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,
#2901
Lucy Rider Meyer
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Lucy Jane Rider Meyer was an American social worker, educator, physician, and author who cofounded the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions in Illinois. She is credited with reviving the office of the female deacon in the U.S. Methodist Episcopal Church.
Go to Profile#2902
Edgar Wind
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Edgar Wind was a German-born British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute as well as the first Professor of art history at Oxford University.
Go to Profile#2903
Carl Justi
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Carl Justi was a German art historian, who practised a biographical approach to art history. Professor of art history at the University of Bonn, he wrote three major critical biographies: of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, of Diego Velázquez and of Michelangelo.
Go to Profile#2904
Howard B. Meek
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Howard Bagnall Meek was an American professor who founded Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. He began teaching hotel management at Cornell during 1922, when the subject was part of the university's agricultural college, which operated its home-economics school, rather than a separate unit within the university.
Go to Profile#2905
Millicent Carey McIntosh
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Millicent Carey McIntosh was an educational administrator and American feminist who led the Brearley School , and most prominently Barnard College . The first married woman to head one of the Seven Sisters, she was "considered a national role model for generations of young women who wanted to combine career and family," advocating for working mothers and for child care as a dignified profession.
Go to Profile#2906
Slavko Vorkapich
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Slavoljub "Slavko" Vorkapić , known in English as Slavko Vorkapich, was a Serbian-born Hollywood montagist, an independent cinematic artist, chair of USC School of Cinematic Arts, chair of the Belgrade Film and Theatre Academy, painter, and illustrator. He was a prominent figure of modern cinematography and motion picture film art during the early and mid-20th century and was a cinema theorist and lecturer.
Go to Profile#2907
Johann Adam von Ickstatt
1702 - 1776 (74 years)
Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt was a German educator and director of the University of Ingolstadt. Born in Vockenhausen, he was a major proponent of the Enlightenment in Bavaria. He died in Waldsassen. He was a godfather to Adam Weishaupt.
Go to Profile#2908
Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1945 - 1982 (37 years)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder , sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder, was a German filmmaker, actor, and dramatist. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema movement. Versatile and prolific, his over 40 films span a variety of genres, most frequently blending elements of Hollywood melodrama with social criticism and avant-garde techniques. His films, according to him, explored "the exploitability of feelings". His work was deeply rooted in post-war German culture: the aftermath of Nazism, the German economic miracle, and the terror of the Red Army Faction.
Go to Profile#2909
Annie Webb Blanton
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Annie Webb Blanton was an American suffragist from Texas, educator, and author of a series of grammar textbooks. Blanton was elected Superintendent of Texas Public Instruction in 1918, making her the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office.
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Francis Anderson
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
Sir Francis Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher and educator. Early life Francis Anderson was born in Glasgow, the son of Francis Anderson, a manufacturer, and his wife Elizabeth Anna Lockart, née Ellison. Anderson was educated at Old Wynd and Oatlands public schools and became a pupil-teacher at the age of 14. He went on to the University of Glasgow, matriculating in 1876 and graduated M.A. in 1883. He was awarded Sir Richard Jebb's prize for Greek literature, took first place in the philosophical classes of Professors Veitch and Caird, and won two scholarships. For two years...
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Kenneth John Conant
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Kenneth John Conant was an American architectural historian and educator, who specialized in medieval architecture. Conant is known for his studies of Cluny Abbey. Career Born in Neenah, Conant received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1915. He was considered the academic heir of Herbert Langford Warren, a teacher at Harvard, and through him, of the art historians Charles Eliot Norton and John Ruskin. He served in the 42nd Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Conant later returned to Harvard.
Go to Profile#2912
William Edward Zeuch
1892 - Present (134 years)
William Edward Zeuch was an American socialist, educator, and academic who is best known as a founder and first director of the Commonwealth College in Arkansas. This college is the most well known attempt in Arkansas at establishing a radical labor educational school.
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Kurt Martin
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Kurt Martin was a German art historian. Martin was a professor of art history. His career began in 1927 as curator of the . From 1934 to 1956, he was director of the Staatlichen Kunsthalle Karlsruhe . In 1940 he was appointed Head of the Municipal Museums of Strasbourg as well as Chief Commissioner of the Alsatian Museums. In 1956 he became Director of the Karlsruher Kunstakademie , and in 1957 General Director of the Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen .
