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,
#14301
James McCune Smith
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
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Carl Joseph Begas
1794 - 1854 (60 years)
Carl Joseph Begas, or Karl Begas, was a German painter who played an important role in the transition from Romanticism to Realism. He was the first in a multi-generational "dynasty" of artists. Life and work His family came from Belgium, in the region near Verviers and Liège. He was the third child of Franz Anton Begasse , a judge, and his wife, Susanne née Hoffstadt. In 1802, they moved to Cologne, where he received his first artistic training from the miniaturist, . Later, he studied at the Lyceum in Bonn with Clemens August Philippart . In 1813, he went to Paris, where he became a student of Antoine-Jean Gros.
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John Alexander Stewart
1882 - 1948 (66 years)
John Alexander Stewart CIE MC was a classical scholar, colonial public servant, and professor of Burmese. Stewart was born in Strichen, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and educated at the University of Aberdeen where he graduated with first-class honours in classics in 1903. He passed the Indian civil service examination in 1904 and went to Myanmar in 1905. He worked for five years in the Settlement Department where he met J S Furnivall. During the First World War, and the Anglo-Afghan War, Stewart served for years with the Burma Sappers and Miners in Mesopotamia and Persia. He returned to Myanmar and was Commissioner of the Magwe Division in the 1930s.
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Hilda Lloyd
1891 - 1982 (91 years)
Dr. Dame Hilda Nora Lloyd, DBE was a British physician and surgeon. She was the first woman to be elected as president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. Born in Birmingham, the younger of two daughters, she attended King Edward VI High School, Edgbaston before entering Birmingham University .
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Lucius Aemilius Juncus
100 - Present (1926 years)
Lucius Aemilius Juncus was a senator of the Roman Empire, and a philosopher. He was consul suffect in the last three months of 127 with Sextus Julius Severus as his colleague. Life According to John Oliver, Juncus came of an equestrian background. There is a lead tessera found in Beirut attesting to a procurator of Syria named L. Aemilius Juncus , who has been identified with this suffect consul or the suffect consul of 179 who was exiled in 183. In either case, Juncus is likely not related to the patrician Aemilia gens, although he may be descended from a client or freedman of a member of tha...
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James Martin
1550 - 1584 (34 years)
James Martin was a Scottish philosophical writer and early Ramist. Life He was a native of Dunkeld, Perthshire, and is said to have been educated at the University of Oxford. A James Martin, whose college is not mentioned, commenced M.A. at Oxford on 31 March 1522.
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Sölvi Helgason
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Sölvi Helgason was an artist, philosopher and drifter in Iceland. If he hadn't been arrested, we might not know anything more about Sölvi than folk tales about his life. He never went to school, but was known to always be painting and writing. It is posited from his writings that he was mentally ill and suffered from paranoia; he was known to accuse people of stealing his work. He often referred to himself by made-up names as well as names of playwrights, artists, musicians and philosophers: Sókrates, Plato, Sólon, Melanchthon, Sölvi Spekingur, Sjúlvi, Húsfriður, Sjúlvi Hinn Vitri, Húmboldt, ...
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Carlo Cignani
1628 - 1719 (91 years)
Carlo Cignani was an Italian painter. His innovative style referred to as his 'new manner' introduced a reflective, intimate mood of painting and presaged the later pictures of Guido Reni and Guercino, as well as those of Simone Cantarini. This gentle manner marked a break with the more energetic style of earlier Bolognese classicism of the Bolognese School of painting.
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Alexander of Lycopolis
300 - Present (1726 years)
Alexander of Lycopolis was the writer of a short treatise, in twenty-six chapters, against the Manicheans . He says in the second chapter of this work that he derived his knowledge of Manes' teaching apo ton gnorimon .
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Arthur McGill
1926 - 1980 (54 years)
Arthur Chute McGill was a Canadian-born American theologian and philosopher. Biography Born in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, on August 7, 1926, McGill moved to Brookline, Massachusetts, later that year where he attended Rivers Country Day School, still extant today. He is mentioned in The Lustre of Our Country The American Experience of Religious Freedom, by prominent Senior Circuit Judge John T. Noonan Jr. The two men prayed and sung Protestant hymns together at the school, and Noonan refers to him as a boyhood rival: "... my River's classmate, Arthur Chute McGill, who later became a professor at Harvard Divinity School.
