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
Gandy Brodie
1924 - 1975 (51 years)
Gandy Brodie was an American painter working primarily in New York City and Townshend, Vermont, during the middle part of the 20th century. He had ties to Abstract Expressionism through artists such as Willem de Kooning and his style, though singular, was considered second-generation Abstract Expressionism. His paintings were influenced by the works of artists such as Camille Corot, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Piet Mondrian, Chaïm Soutine, Georges Rouault, Pablo Picasso, and Paul Klee. Shane Brody, his only child, is a jazz and Americana guitarist who resides in Underhill, Vermont.
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Mary Harriott Norris
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Mary Harriott Norris was an American author and educator. Born in Boonton, New Jersey to Charles Bryan Norris and Mary Lyon Kerr, she was educated at Vassar College, where she graduated with honor, receiving an A.B. degree in 1870. Two years later in 1872 she was invited back to deliver the annual commencement address to the college. She became a writer of short stories, novels, and educational articles; she edited several works and gave a number of lectures. Norris was a regular contributor to the Boston Journal of Education.
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Mortimer Taube
1910 - 1965 (55 years)
Mortimer Taube was an American librarian. He is on the list of the 100 most important leaders in American Library and Information Science of the 20th century. He was important to the Library Science field because he invented Coordinate Indexing, which uses "uniterms" in the context of cataloging. It is the forerunner to computer based searches. In the early 1950s he started his own company, Documentation, Inc. with Gerald J. Sophar. Previously he worked at such institutions as the Library of Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Atomic Energy Commission. American Libraries calls him "...
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Alice Copping
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Alice Copping was senior lecturer in nutrition, Queen Elizabeth College, University of London. She was born in Stratford, New Zealand. Copping attended Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and graduated as Master of Science in 1926. She was awarded the Sarah Ann Rhodes scholarship the following year, and did two years of research work under J. C. Drummond at University College London. She then returned to New Zealand to lecture at the School of Home Science, University of Otago for a year, before returning to London to work in the Division of Nutrition at the Lister Institute.
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Frederick Niecks
1845 - 1924 (79 years)
Frederick Niecks was a German musical scholar and author who resided in Scotland for most of his life. He is best remembered for his biographies of Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann. Biography Friedrich Maternus Niecks was born in Düsseldorf, son of a conductor and teacher; his grandfather was a professional musician. He studied music under his father; he later studied violin under Leopold Auer and others, and studied piano and composition under Julius Tausch. At age 13 he made his debut playing Charles Auguste de Bériot's Violin Concerto No. 2, then joined the Musikverein orchestra, wi...
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William A. Hammond
1828 - 1900 (72 years)
William Alexander Hammond was an American military physician and neurologist. During the American Civil War he was the eleventh Surgeon General of the United States Army and the founder of the Army Medical Museum .
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Stephan von Breuning
1774 - 1827 (53 years)
Stephan von Breuning was a German civil servant and librettist. He was Ludwig van Beethoven's lifelong friend, from his childhood in Bonn when receiving music lessons until acting as executor in Vienna.
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George Ian Scott
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
George Ian Scott CBE, FRSE, FRCSEd was a 20th-century Scottish ophthalmic surgeon who in 1954, became the first holder of the Forbes Chair of Ophthalmology at the University of Edinburgh. He specialised in neuro-ophthalmology, studies of the visual fields and diabetic retinopathy. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh from 1964 to 1967, Surgeon-Oculist to the Queen in Scotland from 1965 and president of the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1972.
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Wang Maozu
1891 - 1949 (58 years)
Wang Maozu was a Chinese educationist and philosopher. In the 1920s, he earned his master's degree at the Teachers College, Columbia University under the instruction of John Dewey, then became a researcher at Harvard University. Several years later, he returned to China and taught at Beijing Normal University, Beijing Women's Normal College and National Central University.
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Gustav von Bergmann
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
Gustav von Bergmann was a German internist born in Würzburg. He was the son of renowned surgeon Ernst von Bergmann . Education In 1903 he received his doctorate at Strasbourg, and afterwards worked at the second medical hospital in Berlin under Friedrich Kraus. In 1916 he became a full professor of internal medicine in Marburg, and later a professor at Frankfurt am Main , the Berlin Charité and Munich .
