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,
#2401
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.
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Im Yunjidang
1721 - 1793 (72 years)
Im Yunjidang was a Korean writer and neo-Confucian philosopher from the Chosŏn dynasty . She defended the right for a woman to become a Confucian master and argued that men and women did not differ in their human nature by interpretations of Confucianism values in moral self-cultivation and human nature.
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María Pascuala Caro Sureda
1768 - 1827 (59 years)
María Pascuala Caro Sureda , was the second woman Doctor of Philosophy in Spain. She was born to the marqués de La Romana, Pere Caro Fontes, and Margalida Sureda de Togores. She was given a high education and taught Latin, which was not usual for women, and her mother arranged for all her children to be given a formal education. She was allowed to study at the University of Valencia, which was highly unusual for a woman, and was even allowed to graduate: she became a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Valencia in 1779, as the second of her sex in Spain, and published her work in physic...
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Cornelia Johanna de Vogel
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Cornelia Johanna de Vogel was a Dutch classicist, philosopher and theologian. She was a “distinguished Dutch Plato scholar”, and a prolific author of ancient philosophy and patristic theology. She was the professor of the history of classical and medieval philosophy at the state university of Utrecht .
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Valéria Dienes
1879 - 1978 (99 years)
Valéria Dienes was a Hungarian philosopher, dancer, dance instructor, choreographer and one of first Hungarian woman to graduate from university. She is widely considered to be one of the most important Hungarian theorists on movement. She was the recipient of Hungary's highest literary award, the Baumgarten Prize in 1934.
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Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa
1905 - 1981 (76 years)
Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa was "a significant logician, philosopher of language and epistemologist", and "one of the most outstanding female representatives" of the third generation of the Lwów–Warsaw school. She is "mostly known as the author of the important argumentation against neopositivism of the Vienna Circle as well as one of the main critics of relativistic theories of truth". She was also noted for popularising Tarski's works on semantics.
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Eleonora Ziemięcka
1819 - 1869 (50 years)
Eleonora Ziemięcka - was a Polish philosopher and publicist. She is often considered to be Poland's first female philosopher. She wrote Thoughts on the Education of Women, and edited the journal Pielgrzym . She has been described as an "anti-Hegelian" and a conservative.
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Helen Wodehouse
1880 - 1964 (84 years)
Helen Marion Wodehouse was a British philosopher and Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. She was also the first woman to hold a professorial chair at the University of Bristol. Life and education Helen Wodehouse was born on 12 October 1880 in Bratton Fleming, North Devon. She was one of four children of the Reverend Philip John Wodehouse , and his wife, Marion Bryan Wallas, meaning Helen and P.G. were cousins. She was educated at Notting Hill High School in London, where her aunt Katharine Wallas was teaching mathematics and in 1898 she won an exhibition to Girton College, Cambridge to read mathematics.
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Theano
600 BC - 500 BC (100 years)
Theano was a 6th-century BC Pythagorean philosopher. She has been called the wife or student of Pythagoras, although others see her as the wife of Brontinus. Her place of birth and the identity of her father is uncertain as well. Many Pythagorean writings were attributed to her in antiquity, including some letters and a few fragments from philosophical treatises, although these are all regarded as spurious by modern scholars.
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Harriet Robinson
Harriet Latham Robinson is an American vaccine researcher who is founder and Chief Scientific Officer Emeritus at GeoVax. She is the former Chief of Microbiology and Immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Microbiology at Emory University. Her research considered HIV vaccine development. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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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.
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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.
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Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Grace C. Bibb
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Grace C. Bibb was a feminist and philosopher. She was part of the push for equality between the sexes, as well as an advocate for women's rights, access to higher education, expansion in employment opportunities, a right to equal pay, and a woman's right to vote. She was appointed Dean at the Normal school despite the fact that women were not at that time allowed to attend the College. In her position at the Normal school, Bibb pushed that women be allowed into the College of Education. She later pushed for women to be allowed into all other University departments.
