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,
#13801
Augustus Fendler
1813 - 1883 (70 years)
Augustus Fendler , alternatively written as August Fendler, was a Prussian-born American natural history collector. Early travels Fendler first attended preparatory school at the age of 12. After four years, he discontinued his education for financial reasons and apprenticed for the town clerk. He disliked the work, and yearned for travel.
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James Mason Hoppin
1820 - 1906 (86 years)
James Mason Hoppin was an American educator and writer. Biography James Mason Hoppin was born at Providence, Rhode Island on January 17, 1820. He graduated from Yale College in 1840 from Harvard Law School in 1842, and from Andover Theological Seminary in 1845. He studied for some time abroad; and was pastor of a Congregational church at Salem, Massachusetts from 1850 to 1859. From 1861 to 1879 he was professor of homiletics at Yale, where he was also professor of art history from 1879 to 1899, when he became professor emeritus. He was a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Science...
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Siegfried Handloser
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Siegfried Adolf Handloser was a Nazi physician and convicted war criminal, convicted for overseeing medical atrocities at concentration camps. He was convicted at the 1947 Doctors' Trial during the subsequent Nuremberg trials and sentenced to life imprisonment. His sentence was ultimately reduced to a 20-year term, though Handloser was released in 1954 and died of cancer the same year.
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Alexander Monro Primus
1697 - 1767 (70 years)
Alexander Monro was a Scottish surgeon and anatomist. His father, the surgeon John Monro, had been a prime mover in the foundation of the Edinburgh Medical School and had arranged Alexander's education in the hope that his son might become the first Professor of Anatomy in the new university medical school.
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William P. C. Barton
1786 - 1856 (70 years)
William Paul Crillon Barton , was a medical botanist, physician, professor, naval surgeon, and botanical illustrator. Biography Barton was born on November 17, 1786, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father William Barton, a lawyer, was the designer of the Great Seal of the United States. His uncle, Benjamin Smith Barton was an eminent medical botanist and vice-president of the American Philosophical Society. In 1813, the younger Barton was also elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Pranas Čepėnas
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Pranas Čepėnas was a Lithuanian historian, encyclopedist, journalist, and lexicographer. In 1926 Čepėnas earned a diploma in history from University of Lithuania. He worked as professor of history at Vilnius University. During World War II he emigrated to Germany and later to the U.S.
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Bernhard Münz
1856 - 1919 (63 years)
Bernhard Münz was an Austrian writer, philosopher, and librarian. Biography He was born in Leipnik to Jewish parents Johanna and Jakob Münz. His younger brother was journalist . Münz studied classical philology and philosophy at the Universities of Vienna, Innsbruck, and Munich, completing a Ph.D. at the former in 1877 under the supervision of Franz Brentano. After working briefly at the university library in Graz, he became in 1889 amanuensis in the library of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, and succeeded Samuel Hammerschlag as its director in 1900.
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Anne Hazen McFarland
1867 - 1930 (63 years)
Anne Hazen McFarland was an American physician and medical journal editor who specialized in the treatment of mental illness in women. She criticized the contemporary idea that gynecological disorders caused insanity and nervousness in women.
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Giovanni Niccolò Muscat
1735 - 1800 (65 years)
Giovanni Niccolò Muscat was a Maltese doctor of law, and a major philosopher. His area of specialisation in philosophy was chiefly jurisprudence. Biography Early life Muscat was born into a very poor family on 8 March 1735. He seems to have lost his parents at a very young age, as he was raised by his aunt. Despite her poverty, this aunt worked hard to pay for the young Muscat's formal education, although it is unknown where he undertook his initial studies. His aunt also paid for his university studies, and it is known that he studied law but it is not certain where, although the Jesuit Col...
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Henry Alexander Miers
1858 - 1942 (84 years)
Sir Henry Alexander Miers, FRS was a British mineralogist and crystallographer. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Oxford. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1896.
