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,
#14451
Marcantonio Genua
1491 - 1563 (72 years)
Marcantonio Genua was a Renaissance Aristotelian philosopher who taught at the University of Padua. He was a teacher and uncle of the great Renaissance philosopher Giacomo Zabarella.
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William McCance
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
William McCance was a Scottish artist, and was second Controller of the Gregynog Press in Powys, mid-Wales. Biography Born on 6 August 1894 in Cambuslang, Scotland, William McCance was the seventh of eight children. After attending Hamilton Academy, McCance entered Glasgow School of Art, studying there 1911–15 and subsequently undertaking a teacher-training course at Glasgow's Kennedy Street school.
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Robert Smirke
1753 - 1845 (92 years)
Robert Smirke was an English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings showing subjects taken from literature. He was a member of the Royal Academy. Life Smirke was born at Wigton near Carlisle, the son of a travelling artist. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a heraldic painter in London, and at the age of twenty began to study at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1775 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, with which he began to exhibit by sending five works; he showed works there again in 1777 and 1778. In 1786 he exhibited Narcissus and The Lady and...
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Bartolomeo Ambrosini
1588 - 1657 (69 years)
Bartolomeo Ambrosini was an Italian botanist, physician and naturalist, for over thirty years prefect of the Botanical Garden of Bologna and editor of many of the posthumous works of Ulisse Aldrovandi.
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John Chiene
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
John Chiene, CB, LLD, MD, FRSE, FRCSEd was a Scottish surgeon, who was Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh during some of its most influential years. He was a founder of the Edinburgh Ambulance Service. The Chiene Medal is presented as an annual prize in surgery at the University. He served as President of the Royal College of Surgeons from 1897 to 1899.
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Ludwig Aschoff
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Karl Albert Ludwig Aschoff was a German physician and pathologist. He is considered to be one of the most influential pathologists of the early 20th century and is regarded as the most important German pathologist after Rudolf Virchow.
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Ambrose McCarthy Patterson
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Ambrose McCarthy Patterson was a painter and printmaker. Life Patterson was born in Daylesford, Victoria. He studied at the Melbourne Art School under E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker, at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra. In Paris he became a friend of compatriot Nellie Melba, the famous soprano; Patterson's brother, Tom, was married to Melba's sister, Belle. Through Melba's influence, he was able to continue his studies with John Singer Sargent.
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Gustav Giemsa
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Berthold Carl Gustav Giemsa was a German chemist and bacteriologist who was a native of Medar-Blechhammer . He is best known for creating a dye solution commonly known as "Giemsa stain" which is used in staining for use in the histopathological diagnosis of malaria and parasites such as Plasmodium, Trypanosoma, and Chlamydia.
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Arnold Kegel
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Arnold Henry Kegel was an American gynecologist who invented the Kegel perineometer and Kegel exercises as non-surgical treatment of urinary incontinence from perineal muscle weakness and/or laxity. Today pelvic floor exercises are widely held as first-line treatment for urinary stress incontinence and any type of female incontinence and female genital prolapse, with evidence supporting its use from systematic reviews of randomized trials in the Cochrane Library amongst others. Kegel first published his ideas in 1948. He was Assistant Professor of Gynecology at the Keck School of Medicine ...
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Susanna Centlivre
1667 - 1723 (56 years)
Susanna Centlivre , born Susanna Freeman, and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century". Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn.
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Vasyl Dovhovych
1783 - 1849 (66 years)
Vasyl Dovhovych is a Ukrainian and Rusyn philosopher, linguist, poet, Transcarpathian academic, and Priest of the Greek Catholic Church. Biography He was born in the village of Zolotarovo, Khust district, in March 1783 in the family of peasants.
