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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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#14551

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.

#14552

Torsten Haferlach

1900 - Present (126 years)

#14553

John Caffey

1895 - 1978 (83 years)

John Patrick Caffey was an American pediatrician and radiologist who is often referred to as one of the founders of pediatric radiology. He was the first to describe shaken baby syndrome, infantile cortical hyperostosis, and Kenny-Caffey syndrome.

#14554

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...

#14555

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...

#14556

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.

#14557

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...

#14558

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.

#14559

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.

#14560

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...

#14561

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.

#14562

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.

#14563

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.

#14564

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.

#14565

Henry Kaplan

1918 - 1984 (66 years)

Henry Seymour Kaplan was an American radiologist who pioneered in radiation therapy and radiobiology. Career Kaplan earned his degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago, after which he trained at the University of Minnesota, Yale University and the National Cancer Institute. He once said he became interested in oncology after his father died of lung cancer, the same disease which killed Dr. Kaplan, a non-smoker.

#14566

Alfred Tarski

1901 - 1983 (82 years)

Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.

#14567

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.

#14568

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

#14569

Otto Erich Deutsch

Otto Erich Deutsch

1883 - 1967 (84 years)

Otto Erich Deutsch was an Austrian musicologist. He is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Franz Schubert's compositions, first published in 1951 in English, with a revised edition published in 1978 in German. It is from this catalogue that the D numbers used to identify Schubert's works derive.

#14570

J. C. C. McKinsey

1908 - 1953 (45 years)

John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic. Biography McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" th...

#14571

Chassar Moir

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Chassar Moir CBE was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Oxford. "One whose contributions were so outstanding as to make Chassar Moir’s an immortal name in the history of Obstetrics and Gynaecology". Sir Norman Jeffcoate

#14572

Lawrence S. Thompson

1916 - 1986 (70 years)

Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.

#14573

A. C. Ewing

1899 - 1973 (74 years)

Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.

#14574

Edwin Arthur Burtt

1892 - 1989 (97 years)

Edwin Arthur Burtt , usually cited as E. A. Burtt, was an American philosopher who wrote extensively on the philosophy of religion. His doctoral thesis published as a book under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science has had a significant influence upon the history of science that is not generally recognized, according to H. Floris Cohen.

#14575

Andreas Speiser

Andreas Speiser

1885 - 1970 (85 years)

Andreas Speiser was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher of science. Life and work Speiser studied in Göttingen, starting in 1904, notably with David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski. In 1917 he became full-time professor at the University of Zurich but later relocated in Basel. During 1924/25 he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Association.

#14576

Bernard Lonergan

Bernard Lonergan

1904 - 1984 (80 years)

Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology , as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. The projected 25-volume Collected Works with the University of Toronto Press is now complete. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; Regis College, T...

#14577

John Elof Boodin

1869 - 1950 (81 years)

John Elof Boodin was a Swedish-born American philosopher and educator. He was the author of numerous books proposing a systematic interpretation of nature. Boodin's work preserved the tradition of philosophical idealism within the framework of contemporary science. Boodin also focused on the social nature of human behavior believing an understanding required an appreciation of individual participation in social life and interpersonal relationship.

#14578

Felix Fleischner

1893 - 1969 (76 years)

Felix G. Fleischner was an Austrian-American radiologist from Boston. The Fleischner Society for thoracic imaging and diagnosis is named after him. Biography Felix Fleischner was born in Vienna. He became an expert in the field of radiology, and most of his work centered on the chest x-ray. He served as professor and head of radiology of the Second Medical Clinic of the University of Vienna.

#14579

Boyd Henry Bode

1873 - 1953 (80 years)

Boyd Henry Bode was an American academic and philosopher, notable for his work on philosophy of education. Bode was born in Ridott, Illinois. He grew up in rural areas of Iowa and South Dakota and attended Pennsylvania College in Iowa and later the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1900.

#14580

David Weyhe Smith

1926 - 1981 (55 years)

David Weyhe Smith was an American pediatrician and dysmorphologist, best known for his pioneering book Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation and for describing fetal alcohol syndrome. Early life and education David Weyhe Smith was born in Oakland, California. He gained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and undertook postdoctoral studies during 1950-51 and 1953-56 in the Department of Pediatrics. He worked with Lawson Wilkins in the field of pediatric endocrinology.

#14581

Raphael Demos

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Raphael Demos was a Greek-American philosopher. He was Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, emeritus, at Harvard University and an authority on the work of the Greek philosopher Plato. At Harvard, he taught Martin Luther King Jr.

#14582

José Gaos

1900 - 1969 (69 years)

José Gaos was a Spanish philosopher who obtained political asylum in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most important Mexican philosophers of the 20th century. He was a member of the Madrid School.

#14583

Philipp Frank

1884 - 1966 (82 years)

Philipp Frank was a physicist, mathematician and philosopher of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was a logical positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was influenced by Mach and was one of the Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

#14584

Louis Round Wilson

Louis Round Wilson

1876 - 1979 (103 years)

Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, directing the library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and as one of the “internationally oriented library leaders in the U.S. who contributed much of the early history of the International Federation of Library Associations and Inst...

#14585

Una Ellis-Fermor

1894 - 1958 (64 years)

Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.

