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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential female people in Philosophy,
#2351
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.
Go to Profile#2352
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.
Go to Profile#2353
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.
Go to Profile#2354
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.
Go to Profile#2355
Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
Go to Profile#2356
Susan Ofori-Atta
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Susan Barbara Gyankorama Ofori-Atta, also de Graft-Johnson, was a Ghanaian medical doctor – the first female doctor on the Gold Coast. She was the first Ghanaian woman and fourth West African woman to earn a university degree. Ofori-Atta was also the third West African woman to become a physician after the Nigerians Agnes Yewande Savage and Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi . In 1933, Sierra Leonean political activist and higher education pioneer, Edna Elliot-Horton became the second West African woman university graduate and the first to earn a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. Eventually Of...
Go to Profile#2357
Alice Weld Tallant
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Alice Weld Tallant was an American physician and medical school professor. When her employment as a professor of obstetrics was terminated at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, it sparked the "Tallant Affair", in which students staged a strike and several colleagues resigned their positions in protest.
Go to Profile#2358
Annette Lewis Phinazee
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Alethia Annette Lewis Hoage Phinazee was the first woman and the first black American woman to earn the doctorate in library science from Columbia University. She was called a trailblazer for her work as a librarian and educator.
Go to Profile#2359
Althea Warren
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Althea Hester Warren was the director of the Los Angeles Public Library from 1933 to 1947 and president of the American Library Association in 1943-1944. She was inducted into the California Library Association's Library Hall of Fame in 2013.
Go to Profile#2360
Raïssa Maritain
1883 - 1960 (77 years)
Raïssa Maritain was a French poet and philosopher. She was the wife of Jacques Maritain, with whom she worked and whose companion she was for more than half a century, at the center of a circle of French Catholic intellectuals. Her memoir, Les Grandes Amitiés, which won the prix du Renouveau français, chronicles this. Jacques Maritain, Raïssa and her sister Vera formed what would be called "the three Maritains".
Go to Profile#2361
Hypatia
360 - 415 (55 years)
Hypatia was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Although preceded by Pandrosion, another Alexandrine female mathematician, she is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She wrote a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume Arithmetica, which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's ...
Go to Profile#2362
Julie Favre
1833 - 1896 (63 years)
Julie Velten Favre , sometimes called Madame Jules Favre, was a French philosopher and educator. She is known for her work educating young women and for advancing a moral philosophy that advocated living a virtuous life, rather than one based on rules and punishment.
Go to Profile#2363
Sojourner Truth
1798 - 1883 (85 years)
Sojourner Truth was an American abolitionist and activist for African-American civil rights, women's rights, and alcohol temperance. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
Go to Profile#2364
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.
Go to Profile#2365
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.
Go to Profile#2366
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.
Go to Profile#2367
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.
Go to Profile#2368
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.
Go to Profile#2369
Elli Lambridi
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Elli Lambridi , also spelled Helle Lampride or Helle Lambridis, was a Greek philosopher who wrote extensively in the fields of ancient and modern philosophy. She also wrote on archaeology, wrote fiction and produced translations. She was also an educator and was active in Greek left-wing politics and feminism from an early age. It has been claimed that her prominence in twentieth-century Greek philosophy has "only recently become widely known". Her life and work was celebrated on 8 March 2017 at a talks event in the old Senate chamber of the Parliament of Greece in Athens.
Go to Profile#2370
Harriet Taylor Mill
1807 - 1858 (51 years)
Harriet Taylor Mill was an English philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing can be found in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. Several pieces can also be found in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, especially volume XXI.
Go to Profile#2371
Anne Conway
1631 - 1679 (48 years)
Anne Conway was an English philosopher of the Enlightenment, whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Gottfried Leibniz. Conway's thought is a deeply original form of rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns that lead some to think of it as unique among seventeenth-century systems. Hugh Trevor-Roper called her "England's greatest female philosopher."
Go to Profile#2372
Helen Knight
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Helen Knight was a British philosopher. She was one of few women active in the early days of analytic aesthetics. Life and education Knight was born in Swiss Cottage, London and attended Fremarch School, Hampstead. She began her BA at Bedford College, London, before coming to Cambridge University in 1921 where she took Part II Moral Sciences in 1923 and obtained a first class degree. From 1923 to 1925 she was a Research Student at Newnham College. She married psychologist Rex Knight on 30 January 1926 , and then appears to have taken a break from academic philosophy until 1932 when she returned to Newnham as Sarah Smithson Research Fellow.
Go to Profile#2373
Margaret MacDonald
1907 - 1956 (49 years)
Margaret MacDonald was a British analytic philosopher. She worked in the areas of philosophy of language, political philosophy and aesthetics. Life and education Margaret MacDonald was born in London and abandoned as a child.
Go to Profile#2374
Arignote
530 BC - 450 BC (80 years)
Arignote or Arignota was a Pythagorean philosopher from Croton, Magna Graecia, or from Samos. She was known as a student of Pythagoras and Theano and, according to some traditions, their daughter as well.
Go to Profile#2375
Angelica Kauffman
1741 - 1807 (66 years)
Maria Anna Angelika Kauffmann , usually known in English as Angelica Kauffman, was a Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome. Remembered primarily as a history painter, Kauffmann was a skilled portraitist, landscape and decoration painter. She was, along with Mary Moser, one of two female painters among the founding members of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.
Go to Profile#2376
Marianna Florenzi
1802 - 1870 (68 years)
Marchioness Marianna Florenzi , née Marianna Bacinetti, was an Italian noblewoman, philosopher and translator of philosophical works. She was also known by her married name of Marianna Florenzi Waddington.
Go to Profile#2377
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson
1836 - 1917 (81 years)
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was an English physician and suffragist. She was the first woman to qualify in Britain as a physician and surgeon. She was the co-founder of the first hospital staffed by women, the first dean of a British medical school, the first woman in Britain to be elected to a school board and, as mayor of Aldeburgh, the first female mayor in Britain.
Go to Profile#2378
Anna Howard Shaw
1847 - 1919 (72 years)
Anna Howard Shaw was a leader of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. She was also a physician and one of the first ordained female Methodist ministers in the United States. Early life
Go to Profile#2379
Gail Stine
1940 - 1977 (37 years)
Gail Stine was an American philosopher who specialized in epistemology and philosophy of language. She was born in Schenectady, New York. Before her death at the age of 37, she was a professor of philosophy at Wayne State University. Wayne State now holds the annual Gail Stine Memorial Lecture in her honor.
Go to Profile#2380
Julia Ward Howe
1819 - 1910 (91 years)
Julia Ward Howe was an American author and poet, known for writing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage.
Go to Profile#2381
Mabel Besant-Scott
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Mabel Emily Besant-Scott was a Theosophist, Co-Freemason and Rosicrucian. She was the daughter of the Theosophist, Secularist, and Co-Freemason Annie Besant and her husband Rev. Frank Besant. She had an older brother named Arthur Besant. When her father and mother separated, she was to be under the custody of her mother, but in 1878 her father went to the High Court and won the case for custody. It was not until she was 21 that she returned to her mother.
Go to Profile#2382
Hanna Reitsch
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Hanna Reitsch was a German aviator and test pilot. Along with Melitta von Stauffenberg, she flight tested many of Germany's new aircraft during World War II and received many honors. Reitsch was among the very last people to meet Adolf Hitler alive in the in late April 1945.
Go to Profile#2383
Yvonne Picard
1920 - 1943 (23 years)
Yvonne Picard was a French philosopher and a member of the French Resistance during the Second World War. She and her brother, the historian Gilbert Charles-Picard, were the children of the archaeologist Charles Picard.
Go to Profile#2384
Magdalena Aebi
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Magdalena Aebi was a Swiss philosopher known for her fundamental criticism of Immanuel Kant. Life Magdalena Aebi was born on 4 February 1898 in Burgdoft into the family of Hans Aebi and Marie A. Nubile. After attending high school in Burgdorf she studied classical philology, art history and archeology in Zurich and Munich, as well as philosophy with Ernst Cassirer in Hamburg. In 1943 she obtained her doctorate with a critical thesis on Immanuel Kant soughting to refute fundamental Kantian arguments related to transcendental logic. In 1947 on the basis of her dissertation Aebi published a book...
Go to Profile#2385
Camila Henríquez Ureña
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Camila Henríquez Ureña , was a writer, essayist, educator and literary critic from the Dominican Republic who became a naturalized Cuban citizen. She descended from a family of writers, thinkers and educators; both her parents, Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and Salomé Ureña, as well as her brothers Pedro and Max, were literary luminaries. Her essays have been published in Instrucción Pública, Ultra, Archipiélago , Casa de las Américas, La Gaceta de Cuba, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Revista de la Universidad de La Habana, and Revista Lyceum. A feminist and a humanist, she lectured durin...
Go to Profile#2386
Sophonisba Breckinridge
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was an American activist, Progressive Era social reformer, social scientist and innovator in higher education. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science and economics then the J.D. at the University of Chicago, and she was the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent her as a delegate to the 7th Pan-American Conference in Uruguay, making her the first woman to represent the U.S. government at an international conference. She led the process of creating the academic professional discipline and degree for social work.
Go to Profile#2387
Scholastica
480 - 547 (67 years)
Scholastica is a saint of the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion. She was born in Italy, and a ninth-century tradition makes her the twin sister of Saint Benedict of Nursia. Her feast day is 10 February, Saint Scholastica's Day. Scholastica is traditionally regarded as the founder of the Benedictine nuns.
Go to Profile#2388
Judith K. Ockene
#2389
Minnie Earl Sears
1873 - 1933 (60 years)
Minnie Earl Sears formulated the Sears List of Subject Headings, a simplification of the Library of Congress Subject Headings. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century."
Go to Profile#2390
Lady Mary Shepherd
1777 - 1847 (70 years)
Lady Mary Shepherd, née Primrose was a Scottish philosopher who published two philosophical books, one in 1824 and one in 1827. According to Robert Blakey, in her entry in his History of the Philosophy of the Mind, she exercised considerable influence over the Edinburgh philosophy of her day.
Go to Profile#2391
Ban Zhao
45 - 116 (71 years)
Ban Zhao , courtesy name Huiban , was a Chinese historian, philosopher, and politician. She was the first known female Chinese historian and, along with Pamphile of Epidaurus, one of the first known female historians. She completed her brother Ban Gu's work on the history of the Western Han, the Book of Han. She also wrote Lessons for Women, an influential work on women's conduct. She also had great interest in astronomy and mathematics and wrote poems, commemorative writings, argumentations, commentaries, essays and several longer works, not all of which survive. She became China's most famous female scholar and an instructor of Taoist sexual practices for the imperial family.
Go to Profile#2392
Hwang Jini
1506 - 1544 (38 years)
Hwang Jini or Hwang Jin-yi , also known by her gisaeng name Myeongwol , was one of the most famous gisaeng of the Joseon Dynasty. She lived during the reign of King Jungjong. She was noted for her exceptional beauty, charming quick wit, extraordinary intellect, and her assertive and independent nature. She has become an almost myth-like figure in modern Korea, inspiring novels, operas, films, and television series.
Go to Profile#2393
Abella
1400 - Present (626 years)
Abella, often known as Abella of Salerno or Abella of Castellomata, was a physician in the mid fourteenth century. Abella studied and taught at the Salerno School of Medicine. Abella is believed to have been born around 1380, but the exact time of her birth and death is unclear. Abella lectured on standard medical practices, bile, and women's health and nature at the medical school in Salerno. Abella, along with Rebecca de Guarna, specialized in the area of embryology. She published two treatises: De atrabile and De natura seminis humani , neither of which survive today. In Salvatore De Renzi...
Go to Profile#2394
Ngaire Kerse
Ngaire Margaret Kerse is a New Zealand medical academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 1998 PhD titled 'Health promotion and older people : a general practice intervention study' at the University of Melbourne, Kerse moved to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor. Notable students include Valerie Wright-St Clair.
Go to Profile#2395
Frances Melville
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Frances Helen Melville , was a Scottish suffragist, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, and one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Edinburgh in 1892. She was president of the British Federation of University Women from 1935 to 1942.
Go to Profile#2396
Gabrielle Suchon
1631 - 1703 (72 years)
Gabrielle Suchon was a French moral philosopher who participated in debates about the social, political and religious condition of women in the early modern era. Her most prominent works are the Traité de la morale et de la politique and Du célibat volontaire .
Go to Profile#2397
Fe del Mundo
1900 - 2011 (111 years)
Fe Villanueva del Mundo, , was a Filipina pediatrician. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and is known for shaping the modern child healthcare system in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice spanned eight decades. She gained international recognition, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1977. In 1980, she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines, and in 2010, she was conferred the Order of Lakandula. She was the first female president of the Philippine Pediatric Society and the first woman to be named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980.
Go to Profile#2398
Eliza Ritchie
1856 - 1933 (77 years)
Dr. Eliza Ritchie was a prominent suffragist in Nova Scotia, Canada. Biography Ritchie was born on 20 May 1856 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was the daughter of John William Ritchie and Amelia Almon. She attended Dalhousie University and went on to earn her doctorate in German philosophy from Cornell University in 1889, becoming one of the first Canadian women to receive a PhD. She traveled to Leipzig, Germany, and Oxford, England to further her studies. She taught at a variety of universities in the United States before returning to Canada in 1899. Beginning in 1901 she lectured philosophy at Dalhousie University.
Go to Profile#2399
Elizabeth Ann Seton
1774 - 1821 (47 years)
Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton was a Catholic religious sister in the United States and an educator, known as a founder of the country's parochial school system. After her death, she became the first person born in what would become the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church . She also established the first Catholic girls' school in the nation in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where she likewise founded the first American congregation of religious sisters, the Sisters of Charity.
Go to Profile#2400
Edwina Whitney
1868 - 1970 (102 years)
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as one of the earliest librarians at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She also served as a German instructor from 1901 to 1926 and an assistant professor of German from 1926 to 1934.
Go to Profile