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.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#17801
Priscilla White
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Priscilla White was a pioneer in the treatment of diabetes during pregnancy and type 1 diabetes. She was also a founding member of the Joslin Diabetes Center. Biography White was born in Boston, Massachusetts but while she was a baby her parents divorced and she was living in Woolaston. She graduated from Quincy High School in Massachiusetts. She attended Radcliffe College before transferring to Tufts University Medical School, where she graduated third in her class in the year 1923. At the time, Harvard Medical School did not accept women. She served her internship at Worcester Memorial Hos...
Go to Profile#17802
George Minot
1885 - 1950 (65 years)
George Richards Minot was an American medical researcher who shared the 1934 Nobel Prize with George Hoyt Whipple and William P. Murphy for their pioneering work on pernicious anemia. Early life George Richards Minot was born in Boston, Massachusetts to James Jackson Minot and Elizabeth Whitney. He was namesake of his great-great-grandfather George Richards Minot . His father was a physician; his father's cousin was anatomist Charles Sedgwick Minot ; one of his great-grandfathers was James Jackson , co-founder of Massachusetts General Hospital. He developed interest, first, in the natural sc...
Go to Profile#17803
Haskell Curry
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Haskell Brooks Curry was an American mathematician and logician. Curry is best known for his work in combinatory logic, which initial concept is based on a paper by Moses Schönfinkel, for which Curry did much of the development. Curry is also known for Curry's paradox and the Curry–Howard correspondence. Named for him are three programming languages: Haskell, Brook, and Curry, and the concept of currying, a method to transform functions, used in mathematics and computer science.
Go to Profile#17804
Carl Richard Moore
1892 - 1955 (63 years)
Carl Richard Moore was an American endocrinologist. He was born in rural farm region of Greene County, Missouri and received his early education in nearby Springfield. After graduating from High School, he attended Drury College where he acquired an interest in biology. In 1913, he obtained his B.S. degree, then worked as an assistant at Drury to earn his M.S. in 1914. With the granting of a fellowship, he attended the University of Chicago where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 1916, with a thesis on the fertilization and parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs. He became an associate in the universit...
Go to Profile#17805
Erwin Ackerknecht
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.
Go to Profile#17806
Dallas B. Phemister
1882 - 1951 (69 years)
Dallas Burton Phemister was an American surgeon and researcher who gave his name to several medical terms. During his career, he was the president of the American Surgical Association and the American College of Surgeons, and was a member of the editorial board of the journal Annals of Surgery.
Go to Profile#17807
Sidney Hook
1902 - 1989 (87 years)
Sidney Hook was an American philosopher of pragmatism known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics. After embracing communism in his youth, Hook was later known for his criticisms of totalitarianism, both fascism and Marxism–Leninism. A social democrat, Hook sometimes cooperated with conservatives, particularly in opposing Marxism–Leninism. After World War II, he argued that members of such groups as the Communist Party USA and Leninists like democratic centralists could ethically be barred from holding the offices of publ...
Go to Profile#17808
Franklin C. McLean
1888 - 1968 (80 years)
Franklin Chambers McLean was a Professor and Chairman of the Department of Medicine and the first appointed Director of the University of Chicago Medical Clinics, as well as the founder of the National Medical Fellowships. He aided the Manhattan Project by studying effects of radiation on organisms. He was also a trustee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund and Fisk University.
Go to Profile#17809
Thomas Addis
1881 - 1949 (68 years)
Thomas Addis Jr. was a Scottish physician-scientist from Edinburgh who made important contributions to the understanding of how blood clots work. He was a pioneer in the field of nephrology, the branch of internal medicine that deals with diseases of the kidney. Addis described the pathogenesis of haemophilia in 1911 and was the first to demonstrate that normal plasma could correct the defect in haemophilia.
Go to Profile#17810
Bernhard Zondek
1891 - 1966 (75 years)
Bernhard Zondek was a German-born Israeli gynecologist who developed the first reliable pregnancy test in 1928. Biography Bernhard Zondek was born in Wronke, Germany, now Wronki, Poland. He studied medicine in Berlin, graduating in 1919. He worked under Karl Franz at the university women's clinic in Berlin Charité, where he specialized in obstetrics and gynecology. His older brother, Hermann Zondek, was a professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin and a pioneer of modern endocrinology.
