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,
#16451
Max Beckmann
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Max Carl Friedrich Beckmann was a German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor, and writer. Although he is classified as an Expressionist artist, he rejected both the term and the movement. In the 1920s, he was associated with the New Objectivity , an outgrowth of Expressionism that opposed its introverted emotionalism. Even when dealing with light subject matter like circus performers, Beckmann often had an undercurrent of moodiness or unease in his works. By the 1930s, his work became more explicit in its horrifying imagery and distorted forms with combination of brutal realism and socia...
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Albert Köster
1862 - 1924 (62 years)
Albert Johannes Köster was a German Germanist and theater scholar. Life Born in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg as the son of a wine wholesaler, Köster attended the Johanneum in Hamburg, where he passed the Abitur in 1882. He then studied at the Universities of Tübingen and Leipzig Law and Berlin Philology and History of Literature. In 1887, he received his doctorate in history from Wilhelm Maurenbrecher and Georg Voigt in Leipzig. The subject of his dissertation was: "Die Wormser Annalen. An investigation of the sources".
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Kenzo Futaki
1873 - 1966 (93 years)
was a Japanese doctor who studied infectious diseases. Futaki was educated at Tokyo Imperial University. He received the prestigious Order of Culture from the Emperor for his academic contributions, which included identifying the infectious agents of dysentery and rat bite fever, He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In addition to his medical research, he had a strong understanding of traditional Japanese folk remedies.
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Henry Corbin
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Henry Corbin was a French philosopher, theologian, and Iranologist, professor of Islamic studies at the École pratique des hautes études. He was influential in extending the modern study of traditional Islamic philosophy from early falsafa to later and "mystical" figures such as Suhrawardi, Ibn Arabi, and Mulla Sadra Shirazi. With works such as Histoire de la philosophie islamique , he challenged the common European view that philosophy in the Islamic world declined after Averroes and Avicenna.
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Estanislao Zuleta
1935 - 1990 (55 years)
Estanislao Zuleta was a Latin American philosopher, writer and professor from Colombia. He was known especially for his works on the universities being a professor for all his life. More important than his writings, Zuleta is remembered by his conferences that were carefully recorded by his colleagues and pupils and published several times during his life and after his death in 1990. He dedicated especially to philosophy, Latin American economy, psychology and education. He let treaties on ancient and modern thinkers of a rich social and historical analysis over the Latin American cultural context.
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Janina Hurynowicz
1894 - 1967 (73 years)
Janina Hurynowicz was a Polish medical doctor, neurophysiologist and neurologist. She was the author of many works on Chronaxie and the influence of insulin on the autonomic nervous system and became a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń.
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Igor Blauberg
1929 - 1990 (61 years)
Igor Viktorovich Blauberg was a Soviet philosopher and cyberneticist. Blauberg was Head of Systems Approach and Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory of the Research Institute for Systems Studies in Moscow. He is known for his pioneering work in the field of systems theory in Russia.
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Rudolf Spanner
1895 - 1960 (65 years)
Rudolf Spanner was Director of the Danzig Anatomical Institute during World War II and Nazi Party member . During the Second World War Spanner used human corpses in the creation of anatomical models for the institute, which after a soap-like byproduct from the model-creation process was presented in the Nuremberg trials as soap made from victims of the Holocaust, has led to numerous accusations against Spanner of crimes against humanity.
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Alfred Caldecott
1850 - 1936 (86 years)
Alfred Caldecott was an English philosopher. Early life Caldecott was born at Challoner House, Crook Street, Chester. His father, John Caldecott, was an accountant, twice married with 13 children. Caldecott was his sixth child by his first wife Mary Dinah . His older brother Randolph was an English artist and illustrator. In 1860 the family moved to 23 Richmond Place at Boughton, Cheshire just outside Chester. He spent the last five years of his schooling at The King's School, Chester.
