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,
#16901
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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Spencer Fullerton Baird
1823 - 1887 (64 years)
Spencer Fullerton Baird was an American naturalist, ornithologist, ichthyologist, herpetologist, and museum curator. Baird was the first curator to be named at the Smithsonian Institution. He eventually served as assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian from 1850 to 1878, and as Secretary from 1878 until 1887. He was dedicated to expanding the natural history collections of the Smithsonian which he increased from 6,000 specimens in 1850 to over 2 million by the time of his death. He also served as the U.S. Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries from 1871 to 1887 and published over 1,000 works durin...
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Aristodemus of Cydathenaeum
450 BC - Present (2476 years)
Aristodemus of Cydathenaeum was an ancient Athenian follower of the philosopher Socrates. He is best remembered as a character and narrative source in Plato's Symposium, and is also preserved in Xenophon's Memorabilia and a fragment from Aristophanes.
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Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
1875 - 1911 (36 years)
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis was a Lithuanian composer, painter, choirmaster, cultural figure, and writer in Polish. Čiurlionis contributed to symbolism and art nouveau, and was representative of the fin de siècle epoch. He has been considered one of the pioneers of abstract art in Europe. During his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. The majority of his paintings are housed in the M. K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas, Lithuania. His works have had a profound influence on modern Lithuanian...
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Dorotea Bucca
1360 - 1436 (76 years)
Dorotea Bocchi was an Italian noblewoman known for studying medicine and philosophy. Dorotea was associated with the University of Bologna, though there are differing beliefs regarding the extent of her participation at the university ranging, from whether she taught or held a position there. Despite these debates, there is consensus that she flourished and was active at the university for more than 40 years, beginning from 1390 onwards.
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Stephanus of Athens
601 - 700 (99 years)
Stephanus of Athens , also called Stephanus the Philosopher, was a Byzantine Greek physician and writer. A Christian native of Athens, he studied at Alexandria under a certain Asclepius, possibly Asclepius of Tralles. He later practised and taught medicine there.
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Fakhr al-Din Iraqi
1213 - 1289 (76 years)
Fakhr al-Din Iraqi was a Persian Sufi poet of the 13th-century. He is principally known for his mixed prose and poetry work, the Lama'at , as well as his divan , most of which were written in the form of a ghazal.
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Virginia M. Alexander
1900 - 1949 (49 years)
Virginia M. Alexander was an American physician, public health researcher, and the founder of the Aspiranto Health Home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Early life Virginia M. Alexander was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on February 4, 1899, to Hilliard Alexander and Virginia Pace, who were both born into slavery in the US. She had four siblings, including the prominent attorney Raymond Pace Alexander. Alexander's mother died when she was 4 years old, and at age 13 her father's riding academy closed. Alexander withdrew from school to help relieve the resulting economic strain on her family...
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Nicoletto Vernia
1420 - 1499 (79 years)
Nicoletto Vernia was an Italian Averroist philosopher, at the University of Padua. Life He studied at Pavia, under Paolo da Pergola in Venice, and with Gaetano da Thiene in Padua, graduating with a doctorate in 1458. His first work was on the unitas intellectus, the theory of Averroes on the unity of the soul and intellect.
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Paraskev Stoyanov
1871 - 1941 (70 years)
Paraskev Ivanchov Stoyanov was a surgeon, anarchist, historian and professor. He is considered one of the fathers of Bulgarian and Romanian anarchism. Biography The son of Ivancho Stoyanov, a Bulgarian active militant for national liberation from Roussé, and Gabriela von Walter, a German woman, Paraskev was born on January 30, 1871, in the city of Giurgiu, Romania, where his father had fled to escape persecution from the Ottomans. Belonging to a wealthy environment, Paraskev Stoyanov enjoyed a solid education, he studied at Bucharest's "Saint Sava" high school and at medical universities in Romania, France and Switzerland.
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Simon Rawidowicz
1897 - 1957 (60 years)
Simon Rawidowicz was a Polish-born American Jewish philosopher. Early life Simon Rawidowicz was born in 1896 in Grajewo, Poland to Chaim Yitzchak Rawidowicz , a Zionist activist, a travelling merchant, a writer, and a pioneer farmer, and to Chana Batya . A second of ten children – seven of whom survived childhood – he studied at the modern Yeshiva at Lida. Rawidowicz received a traditional Jewish education, during the course of which he became attracted to the Haskalah and Modern Hebrew literature. He was drawn to the reviving Hebrew language and literature, and before turning 18 he became a teacher at the Cheder Metukan.
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Mohammad-Hadi Abdekhodaei
1317 - Present (709 years)
Sheikh Mohammad-Hadi Abdekhodaei , is an Iranian Ayatollah He is currently a member of the Fifth term of the Assembly of Experts. He was previously the 11th Ambassador of Iran to the Vatican, and also served in the Iranian Parliament for 3 terms.