Go to Profile#2914
Moina Michael
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Moina Belle Michael was an American professor and humanitarian who conceived the idea of using poppies as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in World War I. Early life Michael was born in 1869 and lived on what is now known as 3698 Moina Michael Road in Good Hope, in Walton County, Georgia. She was the eldest daughter and second of the seven children of John Marion Michael, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, and Alice Sherwood Wise. She was distantly related to General Francis Marion on her father's side, and the Wise family of Virginia state governors on her mother's side.
Go to Profile#2915
Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu was a Romanian pedagogue. Biography Born in 1870 in Pogoanele, Buzău County, he studied for six years at Leipzig University, obtaining his doctorate in philosophy in July 1901 with thesis Über das Leben und die Philosophie Contas. He then became a professor at the University of Bucharest, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1919. A contributor to Convorbiri Literare and România Jună magazines, he helped popularize knowledge of pedagogy in his country. Among his works are a biography of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a book on the phenomenon of education, and one on the problems of Romanian culture.
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Helen Stuart Campbell
1839 - 1918 (79 years)
Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
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Frances St John Chappelle
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John Chappelle was an Assistant in Psychology at the University of Nevada. Biography Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John was born on July 2, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lettie Willoughby St. John, a direct descendant of the first Lord Willoughby and one of the first women to graduate from a medical college. She was also an artist and magazine illustrator.
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Ali al-Qari
Nur ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sultan Muhammad al-Hirawi al-Qari , known as Mulla Ali al-Qari was an Islamic scholar. He was born in Herat, where he received his basic Islamic education. Thereafter, he travelled to Mecca and studied under the scholar Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Haytami Makki, and al-Qari eventually decided to remain in Mecca where he taught, died and was buried.
Go to Profile#2919
William George Constable
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
William George Constable Education Distantly related to the landscape painter John Constable, William George Constable was educated at Derby School, where his father was headmaster, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history, law and economics. In 1909, he was awarded the Whewell Scholarship for International Law. After gaining a First in economics in 1910, he was awarded the McMahon Law Studentship by St John's for four years, then entered the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in May, 1914.
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Thomas Percival Creed
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Sir Thomas Percival Creed, KBE, MC, QC was a lawyer and educationist. Principal of Queen Mary College London from 1952 to 1967, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1964 to 1967.
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May L. Cheney
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
May Lucretia Shepard Cheney was born during the American Civil War in Garden Grove, Iowa, and was named after the month in which she was born, and her maternal grandmother who influenced her childhood. May's early school attendance was in her hometown. She attended high schools in Oakland and Chico, California before enrolling at UCB in 1879. With her widowed mother, she settled at 2020 Hearst Avenue , in a house with a watermill in the rear yard. Residing in the same house was Lemuel Warren Cheney , a law student.
Go to Profile#2922
Chester Lyman
1814 - 1890 (76 years)
Chester Smith Lyman was an American teacher, clergyman and astronomer. Early life and education He was born in Manchester, Connecticut, to Chester and Mary Smith Lyman. Chester is the descendant of Richard Lyman, a settler who arrived in America in 1631. Chester's early education was in a country school, but at an early age he showed a strong interest in astronomy and the sciences. By 1833 he had gained admittance to Yale, and graduated in 1837. In his junior year he became editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and he was a member of Skull and Bones. He served for two years as Superintendent of Ellington School, then studied theology at the Union and Yale seminaries.
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Chloe Clark Willson
1818 - 1874 (56 years)
Chloe Aurelia Clark Willson was an early pioneer of what became the U.S. state of Oregon, and one of the first teachers of the Methodist mission in the Willamette Valley. In 1850, she owned half of the land in Oregon's state capital Salem.
Go to Profile#2924
Benson Dillon Billinghurst
Benson Dillon Billinghurst, often known using his initials as B.D. Billinghurst, was an American educator in Nevada during the early 20th century. Born in Ohio in 1869, he served as the Superintendent of Schools of the Washoe County School District from 1908 until his death in 1935, and was famous for his school building projects, his expansion of the availability and quality of Reno education, the introduction of junior high schools to Nevada, and his influence in education laws and the establishment of the Nevada State Textbook Commission.
