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).
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#18151
Thomas Prof. Dr. Schwarz
#18152
Choe Chiwon
857 - 901 (44 years)
Choe Chiwon was a Korean philosopher and poet of the late medieval Unified Silla period . He studied for many years in Tang China, passed the Tang imperial examination, and rose to the high office there before returning to Silla, where he made ultimately futile attempts to reform the governmental apparatus of a declining Silla state.
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Juana Inés de la Cruz
1651 - 1695 (44 years)
Juana de Asuaje y Ramírez de Santillana, better known as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz , was a colonial Mexican writer, philosopher, composer and poet of the Baroque period, as well as a Hieronymite nun, nicknamed "The Tenth Muse" and "The Phoenix of America" by her contemporary critics. As a Spanish-criolla from the New Spain, she was among the main American-born contributors to the Spanish Golden Age, alongside Juan Ruiz de Alarcón and Garcilaso de la Vega "el Inca", and presently considered one of the most important female authors in Spanish language and Mexico's literary history.
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Luigi Gregori
1819 - 1896 (77 years)
Luigi Gregori was an Italian artist who worked at the Vatican and served as artist in residence and professor at the University of Notre Dame. Biography He was born in Bologna, Italy, in 1819, where at the age of fourteen he became apprentice of the Bolognese artist Giovanni Battista Frulli. There, he studied art of the antiquity as well as local artists, including the Carracci and Guido Reni. Frulli died in 1837, and Gregori then worked for Prince Pignatelli of Monteleone, and he traveled throughout Italy, including studying in Milan and Naples. In 1840, he moved to Rome and enrolled at the Accademia di San Luca and studied under Tommaso Minardi.
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Michael Foster
1903 - 1959 (56 years)
Michael Beresford Foster was a tutor in philosophy of Oxford University's Christ Church. For a period up until his death he was the chairman of the British Student Christian Movement. He was one of A. J. Ayer's tutors at Oxford, but their relationship is remembered more as a source of strained feelings than of scholarly fellowship. His disparate works on political science and various doctrines of Christianity have influenced philosophers such as George Grant, who had, when writing his doctoral thesis, in fact visited with Foster in England.
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Johanna Charlotte Unzer
1725 - 1782 (57 years)
Johanna Charlotte Unzer , was a German writer and philosopher, famed for her progressive views on women's education. She was awarded the imperial Dichterkrone in 1753. She is known for her anacreontic poetry.
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José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
José Manuel Gallegos Rocafull was a Spanish priest, canon of the Cathedral of Cordoba, theologian and philosopher. Gallegos studied at the General and Technical Institute of Seville and later at the Theological Seminary. Upon completion of basic academic training, he matriculated to the Seminary of Madrid to continue his religious training, attending the Pontifical University of Toledo where he graduated in theology in 1920. He later earned his doctorate in the Pontificia Universidad de Sevilla.
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John L. Ziegler
#18159
Frederik van Leenhof
1647 - 1715 (68 years)
Frederik van Leenhof was a Dutch pastor and philosopher active in Zwolle, who caused an international controversy because of his Spinozist work Heaven on Earth . This controversy is extensively discussed in Jonathan Israel's 2001 book Radical Enlightenment.
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Giulio Cesare la Galla
1571 - 1624 (53 years)
Giulio Cesare la Galla was a professor of philosophy at the Collegio Romano in Italy. Biography He was born in Padula, at that time part of the Kingdom of Naples. Lagalla was educated in philosophy and medicine. He became the official physician of the papal galleys for a period, then came to Rome to lecture in natural philosophy at the Collegio Romano. He apparently became the leading peripatetic of the city, and was counted among the opponents of the Copernican heliocentric theory.
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Carl Anton Ewald
1845 - 1915 (70 years)
Carl Anton Ewald was a German gastroenterologist who was a native of Berlin. He was the brother of physiologist Ernst Julius Richard Ewald . In 1870, he earned his medical doctorate in Berlin, and subsequently became an assistant to pathologist Friedrich Theodor von Frerichs . In 1888, he was appointed head physician of the department of internal medicine at Augusta Hospital in Berlin. Carl Ewald was a pioneer in the field of gastroenterology, and was a catalyst in making Augusta Hospital a center for pathological studies of digestion. Ewald is remembered for investigations of gastric secretions, and the introduction of intubation as a medical aid in gastric analysis.