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Balcomb Greene
1904 - 1990 (86 years)
Balcomb Greene was an American artist and teacher. He and his wife, artist Gertrude Glass Greene, were heavily involved in political activism to promote mainstream acceptance of abstract art and were founding members of the American Abstract Artists organization. His early style was completely non-objective. Juan Gris and Piet Mondrian as well as Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse influenced his early style. From the 1940s his work "opened out to the light and space of natural form." He painted landscapes and figure. "He discerned the pain of a man, and hewed to it integrally from beginning to end….
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Scott Gottlieb
#16926
Heinrich Czolbe
1819 - 1873 (54 years)
Heinrich Adam Friedrich Czolbe was a German physician and materialist philosopher. Literary works Neue Darstellung des Sensualismus, 1855Entstehung des Selbstbewußtseins. Eine Antwort an Herrn Professor Lotze, Leipzig 1856 Die Grenzen und der Ursprung des menschlichen Erkentniss, 1865
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João Zeferino da Costa
1840 - 1916 (76 years)
João Zeferino da Costa was a Brazilian painter and designer. Life and work He began his studies in 1857 at the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes under the direction of Victor Meirelles. While there, he won several awards and was granted a fellowship to study in Europe. In 1869, he went to Rome and enrolled at the Accademia di San Luca, becoming a student of Cesare Mariani. He studied there for three years, winning several more awards, which allowed him to extend his visit for a few more years. Some of his best-known paintings were done during this period.
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Robert Sharrock
1630 - 1684 (54 years)
Robert Sharrock was an English churchman and botanist. He is now known for The History of the Propagation and Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature , for philosophical work directed against Thomas Hobbes, and as an associate of Robert Boyle
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Hippo
500 BC - 460 BC (40 years)
Hippo was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. He is variously described as coming from Rhegium, Metapontum, Samos, and Croton, and it is possible that there was more than one philosopher with this name.
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Joseph von Mering
1849 - 1908 (59 years)
Josef, Baron von Mering was a German physician. Working at the University of Strasbourg, Mering was the first person to discover that one of the pancreatic functions is the production of insulin, a hormone which controls blood sugar levels.
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Antoni Leśniowski
1867 - 1940 (73 years)
Antoni Leśniowski was a Polish surgeon, credited with publishing what may have been the earliest reports of the condition which later became known as Crohn's disease. He graduated in medicine from the University of Warsaw in 1890, and studied further in Berlin. From 1892 to 1912 he worked as a surgeon at the Infant Jesus Hospital in Warsaw, specialising in urology. Despite this, his most notable reports were on several cases of inflammatory bowel disease. On May 10, 1903, Medycyna, a weekly medical newspaper, published an article in which he described several cases of intestinal disease, conc...
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Samuel Manuwa
1903 - 1976 (73 years)
Oloye Sir Samuel Layinka Ayodeji Manuwa, CMG, OBE was a Nigerian surgeon, Inspector General of Medical Services and former Chief Medical Adviser to the Federal Government of Nigeria. He was the first Nigerian to pass the FRCS and he obtained the postgraduate Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1934. In 1966, he was elected president of the World Federation for Mental Health.
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Nicola Spedalieri
1740 - 1795 (55 years)
Nicola Spedalieri was an Italian priest, theologian, and philosopher. Life He studied and was ordained a priest in the seminary of Monreale, then among the most prominent in Sicily. In Monreale, he was appointed professor of philosophy and mathematics, and later of theology. At the same time he cultivated the arts of poetry, music, and painting. Disgusted at the opposition stirred up by certain theological theses, which were branded as heretical at Palermo, but approved at Rome, he withdrew from Monreale to Rome , where for ten years, while although leading a penurious life, he participated in fruitful study and labour.
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Francesco Bianchini
1662 - 1729 (67 years)
Francesco Bianchini was an Italian philosopher and scientist. He worked for the curia of three popes, including being camiere d'honore of Clement XI, and secretary of the commission for the reform of the calendar, working on the method to calculate the astronomically correct date for Easter in a given year.
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Giambattista Toderini
1728 - 1799 (71 years)
Giambattista Toderini was a Venetian philosopher, writer, and former Jesuit abbot. Biography Son of Domenico Maria and Anna Maria Cestari, he was the descendant of the Gagliardis dalla Volta counts palatine. Toderini studied philosophy and archaeology, but tended toward contemplative and religious life since his youth and joined the Society of Jesus. He was employed in teaching, dedicating himself to philosophy in Verona and Forlì.
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Deceneus
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Deceneus or Decaeneus was a priest of Dacia during the reign of Burebista . He is mentioned in the near-contemporary Greek Geographica of Strabo and in the 6th-century Latin Getica of Jordanes, where he is called Dicineus.
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Johannes Schefferus
1621 - 1679 (58 years)
Johannes Schefferus was one of the most important Swedish humanists of his time. He was also known as Angelus and is remembered for writing hymns. Schefferus was born in Strasbourg, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. He came from the patrician family , studied at university there and briefly in Leiden, and was in 1648 made professor Skytteanus of eloquence and government at Uppsala University, a chair he held until his death in 1679.