#14586

Alexander Burns Wallace

Alexander Burns Wallace

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Alexander Burns Wallace was a Scottish plastic surgeon. He was a founding member and president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the first editor of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In authorship he appears as A. B. Wallace.

#14587

John Leofric Stocks

1882 - 1937 (55 years)

John Leofric Stocks DSO was a British philosopher and was briefly Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 1937. Biography Stocks was born the sixth of twelve children to John Edward Stocks, the vicar of Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

#14588

W. W. Bartley III

W. W. Bartley III

1934 - 1990 (56 years)

William Warren Bartley III , known as W. W. Bartley III, was an American philosopher specializing in 20th century philosophy, language and logic, and the Vienna Circle. Early life and education Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1934, Bartley was brought up in a Protestant home. He completed his secondary education in Pittsburgh and studied at Harvard University between 1952 and 1956, graduating with a BA degree in philosophy. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was an editor at The Harvard Crimson newspaper. He spent the winter semester of 1956 and the summer semester of 1957 at the Harvard Divinity School and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

#14589

Sophie Bledsoe Aberle

Sophie Bledsoe Aberle

1896 - 1996 (100 years)

Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.

#14590

Maurice Tauber

1908 - 1980 (72 years)

Maurice Falcom Tauber was an influential librarian, educator and researcher in the field of library and information sciences; he was a major actor in how technical services units in American and in international libraries were thought of and how they evolved in the 20th century. Tauber is remembered especially for his role as professor and mentor during his long tenure at Columbia University from 1944-1976. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".

#14591

Karl Löwith

1897 - 1973 (76 years)

Karl Löwith was a German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century. He is known for his two books From Hegel to Nietzsche, which describes the decline of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, which challenges the modern, secular progressive narrative of history, which seeks to ground the meaning of history in itself.

#14592

Chaim Sheba

1908 - 1971 (63 years)

Chaim Sheba was an Israeli physician, notable for being the founder of Sheba Medical Center. Biography Chaim Scheiber was born in Frasin, near Gurahumora, Bukovina, then in Austria-Hungary , to the well known Scheiber Hasidic family, a descendant of the Hasidic court of Ruzhin. As a young child he studied in heder, a school for religious studies only. He transferred from there to the 8th grade in a secular school. Influenced by his grandfather, he began medical studies in Cernăuți and completed such studies in Vienna in December 1932. In the beginning of 1933, Sheba immigrated to Mandate Pa...

#14593

Félix Martí Ibáñez

1911 - 1972 (61 years)

Félix Martí-Ibáñez was a physician, psychiatrist, author, and publisher, who was born in Spain, emigrated to the United States in 1939 following the Spanish Civil War when he was exiled during the Franco Era in Spain, and became an American citizen. In Spain he had served as a minister for the Second Spanish Republic. When he emigrated he settled in Manhattan.

#14594

Ruth Boynton

1896 - 1977 (81 years)

Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota. She worked in public health and student health services. At that time, there were few women in any of these fields. She was director of the University Student Health Service from 1936 to 1961and it was renamed the Boynton Health Service in her honor in 1975. She served as the acting dean of the School of Public Health from 1944 to 1946.

#14595

George Ranken Tudhope

1893 - 1955 (62 years)

George Ranken Tudhope MD FRSE DPH was a 20th-century Scottish pathologist and medical author. The George Ranken Tudhope Prize for best student in Pathology at the University of Dundee is named in his honour.

#14596

Melvin Rader

1903 - 1981 (78 years)

Melvin Miller Rader was an American academic and civil rights advocate. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, teaching ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. In the late 1940s, he was accused of being a Communist by the Canwell Committee, although he was later exonerated.

#14597

Grete L. Bibring

Grete L. Bibring

1899 - 1977 (78 years)

Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.

#14598

John Marwick

1891 - 1978 (87 years)

John Marwick was a New Zealand palaeontologist and geologist. Early life and family Marwick was born near Oamaru, New Zealand, on 3 February 1891, the son of Hugh Marwick, and his wife, Jane née Cuthbert. While at Waitaki Boys' High School he helped to collect fossil shells and learned the beginnings of how to classify molluscs. He studied and taught at the University of Otago, and in 1912 gained an MA with first-class honours in with a thesis on geology. In 1915, he married Marion Ivy Mary Keys at Mosgiel. They had two sons and two daughters, all becoming science graduates.

#14599

Louis Sigurd Fridericia

1881 - 1947 (66 years)

Louis Sigurd Fridericia was a Danish hygienist born in Copenhagen. Fridericia's family moved to Denmark in the 1750s and took as a name a form of the name of the Jutland town, Fredericia, where they settled. He attended the University of Copenhagen and graduated in medicine in 1906.

#14600

Ernst Moro

1874 - 1951 (77 years)

Ernst Moro was an Austrian physician and pediatrician who was the first in western medicine to describe the infant reflex that was named after him . Career Moro studied medicine in Graz, Austria, getting his M.D. in 1899. From 1901 to 1902 he worked with Theodor Escherich in Vienna, the discoverer of the Escherichia coli bacterium. He earned his habilitation in pediatrics in Munich in 1906, and became a professor of pediatrics in the University of Heidelberg in 1911.

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