The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15151
Thomas Prof. Dr. Schwarz
#15152
Choe Chiwon
857 - 901 (44 years)
Choe Chiwon was a Korean philosopher and poet of the late medieval Unified Silla period . He studied for many years in Tang China, passed the Tang imperial examination, and rose to the high office there before returning to Silla, where he made ultimately futile attempts to reform the governmental apparatus of a declining Silla state.
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Juana Inés de la Cruz
1651 - 1695 (44 years)
Juana de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , was a colonial Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, as well as a Hieronymite nun, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. As a Spanish-criolla from the New Spain, she was among the main American-born contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "el Inca", and presently considered one of the most important female authors in Spanish language and Mexico's literary history.
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Luigi Gregori
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Luigi Gregori was an Italian artist who worked at the Vatican and served as artist in residence and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Biography He was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1819, where at the age of fourteen he became apprentice of the Bolognese artist Giovanni Battista Frulli. There, he studied art of the antiquity as well as local artists, including the Carracci and Guido Reni. Frulli died in 1837, and Gregori then worked for Prince Pignatelli of Monteleone, and he traveled throughout Italy, including studying in Milan and Naples. In 1840, he moved to Rome and enrolled at the Accademia di San Luca and studied under Tommaso Minardi.
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Michael Foster
1903 - 1959 (56 years)
Michael Beresford Foster was a tutor in philosophy of Oxford University's Christ Church. For a period up until his death he was the chairman of the British Student Christian Movement. He was one of A. J. Ayer's tutors at Oxford, but their relationship is remembered more as a source of strained feelings than of scholarly fellowship. His disparate works on political science and various doctrines of Christianity have influenced philosophers such as George Grant, who had, when writing his doctoral thesis, in fact visited with Foster in England.
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Johanna Charlotte Unzer
1725 - 1782 (57 years)
Johanna Charlotte Unzer , was a German writer and philosopher, famed for her progressive views on women's education. She was awarded the imperial Dichterkrone in 1753. She is known for her anacreontic poetry.
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José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull was a Spanish priest, canon of the Cathedral of Cordoba, theologian and philosopher. Gallegos studied at the General and Technical Institute of Seville and later at the Theological Seminary. Upon completion of basic academic training, he matriculated to the Seminary of Madrid to continue his religious training, attending the Pontifical University of Toledo where he graduated in theology in 1920. He later earned his doctorate in the Pontificia Universidad de Sevilla.
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John L. Ziegler
#15159
Frederik van Leenhof
1647 - 1715 (68 years)
Frederik van Leenhof was a Dutch pastor and philosopher active in Zwolle, who caused an international controversy because of his Spinozist work Heaven on Earth . This controversy is extensively discussed in Jonathan Israel's 2001 book Radical Enlightenment.
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Giulio Cesare la Galla
1571 - 1624 (53 years)
Giulio Cesare la Galla was a professor of philosophy at the Collegio Romano in Italy. Biography He was born in Padula, at that time part of the Kingdom of Naples. Lagalla was educated in philosophy and medicine. He became the official physician of the papal galleys for a period, then came to Rome to lecture in natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano. He apparently became the leading peripatetic of the city, and was counted among the opponents of the Copernican heliocentric theory.
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Carl Anton Ewald
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Carl Anton Ewald was a German gastroenterologist who was a native of Berlin. He was the brother of physiologist Ernst Julius Richard Ewald . In 1870, he earned his medical doctorate in Berlin, and subsequently became an assistant to pathologist Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs . In 1888, he was appointed head physician of the department of internal medicine at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. Carl Ewald was a pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, and was a catalyst in making Augusta Hospital a center for pathological studies of digestion. Ewald is remembered for investigations of gastric secretions, and the introduction of intubation as a medical aid in gastric analysis.
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Milton J. Rosenau
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Milton Joseph Rosenau was an American public health official and professor who was influential in the early twentieth century. Early life Milton Joseph Rosenau was born in 1869 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Nathan Rosenau and Mathilde Blitz, German Jewish emigrants. After obtaining his degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1889, he joined the United States Marine Hospital Service. After working for a few years under the supervision of Joseph Kinyoun, Rosenau began his ascent into positions of greater authority.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Paul Reclus
1847 - 1914 (67 years)
Jean Jacques Paul Reclus was a French physician specializing in surgery. The Reclus' disease is named after him. He was the son of pastor Jacques Reclus and brother of Élie, Élisée, Onésime and Armand Reclus.
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Parker Cleaveland
1780 - 1858 (78 years)
Parker Cleaveland was an American geologist and mineralogist, born in Rowley, Massachusetts. He was identified with the early progress of the natural sciences. After having attending the Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard in 1799, was tutor in mathematics there from 1803 to 1805, was chosen professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and lecturer on chemistry and mineralogy in Bowdoin College, a position which he retained until his death, although many professorships in other colleges and the presidency of his own were offered to him. He was elected an Ass...
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Jonathan Campbell Meakins
1882 - 1959 (77 years)
Jonathan Campbell Meakins was a Canadian physician and medical author and member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In authorship he is known as J. C. Meakins. He published over 160 works, including the textbook The Practice of Medicine. He was also the founder and first president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He was the Dean of the McGill University's Faculty of Medicine from 1941-1948.
