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,
#15801
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba
1453 - 1515 (62 years)
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba was a Spanish general and statesman who led successful military campaigns during the Conquest of Granada and the Italian Wars. His military victories and widespread popularity earned him the nickname "El Gran Capitán" . He also negotiated the final surrender of Granada and later served as Viceroy of Naples. Fernández de Córdoba was a masterful military strategist and tactician.
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Immanuel Kant
#15803
Pieter De Somer
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Pieter De Somer was a Belgian physician and biologist. He studied medicine from 1935 up to 1942 at the Catholic University of Leuven . He did research and later became a professor at the Department of medicine, where he specialised in microbiology and immunology. In 1968, he became the first rector of the Flemish Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and he remained rector until his death in 1985.
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Alberto Cavalcanti
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Alberto de Almeida Cavalcanti was a Brazilian-born film director and producer. He was often credited under the single name "Cavalcanti". Early life Cavalcanti was born in Rio de Janeiro, the son of a prominent mathematician. He was a precociously intelligent child and, by the age of 15, was studying law at university, but was expelled following an argument with a professor. His father sent him to Geneva, Switzerland, on condition that he did not study law or politics. Cavalcanti chose to study architecture instead. At 18, he moved to Paris to work for an architect, later switching to working in interior design.
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Erik Gustaf Geijer
1783 - 1847 (64 years)
Erik Gustaf Geijer was a Swedish writer, historian, poet, romantic critic of political economy, philosopher, and composer. His writings served to promote Swedish National Romanticism. He was an influential advocate of conservatism, but switched to liberalism later in life.
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Emeric Pressburger
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian-British screenwriter, film director, and producer. He is best known for his series of film collaborations with Michael Powell, in a collaboration partnership known as the Archers, and produced a series of films, including 49th Parallel , The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp , A Matter of Life and Death , Black Narcissus , The Red Shoes , and The Tales of Hoffmann .
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Heinrich Campendonk
1889 - 1957 (68 years)
Heinrich Mathias Ernst Campendonk was a painter and graphic designer born in Germany who became a naturalized Dutch citizen. Life Campendonk was born in Krefeld, Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire. He was the son of a textile merchant, and served a textile apprenticeship until 1905. From 1905 to 1909, he received artistic education from Johan Thorn Prikker at the Handwerker- und Kunstgewerbeschule, a progressive school for arts and crafts. He became friends with , August Macke, Wilhelm Wieger, Franz Marc and Paul Klee during this time.
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Charles Verlat
1824 - 1890 (66 years)
Charles Verlat or Karel Verlat was a Belgian painter, watercolorist, engraver , art educator and director of the Antwerp Academy. He painted many subjects and was particularly known as an animalier and portrait painter. He also created Orientalist works, genre scenes, including a number of singeries, religious compositions and still lifes.
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Hector Boece
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Hector Boece , known in Latin as Hector Boecius or Boethius, was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and the first Principal of King's College in Aberdeen, a predecessor of the University of Aberdeen.
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Francis Xavier Dercum
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Francis Xavier Dercum was an American physician who first described the disease Adiposis dolorosa . He was a noted neurologist and specialised in treating nervous and mental disorders. He treated President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, and Ima Hogg for three years, beginning in 1918.
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Tony Robert-Fleury
1837 - 1912 (75 years)
Tony Robert-Fleury was a French painter, known primarily for historical scenes. He was also a prominent art teacher, with many famous artists among his students. Biography He was born just outside Paris, and studied under his father Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury and under Paul Delaroche and Léon Cogniet at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
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George Sagnani
1667 - 1732 (65 years)
George Sagnani was a minor Maltese philosopher who specialized mainly in ethics and morals. Life Little is known as yet about the private life of Sagnani. He spent his entire adult life in Valletta at the Collegium Melitense, the old University of Malta. Since he was a Jesuit priest, and the college was attached to a Jesuit convent, Sagnani lived and lectured there all his life, and even died there. He had joined the Jesuit congregation in 1686 at nineteen years of age. At the Collegium, Sagnani taught philosophy and, during the latter part of his academic career, moral theology.
