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,
#15851
Melchiorre Zoppio
1544 - 1634 (90 years)
Melchiorre or Melchior Zoppio was an Italian doctor and scholar. Life Born in Bologna, a son of Girolamo Zoppio, Melchiorre Zoppio followed his father's dual career in medicine and education. He taught philosophy in Macerata then Bologna, where in 1588 he was one of the founders of the Accademia dei Gelati. He was one of that society's keenest members, adopting the name Caliginoso within it and leaving it a room for its meetings in his will. Over the fifty years he served as a professor in Bologna Melchiorre acquired such a reputation that his colleagues honoured him with a public inscription during his lifetime.
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Thomas Campion
1567 - 1620 (53 years)
Thomas Campion was an English composer, poet, and physician. He was born in London, educated at Cambridge, studied law in Gray's inn. He wrote over a hundred lute songs, masques for dancing, and an authoritative technical treatise on music.
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Wilibald Nagel
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Wilibald Nagel Life and career Born in Mülheim an der Ruhr Nagel, son of the Lieder and oratorio singer Siegfried Nagel , studied German studies and musicology with Philipp Spitta and Heinrich Bellermann at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1888 he habilitated and accepted a position at the University of Zurich for musicology and taught there as a lecturer at the faculty of philosophy until 1894.
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Hermann Werner Siemens
1891 - 1969 (78 years)
Hermann Werner Siemens was a German dermatologist who first described multiple skin diseases and was one of the inventors of the twin study. Siemens' work in twin studies is influential in modern genetics and is used to address the environmental and genetic impacts upon traits. Siemens was involved in racial hygiene and affiliated with the Nazi Party.
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Albert Fraenkel
1864 - 1938 (74 years)
Julius Albert Fraenkel was a German physician who helped establish Streptococcus pneumoniae as a cause of bacterial pneumonia and championed intravenous ouabain for use in heart failure. The Albert-Fraenkel-Plakette is given to German-speaking cardiologists who have excelled in the field. Born in 1864 in Mußbach an der Weinstraße, Albert was the son of a Jewish merchant. He studied medicine in Munich and Strasbourg in the 1880s. He initially practiced internal medicine and obstetrics, but turned to studying diseases of the lungs after suffering from tuberculosis. He established a tuberculosis sanatorium at Badenweiler in the Black Forest.
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Michael Elliott
1931 - 1984 (53 years)
Michael Elliott, OBE was an English theatre and television director. He was a founding director of the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester. Early life Elliott was born in London, England, son of Rev. Canon Wallace Harold Elliott , a Royal chaplain, writer, and broadcaster, and his wife Edith Plaistow Kilburn. He was educated at Radley College and Keble College, Oxford. While still at Oxford he met Caspar Wrede, the theatre director, with whom he was to work closely for the next three decades.
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Perham Wilhelm Nahl
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Perham Wilhelm Nahl was an American printmaker, painter, illustrator and an arts educator active in Northern California. Early life Perham Wilhelm Nahl was born to Annie and Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl in San Francisco, California. By the mid-1870s the extended Nahl family had moved to the nearby island town of Alameda, where Perham first studied drawing and painting with both his father and his uncle, the fine art painter Charles Christian Nahl. The young Nahl became a director and president of the Alameda Olympic Club, was a competitive diver at the Pacific Swimming Club, and served on the ...
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Tomás Carreras Artau
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Tomàs Carreras i Artau was a Catalan philosopher, ethnologist and politician. Life and career Tomàs Carreras was ethics professor in the University of Barcelona from 1912 until 1949. He set up the Archive of Ethnography and Folklore of Catalonia. Moreover, he was member of the Academy of Good Letters of Barcelona. Together with Jaume Serra i Húnter and Ramon Turró i Darder, he founded in 1923 the Catalan Society of Filosophy, which depended on the Institute of Catalan Studies.
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Edwina Whitney
1868 - 1970 (102 years)
Edwina Maud Whitney was an American librarian and educator who served as one of the earliest librarians at the Connecticut Agricultural College from 1900 to 1934. She also served as a German instructor from 1901 to 1926 and an assistant professor of German from 1926 to 1934.
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James Carroll
1854 - 1907 (53 years)
Major James Carroll was a US Army physician. Carroll was born in England. He moved to Canada in 1874, and enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1874. He graduated with an M.D. from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1891. After graduating Carroll studied bacteriology under Dr. William H. Welch at Johns Hopkins Hospital and assisted Walter Reed in pathology laboratories. Carroll and Reed later worked together at the Army Medical Museum in Washington and the Columbia University Medical School.
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Jakub of Gostynin
1454 - 1506 (52 years)
Jakub of Gostynin was a Polish philosopher and theologian of the late 15th century, and Rector of the University of Kraków in 1503–1504. Life Jakub of Gostynin was one of the chief adherents of the Cologne-style Thomism, a philosophical school that upheld the legacy of work and thought of Thomas Aquinas. Jakub's main work, entitled "Theoremata seu propositiones Auctoris Causarum", was a commentary to Liber de Causis attributed to the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He also wrote a commentary to Metaphysics by Aristotle entitled: "Expositiosuper I–XII libros „Metaphysicae” Aristotelis" as well as to his Physics.
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Cajetan von Textor
1782 - 1860 (78 years)
Cajetan von Textor was a German surgeon born in the Ebersberg district of Upper Bavaria. From 1804 to 1808 he studied at the University of Landshut, where he was a pupil of Philipp Franz von Walther . He spent the next few years on an extended educational journey throughout Europe, where he studied with Alexis Boyer in Paris, Antonio Scarpa in Pavia and Georg Joseph Beer in Vienna. Afterwards he was second physician at the general hospital in Munich.
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Olav Valen-Sendstad
1904 - 1963 (59 years)
Olav Valen-Sendstad was a Norwegian theologian, priest, and philosopher. Biography Valen-Sendstad was born in Notodden, Norway, to agricultural school teacher Aksel Sendstad and Magnhild Valen, and grew up in Kristiania , where he took his examen artium in 1923 and received his cand. theol. degree from the Free Faculty of Theology in 1928. From 1931 to 1941 he was the vicar of Jelsa, and from 1941 to 1955 resident chaplain of St. Johannes Church in Stavanger. I 1948 he received his doctorate; his thesis was Reality and understanding of reality, and from 1948 to 1949 he substituted for professor Arne Næss in teaching philosophy at the University of Oslo.
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Matteo Marangoni
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Matteo Marangoni was an Italian art historian, art critic and composer. Marangoni's art criticism aimed at identifying pure figurative values, in which an artwork's poetic values are identified. His books are positively influenced by the school of Benedetto Croce and Heinrich Wölfflin, clarifying their concepts on the basis of observation and following logic as a science of pure concept.
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Umberto Coromaldi
1870 - 1948 (78 years)
Umberto Coromaldi was an Italian painter and educator, active mainly in his native city of Rome. Biography Umberto Coromaldi was born on September 21, 1870, in Rome, to parents Luisa and Vincenzo Celli. His mother was widowed shortly after his birth, then remarried painter Filippo Indoni, who encouraged young Coromaldi to paint.
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Mollie Huston Lee
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Mollie Huston Lee was the first African American librarian in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the founder of Raleigh's Richard B. Harrison Public Library, the first library in Raleigh to serve African Americans. Her greatest achievement was developing, maintaining, and increasing public library service to the African American people of Raleigh and Wake County, North Carolina, while striving to achieve equal library service for the entire community.
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Lucius Duncan Bulkley
1845 - 1928 (83 years)
Lucius Duncan Bulkley was an American dermatologist and alternative cancer treatment advocate. Biography Bulkley was born in Manhattan. His father was Henry Daggett Bulkley. In 1869, he obtained his M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York. He was house physician at New York Hospital and travelled to Europe to study dermatology in London, Paris and Vienna.
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John Harvey Kellogg
1852 - 1943 (91 years)
John Harvey Kellogg was an American businessman, inventor, physician, and advocate of the Progressive Movement. He was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, founded by members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It combined aspects of a European spa, a hydrotherapy institution, a hospital and high-class hotel. Kellogg treated the rich and famous, as well as the poor who could not afford other hospitals. According to Encyclopædia Britannica, his "development of dry breakfast cereals was largely responsible for the creation of the flaked-cereal industry."
