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,
#17551
David Roberts
1796 - 1864 (68 years)
David Roberts was a Scottish painter. He is especially known for The Holy Land, Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt, and Nubia, a prolific series of detailed lithograph prints of Egypt and the Near East that he produced from sketches he made during long tours of the region . These and his large oil paintings of similar subjects made him a prominent Orientalist painter. He was elected as a Royal Academician in 1841.
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Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet
1815 - 1898 (83 years)
Sir William Jenner, 1st Baronet, GCB, QHP, FRCP, FRS was a significant English physician primarily known for having discovered the distinction between typhus and typhoid. Biography Jenner was born at Chatham on 30 January 1815, and educated at University College London. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1837, a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1852, and in 1844 took the London M.D.
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Scipione Chiaramonti
1565 - 1652 (87 years)
Scipione Chiaramonti was an Italian philosopher and noted opponent of Galileo. Early life The Chiaramonti family was noble and wealthy, claiming to have originated in Clermont and moved to Italy in the fourteenth century. Pope Pius VII was from the same family. The son of a doctor, Scipione studied at the University of Ferrara, lodging first at the house of Cardinal Alessandro d’Este and later associating with the circle of Cardinal Curzio Sangiorgi. In 1588 he married Virginia Abbati, with whom he was to father twelve children . In 1592 he met Galileo, passing through Cesena on his way to P...
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Henry Clerke
1621 - 1687 (66 years)
Henry Clerke was an English academic and physician, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 1672. Life He was son of Thomas Clerke of Willoughby, Warwickshire, England, and matriculated at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 20 April 1635, at the age of 16. He obtained a demyship at Magdalen College, and was probationer fellow there from 1642 to 1667. He graduated B.A. on 4 December 1641, and M.A. on 21 June 1644. He was reader in logic at his college in 1643, bursar in 1653, 1656, and 1662, vice-president in 1655, and again in 1663. He seems to have submitted to the parliamentary visitors in May ...
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Juan Latino
1518 - Present (508 years)
Juan Latino was a Spanish professor of Ethiopian descent at the University of Granada during the sixteenth century. He could be considered the first African who studied at a European university and who reached a professorship on Grammar and Latin Language at the University of Granada.
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Buddhisagarsuri
1874 - 1925 (51 years)
Buddhisagarsuri was a Jain ascetic, philosopher and author from British India. Born in a Hindu family, he was influenced by a Jain monk and later was initiated in asceticism, and later elevated to the title of Acharya. He wrote more than hundred books.
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Pierre Grégoire
1540 - 1597 (57 years)
Pierre Grégoire was a French jurist and philosopher Career and key ideas Grégoire was born to a poor Catholic family in Toulouse. He studied the law and made a career for himself as an influential and at times controversial Catholic jurist. He taught law at Cahors and Toulouse from 1566 until 1582 when his patron, Charles III of Lorraine, procured a professorship in civil and canon law for him at the university of Pont à Mousson. Here Grégoire found himself colleague to the Scottish jurist William Barclay, best known for his invention of the term ‘monarchomach’ and his political treatise De Regno et Regali Potestate .
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Komitas
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Soghomon Soghomonian, ordained and commonly known as Komitas, was an Armenian priest, musicologist, composer, arranger, singer, and choirmaster, who is considered the founder of the Armenian national school of music. He is recognized as one of the pioneers of ethnomusicology.
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Richard Walker
1679 - 1764 (85 years)
Richard Walker was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Cambridge, noted as a supporter of Richard Bentley in his long legal battle with the fellowship of Trinity College. Life He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1706, Cambridge Master of Arts in 1710, Bachelor of Divinity in 1724, and Doctor of Divinity per regias literas in 1728. He was elected a Fellow of Trinity, but in 1708 left Cambridge to serve a curacy at Upwell in Norfolk. In 1717 Richard Bentley, who had a difference with the junior bursar, John Myers, removed him, and recalled Walker to Cambridge to fill his place.
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Thomas Nelson Baker Sr.
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
Reverend Dr. Thomas Nelson Baker, Sr. was a minister, author and philosopher. Born into slavery, Baker was the first African-American to receive a PhD in philosophy in the United States. Biography Baker was born in Eastville, Virginia, on August 11, 1860. His parents were Thomas Chadwick and Edith Nottingham Baker, who were slaves on Robert Nottingham's plantation in Northampton County, Virginia.