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Kurt Köster
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Kurt Köster, also spelled Koetser , was a German librarian and historian. Life and work Köster was the son of Daniel Köster and his wife Emilie, née Loev. In 1930 he graduated from the Wiesbaden high school on Zietenring and then attended the Pedagogical Academy in Frankfurt am Main. Köster worked as a primary school teacher from 1932 to 1939 then studied history, historical auxiliary sciences, German and musicology in Frankfurt and Munich. On 9 September 1942 he was drafted into the German army. He received his doctorate on 12 February 1944 in Frankfurt on the subject of "The Colmar historical sources of the thirteenth century".
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Elsie Gerlach
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Dr. Elsie Gerlach was named the first superintendent of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry Children's Clinic in 1927 after having served as an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. Gerlach stayed for 38 years and became nationally known and respected as a pioneer in the teaching and development of pediatric dentistry. In the early years of the clinic, she looked for children on the street who needed dental care and brought them to the clinic.
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Helen Hart
1900 - 1971 (71 years)
Helen Hart was an American plant pathologist, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Hart was the first woman president of the American Phytopathological Society, and was instrumental in making the University of Minnesota's Department of Plant Pathology a world-leader in stem rust.
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Walther Vetter
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Walther Hermann Vetter was a German musicologist. From 1946 to 1958, he was professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Life Born in Berlin, Vetter, Lutheran, was the son of the Kapellmeister Johannes Vetter , a founding member of the Berlin Philharmonic. In 1897 the family moved to Greiz in the Principality of Reuss-Greiz , where the father founded an orchestra. Vetter first attended the and then, until the Abitur, the Latina of the Francke Foundations in Halle an der Saale. From 1910, he studied musicology, art history and philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and conducting at the Leipzig Conservatory .
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Maryla Falk
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Maryla Falk was a Polish indologist and religious scholar. A member of the Polish Oriental Society, she is best remembered for her book Mit psychologiczny w starożytnych Indiach , and her treatises l misteri di Novalis published in Naples, and Nāma-rūpa and Dharma-rūpa. Origin and Aspects of an Ancient Indian Conception published at the University of Calcutta.
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Wilhelm Ehmann
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Wilhelm Ehmann was a German musicologist, editor, church musician and conductor. He founded the choir Westfälische Kantorei that toured internationally and made many recordings. He was a cofounder and director of the later Hochschule für Kirchenmusik Herford.
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Walsh McDermott
1909 - 1981 (72 years)
Walsh McDermott was an American physician, medical researcher and public health specialist. In his early career, he researched antibiotic agents against tuberculosis and syphilis, earning a Lasker Award for his work on isoniazid, a drug used to treat tuberculosis. His later career focused on public health efforts, and he became a professor in public health at Cornell University.
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Émile Forgue
1860 - 1943 (83 years)
Émile Auguste Forgue was a French surgeon. In 1893 he received his medical doctorate from the University of Montpellier with the thesis Distribution des racines motrices dans les muscles des membres. In 1896 he obtained his agrégation for surgery, and later on, became a professor of operative medicine and clinical surgery at Montpellier. In 1899 he became a correspondent member of the Académie de Médecine. In 1924 he was appointed director of the Centre anticancéreux de Montpellier.
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Brian E. O'Neil
Brian E. O'Neil was an American philosopher and a professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He was known for his research on Descartes' philosophy. O'Neil died from cancer in 1985. Books Epistemological Direct Realism in Descartes' Philosophy, University of New Mexico Press
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Paul Corder
1879 - 1942 (63 years)
Paul Walford Corder was an English composer and music professor. Corder was born at Pimlico, London, the son of musician Frederick Corder and his wife Henrietta Walford. He was baptised at St Gabriel's, Warwick Square, London, on 1 March 1880. He studied under his father at the Royal Academy of Music and won the Goring Thomas scholarship for composition in 1901. In 1907 he joined the staff of the Academy as Professor of Composition and Harmony.
