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,
#3001
Max Dvořák
1874 - 1921 (47 years)
Max Dvořák was a Czech-born Austrian art historian. He was a professor of art history at the University of Vienna and a famous member of the Vienna School of Art History, employing a Geistesgeschichte methodology.
Go to Profile#3002
Charles B. Glenn
1871 - 1967 (96 years)
Charles Bowles Glenn was an American educator who served as superintendent of the Birmingham, Alabama school district from 1921 to 1942, and was president of the National Education Association from 1937 through 1938. Glenn was one of the earliest proponents and implementors of character education in schools, and he is the namesake of Charles B. Glenn Middle School—formerly Charles B. Glenn Vocational High School—in Birmingham.
Go to Profile#3003
Carl Peter Thunberg
1743 - 1828 (85 years)
Carl Peter Thunberg, also known as Karl Peter von Thunberg, Carl Pehr Thunberg, or Carl Per Thunberg , was a Swedish naturalist and an "apostle" of Carl Linnaeus. After studying under Linnaeus at Uppsala University, he spent seven years travelling in southern Italy and Asia, collecting and describing people and animals new to European science, and observing local cultures. He has been called "the father of South African botany", "pioneer of Occidental Medicine in Japan", and the "Japanese Linnaeus".
Go to Profile#3004
Nikolay Punin
1888 - 1953 (65 years)
Nikolay Nikolayevich Punin was a Russian art scholar and writer. He edited several magazines, such as Izobrazitelnoye Iskusstvo among others, and was also co-founder of the Department of Iconography in the State Russian Museum. Punin was a lifelong friend and common-law husband of poet Anna Akhmatova who is famous for writing the poem Requiem.
Go to Profile#3005
James H. Dillard
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
James Hardy Dillard , also known as J. H. Dillard, was an educator from Virginia. The son of slaveholders, Dillard was educated at Washington and Lee University and held a variety of teaching positions. In 1891, Dillard was named a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Go to Profile#3006
Marta Traba
1930 - 1983 (53 years)
Marta Traba Taín was an art critic and writer known for her contributions to Latin American art and literature. Biography Traba's parents were Catalan immigrants, Francisco Traba and Marta Taín. She studied Letters at the University of Buenos Aires. Upon graduation she worked at the arts review journal Ver y Estimar , under the editorship of the art critic Jorge Romero Brest.
Go to Profile#3007
Susan Tolman Mills
1826 - 1912 (86 years)
Susan Tolman Mills was the co-founder of Mills College . Background Mills was born on November 18, 1826, in Enosburgh, Vermont. She was one of eight children of John Tolman and Elizabeth Tolman. Her family moved to Ware, Massachusetts by 1836, where her father and brothers expanded the family's tannery business. She graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1845.
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Giovanni Canestrini
1835 - 1900 (65 years)
Giovanni Canestrini was an Italian naturalist and biologist and translator who was a native of Revò. Career He initially studied in Gorizia and Meran, then furthered his education in natural sciences at the University of Vienna. From 1862 to 1869, he was a lecturer at the University of Modena, and in 1869 became a professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at the University of Padua.
Go to Profile#3009
Paul Frankl
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Paul Frankl was an art historian born in Austria-Hungary. Frankl is most known for his writings on the history and principles of architecture, which he famously presented within a Gestalt-oriented framework.
Go to Profile#3010
Vittorino da Feltre
1378 - 1446 (68 years)
Vittorino da Feltre was an Italian humanist and teacher. He was born in Feltre, Belluno, Republic of Venice and died in Mantua. His real name was Vittorino Rambaldoni. It was in Vittorino that the Renaissance idea of the complete man, or l'uomo universale — health of body, strength of character, wealth of mind — reached its first formulation.
