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.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#11251

Joel G. Breman

#147097
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11252

John Coldstream

1806 - 1863 (57 years)
John Coldstream was a Scottish physician. Life Coldstream, only son of Robert Coldstream, merchant in Timber Bush, by his wife Elizabeth, daughter of John Phillips of Stobcross, Glasgow, was born at Leith on 19 March 1806, and after attending the Royal High School, Edinburgh, continued his studies at the university. He took an interest in Bible and missionary societies, and in 1822 wrote the report of the Leith Juvenile Bible Society.
Go to Profile
#11253

Mladen Vranic

#147105
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11254

Hiroyuki Daida

#147108
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11255

Hudson Gerry Taylor

#147123
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11256

William H. Eaglstein

#147135
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11257

Michael Stuart

#29258
Overall Influence
Michael J. Stuart is an American sports physician and orthopedic surgeon. He is a professor and vice-chairman of orthopedic surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and a co-director of the Mayo Clinic Sports Medicine Center. He has published more than 370 journal articles and 50 book chapters, as of 2022. He specializes in sports medicine, and advocates for strength, flexibility, and awareness, to reduce injuries in ice hockey. He collaborated to arrange the 2010, 2013 and 2017 Ice Hockey Summits, which focused on concussions, and educational programs for players, coaches and parents.
Go to Profile
#11258

Eitan Friedman

#147149
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11259

Massimo Menenti

#147150
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11260

Burleigh Taylor Wilkins

#102974
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Burleigh Taylor Wilkins was a professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He studied at Duke University, ; Harvard University ; and Princeton University . He previously taught history at Shorter College in Rome, Georgia from 1956–57; humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1957–60; philosophy at Princeton University and at Rice University . He taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, from 1968 until 2012.
Go to Profile
#11261

Pamprepius

440 - 484 (44 years)
Pamprepius was a philosopher and a pagan poet who rebelled against the Eastern Roman Emperor Zeno. Damascius described him as a brilliant poet, Malchus as an acute politician, but ugly, arrogant, unscrupulous and treacherous. Rhetorius, an Egyptian astrologer, called him a charlatan and a libertine. He has been compared to Claudian, as both these poets enjoyed eight years of political power at the side of usurpers. He is considered the last Roman pagan poet.
Go to Profile
#11262

Howard Kreisel

Howard Kreisel
#120741
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Howard "Haim" Kreisel is a professor of medieval Jewish philosophy in the department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev . Biography Howard Kreisel was born in New York in 1951. He received his B.A. at Brandeis University in 1972 and went on to complete his M.A. and Ph.D. at Brandeis in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. His doctoral dissertation, Theories of Prophecy in Medieval Jewish Philosophy was written under the supervision of Alfred Ivry. He taught medieval Jewish studies for three years at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College before moving to Israel in 1983.
Go to Profile
#11263

Arthur Zimmermann

#147179
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11264

Alfred P. Hallstrom

#147182
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11265

Francis Wilson Price

#147208
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11266

Ludwig Dill

Ludwig Dill
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Wilhelm Franz Karl Ludwig Dill was a German ship and landscape painter who was a founding member of the Munich Secession. Life and work He was the only son of the Tax Assessor for the Grand Duchy of Baden. The family moved several times, finally settling in Stuttgart in 1862.
Go to Profile
#11267

Robert Michael Franklin Jr.

#38711
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Robert Michael Franklin Jr. is an American author, theologian, ordained minister, and academic administrator who served as the tenth president of Morehouse College from 2007 to 2012. Franklin is a visiting scholar in residence at Stanford University's Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. In January 2014, he became director of the religion program at the Chautauqua Institution.
Go to Profile
#11268

Charles F. Frey

#147236
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11269

Richard J. Gryglewski

#147242
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11270

Tatsuo Miyamura

#147243
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11271

Jørg Gustav Mørland

#147267
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11272

Eusebius of Myndus

300 - Present (1726 years)
Eusebius of Myndus was a 4th-century philosopher, a distinguished Neoplatonist. He is described by Eunapius as one of the links in the "Golden Chain" of Neoplatonism. He was a pupil of Aedesius of Pergamum. He devoted himself principally to logic and ventured to criticize the magical and theurgic side of the doctrine. By this he exasperated the later Emperor Julian, who preferred the mysticism of Maximus and Chrysanthius.
Go to Profile
#11273

Fortunio Liceti

Fortunio Liceti
1577 - 1657 (80 years)
Fortunio Liceti , was an Italian physician and philosopher. Life and career He was born prematurely at Rapallo, near Genoa to Giuseppe Liceti and Maria Fini, while the family was moving from Recco. His father was a doctor and created a makeshift incubator, thereby saving Fortunio.
Go to Profile
#11274

