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 female people in Philosophy,
#2251
Alice DeLamar
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Alice DeLamar was the heiress to Joseph Raphael De Lamar. She was a patron of the arts, and helped fund plays by Mercedes de Acosta. DeLamar also donated some of her land in Palm Beach, Florida to the Audubon Society in the 1960s.
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Martha May Eliot
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Martha May Eliot , was a foremost pediatrician and specialist in public health, an assistant director for WHO, and an architect of New Deal and postwar programs for maternal and child health. Her first important research, community studies of rickets in New Haven, Connecticut, and Puerto Rico, explored issues at the heart of social medicine. Together with Edwards A. Park, her research established that public health measures could prevent and reverse the early onset of rickets.
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Mary J. Safford
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Mary Jane Safford-Blake was a nurse, physician, educator, and humanitarian. As a nurse in the Union army she worked closely with Mary Ann Bickerdyke treating the sick and injured near Fort Donelson, and was nicknamed the "Cairo Angel" for her service in Cairo, Illinois. After the war she became one of the first female gynecologists in the United States and was the first woman to perform an ovariotomy. She later taught at Boston University, and was one of the first women elected to the Boston School Committee.
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Martha H. Mowry
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Martha H. Mowry was an American physician and the first woman physician in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. She was also an advocate for women's suffrage and human welfare reform. Early life and education
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Selma Feldbach
1878 - 1924 (46 years)
Selma Feldbach was the first Estonian woman to become a medical doctor. In 1904 she graduated in medicine from the University of Bern.
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Ida Halpern
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.
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Vida Latham
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Vida Annette Latham was a British-American dentist, physician, microscopist, and researcher, known for her work in publishing and her research on oral tumors, surgery, and anatomy. Early life and education Vida Latham was born in Lancashire in 1866 to a physician father. Her early education took place in Cambridge and Manchester. She earned her master's degree from the University of London in 1889; she published papers on tooth anatomy and pain in 1888 while working at a London dentist's office. She then moved to the United States because she could not practice in the UK with an American dentistry degree.
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Josephine Adams Rathbone
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Josephine Adams Rathbone was a librarian, library educator, author, and president of the American Library Association in 1931–32. She was born in Jamestown, New York. She began her studies at the University of Michigan from 1887 to 1891, then moved to New York where she graduated from the New York State Library School in 1893 earning a B.L.S. After working for two years as an assistant cataloger at the Pratt Institute Free Library she was appointed "chief instructor" at the Pratt Institute Library School in 1895 under Mary Wright Plummer. When Plummer went to the New York Public Library to e...
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Uhwudong
1430 - 1480 (50 years)
Eowudong or Uhwudong , also known as Eoeuludong , née Park , was a Korean dancer, writer, artist, and poet from a noble family in the Joseon Dynasty of the 15th century. Most of her work has not been preserved. She is described to be one of the evil women from the Joseon Dynasty along with Queen Munjeong, Jang Nok-su, and Royal Noble Consort Hui.
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Batis of Lampsacus
350 BC - 210 BC (140 years)
Batis of Lampsacus, was a student of Epicurus at Lampsacus in the early 3rd century BC. According to Diogenes Laertius, she was the sister of Metrodorus and wife of Idomeneus. Seneca the Younger recounts that when Batis' son died, Metrodorus wrote a letter to his sister offering comfort, telling her that "all the Good of mortals is mortal," and "that there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness, and that one should give chase thereto at such times as these." Fragments of a letter from Epicurus to Batis on the death of Metrodorus in 277 BC have also been discovered among the papyri at Herculaneum.
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Margaret Elizabeth Egan
1905 - 1959 (54 years)
Margaret Elizabeth Egan was an American librarian and communication scholar who is best known for “Foundations of a Theory in Bibliography,” published in Library Quarterly in 1952 and co-authored with Jesse Hauk Shera. This article marked the first appearance of the term "social epistemology" in connection with library science.
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Timycha
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Timycha of Sparta , was a Pythagorean philosopher mentioned by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras: The temperance also of those men, and how Pythagoras taught this virtue, may be learnt from what Hippobotus and Neanthes narrate of Myllias and Timycha who were Pythagoreans. For they say that Dionysius the tyrant could not obtain the friendship of any one of the Pythagoreans, though he did every thing to accomplish his purpose; for they had observed, and carefully avoided his monarchical disposition. He sent therefore to the Pythagoreans, a troop of thirty soldiers, under the command of Eurym...
