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).

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#8451

Julie McElrath

#54118

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

M. Juliana “Julie” McElrath is a senior vice president and director of the vaccine and infection disease division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the principal investigator of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network Laboratory Center in Seattle, Washington. She is also a professor at the University of Washington.

#8452

Qadi Baydawi

1201 - 1286 (85 years)

Qadi Baydawi was a Persian jurist, theologian, and Quran commentator. He lived during the post-Seljuk and early Mongol era. Many commentaries have been written on his work. He was also the author of several theological treatises.

#8453

Frederick F. Becker

#122604

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

#8454

Allen C. Enders

#122613

Overall Influence

#8455

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin

#122625

Overall Influence

#8456

Matthias Endres

#122632

Overall Influence

1969 - Present (57 years)

#8457

John Langalibalele Dube

1871 - 1946 (75 years)

John Langalibalele Dube OLG was a South African essayist, philosopher, educator, politician, publisher, editor, novelist and poet. He was the founding president of the South African Native National Congress , which became the African National Congress in 1923. He was an uncle to Dr Pixley ka Isaka Seme, with whom he founded SANNC. Dube served as the president of SANNC between 1912 and 1917. He was brought to America by returning missionaries and attended Oberlin Preparatory Academy.

#8458

Shakib Arslan

1871 - 1946 (75 years)

Shakib Arslan was an Arab writer, poet, historian, politician, and Emir in Lebanon. A prolific writer, he produced some 20 books and 2,000 articles, as well as two collections of poetry and a "prodigious correspondence". He was known as Amir al-Bayān due to his influential writings.

#8459

Tom Gilb

#13434

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Tom Gilb is an American systems engineer, consultant, and author, known for the development of software metrics, software inspection, and evolutionary processes. Biography Tom Gilb was born in 1940 in Pasadena, California, United States. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1956 and to Norway in 1958. He took his first job with IBM in 1958 and became a freelance consultant in 1960.

#8460

Valéria Dienes

1879 - 1978 (99 years)

Valéria Dienes was a Hungarian philosopher, dancer, dance instructor, choreographer and one of first Hungarian woman to graduate from university. She is widely considered to be one of the most important Hungarian theorists on movement. She was the recipient of Hungary's highest literary award, the Baumgarten Prize in 1934.

#8461

Neil J. Douglas

#122726

Overall Influence

#8462

Elliott S. Fisher

#56991

Overall Influence

Elliott S. Fisher is a health policy researcher and advocate for improving health system performance in the United States. He helped develop the concept of accountable care organizations and championed their adoption by Medicare. The development of the Affordable Care Act was influenced by his research on disparities in healthcare spending and utilization across the United States. He has strongly supported a rapid transition from fee-for-service to pay-for-performance models in the U.S. healthcare industry. He is a tenured faculty member at Dartmouth College, where he teaches in the Masters in...

#8463

Ursula Günther

#21783

Overall Influence

1927 - 2006 (79 years)

Ursula Günther was a German musicologist specializing in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries and the music of Giuseppe Verdi. She coined the term , to categorize the rhythmically complex music that followed .

#8464

Jonathan Golledge

#122761

Overall Influence

#8465

Josep Maria Esquirol Calaf

Josep Maria Esquirol Calaf

#92540

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Josep Maria Esquirol Calaf is a Catalan philosopher, essayist and professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona. He directs the Aporia Research Group, whose field of study is contemporary philosophy and, specifically, the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry.

#8466

Michael Zimmer

#22433

Overall Influence

Michael Zimmer is a privacy and data ethics scholar. He currently is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Marquette University and Director of the Center for Data, Ethics, and Society. Previously, he was on the faculty at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and director of the Center for Information Policy Research. Zimmer is on the advisory board of the Future of Privacy Forum, and was on the executive committee of the Association of Internet Researchers from 2009-2016. He was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Pro...

