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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#13751
Peder Severin Krøyer
1851 - 1909 (58 years)
Peder Severin Krøyer , also known as P. S. Krøyer, was a Danish painter. Life Growing up and early training Krøyer was born in Stavanger, Norway, on 23 July 1851 to Ellen Cecilie Gjesdal. He was raised by Gjesdal's sister, Bertha Cecilie and brother-in-law, the Danish zoologist Henrik Nikolai Krøyer, after his mother was judged unfit to care for him. Krøyer moved to Copenhagen to live with his foster parents soon afterward. Having begun his art education at the age of nine under private tutelage, he was enrolled in Copenhagen's Technical Institute the following year.
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Christopher Wren
#13753
Thomas James
1573 - 1629 (56 years)
Thomas James was an English librarian and Anglican clergyman, the first librarian of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Life He was born about 1573 at Newport, Isle of Wight. In 1586 he was admitted a scholar of Winchester College and matriculated at New College, Oxford on 28 January 1592. He then graduated B.A. on 3 May 1595, M.A. on 5 February 1599, and B.D. and D.D. on 16 May 1614.
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Martinus Smiglecius
1563 - 1618 (55 years)
Martinus Smiglecius was a Polish Jesuit philosopher and logician, known for his erudite scholastic Logica. Life He was born on 11 November 1564 in Lwów in the Kingdom of Poland . He used the surname Lwowczyk, or Leopolitanus, and later adopted the name Smiglecius . He attended the Jesuit school in Pułtusk and until 1586 studied in Rome, where he joined the Jesuit order in 1581. His education was financed by the prominent Polish statesman Jan Zamojski. He obtained a master's degree in philosophy and a doctor's degree in theology at the Academy of Vilnius, and taught philosophy and theology th...
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Abu Sayeed Ayyub
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Abu Sayeed Ayyub was an Indian philosopher, teacher, literary critic and writer in both Bengali and English. Though born into a traditional, Urdu-speaking, Muslim family in Calcutta , he was so deeply captivated in his early teenage by the poems of the Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore that he taught himself Bengali so as to appreciate Tagore better. Later, when he started to write, it was mostly in his adopted language, Bengali. During the initial part of his writing career, Ayyub wrote on aesthetics, religion and socialism. However, it was his philosophical and scientific analysis ...
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Joseph Warren
1741 - 1775 (34 years)
Joseph Warren , a Founding Father of the United States, was an American physician who was one of the most important figures in the Patriot movement in Boston during the early days of the American Revolution, eventually serving as President of the revolutionary Massachusetts Provincial Congress. Warren enlisted Paul Revere and William Dawes on April 18, 1775, to leave Boston and spread the alarm that the British garrison in Boston was setting out to raid the town of Concord and arrest rebel leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams. Warren participated in the Battles of Lexington and Concord the fo...
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Varaztad Kazanjian
1879 - 1974 (95 years)
Varaztad H. Kazanjian was an Armenian American oral surgeon who pioneered techniques for plastic surgery and is considered to be the founder of the modern practice of plastic surgery. He graduated from Harvard School of Dental Medicine in 1905. He served as professor of oral surgery from 1922 to 1939 and he was the first to hold the title of Professor of plastic surgery at Harvard Medical School. He also co-authored the first concise book on plastic surgery.
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John of Reading
1250 - 1346 (96 years)
John of Reading was an English Franciscan theologian and scholastic philosopher. He was an early opponent of William of Ockham, and a follower of Duns Scotus. He wrote a commentary on the Sentences around 1320, at the University of Oxford. He argued for the unity of science.
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J. R. Illingworth
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
John Richardson Illingworth was an English Anglican priest, philosopher, and theologian. He was a notable member of the set of liberal Anglo-Catholic theologians based in Oxford, and he contributed two chapters to the influential Lux Mundi.
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Otto Reinhold Jacobi
1812 - 1901 (89 years)
Otto Reinhold Jacobi was a German-Canadian artist. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting. Life and work Born in 1830 Königsberg, Jacobi studied in Berlin at the Royal Academy of Arts. He then studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer. As a landscape and genre painter, he worked in Nassau and Canada. In 1837 he was appointed the court painter to the Duchess of Nassau in Wiesbaden. In those years, Jacobi gave the young Ludwig Knaus his first lessons in oil painting and advised him to study under Karl Ferdinand Sohn at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. His ...