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Milton J. Rosenau
1869 - 1946 (77 years)
Milton Joseph Rosenau was an American public health official and professor who was influential in the early twentieth century. Early life Milton Joseph Rosenau was born in 1869 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Nathan Rosenau and Mathilde Blitz, German Jewish emigrants. After obtaining his degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1889, he joined the United States Marine Hospital Service. After working for a few years under the supervision of Joseph Kinyoun, Rosenau began his ascent into positions of greater authority.
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Emily Carr
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Emily Carr was a Canadian artist and writer who was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. One of the first painters in Canada to adopt a Modernist and Post-Impressionist style, Carr did not receive widespread recognition for her 1929 work, The Indian Church , which is now her best known, until she changed her subject matter from Aboriginal themes to landscapes — forest scenes in particular, evoking primeval grandeur in British Columbia. As a writer Carr was one of the earliest chroniclers of life in her surroundings. The Canadian Encyclopedia describes her as a ...
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Paul Reclus
1847 - 1914 (67 years)
Jean Jacques Paul Reclus was a French physician specializing in surgery. The Reclus' disease is named after him. He was the son of pastor Jacques Reclus and brother of Élie, Élisée, Onésime and Armand Reclus.
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Parker Cleaveland
1780 - 1858 (78 years)
Parker Cleaveland was an American geologist and mineralogist, born in Rowley, Massachusetts. He was identified with the early progress of the natural sciences. After having attending the Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard in 1799, was tutor in mathematics there from 1803 to 1805, was chosen professor of mathematics and natural philosophy and lecturer on chemistry and mineralogy in Bowdoin College, a position which he retained until his death, although many professorships in other colleges and the presidency of his own were offered to him. He was elected an Ass...
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Jonathan Campbell Meakins
1882 - 1959 (77 years)
Jonathan Campbell Meakins was a Canadian physician and medical author and member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame. In authorship he is known as J. C. Meakins. He published over 160 works, including the textbook The Practice of Medicine. He was also the founder and first president of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. He was the Dean of the McGill University's Faculty of Medicine from 1941-1948.
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Richard Rufus of Cornwall
Richard Rufus was a Cornish Franciscan scholastic philosopher and theologian. Life Richard Rufus who studied at Paris and at Oxford starting from the 1220s. He became a Franciscan around 1230. Rufus was one of the first medieval philosophers to write on Aristotle and his commentaries are the earliest known among those which have survived. He also wrote influential commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences. Rufus was influenced by Robert Grosseteste, Alexander of Hales, Richard Fishacre, and Johannes Philoponus, and in turn influenced Bonaventure and Franciscus Meyronnes. Roger Bacon was a fe...
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John Eric Erichsen
1818 - 1896 (78 years)
Sir John Eric Erichsen, 1st Baronet was a Danish-born British surgeon. Early life Erichsen was born in Copenhagen, the son of Eric Erichsen, a member of a well-known Danish banking family. He attended Mansion house school, Hammersmith.
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Jack Black
1871 - 1932 (61 years)
Jack Black was a Canadian-born American hobo and professional burglar. Black is best known for his autobiography You Can't Win , describing his days on the road and life as an outlaw. Black's book was written as an anti-crime book urging criminals to go straight, but it is also his statement of belief in the futility of prisons and the criminal justice system, hence the title of the book. Jack Black was writing from experience, having spent thirty years as a travelling criminal, and offers tales of being a cross-country stick-up man, home burglar, petty thief, and opium fiend. He gained fame as a prison reformer, writer and playwright.
