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,
#15751
Charles A. Hufnagel
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Charles A. Hufnagel, M.D. was an American surgeon who invented the first artificial heart valve in the early 1950s. Hufnagel was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and reared in Richmond, Indiana. His father was also a surgeon. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School. At Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, he began work on the heart and other organ transplants and explored the use of plastic to replace blood vessels, developing a technique called multi-point fixation, which would have great importance in the placement of the artificial aort...
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J. Barkley Rosser
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
John Barkley Rosser Sr. was an American logician, a student of Alonzo Church, and known for his part in the Church–Rosser theorem in lambda calculus. He also developed what is now called the "Rosser sieve" in number theory. He was part of the mathematics department at Cornell University from 1936 to 1963, chairing it several times. He was later director of the Army Mathematics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the first director of the Communications Research Division of IDA. Rosser also authored mathematical textbooks.
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Horace Kallen
1882 - 1974 (92 years)
Horace Meyer Kallen was a German-born American philosopher who supported pluralism and Zionism. Biography Horace Meyer Kallen was born on August 11, 1882, in the town of Bernstadt, Prussian Silesia . His parents were Jacob David Kallen, an Orthodox rabbi, and Esther Rebecca Glazier. In 1887, the family emigrated to the United States. Kallen studied philosophy at Harvard University under George Santayana; in 1903, he received a BA magna cum laude.
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Norwood Russell Hanson
1924 - 1967 (43 years)
Norwood Russell Hanson was an American philosopher of science. Hanson was a pioneer in advancing the argument that observation is theory-laden — that observation language and theory language are deeply interwoven — and that historical and contemporary comprehension are similarly deeply interwoven. His single most central intellectual concern was the comprehension and development of a logic of discovery.
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Robert Foster Kennedy
1884 - 1952 (68 years)
Dr Robert Foster Kennedy MD FRSE was an Irish-born neurologist largely working in America. He gives his name to Foster-Kennedy syndrome, the Kaplan-Kennedy test and Kennedy's Syndrome. He was one of the first medical doctors to use electroconvulsive treatment for mental conditions and one of the first to recognise and define shell shock in the First World War.
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Emil Leon Post
1897 - 1954 (57 years)
Emil Leon Post was an American mathematician and logician. He is best known for his work in the field that eventually became known as computability theory. Life Post was born in Augustów, Suwałki Governorate, Congress Poland, Russian Empire into a Polish-Jewish family that immigrated to New York City in May 1904. His parents were Arnold and Pearl Post.
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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.
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Michael Moravcsik
1928 - 1989 (61 years)
Michael Julius Alexander Moravcsik was a Hungarian-born American theoretical high energy physicist whose areas of research included the two nucleon system, particle spin symmetries. He also made important contributions to the practice and study of science policy in developing nations, scientific methodology, and scientometrics , especially the study of citation and citation indices.
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Douglas Vernon Hubble
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Sir Douglas Vernon Hubble was a paediatric endocrinologist, general practitioner, and professor of paediatrics and dean of medicine at the University of Birmingham. Hubble was principally notable for research into paediatric endocrinology and publishing a number of papers on the subject, which gave him a national reputation.
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Joseph Gilbert Hamilton
1907 - 1957 (50 years)
Joseph Gilbert Hamilton was an American professor of Medical Physics, Experimental Medicine, General Medicine, and Experimental Radiology as well as director of the Crocker Laboratory, part of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Hamilton studied the medical effects of exposure to radioactive isotopes, which included the use of unsuspecting human subjects.
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R. G. Collingwood
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .
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Paul Gyorgy
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Paul György was a Hungarian-born American biochemist, nutritionist, and pediatrician best known for his discovery of three B vitamins: riboflavin, B6, and biotin. Gyorgy was also well known for his research into the protective factors of human breast milk, particularly for his discoveries of Lactobacillus bifidus growth factor activity in human milk and its anti-staphylococcal properties. He was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1975 from President Gerald Ford.
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Kurt Gödel
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was a logician, mathematician, and philosopher. Considered along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege to be one of the most significant logicians in history, Gödel had an immense effect upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the 20th century, a time when others such as Bertrand Russell, Alfred North Whitehead, and David Hilbert were using logic and set theory to investigate the foundations of mathematics, building on earlier work by the likes of Richard Dedekind, Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege.
