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,
#3051
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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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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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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Tamezo Mori
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
, was a Japanese naturalist in Chōsen . He taught at a preparatory school for Keijō Imperial University in Seoul from 1909 until he was expelled by the American forces in 1945. Primarily an ichthyologist, he published numerous works on the zoology of the Korean Peninsula and Manchuria. Some of these, such as his Checklist of the Fishes of Korea and the 1934 Coloured Butterflies from Korea, are still in print.
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Robert Branner
1927 - 1973 (46 years)
Robert Branner was an American art historian, archaeologist, and educator. A scholar of medieval art, specializing in Gothic architecture and illuminated manuscripts, Branner was Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University.
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Clifton F. Conrad
1900 - Present (126 years)
Clifton F. Conrad is Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Conrad was president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 1987–1988. He has consulted, taught, or both in South America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
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Fred Schonell
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Sir Fred Joyce Schonell was an Australian educationist, and vice-chancellor of the University of Queensland from 1960 to 1969. Career Schonell graduated from the University of Western Australia in 1925, at the same time as his wife-to-be, Florence Eleanor de Bracey Waterman; the couple married the next year. Eleanor, as she was always known, was a close collaborator with Schonell, and a noted educationalist in her own right. In 1928 they left for England. Schonell studied at King's College London and the London Day Training College, University of London; his Ph.D. thesis was on the diagnosis and remediation of difficulties in spelling.
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Bernard Ashmole
1894 - 1988 (94 years)
Bernard Ashmole, CBE, MC was a British archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in ancient Greek sculpture. He held a number of professorships during his lifetime; Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of London from 1929 to 1948, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at University of Oxford from 1956 to 1961, and Greek Art and Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen from 1961 to 1963. He was also Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.
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Sigfried Giedion
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Sigfried Giedion was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, Space, Time and Architecture, and Mechanization Takes Command, had an important conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. Giedion was a pupil of Heinrich Wölfflin. He was the first secretary-general of the Congrès International d'Architecture Moderne, and taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and the ETH-Zurich.
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William Bagley
1874 - 1946 (72 years)
William Chandler Bagley , was an American educator and editor. He graduated in 1895 from Michigan State Agricultural College, currently called Michigan State University; completed MS, in 1898, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1898; and was awarded PhD by Cornell University in 1900.
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Benjamin Mays
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Benjamin Elijah Mays was an American Baptist minister and American rights leader who is credited with laying the intellectual foundations of the American civil rights movement. Mays taught and mentored many influential activists, including Martin Luther King Jr, Julian Bond, Maynard Jackson, and Donn Clendenon, among others. His rhetoric and intellectual pursuits focused on Black self-determination. Mays' commitment to social justice through nonviolence and civil resistance were cultivated from his youth through the lessons imbibed from his parents and eldest sister. The peak of his public i...
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Millard Meiss
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Millard Lazare Meiss was an American art historian, one of whose specialties was Gothic architecture. Meiss worked as an art history professor at Columbia University from 1934 to 1953. After teaching at Columbia, he became a professor at Harvard until 1958, when he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, N.J. Meiss has edited several leading art journals and has also written articles and books on medieval and Renaissance painting. Among his many important contributions are Italian style in Catalonia and a fourteenth century Catalan workshop , Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death and French Painting in the Time of Jean de Berry .
Go to Profile#3064
Anthony Blunt
1907 - 1983 (76 years)
Anthony Frederick Blunt , styled Sir Anthony Blunt KCVO from 1956 to November 1979, was a leading British art historian and Soviet spy. Blunt was a professor of art history at the University of London, the director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures. His 1967 monograph on the French Baroque painter Nicolas Poussin is still widely regarded as a watershed book in art history. His teaching text and reference work Art and Architecture in France 1500–1700, first published in 1953, reached its fifth edition in 1999, at which time it was still considered the best ...
