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,
#15351
Josip Križan
1841 - 1921 (80 years)
Josip Križan was a Slovenian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer. He studied mathematics, physics and philosophy in Graz and between 1867 and 1869 obtained a doctorate to become a professor.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
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Otto Heubner
1843 - 1926 (83 years)
Johann Otto Leonhard Heubner was a German internist and pediatrician who was a native of Mühltroff. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, and in 1867 became an assistant to Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich at Leipzig. He later founded a children's hospital and clinic in Leipzig, and in 1891 was appointed to the chair of pediatrics. In 1894 he moved to Berlin, where he became director of the children's clinic and polyclinic at the Charité.
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Valerius Cordus
1515 - 1544 (29 years)
Valerius Cordus was a German physician, botanist and pharmacologist who authored the first pharmacopoeia North of the Alps and one of the most celebrated herbals in history. He is also widely credited with developing a method for synthesizing ether .
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Belle da Costa Greene
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Belle da Costa Greene was an American librarian who managed and developed the personal library of J. P. Morgan. After Morgan's death in 1913, Greene continued as librarian for his son, Jack Morgan, and in 1924 was named the first director of the Pierpont Morgan Library. Despite being born to Black parents, Greene spent her professional career passing for white.
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Laurens Perseus Hickok
1798 - 1888 (90 years)
Laurens Perseus Hickok , American philosopher and divine, was born in Connecticut. Biography He took his degree at Union College in 1820. Until 1836 he was occupied in active pastoral work, and was then appointed professor of theology at the Western Reserve College, Ohio, and later at the Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York.
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Jean Bourdeau
1848 - 1928 (80 years)
Jean Bourdeau was a French writer, known for his books on aspects of socialism. He was also a translator of Schopenhauer, and an early adopter in France of some of the thought of Nietzsche. He wrote on a wide range of subjects, from Johannes Janssen to Maxim Gorky and the rising personality cult of Lenin. He contributed in particular to the Journal des Débats, on contemporary philosophy
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Sophia Jex-Blake
1840 - 1912 (72 years)
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher, and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a university education, when six other women and she, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women, she was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh, at a time when no other medical schools were...
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Robert Henry Perry
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Victor F. Tapson
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Andrew D. Blann
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James Allen
1864 - 1912 (48 years)
James Allen was a British philosophical writer known for his inspirational books and poetry and as a pioneer of the self-help movement. His best known work, As a Man Thinketh, has been mass-produced since its publication in 1902. It has been a source of inspiration to motivational and self-help authors.
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Susan Taubes
1928 - 1969 (41 years)
Susan Taubes was a Hungarian-American writer and intellectual. Taubes was born in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family. Her grandfather Mózes Feldmann was the head of the Conservative or "Status Quo" branch of the divided Hungarian rabbinate in Pest, and her father Sándor Feldmann was a psychoanalyst of Sándor Ferenczi's school, though the two colleagues had a falling out in 1923.
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Kanokogi Kazunobu
1884 - 1949 (65 years)
Kanokogi Kazunobu 鹿子木員信 was a Japanese professor, philosopher, mountaineer, author and war criminal. After training as a naval engineer, he saw combat in the Russo-Japanese War; after converting to Christianity he resigned his commission and travelled to the United States to study theology at Union Theological Seminary and philosophy at Columbia University.
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Frank Lynn Iber
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E. S. Russell
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Edward Stuart Russell OBE FLS was a Scottish biologist and philosopher of biology. Russell was born near Glasgow. He studied at Greenock Academy and later at Glasgow University under Sir Graham Kerr and worked with J. Arthur Thompson after he graduated. He was influenced by his friend Patrick Geddes and in his zoological studies, sought to find holistic principles. He also believed in Lamarckian heritability. He was involved in fishery research, working on research vessels and publishing on the biology of cephalopods and quantitative methods for gathering fishery data. He also worked as Scottish Fisheries expert, Inspector of Fisheries and as an advisor to HM Government.
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Gregory of Rimini
1300 - 1358 (58 years)
Gregory of Rimini , also called Gregorius de Arimino or Ariminensis, was one of the great scholastic philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages. He was the first scholastic writer to unite the Oxonian and Parisian traditions in 14th-century philosophy, and his work had a lasting influence in the Late Middle Ages and Reformation. His scholastic nicknames were Doctor acutus and Doctor authenticus.
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Emil Filla
1882 - 1953 (71 years)
Emil Filla was a Czech painter. He was a leader of the avant-garde in Prague between World War I and World War II and was an early Cubist painter. Early life Filla was born in Chropyně, Moravia, and spent his childhood in Brno, but later moved to Prague. Beginning in 1903, he studied at , but he left the school in 1906.