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Herbert Marcuse
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Herbert Marcuse was a German-American philosopher, social critic, and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Born in Berlin, Marcuse studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and then at Freiburg, where he received his PhD. He was a prominent figure in the Frankfurt-based Institute for Social Research – what later became known as the Frankfurt School. He was married to Sophie Wertheim , Inge Neumann , and Erica Sherover . In his written works, he criticized capitalism, modern technology, Soviet Communism, and popular culture, arguing that they represen...
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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.
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Abraham Wald
1902 - 1950 (48 years)
Abraham Wald was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry and econometrics, and founded the field of sequential analysis. One of his well-known statistical works was written during World War II on how to minimize the damage to bomber aircraft and took into account the survivorship bias in his calculations. He spent his research career at Columbia University. He was the grandson of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner.
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Theodor W. Adorno
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...
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John Plamenatz
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.
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Harold Wolff
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Harold George Wolff was an American doctor, neurologist and pseudoscientist who conducted intentionally harmful and brain-damaging pseudoscientific human experimentation. He is generally considered the father of modern headache research, and a pioneer in the study of psychosomatic illness.
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Andrew Conway Ivy
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Andrew Conway Ivy was an American physician. He was appointed by the American Medical Association as its representative at the 1946 Nuremberg Medical Trial for Nazi doctors, but later fell into disrepute for advocating the fraudulent drug Krebiozen.
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Jean Piaget
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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Zechariah Chafee
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
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Alfred Bielschowsky
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Alfred Bielschowsky was a German ophthalmologist. His specialty was physiology and pathology of the eye, particularly in regards to research of eye movement, space perception and diagnosis of oculomotor anomalies.
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Leon Carnovsky
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Leon Carnovsky was an American librarian and educator who focused much of his time to the survey of libraries in the United States and around the globe. Carnovsky was recognized by American Libraries as being one of the 100 most influential figures in Library and Information Sciences.
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Paul Anton Cibis
1911 - 1965 (54 years)
Paul Anton Cibis was a clinical ophthalmologist, surgeon and pioneer of modern vitreoretinal surgery. As part of Operation Paperclip Cibis came to the United States and performed research for the U.S. Air Force and studied the effects of atomic weapons testing on the eye. He was an internationally recognized expert in retinal detachment surgery and pioneered the use of liquid silicon for this procedure.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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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W. W. Bartley III
1934 - 1990 (56 years)
William Warren Bartley III , known as W. W. Bartley III, was an American philosopher specializing in 20th century philosophy, language and logic, and the Vienna Circle. Early life and education Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1934, Bartley was brought up in a Protestant home. He completed his secondary education in Pittsburgh and studied at Harvard University between 1952 and 1956, graduating with a BA degree in philosophy. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was an editor at The Harvard Crimson newspaper. He spent the winter semester of 1956 and the summer semester of 1957 at the Harvard Divinity School and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Alexandre Koyré
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Alexandre Koyré , also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science. Life Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyra . In Imperial Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
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John Daniel Wild
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
John Daniel Wild was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Wild began his philosophical career as an empiricist and realist but became an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in the United States.
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Irvin Abell
1876 - 1949 (73 years)
Irvin Abell was a surgeon from Louisville, Kentucky. Early life Irvin Abell was born on September 13, 1876, in Lebanon, Kentucky to Sarah Silesia and William Irvin Abell. The Abell family had lived in Kentucky since 1788. He attended St Augustine's Catholic School in Lebanon. He graduated from St. Mary's College in 1894 with a Master of Arts. Abell graduated from Louisville Medical College in 1897 and then studied in Germany at the University of Marburg and the University of Berlin.
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Einar Hammarsten
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Einar Hammarsten was a Swedish physician and professor of pharmacy and chemistry at the Karolinska Institute from 1928 to 1957. His area of research was the chemistry of the cell nucleus, in particular nucleic acids.
