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 people in Philosophy,
#5951
Patrick Marcellin
#97226
Overall Influence
#5952
Nicla Vassallo
#76685
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Nicla Vassallo , is an Italian analytic philosopher with research and teaching interests in epistemology, philosophy of knowledge, theoretical philosophy, as well as gender studies and feminist epistemology. She is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Genoa, a Research Associate of National Research Council, and on List of alumni of King's College London. She also is a poet and lives in Rome.
Go to Profile#5953
John T. Jr. Potts
#97262
Overall Influence
#5954
Fortunato Ciardiello
#97266
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#5955
Gil Omenn
#62320
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Gilbert S. Omenn is an American medical doctor and researcher. He currently is the Harold T. Shapiro Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan; professor of Computational medicine & bioinformatics, Molecular medicine & genetics, Human genetics, and Public health; and the Director of the UM Center for Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics. He is the discover of Omenn syndrome, a genetic disorder that is fatal in infancy unless treated. Omenn has served as editor of the Annual Review of Public Health from 1990–1996. and as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
Go to Profile#5956
Kenneth M. Kent
#97323
Overall Influence
#5957
Malek Bennabi
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Malek Bennabi was an Algerian writer and philosopher, who wrote about human society, particularly Muslim society with a focus on the reasons behind the fall of Muslim civilization. According to Malek Bennabi, the lack of new ideas in Islamic thought emerged what he coined civilizational bankruptcy. He argued that in order to recover its former magnificence, Islamic society had to become an environment in which individuals felt empowered. In order to satisfy his spiritual and material needs, a Muslim needed to feel that his industry and creativity would find reward.
Go to Profile#5958
Donald Davidson
1893 - 1968 (75 years)
Donald Grady Davidson was a U.S. poet, essayist, social and literary critic, and author. An English professor at Vanderbilt University from 1920 to 1965, he was a founding member of the Fugitives and the overlapping group Southern Agrarians, two literary groups based in Nashville, Tennessee. He was a supporter of segregation in the United States.
Go to Profile#5959
Dan Kimball
#35468
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dan Kimball is an author and was a leading voice in the beginning years of the Emerging Church movement in the United States. Kimball's writings focus on encouraging churches and Christians to creatively make any changes needed in order to break the negative stereotypes of church and Christianity that inaccurately may exist. Kimball focuses on doing this through the arts, apologetics and Christians removing themselves from the Christian subculture. Kimball began using phrases such as "Vintage Faith" and "Vintage Christianity" which are used to express the desire to be returning to the historic...
Go to Profile#5960
Anton Mauve
1838 - 1888 (50 years)
Anthonij "Anton" Rudolf Mauve was a Dutch realist painter who was a leading member of the Hague School. He signed his paintings 'A. Mauve' or with a monogrammed 'A.M.'. A master colorist, he was a very significant early influence on his cousin-in-law Vincent van Gogh.
Go to Profile#5961
Werner R. Loewenstein
#97353
Overall Influence
#5962
Shashibhusan Dasgupta
1911 - 1964 (53 years)
Shashibhusan Dasgupta, or Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta, Shashibhusan and Shashi Bhusan Das Gupta was a Bengali scholar of philosophy, languages, literature , literary critic, author and theologian. Dasgupta was born in Chandrahar Village in modern Barisal Division, South-Central Bangladesh. He obtained his IA from B M College, Barisal, his BA in Philosophy from Scottish Church College, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. His MA in Bengali Language and Literature was from Calcutta University in 1935, and he subsequently joined Calcutta University's Bengali Department as a Researcher. Winning the 1937 Pr...
Go to Profile#5963
Denis Anthony Mitchison
#97380
Overall Influence
#5964
Andrew C. Novick
#97414
Overall Influence
#5965
Anthony Price
#84968
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Anthony William Price is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London where he taught philosophy from 1995 until 2016. His research relates to Greek ethics and moral psychology, and contemporary ethics. Price was educated at Winchester College and the University of Oxford. He taught at the University of York from 1972 to 1995.
