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,
#13901
Marian Gieszczykiewicz
1889 - 1942 (53 years)
Marian Teodor Ludwik Gieszczykiewicz was a Polish physician, bacteriologist. Gieszczykiewicz was professor at the Jagiellonian University starting in 1924 and member of the Polish Academy of Skills. During the German occupation he taught at the so-called "Secret Universities".
Go to Profile#13902
Charles-Emmanuel Sédillot
1804 - 1883 (79 years)
Charles-Emmanuel Sédillot was a French military physician and surgeon. He was the son of orientalist Jean Jacques Emmanuel Sédillot , and an older brother to historian Louis-Pierre-Eugène Sédillot.
Go to Profile#13903
Kazimierz Kelles-Krauz
1872 - 1905 (33 years)
Kazimierz Radosław Elehard baron Kelles-Krauz was a Polish philosopher and sociologist, member of the Polish Socialist Party. He was one of the most significant Marxist thinkers at the end of the 19th century.
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Jan Jesenius
1566 - 1621 (55 years)
Jan Jesenius, also written as Jessenius , was a Bohemian physician, politician and philosopher. Life Early years He was from an old noble family, the House of Jeszenszky, originally from the Kingdom of Hungary. He presented himself in his own works as eques Ungarus . According to scholar publications, he had Slovak, Polish or German roots. His father, Boldizsár Jeszenszky de Nagyjeszen, left Turóc County because of the Ottomans' military campaign against Upper Hungary and settled down in Silesia in 1555. He married Marta Schülerin, who came from a wealthy German bourgeois family.
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Mary Putnam Jacobi
1842 - 1906 (64 years)
Mary Corinna Putnam Jacobi was an English-American physician, teacher, scientist, writer, and suffragist. She was the first woman admitted to study medicine at the University of Paris and the first woman to graduate from a pharmacy college in the United States.
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Nikolai Semashko
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Dr. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Semashko , was a revolutionary, Soviet statesman and academic who became People's Commissar of Public Health in 1918, and served in that role until 1930. He was one of the organizers of the health system in the Soviet Union , an academician of the Academy of Medical Sciences and of the Russian SFSR .
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Yoshioka Yayoi
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Yoshioka Yayoi was a Japanese physician, educator, and women's rights activist. She founded the Tokyo Women's Medical University in 1900, as the first medical school for women in Japan. She was also known as Washiyama Yayoi.
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Carl Jakob Adolf Christian Gerhardt
1833 - 1902 (69 years)
Carl Jakob Adolf Christian Gerhardt was a German internist born in Speyer. Biography He studied medicine at the University of Würzburg, earning his doctorate in 1856. Subsequently, he was an assistant to Heinrich von Bamberger and Franz von Rinecker in Würzburg, and worked under Wilhelm Griesinger in Tübingen.
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Ahmad al-Buni
1200 - 1225 (25 years)
Sharaf al-Din or Shihab al-Din or Muḥyi al-Din Abu al-Abbas Aḥmad ibn Ali ibn Yusuf al-Qurashi al-Sufi, better known as Ahmad al-Buni , was a mathematician and philosopher and a well known Sufi. Very little is known about him. His writings deal with the esoteric value of letters and topics relating to mathematics, sihr and spirituality. Born in Buna , al-Buni lived in Egypt and learned from many eminent Sufi masters of his time.
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Gregorio Bressani
1703 - 1771 (68 years)
Gregorio Bressani was an Italian philosopher. Life Bressani was born in Treviso. He graduated from the University of Padua studying literature and philosophy. He was a dear friend of Francesco Algarotti although they had very different opinions. Bressani opposed Galilei and Newton theories in favor of a more scholastic approach. He died in Padua.
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Jean-Baptiste Oudry
1686 - 1755 (69 years)
Jean-Baptiste Oudry was a French Rococo painter, engraver, and tapestry designer. He is particularly well known for his naturalistic pictures of animals and his hunt pieces depicting game. His son, Jacques-Charles Oudry, was also a painter.
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Dominicus Gundissalinus
1115 - 1190 (75 years)
Dominicus Gundissalinus, also known as Domingo Gundisalvi or Gundisalvo , was a philosopher and translator of Arabic to Medieval Latin active in Toledo. Among his translations, Gundissalinus worked on Avicenna's Liber de philosophia prima and De anima, Ibn Gabirol's Fons vitae, and al-Ghazali's Summa theoricae philosophiae, in collaboration with the Jewish philosopher Abraham Ibn Daud and Johannes Hispanus. As a philosopher, Gundissalinus crucially contributed to the Latin assimilation of Arabic philosophy, being the first Latin thinker in receiving and developing doctrines, such as Avicenna's...