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H. B. Acton
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Harry Burrows Acton was an English academic in the field of political philosophy, known for books defending the morality of capitalism, and attacking Marxism-Leninism. He in particular produced arguments on the incoherence of Marxism, which he described as a 'farrago' . His book The Illusion of the Epoch, in which this appears, is a standard point of reference. Other interests were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and Sidney Webb. Acton also endorsed a version of negative utilitarianism, according to which the reduction of su...
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Lawrence H. Gipson
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Lawrence Henry Gipson was an American historian, who won the 1950 Bancroft Prize and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for History for volumes of his magnum opus, the fifteen-volume history of "The British Empire Before the American Revolution", published 1936–70. He was a leader of the "Imperial school" of historians who studied the British Empire from the perspective of London, and generally praised the administrative efficiency and political fairness of the Empire.
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Leo H. Bartemeier
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Leo Henry Bartemeier was an American physician, psychoanalyst, and educator. He was President of the American Psychiatric Association. Biography Bartemeier was born on September 12, 1895, in Muscatine, Iowa, into a Roman Catholic family. He attended the local parochial school and then enrolled in St. Mary's College , a Jesuit center, and completed two years of college. He learned shorthand and typing when working for the Associated Press. He transferred and completed college at The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, earning a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees, following acceptance of his thesis on animal research.
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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Maurice Tauber
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Maurice Falcom Tauber was an influential librarian, educator and researcher in the field of library and information sciences; he was a major actor in how technical services units in American and in international libraries were thought of and how they evolved in the 20th century. Tauber is remembered especially for his role as professor and mentor during his long tenure at Columbia University from 1944-1976. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Karl Löwith
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Karl Löwith was a German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century. He is known for his two books From Hegel to Nietzsche, which describes the decline of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, which challenges the modern, secular progressive narrative of history, which seeks to ground the meaning of history in itself.
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Chaim Sheba
1908 - 1971 (63 years)
Chaim Sheba was an Israeli physician, notable for being the founder of Sheba Medical Center. Biography Chaim Scheiber was born in Frasin, near Gurahumora, Bukovina, then in Austria-Hungary , to the well known Scheiber Hasidic family, a descendant of the Hasidic court of Ruzhin. As a young child he studied in heder, a school for religious studies only. He transferred from there to the 8th grade in a secular school. Influenced by his grandfather, he began medical studies in Cernăuți and completed such studies in Vienna in December 1932. In the beginning of 1933, Sheba immigrated to Mandate Pa...
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Félix Martí Ibáñez
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Félix Martí-Ibáñez was a physician, psychiatrist, author, and publisher, who was born in Spain, emigrated to the United States in 1939 following the Spanish Civil War when he was exiled during the Franco Era in Spain, and became an American citizen. In Spain he had served as a minister for the Second Spanish Republic. When he emigrated he settled in Manhattan.
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Ruth Boynton
1896 - 1977 (81 years)
Ruth Boynton was a physician, researcher, and administrator who spent almost her entire career at the University of Minnesota. She worked in public health and student health services. At that time, there were few women in any of these fields. She was director of the University Student Health Service from 1936 to 1961and it was renamed the Boynton Health Service in her honor in 1975. She served as the acting dean of the School of Public Health from 1944 to 1946.
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George Ranken Tudhope
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
George Ranken Tudhope MD FRSE DPH was a 20th-century Scottish pathologist and medical author. The George Ranken Tudhope Prize for best student in Pathology at the University of Dundee is named in his honour.
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Melvin Rader
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Melvin Miller Rader was an American academic and civil rights advocate. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Washington, teaching ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy. In the late 1940s, he was accused of being a Communist by the Canwell Committee, although he was later exonerated.
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Grete L. Bibring
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.
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John Marwick
1891 - 1978 (87 years)
John Marwick was a New Zealand palaeontologist and geologist. Early life and family Marwick was born near Oamaru, New Zealand, on 3 February 1891, the son of Hugh Marwick, and his wife, Jane née Cuthbert. While at Waitaki Boys' High School he helped to collect fossil shells and learned the beginnings of how to classify molluscs. He studied and taught at the University of Otago, and in 1912 gained an MA with first-class honours in with a thesis on geology. In 1915, he married Marion Ivy Mary Keys at Mosgiel. They had two sons and two daughters, all becoming science graduates.
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