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David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville
1770 - 1849 (79 years)
David Pierre Giottino Humbert de Superville was a Dutch artist and art scholar. He was a draughtsman, lithographer, etcher, and portrait painter, and also wrote treatises on art, including the influential work Essai sur les signes inconditionnels dans l'art . His 1815 painting of the jurist and statesman Johan Melchior Kemper is now part of the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.
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Louis de La Forge
1632 - 1666 (34 years)
Louis de La Forge was a French philosopher who in his Tractatus de mente humana expounded a doctrine of occasionalism. He was born in La Flèche and died in Saumur. He was a friend of Descartes, and one of the most able interpreters of Cartesianism.
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Richard Swineshead
Richard Swineshead was an English mathematician, logician, and natural philosopher. He was perhaps the greatest of the Oxford Calculators of Merton College, where he was a fellow certainly by 1344 and possibly by 1340. His magnum opus was a series of treatises known as the Liber calculationum , written c. 1350, which earned him the nickname of The Calculator.
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Manwel Dimech
1860 - 1921 (61 years)
Manwel Dimech, also known as Manuel Dimech was a Maltese socialist, philosopher, journalist, writer, poet and social revolutionary. Born in Valletta and brought up in extreme poverty and illiteracy, Dimech spent significant portions of his early life in the Maltese prison system, mostly on charges of petty theft. At the age of seventeen, Dimech was arrested for the crime of involuntary murder, and sentenced to seventeen years in jail. After being thrown in jail, Dimech started to educate himself and became a man of letters.
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Howard Atwood Kelly
1858 - 1943 (85 years)
Howard Atwood Kelly was an American gynecologist. He obtained his B.A. degree and M.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He, William Osler, William Halsted, and William Welch together are known as the "Big Four", the founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He is credited with establishing gynecology as a specialty by developing new surgical approaches to gynecological diseases and pathological research. He also developed several medical innovations, including the improved cystoscope, Kelly's clamp, Kelly's speculum, and Kelly's forceps. Because Kell...
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Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck
1776 - 1858 (82 years)
Christian Gottfried Daniel Nees von Esenbeck was a prolific German botanist, physician, zoologist, and natural philosopher. He was a contemporary of Goethe and was born within the lifetime of Linnaeus. He described approximately 7,000 plant species . His last official act as president of the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina was to admit Charles Darwin as a member. He was the author of numerous monographs on botany and zoology. His best-known works deal with fungi.
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Thomas Bartholin
1616 - 1680 (64 years)
Thomas Bartholin was a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian. He discovered the lymphatic system in humans and advanced the theory of refrigeration anesthesia, being the first to describe it scientifically.
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Wilbur Kitchener Jordan
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Wilbur Kitchener Jordan , was an American historian, specializing in sixteenth and seventeenth century Britain. Raised in Lynnville, Indiana, Jordan received a bachelor's degree from Oakland City College in 1923, before earning a master's and doctoral degree from Harvard University. Jordan went on to become a leading historian of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, accruing many honors, and producing books, including Men of Substance: Revolutionary Thinkers of 1640 , Philanthropy in England, 1480-1660 , and a two-volume study of the reign of Edward VI .
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Girolamo Fracastoro
1478 - 1553 (75 years)
Girolamo Fracastoro was an Italian physician, poet, and scholar in mathematics, geography and astronomy. Fracastoro subscribed to the philosophy of atomism, and rejected appeals to hidden causes in scientific investigation. His studies of the mode of syphilis transmission are an early example of epidemiology.
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Franklin Merrell-Wolff
1887 - 1985 (98 years)
Franklin Merrell-Wolff was an American mystic and esoteric philosopher. After formal education in philosophy and mathematics at Stanford and Harvard, Wolff devoted himself to the goal of transcending the normal limits of human consciousness. After exploring various mystical teachings and paths, he dedicated himself to the path of jnana yoga and the writings of Shankara, the expounder of the Advaita Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy.
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Xu Xing
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Xu Xing was a Chinese philosopher and one of the most notable advocates of the egalitarian political philosophy of agriculturalism. With a group of followers he settled in the state of Teng in about 315 BC. A disciple of his visited the Confucian philosopher Mencius, and a short report of their conversation discussing Xu Xing's philosophy survives.
