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,
#14901
Stanisław Bohusz-Siestrzeńcewicz
1869 - 1927 (58 years)
Stanisław Bohusz-Siestrzeńcewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian painter and illustrator. Biography He was born to a noble family. In 1888, he began his artistic studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Bogdan Willewalde. This was followed by enrollment at the Académie Julian in Paris. Later, he took private lessons from Józef Brandt at his studio in Munich and married his daughter Krystyną. They were divorced in 1905.
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Pieter Boddaert
1730 - 1795 (65 years)
Pieter Boddaert was a Dutch physician and naturalist. Early life, family and education Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name . The younger Pieter obtained his M.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1764.
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Michael J. Zinner
#14904
Frans H. Van Eemeren
#14905
Matthew Turner
Matthew Turner , a Liverpool physician, is considered to be the author or co-author of the 1782 pamphlet, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, the first published work of avowed atheism in Britain. Turner was also a pioneer in the use of ether for medical purposes, and wrote a pamphlet on the subject. In a footnote, Turner was the man who introduced Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley in Liverpool, a friendship which led to the formation of the company that produced the famous pottery.
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Lars Frodesen
1889 - 1921 (32 years)
Lars Frodesen was a Danish writer and philosopher from Sønderborg, in Syddanmark. Having been heavily inspired by Blaise Pascal he mainly wrote pessimistic novels, and published essays on modern philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Frodesen's most important work Om planter og gartnere is an exploration of relations between pedagogy, literature, art, and nature. The goal of forming a human being in the process of upbringing is, he claims, creating a person, who thanks to her openness to experiences, is ready to live a life which has a structure mimicking that of the work of literature. S...
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Bernard Germain de Lacépède
1756 - 1825 (69 years)
Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède or La Cépède was a French naturalist and an active freemason. He is known for his contribution to the Comte de Buffon's great work, the Histoire Naturelle.
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Gabriel von Max
1840 - 1915 (75 years)
Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max was a Prague-born Austrian painter, and professor of history painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He was also a collector of anthropological artifacts. Biography He was born Gabriel Cornelius Max, the son of the sculptor Josef Max and Anna Schumann. He received his first artistic training in history painting from his father.
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Miftahetdin Akmulla
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Miftakhetdin Kamaletdinovich Kamaletdinov, known as Akmulla was a Bashkir, Kazakh and Tatar educator, poet and philosopher. Biography Born 14 December 1831 in the village of Tuhanbay, Kulil-Minsk volost Belebeyevsk Uyezd, Orenburg Governorate .
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Raimo O. Sulkava
#14911
Paolo Costa
1771 - 1836 (65 years)
Paolo Costa was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. The son of Domenico Costa and Lucrezia Ricciarelli, he began his studies in 1780 in Ravenna under modest teachers. He then moved to Padua and studied there under Melchiorre Cesarotti and Simone Stratico. His studies were interrupted by the French invasion and occupation in 1797, during which he held government roles in both Ravenna and Bologna.
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Henry Draper
1837 - 1882 (45 years)
Henry Draper was an American doctor and amateur astronomer. He is best known today as a pioneer of astrophotography. Life and work Henry Draper's father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, botanist, and professor at New York University; he was also the first to photograph the moon through a telescope . Draper's mother was Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor of Brazil. His niece, Antonia Maury was also an astronomer.
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Costanzo Varolio
1543 - 1575 (32 years)
Costanzo Varolio, Latinized as Constantius Varolius , was an Italian anatomist and a papal physician to Gregory XIII. Varolio was born in Bologna. He was a pupil of the anatomist Giulio Cesare Aranzio, himself a pupil of Vesalius. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1567. In 1569 the Senate of the University of Bologna created an extraordinary chair in surgery for him with responsibility to teach anatomy as well and where a statue of him is housed at the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio. Later he is believed to have taught at the Sapienza University of Rome although he is not listed on the roll there.
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Metrodorus of Chios
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Metrodorus of Chios was a Greek philosopher, belonging to the school of Democritus, and an important forerunner of Epicurus. Metrodorus was a pupil of Nessus of Chios, or, as some accounts prefer, of Democritus himself. He is said to have taught Diogenes of Smyrna, who, in turn, taught Anaxarchus.
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Henry Brewster Stanton
1805 - 1887 (82 years)
Henry Brewster Stanton was an American abolitionist, social reformer, attorney, journalist and politician. His writing was published in the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and William Lloyd Garrison's Anti-Slavery Standard and The Liberator. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1850 and 1851. His wife, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a world renowned leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
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Cratippus of Pergamon
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Cratippus of Pergamon , was a leading Peripatetic philosopher of the 1st century BC who taught at Mytilene and Athens. The only aspects of his teachings which are known to us are what Cicero records concerning divination.
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Edme-Louis Daubenton
1730 - 1785 (55 years)
Edme-Louis Daubenton was a French naturalist. Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle . The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet , and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings....
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Giuseppe Ferrari
1811 - 1876 (65 years)
Giuseppe Ferrari was an Italian philosopher, historian and politician. Biography He was born at Milan, studied law at Pavia and graduated in 1831. A follower of Romagnosi and Giovan Battista Vico, his first works were an article in the Biblioteca Italiana entitled "Mente di Gian Domenico Romagnosi" , and a complete edition of the works of Vico, prefaced by an appreciation .
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George E. Burch
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
George Edward Burch, M.D. was a shaper of modern cardiology during the middle part of the twentieth century, whose accomplishments included elucidating the fundamental physiological basis of important cardiovascular diseases, in addition to contributions to the teaching of medicine and cardiology. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine at Tulane University for many years. He is best known for his research in electrocardiography and vectorcardiography, for contributions to understanding viral-based cardiovascular diseases, for 12 books in the field of medicine and cardiology, and for more than 850 publications in the scholarly literature.
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William Townsend Porter
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
William Townsend Porter was an American physician, physiologist, and medical educator who spent most of his career at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Harvard Apparatus company, which produced laboratory equipment for teaching and research in physiology, and was the founding editor of the American Journal of Physiology.
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Kyusaku Ogino
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
was a Japanese medical doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. His natural father's family name was Nakamura, but Kyusaku was adopted by the Ogino family in 1901. Ogino studied infertility and developed a method to estimate the fertile period of the menstrual cycle based on the length of a woman's past cycles. This knowledge could be used by couples seeking pregnancy to time intercourse so as to maximize the chances of conception.
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Nicholas Zammit
1815 - 1899 (84 years)
Nicholas Zammit was a Maltese medical doctor, an architect, an artistic designer, and a major philosopher. His area of specialisation in philosophy was chiefly ethics. Throughout his philosophical career he did not adhere to just one intellectual position. Roughly two-thirds into his life, Zammit passed from a liberal way of thinking to a conservative one. This does not mean that there are no carry-overs, developments, or continuations between the two phases, or that Zammit himself acknowledged such a division. Notwithstanding, the development suggests that an analysis of Zammit's works will ...
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Denis Arnold
1926 - 1986 (60 years)
Denis Midgley Arnold was a British musicologist. Biography After being employed in the extramural department of Queen's University, Belfast, he became a Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull, and from 1969 to 1975 was Professor of Music at The University of Nottingham. From 1975 he was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford University. He served as editor of Music & Letters.
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Chunyu Kun
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Chunyu Kun was a wit, Confucian philosopher, emissary, and official during the Chinese Warring States period. He was a contemporary and colleague of Mencius. In the Records of the Grand Historian, Chunyu Kun appears in Linzi, the capital of the northern state of Qi, as an adviser to the chief minister under King Wei of Qi, and as a master scholar at the Jixia Academy, the foremost institution of learning in ancient China. He is said to be "a man of Qi who lived with his wife's family. He was less than five feet tall. Thanks to his wit and his ready tongue he was sent several times as an envo...
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Kanaka Dasa
1509 - 1609 (100 years)
Kanaka Dasa was a Haridasa saint and philosopher of Dvaita Vedanta, popularly called Daasashreshta Kanakadasa from present-day Karnataka, India. He was a follower of Madhvacharya's Dvaita philosophy and a disciple of Vyasatirtha. He was a renowned composer of Carnatic music, poet, reformer and musician. He is known for his keertanas and ugabhoga, and his compositions in the Kannada language for Carnatic music. Like other Haridasas, he used simple Kannada and native metrical forms for his compositions.
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Jim Corbett
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Colonel Edward James Corbett was an Indian-born British hunter, tracker, naturalist, and author who hunted a number of man-eating tigers and leopards in the Indian subcontinent. He held the rank of colonel in the British Indian Army and was frequently called upon by the Government of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, now the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, to kill man-eating tigers and leopards that were preying on people in the nearby villages of the Kumaon-Garhwal Regions.
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Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Pieter Nicolaas/Nicolaus van Eyck He was born Pieter Nicolaas van Eijk and changed his name to van Eyck around 1907. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC in Rome and London, but also a poet, critic, essayist and philosopher from the Netherlands. Awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1947.
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Thomas A. Finlay
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Thomas Aloysius Finlay, S.J. was an Irish Catholic priest, economist, philosopher and editor. Early life He was born on 6 July 1848 near Lanesborough, the son of William Finlay, an engineer, and his wife Maria Magan; the politician Thomas Finlay, named after him, was his nephew. His father, who died in 1864, was from Fifeshire, a Protestant convert to Catholicism; his mother was a Catholic from County Cavan.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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Guido Bonatti
1210 - 1296 (86 years)
Guido Bonatti was an Italian mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, who was the most celebrated astrologer of the 13th century. Bonatti was advisor of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, Ezzelino da Romano III, Guido Novello da Polenta and Guido I da Montefeltro. He also served the communal governments of Florence, Siena and Forlì. His employers were all Ghibellines , who were in conflict with the Guelphs , and all were excommunicated at some time or another. Bonatti's astrological reputation was also criticised in Dante's Divine Comedy, where he is depicted as residing in hell as punishmen...
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C. S. Wright
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Sir Charles Seymour Wright , nicknamed Silas Wright after novelist Silas K. Hocking, was a Canadian member of Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition of 1910–1913, the Terra Nova Expedition. Background Born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1887, the son of an insurance executive, Wright grew up in the Toronto neighbourhood of Rosedale. He was educated at Upper Canada College where he also became head boy. He wore glasses, excelled in sports, and his spirit of adventure saw him spend some of his youth prospecting and canoeing in Canada's unmapped Far North. He studied physics at the Universit...
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William Gilham
1818 - 1872 (54 years)
William Henry Gilham was an American soldier, teacher, chemist, and author. A member of the faculty at Virginia Military Institute, in 1860, he wrote a military manual which was still in modern use 145 years later. He served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, and became president of Southern Fertilizing Company in Richmond after the War.
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Felice Fontana
1730 - 1805 (75 years)
Abbé Gasparo Ferdinando Felice Fontana was an Italian polymath who contributed to experimental studies in physiology, toxicology, and physics. As a physicist he discovered the water gas shift reaction in 1780. He investigated the human eye and has also been credited with discovering the nucleolus of a cell. His work on the venom of vipers was among the earliest experimental toxicological studies. He served as a court physicist for Peter Leopold, Duke of Tuscany and taught at the University of Pisa. He was involved in the establishment of the La Specola museum in Florence.
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Donald MacAlister
1854 - 1934 (80 years)
Sir Donald MacAlister, 1st Baronet of Tarbet was a Scottish physician who was Principal and Vice-Chancellor and, later, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. He was a member of the Cambridge Apostles intellectual secret society, from 1876. From 1904 to 1931 he was President of the General Medical Council.
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August Christian Niemann
1761 - 1832 (71 years)
August Christian Niemann was a German forestry engineer and political economist. He is known as a composer and collector of student songs. Born in Altona, he studied law in Jena and Kiel. Serving as Hofmeister for a fellow student of noble background, he moved to the University of Göttingen in 1782. He returned to Kiel in 1783, where he received his PhD, and lectured on statistics and political science from 1785.
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Elizabeth Bass
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
Mary Elizabeth Bass was an American physician, educator and suffragist. She was the first of two women to become faculty members at the medical school of Tulane University along with Edith Ballard. Bass worked to promote the efforts of women as physicians. She worked at Tulane for thirty years.
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Adam of Balsham
1100 - 1181 (81 years)
Adam of Balsham was an Anglo-Norman scholastic and churchman. Life Adam was born in Balsham, near Cambridge, England. He studied with Peter Lombard at the University of Paris. He later taught at Paris; among his pupils were John of Salisbury and William of Tyre and might have been a contemporary there of Rainald of Dassel . Gabriel Nuchelmans surmises that he may have been the first person to introduce the term enuntiabile, which came to be used in the same sense as dictum.
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Gerard ter Borch
1617 - 1681 (64 years)
Gerard ter Borch , also known as Gerard Terburg , was a Dutch genre painter who lived in the Dutch Golden Age. He influenced fellow Dutch painters Gabriel Metsu, Gerrit Dou, Eglon van der Neer and Johannes Vermeer. According to Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Ter Borch "established a new framework for subject matter, taking people into the sanctum of the home", showing the figures' uncertainties and expertly hinting at their inner lives. His influence as a painter, however, was later surpassed by Vermeer.
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Adriano Tilgher
1887 - 1941 (54 years)
Adriano Tilgher was an Italian philosopher and essayist. Biography Tilgher was born in Resina . After studying law, he dedicated himself to journalism and essay writing. He was a theatre critic for various daily Roman newspapers between 1915 and 1925, proving himself a sharp interpreter of dramatic texts. He is known for his view of the theatre of Luigi Pirandello, which he interpreted as an expression of the contrast between Life and Form , a view Pirandello adopted as his own.
