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,
#17151
Markus Reiner
1886 - 1976 (90 years)
Markus Reiner was an Israeli scientist and a major figure in rheology. Biography Reiner was born in 1886 in Czernowitz, Bukovina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and obtained a degree in Civil Engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna . After the First World War, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine, where he worked as a civil engineer under the British mandate. Reiner married Margalit Obernik and had two children, Ephraim and Hana. He later remarried Dr. Rivka Schoenfeld and had two daughters, Dorit and Shlomit. His granddaughter is Prof. Tal Ilan. After the founding of the state of Israel, he became a professor at the Technion in Haifa.
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Eugène Dupréel
1879 - 1967 (88 years)
Eugène Dupréel was a Belgian philosopher. He has been professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles from 1907 to 1950, teaching logic, metaphysics, greek philosophy, moral philosophy and sociological theory. He developed an ethical theory and a theory of knowledge deeply influenced by sociology, and worked closely with the Institut de Sociologie Solvay. Leader of the "École de Bruxelles", he had a major influence on the argumentation theorist Chaïm Perelman and thus has been instrumental in the renewal of rhetoric.
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Wiktor Dega
1896 - 1995 (99 years)
Wiktor Dega was a Polish surgeon and orthopedist who was well known for his work on polio. Dega served as an expert for the World Health Organization and was one of the founders of the Polish Orthopedic Society. He created new apparatus and devices to help accident victims and survivors of polio, as well as new therapies and operations for congenital dislocations of the hip.
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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Max Seiffert
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Maximilian Seiffert was a German musicologist and editor of Baroque music. Biography Seiffert was born in Beeskow an der Spree, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a teacher. He was first educated at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, in Berlin, where he studied under Philipp Spitta, and then at the University of Berlin where he received a Ph.D. in 1891 for his dissertation J. P. Sweelinck und seine direkten deutschen Schüler .
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Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Andrew Seth, FBA, DCL , who changed his name to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in 1898 to fulfill the terms of a bequest, was a Scottish philosopher. His brother was James Seth, also a philosopher. Early life and education Their father, Smith Kinmont Seth, was the son of a farmer from Fife and a bank clerk in the head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Their mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Andrew Little a farmer from Berwickshire. An elder brother died in infancy.
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Gerald Heard
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Henry FitzGerald Heard , commonly called Gerald Heard, was a British-born American historian, science writer and broadcaster, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Taro Takemi
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Taro Takemi, , was a Japanese physician who served as 11th President of the Japan Medical Association for 25 years from 1957 to 1982, and also served as president of the World Medical Association from 1975 to 1976.
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John Macmurray
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher. His thought both moved beyond and was critical of the modern tradition, whether rationalist or empiricist. His thought may be classified as personalist, as his writings focused primarily on the nature of human beings. He viewed persons in terms of their relationality and agency, rather than the modern tendency to characterize them in terms of individualism and cognition.
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Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera, OBE, JP, was a Sri Lankan academic, scholar and diplomat best known for his Malalasekara English-Sinhala Dictionary. He was Ceylon's first Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Ceylon's High Commissioner to Canada, the United Kingdom and Ceylon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. He was the Professor Emeritus in Pali and Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
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Peter Choong
Peter Fook Meng Choong is an Australian doctor and professor who specializes in orthopaedics. He is the Director of Orthopaedics at St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne and the Hugh Devine Chair of Surgery at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, he became the first surgeon to perform a 3D-printed heel transplant.
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Ernst Gräfenberg
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Ernst Gräfenberg was a German-born physician and scientist. He is known for developing the intra-uterine device , and for his studies of the role of the woman's urethra in orgasm. The G-spot is named after him.
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Henry M. Sheffer
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Henry Maurice Sheffer was an American logician. Life and career Sheffer was a Polish Jew born in the western Ukraine, who immigrated to the USA in 1892 with his parents and six siblings. He studied at the Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University, learning logic from Josiah Royce, and completing his undergraduate degree in 1905, his master's in 1907, and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1908.
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Richard Kroner
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Richard Kroner was a German neo-Hegelian philosopher, known for his Von Kant bis Hegel , a classic history of German idealism written from the neo-Hegelian point of view. He was a Christian, from a Jewish background. He is known for his formulation of Hegel as 'the Protestant Aquinas'.
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Ray Farquharson
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Ray Fletcher Farquharson was a Canadian medical doctor, university professor, and medical researcher. Born in Claude, Ontario, he attended and taught at the University of Toronto for most of his life, and was trained and employed at Toronto General Hospital. With co-researcher Arthur Squires, Farquharson was responsible for the discovery of the Farquharson phenomenon, an important principle of endocrinology, which is that administering external hormones suppresses the natural production of that hormone.
