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.
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List of the most influential people in Education,
#3051
Christian Gueintz
1592 - 1650 (58 years)
Christian Gueintz was a teacher and writer-grammarian. He was qualified and taught in several mainstream subjects of the time, notably philosophy, theology, and law. He lived during the first half of the seventeenth century, a period characterised by Baroque architecture and, in northern Germany, repeatedly disrupted by destructive war, which at various points had a dislocating impact on his career, and through which he demonstrated impressive qualities of persistence.
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George Herbert Carpenter
1865 - 1939 (74 years)
George Herbert Carpenter was a British naturalist and entomologist, born in the Peckham district of southeast London in 1865, and died in Belfast on 22 January 1939. His main interests were in the study of insects and arachnids, zoogeography, and economic zoology. In addition to numerous contributions to scientific journals and Encyclopædia Britannica, he authored five books.
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Althea Sherman
1853 - 1943 (90 years)
Althea Rosina Sherman was an American illustrator, educator, self-taught ornithologist, and writer who commissioned the building of the "Chimney Swifts' Tower" in Clayton County, Iowa. This structure enabled her to observe and report on the life cycle of chimney swifts, the first to complete such investigations. She published more than 70 articles in scientific and ornithological journals during her career. Sherman was elected as a member of the American Ornithologists' Union and was listed in the third edition of American Men of Science. Additionally, her work as an illustrator, particularly...
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Mable E. Buland Campbell
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Mable Electa Buland Campbell was a Professor of English in Washington State during the early 20th century, and was, at one time, the youngest person to hold a PH.D. in the United States. Buland was also active in women's groups associated with women's suffrage.
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William Chapman Hewitson
1806 - 1878 (72 years)
William Chapman Hewitson was a British naturalist. A wealthy collector, Hewitson was particularly devoted to Coleoptera and Lepidoptera and, also, to birds' nests and eggs. His collection of butterflies, collected by him as well as purchased from travellers throughout the world, was one of the largest and most important of his time. He contributed to and published many works on entomology and ornithology and was an accomplished scientific illustrator.
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Petronėlė Lastienė
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Petronėlė Lastienė Sirutytė was a Lithuanian teacher and university professor. She was recognized as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for rescuing Jewish children from the Kaunas Ghetto during the Holocaust.
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William Hallock Johnson
1865 - 1963 (98 years)
William Hallock Johnson was an American educator who served as president of the historically black Lincoln University of Pennsylvania from 1926 to 1936. He had a liberalizing effect on the institution, presiding over the appointment of its first Black faculty member, and substantially reduced the university's debt.
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Jack Smith
1932 - 1989 (57 years)
Jack Smith was an American filmmaker, actor, and pioneer of underground cinema. He is generally acclaimed as a founding father of American performance art, and has been critically recognized as a master photographer.
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Arthur A. O'Leary
1887 - 1962 (75 years)
Arthur Aloysius O'Leary was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit, who served as president of Georgetown University in from 1935 to 1942. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied at Gonzaga College before entering the Society of Jesus and continuing his education at St. Andrew-on-Hudson and Woodstock College. He then taught at St. Andrew-on-Hudson and Georgetown University, where he eventually became the university's librarian, and undertook a major improvement of the Georgetown University Library. O'Leary then assumed the presidency of the university in the midst of the Great Depression and, l...
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Winfield Scott Chaplin
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Winfield Scott Chaplin was the chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1891 until 1907. Early life Winfield Scott Chaplin was born in Maine in 1847 and graduated from West Point in 1870 as a second lieutenant of artillery. After resigning in 1872, Chaplin held a number of academic positions in civil and mechanical engineering; including Maine State College, Imperial University in Tokyo, Harvard University, and Union College. He served as dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard for six years before being named Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis at age 43...
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Walter Fong
1866 - 1906 (40 years)
Walter Ngon Fong was an American educator, missionary and linguist who founded the first technical college in Hong Kong. He was Stanford University's first Chinese graduate. Early life Fong was born on 1 April 1866 to a humble farming family in the village of Sunning, Guangdong, China. At 15, he emigrated to California, United States, where he initially attended a Presbyterian Mission. While later working at the Chinese Methodist School in San Jose, he pursued further studies at the University of the Pacific from which he graduated in 1892. He went on to be the first Chinese student to g...
