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,
#13951
Robert Sharrock
1630 - 1684 (54 years)
Robert Sharrock was an English churchman and botanist. He is now known for The History of the Propagation and Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature , for philosophical work directed against Thomas Hobbes, and as an associate of Robert Boyle
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Hippo
500 BC - 460 BC (40 years)
Hippo was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He is variously described as coming from Rhegium, Metapontum, Samos, and Croton, and it is possible that there was more than one philosopher with this name.
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Joseph von Mering
1849 - 1908 (59 years)
Josef, Baron von Mering was a German physician. Working at the University of Strasbourg, Mering was the first person to discover that one of the pancreatic functions is the production of insulin, a hormone which controls blood sugar levels.
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Antoni Leśniowski
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Antoni Leśniowski was a Polish surgeon, credited with publishing what may have been the earliest reports of the condition which later became known as Crohn's disease. He graduated in medicine from the University of Warsaw in 1890, and studied further in Berlin. From 1892 to 1912 he worked as a surgeon at the Infant Jesus Hospital in Warsaw, specialising in urology. Despite this, his most notable reports were on several cases of inflammatory bowel disease. On May 10, 1903, Medycyna, a weekly medical newspaper, published an article in which he described several cases of intestinal disease, conc...
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Samuel Manuwa
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Oloye Sir Samuel Layinka Ayodeji Manuwa, CMG, OBE was a Nigerian surgeon, Inspector General of Medical Services and former Chief Medical Adviser to the Federal Government of Nigeria. He was the first Nigerian to pass the FRCS and he obtained the postgraduate Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1934. In 1966, he was elected president of the World Federation for Mental Health.
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Nicola Spedalieri
1740 - 1795 (55 years)
Nicola Spedalieri was an Italian priest, theologian, and philosopher. Life He studied and was ordained a priest in the seminary of Monreale, then among the most prominent in Sicily. In Monreale, he was appointed professor of philosophy and mathematics, and later of theology. At the same time he cultivated the arts of poetry, music, and painting. Disgusted at the opposition stirred up by certain theological theses, which were branded as heretical at Palermo, but approved at Rome, he withdrew from Monreale to Rome , where for ten years, while although leading a penurious life, he participated in fruitful study and labour.
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Francesco Bianchini
1662 - 1729 (67 years)
Francesco Bianchini was an Italian philosopher and scientist. He worked for the curia of three popes, including being camiere d'honore of Clement XI, and secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar, working on the method to calculate the astronomically correct date for Easter in a given year.
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Giambattista Toderini
1728 - 1799 (71 years)
Giambattista Toderini was a Venetian philosopher, writer, and former Jesuit abbot. Biography Son of Domenico Maria and Anna Maria Cestari, he was the descendant of the Gagliardis dalla Volta counts palatine. Toderini studied philosophy and archaeology, but tended toward contemplative and religious life since his youth and joined the Society of Jesus. He was employed in teaching, dedicating himself to philosophy in Verona and Forlì.
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Deceneus
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Deceneus or Decaeneus was a priest of Dacia during the reign of Burebista . He is mentioned in the near-contemporary Greek Geographica of Strabo and in the 6th-century Latin Getica of Jordanes, where he is called Dicineus.
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Johannes Schefferus
1621 - 1679 (58 years)
Johannes Schefferus was one of the most important Swedish humanists of his time. He was also known as Angelus and is remembered for writing hymns. Schefferus was born in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He came from the patrician family , studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
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Henry Littlejohn
1826 - 1914 (88 years)
Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn MD LLD FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon, forensic scientist and public health official. He served for 46 years as Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health, during which time he brought about significant improvements in the living conditions and the health of the city's inhabitants. He also served as a police surgeon and medical adviser in Scottish criminal cases.
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Edward Heneage Dering
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Edward Heneage Dering was an English novelist of the Victorian era. He is largely remembered today as a member of "The Quartet" at Baddesley Clinton, with marriages to two artistic women. Biography He was the younger son of Cholmeley Edward John Dering, rector of Pluckley, Kent, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He joined the 68th Foot as an ensign in 1844, and in 1848 was a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. Having caught malaria in Italy, he sold out his commission and left the army in 1851.
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Dionysius of Chalcedon
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Dionysius of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected with the Megarian school. He was a native of Chalcedon on the coast of Bithynia. Dionysius was the person who first used the name Dialecticians to describe a splinter group within the Megarian school "because they put their arguments into the form of question and answer". One area of activity for the dialecticians was the framing of definitions, and Aristotle criticises a definition of life by Dionysius in his Topics: Dionysius is also reported to have taught Theodorus the Atheist.