Go to Profile#17811
Helen B. Taussig
1898 - 1986 (88 years)
Helen Brooke Taussig was an American cardiologist, working in Baltimore and Boston, who founded the field of pediatric cardiology. She is credited with developing the concept for a procedure that would extend the lives of children born with Tetralogy of Fallot . This concept was applied in practice as a procedure known as the Blalock-Thomas-Taussig shunt. The procedure was developed by Alfred Blalock and Vivien Thomas, who were Taussig's colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Go to Profile#17812
Alden Springer Crafts
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Alden Springer Crafts was an American professor of botany, known as the first person in the United States to have the title "Weed Control Scientist" in academic employment. He was President of the American Society of Plant Physiologists for 1955, and President of the Weed Society of America for 1958–1960. Crafts was the editor of the Annual Review of Plant Physiology from 1957 to 1959.
Go to Profile#17813
Reed M. Nesbit
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Reed Miller Nesbit was an American urologist, surgeon, and professor. He was Head of the Urology Section of the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from 1930–1967. Nesbit was a pioneer of transurethral resection of the prostate. He devised the Nesbit operation for treating Peyronie's disease, and he made prominent contributions to pediatric urology, most notably the Cabot-Nesbit style orchiopexy.
Go to Profile#17814
William Bosworth Castle
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
William Bosworth Castle was an American physician and physiologist who transformed hematology from a "descriptive art to a dynamic interdisciplinary science." Life Castle was born to William E. Castle and his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His father was a professor of zoology at Harvard, a pioneer in mammalian genetics, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. The young Castle was educated in local schools and entered Harvard College in 1914. At the end of his third year of college, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School. Upon graduating from medical school, he did a medical ...
Go to Profile#17815
Edward Murray East
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Edward Murray East was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist. He is known for his experiments that led to the development of hybrid corn and his support of 'forced' elimination of the 'unfit' based on eugenic findings. He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait. He is also known as a critic of consumption and as a pioneer of thinking about environmental limits. While some scholars see his population thinking as nothing more than eugenics...
Go to Profile#17816
Joseph Erlanger
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.
Go to Profile#17817
Michael Gelfand
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Michael Gelfand, CBE, was a Zimbabwean medical practitioner of tropical medicine, who received a Papal Order of the Knighthood of St. Sylvester. Early life and education Gelfand was born 26 December, 1912 in Wynberg, Cape Province, Union of South Africa to immigrant Jewish-Lithuanian parents. He attended Wynberg Boys' High School and obtained his degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1936. His further medical training was in London.
Go to Profile#17818
Detlev Bronk
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Detlev Wulf Bronk was a prominent American scientist, educator, and administrator. He is credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline. Bronk served as president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953 and as president of The Rockefeller University from 1953 to 1968. Bronk also held the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1962.
Go to Profile#17819
Hilde Bruch
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Hilde Bruch was a German-born American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, known foremost for her work on eating disorders and obesity. Bruch emigrated to the United States in 1934. She worked and studied at various medical facilities in New York City and Baltimore before becoming a professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in 1964.
Go to Profile#17820
Chester Keefer
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Chester Scott Keefer was an American physician. He served as "penicillin czar" during World War II, responsible for managing distribution and allocation of the then-new drug for civilian uses in the United States, and was dean of the Boston University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#17821
Harold Saxton Burr
1889 - 1973 (84 years)
Harold Saxton Burr was E. K. Hunt Professor of Anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine and researcher into bio-electrics. Early life He was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1889, to parents Hanford Burr and Clara Saxton. He studied in public schools and at the Technical High School in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1908 he was admitted to the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and received his Ph.B. in 1911. On December 27 of that year, in Chicago, he married Jean Chandler, with whom he had a son, Peter. In 1914 he was appointed Instructor in Anatomy at Yale. He studied for his Ph.D. under Ross Granville Harrison, which he received in 1915.
Go to Profile#17822
Daniel Berlyne
1924 - 1976 (52 years)
Daniel Ellis Berlyne was a British and Canadian psychologist. Berlyne worked at several universities both in Canada and the United States. His work was in the field of experimental and exploratory psychology. Specifically, his research focused on how objects and experiences are influenced by and have an influence on curiosity and arousal.