Go to Profile#5966
Margret Grebowicz
#62648
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Margret Grebowicz is a Polish philosopher, author, and former jazz vocalist. She is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. In addition to peer-reviewed academic publications, Grebowicz, a proponent of public humanities, also publishes many works for the lay audience.
Go to Profile#5967
Bart Schultz
#75329
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Bart Schultz is an American philosopher who is Senior Lecturer in Humanities and Director of the Civic Knowledge Project at the University of Chicago. Career Schultz has taught in the College at the University of Chicago since October 1, 1987, having designed a wide range of core courses as well as courses on Teaching Precollegiate Philosophy, Consequentialism from Bentham to Singer, Philosophy and Public Education, The Philosophy of Poverty, John Dewey, The Chicago School of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Education, Philosophies of Environmentalism and Sustainability, and P...
Go to Profile#5968
Harvey S. Levin
#97475
Overall Influence
#5969
Andreas Hochhaus
#97485
Overall Influence
#5970
Herman of Carinthia
1100 - 1160 (60 years)
Herman of Carinthia , also called Hermanus Dalmata or Sclavus Dalmata, Secundus, by his own words born in the "heart of Istria", was a philosopher, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician and translator of Arabic works into Latin.
Go to Profile#5971
Paul Gyorgy
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Paul György was a Hungarian-born American biochemist, nutritionist, and pediatrician best known for his discovery of three B vitamins: riboflavin, B6, and biotin. Gyorgy was also well known for his research into the protective factors of human breast milk, particularly for his discoveries of Lactobacillus bifidus growth factor activity in human milk and its anti-staphylococcal properties. He was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1975 from President Gerald Ford.
Go to Profile#5972
Hermann Oppenheim
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
Hermann Oppenheim was one of the leading neurologists in Germany. Life and work Oppenheim is the son of Juda Oppenheim , the long-time rabbi of the Warburg synagogue community , and his wife, Cäcilie, née Steeg .
Go to Profile#5973
Johan Christian Dahl
1788 - 1857 (69 years)
Johan Christian Claussen Dahl , often known as or , was a Danish-Norwegian artist who is considered the first great romantic painter in Norway, the founder of the "golden age" of Norwegian painting. He is often described as "the father of Norwegian landscape painting" and is regarded as the first Norwegian painter to reach a level of artistic accomplishment comparable to that attained by the greatest European artists of his day. He was also the first to acquire genuine fame and cultural renown abroad. As one critic has put it, "J.C. Dahl occupies a central position in Norwegian artistic life ...
Go to Profile#5974
John Julian Fung
#97547
Overall Influence
#5975
Rosa María Rodríguez Magda
#97531
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Rosa María Rodríguez Magda is a Spanish philosopher and writer. In 1989, she introduced the concept of transmodernity.
Go to Profile#5976
John Witte Jr.
#27384
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
John Witte Jr. is a Canadian-American academic. He is a Robert W. Woodruff University Professor and a McDonald Distinguished Professor at Emory University School of Law in Atlanta, Georgia, and is director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion there.
Go to Profile#5977
Stephen O'Rahilly
#41746
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Sir Stephen Patrick O'Rahilly is an Irish-British physician and scientist known for his research into the molecular pathogenesis of human obesity, insulin resistance and related metabolic and endocrine disorders.
Go to Profile#5978
Pierpaolo Donati
#37459
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
#5979
Bernard Li
#38706
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Professor Bernard Li, KSG , KHS is a Taiwanese philosopher and former president of Fu Jen Catholic University. He is known for the official founder of Fu Jen School and Fu Jen Academia Catholica. He obtained the bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree at Fu Jen Catholic University.