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Richard Rufus of Cornwall
Richard Rufus was a Cornish Franciscan scholastic philosopher and theologian. Life Richard Rufus who studied at Paris and at Oxford starting from the 1220s. He became a Franciscan around 1230. Rufus was one of the first medieval philosophers to write on Aristotle and his commentaries are the earliest known among those which have survived. He also wrote influential commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences. Rufus was influenced by Robert Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, Richard Fishacre, and Johannes Philoponus, and in turn influenced Bonaventure and Franciscus Meyronnes. Roger Bacon was a fe...
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John Eric Erichsen
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Sir John Eric Erichsen, 1st Baronet was a Danish-born British surgeon. Early life Erichsen was born in Copenhagen, the son of Eric Erichsen, a member of a well-known Danish banking family. He attended Mansion house school, Hammersmith.
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Jack Black
1871 - 1932 (61 years)
Jack Black was a Canadian-born American hobo and professional burglar. Black is best known for his autobiography You Can't Win , describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight, but it is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years as a travelling criminal, and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium fiend. He gained fame as a prison reformer, writer and playwright.
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Ignác Jan Hanuš
1812 - 1869 (57 years)
Ignác Jan Hanuš or, in German, Ignaz Johann Hanusch was a Czech philosopher and librarian. Life and work He studied at the grammar school in Staré Město, where one of his teachers was Josef Jungmann. This encounter created an interest in philosophy, which he studied at Charles University, graduating in 1831. In order to have more time for contemplation, he entered the Order of the Premonstratensians at Strahov Monastery. This experience failed to meet his expectations, so he left to study law at the University of Vienna. After 1835, he worked there as an adjunct. A year later, he received his doctorate and became a full Professor at the University of Lemberg; aged only twenty-four.
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Henri Wallon
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist , neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon. Career Henri Wallon conducted two parallel careers. As a convinced Marxist, he took up political duties while carrying out scientific work in the field of developmental psychology.
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Alessandro Piccolomini
1508 - 1579 (71 years)
Alessandro Piccolomini was an Italian humanist, astronomer and philosopher from Siena, who promoted the popularization in the vernacular of Latin and Greek scientific and philosophical treatises. His early works include Il Dialogo della bella creanza delle donne, o Raffaella and the comedies Amor costante, and Alessandro, which were sponsored and produced by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, of which he was a member and an official. Much of his literary production consisted of translations from the Classics, of which Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses and book VI of the Aeneid are early examples.
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Apollonius of Tyre
50 BC - Present (2076 years)
Apollonius of Tyre , was a Stoic philosopher. Strabo describes him as living "a little before my time," and says he wrote "a tabulated account of the philosophers of the school of Zeno and of their books," and which appears to have been a short survey of the philosophers and their writings from the time of Zeno. He is mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius as the author of a work on Zeno. Whether this Apollonius is the same as the one who wrote a work on female philosophers, or as the author of the chronological work of which Stephanus of Byzantium quotes the fourth book, is uncertain.
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Marcus Musurus
1470 - 1517 (47 years)
Marcus Musurus was a Greek scholar and philosopher born in Candia, Venetian Crete . Life The son of a rich merchant, Musurus became at an early age a pupil of Janus Lascaris in Venice. In 1505, Musurus was made professor of Greek language at the University of Padua. Erasmus, who had attended his lectures there, testifies to his knowledge of Latin. However, when the university was closed in 1509 during the War of the League of Cambrai, he returned to Venice where he filled a similar post.
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Hermann Heimpel
#15176
Charles Patin
1633 - 1693 (60 years)
Charles Patin was a French physician and numismatist. He was the son of Guy Patin, dean of the school of medicine in Paris, and a friend of Jacob Spon. Trained first by his father, he obtained a law degree and then chose to study medicine. He became best known for his numismatic work. He married the moralist author Madeleine Patin: their daughter Gabrielle-Charlotte Patin became a painter and numismatist, and their daughter Charlotte-Catherine Patin became a writer.
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Nicarete of Megara
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Nicarete or Nicareta of Megara was a philosopher of the Megarian school, who flourished around . She is stated by Athenaeus to have been a hetaera of good family and education, and to have been a disciple of Stilpo. Diogenes Laërtius states that she was Stilpo's mistress, though he had a wife.
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Christian Bohr
1855 - 1911 (56 years)
Christian Harald Lauritz Peter Emil Bohr was a Danish physician, father of the physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, as well as the mathematician and football player Harald Bohr and grandfather of another physicist and Nobel laureate Aage Bohr. He married Ellen Adler in 1881.
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Josip Franjo Domin
1754 - 1819 (65 years)
Josip Franjo Domin was a Croatian-Hungarian physicist, priest, physician and a pioneer of electrotherapy. Biography Domin was born in Zagreb where he died. He was educated in Zagreb, Vienna, Leoben, Graz. In 1774 he graduated philosophy at the Royal Academy of Sciences and theology in 1776 in Zagreb. In 1777 in Trnava he received a doctorate in mathematics and became a full professor of theoretical and experimental physics, mechanics and economics at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Győr and Pécs . At the Faculty of Arts in Budapest since 1792 he was a physics professor having succeeded Ionnes B.
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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
#15182
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
#15186
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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