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Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly
1691 - 1750 (59 years)
Louis-Jean Lévesque de Pouilly was a French philosopher. A member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, he founded the ESAD de Reims. Lévesque de Pouilly studied philosophy and literature in Paris. He was a friend of Nicolas Fréret and Lord Bolingbroke, met Isaac Newton in England, and is likely to have hosted David Hume in Reims.
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Joachim Dietrich Brandis
1762 - 1846 (84 years)
Joachim Dietrich Brandis was a German-Danish physician. Family He was a son of the judge Christian Dietrich Brandis , and belonged to a prominent family from Hildesheim. He was the father of the philosopher Christian August Brandis and the grandfather of the forestry academic and administrator in India Sir Dietrich Brandis.
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Vincenz Czerny
1842 - 1916 (74 years)
Vincenz Czerny was a German Bohemian surgeon whose main contributions were in the fields of oncological and gynecological surgery. Czerny was born in Trutnov, Bohemia, Austrian Empire. He initially studied at Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague, later transferring to the University of Vienna, where he was a student of Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke . In 1866 he graduated summa cum laude. Afterwards, he remained in Vienna as an assistant to Johann Ritter von Oppolzer and Theodor Billroth . In 1871 he became a clinical director at the University of Freiburg.
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Anthony J. Raimondi
#13917
Friedrich Eduard Schulz
1799 - 1829 (30 years)
Friedrich Eduard Schulz was a German philosopher and orientalist, who was one of the first to uncover evidence of the Kingdom of Urartu. Research on Urartu In 1827, the French scholar Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin recommended that his government send Schulz, then a young professor at the University of Giessen, to the area around Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey on behalf of the French Oriental Society. Schulz discovered and copied numerous cuneiform inscriptions, partly in Assyrian and partly in a hitherto unknown language. Schulz also re-discovered the Kelishin stele, bearing an Assyrian-Urartian bilingual inscription, located on the Kelishin pass on the current Iraqi-Iranian border.
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Philipp Jarnach
1892 - 1982 (90 years)
Philipp Jarnach was a German composer of modern music , pianist, teacher, and conductor. Jarnach was born in Noisy-le-Sec, France, the son of a Spanish sculptor and a Flemish mother. Besides composer such as Hindemith, Jarnach is considered one of the leading and formative composer of the late German Romantic and early modern eras. Until 1914 he lived in Paris, where he studied piano under Édouard Risler and harmony under Albert Lavignac at the Conservatoire de Paris. During the First World War he was a student of Ferruccio Busoni in Zürich. He later completed the opera Doktor Faust which B...
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Samuel D. Gross
1805 - 1884 (79 years)
Samuel David Gross was an American academic trauma surgeon. Surgeon biographer Isaac Minis Hays called Gross "The Nestor of American Surgery." He is immortalized in Thomas Eakins' The Gross Clinic , a prominent American painting of the nineteenth century. A bronze statue of him was cast by Alexander Stirling Calder and erected on the National Mall, but moved in 1970 to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
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Hiroyuki Arai
#13921
Robert A Wilson
#13922
Nakai Riken
1732 - 1817 (85 years)
was a leading academic in the Kaitokudo academy tradition of scholarship. He was the younger son of Nakai Shuan , one of the Kaitokudo's two founding leaders, and was influenced by his teacher and mentor Goi Ranju. His intellectualised way of being led to continued engagement with but physical separation from the Kaitokudo. Much is made of his demeanor reflecting his.
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Antonio Comellas y Cluet
1832 - 1884 (52 years)
Antonio Comellas y Cluet was a philosopher. Comellas studied philosophy and theology in Vic, and entered the diocesan seminary in Solsona, Lleida. After his ordination he continued to teach Latin at Solsona until 1862, when he was appointed professor of theology. During his stay there he published two pamphlets. The first was a discourse, delivered at the opening of the scholastic term, 1866–67, in which he tried to explain in a new manner the procession of the Holy Trinity, and the second a translation, accompanied by prologue and notes, of a work by Reginald Baumstark, Pensamientos de un p...
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John William Ballantyne
1861 - 1923 (62 years)
John William Ballantyne FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish physician and obstetrician. In his teaching of female doctors he was a pioneer in the advancement of female professional training in the field of medicine. He made major advances in the field of midwifery in the late 19th and early 20th century, with influences still felt today. He founded the science of antenatal pathology.
