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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15051
John Bate
John Bate was an English or Welsh theologian and philosopher. Life Bate was, according to Leland's account, born west of the River Severn , but seems to have been brought up in the Carmelite monastery at York, where his progress in learning was so great that he was dispatched to complete his studies at Oxford. Philosophy and theology seem to have divided his attention, and on asking his master's degree in both these subjects he proceeded to add to his reputation by authorship. He was acknowledged to be an authority in his own university and the news of his acquirements soon spread abroad. His...
Go to Profile#15052
Giuseppe Saverio Poli
1746 - 1825 (79 years)
Giuseppe Saverio Poli was an Italian physicist, biologist and natural historian. His collections, together with those stored in the Royal Bourbon Museum, were the foundation of the Zoological Museum of Naples. The specimens were from locations all over the world, and included especially, Lepidoptera, Cnidaria and Mollusca.
Go to Profile#15053
Karl Gottfried Konstantin Dehio
1851 - 1927 (76 years)
Karl Gottfried Konstantin Dehio was a Baltic German internist and professor of pathology. In 1877 he earned his doctorate from the University of Dorpat, and following graduation continued his studies at the University of Vienna. From 1879 to 1883 he was a physician at the Prince of Oldenburg Children's Hospital in St. Petersburg, returning to Dorpat in 1884 as a lecturer at the university. In 1886, he became a professor of pathology, being chosen university rector in 1918.
Go to Profile#15054
Secundus the Silent
100 - 200 (100 years)
Secundus the Silent was a philosopher who lived in Athens in the early 2nd century, who had taken a vow of silence. An anonymous text entitled Life of Secundus purports to give details of his life as well as answers to philosophical questions posed to him by the emperor Hadrian. The work enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages.
Go to Profile#15055
Adolf Sandberger
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Adolf Wilhelm August Sandberger was a German musicologist and composer, with a particular interest in 16th-century music. He founded the School of Musicology at the University of Munich, where he worked as a professor of musicology from 1904 to his retirement in 1930. In addition to his academic work, Sandberger composed two operas, several choruses and some chamber and instrumental music. His Violin Sonata, Op, 10 was dedicated to Benno Walter.
Go to Profile#15056
Abu'l-Fadl ibn al-Amid
912 - 970 (58 years)
Abu 'l-Fadl Muhammad ibn Abi Abdallah al-Husayn ibn Muhammad al-Katib, commonly known after his father as Ibn al-'Amid was a Persian statesman who served as the vizier of the Buyid ruler Rukn al-Dawla for thirty years, from 940 until his death in 970. His son, , also called Ibn al-'Amid, succeeded him in his office.
Go to Profile#15057
Leslie Halliwell
1929 - 1989 (60 years)
Robert James Leslie Halliwell was a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television rights buyer for ITV, the British commercial network, and Channel 4. He is best known for his reference guides, Filmgoer's Companion , a single volume film-related encyclopaedia featuring biographies and technical terms, and Halliwell's Film Guide , which is dedicated to individual films.
Go to Profile#15058
Placida Gardner Chesley
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Placida Gardner Chesley was an American medical doctor and college professor. She was the City Bacteriologist of Los Angeles, and worked in Europe with the Red Cross during World War I. Early life Vera Placida Gardner was born in Orange, California, the daughter of Henri F. Gardner and Emma Howard Gardner. She attended Santa Ana High School, and completed undergraduate studies the University of Southern California, graduating in 1910. She earned her medical degree at the University of Michigan, where she was elected to the medical honor fraternity Alpha Omega Alpha.
Go to Profile#15059
Walter Carr
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
John Walter Carr was an English physician and surgeon. Carr was the son of John Carr of London. He was educated at University College School and trained as a doctor at University College Hospital, graduating Bachelor of Surgery and Doctor of Medicine . He later became consulting physician to the Royal Free Hospital and the Victoria Hospital for Children and lecturer in medicine at the London School of Medicine for Women.
Go to Profile#15060
Leonard N. Boston
1871 - 1931 (60 years)
Leonard Napoleon Boston was an American physician remembered for describing Boston's sign. Biography Leonard Boston was born in 1871 in Philadelphia, and graduated with an M.D. in 1896 from the Medico-Chirurgical College of Philadelphia. He became Professor of Physical Diagnosis in 1912, and then Associate Professor of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1919. He became Professor of Principles and Practice of Medicine at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1928. He died from erysipelas in 1931.
Go to Profile#15061
William Harvey
1796 - 1866 (70 years)
William Harvey was a British wood-engraver and illustrator. Born at Newcastle upon Tyne, Harvey was the son of a bath-keeper. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed to Thomas Bewick, and became one of his favorite pupils. Bewick describes him as one "who both as an engraver & designer, stands preeminent" at his day . He engraved many woodblocks for Bewick's Aesop's Fables .
