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,
#13651
Alexander Peloplaton
#85961
Overall Influence
Alexander , nicknamed Pēloplátōn , also known as Alexander of Seleucia and Alexander the Platonic, was a Greek rhetorician and Platonist philosopher of the age of the Antonines and the Second Sophistic.
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Sandon
#142150
Overall Influence
Sandon is an Orphic philosopher mentioned in the Suda. He is described briefly as a son of Hellanikos. He has been identified with the Sandon of Tarsus mentioned by Pseudo-Lucian in the essay Macrobii , who was the father of Athenodorus . His father Hellanicus may have been the Orphic philosopher of the late 2nd century mentioned by Damascius.
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Paconius Agrippinus
#154928
Overall Influence
Paconius Agrippinus was a Stoic philosopher of the 1st century. His father was put to death by the Roman emperor Tiberius on a charge of treason. Agrippinus himself was accused at the same time as Thrasea, around 67 AD, and was banished from Italy. As a philosopher he was spoken of with praise by Epictetus.
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Ellopion of Peparethus
#192440
Overall Influence
Ellopion of Peparethus was a Socratic philosopher and contemporary of Plato,who is mentioned only by Plutarch. He accompanied Plato and Simmias in philosophical discussions with an Ancient Egyptian priest named Chonuphis of Memphis: Simmias at once recollected: "Of your tablet, Pheidolaüs, I know nothing. But Agetoridas the Spartan came to Memphis with a long document from Agesilaus for the spokesman of the god, Chonuphis, with whom Plato, Ellopion of Peparethos and I had many philosophical discussions in those days. He brought orders from the king that Chonuphis should translate the writing, if he could make anything of it, and send the translation to him at once.
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Raymond Polin
#67478
Overall Influence
1910 - 2001 (91 years)
Raymond Polin was a French philosopher. He taught at the Paris University . He was the president of the University of Paris from 1976 to 1981. Literary works La création des valeurs, 1944La compréhension des valeurs, 1945Du laid, du mal, du faux, 1948
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R. De Staningtona
#192441
Overall Influence
R. De Staningtona was a friar, likely of the Dominican Order, who was at Oxford University in the mid-1250s. He composed a noteworthy summary of libri naturales by Aristotle. His summary was entitled Compilacio quedam liborum naturalium. The manuscript has never been edited although selections from it have appeared in the Journal of the History of Philosophy. The final work he summarized was De anima.
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Rafe Champion
#95140
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
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Yves Brunsvick
#176308
Overall Influence
1921 - 1999 (78 years)
Yves Brunsvick was a famous humanist and philosopher of education. Initially a French teacher, in 1948 he joined the French National Commission , initially as assistant to the Secretary-General, Louis François. In 1958 he became head of the commission. Throughout his life, he had great connections in the cultural aspects of UNESCO and had many interest in the International Bureau of Education . Subsequently, he held the presidency of the IBE council from 1986 to 1989.
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Rod L. Evans
#107417
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Rod L. Evans is an American philosopher, author, and lecturer who writes and speaks on ethics, religion, political philosophy, and English usage. Evans graduated from Old Dominion University and received a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Virginia. He is currently Lecturer of Philosophy at Old Dominion University.
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Judah ben Solomon Canpanton
#192449
Overall Influence
Judah ben Solomon Canpanton was a Jewish ethical writer and philosopher. He was a student of Yom Tov b. Abraham Ishbili. He authored the work Arba'ah Kinyanim, which has been published, while other books remain in manuscript.
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Martin H:son Holmdahl
#141777
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Svante Martin Henriksson Holmdahl was a Swedish professor of anesthesiology, who was rector magnificus of Uppsala university between 1978 and 1989. Holmdahl began his medical studies in Uppsala in 1942. In 1953 he became responsible for the anesthesiology department at the Academic Hospital in Uppsala.
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Jerome Roche
#94630
Overall Influence
1942 - 1994 (52 years)
Jerome Lawrence Alexander Roche was a British musicologist, with a particular interest in Italian church music of the baroque era. Early life and education Roche was born in 1942 in Cairo, Egypt, the son of an army doctor. He was educated at Downside School, a Catholic independent school in Somerset, England, before studying music at St John's College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1962. He went on to study for a PhD, under the supervision of Denis Arnold. His dissertation focussed on the development of vocal duets in Italian baroque church music.
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Jason Herbison
#26634
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Jason Herbison is an Australian television producer, screenwriter and novelist, most recently serving as the executive producer of the soap opera Neighbours. He has written scripts for numerous television serials, and has published several novels.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner
1871 - 1935 (64 years)
Lydia Rabinowitsch-Kempner was a Jewish bacteriologist and physician, known for her research on tuberculosis and public health. She was the second woman to become a Professor in Prussia. Biography Lydia Rabinowitsch was born at Kovno, Russian Empire . She was educated at the girls' gymnasium of her native city, and privately in Latin and Greek, subsequently studying natural sciences at the universities of Zurich and Bern . After graduation she went to Berlin, where Professor Robert Koch permitted her to pursue her bacteriological studies at the Institute for Infectious Diseases. She became t...
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Brand Blanshard
1892 - 1987 (95 years)
Percy Brand Blanshard was an American philosopher known primarily for his defense of reason and rationalism. A powerful polemicist, by all accounts he comported himself with courtesy and grace in philosophical controversies and exemplified the "rational temper" he advocated.
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Ernest Cruickshank
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
Ernest William Henderson Cruickshank FRSE LLD was a Scottish physician and physiologist. He was the author of several textbooks on nutrition. His book Food and Nutrition was an influential best-seller. It looks at the evolution of human diets, protein needs within the body and problems of world malnutrition.
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Étienne Rabaud
1868 - 1956 (88 years)
Étienne Antoine Prosper Jules Rabaud was a French zoologist, known for his studies of animal behavior. From 1894 he served as an assistant in the laboratory of teratology at the École des Hautes-Études, and in 1898 he obtained doctorates in both medicine and sciences. In 1907 he became a maître de conférences at the faculty of sciences in Paris, where he was later named an assistant professor , professor without chair and a professor of experimental biology . From 1910 to 1919 he served as director of the laboratory at Wimereux.
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Georg Jochmann
1874 - 1915 (41 years)
Georg Jochmann was a German internist and bacteriologist, who specialized in infectious diseases. In 1898 he received his medical doctorate at the University of Freiburg, and following graduation, worked as an assistant to Bernhard Fischer at the Institute of Hygiene in Kiel. Afterwards, he worked in the department of internal medicine at Hamburg-Eppendorf Hospital under Theodor Rumpel, and at the university medical clinic in Breslau under Alfred Kast and Adolph Strümpell. In 1904 he obtained his habilitation for internal medicine at the University of Breslau.
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John Crighton Bramwell
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
John Crighton Bramwell was a British cardiologist, professor of medicine, and one of the founders of cardiology as a specialist subject in the UK. Education and career and Martha Crighton, he was education at Cheltenham College, before matriculated in 1907 at Trinity College, Cambridge. There he was influenced by the physiologist Keith Lucas. In 1911 Bramwell started clinical medical training at the Manchester Royal Infirmary. At the start of WWI he joined the 1st East Lancashire Territorial Field Ambulance in Egypt. In 1915 he was granted leave for two months to take his final examination at the University of Manchester, where he graduated MB CHB.
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H. Nida Sen
Hatice Nida Sen is an ophthalmologist researching mechanisms involved in different forms of human uveitis. She is a clinical investigator at the National Eye Institute. Education Hatice Nida Sen obtained a M.D. degree from Hacettepe University Medical School and a Master of Health Sciences from Duke University School of Medicine. She completed an ophthalmology residency at George Washington University and her uveitis and ocular immunology fellowship at the National Eye Institute .
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Frederick Banting
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Sir Frederick Grant Banting was a Canadian medical scientist, physician, painter, and Nobel laureate noted as the co-discoverer of insulin and its therapeutic potential. In 1923, Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting shared the honours and award money with his colleague, Charles Best. That same year, the government of Canada granted Banting a lifetime annuity to continue his work. To this day, Frederick Banting, who received the Nobel Prize at age 32, remains the youngest Nobel laureate for Physiology/Medicine.
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Francisco De Venanzi
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
Francisco Antonio De Venanzi was a Venezuelan doctor, scientist and academic. He was rector of the Universidad Central de Venezuela from 1959 to 1963. His biography was published as volume 51 of the Biblioteca Biográfica Venezolana.
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Saul Hertz
1905 - 1950 (45 years)
Saul Hertz, M.D. was an American physician who devised the medical uses of radioactive iodine. Hertz pioneered the first targeted cancer therapies. Hertz is called the father of the field of theranostics, combining diagnostic imaging with therapy in a single or paired chemical substance.
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Anna Botsford Comstock
1854 - 1930 (76 years)
Anna Botsford Comstock was an acclaimed author, illustrator, and educator of natural studies. The first female professor at Cornell University, her over 900-page work, The Handbook of Nature Study , is now in its 24th edition. Comstock was an American artist and wood engraver known for illustrating entomological text books with her husband, John Henry Comstock including their first joint effort, The Manual for the Study of Insects . Comstock worked with Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Walton Spencer, Alice McCloskey, Julia Rogers, and Ada Georgia as part of the department of Nature Study at Cornell University.
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Peter Anthony Bertocci
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Peter Bertocci was an American philosopher and Borden Parker Bowne professor of philosophy, emeritus, at Boston University. He was a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Bertocci was an advocate of theistic finitism, proposing that "God is all-good but not all-powerful".
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Broda Otto Barnes
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Broda Otto Barnes was an American physician and professor of medicine who studied endocrine dysfunction, particularly hypothyroidism. In the 1970s, Barnes published several books arguing that hypothyroidism was underdiagnosed in the U.S. and was responsible for a wide range of health problems. Barnes' views on the prevalence of hypothyroidism were never widely accepted by the medical community and run counter to its current understanding of thyroid function, but they have been embraced by some elements of the alternative medicine community.
