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
Lawson Wilkins
1894 - 1963 (69 years)
Lawson Wilkins was a pioneering pediatric endocrinologist. He is known along with John Money for pioneering surgeries for visibly intersex newborns. Honors Borden Award, American Academy of Pediatrics Amory Prize, American Academy of Arts and Sciences Koch Award, Endocrine Society John Howland Award, American Pediatric Society
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Frederic Fitch
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Frederic Brenton Fitch was an American logician, a Sterling Professor at Yale University. Education and career At Yale, Fitch earned his B.A in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1934 under the supervision of F. S. C. Northrop. From 1934 to 1937 Fitch was a postdoc at the University of Virginia. In 1937 he returned to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1977.
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Joseph Gilbert Hamilton
1907 - 1957 (50 years)
Joseph Gilbert Hamilton was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, which included the use of unsuspecting human subjects.
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Douglas Vernon Hubble
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Sir Douglas Vernon Hubble was a paediatric endocrinologist, general practitioner, and professor of paediatrics and dean of medicine at the University of Birmingham. Hubble was principally notable for research into paediatric endocrinology and publishing a number of papers on the subject, which gave him a national reputation.
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Michael Moravcsik
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Michael Julius Alexander Moravcsik was a Hungarian-born American theoretical high energy physicist whose areas of research included the two nucleon system, particle spin symmetries. He also made important contributions to the practice and study of science policy in developing nations, scientific methodology, and scientometrics , especially the study of citation and citation indices.
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Erik Jorpes
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Johan Erik Jorpes was a Finnish-born Swedish physician and biochemist. He identified the chemical structure of heparin and developed its clinical applications. Jorpes was the professor of medical chemistry in the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1946–1963.
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Gilbert Ryle
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Gilbert Ryle was a British philosopher, principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "ghost in the machine." He was a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosopherss who shared Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems.
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Keiji Nishitani
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Keiji Nishitani was a Japanese philosopher. He was a scholar of the Kyoto School and a disciple of Kitarō Nishida. In 1924, Nishitani received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University for his dissertation "Das Ideale und das Reale bei Schelling und Bergson". He studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939.
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George Holland Sabine
1880 - 1961 (81 years)
George Holland Sabine , popularly known as Sabine, was a professor of philosophy, dean of the graduate school and vice president of Cornell University. He is best known for his authoritative work A History of Political Theory, which traces the growth of political thought from the times of Plato to modern fascism and nazism. George Sabine was also a carpenter, a blacksmith, a cook, and a gardener and collected lithographs and etchings. In his review of A History of Political Theory, Leland Jenks noted, "Sabine is the only textbook writer who is abreast of recent Rousseau scholarship, as represe...
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Charles A. Baylis
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Charles Augustus Baylis was an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Brown University , University of Maryland , Duke University . He was the managing editor of the Journal of Symbolic Logic.
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L. E. J. Brouwer
1881 - 1966 (85 years)
Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer , usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as the founder of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.
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Guðmundur Finnbogason
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Guðmundur Finnbogason was an Icelandic philosopher, the son of Guðrún Jónsdóttir and Finnbogi Finnbogason. He was one of the first Icelandic psychologists. His work "Sympathetic Understanding" inspired Jean Piaget's development stages model.
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Robert Foster Kennedy
1884 - 1952 (68 years)
Dr Robert Foster Kennedy MD FRSE was an Irish-born neurologist largely working in America. He gives his name to Foster-Kennedy syndrome, the Kaplan-Kennedy test and Kennedy's Syndrome. He was one of the first medical doctors to use electroconvulsive treatment for mental conditions and one of the first to recognise and define shell shock in the First World War.
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Norwood Russell Hanson
1924 - 1967 (43 years)
Norwood Russell Hanson was an American philosopher of science. Hanson was a pioneer in advancing the argument that observation is theory-laden — that observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven — and that historical and contemporary comprehension are similarly deeply interwoven. His single most central intellectual concern was the comprehension and development of a logic of discovery.
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Horace Kallen
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Horace Meyer Kallen was a German-born American philosopher who supported pluralism and Zionism. Biography Horace Meyer Kallen was born on August 11, 1882, in the town of Bernstadt, Prussian Silesia . His parents were Jacob David Kallen, an Orthodox rabbi, and Esther Rebecca Glazier. In 1887, the family emigrated to the United States. Kallen studied philosophy at Harvard University under George Santayana; in 1903, he received a BA magna cum laude.
