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,
#17101
Jakob Eduard Polak
1818 - 1891 (73 years)
Jakob Eduard Polak was an Austrian physician, born to a Jewish family from Bohemia, who played an important role in introducing modern medicine in Iran. Life Polak studied medicine in Prague and Vienna. He was one of the six Austrian teachers invited by Amir Kabir, the Persian chief minister, as the instructors of Dar ul-Fonun, the first modern higher education institution in Iran. By his own account, he entered Iran on 24 November 1851, before the inauguration of the Dar ul-Fonun.
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Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden
1829 - 1887 (58 years)
Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden was an American geologist noted for his pioneering surveying expeditions of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th century. He was also a physician who served with the Union Army during the Civil War.
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Dennis Hart Mahan
1802 - 1871 (69 years)
Dennis Hart Mahan [məˈhæn] was a noted American military theorist, civil engineer and professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1824–1871. He was the father of American naval historian and theorist Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.
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Charles C. Bass
1875 - 1975 (100 years)
Charles Cassidy Bass was an American medical doctor and researcher on tropical medicine who made significant contributions to understanding malaria, hookworm, and other diseases. Later Bass studied the relationship between dental health and general well-being. Bass articulated and promoted the "Bass Technique of Toothbrushing" and developed improved means of flossing teeth, for which some refer to Bass as "The Father of Preventive Dentistry". He subsequently became a university administrator, serving as dean of the Tulane University School of Medicine, from 1922 to 1940.
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Emilio Pettoruti
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Emilio Pettoruti was an Argentine painter, who caused a scandal with his avant-garde cubist exhibition in 1924 in Buenos Aires. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Buenos Aires was a city full of artistic development. Pettoruti's career was thriving during the 1920s when "Argentina witnessed a decade of dynamic artistic activity; it was an era of euphoria, a time when the definition of modernity was developed." While Pettoruti was influenced by Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Abstraction, he did not claim to paint in any of those styles in particular. Exhibiting all over Europ...
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Musa Bigiev
1874 - 1949 (75 years)
Musa Bigiev was a Tatar Hanafi Maturidi scholar, theologian philosopher, publicist and one of the leaders of the Jadid movement. After receiving his education in Kazan, Bukhara, Istanbul and Cairo, he became a political activist for the Ittifaq, the political organisation of the Muslims of Russia. He also taught in Orenburg, wrote journalistic texts and translated classic works into Tatar. After emigrating from the Soviet Union, he travelled Europe and the Middle and Far East while writing and publishing.
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Robert Mark Wenley
1861 - 1929 (68 years)
Prof Robert Mark Wenley FRSE DCL LLD was a 19th/20th-century Scottish philosopher. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 19 July 1861 the son of Jemima Isabella Veitch and her husband, James Adams Wenley FRSE , Treasurer of the Bank of Scotland. The family lived at 4 Buccleuch Place, just south of George Square, Edinburgh.
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Reinhold Begas
1831 - 1911 (80 years)
Reinhold Begas was a German sculptor. Biography Begas was born in Berlin, son of the painter Carl Joseph Begas. He received his early education studying under Christian Daniel Rauch and Ludwig Wilhelm Wichmann. During a period of study in Italy, from 1856 to 1858, he was influenced by Arnold Böcklin and Franz von Lenbach in the direction of a naturalistic style in sculpture. This tendency was marked in the group Borussia, executed for the facade of the exchange in Berlin, which first brought him into general notice.
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Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando
1772 - 1842 (70 years)
Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando, born Joseph Marie Degérando , was a French jurist, philanthropist and philosopher of Italian descent. He is most remembered for his 1804 book Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, considérés relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines as well as his 1820 study of benevolent activity, Le visiteur du pauvre . He influenced Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson who used his philosophical framework extensively in support of his own first book Nature.