Go to Profile#3011
William Henry Hadow
1859 - 1937 (78 years)
Sir William Henry Hadow was a leading educational reformer in Great Britain, a musicologist and a composer. Life Born at Ebrington in Gloucestershire and baptised there on 29 January 1860 by his father, he was the eldest child of the Reverend William Elliot Hadow and his wife Mary Lang Cornish . His grandfather, the Reverend William Thomas Hadow, had married Eleanor Ann Bethune, daughter of Colonel John Drinkwater Bethune.
Go to Profile#3012
Gisela Richter
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Gisela Marie Augusta Richter was a British-American classical archaeologist and art historian. She was a prominent figure and an authority in her field. Early life Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter. Both of her parents and her sister, Irma, were art historians specialised in Italian Renaissance. Richter was educated at Maida Vale School, one of the finest schools for women at the time. She decided to become a classical archaeologist while attending Emmanuel Loewy's lectures at the University of Rome around 1896. In 1901, she began attending Girton College at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3013
Huberto Rohden
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Huberto Rohden Sobrinho, known as Huberto Rohden, was a Brazilian philosopher, educator and theologist. He was born in São Ludgero. A pioneer of transcendentalism in Brazil who wrote more than 100 works, where he taught ecumenical lecture of spiritual approach towards Education, Philosophy, Science, emphasizing self-knowledge.
Go to Profile#3014
Paul Zarifopol
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Paul Zarifopol was a Romanian literary and social critic, essayist, and literary historian. The scion of an aristocratic family, formally trained in both philology and the sociology of literature, he emerged in the 1910s as a rebel, highly distinctive, voice among the Romanian press and book reviewers. He was a confidant and publisher of the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, building his theories on Caragiale's already trenchant appraisals of Romanian society and culture. Zarifopol defended art for art's sake even against the Marxism of his father-in-law, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, and the Poporanism of his friend, Garabet Ibrăileanu.
Go to Profile#3015
William Burns Paterson
1850 - 1915 (65 years)
William Burns Paterson was an educator and horticulturist. He is chiefly known as an educational provider, being involved in establishing Alabama State University. He was a Democrat, a Presbyterian, and a charter member of the Alabama State horticultural society.
Go to Profile#3016
Sayyid Qutb
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
Sayyid Ibrahim Husayn Qutb was an Egyptian author, educator, Islamic scholar, theorist, revolutionary, poet, and a leading member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1966, he was convicted of plotting the assassination of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and was executed by hanging. He is considered as "the Father of Salafi jihadism", the religio-political doctrine that underpins the ideological roots of global jihadist organisations such as al-Qaeda and ISIL.
Go to Profile#3017
Walter Coffey
1876 - 1976 (100 years)
Walter Coffey was the seventh president of the University of Minnesota, serving from 1941 to 1945. Early years Walter Coffey was raised in Hartsville, Indiana and worked with his father as a sheep herder where he began to grow a strong interest in animal husbandry.
Go to Profile#3018
John E. Jacobs
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
John Earl Jacobs was an American educator most notably for serving as an administrator at what is now known as Emporia State University. Before serving as the Kansas State Teachers College interim president of, Jacobs was the Supervisor of Secondary Education at KSTC and served as principal of a couple of high schools before coming to Emporia.
Go to Profile#3019
Irma Salas Silva
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Irma Salas Silva was a distinguished Chilean educator. She was the first Chilean woman to earn a doctorate in education, obtained at Columbia University in 1930. Biography Irma Salas was born in Santiago on 11 March 1903, the daughter of educator and Luisa Silva Molina. She followed in her father's footsteps, becoming a noted academic administrator. She was also an advocate for women's rights and education.
Go to Profile#3020
Booker T. Washington
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite. Washington was from the last generation of Black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centu...
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Horace Walpole
1717 - 1797 (80 years)
Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford , better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whig politician. He had Strawberry Hill House built in Twickenham, southwest London, reviving the Gothic style some decades before his Victorian successors. His literary reputation rests on the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto , and his Letters, which are of significant social and political interest. They have been published by Yale University Press in 48 volumes. In 2017, a volume of Walpole's selected letters was published.
