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,
#14351
M. F. Cleugh
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
M.F. Cleugh was a philosopher and educationalist. For many years she worked at the University of London in their Education department. On retirement she went to live in Shropshire. She is most known for her 1936 PhD work The problem of time, with special reference to its importance for modern thought also at the University of London, which was published in 1937 by Methuen and which has been reprinted several times. Her later work took a psychological slant on the education of those with particular difficulties... the old, the mature or the "slow" learners. She led a one-year course for teach...
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Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben
1819 - 1895 (76 years)
Heinrich Adolf von Bardeleben was a German surgeon born in Frankfurt . He studied medicine at the Universities of Heidelberg, Giessen, Paris and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in 1841 with a thesis on the construction of ductless glands. In 1848 he became an associate professor at Giessen followed by an appointment as a full professor of surgery at the University of Greifswald . In 1868 he returned to Berlin, where he worked at the Charité until his death on 24 September 1895. he was rector of the University of Berlin in 1876–1877.
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Richard von Volkmann
1830 - 1889 (59 years)
Richard von Volkmann was a prominent German surgeon and author of poetry and fiction. Some of his works were illustrated by his son, Hans, a well known artist. Biography He was born in Leipzig on 17 August 1830, the son of physiologist A.W. Volkmann. Richard entered medical school in Berlin and graduated in 1854. In 1867 he was appointed Professor of Surgery and Director of the Surgical Clinic at Halle where he remained until retirement. He was one of the most prominent surgeons of his day. He died in Jena.
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Georges de La Tour
1593 - 1652 (59 years)
Georges de La Tour was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648. He painted mostly religious chiaroscuro scenes lit by candlelight.
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Robert Lewins
1817 - 1895 (78 years)
Robert Lewins was a British army surgeon and philosopher. He is best known for his collaboration with Constance Naden on their philosophical theory called hylo-idealism. Army career Robert Lewins was a Surgeon Lieutenant Colonel who served with the 63rd Regiment in the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny among other campaigns. According to his obituary in the British Medical Journal, Lewins was also 'in the expedition to the north of China in 1865 in charge of the hospital ship Mauritius, and was present at the capture of the Taku Forts, receiving the medal'.
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Grigore T. Popa
1892 - 1948 (56 years)
Grigore T. Popa was a Romanian physician and public intellectual. Of lowly peasant origin, he managed to obtain a university education and become a professor at two of his country's leading universities. An anatomist by specialty, Popa worked on popularizing modern science, reforming the medical and higher education systems, and, in war hospitals, as a decorated and publicly acclaimed practitioner. His work in endocrinology and neuromorphology was valued abroad, while at home he helped train a generation of leading doctors.
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Joachim Yahalom
#14358
Abu Hatim Ahmad ibn Hamdan al-Razi
801 - 933 (132 years)
Abū Ḥātim Aḥmad ibn Ḥamdān al-Rāzī was a Persian Ismaili philosopher of the 9th century, who died in 322 AH . He was also the Da'i al-du'at of Ray and the leader of the Ismaili da'wah in Central Persia.
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Stephen Alfred Forbes
1844 - 1930 (86 years)
Stephen Alfred Forbes was the first chief of the Illinois Natural History Survey, a founder of aquatic ecosystem science and a dominant figure in the rise of American ecology. His publications are striking for their merger of extensive field observations with conceptual insights. Forbes believed that ecological knowledge was fundamental for human well being. Forbes was important to the development of ecological theory. He was acknowledged by the National Academy of Sciences as "the founder of the science of ecology in the United States".
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Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
1827 - 1875 (48 years)
Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux was a French sculptor and painter during the Second Empire under Napoleon III. Life Born in Valenciennes, Nord, son of a mason, his early studies were under François Rude. Carpeaux entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1844 and won the Prix de Rome in 1854, and moving to Rome to find inspiration, he there studied the works of Michelangelo, Donatello and Verrocchio. Staying in Rome from 1854 to 1861, he obtained a taste for movement and spontaneity, which he joined with the great principles of baroque art. Carpeaux sought real life subjects in the streets and broke with t...
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Pieter Brueghel the Younger
1564 - 1638 (74 years)
Pieter Brueghel the Younger was a Flemish painter known for numerous copies after his father Pieter Bruegel the Elder's work, as well as original compositions and Bruegelian pastiches. The large output of his studio , which produced for the local and export market, contributed to the international spread of his father's imagery.