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Robert Bentley Todd
1809 - 1860 (51 years)
Robert Bentley Todd was an Irish-born physician who is best known for describing the condition postictal paralysis in his Lumleian Lectures in 1849 now known as Todd's palsy. Early life The son of physician Charles Hawkes Todd and Elizabeth Bentley , Robert was born in Dublin, Ireland, 9 April 1809. He was the younger brother of noted writer and minister Rev. James Henthorn Todd, D.D. He is the older brother of Rev. William Gowan Todd, D.D. and Armstrong Todd, MD.
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Giovanni Garzoni
1419 - 1505 (86 years)
Giovanni Garzoni was an Italian humanist and physician from Bologna, where he was professor of medicine and teacher of rhetoric. Biography Born in Bologna in 1419 as the son of Bernardo Garzoni, a physician and rhetoric. Already in his youth, Garzoni's main interest was rhetorics, when he may have been instructed by his father Bernardo Garzoni and by Giovanni Lamola, and met humanists like Leonardo Bruni. When his father became one of the physicians of pope Nicholas V , Giovanni went along with him to Rome. The earliest extant texts by Barzoni date from this period, including a 300 folio lon...
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William Angus Sinclair
1905 - 1954 (49 years)
William Angus Sinclair OBE TD FRSE DLitt was a 20th-century Scottish philosopher. Life He was born in Edinburgh on 27 September 1905 the son of Elizabeth Campbell and her husband, Captain John Sinclair of the Mercantile Marine. He was educated at George Watson's College then studied philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, graduating with an MA. In 1932 he began lecturing in logic at the University.
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John Wilson
1840 - 1901 (61 years)
"John Wilson the Revealer of Peyote" was a Caddo medicine man who introduced the Peyote plant into a religion, became a major leader in the Ghost Dance, and introduced a new peyote ceremony with teachings of Christ. John Wilson's Caddo name was Nishkû'ntu, meaning "Moon Head."
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Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider
1750 - 1822 (72 years)
Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider was a German classicist and naturalist. Biography Schneider was born at Collm in Saxony. In 1774, on the recommendation of Christian Gottlob Heine, he became secretary to the famous Strasbourg scholar Richard François Brunck, and in 1811 became professor of ancient languages and eloquence at Breslau where he died in 1822.
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Jakub Górski
1525 - 1583 (58 years)
Jakub Górski was a Polish Renaissance philosopher. Life Jakub Górski was an early Polish representative of Stoicism. He wrote a famous Dialectic and many works in grammar, rhetoric, theology and sociology. A professor at Kraków University, he was an erudite man whose Dialectic gives evidence of extensive acquaintance with new currents and authors, but he was more erudite than independent as a thinker. He tended to eclecticism and sought to reconcile the Stoics with Aristotle.
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Félix Martí Ibáñez
1911 - 1972 (61 years)
Félix Martí-Ibáñez was a physician, psychiatrist, author, and publisher, who was born in Spain, emigrated to the United States in 1939 following the Spanish Civil War when he was exiled during the Franco Era in Spain, and became an American citizen. In Spain he had served as a minister for the Second Spanish Republic. When he emigrated he settled in Manhattan.
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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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Chaim Sheba
1908 - 1971 (63 years)
Chaim Sheba was an Israeli physician, notable for being the founder of Sheba Medical Center. Biography Chaim Scheiber was born in Frasin, near Gurahumora, Bukovina, then in Austria-Hungary , to the well known Scheiber Hasidic family, a descendant of the Hasidic court of Ruzhin. As a young child he studied in heder, a school for religious studies only. He transferred from there to the 8th grade in a secular school. Influenced by his grandfather, he began medical studies in Cernăuți and completed such studies in Vienna in December 1932. In the beginning of 1933, Sheba immigrated to Mandate Pa...
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Karl Löwith
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Karl Löwith was a German philosopher in the phenomenological tradition. A student of Husserl and Heidegger, he was one of the most prolific German philosophers of the twentieth century. He is known for his two books From Hegel to Nietzsche, which describes the decline of German classical philosophy, and Meaning in History, which challenges the modern, secular progressive narrative of history, which seeks to ground the meaning of history in itself.
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Maurice Tauber
1908 - 1980 (72 years)
Maurice Falcom Tauber was an influential librarian, educator and researcher in the field of library and information sciences; he was a major actor in how technical services units in American and in international libraries were thought of and how they evolved in the 20th century. Tauber is remembered especially for his role as professor and mentor during his long tenure at Columbia University from 1944-1976. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Sophie Bledsoe Aberle
1896 - 1996 (100 years)
Sophie Bledsoe Aberle was an American anthropologist, physician and nutritionist known for her work with Pueblo people. She was one of two women first appointed to the National Science Board. Early life and education Sophie Bledsoe Herrick was born in 1896 to Albert and Clara S. Herrick in Schenectady, New York. Her paternal grandmother and namesake was the writer Sophia Bledsoe Herrick. Sophie was educated at home and had a brief marriage at age 21 to a man surnamed Aberle, which surname she chose to keep. She began attending University of California in Berkeley but switched to Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1923, a master's degree in 1925, and a Ph.D.
