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,
#2851
Carl Georg Heise
1890 - 1979 (89 years)
Carl Georg Heise was a German art historian. From 1945 to 1955 he was director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg. Life Heise was born into a Hamburg mercantile family with artistic interests. In about 1906 Aby Warburg became his mentor, and recommended to him a period of studying art history with Wilhelm Vöge in Freiburg. Subsequently, he went to Adolph Goldschmidt in Halle and—against Warburg's advice—to Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. In 1910 he travelled to Italy with Wilhelm Waetzoldt and Warburg, visiting Venice and finally Ferrara, where Warburg was researching the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia.
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Arthur R. M. Spaid
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Rusmiselle Miller Spaid was an American educator, school administrator, lecturer, and writer. He served as principal of Alexis I. duPont High School in Wilmington, Delaware, superintendent of New Castle County Public Schools in Delaware, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, and Delaware State commissioner of Education .
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Maria Montessori
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, becoming one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy; she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
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Jerome Daugherty
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jerome Daugherty was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who served in many different capacities at Jesuit institutions throughout the northeast United States, eventually becoming president of Georgetown University in 1901. Born in Baltimore, he was educated at Loyola College in Maryland, before entering the Society of Jesus and becoming a member of the first class at Woodstock College. He then taught various subjects, including mathematics, Latin, Ancient Greek, rhetoric, and the humanities in Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and served as minister at many of the insti...
Go to Profile#2855
David Talbot Rice
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
David Talbot Rice was an English archaeologist and art historian. He has been described variously as a "gentleman academic" and an "amateur" art historian, though such remarks are not borne out by his many achievements and a lasting legacy of scholarship in his field of study.
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Henry-Russell Hitchcock
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Henry-Russell Hitchcock was an American architectural historian, and for many years a professor at Smith College and New York University. His writings helped to define the characteristics of modernist architecture.
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Ellwood Patterson Cubberley
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Ellwood Patterson Cubberley was an American educator, a eugenicist, and a pioneer in the field of education management. He spent most of his career as a professor and later served as the first dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in California.
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Rhys Carpenter
1889 - 1980 (91 years)
Rhys Carpenter was an American classical art historian and professor at Bryn Mawr College. Carpenter was unconventional as a scholar. He analyzed Greek art from the standpoint of artistic production and behavior. He argued for dating the Greek alphabet to the eighth century B.C.
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Walter Dearborn
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Walter Fenno Dearborn was a pioneering American educator and experimental psychologist who helped to establish the field of reading education. Dearborn, who approached the study of psychology from the perspective of an empirical scientist, is perhaps best known for using empirical research to design and refine teaching methods. Dearborn's research persuaded him that children develop at different rates and that schools should not ignore individual differences by teaching children in large groups or classes.
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Julian Gibbs
1924 - 1983 (59 years)
Julian Howard Gibbs was an American educator and the fifteenth President of Amherst College. Gibbs graduated from Amherst College in 1947. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1949 and 1950 from Princeton University. After a year of postdoctoral study at Cambridge University in England with a Fulbright Fellowship, he briefly taught at the University of Minnesota. Gibbs then worked for eight years at General Electric Company and American Viscose Corporation before accepting a position at Brown University in 1960 as associate professor of chemistry. He was named a full professor in 1963 and served as the chairman of the Chemistry Department at Brown from 1964 to 1972.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
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William Heard Kilpatrick
1871 - 1965 (94 years)
William Heard Kilpatrick was an American pedagogue and a pupil, a colleague and a successor of John Dewey. Kilpatrick was a major figure in the progressive education movement of the early 20th century.
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Edgar Dale
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Edgar Dale was an American educator who developed the Cone of Experience, also known as the Learning Pyramid. He made several contributions to audio and visual instruction, including a methodology for analyzing the content of motion pictures.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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. ...
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Elizabeth Gilmore Holt
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt was an American art historian. Early life and education Elizabeth Basye Gilmore was born in San Francisco, California in 1905, and raised in Madison, Wisconsin; her father Eugene Allen Gilmore was a diplomat and university president. She grew up living at the Eugene A. Gilmore House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908.
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Benedict Wallet Vilakazi
1906 - 1947 (41 years)
Benedict Wallet Vilakazi was a South African novelist, linguist, a descendant of the Zulu royal family, and a radically innovative poet who created a combination of traditional and Romantic poetry in the Zulu language. Vilakazi was also a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became the first Black South African to teach University classes to White South Africans. In 1946, Vilakazi also became the first Black South African to receive a PhD.
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Herbert von Einem
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Herbert von Einem was a German art historian. Life and work Von Einem studied art history at the University of Göttingen, the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1928, he completed his PhD, entitled Die Plastik der Lüneburger Goldenen Tafel under Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt, director of the art history seminar in Göttingen. In 1935 he wrote his Habilitationsschrift at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg on Carl Ludwig Fernow. In 1937 he was assistant of Vitzthum in Göttingen, and in 1938 lecturer in art history. During the Nazi era, he promoted a nationalist-defined art history.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Doak S. Campbell
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Doak Sheridan Campbell was from 1941 to 1957 president of Florida State College for Women and its successor coeducational school, Florida State University. He oversaw the creation of this new university. His opposition to the admission of African-American students has caused controversy about the naming of Doak S. Campbell Stadium in his honor.
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Margaret Clapp
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Margaret Antoinette Clapp was an American scholar, educator and Pulitzer Prize winner. She was the president of Wellesley College from 1949 to 1966. During her presidency, she was able to make many improvements to the college campus by increasing the number of faculty members and increasing financial aid for students. Other accomplishments of note during her tenure construction and remodeling of major campus buildings as well as increasing the college endowment fund.
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Tancred Borenius
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Carl Tancred Borenius was a Finnish art historian working in England, who became the first professor of the history of art at University College London. He was a prolific author, and recognised as one of the world's leading experts on Italian art of the early Renaissance.
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Oliver Samuel Tonks
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Oliver Samuel Tonks was an American art historian, educator, and curator. Tonks was Professor of Art History Emeritus at Vassar College. Career Born in Malden, Tonks was educated at Harvard University, where he earned three degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in 1898, a Master of Arts in 1899, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Archeology in 1903. He was the first to be awarded a doctorate at Harvard in that field, and wrote a dissertation on the Brygos Painter. Additionally, Tonks was a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for the 1901 to 1902 academic year. In the follo...
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Irene Emery
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .
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Helmut Ruhemann
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Helmut Ruhemann CBE, was a German painting conservator and restorer, considered the pre-eminent of his profession during his lifetime. Early life and education He was born in Berlin and studied at Karlsruhe, Munich and Paris.
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Robert Kloster
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Robert Kloster was a Norwegian museum director and art historian. Family He was born in Bergen as a son of physician Robert Emil Kloster and Alette "Ada" Falsen Wiesener . In April 1932 in Paris he married Wibecke Trane Kielland , a daughter of Jonas Schanche Kielland and sister of Thor Bendz Kielland.
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