Search People Result | Academic Influence

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).

Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#14401

Emil Leon Post

1897 - 1954 (57 years)

Emil Leon Post was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Life Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Governorate, Congress Poland, Russian Empire into a Polish-Jewish family that immigrated to New York City in May 1904. His parents were Arnold and Pearl Post.

#14402

Roy Wood Sellars

1880 - 1973 (93 years)

Roy Wood Sellars was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic emergent evolution . Sellars received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he taught for over 40 years. He is the father of Wilfrid Sellars.

#14403

John Herman Randall Jr.

1899 - 1980 (81 years)

John Herman Randall Jr. was an American philosopher, New Thought author, and educator. Early life Randall was born on February 14, 1899, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The son of John Herman Randall Sr., a Baptist minister, he obtained his A.B. from Columbia University in 1918. He obtained an A.M. the following year and a PhD in 1922, with a dissertation titled "The Problem of Group Responsibility to Society". He was influenced by a close group of friends, including James Gutmann, Horace Fries, Herbert Schneider and Irwin Edman. Other influences were his teacher John Dewey, Frederick J. E. Woodbridge, John J.

#14404

Sadaf Farooqi

1900 - Present (126 years)

Ismaa Sadaf Farooqi is a Wellcome Trust Senior Research fellow in Clinical Science, professor of Metabolism and Medicine at the University of Cambridge and a consultant physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge, UK.

#14405

Marc Cantin

1933 - 1990 (57 years)

Marc Cantin was a Canadian Québécois doctor and professor. His studies were completed at Laval University in Quebec and at the University of Chicago. He was a professor at the University of Montreal and at McGill University and worked with the doctor Hans Selye. In 1980, he began to direct the hypertension research group at the Institute of clinical research at Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

#14406

Michael Moravcsik

1928 - 1989 (61 years)

Michael Julius Alexander Moravcsik was a Hungarian-born American theoretical high energy physicist whose areas of research included the two nucleon system, particle spin symmetries. He also made important contributions to the practice and study of science policy in developing nations, scientific methodology, and scientometrics , especially the study of citation and citation indices.

#14407

Douglas Vernon Hubble

1900 - 1981 (81 years)

Sir Douglas Vernon Hubble was a paediatric endocrinologist, general practitioner, and professor of paediatrics and dean of medicine at the University of Birmingham. Hubble was principally notable for research into paediatric endocrinology and publishing a number of papers on the subject, which gave him a national reputation.

#14408

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton

1907 - 1957 (50 years)

Joseph Gilbert Hamilton was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, which included the use of unsuspecting human subjects.

#14409

Reidar Fauske Sognnaes

1911 - 1984 (73 years)

Reidar Sognnaes was Dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, founding Dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry and scholar in the field of oral pathology. Biography Reidar Fauske Sognnaes was born in Bergen, Norway. Sognnæs grew up in Bergen and took his final exams at Tanks gymnas in 1931. He took the first part of dental education in Leipzig, and concluded with an examination at the Norwegian Dental School in 1936. He participated in a Norwegian scientific expedition to Tristan da Cunha during 1937-38. Sognnaes came to America in 1938 as an intern at the Forsyth Dental Infirmary for Children in Boston.

#14410

William C. Stadie

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

William Christopher Stadie was a researcher, a Diabetes specialist. He was John Herr Musser Emeritus Professor of Research Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. He also served as an editor of the Diabetes, the journal of the American Diabetes Association. Other distinctions included: honorary degree of the University of Pennsylvania, the Phillips Medal of the American College of Physicians , the Kober Medal for 1955 from the Association of American Physicians and the Banting Medal of the American Diabetes Association. He was also elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society .

#14411

Robert Maynard Hutchins

Robert Maynard Hutchins

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Robert Maynard Hutchins was an American educational philosopher. He was president and chancellor of the University of Chicago, and earlier dean of Yale Law School . His first wife was the novelist Maude Hutchins. Although his father and grandfather were both Presbyterian ministerss, Hutchins became one of the most influential members of the school of secular perennialism.

#14412

Priscilla White

1900 - 1989 (89 years)

Priscilla White was a pioneer in the treatment of diabetes during pregnancy and type 1 diabetes. She was also a founding member of the Joslin Diabetes Center. Biography White was born in Boston, Massachusetts but while she was a baby her parents divorced and she was living in Woolaston. She graduated from Quincy High School in Massachiusetts. She attended Radcliffe College before transferring to Tufts University Medical School, where she graduated third in her class in the year 1923. At the time, Harvard Medical School did not accept women. She served her internship at Worcester Memorial Hos...