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Josina Carolina van Lynden
1717 - 1791 (74 years)
Josina Carolina van Lynden was a Dutch philosopher who, in 1770, published a book on Logic, called De Logica of redenkunde. She was the first Dutch woman to publish on this topic. Van Lynden was the daughter of Dirk van Lynden en Heilwig van Lynden, member of a Dutch noble family. She lived with her parents in Huis de Parck, a castle in Gelderland. At the age of 25, she married with Adriaan Buurt, a local pastor. Their marriage was not approved by some members of her family as she was part of a noble family while her husband was not. They had managed to postpone the wedding till Josina became 25, but could not prevent them form marrying.
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Karl von Vierordt
1818 - 1884 (66 years)
Karl von Vierordt was a German physiologist. Vierordt was born in Lahr, Baden. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Göttingen, Vienna, and Heidelberg, and began a practice in Karlsruhe in 1842. In 1849 he became a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Tübingen, and in 1853 a professor of physiology.
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William MacGillivray
1796 - 1852 (56 years)
William MacGillivray FRSE was a Scottish naturalist and ornithologist. Life and work MacGillivray was born in Old Aberdeen and brought up on Harris. He returned to Aberdeen where he studied Medicine at King's College, graduating MA in 1815. In Old Aberdeen he lived at 107 High Street.
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Byam Shaw
1872 - 1919 (47 years)
John Byam Liston Shaw , commonly known as Byam Shaw, was a British painter, illustrator, designer and teacher. He is not to be confused with his sons, Glen Byam Shaw, actor and theatre director, and James Byam Shaw, art historian and director of Colnaghi's, who both used "Byam Shaw" as a surname.
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Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Breyer
1771 - 1818 (47 years)
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Breyer was a German historian. Biography From 1789, he studied philosophy and theology at the Tübinger Stift in Tübingen, then from 1797 furthered his education at the University of Jena as a student of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1803, he became an associate professor, and during the following year, was appointed professor of history and statistics at the University of Landshut. In 1807 he became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and later on, a professor of history at the lyceum in Munich.
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Joseph DeLee
1869 - 1942 (73 years)
Joseph Bolivar DeLee was an American physician who became known as the father of modern obstetrics. DeLee founded the Chicago Lying-in Hospital, where he introduced the first portable infant incubator. Early in his career, he was associated with the medical school at Northwestern University. After 1929, he was employed by the medical school at the University of Chicago.
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Andrea Alpago
1450 - 1521 (71 years)
Andrea Alpago was an Italian physician and arabist. In publications of his work in Latin, his name is frequently given as Andreas Alpagus Bellunensis, where "Bellunensis" refers to his birthplace of Belluno in northeastern Italy.
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Shahamir Shahamirian
1723 - 1798 (75 years)
Shahamir Shahamirian was an 18th-century Armenian writer, philosopher, and wealthy merchant in Madras . Born in New Julfa, Iran, he moved to India where he became an affluent merchant and an active member of the Armenian community of Madras. In 1771, Shahamirian and his collaborators founded the first Armenian printing press in Madras. In 1787/88, Shahamirian published , which contained a proposed constitution for a future independent Armenian republic. He is thus regarded as the author of the first Armenian constitution.
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Jean Tagault
Jean Tagault or Jean Tagaut was a French physician and anatomist known for his surgical work and for having fought against Michel Servet who defended judicial astrology and divination as sciences. He is often confused with his son Jean Tagaut, a doctor and poet.
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Carl Bloch
1834 - 1890 (56 years)
Carl Heinrich Bloch was a Danish artist. Biography He was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, and studied there at the Royal Danish Academy of Art under Wilhelm Marstrand. Bloch's parents wanted their son to enter what they considered to be a respectable profession – an officer in the Navy. This, however, was not what he wanted. His only interest was drawing and painting, and he was consumed by the idea of becoming an artist. He went to Italy to study art, passing through the Netherlands, where he became acquainted with the work of Rembrandt, which became a major influence on him. Bloch met his wife, Alma Trepka, in Rome, where he married her on 31 May 1868.