Go to Profile#5980
Giovanni Rasori
1766 - 1837 (71 years)
Giovanni Rasori was an Italian academic, physician and translator. Career Rasori was born in Parma. He began studying at the university of that city with results so brilliant that he deserved the interest of Ferdinand, Duke of Parma that allowed him to complete his studies at the University of Florence, Pavia, London and Paris, where he remained fascinated by the illuminist and pre-revolutionary climate of the time. In Parma, he was a pupil of the anatomist Flaminio Torrigiani.
Go to Profile#5981
Jeffries Wyman
1814 - 1874 (60 years)
Jeffries Wyman was an American naturalist and anatomist, born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Wyman died in Bethlehem, New Hampshire of a pulmonary hemorrhage. Career He graduated Harvard College in 1833 and Harvard Medical School in 1837. He was made curator at Lowell Institute, Boston, in 1839 and remained affiliated there until 1842. Fees from Lowell Institute lectures enabled him to study in Europe, from 1841 to 1842, where he had the opportunity to study under anatomist Richard Owen in London. Upon his return to the United States, he had hoped to gain a professorship at Harvard College but the position went to Asa Gray.
Go to Profile#5982
David Henry Hwang
#2717
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
David Henry Hwang is an American playwright, librettist, screenwriter, and theater professor at Columbia University in New York City. He has won three Obie Awards for his plays FOB, Golden Child, and Yellow Face. Three of his works—M. Butterfly, Yellow Face, and Soft Power—have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Go to Profile#5983
Steven I. Hajdu
#5984
Herman D. Suit
#97707
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
#5985
Alfred Sisley
1839 - 1899 (60 years)
Alfred Sisley was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air . He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, he found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.
Go to Profile#5986
Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi
1209 - 1274 (65 years)
Ṣadr al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Isḥāq ibn Muḥammad ibn Yūnus Qūnawī [alternatively, Qūnavī, Qūnyawī], , was a Persian philosopher, and one of the most influential thinkers in mystical or Sufi philosophy. He played a pivotal role in the study of knowledge—or epistemology, which in his context referred specifically to the theoretical elaboration of mystical/intellectual insight. He combined a highly original mystic-thinker, Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn 'Arabī , whose arcane teachings Qūnavī codified and helped incorporate into the burgeoning pre-Ottoman intellectual tradition, on the one hand, with the logical/philosophical innovations of Ibn Sīnā , on the other.
Go to Profile#5987
Franz Cumont
1868 - 1947 (79 years)
Franz-Valéry-Marie Cumont was a Belgian archaeologist and historian, a philologist and student of epigraphy, who brought these often isolated specialties to bear on the syncretic mystery religions of Late Antiquity, notably Mithraism.
Go to Profile#5988
Monica Morrow
#33847
Overall Influence
Monica Morrow is a breast cancer surgeon and Chief of Breast Surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, NY. Her first day seeing patients in clinic as Chief at MSKCC was Tuesday, February 19, 2008. She formerly served as the chairman of surgical oncology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. She is the President-elect of the Society for Surgical Oncology.
Go to Profile#5989
Siegfried Zielinski
#43138
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Siegfried Zielinski is a German media theorist. He held the chair for Media Theory: Archaeology and Variantology of the Media at Berlin University of the Arts, he is Michel Foucault Professor for Techno-Culture and Media Archaeology at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, and he is director of the International Vilém-Flusser-Archive at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2016 until March 2018, he succeeded Peter Sloterdijk as head of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.
Go to Profile#5990
Conrad Celtes
1459 - 1508 (49 years)
Conrad Celtes was a German Renaissance humanist scholar and poet of the German Renaissance born in Franconia . He led the theatrical performances at the Viennese court and reformed the syllabi. Celtis is considered by many to be the greatest of German humanists and thus dubbed "the Archhumanist" . He is also praised as "the greatest lyric genius and certainly the greatest organizer and popularizer of German Humanism".
