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,
#7101
Teodoro de Almeida
1722 - 1804 (82 years)
Teodoro de Almeida was a Portuguese Catholic priest, member of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, a writer and philosopher, and a leading personage of the Portuguese Enlightenment.
Go to Profile#7102
Lars Iyer
#61731
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Lars Iyer is a British novelist and philosopher of Indian/Danish parentage. He is best known for a trilogy of short novels: Spurious , Dogma , and Exodus , all published by Melville House. Iyer has been shortlisted for both the Believer Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize . He has also written and published two books about Maurice Blanchot.
Go to Profile#7103
Johann Friedrich Flatt
1759 - 1821 (62 years)
Johann Friedrich Flatt was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher. Life Johann Friedrich Flatt was born in Tübingen. His brother, Karl Christian Flatt , was also a theologian. He studied philosophy and theology in Tübingen, afterwards continuing his education in Göttingen. In 1785 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Tübingen, where in 1792 he was appointed an associate professor of theology. In 1798 he succeeded Gottlob Christian Storr as a full professor of theology at Tübingen.
Go to Profile#7104
Jacques Philippe Caen
#109396
Overall Influence
#7105
Narsing A. Rao
#109408
Overall Influence
#7106
Michela Massimi
#41472
Overall Influence
Michela Massimi is an Italian and British philosopher of science, a professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the president-elect of the Philosophy of Science Association. Her research has involved scientific perspectivism and perspectival realism, the Pauli exclusion principle, and the work of Immanuel Kant.
Go to Profile#7107
Marc S. Ernstoff
#109441
Overall Influence
#7108
Nancy E. Lane
#81366
Overall Influence
Nancy E. Lane is an American rheumatologist. She is an Endowed Professor of Medicine, Rheumatology, and Aging Research at the University of California, Davis and director of the UC Davis Musculoskeletal Diseases of Aging Research Group. She has also sat on the editorial boards of Nature Reviews Rheumatology, Rheumatology, Seminars in Arthritis and Rheumatism, Arthritis & Rheumatology, and The Journal of Rheumatology.
Go to Profile#7109
Hendrik van Eikema Hommes
1930 - 1984 (54 years)
Hendrik Jan van Eikema Hommes was a noted Dutch legal scholar and successor to Herman Dooyeweerd in the post of philosopher and judicial scholar at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Van Eikema Hommes wrote an Introduction to the Philosophy of Dooyeweerd, along with numerous legal studies. He was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1983.
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David B. Wong
#88965
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
David Wong is an American philosopher. He is the Susan Fox Beischer and George D. Beischer Professor of Philosophy at Duke University. Wong has done work in ethics, moral psychology, comparative ethics, and Chinese philosophy. He is especially well known for his defense of a version of moral relativism.
Go to Profile#7111
Andrzej Nowicki
#62000
Overall Influence
1919 - 2011 (92 years)
Andrzej Rusław Fryderyk Nowicki was a Polish philosopher of culture, a specialist in the history of philosophy and of atheism, in Italian philosophy of the Renaissance and in religious studies and Grand Master of the Grand East of Poland and a connoisseur of the fine arts, poet and diplomat.
Go to Profile#7112
En – Hou Han
#109498
Overall Influence
#7113
Ingrid Fleming
#109505
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
#7114
Olivier Lortholary
#109518
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
#7115
Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen
1663 - 1727 (64 years)
Johann Christoph Wichmannshausen was a 17th-century German philologist. Biography He received his master's degree from the University of Leipzig in 1685. His dissertation, titled Disputationem Moralem de Divortiis Secundum Jus Naturae , was written under the direction of his father in law and advisor Otto Mencke. He was from 1692 until the time of his death a professor of Near Eastern languages and university librarian at the University of Wittenberg, and gave courses there in Philosophy and Hebrew.
Go to Profile#7116
Raphaël Liogier
#21040
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Raphaël Liogier is a French sociologist and philosopher. He received his PhD in social sciences at the University Paul Cézanne in France, where he also received master's degrees in public law and in political science. Other degrees include a degree in philosophy from the University of Provence, and a Masters of Science by research in philosophy from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Liogier has also studied social sciences as a visiting undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley.
