Search People Result | Academic Influence

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 people in Philosophy,

#5001

Vladimir C.i. Hachinski

#85000

Overall Influence

#5002

John Nicholas Walton

#5003

Elizabeth Blackwell

Elizabeth Blackwell

1821 - 1910 (89 years)

Elizabeth Blackwell was a British and American physician, notable as the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, and the first woman on the Medical Register of the General Medical Council for the United Kingdom. Blackwell played an important role in both the United States and the United Kingdom as a social reformer, and was a pioneer in promoting education for women in medicine. Her contributions remain celebrated with the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal, awarded annually to a woman who has made a significant contribution to the promotion of women in medicine.

#5004

Steven D. Wexner

#74875

Overall Influence

Steven D. Wexner is an American surgeon and physician. He is Director of the Ellen Leifer Shulman and Steven Shulman Digestive Disease Center at Cleveland Clinic Florida. Wexner has received numerous regional, national, and international research awards. Through his multiple academic appointments, Wexner personally trains 15-20 surgeons each year, and he educates thousands more around the world through conferences and lectures. He is a resource for his colleagues from around the world for referral of patients with challenging or complex problems. In 2020, he was elected vice-chair of the Board of Regents of the American College of Surgeons for a one-year term.

#5005

François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno

François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno

1804 - 1884 (80 years)

Abbé François-Napoléon-Marie Moigno was a French Catholic priest and one time Jesuit, as well as a physicist and author. He considered himself a student of Cauchy. Life Moigno was born at Guémené-sur-Scorff, Morbihan, in Brittany, on 15 April 1804. He received his early education at the Jesuit college at Sainte-Anne-d'Auray and entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus on 2 September 1822. He did his theological studies at Montrouge, devoting his leisure to mathematics and physics.

#5006

Lynda Barry

#7987

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Linda Jean Barry , known professionally as Lynda Barry, is an American cartoonist. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip Ernie Pook's Comeek. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel The Good Times are Killing Me, about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, Cruddy, first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published One! Hundred! Demons!, a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". What It Is is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instruc...

#5007

Philip Novak

#42590

Overall Influence

Philip Novak is a Sarlo Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Dominican University in San Rafael, California. He received a bachelor's degree in English at University of Notre Dame , and MA and PhD degrees in Religion at Syracuse University . He joined the faculty of Dominican University in 1980. Novak has been Dean of the School of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.

#5008

Stephen Hetherington

#57965

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Stephen Cade Hetherington is an Australian analytic philosopher specialising in epistemology and, to a lesser extent, metaphysics. He is an emeritus professor in the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, a prolific author, and served as editor-in-chief of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy from December 2013 to March 2022.

#5009

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

Giovanni Domenico Cassini

1625 - 1712 (87 years)

Giovanni Domenico Cassini, also known as Jean-Dominique Cassini was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and engineer. Cassini was born in Perinaldo, near Imperia, at that time in the County of Nice, part of the Savoyard state. Cassini is known for his work on astronomy and engineering. He discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn; the Cassini Division was named after him. Giovanni Domenico Cassini was also the first of his family to begin work on the project of creating a topographic map of France.

#5010

Ira Tabas

#72822

Overall Influence

Ira Tabas is an American molecular biologist who currently serves as Richard J. Stock Professor and Vice-Chair of Research in the Department of Medicine, Professor of Anatomy & Cell Biology at Columbia University in the City of New York, and an endocrinologist affiliated with NewYork–Presbyterian Hospital .

#5011

Eric Ravussin

#72151

Overall Influence

Eric Ravussin is a professor of human physiology and the director of the Nutritional Obesity Research Center at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is also the Douglas L. Gordon Chair in Diabetes and Metabolism at the center. Since 2012 he has also been a Boyd Professor at Louisiana State University.

#5012

Rachida Triki

#72134

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Rachida Triki, also known as Rachida Boubaker-Triki is a Tunisian philosopher, art historian, art critic, and art curator. She is a full professor of philosophy at Tunis University, specialized in Aesthetics.