#8467

Daniel Rutherford

Daniel Rutherford

1749 - 1819 (70 years)

Daniel Rutherford was a Scottish physician, chemist and botanist who is known for the isolation of nitrogen in 1772. Life Rutherford was born on 3 November 1749, the son of Anne Mackay and Professor John Rutherford . He began college at the age of 16 at Mundell's School on the West Bow close to his family home, and then studied medicine under William Cullen and Joseph Black at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with a doctorate in 1772. From 1775 to 1786 he practiced as a physician in Edinburgh.

#8468

Graeme Forbes

Graeme Robertson Forbes is a Scottish-American philosopher and logician and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder and former Celia Scott Weatherhead Distinguished Professor at Tulane University.

#8469

Andrew Barker

#66427

Overall Influence

1943 - 2021 (78 years)

Andrew Dennison Barker, was a British classicist and academic, specialising in ancient Greek music and the intersection between musical theory and philosophy. He was Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham from 1998 to 2008, and had previously taught at the University of Warwick, University of Cambridge, and Selwyn College, Cambridge.

#8470

Warner Fite

1867 - 1955 (88 years)

Warner Fite was an American philosopher. Biography Warner Fite was born in Philadelphia. He graduated with a BA from Haverford College in 1889 and received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1894. Besides teaching at the University of Chicago , Fite also worked at the University of Texas , Indiana University and Harvard University . He held the chair of Stuart Professor of Ethics at Princeton University from 1917 until his retirement in 1935.

#8471

Gordon B. Jr. Cutler

#122849

Overall Influence

#8472

Max Loreau

1928 - 1990 (62 years)

Max Loreau was a 20th-century Belgian philosopher, poet and art critic. Life and career Born in Brussels, Max Loreau was a professor of modern philosophy at the University of Brussels. He was interested in a number of movements ranging from the Renaissance to Cobra. His work focused on artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Guillaume Corneille, and Asger Jorn. A comprehensive study of the logograms by Christian Dotremont was published in 1975; Loreau also worked with Pierre Alechinsky, who helped him to publish L'Épreuve. He died in 1990.

#8473

Iyad Rahwan

#57566

Overall Influence

1978 - Present (48 years)

Iyad Rahwan , is a Syrian-Australian scientist. He is the director of the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Between 2015 and 2020, he was an associate professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, where he has investigated topics in computational social science, collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of artificial intelligence.

#8474

Masamichi Muramatsu

#122873

Overall Influence

#8475

Michael Rectenwald

#38877

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Michael D. Rectenwald is an American scholar and former professor. Although he has written about 19th-century British secularism, he may be most known as a critic of the contemporary social justice movement.

#8476

Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa

1905 - 1981 (76 years)

Maria Kokoszyńska-Lutmanowa was "a significant logician, philosopher of language and epistemologist", and "one of the most outstanding female representatives" of the third generation of the Lwów–Warsaw school. She is "mostly known as the author of the important argumentation against neopositivism of the Vienna Circle as well as one of the main critics of relativistic theories of truth". She was also noted for popularising Tarski's works on semantics.

#8477

Alan H. B. Wu

#122910

Overall Influence

#8478

Arnold Zuboff

#109052

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (80 years)

Arnold Stuart Zuboff is an American philosopher who has worked on topics such as personal identity, philosophy of mind, ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of probability. He is the original formulator of the Sleeping Beauty problem and a view analogous to open individualism—the position that there is one subject of experience, who is everyone—which he calls "universalism".

#8479

José Medina

#85581

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

José Medina is Walter Hill Scott professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the British Wittgenstein Society, the North American Wittgenstein Society, the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy , the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Tennessee Philosophical Association.

#8480

Sergio Jaramillo Caro

#41377

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Sergio Jaramillo Caro is a Colombian politician. He recently was the High Commissioner of Peace under President Juan Manuel Santos leading with Humberto de la Calle the Colombian Peace process between Colombia and the FARC guerrillas between 2012 and 2016. He was previously in government as vice minister of defence and also held the position of national security advisor between 2010 and 2012.