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Rebecca Lee Crumpler
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born Rebecca Davis, , was an American physician, nurse and author. After studying at the New England Female Medical College, in 1864 she became the first African American woman to become a doctor of medicine in the United States. Crumpler was also one of the first female physician authors in the nineteenth century. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses. The book has two parts that cover the prevention and cure of infantile bowel complaints, and the life and growth of human beings. Dedicated to nurses and mothers, it focuses on maternal and pediatric medical ...
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Sarah Hackett Stevenson
1841 - 1909 (68 years)
Sarah Ann Hackett Stevenson was an American physician in Illinois, and the first female member of the American Medical Association , as an Illinois State Medical Society delegate in 1876. She was a leader and advocate for the emancipation of women and for the equal treatment of men and women.
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Elsie Inglis
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Eliza Maud "Elsie" Inglis was a Scottish medical doctor, surgeon, teacher, suffragist, and founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals. She was the first woman to hold the Serbian Order of the White Eagle.
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Julia Gulliver
1856 - 1940 (84 years)
Julia Henrietta Gulliver was an American philosopher, educator and college president. She was only the second woman in America to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy and was a tireless advocate for increased female representation in higher education.
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Elizabeth Cabot Agassiz
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz was an American educator, naturalist, writer, and the co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. A researcher of natural history, she was an author and illustrator of natural history texts as well as a co-author of natural history texts with her husband, Louis Agassiz, and her stepson Alexander Agassiz.
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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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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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Frieda Fraser
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Frieda Fraser was a Canadian physician, scientist and academic who worked in infectious disease, including research on scarlet fever and tuberculosis. After finishing her medical studies at the University of Toronto in 1925, she completed a two-year internship in the United States, studying and working in Manhattan and Philadelphia. Afterward, she conducted research in the Connaught Laboratories concentrating on infectious disease, making important contributions in the pre-penicillin age to isolation of the strains of streptococci likely to lead to disease. From 1928, she lectured in the Dep...
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Constance Mabel Winchell
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Constance Mabel Winchell was an American librarian. Winchell worked at Columbia University for thirty-eight years before retiring in 1962. She is best remembered for producing the seventh and eighth editions of the Guide to Reference Books. In 1999, American Libraries included Constance Winchell in a list of 100 most influential individuals in the field of library and information science.
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Axiothea of Phlius
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Axiothea of Phlius was a female student of Plato and Speusippus. She was born in Phlius, which was under Spartan rule when Plato founded his Academy. Axiothea is said by Themistius to have read Plato's Republic and then traveled to Athens to be his student. According to Dicearchus, Axiothea dressed as a man during her time at Plato's Academy. After Plato's death she continued her studies with Speusippus, Plato's nephew.
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Placida Gardner Chesley
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Placida Gardner Chesley was an American medical doctor and college professor. She was the City Bacteriologist of Los Angeles, and worked in Europe with the Red Cross during World War I. Early life Vera Placida Gardner was born in Orange, California, the daughter of Henri F. Gardner and Emma Howard Gardner. She attended Santa Ana High School, and completed undergraduate studies the University of Southern California, graduating in 1910. She earned her medical degree at the University of Michigan, where she was elected to the medical honor fraternity Alpha Omega Alpha.
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Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
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Hannah Logasa
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Hannah Logasa is considered a pioneer of school libraries. Credited with identifying the necessity of libraries in school, Logasa worked to achieve strong interaction between the library, students, and teachers at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School.
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Jennie Kidd Trout
1841 - 1921 (80 years)
Jennie Kidd Trout was the first woman in Canada to become a licensed medical doctor, on March 11, 1875. Trout was the only woman in Canada licensed to practice medicine until July 1880, when Emily Stowe completed the official qualifications.
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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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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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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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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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Penelope Mackie
1900 - Present (126 years)
Penelope Mackie was a British philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and philosophical logic, and was best known for her work on essence and modality. Mackie spent the majority of her career in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham , having also held appointments at the University of Birmingham, Virginia Commonwealth University, and New College, Oxford.
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