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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.

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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#15601

L. E. J. Brouwer

L. E. J. Brouwer

1881 - 1966 (85 years)

Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer , usually cited as L. E. J. Brouwer but known to his friends as Bertus, was a Dutch mathematician and philosopher who worked in topology, set theory, measure theory and complex analysis. Regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, he is known as the founder of modern topology, particularly for establishing his fixed-point theorem and the topological invariance of dimension.

#15602

Roy Wood Sellars

1880 - 1973 (93 years)

Roy Wood Sellars was a Canadian-born American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of naturalistic emergent evolution . Sellars received his B.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he taught for over 40 years. He is the father of Wilfrid Sellars.

#15603

Paul Tillich

1886 - 1965 (79 years)

Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twentieth century. Tillich taught at German universities before immigrating to the United States in 1933, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary, Harvard University, and the University of Chicago.

#15604

Nils-Åke Hillarp

1916 - 1965 (49 years)

Nils-Åke Hillarp was a Swedish scientist and a prominent force in research on the brain's monoamines. Biography Hillarp was the son of merchant Nils Bengtsson and Hulda, former Johansson, and the brother of Rut Hillarp, a novelist. He became Doctor of Medical Science in 1946. He was appointed assistant and later associate professor of Histology at the University of Lund . The Swedish Medical Research Council enabled him to spend 1960 to 1962 in research at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Gothenburg, then in 1962 he became full professor of histology at the Karolinska Institute ...

#15605

Graeme Forbes

Graeme Robertson Forbes is a Scottish-American philosopher and logician and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder and former Celia Scott Weatherhead Distinguished Professor at Tulane University.

#15606

Frederic Fitch

1908 - 1987 (79 years)

Frederic Brenton Fitch was an American logician, a Sterling Professor at Yale University. Education and career At Yale, Fitch earned his B.A in 1931 and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1934 under the supervision of F. S. C. Northrop. From 1934 to 1937 Fitch was a postdoc at the University of Virginia. In 1937 he returned to Yale, where he taught until his retirement in 1977.

#15607

Reidar Fauske Sognnaes

1911 - 1984 (73 years)

Reidar Sognnaes was Dean of the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, founding Dean of the UCLA School of Dentistry and scholar in the field of oral pathology. Biography Reidar Fauske Sognnaes was born in Bergen, Norway. Sognnæs grew up in Bergen and took his final exams at Tanks gymnas in 1931. He took the first part of dental education in Leipzig, and concluded with an examination at the Norwegian Dental School in 1936. He participated in a Norwegian scientific expedition to Tristan da Cunha during 1937-38. Sognnaes came to America in 1938 as an intern at the Forsyth Dental Infirmary for Children in Boston.

#15608

Virginia Apgar

1909 - 1974 (65 years)

Virginia Apgar was an American physician, obstetrical anesthesiologist and medical researcher, best known as the inventor of the Apgar score, a way to quickly assess the health of a newborn child immediately after birth in order to combat infant mortality. In 1952, she developed the 10-point Apgar score to assist physicians and nurses in assessing the status of newborns. Given at one minute and five minutes after birth, the Apgar test measures a child's breathing, skin color, reflexes, motion, and heart rate. A friend said, "She probably did more than any other physician to bring the problem ...

#15609

Wilfrid Sellars

1912 - 1989 (77 years)

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States". Life and career His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan , the University at Buffalo, and Oriel College, Oxford , where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During World War II, he served in military intelligence.

#15610

Raymond Aron

1905 - 1983 (78 years)

Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. Aron is best known for his 1955 book The Opium of the Intellectuals, the title of which inverts Karl Marx's claim that religion was the opium of the people; he argues that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals in post-war France. In the book, Aron chastised French intellectuals for what he described as their harsh criticism of capitalism and democracy and their simultaneous defense of the actions of the communist governments of the East.

#15611

Hugh Latimer Dryden

Hugh Latimer Dryden

1898 - 1965 (67 years)

Hugh Latimer Dryden was an American aeronautical scientist and civil servant. He served as NASA Deputy Administrator from August 19, 1958, until his death. Biography Early life and education Dryden was born in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the son of Samuel Isaac and Nova Hill Culver Dryden, and was named after a popular local Methodist clergyman. During the financial panic of 1907, his father lost his job and the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland.

#15612

Arthur Prior

1914 - 1969 (55 years)

Arthur Norman Prior , usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior .

#15613

Bernardo Houssay

Bernardo Houssay

1887 - 1971 (84 years)

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was an Argentine physiologist. Houssay was a co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of glucose in animals, sharing the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori. He is the first Latin American Nobel laureate in the sciences.

#15614

William S. Tillett

1892 - 1974 (82 years)

William Smith Tillett was an American internist and microbiologist. He is best known for the discovery of C-reactive protein and the streptokinase. He was also a professor of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine.