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David Frederick Bowers
1906 - 1945 (39 years)
David Frederick Bowers was a philosophy professor, noteworthy as a Guggenheim Fellow. Bowers graduated from Capital University with A.B. in 1929 and from Princeton University with A.M. in 1930 and Ph.D. in 1932. In Princeton University's philosophy department, he was an instructor from 1934 to 1938 and an assistant professor beginning in 1938. He was also an instructor at Harvard University and Radcliffe College in 1938.
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Arthur H. Bulbulian
1900 - 1996 (96 years)
Arthur H. Bulbulian was a pioneer of Armenian descent in the field of facial prosthetics. Life His work as a part of the Mayo Clinic Aero Medical Unit led to his being credited with the creation of the A-14 oxygen mask for the United States Air Force in 1941. The A-14 fighter pilot's mask was frost proof, and included a microphone for radio communication, and allowed the pilot to talk and eat while wearing it.
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Ignacio de Arbieto
1585 - 1670 (85 years)
Ignacio de Arbieto was a Jesuit philosopher and historian of Peru. Biography Arbieto was born in Madrid. He joined the Jesuit Order in 1603 and was ordained as a priest in Lima, Peru, in 1612. He was appointed chair of philosophy in Quito, Ecuador, then he went to Arequipa and finally back to Lima.
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Fausto Vagnetti
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Fausto Vagnetti is a representative of Italian painting from the era of transition from the 19th to the 20th century. He emigrated from Tuscany to Rome and started infusing Tuscan brilliance and chromatism into the warm Roman style of painting.
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Marcel Poëte
1866 - 1950 (84 years)
Marcel César Poëte was a French librarian, historian and urban planning theoretician. He was a co-founder of the School of Advanced Urban Studies, where he taught, and was highly influential in developing new theories of urban planning in Paris in the first half of the 20th century.
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Peter Crockaert
1465 - 1514 (49 years)
Peter Crockaert , known as Peter of Brussels, was a Flemish scholastic philosopher. Initially he was a pupil of John Mair and a follower of William of Ockham. Later he joined the Dominican Order, and became a supporter of orthodox Thomism. He taught at the University of Paris, and is known for a number of commentaries, on Aristotle and Peter of Spain as well as on Aquinas.
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Joe May
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Joe May was an Austrian film director and film producer and one of the pioneers of German cinema. Biography After studying in Berlin and a variety of odd jobs, he began his career as a stage director of operettas in Hamburg. In 1902 he had married the actress Mia May and took his stage name from hers.
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Bruno Piglhein
1848 - 1894 (46 years)
Elimar Ulrich Bruno Piglhein was a German sculptor and painter. He was a founder and first President of the Munich Secession. Life His father was a decorator. Upon graduating from the Gymnasium, he studied with the sculptor Julius Lippelt. After Lippelt's death from tuberculosis, Piglhein went to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, but had to leave after two years for an alleged lack of talent. The sculptor Johannes Schilling saw that he had some potential, however, and took him into his studio. After a short stay in Italy, Piglhein decided to take up painting instead and, on Schilling's recommendation, began studies with Ferdinand Pauwels at the Weimar Saxon-Grand Ducal Art School.
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Friedrich Kaulbach
1822 - 1903 (81 years)
Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Kaulbach was a German painter from Bad Arolsen, Principality of Waldeck and Pyrmont. His father was Christian Kaulbach , a cabinet maker in Arolsen. He was also the cousin and at one time the student of the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach, son of Philipp Karl Friedrich v. Kaulbach , goldsmith and amateur painter.
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P. L. Travers
1899 - 1996 (97 years)
Pamela Lyndon Travers was an Australian-British writer who spent most of her career in England. She is best known for the Mary Poppins series of books, which feature the eponymous magical nanny. Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up in the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school in Sydney. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted the pen name P. L. Travers in 1933 while writing the ...
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James Douglas
1675 - 1742 (67 years)
James Douglas was a Scottish physician and anatomist, and Physician Extraordinary to Queen Caroline. Life and works One of the seven sons of William Douglas and his wife, Joan, daughter of James Mason of Park, Blantyre, he was born in West Calder, West Lothian, in 1675. His brother was the lithotomist John Douglas .
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Hunter McGuire
1835 - 1900 (65 years)
Hunter Holmes McGuire was an American soldier, physician, teacher, and orator. McGuire was a surgeon in the Confederate Army attached to Stonewall Jackson's command, and he continued serving with the Army of Northern Virginia after Jackson's death. He started several schools and hospitals which later became part of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. McGuire was later president of the American Medical Association. His statue sits prominently on the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol. Nearby, the McGuire Veterans Administration Medical Center was named in his honor unti...
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Adrian Beverland
1650 - 1716 (66 years)
Hadriaan Beverland was a Dutch humanist scholar who was banished from Holland in 1679 and settled in England in 1680. Early life Beverland was born between 20 September and 14 December 1650 in Middelburg, son to Johannes Beverland and Catarina van Deijnse . He had two older brothers: Johannes and Christoffel . His father worked in the military village of Lillo and died in March 1654. In September 1654, Beverland’s mother Catarina married Bernard de Gomme, an important military engineer for the English army. The couple moved to England around 1660. Beverland and his brothers remained in Middelburg to finish their education and lived in different households.
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Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet
1815 - 1880 (65 years)
Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet was a French philosopher, whose ideas were a precursor to modern sociology. Works L'Unité Spirituelle .De la Douleur .La Restauration Française .L'Affaiblissement de la Raison .Politique Réelle .L'Infaillibilité .La Raison. Philosophie Fondamentale .La Légitimité .La Loi Électorale et les Deux Chambres .Le XVIIIe Siècle .Le Socialisme et la Société .L'Amour et la Chute .
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Vijayindra Tirtha
1514 - 1592 (78 years)
Vijayīndra Tīrtha was a Dvaita philosopher and dialectician. A prolific writer and an unrelenting polemicist, he is said to have authored 104 treatises expounding the principles of Dvaita and defending it against attacks from the contemporary orthodox schools of Vedanta. He held the pontifical seat at Kumbakonam under the rule of Thanjavur Nayaks where he participated in polemical discussions with the Advaita philosopher Appayya Dikshita Inscriptions from that era record grants of villages received by Vijayindra for his triumph over theological debates . Legend ascribes to him mastery over ...
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Albert Zimmermann
1808 - 1888 (80 years)
August Albert Zimmermann was a German painter. He was the brother of painters Max, Richard, and Robert Zimmermann, and served as Max's teacher. He was primarily self-taught as a painter, but did study at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts Munich.
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Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov
1782 - 1856 (74 years)
Prince Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov was a Russian nobleman and field-marshal, renowned for his success in the Napoleonic Wars and most famous for his participation in the Caucasian War from 1844 to 1853.
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Constantin Regamey
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Constantin Regamey was a philologist, orientalist, musician, composer, and critic. He was a significant presence among intellectual and artistic circles in Warsaw during the 1930s and later a professor at the Universities of Lausanne and Fribourg.
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Achille Gagliardi
1537 - 1607 (70 years)
Achille Gagliardi was a Jesuit ascetic writer and spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition. Life Gagliardi was born at Padua, Italy. After a brilliant career at the University of Padua he entered the Society of Jesus in 1559 with two brothers younger than himself. He taught philosophy at the Roman College, theology at Padua and Milan, and successfully directed several houses of his order in Northern Italy. He displayed indefatigable zeal in preaching, giving retreats and directing congregations, and was held in great esteem as a theologian and spiritual guide by the Archbishop of Milan, ...
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Archibald Bruce
1777 - 1818 (41 years)
Archibald Bruce was an American physician and mineralogist. Biography Bruce was born in New York City in February 1777 and graduated from Columbia College in 1795 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. His father, William Bruce, head of the medical department of the British army at New York, on being ordered to the West Indies, specially directed that his son should not be brought up to the medical profession. From the medical lectures of Nicholas Romayne, the teachings of Dr. Hosack, and attendance on the courses of medical instruction of Columbia, he attained a knowledge of the science. He went to Europe in 1798, received an M.D.
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Marcantonio Genua
1491 - 1563 (72 years)
Marcantonio Genua was a Renaissance Aristotelian philosopher who taught at the University of Padua. He was a teacher and uncle of the great Renaissance philosopher Giacomo Zabarella.