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Gunnar Dahlberg
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Gunnar Dahlberg was a Swedish physician, eugenist and geneticist. From 1922 to 1924 he was the assistant of Herman Lundborg at Statens institut för rasbiologi. In 1935, when Lundborg retired, Dahlberg succeeded him as the head of the institute. Dahlberg held the post until his death in 1956 and was succeeded by the geneticist Jan Arvid Böök.
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Sigmund Spaeth
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth was an American musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music for the general public. His extensive knowledge of both the classical repertoire and popular song enabled him to trace the melodies of current hits back to earlier sources; this talent garnered him fame as the "Tune Detective," a role he played as an entertainer, educator, and as an expert witness in cases of plagiarism and infringement of copyrighted music.
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Paul Grice
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle , which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
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Heinrich Frenkel
1860 - 1931 (71 years)
Heinrich Simon Frenkel was a Swiss physician and neurologist born in Heiden, a town overlooking Lake Constance. He was an early practitioner of neuro-rehabilitation, advocating a regimen of special exercises for patients with neurological disorders.
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Guillermo Feliú Cruz
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Guillermo Feliú Cruz was a Chilean historian, bibliographer and librarian. He learned historical method by José Toribio Medina who later successfully proposed Feliú Cruz as curator of Biblioteca Americana in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.
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Joseph Müller-Blattau
1895 - 1976 (81 years)
Joseph Maria Müller-Blattau was a German musicologist and National Socialist cultural official. He is regarded as a "nestor of Saarbrücken musicology" but also as a "singer of a musical seizure of power" because of his activities in National Socialism.
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Charles De Koninck
1906 - 1965 (59 years)
Charles De Koninck was a Belgian-Canadian Thomist philosopher and theologian. As director of the Department of Philosophy at the Université Laval in Quebec, he influenced Catholic philosophy in French Canada and also influenced Catholic philosophers in English Canada and the United States. The author of many books and articles in French and English, he contributed to a variety of philosophical fields including natural philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, and political philosophy, but he also wrote on theology, especially Mariology.
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Émile Achard
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
Émile Charles Achard was a French internist born in Paris. In Paris, he served as médecin des hôpitaux , later becoming a professor of general pathology and therapeutics. In 1910, he was appointed professor of internal medicine at the University of Paris . During his career, he also served as a physician at Hôpital Cochin.
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Hans Ruin
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Hans Waldemar Ruin was a Finnish philosopher and writer of Swedish-Finnish extraction. Biography Ruin was the son of Professor Waldemar Ruin and Flora Lindholm. He married Karin "Kaisi" Sievers in 1917, daughter of physician Klas Richard Sievers and Freifrau Karin von Bonsdorff. He had two children, Martina and Olof, and maternal grandfather to David and Marika Lagercrantz. His grandchild was also named Hans Ruin and became a philosopher.
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Olaf Stapledon
1886 - 1950 (64 years)
William Olaf Stapledon – known as Olaf Stapledon – was a British philosopher and author of science fiction. In 2014, he was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. Life Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey, on the Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire, the only son of William Clibbett Stapledon and Emmeline Miller. The first six years of his life were spent with his parents at Port Said, Egypt. He was educated at Abbotsholme School in Derbyshire and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA degree in Modern History in 1909, promoted to an MA degree in 1913. After a brie...
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Isak Jundell
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Isak Jundell , née Jundelsky, was a Russian-born Swedish pediatrician. He was Professor of Pediatrics at the Karolinska Institute, a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute and was the first editor-in-chief of Acta Paediatrica.
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Stanley Victor Keeling
1894 - 1979 (85 years)
Stanley Victor Keeling , usually cited as S. V. Keeling, was a British philosopher, formerly a reader at University College London . He is best known for his 1934 monograph Descartes, printed in a second edition in 1968, which for decades served as the standard English introduction to the philosophy of Descartes. Keeling is also known for his 1934 annotated edition of Philosophical Studies by J. M. E. McTaggart. Honoring his passion for ancient, especially Greek, philosophy the UCL Department of Philosophy administer an annual memorial lecture, biennial colloquium and a postgraduate scholarsh...