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Henry Littlejohn
1826 - 1914 (88 years)
Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn MD LLD FRCSE was a Scottish surgeon, forensic scientist and public health official. He served for 46 years as Edinburgh's first Medical Officer of Health, during which time he brought about significant improvements in the living conditions and the health of the city's inhabitants. He also served as a police surgeon and medical adviser in Scottish criminal cases.
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Edward Heneage Dering
1827 - 1892 (65 years)
Edward Heneage Dering was an English novelist of the Victorian era. He is largely remembered today as a member of "The Quartet" at Baddesley Clinton, with marriages to two artistic women. Biography He was the younger son of Cholmeley Edward John Dering, rector of Pluckley, Kent, and prebendary of St Paul's Cathedral. He joined the 68th Foot as an ensign in 1844, and in 1848 was a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. Having caught malaria in Italy, he sold out his commission and left the army in 1851.
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Dionysius of Chalcedon
400 BC - Present (2426 years)
Dionysius of Chalcedon was a Greek philosopher and dialectician connected with the Megarian school. He was a native of Chalcedon on the coast of Bithynia. Dionysius was the person who first used the name Dialecticians to describe a splinter group within the Megarian school "because they put their arguments into the form of question and answer". One area of activity for the dialecticians was the framing of definitions, and Aristotle criticises a definition of life by Dionysius in his Topics: Dionysius is also reported to have taught Theodorus the Atheist.
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Susan McKinney Steward
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Susan Maria McKinney Steward was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. McKinney-Steward's medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1911, she...
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Joseph von Führich
1800 - 1876 (76 years)
Joseph von Führich was an Austrian painter, one of the Nazarenes. He painted religious pictures almost exclusively. Führich acquired his greatest fame as a draughtsman. Biography He was born at Kratzau in Bohemia. Deeply impressed as a boy by rustic pictures adorning the wayside chapels of his native country, his first attempt at composition was a sketch of the Nativity for the festival of Christmas in his father's house. He lived to see the day when, becoming celebrated as a composer of scriptural episodes, his sacred subjects were transferred in numberless repetitions to the roadside chu...
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Antonio del Pollaiuolo
1429 - 1498 (69 years)
Antonio del Pollaiuolo , also known as Antonio di Jacopo Pollaiuolo or Antonio Pollaiuolo , was an Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, engraver, and goldsmith, who made important works in all these media, as well as designing works in others, for example vestments, metal embroidery being a medium he worked in at the start of his career.
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Alexander Macalister
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Prof Alexander Macalister FRS Hon.FRSE FSA FRAI was an Irish anatomist, Professor of Anatomy, Cambridge University, from 1883 until his death. He was a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Life He was born in Dublin, the second son of Robert Macalister, secretary of the Sunday School Society of Ireland, and his wife . Alexander was educated locally then studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin.
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John Dawson
1734 - 1820 (86 years)
John Dawson was both an English mathematician and physician. He was born at Raygill in Garsdale, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, where "Dawson's Rock" celebrates the site of his early thinking about conic sections. After learning surgery from Henry Bracken of Lancaster, he worked as a surgeon in Sedbergh for a year, then went to study medicine at Edinburgh, walking 150 miles there with his savings stitched into his coat. Despite a very frugal lifestyle, he was unable to complete his degree, and had to return to Garsdale until he earned enough as a surgeon and as a private tutor in Mat...
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Pavle Stefanović
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Pavle Stefanović was a Serbian philosopher, esthetician, essayist, music writer, critic and writer. He was the son of physician writer and poet Svetislav Stefanović who translated Shakespeare, and other English writers.
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Saviour Bernard
1724 - 1806 (82 years)
Saviour Bernard was a Maltese medical practitioner, a scientist, and a major philosopher. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were mostly philosophical psychology and physiology. Life Beginnings Bernard was born at Valletta, Malta, on November 29, 1724, from French parents. His family seems to have been well-off, enough, at least, to give Bernard a good initial formation, one which was probably better than that of his peers.
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Hugo Wilhelm von Ziemssen
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
Hugo von Ziemssen was a German physician, born in Greifswald. He studied medicine at the universities of Greifswald, Berlin, and Würzburg. In 1863 he was called to the University of Erlangen as a professor of pathology and therapy as well as the director of the medical clinic. In 1874 he relocated to Munich as a professor and director of the general hospital.
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Carl Thomsen
1847 - 1912 (65 years)
Carl Christian Frederik Jacob Thomsen was a Danish painter and illustrator. He specialized in genre painting and also illustrated the works of several Danish authors. Biography Born in Copenhagen, Thomsen was the son of Chamber Councillor Ludvig Frederik Thomsen and the brother of the acclaimed linguist Vilhelm Thomsen . From an early age, Thomsen was interested in drawing but his parents first encouraged him to study philosophy. After he had graduated in 1866, he began studying art with Frederik Vermehren the same year. He then attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Wilhelm Marstrand, graduating in 1871.
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William Walker
1871 - 1918 (47 years)
William Walker was a prominent Irish trade unionist and a leading figure within the Belfast labour movement. He served as President of the Irish Trades Union Congress and Vice-Chair of the British Labour Party.
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