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
Edgar von Gierke
1877 - 1945 (68 years)
Edgar Otto Conrad von Gierke was a German Jewish pathologist who specialized in glycogenesis and discovered glycogen storage disease type I in 1929. Early life Edgar was born in 1877 the Prussian province of Silesia in Breslau to a famous Pomeranian German family. He was the son of the noted legal scholar Otto von Gierke and Marie Caecilie Elise née Loening . Edgar had a sister named Anna von Gierke and a brother named Julius. Marie was an Evangelical Christian but her parents had converted from Judaism to Christianity in the 1840s prior to her birth. Thus, under the racial laws of German Nazi rule, she was considered to be Jewish as was Edgar, who identified as a Protestant.
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Warren Ashby
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Dr. Warren Ashby was an American philosopher, born in Newport News, Virginia. Biography Ashby graduated with a bachelor of arts from Maryville College, Tennessee, in 1939 and earned B.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale University. Following graduation, Ashby taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1947–1949, then joined the faculty of Woman's College where he taught philosophy until his retirement in 1983. Ashby, who specialized in western ethics, originated and served as head of the Department of Philosophy for twenty years. In 1970 he founded a residential college on the campus, later named Warren Ashby Residential College at Mary Foust in his honor.
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Salvador Mazza
Salvador Mazza was a noted Argentine physician and epidemiologist, best known for his strides in helping control American trypanosomiasis, an endemic disease among the rural, poor majority of early 20th century South America.
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Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity , an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and socia...
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Ejnar Nielsen
1872 - 1956 (84 years)
Ejnar Nielsen was a Danish painter and illustrator, who was a central proponent of Symbolist painting in Danish art. He is also known for his large mosaic on Stærekassen, an extension to the Royal Danish Theatre on Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen. He was a professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1920 to 1930 and received the Academy's Eckersberg Medal in 1908 and its Thorvaldsen Medal in 1913.
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Alabert Fogarasi
1891 - 1959 (68 years)
Alabert Fogarasi, also known as Béla Fogarasi was a Hungarian philosopher and politician. Life Fogarasi was born as Béla Freid on 25 July 1891 in Budapest, and studied in Budapest and Heidelberg. In 1910 he translated Henri Bergson's Introduction à la metaphysique into Hungarian. He was a member of the so-called Sunday circle around Béla Balázs and György Lukács. With Karl Mannheim, Arnold Hauser and Ervin Szabó he was also involved in the Budapest Free School of Humanities, founded by Lukács. A December 1915 lecture on historical materialism to the Hungarian Philosophical Society criticized economic determinism.
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Vivien Thomas
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Vivien Theodore Thomas was an American laboratory supervisor who developed a procedure used to treat blue baby syndrome in the 1940s. He was the assistant to surgeon Alfred Blalock in Blalock's experimental animal laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and later at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Thomas was unique in that he did not have any professional education or experience in a research laboratory; however, he served as supervisor of the surgical laboratories at Johns Hopkins for 35 years. In 1976, Hopkins awarded him an honorary doctorate and named him an instructor of surgery for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
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Léon Brunschvicg
1869 - 1944 (75 years)
Léon Brunschvicg was a French Idealist philosopher. He co-founded the Revue de métaphysique et de morale with Xavier Léon and Élie Halévy in 1893. Life He was born into a Jewish family. From 1895 to 1900 he taught at the Lycée Pierre Corneille in Rouen. In 1897 he completed his thesis under the title . In 1909 he became professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne. He was married to Cécile Kahn, a major campaigner for women's suffrage in France, with whom he had four children.
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Harry Goldschmidt
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Harry Goldschmidt was a Swiss musicologist. Life 1910–1949: Basel, Weimar Republic, France, West Africa, Switzerland Goldschmidt was born in Basel on 17 June 1910, the second child of Siegfried Goldschmidt, a banker from Frankfurt, and Vally Goldschmidt-Peiser, a teacher from Breslau. The boy was given the first names of Heinrich Heine: Heinrich Leopold. The classically educated parents came from non-practising, fully assimilated German-Jewish families and acquired Swiss citizenship on 8 August 1919 in the city of Basel, where father Siegfried had become the youngest bank director in Switze...
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Philotheus Boehner
1901 - 1955 (54 years)
Philotheus Boehner was a member of the Franciscan order known for medieval scholarship. Biography Boehner was born Heinrich Boehner in Lichtenau, Westphalia. He entered the Franciscan Order in 1920, and was given the name , the Latin form of the Greek , . In 1927 he was ordained as a priest, although he was so ill with tuberculosis he was not expected to live. While resting, he began his work as a medieval scholar by translating Étienne Gilson's work on Saint Bonaventura. He became a close friend of Gilson in the 1930s.
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Robert Kudicke
1876 - 1961 (85 years)
Heinrich Robert Hellmuth Kudicke was a German physician, epidemiologist and one of the leading experts on tropical diseases in his lifetime. He worked in German East Africa and China for several years. A long-time collaborator of Nobel laureate Robert Koch, he is especially known for his work with African trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness in the early 20th century. As director of the State Institute of Hygiene in German occupied Warsaw in 1941, he tested a new Typhus vaccine on Jewish residents of the Warsaw ghetto, with ensuing adverse effects and deaths. During the early Cold War era, h...
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Charles Hercus
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Sir Charles Ernest Hercus was a New Zealand doctor and professor of public health. He was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, on 13 June 1888. He was for many years dean of the University of Otago Dunedin School of Medicine. The Hercus Building of the Dunedin campus, on the corner of Great King and Hanover Streets, is named for him.
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Edward Joseph Dent
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Edward Joseph Dent, FBA , generally known as Edward J. Dent, was an English musicologist, teacher, translator and critic. A leading figure of musicology and music criticism, Dent was Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge between 1926 and 1941.
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Ludwig Laqueur
1839 - 1909 (70 years)
Ludwig Laqueur was a German ophthalmologist born in Festenberg, Silesia. He was the father of historian Richard Laqueur . He studied medicine in Breslau and Berlin, earning his doctorate in 1860. From 1863 to 1869 he worked as an assistant at Richard Liebreich's ophthalmological hospital in Paris. In 1872 he became an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, where in 1877 he was appointed a full professor of ophthalmology. Among his assistants at Strasbourg was Paul Silex .
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Vasili Razumovsky
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Vasili Ivanovich Razumovsky was a Russian and Soviet surgeon who was professor of surgery at Kazan University starting in 1887. Rasumovsky was among the founders of universities at Saratov , Tbilisi , and Baku , and was the first rector of Baku State University . After 1920 he returned to Kazan University, and taught there until 1930.
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L. P. Jacks
1860 - 1955 (95 years)
Lawrence Pearsall Jacks , abbreviated L. P. Jacks, was an English educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister who rose to prominence in the period from World War I to World War II. Early life Jacks was born on 9 October 1860 in Nottingham. In 1882, he enrolled in Manchester New College . After graduating with a M.A. in 1886, he spent a year at Harvard University, where he studied with the philosopher Josiah Royce. In 1887, he became assistant minister to Stopford Brooke in his chapel in Bloomsbury, London. He served as assistant minister for a year, and then accepted a position as Unitarian...
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Sydney Dodd
1874 - 1926 (52 years)
Sydney Dodd, FRCVS , was a British veterinary surgeon and scientist. He contributed to the development of bacteriology and protozoology in England, South Africa and Australia. Dodd established a research station in Queensland that was to become the Animal Research Institute, and he was the first lecturer in veterinary bacteriology at the University of Sydney. He became one of the foremost bacteriologists in Australia.
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Leonid Pitamic
1885 - 1971 (86 years)
Leonid Pitamic was a Slovene Yugoslav lawyer, philosopher of law, diplomat, and academic. Life He was born in the Carniolan town of Postojna, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in Slovenia. After finishing the classical lyceum in Gorizia and the Theresianum in Vienna, he enrolled in the University of Vienna, where he studied law. After graduation in 1908, he worked in the local branches of the state administration in Carniola, and later in the ministerial offices in Vienna. In 1915, he obtained habilitation in Austrian civil law, and in 1917 in philosophy of law. After the dissol...
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Shirley Graham Du Bois
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Shirley Graham Du Bois was an American-Ghanaian writer, playwright, composer, and activist for African-American causes, among others. She won the Messner and the Anisfield-Wolf prizes for her works.
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Susan Ofori-Atta
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Susan Barbara Gyankorama Ofori-Atta, also de Graft-Johnson, was a Ghanaian medical doctor – the first female doctor on the Gold Coast. She was the first Ghanaian woman and fourth West African woman to earn a university degree. Ofori-Atta was also the third West African woman to become a physician after the Nigerians Agnes Yewande Savage and Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi . In 1933, Sierra Leonean political activist and higher education pioneer, Edna Elliot-Horton became the second West African woman university graduate and the first to earn a bachelor's degree in the liberal arts. Eventually Of...
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Gerhard Lomer
1882 - 1970 (88 years)
Gerhard Richard Lomer was a librarian, editor, and writer. He was the librarian for McGill University Library from 1920 until 1947 and established the university's graduate level library school. He wrote for reference works including The Warner Library and Allen Johnson's series Chronicles of America. He also edited books by prominent authors of his day including John Moody, the founder of Moody's.
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Ole Mørk Sandvik
1875 - 1976 (101 years)
Ole Mørk Sandvik was a Norwegian educator, musicologist and folk-song collector. Background Sandvik was born on the island of Helgøya in Hedmark, Norway. He was a son of school inspector Paul Knutsen Barstad Sandvik and his wife Nikoline Petrine Mørk . His parents hailed from Ørsta and Volda. Three years later, his family moved to Hamar where he grew up. He graduated examen artium in 1893. He then began studying at the University of Kristiania. In 1897 he undertook theology studies. He graduated cand.theol. in 1902. He also graduated from the seminary at Hamar in 1895.
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Johan Mekkes
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Johan Peter Albertus Mekkes was a Dutch philosopher. Having started his career as an officer in the Dutch army, he later studied law and philosophy. His active life as a publishing philosopher started around 1947. In 1949 he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Leiden. Due to a scarcity of translated works he is little known in the English-speaking world but he was influential for a number of other Dutch philosophers. He was one of the second generation of reformational philosophers arising from the Free University in Amsterdam, after the first generation of Herman Dooyeweerd and D.
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Adam Strohm
1870 - 1951 (81 years)
Adam Julius Strohm was a Swedish-American librarian. He was born in Vänersborg, Sweden and came to the United States in 1892. He was educated at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and the University of Illinois. Strohm served as chief librarian of the Detroit Public Library from 1912 until his retirement in 1941. Prior to moving to Detroit, he served as librarian at the University of Illinois.
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Alice Weld Tallant
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Alice Weld Tallant was an American physician and medical school professor. When her employment as a professor of obstetrics was terminated at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania, it sparked the "Tallant Affair", in which students staged a strike and several colleagues resigned their positions in protest.
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Frederick Madison Allen
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Frederick Madison Allen was a physician who is best remembered for his carbohydrate-restricted low-calorie diet for sufferers of diabetes mellitus. He was known for pioneering the "starvation diet".
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Seymour Lubetzky
1898 - 2003 (105 years)
Seymour Lubetzky was a major cataloging theorist and a prominent librarian. Biography Born in the Russian Empire as Shmaryahu Lubetzky, he worked for years at the Library of Congress. He worked as a teacher before he immigrated to the United States in 1927. He earned his BA from UCLA in 1931, and his MA from UC Berkeley in 1932. Lubetzky also taught at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, then the School of Library Service. He was fluent in six languages, a fact that made him valuable both as a cataloger and a speaker at library conferences.
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Sydney Sparkes Orr
1914 - 1966 (52 years)
Sydney Sparkes Orr was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania and the centre of the "Orr case", a celebrated academic scandal of the 1950s. Born in Belfast in 1914, Orr achieved a first-class-honours BA in Philosophy and received an MA with special commendation at Queen's University before commencing his teaching career at the University of St Andrews and the University of Melbourne. In 1952 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at the University of Tasmania, after falsifying his academic record in his application.
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Carl A. Schenck
1868 - 1955 (87 years)
Carl Alwin Schenck was a German forester and pioneering forestry educator. When Schenck came to the United States to work for George W. Vanderbilt at the Biltmore Estate, he became the third formally trained forester in the United States. He established and operated the Biltmore Forest School, the first forestry school in North America, on Vanderbilt's property.
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Yves Simon
1903 - 1961 (58 years)
Yves René Marie Simon was a French Catholic political philosopher. Life Simon studied under Jacques Maritain at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He taught at the Institut Catholique de Lille from 1930 to 1938. In 1938, he came to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, as a visiting professor. He was unable to return to France because of World War II, and after the war he remained as a professor at Notre Dame until 1948. He then joined the Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago. He remained at the University of Chicago until retiring in 1958 due to illness.
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Fyodor Stepun
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was a Russian and German writer, philosopher, historian and sociologist. Biography Fyodor Avgustovich Stepun was born in Russia on 18 February 1884, in Moscow. After attending secondary school in Moscow he went as a student to Heidelberg, and there in 1910 he obtained his doctorate for a thesis on Vladimir Solovyov's philosophy of history.
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Keizo Dohi
1866 - 1931 (65 years)
was a Japanese professor of dermatology and syphilis, and chair of the department of dermatology and syphilis at the University of Tokyo. Career He trained at the Vienna School of Dermatology, and published his first article in 1896 the Archiv für Dermatologie und Syphilis in German.
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Willy Moog
1888 - 1935 (47 years)
Willy Moog was a German philosopher and educator. Life Willy Moog studied from 1906 to 1909 in Berlin, Munich and Gießen; his areas of primary focus were Germanic Studies and Philosophy. He was inspired by the Berlin lectures of Georg Simmel and studied Neo-Kantianism with the school around Wilhelm Dilthey. 1915-1918 he served, against his will, as soldier in World War I, at a customs office at the Prussian-Polish-Russian border. In 1919, Moog married Mathilde Buss , an artist painter and lyric. The couple had one daughter, Marianne Moog-Hoff , who during World War II emigrated to Oslo in No...
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Annette Lewis Phinazee
1920 - 1983 (63 years)
Alethia Annette Lewis Hoage Phinazee was the first woman and the first black American woman to earn the doctorate in library science from Columbia University. She was called a trailblazer for her work as a librarian and educator.
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John Shaw Billings
1838 - 1913 (75 years)
John Shaw Billings was an American librarian, building designer, and surgeon who modernized the Library of the Surgeon General's Office in the United States Army. His work with Andrew Carnegie led to the development and his service as the first director of the New York Public Library. Billings oversaw the building of the Surgeon General's Library, which was the nation's first comprehensive library for medicine.
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Ernest Swinton
1868 - 1951 (83 years)
Major-General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton, was a British Army officer who played a part in the development and adoption of the tank during the First World War. He was also a war correspondent and author of several short stories on military themes. He is credited, along with fellow officer Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Dally Jones, with having initiated the use of the word "tank" as a code-name for the first tracked, armoured fighting vehicles.
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Camillo Wiethe
1889 - 1949 (60 years)
Camillo Wiethe was an Austrian otorhinolaryngologist. He received his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1913, and later served as a front-line physician during World War I. From 1918 to 1936, he was a physician at the clinic for otorhinolaryngology in Vienna, and in the meantime qualified as a university lecturer . From 1936 to 1938, he was head of the department for otorhinolaryngology at Merchant's Hospital , and from 1938 to 1945 maintained a private practice on the Reichsratsstraße. In 1945 he became an associate professor and director of the second university clinic for ...
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Althea Warren
1866 - 1958 (92 years)
Althea Hester Warren was the director of the Los Angeles Public Library from 1933 to 1947 and president of the American Library Association in 1943-1944. She was inducted into the California Library Association's Library Hall of Fame in 2013.
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Paul Georges Dieulafoy
1839 - 1911 (72 years)
Paul Georges Dieulafoy was a French physician and surgeon. He is best known for his study of acute appendicitis and his description of Dieulafoy's lesion, a rare cause of gastric bleeding. Life, studies, and career Dieulafoy was born in Toulouse. He studied medicine in Paris and earned his doctorate in 1869. In 1863, during his third year of medical school, Dieulafoy went to Paris to attend the clinical department of Professor Armand Trousseau. The two men remained close until the former's death in 1867, with Dieulafoy being referred to as Trousseau's spiritual son. Dieulafoy later led an am...
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Ignacio Barraquer
1884 - 1965 (81 years)
Ignacio Barraquer Barraquer was a Spanish ophthalmologist known for his contributions to the advancement of cataract surgery. Barraquer was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. He was the father of Jose Barraquer, also an ophthalmologist known for pioneering works in refractive surgery.
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Agostino Crosti
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Agostino Crosti , was an Italian dermatologist and professor of dermatology in Milan. Crosti's syndrome and Gianotti–Crosti syndrome are named after him.
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Anton Flettner
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Anton Flettner was a German aviation engineer and inventor. Born in Eddersheim , Flettner made important contributions to airplane, helicopter, vessel, and automobile designs. After serving Germany in both World Wars, Anton Flettner emigrated to the United States post World War II as a consultant to the office of Naval Research at the United States Navy.
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Ugo Spirito
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Ugo Spirito was an Italian philosopher; at first, a fascist political philosopher and subsequently an idealist thinker. He has also been an academic and a university teacher. Early life Spirito undertook academic study in law and philosophy. He was initially an advocate of positivism although in 1918, whilst attending Sapienza University of Rome, he abandoned his position to become a follower of the Actual Idealism of Giovanni Gentile. By the age of 22 he was a self-proclaimed fascist and actualist.
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Johann Gottfried Herder
1744 - 1803 (59 years)
Johann Gottfried von Herder was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang, and Weimar Classicism. He was a Romantic philosopher and poet who argued that true German culture was to be discovered among the common people . He also stated that it was through folk songs, folk poetry, and folk dances that the true spirit of the nation was popularized.
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Mencius
372 BC - 289 BC (83 years)
Mencius ; born Meng Ke ; or Mengzi was a Chinese Confucian philosopher who has often been described as the "second Sage" , that is, second to Confucius himself. He is part of Confucius' fourth generation of disciples. Mencius inherited Confucius' ideology and developed it further. Living during the Warring States period, he is said to have spent much of his life travelling around the states offering counsel to different rulers. Conversations with these rulers form the basis of the Mencius, which would later be canonised as a Confucian classic.
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Ernst Cassirer
1874 - 1945 (71 years)
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
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Albert Camus
1913 - 1960 (47 years)
Albert Camus was a French philosopher, author, dramatist, journalist, and political activist. He was the recipient of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 44, the second-youngest recipient in history. His works include The Stranger, The Plague, The Myth of Sisyphus, The Fall, and The Rebel.
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George Herbert Mead
1863 - 1931 (68 years)
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago. He was one of the key figures in the development of pragmatism. He is regarded as one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, and was an important influence on what has come to be referred to as the Chicago School of Sociology.
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Mozi
470 BC - 391 BC (79 years)
Mozi , original name Mo Di , was a Chinese essayist and philosopher who founded the school of Mohism during the Hundred Schools of Thought period . The ancient text Mozi contains material ascribed to him and his followers.
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Étienne Gilson
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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