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Victor Kraft
1880 - 1975 (95 years)
Victor Kraft was an Austrian philosopher. He is best known for being a member of the Vienna Circle. Early life and education Kraft studied philosophy, geography and history at the University of Vienna. He participated in the events of the university's Philosophical Society, as well as with private circles . He received in 1903 his Ph.D. with a dissertation on "The Knowledge of the External World". Then he moved to Berlin to continue his studies under Georg Simmel, Wilhelm Dilthey and Carl Stumpf at the University of Berlin. Kraft started working in 1912 at the university's library, where he was a scientific civil servant until 1939.
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Caroline Durieux
1886 - 1989 (103 years)
Caroline Wogan Durieux was an American printmaker, painter, and educator. She was a Professor Emeritus at both Louisiana State University, where she worked from 1943 to 1964 and at Newcomb College of Tulane University
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Emilio Oribe
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Emilio Nicolás Oribe , was a Uruguayan poet, essayist, philosopher, and doctor. A professor at the University of the Republic, Uruguay, Oribe was dean of the university's Faculty of Humanities and Sciences and a member of the Uruguayan Academy of Letters.
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Frederick Maguire
1888 - 1953 (65 years)
Major General Frederick Arthur Maguire, was an Australian physician, gynaecologist, and soldier, who spent much of his career with the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, the University of Sydney and in the service of the Australian Army Medical Corps. Maguire served as Director General Australian Army Medical Services from 1941 to 1942 during the Second World War, and was later a founding member and chairman of the Australian Regional Council of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
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Edward Sayers
1902 - 1985 (83 years)
Sir Edward George Sayers was a New Zealand medical doctor, parasitologist, Methodist missionary, military medical administrator, consultant physician and, from 1958 to 1968, Dean of the University of Otago, School of Medicine. Having trained as a doctor, from 1927 to 1934 he worked at the Methodist mission in the Solomon Islands where he carried out fieldwork in the treatment of malaria. The significance of this work became apparent when Sayers used his knowledge to reduce deaths of American, Australia and New Zealand military forces during the invasion of Pacific Islands during World War II.
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Fyodor Shcherbatskoy
1866 - 1942 (76 years)
Fyodor Ippolitovich Shcherbatskoy or Stcherbatsky , often referred to in the literature as F. Th. Stcherbatsky, was a Russian Indologist who, in large part, was responsible for laying the foundations in the Western world for the scholarly study of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy. He was born in Kielce, Poland , and died at the Borovoye Resort in northern Kazakhstan.
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J. L. Mackie
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
John Leslie Mackie was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong , opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered. His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy.
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Leon Tochowicz
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Leon Tochowicz was a Polish internist and cardiologist. For three terms he was a rector of the Medical Academy in Kraków , and was referred to as the "founder of the Kraków school of cardiology". He was the author of nearly one hundred original research papers, mostly in the field of clinical cardiology, and was the initiator of the construction of the Institute of Pediatrics in Kraków-Prokocim, nowadays the University Children's Hospital in Kraków.
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Zoltán Gárdonyi
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Zoltán Gárdonyi was a Hungarian composer and musicologist. He taught at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music for 26 years. Life and work Gárdonyi was born in Budapest. His mother, the pianist Maria Weigl, studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music with Liszt's pupil, István Thomán, at the same time and in the same class as Béla Bartók. At the age of 17, Gárdonyi began his studies in composition with Zoltán Kodály at the Liszt Academy in Budapest. After studying with Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schering in Berlin, he taught as a professor at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest from 1941 until 1967.
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Sara Josephine Baker
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Sara Josephine Baker was an American physician notable for making contributions to public health, especially in the immigrant communities of New York City. Her fight against the damage that widespread urban poverty and ignorance caused to children, especially newborns, is perhaps her most lasting legacy. In 1917, she noted that babies born in the United States faced a higher mortality rate than soldiers fighting in World War I, drawing a great deal of attention to her cause. She also is known for tracking down Mary Mallon, better known as Typhoid Mary.
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Oswald Jonas
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Oswald Jonas was a music theorist and musicologist and student of Heinrich Schenker. Despite Schenker's conservative nationalist views Jonas was an admirer of Karl Kraus. In 1935, Jonas founded the Schenker Institut and began publishing Der Dreiklang with Felix Salzer. The Oswald Jonas Memorial Collection, housed at the University of California, Riverside Library, holds the complete diaries of Schenker and much of the correspondence and manuscripts of Erwin Ratz, Jonas's first student. His primary students include Felix Salzer, Ernst Oster, and Sylvan Kalib.
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Ernesto Buonaiuti
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Ernesto Buonaiuti was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists. As a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current.