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Cornelius Beach Bradley
1843 - 1936 (93 years)
Cornelius Beach Bradley was an American English-language scholar. He served as professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley , and also extensively studied the Thai language. Bradley was born and grew up in Siam, the son of missionary Dan Beach Bradley, and also did missionary work in the country after graduating from Oberlin College in the United States. He returned to the United States in 1874, becoming a teacher and vice-principal at Oakland High School, before joining the faculty of the University of California in 1882. He was also known for mountaineering, especially in...
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Hermann Board
1867 - 1918 (51 years)
Hermann Board was a German architect and art historian. Life Born in Essen, Board was the son of the master mason Hermann Board and attended the municipal Realschule in Essen. He then completed a four-year apprenticeship as an architect and attended the municipal further education school in Essen, the commercial technical school in Cologne and the Technical University of Berlin. Afterwards, he worked for seven years in the construction office of the mining company and also taught in the construction classes of the municipal technical and further education schools in Essen. This was followed...
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John Strong
1868 - 1945 (77 years)
John Strong CBE FRSE FEIS LLD was a 20th-century British educationalist. He was one of the creators of the Education Act 1918. This brought the many poorly-funded private Catholic schools in Scotland into state control.
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Elisabeth Neurdenburg
1882 - 1957 (75 years)
Elisabeth Neurdenburg was a Dutch art historian. She contributed to the large inventory of 17th-century Dutch paintings by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, and became a specialist on Dutch Kraak ware. She was a close friend of the Dutch art historian and museum director Ida Caroline Eugenie Peelen.
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Sidney Olcott
1873 - 1949 (76 years)
Sidney Olcott was a Canadian-born film producer, director, actor and screenwriter. Biography Born John Sidney Allcott in Toronto, he became one of the first great directors of the motion picture business. With a desire to be an actor, a young Sidney Olcott went to New York City where he worked in the theatre until 1904 when he performed as a film actor with the Biograph Studios.
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Con Leventhal
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
A.J. Con Leventhal was an Irish lecturer, essayist, and critic. Early life and education Leventhal was born Abraham Jacob Leventhal in Lower Clanbrassil Street, Dublin on 9 May 1896. His parents were Rosa and Moses Leventhal. His father was a draper, and his mother was a poet. She was a Zionist, who was a founding member of the Women's Zionist Society. He lived in the "Little Jerusalem" of Dublin, the area around the South Circular Road, in his youth. He attended Wesley College, Dublin, and then Trinity College Dublin to study modern languages. He edited the TCD student magazine in 1918. I...
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Donald Brittain
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Donald Code Brittain, was a film director and producer with the National Film Board of Canada. Career Fields of Sacrifice is considered Brittain's first major film as director. His other notable directorial credits include the 1964 feature documentary Bethune, 1965 documentaries Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen and Memorandum and the Genie Award-winning 1979 documentary Paperland: The Bureaucrat Observed. He also directed the first-ever IMAX film, Tiger Child for Expo '70, and Earthwatch, a 70mm film for Expo 86.
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William Suida
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
William Suida, born Wilhelm Emil Suida was an eminent Austrian art historian and art collector and "one of the greatest connoisseurs of Italian art." He published books and essays in multiple languages about numerous artists and schools of art. He and his heirs amassed a large private collection that in 1999 was acquired by the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, where many paintings from the Suida-Manning Collection are on permanent display.
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Émil Goeldi
1859 - 1917 (58 years)
Émil August Goeldi , was a Swiss-Brazilian naturalist and zoologist. He was the father of Oswaldo Goeldi, a noted Brazilian engraver and illustrator. Biography Goeldi studied zoology in Jena, Germany with Ernst Haeckel, and in 1884 he was invited by Ladislau de Souza Mello Netto, the influential director of the Brazilian Museu Imperial e Nacional, to work at that institution. Goeldi arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1885 to work in the National Museum
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Igino Benvenuto Supino
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Igino Benvenuto Supino was an Italian painter, art critic, and historian. Biography Igino was born to a prominent and erudite Jewish family of Pisa; his father, Moises, was a collector of medieval seals, coins and medals, who donated his collection to the Museum of Pisa.
