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,
#3101
Johann Benzenberg
1777 - 1846 (69 years)
Johann Friedrich Benzenberg was a German astronomer, geologist, and physicist. Biography Benzenberg was born near Elberfeld, Germany on 5 May 1777 to Heinrich Benzenberg and Johanna Elisabeth. He married Charlotte Platzhoff in 1807. After studying theology at Herborn and Marburg, he travelled to Göttingen where he became interested in science through attending lectures by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Abraham Gotthelf Kästner. Benzenberg obtained a PhD from the University of Duisburg in 1800 and became a professor of mathematics at the women's college of Düsseldorf in 1805. After the Napoleonic occupation of Germany he immigrated to Switzerland where he became interested in politics.
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Mary Julia Baldwin
1829 - 1897 (68 years)
Mary Julia Baldwin was an American educator in Staunton, Virginia. For thirty-four years she ran Mary Baldwin College, which was named in her honor in 1895 and later became Mary Baldwin University. Early and family life Born to Margaret Sarah Sowers Baldwin Heiskell and her husband William Daniel Baldwin in Winchester, Virginia at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley on October 4, 1829, Mary Julia Baldwin never knew her father, who died when she was a baby. Raised by her maternal grandparents in Staunton, Virginia after her mother remarried, in 1842 Mary became a member of the first class of sixty girls at the Augusta Female Seminary.
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Lucjan Zarzecki
1873 - 1925 (52 years)
Lucjan Zarzecki was a Polish pedagogue and mathematician, a co-originator of national education concept. His area of study was general didactics and didactics of mathematics. Member of the Polska Macierz Szkolna, professor and director of Pedagogics Department of the Wolna Wszechnica Polska in Warsaw.
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Rolfe Humphries
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
George Rolfe Humphries was a poet, translator, and teacher. Life An alumnus of Towanda High School, Humphries graduated cum laude from Amherst College in 1915. He was a first lieutenant machine gunner in World War I, from 1917 to 1918. In 1925, he married Helen Ward Spencer.
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Ritwik Ghatak
1925 - 1976 (51 years)
Ritwik Kumar Ghatak was a noted Indian film director, screenwriter and playwright. Along with prominent contemporary Bengali filmmakers like Satyajit Ray, Tapan Sinha and Mrinal Sen, his cinema is primarily remembered for its meticulous depiction of social reality, partition and feminism. He won the National Film Award's Rajat Kamal Award for Best Story in 1974 for his Jukti Takko Aar Gappo and Best Director's Award from Bangladesh Cine Journalist's Association for Titash Ekti Nadir Naam. The Government of India honoured him with the Padma Shri for Arts in 1970.
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Karl Heinrich Seibt
1735 - 1806 (71 years)
Karl Heinrich Seibt was a pioneering German catholic theologian and teacher. Life Karl Heinrich von Seibt was born in Mariental , a long-established settlement on the banks of the Neisse river at the northern frontier of Bohemia, which at that time was culturally and linguistically German. At the time of his birth his father was a "Klostersekretär" working for the monastery around which the little village clustered, and at which, according to some sources, Karl Heinrich was born.
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Charles S. Howe
1858 - 1939 (81 years)
Charles Sumner Howe was the second president of Case School of Applied Science, now Case Western Reserve University. Howe was born on September 29, 1858, in Nashua, New Hampshire. He earned his B.S. at both Massachusetts Agricultural College and Boston University in 1878 and his PhD from the College of Wooster in 1887.
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Aloys Hirt
1759 - 1837 (78 years)
Aloys Hirt was a German art historian and archaeologist of Ancient Greek and Roman architecture. He was responsible for the King of Prussia's antiquities collection from 1798, and became the University of Berlin's first professor of art theory and art history in 1810.
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Cecil Parrott
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Sir Cecil Cuthbert Parrott was a British diplomat, translator, writer and scholar. After studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge, he became a teacher. He joined the Foreign Office in 1939. His diplomatic career culminated with his posting to Prague, where he was the British Ambassador from 1960 to 1966. On retiring from the Foreign Office, he became first Professor of Russian and Soviet Studies and later Professor of Central and South-Eastern European Studies and Director of the Comenius Centre at the University of Lancaster.
