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,
#3101
Arthur Masterman
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
Arthur Thomas Masterman FRS FRSE was an English zoologist and author. He was an expert on the British fishing industry. Life He was born on 9 April 1869 the son of Thomas W. Masterman of Rotherfield Hall in Sussex. His older brother Howard Masterman, became Bishop of Plymouth. His youngest brother was Charles Masterman. Masterman was educated at University School in Hastings and then Weymouth College. He then won a scholarship to Christ's College, Cambridge studying under Sir Arthur Shipley. He graduated in physiology and zoology in 1893.
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David Hand
1900 - 1986 (86 years)
David Dodd Hand was an American animator and animation filmmaker known for his work at Walt Disney Productions. He worked on numerous Disney shorts during the 1930s and eventually became supervising director on the animated features Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Bambi.
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George Henry Perkins
1844 - 1933 (89 years)
George Henry Perkins was an American naturalist. He was the state entomologist and geologist for Vermont. Biography He was educated at the Knox Academy, Galesburg, Illinois, and at Yale, where he graduated in 1867, and in 1869 received the degree of Ph.D. there for postgraduate studies. In 1869 he was appointed as professor of natural history in the University of Vermont, and in 1898 he became dean of the natural science department. Beginning in 1880, he held the office of state entomologist of Vermont. In 1895, he left that post to become the state geologist. He devoted considerable study to...
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Ernst Buchner
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Ernst Buchner was a German museum administrator and art historian. A native of Munich, he was director of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, a position in German arts administration second only to the head of the Berlin museum network. He joined the Nazi Party in 1933, played a role in seizing Jewish art, and was eventually responsible for safeguarding German collections and Nazi Plunder from the threat of destruction in war. He largely rehabilitated his career after his post-war denazification trial.
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Leila Cook Barber
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Leila Cook Barber was an American art historian and professor, specializing in the Renaissance art and Medieval studies. She was a Professor Emeritus at Vassar College, where she taught from 1931 until 1968.
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Charles de Tolnay
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Charles de Tolnay, born Károly von Tolnai , was a Hungarian art historian and an expert on Michelangelo. According to Erwin Panofsky, he was "one of the most brilliant art historians" of his time. Life and work De Tolnay was born in Budapest. He was the son of Arnold von Tolnai, an official of the Hungarian administration. In 1918, he began studying art history and archaeology as Karl Tolnai in Germany, first at the University of Berlin , then at the University of Frankfurt .
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Sturla Gudlaugsson
1913 - 1971 (58 years)
Sturla Gudlaugsson was a Danish-born Dutch art historian and director of the RKD and the Mauritshuis in The Hague. Gudlaugsson was born in Skagen as the son of the Icelandic poet Jonas Gudlaugsson, but his father died when he was three and he grew up in Kleef with his mother's extended Dutch family. He studied in Berlin and worked first there until he felt he needed to leave the Nazi regime and got a job in Denmark. He then worked briefly at the Gemeentelijk museum in The Hague before starting work at the RKD in 1942.
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Jomí García Ascot
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Jomí García Ascot was a poet, essayist, filmmaker, director and educator. Born in Tunisia, he was a Spanish exile who lived in Mexico. Biography José Miguel García Ascot was born on 24 March 1927 in Tunis, Tunisia. The son of a Spanish diplomat, he spent his childhood traveling from Portugal to France to Belgium and Morocco.
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J. Eugene Gallery
1898 - 1960 (62 years)
Joseph Eugene Gallery was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit. He studied sociology at Georgetown University, before serving in the U.S. Army during World War I. Upon his return, he graduated, and entered business in Washington, D.C. He then entered the Society of Jesus in 1931, and was later ordained a priest. He became a professor of sociology at the University of Scranton, and also worked in child welfare and in arbitrating industrial disputes. In 1947, Gallery became the president of the University of Scranton. During his presidency, the university's graduate school was established. Hi...
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Carl Georg Heise
1890 - 1979 (89 years)
Carl Georg Heise was a German art historian. From 1945 to 1955 he was director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg. Life Heise was born into a Hamburg mercantile family with artistic interests. In about 1906 Aby Warburg became his mentor, and recommended to him a period of studying art history with Wilhelm Vöge in Freiburg. Subsequently, he went to Adolph Goldschmidt in Halle and—against Warburg's advice—to Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. In 1910 he travelled to Italy with Wilhelm Waetzoldt and Warburg, visiting Venice and finally Ferrara, where Warburg was researching the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia.
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Arthur R. M. Spaid
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Rusmiselle Miller Spaid was an American educator, school administrator, lecturer, and writer. He served as principal of Alexis I. duPont High School in Wilmington, Delaware, superintendent of New Castle County Public Schools in Delaware, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, and Delaware State commissioner of Education .
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Henri Gabriel Marceau
1896 - 1969 (73 years)
Henri Gabriel Marceau was an American architect, teacher, art historian and museum curator. He served as Director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1955–1964. Career He studied architecture at Columbia University, but his education was interrupted by military service in World War I. He graduated from Columbia in 1921, and spent that summer in France rebuilding war-damaged buildings. He won the 1922 Prix de Rome in architecture, studying for the next three years at the American Academy in Rome. In 1926, he was named assistant curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, a vast collection of Old...
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Jerome Daugherty
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jerome Daugherty was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who served in many different capacities at Jesuit institutions throughout the northeast United States, eventually becoming president of Georgetown University in 1901. Born in Baltimore, he was educated at Loyola College in Maryland, before entering the Society of Jesus and becoming a member of the first class at Woodstock College. He then taught various subjects, including mathematics, Latin, Ancient Greek, rhetoric, and the humanities in Massachusetts, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and served as minister at many of the insti...
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Helmut Ruhemann
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Helmut Ruhemann CBE, was a German painting conservator and restorer, considered the pre-eminent of his profession during his lifetime. Early life and education He was born in Berlin and studied at Karlsruhe, Munich and Paris.
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Irene Emery
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Irene Emery was an American art historian, scholar, curator, textile anthropologist, sculptor, and modern dancer. She was known for her pioneering research in systematically describing global textiles, and was a leading authority on ancient fabrics and textiles, and for her published book The Primary Structures of Fabrics: An Illustrated Classification .
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Oliver Samuel Tonks
1874 - 1953 (79 years)
Oliver Samuel Tonks was an American art historian, educator, and curator. Tonks was Professor of Art History Emeritus at Vassar College. Career Born in Malden, Tonks was educated at Harvard University, where he earned three degrees: a Bachelor of Arts in 1898, a Master of Arts in 1899, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Classical Archeology in 1903. He was the first to be awarded a doctorate at Harvard in that field, and wrote a dissertation on the Brygos Painter. Additionally, Tonks was a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for the 1901 to 1902 academic year. In the follo...
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Tancred Borenius
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Carl Tancred Borenius was a Finnish art historian working in England, who became the first professor of the history of art at University College London. He was a prolific author, and recognised as one of the world's leading experts on Italian art of the early Renaissance.
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Margaret Clapp
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Margaret Antoinette Clapp was an American scholar, educator and Pulitzer Prize winner. She was the president of Wellesley College from 1949 to 1966. During her presidency, she was able to make many improvements to the college campus by increasing the number of faculty members and increasing financial aid for students. Other accomplishments of note during her tenure construction and remodeling of major campus buildings as well as increasing the college endowment fund.
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Doak S. Campbell
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Doak Sheridan Campbell was from 1941 to 1957 president of Florida State College for Women and its successor coeducational school, Florida State University. He oversaw the creation of this new university. His opposition to the admission of African-American students has caused controversy about the naming of Doak S. Campbell Stadium in his honor.
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Edith Philips
1892 - 1983 (91 years)
Edith Philips was an American writer and academic of French literature. Her research focused on eighteenth-century French literature and French emigration to the United States. She was a Guggenheim Fellow and a professor of French at Goucher College and Swarthmore College. In 1932, she published The Good Quaker in French Legend. She served as the acting dean of women at Swarthmore and was later appointed the Susan W. Lippincott Professor of French in 1941. Philips was the founding chair of the Department of Modern Languages at Swarthmore, serving in this position from 1949 to 1960.
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Edith Hall Dohan
1877 - 1943 (66 years)
Edith Hayward Hall Dohan was an American archaeologist who earned Bryn Mawr College's first classical archaeology Ph.D. Hall was part of an excavation team with Harriet Boyd in her early career that most notably brought the first Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean collection to be displayed in America. Hall later wrote The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age, which was published in 1906 that breaks down the evolution of the art and pottery in Crete from the Bronze Age.
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Oliver Waterman Larkin
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Oliver Waterman Larkin was an American art historian and educator. He won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for History for his book Art and Life in America. Life and work Larkin was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Ernest Larkin, a collector and dealer of antiques, and Kate Mary Waterman. He had two brothers and a sister. He grew up in Medford, and later in Georgetown, Massachusetts, where in 1914 he graduated with honors from the Perley Free School. By this time he had already begun to show his interest in the arts. He enrolled in Harvard University where he majored in French and Latin.
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Herbert von Einem
1905 - 1983 (78 years)
Herbert von Einem was a German art historian. Life and work Von Einem studied art history at the University of Göttingen, the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1928, he completed his PhD, entitled Die Plastik der Lüneburger Goldenen Tafel under Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt, director of the art history seminar in Göttingen. In 1935 he wrote his Habilitationsschrift at the Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg on Carl Ludwig Fernow. In 1937 he was assistant of Vitzthum in Göttingen, and in 1938 lecturer in art history. During the Nazi era, he promoted a nationalist-defined art history.
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Maurice H. Rees
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
Maurice Holmes Rees was American medical educator who served as Dean of the University of Colorado School of Medicine and Superintendent of the University of Colorado Hospital from 1920 to 1945. Early life and education Maurice Holmes Rees was born on April 27, 1880, in Newton, Iowa, to Spencer Harris Rees and Margaret Holmes. He attended Newton High School and served in the Iowa National Guard from 1889 to 1901, where he was honorably discharged.
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Benedict Wallet Vilakazi
1906 - 1947 (41 years)
Benedict Wallet Vilakazi was a South African novelist, linguist, a descendant of the Zulu royal family, and a radically innovative poet who created a combination of traditional and Romantic poetry in the Zulu language. Vilakazi was also a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, where he became the first Black South African to teach University classes to White South Africans. In 1946, Vilakazi also became the first Black South African to receive a PhD.
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Elizabeth Gilmore Holt
1905 - 1987 (82 years)
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt was an American art historian. Early life and education Elizabeth Basye Gilmore was born in San Francisco, California in 1905, and raised in Madison, Wisconsin; her father Eugene Allen Gilmore was a diplomat and university president. She grew up living at the Eugene A. Gilmore House, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1908.
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Wolfgang Rosenthal
1882 - 1971 (89 years)
Wolfgang Rosenthal was a German oral surgeon. Until the mid-1930s, he also pursued a parallel career as a bass-baritone singer. After the destructive bombing of the in Leipzig it became necessary to identify the physical remains of Johann Sebastian Bach before they could be reburied at the Thomaskirche nearby: Rosenthal was able to combine his knowledge of anatomy with his insights into the physical effect of a lifetime of organ playing on a musician's legs to provide the necessary identification.
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Horace Dutton Taft
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Horace Dutton Taft was an American educator, and the founder of The Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut, United States. Early life He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the younger brother of William Howard Taft of the powerful Taft family. He graduated from Yale University in 1883, where he was a member of Skull and Bones and won the Townsend Prize.
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Charles L. Kuhn
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Charles Louis Kuhn II was an American art historian and curator. Kuhn was the Director of the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University from 1930 to 1968. Career Kuhn graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts in 1923, and then continued on to Harvard University to earn a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1924 and 1929, respectively. His doctoral dissertation was on Romanesque murals in Catalonia.
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Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl
1880 - 1936 (56 years)
Rudolf Meyer Riefstahl was a German art historian and specialist in Islamic art who spent the majority of his career in America where he moved in 1915. His numerous obituaries attest to his distinguished career and the loss felt in his field of study at his sudden and early death from pneumonia.
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Helga Eng
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
Helga Kristine Eng was a Norwegian psychologist and educationalist. She was the third woman to receive a doctor's degree in Norway, and the first to do so in psychology. Early life and education She was born in Rakkestad as a daughter of teacher and smallholder Hans Andersen Kirkeng and Johanne Marie Sæves . She had seven siblings. She graduated from Asker Seminary in 1895, and started a career as a primary school teacher. She started in Lier, continued in Moss from 1897 to 1900 when she was hired at Lakkegata School at Tøyen, Oslo.
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Claude Colleer Abbott
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Claude Colleer Abbott was an English poet, scholar and university lecturer, the 'C. C. Abbott' of academic publications. He is principally known as the editor of Gerard Manley Hopkins' correspondence.
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Donald K. David
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Donald Kirk David was the third dean of the Harvard Business School, serving from 1942 to 1955. Donald K. David, the Chairman of the Committee for Economic Development , established a national Commission on Money and Credit , November 21, 1957. The report of the Commission was published in June 1961 and it was subsequently disbanded.
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Grace Coyle
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Grace Longwell Coyle was a highly influential American thinker in the area of social work with groups. She wrote important books on the subject, and had great influence on the development of teaching group work concepts.
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William Groves
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
William Charles Groves was an Australian educator and public servant. He served as Director of Education in Nauru and Papua and New Guinea between 1937 and 1958, also serving on the Legislative Council in Papua and New Guinea as part of the role.
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John Beazley
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Sir John Davidson Beazley, was a British classical archaeologist and art historian, known for his classification of Attic vases by artistic style. He was professor of classical archaeology and art at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1956.
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Heinrich Wölfflin
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Heinrich Wölfflin was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that saw German art history's rise to pre-eminence. His three most important books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock , Die Klassische Kunst , and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe .
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Ellis Waterhouse
1905 - 1985 (80 years)
Sir Ellis Kirkham Waterhouse was an English art historian and museum director who specialised in Roman baroque and English painting. He was Director of the National Galleries of Scotland and held the Barber chair at Birmingham University until his official retirement in 1970.
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Kurt Bauch
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Kurt Bauch was a German art historian with particular interest in the art of Rembrandt. The son of a Mecklenburg judge, Bauch studied art history at the University of Berlin under Adolph Goldschmidt and at the University of Munich under Heinrich Wölfflin. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the Rembrandt pupil, Jacob Adriaensz Backer, at the University of Freiburg under Hans Jantzen. From 1924 to 1926 he was assistant of the famous Dutch Rembrandt scholar, Cornelis Hofstede de Groot in the Hague. In 1927 he completed his Habilitationsschrift on the art of the young Rembrandt. For some years he worked as a Privatdozent, teaching medieval and early modern art in Freiburg and Frankfurt am Main.
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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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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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