#14413

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...

#14414

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.

#14415

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...

#14416

Erwin Ackerknecht

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.

#14417

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.

#14418

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...

#14419

Kenneth Burke

1897 - 1993 (96 years)

Kenneth Duva Burke was an American literary theorist, as well as poet, essayist, and novelist, who wrote on 20th-century philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, and rhetorical theory. As a literary theorist, Burke was best known for his analyses based on the nature of knowledge. Further, he was one of the first individuals to stray from more traditional rhetoric and view literature as "symbolic action."

#14420

Eugene Floyd DuBois

1882 - 1959 (77 years)

Eugene Floyd DuBois was an American physician and teacher, remembered for his work on the physiology of fever and heat production. His grandmother Mary Ann Delafield DuBois founded a hospital in New York City in 1854.

#14421

Wolf W. Zuelzer

1909 - 1987 (78 years)

Wolf William Zuelzer was a German-American pediatric pathologist. He worked at the Children's Hospital of Michigan for 35 years, where he oversaw a large amount of pediatric research, particularly in the field of hematology. He received the John Howland Award in 1985.

#14422

Jerome Groopman

1900 - Present (126 years)

Jerome E. Groopman has been a staff writer in medicine and biology for The New Yorker since 1998. He is the Dina and Raphael Recanati Chair of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Chief of Experimental Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and author of five books, all written for a general audience.

#14423

Bernhard Zondek

Bernhard Zondek

1891 - 1966 (75 years)

Bernhard Zondek was a German-born Israeli gynecologist who developed the first reliable pregnancy test in 1928. Biography Bernhard Zondek was born in Wronke, Germany, now Wronki, Poland. He studied medicine in Berlin, graduating in 1919. He worked under Karl Franz at the university women's clinic in Berlin Charité, where he specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. His older brother, Hermann Zondek, was a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a pioneer of modern endocrinology.

#14424

Loren Eiseley

1907 - 1977 (70 years)

Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

#14425

Helen B. Taussig

Helen B. Taussig

1898 - 1986 (88 years)

Helen Brooke Taussig was an American cardiologist, working in Baltimore and Boston, who founded the field of pediatric cardiology. She is credited with developing the concept for a procedure that would extend the lives of children born with Tetralogy of Fallot . This concept was applied in practice as a procedure known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt. The procedure was developed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, who were Taussig's colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

#14426

Alden Springer Crafts

1897 - 1990 (93 years)

Alden Springer Crafts was an American professor of botany, known as the first person in the United States to have the title "Weed Control Scientist" in academic employment. He was President of the American Society of Plant Physiologists for 1955, and President of the Weed Society of America for 1958–1960. Crafts was the editor of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology from 1957 to 1959.

#14427

Reed M. Nesbit

1898 - 1979 (81 years)

Reed Miller Nesbit was an American urologist, surgeon, and professor. He was Head of the Urology Section of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 1930–1967. Nesbit was a pioneer of transurethral resection of the prostate. He devised the Nesbit operation for treating Peyronie's disease, and he made prominent contributions to pediatric urology, most notably the Cabot-Nesbit style orchiopexy.

#14428

Harry Bakwin

1894 - 1973 (79 years)

Harry Bakwin was a New York pediatrician, and also a Professor of Pediatrics at New York University. Biography Born in 1894 to a Jewish family, Bakwin graduated with a M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1917. In 1925, Bakwin married Ruth Morris Bakwin who was an heir to some of the fortunes made by the Chicago meat-packing industry as the daughter of Edward Morris, son of the founder of Morris & Company; and Helen Swift Morris, the daughter of Gustavus Swift, founder of Swift & Company. Her sister was psychiatrist Muriel Gardiner who was married to the Austri...

#14429

Joseph Erlanger

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.

#14430

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.

#14431

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.

#14432

Hilde Bruch

1904 - 1984 (80 years)

Hilde Bruch was a German-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known foremost for her work on eating disorders and obesity. Bruch emigrated to the United States in 1934. She worked and studied at various medical facilities in New York City and Baltimore before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964.

#14433

Chester Keefer

1897 - 1972 (75 years)

Chester Scott Keefer was an American physician. He served as "penicillin czar" during World War II, responsible for managing distribution and allocation of the then-new drug for civilian uses in the United States, and was dean of the Boston University School of Medicine.