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J. Barkley Rosser
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
John Barkley Rosser Sr. was an American logician, a student of Alonzo Church, and known for his part in the Church–Rosser theorem in lambda calculus. He also developed what is now called the "Rosser sieve" in number theory. He was part of the mathematics department at Cornell University from 1936 to 1963, chairing it several times. He was later director of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the first director of the Communications Research Division of IDA. Rosser also authored mathematical textbooks.
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Charles A. Hufnagel
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Charles A. Hufnagel, M.D. was an American surgeon who invented the first artificial heart valve in the early 1950s. Hufnagel was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and reared in Richmond, Indiana. His father was also a surgeon. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he began work on the heart and other organ transplants and explored the use of plastic to replace blood vessels, developing a technique called multi-point fixation, which would have great importance in the placement of the artificial aort...
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Karl Loewenstein
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
Karl Loewenstein was a German lawyer and political scientist, regarded as one of the prominent figures of Constitutional law in the twentieth century. His research and investigations into the typology of the different constitutions have had some impact on the Western constitutional thought. Loewenstein is credited with establishing the theoretical foundations of militant democracy to battle anti-democratic mass movements.
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Ödön Pártos
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Ödön Pártos [alternate transcription in English: Oedoen Partos, , ] was a Hungarian-Israeli violist and composer. A recipient of the Israel Prize, he taught and served as director of the Rubin Academy of Music, now known as the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv.
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Eino Kulonen
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
Eino Kulonen was a Finnish physician and scientist. Kulonen was born in Kiikka in Pirkanmaa. He earned his D.Med.Sc. degree in 1951 and held the position of docent at the University of Helsinki from 1953 to 1954. From 1955 to 1984, he was professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Turku. His research involved the chemistry and structure of connective tissue, as well as the effects of alcohol on the nerve system.
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Richard Milton Martin
1916 - 1985 (69 years)
Richard Milton Martin was an American logician and analytic philosopher. In his Ph.D. thesis written under Frederic Fitch, Martin discovered virtual sets a bit before Quine, and was possibly the first non-Pole other than Joseph Henry Woodger to employ a mereological system. Building on these and other devices, Martin forged a first-order theory capable of expressing its own syntax as well as some semantics and pragmatics , all while abstaining from set and model theory , and from intensional notions such as modality.
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Ludwig Schiedermair
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Ludwig Ferdinand Schiedermair was a German minister and musicologist. He concerned himself with opera history, Mozart, and Beethoven. In 1914 he edited the first complete critical edition of the letters of Mozart and his family.
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Thomas Hocken
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Thomas Morland Hocken was a New Zealand collector, bibliographer and researcher. Early life He was born in Rutlandshire on 14 January 1836, the son of Wesleyan minister Joshua Hocken, and educated at Woodhouse Grove School and a school in Newcastle. He studied medicine at Durham University and Trinity College Dublin, and in 1859 became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
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Bruce Chown
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Bruce Chown was a Canadian medical doctor who researched the blood factor known as the Rhesus factor and discovered an Rh immune vaccine, Rh gamma globulin, which helps to prevent Erythroblastosis fetalis.
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Isadore Gilbert Mudge
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Isadore Gilbert Mudge was ranked by the magazine American Libraries as one of the top 100 important leaders that libraries have had in the 20th century. Mudge was a defining influence on what a contemporary reference librarian is and was essential for helping organize and promote reference books for use in helping patrons find information and answers to questions.
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Charles Jacques Bouchard
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Charles Jacques Bouchard was a French pathologist and an esperantist born in Montier-en-Der, a commune the department of Haute-Marne. Biography He studied medicine in Lyon and Paris, where he obtained his doctorate in 1866. In 1874 he became a physician at Bicêtre Hospital, and in 1879 was appointed chair of general pathology. In 1886, he became a member of the Academie de Médecine.
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Clay Johnston
S. Claiborne "Clay" Johnston is the former Dean of the Dell Medical School and Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean's Chair at the University of Texas, Austin, United States. Dell Medical School opened in 2016 with Johnston being named as the inaugural dean in January 2014 In July 2021, Johnston announced that he would step down as the dean of the Dell Medical School. He officially left his position on August 31, 2021.
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Aristotle
384 BC - 322 BC (62 years)
Aristotle was an Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
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Plato
427 BC - 347 BC (80 years)
Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Athens during the Classical period. In Athens, Plato founded the Academy, a philosophical school where he taught the philosophical doctrines that would later become known as Platonism. Plato, or Platon, was a pen name derived, apparently, from the nickname given to him by his wrestling coachallegedly a reference to his physical girth. According to Alexander Polyhistor, quoted by Diogenes Laërtius, his actual name was Aristocles, son of Ariston, of the deme Collytus, in Athens.