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Carl Nicolai Starcke
1858 - 1926 (68 years)
Carl Nicolai Starcke was a Danish sociologist, politician, educator and philosopher. He is buried at Holmens Cemetery. He was the father of Viggo Starcke, another writer and publisher of books such as Denmark in World History.
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Guillaume de La Perrière
1503 - 1565 (62 years)
Guillaume de La Perrière was one of the earliest French writers of emblem books. His work is often associated with the French Renaissance. La Perrière chronicled events in his home city of Toulouse. His best known work is Le Théâtre des bons engins, published in Paris in 1539, and was edited in later editions, published in 1540 and 1585. More recently, La Perrière's Le miroir politique has received attention, thanks to the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault identifies the work of La Perriere as belonging to Early Modern France and foreshadowing discourses of governmentality.
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Shiy De-jinn
1923 - 1981 (58 years)
Shiy De-jinn 席德進 was a Chinese modernist artist who became prominent in Taiwan. Born in Sichuan, he was a student of Lin Fengmian and Pang Xunqin. Fleeing the CCP to Taiwan, he lived there until his death. He has attracted interested as a nativist and, especially posthumosuly, as a queer artist.
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Joshua Chamberlain
1828 - 1914 (86 years)
Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was an American college professor from Maine who volunteered during the American Civil War to join the Union Army. He became a highly respected and decorated Union officer, reaching the rank of brigadier general . He is best known for his gallantry at the Battle of Gettysburg, for which he was awarded the Medal of Honor.
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Janet Niven
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Janet Simpson Ferguson Niven FCPath, was a British histologist and pathologist. Janet Niven graduated from the University of Glasgow with a first class Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery degree in 1925. She was the first woman to win the Brunton Memorial Prize, awarded to the most distinguished medical graduate each year. During her time working at the University of Glasgow, she was awarded the Faulds Research Fellowship , the McCunn Scholarship , and the Carnegie Research Fellowship . In 1932, she was awarded an MD for her research on tissue culture and became a lecturer in the Pathology Department , as well as working as an assistant pathologist at the Western Infirmary.
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Choe Chung
984 - 1068 (84 years)
#15367
Theophil Mitchell Prudden
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Theophil Mitchell Prudden was an American pathologist, born in Middlebury, Connecticut. He graduated from the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale, in 1872 and received his M. D. from Yale School of Medicine in 1875. He became an assistant and was professor of pathology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University. In 1901 he was made a director of the Rockefeller Institute for medical research.
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Vera Gedroits
1876 - 1932 (56 years)
Vera Gedroits was born in 1870 in Slobodische, Russia. She was not allowed to study in Russia after her involvement in a controversial student movement. In order to secure her education, she married Nikolai Belozerov (despite being open about her lesbianism) to secure a passport under her married name to immigrate to Switzerland and study at the University of Lausanne. Gedroits studied to become a surgeon and received her degree as a Doctor of Medicine and Surgery in 1898. After completing her studies, her family asked her to return to Russia as her sister had recently died and her mother was in poor health.
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Harry L. Fisher
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Harry Linn Fisher was the 69th national president of the American Chemical Society, and an authority on the chemistry of vulcanization. Fisher was the author of four popular books on the chemistry and technology of rubber, and the holder of 50 patents.
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Marcel Junod
1904 - 1961 (57 years)
Marcel Junod was a Swiss medical doctor and one of the most accomplished field delegates in the history of the International Committee of the Red Cross . After medical school and a short position as a surgeon in Mulhouse, France, he became an ICRC delegate and was deployed in Ethiopia during the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and in Europe as well as in Japan during World War II. In 1947, he wrote a book with the title Warrior without Weapons about his experiences. After the war, he worked for the United Nations Children's Fund as chief representative in China, and settled back in Europe in 1950.
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Carl Posner
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Carl Posner was a German urologist. Posner was born in Berlin. He studied natural sciences and medicine at several German universities, receiving his PhD at Leipzig in 1875 and his medical doctorate at Giessen in 1880. Afterwards, he settled into a medical practice in Berlin, and in the meantime, received training in urology as a private assistant to Ernst Fürstenheim . In 1889 he obtained his habilitation, and shortly afterwards worked as a lecturer at Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, where in 1903 he became an associate professor of internal medicine. He died in Berlin, aged 74.