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H. B. Acton
1908 - 1974 (66 years)
Harry Burrows Acton was an English academic in the field of political philosophy, known for books defending the morality of capitalism, and attacking Marxism-Leninism. He in particular produced arguments on the incoherence of Marxism, which he described as a 'farrago' . His book The Illusion of the Epoch, in which this appears, is a standard point of reference. Other interests were the Marquis de Condorcet, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and Sidney Webb. Acton also endorsed a version of negative utilitarianism, according to which the reduction of su...
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Einar Hammarsten
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Einar Hammarsten was a Swedish physician and professor of pharmacy and chemistry at the Karolinska Institute from 1928 to 1957. His area of research was the chemistry of the cell nucleus, in particular nucleic acids.
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Kurt Grelling
1886 - 1942 (56 years)
Kurt Grelling was a German logician and philosopher, member of the Berlin Circle. Life and work Kurt Grelling was born on 2 March 1886 in Berlin. His father, the Doctor of Jurisprudence Richard Grelling, and his mother, Margarethe , were Jewish. Shortly after his arrival in 1905 at University of Göttingen, Grelling began a collaboration with philosopher Leonard Nelson, with whom he tried to solve Russell's paradox, which had shaken the foundations of mathematics when it was announced in 1903. Their 1908 paper included new paradoxes, including a semantic paradox that was named the Grelling–Ne...
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Carlos Real de Azúa
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Carlos Real de Azúa was a Uruguayan lawyer, professor, essayist, sociologist and historian. Biography Real de Azúa Real was born into an old Uruguayan family, the first Real de Azúa having arrived at the Río de la Plata in 1794. He was a Catholic and, in his youth, an enthusiastic fascist and anti-liberal, an admirer of the Falange Española , a fan of the right-wing journalist and politician Benito Nardone , and an outspoken critic of Batllism .
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Irvin Abell
1876 - 1949 (73 years)
Irvin Abell was a surgeon from Louisville, Kentucky. Early life Irvin Abell was born on September 13, 1876, in Lebanon, Kentucky to Sarah Silesia and William Irvin Abell. The Abell family had lived in Kentucky since 1788. He attended St Augustine's Catholic School in Lebanon. He graduated from St. Mary's College in 1894 with a Master of Arts. Abell graduated from Louisville Medical College in 1897 and then studied in Germany at the University of Marburg and the University of Berlin.
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John Daniel Wild
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
John Daniel Wild was a twentieth-century American philosopher. Wild began his philosophical career as an empiricist and realist but became an important proponent of existentialism and phenomenology in the United States.
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Andrija Štampar
1888 - 1958 (70 years)
Andrija Štampar was a distinguished scholar in the field of social medicine from Croatia. Education Štampar was born 1 September 1888 in Brodski Drenovac , at the time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in modern Požega-Slavonia County. From 1898 to 1906, he attended grammar school in Vinkovci. During his secondary schooling, Štampar was a brilliant pupil and, at that time, he wrote his first literary attempt, published in the periodical Pobratim in 1902. He enrolled at the medical school in Vienna in 1906, which was at the time the most important medical center in the world. As a medical s...
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Alexandre Koyré
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Alexandre Koyré , also anglicized as Alexander Koyre, was a French philosopher of Russian origin who wrote on the history and philosophy of science. Life Koyré was born in the city of Taganrog, Russia on 29 August 1892 into a Jewish family. His original name was Alexandr Vladimirovich Koyra . In Imperial Russia he studied in Tiflis, Rostov-on-Don and Odessa, before pursuing his studies abroad.
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Władysław Dobrzaniecki
1897 - 1941 (44 years)
Władysław Dobrzaniecki was a Polish physician and surgeon. Władysław was since 1936 head of the Saint Zofia Children Hospital in Lwów, and since 1938 titular professor of surgery at the Lviv University. He was a precursor of plastic surgery in Poland.
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Ernst Krieck
1882 - 1947 (65 years)
Ernst Krieck was a German teacher, writer, and professor. Along with Alfred Baeumler, Krieck was considered a leading National Socialist theoretical scientist. Life Before the Third Reich Ernst Krieck was born in 1882 in Vögisheim. After his graduation from junior high school, Krieck went to a teacher’s college in Karlsruhe. In 1900 he entered the Baden elementary school service; in 1904 he was transferred to Mannheim. During his following work as an elementary school teacher, he began to criticize the dominant school system as mechanical and too bureaucratic. During this time, Krieck contin...
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Alessandro Padoa
1868 - 1937 (69 years)
Alessandro Padoa was an Italian mathematician and logician, a contributor to the school of Giuseppe Peano. He is remembered for a method for deciding whether, given some formal theory, a new primitive notion is truly independent of the other primitive notions. There is an analogous problem in axiomatic theories, namely deciding whether a given axiom is independent of the other axioms.
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Paul Anton Cibis
1911 - 1965 (54 years)
Paul Anton Cibis was a clinical ophthalmologist, surgeon and pioneer of modern vitreoretinal surgery. As part of Operation Paperclip Cibis came to the United States and performed research for the U.S. Air Force and studied the effects of atomic weapons testing on the eye. He was an internationally recognized expert in retinal detachment surgery and pioneered the use of liquid silicon for this procedure.
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Leon Carnovsky
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Leon Carnovsky was an American librarian and educator who focused much of his time to the survey of libraries in the United States and around the globe. Carnovsky was recognized by American Libraries as being one of the 100 most influential figures in Library and Information Sciences.
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Alfred Bielschowsky
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Alfred Bielschowsky was a German ophthalmologist. His specialty was physiology and pathology of the eye, particularly in regards to research of eye movement, space perception and diagnosis of oculomotor anomalies.
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Zechariah Chafee
1885 - 1957 (72 years)
Zechariah Chafee Jr. was an American judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate, described as "possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century" by Richard Primus. Chafee's avid defense of freedom of speech led to Senator Joseph McCarthy calling him "dangerous" to America.
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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John Plamenatz
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.
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George Hourani
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics. Biography George Hourani was born into a prosperous British family of Lebanese Christian extraction in Didsbury, Manchester. He was the fourth of six children, having three older sisters and two younger brothers. His brothers were Albert Hourani and Cecil Hourani.
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Maurice Mandelbaum
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Maurice Mandelbaum was an American philosopher and phenomenologist . He was professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University with stints at Dartmouth College and Swarthmore College. He held two degrees from Dartmouth and a PhD from Yale University. He was known for his work in phenomenology, epistemology, philosophy of perception , and the history of ideas.
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Hjalmar August Schiøtz
1850 - 1927 (77 years)
Hjalmar August Schiøtz was a Norwegian physician, ophthalmologist and educator. Schiøtz is credited as being Norway's first professor of ophthalmology. He was born in Stavanger, Norway. In 1877 he received his medical degree from the University of Kristiania later studying ophthalmology in Vienna, where he befriended Ernst Fuchs , and in Paris, where he was employed as "directeur adjoint" in the ophthalmology laboratory at the Sorbonne. In 1884 he became head of a polyclinic for ear, nose, throat and eye diseases in Kristiania. Dating from 1898, he started teaching ophthalmology at the Oslo University Hospital, Rikshospitalet.
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Leonard Marsh
1906 - 1983 (77 years)
Leonard Charles Marsh was a Canadian social scientist and professor. Early life and education Marsh was born in England and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1928. After graduation, he studied wages and housing and conducted research for Sir William Beveridge.
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Bruno Fleischer
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Bruno Otto Fleischer was a German ophthalmologist. Kayser-Fleischer rings and Fleischer rings are named for him. Further reading
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Walter Kaufmann
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
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Charles W. Morris
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Charles William Morris was an American philosopher and semiotician. Early life and education A son of Charles William and Laura Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901, in Denver, Colorado.
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Cornelis de Langen
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Cornelis Douwe de Langen was a Dutch physician. He spent a substantial part of his career in Java, Indonesia where he did extensive work on tropical medicine and observed an association between dietary cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases".
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A. C. Ewing
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.
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Lawrence S. Thompson
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.
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Hans Mersmann
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Hans Mersmann was a German music historian, musicologist and teacher of music. Life Born in Potsdam, Mersmann studies in Munich and Berlin. He received his doctorate in 1914. One year later he was commissioned by the Prussian Folk Song Commission to create a folk song archive. From 1924 to 1933, he was editor-in-chief of the magazine "Melos". In 1926, he became a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1933, after the Nazi takeover, he was dismissed from the university on the grounds that he had worked in the field of Neue Musik. He was then obliged to give private music lessons....
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