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Johannes Nobel
1887 - 1960 (73 years)
Johannes Nobel was a German indologist and Buddhist scholar. Early life and education Johannes Nobel was born on 25 June 1887 in Forst . He studied Indo-European languages, Arabic, Turkish and Sanskrit at the University of Greifswald from 1907, then from 1908 at the Friedrich Wilhelms University Berlin. In 1911 he completed his PhD thesis on the history of the Alamkãraśāstra, and decided to work as a librarian. In 1915 he passed the library examinations and found employment at the Old Royal Library in Berlin. In the First World War, Nobel joined the Landsturm and was temporarily employed by t...
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Robert Aim Lennie
1889 - 1961 (72 years)
Robert Aim Lennie was Regius Professor of Midwifery at the University of Glasgow from 1946 to 1955. Lennie was born at Cambuslang, Glasgow in 1889 the son of Ritchie Lennie , an oil and colour manufacturer, from Kincardine, Perthshire, and his wife Isabella Crawford Smith, daughter of Brodie Smith, a drapery merchant, from Leslie, Fife. R.A. Lennie graduated MB from the University of Glasgow in 1912, and was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 1936.
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Ferdinand Sauerbruch
1875 - 1951 (76 years)
Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch was a German surgeon. His major work was on the use of negative-pressure chambers for surgery. Biography Sauerbruch was born in Barmen , Germany. He studied medicine at the Philipps University of Marburg, the University of Greifswald, the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, and the University of Leipzig, from the last of which he graduated in 1902. He went to Breslau in 1903, where he developed the Sauerbruch chamber, a pressure chamber for operating on the open thorax, which he demonstrated in 1904. This invention was a breakthrough in thorax medicine and allowed heart and lung operations to take place at greatly reduced risk.
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Pauline Alderman
1893 - 1983 (90 years)
Edith Pauline Alderman was an American musicologist and composer. She was the founder and the first Chairwoman of the Department of Music History and Literature at the University of Southern California, between 1952 and 1960.
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Katharine Lloyd-Williams
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Katharine Georgina Lloyd-Williams CBE was a British anaesthetist, general practitioner and medical educator. She was a consultant anaesthetist at the Royal Free Hospital from 1934 and dean of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine from 1945, retiring from both posts in 1962.
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Eric D'Ath
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Eric Frederick D'Ath was a New Zealand pathologist, and was professor of pathology and medical jurisprudence at the University of Otago from 1929 until 1962. In the 1965 Queen's Birthday Honours, D'Ath was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, in recognition of his services as professor of pathology and medical jurisprudence at the University of Otago. In 1975, he was conferred an honorary Doctor of Science degree by the University of Otago.
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Charles Leonard Hamblin
1922 - 1985 (63 years)
Charles Leonard Hamblin was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology in Sydney. Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack. This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack. The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. In philosophy, Hamblin is known for his book Fallacies, a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic.
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Günther Jacoby
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Friedrich Günther Jacoby was a German theologian and philosopher. Life Born in Königsberg, Jacoby studied Protestant theology there from 1900 to 1903. He acquired the licentiate degree with a text interpretation of the Biblical book of Jeremiah. After the state examination for the higher school service in religion, Hebrew and German, which he passed in 1904, he studied philosophy in East Prussia and Berlin while working as an assistant teacher and received his doctorate in 1906 under Friedrich Paulsen with the work Herders "Kalligone" und ihre Verhältnis zu Kants "Kritik der Urteilskraft". Tw...
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Nikos Nissiotis
1924 - 1986 (62 years)
Nikolaos "Nikos" A. Nissiotis was a Greek theologian, philosopher, university professor, and basketball coach. Basketball coaching career Nissiotis is largely credited with developing the sport of basketball in Greece. He was the head coach of the Greek League club Panellinios Athens, during its famous "Golden Five", or "Fabulous Five" era, during the 1950s decade. With Panellinios, he won 3 Greek League championships, in the years 1953, 1955, and 1957. He also won two European-wide International Club Tournament Championships with the club, as he won the 1955 Brussels Basketball Tournament and the 1956 San Remo Basketball Tournament.
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Paul-Louis Landsberg
1901 - 1944 (43 years)
Paul-Louis Landsberg was a twentieth century Existentialist philosopher who is known for his works The Experience of Death and The Moral Problem of Suicide. Landsberg lectured at the Universities of Bonn, Madrid and Paris, among others. He was a pupil of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler, continuing their work in Phenomenology to tackle several vital subjects, including personal identity, death and suicide. He was a close friend of the Christian Existentialist Emmanuel Mounier and a key contributor to the philosophical journal Esprit .
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