Larry L. Butcher

#147285
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11275

John Desmond Ward

#147288
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11276

J. Grimley Evans

Go to Profile
#11277

Karl Michaëlsson

#147320
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11278

William Hare

#87366
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
William Hare is a philosopher whose writings deal primarily with problems in philosophy of education. He attended Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys, 1955–62. After receiving his B.A. from the University of London , he gained an M.A. in philosophy from the University of Leicester , and a Ph.D. in educational theory from the University of Toronto . He was Professor of Education and Philosophy at Dalhousie University from 1970 to 1995, and subsequently Professor of Education at Mount Saint Vincent University until his retirement in June 2008. He is now Professor Emeritus. He is known mainly for ...
Go to Profile
#11279

Robert W. Ii Hobson

#147346
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11280

Aristocles of Pergamon

100 - 200 (100 years)
Aristocles of Pergamon was a sophist and rhetorician who lived in the time of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. He spent the early part of his life on the study of Peripatetic philosophy, and during this period he completely neglected his outward appearance. But afterwards he was seized by the desire of becoming a rhetorician, and went to Rome, where he enrolled himself among the pupils of Herodes Atticus. After his return to Pergamus, he made a complete change in his mode of life, and appears to have enjoyed a great reputation as a teacher of rhetoric. His declamations are praised for t...
Go to Profile
#11281

Elizabeth Castelli

#51339
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Elizabeth Castelli is an author and Professor of Religion at Barnard College. She specializes in biblical studies, late ancient Christianity, feminist studies in religion along with theory and method in the study of religion, with a particular focus on the after-effects of biblical and early Christian texts, including the citation of the Bible and ancient Christian sources in debates concerning cultural and political expression.
Go to Profile
#11282

Hermann Otto Handwerker

#147382
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11283

Diethelm Wallwiener

#147388
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11284

Ukshin Hoti

#78164
Overall Influence
1943 - 1999 (56 years)
Ukshin Hoti was a Kosovo Albanian philosopher and activist. Hoti was a professor of international law and later philosophy at the University of Pristina and founder of UNIKOMB, a political party of Kosovo. Since 1982 he had been arrested several times by Yugoslav authorities. In 1994 he was convicted to five years in the Dubrava prison. In May 1999, when his sentence ended and he was to be released, the prison guards transferred him to an unknown location. His whereabouts remain unknown and many human rights activists consider him dead.
Go to Profile
#11285

Mark Silk

#45013
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mark Silk is an American academic. He is Professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College, where he also serves as the Director the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life. In addition, Silk is a Contributing Editor of the Religion News Service, specializing in Spiritual Politics.
Go to Profile
#11286

Caroline Homer

#128373
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Caroline Susan E. Homer is an Australian midwifery researcher and international advocate for women's health rights. She is Co-Program Director, Maternal and Child Health at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne and Visiting Distinguished Professor of Midwifery at the University of Technology Sydney.
Go to Profile
#11287

Marja. A. Boermeester

#147406
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11288

Geoffrey Watkinson

#147411
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11289

Dr Donald L. Lamm

#147417
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11290

F. Blair Simmons

#147425
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11291

Martine R. Rémy-jardin

#147428
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11292

Yukitaka Ushio

#147433
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11293

Sudhansu Chokroverty

#147463
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11294

Henry of Oyta

1330 - 1397 (67 years)
Henry of Oyta was a German theologian and nominalist philosopher. Life He was born at Friesoythe in present-day Lower Saxony. Henry graduated M.A. at the University of Prague in 1355. He was then rector of a school in Erfurt, and returned to Prague in 1366. In the course of a long-running dispute, Adalbert Ranconis accused him of heresy in 1369–70. He began teaching at the University of Paris in 1377. For reasons connected with the Western Schism, he left Paris in 1381; he then taught at Prague, 1381 to 1381, lecturing there on the Psalms and Gospel of John. He was at the University of Vien...
Go to Profile
#11295

Nicole Mosconi

#126333
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
Nicole Mosconi was a French philosopher and professor. A specialist in educational questions, she was a member of the from 2006 until her death. Biography Mosconi, née Aubineau, graduated from the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in 1961 with an agrégation in philosophy. She earned a doctorate from Paris Nanterre University in 1986 under the direction of with the title "La mixité dans l'enseignement secondaire : un faux-semblant ?" In 1992, she published "Savoir, rapport au savoir et différence des sexes". In 1994, she became a professor of educational sciences.
Go to Profile
#11296

Ronald M. Du Bois

#147495
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11297

Michihiko Tada

#147499
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11298

Roland H. Ingram

#147510
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#11299

Lyn Chitty

#126685
Overall Influence
Dame Lyn Susan Chitty is a British physician and Professor of Genetics and Fetal Medicine at University College London. She is the deputy director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research Great Ormond Street Hospital Biomedical Research Centre. She is the 2022 president of the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis. Her research considers non-invasive prenatal diagnostics. She was made a Dame in the 2022 New Year Honours.
Go to Profile
#11300

Peter Ingwersen

#147523
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Go to Profile