#15615

Dickinson W. Richards

Dickinson W. Richards

1895 - 1973 (78 years)

Dickinson Woodruff Richards Jr. was an American physician and physiologist. He was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1956 with André Cournand and Werner Forssmann for the development of cardiac catheterization and the characterisation of a number of cardiac diseases.

#15616

Michael Mulholland

1900 - Present (126 years)

Michael W. Mulholland is an American surgeon who is Professor of Surgery and the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan. Biography Mulholland was educated at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and gained his medical degree from Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago. This was followed by postgraduate training in General Surgery at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he also gained his Ph.D. From 1985-1988, Mulholland was an Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle. He joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1988.

#15617

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

1873 - 1962 (89 years)

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being , on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.

#15618

George Catlin

1896 - 1979 (83 years)

Sir George Edward Gordon Catlin was an English political scientist and philosopher. A strong proponent of Anglo-American co-operation, he worked for many years as a professor at Cornell University and other universities and colleges in the United States and Canada. He preached the use of a natural science model for political science. McMaster University Libraries holds his correspondence archive and the body of some of his works. He had two children, one of whom was the politician and academic Shirley Williams.

#15619

Isaac Starr

1895 - 1989 (94 years)

Isaac "Jack" Starr , known as the father of ballistocardiography, was an American physician, heart disease specialist, and clinical epidemiologist notable for developing the first practical ballistocardiograph. His early academic positions included being an assistant professor in pharmacology and later the first Hartzell Professor of Research Therapeutics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania as well as dean of the school from 1945 to 1948.

#15620

Mark M. Ravitch

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Mark Mitchell Ravitch was an American surgeon. He pioneered the use of surgical staples, the treatment of chest wall deformities, and non-operative management of intussusception. Early life and education Ravitch was born in 1910 in New York City. He attended the University of Oklahoma, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and graduated with a degree in zoology in 1930. He received his M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1934 and remained at Johns Hopkins to complete his surgical training, which he finished in 1943 under the mentorship of Alfred Blalock.

#15621

Max Horkheimer

1895 - 1973 (78 years)

Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...

#15622

Josep Trueta

1897 - 1977 (80 years)

Josep Trueta i Raspall was a Catalan surgeon and researcher from Spain. Biography As a Catalan nationalist, he fled into exile to England after the Spanish Civil War, during which he had been the chief of trauma services for the main hospital in Barcelona. In 1939 a booklet of his, first published in Catalan, was published in English as Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures, with special reference to the Closed Method as used in the war in Spain, in London. His work was noted and accepted by the British RAMC, thus influencing British Army medical practice. During World War II, he helped to organize medical emergency services.

#15623

Oswald Avery

1877 - 1955 (78 years)

Oswald Theodore Avery Jr. was a Canadian-American physician and medical researcher. The major part of his career was spent at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York City. Avery was one of the first molecular biologists and a pioneer in immunochemistry, but he is best known for the experiment that isolated DNA as the material of which genes and chromosomes are made.

#15624

Norman Geschwind

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Norman Geschwind was a pioneering American behavioral neurologist, best known for his exploration of behavioral neurology through disconnection models based on lesion analysis. Early life Norman Geschwind was born on January 8, 1926, in New York City, New York to a Jewish family. He was a student at Boy's High School in Brooklyn, New York. He matriculated into Harvard University in 1942, initially planning to study mathematics. His education was interrupted when drafted into the Army in 1944. After serving for two years, he returned to Harvard University in 1946. Geschwind changed to the Depa...

#15625

Lester Dragstedt

Lester Dragstedt

1893 - 1975 (82 years)

Lester Reynold Dragstedt was an American surgeon who was the first to successfully separate conjoined twins. He was considered nationally known, and a leading authority on ulcers and gastroneuro surgery.

#15626

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

1901 - 1972 (71 years)

Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory . This is an interdisciplinary practice that describes systems with interacting components, applicable to biology, cybernetics and other fields. Bertalanffy proposed that the classical laws of thermodynamics might be applied to closed systems, but not necessarily to "open systems" such as living things. His mathematical model of an organism's growth over time, published in 1934, is still in use today.

#15627

Alexis Carrel

1873 - 1944 (71 years)

Alexis Carrel was a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation. Carrel was also a pioneer in transplantology and thoracic surgery. He is known for his leading role in implementing eugenic policies in Vichy France.

#15628

Franz J. Ingelfinger

1910 - 1980 (70 years)

Franz Joseph Ingelfinger was a German-American physician, researcher and journal editor. He served as Chief of Gastroenterology at Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research, part of Boston University School of Medicine. He also served as Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1967 to 1976. His work was influential in the field of science journalism.

#15629

Maxwell Wintrobe

1901 - 1986 (85 years)

Maxwell Myer Wintrobe was an Austrian-born American physician who was a 20th-century authority in the medical field of hematology. His 1942 textbook on hematology, Clinical Hematology, was the first dedicated work in the field and he contributed to the diagnostic approach of anemia and copper metabolism, amongst many other achievements.