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Nicola Abbagnano
1901 - 1990 (89 years)
Nicola Abbagnano was an Italian existential philosopher. Life Nicola Abbagnano was born in Salerno on 15 July 1901. He was the first-born son of a middle-class professional family. His father was a practicing lawyer in the area. He studied in Naples, and in November 1922 obtained a degree in philosophy, his thesis that became the subject of his first book Le sorgenti irrazionali del pensiero . His mentor was Antonio Aliotta. In the following years, he taught philosophy and history at the Liceo Umberto I°, in Naples, and from 1917 to 1936 he was the professor of philosophy and pedagogy in the Istituto di Magistero Suor Orsola Benincasa.
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Elsie Few
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Elsie Evelyn Few, was a Jamaican-born artist, who had a long career in Britain and was associated with the Euston Road School. Throughout her career Few produced oil paintings of landscapes but later in her life began using collage techniques to create abstract designs.
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Ksenija Atanasijević
1894 - 1981 (87 years)
Ksenija Atanasijević was the first recognised major female Serbian philosopher, and the first female professors of Belgrade University, where she graduated. She wrote about Giordano Bruno, ancient Greek philosophy and the history of Serbian philosophy, and translated important philosophical works into Serbian, including works by Aristotle, Plato, and Spinoza. She was also an early Serbian feminist writer and philosopher.
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Max Holzmann
1899 - 1994 (95 years)
Max Holzmann was a Swiss cardiologist. Early life Max Holzmann was born on 31 March 1899 in Zurich, the son of physician Moritz Holzmann and Anna Helena Lerch. Holzmann took a degree in medicine in Zurich and Lausanne, and in 1923 graduated with a doctor of medicine degree. Holzmann worked as a doctor in Vienna, Paris and at the University Hospital in Zurich.
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Henryk Hilarowicz
1890 - 1941 (51 years)
Henryk Hilarowicz was a Polish surgeon, and a professor at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów. He was murdered by the Nazis in the Massacre of Lwów professors. Further reading
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Alois Höfler
1853 - 1922 (69 years)
Alois Höfler was an Austrian philosopher and university professor of education in Prague and Vienna. He was seen by the logical positivist Otto Neurath as an important link between Bernard Bolzano's work and the Vienna Circle.
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Louis Rougier
1889 - 1982 (93 years)
Louis Auguste Paul Rougier was a French philosopher. Rougier made many important contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science, political philosophy and the history of Christianity. Early life Rougier was born in Lyon. Debilitated by pleurisy in his youth, he was declared unfit for service in World War I and devoted his adolescence to intellectual pursuits. He studied philosophy under Edmond Goblot.
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Max Fleischer
1861 - 1930 (69 years)
Richard Paul Max Fleischer was a German painter and bryologist. As a botanist, he is remembered for his work with Javan mosses. Biography He took art classes in Breslau, qualifying as an art teacher in 1881. He furthered his studies in Munich and Paris, where his interest in natural sciences grew. He subsequently moved to Zurich in 1892 in order to study geology. In the latter part of the 1890s, he was invited by botanist Melchior Treub to Java as an illustrator. On Java, along with his artistic duties, he collected regional botanical specimens and conducted investigations of the island's mosses.
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Carlos Jiménez Díaz
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Carlos Jiménez Díaz was an important Spanish physician and clinical researcher.
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Max Schwimmer
1895 - 1960 (65 years)
Max Schwimmer was a German painter, graphic artist and illustrator. Life Schwimmer was born in Leipzig as the son of a factory bookbinder. He attended the there. He then worked for several years as a school teacher in in the Erzgebirge and in Marienberg. During the First World War, he was drafted as a soldier. After returning from the war, he began studying art history and philosophy at the Leipzig University in 1919. This period saw the beginnings of his artistic activity. He also found a connection to the anti-bourgeois cabaret scene, which was dominated by Hans Reimann, Erich Weinert, Slang , and Ringelnatz.
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Gottlieb Olpp
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Gottlieb Friedrich Adolf Olpp was a German missionary and tropical medicine doctor, accredited with spreading Traditional Chinese Medicine and aiding the development of sinology in Germany and the West in early 20th century. As a medical missionary from the Rhenish Missionary Society from 1898 to 1907 in Dongguan, Guangdong Province of China, he conducted extensive research on local diseases and healing practices, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and wrote extensively throughout his life for publication in Germany on the topic of tropical medicine, theology and missionary work. After his...
