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 …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#12951
Karl‐heinz Grzeschik
#162256
Overall Influence
#12952
Paul Kelly
#119547
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Paul Joseph Kelly is Professor of Political Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science , and Head of the Department of Government. Research Kelly’s early work and main contribution as a historian of political theory was as part of a group of revisionist Bentham scholars, having worked on the manuscripts at the Bentham Project at University College London. Kelly rejected the common claim that Bentham was a crude act-utilitarian. Instead, he argued that Bentham developed a complex two-level utilitarian theory similar to those of contemporary indirect utilitarian theorists such as R. M.
Go to Profile#12953
Neil John Mchugh
#162265
Overall Influence
#12954
Felix Unger
#21818
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Felix Unger is a heart specialist who served as the president of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts for three decades. He is the president of Alma Mater Europaea. In 1986 he performed the first artificial heart transplantation in Europe.
Go to Profile#12955
Josef Zezulka
#159694
Overall Influence
1912 - 1992 (80 years)
Josef Zezulka was a Czech philosopher, healer and the founder of the discipline of biotronics. He wrote many philosophical works, best known of which is BYTÍ - EXISTENCE - A Philosophy for Life, which encompasses topics such as the birth of space and its life, evolution of a being, karma, vegetarianism and life energetics.
Go to Profile#12956
Sven Erik G. Nilsson
#162329
Overall Influence
#12957
Kunio Shirato
#162330
Overall Influence
#12958
Marc A. Boogaerts
#162336
Overall Influence
#12959
Hiroaki Matsuoka
#162337
Overall Influence
#12960
Joseph E. Geenen
#162345
Overall Influence
#12961
Sally Ann Shumaker
#162351
Overall Influence
#12962
Ruth M. Mcpherson
#162355
Overall Influence
#12963
Pentti Kujala
#162373
Overall Influence
#12964
Henri E. Kulbertus
#162375
Overall Influence
#12965
Gérard M. Guiraudon
#162386
Overall Influence
#12966
Jacek J. Hawiger
#162405
Overall Influence
#12967
Yuichiro Ogura
#162416
Overall Influence
#12968
Michael M. Meguid
#102812
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michael M. Meguid is Professor of Surgery Emeritus at Upstate Medical University , Syracuse, New York. Biography Born in Egypt, Michael Marwan Meguid spent his childhood in Egypt, Germany, and then England. There he attended University College London and University College Hospital Medical School, graduating with his MB BS degree in 1968. For the next two years he was an Anatomy Professor at UCL, while he successfully completed Part 1 of the Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons , London qualification. From 1970 until 1976 he did his surgical residency at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, ...
Go to Profile#12969
John Gall
#35605
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
John Gall was an American author, scholar, and pediatrician. Gall is known for his 1975 book General systemantics: an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., a critique of systems theory. One of the statements from this book has become known as Gall's law.
Go to Profile#12970
Christoph Rehmann-Sutter
#111531
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Christoph Rehmann-Sutter is a philosopher and bioethicist. He is holding a professorship for theory and ethics in biosciences at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies at the University of Lübeck in Germany.
Go to Profile#12971
James Alan Rand
#162432
Overall Influence
#12972
Jens Damsgaard Mikkelsen
#162459
Overall Influence
#12973
Abraham Morgentaler
#162461
Overall Influence
#12974
Garen Wintemute
#48663
Overall Influence
Garen J. Wintemute is an emergency medicine physician at UC Davis Medical Center, in the US state of California, where he is the director of the Violence Prevention Research Program. He conducts research in the fields of injury epidemiology and the prevention of firearm violence. He has been named a "hero of medicine" by Time magazine. He is the director of the University of California Firearm Violence Research Center, which was established in 2017; the center is the first state-funded gun violence research center in the country.
Go to Profile#12975
Frederick F. Russell
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Brigadier General Frederick Fuller Russell was a U.S. Army physician who perfected a typhoid vaccine in 1909. In 1911, a typhoid vaccination program was carried out to have the entire U.S. Army immunized. As a direct result of his research, the U.S. Army was the first military to make vaccination a required prophylaxis against typhoid. The 1911 measure eliminated typhoid as a significant cause of morbidity and mortality among U.S. military personnel.
Go to Profile#12976
Günther Rohrmoser
#80499
Overall Influence
Günter Rohrmoser was Christian conservative German social philosopher and professor at the Hohenheim University and at Stuttgart University. He was an advisor to prominent CDU politicians. Life Rohrmoser studied philosophy, theology, history and economics in Münster. One of his eminent professors at Münster University was Joachim Ritter and he became a follower of the German post war "Ritter school" of conservative philosophers. He wrote his "Habilitation" in Cologne on the philosophy of Hegel. From 1976 until 1996 he taught as a professor for social philosophy at Hohenheim University near Stuttgart.
