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,
#2451
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#2452
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...
Go to Profile#2453
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#2454
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#2455
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.
Go to Profile#2456
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.
Go to Profile#2457
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.
Go to Profile#2458
Pura Belpré
1899 - 1982 (83 years)
Pura Teresa Belpré y Nogueras was an Afro-Puerto Rican educator who served as the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. Life Belpré was born in Cidra, Puerto Rico. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903. Belpré graduated from Central High School in Santurce, Puerto Rico in 1919 and enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras, where she originally planned on becoming a teacher. But, in 1920, Belpré interrupted her studies...
Go to Profile#2459
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#2460
Rachel Bespaloff
1895 - 1949 (54 years)
Rachel Bespaloff was a Ukrainian-French philosopher. Life Rachel Bespaloff came from a Jewish family: her father was the Zionist writer and activist Daniel Pasmanik. A disciple of Lev Shestov, Bespaloff took an increasingly critical distance from Shestov throughout the 1930s. She was one of the first French readers of Heidegger, and wrote on Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, André Malraux, and Julien Green. In 1942 she left France for the United States, working for the French section of the Office of War Information before teaching French at Mount Holyoke College. She committed suicide in 1949.
Go to Profile#2461
Amelia Earhart
1897 - 1939 (42 years)
Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and writer. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She set many other records, was one of the first aviators to promote commercial air travel, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences, and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots.
Go to Profile#2462
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 .
Go to Profile#2463
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.
Go to Profile#2464
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.
Go to Profile#2465
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.
Go to Profile#2466
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.
Go to Profile#2467
Constance Naden
1858 - 1889 (31 years)
Constance Caroline Woodhill Naden was an English writer, poet and philosopher. She studied, wrote and lectured on philosophy and science, alongside publishing two volumes of poetry. Several collected works were published following her death at the young age of 31. In her honour, Robert Lewins established the Constance Naden Medal and had a bust of her installed at Mason Science College . William Ewart Gladstone considered her one of the nineteenth century's foremost female poets.
Go to Profile#2469
M. F. Cleugh
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
M.F. Cleugh was a philosopher and educationalist. For many years she worked at the University of London in their Education department. On retirement she went to live in Shropshire. She is most known for her 1936 PhD work The problem of time, with special reference to its importance for modern thought also at the University of London, which was published in 1937 by Methuen and which has been reprinted several times. Her later work took a psychological slant on the education of those with particular difficulties... the old, the mature or the "slow" learners. She led a one-year course for teach...
Go to Profile#2470
Juana Inés de la Cruz
1651 - 1695 (44 years)
Juana de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , was a colonial Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, as well as a Hieronymite nun, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. As a Spanish-criolla from the New Spain, she was among the main American-born contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "el Inca", and presently considered one of the most important female authors in Spanish language and Mexico's literary history.
Go to Profile#2471
Johanna Charlotte Unzer
1725 - 1782 (57 years)
Johanna Charlotte Unzer , was a German writer and philosopher, famed for her progressive views on women's education. She was awarded the imperial Dichterkrone in 1753. She is known for her anacreontic poetry.
Go to Profile#2472
Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
Go to Profile#2473
Nicarete of Megara
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Nicarete or Nicareta of Megara was a philosopher of the Megarian school, who flourished around . She is stated by Athenaeus to have been a hetaera of good family and education, and to have been a disciple of Stilpo. Diogenes Laërtius states that she was Stilpo's mistress, though he had a wife.
Go to Profile#2474
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".
Go to Profile#2475
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.
Go to Profile#2476
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.
Go to Profile#2477
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...
Go to Profile#2478
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.
Go to Profile#2479
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.
Go to Profile#2480
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.
Go to Profile#2481
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".
Go to Profile#2482
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.
Go to Profile#2483
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.
Go to Profile#2484
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.
Go to Profile#2485
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...
Go to Profile#2486
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.
Go to Profile#2487
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.
Go to Profile#2488
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.
Go to Profile#2489
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 .
Go to Profile#2490
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.
Go to Profile#2491
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.
Go to Profile#2492
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.
Go to Profile#2493
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.
Go to Profile#2494
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...
Go to Profile#2495
Helen B. Taussig
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Helen Brooke Taussig was an American cardiologist, working in Baltimore and Boston, who founded the field of pediatric cardiology. She is credited with developing the concept for a procedure that would extend the lives of children born with Tetralogy of Fallot . This concept was applied in practice as a procedure known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt. The procedure was developed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, who were Taussig's colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Go to Profile#2496
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.
Go to Profile#2497
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.
Go to Profile#2498
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.
Go to Profile#2499
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".
Go to Profile#2500
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.
Go to Profile