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Carlo Maratta
1625 - 1713 (88 years)
Carlo Maratta or Maratti was an Italian painter, active mostly in Rome, and known principally for his classicizing paintings executed in a Late Baroque Classical manner. Although he is part of the classical tradition stemming from Raphael, he was not exempt from the influence of Baroque painting and particularly in his use of colour. His contemporary and friend, Giovanni Bellori, wrote an early biography on Maratta.
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Ernst Simon
1899 - 1988 (89 years)
Ernst Akiba/Akiva Simon was a German-Jewish educator and religious philosopher. Biography In the 1920s, Ernst Simon co-founded Brit Shalom along with Martin Buber, an organization espousing a binational solution for promoting the co-existence of Jews and Arabss in the State of Israel. From 1930 to 1933 he taught at the Hebrew Reali School Haifa, headed by Arthur Biram. In 1942, he was one of the founders of the binationalist Ihud party.
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Abraham Yagel
1553 - 1623 (70 years)
Abraham Yagel was an Italian Jewish catechist, philosopher, and cabalist. He lived successively at Luzzara, Venice, Ferrara, and Sassuolo. Life and identity Giulio Bartolocci, followed by De Rossi, Wolf, and Julius Fürst, erroneously identified Abraham Yagel with the Christian censor Camillo Jagel, declaring that Abraham Jagel embraced Christianity and changed his name to "Camillo Jagel." The untenability of this identification has been proved by later scholars, including Hananiah Coèn.
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Nilratan Sircar
1861 - 1943 (82 years)
Sir Nilratan Sircar M.A. M.D. D.Sc. was an Indian medical doctor, educationist, philanthropist and swadeshi entrepreneur. He was awarded honorary DCL by University of Oxford & LL.D by University of Edinburgh. He was a renowned figure in promoting Science and Technology education in contemporary India.
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Theophilus Gould Steward
1843 - 1924 (81 years)
Theophilus Gould Steward was an American author, educator, and clergyman. He was a U.S. Army chaplain and Buffalo Soldier of 25th U.S. Colored Infantry. Life and career Early years Steward was born to James Steward and Rebecca Gould in Gouldtown, New Jersey. The son of free Blacks reared in a family that stressed education, he received his formal education in the Gouldtown public schools.
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Jean de Beaugrand
1584 - 1640 (56 years)
Jean de Beaugrand was the foremost French lineographer of the seventeenth century. Though born in Mulhouse , de Beaugrand moved to Paris in 1581. He also worked as a mathematician and published works on geostaticss. He is credited with naming the cycloid. He lived and worked in Paris as an artist until his death in 1640.
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Bernhard Heine
1800 - 1846 (46 years)
Bernhard Heine was a German physician, bone specialist and the inventor of the osteotome, a medical tool for cutting bones. Apprenticeship in Würzburg Bernhard Heine was born on August 20, 1800, as the son of a tanner in Schramberg. At the age of ten years he was apprenticed to his uncle Johann Georg Heine in Würzburg as an orthopaedic mechanic. Without any enrolment he later attended lectures in medicine at the University of Würzburg.
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Henri Filhol
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Henri Filhol was a French medical doctor, malacologist and naturalist born in Toulouse. He was the son of Édouard Filhol , curator of the Muséum de Toulouse. After receiving his early education in Toulouse, he moved to Paris, where he obtained doctorates in medicine and science. In 1879 he was appointed professor of zoology at the Faculty of Toulouse. From 1894 to 1902 he occupied the chair of comparative animal anatomy at the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris. In 1897 he became a member of the Académie des sciences.
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Albert Houtin
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Albert Houtin was a French Catholic theologian and historian with a focus on the history of doctrine and on modernism in French religion. Born in La Flèche, he grew up to become a priest and was ordained in 1891. Following the turn of the century, he became disenchanted with religion and came to regard all religious belief systems as fraudulent. In 1907, he had attended the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, which had been organised by Unitarians.