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George F. Zook
1885 - 1951 (66 years)
George Frederick "Fred" Zook was an American educator who was President of the University of Akron, U.S. Commissioner of Education, and President of the American Council on Education. Life and career Zook was born on April 22, 1885, on a farm near Fort Scott, Kansas, the son of Stephen Douglas Zook and Helen Follenius. He enrolled at the University of Kansas in 1902, funding his education by driving a hearse. After graduation he was a fellow at the University of Kansas, then an assistant at Cornell University, and a faculty member at Penn State University, where he advanced from instructor to full professor.
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Stanley B. Freeborn
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Stanley Barron Freeborn served as the first chancellor of University of California, Davis between 1958 and June 1959. Prior to being the first chancellor of UC Davis, Freeborn was the dean of the College of Agriculture at UC Berkeley. Following his death in 1960, UC Davis renamed its assembly hall to Freeborn Hall in his honor.
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Margarete Bieber
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Margarete Bieber was a Jewish German-American art historian, classical archaeologist and professor. She became the second woman university professor in Germany in 1919 when she took a position at the University of Giessen. She studied the theatre of ancient Greece and Rome as well as the sculpture and clothing in ancient Rome and Greece.
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Louis Grodecki
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Louis Grodecki was a French art historian. A disciple of Henri Focillon since 1929, shortly after his arrival in France, and naturalized French in 1935, he met art historian Erwin Panofsky in 1949 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Grodecki is famous for his work on romanesque stained glass, of Paris, Picardy and the Nord-Pas de Calais region. His most notable works are about the stained glasses of Chartres Cathedral, in particular a complete catalogue which he never finished. He was a reviewer for the doctoral dissertation of E. Wayne Craven.
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Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Charles Rufus Morey
1877 - 1955 (78 years)
Charles Rufus Morey was an American art historian, professor, and chairman of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University from 1924 to 1945. He had expertise in medieval art and founded the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University in 1917. He was one of the founders of the College Art Association.
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Harold Rugg
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Harold Ordway Rugg was an educational reformer in the early to mid 1900s, associated with the Progressive education movement. Originally trained in civil engineering at Dartmouth College , Rugg went on to study psychology, sociology and education at the University of Illinois where he completed a doctoral dissertation titled "The Experimental Determination of Mental Discipline in School Studies."
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Maria Montessori
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Maria Tecla Artemisia Montessori was an Italian physician and educator best known for her philosophy of education and her writing on scientific pedagogy. At an early age, Montessori enrolled in classes at an all-boys technical school, with hopes of becoming an engineer. She soon had a change of heart and began medical school at the Sapienza University of Rome, becoming one of the first women to attend medical school in Italy; she graduated with honors in 1896. Her educational method is in use today in many public and private schools globally.
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David Talbot Rice
1903 - 1972 (69 years)
David Talbot Rice was an English archaeologist and art historian. He has been described variously as a "gentleman academic" and an "amateur" art historian, though such remarks are not borne out by his many achievements and a lasting legacy of scholarship in his field of study.
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Henry-Russell Hitchcock
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Henry-Russell Hitchcock was an American architectural historian, and for many years a professor at Smith College and New York University. His writings helped to define the characteristics of modernist architecture.
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Ellwood Patterson Cubberley
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Ellwood Patterson Cubberley was an American educator, a eugenicist, and a pioneer in the field of education management. He spent most of his career as a professor and later served as the first dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in California.
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Edwin Broun Fred
1887 - 1981 (94 years)
Edwin Broun Fred was an American bacteriologist and academic who was the 15th president of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, serving from 1945 to 1958. Born in Virginia, Fred studied at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the University of Göttingen. After briefly teaching at Virginia Polytechnic, Fred took a position with Wisconsin. He was dean of the graduate school from 1934 until 1943, then was dean of the College of Agriculture until 1945. He ascended to the presidency and was known for his response to the postwar growth in admissions. Fred was the president of the Society of Ameri...