Go to Profile#7117
Lawrence A. Frohman
#109528
Overall Influence
#7118
Henry Marsh
#16450
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Henry Thomas Marsh CBE FRCS is an English neurosurgeon and best-selling author, a pioneer of awake craniotomy techniques and of neurosurgical work in Ukraine. His widely acclaimed memoir Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery was published in 2014. It has been translated into 37 languages. According to The Economist, this memoir is "so elegantly written it is little wonder some say that in Mr Marsh neurosurgery has found its Boswell." His second memoir Admissions: A life in brain surgery was published in 2017. And Finally, his most recent book, was published in 2022 to critica...
Go to Profile#7119
Frank Stack
#32626
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Frank Huntington Stack is an American underground cartoonist and fine artist. Working under the name Foolbert Sturgeon to avoid persecution for his work while living in the Bible Belt, Stack published what is considered by many to be the first underground comic, The Adventures of Jesus, in 1964.
Go to Profile#7120
Grant W. Liddle
#109552
Overall Influence
#7121
Nina Witoszek
#61909
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Nina Witoszek Nina Witoszek is a Polish-Irish-Norwegian writer and research professor at the Center for Development and the Environment in Oslo. She is also director of the Arne Næss Programme on Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Prior to her work at SUM, she taught comparative cultural history at the National University of Ireland in Galway and the European University in Florence . She held fellowships at the Swedish Collegium of the Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Uppsala , Robinson College, Cambridge and Mansfield College, Oxford and visiting prof...
Go to Profile#7122
Carl Wood
#20009
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Edwin Carlyle "Carl" Wood, , FRANZCOG was a prominent Australian gynaecologist, best known for his pioneering work developing and commercialising the technique of in-vitro fertilisation . He gained considerable international and national attention for his wide-ranging contributions in the field of women's health over a period of almost 50 years, although not all of it was positive given the controversial nature of many of his endeavours.
Go to Profile#7123
Oliva Sabuco
1562 - 1622 (60 years)
Oliva Sabuco de Nantes Barrera was a Spanish writer in holistic medical philosophy in the late 16th – early 17th century. She was interested in the interaction between the physical and psychological phenomena; therefore she wrote a collection of medical and psychological treatises that target human nature and explain the effects of emotions on the body and soul. She analyzed theoretical claims of ancient philosophers and wrote an early theory of what is now considered applied psychology.
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Kapil Kapoor
#30826
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Kapil Kapoor is an Indian scholar of linguistics and literature and an authority on Indian intellectual traditions. He is former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University and served as professor at the Centre for Linguistics and English, and at the Centre for Sanskrit Studies there before retiring in 2005. He is Editor-in-Chief of the 11-Volume Encyclopedia of Hinduism published by Rupa & Co. in 2012. He is a member of the Kapoor family.
Go to Profile#7125
Marianne Durano
#60941
Overall Influence
1991 - Present (35 years)
Marianne Durano, , is a French essayist and philosopher, and member of the editorial board of the journal Limite. Biography Durano is one of the French theorists of integral ecology, alongside Eugénie Bastié and Gaultier Bès. A graduate of Lyon and a graduate of philosophy, she is a part-time philosophy professor in a high school.
Go to Profile#7126
Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff
1782 - 1863 (81 years)
Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff was a German philosopher and theologian. Life He was born in Berlin. The son of a musician, from the age of twelve Trahndorff attended the school in Oels , where his father had been appointed chapel director by the Prinz von Brunswick-Lüneburg, Frederick August I. From 1801 he studied theology and philology in Königsberg, and on completion of his studies he began a career as a high-school teacher, mostly at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin but with several years in Białystok .
Go to Profile#7127
Myron Augsburger
#55730
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (97 years)
Myron Augsburger is an American Mennonite pastor, professor, theologian, and author. He is the former president of both Eastern Mennonite College and the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities.
Go to Profile#7128
Stephen N. Thibodeau
#109579
Overall Influence
#7129
Melvin L. Depamphilis
#109598
Overall Influence
#7130
Alton Ochsner
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Alton Ochsner Sr. was an American surgeon and medical researcher who worked at Tulane University and other New Orleans hospitals before he established The Ochsner Clinic. Now known as Ochsner Medical Center, the clinic is the flagship hospital of Ochsner Health System. Among its many services are heart transplants.
