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 people in Philosophy,
#6901
Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt
1882 - 1955 (73 years)
Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt was a Swedish jurist and legislator, particularly known as a proponent of Scandinavian Legal Realism, having been strongly influenced by his compatriot, the charismatic philosopher Axel Hägerström. He studied law at Lund University and was a professor of law at the University of Uppsala from 1914 to 1947. Like Hägerström, Karl Olivecrona and Alf Ross, he resists the exposition of rights as metaphysical entities, arguing that realistic legal analysis should dispense with them. Lundstedt's main focus in his theoretical work became a sustained attack on what he called the method of justice.
Go to Profile#6902
John Paul Blass
#86220
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
John P. Blass, physician, biochemist and neurochemist, was born on February 21, 1937 in Vienna, Austria, and deceased March 12, 2023 in New York City. Both his parents were physicians; his father, Gustaf Blass, was a prominent Viennese radiologist and his mother, Jolan Wirth Blass, a student of Sigmund Freud, was a psychoanalyst originally from Budapest. The family then moved to Stamford, Connecticut. Both parents practiced psychiatry, Gustaf in a private sanitarium in Stamford and Jolan as a child psychiatrist in New York City and Connecticut. He is survived by his wife, son and two granddaug...
Go to Profile#6903
Johann David Michaelis
1717 - 1791 (74 years)
Johann David Michaelis was a German biblical scholar and teacher. He was member of a family that was committed to solid discipline in Hebrew and the cognate languages, which distinguished the University of Halle in the period of Pietism. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
Go to Profile#6904
Arthur Hyman
#76792
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Arthur Hyman was a professor of philosophy at Yeshiva University. Early life and career Hyman was born in Schwaebisch Hall, Germany, on April 10, 1921. He was Dean of the Bernard Revel Graduate School until 2008, succeeded by David Berger. He taught philosophy at Yeshiva University for 55 years. He also taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yale University, Columbia University and Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Go to Profile#6905
Huibert A. P. Pols
#107414
Overall Influence
#6906
R. Alan North
#107419
Overall Influence
#6907
Emilio Uranga
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Emilio Uranga González was a Mexican philosopher. Biography Emilio was born in 1921 in Mexico City. He studied at high school hermanos de las escuelas Cristianas, and proceeded to National Autonomous University of Mexico to study medicine in 1941 and left the university in 1944 to study philosophy. He made contact with the philosophical school of José Gaos, and between 1947 and 1948 he joined and lead the Groupo Hiperion, with philosophers Ricardo Guerra, Jorge Portilla, Salvador Reyes Nevares, Fausto Vega, and Luis Villoro, and acted as an introducer of French existentialism to Mexico and d...
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Sampath Parthasarathy
#107433
Overall Influence
Sampath Parthasarathy is a former Associate Dean of Research and current Professor and Florida Hospital Chair in Cardiovascular Science in the College of Medicine at the University of Central Florida. He is the editor-in-chief of Healthcare and co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medicinal Food.
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Eugene Floyd DuBois
1882 - 1959 (77 years)
Eugene Floyd DuBois was an American physician and teacher, remembered for his work on the physiology of fever and heat production. His grandmother Mary Ann Delafield DuBois founded a hospital in New York City in 1854.
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A. Edward Maumenee
#107446
Overall Influence
#6911
Richard Watson
#68310
Overall Influence
1931 - 2019 (88 years)
Richard Allan Watson was an American philosopher, speleologist and author. Biography Watson taught philosophy at Washington University in St. Louis for forty years. He was considered one of the foremost living authorities on Descartes. He was an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy for Washington University.
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Mahdi Abbaszadeh
#70618
Overall Influence
Mahdi Abbaszadeh is an Iranian philosopher and associate professor of epistemology at the Research Institute for Islamic Culture and Thought. He is a recipient of the Iranian Book of the Year Award for his book System of Illuminative Epistemology of Al-Suhrawardi.
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Alireza Qaeminia
#74292
Overall Influence
Alireza Qaeminia is an Iranian philosopher and associate professor of epistemology at the Research Institute for Islamic Culture and Thought. He is a recipient of the Iranian Book of the Year Award for his book Biology of the Religious Text.