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Praxiphanes
Praxiphanes a Peripatetic philosopher, was a native of Mytilene, who lived a long time in Rhodes. He lived in the time of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Ptolemy I Soter, and was a pupil of Theophrastus, about 322 BC. He subsequently opened a school himself, in which Epicurus is said to have been one of his pupils. Praxiphanes paid special attention to grammatical studies, and is hence named along with Aristotle as the founder and creator of the science of grammar.
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Pietru Caxaro
1400 - 1485 (85 years)
Pietru "Peter" Caxaro was a Maltese philosopher and poet. He is so far Malta's first known philosopher, fragments of whose works are extant. His philosophical views and positions qualify him as an honourable adherent of the mediaeval humanist movement. His contribution skilfully stands as a mature reflection of the social and cultural revival of his time.
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Charles Le Roy
1726 - 1779 (53 years)
Charles Le Roy was an 18th-century French physician and Encyclopédiste. An advisor to the king, he was professor of medicine at the University of Montpellier, a member of the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, the Société royale de médecine and the Academies of Montpellier, Nîmes and Toulouse.
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William Drummond of Logiealmond
1770 - 1828 (58 years)
Sir William James Charles Maria Drummond of Logiealmond FRS FRSE DCL was a Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher. His book Academical Questions is arguably important in the development of the ideas of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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Johann Ender
1793 - 1854 (61 years)
Johann Nepomuk Ender was an Austrian portrait painter and engraver. Biography He spent several years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, where he had his debut with his canvas depicting the death of Marcus Aurelius. which won an award. Although he developed his own style, his works show the obvious influence of his contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Isabey.
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Ludwig Karl Georg Pfeiffer
1805 - 1877 (72 years)
Ludwig Karl Georg Pfeiffer, also known as Louis Pfeiffer , was a German physician, botanist and conchologist. Early life, Education & Medical Career Louis Pfeiffer was born in Cassel, the eldest son of the jurist Burkhard Wilhelm Pfeiffer and his wife Louise . Pfeiffer received his primary education in the Cassel Lyceum, where he distinguished himself academically, and by the age of fifteen was already at the top of his class. In 1820, political tensions forced his father to relocate the family to Lübeck, but Louis continued to excel, reaching the top of his class there as well. At the age of...
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Thomas C. Jerdon
1811 - 1872 (61 years)
Thomas Caverhill Jerdon was an English physician, zoologist and botanist. He was a pioneering ornithologist who described numerous species of birds in India. Several species of plants and birds including Jerdon's baza, Jerdon's leafbird, Jerdon's bushlark, Jerdon's nightjar, Jerdon's courser, Jerdon's babbler and Jerdon's bush chat are named after him.
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Horst Oertel
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Horst Oertel M.D., Emeritus Professor and Head of Pathology at McGill University, Montreal , he was well-known on both sides of the Atlantic. Five of his books are still published today as standard texts for students of Pathology.
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Liu Biao
142 - 208 (66 years)
Liu Biao , courtesy name Jingsheng, was a Chinese military general, politician, and warlord who lived in the late Eastern Han dynasty of China. He is best known for serving as the governor of Jing Province from 192 until his death in 208. He was also a member of the extended family of the Han emperors through his ancestor Liu Yu, the fifth son of Emperor Jing. Liu Biao was described as a handsome man and was over eight chi tall .
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Robert Alyngton
1355 - 1398 (43 years)
Robert Alyngton , was an English philosopher who developed new logical, semantic, metaphysical, and ontological theories in 14th century thought. Alyngton is credited with creating the ideological foundation for the Oxford Realists by substituting reference to objective reality with reference to mental and linguistic reality.