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Cyrus Nutt
1814 - 1875 (61 years)
Cyrus Nutt served as the fifth president of Indiana University. Biography Cyrus Nutt was born in Southington Township, Trumbull County, Ohio on September 4, 1814. His father was James Nutt and his mother was Mary Viets who married in 1806. Cyrus was the second son, with one brother and two sisters who all lived in a log cabin on a piece of land next to a large farm belonging James father-in-law.
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John D. Whitney
1850 - 1917 (67 years)
John Dunning Whitney was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became the president of Georgetown University in 1898. Born in Massachusetts, he joined the United States Navy at the age of sixteen, where he was introduced to Catholicism by way of a book that accidentally came into his possession and prompted him to become a Catholic. He entered the Society of Jesus and spent the next twenty-five years studying and teaching mathematics at Jesuit institutions around the world, including in Canada, England, Ireland, and around the United States in New York, Maryland, Boston, and Louisiana. ...
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Li Shizeng
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Li Shizeng , born Li Yuying, was an educator, promoter of anarchist doctrines, political activist, and member of the Chinese Nationalist Party in early Republican China. After coming to Paris in 1902, Li took a graduate degree in chemistry and biology, and then along with Wu Zhihui and Zhang Renjie, cofounded the Chinese anarchist movement. He was a supporter of Sun Yat-sen. He organized cultural exchange between France and China, established the first factory in Europe to manufacture and sell beancurd, and created Diligent Work-Frugal Study programs which brought Chinese students to France for work in factories.
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Wilhelm Martin
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Wilhelm Martin was a German-Dutch art historian. Wilhelm Martin was born in 1876 in Quakenbrück, Germany as the son of Karl Martin, a geologist, and Ana Fittica. When his father became a professor at the University of Leiden in 1877, the family moved to the Netherlands. Wilhelm's two younger brothers, Herman Martin and Hans Martin were both born in the Netherlands.
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John Smith
1825 - 1910 (85 years)
John Smith was a Scottish dentist, philanthropist and pioneering educator. The founder of the Edinburgh school of dentistry, he served as president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and president of the British Dental Association. He was the official surgeon/dentist to Queen Victoria when in Scotland.
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F. Clever Bald
1897 - 1970 (73 years)
Frederick Clever Bald was a teacher and authority on early Michigan history and served as director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. Following service in France with an ambulance unit during World War I, Bald completed his college education and embarked on a teaching career in Detroit, Michigan before returning to graduate school to study the history of the Northwest Territory. The subject of his dissertation was Detroit during its first decade under American occupation, subsequently published as Detroit's First American Decade 1796 to 1805. Bald also authored the book Michigan in Four Centuries as well as numerous articles.
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Charles Chauvel
1897 - 1959 (62 years)
Charles Edward Chauvel OBE was an Australian filmmaker, producer and screenwriter and nephew of Australian army General Sir Harry Chauvel. He is noted for writing and directing the films Forty Thousand Horsemen in 1940 and Jedda in 1955. His wife, Elsa Chauvel, was a frequent collaborator on his filmmaking projects.
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Matteo Marangoni
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Matteo Marangoni was an Italian art historian, art critic and composer. Marangoni's art criticism aimed at identifying pure figurative values, in which an artwork's poetic values are identified. His books are positively influenced by the school of Benedetto Croce and Heinrich Wölfflin, clarifying their concepts on the basis of observation and following logic as a science of pure concept.
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Rachel Elfreda Fowler
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Rachel Elfreda Fowler was an English literary scholar and lecturer in art and history at the University of Oxford. Early life Rachel Fowler was born in London on 10 December 1872, the youngest daughter of Sir Robert Fowler , member of parliament and Lord Mayor of London, and his wife Sarah Charlotte Fowler, née Fox. Elfreda was one of eleven children. She received her advanced education at Westfield College and then at the University of Oxford where she studied modern languages.
