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.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#15751
Winifred Cullis
1875 - 1956 (81 years)
Winifred Cullis was a physiologist and academic, and the first woman to hold a professorial chair at a medical school. Early life and education Born in Gloucester, Winifred was the youngest daughter of the six children of Frederick John and Louisa Cullis. Her brother Cuthbert Edmund Cullis became a mathematician. The family moved to Birmingham in 1880. She was initially educated at a middle school, the Summer Hill School, and at 16 transferred to the associated King Edward VI High School for Girls, Birmingham and took extra science classes at Mason College.
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Mahmoud K. Muftić
1925 - 1971 (46 years)
Mahmoud Kamal Muftić Career Muftić, a keenly religious Bosnian Muslim, grew up in Sarajevo in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina. While still a teenager Muftić became involved in the Croatian counter-insurgency campaign against communist-led Yugoslav partisans. By 1945 he and other Bosnian Muslims found themselves in refugee camps in Italy, unable to return to now-communist Yugoslavia, but courted by several Muslim nations of the Middle East who saw them as fellow Muslims in need and also sought their military experience. In 1947 he was among the 135 Bosnian and Albanian Muslims who were granted asylum by Egypt at the behest of Prince Amr Ibrahim, a member of the Egyptian royal family.
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Isabella Forshall
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Isabella Forshall FRCSE was an English paediatric surgeon who played a leading role in the development of the speciality of paediatric surgery in the United Kingdom. She took a particular interest in neonatal surgery and was instrumental in the establishment of the Liverpool Neonatal Surgical Unit, the first neonatal intensive care unit in the UK and indeed in the world.
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Gilbert L. Voss
1918 - 1989 (71 years)
Gilbert L. Voss was an American conservationist and oceanographer. He was one of the main persons behind the establishment of John Pennekamp Coral Reef State Park in Florida and he spoke out successfully against several proposed real estate developments that might have threatened the ecology of the Florida Keys.
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Morris Lazerowitz
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Morris Lazerowitz was Polish-born American philosopher and author. Early life and education Born Morris Laizerowitz in Lodz, Poland, his father, Max and eldest sister emigrated to the United States in 1912 and through their hard work, saved enough money to bring the rest of the family to join them three years later. The family settled in Omaha, Nebraska. Morris studied the violin and becoming proficient enough to be substituting in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra by the age of nineteen. However he was forced by a back injury to give this up.
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Keyes Metcalf
1889 - 1983 (94 years)
Keyes DeWitt Metcalf was an American librarian. He has been identified as one of the 100 most important leaders in librarianship by the journal American Libraries. In a career spanning over 75 years, he worked in various roles at the New York Public Library and served as the director of the Harvard University library system. He was known for his expertise in planning and designing research libraries.
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Wilmon Henry Sheldon
1875 - 1980 (105 years)
Wilmon Henry Sheldon was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Life and career Sheldon was educated at Harvard University and taught at Yale. Major works
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Surendranath Dasgupta
1887 - 1952 (65 years)
Surendranath Dasgupta was an Indian scholar of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. Family and education Surendranath Dasgupta was born to a Vaidya family in Kushtia, Bengal , on Sunday, 18 October 1885, corresponding to Dashami Shukla of the month of Āśvin and coinciding with the festivals of Dussehra and Durga Visarjan. His ancestral home was in the village Goila in Barisal District. He studied at Ripon College in Calcutta and graduated with honours in Sanskrit. Later, in 1908, he received his master's degree from Sanskrit College, Calcutta. He got a second master's degree in Western philosophy...
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Clement Mundle
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Clement Williams Kennedy Mundle was a Scottish philosopher and parapsychologist. He was head of the Philosophy Department, University of St. Andrews, University College Dundee later "Queens College" and eventually becoming the University of Dundee, Scotland . From 1955 to 1981 he was Professor of philosophy at the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Mundle was president of the Society for Psychical Research, London .