Go to Profile#15062
Radulfus Ardens
1101 - 1200 (99 years)
Radulfus Ardens was a French theologian and early scholastic philosopher of the 12th century. He was born in Beaulieu, Poitou. He is known for his Summa de vitiis et virtutibus or Speculum universale . It is in 14 volumes and is a systematic work of theology and ethics.
Go to Profile#15063
A. Edward Sutherland
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Albert Edward Sutherland was a film director and actor. Born in London, he was from a theatrical family. His father, Al Sutherland, was a theatre manager and producer and his mother, Julie Ring, was a vaudeville performer. He was a nephew of both Blanche Ring and Thomas Meighan, who was married to Frances Ring, another of his mother's sisters.
Go to Profile#15064
Sam Jaffe
1891 - 1984 (93 years)
Shalom "Sam" Jaffe was an American actor, teacher, musician, and engineer. In 1951, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in The Asphalt Jungle . He also appeared in The Day the Earth Stood Still and Ben-Hur , and is additionally known for his roles as the titular character in Gunga Din and as the "High Lama" in Lost Horizon .
Go to Profile#15065
Ana Aslan
1897 - 1988 (91 years)
Ana Aslan was a Romanian biologist and physician of partial Armenian descent, born Anna Aslanyan, specialist in gerontology, academician from 1974 and the director of the National Institute of Geriatrics and Gerontology .
Go to Profile#15066
Hannah Logasa
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Hannah Logasa is considered a pioneer of school libraries. Credited with identifying the necessity of libraries in school, Logasa worked to achieve strong interaction between the library, students, and teachers at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School.
Go to Profile#15067
Walter Langdon-Brown
1870 - 1946 (76 years)
Sir Walter Langdon-Brown was a British medical doctor and writer. Biography He was born in Bedford, the son of the Rev. John Brown of Bunyan's Chapel, Bedford and his wife, Ada Haydon Ford . His mother was a niece of John Langdon Down, describer of Down syndrome. His sister was Florence Ada Keynes, the social reformer, wife of John Neville Keynes and mother of John Maynard Keynes .
Go to Profile#15068
Heinrich Bellermann
1832 - 1903 (71 years)
Johann Gottfried Heinrich Bellermann was a German music theorist. He was the author of Der Contrapunkt , 1862, , and Die Grösse der musikalischen Intervalle als Grundlage der Harmonie , 1873 . Bellermann may be regarded as an influence on the Second Viennese School, as his Counterpoint was used by Arnold Schoenberg when teaching composition to pupils such as Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
Go to Profile#15069
John Todd
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
John Todd was an American Congregationalist minister, co-founder of Tabor College in Tabor, Iowa, a leading abolitionist and a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Background John Todd was born November 10, 1818, in West Hanover, Pennsylvania. He was the second son and fifth child of Capt. James Todd and Sally Ainsworth Todd. The Todds' ancestors were Scotch Irish and Presbyterians, and Todd grew up attending a Presbyterian church. Todd was an early graduate of Oberlin College and its seminary . In the 1850s, Todd moved West to help start an Oberlin-like school on the Iowa frontier. He was...
Go to Profile#15070
Niels Simonsen
1807 - 1885 (78 years)
Niels Simonsen was a Danish painter, lithographer and sculptor. Biography Simonsen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Simnon Rasmusson and Bolette Nielsdatter. His parents were shopkeepers. At the age of fourteen, he was apprenticed to a master decorative painter and began to take drawing lessons at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he took private lessons from Johan Ludwig Lund.
Go to Profile#15071
Hermann Lebert
1813 - 1878 (65 years)
Hermann Lebert was a German physician and naturalist. Lebert was born in Breslau. He studied medicine and the natural sciences first in Berlin and later in Zurich under Johann Lukas Schönlein. After he received his medical doctorate , he traveled throughout Switzerland, studying botany. For the next year and a half he studied in Paris, particularly under Baron Guillaume Dupuytren and Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis. In 1838 he settled in Bex, later changing between Bex and Paris. From 1842 to 1845 he worked mainly in comparative anatomy, which had interested him during his travels as a student on the coast of Normandy and the Channel Islands with Charles-Philippe Robin.
Go to Profile#15072
Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Alexander Hugh Freeland Barbour FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish gynaecologist and noted medical author. He was President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and co-author of the world-acclaimed Manual of Gynaecology.
Go to Profile#15073
Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl
1366 - 1433 (67 years)
Nikolaus von Dinkelsbühl was an Austrian Roman Catholic clergyman, pulpit orator and theologian. Biography He was born c. 1360, in Dinkelsbühl. He studied at the University of Vienna where he is mentioned as baccalaureus in the faculty of Arts in 1385. Magister in 1390, he lectured in philosophy, mathematics and physics until 1397, and from 1402 to 1405. From 1397 he was dean of the faculty; he studied theology, lecturing until 1402 on theological subjects, first as cursor biblicus, and later on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. In 1405 he became bachelor of Divinity, in 1408 licentiate and in 1409 doctor and member of the theological faculty.