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Jan Steen
1626 - 1679 (53 years)
Jan Havickszoon Steen was a Dutch Golden Age painter, one of the leading genre painters of the 17th century. His works are known for their psychological insight, sense of humour and abundance of colour.
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Joe Friggieri
#77982
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Prof. Joe Friggieri is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Malta, poet, playwright and theatre director. Biography Friggieri was the first professor of philosophy on the University of Malta faculty not to be a Catholic priest and succeeded Peter Serracino Inglott in 1996 upon the latter's retirement. He holds doctorates from the University of Milan and The University of Oxford. Friggieri has been guest research scholar and lecturer at the Universities of Venice, Amsterdam, St Andrews, Augsburg and Genova. He is currently a professor at the University of Malta and previously was a me...
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Donna Cox
#14438
Overall Influence
Donna J. Cox is an American artist and scientist, Michael Aiken Endowed Chair; Professor of Art + Design; Director, Advanced Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign ; Director, Visualization and Experimental Technologies at National Center for Supercomputing Applications ; and Director, edream . She is a recognized pioneer in computer art and scientific visualization, specifically cinematic scientific visualization.
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Daniel Garber
#100057
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Daniel Garber is an American philosopher. He is the A. Watson Armour, III, University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. He is a specialist in the history of early modern philosophy and science.
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R. L. Nettleship
1846 - 1892 (46 years)
Richard Lewis Nettleship was an English philosopher. Life The youngest brother of Henry Nettleship, he was educated at Uppingham and Balliol College, Oxford, where he held a scholarship. He won the Hertford scholarship, the Ireland, the Gaisford Prize for Greek verse, a Craven scholarship and the Arnold prize, but took only a second class in literae humaniores.
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Gu Su
#55867
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gu Su is a Chinese liberal political philosopher and was professor of Philosophy and Law at Darcy University, China. After graduating from Nanjing University, he studied at Duke University between 1983 and 1986. After then he taught at Nanjing university as a faculty member. His main work is Essential Ideas of Liberalism, published in China and Taiwan several times, introducing main ideas of liberalism and their implications to Chinese political and social practice. He has edited a series of books and written many articles in the national press, newspapers, magazines and journals on political and legal issues.
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Jean-Louis Le Moigne
#35970
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
Jean-Louis Le Moigne is a French specialist in systems theory and constructivist epistemology. He is an alumnus from École Centrale Paris. Biography Jean-Louis Le Moigne was born on 22 March 1931 in Casablanca, French Morocco. He is married to Maguy Le Moigne, and they have 3 children.ECP Engineer . Diplomas from ITP Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management .Industrial Career 1959–1971: Shell Group France: lubricant development; operational research; Informational Organization; Central Planning; Director of South-West Region, Logistics.Professor , later Emeritus Profess...
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Cindy Lee Grines
#107569
Overall Influence
#6922
Michael Dexter
#57338
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Michael Dexter FRS is a British haematologist and director of the Wellcome Trust, from 1998 to 2003. Education Dexter was inspired to take A levels at night school and went on study physiology and zoology at the University of Salford. After graduating, he continued in academia and received a PhD from the University of Manchester in 1974 for research into Leukemia. Dexter also received a Doctor of Science degree from the University of Salford in 1982.
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Sophonisba Breckinridge
1866 - 1948 (82 years)
Sophonisba Preston Breckinridge was an American activist, Progressive Era social reformer, social scientist and innovator in higher education. She was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in political science and economics then the J.D. at the University of Chicago, and she was the first woman to pass the Kentucky bar. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent her as a delegate to the 7th Pan-American Conference in Uruguay, making her the first woman to represent the U.S. government at an international conference. She led the process of creating the academic professional discipline and degree for social work.
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George Henry Radcliffe Parkinson
#96897
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
George Henry Radcliffe Parkinson was a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. Biography Parkinson was born in 1923 in Tianjin, China, to British parents. He was educated at Bradford Grammar School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he obtained a First Class Honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1949, and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in 1952. His doctoral thesis concerned Baruch Spinoza. Later work focused on Gottfried W. Leibniz. In 1950 he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading, under then Head of Department Professor H A Hodges, and he remained in the department until he retired.