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Hugo Dingler
1881 - 1954 (73 years)
Hugo Albert Emil Hermann Dingler was a German scientist and philosopher. Life Hugo Dingler studied mathematics, philosophy, and physics with Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski, David Hilbert, Edmund Husserl, Woldemar Voigt, and Wilhem Roentgen at the universities of Göttingen and Munich. He graduated from the University of Munich with a thesis under Aurel Voss. Dingler earned his Ph.D. in mathematics, physics and astronomy in 1906. His doctoral advisor was Ferdinand von Lindemann. In 1910 Dingler's first attempt to earn a Habilitation failed. His second try in 1912 was successful. Dingler then taught as a Privatdozent and hold lectures on mathematics, philosophy and the history of science.
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Felix Lewandowsky
1879 - 1921 (42 years)
Felix Lewandowsky was a German dermatologist. Biography In 1902, he earned his doctorate at the University of Strassburg. From 1903 to 1907, he worked at the dermatological clinic in Bern, where he served as an assistant to Josef Jadassohn . Afterwards, he returned to his hometown of Hamburg, where he worked in dermatologist Eduard Arning’s department at St. Georg's Hospital. In 1917, he was appointed director of the dermatological clinic at Basel. While at Basel, he was the author of works on leprosy.
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Marshall Stearns
1908 - 1966 (58 years)
Marshall Winslow Stearns was an American jazz critic and musicologist. He was the founder of the Institute of Jazz Studies. Biography Stearns was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Edith Baker Winslow and Harry Ney Stearns . His father was a Harvard University graduate and an attorney.
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Gerald Mast
1940 - 1988 (48 years)
Gerald Mast was an author, film historian, and member of the University of Chicago faculty. He was a contributor to the modern discipline of film studies and film history. Life and career Mast was born in Los Angeles in 1940; his family included his mother, Bessie, and Linda, his sister. He attended the University of Chicago, where he received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in English. He taught at New York University, Oberlin College, and the Richmond College of the City University of New York, before joining the faculty of his alma mater in 1978. He chaired the Department of...
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Marc Amsler
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
Marc Amsler was a professor of ophthalmology in the Eye Clinic at the University of Zurich. He took the position as professor of ophthalmology in Zurich in 1944. His predecessor was Prof. Alfred Vogt. Prior to assuming the position at Zurich, Dr. Amsler was chief ophthalmologist in Lausanne, since 1935. His predecessor there, under whom he worked beforehand, was Jules Gonin. During his time in Lausanne, Amsler was instrumental in creating the Jules Gonin Medal which is awarded every four years and is considered the highest honor in ophthalmology. Amsler was professor and chief of the Zurich Eye Clinic until 1961.
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Robert H. Brower
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
Robert H. Brower was a professor of Far East Language and Literature, Japanese Language and Literature, chair of Far East Language and Literature at the University of Michigan from 1966 to 1988. Life as a student Professor Brower was born on March 23, 1923, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He received his bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 1944. He learned Japanese while serving with the armed forces in World War II, and received his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Michigan in 1947 and 1952, respectively.
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Herman Dooyeweerd
1894 - 1977 (83 years)
Herman Dooyeweerd was a professor of law and jurisprudence at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam from 1926 to 1965. He was also a philosopher and principal founder of Reformational philosophy with Dirk Vollenhoven, a significant development within the Neocalvinist school of thought. Dooyeweerd made several contributions to philosophy and other academic disciplines concerning the nature of diversity and coherence in everyday experience, the transcendental conditions for theoretical thought, the relationship between religion, philosophy, and scientific theory, and an understanding of meaning, b...
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Markus Reiner
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Markus Reiner was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology. Biography Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna . After the First World War, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa.
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Eugène Dupréel
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Eugène Dupréel was a Belgian philosopher. He has been professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1907 to 1950, teaching logic, metaphysics, greek philosophy, moral philosophy and sociological theory. He developed an ethical theory and a theory of knowledge deeply influenced by sociology, and worked closely with the Institut de Sociologie Solvay. Leader of the "École de Bruxelles", he had a major influence on the argumentation theorist Chaïm Perelman and thus has been instrumental in the renewal of rhetoric.
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Wiktor Dega
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Wiktor Dega was a Polish surgeon and orthopedist who was well known for his work on polio. Dega served as an expert for the World Health Organization and was one of the founders of the Polish Orthopedic Society. He created new apparatus and devices to help accident victims and survivors of polio, as well as new therapies and operations for congenital dislocations of the hip.
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Wilhelm Pfannenstiel
1890 - 1982 (92 years)
Wilhelm Hermann Pfannenstiel was a German physician, member of the Nazi Party from 1933, , and SS officer from 1934, . In August 1942 he witnessed, together with Kurt Gerstein, the gassing of Jews in Bełżec extermination camp. He may also share responsibility with other SS officials in criminal medical experimentations on unwilling and uninformed human beings, mainly Jews prisoners in Dachau concentration camp.
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Olav Torgersen
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Olav Torgersen was a Norwegian pathologist. He was born in Kristiansand as a son of wholesaler Carl Torgersen and Kristine Torgersen . He finished his secondary education in 1926 and graduated from the Royal Frederick University with the cand.med. degree in 1934. In 1939 he married colonel's daughter Ada Jørgensen .
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Farquhar Buzzard
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Sir Edward Farquhar Buzzard, 1st Baronet, was a prominent British physician and Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford . Career Farquhar Buzzard was born on 20 December 1871, one of six children of the neurologist Thomas Buzzard. and his wife Isabel Wass. Educated at Charterhouse School and Christ Church, Oxford, during his career he was Consultant Physician at St. Thomas' Hospital, London, Goulstonian Lecturer in 1907 at the Royal College of Physicians, London, a physician at the Belgrave Hospital for Children, the National Hospital for Paralysed and Epileptic, the Royal ...
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Naomi Scheman
1900 - Present (126 years)
Naomi Scheman is a Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Women's and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is also a guest professor at the Umeå Center for Gender Studies in Sweden. Scheman was one of the first scholars to bring Wittgenstein's thoughts in to feminist philosophy.
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Harry Morgan Ayres
1881 - 1948 (67 years)
Harry Morgan Ayres was a professor of English Literature at Columbia University an author, and editor. He edited The Reader's Dictionary of Authors including entries for Charles William Eliot, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, and George Moore and also contributed to the Library of the World's Best Literature.
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Eugenio Imaz
1900 - 1951 (51 years)
Eugenio Ímaz Echeverría was a Spanish philosopher and translator. He is the grandfather of Carlos Imaz Gispert, the Mexican politician. Biography He graduated in law and philosophy from the Universidad Central de Madrid . Through a grant from the Board for the Expansion of Studies Imaz travelled to Germany, where he worked at different universities and completed his studies for two years. From this period, he collaborated in publications such as Revista de Occidente y Cruz y Raya.
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Ruth Shaw Wylie
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Ruth Shaw Wylie was a U.S.-born composer and music educator. She described herself as “a fairly typical Midwestern composer,” pursuing musical and aesthetic excellence but not attracting much national attention: “All good and worthy creative acts do not take place in New York City,” she wrote in 1962, “although most good and worthy rewards for creative acts do emanate from there; and if we can’t all be on hand to reap these enticing rewards we can take solace in the fact that we are performing good deeds elsewhere.” She was among the many twentieth-century American composers whose work contri...
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Donald Wing
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Donald Goddard Wing was an Associate Librarian at Yale University from 1939 to 1970, best known for his publication of the bibliographic work A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of the English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641-1700 , and companion work A Gallery of Ghosts; Books Published Between 1641-1700 Not Found in the Short-Title Catalogue . Wing's Short title catalogue was a continuation of the earlier A Short-Title Catalogue of Books….1475-1640 compiled by Pollard and Redgrave. His Short-Title Catalogue became so ...
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Newton Phelps Stallknecht
1906 - 1981 (75 years)
Newton Phelps Stallknecht was an American philosopher and a professor of comparative literature and philosophy at Indiana University. In addition, he was the Director of the School of Letters at Indiana University from 1953-1972. He also served as a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Stallknecht was educated at Princeton University, achieving his A.B. in 1927, A.M. in 1928, and Ph.D. in 1930. During World War II, he was attached to the United States Army Security Agency in Washington. His publications cover both philosophy and comparative literature, with a philosophical fo...