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Helen M. Robinson
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Helen M. Robinson was an American writer and educator who became the lead writer of the Dick and Jane series of readers after the death of William S. Gray in 1960, a status she retained through the late 1970s. She was a professor at the University of Chicago from 1944 to 1968, and was nationally recognized in the field of reading education. She served as first President of the Reading Hall of Fame.
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Abdussalam Akhundzadeh
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Abdussalam Akhundzadeh was an Azerbaijani religious educator, Islamic theologian and the fifth Sheikh ul-Islam of the Caucasus. Early life He was born in Salyan on 13 January 1843 to local cleric Akhund Vali Muhammad and his wife Khanum Aliverdi gizi. He learnt Arabic, Persian and Turkish in early periods of his life from his father. He moved to Tbilisi in 1864 and settled in current Gorgasali street, Old Tbilisi. On October 6, 1879, he was allowed to work as a teacher in the Tatar department, beating Seyid Azim Shirvani in competition, and by July 28, 1880, he was officially appointed a teacher in Gori Teachers Seminary.
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Johann Friedrich von Brandt
1802 - 1879 (77 years)
Johann Friedrich von Brandt was a German-Russian naturalist, who worked mostly in Russia. Brandt was born in Jüterbog and educated at a gymnasium in Wittenberg and the University of Berlin. In 1831 he emigrated to Russia, and soon was appointed director of the Zoological Museum of the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Brandt encouraged the collection of native animals, many of which were not represented in the museum. Many specimens began to arrive from the expeditions of Severtzov, Przhevalsky, Middendorff, Schrenck and Gustav Radde.
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John M. Mason
1770 - 1829 (59 years)
John Mitchell Mason was an American preacher and theologian who was Provost of Columbia College in the early 1810s, and briefly President of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in the early 1820s.
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Peter Forsskål
1732 - 1763 (31 years)
Peter Forsskål, sometimes spelled Pehr Forsskål, Peter Forskaol, Petrus Forskål or Pehr Forsskåhl was a Swedish-speaking Finnish explorer, orientalist, naturalist, and an apostle of Carl Linnaeus.
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Zhao Taimou
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Zhao Taimou was a Chinese educator. He was the president of Shandong University from September 1932 until June 1936, and again from 1946 until 1949. Life Zhao was born in Qingzhou, Shandong in 1889.
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Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton
1824 - 1908 (84 years)
Electa Nobles Lincoln Walton was an American educator, lecturer, writer, and suffragist from the U.S. state of New York. Though she was co-author of a series of arithmetic books, the publishers decided that her name should be withheld. She became an advocate for the enfranchisement of women. She was said to be the "first woman to administer a state normal school". She was an officer of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association, an active member and director in the New England Women's Educational Club of Boston, and president of the West Newton Woman's Educational Club since its organization in 1880.
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William P. Trowbridge
1828 - 1892 (64 years)
William Petit Trowbridge was a mechanical engineer, military officer, and naturalist. He was one of the first mechanical engineers on the faculties of the University of Michigan, the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale, and the Columbia School of Mines. He had a brief military career after graduating from West Point and later served as Adjutant General for the State of Connecticut from 1873 to 1876. During his career as a surveyor on the American Pacific coast he collected thousands of animal specimens, several of which now bear his name.
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Julia Gulliver
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Julia Henrietta Gulliver was an American philosopher, educator and college president. She was only the second woman in America to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a tireless advocate for increased female representation in higher education.
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Charles Augustus Aiken
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Charles Augustus Aiken was an American clergyman and academic. Biography He was born in Manchester, Vermont, on October 30, 1827, to John Aiken and Harriet Adams Aiken. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1846, at the age of nineteen, and went on to Andover Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1853. He married Sarah Noyes on October 17, 1854, and was ordained a pastor of the Congregational church in Yarmouth, Maine, that same year.