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Allen Foster
#14363
Frederic Leighton
1830 - 1896 (66 years)
Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, , known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British Victorian painter, draughtsman, and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.
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Yuriy Drohobych
1450 - 1494 (44 years)
Yuriy Drohobych or Yuriy Kotermak was a Ruthenian philosopher, astronomer, writer, medical doctor, rector of the University of Bologna, and professor of Kraków Academy, and the first publisher of a Church Slavonic printed text. He is the author of Iudicium Pronosticon Anni 1483 Currentis.
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Uicheon
1055 - 1101 (46 years)
Uicheon was a Korean Royal Prince and influential Korean Buddhist scholar-monk during the Goryeo period . He was the fourth son of King Munjong and Queen Inye from the Incheon Yi clan and the younger brother of Sunjong, Seonjong, and Sukjong.
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Jarava Lal Mehta
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Jarava Lal Mehta was an Indian philosopher, and expert on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. He was a professor at the Central Hindu College of Banaras Hindu University, Center for the Study of World Religions of Harvard Divinity School and the University of Hawaiʻi .
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Arthur Rook
#14368
Arthur Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder
1890 - 1967 (77 years)
Marshal of the Royal Air Force Arthur William Tedder, 1st Baron Tedder, was a Scottish senior Royal Air Force commander. He was a pilot and squadron commander in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and he went on to serve as a senior officer in the Royal Air Force during the inter-war years when he served in Turkey, Great Britain and the Far East.
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Eric Walten
1663 - 1697 (34 years)
Eric Walten was a Dutch Enlightenment thinker and pamphleteer, notably accused of blasphemy and of secretly following the philosophical thinking of Benedict Spinoza in the 1690s. Little information survives of Walten's life. He told the court that he was born in Ham, Munsterland, now in Germany. The Dutch scholar Wiep van Bunge suggests that Walten may have been of English descent. He lived in Utrecht until 1685, and from 1688 in The Hague and Rotterdam.
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John Rutherford
1695 - 1779 (84 years)
John Rutherford was a Scottish physician and professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School. He is the father of the scientist Daniel Rutherford and the grandfather of the writer Walter Scott.
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Louis-Marie Régis
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Louis-Marie Régis was a Canadian philosopher, medievalist, and Dominican priest. He was the founder of the Institute for Medieval Studies in 1942 and served as its director from 1943 until 1952. In 1971 he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.
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Walter Stewart Scacchi
#14373
Herbert Mayo
1796 - 1852 (56 years)
Herbert Mayo, M.D. , was a British physiologist, anatomist and medical writer. Biography Mayo was born in Queen Anne Street, London, the third son of John Mayo. He entered Middlesex Hospital as a surgical pupil on 17 May 1814, and was a pupil of Sir Charles Bell . He also studied at the Leyden University, where he graduated with a D.M. degree. He became house-surgeon at Middlesex Hospital in 1818, and M.R.C.S. in 1819.
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Léon Cogniet
1794 - 1880 (86 years)
Léon Cogniet was a French history and portrait painter. He is probably best remembered as a teacher, with more than one hundred notable students. Biography He was born in Paris. His father was a painter and wallpaper designer. In 1812, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-arts, where he studied with Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. He also worked in the studios of Jean-Victor Bertin. After failing an attempt to win the Prix de Rome in 1816, he won the following year with his depiction of Helen Rescued by Castor and Pollux and received a stipend to study at the French Academy in Rome until 1822. Before l...
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Thomas Prof. Dr. Schwarz
#14376
Choe Chiwon
857 - 901 (44 years)
Choe Chiwon was a Korean philosopher and poet of the late medieval Unified Silla period . He studied for many years in Tang China, passed the Tang imperial examination, and rose to the high office there before returning to Silla, where he made ultimately futile attempts to reform the governmental apparatus of a declining Silla state.
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Juana Inés de la Cruz
1651 - 1695 (44 years)
Juana de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , was a colonial Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, as well as a Hieronymite nun, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. As a Spanish-criolla from the New Spain, she was among the main American-born contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "el Inca", and presently considered one of the most important female authors in Spanish language and Mexico's literary history.