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Otto Heinrich Enoch Becker
1828 - 1890 (62 years)
Otto Heinrich Enoch Becker was a German ophthalmologist born near Ratzeburg. Education and career In 1859 he earned his medical doctorate from the University of Vienna, where he studied under Carl Ferdinand von Arlt . Beginning in 1867 he was a professor of ophthalmology at the University of Heidelberg.
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Girolamo Manfredi
1430 - 1493 (63 years)
Girolamo Manfredi or Hieronimus de Manfredis was an Italian philosopher, physician and astronomer. He lived and worked in Bologna, becoming a notable citizen. Life Born in Bologna in a family of lawyers, he led his studies in his hometown, in Ferrara where he graduated in 1455, and in Parma where he completed his Ph.D. He taught Logic and other disciplines in Bologna for the rest of his life.
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André de Gouveia
1497 - 1548 (51 years)
André de Gouveia was a Portuguese humanist and pedagogue during the Renaissance. Biography André de Gouveia became one of the first Portuguese to study in the Collège Sainte-Barbe, in Paris, which was then directed by his uncle Diogo de Gouveia. After attending six years in Maîtrise des Arts he earned a degree as doctor in theology, and simultaneously, began teaching at the college.
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Eli Ives
1779 - 1861 (82 years)
Eli Ives was an American physician. He was son of Dr Levi and Lydia Ives, and was born in New Haven, Connecticut, February 7, 1779. He graduated from Yale University in 1799. The two years after his graduation he spent as Rector of the Hopkins Grammar School in New Haven, at the same time studying medicine partly with his father and partly with Dr. Aeneas Munson. At a subsequent period he attended in Philadelphia the lectures of Drs Benjamin Rush and Caspar Wistar. In 1801 he began to practice his profession in New Haven, and was continuously engaged in a widely extended field, during a per...
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César Chesneau Dumarsais
1676 - 1756 (80 years)
César Chesneau, sieur Dumarsais or Du Marsais was a French philosophe, grammarian and contributor to the Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. He was a prominent figure in what became known as the Enlightenment, and contributed to Diderot's Encyclopédie. After his death, Jacques-Philippe-Augustin Douchet and Nicolas Beauzée, who were both teachers at the École royale militaire, took over his work.
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Joseph Gerhard Liebes
1910 - 1988 (78 years)
Joseph Gerhard Liebes was an Israeli translator and scholar of Ancient Greek classical literature and Latin literature into Hebrew. He translated Plato's writings into Hebrew. Biography Liebes was born in 1910 in San Salvador to a German-Jewish businessman. He was reared and educated in Hamburg, where he studied at a Latin and ancient Greek gymnasium. He was active in the Zionist youth movement Blau-Weis .
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Joseph Hume
1777 - 1855 (78 years)
Joseph Hume FRS was a Scottish surgeon and Radical MP. Early life He was born the son of a shipmaster James Hume in Montrose, Angus, who died shortly. He attended Montrose Academy, where he knew the older James Mill; and from 1790 was apprenticed to a local surgeon-apothecary, John Bale.
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Charles Rosen
1878 - 1950 (72 years)
Charles Rosen was an American painter who lived for many years in Woodstock, New York. In the 1910s he was acclaimed for his Impressionist winter landscapes. He became dissatisfied with this style and around 1920 he changed to a radically different cubist-realist style. He became recognized as one of the leaders of the Woodstock artists colony.
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William de Burgh
1866 - 1943 (77 years)
William George de Burgh was an English philosopher who was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. Career Born on 24 October 1866 in Wandsworth, de Burgh was educated at Winchester and Merton College, Oxford. He was a founding member of the University of Reading, where he became Professor of Philosophy in 1907. His works include Towards a Religious Philosophy , From Morality to Religion , and The Legacy of the Ancient World .
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Linda Eastman
1867 - 1963 (96 years)
Linda Anne Eastman was an American librarian. She was selected by the American Library Association as one of the 100 most important librarians of the 20th century. Eastman served as the head Librarian of the Cleveland Public Library from 1918 to 1938 and president of the ALA from 1928 to 1929. At the time of her appointment in Cleveland, she was the first woman to head a library system the size of Cleveland's. She was also a founding member and later president of the Ohio Library Association, and a professor of Library Science at Case Western Reserve University.
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Alva Belmont
1853 - 1933 (80 years)
Alva Erskine Belmont , known as Alva Vanderbilt from 1875 to 1896, was an American multi-millionaire socialite and women's suffrage activist. She was noted for her energy, intelligence, strong opinions, and willingness to challenge convention.
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Alexander Sutherland
1852 - 1902 (50 years)
Alexander Sutherland was a Scottish-Australian educator, writer and philosopher. Early life and education Sutherland was born at Glasgow, both parents were Scottish, his father, George Sutherland, a carver of ship's figureheads, married Jane Smith, a woman of character and education. The family came to Australia in 1864 on account of the father's health, and Alexander at 14 years of age became a pupil-teacher with the education department at Sydney.
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Quintus Lucilius Balbus
1 BC - 100 (101 years)
Quintus Lucilius Balbus was a Stoic philosopher and a pupil of Panaetius. Balbus appeared to Cicero as comparable to the best Greek philosophers. He is introduced by Cicero in his dialogue On the Nature of the Gods as the expositor of the opinions of the Stoics on that subject, and his arguments are represented as of considerable weight. His name appears in the extant fragments of Cicero's Hortensius, but it is no longer thought that Balbus was a speaker in the dialogue.
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Karl Thiersch
1822 - 1895 (73 years)
Karl Thiersch, also spelled Carl Thiersch , was a German surgeon born in Munich. His father was educationist Friedrich Thiersch, his father-in-law was renowned chemist Justus von Liebig. One brother, Ludwig, was an influential painter, while another, Heinrich Wilhelm Josias, was a theologian.
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Jacob ben Nissim
950 - 1006 (56 years)
Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahin was a Jewish philosopher and mathematician who lived at Kairouan, Tunisia in the 10th century; he was a younger contemporary of Saadia. At Jacob's request Sherira Gaon wrote a treatise entitled Iggeret, on the redaction of the Mishnah. Jacob is credited with the authorship of an Arabic commentary on the Sefer Yeẓirah .
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Monaldo Leopardi
1776 - 1847 (71 years)
Count Monaldo Leopardi was an Italian philosopher, nobleman, politician and writer, notable as one of the main Italian intellectuals of the counter-revolution. His son Giacomo Leopardi was a poet and thinker with completely opposite views, which were probably the root cause of their discord.
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Benedictus Aretius
1522 - 1574 (52 years)
Benedictus Aretius was a Swiss Protestant theologian, Protestant reformer and natural philosopher. Life He was born at Bätterkinden, in the canton of Bern, Switzerland. He studied at Strasbourg and at Marburg, where he became professor of logic. He was called to Bern as a school-teacher, 1548, and became professor of theology, 1564.
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Robert Plot
1640 - 1696 (56 years)
Robert Plot was an English naturalist, first Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, and the first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum. Early life and education Born in Borden, Kent to parents Robert Plot and Elisabeth Patenden, and baptised on 13 December 1640, Plot was educated at the Wye Free School in Kent. He entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1658 where he graduated with a BA in 1661 and an MA in 1664. Plot subsequently taught and served as dean and vice principal at Magdalen Hall while preparing for his BCL and DCL, which he received in 1671 before moving to University College in ...
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Mehdi Bayani
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Mehdi Bayani was the founder and the first head of the National Library of Iran, specialist in Persian manuscripts and calligraphy, writer, researcher, and professor at the University of Tehran. Life and careers Mehdi Bayani was born in 1906 in Hamedan, Iran. His father, "Mirza Mohammad Khan Mostofi Farahani", was from the succession of teachers and accountant of Farahan and his maternal ancestor was "Mirza Soleimaan Bayan ol-Saltaneh Farahani", the head of the royal exchequer and the author of "the treatise on the rules of clerking and accounting". At the age of two, his father died and his mother came to Tehran with him and other children.
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Euphraeus
Euphraeus was a philosopher and student of Plato from the town of Oreus in northern Euboea. He appears to have been active in politics in addition to his speculative studies, being first an adviser to Perdiccas III of Macedon and then an opponent of Philip II and his supporters in Oreus. Information regarding his life is scant, however, and few facts about it are mentioned in more than one source. He appears in the Fifth Letter of Plato, Demosthenes' Third Philippic, and Athenaeus' Deipnosophistae .
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John Anderson
1726 - 1796 (70 years)
John Anderson was a Scottish natural philosopher and liberal educator at the forefront of the application of science to technology in the industrial revolution, and of the education and advancement of working men and women. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was the posthumous founder of Anderson's College , which ultimately evolved into the University of Strathclyde.
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Sydney Ringer
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Sydney Ringer FRS was a British clinician, physiologist and pharmacologist, best known for inventing Ringer's solution. He was born in 1835 in Norwich, England and died following a stroke in 1910 in Lastingham, Yorkshire, England. His gravestone and some other records report 1835 for his birth, some census records and other documents suggest 1836, but his baptismal record at St Mary's Baptist Chapel confirms this was 1835.
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Ludovic Lalanne
1815 - 1898 (83 years)
Ludovic Lalanne was a French historian and librarian. The engineer and politician Léon Lalanne was his brother. Biography Lalanne was a student at the lycée Louis-le-Grand and later at the École des Chartes, where he was graduated archivist paleographer in 1841. He was librarian of the Institut.
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Jacob van Campen
1596 - 1657 (61 years)
Jacob van Campen was a Dutch artist and architect of the Golden Age. Life He was born into a wealthy family at Haarlem, and spent his youth in his home town. Being of noble birth and with time on his hands, he took up painting mainly as a pastime. In 1614, he became a member of the Guild of Saint Luke , and studied painting under Frans de Grebber - a number of Van Campen's oils survive. About 1616 to 1624 he is thought to have lived in Italy. On his return to the Netherlands, Van Campen turned to architecture, applying ideas borrowed from Andrea Palladio, Vincenzo Scamozzi and classical influences from Vitruvius.
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Andronicus Contoblacas
Andronicus Contoblacas was a Greek Renaissance humanist and scholar. Contobacles originated from Constantinople and left after the Ottoman Empire conquered the city. He first travelled to Venice, Italy. From 1458 and 1465 an Andronikos from Constantinople is mentioned as a lecturer in humanist studies at the University of Bologna. A professor for the Greek Language is mentioned for the term 1466/67 at the same university. Coming from Northern Italy, he arrived in Basel where he resided for about three years between 1474 and 1477. He taught Greek to students of the University of Basel, staying at the dorm of Hieronymus Berlin.
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Dawūd al-Qayṣarī
1260 - 1350 (90 years)
Dawūd al-Qayṣarī was an early Ottoman Sufi scholar, philosopher and mystic. He was born in Kayseri, in central Anatolia and was the student of the Iranian scholar, Abd al-Razzaq Kāshānī . He was the author of over a dozen philosophical texts, many of which are still important textbooks in Shi'ite religious schools. The most important is the commentary on Ibn al-'Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam and his criticism of Ibn al-Farid's poetry. Sultan Orhan Gazi built a school for him in the town of İznik, the first case of an Ottoman state-established medrese.
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Robert Greene
1678 - 1730 (52 years)
Robert Greene , was an English philosopher. Early life Greene, the son of Robert Greene, a mercer of Tamworth, Staffordshire, by his wife Mary Pretty of Fazeley, was born about 1678. His father, who according to the son was a repository of all the Christian virtues, died while Greene was a boy, and it was through the generosity of his uncle, John Pretty, rector of Farley, Hampshire, that he was sent to Clare Hall, Cambridge. He graduated B.A. 1699, and M.A. 1703. He became a fellow and tutor of his college and took orders.
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Archibald Pitcairne
1652 - 1713 (61 years)
Archibald Pitcairne or Pitcairn was a Scottish physician. He was a physician and poet who first studied law at Edinburgh and Paris graduating with an M.A. from Edinburgh in 1671. He turned his attention to medicine, and commenced to practise in Edinburgh, around 1681. He was appointed professor of physic at Leyden, in 1692, resigning his chair. On returning to Edinburgh, however, around 1693, he was suspected of being at heart an atheist, chiefly on account of his mockery of the puritanical strictness of the Presbyterian church. He was the reput...
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Wally Wood
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Wallace Allan Wood was an American comic book writer, artist and independent publisher, widely known for his work on EC Comics's titles such as Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, and MAD Magazine from its inception in 1952 until 1964, as well as for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, and work for Warren Publishing's Creepy. He drew a few early issues of Marvel's Daredevil and established the title character's distinctive red costume. Wood created and owned the long-running characters Sally Forth and Cannon.
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Qaem Amrohvi
1919 - 1990 (71 years)
Qaem Amrohvi was an Urdu poet, philosopher and thinker. Qaem Amrohvi was a well known pakistani urdu poet, his real name was Syed Zariful Hasan. He was born in 1919 in Amroha, India. After the independence of Pakistan in 1947, he migrated to Pakistan. He belonged to the Naqvi Syed family. In 1974, he moved to Kuwait and settled there. During the days of Gulf War, he moved back to Pakistan. He died in 1990 in Karachi.
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Franz Zacharias Ermerins
1808 - 1871 (63 years)
Franz Zacharias Ermerins was a Dutch physician and medical editor whose literary work encompassed Hippocrates and ancient Greek medicine. He was born into an eminent Zeeland family in Middelburg. In 1826, he graduated from the Latin school there. After the outbreak of the Belgian Revolution while he was a medical student at Leyden University, he joined the Leidse Jagers, a volunteer company of soldiers drawn from the Leyden student body, and participated in the Ten Days' Campaign. Upon his safe return, he continued his studies. He received a doctoral degree on November 3, 1832, with his ...
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George Romney
1734 - 1802 (68 years)
George Romney was an English portrait painter. He was the most fashionable artist of his day, painting many leading society figures – including his artistic muse, Emma Hamilton, mistress of Lord Nelson.
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Robert Ernest Hume
1877 - 1948 (71 years)
Robert Ernest Hume was an Indian-born American author and professor of the History of Religions at Union Theological Seminary, Christian missionary in India, and congregational minister. His translation of The Thirteen Principle Upanishads is seen as the standard for the work.
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David Walker
1785 - 1830 (45 years)
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well . In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge , he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery.
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Robert Sibbald
1641 - 1722 (81 years)
Sir Robert Sibbald was a Scottish physician and antiquary. Life He was born in Edinburgh, the son of David Sibbald and Margaret Boyd . Educated at the Royal High School and the Universities of Edinburgh, Leiden, and Paris, he took his doctor's degree at the University of Angers in 1662, and soon afterwards settled as a physician working in Edinburgh. He resided at "Kipps Castle" near Linlithgow. In 1667 with Sir Andrew Balfour he started the botanical garden in Edinburgh, and he took a leading part in establishing the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, of which he was elected president in 1684.
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Wang Wei
699 - 759 (60 years)
Wang Wei was a Chinese musician, painter, poet, and politician of the middle Tang dynasty. He is regarded as one of the most famous men of arts and letters of his era. Many of his poems survive and 29 of them are included in the 18th-century anthology Three Hundred Tang Poems. Many of his best poems were inspired by the local landscape.
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Ioan Cantacuzino
1863 - 1934 (71 years)
Ioan I. Cantacuzino was a renowned Romanian physician and bacteriologist, a professor at the School of Medicine and Pharmacy of the University of Bucharest, and a titular member of the Romanian Academy. He established the fields of microbiology and experimental medicine in Romania, and founded the Ioan Cantacuzino Institute.
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Koorathalvar
1010 - Present (1016 years)
Koorathalvar was the chief disciple of the prominent Vaishnavite saint Ramanuja. According to popular tradition, he was a humble man who assisted Ramanuja in all of his endeavours. Early life Koorathalvar was born as Kuresan in a small hamlet 'Kooram' near Kanchi, in the year of 1010 A.D in an affluent family. He belonged to the clan of Haritha, who were popular landlords. Koorathalvar was married at a young age to Andal, a devout and pious lady. Both of them were recorded to have led a happy and peaceful life. They were deeply devoted to the deity Varadaraja Perumal. The couple were renowned in the holy town of Kanchipuram for their unstinting philanthropy and kindness.
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