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Paul Zweifel
1848 - 1927 (79 years)
Paul Zweifel was a German gynecologist and physiologist. In 1876 he proved that the fetus was metabolically active. Biography Zweifel was born in Switzerland; his father was a physician. He was educated at the University of Zürich , studying under Adolf Gusserow . In 1871, he received the venia legendi at the University of Strassburg, where he had already become an assistant in the gynecological institute. At Strassburg, he conducted studies on the physiology of the fetus and placenta in Felix Hoppe-Seyler's institute. In 1876 he was appointed professor of gynecology at the University of Erlangen.
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Friedrich Trautwein
1888 - 1956 (68 years)
Friedrich Trautwein was a German engineer. Trautwein developed the Trautonium and is considered a pioneer of electronic music in Germany. Life As a child, Friedrich Trautwein learned to play the organ in church. He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, followed by law and physics in Berlin and Heidelberg. In 1906, he joined the Teutonia fraternity in Karlsruhe.
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Thomas Benton Cooley
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Thomas Benton Cooley was an American pediatrician and hematologist and professor of hygiene and medicine at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University. He was the director of the Pasteur Institute at the University of Michigan from 1903 to 1904. He worked in private practice in Detroit as the city's first pediatrician starting in 1905. He worked with the Babies' Milk Fund and helped to reduce Detroit's high infant mortality rate in the 1900s and 1910s. During World War I, Cooley went to France as the assistant chief of the Children's Bureau of the American Red Cross. He was decorated in 1924 with the cross of the Legion of Honor for his work in France.
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William Parks
1868 - 1936 (68 years)
William Arthur Parks was a Canadian geologist and paleontologist, following in the tradition of Lawrence Lambe. Parks was born in Hamilton, Ontario. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1892, Parks joined the University of Toronto's staff, where he taught geology, paleontology, and mineralogy. He went on to earn a PhD in 1900. He wrote 80 scientific papers in his lifetime. Parks died in Toronto, Ontario, in 1936.
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George Edward Post
1838 - 1909 (71 years)
George Edward Post was an American surgeon, academic and botanist. Biography George Edward Post was born in New York City on December 17, 1838, the son of Alfred Charles Post. He was a Professor of Surgery at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, which became the American University of Beirut . He had originally graduated from University College of New York.
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Arthur Schwartz
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Arthur Schwartz was an American composer and film producer, widely noted for his songwriting collaborations with Howard Dietz. Biography Early life Schwartz was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City, on November 25, 1900. He taught himself to play the harmonica and piano as a child, and began playing for silent films at age 14. He earned a B.A. in English at New York University and an M.A. in Architecture at Columbia. Forced by his father, an attorney, to study law, Schwartz graduated from NYU Law School with a Juris Doctor and was admitted to the bar in 1924.
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Wilhelm Rust
1822 - 1892 (70 years)
Wilhelm Rust was a German musicologist and composer. He is most noted today for his substantial contributions to the Bach Gesellschaft edition of the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Born in Dessau, Rust studied piano and organ with his uncle Wilhelm Karl Rust, and later under Friedrich Schneider . From 1845 to 1848 he was music teacher in a Hungarian nobleman's family. He went to Berlin in 1849, where he taught and joined the Singakademie in 1850. He joined the Leipzig Bach-Verein in 1850, and played in numerous concerts. He became organist of St. Luke's in 1861, conductor of the Berlin Bach-Verein from 1862 to 1874, and Royal Music Director in 1864.
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Aonio Paleario
1503 - 1570 (67 years)
Aonio Paleario was an Italian Christian termed a reformer. Life He was born about 1500 at Veroli, in the Roman Campagna. Other forms of his name are Antonio Della Paglia, A. Degli Pagliaricci. In 1520 he went to Rome, where he entered the brilliant literary circle of Leo X. When Charles of Bourbon stormed Rome in 1527, Paleario went first to Perugia and then to Siena, where he settled as a teacher of Greek and Hebrew.