Go to Profile#15074
Charles Cotin
1604 - 1682 (78 years)
Charles Cotin or Abbé Cotin was a French abbé, philosopher and poet in the Baroque Précieuses style. He was made a member of the Académie française on 7 January 1655. Cotin was born and died in Paris. He was a scholar of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, an advisor to Louis XIV, and renowned in his time for his sermons, poetry, and erudition. He frequented the Paris literary salons, particularly that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet as a friend of Mlle de Gournay, and his translation of the Song of Songs is more notable for its flavor of fashionable salons than of sacred poetry.
Go to Profile#15075
William Evans
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
William Evans F.R.C.P., Hon. D.Sc. was a distinguished Harley Street cardiologist. He was a grandson of "the Welsh Swagman", Joseph Jenkins, whose voluminous Australian diaries over 25 years he edited and published as excerpts in 1975.
Go to Profile#15076
Prospero Alpini
1553 - 1616 (63 years)
Prospero Alpini was a Venetian physician and botanist. He travelled around Egypt and served as the fourth prefect in charge of the botanical garden of Padua. He wrote several botanical treatises which covered exotic plants of economic and medicinal value. His description of coffee and banana plants are considered the oldest in European literature. The ginger-family genus Alpinia was named in his honour by Carolus Linnaeus.
Go to Profile#15077
Richard Batka
1868 - 1922 (54 years)
Richard Batka was an Austrian musicologist, music critic and librettist. Educated at German Charles-Ferdinand University in his native city of Prague, he began his career as a lecturing academic at that institution in 1900; leaving that post in 1906 to teach on the faculty of the Prague Conservatory. In 1908 he moved to Vienna where he taught courses in the history of opera at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna from 1909 to 1914.
Go to Profile#15078
Ephrem Mtsire
1001 - 1101 (100 years)
Ephrem Mtsire or Ephraim the Lesser was a Georgian monk at Antioch, theologian and translator of patristic literature from Greek. Information as to Ephrem’s life is scarce. Early in life he received a thorough Hellenic education presumably in Constantinople, where his purported father Vache Karich'isdze, a Georgian nobleman from Tao, had removed in 1027. Ephrem then became a monk at the Black Mountain near Antioch, which was populated by a vibrant Georgian monastic community of around 70 monks. Later in his life, c. 1091, Ephrem became a hegumen of the Kastana monastery, probably at the Cast...
Go to Profile#15079
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.
Go to Profile#15080
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.
Go to Profile#15081
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.
Go to Profile#15082
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.
Go to Profile#15083
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.
Go to Profile#15084
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 ...
Go to Profile#15085
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.
Go to Profile#15086
Paul Fürbringer
1849 - 1930 (81 years)
Paul Walther Fürbringer was a German physician and chemist born in Delitzsch, in the Prussiann Province of Saxony. He was a brother to anatomist Max Fürbringer . He studied medicine at the Universities of Jena and Berlin. He served as an assistant physician during the Franco-Prussian War, afterwards working as an assistant in the institute of pathology at Jena, and in Nikolaus Friedreich's clinic at the University of Heidelberg. In 1876 he received his habilitation for pharmacology and medicinal chemistry with a dissertation involving oxalic acid excretion in the urine.
Go to Profile#15087
Karl Nef
1873 - 1935 (62 years)
Karl Nef was a Swiss musicologist. Life Born in St. Gallen, Nef first studied cello at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, but then turned to musicology under the influence of Hermann Kretzschmar. In 1896 his dissertation "Die Collegia Musica in der deutschen reformierten Schweiz von ihrer Entstehung bis zum Beginn des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. With an introduction on the reformed and the cultivation of profane music in Switzerland in the early days" at the Zollikofer'sche Buchdruckerei St. Gallen. In 1897, he moved to Basel, where he first worked as an editor for the Schweizer Musi...
Go to Profile#15088
Georg Ledderhose
1855 - 1925 (70 years)
Georg Otto Ledderhose was a German surgeon, professor and pioneering traumatologist. Biography Early life He was born in the Bockenheim district of Frankfurt am Main. His father was the politician and university rector Karl Ledderhose and his mother was Wilhelmine Justine Charlotte . Wilhelmine's father was Johann Georg Heinrich Pfeiffer , the third son of Johann Jakob Pfeiffer, and brother of Burkhard Wilhelm, Carl Jonas, and Franz Georg Pfeiffer. Two of Ledderhose's uncles, the husbands of his mother's sisters, were the chemist Friedrich Wöhler and the jurist Otto Bähr, and another of his mother's sisters was the mother of the Prussian cavalry general Adolf von Deines.