Go to Profile#2925
Sailendra Sircar
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Sailendranath Sircar was the fifth and the youngest son of Peary Charan Sircar, he was the founder head master of Swaraswati Institution, established in 1920, now renamed as Sailendra Sircar Vidyalaya, situated at north Kolkata. He was the head examiner in English under Calcutta University, and a gold medalist of the university.
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John Harrison Minnick
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
John Harrison Minnick was an American educator, born at Somerset, Indiana, and educated at Indiana University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and other universities. For several years he taught in high schools in Indiana and Illinois, and from 1911 to 1913 he was critic teacher of mathematics at Indiana University. For two years following he was instructor in mathematics at the Horace Mann School at New York City. In 1916 he became instructor of mathematics in the University of Pennsylvania and was successively assistant professor of education, professor of education, and dean of the school of education at that university.
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James Orton
1830 - 1877 (47 years)
James Orton was an American naturalist who contributed much to the knowledge of South America and the Amazon basin. Biography Orton was the son of Presbyterian clergyman and theologian Azariah Giles Orton. Four of his seven brothers died in infancy, and the family's financial resources were very meager. Early in life he developed an interest in natural history and writing. Financial difficulties and poor health delayed his matriculation at Williams College, where he graduated in 1855. In 1858, he graduated from Andover Theological Seminary. After spending some time in travel in Europe and the East, he was ordained pastor of the Congregational Church in Greene, New York, on July 11, 1860.
Go to Profile#2928
William T. B. Williams
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
William Taylor Burwell Williams was Dean of the College Department at Tuskegee Institute and two-time president of the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools . He was a member of U.S. Commissions on Education in Haiti and the Virgin Islands, and a member of the U.S. War Department Committee on Education and Special Training. Williams worked as a field agent of the Slater and Jeanes Fundss and the General Education Board. He taught at Hampton Institute and was a member of the editorial staff of its journal Southern Workman. In 1934, he was the recipient of the NAACP's Spingarn Med...
Go to Profile#2929
John William Adamson
1857 - 1947 (90 years)
John William Adamson was a British educationist and historian of education. From 1903 to 1924 he was Professor of Education at King's College London. He was the most distinguished historian of education of his day.
Go to Profile#2930
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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George Arliss
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
George Arliss was an English actor, author, playwright, and filmmaker who found success in the United States. He was the first British actor to win an Academy Award – which he won for his performance as Victorian-era British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli in Disraeli – as well as the earliest-born actor to win the honour. He specialized in successful biopics, such as Disraeli, Voltaire , and Cardinal Richelieu , as well as light comedies, which included The Millionaire and A Successful Calamity .
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Maurice Holleaux
1861 - 1932 (71 years)
Maurice Holleaux was a 19th–20th-century French historian, archaeologist and epigrapher, a specialist of Ancient Greece. Biography Années de formation Admitted in the École normale supérieure in 1879, Holleaux was agrégé in history in 1881 and became a member of the French School at Athens in 1882. He then conducted epigraphic explorations in Samos and Rhodes. He devoted thereafter an important scientific activity in the latter city. In 1884 he undertook missions in Asia Minor during which he discovered with Pierre Paris the inscription of Diogenes of Oenoanda. Back in Greece, he excavated in Boeotia the Ptoion sanctuary which had been previously identified by the traveler William Leake.
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Elizabeth Powell Bond
1841 - 1926 (85 years)
Elizabeth Powell Bond was an educator and social activist who was the first Dean of Women at Swarthmore College. Family and education Elizabeth Powell was born in 1841 in Clinton, New York, to a Quaker couple, Catherine Macy Powell and Townsend Powell. Her father was a farmer, and when she was four, the family moved to a farm in Ghent. By the age of 15, she was serving as an assistant teacher at a Friends’ School in the county. She graduated at the age of seventeen from the State Normal School in Albany.
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Elisha Mitchell
1793 - 1857 (64 years)
Elisha Mitchell was an American educator, geologist and Presbyterian minister. His geological studies led to the identification of North Carolina's Mount Mitchell as the highest peak in the United States east of the Mississippi River.