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Arthur Henfrey
1819 - 1859 (40 years)
Arthur Henfrey was an English surgeon and botanist. Life Henfrey was born of English parents at Aberdeen on 1 November 1819. He studied medicine and surgery at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, and was admitted a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1843. Poor health caused him to give up his medical career.
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Rupert Pearse
Rupert Pearse is a British physician specialising in intensive care medicine, and NIHR Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at Queen Mary University of London. Pearse graduated from St George's, University of London, in 1996.
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Albert Thierfelder
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
Ferdinand Albert Thierfelder was a German pathologist born in Meissen. He was the son of city physician , and was a younger brother to internist Theodor Thierfelder . He studied medicine at the University of Rostock and University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1870 with a dissertation on sweat gland adenoma, Ein Fall von Schweissdrüsen-Adenom. He spent several years as an assistant at the institute of pathology in Leipzig, and from 1876 to 1908 was a full professor of anatomic pathology in Rostock. One of his better known assistants in Rostock was pathologist Otto Lubarsch .
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Karl Gottlob Kühn
1754 - 1840 (86 years)
Karl Gottlob Kühn was a German physician and medical historian. He studied medicine at the University of Leipzig, earning his doctorate in 1783 with the dissertation thesis "De forcibus obstetriciis nuper inventis". In 1785 he became an associate professor at Leipzig, where he later served as a full professor of therapy and physics and pathology . On three separate occasions he served as university rector .
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Andrew Gray
1847 - 1925 (78 years)
Andrew Gray was a Scottish physicist and mathematician. Life Born in Lochgelly, Fife, the son of John Gray, he was educated at Lochgelly School and then studied at the University of Glasgow , where he was appointed the Eglinton Fellow in Mathematics in 1876. Perhaps more significantly, however, in 1875 he became the assistant and private secretary of Professor William Thomson . He held this post – an official University one after 1880 – until 1884, when he was appointed Professor of Physics at the newly founded University College of North Wales.
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Simone Porzio
1496 - 1554 (58 years)
Simone Porzio was an Italian philosopher, born and died in Naples. Life Like his greater contemporary, Pomponazzi, he was a lecturer on medicine at Pisa , and in later life gave up purely scientific study for speculation on the nature of man. His philosophic theory was identical with that of Pomponazzi, whose De immortalitate animi he defended and amplified in a treatise De mente humana. There is told of him a story which illustrates the temper of the early humanistic revival in Italy. When he was beginning his first lecture at Pisa he opened the meteorological treatises of Aristotle. The au...
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John Ming
1838 - 1910 (72 years)
Rev. John Joseph Ming S.J. was a Swiss Roman Catholic priest, philosopher and writer. He was born in Giswil, Obwalden and was educated at gab Gauthier College, Engelberg, Obwalden. He was ordained in 1868. He was appointed a theological lecturer at the Seminary of the Prince Bishop of Görz in 1871 and was sent to the United States in 1872. He taught philosophy at colleges and contributed articles to the Catholic Encyclopedia and The American Catholic Quarterly Review. He was considered one of the greatest Catholic authorities on sociology of his era.
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Andries Mac Leod
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Andries Hugo Donald Mac Leod was a Belgian-Swedish philosopher and mathematician. Andries Mac Leod was born in Ledeberg, a suburb of Ghent, as a son of Julius Mac Leod, a botanist and professor at Ghent University, and of Fanny Mac Leod born Maertens, who was translator from English into Dutch of two books by Kropotkin.
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Adam of Łowicz
1500 - 1514 (14 years)
Adam of Łowicz was a professor of medicine at the University of Krakow, its rector in 1510–1511, a humanist, writer and philosopher. Life Adam studied in the Department of Liberal Arts at the University of Krakow, earning a baccalaureate in 1488 and a master's degree in 1492. He then studied medicine in Italy. Returning to Poland, he served as court physician to Kings Jan I Olbracht, Alexander Jagiellon and Zygmunt I. In 1510 and 1511 he was twice elected rector of the University of Krakow. He opposed the clergy's dominance over the secular estate. An unconventional thinker, he hypothesized t...