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Allvar Gullstrand
1862 - 1930 (68 years)
Allvar Gullstrand was a Swedish ophthalmologist and optician. Life Born at Landskrona, Sweden, Gullstrand was professor successively of eye therapy and of optics at the University of Uppsala. He applied the methods of physical mathematics to the study of optical images and of the refraction of light in the eye. For this work, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1911.
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Rinchen Zangpo
958 - 1055 (97 years)
Lochen Rinchen Zangpo , also known as Mahaguru, was a principal lotsawa or translator of Sanskrit Buddhist texts into Tibetan during the second diffusion of Buddhism in Tibet, variously called the New Translation School, New Mantra School or New Tantra Tradition School. He was a student of the famous Indian master, Atisha. His associates included Legpai Sherab. Zangpo's disciple Guge Kyithangpa Yeshepal wrote Zangpo's biography. He is said to have built over one hundred monasteries in Western Tibet, including the famous Tabo Monastery in Spiti, Himachal Pradesh, Poo in Kinnaur and Rinchenli...
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Georg Otho
1634 - 1713 (79 years)
Georg Otho was a German orientalist, who was born at Sattenhausen, near Cassel. He became professor and librarian at the University of Marburg, and died in that city. Besides a large number of academical discourses, and Latin essays on various points of philosophy and of Biblical exegesis, he wrote, Oratio funebris in obitum Justi Jungmannii : De accentuatione textus Hebraici : Synopsis institutionum Samaritanarum, Rabbinicarum, Arabicarum, Ethiopicarum, et Persicarum, ex. optimis autoribus excerpta Francf. 1701, 8voibid. 1702, 4toMarb. 1692, 4to
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Thomas Hollis
1720 - 1774 (54 years)
Thomas Hollis FRS FRSA was an English political philosopher and author. Early life Hollis was educated at Adams Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire, until the age 10, and then in St. Albans until 15, before learning French, Dutch and accountancy in Amsterdam. After the death of his father in 1735, his guardian was a John Hollister. He was trained in this time in public service by John Ward of Gresham College, London. He took Chambers with Lincoln's Inn from 1740 to 1748, though without ever reading law. By this time he was a man of considerable wealth having inherited from his father, grand...
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Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney
1757 - 1820 (63 years)
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, abolitionist, writer, orientalist, and politician. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais after his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney .
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Rebecca Lee Crumpler
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born Rebecca Davis, , was an American physician, nurse and author. After studying at the New England Female Medical College, in 1864 she became the first African American woman to become a doctor of medicine in the United States. Crumpler was also one of the first female physician authors in the nineteenth century. In 1883, she published A Book of Medical Discourses. The book has two parts that cover the prevention and cure of infantile bowel complaints, and the life and growth of human beings. Dedicated to nurses and mothers, it focuses on maternal and pediatric medical ...
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Billy Bishop
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Air Marshal William Avery Bishop, was a Canadian flying ace of the First World War. He was officially credited with 72 victories, making him the top Canadian and British Empire ace of the war, and also received a Victoria Cross. During the Second World War, Bishop was instrumental in setting up and promoting the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan.
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Adolf Kussmaul
1822 - 1902 (80 years)
Adolph Kußmaul was a German physician and a leading clinician of his time. He was born as the son and grandson of physicians at Graben near Karlsruhe and studied at Heidelberg. He entered the army after graduation and spent two years as an army surgeon. This was followed by a period as a general practitioner before he went to Würzburg to study for his doctorate under Virchow.
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Saib Shawkat
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
Saib Shawkat was an Iraqi doctor and politician who was an Arab nationalist leader in Iraq. Medical career He was from an upscale patriotic Baghdadian family of Georgian origin and studied at a medical school in Istanbul 1913-1918, completing post-graduate studies in general surgery in Germany. Shawkat was the first Iraqi doctor to teach anatomy at the Iraqi Royal College of Medicine of which he became the dean later in the 1940s. He was one of the pioneers in general surgery in Iraq, serving as Director General of Baghdad Hospital in the 1930s. In 1932 he became a founding committee member of the Iraqi Red Crescent Society.
