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,
#2301
Hattie Alexander
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was an American pediatrician and microbiologist. She earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1930 and continued her research and medical career at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Alexander became the lead microbiologist and the head of the bacterial infections program at Columbia-Presbyterian. She occupied many prestigious positions at Columbia University and was well honored even after her death from liver cancer in 1968. Alexander is known for her development of the first effective remedies for Haemophilus influenzae infection, as well as being one of the first scientists to identify and study antibiotic resistance.
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Margaret Fairlie
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Margaret Fairlie FRCOG FRCSE was a Scottish academic and gynaecologist. Fairlie spent most of her career working at Dundee Royal Infirmary and teaching at the medical school at University College, Dundee . In 1940 she became the first woman to hold a professorial chair in Scotland.
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Katharine Sharp
1865 - 1914 (49 years)
Katharine Lucinda Sharp gained prominence as a pioneering librarian for her intense engagement with the library profession that spanned 19 years. Having founded the innovative University of Illinois Library School, she resigned from her position and left the library field as rapidly as she had entered it. She is remembered for ‘professionalizing’ the field of library science and for her considerable contribution to the standards of the discipline. In 1999, Sharp was named in the American Library Association's 100 leaders of the 20th century.
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Clarisse Coignet
1824 - 1916 (92 years)
Clarisse Coignet was a French moral philosopher, educator, and historian. She was also associated with the social and political movement called La Morale independante, which advanced the idea that morality is independent from science and religion.
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Alice Ravenhill
1859 - 1954 (95 years)
Alice Ravenhill was an educational pioneer, a developer of Women's Institutes, and one of the first authors to propound aboriginal rights in B.C. She is also the author of numerous articles and books, including her autobiography which she wrote when she was 92.
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Jane Clapperton
1832 - 1914 (82 years)
Jane Hume Clapperton was a British philosopher, birth control pioneer, socialist, social reformer and suffragist. Life Her father was Alexander Clapperton and mother Anne Clapperton . She had eleven siblings. Her father ran a company, Clapperton & Co., in Edinburgh and moved from 43 Lauriston Place close to George Heriot's School to 126 George Street in the year Jane was born.
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Su Xuelin
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Su Xuelin or Su Hsüeh-lin was a Chinese writer and scholar. Early life Su Xuelin was born to a family of officials native to Anhui province in 1897. Her grandfather, Su Jinxin, served as a magistrate in several counties in Zhejiang province, where Su Xuelin was born. Her mother was surnamed Tu, but had no formal first name, instead going by the nickname To-Ni. Su's father held a minor official position, first under the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China. Su had three brothers and two sisters.
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Hilda Lloyd
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Dr. Dame Hilda Nora Lloyd, DBE was a British physician and surgeon. She was the first woman to be elected as president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Born in Birmingham, the younger of two daughters, she attended King Edward VI High School, Edgbaston before entering Birmingham University .
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Laura Bentivolgio Davia
1689 - Present (337 years)
Laura Bentivoglio Davia was an Italian aristocratic philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and natural philosophy. She was known primarily for creating relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze .
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Emilia Rensi
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Emilia Rensi was an Italian philosopher, free thinker, writer and teacher. She wrote for anarchist and progressive magazines, such as Flavia Steno's La Chiosa, Volontà , Umanità Nova and Franco Leggio's Sicilia Libertaria . She began publishing books on social, cultural and ethical subjects from the late 1960s onwards.
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Theodora Kimball Hubbard
1887 - 1935 (48 years)
Theodora Kimball Hubbard was the first librarian of the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture, and a contemporary of and collaborator with many significant figures in landscape architecture in expanding the body of knowledge in that subject area.
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Themista of Lampsacus
300 BC - 260 BC (40 years)
Themista of Lampsacus , the wife of Leonteus, was a student of Epicurus, early in the 3rd century BC. Epicurus' school was unusual in the 3rd century, in that it allowed women to attend, and we also hear of Leontion attending Epicurus' school around the same time. Cicero ridicules Epicurus for writing "countless volumes in praise of Themista," instead of more worthy men such as Miltiades, Themistocles or Epaminondas. Themista and Leonteus named their son Epicurus.
