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,
#2951
Seiichi Tejima
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Incorporates translated material from the article in the Japanese Wikipedia Seiichi Tejima was a Japanese educator of the Meiji period. Principal of the Tokyo Technical School, Tokyo Technical High School and Tokyo Higher Technical School, the former constituent parts of the current Tokyo Institute of Technology. A prominent advocate for technical education, Tejima became the second president of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and served in this capacity from 1890-1898, 1899-1901 and 1901-1916.
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Louisa Macdonald
1858 - 1949 (91 years)
Louisa Macdonald was an educationist and women's suffragist. Early life and education Louisa Macdonald was born in 1858 in Arbroath, Scotland, the eleventh child of Ann and John Macdonald, town clerk and lawyer. Louisa and her sister Isabella enrolled at the University College, London, where they were among the first residents in College Hall. Macdonald graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1884 with first class honours in classics and honours in German. She graduated with a Master of Arts in classics in 1886 and took up an immediate career in education by providing lectures and private lesso...
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Johann Weikhard von Valvasor
1641 - 1693 (52 years)
Johann Weikhard Freiherr von Valvasor or Johann Weichard Freiherr von Valvasor or simply Valvasor was a natural historian and polymath from Carniola, present-day Slovenia, and a fellow of the Royal Society in London.
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Carlos Albizu Miranda
1920 - 1984 (64 years)
Carlos Albizu Miranda is the first Hispanic educator to have a North American University renamed in his honor and one of the first Hispanics to earn a Ph.D. in psychology in the United States. Early years Albizu Miranda, cousin of the Puerto Rican Nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos, was born in Ponce, the second largest city in Puerto Rico located in the southern region of the island. His family moved to New York City where he received his primary and secondary education. Albizu Miranda and his family returned to Puerto Rico and he enrolled in the University of Puerto Rico where in 1943 h...
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William Johnson
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
William Harding Johnson was an American educator who served as superintendent of Chicago Public Schools. His decade-long tenure as superintendent was controversial, and ended with him being pressured to resign after the National Education Association released a report which detailed corrupt and unethical actions by Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education, which resulted in the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools threatening to revoke its accreditation of Chicago Public Schools' high schools. Despite his controversy, he had a number of successes, such as being credited with decreased school truancy.
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Peary Charan Sarkar
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
Peary Charan Sircar , was an educationist and textbook writer in nineteenth century Bengal. His series of Reading Books introduced a whole generation of Bengalis to the English language, sold in the millions and were translated into every major Indian language. He was also a pioneer of women's education in Bengal and was called 'Arnold of the East'.
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Alexis F. Lange
1862 - 1924 (62 years)
Alexis Frederick Lange was the Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley and led the effort to found the community college system in the state of California. External links Lange bust in Haviland Hall
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Robert Kibbee
1921 - 1982 (61 years)
Robert Joseph Kibbee was an American university administrator who was Chancellor of the City University of New York. Biography Kibbee was born on Staten Island, New York. His father was Hollywood actor Guy Kibbee and his mother was Helen Shay Kibbee; his parents separated when he was a young boy. He attended Xavier High School in Manhattan, New York, and earned a bachelor's degree at Fordham University in 1943.
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Ernst Meumann
1862 - 1915 (53 years)
Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm Meumann was a German educator, pedagogist and psychologist, the founder of experimental pedagogy. Works Die Sprache des Kindes Über Ökonomie und Technik des Lernens Der Verzug des Schuldners nach dem Recht des BGB für das Deutsche Reich Intelligenz und Wille. Ökonomie und Technik des Gedächtnisses Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die experimentelle Pädagogik System der Ästhetik Abriss der experimentellen Pädagogik The psychology of learning: an experimental investigation of the economy and technique of memory. 2012, Nabu press. ISBN 9781279520284
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Samuel Silas Curry
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
Samuel Silas Curry was an American professor of elocution and vocal expression. He is the namesake of Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts. Early life and education Born on a small farm in Chatata, Tennessee, he was the son of James Campbell Curry and Nancy Young Curry, and shared kinship with famed frontiersmen Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Growing up on a frontier farm, he learned what it meant to work hard and gained a love of the natural world which would influence his later work. He was a teenager during the tumultuous years of the American Civil War, and experienced hardships when ...