Go to Profile#5991
Abu al-Hassan al-Amiri
913 - 992 (79 years)
Abu al-Hassan Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Amiri was a Muslim theologian and philosopher who attempted to reconcile philosophy with religion, and Sufism with conventional Islam. While al-'Amiri believed the revealed truths of Islam were superior to the logical conclusions of philosophy, he argued that the two did not contradict each other. Al-'Amiri consistently sought to find areas of agreement and synthesis between disparate Islamic sects. However, he believed Islam to be morally superior to other religions, specifically Zoroastrianism and Manicheism.
Go to Profile#5992
Daniel J. Mccarty
#97788
Overall Influence
#5993
Ithiel de Sola Pool
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Ithiel de Sola Pool was an American academic who was a widely celebrated and often controversial figure in the field of social sciences and information technology. He did significant research on technology and its effects on society. He coined the term "convergence" to describe the effect of various scientific innovations on society in a futuristic world, and made predictions of ways that technology would impact society that were often prescient. In his 1983 book Technologies of Freedom, he predicted that digital electronics would allow convergence between historically separated modes of comm...
Go to Profile#5994
Philippe Froguel
#97811
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
#5995
David Handelsman
#77769
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
David Joshua Handelsman, is trained in Medicine and Endocrinology. His expertise is in testicular function and androgen physiology, pharmacology, and toxicology. His experience spans basic, clinical, and public health domains including a recent focus on genetic models of androgen action, steroid mass spectrometry, and anti-doping science. He was Australia's first Professor in Reproductive Endocrinology and Andrology. He has worked in the US, Australia, and Germany. His professional involvement includes the World Health Organisation Human Reproduction Programme's Male Task Force, WHO Human Re...
Go to Profile#5996
Farshid Guilak
#29309
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Farshid Guilak is an American engineer and orthopedic researcher. He is the Mildred B. Simon Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis and director of research at Shriners Hospitals for Children. He is also on the faculty of the departments of Biomedical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, and Developmental Biology at Washington University.
Go to Profile#5997
Timothy Chambers
#93516
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Timothy Chambers is a philosopher who has written a number of articles which have appeared in the journals Mind , the Monist , Philosophy , the Aristotelian Society Proceedings, and Ratio . His research interests include Hilary Putnam, time travel, the Ontological Argument, the Doomsday Argument and the semantics of vagueness. His work on Putnam included a logical formula—the Chambers Conditional—which figures in Crispin Wright's recent work on vagueness.
Go to Profile#5998
Heinrich Zangger
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Heinrich Zangger was a Swiss toxicologist and coroner. He was one of the "foremost forensic scientists of his generation". Biography Zangger was the son of a prosperous farmer and studied medicine at the University of Zurich. There he received his medical doctorate on February 19, 1902. His doctoral dissertation is titled Histologisch-färbetechnische Erfahrungen im Allgemeinen und speziell über die Möglichkeit einer morphologischen Darstellung der Zellnarkose [vitale Färbung] . On April 15, 1902 he was appointed professor extraordinarius for anatomy and special physiology of domestic animals...
Go to Profile#5999
Alp Ikizler
#10793
Overall Influence
T. Alp Ikizler is a nephrologist, currently holding the Catherine McLaughlin Hakim chair in Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, where he does clinical work and heads a research lab. Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he received his M.D. from the Istanbul University Faculty of Medicine.
Go to Profile#6000
John Olubi Sodipo
#84885
Overall Influence
1935 - 1999 (64 years)
John Olubi Sodipo , was a Nigerian philosopher. Early life and education He went to Remo Secondary School, Sagamu from 1948 to 1953 and also to University of Ibadan from 1956 to 1960 and at the Durham University, England from 1961 to 1964.Lectured University Ibadan from 1964 to 1966 Sodipo lectured in philosophy at the University of Lagos from 1966 and taught at Obafemi Awolowo University from 1968 to 1982, where he became the first professor in African philosophy and served as first head of department of philosophy. He became the first vice-chancellor of Ogun State University when it opened in 1982.
Go to Profile