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Agathon Benary
1807 - 1860 (53 years)
Karl Albert Agathon Benary was a German classical philologist. He was the brother of orientalist Franz Ferdinand Benary . He received his education at the gymnasiums in Göttingen and Erfurt, where he was a student of Franz Ernst Heinrich Spitzner. From 1824 to 1827 he studied classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Halle, obtaining his doctorate with the dissertation "De Aeschyli Prometheo soluto". At Halle he was especially influenced by the teachings of Christian Karl Reisig. After graduation, he worked as a high school teacher in Berlin, and in the meantime, continued his philological studies as a pupil of Franz Bopp.
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Johannes Wilde
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Johannes Wilde CBE was a Hungarian art historian and teacher of art history. He later became an Austrian, and then a British, citizen. He was a noted expert on the drawings of Michelangelo. Wilde was a pioneer of the use of X-rays as a tool for the study of both the creation and the state of conservation of paintings. From 1948 to 1958 he was deputy director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.
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Karl Holzinger
1892 - 1954 (62 years)
Karl John Holzinger was an American educational psychologist known for his work in psychometrics. Education Holzinger received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from the University of Minnesota in 1915 and 1917, respectively. He then attended the University of Chicago, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1922. He subsequently studied at University College London with both Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman. Holzinger became interested in intelligence testing through his work with Spearman.
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Thomas Cooke Middleton
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Thomas Cooke Middleton was born into a Quaker family on March 30, 1842 in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania. At the age of twelve, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic faith with his mother and five sisters. He became a novice in the Order of St. Augustine in Tolentine, Italy in 1858 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1864.
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Francis Klingender
1907 - 1955 (48 years)
Francis Donald Klingender was a Marxist art historian and exponent of Kunstsoziologie whose uncompromising views meant that he never quite fitted into the British art history establishment. Klingender was born in Goslar, Germany, to British parents. At the start of the first World War, his father, Louis Henry Weston Klingender , was interned near Berlin on suspicion of spying for the British. The family moved back to England in the 1920s and Klingender supported them while attending night classes at the London School of Economics. He subsequently embarked on an academic career in sociology, b...
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Lydia Shattuck
1822 - 1889 (67 years)
Lydia White Shattuck was an American botanist, naturalist, chemist, and professor at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary . Early life and education Shattuck was born in 1822 in East Landoff , New Hampshire to first cousins Betsey Fletcher and Timothy Shattuck, and she was the only one of their first five children to survive past infancy. When she was a young girl, her mother would take her on excursions through the woods, which inspired a love of nature, particularly wildflowers.
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Henry Baker
1698 - 1774 (76 years)
Henry Baker was a British naturalist. Life He was born in Chancery Lane, London, 8 May 1698, the son of William Baker, a clerk in chancery. In his fifteenth year he was apprenticed to John Parker, a bookseller. At the close of his indentures in 1720, Baker went on a visit to John Forster, a relative, who had a deaf-mute daughter, then eight years old. As a successful therapist of deaf people, he went on to make money, by a system that he kept secret. His work as therapist caught the attention of Daniel Defoe, whose youngest daughter Sophia he married on 30 April 1729.
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Jakob Rosenberg
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Jakob Rosenberg was an art historian, museum curator, and educator who is noted particularly for published work on Rembrandt. He was active in Germany until his 1937 emigration to the United States, where he joined the faculty of Harvard University. In addition to his professorship he was the curator of prints at the Fogg Museum. Rosenberg retired in 1964, but continued his scholarly activities until his 1980 death in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Winifred Lamb
1894 - 1963 (69 years)
Winifred Lamb was a British archaeologist, art historian, and museum curator who specialised in Greek, Roman, and Anatolian cultures and artefacts. The bulk of her career was spent as the honorary keeper of Greek antiquities at the University of Cambridge's Fitzwilliam Museum from 1920 to 1958, and the Fitzwilliam Museum states that she was a "generous benefactor ... raising the profile of the collections through groundbreaking research, acquisitions and publications."
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Ed Emshwiller
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
Edmund Alexander Emshwiller was an American visual artist notable for his science fiction illustrations and his pioneering experimental films. He usually signed his illustrations as Emsh but sometimes used Ed Emsh, Ed Emsler, Willer and others.
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Jane Bancroft Robinson
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Jane Marie Bancroft Robinson was an author and educator. Early life and education Jane Marie Bancroft was born in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on December 24, 1847. She descended on her mother's side, Caroline J. Orton, from an old Dutch family of New York City, and on her father's side from early English settlers in New Jersey. Her father, Rev. George C. Bancroft, was for over fifty years a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Gerhard Dietrich
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Gerhard Dietrich was a leading German pedagogue and a Trades Union Official. From 1952 till 1980 he worked at the Karl Marx University of Leipzig on the Structuring and Methodology of teaching Biology. Between 1980 and 1986 he was General Secretary of the Berlin based Academy of Pedagogic Sciences.
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Walter Friedländer
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
Walter Ferdinand Friedlaender was a German art historian . Walter Friedlaender was the son of Sigismund Friedlaender and Anna Joachimsthal. Born in Glogau, he was taught art history by Heinrich Wölfflin and others. Among his first students was Erwin Panofsky.
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Mieczysław Gębarowicz
1893 - 1984 (91 years)
Mieczysław Jan Gębarowicz was a Polish art historian, soldier, dissident, museum director and custodian of cultural heritage. He studied history and the history of art at Lwów University During the 1940s and 1950s he was responsible for saving many Polish cultural works in Lviv, including books and manuscripts, from being destroyed or dispersed.
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Sidney Franklin
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Sidney Arnold Franklin was an American film director and producer. Franklin, like William C. deMille, specialized in adapting literary works or Broadway stage plays. His brother Chester Franklin also became a director during the silent film era, best known for directing the early Technicolor film The Toll of the Sea.
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E. E. Speight
1871 - 1949 (78 years)
Ernest Edwin Speight , usually known as E E Speight, was a Yorkshireman who travelled in Japan and India and was a professor of English for twenty years at the Imperial University, Tokyo, Japan and also at the Fourth Higher School, Kanazawa, then for a further twenty years at the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India. In India he made a study of the Nilgiri hill tribes and was working on a Toda grammar at his death
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Iraklis Mitsopoulos
1816 - 1892 (76 years)
Iraklis Mitsopoulos was an author, biologist, archaeologist, physicist, zoologist, paleontologist, mineralogist, geologist, and professor. He is considered the father of modern natural sciences in Greece. He taught classes for over forty-seven years of his life. His nephew world renowned Greek geologist Konstantinos M. Mitsopoulos became the first student to receive a doctorate degree in the natural sciences at the University of Athens. His son Maximos Mitsopoulos also became a geologist. Hercules co-founded the Museum of Physical Geography in Athens, Greece, and directed its Zoological Department.
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LeRoy D. Brown
1848 - 1898 (50 years)
LeRoy D. Brown was the first president of University of Nevada. History Nevada became a state in 1864. Its constitution mandated the establishment of a state university with departments in agriculture, the mechanic arts, and mining, along with a state normal school for teacher training. The constitution specified that the state university would be controlled by an elected Board of Regents. The Nevada Legislature established the first State University campus in Elko, Nevada. Its Preparatory Department opened for enrollment in October 1874 with the goal of enhancing Nevada's young people to be ready for college-level study.
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Christian Leberecht Vogel
1759 - 1816 (57 years)
Christian Leberecht Vogel was a German painter, draughtsman and writer on art theory. His pupils included Louise Seidler, and he was the father of court painter and art professor Carl Christian Vogel.
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André Jolles
1874 - 1946 (72 years)
Johannes Andreas Jolles, known as André Jolles was a Dutch-German art historian, literary critic and linguist who was affiliated with the Nazi Party. He is best known for his work Simple Forms. Life Jolles was born on August 7, 1874, in Den Helder. His father, Hendrik Jolle Jolles, died on February 25, 1888, in Naples. Jolles grew up as an only child with his mother Jacoba Cornelia Singles in Amsterdam.
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