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Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider was a German-Australian physicist and philosopher. She is best known for her collaboration and correspondence with physicists Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and Max Planck. Rosenthal-Schneider earned a PhD in philosophy in 1920 at the University of Berlin, where she first met Albert Einstein. After leaving Nazi Germany and emigrating to Australia in 1938, she became a tutor in the German department at the University of Sydney in 1945 and taught history and philosophy of science. In the 1940s and 1950s, she exchanged a series of letters with Albert Einstein about philo...
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Gertrude Van Wagenen
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Gertrude L. Van Wagenen was an American biologist. She was also a collector of anatomical illustrations and models. Early life Gertrude L. Van Wagenen was the daughter of Anthony Van Wagenen , a judge and lawyer in Sioux City, Iowa, and his wife Gertrude . She completed undergraduate studies at Iowa State University in 1913, where she majored in zoology and was a member of the Beta Zeta chapter of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority. For a few years after graduating, she taught in Ottumwa, Iowa, and endured a case of scarlet fever, with the quarantine it required. In 1918, she collected corals, ...
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Ellen Mitchell
1838 - 1920 (82 years)
Ellen M. Mitchell was an American philosopher, educator and education reformer. She was one of the first women to be appointed lecturer in a university, in addition to writing philosophy, literature and literary criticism.
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Lillias Hamilton
1858 - 1925 (67 years)
Lillias Anna Hamilton was a British medical doctor and writer. She was born at Tomabil Station, New South Wales to Hugh Hamilton and his wife Margaret Clunes . After attending school in Ayr and then Cheltenham Ladies' College, she trained first as a nurse, in Liverpool, before going on to study medicine in Scotland, qualifying as a Doctor of Medicine in 1890.
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Claude de Bectoz
1490 - 1547 (57 years)
Claude de Bectoz was a French writer and philosopher of the Renaissance. Life Both her mother, Michelette de Salvaing, and father, Jacques de Bactoz, were from well-known families in the Dauphiné. Denys Fauchier taught her to write Latin and verse. Claude would later write prose and verse in both French and Italian.
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Daisy Maud Bellis
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Daisy Maud Bellis was an American painter. Bellis was a native of Waltham, Massachusetts; her birthplace has also been given as Branford, Connecticut, where she later lived. She studied at the Massachusetts College of Art, the University of Vermont, and the Breckenridge School of Painting, and had further lessons at institutions in Montreal and Paris.
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Mae Murray
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Mae Murray was an American actress, dancer, film producer, and screenwriter. Murray rose to fame during the silent film era and was known as "The Girl with the Bee-Stung Lips" and "The Gardenia of the Screen".
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Adelaide Underhill
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Adelaide Underhill was an American librarian. She was hired to catalog and update the organization of volumes in the Vassar College library. She used the Dewey Decimal System and, along with help from her lifelong companion, Lucy Maynard Salmon, built Vassar's into one of the most impressive collections for a liberal arts college at the time.
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Elizabeth Smith Shortt
1859 - 1949 (90 years)
Elizabeth Smith Shortt was one of the first three women to earn a medical degree in Canada. She was one of the women medical students expelled from Queen's University, Ontario following a hostile backlash from male staff and students at the presence of women in the medical school. Shortt went on to complete her studies at a newly established women's college and practised medicine in Hamilton, Ontario. She was a long-serving and active member of the National Council of Women of Canada and spearheaded a number of public health and women's welfare initiatives.
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Marion Murdoch
1849 - 1943 (94 years)
Marion Murdoch was an American minister in Iowa. Murdoch was said to be the first woman in America to receive the degree of Bachelor of Divinity. Early years and education Murdoch was born in Garnavillo, Iowa, October 9, 1849. Her father, Judge Samuel Murdoch, was the last living member of the Territorial legislature of Iowa. He had been a member of the state legislature and judge of the district court. Her mother had come from New York in 1837. Murdoch's early life was spent in outdoor pursuits, developing in her that love of nature and desire for a life of freedom for women. Of the family o...