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August Buchner
1591 - 1661 (70 years)
August Buchner was a German philologist, poet and literary scholar, an influential professor of poetry and rhetoric at the University of Wittenberg. Career Buchner was born in Dresden the son of Paul Buchner and his wife Maria, the daughter of the mayor of Dresden . After private education, he attended from 17 November 1604 the Landesschule Pforta, where he received education in religion, classical languages and the liberal arts. He studied at the University of Wittenberg from 19 November 1610, first law and philosophy. He studied poetry with and , ethics with , Greek with , and rhetoric w...
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Giorgio Nataletti
1907 - 1972 (65 years)
Giorgio Nataletti was an Italian musicologist, the first director of the Ethnomusicological Archives at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. He was in charge of a vast project from 1948–72 to record traditional Italian music. It was done under the auspices of RAI, the Italian Radio and Television agency. The results are preserved in the RAI archives as well as those of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia.
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Mahmood Anjir-Faghnawi
1231 - 1317 (86 years)
#13773
John Nash
1893 - 1977 (84 years)
John Northcote Nash was a British painter of landscapes and still-lives, and a wood engraver and illustrator, particularly of botanic works. He was the younger brother of the artist Paul Nash. Early life Nash was born in London, the younger son of lawyer William Harry Nash who served as recorder of Abingdon and Caroline Maude Jackson. His mother came from a family with a naval tradition; she was mentally unstable and died in a mental asylum in 1910. In 1901 the family moved to Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire. Nash was educated at Langley Place in Slough and afterwards at Wellington College, Berkshire.
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Max Schneider
1875 - 1967 (92 years)
Max Schneider was a German music historian. Life Born in Eisleben, Schneider studied musicology at the University of Leipzig with Hermann Kretzschmar and Hugo Riemann and composition with Salomon Jadassohn. After his time as second Kapellmeister in Halle from 1897 to 1901, he continued his studies of music history with Kretzschmar. In 1904, he moved to Berlin, where he worked from 1905 to 1915 as a "scientific assistant" at the Alte Bibliothek.
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Etta Lemon
1860 - 1953 (93 years)
Margaretta "Etta" Louisa Lemon was an English bird conservationist and a founding member of what is now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . She was born into an evangelical Christian family in Kent, and after her father's death she increasingly campaigned against the use of plumage in hatmaking which had led to billions of birds being killed for their feathers. She founded the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk with Eliza Phillips in Croydon in 1889, which two years later merged with Emily Williamson's Manchester-based Society for the Protection of Birds , also founded in 1889. The new or...
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Louis Figuier
1819 - 1894 (75 years)
Louis Figuier was a French scientist and writer. He was the nephew of Pierre-Oscar Figuier and became Professor of chemistry at L'Ecole de pharmacie of Montpellier. Louis Figuier was married to French writer Louise Juliette Bouscaren.
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Heinrich Husmann
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Heinrich Husmann was a German musicologist and university professor. Biography At the University of Göttingen, Husmann was a pupil of Friedrich Ludwig and then of Johannes Wolf, Arnold Schering, Friedrich Blume and Erich Moritz von Hornbostel at the Humboldt University, Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 1932.
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Otto Heurnius
1577 - 1652 (75 years)
Otto Heurnius was a Dutch physician, theologian and philosopher. Life He studied at Leiden University. He subsequently succeeded his father Johannes Heurnius as professor of medicine at Leiden University, and took over anatomy teaching from Pieter Pauw from 1617. Alongside his practical anatomy teaching, he had the care of a very various collection of zoological and botanical specimens. The aims of the collection included reconstruction of the life of the Israelites in Egypt, as in the Book of Exodus.
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Gumersindo de Azcárate
1840 - 1917 (77 years)
Gumersindo de Azcárate was a Spanish philosopher, jurist and politician. Biography After law studies in Oviedo, he taught comparative law in Madrid since 1864 and represented León in the Cortes. In the 1870s, he joined Francisco Giner de los Ríos and Julián Sanz del Río to teach at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza .
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Teofil Rutka
1622 - 1700 (78 years)
Teofil Rutka SJ - Polish Jesuit. Rhetorician, philosopher, theologian and missionary. Biography Born in the region of Kyiv, he received his secondary education at the Jesuit College in Ostroh. On 13 August 1643, he joined the Jesuit Order in Kraków and was ordained priest in Poznań in 1652. He was a professor of rhetorics, philosophy, polemical theology and moral theology in many Jesuit schools in Poland . He served as a professor in the years 1653–76, with short breaks for being a court missionary , a missionary to the Crimean Khanate , a poenitentiarius in Loreto , and a missionary to Constantinople .
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William Thomas Blanford
1832 - 1905 (73 years)
William Thomas Blanford was an English geologist and naturalist. He is best remembered as the editor of a major series on The Fauna of British India, Including Ceylon and Burma. Biography Blanford was born in London to William Blanford and Elizabeth Simpson. His father owned a factory next to their house on Bouverie street, Whitefriars. He was educated in private schools in Brighton and Paris . He joined his family business in carving and gilding and studied at the School of Design in Somerset House. Suffering from ill health, he spent two years in a business house at Civitavecchia owned by a friend of his father.
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Michał Falkener
1460 - 1533 (73 years)
Michael Falkener, Michał z Wrocławia, Michał Wrocławczyk, Michael de Wratislava, Michael Vratislaviensis was a Silesian Scholastic philosopher, astronomer, astrologer, mathematician, theologian, philologist, and professor of the Kraków Academy.
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David Williams
1738 - 1816 (78 years)
David Williams was a Welsh philosopher of the Enlightenment period. He was an ordained minister, theologian and political polemicist, and was the founder in 1788 of the Royal Literary Fund, of which he had been a proponent since 1773.
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John William Turner
1790 - 1835 (45 years)
John William Turner MD FRSE was a 19th-century Scottish physician who served as Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Life He was born in England in 1790. His family moved to Newbattle south of Edinburgh around 1795.
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Saverius Pace
1501 - 1601 (100 years)
Saverius Pace was a minor Maltese philosopher who specialised in physics. Life Little is known about the private life of Saverius Pace. Neither his dates of birth and death nor his birthplace in Malta are identified as yet. He might have lectured at the Collegium Melitense see in Valletta. Only one work of Pace's has survived. No portrait of Pace is known to exist so far.
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Newton Spaulding Manross
1825 - 1862 (37 years)
Newton Spaulding Manross was an American scientist and engineer. Early life and education He was born in Bristol, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale College in 1850. He sailed for Europe the day after graduation, and spent a year and a half in studying chemistry at the University of Göttingen. He received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from that university in 1852.
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William Roxburgh
1751 - 1815 (64 years)
William Roxburgh FRSE FRCPE FLS was a Scottish surgeon and botanist who worked extensively in India, describing species and working on economic botany. He is known as the founding father of Indian botany. He published numerous works on Indian botany, illustrated by careful drawings made by Indian artists and accompanied by taxonomic descriptions of many plant species. Apart from the numerous species that he named, many species were named in his honour by his collaborators.
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James Whale
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
James Whale was an English film director, theatre director and actor, who spent the greater part of his career in Hollywood. He is best remembered for several horror films: Frankenstein , The Old Dark House , The Invisible Man and Bride of Frankenstein , all considered classics. Whale also directed films in other genres, including the 1936 film version of the musical Show Boat.
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Fukuzawa Yukichi
1835 - 1901 (66 years)
Fukuzawa Yukichi was a Japanese educator, philosopher, writer, entrepreneur and samurai who founded Keio University, the newspaper Jiji-Shinpō, and the Institute for Study of Infectious Diseases. Fukuzawa was an early advocate for reform in Japan. His ideas about the organization of government and the structure of social institutions made a lasting impression on a rapidly changing Japan during the Meiji period. He appears on the current 10,000-Japanese yen banknote.
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Cornelis Bontekoe
1647 - 1685 (38 years)
Cornelis Bontekoe , whose real name was Cornelis Dekker, was a Dutch physician known also as a popular essayist, particularly on his promotion of tea, and editor of the works of Arnold Geulincx, a Belgian philosopher. He also applied what were generally Cartesian theories in medicine, but with innovations such as a purely hydraulic and muscular explanation of the mechanism of the heart.
