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,
#14151
George Minot
1885 - 1950 (65 years)
George Richards Minot was an American medical researcher who shared the 1934 Nobel Prize with George Hoyt Whipple and William P. Murphy for their pioneering work on pernicious anemia. Early life George Richards Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts to James Jackson Minot and Elizabeth Whitney. He was namesake of his great-great-grandfather George Richards Minot . His father was a physician; his father's cousin was anatomist Charles Sedgwick Minot ; one of his great-grandfathers was James Jackson , co-founder of Massachusetts General Hospital. He developed interest, first, in the natural sc...
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Haskell Curry
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Haskell Brooks Curry was an American mathematician and logician. Curry is best known for his work in combinatory logic, which initial concept is based on a paper by Moses Schönfinkel, for which Curry did much of the development. Curry is also known for Curry's paradox and the Curry–Howard correspondence. Named for him are three programming languages: Haskell, Brook, and Curry, and the concept of currying, a method to transform functions, used in mathematics and computer science.
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Carl Richard Moore
1892 - 1955 (63 years)
Carl Richard Moore was an American endocrinologist. He was born in rural farm region of Greene County, Missouri and received his early education in nearby Springfield. After graduating from High School, he attended Drury College where he acquired an interest in biology. In 1913, he obtained his B.S. degree, then worked as an assistant at Drury to earn his M.S. in 1914. With the granting of a fellowship, he attended the University of Chicago where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1916, with a thesis on the fertilization and parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs. He became an associate in the universit...
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Erwin Ackerknecht
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.
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Dallas B. Phemister
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.
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Sidney Hook
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Sidney Hook was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism. A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism. After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of publ...
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William Bosworth Castle
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
William Bosworth Castle was an American physician and physiologist who transformed hematology from a "descriptive art to a dynamic interdisciplinary science." Life Castle was born to William E. Castle and his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a professor of zoology at Harvard, a pioneer in mammalian genetics, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The young Castle was educated in local schools and entered Harvard College in 1914. At the end of his third year of college, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School. Upon graduating from medical school, he did a medical ...
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Edward Murray East
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Edward Murray East was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist. He is known for his experiments that led to the development of hybrid corn and his support of 'forced' elimination of the 'unfit' based on eugenic findings. He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait. He is also known as a critic of consumption and as a pioneer of thinking about environmental limits. While some scholars see his population thinking as nothing more than eugenics...
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Joseph Erlanger
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.
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Michael Gelfand
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Michael Gelfand, CBE, was a Zimbabwean medical practitioner of tropical medicine, who received a Papal Order of the Knighthood of St. Sylvester. Early life and education Gelfand was born 26 December, 1912 in Wynberg, Cape Province, Union of South Africa to immigrant Jewish-Lithuanian parents. He attended Wynberg Boys' High School and obtained his degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1936. His further medical training was in London.
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Detlev Bronk
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Detlev Wulf Bronk was a prominent American scientist, educator, and administrator. He is credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline. Bronk served as president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953 and as president of The Rockefeller University from 1953 to 1968. Bronk also held the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1962.
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Dickinson W. Richards
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Dickinson Woodruff Richards Jr. was an American physician and physiologist. He was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 with André Cournand and Werner Forssmann for the development of cardiac catheterization and the characterisation of a number of cardiac diseases.
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Arthur Oncken Lovejoy
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being , on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.
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George Catlin
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-American co-operation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries holds his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. He had two children, one of whom was the politician and academic Shirley Williams.
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Isaac Starr
1895 - 1989 (94 years)
Isaac "Jack" Starr , known as the father of ballistocardiography, was an American physician, heart disease specialist, and clinical epidemiologist notable for developing the first practical ballistocardiograph. His early academic positions included being an assistant professor in pharmacology and later the first Hartzell Professor of Research Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania as well as dean of the school from 1945 to 1948.
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Mark M. Ravitch
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Mark Mitchell Ravitch was an American surgeon. He pioneered the use of surgical staples, the treatment of chest wall deformities, and non-operative management of intussusception. Early life and education Ravitch was born in 1910 in New York City. He attended the University of Oklahoma, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and graduated with a degree in zoology in 1930. He received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1934 and remained at Johns Hopkins to complete his surgical training, which he finished in 1943 under the mentorship of Alfred Blalock.
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Kurt Gödel
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege.