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R. B. Braithwaite
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Richard Bevan Braithwaite was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Life Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, son of the historian of early Quaker history, William Charles Braithwaite. He was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset , and Bootham School, York, 1914–18. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he served in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.
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Thomas Ferguson
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Thomas Ferguson FRSE CBE was a Scottish surgeon and Professor of Public Health from 1944 to 1964 at the University of Glasgow. Much of his early writing and philosophy paved the way for the National Health Service in Britain after the Second World War.
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Marvin Farber
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Marvin Farber was an American philosopher and educator. Early life and education He was born in Buffalo, New York to Jewish parents Simon and Matilda Farber. He was the second oldest of their 14 children. One of his brothers was pathologist and cancer researcher Sidney Farber.
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Virginia Gildersleeve
1877 - 1965 (88 years)
Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve was an American academic, the long-time dean of Barnard College, co-founder of the International Federation of University Women, and the only woman delegated by United States to the April 1945 San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, which negotiated the charter for and creation of the United Nations.
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G. E. Moore
1873 - 1958 (85 years)
George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".
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Michael Mulholland
1900 - Present (126 years)
Michael W. Mulholland is an American surgeon who is Professor of Surgery and the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan. Biography Mulholland was educated at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and gained his medical degree from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. This was followed by postgraduate training in General Surgery at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he also gained his Ph.D. From 1985-1988, Mulholland was an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1988.
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A. C. Ewing
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.
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Lawrence S. Thompson
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.
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Chassar Moir
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Chassar Moir CBE was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Oxford. "One whose contributions were so outstanding as to make Chassar Moir’s an immortal name in the history of Obstetrics and Gynaecology". Sir Norman Jeffcoate
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Günther Klaffenbach
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Günther Klaffenbach was a German epigraphist. He was an editor of Inscriptiones Graecae from 1929, in succession to Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen.
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Ernst Bücken
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Ernst Bücken was a German musicologist and university teacher. Life Born in Aachen, Bücken, son of a director of a textile factory, first began studying law at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. After moving to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München he studied musicology with Adolf Sandberger, piano with Walter Braunfels and Anna Hirzel-Langenhan and music composition with Walter Courvoisier. Besides, he attended lectures in German language and literature and philosophy with Franz Muncker, Georg von Hertling, Oswald Külpe and Ernst von Aster. With his dissertation on Anton Reicha, his life and his compositions he was awarded a doctorate in 1912.
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Gordon Clark
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Gordon Haddon Clark was an American philosopher and Calvinist theologian. He was a leading figure associated with presuppositional apologetics and was chairman of the Philosophy Department at Butler University for 28 years. He was an expert in pre-Socratic and ancient philosophy and was noted for defending the idea of propositional revelation against empiricism and rationalism, in arguing that all truth is propositional. His theory of knowledge is sometimes called scripturalism.
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J. C. C. McKinsey
1908 - 1953 (45 years)
John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic. Biography McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" th...
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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 ...
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Otto Erich Deutsch
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Otto Erich Deutsch was an Austrian musicologist. He is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Franz Schubert's compositions, first published in 1951 in English, with a revised edition published in 1978 in German. It is from this catalogue that the D numbers used to identify Schubert's works derive.
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Agnes Fogo
Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.
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Emanuel Rádl
1873 - 1942 (69 years)
Emanuel Rádl was an original Czech biologist, historian of science, philosopher and a critical supporter of Masaryk´s pre-war democratic Czechoslovakia. He earned international renown by his works on the evolution of neural system and as historian of evolution theories.
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May Brodbeck
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
May Brodbeck was an American philosopher of science. Biography Brodbeck was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied chemistry at New York University, attending evening courses while working, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. Thereafter, she worked as a high-school chemistry teacher, before being recruited into the Manhattan Project. Following the war, she studied philosophy at the University of Iowa, completing a Ph.D. supervised by Gustav Bergmann in 1947, on the subject of John Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
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John Walker
1893 - 1991 (98 years)
John Walker was a Canadian horticulturist and plant breeder who developed numerous varieties of trees and shrubs. His selections have been used in shelterbelts and landscaping applications across Canada and in northern countries around the world. Some of his selections include:Coronation Triumph PotentillaDensity and Korman SpireaJubilee WillowRadiance Amur MaplePrairie Princess PhloxGarry Pink ViburnumHill PoplarWalker PoplarWalker CaraganaHe was a founding member of the Indian Head Horticultural Society and past president of the Saskatchewan Institute of Agrologists, the Saskatchewan Hortic...
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Jesse Shera
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
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Anatole Chauffard
1855 - 1932 (77 years)
Anatole Marie Émile Chauffard was a French internist born in Avignon. He earned his doctorate in 1882, and became médecin des hôpitaux. In 1907 he was appointed professor of internal medicine at the Paris faculty. He was a member of the Académie de Médecine, and in 1911 attained the clinical chair at Hôpital Saint-Antoine.
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Dorothy Price
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Dorothy Price was an American physiologist and endocrinologist. She is best known for her discovery of the principle of negative feedback in endocrine axis regulation, in work done alongside Carl Moore. She is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of neuroendocrinology.
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