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Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus
113 - 200 (87 years)
Gnaeus Claudius Severus Arabianus was a senator and philosopher who lived in the Roman Empire. Life Severus was the son of the consul and first Roman Governor of Arabia Petraea, Gaius Claudius Severus, by an unnamed mother. Severus was of Pontian Greek descent. He was born and raised in Pompeiopolis, a city in the Roman province of Galatia.
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David Martin
1737 - 1797 (60 years)
David Martin was a Scottish painter and engraver. Born in Fife, he studied in Italy and England, before gaining a reputation as a portrait painter. Early life Born in Anstruther Easter, he was the first of the five children of John Martin , Anstruther Easter's parish schoolmaster, and his second wife, Mary Boyack .
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Petre P. Negulescu
1872 - 1951 (79 years)
Petre Paul Negulescu was a Romanian philosopher and conservative politician, known as a disciple and continuator of Titu Maiorescu. Affiliated with Maiorescu's Junimea society from his early twenties, he debuted as a positivist and monist, attempting to reconcile art for art's sake with an evolutionist philosophy of culture. He was a lecturer and tenured professor at the University of Iași, where he promoted the Junimist lobby against left-wing competitors, and formalized his links with the Conservative Party in 1901. From 1910, he taught at the University of Bucharest, publishing works on Re...
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Hawley Harvey Crippen
1862 - 1910 (48 years)
Hawley Harvey Crippen , colloquially known as Dr. Crippen, was an American homeopath, ear and eye specialist and medicine dispenser who was hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, for the murder of his wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen. He was one of the first criminals to be captured with the aid of wireless telegraphy.
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Bob Fosse
1927 - 1987 (60 years)
Robert Louis Fosse was an American actor, choreographer, dancer, and film and stage director. He directed and choreographed musical works on stage and screen, including the stage musicals The Pajama Game , Damn Yankees , How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying , Sweet Charity , Pippin , and Chicago . He directed the films Sweet Charity , Cabaret , Lenny , All That Jazz , and Star 80 .
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Erwin Bälz
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Erwin Otto Eduard von Bälz , often simply known as Erwin Bälz without the noble "von" particle, was a German internist, anthropologist, and personal physician to the Japanese Imperial Family and cofounder of modern western medicine in Japan.
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Georg Theodor August Gaffky
1850 - 1918 (68 years)
Georg Theodor August Gaffky was a Hanover-born bacteriologist best known for identifying bacillus salmonella typhi as the cause of typhoid disease in 1884. Early life and career Gaffky's parents were the shipping agent Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Gaffky, and Emma Schumacher. His medical studies at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin were completed in 1873 after an interruption by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. His dissertation postulated a relationship between lead poisoning and kidney disease. He worked as an assistant at the Berlin Charité hospital and passed the state medical exams in 1875.
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Isaac Abarbanel
1437 - 1508 (71 years)
Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel , commonly referred to as Abarbanel , also spelled Abravanel, Avravanel, or Abrabanel, was a Portuguese Jewish statesman, philosopher, Bible commentator, and financier. Name Some debate exists over whether his last name should be pronounced Abarbanel or Abravanel. The traditional pronunciation is Abarbanel. Modern scholarly literature, since Graetz and Baer, has most commonly used Abravanel, but his own son Judah insisted on Abarbanel, and Sefer HaTishbi by Elijah Levita, who was a nearby contemporary, twice vowels the name as Abarbinel .
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Rudolf Kaltenbach
1842 - 1893 (51 years)
Rudolf Kaltenbach was a German gynecologist who was a native of Freiburg im Breisgau. In 1865 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, and afterwards trained under Johann von Dumreicher at the surgical hospital in Vienna. From 1867 to 1873 he was an assistant to Alfred Hegar in Freiburg, and was later a professor of gynecology and obstetrics at the University of Giessen. In 1887 he became an OB/GYN professor at Halle, where he succeeded Robert Michaelis von Olshausen . Kaltenbach served in the military during the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian Wars.