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John P. Merrill
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
John Putnam Merrill was an American physician and medical researcher. He led the team which performed the world's first successful kidney transplant. He generally credited as the "father of nephrology" or "the founder of nephrology," which is the scientific study of the kidney and its diseases.
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Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim , Inge Neumann , and Erica Sherover . In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represen...
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Thomas Francis Jr.
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Thomas Francis Jr. was an American physician, virologist, and epidemiologist who guided the discovery and development of the polio vaccine being worked on by his student Jonas Salk. Francis was the first person to isolate influenza virus in the United States, and in 1940 showed that there are other strains of influenza, and took part in the development of influenza vaccines.
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Alfred Blalock
1899 - 1964 (65 years)
Alfred Blalock was an American surgeon most noted for his work on the medical condition of shock as well as tetralogy of Fallot – commonly known as blue baby syndrome. He created, with assistance from his research and laboratory assistant Vivien Thomas and pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig, the Blalock–Thomas–Taussig shunt, a surgical procedure to relieve the cyanosis from tetralogy of Fallot. This operation ushered in the modern era of cardiac surgery. He worked at both Vanderbilt University and Johns Hopkins University, where he studied medicine and later served as chief of surgery. He i...
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Leslie John Witts
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Leslie John Witts was a British physician and pioneering haematologist. Biography L. J. Witts received secondary education at Boteler Grammar School, where he won in 1916 a scholarship to the University of Manchester. During WWI when he reached the age of 18 he joined the Inns of Court Officers Training Corps and then the Royal Field Artillery. Serving on the western front, he suffered a leg wound and was invalided back to civilian life. From 1919 to 1923 he studied at the University of Manchester, graduating there MB ChB in 1923. After house appointments, he became Dickinson travelling scho...
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Alan Ross Anderson
1925 - 1973 (48 years)
Alan Ross Anderson was an American logician and professor of philosophy at Yale University and the University of Pittsburgh. A frequent collaborator with Nuel Belnap, Anderson was instrumental in the development of relevance logic and deontic logic.
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Dennis Robert Hoagland
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Dennis Robert Hoagland was an American chemist and plant and soil scientist working in the fields of plant nutrition, soil chemistry, agricultural chemistry, biochemistry, and physiology. He was Professor of Plant Nutrition at the University of California at Berkeley from 1927 until his death in 1949.
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Wallace O. Fenn
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Wallace Osgood Fenn was a physiologist, chairman of the department of physiology at the University of Rochester from 1925 to 1959. He also headed the University's Space and Science center from 1964 to 1966. He was also the president of the American Physiological Society, the president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the president of the International Union of Physiological Science. His work on heat generated by muscles, oxygen use by the nervous system, and potassium equilibrium in muscle, as well as pressure breathing and nitrogen narcosis, was recognized internationally.
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Robert Edward Gross
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Robert Edward Gross was an American surgeon and a medical researcher. He performed early work in pediatric heart surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. Gross was president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Abraham Wald
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
Abraham Wald was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry and econometrics, and founded the field of sequential analysis. One of his well-known statistical works was written during World War II on how to minimize the damage to bomber aircraft and took into account the survivorship bias in his calculations. He spent his research career at Columbia University. He was the grandson of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner.
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Theodor W. Adorno
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...
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Alfred Tarski
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.
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Michel Foucault
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
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Loren Lomasky
Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.
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Hans Reichenbach
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin in 1928, also known as the "Berlin Circle". Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling all became members of the Berlin Circle.
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Alan Moncrieff
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Sir Alan Aird Moncrieff, was a British paediatrician and professor emeritus at University of London. He was most notable for developing the first premature-baby unit in 1947. It was Moncrief who recognised and developed the concept of daily parental visits to the ward, which he developed while at Great Ormond Street, well before the need for this became recognised, and with his ward sister, published an article on Hospital Visiting for Children in 1949.
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Harold Jeghers
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Harold Joseph Jeghers was an American internist, best known for his description of Peutz–Jeghers syndrome, a disorder of gastrointestinal polyps and hyperpigmentation of the mouth and lips. Life and scientific career Jeghers was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1904. In 1928, he graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Science in Biology. He graduated from medical school at Western Reserve University in 1932. He worked as a consultant at Boston City Hospital before being appointed chairman of the Medicine Department at Georgetown University in 1946. In 1956, he become a professor at Seton Hall College.