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Immanuel Kant
1724 - 1804 (80 years)
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential and controversial figures in modern Western philosophy.
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Bertrand Russell
1872 - 1970 (98 years)
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, and various areas of analytic philosophy, especially philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
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Karl Marx
1818 - 1883 (65 years)
Karl Marx was a German-born philosopher, economist, political theorist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the three-volume ; the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism and represents his greatest intellectual achievement. Marx's ideas and theories and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have exerted enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.
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Socrates
469 BC - 399 BC (70 years)
Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem.
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Thomas Aquinas
1225 - 1274 (49 years)
Thomas Aquinas was an Italian Dominican friar and priest, an influential philosopher and theologian, and a jurist in the tradition of scholasticism from the county of Aquino in the Kingdom of Sicily.
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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
1770 - 1831 (61 years)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher and one of the most influential figures of German idealism and 19th-century philosophy. His influence extends across the entire range of contemporary philosophical topics, from metaphysical issues in epistemology and ontology, to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, and the history of philosophy.
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Martin Heidegger
1889 - 1976 (87 years)
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
1844 - 1900 (56 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
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René Descartes
1596 - 1650 (54 years)
René Descartes was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician, widely considered a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Mathematics was central to his method of inquiry, and he connected the previously separate fields of geometry and algebra into analytic geometry. Descartes spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, initially serving the Dutch States Army, later becoming a central intellectual of the Dutch Golden Age. Although he served a Protestant state and was later counted as a Deist by critics, Descartes was Roman Catholic.
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John Locke
1632 - 1704 (72 years)
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician, widely regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "father of liberalism". Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, Locke is equally important to social contract theory. His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American Revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
1889 - 1951 (62 years)
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. In spite of his position, during his entire life only one book of his philosophy was published, the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung , which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His only other published works were an article, "Some Remarks on Logical Form" ; a book review; and a children's dictionary.
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Baruch Spinoza
1632 - 1677 (45 years)
Baruch Spinoza was a philosopher of Portuguese-Jewish origin, born in Amsterdam, the Dutch Republic, and mostly known under his Latinized pen name Benedictus de Spinoza. One of the foremost and seminal thinkers of the Enlightenment, modern biblical criticism, and 17th-century Rationalism, including modern conceptions of the self and the universe, he came to be considered "one of the most important philosophers—and certainly the most radical—of the early modern period". He was influenced by Stoicism, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, and a variety of heterodox Christian thinkers of his day.
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Thomas Hobbes
1588 - 1679 (91 years)
Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, and ethics, as well as philosophy in general. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
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Gottlob Frege
1848 - 1925 (77 years)
Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics. Though he was largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano , Bertrand Russell , and, to some extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced his work to later generations of philosophers. Frege is widely considered to be the greatest logician since Aristotle, and one of the most profound philosophers of mathematics ev...
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Friedrich Engels
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Friedrich Engels was a German philosopher, political theorist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman and Karl Marx's closest friend and collaborator. Engels's family was wealthy and owned large cotton-textile mills in Prussia and England. He met Marx in 1844, and they jointly authored a number of works, including The Holy Family , The German Ideology , and The Communist Manifesto , and worked as political organizers and activists in the Communist League and First International. Engels also helped Marx financially, allowing him to continue his writing after moving to London in 1849.
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Charles Sanders Peirce
1839 - 1914 (75 years)
Charles Sanders Peirce was an American scientist, mathematician, logician, and philosopher who is sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". According to philosopher Paul Weiss, Peirce was "the most original and versatile of America's philosophers and America's greatest logician". Bertrand Russell wrote "he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century and certainly the greatest American thinker ever".
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Søren Kierkegaard
1813 - 1855 (42 years)
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher. He wrote critical texts on organized religion, Christianity, morality, ethics, psychology, and the philosophy of religion, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony, and parables. Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual," giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment. He was against lit...
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John Dewey
1859 - 1952 (93 years)
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality.
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Edmund Husserl
1859 - 1938 (79 years)
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality. In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction. Arguing that transcendental consciousness sets the limits of all possible knowledge, Husserl redefined phenomenology as a transcendental-idealist philosophy. Husserl's thought profoundly influenced 20th-century philosoph...
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Arthur Schopenhauer
1788 - 1860 (72 years)
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation , which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant , Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance.
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William James
1842 - 1910 (68 years)
William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology."
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