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Bernard Nieuwentyt
1654 - 1718 (64 years)
Bernard Nieuwentijt, Nieuwentijdt, or Nieuwentyt was a Dutch philosopher, mathematician, physician, magistrate, mayor , and theologian. Career As a philosopher, Nieuwentyt was a follower of Descartes and an opponent of Spinoza. In 1695 he was involved in a controversy over the foundations of infinitesimal calculus with Leibniz. Nieuwentijt advocated 'nilsquare' infinitesimals , whereas Leibniz was uncertain about explicitly adopting such a rule - they did however come to be used throughout physics from then on.
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William Morgan
1750 - 1833 (83 years)
William Morgan, FRS was a British physician, physicist and statistician, who is considered the father of modern actuarial science. He is also credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube".
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Friedrich Jäger von Jaxtthal
1784 - 1871 (87 years)
Christoph Friedrich Jäger Ritter von Jaxtthal was an Austrian ophthalmologist who was a native of Kirchberg an der Jagst. Early life and education He studied medicine in Vienna and Landshut, and in 1809 became a physician in the Napoleonic Wars. He later returned to Vienna, where in 1812 he received his medical degree at the university.
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Vasily Anisimoff
1878 - 1938 (60 years)
Vasily Onisimovich Afanasiev was a revolutionary and a propagandist of Marxism as well as a prominent activist and supporter of the Russian and international Socialist movement. He was among the active members of the RSDLP and was a Menshevik. In 1925, Anisimoff became the deputy head of the economic department of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy of the RSFSR, managing the "Exportles" trust.
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William Stewart Halsted
1852 - 1922 (70 years)
William Stewart Halsted, M.D. was an American surgeon who emphasized strict aseptic technique during surgical procedures, was an early champion of newly discovered anesthetics, and introduced several new operations, including the radical mastectomy for breast cancer. Along with William Osler , Howard Atwood Kelly and William H. Welch , Halsted was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His operating room at Johns Hopkins Hospital is in Ward G, and was described as a small room where medical discoveries and miracles took place. According to an intern who once...
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Anastasio Cuschieri
1876 - 1962 (86 years)
Anastastio Cuschieri was a Maltese poet, politician, and minor philosopher. He held the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Malta . In philosophy he was mostly interested in ethics. Life Beginnings Cuschieri was born at Valletta, Malta, on 27 January 1876. He joined the Carmelite Order on 25 April 1891, at 19 years of age. That same year he began pursuing his institutional studies in philosophy and theology at the University of Malta. He made his religious profession on 28 August 1892. On completion of his university courses in 1898, Cuschieri was ordained a priest, and sent to Rome, Italy, to pursue studies in philosophy and theology at the Jesuits' Gregorian University.
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Bryson of Achaea
450 BC - 400 BC (50 years)
Bryson of Achaea was an ancient Greek philosopher. Very little information is known about him. He was said to have been a pupil of Stilpo and Clinomachus, which would mean that he was a philosopher of the Megarian school. He was said to have taught Crates the Cynic, Pyrrho the Skeptic, and Theodorus the Atheist. Diogenes Laërtius includes him among a list of philosophers who left no writings.
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Henri François Marion
1846 - 1896 (50 years)
Henri François Marion was a French philosopher and educationalist. Life He was born in Saint-Parize-en-Viry, Nièvre department, on 9 September 1846. He studied at Nevers, and at the École Normale, where he graduated in 1868. After occupying several minor positions, he returned to Paris in 1875 as professor of the Lycée Henri IV, and in 1880 he became Docteur ès lettres. In the same year he was elected a member of the Council of Public Instruction, and devoted himself to improving the scheme of French education, especially in girls' schools. He was largely instrumental in the foundation of eco...
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Theombrotus
Theombrotus was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Cynic school who is said to have thrown himself to his death from a high wall after reading Plato's work on the immortality of the soul and concluding that he would be better off in the next life.
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Ernst Kurth
1886 - 1946 (60 years)
Ernst Kurth was a Swiss music theorist of Austrian origin. Career Kurth studied musicology with Guido Adler in Vienna, and earned his Ph.D. with a thesis about Christoph Willibald Gluck's operatic style. In a relatively short publishing career of about 15 years, Kurth wrote four enormously influential works: Grundlagen des Linearen Kontrapunkts , Romantische Harmonik und ihre Krise in Wagners "Tristan" , Bruckner, and Musikpsychologie. Since the 1940s, Kurth was gradually eclipsed by other theorists . However, his concept of "developmental motif" has remained influential. A developmental motif is one which gradually changes or grows, becoming a structural carrier of formal developments.
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Garegin Nzhdeh
1886 - 1955 (69 years)
Garegin Ter-Harutyunyan, better known by his nom de guerre Garegin Nzhdeh , was an Armenian statesman, military commander and nationalist political thinker. As a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, he was involved in the national liberation struggle and revolutionary activities during the First Balkan War and World War I and became one of the key political and military leaders of the First Republic of Armenia . He is widely admired as a charismatic national hero by Armenians.
