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 …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15501
John D. Faris
#77793
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Denver Faris is an American Chorbishop of the Syriac Maronite Church of Antioch, serving the Maronite Catholic Eparchy of Saint Maron of Brooklyn, headquartered in Brooklyn, New York. He is a canon lawyer of the Eastern Catholic Church, and an expert called upon for dialogue between the Catholic Church and the Eastern Christian Churches.
Go to Profile#15502
Axel Kaiser
#36236
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Axel Phillip Kaiser Barents-Von Hohenhagen is a Chilean writer, lawyer and political scientist. A Mont Pelerin Society member, he has collaborated as a columnist for El Mercurio, El Líbero and Diario Financiero. In 2013 and 2014 he published two articles in Forbes: "Is this the end of the Chilean economic miracle?" and "Michelle Bachelet is destroying Chile's free market institutions". Some critics argued about the latter that Kaiser was overstating the impact of Michelle Bachelet's reforms.
Go to Profile#15503
Günter Bentele
#86249
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Günter Bentele was a professor of Public Relations at the University of Leipzig between 1994 and 2014. Between 1989 and 1994 he taught at the University of Bamberg.
Go to Profile#15504
Ruth Hall
#173278
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Ruth Hall is a professor at PLAAS at the University of the Western Cape, which she joined in 2002. A political scientist by training, she specialises in the politics and the political economy of agrarian reform, land redistribution, and poverty.
Go to Profile#15505
William Weaver Austin
#116888
Overall Influence
1920 - 2000 (80 years)
William Weaver Austin was an American musicologist, organist, and pianist. Austin was born in Lawton, Oklahoma on January 18, 1920, and attended schools in Kansas City, Missouri, Great Falls, Montana, and Minneapolis, Minnesota. Aged 15, he accepted admission to Harvard University, where he studied American history and literature. He came to know Walter Piston, and participated in the Harvard Glee Club as an accompanist. Following the completion of his master's degree at Harvard in 1940, Austin went to the Berkshire Music Center to coach opera and study counterpoint under Paul Hindemith. In 1941, Austin spent some time at the MacDowell Colony.
Go to Profile#15506
Patricia Charache
#27300
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Patricia Charache was a physician specializing in infectious disease and microbiology. She was a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine for more than 50 years, retiring as a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Pathology, Medicine, and Oncology.
Go to Profile#15507
Danny Ben-Moshe
#131244
Overall Influence
Danny Ben-Moshe is a documentary film maker and an associate professor at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. He has produced and directed several critically praised documentaries. Career In 2001, Ben-Moshe was presented with the Commonwealth Centenary of Federation medal for leadership against and research into racism in Australia. These include The Buchenwald Ball about Holocaust survivors in Australia celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of their liberation, which screened on SBS Television in Australia.
Go to Profile#15508
Kurt Blaukopf
#44747
Overall Influence
1914 - 1999 (85 years)
Kurt Blaukopf was an Austrian music sociologist. Blaukopf established music sociology as a subject at the Vienna Musikhochschule. He founded the Institute of Music Sociology and the MEDIACULT Institute.
Go to Profile#15509
Alexander Savvas
1907 - 1981 (74 years)
Alexander Savvas was a Greek Professor of Medicine at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Faculty of Anatomy. He wrote a number of anatomy books and research protocols, and was influential among Greek physicians for his educational method and proficient use of Greek language and medical terminology.
Go to Profile#15510
Jerry Green
#80044
Overall Influence
Jerome Frederic Green was an American sports journalist and author. He was a staff writer for the Associated Press from 1956 to 1963 and for The Detroit News from 1963 to 2004. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 2003. He is the only sportswriter to have covered each of the first 56 Super Bowls, from 1967 to 2022.
Go to Profile#15511
Martin Dobelle
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Martin Dobelle was an American surgeon. Early life and education Born in New York City December 25, 1906, the son of Harry and Ida Kaplan Dobelle, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York. An alumnus of Boys High School, he received a track and field scholarship to and graduated from Fordham University in 1926 where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After working in a Brooklyn pharmacy for two years, he studied medicine at the University of Ghent in Belgium, where he received his M.D. degree in 1932. As an intern and resident, he served in various American hospitals, including Boston City Hospital, at which time he held teaching fellowships at both Tufts University and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#15512
Alfred Sokołowski
1849 - 1924 (75 years)
Alfred Marcin Sokołowski was a Polish pulmonologist and professor of the University of Warsaw. He specialised in the field of Phthisiatry and he was one of the pioneers of modern treatment to diseases of the respiratory system.
Go to Profile#15513
Abul Hasan Hankari
1018 - 1093 (75 years)
Abul Hasan Hankari Abu Al Hasan Ali Bin Mohammad Qureshi Hashmi Hankari Harithi , town of Mosul , died 1st Moharram 486 AH , in Baghdad, was a Muslim mystic also renowned as one of the most influential Muslim scholar, philosopher, theologian and jurist of his time and Sufi based in Hankar.
Go to Profile#15514
Margaret Hayes Grazier
#93357
Overall Influence
1916 - 1999 (83 years)
Margaret Hayes Grazier was an American librarian, educator, and published author in the field of Library and Information science, who specialized in school librarianship. She worked as a school librarian at various high schools and, later in her career, as a professor of library science at Wayne State University. Grazier had developed a model to guide library media specialists to become fully immersed in the entire cycle of the student's learning process, everything from storytelling to planning and evaluating curriculum. She was active in several important library organizations, including th...
Go to Profile#15515
Frank Schneider
#167888
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Frank Schneider is a German musicologist. Life Born in Großerkmannsdorf, Saxony, Schneider studied Kapellmeister from 1961 at the Musikhochschule Dresden and from 1964 musicology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Go to Profile#15516
James Underwood
#42925
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Sir James Cresseé Elphinstone Underwood FMedSci is a British pathologist who was awarded a knighthood for services to medicine in the 2005 New Year honours list. Early life and education Underwood was born at Walsall in 1942, where his father, John Underwood, was a general practitioner. The family settled in Cheltenham in 1948. He was educated at Downside School, Somerset. From 1960-1965 he was a medical student at St Bartholomew's Hospital Medical College, and a house doctor at St Stephen's Hospital, Chelsea.
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Robert Adams
#109460
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Robert Adams was an American Advaita teacher. In later life Adams held satsang with a small group of devotees in California, US. He mainly advocated the path of jñāna yoga with an emphasis on the practice of self-enquiry. Adams' teachings were not well known in his lifetime, but have since been widely circulated amongst those investigating the philosophy of Advaita and the Western devotees of Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi. A book of his teachings, Silence of the Heart: Dialogues with Robert Adams, was published in 1999.
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Steven C. Beering
#24719
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Steven Claus Beering served as president of Purdue University from 1983 to 2000. Previously, he was dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine for nine years. During his leadership, Purdue's main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana, grew by more than 20 buildings. He replaced John W. Hicks and was succeeded by Martin C. Jischke. Beering was well known for his opposition to financial earmarks. In his honor, the former Liberal Arts Education Building , was renamed Beering Hall. He also founded an eponymous scholarship which provides recipients with full tuition and fees, room and board, an...
Go to Profile#15519
Pedro José Greer
#36533
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Pedro José Greer Jr. is an American physician of Cuban descent. He is Founding Dean for the Roseman University Health Sciences College of Medicine. He was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1993, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, and the Great Floridian Award in 2013. He has been a board member of the American charity for the homeless, Comic Relief.
Go to Profile#15520
Philip Syng Physick
1768 - 1837 (69 years)
Philip Syng Physick was an American physician and professor born in Philadelphia. He was the first professor of surgery and later of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania medical school from 1805 to 1831 during which time he was a highly influential teacher. Physick invented a number of surgical devices and techniques including the stomach tube and absorbable sutures. He has been called the "Father of American Surgery."
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Sigvald Bernhard Refsum
#83175
Overall Influence
1907 - 1991 (84 years)
Sigvald Bernhard Refsum was a Norwegian neurologist and university teacher. Biography Sigvald Refsum studied medicine at University of Oslo and obtained his doctorate in 1946. He taught in University of Bergen from 1951, then from 1954 until his retirement in 1978 in University of Oslo. Refsum disease is named after him.
Go to Profile#15522
Wolfram Samlowski
#79530
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Wolfram Samlowski is an American medical oncologist with Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada and a member of the Research Developmental Therapeutics and Genitourinary Committees for US Oncology. His research interests include translational research and development of novel cancer immunotherapy agents, translational drug development as well as gene therapy. His clinical interests are in developing more effective treatments for advanced stages of melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancers , and renal cancer.
Go to Profile#15523
Aneez Esmail
#180416
Overall Influence
#15524
Howard Landy
#73513
Overall Influence
Howard Landy is a professor of neurosurgery in the Department of Neurological Surgery and Radiation Oncology at the University of Miami and serves as the director of quality and patient safety at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Go to Profile#15525
David Nicholls
#79669
Overall Influence
1936 - 1996 (60 years)
David Gwyn Nicholls was an English Anglican priest, theologian, and Caribbean studies scholar who authored more than one hundred publications in the fields of political theology and Caribbean studies.
Go to Profile#15526
Harendra de Silva
#25212
Overall Influence
Harendra de Silva is a pediatrician whose efforts have helped to create awareness of child abuse in Sri Lanka. Education de Silva was educated at Ananda College Colombo, before he entered the Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo, where he obtained both an undergraduate Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery and later Doctor of Medicine.
Go to Profile#15527
James W. Holsinger
#60075
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
James Wilson Holsinger Jr., is an American physician. A former major general in the U.S. Army Reserve , he has worked primarily in public health for over thirty years. He served as the Under Secretary of Veterans Affairs for Health from 1990 to 1993, during the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. From 1994 to 2003, Holsinger was the Chancellor of the University of Kentucky's Chandler Medical Center. From 2003 to 2005 he served as Kentucky's Secretary of Health and Family Services.
Go to Profile#15528
Selna Kaplan
#38212
Overall Influence
1927 - 2010 (83 years)
Selna Lucille Kaplan was an American pediatric endocrinologist and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco. She led the first American clinical trials of growth hormone treatment.
Go to Profile#15529
Dan Caspi
#73467
Overall Influence
1945 - 2017 (72 years)
Dan Caspi was a lecturer at the Communication Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel. Throughout his career, Caspi has combined research with public activity and extensive, lively commentary, publishing hundreds of articles in the printed daily and online press, including regular columns in a Jerusalem local paper, in the Israel Publishers’ Association monthly Otot ' in Haayin Hashviit ' the op-ed section of ynet and a blog for Ha'aretz.
Go to Profile#15530
Deng Xi
545 BC - 501 BC (44 years)
Deng Xi was a Chinese philosopher and rhetorician who was associated with the Chinese philosophical tradition School of Names. Once a senior official of the Zheng state, and a contemporary of Confucius, he is regarded as China's earliest known lawyer, with clever use of words and language in lawsuits. The Zuo Zhuan and Annals of Lü Buwei critically credit Deng with the authorship of a penal code, the earliest known statute in Chinese criminology entitled the "Bamboo Law". This was developed to take the place of the harsh, more Confucian criminal code developed by the Zheng statesman Zichan.
Go to Profile#15531
Felix Fleischner
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Felix G. Fleischner was an Austrian-American radiologist from Boston. The Fleischner Society for thoracic imaging and diagnosis is named after him. Biography Felix Fleischner was born in Vienna. He became an expert in the field of radiology, and most of his work centered on the chest x-ray. He served as professor and head of radiology of the Second Medical Clinic of the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile#15532
Tania Bubela
#94891
Overall Influence
Tania Marjorie Bubela is a professor and dean in the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University. Education Born and raised in Australia, Bubela earned her bachelor's degree in 1988 from the Australian National University and her PhD from the University of Sydney.
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Károly Ferenczy
1862 - 1917 (55 years)
Károly Ferenczy was a Hungarian painter and leading member of the Nagybánya artists' colony. He was among several artists who went to Munich for study in the late nineteenth century, where he attended free classes by the Hungarian painter, Simon Hollósy. Upon his return to Hungary, Ferenczy helped found the artists colony in 1896, and became one of its major figures. Ferenczy is considered the "father of Hungarian impressionism and post-impressionism" and the "founder of modern Hungarian painting".
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Robert Tuttle Morris
1857 - 1945 (88 years)
Robert Tuttle Morris , also known as Bob Morris, was an American surgeon and writer. Life Early life and the call of medicine Robert Tuttle Morris was born in Seymour, Connecticut on May 14, 1857, the eldest of six children. His father was a lawyer, probate judge, and Governor of Connecticut. His mother Eugenia was an author. He attended Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven before studying biology at Cornell University in Ithaca from 1875-1879. As a child he developed an acute interest in nature and animals and continually observed the phenomena of the natural world. While still in high school in New Haven he planned to attend the biology program organised by Dr.
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John E. J. Rasko
#116935
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
John E. J. Rasko AO is an Australian clinical hematologist, pathologist and scientist whose research focuses on gene and stem cell therapy, experimental haematology and molecular biology. He directs the Department of Cell and Molecular Therapies at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, heads the Gene and Stem Cell Therapy Program at the Centenary Institute, Sydney, and is Professor of Medicine, Sydney Medical School, the University of Sydney. He is a science communicator, often interviewed on Australian radio and television, and is a regular contributor to Breakfast, Radio National, ABC. Rasko delivered the ABC's 2018 Boyer Lectures.
Go to Profile#15536
Nathaniel Tkacz
#122239
Overall Influence
Nathaniel Tkacz is a Swedish-Australian scholar of digital media who is currently Reader at the University of Warwick. His research on Wikipedia has been influential in media studies and organisational theory. Tkacz has described his work as investigating "the political, economic and organisational dimensions of technology, with a specific focus on networked and digital forms".