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Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo
1924 - 1984 (60 years)
Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo Torrontegui , also known as Fernando M. Zóbel, was a Spanish Filipino painter, businessman, art collector and museum founder. Early life Zóbel was born in Ermita, Manila in the Philippines to Enrique Zóbel de Ayala and Fermina Montojo y Torrontegui and was a member of the prominent Zóbel de Ayala family. He was a brother of Jacobo Zóbel , Alfonso and Mercedes Zóbel McMicking, all children of his father from his first wife, Consuelo Róxas de Ayala . He was a nephew and namesake of Fernando Antonio Zóbel de Ayala, the eldest brother of his father.
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Rose Rand
1903 - 1980 (77 years)
Rose Rand was an Austrian-American logician and philosopher. She was a member of the Vienna Circle. Life and work Rose Rand was born in Lemberg in the Austrian crown land of Galicia . After her family moved to Austria she studied at the Polish Gymnasium in Vienna. In 1924 she enrolled in Vienna University, her teachers included Heinrich Gomperz, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap. She graduated with her first degree in 1928. During her post-graduation years, she remained in contact with Vienna Circle colleagues such as Schlick.
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Adolfo Ferrata
1880 - 1946 (66 years)
Adolfo Ferrata was an Italian pathologist and hematologist. In 1904 he earned his medical degree from the University of Parma, spending the following years performing scientific research in clinics at Parma, Berlin and Naples. From 1921 to 1924 he was a professor of special medical pathology at the Universities of Messina and Siena, afterwards serving as a professor of clinical medicine at the University of Pavia, a position he kept for the remainder of his career.
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Johannes Jacobus Poortman
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Johannes Jacobus Poortman , studied philosophy and psychology at Groningen University under Professor Gerardus Heymans. In 1919 he received his Master of Arts; many years later he would also earn a Ph.D. He was also a theosophist.
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Paul Häberlin
1878 - 1960 (82 years)
Paul Haeberlin was a Swiss philosopher who at different times in his career took the standpoint that either religion or theoretical knowledge was the answer to human problems. He always gave philosophy an important role, but religion was to him the only way man could understand his real position in existence. Haeberlin made contributions to characterology and psychotherapeutics, and was especially successful in treating psychopathic youth and teens. Made a full professor of philosophy, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Basel.
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Takeo Yamaguchi
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Takeo Yamaguchi was an avant-garde Japanese painter of monochrome Art Informel works. About Yamaguchi studied Western painting at the Tokyo Art School. Upon graduation in 1927, he moved to Paris to study European painting. He developed his mature style during the mid-1950s, with a focus on flatness.
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Haridas Bhattacharya
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Haridas Bhattacharyya was a Bengali Indian philosopher, author and educationist, known for his works on comparative religion. Early life He was born in an orthodox Brahmin family on 7 November 1891, at Bhatpara, West Bengal to Pandit Ramprasanna Bhattacharyya, a scholar at the princely court of Krishnanagar and a Sanskrit scholar.
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Kurt Sternberg
1885 - 1942 (57 years)
Kurt Max Julius Sternberg was a Neo-Kantian German philosopher, author, and Holocaust victim. Biography Sternberg was born in Berlin, studied with the Neo-Kantian philosophers Alois Riehl and Friedrich Paulsen, and published on academic philosophy and liberal politics. Sternberg engaged in Neo-Kantian debates over the natural sciences and cultural sciences in Zur Logik der Geschichtswissenschaft . He rejected the pessimism of Oswald Spengler in Idealismus und Kultur . He also wrote works on literary and political figures such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Heinrich Heine, and Walther Rathenau. Later...
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Ernest Désiré Glasson
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
Ernest Désiré Glasson was a French academic, jurist, professor of civil procedure and specialist in the history of French, Roman, and comparative law.