Go to Profile#12977
Harubumi Kato
#162504
Overall Influence
#12978
Daniel John Sexton
#162509
Overall Influence
#12979
Peter R. Kvietys
#162514
Overall Influence
#12980
Richard K. Albert
#162516
Overall Influence
#12981
Max Koner
1854 - 1900 (46 years)
Max Johann Bernhard Koner was a German portraitist. Biography From 1873 to 1878, he studied at the Prussian Academy of Arts under Eduard Daege, Anton von Werner and others. He spent some time in Italy in 1875 and, after graduating went to study in Paris. In 1893, he became a member of the Academy.
Go to Profile#12982
Esther E. Freeman
#89024
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
Esther Ellen Freeman is an American physician who is an Assistant Professor of Dermatology at the Harvard Medical School and Director of Global Health Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research considers HIV infection with AIDS-defining malignancies, including Kaposi's sarcoma. During the COVID-19 pandemic Freeman established the American Academy of Dermatology register of COVID-19 skin complaints, through which she identified the novel symptom of COVID toes.
Go to Profile#12983
Werner Alois Prof Dipl Kaiser
#162540
Overall Influence
#12984
Tosson Aly Morsy
#162570
Overall Influence
#12985
Socrates the Younger
420 BC - 400 BC (20 years)
Socrates the Younger was an ancient Athenian philosopher. Ancient texts suggest that he was a young student of the elder Socrates and later a cohort of Plato. He is best remembered for his depiction in Plato's Statesman, and scholars have suggested that he had ties to Academic and Pythagorean philosophy.
Go to Profile#12986
Leighton Chan
#49854
Overall Influence
Leighton Chan is an American medical researcher and rehabilitation physician. He is Chief of the Rehabilitation Medicine Department and Acting Chief Scientific Officer/Scientific Director at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.
Go to Profile#12987
R. M. Bowen Wright
#162597
Overall Influence
#12988
Edward Tuddenham
#76453
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Edward G. D. Tuddenham FMedSci is considered one of the world's leading haematologists having authored over 200 papers in the field. He gained his Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery at the University of London in 1968 and his Membership of the Royal College of Physicians in 1975. Up until 2005 was head of the Haemostasis and Thrombosis Research Group at Imperial College. Professor Tuddenham is a pioneer in the field of haemophilia and was responsible, along with Frances Rotblat, for the purification and cloning of the factor VIII gene, which led to the highly effective and safe treatments available to haemophilia sufferers today.
Go to Profile#12989
Marek Kwiek
#162610
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
#12990
Peter Michael Stephan Hacker
#162611
Overall Influence
#12991
Gottfried Otto Helmut Naumann
#12992
Silvio Brusaferro
#162631
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#12993
Federica Agosta
#162634
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
#12994
Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen
1215 - Present (811 years)
Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen was a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. He was the author of the Midrash ha-Ḥokmah, considered the first of the great Hebrew encyclopedias, and notable for its in-depth treatment both of the exact sciences and of biblical and rabbinic texts.
Go to Profile#12995
William A. Friedman
#162663
Overall Influence
#12996
David Vaughan
#39881
Overall Influence
1924 - 2017 (93 years)
David Vaughan was a dance archivist, historian and critic. He was the archivist of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 1976 until the company was disbanded in 2012. In his long career, Vaughan was a dancer, choreographer, actor and singer whose work had been seen in London, Paris, and in New York, both on- and off-Broadway, as well as in regional theatres across the United States, in cabarets, on television and on film. Vaughan's ballet choreography was used in Stanley Kubrick's 1955 film Killer's Kiss, danced by Kubrick's wife at the time, ballerina Ruth Sobotka. He has worked with both ...
Go to Profile#12997
Jakob Eduard Polak
1818 - 1891 (73 years)
Jakob Eduard Polak was an Austrian physician, born to a Jewish family from Bohemia, who played an important role in introducing modern medicine in Iran. Life Polak studied medicine in Prague and Vienna. He was one of the six Austrian teachers invited by Amir Kabir, the Persian chief minister, as the instructors of Dar ul-Fonun, the first modern higher education institution in Iran. By his own account, he entered Iran on 24 November 1851, before the inauguration of the Dar ul-Fonun.
Go to Profile#12998
Antonín Heveroch
1869 - 1927 (58 years)
Antonín Heveroch was a Czech psychiatrist and neurologist. After working at the Psychiatric Clinic in Prague, he left it and established a second psychiatric hospital. Early years Heveroch was born in 1869 in Minice, a neighbourhood of Kralupy nad Vltavou. His father, František Heveroch , was a cantor and choir director. He attended primary school in Vepřek and Zlonice, and grammar school in Slaný. He initially studied at Charles University Faculty of Law, however, in 1889, he switched to the Faculty of Medicine, graduating in 1894. He was a student of Karel Kuffner. In 1899, he was studying ...
Go to Profile#12999
Clarence E. Grim
#162726
Overall Influence
#13000
Ingalill Rahm Hallberg
#162733
Overall Influence