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James A. Doonan
1841 - 1911 (70 years)
James Aloysius Doonan was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit, who was the president of Georgetown University from 1882 to 1888. During that time he oversaw the naming of Gaston Hall and the construction of a new building for the School of Medicine. Doonan also acquired two historic cannons that were placed in front of Healy Hall. His presidency was financially successful, with a reduction in the university's burdensome debt that had accrued during the construction of Healy Hall.
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Richard Henry Beddome
1830 - 1911 (81 years)
Colonel Richard Henry Beddome was a British military officer and naturalist in India, who became chief conservator of the Madras Forest Department. In the mid-19th century, he extensively surveyed several remote and then-unexplored hill ranges in Sri Lanka and south India, including those in the Eastern Ghats such as Yelandur, Kollegal, Shevaroy Hills, Yelagiri, Nallamala Hills, Visakhapatnam hills, and the Western Ghats such as Nilgiri hills, Anaimalai hills, Agasthyamalai Hills and Kudremukh. He described many species of plants, amphibians, and reptiles from southern India and Sri Lanka, an...
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Lucy Rider Meyer
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Lucy Jane Rider Meyer was an American social worker, educator, physician, and author who cofounded the Chicago Training School for City, Home, and Foreign Missions in Illinois. She is credited with reviving the office of the female deacon in the U.S. Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Edgar Wind
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Edgar Wind was a German-born British interdisciplinary art historian, specializing in iconology in the Renaissance era. He was a member of the school of art historians associated with Aby Warburg and the Warburg Institute as well as the first Professor of art history at Oxford University.
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Carl Justi
1832 - 1912 (80 years)
Carl Justi was a German art historian, who practised a biographical approach to art history. Professor of art history at the University of Bonn, he wrote three major critical biographies: of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, of Diego Velázquez and of Michelangelo.
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Howard B. Meek
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Howard Bagnall Meek was an American professor who founded Cornell University's School of Hotel Administration. He began teaching hotel management at Cornell during 1922, when the subject was part of the university's agricultural college, which operated its home-economics school, rather than a separate unit within the university.
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Millicent Carey McIntosh
1898 - 2001 (103 years)
Millicent Carey McIntosh was an educational administrator and American feminist who led the Brearley School , and most prominently Barnard College . The first married woman to head one of the Seven Sisters, she was "considered a national role model for generations of young women who wanted to combine career and family," advocating for working mothers and for child care as a dignified profession.
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Slavko Vorkapich
1894 - 1976 (82 years)
Slavoljub "Slavko" Vorkapić , known in English as Slavko Vorkapich, was a Serbian-born Hollywood montagist, an independent cinematic artist, chair of USC School of Cinematic Arts, chair of the Belgrade Film and Theatre Academy, painter, and illustrator. He was a prominent figure of modern cinematography and motion picture film art during the early and mid-20th century and was a cinema theorist and lecturer.
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Johann Adam von Ickstatt
1702 - 1776 (74 years)
Johann Adam Freiherr von Ickstatt was a German educator and director of the University of Ingolstadt. Born in Vockenhausen, he was a major proponent of the Enlightenment in Bavaria. He died in Waldsassen. He was a godfather to Adam Weishaupt.
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Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1945 - 1982 (37 years)
Rainer Werner Fassbinder , sometimes credited as R. W. Fassbinder, was a German filmmaker, actor, and dramatist. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures and catalysts of the New German Cinema movement. Versatile and prolific, his over 40 films span a variety of genres, most frequently blending elements of Hollywood melodrama with social criticism and avant-garde techniques. His films, according to him, explored "the exploitability of feelings". His work was deeply rooted in post-war German culture: the aftermath of Nazism, the German economic miracle, and the terror of the Red Army Faction.
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Annie Webb Blanton
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Annie Webb Blanton was an American suffragist from Texas, educator, and author of a series of grammar textbooks. Blanton was elected Superintendent of Texas Public Instruction in 1918, making her the first woman in Texas elected to statewide office.
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Francis Anderson
1858 - 1941 (83 years)
Sir Francis Anderson was a Scottish-born Australian philosopher and educator. Early life Francis Anderson was born in Glasgow, the son of Francis Anderson, a manufacturer, and his wife Elizabeth Anna Lockart, née Ellison. Anderson was educated at Old Wynd and Oatlands public schools and became a pupil-teacher at the age of 14. He went on to the University of Glasgow, matriculating in 1876 and graduated M.A. in 1883. He was awarded Sir Richard Jebb's prize for Greek literature, took first place in the philosophical classes of Professors Veitch and Caird, and won two scholarships. For two years...