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James Tissot
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Jacques Joseph Tissot , better known as James Tissot , was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. He was born to a drapery merchant and a milliner and decided to pursue a career in art at a young age, coming to incorporate elements of realism, early Impressionism, and academic art into his work. He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England, but he would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life.
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Ichthyas
Ichthyas , the son of Metallus, was a Greek philosopher and a disciple and successor of Euclid of Megara in the Megarian school. He was a colleague of Thrasymachus of Corinth in the school. Ichthyas is described as a man of great eminence, and Diogenes of Sinope is said to have addressed a dialogue to him.
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Sergei Tolstoy
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
Count Sergei Lvovich Tolstoy was a composer and ethnomusicologist who was among the first Europeans to make an in-depth study of the music of India. He was also an associate of the Sufi mystic, Inayat Khan, and participated in helping the Doukhobors move to Canada.
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James H. Lubowitz
#13929
Paul Cullinan
#13930
Fan Zhongyan
989 - 1052 (63 years)
Fan Zhongyan , courtesy name Xiwen , was a Chinese military strategist, philosopher, poet, and politician of the Song dynasty. After serving the central government for several decades, Fan was appointed Prime Minister or Chancellor over the entire Song empire. Fan's philosophical, educational and political contributions continue to be influential to this day, and his writings remain a core component of the Chinese literary canon. His attitude towards official service is encapsulated by his oft-quoted line on the proper attitude of scholar-officials: "They were the first to worry the worries of All-under-Heaven, and the last to enjoy its joys".
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Thomas J. Walley
#13932
Nusret Fişek
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Hasan Nusret Fişek was a Turkish physician and Minister of Health. Early years Nusret Hasan Fişek was born in Sivas to Hayrullah Fişek, a commander at the Turkish War of Independence, and Mukaddes on November 21, 1914. He had a brother, A. Hicri Fişek. He was registered in Istanbul.
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Joachim Camerarius
1500 - 1574 (74 years)
Joachim Camerarius , the Elder, was a German classical scholar. His critical abilities, his deep understanding of Greek and Latin, and his wide-ranging knowledge of the ancient world made him one of the foremost German scholars of his time.
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Edmund Dickinson
1624 - 1707 (83 years)
Edmund Dickinson or Dickenson was an English royal physician and alchemist, author of a syncretic philosophical system. Life He was son of the Rev. William Dickinson, rector of Appleton in Berkshire , by his wife Mary, daughter of Edmund Colepepper, and was born on 26 September 1624. He received his primary education at Eton College, and in 1642 entered Merton College, Oxford, where he was admitted one of the Eton postmasters. He took the degree of B.A. 22 June 1647, and was elected probationer-fellow of his college, On 27 November 1649 he had the degree of M.A. conferred upon him. Applying himself to the study of medicine, he obtained the degree of M.D.
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Thomas Louis Hanna
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
Thomas Louis Hanna was a philosophy professor and movement theorist who coined the term somatics in 1976. He called his work Hanna Somatic Education. He proposed that most negative health effects are due to what he called Sensory Motor Amnesia. He claimed that many common age-related ailments are not simply a matter of time but the result of poor movement habits.
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Nathan Smith Davis
1817 - 1904 (87 years)
Nathan Smith Davis Sr., M.D., LLD was a physician who was instrumental in the establishment of the American Medical Association and was twice elected its president. He became the first editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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James Agee
1909 - 1955 (46 years)
James Rufus Agee was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time Magazine, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family , won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
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Publio Fausto Andrelini
1450 - 1518 (68 years)
Publio Fausto Andrelini was an Italian humanist poet, an intimate friend of Erasmus in the 1490s, who spread the New Learning in France. He taught at the University of Paris as "professor of humanity" from 1489, and became a court poet in the circle around Anne of Brittany, the queen to two kings.
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Samuel Henry Dickson
1798 - 1872 (74 years)
Samuel Henry Dickson was an American poet, physician, writer and educator born in Charleston, South Carolina. Dickson graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Medical College of South Carolina. He also taught at NYU and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dickson was a popular published poet and a leader in Charleston intellectual circles. He was friends with Charleston poet William Gilmore Simms and William Cullen Bryant. He and his brother Dr. John Dickson played a significant role in the medical education of the US's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
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Sándor Liezen-Mayer
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Sándor Liezen-Mayer, or Alexander von Liezen-Mayer was a Hungarian-born German illustrator and history painter. Biography Apparently destined for a military career, he showed an aptitude for drawing and, thanks to the intervention of an uncle, was able to attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied with Karl von Blaas. After eighteen months there, he held his first exhibit in Pest in 1857. He then went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Hermann Anschütz but, by 1862, had found a position in the studios of Karl von Piloty, which had a decisive influence on his style.