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Sarah Hackett Stevenson
1841 - 1909 (68 years)
Sarah Ann Hackett Stevenson was an American physician in Illinois, and the first female member of the American Medical Association , as an Illinois State Medical Society delegate in 1876. She was a leader and advocate for the emancipation of women and for the equal treatment of men and women.
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James Freeman Dana
1793 - 1827 (34 years)
James Freeman Dana was an American chemist. Biography He graduated from Harvard in 1813, and from the medical school in 1817. He studied with Dr. John Gorham, and developed such ability that in 1815 he was selected by the authorities of Harvard to procure for the chemical laboratory a new outfit of apparatus. For this purpose, he visited London, where for six months he worked in the laboratory of Friedrich Christian Accum.
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Walter Gerstenberg
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Walter Gerstenberg was a German musicologist and an expert on Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert. Publications Die Klavierkompositionen Domenico Scarlattis. Schiele, Regensburg 1931; also as . Bosse, Regensburg 1933 .as editor with Heinrich Husmann and Harald Heckmann: Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongreß Hamburg 1956. Bärenreiter, Kassel among others 1957, .as editor with Jan LaRue and Wolfgang Rehm: Festschrift Otto Erich Deutsch zum 80. Geburtstag am 5. September 1963. Bärenreiter, Kassel atc. 1963, .
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Alexander Hegius von Heek
1430 - 1498 (68 years)
Alexander Hegius von Heek was a German humanist, so called from his birthplace Heek . Hegius learned, likely in Emmerich, Greek from Rodolphus Agricola. In 1474 he settled down at Deventer in the Netherlands, where he either founded or succeeded to the headship of a school, which became famous for the number of its distinguished alumni. First and foremost of these was Erasmus; others were Hermann von dem Busche and Murmellius, the missionaries of humanism, Conrad Goclenius , Conrad Mutianus and Frans van Cranevelt.
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John Addington Symonds
1807 - 1871 (64 years)
John Addington Symonds was an English physician and author. Life He was born in Oxford, where his father John Symonds was a medical practitioner. His mother was Mary Williams, of Aston, Oxfordshire. Symonds was educated at Magdalen College School; at the age of sixteen he went to the University of Edinburgh for medical training, and graduated M.D. in 1828.
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Yun Jeung
1629 - 1714 (85 years)
Yun Jeung or Yun Chǔng was a Confucian scholar in Korea during the late period of the Joseon dynasty. He was known as being a progressive thinker and for his opposition to the formalism and ritualism in the predominant philosophy of Chu Hsi. Yun Chung refused government office because he thought the Korean monarchy was corrupt, and spend his life teaching Sirhak ideas. He is known for the quote, "The king could exist without the people, but the people could not exist without the king."
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Carl Wurzinger
1817 - 1883 (66 years)
Carl Wurzinger was an Austrian history painter and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Life and work His father was the caretaker for an estate. In 1832, at the age of fourteen, he became a student at the Academy of Fine Arts. He exhibited his first works in 1844. Three years later, he left Vienna to continue his education in Italy. He remained there for nine years.
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Joseph Hilarius Eckhel
1737 - 1798 (61 years)
Joseph Hilarius Eckhel was an Austrian Jesuit priest and numismatist. Biography Eckhel was born at Enzersfeld, in Lower Austria. His father was farm-steward to Count Zinzendorf, and he received his early education at the Jesuits' College, Vienna, where at the age of fourteen he was admitted into the order. He devoted himself to antiquities and numismatics. After being engaged as professor of poetry and rhetoric, first at Steyr and afterwards at Vienna, he was appointed in 1772 keeper of the cabinet of coins at the Jesuits' College, and in the same year he went to Italy for the purpose of personal inspection and study of antiquities and coins.
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Elsie Inglis
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Eliza Maud "Elsie" Inglis was a Scottish medical doctor, surgeon, teacher, suffragist, and founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals. She was the first woman to hold the Serbian Order of the White Eagle.
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Liu Yiming
1734 - 1821 (87 years)
Liu Yiming was a Chinese Taoist master, thinker, and writer. He was one of the main representatives of Taoist Internal Alchemy, or Neidan. He was an 11th-generation master of one of the northern branches of the Longmen 龍門 lineage, and the author of a large number of works that illustrate his views on both Taoism and Neidan.
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