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,
#2451
Lucretia Mott
1793 - 1880 (87 years)
Lucretia Mott was an American Quaker, abolitionist, women's rights activist, and social reformer. She had formed the idea of reforming the position of women in society when she was amongst the women excluded from the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in 1840. In 1848, she was invited by Jane Hunt to a meeting that led to the first public gathering about women's rights, the Seneca Falls Convention, during which the Declaration of Sentiments was written.
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Elena Cornaro Piscopia
1646 - 1684 (38 years)
Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia or Elena Lucrezia Corner , also known in English as Helen Cornaro, was a Venetian philosopher of noble descent who in 1678 became one of the first women to receive an academic degree from a university, and the first to receive a Doctor of Philosophy degree.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Alice DeLamar
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Alice DeLamar was the heiress to Joseph Raphael De Lamar. She was a patron of the arts, and helped fund plays by Mercedes de Acosta. DeLamar also donated some of her land in Palm Beach, Florida to the Audubon Society in the 1960s.
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Martha May Eliot
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
Martha May Eliot , was a foremost pediatrician and specialist in public health, an assistant director for WHO, and an architect of New Deal and postwar programs for maternal and child health. Her first important research, community studies of rickets in New Haven, Connecticut, and Puerto Rico, explored issues at the heart of social medicine. Together with Edwards A. Park, her research established that public health measures could prevent and reverse the early onset of rickets.
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Mary J. Safford
1834 - 1891 (57 years)
Mary Jane Safford-Blake was a nurse, physician, educator, and humanitarian. As a nurse in the Union army she worked closely with Mary Ann Bickerdyke treating the sick and injured near Fort Donelson, and was nicknamed the "Cairo Angel" for her service in Cairo, Illinois. After the war she became one of the first female gynecologists in the United States and was the first woman to perform an ovariotomy. She later taught at Boston University, and was one of the first women elected to the Boston School Committee.
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Martha H. Mowry
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Martha H. Mowry was an American physician and the first woman physician in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. She was also an advocate for women's suffrage and human welfare reform. Early life and education
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Selma Feldbach
1878 - 1924 (46 years)
Selma Feldbach was the first Estonian woman to become a medical doctor. In 1904 she graduated in medicine from the University of Bern.
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Ida Halpern
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.
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Vida Latham
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Vida Annette Latham was a British-American dentist, physician, microscopist, and researcher, known for her work in publishing and her research on oral tumors, surgery, and anatomy. Early life and education Vida Latham was born in Lancashire in 1866 to a physician father. Her early education took place in Cambridge and Manchester. She earned her master's degree from the University of London in 1889; she published papers on tooth anatomy and pain in 1888 while working at a London dentist's office. She then moved to the United States because she could not practice in the UK with an American dentistry degree.
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Josephine Adams Rathbone
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
Josephine Adams Rathbone was a librarian, library educator, author, and president of the American Library Association in 1931–32. She was born in Jamestown, New York. She began her studies at the University of Michigan from 1887 to 1891, then moved to New York where she graduated from the New York State Library School in 1893 earning a B.L.S. After working for two years as an assistant cataloger at the Pratt Institute Free Library she was appointed "chief instructor" at the Pratt Institute Library School in 1895 under Mary Wright Plummer. When Plummer went to the New York Public Library to e...
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Uhwudong
1430 - 1480 (50 years)
Eowudong or Uhwudong , also known as Eoeuludong , née Park , was a Korean dancer, writer, artist, and poet from a noble family in the Joseon Dynasty of the 15th century. Most of her work has not been preserved. She is described to be one of the evil women from the Joseon Dynasty along with Queen Munjeong, Jang Nok-su, and Royal Noble Consort Hui.
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Batis of Lampsacus
350 BC - 210 BC (140 years)
Batis of Lampsacus, was a student of Epicurus at Lampsacus in the early 3rd century BC. According to Diogenes Laertius, she was the sister of Metrodorus and wife of Idomeneus. Seneca the Younger recounts that when Batis' son died, Metrodorus wrote a letter to his sister offering comfort, telling her that "all the Good of mortals is mortal," and "that there is a certain pleasure akin to sadness, and that one should give chase thereto at such times as these." Fragments of a letter from Epicurus to Batis on the death of Metrodorus in 277 BC have also been discovered among the papyri at Herculaneum.
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Ruth Boynton
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota. She worked in public health and student health services. At that time, there were few women in any of these fields. She was director of the University Student Health Service from 1936 to 1961and it was renamed the Boynton Health Service in her honor in 1975. She served as the acting dean of the School of Public Health from 1944 to 1946.
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Timycha
400 BC - 400 BC (0 years)
Timycha of Sparta , was a Pythagorean philosopher mentioned by Iamblichus in his Life of Pythagoras: The temperance also of those men, and how Pythagoras taught this virtue, may be learnt from what Hippobotus and Neanthes narrate of Myllias and Timycha who were Pythagoreans. For they say that Dionysius the tyrant could not obtain the friendship of any one of the Pythagoreans, though he did every thing to accomplish his purpose; for they had observed, and carefully avoided his monarchical disposition. He sent therefore to the Pythagoreans, a troop of thirty soldiers, under the command of Eurym...
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Hilde Bruch
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Hilde Bruch was a German-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known foremost for her work on eating disorders and obesity. Bruch emigrated to the United States in 1934. She worked and studied at various medical facilities in New York City and Baltimore before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964.
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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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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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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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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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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Frances Clarke Sayers
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Clarke Sayers was an American children's librarian, author of children's books, and lecturer on children's literature. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Hilary Cass
Hilary Dawn Cass is a British medical doctor and a consultant in paediatric disability at St Thomas' Hospital, London. She was the President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health from 2012 to 2015.