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Ignác Jan Hanuš
1812 - 1869 (57 years)
Ignác Jan Hanuš or, in German, Ignaz Johann Hanusch was a Czech philosopher and librarian. Life and work He studied at the grammar school in Staré Město, where one of his teachers was Josef Jungmann. This encounter created an interest in philosophy, which he studied at Charles University, graduating in 1831. In order to have more time for contemplation, he entered the Order of the Premonstratensians at Strahov Monastery. This experience failed to meet his expectations, so he left to study law at the University of Vienna. After 1835, he worked there as an adjunct. A year later, he received his doctorate and became a full Professor at the University of Lemberg; aged only twenty-four.
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Henri Wallon
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Henri Paul Hyacinthe Wallon was a French philosopher, psychologist , neuropsychiatrist, teacher, and politician. He was the grandson of the historian and statesman Henri-Alexandre Wallon. Career Henri Wallon conducted two parallel careers. As a convinced Marxist, he took up political duties while carrying out scientific work in the field of developmental psychology.
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Alessandro Piccolomini
1508 - 1579 (71 years)
Alessandro Piccolomini was an Italian humanist, astronomer and philosopher from Siena, who promoted the popularization in the vernacular of Latin and Greek scientific and philosophical treatises. His early works include Il Dialogo della bella creanza delle donne, o Raffaella and the comedies Amor costante, and Alessandro, which were sponsored and produced by the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, of which he was a member and an official. Much of his literary production consisted of translations from the Classics, of which Book XIII of Ovid's Metamorphoses and book VI of the Aeneid are early examples.
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Apollonius of Tyre
50 BC - Present (2076 years)
Apollonius of Tyre , was a Stoic philosopher. Strabo describes him as living "a little before my time," and says he wrote "a tabulated account of the philosophers of the school of Zeno and of their books," and which appears to have been a short survey of the philosophers and their writings from the time of Zeno. He is mentioned by Diogenes Laërtius as the author of a work on Zeno. Whether this Apollonius is the same as the one who wrote a work on female philosophers, or as the author of the chronological work of which Stephanus of Byzantium quotes the fourth book, is uncertain.
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Marcus Musurus
1470 - 1517 (47 years)
Marcus Musurus was a Greek scholar and philosopher born in Candia, Venetian Crete . Life The son of a rich merchant, Musurus became at an early age a pupil of Janus Lascaris in Venice. In 1505, Musurus was made professor of Greek language at the University of Padua. Erasmus, who had attended his lectures there, testifies to his knowledge of Latin. However, when the university was closed in 1509 during the War of the League of Cambrai, he returned to Venice where he filled a similar post.
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Hermann Heimpel
#18176
Charles Patin
1633 - 1693 (60 years)
Charles Patin was a French physician and numismatist. He was the son of Guy Patin, dean of the school of medicine in Paris, and a friend of Jacob Spon. Trained first by his father, he obtained a law degree and then chose to study medicine. He became best known for his numismatic work. He married the moralist author Madeleine Patin: their daughter Gabrielle-Charlotte Patin became a painter and numismatist, and their daughter Charlotte-Catherine Patin became a writer.
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Nicarete of Megara
400 BC - 300 BC (100 years)
Nicarete or Nicareta of Megara was a philosopher of the Megarian school, who flourished around . She is stated by Athenaeus to have been a hetaera of good family and education, and to have been a disciple of Stilpo. Diogenes Laërtius states that she was Stilpo's mistress, though he had a wife.
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Christian Bohr
1855 - 1911 (56 years)
Christian Harald Lauritz Peter Emil Bohr was a Danish physician, father of the physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, as well as the mathematician and football player Harald Bohr and grandfather of another physicist and Nobel laureate Aage Bohr. He married Ellen Adler in 1881.
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Josip Franjo Domin
1754 - 1819 (65 years)
Josip Franjo Domin was a Croatian-Hungarian physicist, priest, physician and a pioneer of electrotherapy. Biography Domin was born in Zagreb where he died. He was educated in Zagreb, Vienna, Leoben, Graz. In 1774 he graduated philosophy at the Royal Academy of Sciences and theology in 1776 in Zagreb. In 1777 in Trnava he received a doctorate in mathematics and became a full professor of theoretical and experimental physics, mechanics and economics at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Győr and Pécs . At the Faculty of Arts in Budapest since 1792 he was a physics professor having succeeded Ionnes B.
