The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#14651
Wilhelm von Diez
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
Albrecht Christoph Wilhelm von Diez was a German painter and illustrator of the Munich School. Life He attended a trade school in Munich, followed by the Polytechnic School from 1853 to 1855 and, from 1855, the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where he was briefly a student of Karl von Piloty. He didn't stay at the Academy very long, preferring to teach himself draftsmanship and painting.
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Antonio Carini
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Antonio Carini was an Italian physician, bacteriologist and professor. He worked in the public health services of São Paulo, Brazil for over forty years. Carini showed that rabies of herbivores could be transmitted by bats, and discovered a parasitic fungus , which causes pneumocystosis.
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Johann Major
1533 - 1600 (67 years)
Johann Major was a German Protestant theologian, humanist and poet. Life Major was born in Sankt Joachimsthal in the Kingdom of Bohemia. He matriculated in 1549 at the University of Wittenberg, and died in Zerbst.
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Heinrich Petraeus
1589 - 1620 (31 years)
Heinrich Petraeus was a German physician and writer. He was Professor of Medicine at the University of Marburg. He was son-in-law of the chemist Johannes Hartmann . He is known for his Nosologia Harmonica Dogmatica et Hermetica. This was an attempt to find concord between rival medical theories of the time: those of the progressive chemical physicians and those of the tradition-based Galenists.
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Octave Hamelin
1856 - 1907 (51 years)
Octave Hamelin was a French philosopher. He taught as a professor at the University of Bordeaux and the University of Sorbonne . Hamelin was a close friend of the sociologist Émile Durkheim, with whom he shared an interest in the French philosopher Charles Renouvier. He is also known as a translator of classical Greek philosophers.
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Andrew Fernando Holmes
1797 - 1860 (63 years)
Andrew Fernando Holmes was a Canadian physician, academic, and one of the founders of the Montreal Medical Institution, the first medical school in Canada. In 1797, Holmes' parents, Thomas Holmes and Susanna Scott, and his older brother, Benjamin were emigrating to North America when they were captured by a French frigate. They were taken to Cádiz, Spain, where Holmes was born. The family eventually reached British North America in 1801, settling in Montreal.
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Jean Bauhin
1511 - 1582 (71 years)
Jean Bauhin was a French physician. He was born in Amiens, France and died in Basel, Switzerland, where he had to relocate after converting to Protestantism. He was the physician to Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre.
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Richard Brinkley
1330 - 1379 (49 years)
Richard Brinkley was an English Franciscan scholastic philosopher and theologian. He was at the University of Oxford in the mid-fourteenth century; he produced a Summa Logicae in a nominalist vein in the 1360s or early 1370s, and other works.
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Augustus Thorndike
1896 - 1986 (90 years)
Augustus Thorndike, M.D. , was the chief of surgery at Harvard University Health Service from 1931 to 1962 and a pioneer in sports medicine. Thorndike served in World War I and was a 1919 graduate of Harvard College and a 1921 graduate of Harvard Medical School. He pioneered many advancements in sports medicine, including the rules that a physician must be present at every sports event and that a doctor must decide if an injured athlete should play. He also designed advanced equipment for football players and was the first to insist that hockey players wear helmets.
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Karl Rottmanner
1783 - 1824 (41 years)
Karl Borromäus Rottmanner was a German poet, philosopher, and politician. Born in Munich, he was the son of lawyer and agricultural reformer Simon Rottmanner and his wife Maria Anna Barbara Paur . His first cousin once removed was German composer and organist Eduard Rottmanner. He studied law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich where he earned a PhD. While a student there he belonged to a student patriotic movement led by Johann Nepomuk von Ringseis. After graduating, he became a member of the Landtag of Bavaria. He died in Ast.
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Carl Werner
1808 - 1894 (86 years)
Carl Friedrich Heinrich Werner was a German watercolor painter. Biography Born in Weimar, Werner studied painting under Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld in Leipzig. He switched to studying architecture in Munich from 1829 to 1831, but thereafter returned to painting. He won a scholarship to travel to Italy, where he ended up founding a studio in Venice and remaining until the 1850s, making a name for himself as a watercolor painter. He exhibited around Europe, in particular travelling often to England, where he exhibited at the New Watercolour Society.
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Karl Gottfried Hagen
1749 - 1829 (80 years)
Karl Gottfried Hagen was a German chemist. Hagen was born and died in Königsberg, Prussia. He founded the first German chemical laboratory at the University of Königsberg, thus establishing the scientific discipline of pharmaceutical chemistry in Germany. He worked as a professor in the field of physics, chemistry and mineralogy.
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Cecco d'Ascoli
1269 - 1327 (58 years)
Cecco d'Ascoli is the popular name of Francesco degli Stabili , an Italian encyclopaedist, physician and poet. Cecco is the diminutive of Francesco, Ascoli was the place of his birth. The lunar crater Cichus is named after him.