Go to Profile#7131
Barbara Stühlmeyer
#29240
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Barbara Stühlmeyer OblOSB is a German theologian, musicologist, author, especially a Hildegard scholar and a science journalism. Biography Stühlmeyer was born in Bremen. After completing her A levels at the Altes Gymnasium in Bremen and her organ studies with church music director Winfrid Langosz, whom she assisted at the Catholic Provost church St. John's Bremen, she studied Christian music at the University of the Arts Bremen . During her scientific studies from 1988 to 1994 she studied Catholic theology with Arnold Angenendt and Klemens Richter, philosophy with Berthhold Wald and musicology with Axel Beer and Winfried Schepporst at the Westfaelische Wilhelms Universitaet in Muenster.
Go to Profile#7132
Joanne B. Ciulla
#91263
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Joanne Bridgett Ciulla is an American philosopher. She is a pioneer in the field of leadership ethics as well as teaching and publishing on business Ethics. She is currently a professor at the Rutgers Business School - Newark and New Brunswick and is the director of the Institute for Ethical Leadership. She has received several awards for her contributions to leadership studies and business ethics.
Go to Profile#7133
Sophie Grace Chappell
#92748
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (62 years)
Sophie Grace Chappell is an English philosopher and academic. Since 2006, she has been Professor of Philosophy at the Open University. Early life and education Chappell was born in November 1964. She studied Literae humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford, having been awarded the Anne Shaw Classical Scholarship. She achieved a first in Honour Moderations in March 1986 and an upper second in the Final Honour School in June 1988, thereby graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. She then moved to the University of Edinburgh to undertake research for a Doctor of Philosophy degree under the supervision of James Mackey and Dory Scaltsas.
Go to Profile#7134
Giuseppe Rensi
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Giuseppe Rensi was an Italian philosopher. Early life and education Giuseppe Rensi's father Gaetano was a doctor; his mother was Emilia Wallner, and he also had a sister, Teresa. He attended high school in Verona, then studied law, first in Padua and then in Rome, where he graduated in 1893. As a young man he began to collaborate on socialist-inspired periodicals, for example the Rivista popolare, directed by Napoleone Colajanni, and the Critica Sociale, directed by Filippo Turati. At Turati's invitation he moved to Milan where he began regularly to frequent socialist circles. He also worked...
Go to Profile#7135
Fiona Timmins
#109668
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
#7136
Nilesh Samani
#55597
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Sir Nilesh Jayantilal Samani is a British physician who is professor of Cardiology at the University of Leicester, consultant cardiologist at Glenfield Hospital in the city, and Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation.
Go to Profile#7137
Souleymane Mboup
#20670
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Souleymane Mboup is a Senegalese microbiologist, medical researcher, and colonel in the Armed Forces of Senegal. In 1985, he was a member of the first team to identify HIV-2, a form of HIV that is typically found in West Africa and is less transmissible than the more common HIV-1. Mboup has contributed to the improvement of Senegal's research infrastructure throughout his career. Among his published works, he is known for editing the 1994 reference book AIDS in Africa. Mboup is currently the President of L'Institut de Recherche en Santé, de Surveillance Épidémiologique et de Formations in D...
Go to Profile#7138
Damaris Cudworth Masham
1659 - 1708 (49 years)
Damaris Cudworth, Lady Masham was an English writer, philosopher, theologian, and advocate for women's education who is often characterized as a proto-feminist. She overcame some weakness of eyesight and lack of access to formal higher education to win high regard among eminent thinkers of her time. With an extensive correspondence, she published two works, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God and Thoughts in reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life . She is particularly noted for her long, mutually-influential friendship with the philosopher John Locke.
Go to Profile#7139
Catherine Ann Jones
#51342
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Catherine Ann Jones is a prize-winning playwright as well as an actor and short story writer. After playing major roles in over 55 plays on and off Broadway, she became disappointed by the lack of good roles for women and wrote a play, "On the Edge", about Virginia Woolf and her struggle with madness in a world gone mad, Hitler, and WWII. The play won a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Eleven of her plays, including "Calamity Jane" , "The Women of Cedar Creek", and "Freud’s Oracle", have won multiple awards and are produced both in and out of New York. Her films include "The Christmas W...