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Jodie Hunter
Jodie Margaret Roberta Hunter is a New Zealand academic, of Cook Island Māori descent, and is a full professor at Massey University. Hunter researches mathematics pedagogy, with a particular interest in culturally responsive teaching of mathematics to Pasifika students. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
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John Berryman
1914 - 1972 (58 years)
John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
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Julian Gibbs
1924 - 1983 (59 years)
Julian Howard Gibbs was an American educator and the fifteenth President of Amherst College. Gibbs graduated from Amherst College in 1947. He earned his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in 1949 and 1950 from Princeton University. After a year of postdoctoral study at Cambridge University in England with a Fulbright Fellowship, he briefly taught at the University of Minnesota. Gibbs then worked for eight years at General Electric Company and American Viscose Corporation before accepting a position at Brown University in 1960 as associate professor of chemistry. He was named a full professor in 1963 and served as the chairman of the Chemistry Department at Brown from 1964 to 1972.
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Walter Dearborn
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Walter Fenno Dearborn was a pioneering American educator and experimental psychologist who helped to establish the field of reading education. Dearborn, who approached the study of psychology from the perspective of an empirical scientist, is perhaps best known for using empirical research to design and refine teaching methods. Dearborn's research persuaded him that children develop at different rates and that schools should not ignore individual differences by teaching children in large groups or classes.
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James Ritchie
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
James Ritchie CBE PRSE was a Scottish naturalist and archaeologist, who was Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh 1936–52 and President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1952–1958.
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Herbert Heaton
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Herbert Heaton was a British-born economic historian. He held posts at the University of Tasmania, Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Minnesota, where he was head of the Department of History from 1954 until his retirement in 1958. Heaton was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1945.
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Lawrence Stenhouse
1926 - 1982 (56 years)
Lawrence Stenhouse was a British educational thinker who sought to promote an active role for teachers in educational research and curriculum development. Life Stenhouse was born in 1926 and he was educated at Manchester Grammar School, the University of St Andrews and the University of Glasgow .
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Eduard C. Lindeman
1885 - 1953 (68 years)
Eduard C. Lindeman was an American educator, notable for his pioneering contributions in adult education. He introduced many concepts of modern adult education in his book, The Meaning of Adult Education.
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William Bell Dinsmoor
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
William Bell Dinsmoor Sr. was an American architectural historian of classical Greece and a Columbia University professor of art and archaeology. Biography He was born on July 29, 1886, in Windham, New Hampshire.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Sirarpie Der Nersessian was an Armenian art historian, who specialized in Armenian and Byzantine studies. Der Nersessian was a renowned academic and a pioneer in Armenian art history. She taught at several institutions in the United States, including Wellesley College in Massachusetts and as Henri Focillon Professor of Art and Archaeology at Harvard University. She was a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, its deputy director from 1954–55 and 1961–62, and a member of its Board of Scholars. Der Nersessian was also a member of several international institutions such as the British Academy , the Ac...
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Charlotte Towle
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Charlotte Helen Towle was an American social worker, academic and writer. Early life and education Towle was born and raised in Butte, Montana. In 1919, she received a BA in Education from Goucher College. After graduation, she worked at the American Red Cross and became increasingly interested in social work. With financial support from a Commonwealth Fund fellowship, she attended New York School of Social Work . She earned a degree in Psychiatric Social Work in 1926.
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Georges Daux
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Georges Daux was a French archaeologist and a leading scholar of Greek inscriptions. Born in Bastia and educated at the École normale supérieure, Daux headed the French School at Athens from 1950 to 1969.
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Walter William Spencer Cook
1888 - 1962 (74 years)
Walter William Spencer Cook, also known as Walter W. S. Cook in citation was an American art historian and professor. He specialized in Spanish Medieval art history. He was an emeritus professor from New York University and he helped found the New York University Institute of Fine Arts. He had a prominent role in introducing eminent German art historians to the United States.
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Franklin S. Harris
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Franklin Stewart Harris was president of Brigham Young University from July 1921 until June 1945, and president of Utah State University from 1945 to 1950. His administration was the longest in BYU history and saw the granting of the first master's degrees. Under his administration the school became an accredited university. He set up several colleges, such as the College of Fine and Performing Arts with Gerrit De Jong as the founding dean. Harris was an agricultural scientist, holding a doctorate in agronomy from Cornell University. He had served as the agriculture department head and head...