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Luigi Gregori
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Luigi Gregori was an Italian artist who worked at the Vatican and served as artist in residence and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Biography He was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1819, where at the age of fourteen he became apprentice of the Bolognese artist Giovanni Battista Frulli. There, he studied art of the antiquity as well as local artists, including the Carracci and Guido Reni. Frulli died in 1837, and Gregori then worked for Prince Pignatelli of Monteleone, and he traveled throughout Italy, including studying in Milan and Naples. In 1840, he moved to Rome and enrolled at the Accademia di San Luca and studied under Tommaso Minardi.
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Michael Foster
1903 - 1959 (56 years)
Michael Beresford Foster was a tutor in philosophy of Oxford University's Christ Church. For a period up until his death he was the chairman of the British Student Christian Movement. He was one of A. J. Ayer's tutors at Oxford, but their relationship is remembered more as a source of strained feelings than of scholarly fellowship. His disparate works on political science and various doctrines of Christianity have influenced philosophers such as George Grant, who had, when writing his doctoral thesis, in fact visited with Foster in England.
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Johanna Charlotte Unzer
1725 - 1782 (57 years)
Johanna Charlotte Unzer , was a German writer and philosopher, famed for her progressive views on women's education. She was awarded the imperial Dichterkrone in 1753. She is known for her anacreontic poetry.
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José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull was a Spanish priest, canon of the Cathedral of Cordoba, theologian and philosopher. Gallegos studied at the General and Technical Institute of Seville and later at the Theological Seminary. Upon completion of basic academic training, he matriculated to the Seminary of Madrid to continue his religious training, attending the Pontifical University of Toledo where he graduated in theology in 1920. He later earned his doctorate in the Pontificia Universidad de Sevilla.
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John L. Ziegler
#14383
Frederik van Leenhof
1647 - 1715 (68 years)
Frederik van Leenhof was a Dutch pastor and philosopher active in Zwolle, who caused an international controversy because of his Spinozist work Heaven on Earth . This controversy is extensively discussed in Jonathan Israel's 2001 book Radical Enlightenment.
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Giulio Cesare la Galla
1571 - 1624 (53 years)
Giulio Cesare la Galla was a professor of philosophy at the Collegio Romano in Italy. Biography He was born in Padula, at that time part of the Kingdom of Naples. Lagalla was educated in philosophy and medicine. He became the official physician of the papal galleys for a period, then came to Rome to lecture in natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano. He apparently became the leading peripatetic of the city, and was counted among the opponents of the Copernican heliocentric theory.
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Carl Anton Ewald
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Carl Anton Ewald was a German gastroenterologist who was a native of Berlin. He was the brother of physiologist Ernst Julius Richard Ewald . In 1870, he earned his medical doctorate in Berlin, and subsequently became an assistant to pathologist Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs . In 1888, he was appointed head physician of the department of internal medicine at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. Carl Ewald was a pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, and was a catalyst in making Augusta Hospital a center for pathological studies of digestion. Ewald is remembered for investigations of gastric secretions, and the introduction of intubation as a medical aid in gastric analysis.
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Milton J. Rosenau
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Milton Joseph Rosenau was an American public health official and professor who was influential in the early twentieth century. Early life Milton Joseph Rosenau was born in 1869 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Nathan Rosenau and Mathilde Blitz, German Jewish emigrants. After obtaining his degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1889, he joined the United States Marine Hospital Service. After working for a few years under the supervision of Joseph Kinyoun, Rosenau began his ascent into positions of greater authority.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Paul Reclus
1847 - 1914 (67 years)
Jean Jacques Paul Reclus was a French physician specializing in surgery. The Reclus' disease is named after him. He was the son of pastor Jacques Reclus and brother of Élie, Élisée, Onésime and Armand Reclus.
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Parker Cleaveland
1780 - 1858 (78 years)
Parker Cleaveland was an American geologist and mineralogist, born in Rowley, Massachusetts. He was identified with the early progress of the natural sciences. After having attending the Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard in 1799, was tutor in mathematics there from 1803 to 1805, was chosen professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and lecturer on chemistry and mineralogy in Bowdoin College, a position which he retained until his death, although many professorships in other colleges and the presidency of his own were offered to him. He was elected an Ass...