#15630

Carl J. Wiggers

1883 - 1963 (80 years)

Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.

#15631

Rudolf Carnap

1891 - 1970 (79 years)

Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."

#15632

Charles Best

1899 - 1978 (79 years)

Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...

#15633

Maxwell Finland

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Maxwell Finland was an American scientist, medical researcher, an expert on infectious diseases. Finland led seminal research of antibiotic treatment of pneumonia. Early life and education Finland was born on March 15, 1902, in Zhashkiv near Kyiv, Ukraine. He immigrated as a child to the United States at the age of 4. Finland graduated from the Boston English High School and cum laude from Harvard College in 1922. He then graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1926.

#15634

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault

1926 - 1984 (58 years)

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.

#15635

Loren Lomasky

Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.

#15636

G. E. Moore

1873 - 1958 (85 years)

George Edward Moore was an English philosopher, who with Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and earlier Gottlob Frege was among the initiators of analytic philosophy. He and Russell began deemphasizing the idealism which was then prevalent among British philosophers and became known for advocating common-sense concepts and contributing to ethics, epistemology and metaphysics. He was said to have an "exceptional personality and moral character". Ray Monk later dubbed him "the most revered philosopher of his era".

#15637

Marvin Farber

1901 - 1980 (79 years)

Marvin Farber was an American philosopher and educator. Early life and education He was born in Buffalo, New York to Jewish parents Simon and Matilda Farber. He was the second oldest of their 14 children. One of his brothers was pathologist and cancer researcher Sidney Farber.

#15638

Thomas Ferguson

1900 - 1977 (77 years)

Thomas Ferguson FRSE CBE was a Scottish surgeon and Professor of Public Health from 1944 to 1964 at the University of Glasgow. Much of his early writing and philosophy paved the way for the National Health Service in Britain after the Second World War.

#15639

R. B. Braithwaite

R. B. Braithwaite

1900 - 1990 (90 years)

Richard Bevan Braithwaite was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Life Braithwaite was born in Banbury, Oxfordshire, son of the historian of early Quaker history, William Charles Braithwaite. He was educated at Sidcot School, Somerset , and Bootham School, York, 1914–18. As a conscientious objector in the First World War, he served in the Friends' Ambulance Unit.

#15640

John Elof Boodin

1869 - 1950 (81 years)

John Elof Boodin was a Swedish-born American philosopher and educator. He was the author of numerous books proposing a systematic interpretation of nature. Boodin's work preserved the tradition of philosophical idealism within the framework of contemporary science. Boodin also focused on the social nature of human behavior believing an understanding required an appreciation of individual participation in social life and interpersonal relationship.

#15641

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.

#15642

Boyd Henry Bode

1873 - 1953 (80 years)

Boyd Henry Bode was an American academic and philosopher, notable for his work on philosophy of education. Bode was born in Ridott, Illinois. He grew up in rural areas of Iowa and South Dakota and attended Pennsylvania College in Iowa and later the University of Michigan, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1897, and Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1900.

#15643

David Weyhe Smith

1926 - 1981 (55 years)

David Weyhe Smith was an American pediatrician and dysmorphologist, best known for his pioneering book Recognizable Patterns of Human Malformation and for describing fetal alcohol syndrome. Early life and education David Weyhe Smith was born in Oakland, California. He gained his medical degree from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and undertook postdoctoral studies during 1950-51 and 1953-56 in the Department of Pediatrics. He worked with Lawson Wilkins in the field of pediatric endocrinology.

#15644

Raphael Demos

1892 - 1968 (76 years)

Raphael Demos was a Greek-American philosopher. He was Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy and Civil Polity, emeritus, at Harvard University and an authority on the work of the Greek philosopher Plato. At Harvard, he taught Martin Luther King Jr.

#15645

José Gaos

1900 - 1969 (69 years)

José Gaos was a Spanish philosopher who obtained political asylum in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most important Mexican philosophers of the 20th century. He was a member of the Madrid School.

#15646

Philipp Frank

1884 - 1966 (82 years)

Philipp Frank was a physicist, mathematician and philosopher of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was a logical positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was influenced by Mach and was one of the Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

#15647

Louis Round Wilson

Louis Round Wilson

1876 - 1979 (103 years)

Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, directing the library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and as one of the “internationally oriented library leaders in the U.S. who contributed much of the early history of the International Federation of Library Associations and Inst...

#15648

Una Ellis-Fermor

1894 - 1958 (64 years)

Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.

#15649

Alexander Burns Wallace

Alexander Burns Wallace

1906 - 1974 (68 years)

Alexander Burns Wallace was a Scottish plastic surgeon. He was a founding member and president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the first editor of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In authorship he appears as A. B. Wallace.

#15650

John Leofric Stocks

1882 - 1937 (55 years)

John Leofric Stocks DSO was a British philosopher and was briefly Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 1937. Biography Stocks was born the sixth of twelve children to John Edward Stocks, the vicar of Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

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