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Elbert K. Fretwell
1878 - 1962 (84 years)
Elbert K. Fretwell was an American academic and early leader in the field of youth development through recreation and extracurricular activity. He served as the second Chief Scout Executive of the Boy Scouts of America , serving from 1943 to 1948. Upon his retirement from the BSA, Fretwell was given the title of Chief Scout.
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Otto Brendel
1901 - 1973 (72 years)
Otto Johannes Brendel was a German art historian and scholar of Etruscan art and archaeology. Biography In 1928, he received his Ph.D. from the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg under Ludwig Curtius on the topic of Roman iconography of the Augustan period. While at Heidelberg, Brendel studied with many notable scholars, including Franz Boll, E. Wayne Craven, Alfred von Domaszewski, Friedrich Karl von Duhn, Richard Carl Meister, Eugen Täubler, the literary theorist Ernst Robert Curtius, Friedrich Gundolf, Karl Jaspers, and the classical art historians Karl Lehmann and Friedrich Zimmer. ...
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Françoise Henry
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Françoise Henry was a scholar of early Irish art, archaeologist, and art historian. While at University College Dublin , she founded the Department of History of European Painting in 1965, and was head until she retired in 1974.
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Harold Wethey
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Harold Edwin Wethey was an American art historian and educator. From 1940 to 1972, Wethey was a professor of art history at the University of Michigan. Career Born in Port Byron, Wethey received a Bachelor of Arts in Romance Languages from Cornell University in 1923, and then a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in Art History from Harvard University in 1931 and 1934, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was on the sculptor Gil de Siloé and was titled "Gil de Siloé and Sculpture in Burgos under the Catholic Kings." He taught at Bryn Mawr College and Washington University in St. Loui...
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Robert Kloster
1905 - 1979 (74 years)
Robert Kloster was a Norwegian museum director and art historian. Family He was born in Bergen as a son of physician Robert Emil Kloster and Alette "Ada" Falsen Wiesener . In April 1932 in Paris he married Wibecke Trane Kielland , a daughter of Jonas Schanche Kielland and sister of Thor Bendz Kielland.
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Felton Grandison Clark
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Felton Grandison Clark was an African-American academic administrator from Louisiana. He served as the president of Southern University , a historically black university and land-grant college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1938 to 1969. During this period, he led decades of expansion that resulted in the number of students increasing from 1,500 to over 11,000. By the time of his retirement, SU had grown to be America's largest historically black university by enrollment.
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Hjalmar Broch
1882 - 1969 (87 years)
Hjalmar Broch was a Norwegian zoologist and university professor at the University of Oslo . His specialty was biology of lesser marine animals; he published extensively on the biology of fish. Biography Hjalmar Broch was born in 1882 at Horten, Vestfold, Norway. His father was grocer and brewery owner Johan Anthony Zinck Broch ; his mother was Fanny Harriet Caroline Gamborg . An older sister, Lagertha Broch , became a noted children's author, and an older brother, Olaf Broch , became a noted linguist, specializing in Slavic languages. His younger sister Nanna Broch was a noted social worker...
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Lotte Brand Philip
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Lotte Brand Philip was a German art historian, professor and expert on Netherlandish art, one of the most notable and incisive experts on 14th- and 15th-century art to have studied under Erwin Panofsky. Born a Christian of Jewish descent, she resisted state intimidation to leave Germany, only moving to the United States in 1941. She began her new life as a jewelry designer, before establishing a career as an art historian and writer, and taking professorship at a number of universities, including New York University and Queens College, Flushing. During her long career, Brand wrote highly reg...
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Edward J. Sparling
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Edward J. Sparling was an educator who was the founder of Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois. Edward Sparling was born in Panoche, California in 1896. Sparling received a B.A. from Stanford University and his Master's and Ph.D. from Columbia University where he lived in the International House of New York. During World War I, Sparling served in the U.S. Army as a flying instructor. In 1936 to 1945 Sparling became president of Central YMCA College in Chicago and served there until 1945 when he incorporated Roosevelt College, which would admit students regardless of race or religion. The college became a university in 1954 and Sparling stepped down as president in 1963.
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