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William McCance
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
William McCance was a Scottish artist, and was second Controller of the Gregynog Press in Powys, mid-Wales. Biography Born on 6 August 1894 in Cambuslang, Scotland, William McCance was the seventh of eight children. After attending Hamilton Academy, McCance entered Glasgow School of Art, studying there 1911–15 and subsequently undertaking a teacher-training course at Glasgow's Kennedy Street school.
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Robert Smirke
1753 - 1845 (92 years)
Robert Smirke was an English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings showing subjects taken from literature. He was a member of the Royal Academy. Life Smirke was born at Wigton near Carlisle, the son of a travelling artist. When he was twelve he was apprenticed to a heraldic painter in London, and at the age of twenty began to study at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1775 he became a member of the Incorporated Society of Artists, with which he began to exhibit by sending five works; he showed works there again in 1777 and 1778. In 1786 he exhibited Narcissus and The Lady and...
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Bartolomeo Ambrosini
1588 - 1657 (69 years)
Bartolomeo Ambrosini was an Italian botanist, physician and naturalist, for over thirty years prefect of the Botanical Garden of Bologna and editor of many of the posthumous works of Ulisse Aldrovandi.
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John Chiene
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
John Chiene, CB, LLD, MD, FRSE, FRCSEd was a Scottish surgeon, who was Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh during some of its most influential years. He was a founder of the Edinburgh Ambulance Service. The Chiene Medal is presented as an annual prize in surgery at the University. He served as President of the Royal College of Surgeons from 1897 to 1899.
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Ludwig Aschoff
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Karl Albert Ludwig Aschoff was a German physician and pathologist. He is considered to be one of the most influential pathologists of the early 20th century and is regarded as the most important German pathologist after Rudolf Virchow.
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Ambrose McCarthy Patterson
1877 - 1967 (90 years)
Ambrose McCarthy Patterson was a painter and printmaker. Life Patterson was born in Daylesford, Victoria. He studied at the Melbourne Art School under E. Phillips Fox and Tudor St. George Tucker, at the National Gallery Art School in Melbourne and continued his studies in Paris at the Académie Colarossi and the Académie Julian under Lucien Simon, André Lhote and Maxime Maufra. In Paris he became a friend of compatriot Nellie Melba, the famous soprano; Patterson's brother, Tom, was married to Melba's sister, Belle. Through Melba's influence, he was able to continue his studies with John Singer Sargent.
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Gustav Giemsa
1867 - 1948 (81 years)
Berthold Carl Gustav Giemsa was a German chemist and bacteriologist who was a native of Medar-Blechhammer . He is best known for creating a dye solution commonly known as "Giemsa stain" which is used in staining for use in the histopathological diagnosis of malaria and parasites such as Plasmodium, Trypanosoma, and Chlamydia.
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Arnold Kegel
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Arnold Henry Kegel was an American gynecologist who invented the Kegel perineometer and Kegel exercises as non-surgical treatment of urinary incontinence from perineal muscle weakness and/or laxity. Today pelvic floor exercises are widely held as first-line treatment for urinary stress incontinence and any type of female incontinence and female genital prolapse, with evidence supporting its use from systematic reviews of randomized trials in the Cochrane Library amongst others. Kegel first published his ideas in 1948. He was Assistant Professor of Gynecology at the Keck School of Medicine ...
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Susanna Centlivre
1667 - 1723 (56 years)
Susanna Centlivre , born Susanna Freeman, and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century". Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn.
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Vasyl Dovhovych
1783 - 1849 (66 years)
Vasyl Dovhovych is a Ukrainian and Rusyn philosopher, linguist, poet, Transcarpathian academic, and Priest of the Greek Catholic Church. Biography He was born in the village of Zolotarovo, Khust district, in March 1783 in the family of peasants.
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Josina Carolina van Lynden
1717 - 1791 (74 years)
Josina Carolina van Lynden was a Dutch philosopher who, in 1770, published a book on Logic, called De Logica of redenkunde. She was the first Dutch woman to publish on this topic. Van Lynden was the daughter of Dirk van Lynden en Heilwig van Lynden, member of a Dutch noble family. She lived with her parents in Huis de Parck, a castle in Gelderland. At the age of 25, she married with Adriaan Buurt, a local pastor. Their marriage was not approved by some members of her family as she was part of a noble family while her husband was not. They had managed to postpone the wedding till Josina became 25, but could not prevent them form marrying.
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