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Mordaunt Hall
1878 - 1973 (95 years)
Mordaunt Hall was the first regularly assigned motion picture critic for The New York Times, working from October 1924 to September 1934. His writing style was described in his Times obituary as "chatty, irreverent, and not particularly analytical. […] The interest of other critics in analyzing cinematographic techniques was not for him."
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George Skene
1741 - Present (285 years)
Prof George Skene of Rubislaw was an 18th-century Scottish physician who co-founded the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. Life He was born in Rubislaw House in Aberdeen in 1741 the son of Francis Skene, Regent of Marischal College and great grandson of George Skene, Provost of Aberdeen.
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Walter Mackenzie
1909 - 1978 (69 years)
Walter Campbell Mackenzie was a Canadian surgeon and academic. Born in Glace Bay, Cape Breton, Mackenzie received his BSc in 1927 and MD in 1932 from Dalhousie University and was honoured as one of two Malcolm Honour Society Medal winners. He began surgery training at McGill University then moved to the Mayo Clinic in 1933 to complete his MSc. From 1940 to 1945 served in the Royal Canadian Navy where he was promoted to surgeon-commander.
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Juan de Mal Lara
1524 - 1571 (47 years)
Juan de Mal Lara was a Spanish humanist, poet, playwright and paremiologue at the University of Seville during the period of the Spanish Renaissance in the reign of Philip II of Spain. Biography Mal Lara studied Latin and Greek grammar at the College of San Miguel in Sevilla. His teacher was Pedro Fernandez de Castilleja and later Mal Lara taught humanities to Mateo Alemán. It was a decade later, after studying at the University of Salamanca, where he was student of Hernán Núñez one of classmates was Francisco Sánchez de las Brozas, known as the "Brocense"; later he went to Valencia and Barcelona, where he completed his studies with Francisco Escobar before returning again to Salamanca.
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Laura Bentivolgio Davia
1689 - Present (337 years)
Laura Bentivoglio Davia was an Italian aristocratic philosopher engaged in the pursuit of knowledge and natural philosophy. She was known primarily for creating relationships with leading natural philosophers associated with the University of Bologna and the Istituto delle Scienze .
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Walter Channing
1786 - 1876 (90 years)
Walter Channing was an American physician and professor of medicine. He was the brother of preacher William Ellery Channing and of fellow Harvard professor , Edward Tyrrel Channing. He was also the father of the poet William Ellery Channing. He was married to Eliza Wainwright Channing from 1831 until her death in 1834.
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Thomas Reid
Thomas Reid was a Scottish humanist and philosopher who became Latin secretary to King James VI and I. Life He was second son of James Reid, minister of Banchory Ternan, Kincardineshire, a cadet of the Pitfoddels family. Alexander Reid the surgeon, was a younger brother. Thomas was educated at the grammar school, Aberdeen, and at Marischal College and University, where he appears to have graduated M.A. about 1600. In 1602 he was appointed to a mastership in the grammar school, which he resigned in the following year on being chosen one of the regents in Marischal College.
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Jovita Idar
1885 - 1946 (61 years)
Jovita Idar Vivero was an American journalist, teacher, political activist, and civil rights worker who championed the cause of Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants. Against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution, which lasted a decade from 1910 through 1920, she worked for a series of newspapers, using her writing to work towards making a meaningful and effective change. She began her career in journalism at La Crónica, her father's newspaper in Laredo, Texas, her hometown.
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Arthur Thomson
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Sir Arthur Peregrine Thomson MC, LLD, MD, FRCP was a British physician. Born in British Guiana the son of Arthur Henry Thomson, a colonial civil servant, he was educated at Dulwich College and Birmingham University, where he graduated in 1915 with first class honours in medicine, surgery and midwifery. He was also awarded the gold medal in clinical medicine, the Russell Memorial Prize, and was both Queen's and Ingleby Scholar.