Go to Profile#17823
Tinsley R. Harrison
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Tinsley Randolph Harrison was an American physician and editor of the first five editions of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine. Harrison specialized in cardiology and the pathophysiology of heart disease.
Go to Profile#17824
John Rock
1890 - 1984 (94 years)
#17825
Arthur David Ritchie
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Arthur David Ritchie FRSE was a British chemical physiologist and philosopher. Life He was born Oxford on 22 June 1891 the son of Prof David George Ritchie. The family moved to St Andrews in 1894 when his father was given a new professorship there.
Go to Profile#17826
Ernest Nagel
1901 - 1985 (84 years)
Ernest Nagel was an American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement. His 1961 book The Structure of Science is considered a foundational work in the logic of scientific explanation.
Go to Profile#17827
Owen Harding Wangensteen
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
Owen Harding Wangensteen was an American surgeon who developed the Wangensteen tube, which used suction to treat small bowel obstruction, an innovation estimated to have saved a million lives by the time of his death. He founded the Surgical Forum at the American College of Surgeons and was renowned for his surgical teaching. Amongst his most notable students were Walton Lillehei, Christiaan Barnard, K. Alvin Merendino, Norman Shumway and Edward Eaton Mason. He made contributions to surgical practices in other areas, including appendicitis, peptic ulcers and particularly gastric cancer. In h...
Go to Profile#17828
Maxwell Wintrobe
1901 - 1986 (85 years)
Maxwell Myer Wintrobe was an Austrian-born American physician who was a 20th-century authority in the medical field of hematology. His 1942 textbook on hematology, Clinical Hematology, was the first dedicated work in the field and he contributed to the diagnostic approach of anemia and copper metabolism, amongst many other achievements.
Go to Profile#17829
Wallace O. Fenn
1893 - 1971 (78 years)
Wallace Osgood Fenn was a physiologist, chairman of the department of physiology at the University of Rochester from 1925 to 1959. He also headed the University's Space and Science center from 1964 to 1966. He was also the president of the American Physiological Society, the president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the president of the International Union of Physiological Science. His work on heat generated by muscles, oxygen use by the nervous system, and potassium equilibrium in muscle, as well as pressure breathing and nitrogen narcosis, was recognized internationally.
Go to Profile#17830
Robert Edward Gross
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Robert Edward Gross was an American surgeon and a medical researcher. He performed early work in pediatric heart surgery at Boston Children's Hospital. Gross was president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#17831
Carl J. Wiggers
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Carl J. Wiggers was a doctor and medical researcher famous for his heart and blood-pressure research. He developed the Wiggers diagram, which is commonly used in teaching of cardiovascular research.
Go to Profile#17832
Rudolf Carnap
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism. He is considered "one of the giants among twentieth-century philosophers."
Go to Profile#17833
Charles Best
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Charles Herbert Best , was an American-Canadian medical scientist and one of the co-discoverers of insulin. Personal life Born in West Pembroke, Maine, on February 27, 1899, to Luella Fisher and Herbert Huestis Best, a Canadian-born physician from Nova Scotia. His father, Herbert Best, was a doctor in a small Maine town with a limited economy based mostly on sardine-packing. His mother, Lulu Newcomb, later Lulu Best, who sang soprano, accompanying herself on organ and piano, was in demand as a performer at funerals and weddings. Best grew up in Pembroke before going to Toronto, Ontario, to st...
Go to Profile#17834
Alfred Tarski
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Alfred Tarski was a Polish-American logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic, he also contributed to abstract algebra, topology, geometry, measure theory, mathematical logic, set theory, and analytic philosophy.
Go to Profile#17835
Harold Wolff
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Harold George Wolff was an American doctor, neurologist and pseudoscientist who conducted intentionally harmful and brain-damaging pseudoscientific human experimentation. He is generally considered the father of modern headache research, and a pioneer in the study of psychosomatic illness.
Go to Profile#17836
Andrew Conway Ivy
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Andrew Conway Ivy was an American physician. He was appointed by the American Medical Association as its representative at the 1946 Nuremberg Medical Trial for Nazi doctors, but later fell into disrepute for advocating the fraudulent drug Krebiozen.
Go to Profile#17837
Michel Foucault
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic. Foucault's theories primarily address the relationships between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels. His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication studies, anthropology, psychology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism, Marxism and critical theory.