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Aloisio Galea
1851 - 1905 (54 years)
Aloisio Galea was a Maltese theologian and minor philosopher. He specialised mostly in moral philosophy. Life Galea was born in Valletta in 1851. He studied at the bishop’s seminary and at the University of Malta. He was ordained a priest in 1874. His main intellectual endeavour was to study, elaborate upon and teach Thomistic writings and doctrines, of which he was an expert. Specifically, he applied his studies to his pastoral work, particularly by focusing on Aquinas’ moral philosophy. Galea died in 1905.
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Anders Celsius
1701 - 1744 (43 years)
Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 proposed the Centigrade temperature scale which was later renamed Celsius in his honour.
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Ngaire Kerse
Ngaire Margaret Kerse is a New Zealand medical academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the University of Auckland. Academic career After a 1998 PhD titled 'Health promotion and older people : a general practice intervention study' at the University of Melbourne, Kerse moved to the University of Auckland, rising to full professor. Notable students include Valerie Wright-St Clair.
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Kurt H. Debus
1908 - 1983 (75 years)
Kurt Heinrich Debus was a German-American rocket engineer and NASA director. Born in Germany, he was a member of the Schutzstaffel during World War II, where he served as a V-weapons flight test director. Following the war, he was brought to the United States via Operation Paperclip, and directed the design, development, construction and operation of NASA's Saturn launch facilities. He became the first director of NASA's Launch Operations Center , and, under him, NASA conducted 150 launches of military missiles and space vehicles, including 13 launches of the Saturn V rocket as part of the A...
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Lorentz M. Irgens
#17133
Hermann von dem Busche
1468 - 1534 (66 years)
Hermann von dem Busche was a German humanist writer, known for his Vallum humanitatis . He was a pupil of Rudolph von Langen. Vallum humanitatis, sive Humaniorum litterarum contra obrectatores vindiciae was in effect a manifesto for the humanist movement of the time.
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William Roscoe
1753 - 1831 (78 years)
William Roscoe was an English banker, lawyer, and briefly a Member of Parliament. He is best known as one of England's first abolitionists, and as the author of the poem for children The Butterfly's Ball, and the Grasshopper's Feast. In his day he was also respected as a historian and art collector, as well as a botanist and miscellaneous writer.
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Jacob Ungerer
1840 - 1920 (80 years)
Jacob Ungerer was a German sculptor and Professor of Fine Arts. Life Jacob Ungerer was born and died in Munich. On his father's side he descended from a family of Munich Cafetiers and brewery owners who had grown rich in the 19th century and who had become technical pioneers . Jacob Ungerer's mother came from a glass blower family from Zwiesel.
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Marian Zdziechowski
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Marian Zdziechowski was a Polish philosopher, Slavist, publicist and cultural historian. He was a critic of fascist and communist totalitarianism, and was considered a representative of catastrophism and philosophical pessimism. He was a brother of the writer Kazimierz Zdziechowski.
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J. Donald Hill
#17138
Gerrit Smith
1797 - 1874 (77 years)
Gerrit Smith , also spelled Gerritt Smith, was an American social reformer, abolitionist, businessman, public intellectual, and philanthropist. Married to Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, Smith was a candidate for President of the United States in 1848, 1856, and 1860, but only served a single term in the House of Representatives from 1853 to 1854.
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Lodovico delle Colombe
1565 - 1616 (51 years)
Lodovico delle Colombe was an Italian Aristotelian scholar, famous for his battles with Galileo Galilei in a series of controversies in physics and astronomy. Early life Delle Colombe was born in Florence in the second half of the 16th century. A date of January 20, 1565 has been suggested, but the source for this is unknown. Likewise nothing is known of his family, except that he was of noble origin, or of his education. He became a member of the Accademia Fiorentina when Francesco Nori was its consul and was also a member of the Consiglio dei Dugento, the advisory body to the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
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Victor C. Vaughan
1851 - 1929 (78 years)
Victor Clarence Vaughan was an American physician, medical researcher, educator, and academic administrator. From 1891 to 1921 he was the dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, which rose to national prominence under his leadership.