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Theodor von Dusch
1824 - 1890 (66 years)
Theodor von Dusch was a German physician who was a native of Karlsruhe. He was the son of Baden statesman Alexander von Dusch . He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he had as instructors Jacob Henle , Karl von Pfeufer and Maximilian Joseph von Chelius . He earned his doctorate in 1847, and was habilitated for medicine in 1854. In 1870 he became professor and director of the policlinic at Heidelberg.
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Anton Kolig
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
Anton Kolig was an Austrian expressionist painter. Biography Anton Kolig was born in Neutitschein as the son of salon artist Ferdinant Kolig. He studied at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts with Oscar Kokoschka in 1904–1907, then from 1907 he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna under the guidance of Heinrich Lefler and Alois Delug.
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Emilia Rensi
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Emilia Rensi was an Italian philosopher, free thinker, writer and teacher. She wrote for anarchist and progressive magazines, such as Flavia Steno's La Chiosa, Volontà , Umanità Nova and Franco Leggio's Sicilia Libertaria . She began publishing books on social, cultural and ethical subjects from the late 1960s onwards.
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Qadi Husayn Maybudi
Qadi Kamal al-Din Husayn ibn Mu'in al-Din Ali Maybudi , better known as Qadi Husayn Maybudi , was an Iranian scholar and qadi in the city of Yazd under the Aq Qoyunlu. He was executed in 1504 after having participated in a failed revolt against the Safavid shah Ismail I .
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Theodora Kimball Hubbard
1887 - 1935 (48 years)
Theodora Kimball Hubbard was the first librarian of the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture, and a contemporary of and collaborator with many significant figures in landscape architecture in expanding the body of knowledge in that subject area.
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Otto Küstner
1849 - 1931 (82 years)
Otto Ernst Küstner was a German gynecologist. Initially he studied medicine in Leipzig and Berlin, and during the Franco-Prussian War was a volunteer with the Garde-Füsilier-Regiment. Afterwards, he continued his studies at the University of Halle, obtaining his doctorate in 1873. He then furthered his education in Vienna, later returning to Halle as an assistant in the polyclinic of Theodor Weber and also in the obstetrics institute under Robert Michaelis von Olshausen.
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Eustachio Divini
1610 - 1685 (75 years)
Eustachio Divini was an Italian manufacturer and experimenter of optical instruments for scientific use in Rome. The origins Eustachio was born on 4 October 1610 in San Severino Marche, from the illustrious Divini's family. At the age of 4 his mother, Virginia Saracini, died and 7 years later his father, Tardozzo Divini, also died, so his brothers Vincenzo and Cipriano looked after him and his basic education before moving to Rome. At that time Divini was initiated into the military career but after a severe disease in 1629 he had to give up. After that he joined again his brothers.
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Themista of Lampsacus
300 BC - 260 BC (40 years)
Themista of Lampsacus , the wife of Leonteus, was a student of Epicurus, early in the 3rd century BC. Epicurus' school was unusual in the 3rd century, in that it allowed women to attend, and we also hear of Leontion attending Epicurus' school around the same time. Cicero ridicules Epicurus for writing "countless volumes in praise of Themista," instead of more worthy men such as Miltiades, Themistocles or Epaminondas. Themista and Leonteus named their son Epicurus.
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Leonteus of Lampsacus
301 BC - 201 BC (100 years)
Leonteus of Lampsacus was a pupil of Epicurus early in the 3rd century BCE. He was the husband of Themista, who also attended Epicurus' school. Such was the esteem in which they held Epicurus that they named their son after him.
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Liang Boqiang
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Liang Boqiang 梁伯强 Chinese pathologist, member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, pioneer pathologist in China.
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Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider
1891 - 1990 (99 years)
Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider was a German-Australian physicist and philosopher. She is best known for her collaboration and correspondence with physicists Albert Einstein, Max von Laue, and Max Planck. Rosenthal-Schneider earned a PhD in philosophy in 1920 at the University of Berlin, where she first met Albert Einstein. After leaving Nazi Germany and emigrating to Australia in 1938, she became a tutor in the German department at the University of Sydney in 1945 and taught history and philosophy of science. In the 1940s and 1950s, she exchanged a series of letters with Albert Einstein about philo...