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Duncan Archibald Graham
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Duncan Archibald Graham, was a Canadian physician and academic who held the first position in the British Empire of chair of clinical medicine, established by John Craig Eaton at the University of Toronto in 1919. He held this position and was chair of the department of medicine and physician-in-chief at the Toronto General Hospital, until 1947.
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Walter Blankenburg
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Walter Blankenburg was a German Protestant pastor, director of church music and musicologist, who focused in several publications on liturgy, hymnology, and on the sacred music of the early Baroque period, especially by Johann Sebastian Bach.
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David Drummond
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Sir David Drummond CBE was an Anglo-Irish physician and president of the British Medical Association. He was warden and vice-chancellor of the University of Durham between 1920 and 1922, having also served as the president of the University's College of Medicine in Newcastle.
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Francis Kiernan
1800 - 1874 (74 years)
Francis Kiernan FRS was an anatomist and physician. He was born in Ireland, the eldest of four children. His father, Francis Kiernan , was also a physician and brought the family to England in the early 19th century. Francis junior was educated at the Roman Catholic College at Ware, Hertfordshire, and was trained in medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London.
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Hermann Biggs
1859 - 1923 (64 years)
Hermann Michael Biggs was an American physician and pioneer in the field of public health who helped apply the science of bacteriology to the prevention and control of infectious diseases. He was born in Trumansburg, New York.
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Gregory Blaxland
1778 - 1853 (75 years)
Gregory Blaxland was an English pioneer farmer and explorer in Australia, noted especially for initiating and co-leading the first successful crossing of the Blue Mountains by European settlers. Early life Gregory Blaxland was born 17 June 1778 at Fordwich, Kent, England, the fourth son of John Blaxland, mayor from 1767 to 1774, whose family had owned estates nearby for generations, and Mary, daughter of Captain Parker, R.N. Gregory attended The King's School, Canterbury. In July 1799 in the church of St George the Martyr there, he married 20-year-old Elizabeth, daughter of John Spurdon; the...
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John Bate
John Bate was an English or Welsh theologian and philosopher. Life Bate was, according to Leland's account, born west of the River Severn , but seems to have been brought up in the Carmelite monastery at York, where his progress in learning was so great that he was dispatched to complete his studies at Oxford. Philosophy and theology seem to have divided his attention, and on asking his master's degree in both these subjects he proceeded to add to his reputation by authorship. He was acknowledged to be an authority in his own university and the news of his acquirements soon spread abroad. His...
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Giuseppe Saverio Poli
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Giuseppe Saverio Poli was an Italian physicist, biologist and natural historian. His collections, together with those stored in the Royal Bourbon Museum, were the foundation of the Zoological Museum of Naples. The specimens were from locations all over the world, and included especially, Lepidoptera, Cnidaria and Mollusca.
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Karl Gottfried Konstantin Dehio
1851 - 1927 (76 years)
Karl Gottfried Konstantin Dehio was a Baltic German internist and professor of pathology. In 1877 he earned his doctorate from the University of Dorpat, and following graduation continued his studies at the University of Vienna. From 1879 to 1883 he was a physician at the Prince of Oldenburg Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, returning to Dorpat in 1884 as a lecturer at the university. In 1886, he became a professor of pathology, being chosen university rector in 1918.
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Secundus the Silent
100 - 200 (100 years)
Secundus the Silent was a philosopher who lived in Athens in the early 2nd century, who had taken a vow of silence. An anonymous text entitled Life of Secundus purports to give details of his life as well as answers to philosophical questions posed to him by the emperor Hadrian. The work enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages.
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Adolf Sandberger
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Adolf Wilhelm August Sandberger was a German musicologist and composer, with a particular interest in 16th-century music. He founded the School of Musicology at the University of Munich, where he worked as a professor of musicology from 1904 to his retirement in 1930. In addition to his academic work, Sandberger composed two operas, several choruses and some chamber and instrumental music. His Violin Sonata, Op, 10 was dedicated to Benno Walter.
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Abu'l-Fadl ibn al-Amid
912 - 970 (58 years)
Abu 'l-Fadl Muhammad ibn Abi Abdallah al-Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Katib, commonly known after his father as Ibn al-'Amid was a Persian statesman who served as the vizier of the Buyid ruler Rukn al-Dawla for thirty years, from 940 until his death in 970. His son, , also called Ibn al-'Amid, succeeded him in his office.
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Leslie Halliwell
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Robert James Leslie Halliwell was a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television rights buyer for ITV, the British commercial network, and Channel 4. He is best known for his reference guides, Filmgoer's Companion , a single volume film-related encyclopaedia featuring biographies and technical terms, and Halliwell's Film Guide , which is dedicated to individual films.
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Placida Gardner Chesley
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Placida Gardner Chesley was an American medical doctor and college professor. She was the City Bacteriologist of Los Angeles, and worked in Europe with the Red Cross during World War I. Early life Vera Placida Gardner was born in Orange, California, the daughter of Henri F. Gardner and Emma Howard Gardner. She attended Santa Ana High School, and completed undergraduate studies the University of Southern California, graduating in 1910. She earned her medical degree at the University of Michigan, where she was elected to the medical honor fraternity Alpha Omega Alpha.
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Walter Carr
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
John Walter Carr was an English physician and surgeon. Carr was the son of John Carr of London. He was educated at University College School and trained as a doctor at University College Hospital, graduating Bachelor of Surgery and Doctor of Medicine . He later became consulting physician to the Royal Free Hospital and the Victoria Hospital for Children and lecturer in medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women.
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Leonard N. Boston
1871 - 1931 (60 years)
Leonard Napoleon Boston was an American physician remembered for describing Boston's sign. Biography Leonard Boston was born in 1871 in Philadelphia, and graduated with an M.D. in 1896 from the Medico-Chirurgical College of Philadelphia. He became Professor of Physical Diagnosis in 1912, and then Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1919. He became Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1928. He died from erysipelas in 1931.
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William Harvey
1796 - 1866 (70 years)
William Harvey was a British wood-engraver and illustrator. Born at Newcastle upon Tyne, Harvey was the son of a bath-keeper. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Thomas Bewick, and became one of his favorite pupils. Bewick describes him as one "who both as an engraver & designer, stands preeminent" at his day . He engraved many woodblocks for Bewick's Aesop's Fables .
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Radulfus Ardens
1101 - 1200 (99 years)
Radulfus Ardens was a French theologian and early scholastic philosopher of the 12th century. He was born in Beaulieu, Poitou. He is known for his Summa de vitiis et virtutibus or Speculum universale . It is in 14 volumes and is a systematic work of theology and ethics.
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A. Edward Sutherland
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Albert Edward Sutherland was a film director and actor. Born in London, he was from a theatrical family. His father, Al Sutherland, was a theatre manager and producer and his mother, Julie Ring, was a vaudeville performer. He was a nephew of both Blanche Ring and Thomas Meighan, who was married to Frances Ring, another of his mother's sisters.
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Sam Jaffe
1891 - 1984 (93 years)
Shalom "Sam" Jaffe was an American actor, teacher, musician, and engineer. In 1951, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Asphalt Jungle . He also appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Ben-Hur , and is additionally known for his roles as the titular character in Gunga Din and as the "High Lama" in Lost Horizon .
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Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
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Hannah Logasa
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Hannah Logasa is considered a pioneer of school libraries. Credited with identifying the necessity of libraries in school, Logasa worked to achieve strong interaction between the library, students, and teachers at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School.
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Walter Langdon-Brown
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Sir Walter Langdon-Brown was a British medical doctor and writer. Biography He was born in Bedford, the son of the Rev. John Brown of Bunyan's Chapel, Bedford and his wife, Ada Haydon Ford . His mother was a niece of John Langdon Down, describer of Down syndrome. His sister was Florence Ada Keynes, the social reformer, wife of John Neville Keynes and mother of John Maynard Keynes .
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Heinrich Bellermann
1832 - 1903 (71 years)
Johann Gottfried Heinrich Bellermann was a German music theorist. He was the author of Der Contrapunkt , 1862, , and Die Grösse der musikalischen Intervalle als Grundlage der Harmonie , 1873 . Bellermann may be regarded as an influence on the Second Viennese School, as his Counterpoint was used by Arnold Schoenberg when teaching composition to pupils such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
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John Todd
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
John Todd was an American Congregationalist minister, co-founder of Tabor College in Tabor, Iowa, a leading abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Background John Todd was born November 10, 1818, in West Hanover, Pennsylvania. He was the second son and fifth child of Capt. James Todd and Sally Ainsworth Todd. The Todds' ancestors were Scotch Irish and Presbyterians, and Todd grew up attending a Presbyterian church. Todd was an early graduate of Oberlin College and its seminary . In the 1850s, Todd moved West to help start an Oberlin-like school on the Iowa frontier. He was...
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Niels Simonsen
1807 - 1885 (78 years)
Niels Simonsen was a Danish painter, lithographer and sculptor. Biography Simonsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Simnon Rasmusson and Bolette Nielsdatter. His parents were shopkeepers. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a master decorative painter and began to take drawing lessons at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he took private lessons from Johan Ludwig Lund.