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Janet Erskine Stuart
1857 - 1914 (57 years)
Janet Erskine Stuart, RSCJ , also known as Mother Janet Stuart, was an English Roman Catholic nun and educator. She founded a number of schools. Stuart left the Church of England and converted to the Catholic Church in 1879. She joined the Society of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton three years later and, in 1911, became Superior General of the Society.
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William Jasper Kerr
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
William Jasper Kerr was an American academic in the states of Oregon and Utah. A native of Utah, he served as president of Oregon State Universitynot to be confused with Brigham Young University Early life and education Kerr was born on November 17, 1863, in Richmond in the then Utah Territory. He received a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Utah in 1885. He planned to study law, and turned down appointment to West Point in order to go into law, but never did go into the profession. He married Leonora Hamilton in 1885, and had four daughters and two sons.
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Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.
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Hans Hess
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Hans Hess was a German museum curator who worked in Leicester and York. Biography He was born in Erfurt, the son of a successful Jewish shoe manufacturer and patron of the arts Alfred Hess and his wife Thekla Hess, née Pauson . The artists Feininger, Kandinsky, Klee, and Pechstein were family friends as well as people like who lived in the town where his mother was born and raised. Hans Hess attended the reform boarding schools Wickersdorf Free School Community and Schule am Meer where he also got confronted with a rich variety of expressionist arts, artists like Christian Rohlfs, their pai...
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Martin Hattala
1821 - 1903 (82 years)
Martin Hattala was a Slovak pedagogue, Roman Catholic theologian and linguist. He is best known for his reform of the Štúr's Slovak language, so-called Hodža-Hattala reform, in which he introduced the etymological principle to the Slovak language.
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Johann Georg Gmelin
1709 - 1755 (46 years)
Johann Georg Gmelin was a German naturalist, botanist and geographer. Early life and education Gmelin was born in Tübingen, the son of a professor at the University of Tübingen. He was a gifted child and began attending university lectures at the age of 14. In 1727, he graduated with a medical degree at the age of 18. He then travelled to St Petersburg and obtained a fellowship at the Academy of Sciences in 1728. He lectured at the university from 1730, and in the following year was appointed professor of chemistry and natural history.
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Chandramukhi Basu
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Chandramukhi Bose , a Bengali from Dehradun, which was located in the United Provinces of Agra and OudhBA Early life The daughter of Bhuban Mohan Bose, she passed the First Arts examination from Dehradun Native Christian School in 1880. At that time Bethune School, to which she wanted to enter; did not admit non-Hindu girls, and as such she had to be admitted at the First Arts level in Reverend Alexander Duff's Free Church Institution . In 1876, because of the discriminatory official stances towards gender, she had to be given special permission to appear for the F.A. examination. As the onl...
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George Oprescu
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
George Oprescu was a Romanian historian, art critic and collector. Born into a poor family, he developed a taste for the fine arts early in life, as well as for the French language, which he taught into his forties. Subsequently, working for the League of Nations, he turned his attention to art history, becoming a professor in the field at the University of Bucharest in 1931. He was also a museum curator and magazine editor, and in 1949 established the Institute of Art History, which he led for two decades until his death. His substantial private collection is now in the hands of various inst...
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Erastus Milo Cravath
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Erastus Milo Cravath was a pastor and American Missionary Association official who after the American Civil War, helped found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and numerous other historically black colleges in Georgia and Tennessee for the education of freedmen. He also served as president of Fisk University for more than 20 years.
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Alfred H. Barr Jr.
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Alfred Hamilton Barr Jr. was an American art historian and the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From that position, he was one of the most influential forces in the development of popular attitudes toward modern art; for example, his arranging of the blockbuster Van Gogh exhibition of 1935, in the words of author Bernice Kert, was "a precursor to the hold Van Gogh has to this day on the contemporary imagination."
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Charles Duncan McIver
1860 - 1906 (46 years)
Charles Duncan McIver was the founder and first president of the institution now known as The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Life and career He was born 1860 in Lee County, North Carolina and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, in 1881. McIver became a teacher in Durham and Winston North Carolina until 1889 when he and Edwin A. Alderman were chosen by the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction to hold teacher institutes across the state.
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John Milton Gregory
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
John Milton Gregory was an American educator and the first president of the University of Illinois, then known as Illinois Industrial University. Early life John Milton Gregory was born on July 16, 1822, in Sand Lake, New York. He graduated from Union College in 1846. He then spent two years studying law, but ultimately entered the ministry and became a Baptist clergyman.
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David Yellin
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
David Yellin was an educator, a researcher of the Hebrew language and literature, a politician, one of the leaders of the Yishuv, the founder of the first Hebrew College for Teachers, one of the founders of the Hebrew Language Committee and the Israel Teachers Union, and the Zikhron Moshe neighborhood of Jerusalem.
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Auguste Angellier
1848 - 1911 (63 years)
Auguste Angellier was the first teacher of language and English literature at the Faculté de Lettres of Lille, before becoming its dean from 1897 to 1900. A literary critic and historian of literature, he was also a poet, and made sensation at the Sorbonne attacking the theories of Hippolyte Taine in his thesis about Robert Burns in 1893.
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John Langalibalele Dube
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
John Langalibalele Dube OLG was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet. He was the founding president of the South African Native National Congress , which became the African National Congress in 1923. He was an uncle to Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, with whom he founded SANNC. Dube served as the president of SANNC between 1912 and 1917. He was brought to America by returning missionaries and attended Oberlin Preparatory Academy.
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Otto Pächt
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Otto Pächt was an Austrian art historian and one of the representatives of the second wave of the Vienna School of Art History. He mostly wrote on the medieval and Renaissance art of Europe. An exile from the Nazis, he taught in England and United States, before returning to Austria in 1963.
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Madan Mohan Malaviya
1861 - 1946 (85 years)
Madan Mohan Malaviya was an Indian scholar, educational reformer and politician notable for his role in the Indian independence movement. He was president of the Indian National Congress four times and the founder of Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha. He was addressed as Pandit, a title of respect, and also as Mahamana .
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Cesare Brandi
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Cesare Brandi was an art critic and historian, specialist in conservation-restoration theory. In 1939 he became the first director of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome. His main books on art interpretation are Le due vie , and Teoria generale della critica . Le due vie was presented and debated in Rome by Roland Barthes, Giulio Carlo Argan and Emilio Garroni. The philosopher he felt mostly closer to was Heidegger, although their positions didn't coincide; for this, he felt also closer to Derrida, particularly to his theorization of Différance.
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Fritz Lang
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Friedrich Christian Anton Lang , better known as Fritz Lang , was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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Peter Noikov
1868 - 1921 (53 years)
Peter Noikov was a Bulgarian educator and the first Bulgarian professor in pedagogic. Noikov was born in Yambol. He worked as a teacher and graduated from a secondary school in Sofia. In 1893 the Ministry of Education sent him to a course in Switzerland. The same year, he enrolled at the University of Leipzig, studying philosophy and pedagogy under Wilhelm Wundt, Friedrich Paulsen, Johannes Volkelt and Carl Stumpf. He made PhD in 1898 .
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John M. Bloss
1839 - 1905 (66 years)
John McKnight Bloss was an American Civil War soldier who had an influence on the Battle of Antietam and was later President of Oregon Agricultural College from 1892 until 1896. Early life and education He was born in New Philadelphia, Indiana in 1839.
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Manolis Triantafyllidis
1883 - 1959 (76 years)
Manolis A. Triantafyllidis was a major representative of the demotic movement in education in Greece. He was mostly active in Thessaloniki, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is well known for his comprehensive grammar of Modern Greek.
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Louis P. Bénézet
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Louis Paul Bénézet was an American educator and writer who pioneered the reform of school education in the early twentieth century. Early career Bénézet was principal and football coach of Central High School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, from 1907 to 1908. From 1916 to 1924, Bénézet was superintendent of schools in Evansville, Indiana and, from 1924 to 1938, in Manchester, New Hampshire.
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Munier Choudhury
1925 - 1971 (46 years)
Munier Choudhury was a Bangladeshi educationist, playwright, literary critic and political dissident. He was a victim of the mass killing of Bangladeshi intellectuals in 1971. He was awarded Independence Day Award in 1980, by the then president Ziaur Rahman's government, posthumously.
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John Canaday
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
John Edwin Canaday was a leading American art critic, author and art historian. Early life and education John Canaday was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, to Franklin and Agnes F. Canaday. His family moved to Dallas when Canaday was seven and later moved to San Antonio, where he attended Main Avenue High School.
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Richard Copley Christie
1830 - 1901 (71 years)
Richard Copley Christie was an English lawyer, university teacher, philanthropist and bibliophile. Early life and education He was born at Lenton in Nottinghamshire, the son of a mill owner. He was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford where he was tutored by Mark Pattison, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1857. He also held numerous academic appointments, notably the professorships of history from 1854 to 1856 and of political economy from 1855 to 1866 at Owens College.
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Ben Bowen Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Sir Ben Bowen Thomas was a Welsh civil servant and university President. He served as Permanent Secretary to the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Education from 1945 to 1963, and was President of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1964 to 1975. In June 1977 Thomas was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University.
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John Huston
1906 - 1987 (81 years)
John Marcellus Huston was an American film director, screenwriter and actor. He wrote the screenplays for most of the 37 feature films he directed, many of which are today considered classics. Many of his films involved themes such as religion, meaning, truth, freedom, psychology, colonialism, and war. He received numerous accolades including two Academy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards. He also received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and the BAFTA Fellowship in 1980.
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Edwin C. Hewett
1828 - 1905 (77 years)
Edwin C. Hewett was a professor and president at Illinois State Normal University, now known as Illinois State University. He was a prominent president in the early years of the university and an outspoken advocate for equal education.
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Alois Riegl
1858 - 1905 (47 years)
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. He was one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline, and one of the most influential practitioners of formalism.
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Syed Ahmad Khan
1817 - 1898 (81 years)
Sir Syed Ahmad Khan , also spelled Sayyid Ahmad Khan, was an Indian Muslim reformer, philosopher, and educationist in nineteenth-century British India. Though initially espousing Hindu–Muslim unity, he later became the pioneer of Muslim nationalism in India and is widely credited as the father of the two-nation theory, which formed the basis of the Pakistan movement. Born into a family with strong ties to the Mughal court, Ahmad studied science and the Quran within the court. He was awarded an honorary LLD from the University of Edinburgh in 1889.
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Niels Laurits Høyen
1798 - 1870 (72 years)
Niels Laurits Andreas Høyen is considered to be the first Danish art historian and critic. He promoted a Danish nationalistic art through his writings and lectures, and exerted a far reaching effect on contemporary artists. His work in various cultural institutions helped steer the development of Danish art during the mid-19th century.
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Gustav Friedrich Waagen
1794 - 1868 (74 years)
Gustav Friedrich Waagen was a German art historian. His opinions were greatly respected in England, where he was invited to give evidence before the royal commission inquiring into the condition and future of the National Gallery, for which he was a leading candidate to become director. He died on a visit to Copenhagen in 1868.
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David McCutchion
1930 - 1972 (42 years)
David McCutchion was an English-born academic, and a pioneer in a number of original strands of scholarship in Indian studies before his early death at age 41. Popularly known as "Davidbabu", in his short life, he made a major contribution to the study of Hindu terracotta and brick temples of Bengal and was also one of the first scholars to write a study of the emerging field of Indian writing in English.
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Joachim von Sandrart
1606 - 1688 (82 years)
Joachim von Sandrart was a German Baroque art-historian and painter, active in Amsterdam during the Dutch Golden Age. He is most significant for his collection of biographies of Dutch and German artists the Teutsche Academie, published between 1675 and 1680.
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Margaret Tuke
1862 - 1947 (85 years)
Dame Margaret Janson Tuke was a British academic and educator. She was the youngest child of the philanthropist James Hack Tuke. She was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1932.
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Mary Ann Shadd
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
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Julia Ettie Crane
1855 - 1923 (68 years)
Julia Ettie Crane , also known as Julia Etta Crane, was an American music educator and the founder of the Crane School of Music. This was the first school specifically created for the training of public school music teachers. She is among the most important figures in the history of American music education. Crane was a student of Manuel García.
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Kawai Michi
1877 - 1953 (76 years)
Kawai Michi was a Japanese educator, Christian activist, and proponent of Japanese-Western ties before, during, and after World War II. She served as the first Japanese National Secretary of the YWCA of Japan and founded Keisen University.
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