Go to Profile#3022
Rudolf Wittkower
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Rudolf Wittkower was a British art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, who spent much of his career in London, but was educated in Germany, and later moved to the United States. Despite having a British father who stayed in Germany after his studies, he was born and raised in Berlin.
Go to Profile#3023
Josephine Turpin Washington
1861 - 1949 (88 years)
Josephine Turpin Washington was an African-American writer and teacher. A long-time educator and a frequent contributor, Washington devised articles to magazines and newspapers typically concerning some aspect of racism in America. Washington was a great-granddaughter of Mary Jefferson Turpin, a paternal aunt of Thomas Jefferson.
Go to Profile#3024
Maikki Friberg
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
Maria Elisabeth Friberg was a Finnish educator, journal editor, suffragist and peace activist. She is remembered for her involvement in the Finnish women's movement, especially as chair of the Finnish women's rights organisation Suomen Naisyhdistys and as the founder and editor of the women's journal Naisten Ääni . She travelled widely, promoting understanding of Finland abroad while participating in international conferences and contributing to the foreign press.
Go to Profile#3025
Taki Fujita
1898 - 1993 (95 years)
Taki Fujita was a Japanese educator and activist for women's rights. Fujita was president of Tsuda College from 1962 to 1972. Early life and education Fujita was born in Nagoya, and raised in Okinawa and Osaka, the daughter of a judge, Fujita Kikue, and Fujita Kameki. Her parents were Christian and she was baptized as an infant; as an adult she was drawn to the Quaker tradition. She attended Tsuda College beginning in 1916, and graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1925. She returned to the United States in 1935 for further study at Smith College.
Go to Profile#3026
Victor Della-Vos
1829 - 1890 (61 years)
Victor Karlovich Della-Vos was a Russian educationalist and proponent of manual training. Della-Vos graduated from Moscow University in 1853 with a degree in physical and mathematical sciences and soon embarked on his teaching career. In 1858 he went to Paris to study machine tool manufacture. After also visiting London where he studied agricultural machinery he returned to Russia in 1864 to take up the post of professor of mechanics at the Petrovsky Academy. By 1868 he was appointed director of the Moscow Imperial Technical Academy. He became widely known for his combination of both theoreti...
Go to Profile#3027
Emma Elizabeth Johnson
1863 - Present (163 years)
Emma Elizabeth Johnson was an American educator who served as president of Johnson Bible College , in Knoxville, Tennessee, from 1925 until her death. She was the first American woman to serve as president of a co-educational university.
Go to Profile#3028
André Grabar
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
André Nicolaevitch Grabar was a historian of Romanesque art and the art of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Bulgarian Empire. Born and educated in Kiev, Saint Petersburg and Odessa, he spent his career in Bulgaria , France and the United States , and wrote all his papers in French. Grabar was one of the 20th-century founders of the study of the art and icons of the Eastern Roman Empire, adopting a synthetic approach embracing history, theology and interactions with the Islamic world.
Go to Profile#3029
Cees P. M. Van Der Vleuten
#3030
Karl Georg von Raumer
1783 - 1865 (82 years)
Karl Georg von Raumer was a German geologist and educator. Biography Raumer was born in Wörlitz, in Anhalt-Dessau. He was educated at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, and at the mining academy in Freiberg as a student of Abraham Gottlob Werner. In 1811 he became professor of mineralogy at Breslau, and two years later, participated in the German Campaign of 1813. In 1819 he relocated as a professor to the University of Halle, then in 1827 settled at the University of Erlangen as a professor of natural history and mineralogy. Raumer died in Erlangen.
Go to Profile#3031
Leonard Horner
1785 - 1864 (79 years)
Leonard Horner FRSE FRS FGS was a Scottish merchant, geologist and educational reformer. He was the younger brother of Francis Horner. Horner was a founder of the School of Arts of Edinburgh, now Heriot-Watt University and one of the founders of the Edinburgh Academy. A 'radical educational reformer' he was involved in the establishment of University College School. As a commissioner on the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children in Factories, Horner arguably did more to improve the working conditions of women and children in North England than any other person in the 19th century.