Go to Profile#15089
Joseph Shaw Bolton
1867 - 1946 (79 years)
Joseph Shaw Bolton was a British physician, pathologist, psychiatrist and neurologist who was Professor of Mental Diseases at the University of Leeds. Early life and education After education at Spring Hill School in Whitby, Bolton worked as an assistant without formal qualification at an asylum and as an assistant to a general practitioner in Manchester. He graduated BSc in 1888. He then studied at University College London Medical School where he graduated MB ChB in 1894 and became a demonstrator of anatomy. By 1896 he graduated MD.
Go to Profile#15090
Edgar Crookshank
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Edgar March Crookshank was an English physician and microbiologist. Biography Crookshank studied at King's College London and qualified for medicine in 1881. He served briefly as an assistant to Joseph Lister, a physician noted for his work promoting antiseptics and sterile surgery. In 1882, Crookshank served as a doctor with the British armed forces sent to Egypt as a result of the Urabi Revolt; he was decorated for his service at the Battle of Tel el-Kebir.
Go to Profile#15091
Alexander Marcet
1770 - 1822 (52 years)
Alexander John Gaspard Marcet FRS , was a Genevan-born physician who became a British citizen in 1800. His wife Jane Marcet was a prolific author, whose series of books entitled 'Conversations' treated topics such as chemistry, botany, religion and economics.
Go to Profile#15092
Judah ben Moses Romano
1293 - 1330 (37 years)
Judah ben Moses Romano was an Italian Jewish philosopher and translator of the fourteenth century. He was a cousin of Immanuel of Rome. He was a significant early translator of works of scholastic philosophy from Latin into Hebrew. He was the first Hebrew translator of Thomas Aquinas; he also translated Albertus Magnus, Giles of Rome, Alexander of Alessandri, Domenicus Gundissalinus and Angelo of Camerino.
Go to Profile#15093
Francisco Foreiro
1523 - 1581 (58 years)
Francisco Foreiro was a Portuguese Dominican theologian and biblist. Biography Born in 1523 in Lisbon, he studied arts and theology and entered among the Dominicans in February 1539. King John III sent him to study theology in the university of Paris and, on his return to Lisbon, he appointed Foreiro his preacher. Prince Louis at the same time entrusted to him the education of his son, António.
Go to Profile#15094
James of Metz
James Metz was a fourteenth century philosopher and Dominican theologian. Very little is known about his life. It is a not known when he was born and when he died, but what is known is that he was philosophically active in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Of his works that survive, much remains unedited, and only a dozen manuscript copies still exist. James was known as a Dominican theologian, which meant following the teachings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. However, he earned the reputation for being a "critical-Thomist," as he openly disagreed some of Aquinas's positions. One accou...
Go to Profile#15095
Adam Pulchrae Mulieris
Adam Pulchrae Mulieris, also called Adam de Puteorumvilla, was a Paris master who studied under Peter of Lamballe, who flourished in the first half of the 13th century. Little is known of his life. He has been described as one of the “metaphysicians of light” . He was a contemporary of William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris, and his works are cited by Richard de Fournival, Gerard of Abbeville and Thomas Aquinas. The origin of his name is unknown.
Go to Profile#15096
Heinrich Füger
1751 - 1818 (67 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Füger was a German classicist portrait and historical painter. Biography Füger was a pupil of Nicolas Guibal in Stuttgart and of Adam Friedrich Oeser in Leipzig. Afterward, he traveled and spent some time in Rome and Naples, where he painted frescoes in the Palazzo Caserta. On his return to Vienna he was appointed court painter, professor, and vice-director of the Academy, and in 1806 director of the Belvedere Gallery.
Go to Profile#15097
Alexander Dyce Davidson
1835 - 1886 (51 years)
Alexander Dyce Davidson MD FRSE was Scottish academic and surgeon. He was Professor of Materia Medica at Aberdeen University. He was described as a "sweet and amiable character". He specialised in ophthalmic surgery.
Go to Profile#15098
Patrick Forbes
1776 - 1847 (71 years)
Patrick Forbes was a Scottish minister who served as Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland for the period 1829 to 1830. He was Professor of Humanities and Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen.
Go to Profile#15099
Arthur Purdy Stout
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Arthur Purdy Stout was an American surgeon and pathologist. Early years and education Arthur Purdy Stout was the fourth son of Joseph and Julia Frances Stout. He attended the Pomfret School and Yale University, where he earned an A.B. degree in 1907. After spending a year abroad, Arthur entered the College of Physicians & Surgeons of Columbia University. He completed his M.D. degree in 1912.
Go to Profile#15100
Paul North Rice
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Paul North Rice was an American librarian who served as Chief of the Reference Department of the New York Public Library, Executive Secretary of the Association of Research Libraries and President of the American Library Association.
Go to Profile