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Ruth Shaw Wylie
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Ruth Shaw Wylie was a U.S.-born composer and music educator. She described herself as “a fairly typical Midwestern composer,” pursuing musical and aesthetic excellence but not attracting much national attention: “All good and worthy creative acts do not take place in New York City,” she wrote in 1962, “although most good and worthy rewards for creative acts do emanate from there; and if we can’t all be on hand to reap these enticing rewards we can take solace in the fact that we are performing good deeds elsewhere.” She was among the many twentieth-century American composers whose work contri...
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Naomi Scheman
1900 - Present (126 years)
Naomi Scheman is a Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is also a guest professor at the Umeå Center for Gender Studies in Sweden. Scheman was one of the first scholars to bring Wittgenstein's thoughts in to feminist philosophy.
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Isabella Forshall
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Isabella Forshall FRCSE was an English paediatric surgeon who played a leading role in the development of the speciality of paediatric surgery in the United Kingdom. She took a particular interest in neonatal surgery and was instrumental in the establishment of the Liverpool Neonatal Surgical Unit, the first neonatal intensive care unit in the UK and indeed in the world.
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Winifred Cullis
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.
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Grace de Laguna
1878 - 1978 (100 years)
Grace Mead de Laguna was an American philosopher who taught at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. Life Grace Mead Andrus was born on 28 September 1878 in East Berlin, Connecticut. She was the youngest child, and only daughter, of Wallace R. Andrus and Annis Andrus . Both parents were of Connecticut ancestry dating back to the 17th century. Her mother, Annis, had been a school teacher. Her father had served with the 17th Connecticut Volunteers during the Civil War, He would later work as a land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway whilst it was being built. This led to the family moving, wh...
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Cicely Williams
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Cicely Delphine Williams, OM, CMG, FRCP was a Jamaican physician, most notable for her discovery and research into kwashiorkor, a condition of advanced malnutrition, and her campaign against the use of sweetened condensed milk and other artificial baby milks as substitutes for human breast milk.
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Sadaf Farooqi
1900 - Present (126 years)
Ismaa Sadaf Farooqi is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research fellow in Clinical Science, professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a consultant physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK.
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Dorothy Price
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Dorothy Price was an American physiologist and endocrinologist. She is best known for her discovery of the principle of negative feedback in endocrine axis regulation, in work done alongside Carl Moore. She is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of neuroendocrinology.
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May Brodbeck
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
May Brodbeck was an American philosopher of science. Biography Brodbeck was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied chemistry at New York University, attending evening courses while working, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. Thereafter, she worked as a high-school chemistry teacher, before being recruited into the Manhattan Project. Following the war, she studied philosophy at the University of Iowa, completing a Ph.D. supervised by Gustav Bergmann in 1947, on the subject of John Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
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Agnes Fogo
Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.
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H. Nida Sen
Hatice Nida Sen is an ophthalmologist researching mechanisms involved in different forms of human uveitis. She is a clinical investigator at the National Eye Institute. Education Hatice Nida Sen obtained a M.D. degree from Hacettepe University Medical School and a Master of Health Sciences from Duke University School of Medicine. She completed an ophthalmology residency at George Washington University and her uveitis and ocular immunology fellowship at the National Eye Institute .
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Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Ruth Boynton
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota. She worked in public health and student health services. At that time, there were few women in any of these fields. She was director of the University Student Health Service from 1936 to 1961and it was renamed the Boynton Health Service in her honor in 1975. She served as the acting dean of the School of Public Health from 1944 to 1946.
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Grete L. Bibring
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.
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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Frances Clarke Sayers
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Clarke Sayers was an American children's librarian, author of children's books, and lecturer on children's literature. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Hilary Cass
Hilary Dawn Cass is a British medical doctor and a consultant in paediatric disability at St Thomas' Hospital, London. She was the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health from 2012 to 2015.
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Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a Jewish bacteriologist and physician, known for her research on tuberculosis and public health. She was the second woman to become a Professor in Prussia. Biography Lydia Rabinowitsch was born at Kovno, Russian Empire . She was educated at the girls' gymnasium of her native city, and privately in Latin and Greek, subsequently studying natural sciences at the universities of Zurich and Bern . After graduation she went to Berlin, where Professor Robert Koch permitted her to pursue her bacteriological studies at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. She became t...
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Anna Botsford Comstock
1854 - 1930 (76 years)
Anna Botsford Comstock was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies. The first female professor at Cornell University, her over 900-page work, The Handbook of Nature Study , is now in its 24th edition. Comstock was an American artist and wood engraver known for illustrating entomological text books with her husband, John Henry Comstock including their first joint effort, The Manual for the Study of Insects . Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.
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Virginia Gildersleeve
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve was an American academic, the long-time dean of Barnard College, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, and the only woman delegated by United States to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the charter for and creation of the United Nations.