Go to Profile#17838
Loren Lomasky
Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.
Go to Profile#17839
Loren Eiseley
1907 - 1977 (70 years)
Loren Eiseley was an American anthropologist, educator, philosopher, and natural science writer, who taught and published books from the 1950s through the 1970s. He received many honorary degrees and was a fellow of multiple professional societies. At his death, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#17840
Ian Donald
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ian Donald was an English physician who pioneered the diagnostic use of ultrasound in obstetrics, enabling the visual discovery of abnormalities during pregnancy. Donald was born in Cornwall, England, to a Scottish family of physicians. He was educated in Scotland and South Africa before studying medicine at the University of London in 1930, and became the third generation of doctors in his family. At the start of World War II, Donald was drafted into the Royal Air Force as a medical officer, where he developed an interest in radar and sonar. In 1952, at St Thomas' Hospital, he used what he ...
Go to Profile#17841
Cicely Williams
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Cicely Delphine Williams, OM, CMG, FRCP was a Jamaican physician, most notable for her discovery and research into kwashiorkor, a condition of advanced malnutrition, and her campaign against the use of sweetened condensed milk and other artificial baby milks as substitutes for human breast milk.
Go to Profile#17842
Dorothy Price
1899 - 1980 (81 years)
Dorothy Price was an American physiologist and endocrinologist. She is best known for her discovery of the principle of negative feedback in endocrine axis regulation, in work done alongside Carl Moore. She is considered one of the early pioneers in the field of neuroendocrinology.
Go to Profile#17843
Jesse Shera
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
Go to Profile#17844
May Brodbeck
1917 - 1983 (66 years)
May Brodbeck was an American philosopher of science. Biography Brodbeck was born in Newark, New Jersey. She studied chemistry at New York University, attending evening courses while working, and earned a bachelor's degree in 1941. Thereafter, she worked as a high-school chemistry teacher, before being recruited into the Manhattan Project. Following the war, she studied philosophy at the University of Iowa, completing a Ph.D. supervised by Gustav Bergmann in 1947, on the subject of John Dewey's Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
Go to Profile#17845
Agnes Fogo
Agnes B. Fogo is a professor of renal pathology at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Biography Fogo graduated from the University of Oslo, Norway, and the University of Tennessee, USA. She completed her M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine before going on to do residency and a fellowship in renal pathology.
Go to Profile#17846
Otto Erich Deutsch
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Otto Erich Deutsch was an Austrian musicologist. He is known for compiling the first comprehensive catalogue of Franz Schubert's compositions, first published in 1951 in English, with a revised edition published in 1978 in German. It is from this catalogue that the D numbers used to identify Schubert's works derive.
Go to Profile#17847
J. C. C. McKinsey
1908 - 1953 (45 years)
John Charles Chenoweth McKinsey , usually cited as J. C. C. McKinsey, was an American mathematician known for his work on game theory and mathematical logic, particularly, modal logic. Biography McKinsey received B.S. and M.S. degrees from New York University and a Ph.D. degree in 1936 from the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Blumenthal Research Fellow at New York University from 1936 to 1937 and a Guggenheim Fellow from 1942 to 1943. He also taught at Montana State College, and in Nevada, then Oklahoma, and in 1947 he went "to a research group at Douglas Aircraft Corporation" th...
Go to Profile#17848
Henry Nelson Wieman
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
Henry Nelson Wieman was an American philosopher and theologian. He became the most famous proponent of theocentric naturalism and the empirical method in American theology and catalyzed the emergence of religious naturalism in the latter part of the 20th century. His grandson Carl Wieman is a Nobel laureate, and his son-in-law Huston Smith was a prominent scholar in religious studies.
Go to Profile#17849
Dugald Baird
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Sir Dugald Baird FRCOG was a British medical doctor and a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology. Baird was most notable and influential in calling for the liberalising of abortion. In his delivery of the Sandoz lecture in November 1961, titled the Fifth Freedom, he advocated for freedom from the tyranny of fertility.
Go to Profile#17850
Mária Telkes
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Mária Telkes was a Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventor who worked on solar energy technologies. She moved to the United States in 1925 to work as a biophysicist. She became an American citizen in 1937 and started work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create practical uses of solar energy in 1939.
Go to Profile