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,
#14751
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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Josiah Warren
1798 - 1874 (76 years)
Josiah Warren was an American utopian socialist, American individualist anarchist, individualist philosopher, polymath, social reformer, inventor, musician, printer and author. He is regarded by anarchist historians like James J. Martin and Peter Marshall among others as the first American anarchist and the four-page weekly paper he edited during 1833, The Peaceful Revolutionist, the first anarchist periodical published, was an enterprise for which he built his own printing press, cast his own type, and made his own printing plates.
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Anthony Fokker
1890 - 1939 (49 years)
Anton Herman Gerard "Anthony" Fokker was a Dutch aviation pioneer, aviation entrepreneur, aircraft designer, and aircraft manufacturer. He produced fighter aircraft in Germany during the First World War such as the Eindecker monoplanes, the Dr.1 triplane and the D.VII biplane.
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Charles Bolton
1870 - 1947 (77 years)
Charles Bolton was a British physician and pathologist. Bolton was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, the younger brother of psychiatrist Joseph Shaw Bolton . He trained as a doctor at University College Hospital in London and worked there in later life, holding the positions of resident medical officer, consulting physician, director of pathological studies and research, and lecturer in clinical medicine and general pathology at the medical school. He was also physician to the Queen's Hospital for Children. He held the degrees of Doctor of Medicine and Doctor of Science and was elected Fellow of ...
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Karol Rathaus
1895 - 1954 (59 years)
Karol Rathaus was a German-Austrian Jewish composer who immigrated to the United States via Berlin, Paris, and London, escaping the rise of Nazism in Germany. Life Born in the Ukrainian city of Ternopil , Rathaus began composing at an early age, beginning his studies in 1913/1914 at the Academy of Performing Arts and Music in Vienna. His studies were interrupted by military service during the First World War. As one of the favorite pupils of Franz Schreker, Rathaus followed him to the Academy of Music in Berlin, where he continued to study music and composition. After graduation, Rathaus accepted the position of a teacher of composition and music theory at the Berlin University of the Arts.
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Metrodorus of Stratonicea
140 BC - 70 BC (70 years)
Metrodorus of Stratonikeia was at first a disciple of Epicureanism, but afterwards attached himself to Carneades. His defection from the Epicurean school is almost unique. It is explained by Cicero as being due to his theory that the scepticism of Carneades was merely a means of attacking the Stoics on their own ground. Metrodorus held that Carneades was in reality a loyal follower of Plato. Cicero speaks of him as an orator of great fire and volubility. He flourished about 110 BC.
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Franklin Rhoda
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Franklin Rhoda . In the words of historian Mike Foster, Frank Rhoda was an "artist, musician, writer, surveyor, naturalist, social critic, defender of civil liberties and champion of Christ - the only theme unifying his versatile life was idealism that aimed to reform almost everything he encountered."
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Walter Gross
1904 - 1945 (41 years)
Dr. Walter Gross was a German physician appointed to create the Office for Enlightenment on Population Policy and Racial Welfare for the Nazi Party. He headed this office, renamed the Office of Racial Policy in 1934, until his suicide at the close of World War II.
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Dosa ben Saadia
935 - 1018 (83 years)
Dosa ben Saadia was a Talmudic scholar and philosopher who was the Gaon of Sura from 1012 until his death in 1018. Biography Born in Tiberias in about 935, his father Saadia Gaon was a prominent figure, the Sura Gaon from 928 to 942. In a letter written in 928, his father mentions his older brother Sheerit, although he does not mention Dosa. This has led scholars to place Dosa's birth around 935, meaning that he was only a young boy when his father died in 942. In 953, Sheerit and Dosa compiled a list of their father's books. Ibn Daud states in Sefer ha-Qabbalah that Dosa wrote a biography ab...
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Werner Zoege von Manteuffel
1857 - 1926 (69 years)
Werner Maximilian Friedrich Zoege von Manteuffel was a Baltic German medical surgeon. He was the earliest advocate of sterilisedd gloves. He studied at the University of Dorpat and became a doctor in 1886.
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Frank Barna Bigelow
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
Frank Barna Bigelow was an American librarian. Frank Barna was born at Amherst, Massachusetts, Feb. 7, 1869, third child of six of prominent Amherst physician Orvis Furman Bigelow, M.D. and Mary Helen Bigelow; grandson of Judge William Morrill Pingry of Vermont; and nephew of California Forty-niner Adoniram Judson Biglow [this branch of the singularly-related Bigelow/Biglow family was dropping the "e" in the name around this time], having sailed on a clipper ship around Cape Horn which docked in San Francisco on 10 October 1849. Frank Barna was educated at the schools of Amherst and was gra...
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Fritz de Quervain
1868 - 1940 (72 years)
Fritz de Quervain was a Swiss surgeon born in Sion. He was a leading authority on thyroid disease. In 1892 he received his doctorate from the University of Bern, and several years later became director of the surgical department at a hospital in La Chaux-de-Fonds in the canton of Neuchâtel. In 1910 he was appointed to the chair of surgery at the University of Basel, and from 1918 was a professor of surgery at Bern and director of the Inselspital.
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Charles Alexandre Lesueur
1778 - 1846 (68 years)
Charles Alexandre Lesueur was a French naturalist, artist, and explorer. He was a prolific natural-history collector, gathering many type specimens in Australia, Southeast Asia, and North America, and was also responsible for describing numerous species, including the spiny softshell turtle , smooth softshell turtle , and common map turtle . Both Mount Lesueur and Lesueur National Park in Western Australia are named in his honor.
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Bernard Wagenaar
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Bernard Wagenaar was a Dutch-American composer, conductor and violinist. Wagenaar was born in Arnhem. He studied at Utrecht University before starting his career as a teacher and conductor in 1914. He moved to the U.S. in 1920, and he became a citizen in 1927. From 1925 to 1968 he taught at the Juilliard School, where Ned Rorem, Jacob Druckman, Norman Dello Joio, Bernard Herrmann, Robert Ward, Tutti Camarata, Charles Jones, Alan Shulman, Katharine Mulky Warne, and James Cohn were among his pupils. He was an active member of the League of Composers and similar organizations and was an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau in the Netherlands.
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Gyula Kornis
1885 - 1958 (73 years)
Gyula Kornis was a Hungarian Piarist, philosopher, educator, professor and politician, who served as Speaker of the House of Representatives for a short time in 1938. He had an important role in implementation of educational policy of Count Kuno von Klebelsberg, Minister of Religion and Education in the cabinet of István Bethlen in the 1920s. Kornis also served as interim President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1945, after the Second World War.
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Galeazzo di Santa Sofia
1352 - 1427 (75 years)
Galeazzo di Santa Sofia was an Italian physician and anatomist. Life He taught medicine at the universities in Bologna and Padua. He was called to Vienna where he introduced anatomy as a subject of study and in 1404 made the first dissection north of the Alps.
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Joseph Igersheimer
1879 - 1965 (86 years)
Joseph Igersheimer was a German born ophthalmologist known for his work on arsphenamine for the treatment of syphilis. A Jew, after escaping the Nazis, While in forced exile from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939, Joseph Igersheimer was the architect of modern ophthalmology in Turkey. Earlier he was a pioneer in addressing the impact of syphilis on eyesight. He was the first to use arsphenamine in the treatment of syphilis of the eye and the first to operate on retinal detachment by closing the holes. In 1939 he joined the faculty of Tufts University School of Medicine and became a major c...
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John Miller Turpin Finney
1863 - 1942 (79 years)
John Miller Turpin Finney was an American surgeon and academic who also served as a brigadier general during World War I. He is best remembered for serving as the first president of the American College of Surgeons.
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John Thomson
1765 - 1846 (81 years)
John Thomson FRS FRSE PRCPE was a Scottish surgeon and physician, reputed in his time "the most learned physician in Scotland". He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh from 1834 to 1836.
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William T. Bovie
1882 - 1958 (76 years)
William T. Bovie was an American scientist and inventor. He is credited with conceptualizing the field of biophysics and with inventing a modern medical device known as the Bovie electrosurgical generator. Bovie taught or conducted research at Harvard University, Northwestern University, Jackson Laboratory and Colby College.
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Charles McBurney
1845 - 1913 (68 years)
Charles Heber McBurney, MD was an American surgeon, well known for describing McBurney's point in appendicitis. Life and career Charles McBurney was born in 1845. He graduated in the arts from Harvard College in 1866, and qualified in medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in New York City with an M.D. in 1870. He trained further in Europe for 2 years, and started practice in New York in 1873. He became assistant surgeon to the Bellevue Hospital in 1880, and surgeon-in-chief of the Roosevelt Hospital in 1888. Here he did his most famous work on appendicitis, presenting his report on operative management to the New York Surgical Society in 1889.
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John Britton
1771 - 1857 (86 years)
John Britton was an English antiquary, topographer, author and editor. He was a prolific populariser of the work of others, rather than an undertaker of original research. He is remembered as co-author of nine volumes in the series The Beauties of England and Wales ; and as sole author of the Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain and Cathedral Antiquities of England .
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Xie Daoyun
349 - 409 (60 years)
Xie Daoyun was a Chinese poet, writer, scholar, calligrapher and debater of the Eastern Jin Dynasty. Family Born in Yangxia County, Henan, Daoyun belonged to the Xie clan and was a sister of the general Xie Xuan. Though her mother is unknown, it is known that she gave birth to five more children. She was also the favourite niece of prime-minister Xie An. There were Daoist and Confucianist influences in her work.
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Doug Wright
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
Douglas Austin Wright was a Canadian cartoonist, best known for his weekly comic strip Doug Wright's Family . The Doug Wright Awards are named after him to honour excellence in Canadian cartooning.
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Mark Ridley
1560 - 1624 (64 years)
Dr Mark Ridley was an English physician and lexicographer, born in Stretham, Cambridgeshire, to Lancelot Ridley. He became physician to the English merchants in Russia, and then personal physician to the Tsar of Russia.
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Louis Appia
1818 - 1898 (80 years)
Louis Paul Amédée Appia was a Swiss surgeon with special merit in the area of military medicine. In 1863 he became a member of the Geneva "Committee of Five", which was the precursor to the International Committee of the Red Cross. Six years later he met Clara Barton, an encounter which had significant influence on Clara Barton's subsequent endeavours to found a Red Cross society in the United States and her campaign for an accession of the US to the Geneva Convention of 1864.
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Avraham Sharon
1878 - 1957 (79 years)
Avraham Sharon was an Israeli philosopher, musician, scholar and publicist. Sharon established the Autographs and Portraits Collection in the National Library of Israel. Biography Abraham Schwadron was born in the village of Bieniów , near Zolochiv in Galicia . His parents were Isaac Schwadron, a beverage manufacturer, and Rivka Gelernter. In his childhood he studied with his uncle, Sholom Mordechai Schwadron and later on in the Jewish Gymnasium in Suceava. Sharon studied in the University of Vienna, where he received three doctoral degrees – in philosophy, law, and chemistry – the latter ...
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David Campbell
1889 - 1978 (89 years)
Sir David Campbell MC FRSE was a Scottish physician and pharmacologist. He was Professor of Materia Medica at Aberdeen University from 1930 to 1959. He won the Military Cross in 1918 due to his bravery serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps.
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Rudolf Jakob Camerarius
1665 - 1721 (56 years)
Rudolf Jakob Camerarius or Camerer was a German botanist and physician. Life Camerarius was born at Tübingen, and became professor of medicine and director of the botanical gardens at Tübingen in 1687. He is chiefly known for his investigations on the reproductive organs of plants .