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Aron Brand
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Aron Brand-Auraban was an Israeli pediatric cardiologist. He served as chairman of the Israel Medical Association in Jerusalem, and founded the Jerusalem Academy of Medicine. Biography Aron Brand grew up in Koło, where he attended heder and the Jewish gymnasium. His father, Natan, was a grain merchant and miller. In 1925, his father, a fervent Zionist, sent him to Palestine to study at Gymnasia Herzliya in Tel Aviv. In 1928, he studied philosophy and Jewish studies in Berlin. He studied simultaneously at the University of Berlin and the Hochschule fuer die Wissenschaft des Judentums. One of h...
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Seyyed Nassir Ghaemi
#18182
Lorenzo Magalotti
1637 - 1712 (75 years)
Lorenzo Magalotti was an Italian philosopher, author, diplomat and poet. Magalotti was born in Rome into an aristocratic family, the son of Ottavio Magalotti, Prefect of the Pontifical Mail: his uncle Lorenzo Magalotti was a member of the Roman Curia. His cousin Filippo was rector at University of Pisa. The Jesuit Magalotti became the secretary of the Accademia del cimento and a gazetteer of the sciences.
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Mirza Mahdi Ashtiani
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Mirza Mahdi Ashtiani , a man of wisdom, mystic, man of literature, was a Great Master in the philosophical School of Tehran. Birth and family Mirza Mahdi was born in 1889 in Tehran. His father, Mirza Jafar was the relatives of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Hasan Ashtiani, famous as the Little Mirza, one of the most great men of knowledge in Tehran.
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Rudolf Gerber
1899 - 1957 (58 years)
Rudolf Gerber was a German musicologist. He was professor and director of the musicology department of the University of Gießen and from 1943 professor of musicology at the University of Göttingen.
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William H. Masters
#18186
John Laurens
1754 - 1782 (28 years)
John Laurens was an American soldier and statesman from South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, best known for his criticism of slavery and his efforts to help recruit slaves to fight for their freedom as U.S. soldiers.
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John Moore
1729 - 1802 (73 years)
John Moore FRSE was a Scottish physician and travel author. He also edited the works of Tobias Smollett. Life He was born on 10 October 1729 in Stirling, the son of Rev Charles Moore of Rowallan and his wife, Marion Anderson. The family moved to Glasgow in his youth and he was educated at Glasgow Grammar School. He was then apprenticed to Dr. John Gordon in Glasgow 1745 to 1747.
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Erich Schenk
1902 - 1974 (72 years)
Erich Schenk was an Austrian musicologist and music historian. Personal and scientific life Born in Salzburg , Schenk studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum and then at the University of Munich, where he also received his doctorate in 1925. His habilitation followed in 1930 at the University of Rostock, and four years later he founded the Musicological Institute at that institution in 1934. He remained director of Musicological Institute through 1940.
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Walter Jekyll
1849 - 1929 (80 years)
Walter Jekyll , was an English clergyman who renounced his religion and became a planter in Jamaica, where he collected and published songs and stories from the local African-Caribbean community. Early life Jekyll lived in his youth with his family at 2 Grafton Street, Mayfair, London, the seventh of the seven children of Captain Edward Joseph Hill Jekyll, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and his wife Julia Hammersley. His sister was the gardener Gertrude Jekyll. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. Jekyll was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, who borrowed the family ...
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George Lokert
1485 - 1547 (62 years)
George Lokert of Ayr was a Scottish philosopher and theologian who made significant contributions to the study of logic. A pupil of John Mair, he also studied and taught at the University of Paris, and eventually served as prior of the Sorbonne. Returning to Scotland in 1521, he served as Rector of the University of St Andrews .
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Publio Fausto Andrelini
1450 - 1518 (68 years)
Publio Fausto Andrelini was an Italian humanist poet, an intimate friend of Erasmus in the 1490s, who spread the New Learning in France. He taught at the University of Paris as "professor of humanity" from 1489, and became a court poet in the circle around Anne of Brittany, the queen to two kings.
