders of the Vienna School of Art History. Life The son of a palace official in Schloß Tschischkowitz , Thausing began his academic career as a student of German literature and history. He studied first in Prague, and in 1858 went to Vienna, where he studied at the Österreichische Institut für Geschichtsforschung . There he came into contact with Rudolf Eitelberger, who since 1852 had held the first chair in art history at the University of Vienna. Under his influence Thausing began to study the history of art. In 1862 he ...
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Alberta Virginia Scott
1878 - 1902 (24 years)
Alberta Virginia Scott was an American educator. She was the first African-American graduate of Radcliffe College, in 1898. Early life Alberta Virginia Scott was born near Richmond, Virginia. Her mother worked as a cook. She raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her family moved when she was six years old. Her family were members of the historic Union Baptist Church in Cambridge. Scott attended Allston School and then Cambridge Latin School, graduating with the class of 1894.
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Thomas Dawson
Thomas Dawson was an Anglican priest and the fourth president of The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia . He is also the brother of William Dawson, who was the second president of William & Mary . He was educated at William & Mary and also held several religious positions, including being an Anglican clergyman, rector of the Bruton Parish, and commissary of the Bishop of London. Dawson was also a member of the Governor's Council and master of the Indian School at the College.
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Christian Gueintz
1592 - 1650 (58 years)
Christian Gueintz was a teacher and writer-grammarian. He was qualified and taught in several mainstream subjects of the time, notably philosophy, theology, and law. He lived during the first half of the seventeenth century, a period characterised by Baroque architecture and, in northern Germany, repeatedly disrupted by destructive war, which at various points had a dislocating impact on his career, and through which he demonstrated impressive qualities of persistence.
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George Herbert Carpenter
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
George Herbert Carpenter was a British naturalist and entomologist, born in the Peckham district of southeast London in 1865, and died in Belfast on 22 January 1939. His main interests were in the study of insects and arachnids, zoogeography, and economic zoology. In addition to numerous contributions to scientific journals and Encyclopædia Britannica, he authored five books.
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Althea Sherman
1853 - 1943 (90 years)
Althea Rosina Sherman was an American illustrator, educator, self-taught ornithologist, and writer who commissioned the building of the "Chimney Swifts' Tower" in Clayton County, Iowa. This structure enabled her to observe and report on the life cycle of chimney swifts, the first to complete such investigations. She published more than 70 articles in scientific and ornithological journals during her career. Sherman was elected as a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and was listed in the third edition of American Men of Science. Additionally, her work as an illustrator, particularly...
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Mable E. Buland Campbell
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Mable Electa Buland Campbell was a Professor of English in Washington State during the early 20th century, and was, at one time, the youngest person to hold a PH.D. in the United States. Buland was also active in women's groups associated with women's suffrage.
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William Chapman Hewitson
1806 - 1878 (72 years)
William Chapman Hewitson was a British naturalist. A wealthy collector, Hewitson was particularly devoted to Coleoptera and Lepidoptera and, also, to birds' nests and eggs. His collection of butterflies, collected by him as well as purchased from travellers throughout the world, was one of the largest and most important of his time. He contributed to and published many works on entomology and ornithology and was an accomplished scientific illustrator.
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Petronėlė Lastienė
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Petronėlė Lastienė Sirutytė was a Lithuanian teacher and university professor. She was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jewish children from the Kaunas Ghetto during the Holocaust.
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William Hallock Johnson
1865 - 1963 (98 years)
William Hallock Johnson was an American educator who served as president of the historically black Lincoln University of Pennsylvania from 1926 to 1936. He had a liberalizing effect on the institution, presiding over the appointment of its first Black faculty member, and substantially reduced the university's debt.
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Jack Smith
1932 - 1989 (57 years)
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer.
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Arthur A. O'Leary
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
Arthur Aloysius O'Leary was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit, who served as president of Georgetown University in from 1935 to 1942. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied at Gonzaga College before entering the Society of Jesus and continuing his education at St. Andrew-on-Hudson and Woodstock College. He then taught at St. Andrew-on-Hudson and Georgetown University, where he eventually became the university's librarian, and undertook a major improvement of the Georgetown University Library. O'Leary then assumed the presidency of the university in the midst of the Great Depression and, l...
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Winfield Scott Chaplin
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Winfield Scott Chaplin was the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1891 until 1907. Early life Winfield Scott Chaplin was born in Maine in 1847 and graduated from West Point in 1870 as a second lieutenant of artillery. After resigning in 1872, Chaplin held a number of academic positions in civil and mechanical engineering; including Maine State College, Imperial University in Tokyo, Harvard University, and Union College. He served as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard for six years before being named Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis at age 43...
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Walter Fong
1866 - 1906 (40 years)
Walter Ngon Fong was an American educator, missionary and linguist who founded the first technical college in Hong Kong. He was Stanford University's first Chinese graduate. Early life Fong was born on 1 April 1866 to a humble farming family in the village of Sunning, Guangdong, China. At 15, he emigrated to California, United States, where he initially attended a Presbyterian Mission. While later working at the Chinese Methodist School in San Jose, he pursued further studies at the University of the Pacific from which he graduated in 1892. He went on to be the first Chinese student to g...
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Cornelius Beach Bradley
1843 - 1936 (93 years)
Cornelius Beach Bradley was an American English-language scholar. He served as professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley , and also extensively studied the Thai language. Bradley was born and grew up in Siam, the son of missionary Dan Beach Bradley, and also did missionary work in the country after graduating from Oberlin College in the United States. He returned to the United States in 1874, becoming a teacher and vice-principal at Oakland High School, before joining the faculty of the University of California in 1882. He was also known for mountaineering, especially in...
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Hermann Board
1867 - 1918 (51 years)
Hermann Board was a German architect and art historian. Life Born in Essen, Board was the son of the master mason Hermann Board and attended the municipal Realschule in Essen. He then completed a four-year apprenticeship as an architect and attended the municipal further education school in Essen, the commercial technical school in Cologne and the Technical University of Berlin. Afterwards, he worked for seven years in the construction office of the mining company and also taught in the construction classes of the municipal technical and further education schools in Essen. This was followed...
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John Strong
1868 - 1945 (77 years)
John Strong CBE FRSE FEIS LLD was a 20th-century British educationalist. He was one of the creators of the Education Act 1918. This brought the many poorly-funded private Catholic schools in Scotland into state control.
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Elisabeth Neurdenburg
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Elisabeth Neurdenburg was a Dutch art historian. She contributed to the large inventory of 17th-century Dutch paintings by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, and became a specialist on Dutch Kraak ware. She was a close friend of the Dutch art historian and museum director Ida Caroline Eugenie Peelen.
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