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John Adamson
1809 - 1870 (61 years)
John Adamson was a Scottish physician, pioneer photographer, physicist, lecturer and museum curator. He was a highly respected figure in St Andrews, and was responsible for producing the first calotype portrait in Scotland in 1841. He taught the process to his brother, the famous pioneering photographer Robert Adamson. He was curator of the Literary and Philosophical Society Museum at St Andrews from 1838 until his death.
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Johann von Wowern
1574 - 1612 (38 years)
Johann von Wowern was a German statesman, philologist, and lawyer. He is known for his 1603 work De Polymathia tractatio: integri operis de studiis veterum, the first work in Western Europe to use the term "polymath" in its title. Wowern defined polymathy as "knowledge of various matters, drawn from all kinds of studies ... ranging freely through all the fields of the disciplines, as far as the human mind, with unwearied industry, is able to pursue them". Von Wowern lists erudition, literature, philology, philomathy and polyhistory as synonyms.
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William of Marseille
William of Marseille was a thirteenth-century English academic, teaching in France. He is known for the medical-astrological treatise De urina non visa. The method is to use a horoscope to deduce properties of the urine of a patient for diagnosis, when the urine itself cannot be obtained. This book was still used at the University of Bologna in 1405.
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Claude Rogers
1907 - 1979 (72 years)
Claude Maurice Rogers was a British painter of portraits and landscapes, an influential art teacher, a founding member of the Euston Road School and at one time the President of the London Group of British artists.
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Raymond Cazallis Davis
1836 - 1919 (83 years)
Raymond Cazallis Davis was the chief librarian at the University of Michigan for 28 years. He was the first to offer a course at a college in bibliography. Early life Davis was born in Cushing, Maine, on June 23, 1836. His parents were George Davis and Catherine Davis. His father is of English and Welsh ancestry and his mother of Scotch and Irish. Davis's father was a sea captain. In 1849 when Davis was 13 years old his mother died. His father then took him on a two-year world tour.
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Hermann Friedberg
1817 - 1884 (67 years)
Hermann Friedberg was a German physician from Rosenberg , Silesia. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Paris, and Breslau, receiving from the last-named the degree of doctor of medicine in 1840. From 1849 to 1852 he was an assistant at the surgical hospital of the University of Berlin, and in 1852 was admitted as a privatdozent in surgery and pharmacology to the medical faculty of the Berlin University, at the same time conducting a private hospital for the treatment of surgical and ophthalmological diseases. In 1866 he was appointed professor of pharmacology at the Univ...
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Sextus Otto Lindberg
1835 - 1889 (54 years)
Sextus Otto Lindberg was a Swedish physician and botanist, known as a bryologist. Life He was born in Stockholm, and educated in Uppsala. He worked in the Grand Duchy of Finland, then part of the Russian Empire. He became professor of botany, and dean of the physics-mathematics faculty, at the University of Helsingfors.
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Ernst Kohlschütter
1837 - 1905 (68 years)
Ernst Otto Heinrich Kohlschütter was a German physician born in Dresden. He was the father of astronomer Arnold Kohlschütter . The son of Dr. Otto Kohlschütter , he studied medicine at the University of Leipzig. In 1862 he earned his doctorate with an influential dissertation on "sleep depth" titled Messungen der Festigkeit des Schlafes. With help from Theodor Weber , he was able to remain in Leipzig as an assistant at the university polyclinic. Later on, he received his habilitation at the University of Halle, becoming a privat-docent of internal medicine and subsequently a lecturer in balne...
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Charles Minnigerode
1814 - 1894 (80 years)
Charles Frederick Ernest Minnigerode was a German-born American professor and clergyman who is credited with introducing the Christmas tree to Williamsburg. He was professor of Latin and Greek at the College of William and Mary from 1842 to 1848. A Lutheran, Minnigerode became an Episcopalian. In 1845, he submitted himself as a candidate for the priesthood. The following year at Bruton Parish Church, Bishop John Johns ordained him to the transitional diaconate; and then to the priesthood in 1847.
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Pieter Gillis
1486 - 1533 (47 years)
Pieter Gillis , known by his anglicised name Peter Giles and sometimes the Latinised Petrus Ægidius, was a humanist, printer, and secretary to the city of Antwerp in the early sixteenth century. He is most famous as a friend and supporter of Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. He seemed to have recommended the painter Hans Holbein the Younger to the court of England, where Thomas More received him delighted. Thomas More's Utopia, although fictional, includes Pieter Gillis as a character in Book I. More dedicated Utopia to Gillis, who may have designed the Utopian alphabet. They first met whe...