#5013

Maik Hosang

#47305

Overall Influence

1961 - Present (65 years)

Maik Hosang is a German philosopher, future researcher and human ecologist. Life Hosang studied philosophy, psychology and anthropology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin. In connection with the theories of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Nicolai Hartmann, Max Scheler, Manfred Eigen, Erich Jantsch and others he wrote his thesis to the topic "The Human Being in the evolutionary layers of self-organization." He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1990 at the Humboldt-University of Berlin.

#5014

Jeffrey Flier

#40722

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Jeffrey Flier is an American physician, endocrinologist; widely cited scientist; the Higginson Professor of Medicine and Physiology at Harvard Medical School; and a Distinguished Service Professor at the same institution. He was the 21st Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University from 2007 to 2016.

#5015

Katherine Flegal

#16111

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Katherine Mayhew Flegal is an American epidemiologist and senior scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics. She is one of the most highly cited scientists in the field of the epidemiology of obesity according to Thomson Reuters and has been called "one of the great epidemiologists" by former FDA Commissioner David A. Kessler.

#5016

Joseph Rickaby

1845 - 1932 (87 years)

Joseph John Rickaby, SJ was an English Jesuit priest and philosopher. Life Rickaby was born in 1845 in Everingham, York. He received his education at Stonyhurst College, and was ordained in 1877, one of the so-called Stonyhurst Philosophers, along with Richard F. Clarke, Herbert Lucas, and his own brother, John Rickaby. a significant group for neo-scholasticism in England. At the time he was at St Beuno's, he was on friendly terms with Gerard Manley Hopkins; they were ordained on the same day.

#5017

Paul John Nestel

#85149

Overall Influence

#5018

Gerard Bolland

1854 - 1922 (68 years)

Gerardus Johannes Petrus Josephus Bolland , also known as G.J.P.J. Bolland, was a Dutch autodidact, linguist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and lecturer. An excellent orator, he gave extremely well attended public lectures in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Delft, Groningen, Nijmegen and Belgium.

#5019

Tilopa

928 - 1009 (81 years)

Tilopa was an Indian Buddhist monk in the tantric Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He lived along the Ganges River, with wild ladies as a tantric practitioner and mahasiddha. He practised Anuttarayoga Tantra, a set of spiritual practices intended to accelerate the process of attaining Buddhahood. He became a holder of all the tantric lineages, possibly the only person in his day to do so. As well as the way of insight, and Mahamudra he learned and passed on the Way of Methods, today known as the 6 Yogas of Naropa, and guru yoga. Naropa is considered his main student.

#5020

Inga Bostad

#33933

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Inga Bostad is a Norwegian philosopher, writer and educator. She served as prorector of the University of Oslo from 2009 to 2013 and as director of the Norwegian Centre for Human Rights from 2014 to 2017.

#5021

Gregory Currie

#59024

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Gregory Paul Currie FAHA is a British philosopher and academic, known for his work on philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Currie is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and Executive Editor of Mind & Language.

#5022

Peter Setlow

#85280

Overall Influence

#5023

Kaneko Daiei

1881 - 1976 (95 years)

Kaneko Daiei was a Japanese Shin Buddhist philosopher and priest during the first half of the 20th century, belonging to the Ōtani-ha branch of Shin Buddhism. He was born to the priest of Saiken-ji, a Shin Buddhist temple in Jōetsu, Niigata Prefecture. He attended Shinshu University from 1901 when it was under the new leadership of Kiyozawa Manshi. It was at this time that he met and became close to Soga Ryojin. After graduating, he returned home and worked to propagate the ideas of Kiyozawa. In 1916, Kaneko took up a position on the faculty of Ōtani University. In 1925 and 1926, he published ...

#5024

Brian Druker

#10000

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Brian J. Druker is a physician-scientist at Oregon Health & Science University , in Portland, Oregon. He is the director of OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute, JELD-WEN Chair of Leukemia Research, Associate Dean for Oncology in the OHSU School of Medicine, and professor of medicine.

#5025

Leslie Francis

#61908

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Leslie Pickering Francis is an American philosopher, currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Distinguished Professor of Law at University of Utah. Francis holds joint appointments as Alfred C. Emery professor of law and professor of philosophy, and adjunct appointments in Family and Preventive Medicine , Internal Medicine , and Political Science, at the University of Utah. She was appointed to the rank of Distinguished Professor in 2009 and became director of the University of Utah Center for Law and Biomedical Sciences in 2015. Francis was President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in 2015-2016.