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David Turner
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
David Turner was a British playwright. Turner was born in Birmingham and came from a working-class background. He studied French at Birmingham University and later worked as a school teacher in that city. He is best remembered for his stage play Semi-Detached, first performed during 1962, which reached Broadway and was adapted for the film All the Way Up . He prepared modern versions of classic plays including John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a version seen in London in 1968, and The Miser by Molière, which was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1973.
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Paul Lehmann
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Paul Lehmann was a German paleographer and philologist. Biography Paul Lehmann was the son of businessman Gustav Lehmann and his wife Louisa Meyer. After attending school in his hometown, Lehmann started studying at the University of Göttingen. A successor to Ludwig Traube, Paul Lehmann began as docent at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1911 and became professor of medieval Latin philology there in 1917. Author of a dissertation on Franciscus Modius and a Habilitationsschrift on Johannes Sichardus, he made numerous contributions to the Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie. He is best known for Parodie im Mittelalter .
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Werner Danckert
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Werner Danckert was a German folk song researcher. Life Born in Erfurt, Danckert trained as a concert pianist after graduating from high school in 1917. He studied musicology with the subsidiary subjects philosophy and physics. In 1923 he received his doctorate in Erlangen ; the habilitation followed at the University of Jena in 1926.
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Gabrielle Suchon
1631 - 1703 (72 years)
Gabrielle Suchon was a French moral philosopher who participated in debates about the social, political and religious condition of women in the early modern era. Her most prominent works are the Traité de la morale et de la politique and Du célibat volontaire .
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Swami Yogananda
1861 - 1899 (38 years)
Swami Yogananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna, the 19th-century mystic. He took his formal initiation from Sarada Devi, the "holy mother" of Ramakrishna Order and spiritual consort of Ramakrishna. He was the first vice-president of Ramakrishna Mission. He belonged to the family of Sabarna Roy Choudhury, an aristocratic family of erstwhile Bengal. He had a very short life, but he played a very important role during the formative years of Ramakrishna Mission. He was also a dedicated and devoted attendant to Sarada Devi during her stay in Calcutta after Ramakrishna's death. He was one of the dis...
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Fe del Mundo
1900 - 2011 (111 years)
Fe Villanueva del Mundo, , was a Filipina pediatrician. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and is known for shaping the modern child healthcare system in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice spanned eight decades. She gained international recognition, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1977. In 1980, she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines, and in 2010, she was conferred the Order of Lakandula. She was the first female president of the Philippine Pediatric Society and the first woman to be named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980.
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Oskar Zwintscher
1870 - 1916 (46 years)
Oskar Zwintscher was a German painter. He is often associated with the Jugendstil movement. Life From 1887 to 1890 he studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and, from 1890 to 1892 was a student of Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. After his studies, he became a free-lance painter in Meißen, where he received a stipendium, awarded to Saxon painters by the "Munkeltsche Legat". This enabled him to work for three years with no financial worries. In 1898, he presented his first large collection of paintings to the public.
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Cornelius Golightly
1917 - 1976 (59 years)
Cornelius Lacy Golightly was the first black president of the Detroit Board of Education. He was a teacher, civil rights activist, public intellectual, and educational administrator. Early life Cornelius L. Golightly was born on March 23, 1917, in Waterford, Mississippi. His father, Reverend Richmond Mack Golightly, was from Livingston, Alabama. His mother, Margaret Fullilove was from Honey Island, Mississippi. Golightly was one of ten children.
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Jan Rokycana
1396 - 1471 (75 years)
Jan Rokycana was a Czech Hussite theologian in the Kingdom of Bohemia and a key figure of the Bohemian Reformation. Life In his youth, Jan Rokycana entered the Augustinian monastery in Rokycany. Later, he left the monastery to study in Prague, gaining his baccalaureate in 1415. He joined the movement against Jan Želivský, after which he had to flee from Prague. He also opposed the Taborites, most notably at Konopiště in 1423. Later in Prague he opposed Jan Žižka, when he was blamed for the defeat of the Prague militia at Malešov.
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Alexander Crombie
1762 - 1840 (78 years)
Alexander Crombie FRS was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, schoolmaster and philosopher. Biography He was born in Aberdeen on 17 July 1760, the son of Thomas Crombie. He studied at Marischal College. There he was taught divinity by James Beattie, gaining a M.A. in 1778. In 1794 his college awarded him an honorary doctorate .
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