Go to Profile#7140
Brian Houghton Hodgson
1800 - 1894 (94 years)
Brian Houghton Hodgson was a pioneer naturalist and ethnologist working in India and Nepal where he was a British Resident. He described numerous species of birds and mammals from the Himalayas, and several birds were named after him by others such as Edward Blyth. He was a scholar of Newar Buddhism and wrote extensively on a range of topics relating to linguistics and religion. He was an opponent of the British proposal to introduce English as the official medium of instruction in Indian schools.
Go to Profile#7141
Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk was a Dutch anthropologist, biologist and psychologist. He graduated as a physician, was a lecturer in biology and general physiology at the VU University Amsterdam and received a chair in physiology there in 1919. In 1924 he became professor of physiology and histology in Groningen. From 1946 until his retirement in 1957, he was an extraordinary professor in Nijmegen and professor of psychology in Utrecht, although he had never studied psychology. [1]
Go to Profile#7142
Francesco Robortello
1516 - 1567 (51 years)
Francesco Robortello was a Renaissance humanist, nicknamed Canis grammaticus for his confrontational and demanding manner. As scholar Robortello, who was born in Udine, was an editor of rediscovered works of Antiquity, who taught philosophy and rhetoric, as well as ethics , and Latin and Greek, roving from Padua through universities at Lucca, Pisa, Venice, Padua, and Bologna before finally returning to Padua in 1560.
Go to Profile#7143
C. E. M. Joad
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad was an English philosopher, author, teacher and broadcasting personality. He appeared on The Brains Trust, a BBC Radio wartime discussion programme. He popularised philosophy and became a celebrity, before his downfall in a scandal over an unpaid train fare in 1948.
Go to Profile#7144
Swee Lay Thein
#93533
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Swee Lay Thein is a Malaysian haematologist and physician-scientist who is Senior Investigator at the National Institutes of Health. She works on the pathophysiology of haemoglobin disorders including sickle cell disease and thalassemia.
Go to Profile#7145
Ronna Burger
#83450
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Ronna C. Burger is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy, Catherine & Henry J. Gaisman Chair, and Sizeler Professor of Jewish Studies at Tulane University. Career She received her PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research Graduate Faculty and has been teaching at Tulane since 1980. Her research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Earhart Foundation, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and Carl Friedrich von Siemens Foundation. She is the author of books and articles on Plato and Aristotle, and her graduate seminars on those thinkers have often led to dissertations in ancient philosophy.
Go to Profile#7146
Richard I. Fisher
#109782
Overall Influence
#7147
Khalifa Abdul Hakim
1893 - 1959 (66 years)
Khalifa Abdul Hakeem was a Pakistani philosopher, poet, critic, researcher, philologist, translator, and former professor of philosophy at Osmania University. He was the former director of Islamic Culture Institute, Lahore.
Go to Profile#7148
Bolus of Mendes
300 BC - 300 BC (0 years)
Bolus of Mendes was a philosopher, a neopythagorean writer of works of esoterica and medicine, in Ptolemaic Egypt. Both the Suda, and a later work mistakenly attributed to Eudokia Makrembolitissa—; Bed of Violets, probably a 16th-century forgery by Constantine Paleocappa—write of a Pythagorean philosopher of Mendes in Egypt. He is described as one who wrote on marvels, potent remedies, and astronomical phenomena. The Suda, however, also describes a separate Bolus who was a philosopher of the school of Democritus, who wrote Inquiry, and Medical Art, containing "natural medical remedies from so...
Go to Profile#7149
Raymond Briggs
#4311
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Raymond Redvers Briggs was an English illustrator, cartoonist, graphic novelist and author. Achieving critical and popular success among adults and children, he is best known in Britain for his 1978 story The Snowman, a book without words whose cartoon adaptation is televised and whose musical adaptation is staged every Christmas.
Go to Profile#7150
Kenneth D. Brandt
#109822
Overall Influence