#14434

Harold Saxton Burr

Harold Saxton Burr

1889 - 1973 (84 years)

Harold Saxton Burr was E. K. Hunt Professor of Anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine and researcher into bio-electrics. Early life He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1889, to parents Hanford Burr and Clara Saxton. He studied in public schools and at the Technical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1908 he was admitted to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and received his Ph.B. in 1911. On December 27 of that year, in Chicago, he married Jean Chandler, with whom he had a son, Peter. In 1914 he was appointed Instructor in Anatomy at Yale. He studied for his Ph.D. under Ross Granville Harrison, which he received in 1915.

#14435

Mircea Eliade

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. A leading interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but actually parti...

#14436

Hideyo Noguchi

1876 - 1928 (52 years)

Hideyo Noguchi, also known as Seisaku Noguchi, was a prominent Japanese bacteriologist who in 1911 discovered the agent of syphilis as the cause of progressive paralytic disease. Early life Noguchi Hideyo, whose childhood name was Seisaku Noguchi, was born to a family of farmers for generations in Inawashiro, Fukushima prefecture in 1876. When he was one and a half years old, he fell into a fireplace and suffered a burn injury on his left hand. There was no doctor in the small village, but one of the men examined the boy. "The fingers of the left hand are mostly gone," he said, "and the left a...

#14437

Sidney Farber

1903 - 1973 (70 years)

Sidney Farber was an American pediatric pathologist. He is regarded as the father of modern chemotherapy for his work using folic acid antagonists to combat leukemia, which led to the development of other chemotherapeutic agents against other malignancies. Farber was also active in cancer research advocacy and fundraising, most notably through his establishment of the Jimmy Fund, a foundation dedicated to pediatric research in childhood cancers. The Dana–Farber Cancer Institute is named after him.

#14438

Max Horkheimer

1895 - 1973 (78 years)

Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...

#14439

Josep Trueta

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Josep Trueta i Raspall was a Catalan surgeon and researcher from Spain. Biography As a Catalan nationalist, he fled into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the main hospital in Barcelona. In 1939 a booklet of his, first published in Catalan, was published in English as Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures, with special reference to the Closed Method as used in the war in Spain, in London. His work was noted and accepted by the British RAMC, thus influencing British Army medical practice. During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services.

#14440

Oswald Avery

1877 - 1955 (78 years)

Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

#14441

Norman Geschwind

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Norman Geschwind was a pioneering American behavioral neurologist, best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis. Early life Norman Geschwind was born on January 8, 1926, in New York City, New York to a Jewish family. He was a student at Boy's High School in Brooklyn, New York. He matriculated into Harvard University in 1942, initially planning to study mathematics. His education was interrupted when drafted into the Army in 1944. After serving for two years, he returned to Harvard University in 1946. Geschwind changed to the Depa...

#14442

Lester Dragstedt

Lester Dragstedt

1893 - 1975 (82 years)

Lester Reynold Dragstedt was an American surgeon who was the first to successfully separate conjoined twins. He was considered nationally known, and a leading authority on ulcers and gastroneuro surgery.

#14443

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

1901 - 1972 (71 years)

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.

#14444

Alexis Carrel

1873 - 1944 (71 years)

Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.

#14445

Franz J. Ingelfinger

1910 - 1980 (70 years)

Franz Joseph Ingelfinger was a German-American physician, researcher and journal editor. He served as Chief of Gastroenterology at Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research, part of Boston University School of Medicine. He also served as Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1967 to 1976. His work was influential in the field of science journalism.

#14446

Max Black

1909 - 1988 (79 years)

Max Black was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies of the work of philosophers such as Frege. His translation of Frege's published philosophical writing is a classic text.

#14447

Carl J. Wiggers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.

#14448

Rudolf Carnap

1891 - 1970 (79 years)

Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."

#14449

Charles Best

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...

#14450

Maxwell Finland

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Maxwell Finland was an American scientist, medical researcher, an expert on infectious diseases. Finland led seminal research of antibiotic treatment of pneumonia. Early life and education Finland was born on March 15, 1902, in Zhashkiv near Kyiv, Ukraine. He immigrated as a child to the United States at the age of 4. Finland graduated from the Boston English High School and cum laude from Harvard College in 1922. He then graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1926.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions