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,
#17251
Pierre-Joseph Desault
1738 - 1795 (57 years)
Pierre-Joseph Desault was a French anatomist and surgeon. Biography Pierre-Joseph Desault was born in Vouhenans, Franche-Comté. He was destined for a career in the Church, but his own inclination was towards the study of medicine; after learning something from the barber-surgeon of his native village, he was settled as an apprentice in the military hospital of Belfort, where he acquired some knowledge of anatomy and military surgery. Going to Paris at about twenty years of age, he later opened a school of anatomy there in the winter of 1766, the success of which excited the jealousy of the established teachers and professors, who tried to make him give up his lectures.
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Christian Friedrich Nasse
1778 - 1851 (73 years)
Christian Friedrich Nasse was a German physician and psychiatrist born in Bielefeld. He studied medicine at the University of Halle under physiologist Johann Christian Reil . At Halle, Achim von Arnim and Friedrich von Raumer were among his friends. Following graduation returned to Bielefeld as a general practitioner, later serving as director of a hospital for the poor. From 1819 until his death in 1851, he worked as a professor at the University of Bonn.
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Ferdinand Adolf Kehrer
1837 - 1914 (77 years)
Ferdinand Adolf Kehrer was a German gynecologist who was a native of Guntersblum in Rhenish Hesse. He was the father of neurologist Ferdinand Adalbert Kehrer . He studied medicine at the University of Giessen under Ferdinand von Ritgen , at Munich with Karl von Hecker and in Vienna under Karl von Braun-Fernwald . From 1872 to 1881, he was a "full professor" of obstetrics at the University of Giessen, where he also served as director of the Frauenklinik. In 1881 he relocated to the University of Heidelberg as chair of gynecology.
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Fritz Schultze
1846 - 1908 (62 years)
Fritz Schultze was a German philosopher. Schultze was born at Celle and educated at Jena, Göttingen, and Munich. He was professor extraordinary of philosophy at Jena in 1875 and 1876, when he was appointed professor of philosophy and pedagogy at the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Dresden.
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Damião de Góis
1502 - 1574 (72 years)
Damião de Góis , born in Alenquer, Portugal, was an important Portuguese humanist philosopher. He was a friend and student of Erasmus. He was appointed secretary to the Portuguese factory in Antwerp in 1523 by King John III of Portugal. He compiled one of the first accounts on Ethiopian Christianity.
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Alfred Williams Momerie
1848 - 1900 (52 years)
Alfred Williams Momerie was an English cleric and academic of Broad Church views. Life Born in London on 22 March 1848, he was the only child of Isaac Vale Mummery , a Congregational minister, and his wife, a daughter of Thomas George Williams of Hackney; he used the form Momerie of the Huguenot name Mummery from 1879. He was educated at the City of London School and Edinburgh University, where he won the Horsliehill and Miller scholarship with the medal and Bruce prize for metaphysics, and graduated M.A. in 1875 and D.Sc. in 1876. From Edinburgh he went on to St. John's College, Cambridge, w...
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Bernard J. Ransil
#17258
Kenryo Kanamatsu
1915 - 1986 (71 years)
Kenryō Kanamatsu was a translator, author, and lifelong devotee of Jōdo Shinshū, sometimes called "Shin Buddhism". His seminal work, Naturalness, , was an introduction of Jōdo Shinshū to the Western world.
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Anđelko Habazin
1924 - 1978 (54 years)
Anđelko Habazin was a Croatian philosopher. Anđelko Habazin was born in Zagreb , where he graduated from the university with a degree in philosophy in 1954. He received his doctorate degree in philosophy from the University of Sarajevo in 1962. He worked as a professor at the University of Banja Luka , and then at the University of Zadar from 1974 until 1978. He died in Zadar, aged 54.
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Stanisław Bohusz-Siestrzeńcewicz
1869 - 1927 (58 years)
Stanisław Bohusz-Siestrzeńcewicz was a Polish-Lithuanian painter and illustrator. Biography He was born to a noble family. In 1888, he began his artistic studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Bogdan Willewalde. This was followed by enrollment at the Académie Julian in Paris. Later, he took private lessons from Józef Brandt at his studio in Munich and married his daughter Krystyną. They were divorced in 1905.
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Pieter Boddaert
1730 - 1795 (65 years)
Pieter Boddaert was a Dutch physician and naturalist. Early life, family and education Boddaert was the son of a Middelburg jurist and poet by the same name . The younger Pieter obtained his M.D. at the University of Utrecht in 1764.
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Michael J. Zinner
#17263
Frans H. Van Eemeren
#17264
Matthew Turner
Matthew Turner , a Liverpool physician, is considered to be the author or co-author of the 1782 pamphlet, Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, the first published work of avowed atheism in Britain. Turner was also a pioneer in the use of ether for medical purposes, and wrote a pamphlet on the subject. In a footnote, Turner was the man who introduced Josiah Wedgwood to Thomas Bentley in Liverpool, a friendship which led to the formation of the company that produced the famous pottery.
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Lars Frodesen
1889 - 1921 (32 years)
Lars Frodesen was a Danish writer and philosopher from Sønderborg, in Syddanmark. Having been heavily inspired by Blaise Pascal he mainly wrote pessimistic novels, and published essays on modern philosophy and philosophical anthropology. Frodesen's most important work Om planter og gartnere is an exploration of relations between pedagogy, literature, art, and nature. The goal of forming a human being in the process of upbringing is, he claims, creating a person, who thanks to her openness to experiences, is ready to live a life which has a structure mimicking that of the work of literature. S...
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Bernard Germain de Lacépède
1756 - 1825 (69 years)
Bernard-Germain-Étienne de La Ville-sur-Illon, comte de Lacépède or La Cépède was a French naturalist and an active freemason. He is known for his contribution to the Comte de Buffon's great work, the Histoire Naturelle.
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Gabriel von Max
1840 - 1915 (75 years)
Gabriel Cornelius Ritter von Max was a Prague-born Austrian painter, and professor of history painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He was also a collector of anthropological artifacts. Biography He was born Gabriel Cornelius Max, the son of the sculptor Josef Max and Anna Schumann. He received his first artistic training in history painting from his father.
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Miftahetdin Akmulla
1831 - 1895 (64 years)
Miftakhetdin Kamaletdinovich Kamaletdinov, known as Akmulla was a Bashkir, Kazakh and Tatar educator, poet and philosopher. Biography Born 14 December 1831 in the village of Tuhanbay, Kulil-Minsk volost Belebeyevsk Uyezd, Orenburg Governorate .
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Raimo O. Sulkava
#17270
Paolo Costa
1771 - 1836 (65 years)
Paolo Costa was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. The son of Domenico Costa and Lucrezia Ricciarelli, he began his studies in 1780 in Ravenna under modest teachers. He then moved to Padua and studied there under Melchiorre Cesarotti and Simone Stratico. His studies were interrupted by the French invasion and occupation in 1797, during which he held government roles in both Ravenna and Bologna.
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Henry Draper
1837 - 1882 (45 years)
Henry Draper was an American doctor and amateur astronomer. He is best known today as a pioneer of astrophotography. Life and work Henry Draper's father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, botanist, and professor at New York University; he was also the first to photograph the moon through a telescope . Draper's mother was Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, daughter of the personal physician to the Emperor of Brazil. His niece, Antonia Maury was also an astronomer.
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Costanzo Varolio
1543 - 1575 (32 years)
Costanzo Varolio, Latinized as Constantius Varolius , was an Italian anatomist and a papal physician to Gregory XIII. Varolio was born in Bologna. He was a pupil of the anatomist Giulio Cesare Aranzio, himself a pupil of Vesalius. He received his doctorate in medicine in 1567. In 1569 the Senate of the University of Bologna created an extraordinary chair in surgery for him with responsibility to teach anatomy as well and where a statue of him is housed at the Anatomical Theatre of the Archiginnasio. Later he is believed to have taught at the Sapienza University of Rome although he is not listed on the roll there.
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Metrodorus of Chios
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Metrodorus of Chios was a Greek philosopher, belonging to the school of Democritus, and an important forerunner of Epicurus. Metrodorus was a pupil of Nessus of Chios, or, as some accounts prefer, of Democritus himself. He is said to have taught Diogenes of Smyrna, who, in turn, taught Anaxarchus.
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Henry Brewster Stanton
1805 - 1887 (82 years)
Henry Brewster Stanton was an American abolitionist, social reformer, attorney, journalist and politician. His writing was published in the New York Tribune, the New York Sun, and William Lloyd Garrison's Anti-Slavery Standard and The Liberator. He was elected to the New York State Senate in 1850 and 1851. His wife, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was a world renowned leading figure of the early women's rights movement.
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Cratippus of Pergamon
100 BC - 100 BC (0 years)
Cratippus of Pergamon , was a leading Peripatetic philosopher of the 1st century BC who taught at Mytilene and Athens. The only aspects of his teachings which are known to us are what Cicero records concerning divination.
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Edme-Louis Daubenton
1730 - 1785 (55 years)
Edme-Louis Daubenton was a French naturalist. Daubenton was the cousin of another French naturalist, Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton. Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon engaged Edme-Louis Daubenton to supervise the coloured illustrations for the monumental Histoire Naturelle . The Planches enluminée started to appear in 1765 and finally counted 1,008 plates, all engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet , and all painted by hand. The Parisian publisher Panckoucke published a version without text between 1765 and 1783. More than 80 artists took part in the realization of the original paintings....
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Giuseppe Ferrari
1811 - 1876 (65 years)
Giuseppe Ferrari was an Italian philosopher, historian and politician. Biography He was born at Milan, studied law at Pavia and graduated in 1831. A follower of Romagnosi and Giovan Battista Vico, his first works were an article in the Biblioteca Italiana entitled "Mente di Gian Domenico Romagnosi" , and a complete edition of the works of Vico, prefaced by an appreciation .
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George E. Burch
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
George Edward Burch, M.D. was a shaper of modern cardiology during the middle part of the twentieth century, whose accomplishments included elucidating the fundamental physiological basis of important cardiovascular diseases, in addition to contributions to the teaching of medicine and cardiology. He was chairman of the Department of Medicine at Tulane University for many years. He is best known for his research in electrocardiography and vectorcardiography, for contributions to understanding viral-based cardiovascular diseases, for 12 books in the field of medicine and cardiology, and for more than 850 publications in the scholarly literature.
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William Townsend Porter
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
William Townsend Porter was an American physician, physiologist, and medical educator who spent most of his career at Harvard Medical School. He founded the Harvard Apparatus company, which produced laboratory equipment for teaching and research in physiology, and was the founding editor of the American Journal of Physiology.
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Kyusaku Ogino
1882 - 1975 (93 years)
was a Japanese medical doctor specializing in obstetrics and gynecology. His natural father's family name was Nakamura, but Kyusaku was adopted by the Ogino family in 1901. Ogino studied infertility and developed a method to estimate the fertile period of the menstrual cycle based on the length of a woman's past cycles. This knowledge could be used by couples seeking pregnancy to time intercourse so as to maximize the chances of conception.
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Nicholas Zammit
1815 - 1899 (84 years)
Nicholas Zammit was a Maltese medical doctor, an architect, an artistic designer, and a major philosopher. His area of specialisation in philosophy was chiefly ethics. Throughout his philosophical career he did not adhere to just one intellectual position. Roughly two-thirds into his life, Zammit passed from a liberal way of thinking to a conservative one. This does not mean that there are no carry-overs, developments, or continuations between the two phases, or that Zammit himself acknowledged such a division. Notwithstanding, the development suggests that an analysis of Zammit's works will ...
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Denis Arnold
1926 - 1986 (60 years)
Denis Midgley Arnold was a British musicologist. Biography After being employed in the extramural department of Queen's University, Belfast, he became a Lecturer in Music at the University of Hull, and from 1969 to 1975 was Professor of Music at The University of Nottingham. From 1975 he was Heather Professor of Music at Oxford University. He served as editor of Music & Letters.
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Chunyu Kun
500 BC - Present (2526 years)
Chunyu Kun was a wit, Confucian philosopher, emissary, and official during the Chinese Warring States period. He was a contemporary and colleague of Mencius. In the Records of the Grand Historian, Chunyu Kun appears in Linzi, the capital of the northern state of Qi, as an adviser to the chief minister under King Wei of Qi, and as a master scholar at the Jixia Academy, the foremost institution of learning in ancient China. He is said to be "a man of Qi who lived with his wife's family. He was less than five feet tall. Thanks to his wit and his ready tongue he was sent several times as an envo...
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Kanaka Dasa
1509 - 1609 (100 years)
Kanaka Dasa was a Haridasa saint and philosopher of Dvaita Vedanta, popularly called Daasashreshta Kanakadasa from present-day Karnataka, India. He was a follower of Madhvacharya's Dvaita philosophy and a disciple of Vyasatirtha. He was a renowned composer of Carnatic music, poet, reformer and musician. He is known for his keertanas and ugabhoga, and his compositions in the Kannada language for Carnatic music. Like other Haridasas, he used simple Kannada and native metrical forms for his compositions.
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Jim Corbett
1875 - 1955 (80 years)
Colonel Edward James Corbett was an Indian-born British hunter, tracker, naturalist, and author who hunted a number of man-eating tigers and leopards in the Indian subcontinent. He held the rank of colonel in the British Indian Army and was frequently called upon by the Government of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, now the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, to kill man-eating tigers and leopards that were preying on people in the nearby villages of the Kumaon-Garhwal Regions.
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Pieter Nicolaas van Eyck
1887 - 1954 (67 years)
Pieter Nicolaas/Nicolaus van Eyck He was born Pieter Nicolaas van Eijk and changed his name to van Eyck around 1907. He worked as a foreign correspondent for the Dutch newspaper NRC in Rome and London, but also a poet, critic, essayist and philosopher from the Netherlands. Awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize in 1947.
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Thomas A. Finlay
1848 - 1940 (92 years)
Thomas Aloysius Finlay, S.J. was an Irish Catholic priest, economist, philosopher and editor. Early life He was born on 6 July 1848 near Lanesborough, the son of William Finlay, an engineer, and his wife Maria Magan; the politician Thomas Finlay, named after him, was his nephew. His father, who died in 1864, was from Fifeshire, a Protestant convert to Catholicism; his mother was a Catholic from County Cavan.
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James Jurin
1684 - 1750 (66 years)
James Jurin FRS FRCP was an English scientist and physician, particularly remembered for his early work in capillary action and in the epidemiology of smallpox vaccination. He was a staunch proponent of the work of Sir Isaac Newton and often used his gift for satire in Newton's defence.
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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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Asen Kozharov
1911 - 1988 (77 years)
Asen Todorov Kojarov was a Bulgarian philosopher, politician, yogi. He was a member of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization and the Bulgarian Communist Party. Biography He was born in 1911 as Asen Charakchiev in the town of Nevrokop, in the Salonica Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, now the town of Gotse Delchev, Bulgaria. In 1935 as a student of philosophy he was expelled from University of Sofia for communist activities and was sentenced to 12 1/2 years of imprisonment. In the prison, he illegally studied the classicists of Marxism-Leninism and guided circles in philosophy. Freed in 1940, he again joined the illegal communist movement.
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William Smith
1653 - 1735 (82 years)
Reverend William Smith was an English antiquary responsible for the cataloguing of the archives of University College, Oxford, and composing an original and controversial history of the college, The Annals of University College. Smith was a Fellow of Oxford University, from 1675 to 1704, and then the rector of Melsonby, from 1704 to 1735.
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Hugh Binning
1627 - 1653 (26 years)
Hugh Binning was a Scottish philosopher and theologian. He was born in Scotland during the reign of Charles I and was ordained in the Church of Scotland. He died in 1653, during the time of Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth of England.
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Li Kui
500 BC - 400 BC (100 years)
Li Kui was a Chinese hydraulic engineer, philosopher, and politician. He served as government minister and court advisor to Marquis Wen in the state of Wei. In 407 BC, he wrote the Book of Law . Said to have been main a been a main influence on Shang Yang, it served the basis for the codified laws of the Qin and Han dynasties.
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Nasim Amrohvi
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Nasim Amrohvi or Syed Qaim Raza Taqvi He belonged to the Taqvi Syed family. His father was Syed Barjees Hussain Taqvi and his mother was Syeda Khatoon. His grand father was Shamim Amrohvi who was bestowed the title of Farazdaq-e-Hind.
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Friedrich Kasimir Medikus
1736 - 1808 (72 years)
Friedrich Kasimir Medikus was a German physician and botanist. He was born at Grumbach and became director of the University of Mannheim and curator of the botanical garden at Mannheim. He encouraged the cultivation of locust trees in Europe.
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Lewis Milestone
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
Lewis Milestone was an American film director. Milestone directed Two Arabian Knights and All Quiet on the Western Front , both of which received the Academy Award for Best Director. He also directed The Front Page , The General Died at Dawn , Of Mice and Men , Ocean's 11 , and received the directing credit for Mutiny on the Bounty , though Marlon Brando largely appropriated his responsibilities during its production.
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Karl Ernst Theodor Schweigger
1830 - 1905 (75 years)
Karl Ernst Theodor Schweigger was a German ophthalmologist who was a native of Halle an der Saale. He was the son of scientist Johann Salomo Christoph Schweigger , inventor of an early galvanometer.
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