#5026

Henri Bortoft

#32558

Overall Influence

1938 - 2012 (74 years)

Peter Henri Bortoft was a British independent researcher and teacher, lecturer and writer on physics and the philosophy of science. He is best known for his work The Wholeness of Nature, considered a relevant and original recent interpretation of Goethean science. His book Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought was published in 2012.

#5027

Matthias Jakob Schleiden

Matthias Jakob Schleiden

1804 - 1881 (77 years)

Matthias Jakob Schleiden was a German botanist and co-founder of cell theory, along with Theodor Schwann and Rudolf Virchow. He published some poems and non-scientific work under the pseudonym Ernst.

#5028

Christopher D. Green

#43104

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Christopher Darren Green is professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has been cross-appointed to the graduate philosophy and science and technology studies programs as well. His research mostly pertains to the history of psychology, though he also writes on methodological and statistical issues in psychology.

#5029

Antonio Vidal-Puig

#16212

Overall Influence

Antonio Vidal-Puig is a Spanish medical doctor and scientist who works as a Professor of Molecular Nutrition and Metabolism at the University of Cambridge , best known for advancing the concept that pharmacological targeting of brown fat may serve to treat overweight and obesity in affected individuals, as well as for introducing the concept of adipose tissue "expandability" as an important factor in the pathogenesis of insulin resistance in the context of positive energy balance. His published work focuses on areas such as adipose tissue metabolism and lipotoxicity, regulation of insulin ...

#5030

Georges Didi-Huberman

Georges Didi-Huberman

#36843

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Georges Didi-Huberman FBA is a French philosopher and art historian. Biography Georges Didi-Huberman was born on 13 June 1953 in Saint-Étienne. He has been a scholar at the French Academy in Rome and resident in the Berenson Foundation of Villa I Tatti in Florence. He teaches at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, where he has been a lecturer since 1990.

#5031

Yvanka B. Raynova

Yvanka B. Raynova

#71776

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Yvanka B. Raynova is a Bulgarian philosopher, feminist, editor, translator, and publisher. She is full professor of contemporary philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and director of the Institute for Axiological Research in Vienna. She elaborated a post-personalist hermeneutic phenomenology based on some gnostic ideas. Her works include studies on continental philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, axiology , feminist philosophy, intercultural philosophy, religious studies, and translation studies.

#5032

Steven Evan Nissen

#85422

Overall Influence

#5033

Ali Murad Davudi

1922 - 1979 (57 years)

Dr Ali Murad Davudi was an Iranian Baháʼí who was a member of the national governing body of the Baháʼís in Iran. He was a professor at Tehran University in the philosophy department. In 1979, during a wave of persecution toward Baháʼís, he was kidnapped and has been presumed a victim of state execution.

#5034

Willie Esterhuyse

#53653

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Willem Petrus "Willie" Esterhuyse, OLS is an emeritus professor of philosophy and business ethics at the University of Stellenbosch, a columnist and critic of the system of apartheid. Early life Willem Petrus Esterhuyse was born in 1936 in Laingsburg, Cape Province, Union of South Africa . He married Annemarie Esterhuyse, née Barnard, a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Stellenbosch. They have two daughters and four sons.

#5035

Pierre Corvol

#34882

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Pierre Corvol is a French doctor and biology researcher. He was director of the Collège de France from 2006 to August 2012. Early life and education Corvol studied at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, France. He served as resident at academic hospitals of Paris , and spent post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, USA, in 1969.

#5036

Edward F. Domino

#85485

Overall Influence

#5037

Mattias Kumm

#54392

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (59 years)

Mattias Kumm is Inge Rennert Professor of Law at New York University School of Law, as well as holding a Research Professorship on "Globalization and the Rule of Law" at the Social Science Research Center and Humboldt University in Berlin.

#5038

Albert Rivaud

1876 - 1956 (80 years)

Albert Rivaud was a French philosopher and classical scholar. In 1908 he was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Poitiers. In 1927 he succeeded Léon Brunschvicg as professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1940 he served briefly as Minister of National Education in the government of Philippe Pétain.