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Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a Jewish bacteriologist and physician, known for her research on tuberculosis and public health. She was the second woman to become a Professor in Prussia. Biography Lydia Rabinowitsch was born at Kovno, Russian Empire . She was educated at the girls' gymnasium of her native city, and privately in Latin and Greek, subsequently studying natural sciences at the universities of Zurich and Bern . After graduation she went to Berlin, where Professor Robert Koch permitted her to pursue her bacteriological studies at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. She became t...
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Anna Botsford Comstock
1854 - 1930 (76 years)
Anna Botsford Comstock was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies. The first female professor at Cornell University, her over 900-page work, The Handbook of Nature Study , is now in its 24th edition. Comstock was an American artist and wood engraver known for illustrating entomological text books with her husband, John Henry Comstock including their first joint effort, The Manual for the Study of Insects . Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.
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Virginia Gildersleeve
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve was an American academic, the long-time dean of Barnard College, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, and the only woman delegated by United States to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the charter for and creation of the United Nations.
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Janina Hurynowicz
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Janina Hurynowicz was a Polish medical doctor, neurophysiologist and neurologist. She was the author of many works on Chronaxie and the influence of insulin on the autonomic nervous system and became a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Elsie Gerlach
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Dr. Elsie Gerlach was named the first superintendent of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry Children's Clinic in 1927 after having served as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerlach stayed for 38 years and became nationally known and respected as a pioneer in the teaching and development of pediatric dentistry. In the early years of the clinic, she looked for children on the street who needed dental care and brought them to the clinic.
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Helen Hart
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Helen Hart was an American plant pathologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Hart was the first woman president of the American Phytopathological Society, and was instrumental in making the University of Minnesota's Department of Plant Pathology a world-leader in stem rust.
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Maryla Falk
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Maryla Falk was a Polish indologist and religious scholar. A member of the Polish Oriental Society, she is best remembered for her book Mit psychologiczny w starożytnych Indiach , and her treatises l misteri di Novalis published in Naples, and Nāma-rūpa and Dharma-rūpa. Origin and Aspects of an Ancient Indian Conception published at the University of Calcutta.
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Elsie Few
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Elsie Evelyn Few, was a Jamaican-born artist, who had a long career in Britain and was associated with the Euston Road School. Throughout her career Few produced oil paintings of landscapes but later in her life began using collage techniques to create abstract designs.
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Ksenija Atanasijević
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Ksenija Atanasijević was the first recognised major female Serbian philosopher, and the first female professors of Belgrade University, where she graduated. She wrote about Giordano Bruno, ancient Greek philosophy and the history of Serbian philosophy, and translated important philosophical works into Serbian, including works by Aristotle, Plato, and Spinoza. She was also an early Serbian feminist writer and philosopher.
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Rose Rand
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Rose Rand was an Austrian-American logician and philosopher. She was a member of the Vienna Circle. Life and work Rose Rand was born in Lemberg in the Austrian crown land of Galicia . After her family moved to Austria she studied at the Polish Gymnasium in Vienna. In 1924 she enrolled in Vienna University, her teachers included Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap. She graduated with her first degree in 1928. During her post-graduation years, she remained in contact with Vienna Circle colleagues such as Schlick.
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Hannah Arendt
1906 - 1975 (69 years)
Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theoristss of the 20th century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of ev...
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Ayn Rand
1905 - 1982 (77 years)
Alice O'Connor , better known by her pen name Ayn Rand , was a Russian-born American writer and public philosopher. She is known for her fiction and for developing a philosophical system she named Objectivism. Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. After two early novels that were initially unsuccessful and two Broadway plays, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. In 1957, Rand published her best-selling work, the novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward, until her death in 1982, she turned to non-fiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own pe...
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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".
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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 ...
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Helen Keller
1880 - 1968 (88 years)
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the Unite...
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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.
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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.
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Valerie Solanas
1936 - 1988 (52 years)
Valerie Jean Solanas was an American radical feminist known for the SCUM Manifesto, which she self-published in 1967, and for her attempt to murder artist Andy Warhol in 1968. Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government,...
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Sosipatra
400 - 400 (0 years)
Sosipatra was a Neoplatonist philosopher and mystic who lived in Ephesus and Pergamon in the first half of the 4th century CE. The story of her life is told in Eunapius' Lives of the Sophists. Biography
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Clémence Royer
1830 - 1902 (72 years)
Clémence Royer was a self-taught French scholar who lectured and wrote on economics, philosophy, science and feminism. She is best known for her controversial 1862 French translation of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species.
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Alice Paul
1885 - 1977 (92 years)
Alice Stokes Paul was an American Quaker, suffragist, feminist, and women's rights activist, and one of the foremost leaders and strategists of the campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits sex discrimination in the right to vote. Paul initiated, and along with Lucy Burns and others, strategized events such as the Woman Suffrage Procession and the Silent Sentinels, which were part of the successful campaign that resulted in the amendment's passage in August 1920.
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Ruth Nanda Anshen
1900 - 2003 (103 years)
Ruth Nanda Anshen was an American philosopher, author and editor. She was the author of several books including The Anatomy of Evil, Biography of An Idea, Morals Equals Manners and The Mystery of Consciousness: A Prescription for Human Survival.
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Louise Michel
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Louise Michel was a teacher and important figure in the Paris Commune. Following her penal transportation to New Caledonia she embraced anarchism. When returning to France she emerged as an important French anarchist and went on speaking tours across Europe. The journalist Brian Doherty has called her the "French grande dame of anarchy." Her use of a black flag at a demonstration in Paris in March 1883 was also the earliest known of what would become known as the anarchy black flag.
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