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Kate Isabel Campbell
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Dame Kate Isabel Campbell, DBE, FRCOG was a noted Australian physician and paediatrician. Campbell's discovery, that blindness in premature babies was caused by high concentrations of oxygen, resulted in the alteration of the treatment of premature babies world-wide and for this she received global recognition.
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Maude Abbott
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
Maude Elizabeth Seymour Abbott was a Canadian physician, among Canada's earliest female medical graduates, and an internationally known expert on congenital heart disease. She was one of the first women to obtain a BA from McGill University.
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Alice Rebecca Brooks McGuire
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Alice "Sally" Rebecca Brooks McGuire was an American librarian. She was named Librarian of the Year by the Texas Library Association, and taught at the University of Texas in its Graduate School of Library Science.
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Margaret Mann
1873 - 1960 (87 years)
Margaret Mann was a noted librarian and teacher who dominated the field of cataloging for almost fifty years. The bulk of her career was spent as a professor at the University of Michigan. She was hired as one of the first three full-time faculty members in the department of library science at Michigan in 1926 and retired in 1938. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Margaret Seward
1864 - 1929 (65 years)
Margaret Seward MBE became the earliest Chemist on staff at the Women's College , from 1896 to 1915. She became the pioneer woman to obtain a first class in the honour school of Natural Science and later received an MBE for her work on nutrition during World War I.
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Anne Hazen McFarland
1867 - 1930 (63 years)
Anne Hazen McFarland was an American physician and medical journal editor who specialized in the treatment of mental illness in women. She criticized the contemporary idea that gynecological disorders caused insanity and nervousness in women.
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Mary Harris Thompson
1829 - 1895 (66 years)
Mary Harris Thompson, MD, , was the founder, head physician and surgeon of the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, renamed Mary Harris Thompson Hospital after her death in 1895. She was one of the first women to practice medicine in Chicago.
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Eta Harich-Schneider
1894 - 1986 (92 years)
Eta Harich-Schneider was a German harpsichordist, musicologist, Japanologist and writer. Life Born in Oranienburg, Harich-Schneider later gave her year of birth as 1897, whereas her gravestone in Vienna-Hietzing reads "1894".
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Jane Anne Russell
1911 - 1967 (56 years)
Jane Anne Russell was an endocrinologist. She researched pituitary extract. Education Russell graduated from Long Beach Polytechnic High School, California, in 1928, as the second best student in her class. At age 17, she entered the University of California Berkeley, and graduated in 1932 as first in her class. She was awarded the California Fellowship in Biochemistry in 1934 and the Rosenburg Fellowship in 1935.
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Jacqueline Cochran
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Jacqueline Cochran was an American pilot and business executive. She pioneered women's aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation. She set numerous records and was the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. Cochran was the wartime head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots , which employed about 1000 civilian American women in a non-combat role to ferry planes from factories to port cities. Cochran was later a sponsor of the Mercury 13 women astronaut program.
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Ida Mann
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Professor Dame Ida Caroline Mann, Mrs Gye, DBE, FRCS was "a distinguished ophthalmologist ... equally well known for her pioneering research work on embryology and development of the eye, and on the influences of genetic and social factors on the incidence and severity of eye disease throughout the world". Only six other women were Fellows at this time.
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Públia Hortênsia de Castro
1548 - 1595 (47 years)
Públia Hortênsia de Castro was a scholar and humanist in the court of Catherine of Austria, Queen of Portugal. Born in 1548 in Vila Viçosa, Portugal, she was named for Hortensia, the famous Roman orator and daughter of Quintus Hortensius, suggesting that her parents intended for her to become a well-educated woman. She evidently studied Greek and Latin, and by the time she was seventeen she was engaged in public debates on Aristotle. There are stories that, dressed as a boy and chaperoned by her brother, she attended the University of Coimbra, in Lisbon, but historians consider this unlikely....