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Gil Jae
1353 - 1419 (66 years)
Gil Jae or Kil Jae was a Korean scholar-official of the Goryeo period then of the Joseon period. Works Yaeun jip Yaeun eunhaeng seupyu Yaeun sokjip See also Jeong Mong-juJeong Do-jeonKwon GeunJeong Inji
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James Dudley Fooshe
1844 - 1940 (96 years)
James Dudley Fooshe , known as J. D. Fooshe, was a soldier, author, farmer, philosopher, Methodist churchman and one of the last surviving Confederate veterans in Richmond Co., Georgia. He was a prolific writer of articles that dealt with reminiscences of the American Civil War and his philosophy of religion, social conduct and political economy.
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Walter C. Lowdermilk
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Walter Clay Lowdermilk was a soil conservationist who worked in countries throughout the world to help protect and reclaim lands in order to better feed their population. Lowdermilk worked with the Belgian Relief Effort after World War I, in China in the 1920s to help avert famine, with the Soil Conservation Service, in fascist Italy in the 1930s, in the United States, and in Mandatory Palestine planning land and water use.
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Gilbert Barling
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Sir Harry Gilbert Barling, 1st Baronet was an English surgeon. Life Barling was born at Newnham on Severn, Gloucestershire and educated at a boarding school at Weston, near Bath. He went to Birmingham in 1875 at the age of 20, to take his matriculation exam at Queen's College, Birmingham , before going on to study at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London and culminating in his admittance to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1879, becoming a Fellow in 1881. It was at this time he was appointed resident pathologist at the General Hospital which would start an association lasting for 60 years. He became President of the hospital in 1925.
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Robert Edmund Scoresby-Jackson
1833 - 1867 (34 years)
Robert Edmund Scoresby-Jackson FRSE FRCPE FRCSE was a short-lived but influential British physician and historian. He specialised in the effects of climate upon health. Life He was born Robert Edmund Jackson on 12 November 1833 in Whitby on the Yorkshire coast. He was the son of Captain Thomas Jackson , a merchant mariner and shipowner, and his wife Arabella Scoresby , sister of Rev William Scoresby. Both his parents outlived him. He adopted the name Scoresby-Jackson on the death of his uncle.
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William Adam
1796 - 1881 (85 years)
William Adam was a British Baptist minister, missionary, abolitionist and Harvard professor. Scotland and India Adam was born in Dunfermline in Scotland, and it was after being inspired by the churchman Thomas Chalmers that he decided to go to India. He arranged to be educated at the Baptist College in Bristol and to the University of Glasgow. Adam volunteered to become a missionary and by 1818 he was working hard north of Calcutta trying to master Sanskrit and Bengali. Having learned these he was engaged in creating a translation of the new testament in Bengali. He worked with Ram Mohan Roy ...
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Friedrich Kraus
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Friedrich Kraus was an Austrian internist. He was born in Bodenbach, Bohemia and died in Berlin. He is remembered for his achievements in the field of electrocardiography and his work in colloid chemistry.
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Michael J. Adams
1930 - 1967 (37 years)
Michael James Adams was an American aviator, aeronautical engineer, and USAF astronaut. He was one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA.
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Maciej Miechowita
1457 - 1523 (66 years)
Maciej Miechowita was a Polish renaissance scholar, professor of Jagiellonian University, historian, chronicler, geographer, medical doctor , alchemist, astrologer and canon in Kraków. Life He studied at the Jagiellonian University , obtaining his master's degree in 1479. Between 1480-1485 he studied abroad. Upon his return to the country, he became a professor at the Jagiellonian University, where he served as a rector eight times , and also twice as a deputy chancellor of the Academia.
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George Pickering
1904 - 1980 (76 years)
Sir George White Pickering, FRS was an English medical doctor and academic. Biography Pickering was Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford from 1956 to 1968, and Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1968 to 1975.
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Charles Hunter Stewart
1854 - Present (172 years)
Charles Hunter Stewart was a Scottish physician and public health expert. Born in Edinburgh, Stewart studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. In 1884 he became an assistant at the Laboratory of Public Health in Edinburgh under Henry Littlejohn.
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