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Ottomar Rosenbach
1851 - 1907 (56 years)
Ottomar Ernst Felix Rosenbach was a German physician. Krappitz was a Silesian city where his father, Samuel Rosenbach, practised medicine. He received his education at the universities of Berlin and Breslau . His studies were interrupted by the Franco-Prussian war, in which he took an active part as a volunteer. From 1874 to 1877 he was assistant to Wilhelm Olivier Leube and Carl Wilhelm Hermann Nothnagel at the medical hospital and dispensary of the University of Jena; in 1878 he was appointed assistant at the Allerheiligen-Hospital at Breslau, and became privatdozent at the university of ...
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Li Ye
1192 - 1279 (87 years)
Li Ye , born Li Zhi , courtesy name Li Jingzhai , was a Chinese scientist and writer who published and improved the tian yuan shu method for solving polynomial equations of one variable. Along with the 4th-century Chinese astronomer Yu Xi, Li Ye proposed the idea of a spherical Earth instead of a flat one before the advances of European science in the 17th century.
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Helen Katharine Forbes
1891 - 1945 (54 years)
Helen Katharine Forbes was a Californian artist and arts educator specializing in etching, murals and painting. She is best known for western landscapes, portrait paintings, and her murals with the Treasury Section of Fine Arts and Work Progress Administration . Forbes was skilled in painting in oil, watercolor, and egg tempera. She painted landscapes of Mexico, Mono Lake and the Sierras in the 1920s, desert scenes of Death Valley in the 1930s, and portraits and still-lifes.
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Fedor Krause
1857 - 1937 (80 years)
Fedor Krause was a German neurosurgeon who was native of Friedland . Biography He originally studied music at the Conservatoire in Berlin, and later switched to medicine, earning his doctorate at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1883 he became a medical assistant to Richard von Volkmann at the surgical university clinic at Halle. Afterwards, he was a pathologist at the Senckenberg Institute in Frankfurt am Main , a surgeon at the city hospital at Hamburg-Altona , and later head of the surgical department at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. In 1901 he became an associate professor at the University of Berlin.
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Otto Spiegelberg
1830 - 1881 (51 years)
Otto Spiegelberg was a German gynecologist. He was born in Peine and died in Breslau. He studied medicine at the University of Göttingen, afterwards furthering his education in Berlin, Prague and throughout the United Kingdom. In 1851 he earned his medical doctorate, and subsequently obtained his habilitation at Göttingen . Later he was a professor of obstetrics at the Universities of Freiburg, Königsberg and Breslau.
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Paul Friedrich Meyerheim
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was a German painter and graphic artist. He did portraits and landscapes, but is best known as a painter of animals. Life Paul Friedrich Meyerheim was born in Berlin on 13 July 1842. He and his brother took their first art lessons from his father. As a young boy, he was fascinated with the new Berlin Zoological Gardens and went there so often he was able to befriend Martin Lichtenstein, the zoo's founder, who allowed him into areas that were normally closed to the public. This experience led him to specialize in animal painting.
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P. Kanagasabapathy
1923 - 1977 (54 years)
Perampalam Kanagasabapathy was a Ceylon Tamil mathematician, academic and dean of the Faculty of Science at the Jaffna Campus of the University of Sri Lanka. Early life and family Kanagasabapathy was born in 1923. He was the son of Iyampillai Perampalam from Erlalai in northern Ceylon. He was educated at Jaffna Hindu College. After school he joined the University of Ceylon. He then went to the University of Cambridge, graduating with a master's degree in mathematics.
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Abu Bakr az-Zubaydi
928 - 989 (61 years)
Abū Bakr az-Zubaydī , also known as Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Madḥīj al-Faqīh and Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan az-Zubaydī al-Ishbīlī , held the title Akhbār al-fuquhā and wrote books on topics including philology, biography, history, philosophy, law, lexicology, and hadith.
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Ambrose Burnside
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
Ambrose Everett Burnside was an American army officer and politician who became a senior Union general in the Civil War and three-time Governor of Rhode Island, as well as being a successful inventor and industrialist.
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Charley Chase
1893 - 1940 (47 years)
Charles Joseph Parrott , known professionally as Charley Chase, was an American comedian, actor, screenwriter and film director. He worked for many pioneering comedy studios but is chiefly associated with producer Hal Roach. Chase was the elder brother of comedian/director James Parrott.
