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
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Judith K. Ockene
#2453
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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
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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.
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Ingerid Dal
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Ingerid Dal was a Norwegian linguist known for her work and research of German, English and the Nordic languages. Early life and education Dal was born in Drammen, Norway. She attended Kristiana University after moving to Oslo at age 19. Following World War I, she moved to Germany where she attended Heidelberg University and studied philology and philosophy. She then attended the University of Hamburg where she continued her studies and, in 1925, presented her thesis on Lask's Kategorienlehre in relation to Kant's philosophy. In 1930, she finished her thesis at the University of Oslo on the o...
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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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Willemina Ogterop
1881 - 1974 (93 years)
Willemina Ogterop was a Dutch-American artist and stained glass window designer of almost 500 windows in 80 locations. Biography Ogterop was born in Maastricht in the Netherlands in 1881. After migrating to California in 1918 with her husband and four children, she worked in the Cummings Art Glass Studio in San Francisco as their principal designer from 1928 to 1953, designing nearly 500 stained glass windows, and creating more than 200 works of art in other media.
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Rahel Hirsch
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Rahel Hirsch was a German physician and professor at the Charité medical school in Berlin. In 1913 she became the first woman in the Kingdom of Prussia to be appointed a professor of medicine. Biography Rahel Hirsch was born on 15 September 1870 in Frankfurt am Main, one of eleven children of Mendel Hirsch . Mendel Hirsch was the director of the girls' school of the Jewish religious community in Frankfurt am Main. Mendel's fatherRahel's paternal grandfatherwas the eminent rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch
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Myia
600 BC - 560 BC (40 years)
Myia was a Pythagorean philosopher and, according to later tradition, one of the daughters of Theano and Pythagoras. Life Myia was married to Milo of Croton, the famous athlete. She was a choir leader as a girl, and as a woman she was noted for her exemplary religious behaviour. Lucian, in his In Praise of a Fly, states that he could say many things about Myia the Pythagorean were it not for the fact that her history is known to everyone.
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Hattie Alexander
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Hattie Elizabeth Alexander was an American pediatrician and microbiologist. She earned her M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1930 and continued her research and medical career at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. Alexander became the lead microbiologist and the head of the bacterial infections program at Columbia-Presbyterian. She occupied many prestigious positions at Columbia University and was well honored even after her death from liver cancer in 1968. Alexander is known for her development of the first effective remedies for Haemophilus influenzae infection, as well as being one of the first scientists to identify and study antibiotic resistance.
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Margaret Fairlie
1891 - 1963 (72 years)
Margaret Fairlie FRCOG FRCSE was a Scottish academic and gynaecologist. Fairlie spent most of her career working at Dundee Royal Infirmary and teaching at the medical school at University College, Dundee . In 1940 she became the first woman to hold a professorial chair in Scotland.
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Jessie Gray
1910 - 1978 (68 years)
Jessie Catherine Gray was a Canadian cancer surgeon, educator, and researcher. Known as the Canadian "First Lady of Surgery", Gray is described as a trailblazer for women surgeons and an example that women could excel in the male-dominated field of general surgery. During her career, she was considered one of the top four cancer surgeons in North America, and she earned many firsts and fellowships in her field.
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Ellen Bliss Talbot
1867 - 1968 (101 years)
Ellen Bliss Talbot was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Mount Holyoke College, chairing the department of philosophy and psychology for 32 years. She is considered one of the first professional academic women philosophers.
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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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Ihsan El-Kousy
1900 - Present (126 years)
Ihsan El-Kousy was the first Egyptian Muslim woman to graduate from the American University of Beirut. Early life Ihsan El-Kousy was born in 1900 in Al Qusea, an ancient city in central Egypt near the Nile. During that time education for girls wasn't common or encouraged, however, Ihsan received an education and continued her studies until she earned a graduate degree and then a PhD in UK. This was due to the fact that both her parents and grandparents kept on motivating her, in addition to generally being raised up surrounded by books. In fact, Ihsan then moved to Lebanon and became the firs...
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Marie Lloyd
1870 - 1922 (52 years)
Matilda Alice Victoria Wood , professionally known as Marie Lloyd , was an English music hall singer, comedian and musical theatre actress. She was best known for her performances of songs such as "The Boy I Love Is Up in the Gallery", "My Old Man " and "Oh Mr Porter What Shall I Do". She received both criticism and praise for her use of innuendo and double entendre during her performances, but enjoyed a long and prosperous career, during which she was affectionately called the "Queen of the Music Hall".
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Azalea Thorpe
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Azalea Thorpe was a Scottish-born American weaver and textile designer. Known for her innovative experimentation with both natural and synthetic materials, Thorpe was a featured instructor and lecturer throughout the United States. She has weavings in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. An annual award given in her honor is presented by the Institute of American Indian Arts for fiber arts.
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Katarina Jovanović
1869 - 1954 (85 years)
Katarina A. Jovanović was a Serbian translator, literary historian, publicist, philosopher, journalist and humanitarian. She translated into German Petar II Petrović Njegoš's masterpiece "Mountain Wreath" .
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Mary Carr Moore
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Mary Carr Moore was an American composer, conductor, vocalist, and music educator of the twentieth century. She is best remembered today for her association with the musical life of the West Coast.
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Sophia B. Jones
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Sophia Bethena Jones was a British North America-born American medical doctor and the first woman of African descent to graduate from the University of Michigan Medical School. She founded the Nursing Program at Spelman College, where she was the first black faculty member.
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María Teresa Ferrari
1887 - 1956 (69 years)
María Teresa Ferrari was an Argentine educator, physician, and women's rights activist. She was the first female university professor in Latin America and one of the first women allowed to teach medicine. She was a pioneering researcher in women's health, studying the use of radiation therapy rather than surgery for uterine tumors and developing a vaginoscope that revolutionized women's health care in Brazil. She established the first maternity ward and gynecological services at the Hospital Militar Central of Buenos Aires in 1925, which provided the first incubation services in the country.
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