#8481

Holger K. Eltzschig

#122926

Overall Influence

#8482

Bernard Waeber

#8483

Nicholas Southwood

#25583

Overall Influence

Nicholas Southwood is an Australian philosopher and associate professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Political Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Moral, Social and Political Theory. Southwood is known for his research on contractualism and social philosophy.

#8484

Harvey R. Colten.

#122962

Overall Influence

#8485

Frans M. J. Debruyne

#122974

Overall Influence

#8486

Govert Bidloo

1649 - 1713 (64 years)

Govert Bidloo or Govard Bidloo was a Dutch Golden Age physician, anatomist, poet and playwright. He was the personal physician of William III of Orange-Nassau, Dutch stadholder and King of England, Scotland and Ireland.

#8487

Egon Friedell

1878 - 1938 (60 years)

Egon Friedell was a prominent Austrian cultural historian, playwright, actor and Kabarett performer, journalist and theatre critic. Friedell has been described as a polymath. Before 1916, he was also known by his pen name Egon Friedländer.

#8488

Jecko V. Thachil

#123027

Overall Influence

#8489

Brett Eugene Quincy Bouma

#123044

Overall Influence

#8490

Joseph J Eron

#123052

Overall Influence

#8491

Norman Uphoff

#39754

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Norman Uphoff is an American social scientist now involved with agroecology serving as a Professor of Government and International Agriculture at Cornell University. He is the acting director of the Cornell Institute for Public Affairs and former director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development 1990–2005.

#8492

Arlen Dale Hanssen

#123070

Overall Influence

#8493

Joseph Bell

1837 - 1911 (74 years)

Joseph Bell FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon and lecturer at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh in the 19th century. He is best known as an inspiration for the literary character, Sherlock Holmes.

#8494

Thomas Matthijs Van Gulik

#123088

Overall Influence

#8495

Grigore Tocilescu

Grigore Tocilescu

1850 - 1909 (59 years)

Grigore George Tocilescu was a Romanian historian, archaeologist, epigrapher and folkorist, member of Romanian Academy. He was a professor of ancient history at the University of Bucharest, author of Marele Dicționar Geografic al României , general secretary of the Romanian Ministry of Teaching and multiple times senator, with conservative political views. Tocilescu is one of the first Romanian historians who focused on the study of civilizations in ancient Dacia. As a folklorist he collaborated on the publication of a folkloristics compendium.

#8496

Sander Kersten

#123091

Overall Influence

#8497

Murray Smith

#42737

Overall Influence

Murray Smith is a film theorist and philosopher of art based at the University of Kent, where he is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film and co-director of the Aesthetics Research Centre. He is the author of three books and numerous articles on film and aesthetics, and the co-editor of three collections of essays. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image from 2014 to 2017, and has served on the editorial boards of Screen, Cinema Journal, the British Journal of Aesthetics, Projections and Series. He has held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship , and a Laurance S Rockefeller Fellowship at Princeton University’s Centre for Human Values .

#8498

Roger Stupp

#123110

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

#8499

Stjepan Gradić

1613 - 1683 (70 years)

Stjepan Gradić, also known as Stefano Gradi was a polymath, philosopher, scientist and a patrician of the Republic of Ragusa. Biography Stijepo's parents were Miho Gradi and Marija Benessa . He was born in Ragusa , Republic of Ragusa, where he was first schooled. He moved to Rome by the order of his uncle, a vicar general of Ragusa, Petar Benessa. In Rome and in Bologna he studied philosophy, theology, law and mathematics. His mathematics professor in Rome was Bonaventura Cavalieri and in Bologna his mathematics professor was Benedetto Castelli. He became a priest in 1643, the year he returned home and soon became abbot of the Benedictine abbey of St.

#8500

Diana. B. Petitti

#123160

Overall Influence

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions