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,
#15051
Aron Brand
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Aron Brand-Auraban was an Israeli pediatric cardiologist. He served as chairman of the Israel Medical Association in Jerusalem, and founded the Jerusalem Academy of Medicine. Biography Aron Brand grew up in Koło, where he attended heder and the Jewish gymnasium. His father, Natan, was a grain merchant and miller. In 1925, his father, a fervent Zionist, sent him to Palestine to study at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. In 1928, he studied philosophy and Jewish studies in Berlin. He studied simultaneously at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. One of h...
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Seyyed Nassir Ghaemi
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Lorenzo Magalotti
1637 - 1712 (75 years)
Lorenzo Magalotti was an Italian philosopher, author, diplomat and poet. Magalotti was born in Rome into an aristocratic family, the son of Ottavio Magalotti, Prefect of the Pontifical Mail: his uncle Lorenzo Magalotti was a member of the Roman Curia. His cousin Filippo was rector at University of Pisa. The Jesuit Magalotti became the secretary of the Accademia del cimento and a gazetteer of the sciences.
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Mirza Mahdi Ashtiani
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Mirza Mahdi Ashtiani , a man of wisdom, mystic, man of literature, was a Great Master in the philosophical School of Tehran. Birth and family Mirza Mahdi was born in 1889 in Tehran. His father, Mirza Jafar was the relatives of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Hasan Ashtiani, famous as the Little Mirza, one of the most great men of knowledge in Tehran.
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Rudolf Gerber
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Rudolf Gerber was a German musicologist. He was professor and director of the musicology department of the University of Gießen and from 1943 professor of musicology at the University of Göttingen.
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William H. Masters
#15057
John Laurens
1754 - 1782 (28 years)
John Laurens was an American soldier and statesman from South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, best known for his criticism of slavery and his efforts to help recruit slaves to fight for their freedom as U.S. soldiers.
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John Moore
1729 - 1802 (73 years)
John Moore FRSE was a Scottish physician and travel author. He also edited the works of Tobias Smollett. Life He was born on 10 October 1729 in Stirling, the son of Rev Charles Moore of Rowallan and his wife, Marion Anderson. The family moved to Glasgow in his youth and he was educated at Glasgow Grammar School. He was then apprenticed to Dr. John Gordon in Glasgow 1745 to 1747.
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Erich Schenk
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Erich Schenk was an Austrian musicologist and music historian. Personal and scientific life Born in Salzburg , Schenk studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum and then at the University of Munich, where he also received his doctorate in 1925. His habilitation followed in 1930 at the University of Rostock, and four years later he founded the Musicological Institute at that institution in 1934. He remained director of Musicological Institute through 1940.
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Walter Jekyll
1849 - 1929 (80 years)
Walter Jekyll , was an English clergyman who renounced his religion and became a planter in Jamaica, where he collected and published songs and stories from the local African-Caribbean community. Early life Jekyll lived in his youth with his family at 2 Grafton Street, Mayfair, London, the seventh of the seven children of Captain Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and his wife Julia Hammersley. His sister was the gardener Gertrude Jekyll. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. Jekyll was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family ...
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George Lokert
1485 - 1547 (62 years)
George Lokert of Ayr was a Scottish philosopher and theologian who made significant contributions to the study of logic. A pupil of John Mair, he also studied and taught at the University of Paris, and eventually served as prior of the Sorbonne. Returning to Scotland in 1521, he served as Rector of the University of St Andrews .
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Mulla Hamzah Gilani
Mulla Hamzah Gilani was an Iranian shia philosopher. He was one of the pupils of Muhammad Sadiq Ardestani. Life He was come from Gilan province but most of his life has been passed in Isfahan because of this, he also called as isfahani. It is not clear when he was born but according to Hazin lahiji, Molla Hamzeh died around 1134 lunar Hijrah. there is little information about his life in the main sources.
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James Lorrain Smith
1862 - 1931 (69 years)
James Lorrain Smith FRS FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish pathologist known for his works in human physiology, especially his research on respiration in collaboration with John Scott Haldane. Life He was born in the manse at Half Morton in rural Dumfriesshire the fourth son of Rev Walter Smith who was a Free Church of Scotland minister in the parish. He had several talented siblings, including the mycologist, Annie Lorrain Smith who worked informally at the British Museum. His brother Walter Smith became a professor of philosophy at Lake Forest College in Illinois whilst another brother, William Geor...
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Najm al-Din Kubra
1145 - 1221 (76 years)
Najm ad-Din Kubra was a 13th-century Khwarezmian Sufi from Khwarezm and the founder of the Kubrawiya, influential in the Ilkhanate and Timurid dynasty. His method, exemplary of a "golden age" of Sufi metaphysics, was related to the Illuminationism of Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi as well as to Rumi's Shams Tabrizi. Kubra was born in 540/1145 and died in 618/1221.