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Hermann Lebert
1813 - 1878 (65 years)
Hermann Lebert was a German physician and naturalist. Lebert was born in Breslau. He studied medicine and the natural sciences first in Berlin and later in Zurich under Johann Lukas Schönlein. After he received his medical doctorate , he traveled throughout Switzerland, studying botany. For the next year and a half he studied in Paris, particularly under Baron Guillaume Dupuytren and Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis. In 1838 he settled in Bex, later changing between Bex and Paris. From 1842 to 1845 he worked mainly in comparative anatomy, which had interested him during his travels as a student on the coast of Normandy and the Channel Islands with Charles-Philippe Robin.
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Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish gynaecologist and noted medical author. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and co-author of the world-acclaimed Manual of Gynaecology.
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Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl
1366 - 1433 (67 years)
Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl was an Austrian Roman Catholic clergyman, pulpit orator and theologian. Biography He was born c. 1360, in Dinkelsbühl. He studied at the University of Vienna where he is mentioned as baccalaureus in the faculty of Arts in 1385. Magister in 1390, he lectured in philosophy, mathematics and physics until 1397, and from 1402 to 1405. From 1397 he was dean of the faculty; he studied theology, lecturing until 1402 on theological subjects, first as cursor biblicus, and later on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In 1405 he became bachelor of Divinity, in 1408 licentiate and in 1409 doctor and member of the theological faculty.
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Charles Cotin
1604 - 1682 (78 years)
Charles Cotin or Abbé Cotin was a French abbé, philosopher and poet in the Baroque Précieuses style. He was made a member of the Académie française on 7 January 1655. Cotin was born and died in Paris. He was a scholar of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, an advisor to Louis XIV, and renowned in his time for his sermons, poetry, and erudition. He frequented the Paris literary salons, particularly that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet as a friend of Mlle de Gournay, and his translation of the Song of Songs is more notable for its flavor of fashionable salons than of sacred poetry.
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William Evans
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
William Evans F.R.C.P., Hon. D.Sc. was a distinguished Harley Street cardiologist. He was a grandson of "the Welsh Swagman", Joseph Jenkins, whose voluminous Australian diaries over 25 years he edited and published as excerpts in 1975.
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Prospero Alpini
1553 - 1616 (63 years)
Prospero Alpini was a Venetian physician and botanist. He travelled around Egypt and served as the fourth prefect in charge of the botanical garden of Padua. He wrote several botanical treatises which covered exotic plants of economic and medicinal value. His description of coffee and banana plants are considered the oldest in European literature. The ginger-family genus Alpinia was named in his honour by Carolus Linnaeus.
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Richard Batka
1868 - 1922 (54 years)
Richard Batka was an Austrian musicologist, music critic and librettist. Educated at German Charles-Ferdinand University in his native city of Prague, he began his career as a lecturing academic at that institution in 1900; leaving that post in 1906 to teach on the faculty of the Prague Conservatory. In 1908 he moved to Vienna where he taught courses in the history of opera at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna from 1909 to 1914.
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Ephrem Mtsire
1001 - 1101 (100 years)
Ephrem Mtsire or Ephraim the Lesser was a Georgian monk at Antioch, theologian and translator of patristic literature from Greek. Information as to Ephrem’s life is scarce. Early in life he received a thorough Hellenic education presumably in Constantinople, where his purported father Vache Karich'isdze, a Georgian nobleman from Tao, had removed in 1027. Ephrem then became a monk at the Black Mountain near Antioch, which was populated by a vibrant Georgian monastic community of around 70 monks. Later in his life, c. 1091, Ephrem became a hegumen of the Kastana monastery, probably at the Cast...
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Najm al-Din al-Qazwini al-Katibi
1203 - 1277 (74 years)
Najm al-Dīn 'Alī ibn 'Umar al-Qazwīnī al-Kātibī was a Persian Islamic philosopher and logician of the Shafi`i school. A student of Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī. His most important works are a treatise on logic, Al-Risala al-Shamsiyya, and one on metaphysics and the natural sciences, Hikmat al-'Ain.
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Jennie Kidd Trout
1841 - 1921 (80 years)
Jennie Kidd Trout was the first woman in Canada to become a licensed medical doctor, on March 11, 1875. Trout was the only woman in Canada licensed to practice medicine until July 1880, when Emily Stowe completed the official qualifications.
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Friedrich von Esmarch
1823 - 1908 (85 years)
Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch was a German surgeon. He developed the Esmarch bandage and founded the Deutscher Samariter-Verein, the predecessor of the Deutscher Samariter-Bund. Life Esmarch was born in Tönning, Schleswig-Holstein. He studied at Kiel and Göttingen, and in 1846 became Bernhard Rudolf Konrad von Langenbeck's assistant at the Kiel surgical hospital. He served in the Schleswig-Holstein War of 1848 as junior surgeon, and this directed his attention to the subject of military surgery. He was taken prisoner, but afterwards exchanged, and was then appointed as surgeon to a field hospital.
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