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Jaap Kunst
1891 - 1960 (69 years)
Jaap Kunst was a Dutch musicologist. He is credited with coining the term "ethnomusicology" as a more accurate name for the field then known as comparative musicology. Kunst studied the folk music of the Netherlands and of Indonesia. His published work totals more than 70 texts.
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Theodor Schwarz
1777 - 1850 (73 years)
Theodor Schwarz was a German Lutheran clergyman and writer. He published novels under the pseudonym Theodor Melas. He was the son of provost Georg Theodor Schwarz. From 1798 he studied at the University of Jena, where he attended lectures given by Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Johann Jakob Griesbach and Friedrich Schiller. In 1800 he traveled with painter Jakob Wilhelm Roux to Saxon Switzerland and to Dresden, where he met with Caspar David Friedrich. In 1801 he returned to Rügen and assisted his father at the parish. Afterwards, he worked for several years as a ...
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Alexander Hamilton
1739 - 1802 (63 years)
Alexander Hamilton FRSE FRCSE FRCPE was a Scottish physician. He was a co-founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783. He was one of the first persons to recognise that puerperal fever was infectious. He was professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh.
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Rudolf Wiegmann
1804 - 1865 (61 years)
Heinrich Ernst Gottfried Rudolf Wiegmann was a German painter, archaeologist, art historian, graphic artist and architect. He worked in the Classical style and, as a painter, is best known for his vedute. His wife, Marie Wiegmann, whom he married in 1841, was also a painter of some note.
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David Guest
1911 - 1938 (27 years)
David Guest was a British mathematician and philosopher who volunteered to fight for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in Spain in 1938. He was the uncle of American-British musician, actor and director Christopher Guest.
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Jean de Silhon
1596 - 1667 (71 years)
Jean de Silhon was a French philosopher and politician. He was a founding member, and the first to occupy seat 24 of the Académie française in 1634. At Cardinal Richelieu's prompting, he defended the concept of reason of state, arguing that the political necessities under which the State operates mean that it need not always follow normal laws of ethics, such as telling the truth. Reason of state was thus, he said, "a mean between that which conscience permits and affairs require."
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Emil Hammacher
1885 - 1916 (31 years)
Emil Hammacher was a German philosopher, proponent of objective idealism and mystic, doctor of Philosophy and Law, professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn. He studied in Geneva, Heidelberg, Berlin and Bonn. Hammacher borrowed the basic tenets of objective idealism from Hegel. He rejected dialectics and developed the mystical doctrine of "ethical self-awareness of the spirit" as "the supreme and fundamental value." In his work directed against Marxism, Hammacher holds the idea that the socialization of the means of production and materialism are contrary to the laws of morality.
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Andrew McNaughton
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
General Andrew George Latta McNaughton was a Canadian electrical engineer, scientist, army officer, cabinet minister, and diplomat. Early life McNaughton was born in Moosomin, District of Assiniboia, North-West Territories , on 25 February 1887. Both of McNaughton's parents were immigrants from Scotland, and his youth was a happy one, being brought up by an adventuresome father who had once been a trader in buffalo hides and a kindly, loving mother. His upbringing on a farm instilled in him a life-long love of hard work and self-discipline. McNaughton spent his free time riding horses across the vast expanses of the Prairies while also engaging in hunting and fishing.
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E. I. Watkin
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Edward Ingram Watkin was an English Catholic philosopher, pacifist and writer. Life He studied at St Paul's School, London and New College, Oxford. In 1908, Watkin became a convert to Catholicism. He publicly opposed conscription in 1916, a position he upheld in his 1939 pamphlet The Crime of Conscription.
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Petrus Martinez de Osma
1427 - 1480 (53 years)
Petrus Martinez de Osma was a Spanish theologian and philosopher, known for his views on indulgences, which he retracted at the end of his life. Life He graduated M.A. at the University of Salamanca in 1457. He was professor of theology there from 1463. A follower of Alonso el Madrigal , from 1476 he defended theses on indulgences and confession resembling those of John Wyclif and Jan Hus, and anticipating issues from the Protestant Reformation. Among his pupils was Antonio de Nebrija.
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Muretus
1526 - 1585 (59 years)
Muretus is the Latinized name of Marc Antoine Muret , a French humanist who was among the revivers of a Ciceronian Latin style and is among the usual candidates for the best Latin prose stylist of the Renaissance.
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