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Philippe-Charles Schmerling
1790 - 1836 (46 years)
Philippe-Charles or Philip Carel Schmerling was a Dutch/Belgian prehistorian, pioneer in paleontology, and geologist. He is often considered the founder of paleontology. In 1829 he discovered the first Neanderthal fossil in a cave in Engis, the partial cranium of a small child, although it was not recognized as such until 1936, and is now thought to be between 30,000-70,000 years old. It was the second discovery of a fossil of the genus Homo after the discovery of the Red Lady of Paviland in Wales in 1823.
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Georg Joachim Zollikofer
1730 - 1788 (58 years)
Georg Joachim Zollikofer was a Swiss-German theologian who popularized Enlightenment theology, and published several books of sermons and hymns. Life Georg Joachim Zollikofer was born on 5 August 1730 in St. Gallen, Switzerland. His father, David Anthony Zollikofer, was a prominent lawyer. His mother was Anna Elisabeth Högger. He was educated at the St. Gallen gymnasium, then studied at Bremen and afterwards at the Utrecht University with a view to becoming a minister. After leaving university he was given a position as a preacher at Murten, Vaud in 1754. Soon after he was appointed to a larger church at Monsheim, Rheinhessen, and then to a church in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt am Main.
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Jacob Mendes Da Costa
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Jacob Mendes Da Costa, or Jacob Mendez Da Costa was an American physician. He is particularly known for discovering Da Costa's syndrome , an anxiety disorder combining effort fatigue, dyspnea, a sighing respiration, palpitation and sweating that he first observed in soldiers in the American Civil War and documented in an 1871 study.
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Leopoldo Maggi
1840 - 1905 (65 years)
Leopoldo Maggi was an Italian physician, craniologist and naturalist. He completed his studies in the University of Pavia. In 1863 he obtained two degrees: in Natural sciences and in Medicine and surgery and became assistant first to Paolo Panceri the teacher of several other outstanding Italian zoologists of the end of the 19th century and then to Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli. In 1864 he was appointed lecturer in Mineralogy and Geology at Pavia, where from 1874 he held the professorship of Zoology and Comparative anatomy. When zoology became a separate subject in 1875 he held the chair of Com...
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Goswin Karl Uphues
1841 - 1916 (75 years)
Goswin Karl Uphues was a German philosopher. He taught at a gymnasium in Aarau before becoming a professor at the University of Halle. A collection of papers published by Uphues between 1869 and 1882 was edited by Kurt Flasch in 1973.
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Julian Monson Sturtevant
1805 - 1886 (81 years)
Julian Monson Sturtevant was an American author and educator. He was a founding professor and second president of Illinois College. Sturtevant, son of Warren and Lucy Sturtevant, was born in Warren, Connecticut on July 26, 1805. In 1816, the family removed to the Western Reserve, and settled in Tallmadge , Ohio, whence two sons came to Yale College in 1822. Julian, the younger son, graduated in 1826. After teaching school in New Canaan, Connecticut, he entered the Yale Theological Seminary in 1828, and was ordained at Woodbury, Connecticut on August 27, 1829, as an evangelist. Four days later, he married Elizabeth M.
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Vāchaspati Misra
900 - 980 (80 years)
Vachaspati Mishra was a ninth or tenth century Indian Hindu philosopher of the Advaita Vedanta tradition, who wrote bhashya on key texts of almost every 9th-century school of Hindu philosophy. He also wrote an independent treatise on grammar, Tattvabindu, or Drop of Truth, which focuses on Mīmāṃsā theories of sentence meaning.
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Agathobulus
100 - 200 (100 years)
Agathobulus of Alexandria, who lived c. 125 AD, was a Cynic philosopher and teacher of Demonax and Peregrinus Proteus. Little is known about his life. He is listed in the Chronicle of Jerome as flourishing in the 224th Olympiad : "Plutarch of Chaeronea, Sextus, Agathobulus and Oenomaus are considered notable philosophers."
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Reinhold Schünzel
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Reinhold Schünzel was a German actor and director, active in both Germany and the United States. The son of a German father and a Jewish mother, he was born in St. Pauli, the poorest part of Hamburg. Despite being of Jewish ancestry, Schünzel was allowed by the Nazis to continue making films for several years until he left in 1937 to live abroad.