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Sara Josephine Baker
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially in the immigrant communities of New York City. Her fight against the damage that widespread urban poverty and ignorance caused to children, especially newborns, is perhaps her most lasting legacy. In 1917, she noted that babies born in the United States faced a higher mortality rate than soldiers fighting in World War I, drawing a great deal of attention to her cause. She also is known for tracking down Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary.
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Pauline Alderman
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Edith Pauline Alderman was an American musicologist and composer. She was the founder and the first Chairwoman of the Department of Music History and Literature at the University of Southern California, between 1952 and 1960.
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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Janina Hurynowicz
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Janina Hurynowicz was a Polish medical doctor, neurophysiologist and neurologist. She was the author of many works on Chronaxie and the influence of insulin on the autonomic nervous system and became a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Elsie Gerlach
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Dr. Elsie Gerlach was named the first superintendent of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry Children's Clinic in 1927 after having served as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerlach stayed for 38 years and became nationally known and respected as a pioneer in the teaching and development of pediatric dentistry. In the early years of the clinic, she looked for children on the street who needed dental care and brought them to the clinic.
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Helen Hart
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Helen Hart was an American plant pathologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Hart was the first woman president of the American Phytopathological Society, and was instrumental in making the University of Minnesota's Department of Plant Pathology a world-leader in stem rust.
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Maryla Falk
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Maryla Falk was a Polish indologist and religious scholar. A member of the Polish Oriental Society, she is best remembered for her book Mit psychologiczny w starożytnych Indiach , and her treatises l misteri di Novalis published in Naples, and Nāma-rūpa and Dharma-rūpa. Origin and Aspects of an Ancient Indian Conception published at the University of Calcutta.
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Elsie Few
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Elsie Evelyn Few, was a Jamaican-born artist, who had a long career in Britain and was associated with the Euston Road School. Throughout her career Few produced oil paintings of landscapes but later in her life began using collage techniques to create abstract designs.
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Ksenija Atanasijević
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Ksenija Atanasijević was the first recognised major female Serbian philosopher, and the first female professors of Belgrade University, where she graduated. She wrote about Giordano Bruno, ancient Greek philosophy and the history of Serbian philosophy, and translated important philosophical works into Serbian, including works by Aristotle, Plato, and Spinoza. She was also an early Serbian feminist writer and philosopher.
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Rose Rand
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Rose Rand was an Austrian-American logician and philosopher. She was a member of the Vienna Circle. Life and work Rose Rand was born in Lemberg in the Austrian crown land of Galicia . After her family moved to Austria she studied at the Polish Gymnasium in Vienna. In 1924 she enrolled in Vienna University, her teachers included Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap. She graduated with her first degree in 1928. During her post-graduation years, she remained in contact with Vienna Circle colleagues such as Schlick.
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Isadore Gilbert Mudge
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Isadore Gilbert Mudge was ranked by the magazine American Libraries as one of the top 100 important leaders that libraries have had in the 20th century. Mudge was a defining influence on what a contemporary reference librarian is and was essential for helping organize and promote reference books for use in helping patrons find information and answers to questions.
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Helen Keller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the Unite...
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Alice Hamilton
1869 - 1970 (101 years)
Alice Hamilton was an American physician, research scientist, and author. She was a leading expert in the field of occupational health, laid the foundation for health and safety protections, and a pioneer in the field of industrial toxicology.
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Georgia Harkness
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Georgia Elma Harkness was an American Methodist theologian and philosopher. Harkness has been described as one of the first significant American female theologians and was important in the movement to legalize the ordination of women in American Methodism.
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Mary Somerville
1780 - 1872 (92 years)
Mary Somerville was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Lyubov Axelrod
1868 - 1946 (78 years)
Lyubov Isaakovna Axelrod was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist philosopher and an art theoretician. Early life Axelrod was born in the family of a rabbi in Vilenkovichi, a village in the Vilna gubernia of the Russian Empire, now in Pastavy Raion, Belarus. She became involved with the narodnik organization at age 16. She emigrated to Switzerland in 1887, with the assistance of Leo Jogiches when the Vitebsk organisation collapsed in the wake of an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Alexander III of Russia organised by Aleksandr Ulyanov, older brother of Vladimir Lenin.
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Germaine de Staël
1766 - 1817 (51 years)
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein , commonly known as Madame de Staël , was a prominent woman of letters and political theorist in both Parisian and Genevan intellectual circles. She was the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzanne Curchod, a respected salonhostess. Throughout her life, she held a moderate stance during the tumultuous periods of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, persisting until the time of the French Restoration.
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