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Jakob Martini
1570 - 1649 (79 years)
Jakob Martini was a German Lutheran theologian and philosopher. Biography Jakob Martini was born at Langenstein in the hill country to the west of Magdeburg. Adam Martini, his father, was a pastor.
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Thomas Dewar Weldon
1896 - 1958 (62 years)
Thomas Dewar "Harry" Weldon was a British philosopher. Life Thomas Weldon was born at 3 Bryanston Mansions, York Street, Marylebone, London, in 1896. After an education at Tonbridge School, he won a scholarship to read Literae humaniores at Magdalen College, Oxford, which he postponed to become an officer in the Royal Field Artillery in 1915. He spent World War I in France and Belgium, rising to acting captain, being wounded and winning the Military Cross and bar. He finally went up to Oxford in 1919, graduating with a first class degree in 1921. Weldon was elected a fellow and philosophy tutor at his college two years later, getting to know C.
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Takeuchi Seihō
1864 - 1942 (78 years)
Takeuchi Seihō was a Japanese painter of the Nihonga genre, active from the Meiji through the early Shōwa period. One of the founders of nihonga, his works spanned half a century and he was regarded as master of the prewar Kyoto circle of painters. His real name was Takeuchi Tsunekichi.
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Paul Krannhals
1883 - 1934 (51 years)
Paul Krannhals was a Baltic-German philosopher. He was an early supporter of the NSDAP in the 1920s and 1930s. His work Das Organische Weltbild was referred to by Otto Dietrich as "the first attempt from a National Socialist perspective...to scientifically clarify and present the organic or universalist worldview".
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Frederick F. Russell
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Brigadier General Frederick Fuller Russell was a U.S. Army physician who perfected a typhoid vaccine in 1909. In 1911, a typhoid vaccination program was carried out to have the entire U.S. Army immunized. As a direct result of his research, the U.S. Army was the first military to make vaccination a required prophylaxis against typhoid. The 1911 measure eliminated typhoid as a significant cause of morbidity and mortality among U.S. military personnel.
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Max Koner
1854 - 1900 (46 years)
Max Johann Bernhard Koner was a German portraitist. Biography From 1873 to 1878, he studied at the Prussian Academy of Arts under Eduard Daege, Anton von Werner and others. He spent some time in Italy in 1875 and, after graduating went to study in Paris. In 1893, he became a member of the Academy.
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Socrates the Younger
420 BC - 400 BC (20 years)
Socrates the Younger was an ancient Athenian philosopher. Ancient texts suggest that he was a young student of the elder Socrates and later a cohort of Plato. He is best remembered for his depiction in Plato's Statesman, and scholars have suggested that he had ties to Academic and Pythagorean philosophy.
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Gottfried Otto Helmut Naumann
#15073
Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen
1215 - Present (811 years)
Judah ben Solomon ha-Kohen was a thirteenth-century Spanish Jewish philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician. He was the author of the Midrash ha-Ḥokmah, considered the first of the great Hebrew encyclopedias, and notable for its in-depth treatment both of the exact sciences and of biblical and rabbinic texts.
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Jakob Eduard Polak
1818 - 1891 (73 years)
Jakob Eduard Polak was an Austrian physician, born to a Jewish family from Bohemia, who played an important role in introducing modern medicine in Iran. Life Polak studied medicine in Prague and Vienna. He was one of the six Austrian teachers invited by Amir Kabir, the Persian chief minister, as the instructors of Dar ul-Fonun, the first modern higher education institution in Iran. By his own account, he entered Iran on 24 November 1851, before the inauguration of the Dar ul-Fonun.
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Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
1829 - 1887 (58 years)
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union Army during the Civil War.
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Dennis Hart Mahan
1802 - 1871 (69 years)
Dennis Hart Mahan [məˈhæn] was a noted American military theorist, civil engineer and professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1824–1871. He was the father of American naval historian and theorist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.
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Charles C. Bass
1875 - 1975 (100 years)
Charles Cassidy Bass was an American medical doctor and researcher on tropical medicine who made significant contributions to understanding malaria, hookworm, and other diseases. Later Bass studied the relationship between dental health and general well-being. Bass articulated and promoted the "Bass Technique of Toothbrushing" and developed improved means of flossing teeth, for which some refer to Bass as "The Father of Preventive Dentistry". He subsequently became a university administrator, serving as dean of the Tulane University School of Medicine, from 1922 to 1940.
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Emilio Pettoruti
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Emilio Pettoruti was an Argentine painter, who caused a scandal with his avant-garde cubist exhibition in 1924 in Buenos Aires. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires was a city full of artistic development. Pettoruti's career was thriving during the 1920s when "Argentina witnessed a decade of dynamic artistic activity; it was an era of euphoria, a time when the definition of modernity was developed." While Pettoruti was influenced by Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Abstraction, he did not claim to paint in any of those styles in particular. Exhibiting all over Europ...
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Musa Bigiev
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Musa Bigiev was a Tatar Hanafi Maturidi scholar, theologian philosopher, publicist and one of the leaders of the Jadid movement. After receiving his education in Kazan, Bukhara, Istanbul and Cairo, he became a political activist for the Ittifaq, the political organisation of the Muslims of Russia. He also taught in Orenburg, wrote journalistic texts and translated classic works into Tatar. After emigrating from the Soviet Union, he travelled Europe and the Middle and Far East while writing and publishing.
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Robert Mark Wenley
1861 - 1929 (68 years)
Prof Robert Mark Wenley FRSE DCL LLD was a 19th/20th-century Scottish philosopher. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 19 July 1861 the son of Jemima Isabella Veitch and her husband, James Adams Wenley FRSE , Treasurer of the Bank of Scotland. The family lived at 4 Buccleuch Place, just south of George Square, Edinburgh.
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Reinhold Begas
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Reinhold Begas was a German sculptor. Biography Begas was born in Berlin, son of the painter Carl Joseph Begas. He received his early education studying under Christian Daniel Rauch and Ludwig Wilhelm Wichmann. During a period of study in Italy, from 1856 to 1858, he was influenced by Arnold Böcklin and Franz von Lenbach in the direction of a naturalistic style in sculpture. This tendency was marked in the group Borussia, executed for the facade of the exchange in Berlin, which first brought him into general notice.
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Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando
1772 - 1842 (70 years)
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando , was a French jurist, philanthropist and philosopher of Italian descent. He is most remembered for his 1804 book Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, considérés relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines as well as his 1820 study of benevolent activity, Le visiteur du pauvre . He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who used his philosophical framework extensively in support of his own first book Nature.
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Carlo Maratta
1625 - 1713 (88 years)
Carlo Maratta or Maratti was an Italian painter, active mostly in Rome, and known principally for his classicizing paintings executed in a Late Baroque Classical manner. Although he is part of the classical tradition stemming from Raphael, he was not exempt from the influence of Baroque painting and particularly in his use of colour. His contemporary and friend, Giovanni Bellori, wrote an early biography on Maratta.
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Ernst Simon
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Ernst Akiba/Akiva Simon was a German-Jewish educator and religious philosopher. Biography In the 1920s, Ernst Simon co-founded Brit Shalom along with Martin Buber, an organization espousing a binational solution for promoting the co-existence of Jews and Arabss in the State of Israel. From 1930 to 1933 he taught at the Hebrew Reali School Haifa, headed by Arthur Biram. In 1942, he was one of the founders of the binationalist Ihud party.
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Abraham Yagel
1553 - 1623 (70 years)
Abraham Yagel was an Italian Jewish catechist, philosopher, and cabalist. He lived successively at Luzzara, Venice, Ferrara, and Sassuolo. Life and identity Giulio Bartolocci, followed by De Rossi, Wolf, and Julius Fürst, erroneously identified Abraham Yagel with the Christian censor Camillo Jagel, declaring that Abraham Jagel embraced Christianity and changed his name to "Camillo Jagel." The untenability of this identification has been proved by later scholars, including Hananiah Coèn.
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Nilratan Sircar
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Sir Nilratan Sircar M.A. M.D. D.Sc. was an Indian medical doctor, educationist, philanthropist and swadeshi entrepreneur. He was awarded honorary DCL by University of Oxford & LL.D by University of Edinburgh. He was a renowned figure in promoting Science and Technology education in contemporary India.
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Theophilus Gould Steward
1843 - 1924 (81 years)
Theophilus Gould Steward was an American author, educator, and clergyman. He was a U.S. Army chaplain and Buffalo Soldier of 25th U.S. Colored Infantry. Life and career Early years Steward was born to James Steward and Rebecca Gould in Gouldtown, New Jersey. The son of free Blacks reared in a family that stressed education, he received his formal education in the Gouldtown public schools.
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Jean de Beaugrand
1584 - 1640 (56 years)
Jean de Beaugrand was the foremost French lineographer of the seventeenth century. Though born in Mulhouse , de Beaugrand moved to Paris in 1581. He also worked as a mathematician and published works on geostaticss. He is credited with naming the cycloid. He lived and worked in Paris as an artist until his death in 1640.
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Bernhard Heine
1800 - 1846 (46 years)
Bernhard Heine was a German physician, bone specialist and the inventor of the osteotome, a medical tool for cutting bones. Apprenticeship in Würzburg Bernhard Heine was born on August 20, 1800, as the son of a tanner in Schramberg. At the age of ten years he was apprenticed to his uncle Johann Georg Heine in Würzburg as an orthopaedic mechanic. Without any enrolment he later attended lectures in medicine at the University of Würzburg.