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Jonathan Campbell Meakins
1882 - 1959 (77 years)
Jonathan Campbell Meakins was a Canadian physician and medical author and member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In authorship he is known as J. C. Meakins. He published over 160 works, including the textbook The Practice of Medicine. He was also the founder and first president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He was the Dean of the McGill University's Faculty of Medicine from 1941-1948.
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Richard Rufus of Cornwall
Richard Rufus was a Cornish Franciscan scholastic philosopher and theologian. Life Richard Rufus who studied at Paris and at Oxford starting from the 1220s. He became a Franciscan around 1230. Rufus was one of the first medieval philosophers to write on Aristotle and his commentaries are the earliest known among those which have survived. He also wrote influential commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences. Rufus was influenced by Robert Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, Richard Fishacre, and Johannes Philoponus, and in turn influenced Bonaventure and Franciscus Meyronnes. Roger Bacon was a fe...
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John Eric Erichsen
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Sir John Eric Erichsen, 1st Baronet was a Danish-born British surgeon. Early life Erichsen was born in Copenhagen, the son of Eric Erichsen, a member of a well-known Danish banking family. He attended Mansion house school, Hammersmith.
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Jack Black
1871 - 1932 (61 years)
Jack Black was a Canadian-born American hobo and professional burglar. Black is best known for his autobiography You Can't Win , describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight, but it is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years as a travelling criminal, and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium fiend. He gained fame as a prison reformer, writer and playwright.
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Ignác Jan Hanuš
1812 - 1869 (57 years)
Ignác Jan Hanuš or, in German, Ignaz Johann Hanusch was a Czech philosopher and librarian. Life and work He studied at the grammar school in Staré Město, where one of his teachers was Josef Jungmann. This encounter created an interest in philosophy, which he studied at Charles University, graduating in 1831. In order to have more time for contemplation, he entered the Order of the Premonstratensians at Strahov Monastery. This experience failed to meet his expectations, so he left to study law at the University of Vienna. After 1835, he worked there as an adjunct. A year later, he received his doctorate and became a full Professor at the University of Lemberg; aged only twenty-four.
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Henri Wallon
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist , neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon. Career Henri Wallon conducted two parallel careers. As a convinced Marxist, he took up political duties while carrying out scientific work in the field of developmental psychology.
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Alessandro Piccolomini
1508 - 1579 (71 years)
Alessandro Piccolomini was an Italian humanist, astronomer and philosopher from Siena, who promoted the popularization in the vernacular of Latin and Greek scientific and philosophical treatises. His early works include Il Dialogo della bella creanza delle donne, o Raffaella and the comedies Amor costante, and Alessandro, which were sponsored and produced by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, of which he was a member and an official. Much of his literary production consisted of translations from the Classics, of which Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses and book VI of the Aeneid are early examples.
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Apollonius of Tyre
50 BC - Present (2076 years)
Apollonius of Tyre , was a Stoic philosopher. Strabo describes him as living "a little before my time," and says he wrote "a tabulated account of the philosophers of the school of Zeno and of their books," and which appears to have been a short survey of the philosophers and their writings from the time of Zeno. He is mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius as the author of a work on Zeno. Whether this Apollonius is the same as the one who wrote a work on female philosophers, or as the author of the chronological work of which Stephanus of Byzantium quotes the fourth book, is uncertain.
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Marcus Musurus
1470 - 1517 (47 years)
Marcus Musurus was a Greek scholar and philosopher born in Candia, Venetian Crete . Life The son of a rich merchant, Musurus became at an early age a pupil of Janus Lascaris in Venice. In 1505, Musurus was made professor of Greek language at the University of Padua. Erasmus, who had attended his lectures there, testifies to his knowledge of Latin. However, when the university was closed in 1509 during the War of the League of Cambrai, he returned to Venice where he filled a similar post.
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Hermann Heimpel
#14400
Charles Patin
1633 - 1693 (60 years)
Charles Patin was a French physician and numismatist. He was the son of Guy Patin, dean of the school of medicine in Paris, and a friend of Jacob Spon. Trained first by his father, he obtained a law degree and then chose to study medicine. He became best known for his numismatic work. He married the moralist author Madeleine Patin: their daughter Gabrielle-Charlotte Patin became a painter and numismatist, and their daughter Charlotte-Catherine Patin became a writer.
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