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Ernst Langlotz
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Ernst Langlotz was a German classical archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in Greek sculpture of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. He studied classical archaeology, philology and art history at the universities of Leipzig and Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1921. As a student, his influences were archaeologist Franz Studniczka and art historian Heinrich Wölfflin . Following graduation, he took a study trip to Italy and Greece, where he met with Ernst Buschor in Athens. In 1925 he qualified as a lecturer at the University of Würzburg, and subsequently worked as a conservator at th...
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Jennie Fowler Willing
1834 - 1916 (82 years)
Jennie Fowler Willing was a Canadian-born American educator, author, preacher, social reformer, and suffragist. She married a lawyer and Methodist pastor at age 19. In 1873, she and her husband became professors at Illinois Wesleyan University. In addition to teaching, she was a leader in the temperance movement. Willing came to notice when she joined the Illinois Woman's State Temperance Union, serving as its leader for some years. She and Emily Huntington Miller were involved with creating and presiding over the First Woman's National Temperance Convention of 1874 in Cleveland where the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union was formed.
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Victor Bursian
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Victor Robertovich Bursian was a Soviet scientist who worked on theoretical physics, geophysics, electricity and thermodynamics, crystal physics, and the theory of electrical resistivity tomography.
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Joseph Cummings
1817 - 1890 (73 years)
Joseph Cummings was an American academic who served as the 5th president of Wesleyan University from 1857 to 1875, the 5th president of Northwestern University from 1881 to 1890, and the president of Genesee College from 1854 to 1857.
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Botho Graef
1857 - 1917 (60 years)
Franz Botho Graef was a German classical archaeologist and art historian. His father was painter Gustav Graef, and his sister, Sabine Lepsius, was also an artist of some note. Graef taught at the University of Jena from 1904 until 1917.
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Rufus Early Clement
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Rufus Early Clement was an American academic administrator and university president. He served as the sixth and longest-serving president of the historically black Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.
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William Richardson
1743 - 1814 (71 years)
William Richardson FRSE was a Scottish classicist and literary scholar. In 1783 he was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life Born in Aberfoyle, Perthshire, he was the son of Rev. James Richardson, the Church of Scotland parish minister of the same parish in which William was first educated. William attended the University of Glasgow in 1757 where he focused on his talent for learning languages. He graduated MA from the University in 1763 and was employed by Charles Cathcart, 9th Lord Cathcart, as tutor to his two sons.
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Mary Harriott Norris
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Mary Harriott Norris was an American author and educator. Born in Boonton, New Jersey to Charles Bryan Norris and Mary Lyon Kerr, she was educated at Vassar College, where she graduated with honor, receiving an A.B. degree in 1870. Two years later in 1872 she was invited back to deliver the annual commencement address to the college. She became a writer of short stories, novels, and educational articles; she edited several works and gave a number of lectures. Norris was a regular contributor to the Boston Journal of Education.
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Mary Mitchell Birchall
1846 - 1898 (52 years)
Mary Mitchell Birchall, born Mary Wheelwright Mitchell , was the first woman in New England to earn a bachelor's degree when she graduated from Bates College in 1869. She later served as a professor at Vassar College and founded a girls' school in Boston.
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James Fitzjames Duff
1898 - 1970 (72 years)
Sir James Fitzjames Duff was an English academic and Vice-chancellor of Durham University. The son of James Duff Duff, he was educated at Winchester College then at Trinity College, Cambridge. In the 1920s, he conducted pioneering research with Godfrey Thomson on the relationship between IQ and social class, now regarded as controversial. He was Professor of Education at the University of Manchester from 1932 to 1937, then Warden of Durham University from 1937 until 1960. During this time, he held the position of Vicechancellor for 6 periods of two years, in alternation with the Rector of Ki...
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María Teresa Babín Cortés
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
María Teresa Babín Cortés was a Puerto Rican educator, literary critic, and essayist. She also wrote poetry and plays. Among her best-known works is Panorama de la Cultura Puertorriqueña and several essays on Federico García Lorca.
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Ole Borch
1626 - 1690 (64 years)
Ole Borch was a Danish scientist, physician, grammarian, and poet. He was royal physician to both Kings Frederick III of Denmark and Christian V of Denmark. He was the founder of Borchs Kollegium and is noted for being the influential instructor of scientist Nicolas Steno.
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