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Karel Frederik Wenckebach
1864 - 1940 (76 years)
Professor, Dr Karel Frederik Wenckebach was a Dutch anatomist who was a native of the Hague. He studied medicine in Utrecht, and in 1901 become a professor of medicine at the University of Groningen. Later he was a professor at the Universities of Strasbourg and Vienna .
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Hans Zinsser
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Hans Zinsser was an American physician, bacteriologist, and prolific author. The author of over 200 books and medical articles, he was also a published poet. Some of his verses were published in The Atlantic Monthly. His 1940 publication, As I Remember Him: the Biography of R.S., won one of the early National Book Awards, the sixth and last annual award for Nonfiction voted by members of the American Booksellers Association.
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Thomas Okey
1852 - 1935 (83 years)
Thomas Okey was an expert on basket weaving, a translator of Italian, and a writer on art and the topography of architecture and art works in Italy and France. Okey's first experience of the Italian language came when he attended the Extension Lectures at Toynbee Hall in the 1880s.
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Percy Moreau Ashburn
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Percy Moreau Ashburn was a colonel and medical officer in the United States Army. With then Lieutenant Charles Franklin Craig, Ashburn made the link that mosquitoes were involved in the transmission of Dengue fever. As a major, he served as the sixth commanding officer of the Walter Reed General Hospital, and as a colonel, he served as the first commandant of the Medical Field Service School at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania.
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Margaret Elizabeth Egan
1905 - 1959 (54 years)
Margaret Elizabeth Egan was an American librarian and communication scholar who is best known for “Foundations of a Theory in Bibliography,” published in Library Quarterly in 1952 and co-authored with Jesse Hauk Shera. This article marked the first appearance of the term "social epistemology" in connection with library science.
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Jørgen Løvset
1896 - 1981 (85 years)
Jørgen Løvset was a Norwegian professor of medicine, gynecology and obstetrics. He was the son of a farmer Arnt Løvset and Helle Hove , married Selma Margaret Nilsen in 1924, divorced 1950, and married again in 1951 with the nurse Aslaug Tordis Gil .
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H. L. D. Kirkham
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
Harold Laurens Dundas Kirkham was an Anglo-American plastic surgeon. He was the first Professor of Plastic Surgery at Baylor University, Texas and also served with the US Navy Medical Corps, becoming head of plastic surgery at the United States Naval Medical Center San Diego during the Second World War.
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Jakob Johann von Uexküll
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
Jakob Johann Freiherr von Uexküll was a Baltic German biologist who worked in the fields of muscular physiology and animal behaviour studies and was an influence on the cybernetics of life. However, his most notable contribution is the notion of Umwelt, used by semiotician Thomas Sebeok and philosopher Martin Heidegger. His works established biosemiotics as a field of research.
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Dewitt H. Parker
1885 - 1949 (64 years)
Dewitt H. Parker was a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan. Appointed department chair in 1929, Parker published works on metaphysics, aesthetics, and ethics. Publications Books The Self and Nature The Principles of Aesthetics The Analysis of Art Human Values Experience and Substance The Philosophy of Value
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Robert Blanché
1898 - 1975 (77 years)
Robert Blanché was an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse. He wrote many books addressing the philosophy of mathematics. About Structures intellectuelles Robert Blanché died in 1975. Nine years before, in 1966, he published with Vrin: Structures intellectuelles. Therein, he deals with the logical hexagon. Whereas the logical square or square of Apuleius represents four values: A,E,I,O , the logical hexagon represents six, that is to say, not only A,E,I,O but also two new values: Y and U. It is advisable to read the article: logical hexagon as well what concerns In...
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Alfred Lublin
1895 - 1956 (61 years)
Alfred Lublin was a German physician, a professor at the University of Greifswald specialised in diabetes. In 1939 Lublin emigrated to Bolivia where he died in 1956, Biography Lublin was born in Bischofsburg, East Prussia, German Empire , his father was a judge. Lublin attended the gymnasium in Königsberg where he passed his Abitur in 1913 and began to study medicine at the University of Geneva. With the outbreak of World War I he volunteered the German Army . He was first employed as a medical sergeant, then as a junior doctor, on the eastern front, later in the Königsberg hospital, on the Balkans and finally on the Western Front.
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Leiv Amundsen
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Leiv Amundsen was a Norwegian librarian and philologist. He was born in Tjøme as a son of sailmaker Carl Amundsen and Henrikke Elise Andersen . He attended upper secondary school in Drammen, and worked at the University Library of Oslo at the same time as studying classical philology at the Royal Frederick University. He never actually graduated from the university, but was instead promoted manager of the manuscript collection at the University Library in 1923. He specialized in papyrology, first as the assistant of Samson Eitrem. He was a research fellow with Rockefeller grants from 1926 to 1929, and studied abroad.
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Jan van der Hoeve
1878 - 1952 (74 years)
Jan van der Hoeve was a Dutch ophthalmologist. He is recognised for his concept of the phakomatoses, often called neurocutaneous syndromes. Van der Hoeve graduated from the University of Leiden and received his doctorate at the University of Bern. He became a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Groningen and later at the University of Leiden. Van der Hoeve became a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1923. He was elected president of the Physical Section of the institute in 1932.
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Anny Rosenberg Katan
1898 - 1992 (94 years)
Anny Rosenberg Katan was a child psychologist born in Vienna, Austria, who pioneered the use of psychoanalysis to treat emotionally disturbed youth. She had close personal ties to the Sigmund Freud family and was one of the first child analysts in the city of Vienna.
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Horace L. Friess
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Horace L. Friess was an American ethicist. He was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Human Relations at Columbia University, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Early life Friess was born on March 4, 1900, in New York City. He attended Columbia University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1918 and a PhD in 1926.
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Richard Müller-Freienfels
1882 - 1949 (67 years)
Richard Müller-Freienfels was a German philosopher, psychologist and social critic. He was "one of the most important mediators of empirical psychology" to poetics. Life Müller-Freienfels was born in Bad Ems on 7 August 1882. He was a lecturer and writer at the Berlin Trade School . He died on 12 December 1949 in Weilburg.
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Melvil Dewey
1851 - 1931 (80 years)
Melville Louis Kossuth "Melvil" Dewey was an influential American librarian and educator, inventor of the Dewey Decimal system of library classification, a founder of the Lake Placid Club, and a chief librarian at Columbia University. He was also a founding member of the American Library Association. Although Dewey's contributions to the modern library are widely recognized, his legacy is marred by allegations of sexual harassment, racism, and antisemitism.
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Edith Stein
1891 - 1942 (51 years)
Edith Stein, OCD was a German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a Discalced Carmelite nun. She is canonized as a martyr and saint of the Catholic Church; she is also one of six patron saints of Europe.
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Frances Clarke Sayers
1897 - 1989 (92 years)
Frances Clarke Sayers was an American children's librarian, author of children's books, and lecturer on children's literature. In 1999, American Libraries named her one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Alfred Leland Crabb
1884 - 1979 (95 years)
Alfred Leland Crabb was an American academic and author of historical novels. He was Professor of Education at Peabody College from 1927 to 1949. He wrote two trilogies on Southern culture. Early life Alfred Leland Crabb was born on January 22, 1884, in Plum Springs, Kentucky. His father, James Wade Crabb, was a farmer. His mother was Annie Cordelia Crabb.
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Stig Wikander
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Oscar Stig Wikander was a Swedish Indologist, Iranologist and religious scientist. Biography Stig Wikander was born in Norrtälje, Sweden on 27 August 1908, the son of a pharmacist. After graduating from high school in Uppsala at seventeen, Wikander enrolled at Uppsala University, where he received an MA in Latin and Greek summa cum laude at the age of eighteen. His mentor at Uppsala was Henrik Samuel Nyberg. Wikander subsequently went to Paris, Berlin and Copenhagen. In Paris he became a member of the prestigious Société Asiatique. At the University of Copenhagen he studied under Arthur Chri...
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Richard Witts
1900 - Present (126 years)
Richard "Dick" Witts is an English musicologist, music historian, and ex leader of 1980s band the Passage. He attended Clee Grammar School for Boys. He studied at the Royal Manchester College of Music and briefly at Manchester University. During this time he was a member of the Hallé Orchestra as a percussionist. During the mid-1970s he wrote for the contemporary classical music magazine Contact.
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