#5039

Lawrence Dade Lunsford

#85590

Overall Influence

#5040

Nadežda Čačinovič

#38408

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Nadežda Čačinovič is a Croatian philosopher, sociologist and author. She was born to Slovene parents in Budapest in 1947 where her father Rudolf Čačinovič was serving as a military attache. She graduated in philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana. She subsequently studied at the University of Bonn from 1968 to 1970 where her father was serving as ambassador of Yugoslavia to West Germany. She obtained a doctorate and became a professor at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb, being employed there ...

#5041

Ranjana Khanna

#28803

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Ranjana Khanna is a literary critic and theorist recognized for her interdisciplinary, feminist and internationalist contributions to the fields of post-colonial studies, feminist theory, literature and political philosophy. She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published extensively on questions of post-colonial agency, film, Algeria, area studies, autobiography, Marxism, the visual and feminist theory. She received her Ph.D in 1993 from the University of York. She has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle and at the University of Utah, and...

#5042

John of Paris

1240 - 1304 (64 years)

John of Paris , also called Jean Quidort and Johannes de Soardis , was a French philosopher, theologian, and Dominican friar. Life John of Paris was born in Paris at an unknown date. Having obtained the degree of Master of Arts with distinction, he joined the Dominican Order, when about twenty years of age, at the Convent of St. James in his native city. There he taught philosophy and theology, and obtained the degree of Master of Theology. He was endowed with great ability, possessed great literary and linguistic attainments, and was considered one of the best theologians of the university a...

#5043

Nicholas Christakis

Nicholas Christakis

#29717

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (64 years)

Nicholas A. Christakis is a Greek-American sociologist and physician known for his research on social networks and on the socioeconomic, biosocial, and evolutionary determinants of human welfare . He is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University, where he directs the Human Nature Lab. He is also the co-director of the Yale Institute for Network Science.

#5044

Krzysztof Pomian

Krzysztof Pomian

#36421

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Krzysztof Pomian , is a Polish philosopher, historian and essayist. He is a professor of history at the Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika in Toruń and, in 2001, was academic director of the Museum of Europe in Brussels.

#5045

Jean‐charles Fruchart

#85654

Overall Influence

#5046

Kenneth L. Davis

#85658

Overall Influence

#5047

Victor Goldschmidt

1914 - 1981 (67 years)

Victor Goldschmidt was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. Born in Germany, he came to France in 1933. Before the war he studied at the Sorbonne and at the École pratique des hautes études under Henri Marguerite.

#5048

Páll Skúlason

#32261

Overall Influence

1945 - 2015 (70 years)

Páll Skúlason was a professor of philosophy and former Rector of the University of Iceland. Born and raised in Akureyri, in northern Iceland, Páll Skúlason graduated from highschool in 1965. He studied philosophy at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium, earning a BA in 1967 and a doctorate in 1973. His doctoral dissertation, Du cercle et du Sujet: problème de compréhension et de méthode dans la Philosophie de Paul Ricœur, considered the philosophy of French philosopher Paul Ricœur.

#5049

Tomoji Abe

1903 - 1973 (70 years)

was a Japanese novelist, social critic, humanist, and translator of English and American literature. Although he began writing as a modernist, in his later works he represented the intellectual movement in Japanese literature. This movement departed from Japanese traditional thinking and from established forms of narration, which focused on esthetic values and emotional states of mind ; it also departed from modernist views, which continued to be popular in world literature and in Japan . Abe's intellectual approach was incompatible with the socio-political atmosphere of Japan in the early Shō...

#5050

Alan M. Olson

#69638

Overall Influence

1939 - Present (87 years)

Alan M. Olson is a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, Emeritus, at Boston University. He received his degrees from Saint Olaf College , Luther Theological Seminary , Nashotah House, where he studied with Arthur Anton Vogel, and Boston University where he studied with Peter Anthony Bertocci, Erazim Kohak, Harold H. Oliver and John N. Findlay. He served as Chairman of the Religion Department at Boston University, 1980–1987, and Chairman of the Philosophy Department, ad interim, 1987-1989. During the 1970s he was Program Coordinator of the Boston University Institute for Philosophy and Religion; and was Executive Director of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy in Boston, 1998.

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