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John Morgan
1735 - 1789 (54 years)
John Morgan , "founder of Public Medical Instruction in America," was co-founder of the Medical College at the University of Pennsylvania, the first medical school in Colonial America. He served as the second chief physician and director general of the Continental Army, an early name for the Surgeon General of the United States Army. He was an early member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1766, where he served as curator from 1769 to 1770.
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Franz Naegele
1778 - 1851 (73 years)
Franz Karl Naegele was a German obstetrician born in Düsseldorf. His son, Hermann Franz Naegele , was also a noted obstetrician. He earned his medical degree from the University of Bamberg, afterwards opening a medical practice in Barmen. In 1807, he became an associate professor at the University of Heidelberg, where in 1810 he was appointed a full professor of obstetrics.
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Hideaki Kaneto
#17144
Kazimierz Pochwalski
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Kazimierz Teofil Pochwalski was a Polish painter known primarily for his portraits, although he produced works in a wide variety of genres. Early life Pochwalski was born in Kraków on 25 December 1855 and came from a family that produced several generations of painters and his younger brother Władysław also became a well-known artist. From 1871 to 1879, he studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts under Jan Matejko, then attended the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, from 1879 to 1888. This was followed by studies in Vienna and Paris, where he was influenced by the work of Léon Bonnat.
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Jan of Stobnica
1470 - 1519 (49 years)
Jan of Stobnica , was a Polish philosopher, scientist and geographer of the early 16th century. Life Jan of Stobnica was educated at the Jagiellonian University , where he taught as professor between 1498 and 1514. He is the author of numerous works on the subjects of logic, grammar, astronomy, geography, mathematics, music, natural sciences, and ethics.
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Göran Liljestrand
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Göran Liljestrand , Swedish pharmacologist, known for the discovery of the Euler-Liljestrand mechanism. Liljestrand was born in Gothenburg but finished school at the Norra Real school in Stockholm, before matriculating at the University College of Stockholm in 1904. He continued his studies at the Karolinska Institute, completed his medicine kandidat degree in 1909, the Licentiate of Medical Science degree in 1915, and his doctorate in 1917, becoming docent of physiology at the Institute the same year. He held the professorship in pharmacology and physiology at the Karolinska Institute from 1...
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Publius Anteius Antiochus
150 - 200 (50 years)
Publius Anteius Antiochus, or Antiochus of Aegae , was a sophist—or, as he claimed to be, a Cynic philosopher—of ancient Rome, from the Cilician port city of Aegeae . He lived around the 2nd century AD, during the reigns of the Roman emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, and is known from a number of inscriptions that indicate him to have been a student of Philostratus, as well as a Syrian named Dardanus and a certain Milesian named Dionysius.
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Frances Melville
1873 - 1962 (89 years)
Frances Helen Melville , was a Scottish suffragist, advocate for higher education for women in Scotland, and one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Edinburgh in 1892. She was president of the British Federation of University Women from 1935 to 1942.
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Heymeric de Campo
1395 - 1460 (65 years)
Heymeric de Campo was a Dutch theologian and scholastic philosopher. He was a prominent Albertist, and forerunner of Nicholas of Cusa. He studied at the University of Paris, and taught at Cologne , and Leuven.
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Tomáš Štítný ze Štítného
1333 - 1409 (76 years)
Tomáš Štítný ze Štítného was a Czech nobleman, writer, theologian, translator, and Christian preacher. Tomáš Štítný came from a lower nobility from the Štítná fortress External links Reprint from 1852, some of his manuscripts
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