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Laura Alberta Linton
1853 - 1915 (62 years)
Laura Alberta Linton was an American chemist and physician. Early life and education Linton was born in Mahoning County, Ohio, on April 8, 1853, the oldest child of Joseph and Christina Linton. The family were Quakers. The family farmed in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey before settling in Wabasha County, Minnesota. Linton graduated from the Winona Normal School in 1872, and went on to the University of Minnesota, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry.
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Bertha Van Hoosen
1863 - 1952 (89 years)
Bertha Van Hoosen was an American surgeon devoted to women's health issues and the advancement of fellow women surgeons. Among other notable achievements, Van Hoosen was the first president and a founder of the American Medical Women's Association in 1915 and the first woman to be head of a medical division at a coeducational university. She published an autobiography detailing her personal experiences in medicine, Petticoat Surgeon.
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Grace Arabell Goldsmith
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Grace Arabell Goldsmith was a U.S. physician best known for her research on nutritional deficiency diseases, B-complex vitamins, and the vitamin enrichment of foods. She identified the cause of the disease pellagra.
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Eliza Maria Mosher
1846 - 1928 (82 years)
Eliza Maria Mosher was a United States physician, inventor, medical writer, and educator whose wide-ranging medical career included an educational focus on physical fitness and health maintenance. She was the first Dean of Women at the University of Michigan, and the first woman professor to be recognized by the university.
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Joice NanKivell Loch
1887 - 1982 (95 years)
Joice NanKivell Loch MBE was an Australian author, journalist and humanitarian worker who worked with refugees in Poland, Greece and Romania after World War I and World War II. Biography Joice Mary NanKivell was born at Farnham sugar cane plantation in Ingham in far north Queensland in 1887. Her father acted as manager of the plantation for Fanning, NanKivell, a company run by the Fanning brothers and her wealthy grandfather, Thomas NanKivell. The family fortune was lost however when Kanaka labour was abolished and Joice and her parents walked off the property virtually penniless. Her father,...
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Ethel Collins Dunham
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Ethel Collins Dunham , and her life partner, Martha May Eliot, devoted their lives to the care of children. Dunham focused on premature babies and newborns, becoming chief of child development at the Children's Bureau in 1935. She established national standards for the hospital care of newborn children and expanded the scope of health care for growing youngsters by monitoring their progress in regular home visits by Children's Bureau staff.
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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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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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Margaret Masterman
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Margaret Masterman was a British linguist and philosopher, most known for her pioneering work in the field of computational linguistics and especially machine translation. She founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit.
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Hilda D. Oakeley
1867 - 1950 (83 years)
Hilda Diana Oakeley was a British philosopher, educationalist and author. Life and career Hilda Oakeley was born in 1867 in Durham, UK. She was from a privileged upper-middle-class background. Her father, Sir Evelyn Oakeley was a member of a Shropshire gentry family. He and his wife Caroline had five children. In 1878 her father was promoted and the family moved to Manchester. Hilda attended the private Ellerslie Ladies' College. After finishing school she moved to London and independently studied philosophy and psychology. She attended some of the lectures of the philosopher Bernard Bosanqu...
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Virginia Barbour
Virginia M. Barbour is a professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and serves as the Director of the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group. She is best known for being one of the three founding editors of PLOS Medicine, and her various roles in championing the open access movement.
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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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Norman Dott
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Norman McOmish Dott, CBE FRCSE FRSE FRCSC was a Scottish neurosurgeon. He was the first holder of the Chair of Neurological Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Life Norman Dott was born in Edinburgh on 26 August 1897, the third of the five children of Rebecca Morton and Peter McOmish Dott , a picture dealer based at 127 George Street in Edinburgh's New Town. He was educated at George Heriot's School and originally intended a career in engineering. However a serious motorcycle accident on Lothian Road, hospitalised him and left him with a permanent leg injury . The long spell in hospital re-inspired Dott and he changed his ambition to focus upon medicine rather than engineering.
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Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
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