Go to Profile#6925
Kersey Graves
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Kersey Graves was a skeptic, atheist, rationalist, spiritualist, reformist writer, who was popular on the American freethought circuit of the late 19th century. Life Graves was born in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. His parents were Quakers, and as a young man he followed them in their observance, later moving to the Hicksite wing of Quakerism. According to one source, Graves did not attend school for more than three or four months in his life, but another source says that he received an "academical education", and at the age of 19 was teaching in a school at Richmond, a career he was to follow...
Go to Profile#6926
Bryan Stone
#49531
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Bryan P. Stone is an American theologian who is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Boston University School of Theology, and a Co-director of the Center for Practical Theology. Stone writes on topics related to both systematic theology and practical theology. He is associated with both postliberalism and Christian pacifism, having been influenced by thinkers such as John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Wesley, and in his earliest work with liberation theology and process theology.
Go to Profile#6927
Milton E. Kern
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Milton Early Kern was an American Seventh-day Adventist educator and youth leader. He attended Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska. From 1900 to 1904 Kern was head of the Bible and history departments at Union College. His success in working for Adventist young people led to a position as secretary of the young people's department of the Central Union Conference. At the General Conference Council held in 1907, at which the General Conference organized a "Young People's Department" he became the first chair with Matilda Erickson as the first secretary. Later in the year the new organization was...
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Gilles Montalescot
#107679
Overall Influence
#6929
George Lansing Raymond
1839 - 1929 (90 years)
George Lansing Raymond, was a prominent professor of Aesthetic Criticism at Princeton University from 1881 to 1905, and author of a new system of esthetics. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature seven times.
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Jan Szylling
1500 - Present (526 years)
Jan Szylling was a Polish Scholastic philosopher. Life Jan Szylling, a native of Kraków, studied with Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples in Paris, France, in the first years of the 16th century. Later he was a cathedral canon in Kraków.
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Sanjiv Chopra
#12102
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Sanjiv Chopra, M.B.B.S, M.A.C.P, is an Indian-born American physician, Professor of Medicine and former Faculty Dean for Continuing Medical Education at Harvard Medical School. He currently serves as a Marshall Wolf Master Clinician Educator at Brigham and Women's Hospital and co-director of the CME Division in the Department of Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
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Gilles Salles
#72536
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Gilles Salles is a French haematologist who joined the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York in 2020 after a career as a French University Professor & Medical Doctor in Lyon University Hospitals . He is specialized in hematologic malignancies, in particular non-Hodgkin and Hodgkin lymphomas.
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Michael Brauer
#107698
Overall Influence
#6934
Christine L. Borgman
#43834
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Christine L. Borgman is Distinguished Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at UCLA. She is the author of more than 200 publications in the fields of information studies, computer science, and communication. Two of her sole-authored monographs, Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet and From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in a Networked World , have won the Best Information Science Book of the Year award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. She is a lead investigato...
Go to Profile#6935
David Rosin
1823 - 1894 (71 years)
David Rosin was a German Jewish theologian from Rosenberg, Silesia. Having received his early instruction from his father, who was a teacher in his native town, he attended the yeshiva of Kempen, of Myslowitz , and of Prague ; but, wishing to receive a regular school education, he went to Breslau, where he entered the gymnasium, and graduated in 1846. He continued his studies at the universities of Berlin and Halle and passed his examination as teacher for the gymnasium. Returning to Berlin, he taught in various private schools, until Michael Sachs, with whom he was always on terms of intima...
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Eduardo Lourenço
#31309
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Eduardo Lourenço de Faria , best known as Eduardo Lourenço, was a Portuguese essayist, professor, critic, philosopher and writer. Early life Coming from a small village in Beira Interior, he is the eldest of the seven children of Abílio de Faria, Captain of Infantry, and Maria de Jesus Lourenço. He moved to Guarda in 1932 and entered the Military College in 1934, one year after his father left for Nampula, Mozambique.