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Charles Adolphus Row
1816 - 1896 (80 years)
Charles Adolphus Row was an English Church of England clergyman and moral philosopher. Life Charles Adolphus Row was born in 1816. He was the third son of William Row of St John, Cornwall. He attended Pembroke College, Oxford where he matriculated on 7 May 1834 at the age of 17. He was a scholar at Pembroke from 1834–38. He obtained a B.A. on 29 November 1838 and an M.A. on 11 November 1841.
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Claude Guillermet de Bérigard
1578 - 1663 (85 years)
Claude Guillermet de Bérigard , also known by the Latin form of his name Claudius Berigardus, was a French philosopher, physician and mathematician who became professor of philosophy at Pisa and Padua. He was a vocal opponent of the theories of Galileo. His last name is sometimes spelled Beauregard.
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Henry Elijah Alvord
1844 - 1904 (60 years)
Henry Elijah Alvord was an American university administrator, educator, and Army officer. He served as the president of the Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College and the Maryland Agricultural College as well teaching Military Science at Massachusetts Agricultural College .
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Seale Harris
1870 - 1957 (87 years)
Seale Harris was an American physician and researcher born in Cedartown, Georgia. He was nicknamed "the Benjamin Franklin of Medicine" by contemporaries for his leadership and writing on a wide range of medical and political topics. Dr. Harris' most celebrated accomplishments were his 1924 hypothesis of hyperinsulinism as a cause of spontaneous hypoglycemia.
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Gandy Brodie
1924 - 1975 (51 years)
Gandy Brodie was an American painter working primarily in New York City and Townshend, Vermont, during the middle part of the 20th century. He had ties to Abstract Expressionism through artists such as Willem de Kooning and his style, though singular, was considered second-generation Abstract Expressionism. His paintings were influenced by the works of artists such as Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee. Shane Brody, his only child, is a jazz and Americana guitarist who resides in Underhill, Vermont.
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Mary Harriott Norris
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Mary Harriott Norris was an American author and educator. Born in Boonton, New Jersey to Charles Bryan Norris and Mary Lyon Kerr, she was educated at Vassar College, where she graduated with honor, receiving an A.B. degree in 1870. Two years later in 1872 she was invited back to deliver the annual commencement address to the college. She became a writer of short stories, novels, and educational articles; she edited several works and gave a number of lectures. Norris was a regular contributor to the Boston Journal of Education.
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Mortimer Taube
1910 - 1965 (55 years)
Mortimer Taube was an American librarian. He is on the list of the 100 most important leaders in American Library and Information Science of the 20th century. He was important to the Library Science field because he invented Coordinate Indexing, which uses "uniterms" in the context of cataloging. It is the forerunner to computer based searches. In the early 1950s he started his own company, Documentation, Inc. with Gerald J. Sophar. Previously he worked at such institutions as the Library of Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. American Libraries calls him "...
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Alice Copping
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Alice Copping was senior lecturer in nutrition, Queen Elizabeth College, University of London. She was born in Stratford, New Zealand. Copping attended Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and graduated as Master of Science in 1926. She was awarded the Sarah Ann Rhodes scholarship the following year, and did two years of research work under J. C. Drummond at University College London. She then returned to New Zealand to lecture at the School of Home Science, University of Otago for a year, before returning to London to work in the Division of Nutrition at the Lister Institute.
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Frederick Niecks
1845 - 1924 (79 years)
Frederick Niecks was a German musical scholar and author who resided in Scotland for most of his life. He is best remembered for his biographies of Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. Biography Friedrich Maternus Niecks was born in Düsseldorf, son of a conductor and teacher; his grandfather was a professional musician. He studied music under his father; he later studied violin under Leopold Auer and others, and studied piano and composition under Julius Tausch. At age 13 he made his debut playing Charles Auguste de Bériot's Violin Concerto No. 2, then joined the Musikverein orchestra, wi...
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