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Andrej Dudrovich
1782 - 1830 (48 years)
Andrej Dudrovich was a Russian philosopher, professor and president of Kharkov University during the Age of Enlightenment. Biography Andrej Dudrovich was born in Serbia, then part of the Austrian Empire before emigrating to Imperial Russia. Like many intellectuals of his generation who received an education abroad, he became influenced by Immanuel Kant's moral teachings. His chief work was a doctoral dissertation dealing with Kant while in the class of Johann Baptist Schad, a Benedictine monk who converted to Protestanism and became one of Kant's disciples in Imperial Russia. Dudrovich was a...
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Antoine-Fortuné Marion
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
Antoine-Fortuné Marion was a French naturalist with interests in geology, zoology, and botany. He was also a competent amateur painter. A school friend of Paul Cézanne's in Aix-en-Provence, Marion went on to become professor and director of the Natural History Museum in Marseille. Cézanne painted his portrait in 1866–1867 at the Bastide du Jas de Bouffan.
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Sydney Cockerell
1867 - 1962 (95 years)
Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell was an English museum curator and collector. From 1908 to 1937, he was director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. He was knighted in 1934. Biography Sydney Cockerell made his way initially as clerk in the family coal business, George J. Cockerell & Co., until he met John Ruskin. Around 1887, Cockerell sent Ruskin some sea shells, which he collected.
Go to Profile#3035
Hal Roach
1892 - 1992 (100 years)
Harold Eugene "Hal" Roach Sr. was an American film and television producer, director, screenwriter, and centenarian, who was the founder of the namesake Hal Roach Studios. Roach was active in the industry from the 1910s to the 1990s known for producing a number of successes including the Laurel and Hardy franchise, the films of entertainer Charley Chase, and the Our Gang short film comedy series.
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Boris Vipper
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Boris Robertovich Vipper was a Russian, Latvian and Soviet art historian. Early life and education Boris Robertovich Vipper was born in Moscow, in the Russian Empire, the only son of historian Robert Vipper, who was of Austrian origin , and his wife Anastasiia Vasilievna Akhramovich, an ethnic Belarusian. He attended the VII Moscow Classical Gymnasium, completing his studies in 1906, and applied for entrance to the Imperial Moscow University, where his father was employed. Vipper studied at the historical-philological faculty, graduating in 1911. In 1918 he obtained a master's degree at the s...
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John Finley Crowe
1787 - 1860 (73 years)
John Finley Crowe was a Presbyterian minister and the founder of Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. His residence from 1824 to 1860, the Crowe-Garritt House, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
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Dionýz Ilkovič
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Dionýz Ilkovič was a Czechoslovak physicist and physical chemist of Rusyn ethnicity. Along with Nobel laureate Jaroslav Heyrovský, he helped to establish theoretical basis of polarography. In this field, he is the author of an important result, the Ilkovic's equation. He was also one of the leading figures in modern university-level physics education in Slovakia.
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Richard Ettinghausen
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Richard Ettinghausen Princeton, New Jersey was a German-American historian of Islamic art and chief curator of the Freer Gallery. Education Ettinghausen was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Frankfurt in 1931 in Islamic history and art history.
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François Jules Pictet de la Rive
1809 - 1872 (63 years)
François Jules Pictet-De la Rive was a Swiss zoologist and palaeontologist. Biography He was born in Geneva. He graduated B. Sc. at Geneva in 1829, and pursued his studies for a short time at Paris, where under the influence of Georges Cuvier, de Blainville and others, he worked at natural history and comparative anatomy. On his return to Geneva in 1830 he assisted A. P. de Candolle by giving demonstrations in comparative anatomy. Five years later, when de Candolle retired, Pictet was appointed professor of zoology and comparative anatomy.