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Eduard Arning
1855 - 1936 (81 years)
Eduard Christian Arning was an English-German dermatologist and microbiologist from Manchester. Biography Arning received his early education from private tutors and at the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums in Hamburg. In 1879 he obtained his medical doctorate from Strassburg, and afterwards was a medical assistant in Strassburg under Adolf Kussmaul and Oswald Kohts , and later in Berlin under Oskar Lassar . From 1884 to 1886, he researched leprosy in the Hawaiian Islands. In 1887 he became a specialist of dermatology and venereal disease in Hamburg, where from 1906 he served as physician-in-chief in the department of skin and venereal diseases at the "Allgemeines Krankenhaus St.
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John Sutherland
1808 - 1891 (83 years)
John Sutherland was a physician and promoter of sanitary science. Sutherland was born in Edinburgh, where he completed his high school studies. He became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1827, and graduated M.D. at the university in 1831.
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Pyotr Nikolsky
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Pyotr Vasilyevich Nikolsky was a Ukrainian ans Russian dermatologist. He was born in Usman in the Russian Empire and earned his medical degree from the Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kyiv in 1884. After graduating, he studied under Mikhail Stukovenkov at the Department of Dermatology and Venerology in Kyiv. In 1896, he defended his doctoral thesis on pemphigus foliaceus, in which he described a dermatological condition involving a weakening relationship among the epidermal layers. The sloughing of skin associated with certain varieties of this condition is now referred to as Nikolsky's sign.
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Mary Harris Thompson
1829 - 1895 (66 years)
Mary Harris Thompson, MD, , was the founder, head physician and surgeon of the Chicago Hospital for Women and Children, renamed Mary Harris Thompson Hospital after her death in 1895. She was one of the first women to practice medicine in Chicago.
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Metrodorus of Stratonicea
140 BC - 70 BC (70 years)
Metrodorus of Stratonikeia was at first a disciple of Epicureanism, but afterwards attached himself to Carneades. His defection from the Epicurean school is almost unique. It is explained by Cicero as being due to his theory that the scepticism of Carneades was merely a means of attacking the Stoics on their own ground. Metrodorus held that Carneades was in reality a loyal follower of Plato. Cicero speaks of him as an orator of great fire and volubility. He flourished about 110 BC.
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Franklin Rhoda
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Franklin Rhoda . In the words of historian Mike Foster, Frank Rhoda was an "artist, musician, writer, surveyor, naturalist, social critic, defender of civil liberties and champion of Christ - the only theme unifying his versatile life was idealism that aimed to reform almost everything he encountered."
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Walter Gross
1904 - 1945 (41 years)
Dr. Walter Gross was a German physician appointed to create the Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare for the Nazi Party. He headed this office, renamed the Office of Racial Policy in 1934, until his suicide at the close of World War II.
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Dosa ben Saadia
935 - 1018 (83 years)
Dosa ben Saadia was a Talmudic scholar and philosopher who was the Gaon of Sura from 1012 until his death in 1018. Biography Born in Tiberias in about 935, his father Saadia Gaon was a prominent figure, the Sura Gaon from 928 to 942. In a letter written in 928, his father mentions his older brother Sheerit, although he does not mention Dosa. This has led scholars to place Dosa's birth around 935, meaning that he was only a young boy when his father died in 942. In 953, Sheerit and Dosa compiled a list of their father's books. Ibn Daud states in Sefer ha-Qabbalah that Dosa wrote a biography ab...
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Werner Zoege von Manteuffel
1857 - 1926 (69 years)
Werner Maximilian Friedrich Zoege von Manteuffel was a Baltic German medical surgeon. He was the earliest advocate of sterilisedd gloves. He studied at the University of Dorpat and became a doctor in 1886.