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Susan McKinney Steward
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Susan Maria McKinney Steward was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. McKinney-Steward's medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1911, she...
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Joseph von Führich
1800 - 1876 (76 years)
Joseph von Führich was an Austrian painter, one of the Nazarenes. He painted religious pictures almost exclusively. Führich acquired his greatest fame as a draughtsman. Biography He was born at Kratzau in Bohemia. Deeply impressed as a boy by rustic pictures adorning the wayside chapels of his native country, his first attempt at composition was a sketch of the Nativity for the festival of Christmas in his father's house. He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside chu...
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Antonio del Pollaiuolo
1429 - 1498 (69 years)
Antonio del Pollaiuolo , also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo , was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
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Alexander Macalister
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Prof Alexander Macalister FRS Hon.FRSE FSA FRAI was an Irish anatomist, Professor of Anatomy, Cambridge University, from 1883 until his death. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Life He was born in Dublin, the second son of Robert Macalister, secretary of the Sunday School Society of Ireland, and his wife . Alexander was educated locally then studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin.
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John Dawson
1734 - 1820 (86 years)
John Dawson was both an English mathematician and physician. He was born at Raygill in Garsdale, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where "Dawson's Rock" celebrates the site of his early thinking about conic sections. After learning surgery from Henry Bracken of Lancaster, he worked as a surgeon in Sedbergh for a year, then went to study medicine at Edinburgh, walking 150 miles there with his savings stitched into his coat. Despite a very frugal lifestyle, he was unable to complete his degree, and had to return to Garsdale until he earned enough as a surgeon and as a private tutor in Mat...
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Pavle Stefanović
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Pavle Stefanović was a Serbian philosopher, esthetician, essayist, music writer, critic and writer. He was the son of physician writer and poet Svetislav Stefanović who translated Shakespeare, and other English writers.
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Guido Bonatti
1210 - 1296 (86 years)
Guido Bonatti was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, who was the most celebrated astrologer of the 13th century. Bonatti was advisor of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, Ezzelino da Romano III, Guido Novello da Polenta and Guido I da Montefeltro. He also served the communal governments of Florence, Siena and Forlì. His employers were all Ghibellines , who were in conflict with the Guelphs , and all were excommunicated at some time or another. Bonatti's astrological reputation was also criticised in Dante's Divine Comedy, where he is depicted as residing in hell as punishmen...
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C. S. Wright
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Charles Seymour Wright , nicknamed Silas Wright after novelist Silas K. Hocking, was a Canadian member of Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition of 1910–1913, the Terra Nova Expedition. Background Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1887, the son of an insurance executive, Wright grew up in the Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale. He was educated at Upper Canada College where he also became head boy. He wore glasses, excelled in sports, and his spirit of adventure saw him spend some of his youth prospecting and canoeing in Canada's unmapped Far North. He studied physics at the Universit...
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William Gilham
1818 - 1872 (54 years)
William Henry Gilham was an American soldier, teacher, chemist, and author. A member of the faculty at Virginia Military Institute, in 1860, he wrote a military manual which was still in modern use 145 years later. He served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and became president of Southern Fertilizing Company in Richmond after the War.
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Felice Fontana
1730 - 1805 (75 years)
Abbé Gasparo Ferdinando Felice Fontana was an Italian polymath who contributed to experimental studies in physiology, toxicology, and physics. As a physicist he discovered the water gas shift reaction in 1780. He investigated the human eye and has also been credited with discovering the nucleolus of a cell. His work on the venom of vipers was among the earliest experimental toxicological studies. He served as a court physicist for Peter Leopold, Duke of Tuscany and taught at the University of Pisa. He was involved in the establishment of the La Specola museum in Florence.
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Donald MacAlister
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Sir Donald MacAlister, 1st Baronet of Tarbet was a Scottish physician who was Principal and Vice-Chancellor and, later, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society, from 1876. From 1904 to 1931 he was President of the General Medical Council.
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August Christian Niemann
1761 - 1832 (71 years)
August Christian Niemann was a German forestry engineer and political economist. He is known as a composer and collector of student songs. Born in Altona, he studied law in Jena and Kiel. Serving as Hofmeister for a fellow student of noble background, he moved to the University of Göttingen in 1782. He returned to Kiel in 1783, where he received his PhD, and lectured on statistics and political science from 1785.
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Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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Adam of Balsham
1100 - 1181 (81 years)
Adam of Balsham was an Anglo-Norman scholastic and churchman. Life Adam was born in Balsham, near Cambridge, England. He studied with Peter Lombard at the University of Paris. He later taught at Paris; among his pupils were John of Salisbury and William of Tyre and might have been a contemporary there of Rainald of Dassel . Gabriel Nuchelmans surmises that he may have been the first person to introduce the term enuntiabile, which came to be used in the same sense as dictum.
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Gerard ter Borch
1617 - 1681 (64 years)
Gerard ter Borch , also known as Gerard Terburg , was a Dutch genre painter who lived in the Dutch Golden Age. He influenced fellow Dutch painters Gabriel Metsu, Gerrit Dou, Eglon van der Neer and Johannes Vermeer. According to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Ter Borch "established a new framework for subject matter, taking people into the sanctum of the home", showing the figures' uncertainties and expertly hinting at their inner lives. His influence as a painter, however, was later surpassed by Vermeer.
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Adriano Tilgher
1887 - 1941 (54 years)
Adriano Tilgher was an Italian philosopher and essayist. Biography Tilgher was born in Resina . After studying law, he dedicated himself to journalism and essay writing. He was a theatre critic for various daily Roman newspapers between 1915 and 1925, proving himself a sharp interpreter of dramatic texts. He is known for his view of the theatre of Luigi Pirandello, which he interpreted as an expression of the contrast between Life and Form , a view Pirandello adopted as his own.
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Jaap Kunst
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Jaap Kunst was a Dutch musicologist. He is credited with coining the term "ethnomusicology" as a more accurate name for the field then known as comparative musicology. Kunst studied the folk music of the Netherlands and of Indonesia. His published work totals more than 70 texts.
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Theodor Schwarz
1777 - 1850 (73 years)
Theodor Schwarz was a German Lutheran clergyman and writer. He published novels under the pseudonym Theodor Melas. He was the son of provost Georg Theodor Schwarz. From 1798 he studied at the University of Jena, where he attended lectures given by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Johann Jakob Griesbach and Friedrich Schiller. In 1800 he traveled with painter Jakob Wilhelm Roux to Saxon Switzerland and to Dresden, where he met with Caspar David Friedrich. In 1801 he returned to Rügen and assisted his father at the parish. Afterwards, he worked for several years as a ...
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Alexander Hamilton
1739 - 1802 (63 years)
Alexander Hamilton FRSE FRCSE FRCPE was a Scottish physician. He was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was one of the first persons to recognise that puerperal fever was infectious. He was professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh.
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Rudolf Wiegmann
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Ernst Gottfried Rudolf Wiegmann was a German painter, archaeologist, art historian, graphic artist and architect. He worked in the Classical style and, as a painter, is best known for his vedute. His wife, Marie Wiegmann, whom he married in 1841, was also a painter of some note.
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David Guest
1911 - 1938 (27 years)
David Guest was a British mathematician and philosopher who volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in Spain in 1938. He was the uncle of American-British musician, actor and director Christopher Guest.
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Jean de Silhon
1596 - 1667 (71 years)
Jean de Silhon was a French philosopher and politician. He was a founding member, and the first to occupy seat 24 of the Académie française in 1634. At Cardinal Richelieu's prompting, he defended the concept of reason of state, arguing that the political necessities under which the State operates mean that it need not always follow normal laws of ethics, such as telling the truth. Reason of state was thus, he said, "a mean between that which conscience permits and affairs require."
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Emil Hammacher
1885 - 1916 (31 years)
Emil Hammacher was a German philosopher, proponent of objective idealism and mystic, doctor of Philosophy and Law, professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn. He studied in Geneva, Heidelberg, Berlin and Bonn. Hammacher borrowed the basic tenets of objective idealism from Hegel. He rejected dialectics and developed the mystical doctrine of "ethical self-awareness of the spirit" as "the supreme and fundamental value." In his work directed against Marxism, Hammacher holds the idea that the socialization of the means of production and materialism are contrary to the laws of morality.
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Andrew McNaughton
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
General Andrew George Latta McNaughton was a Canadian electrical engineer, scientist, army officer, cabinet minister, and diplomat. Early life McNaughton was born in Moosomin, District of Assiniboia, North-West Territories , on 25 February 1887. Both of McNaughton's parents were immigrants from Scotland, and his youth was a happy one, being brought up by an adventuresome father who had once been a trader in buffalo hides and a kindly, loving mother. His upbringing on a farm instilled in him a life-long love of hard work and self-discipline. McNaughton spent his free time riding horses across the vast expanses of the Prairies while also engaging in hunting and fishing.
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E. I. Watkin
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Edward Ingram Watkin was an English Catholic philosopher, pacifist and writer. Life He studied at St Paul's School, London and New College, Oxford. In 1908, Watkin became a convert to Catholicism. He publicly opposed conscription in 1916, a position he upheld in his 1939 pamphlet The Crime of Conscription.
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Petrus Martinez de Osma
1427 - 1480 (53 years)
Petrus Martinez de Osma was a Spanish theologian and philosopher, known for his views on indulgences, which he retracted at the end of his life. Life He graduated M.A. at the University of Salamanca in 1457. He was professor of theology there from 1463. A follower of Alonso el Madrigal , from 1476 he defended theses on indulgences and confession resembling those of John Wyclif and Jan Hus, and anticipating issues from the Protestant Reformation. Among his pupils was Antonio de Nebrija.
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Muretus
1526 - 1585 (59 years)
Muretus is the Latinized name of Marc Antoine Muret , a French humanist who was among the revivers of a Ciceronian Latin style and is among the usual candidates for the best Latin prose stylist of the Renaissance.
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William George MacCallum
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
William George MacCallum was a Canadian-American physician and pathologist. He was of Scottish descent and was born in Dunnville village in Canada, where his father was a physician. He was educated at the University of Toronto. He graduated with BA in 1894. Initially inclined towards Greeks as academic career, his father influenced him to enter medicine. He joined the second year of the first batch of medicine course in the Johns Hopkins Medical School, and became one of the first graduates of the institute in 1897. He was appointed assistant resident of pathology of the medical school in 1897, resident pathologist in 1901, soon after Associate Professor, and full Professor in 1908.
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Giovanni Bianchi
1693 - 1775 (82 years)
Giovanni Bianchi , also known as Jano Planco, was an Italian physician, anatomist, archaeologist, zoologist and intellectual. He wrote numerous medical texts and De Conchis minus notis liber , a work on Foraminifera, and maintained a cabinet of curiosities.
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Hieronymus Fabricius
1533 - 1619 (86 years)
Girolamo Fabrici d'Acquapendente, also known as Girolamo Fabrizio or Hieronymus Fabricius , was a pioneering anatomist and surgeon known in medical science as "The Father of Embryology." Life and accomplishments Born in Acquapendente, Latium, Fabricius studied at the University of Padua, receiving a Doctor of Medicine degree in 1559 under the guidance of Gabriele Falloppio. He was a private teacher of anatomy in Padua, 1562–1565, and in 1565, became professor of surgery and anatomy at the university, succeeding Falloppio.
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Grant Lewi
1902 - 1951 (49 years)
William Grant Lewi II was an American astrologer and author. Best known for his books Astrology for the Millions and Heaven Knows What, Lewi has been described as the father of modern astrology in America.
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Jacob Anton Zallinger zum Thurn
1735 - 1813 (78 years)
Jacob Anton Zallinger zum Thurn was a philosopher and canonist . Biography Zallinger studied at Innsbruck and Munich, and entered the Jesuit order at Landsberg am Lech on 9 October 1753. He taught philosophy at Munich from 1758 to 1761, before going to Ingolstadt to study theology. Zallinger was ordained priest on 1 June 1765.
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Francis Hutcheson
1721 - 1784 (63 years)
Francis Hutcheson was an Irish violinist, composer, physician and lecturer in chemistry. His surname was often misspelled as "Hutchinson". He published his music under the pseudonym "Francis Ireland".
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Hans Curschmann
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Hans Heinrich Curschmann was a German physician and neurologist remembered for Curschmann-Batten-Steinert syndrome. He attended universities in Freiberg, Leipzig and Munich, earning his doctorate in 1900. From 1900 to 1907 he worked in Leipzig, Heidelberg, Berlin and Tübingen, and from 1907 to 1916 he was the senior physician at the city hospital in Mainz. In 1916 he became director of the medical clinic of Rostock, becoming professor in 1921.
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Eliza Haywood
1693 - 1756 (63 years)
Eliza Haywood , born Elizabeth Fowler, was an English writer, actress and publisher. An increase in interest and recognition of Haywood's literary works began in the 1980s. Described as "prolific even by the standards of a prolific age", Haywood wrote and published over 70 works in her lifetime, including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood today is studied primarily as one of the 18th-century founders of the novel in English.
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Ole Worm
1588 - 1654 (66 years)
Ole Worm , who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen where he taught Greek, Latin, physics and medicine.
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Grace C. Bibb
1842 - 1912 (70 years)
Grace C. Bibb was a feminist and philosopher. She was part of the push for equality between the sexes, as well as an advocate for women's rights, access to higher education, expansion in employment opportunities, a right to equal pay, and a woman's right to vote. She was appointed Dean at the Normal school despite the fact that women were not at that time allowed to attend the College. In her position at the Normal school, Bibb pushed that women be allowed into the College of Education. She later pushed for women to be allowed into all other University departments.
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