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Jacopo Berengario da Carpi
1460 - 1530 (70 years)
Jacopo Berengario da Carpi was an Italian physician. His book "Isagoge breves" published in 1522 made him the most important anatomist before Andreas Vesalius. Early years Jacopo Berengario da Carpi was the son of a surgeon. As a youth he assisted his father in surgical work, and his surgical skills became the basis of his later work as a physician. In his late teens, through the association of his family with Lionello Pio, Berengario came under the tutelage of the great humanist printer, Aldo Manuzio who came to Carpi to tutor Alberto III Pio, Prince of Carpi and apparently included Berengario in his instruction.
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John Martin Munro Kerr
1868 - 1960 (92 years)
John Martin Munro Kerr was Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow from 1927 to 1934. A scholar and surgeon of international acclaim he won both the Katherine Bishop Harman Prize in 1934 for his book Maternal Mortality and Morbidity and was the first recipient of the Blair Bell Medal for obstetrics and gynaecology.
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Maria Petraccini
1759 - 1791 (32 years)
Maria Magdalena Petraccini Ferretti was an Italian anatomist, physician, professor of anatomy. She was born in Florence, Tuscany, 1759 and died in Bagnacavallo, Ravenna, 1791. Biography and personal life Pettracini was born in a merchant family in Tuscany. She married Italian physician and anatomy professor Francesco Ferretti. She became interested in surgery thanks to him, who was the chief at the Bagnacavallo hospital. Subsequently, Petraccini was tutored in surgery by her spouse, who taught her by operating on corpses. Her technique became so precise that she was envied even by those above her.
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Philip Radcliffe
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Philip FitzHugh Radcliffe was an English academic, musicologist and composer, born in Godalming, Surrey. Early life He was educated at Charterhouse and read Classics at King's College, Cambridge, gaining a scholarship and a First in Part I of the degree, but then only a Third in Part II, causing him to switch his attention to music, studying under Edward Dent and Henry Moule. He was a gifted pianist.
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Lucien Howe
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
Lucien Howe was an American physician who spent much of his career as a professor of ophthalmology at the University at Buffalo. In 1876 he was instrumental in the creation of the Buffalo Eye and Ear Infirmary.
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Robert Latta
1865 - 1932 (67 years)
Robert Latta was a Scottish philosopher known for his works on the philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. He was the Regius Chair of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. Life Latta was born and educated in Edinburgh, and he graduated in 1886 with a first-class honours degree in MA. He continued his studies and earned a DPhil from the same university in 1897. In 1892, he became an Assistant and Lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of St Andrews, where he stayed for six years before moving to University College, Dundee to become a lecturer in Logic and Moral Philosophy.
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Matthijs Siegenbeek
1774 - 1854 (80 years)
Matthijs Siegenbeek was a Dutch academic. From 1797 to 1847 he was the first professor of the Dutch language at the University of Leiden. From 1803 he was the member, then secretary, of the head-office of that university's literary faculty. Initially he was a Mennonite voorganger in Dokkum.
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Jasobanta Dasa
1487 - Present (539 years)
Jasobanta Dasa was an Odia poet, litterateur and mystic. He was one of the five great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha during the Bhakti age of literature. He is known for his work Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita.
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Mary Ann Shadd
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Mary Ann Camberton Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the United States. Mary Shadd established the newspaper Provincial Freeman in 1853, which was published weekly in southern Ontario. it advocated equality, integration, and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
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Christian Schreiber
1781 - 1857 (76 years)
Christian Johann Christoph Schreiber was a German theologian, philologist, philosopher, and poet. He was also the Superintendent of the dioceses of Lengsfeld and Dermbach. He was connected in friendship or correspondence to writers and philosophers of his time, and published poetry, sermons, historical and philosophical works.
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