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Frank Barna Bigelow
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Frank Barna Bigelow was an American librarian. Frank Barna was born at Amherst, Massachusetts, Feb. 7, 1869, third child of six of prominent Amherst physician Orvis Furman Bigelow, M.D. and Mary Helen Bigelow; grandson of Judge William Morrill Pingry of Vermont; and nephew of California Forty-niner Adoniram Judson Biglow [this branch of the singularly-related Bigelow/Biglow family was dropping the "e" in the name around this time], having sailed on a clipper ship around Cape Horn which docked in San Francisco on 10 October 1849. Frank Barna was educated at the schools of Amherst and was gra...
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Fritz de Quervain
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Fritz de Quervain was a Swiss surgeon born in Sion. He was a leading authority on thyroid disease. In 1892 he received his doctorate from the University of Bern, and several years later became director of the surgical department at a hospital in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the canton of Neuchâtel. In 1910 he was appointed to the chair of surgery at the University of Basel, and from 1918 was a professor of surgery at Bern and director of the Inselspital.
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Charles Alexandre Lesueur
1778 - 1846 (68 years)
Charles Alexandre Lesueur was a French naturalist, artist, and explorer. He was a prolific natural-history collector, gathering many type specimens in Australia, Southeast Asia, and North America, and was also responsible for describing numerous species, including the spiny softshell turtle , smooth softshell turtle , and common map turtle . Both Mount Lesueur and Lesueur National Park in Western Australia are named in his honor.
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Bernard Wagenaar
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Bernard Wagenaar was a Dutch-American composer, conductor and violinist. Wagenaar was born in Arnhem. He studied at Utrecht University before starting his career as a teacher and conductor in 1914. He moved to the U.S. in 1920, and he became a citizen in 1927. From 1925 to 1968 he taught at the Juilliard School, where Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, Norman Dello Joio, Bernard Herrmann, Robert Ward, Tutti Camarata, Charles Jones, Alan Shulman, Katharine Mulky Warne, and James Cohn were among his pupils. He was an active member of the League of Composers and similar organizations and was an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands.
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Gyula Kornis
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Gyula Kornis was a Hungarian Piarist, philosopher, educator, professor and politician, who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives for a short time in 1938. He had an important role in implementation of educational policy of Count Kuno von Klebelsberg, Minister of Religion and Education in the cabinet of István Bethlen in the 1920s. Kornis also served as interim President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1945, after the Second World War.
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Galeazzo di Santa Sofia
1352 - 1427 (75 years)
Galeazzo di Santa Sofia was an Italian physician and anatomist. Life He taught medicine at the universities in Bologna and Padua. He was called to Vienna where he introduced anatomy as a subject of study and in 1404 made the first dissection north of the Alps.
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Joseph Igersheimer
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Joseph Igersheimer was a German born ophthalmologist known for his work on arsphenamine for the treatment of syphilis. A Jew, after escaping the Nazis, While in forced exile from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939, Joseph Igersheimer was the architect of modern ophthalmology in Turkey. Earlier he was a pioneer in addressing the impact of syphilis on eyesight. He was the first to use arsphenamine in the treatment of syphilis of the eye and the first to operate on retinal detachment by closing the holes. In 1939 he joined the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine and became a major c...
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John Miller Turpin Finney
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
John Miller Turpin Finney was an American surgeon and academic who also served as a brigadier general during World War I. He is best remembered for serving as the first president of the American College of Surgeons.
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John Thomson
1765 - 1846 (81 years)
John Thomson FRS FRSE PRCPE was a Scottish surgeon and physician, reputed in his time "the most learned physician in Scotland". He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1834 to 1836.
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William T. Bovie
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
William T. Bovie was an American scientist and inventor. He is credited with conceptualizing the field of biophysics and with inventing a modern medical device known as the Bovie electrosurgical generator. Bovie taught or conducted research at Harvard University, Northwestern University, Jackson Laboratory and Colby College.