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Erich Urbach
1893 - 1946 (53 years)
Erich Urbach was an Austrian dermatologist from Vienna who, in conjunction with Camillo Wiethe, an otorhinolaryngologist, first described lipoid proteinosis. Biography As a lieutenant in the Austrian army during World War I, he was a member of a surgical group serving under professor Anton von Eiselsberg. In 1919 he obtained his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna. He worked in the internal medicine and dermatology departments at Vienna General Hospital and also at the Breslau skin clinic, where he was an assistant to Josef Jadassohn. From 1936 to 1938, he was head physician in th...
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Michael Oakeshott
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Michael Joseph Oakeshott FBA was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about the philosophies of history, religion, aesthetics, education, and law. Biography Early life and education Oakeshott was the son of Joseph Francis Oakeshott, a civil servant and member of the Fabian Society, and Frances Maude, daughter of George Thistle Hellicar, a well-off Islington silk-merchant. Though there is no evidence that he knew her, he was related by marriage to the women's rights activist Grace Oakeshott, and to the economist and social reformer Gilbert Slater.
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Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
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Claude Fortier
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Claude Fortier was a Canadian physiologist and expert on the pituitary gland. From 1974 to 1975, he was the president of the Royal Society of Canada. Honours In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.In 1980, he was awarded the Quebec government's Prix Marie-Victorin.In 1998, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
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Edward Conze
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Edward Conze, born Eberhard Julius Dietrich Conze was a scholar of Marxism and Buddhism, known primarily for his commentaries and translations of the Prajñāpāramitā literature. Biography Conze's parents, Dr. Ernst Conze and Adele Louise Charlotte Köttgen , both came from families involved in the textile industry in the region of Langenberg, Germany. Ernst had a doctorate in Law and served in the Foreign Office and later as a judge. Conze was born in London while his father was Vice Consul and thus entitled to British citizenship.
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George Hourani
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics. Biography George Hourani was born into a prosperous British family of Lebanese Christian extraction in Didsbury, Manchester. He was the fourth of six children, having three older sisters and two younger brothers. His brothers were Albert Hourani and Cecil Hourani.
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John Plamenatz
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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Zechariah Chafee
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
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Alfred Bielschowsky
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Alfred Bielschowsky was a German ophthalmologist. His specialty was physiology and pathology of the eye, particularly in regards to research of eye movement, space perception and diagnosis of oculomotor anomalies.
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Leon Carnovsky
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Leon Carnovsky was an American librarian and educator who focused much of his time to the survey of libraries in the United States and around the globe. Carnovsky was recognized by American Libraries as being one of the 100 most influential figures in Library and Information Sciences.
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Paul Anton Cibis
1911 - 1965 (54 years)
Paul Anton Cibis was a clinical ophthalmologist, surgeon and pioneer of modern vitreoretinal surgery. As part of Operation Paperclip Cibis came to the United States and performed research for the U.S. Air Force and studied the effects of atomic weapons testing on the eye. He was an internationally recognized expert in retinal detachment surgery and pioneered the use of liquid silicon for this procedure.
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Lawrence H. Gipson
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Lawrence Henry Gipson was an American historian, who won the 1950 Bancroft Prize and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for History for volumes of his magnum opus, the fifteen-volume history of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published 1936–70. He was a leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied the British Empire from the perspective of London, and generally praised the administrative efficiency and political fairness of the Empire.
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Leo H. Bartemeier
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Leo Henry Bartemeier was an American physician, psychoanalyst, and educator. He was President of the American Psychiatric Association. Biography Bartemeier was born on September 12, 1895, in Muscatine, Iowa, into a Roman Catholic family. He attended the local parochial school and then enrolled in St. Mary's College , a Jesuit center, and completed two years of college. He learned shorthand and typing when working for the Associated Press. He transferred and completed college at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, earning a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees, following acceptance of his thesis on animal research.
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Grete L. Bibring
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.
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John Marwick
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
John Marwick was a New Zealand palaeontologist and geologist. Early life and family Marwick was born near Oamaru, New Zealand, on 3 February 1891, the son of Hugh Marwick, and his wife, Jane née Cuthbert. While at Waitaki Boys' High School he helped to collect fossil shells and learned the beginnings of how to classify molluscs. He studied and taught at the University of Otago, and in 1912 gained an MA with first-class honours in with a thesis on geology. In 1915, he married Marion Ivy Mary Keys at Mosgiel. They had two sons and two daughters, all becoming science graduates.
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