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Kenneth John Conant
1894 - 1984 (90 years)
Kenneth John Conant was an American architectural historian and educator, who specialized in medieval architecture. Conant is known for his studies of Cluny Abbey. Career Born in Neenah, Conant received a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts from Harvard University in 1915. He was considered the academic heir of Herbert Langford Warren, a teacher at Harvard, and through him, of the art historians Charles Eliot Norton and John Ruskin. He served in the 42nd Infantry Division of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and was wounded in the Second Battle of the Marne in 1918. Conant later returned to Harvard.
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William Edward Zeuch
1892 - Present (133 years)
William Edward Zeuch was an American socialist, educator, and academic who is best known as a founder and first director of the Commonwealth College in Arkansas. This college is the most well known attempt in Arkansas at establishing a radical labor educational school.
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Kurt Martin
1899 - 1975 (76 years)
Kurt Martin was a German art historian. Martin was a professor of art history. His career began in 1927 as curator of the . From 1934 to 1956, he was director of the Staatlichen Kunsthalle Karlsruhe . In 1940 he was appointed Head of the Municipal Museums of Strasbourg as well as Chief Commissioner of the Alsatian Museums. In 1956 he became Director of the Karlsruher Kunstakademie , and in 1957 General Director of the Bayerischen Staatsgemäldesammlungen .
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Moina Michael
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Moina Belle Michael was an American professor and humanitarian who conceived the idea of using poppies as a symbol of remembrance for those who served in World War I. Early life Michael was born in 1869 and lived on what is now known as 3698 Moina Michael Road in Good Hope, in Walton County, Georgia. She was the eldest daughter and second of the seven children of John Marion Michael, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, and Alice Sherwood Wise. She was distantly related to General Francis Marion on her father's side, and the Wise family of Virginia state governors on her mother's side.
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Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu
1870 - 1945 (75 years)
Ion A. Rădulescu-Pogoneanu was a Romanian pedagogue. Biography Born in 1870 in Pogoanele, Buzău County, he studied for six years at Leipzig University, obtaining his doctorate in philosophy in July 1901 with thesis Über das Leben und die Philosophie Contas. He then became a professor at the University of Bucharest, and was elected a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy in 1919. A contributor to Convorbiri Literare and România Jună magazines, he helped popularize knowledge of pedagogy in his country. Among his works are a biography of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a book on the phenomenon of education, and one on the problems of Romanian culture.
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Helen Stuart Campbell
1839 - 1918 (79 years)
Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
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Frances St John Chappelle
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John Chappelle was an Assistant in Psychology at the University of Nevada. Biography Frances Arcadia Willoughby St. John was born on July 2, 1897, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lettie Willoughby St. John, a direct descendant of the first Lord Willoughby and one of the first women to graduate from a medical college. She was also an artist and magazine illustrator.
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Ali al-Qari
Nur ad-Din Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Sultan Muhammad al-Hirawi al-Qari , known as Mulla Ali al-Qari was an Islamic scholar. He was born in Herat, where he received his basic Islamic education. Thereafter, he travelled to Mecca and studied under the scholar Shaykh Ahmad Ibn Hajar al-Haytami Makki, and al-Qari eventually decided to remain in Mecca where he taught, died and was buried.
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William George Constable
1887 - 1976 (89 years)
William George Constable Education Distantly related to the landscape painter John Constable, William George Constable was educated at Derby School, where his father was headmaster, and St John's College, Cambridge, where he read history, law and economics. In 1909, he was awarded the Whewell Scholarship for International Law. After gaining a First in economics in 1910, he was awarded the McMahon Law Studentship by St John's for four years, then entered the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar in May, 1914.
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Thomas Percival Creed
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Sir Thomas Percival Creed, KBE, MC, QC was a lawyer and educationist. Principal of Queen Mary College London from 1952 to 1967, he served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1964 to 1967.
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