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Henri Filhol
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Henri Filhol was a French medical doctor, malacologist and naturalist born in Toulouse. He was the son of Édouard Filhol , curator of the Muséum de Toulouse. After receiving his early education in Toulouse, he moved to Paris, where he obtained doctorates in medicine and science. In 1879 he was appointed professor of zoology at the Faculty of Toulouse. From 1894 to 1902 he occupied the chair of comparative animal anatomy at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. In 1897 he became a member of the Académie des sciences.
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Albert Houtin
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Albert Houtin was a French Catholic theologian and historian with a focus on the history of doctrine and on modernism in French religion. Born in La Flèche, he grew up to become a priest and was ordained in 1891. Following the turn of the century, he became disenchanted with religion and came to regard all religious belief systems as fraudulent. In 1907, he had attended the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, which had been organised by Unitarians.
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Arthur Henfrey
1819 - 1859 (40 years)
Arthur Henfrey was an English surgeon and botanist. Life Henfrey was born of English parents at Aberdeen on 1 November 1819. He studied medicine and surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843. Poor health caused him to give up his medical career.
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Rupert Pearse
Rupert Pearse is a British physician specialising in intensive care medicine, and NIHR Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at Queen Mary University of London. Pearse graduated from St George's, University of London, in 1996.
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Albert Thierfelder
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
Ferdinand Albert Thierfelder was a German pathologist born in Meissen. He was the son of city physician , and was a younger brother to internist Theodor Thierfelder . He studied medicine at the University of Rostock and University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1870 with a dissertation on sweat gland adenoma, Ein Fall von Schweissdrüsen-Adenom. He spent several years as an assistant at the institute of pathology in Leipzig, and from 1876 to 1908 was a full professor of anatomic pathology in Rostock. One of his better known assistants in Rostock was pathologist Otto Lubarsch .
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Karl Gottlob Kühn
1754 - 1840 (86 years)
Karl Gottlob Kühn was a German physician and medical historian. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1783 with the dissertation thesis "De forcibus obstetriciis nuper inventis". In 1785 he became an associate professor at Leipzig, where he later served as a full professor of therapy and physics and pathology . On three separate occasions he served as university rector .
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Andrew Gray
1847 - 1925 (78 years)
Andrew Gray was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. Life Born in Lochgelly, Fife, the son of John Gray, he was educated at Lochgelly School and then studied at the University of Glasgow , where he was appointed the Eglinton Fellow in Mathematics in 1876. Perhaps more significantly, however, in 1875 he became the assistant and private secretary of Professor William Thomson . He held this post – an official University one after 1880 – until 1884, when he was appointed Professor of Physics at the newly founded University College of North Wales.
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Simone Porzio
1496 - 1554 (58 years)
Simone Porzio was an Italian philosopher, born and died in Naples. Life Like his greater contemporary, Pomponazzi, he was a lecturer on medicine at Pisa , and in later life gave up purely scientific study for speculation on the nature of man. His philosophic theory was identical with that of Pomponazzi, whose De immortalitate animi he defended and amplified in a treatise De mente humana. There is told of him a story which illustrates the temper of the early humanistic revival in Italy. When he was beginning his first lecture at Pisa he opened the meteorological treatises of Aristotle. The au...
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John Ming
1838 - 1910 (72 years)
Rev. John Joseph Ming S.J. was a Swiss Roman Catholic priest, philosopher and writer. He was born in Giswil, Obwalden and was educated at gab Gauthier College, Engelberg, Obwalden. He was ordained in 1868. He was appointed a theological lecturer at the Seminary of the Prince Bishop of Görz in 1871 and was sent to the United States in 1872. He taught philosophy at colleges and contributed articles to the Catholic Encyclopedia and The American Catholic Quarterly Review. He was considered one of the greatest Catholic authorities on sociology of his era.
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Andries Mac Leod
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Andries Hugo Donald Mac Leod was a Belgian-Swedish philosopher and mathematician. Andries Mac Leod was born in Ledeberg, a suburb of Ghent, as a son of Julius Mac Leod, a botanist and professor at Ghent University, and of Fanny Mac Leod born Maertens, who was translator from English into Dutch of two books by Kropotkin.
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Adam of Łowicz
1500 - 1514 (14 years)
Adam of Łowicz was a professor of medicine at the University of Krakow, its rector in 1510–1511, a humanist, writer and philosopher. Life Adam studied in the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of Krakow, earning a baccalaureate in 1488 and a master's degree in 1492. He then studied medicine in Italy. Returning to Poland, he served as court physician to Kings Jan I Olbracht, Alexander Jagiellon and Zygmunt I. In 1510 and 1511 he was twice elected rector of the University of Krakow. He opposed the clergy's dominance over the secular estate. An unconventional thinker, he hypothesized t...
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