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Dimitar Dimov
1909 - 1966 (57 years)
Dimitar Todorov Dimov was a Bulgarian dramatist, novelist and veterinary surgeon. Biography Born in Lovech, Dimov is best known for his best-selling novel Tobacco which was made into the 1962 film Tobacco directed by Nikola Korabov. The plot of Dimov's Tobacco deals with the fates of a number of characters connected to a major tobacco factory. The central thread of the plot is the story of Boris, an ambitious youth of poor origins who renounces his first love Irina to marry Maria, the heiress of the tobacco business. He proceeds to steer the business with great greed and ruthlessness. His wi...
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Samuel Haughton
1821 - 1897 (76 years)
Samuel Haughton was an Irish clergyman, medical doctor, and scientific writer. Biography The scientist Samuel Haughton was born in Carlow, the son of another Samuel Haughton and grandson of the three-times-married Samuel Pearson Haughton , a Quaker.
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David Renaud Boullier
1699 - 1759 (60 years)
David Renaud Boullier was a Dutch Huguenot theologian, Protestant minister and philosopher. Biography Boullier was born in Utrecht on 24 March 1699. He was educated at Utrech University. He was a Protestant pastor in Amsterdam and was active in London for several years.
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Karl Albert Scherner
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Karl Albert Scherner was a German philosopher and psychologist. Life Karl Albert Scherner was born on 26 July 1825 in Deutsch-Krawarn, a village on the then border between Prussian Silesia and Austrian Silesia , near the district capital of Ratibor . He studied at the Gymnasium in Ratibor and in May 1846 went up to the university in Breslau , where he studied Catholic theology. In 1858 he became a Docent in the Philosophy Department of the same university, a position which he held until the winter term of 1871–72. He is said to have given up his university career because of a severe throat condition.
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Samuel de Sorbiere
1615 - 1670 (55 years)
Samuel Sorbière was a French physician and man of letters, a philosopher and translator, who is best known for his promotion of the works of Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Gassendi, in whose view of physics he placed his support, though unable to refute René Descartes, but who developed a reputation in his own day for a truculent and disputatious nature. Sorbière is regarded often by his position on ethics and disclosure about medical mistakes. In 1672 Sorbière considered the idea of being honest and upfront about a mistake having been made in medicine but thought that it might seriously jeopard...
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Lala Lajpat Rai
1865 - 1928 (63 years)
Lala Lajpat Rai was an Indian revolutionary, politician, and author, generally known as Lala Lajpat Rai. He was popularly known as Punjab Kesari. He was one of the three members of the Lal Bal Pal trio. He died of severe head trauma injuries sustained 18 days earlier during a baton charge by police in Lahore, when he led a peaceful protest march against the all-British Simon Commission Indian constitutional reforms.
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Marianne Brandt
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Marianne Brandt was a German painter, sculptor, photographer, metalsmith, and designer who studied at the Bauhaus art school in Weimar and later became head of the Bauhaus Metall-Werkstatt in Dessau in 1928. Today, Brandt's designs for household objects such as lamps and ashtrays are considered timeless examples of modern industrial design. She also created photomontages.
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Karl Landsteiner
1868 - 1943 (75 years)
Karl Landsteiner was an Austrian American biologist, physician, and immunologist. He emigrated with his family to New York in 1923 at the age of fifty five for professional opportunities, working for the Rockefeller Institute.
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Götz Briefs
1889 - 1974 (85 years)
Götz Briefs was a Catholic social theorist, social ethicist, social philosopher and political economist, who together with Gustav Gundlach, SJ influenced the social teachings of Pope Pius XI. Biography In 1908, Briefs began to study history and philosophy at the University of Munich. As it was customary in German academic circles at the time, he frequently switched universities, moving in 1909 to Bonn, and later in 1911 to Freiburg. In Freiburg, he became a member of K.D.St. V. Wildenstein Freiburg im Breisgau, a Catholic student fraternity that belong to the Cartellverband der katholischen deutschen Studentenverbindungen.
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John Major
1467 - 1550 (83 years)
John Major was a Scottish philosopher, theologian, and historian who was much admired in his day and was an acknowledged influence on all the great thinkers of the time. A renowned teacher, his works were much collected and frequently republished across Europe. His "sane conservatism" and his sceptical, logical approach to the study of texts such as Aristotle or the Bible were less prized in the subsequent age of humanism, when a more committed and linguistic/literary approach prevailed.
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