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Curtis Bernhardt
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Curtis Bernhardt was a German film director born in Worms, Germany, under the name Kurt Bernhardt. Career He trained as an actor in Germany, and performed on the stage, before starting as a film director in 1924, with Nameless Heroes. Other films include A Stolen Life and Sirocco .
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James Boevey
1622 - 1696 (74 years)
James Boevey was an English merchant, lawyer and philosopher of Huguenot parentage. Origins He was born in London at 6 a.m. on 7 May 1622 in Mincing Lane, in the parish of St. Dunstan-in-the-East. He was the youngest son of Andreas Boevey by his second wife Joanna der Wilde , daughter of Peter der Wilde. Andreas Boevey was a Dutch Huguenot from Courtrai in Flanders who had been brought to England aged 7 by his Huguenot parents following the invasion of the Low Countries by the Duke of Alva and the Duke's subsequent persecutions. Andreas had nine children by his first wife Esther Fenn and two by his second wife, the eldest of whom was James.
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Marek Gatty-Kostyal
1886 - 1965 (79 years)
Marek Gatty-Kostyal was a Polish chemist and pharmacist, known for his many contributions to pharmaceutical science.
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Miriam E. Carey
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Miriam Eliza Carey was an American librarian who helped establish the first libraries in prisons and hospitals in Iowa and Minnesota. Education and career Carey studied at Rockford Seminary , Oberlin College, Ohio and the library school of the University of Illinois, .
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John White
1756 - 1832 (76 years)
John White was an Irish surgeon and botanical collector. Biography White was born in the townland of Drumaran, near Belcoo, in County Fermanagh in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, about 1756, and not, as stated in the Dictionary of Australian Biography and the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in Sussex, England. On 18 June 1778 John White qualified as a surgeon's mate, first rate, following examination at the Company of Surgeons in London. He entered the Royal Navy on 26 June 1778 as surgeon's mate aboard . He was promoted surgeon in 1780, serving aboard until 1786 when Sir Andr...
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Otto Gussmann
1869 - 1926 (57 years)
Otto Friedrich Gussmann was a German decorative artist, designer, and art professor. Biography His father was a pastor. After completing secondary school, he began an apprenticeship with a decorative painter in Stuttgart. He also took classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule . In 1892, he moved to the teaching institute at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin. Four years later, he began studying at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.
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William Polk
1758 - 1834 (76 years)
Colonel William Polk was a North Carolina banker, educational administrator, political leader, renowned Continental officer in the War for American Independence, and survivor of the 1777/1778 encampment at Valley Forge.
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Olav Gurvin
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Olav Gurvin was a Norwegian musicologist, a professor at the University of Oslo from 1957. He co-edited the first Norwegian music encyclopedia in 1949, and edited the magazine Norsk Musikkliv from 1942 to 1951.
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Alexander Anderson
1748 - 1811 (63 years)
Alexander Anderson was a Scottish surgeon, explorer and botanist who worked as Superintendent to the Botanical Garden on the Windward Island of Saint Vincent from 1785 to 1811. Early life and education Born in Aberdeen, Anderson later studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he was tutored by William Cullen and John Hope . Fellow Aberdonian William Forsyth briefly employed him at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, prior to Anderson's emigration to New York in 1774, where he stayed with his brother John, a printer. After a petition was lodged by physicians William Wright and Thomas C...
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Arthur Trebitsch
1880 - 1927 (47 years)
Arthur Trebitsch was an Austrian writer and racial theorist, known for being an antisemite of Jewish origin. He offered his services to help the fledgling Nazis to write their antisemitic literature, and was an influence on the early development of the Austrian branch of the Nazi party.
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Alida Avery
1833 - 1908 (75 years)
Alida Avery was an American physician and Vassar College faculty member. In Colorado, she was thought to be the first woman licensed to practice medicine in the state. She was also the Superintendent of Hygiene for Colorado. Avery was among the first women first admitted to the Denver Medical Society.
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