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Herman Kiefer
1825 - 1911 (86 years)
Herman Kiefer , also spelled Hermann Kiefer, was a physician, politician and diplomat of the United States. Biography Germany He was the only son of a physician, Conrad Kiefer. His mother was a daughter of the gardener of the Grand Duke in Karlsruhe. Thus, he was brought up in a conservative environment and trained to respect the established order of things. He attended gymnasia at Freiburg, Mannheim, and Karlsruhe. His childhood hero was Frederick the Great. He wrote his first poem, "The Death of Socrates," in 1839, while at Freiburg. He continued writing poems for the rest of his life, and spent much of his youth wandering in the Black Forest.
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Lionel Dauriac
1847 - 1923 (76 years)
Lionel Dauriac was a French philosopher and musicologist. Dauriac was born in Brest, the son of an admiral. He was professor of musical aesthetics at the Sorbonne between 1896 and 1903. He died 26 May 1923 in Paris. An internationally minded music critic, he wrote biographies of Gioachino Rossini, Richard Wagner and Giacomo Meyerbeer.
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Florentino Ameghino
1853 - 1911 (58 years)
Florentino Ameghino was an Argentine naturalist, paleontologist, anthropologist and zoologist, whose fossil discoveries on the Argentine Pampas, especially on Patagonia, rank with those made in the western United States during the late 19th century. Along with his two brothers – Carlos and Juan – Florentino Ameghino was one of the most important founding figures in South American paleontology.
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Keiji Nishitani
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Keiji Nishitani was a Japanese philosopher. He was a scholar of the Kyoto School and a disciple of Kitarō Nishida. In 1924, Nishitani received his doctorate from Kyoto Imperial University for his dissertation "Das Ideale und das Reale bei Schelling und Bergson". He studied under Martin Heidegger in Freiburg from 1937 to 1939.
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Guðmundur Finnbogason
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Guðmundur Finnbogason was an Icelandic philosopher, the son of Guðrún Jónsdóttir and Finnbogi Finnbogason. He was one of the first Icelandic psychologists. His work "Sympathetic Understanding" inspired Jean Piaget's development stages model.
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Ödön Pártos
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Ödön Pártos [alternate transcription in English: Oedoen Partos, , ] was a Hungarian-Israeli violist and composer. A recipient of the Israel Prize, he taught and served as director of the Rubin Academy of Music, now known as the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv.
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Ludwig Schiedermair
1876 - 1957 (81 years)
Ludwig Ferdinand Schiedermair was a German minister and musicologist. He concerned himself with opera history, Mozart, and Beethoven. In 1914 he edited the first complete critical edition of the letters of Mozart and his family.
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Thomas Hocken
1836 - 1910 (74 years)
Thomas Morland Hocken was a New Zealand collector, bibliographer and researcher. Early life He was born in Rutlandshire on 14 January 1836, the son of Wesleyan minister Joshua Hocken, and educated at Woodhouse Grove School and a school in Newcastle. He studied medicine at Durham University and Trinity College Dublin, and in 1859 became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
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Isadore Gilbert Mudge
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Isadore Gilbert Mudge was ranked by the magazine American Libraries as one of the top 100 important leaders that libraries have had in the 20th century. Mudge was a defining influence on what a contemporary reference librarian is and was essential for helping organize and promote reference books for use in helping patrons find information and answers to questions.
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Charles Jacques Bouchard
1837 - 1915 (78 years)
Charles Jacques Bouchard was a French pathologist and an esperantist born in Montier-en-Der, a commune the department of Haute-Marne. Biography He studied medicine in Lyon and Paris, where he obtained his doctorate in 1866. In 1874 he became a physician at Bicêtre Hospital, and in 1879 was appointed chair of general pathology. In 1886, he became a member of the Academie de Médecine.
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Clay Johnston
S. Claiborne "Clay" Johnston is the former Dean of the Dell Medical School and Frank and Charmaine Denius Distinguished Dean's Chair at the University of Texas, Austin, United States. Dell Medical School opened in 2016 with Johnston being named as the inaugural dean in January 2014 In July 2021, Johnston announced that he would step down as the dean of the Dell Medical School. He officially left his position on August 31, 2021.
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