Go to Profile#15537
Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
1901 - 1988 (87 years)
Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt was a German composer, musicologist, and historian and critic of music. Life Stuckenschmidt was born in Strasbourg. At as early an age as 19, he was the Berlin-based music critic/correspondent for the Prague-based periodical Bohemia, and lived as a freelance music writer in Hamburg, Vienna, Paris, Berlin and Prague, becoming personally acquainted with numerous composers of avant-garde music.
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Christophe Wiart
#118429
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Christophe Wiart is a French scientist. His fields of expertise are Asian ethnopharmacology, chemotaxonomy and ethnobotany. He has collected, identified and classified several hundred species of medicinal plants of India, Southeast Asia and China.
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Claude Aubery
1501 - 1596 (95 years)
Claude Aubery, Claude Auberi or Claudius Alberius Triuncurianus was a French Reformed Protestant physician, philosopher and theologian. His doctrine, close to that of Sebastian Castellio or Andreas Osiander, was called Alberianism.
Go to Profile#15540
Wu Mengchao
#8392
Overall Influence
1922 - 2021 (99 years)
Dr. Wu Mengchao , was a Chinese surgeon and a medical scientist who specialized in hepatobiliary surgery. He was also known as the "Father of Chinese Hepatobiliary Surgery". Wu was born in Minqing County, Fuzhou, China. In 1940, he was admitted to 同济附中 , a high school affiliated to Tongji University. In 1949, he graduated from Tongji University School of Medicine in Shanghai. He was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1991 and was awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award in 2005, China's highest scientific prize, by President Hu Jintao. He was the founding director o...
Go to Profile#15541
Gerd Wolandt
#174162
Overall Influence
1928 - 1997 (69 years)
Gerd Wolandt was a German philosopher and academic teacher. Life and career Wolangt was born in Heiligenhaus. After his family moved to Karthaus in 1940, Wolandt first attended the St. Johann grammar school in Danzig and later the secondary school in Berent. At the end of the Second World War, he was conscripted into the Reich Labour Service in 1944 and then as a . He then took his Abitur in Velbert, having returned to the Rhineland after the war.
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Darrell Kirch
#40985
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Darrell G. Kirch is an American physician who is president and CEO emeritus of the Association of American Medical Colleges . He trained as a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, before going on to hold senior administrative positions at several medical colleges.
Go to Profile#15543
Egon von Vietinghoff
#80677
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Egon Arnold Alexis Freiherr von Vietinghoff genannt Scheel was a German-Swiss painter, author, philosopher and creator of the Egon von Vietinghoff Foundation. He reconstructed the lost painting techniques of the Old Masters, and created some 2,700 paintings.
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Frank Jeremiah Armstrong
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Frank Jeremiah Armstrong was an American physician who was the first African-American graduate of Cornell College. He was the assistant of Booker T. Washington and later became a physician. He was murdered in his office in 1946, possibly by a burglar after a hospital's narcotics.
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Charles Conrad Abbott
1843 - 1919 (76 years)
Charles Conrad Abbott was an American archaeologist and naturalist. Biography Abbott was born at Trenton, New Jersey, son of Timothy and Susan Abbott; grandson of Joseph and Anne Abbott, and a descendant of John and Anne Abbott, settlers, from England, in New Jersey in 1684. He studied medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. During the American Civil War, he served as a surgeon in the Union Army. He received his M.D. degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1865, but never entered into the practice of the profession.
Go to Profile#15546
Sandra Collins
#65501
Overall Influence
Sandra Collins is an Irish mathematician and leading academic librarian, who is the university librarian of University College Dublin, Ireland's largest university, since 2022. She was director of the National Library of Ireland from 2015.
Go to Profile#15547
Adrian M. Di Bisceglie
#180563
Overall Influence
#15548
Guillaume Dupuytren
1777 - 1835 (58 years)
Baron Guillaume Dupuytren was a French anatomist and military surgeon. Although he gained much esteem for treating Napoleon Bonaparte's hemorrhoids, he is best known today for his description of Dupuytren's contracture which is named after him and on which he first operated in 1831 and published in The Lancet, in 1834.
Go to Profile#15549
Philippe Charlier
#73752
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Philippe Charlier is a French coroner, forensic pathologist and paleopathologist. Biography Charlier was born in Meaux on 25 June 1977. His father is a doctor, his mother a pharmacist. He made his first dig at the age of 10, when he found a human skull. He studied archaeology and art history at the Michelet Institute and was part of the forensic department at Raymond Poincaré University Hospital.
Go to Profile#15550
John Charnley
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Sir John Charnley, was an English orthopaedic surgeon. He pioneered the hip replacement operation, which is now one of the most common operations both in the UK and elsewhere in the world, and created the "Wrightington centre for hip surgery". He also demonstrated the fundamental importance of bony compression in operations to arthrodese joints, in particular the knee, ankle and shoulder.
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