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Karim S. Fizazi
#107757
Overall Influence
#6938
Kazimierz Łyszczyński
1634 - 1689 (55 years)
Kazimierz Łyszczyński , also known in English as Casimir Liszinski, was a Polish nobleman, philosopher, and soldier in the ranks of the Sapieha family, who was accused, tried, and executed for atheism in 1689.
Go to Profile#6939
Pierre Vassalli
#107770
Overall Influence
#6940
Kai-man Kwan
#83682
Overall Influence
Kai-man Kwan is a Chinese Christian philosopher at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the current Director of the Centre for Sino-Christian Studies. Education and career After graduating as an electrical engineer from the University of Hong Kong in 1983, Kwan worked as a Science and Maths teacher first at Matteo Ricci College, and then at Carmel Alison Lam Foundation Secondary School. He completed his M.Phil. in 1991 and Ph.D. in 1993 from Oxford University under the supervision of Richard Swinburne. The next year he joined Hong Kong Baptist University as a part-time Lecturer. He served as the Head of the Department of Religion and Philosophy from 2013 to 2018.
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Frances Alice Shepherd
#70973
Overall Influence
Frances Alice Shepherd, is a Canadian oncologist recognized for her research on lung cancer and her contributions to the design, development, and conduct of clinical trials. She is currently a senior staff physician at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, where she has held the Scott Taylor Chair in Lung Cancer Research since 2001, and she is a full professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Toronto.
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David William Dodick
#107840
Overall Influence
#6943
Gustav Glogau
1844 - 1895 (51 years)
Gustav Glogau was a German philosopher of religion and an academic. He worked for the Technical College in Zurich as a private tutor and, later, ordinarius, teaching philosophy and pedagogy subjects. He taught as a professor at the Halle University , Kiel University .
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Jakob Wimpfeling
1450 - 1528 (78 years)
Jakob Wimpfeling was a Renaissance humanist and theologian. Biography Wimpfeling was born in Sélestat , Alsace, Lorraine. He went to the school at Sélestat, which was run by Ludwig Dringenberg, the founder of the Humanist Library of Sélestat. In 1464 he became a student at the University of Freiburg, where he received his baccalaureus in 1466; later he went to the University of Erfurt and the University of Heidelberg, where he received his magister in 1471. He then studied Canon law for three years, and finally theology.
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Patrick Aidan Heelan
#89068
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Patrick Aidan Heelan, S.J. was an Irish Jesuit priest, physicist, and philosopher of science. He was William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. Biography Patrick A. Heelan was born in Dublin to an Irish father and a Belgian mother. He joined the Society of Jesus at 16, received his B.A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1948, all with first-class honors, in mathematics and mathematical physics at University College, Dublin during which time he also worked with Erwin Schrödinger and John Synge at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies both mathematicians famous for their work in general relativity and cosmology.
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James Giles
#82098
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
James Giles is a Canadian philosopher and psychologist. He has written about the philosophy of perception, personal identity and the self, mindfulness, Buddhist and Taoist philosophy, and has published theories of the evolution of human hairlessness, the nature of sexual desire, sexual attraction, and gender. His wide range of academic interests and often controversial views have earned him the title of an "interdisciplinary maverick."
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Jeffrey A. Engelman
#107898
Overall Influence
#6948
Jean Curthoys
#73349
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean Curthoys is an Australian feminist philosopher. She was born in Broken Hill, New South Wales, the daughter of Geoffrey and Barbara Curthoys, leading members of the Communist Party of Australia. Her sister Ann Curthoys is an academic historian. After studying science and philosophy at the University of Sydney, she helped teach the first feminist philosophy course in Sydney in 1973. Her 1997 book, Feminist Amnesia, accuses later academic feminist theory of abandoning the liberation theory of the 1960s for an intellectually and morally sterile careerism.
Go to Profile#6949
Murray Epstein
#107910
Overall Influence
#6950
Salim Abdool Karim
#63381
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Salim S. Abdool Karim, MBChB, MMed, MS, FFPHM, FFPath , DipData, PhD, DSc, FRS is a South African public health physician, epidemiologist and virologist who has played a leading role in the AIDS and COVID-19 pandemic. His scientific contributions have impacted the landscape of HIV prevention and treatment, saving thousands of lives.
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