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Thomas Jones
1870 - 1955 (85 years)
Thomas Jones, CH was a British civil servant and educationalist, once described as "one of the six most important men in Europe", and also as "the King of Wales" and "keeper of a thousand secrets". Jones served as Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet for nearly twenty years, under four different Prime Ministers.
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Jacob Bigelow
1787 - 1879 (92 years)
Jacob Bigelow was an American physician, botanist and botanical illustrator. He was architect of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts , husband to Mary Scollay, and the father of physician Henry Jacob Bigelow.
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Mary Pickford
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
Gladys Marie Smith , known professionally as Mary Pickford, was a Canadian actress resident in the U.S., and also producer, screenwriter and film studio founder, who was a pioneer in the US film industry with a Hollywood career that spanned five decades.
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Wilbur S. Jackman
1855 - 1907 (52 years)
Wilbur Samuel Jackman was an American educator and one of the originators of the nature study movement. Jackman was born in Mechanicstown, Ohio, and shortly after his birth the family moved to California, Pennsylvania, where he spent his boyhood growing up on a farm that his grandfather had obtained from the local Indians in exchange for a copper kettle. It was his childhood experiences that engendered him with a love of the outdoors and all the plants and animals that live there. Jackman continued his education at the California Normal School, travelling to school and back on horseback. He then went to Meadville College for three years.
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John Warren Davis
1888 - 1980 (92 years)
John Warren Davis was an American educator, college administrator, and civil rights leader. He was the fifth and longest-serving president of West Virginia State University in Institute, West Virginia, a position he held from 1919 to 1953. Born in Milledgeville, Georgia, Davis relocated to Atlanta in 1903 to attend high school at Atlanta Baptist College . He worked his way through high school and college at Morehouse and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1911. At Morehouse, Davis formed associations with John Hope, Mordecai Wyatt Johnson, Samuel Archer, Benjamin Griffith Brawley, Booker T.
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Regnerus Praedinius
1510 - 1559 (49 years)
Regnerus Praedinius or Reinier Veldman was a Dutch humanist, rector, reformer, and teacher. The Praedinius Gymnasium in Groningen is named after him. Johannes Acronius Frisius, Volcher Coiter, and Abel Eppens were among his students. He was born in Winsum as Reinier Veldman. He studied theology at the Fraterhuis in Groningen, and at Leuven, before becoming the rector of the St. Maartens school. He began to find problems in the Catholic Church and sought to reform the system. He was an admirer of Desiderius Erasmus. He later Latinized "Veldman" using the word praedium to Praedinius. Reinier w...
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Karl Friedrich Schimper
1803 - 1867 (64 years)
Karl Friedrich Schimper was a German botanist, naturalist and poet. Life Early life and education Schimper was born in Mannheim, on February 15, 1803, to Friedrich Ludwig Heinrich Schimper and Margaretha Kathar. Jakob. Wilh. V. Furtenbach. He was a theology student at Heidelberg University and taught at Munich University.
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Julius von Schlosser
1866 - 1938 (72 years)
Julius Alwin Franz Georg Andreas Ritter von Schlosser was an Austrian art historian and an important member of the Vienna School of Art History. According to Ernst Gombrich, he was "One of the most distinguished personalities of art history".
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Nathaniel Butler Jr.
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Nathaniel J. Butler was the 12th President of Colby College, Maine, United States from 1896 to 1901. Early life Butler was born in Eastport, Maine, to Rev. Nathaniel and Jeanne Emery Butler. He was educated at Camden High School and Coburn Classical Institute, and graduated from Colby College in 1873.
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Sibyl Moholy-Nagy
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Sibyl Moholy-Nagy was an architectural and art historian. Originally a German citizen, she accompanied her second husband, the Hungarian Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, in his move to the United States. She was the author of a study of his work, Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, plus several other books on architectural history.
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