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Charles McBurney
1845 - 1913 (68 years)
Charles Heber McBurney, MD was an American surgeon, well known for describing McBurney's point in appendicitis. Life and career Charles McBurney was born in 1845. He graduated in the arts from Harvard College in 1866, and qualified in medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York City with an M.D. in 1870. He trained further in Europe for 2 years, and started practice in New York in 1873. He became assistant surgeon to the Bellevue Hospital in 1880, and surgeon-in-chief of the Roosevelt Hospital in 1888. Here he did his most famous work on appendicitis, presenting his report on operative management to the New York Surgical Society in 1889.
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John Britton
1771 - 1857 (86 years)
John Britton was an English antiquary, topographer, author and editor. He was a prolific populariser of the work of others, rather than an undertaker of original research. He is remembered as co-author of nine volumes in the series The Beauties of England and Wales ; and as sole author of the Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain and Cathedral Antiquities of England .
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Xie Daoyun
349 - 409 (60 years)
Xie Daoyun was a Chinese poet, writer, scholar, calligrapher and debater of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Family Born in Yangxia County, Henan, Daoyun belonged to the Xie clan and was a sister of the general Xie Xuan. Though her mother is unknown, it is known that she gave birth to five more children. She was also the favourite niece of prime-minister Xie An. There were Daoist and Confucianist influences in her work.
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Doug Wright
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
Douglas Austin Wright was a Canadian cartoonist, best known for his weekly comic strip Doug Wright's Family . The Doug Wright Awards are named after him to honour excellence in Canadian cartooning.
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Mark Ridley
1560 - 1624 (64 years)
Dr Mark Ridley was an English physician and lexicographer, born in Stretham, Cambridgeshire, to Lancelot Ridley. He became physician to the English merchants in Russia, and then personal physician to the Tsar of Russia.
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Louis Appia
1818 - 1898 (80 years)
Louis Paul Amédée Appia was a Swiss surgeon with special merit in the area of military medicine. In 1863 he became a member of the Geneva "Committee of Five", which was the precursor to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Six years later he met Clara Barton, an encounter which had significant influence on Clara Barton's subsequent endeavours to found a Red Cross society in the United States and her campaign for an accession of the US to the Geneva Convention of 1864.
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Avraham Sharon
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Avraham Sharon was an Israeli philosopher, musician, scholar and publicist. Sharon established the Autographs and Portraits Collection in the National Library of Israel. Biography Abraham Schwadron was born in the village of Bieniów , near Zolochiv in Galicia . His parents were Isaac Schwadron, a beverage manufacturer, and Rivka Gelernter. In his childhood he studied with his uncle, Sholom Mordechai Schwadron and later on in the Jewish Gymnasium in Suceava. Sharon studied in the University of Vienna, where he received three doctoral degrees – in philosophy, law, and chemistry – the latter ...
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David Campbell
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
Sir David Campbell MC FRSE was a Scottish physician and pharmacologist. He was Professor of Materia Medica at Aberdeen University from 1930 to 1959. He won the Military Cross in 1918 due to his bravery serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
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Rudolf Jakob Camerarius
1665 - 1721 (56 years)
Rudolf Jakob Camerarius or Camerer was a German botanist and physician. Life Camerarius was born at Tübingen, and became professor of medicine and director of the botanical gardens at Tübingen in 1687. He is chiefly known for his investigations on the reproductive organs of plants .
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Ottomar Rosenbach
1851 - 1907 (56 years)
Ottomar Ernst Felix Rosenbach was a German physician. Krappitz was a Silesian city where his father, Samuel Rosenbach, practised medicine. He received his education at the universities of Berlin and Breslau . His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war, in which he took an active part as a volunteer. From 1874 to 1877 he was assistant to Wilhelm Olivier Leube and Carl Wilhelm Hermann Nothnagel at the medical hospital and dispensary of the University of Jena; in 1878 he was appointed assistant at the Allerheiligen-Hospital at Breslau, and became privatdozent at the university of ...
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Li Ye
1192 - 1279 (87 years)
Li Ye , born Li Zhi , courtesy name Li Jingzhai , was a Chinese scientist and writer who published and improved the tian yuan shu method for solving polynomial equations of one variable. Along with the 4th-century Chinese astronomer Yu Xi, Li Ye proposed the idea of a spherical Earth instead of a flat one before the advances of European science in the 17th century.
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Helen Katharine Forbes
1891 - 1945 (54 years)
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration . Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
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Fedor Krause
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Fedor Krause was a German neurosurgeon who was native of Friedland . Biography He originally studied music at the Conservatoire in Berlin, and later switched to medicine, earning his doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1883 he became a medical assistant to Richard von Volkmann at the surgical university clinic at Halle. Afterwards, he was a pathologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt am Main , a surgeon at the city hospital at Hamburg-Altona , and later head of the surgical department at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. In 1901 he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin.
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Otto Spiegelberg
1830 - 1881 (51 years)
Otto Spiegelberg was a German gynecologist. He was born in Peine and died in Breslau. He studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, afterwards furthering his education in Berlin, Prague and throughout the United Kingdom. In 1851 he earned his medical doctorate, and subsequently obtained his habilitation at Göttingen . Later he was a professor of obstetrics at the Universities of Freiburg, Königsberg and Breslau.
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Paul Friedrich Meyerheim
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was a German painter and graphic artist. He did portraits and landscapes, but is best known as a painter of animals. Life Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was born in Berlin on 13 July 1842. He and his brother took their first art lessons from his father. As a young boy, he was fascinated with the new Berlin Zoological Gardens and went there so often he was able to befriend Martin Lichtenstein, the zoo's founder, who allowed him into areas that were normally closed to the public. This experience led him to specialize in animal painting.
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P. Kanagasabapathy
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Perampalam Kanagasabapathy was a Ceylon Tamil mathematician, academic and dean of the Faculty of Science at the Jaffna Campus of the University of Sri Lanka. Early life and family Kanagasabapathy was born in 1923. He was the son of Iyampillai Perampalam from Erlalai in northern Ceylon. He was educated at Jaffna Hindu College. After school he joined the University of Ceylon. He then went to the University of Cambridge, graduating with a master's degree in mathematics.
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Abu Bakr az-Zubaydi
928 - 989 (61 years)
Abū Bakr az-Zubaydī , also known as Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Madḥīj al-Faqīh and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan az-Zubaydī al-Ishbīlī , held the title Akhbār al-fuquhā and wrote books on topics including philology, biography, history, philosophy, law, lexicology, and hadith.
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Ambrose Burnside
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
Ambrose Everett Burnside was an American army officer and politician who became a senior Union general in the Civil War and three-time Governor of Rhode Island, as well as being a successful inventor and industrialist.
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Charley Chase
1893 - 1940 (47 years)
Charles Joseph Parrott , known professionally as Charley Chase, was an American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director. He worked for many pioneering comedy studios but is chiefly associated with producer Hal Roach. Chase was the elder brother of comedian/director James Parrott.
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Charles Adolphus Row
1816 - 1896 (80 years)
Charles Adolphus Row was an English Church of England clergyman and moral philosopher. Life Charles Adolphus Row was born in 1816. He was the third son of William Row of St John, Cornwall. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford where he matriculated on 7 May 1834 at the age of 17. He was a scholar at Pembroke from 1834–38. He obtained a B.A. on 29 November 1838 and an M.A. on 11 November 1841.
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Claude Guillermet de Bérigard
1578 - 1663 (85 years)
Claude Guillermet de Bérigard , also known by the Latin form of his name Claudius Berigardus, was a French philosopher, physician and mathematician who became professor of philosophy at Pisa and Padua. He was a vocal opponent of the theories of Galileo. His last name is sometimes spelled Beauregard.
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