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Samuel Henry Dickson
1798 - 1872 (74 years)
Samuel Henry Dickson was an American poet, physician, writer and educator born in Charleston, South Carolina. Dickson graduated from Yale and the University of Pennsylvania. He was one of the founders of the Medical College of South Carolina. He also taught at NYU and the Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Dickson was a popular published poet and a leader in Charleston intellectual circles. He was friends with Charleston poet William Gilmore Simms and William Cullen Bryant. He and his brother Dr. John Dickson played a significant role in the medical education of the US's first female doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell.
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Sándor Liezen-Mayer
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Sándor Liezen-Mayer, or Alexander von Liezen-Mayer was a Hungarian-born German illustrator and history painter. Biography Apparently destined for a military career, he showed an aptitude for drawing and, thanks to the intervention of an uncle, was able to attend the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where he studied with Karl von Blaas. After eighteen months there, he held his first exhibit in Pest in 1857. He then went to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich under Hermann Anschütz but, by 1862, had found a position in the studios of Karl von Piloty, which had a decisive influence on his style.
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David Turner
1927 - 1990 (63 years)
David Turner was a British playwright. Turner was born in Birmingham and came from a working-class background. He studied French at Birmingham University and later worked as a school teacher in that city. He is best remembered for his stage play Semi-Detached, first performed during 1962, which reached Broadway and was adapted for the film All the Way Up . He prepared modern versions of classic plays including John Gay's The Beggar's Opera, a version seen in London in 1968, and The Miser by Molière, which was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1973.
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Paul Lehmann
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
Paul Lehmann was a German paleographer and philologist. Biography Paul Lehmann was the son of businessman Gustav Lehmann and his wife Louisa Meyer. After attending school in his hometown, Lehmann started studying at the University of Göttingen. A successor to Ludwig Traube, Paul Lehmann began as docent at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in 1911 and became professor of medieval Latin philology there in 1917. Author of a dissertation on Franciscus Modius and a Habilitationsschrift on Johannes Sichardus, he made numerous contributions to the Sitzungsberichte der bayerischen Akademie. He is best known for Parodie im Mittelalter .
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Werner Danckert
1900 - 1970 (70 years)
Werner Danckert was a German folk song researcher. Life Born in Erfurt, Danckert trained as a concert pianist after graduating from high school in 1917. He studied musicology with the subsidiary subjects philosophy and physics. In 1923 he received his doctorate in Erlangen ; the habilitation followed at the University of Jena in 1926.
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Gabrielle Suchon
1631 - 1703 (72 years)
Gabrielle Suchon was a French moral philosopher who participated in debates about the social, political and religious condition of women in the early modern era. Her most prominent works are the Traité de la morale et de la politique and Du célibat volontaire .
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Swami Yogananda
1861 - 1899 (38 years)
Swami Yogananda was a disciple of Ramakrishna, the 19th-century mystic. He took his formal initiation from Sarada Devi, the "holy mother" of Ramakrishna Order and spiritual consort of Ramakrishna. He was the first vice-president of Ramakrishna Mission. He belonged to the family of Sabarna Roy Choudhury, an aristocratic family of erstwhile Bengal. He had a very short life, but he played a very important role during the formative years of Ramakrishna Mission. He was also a dedicated and devoted attendant to Sarada Devi during her stay in Calcutta after Ramakrishna's death. He was one of the dis...
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Fe del Mundo
1900 - 2011 (111 years)
Fe Villanueva del Mundo, , was a Filipina pediatrician. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and is known for shaping the modern child healthcare system in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice spanned eight decades. She gained international recognition, including the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public Service in 1977. In 1980, she was conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines, and in 2010, she was conferred the Order of Lakandula. She was the first female president of the Philippine Pediatric Society and the first woman to be named National Scientist of the Philippines in 1980.
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Oskar Zwintscher
1870 - 1916 (46 years)
Oskar Zwintscher was a German painter. He is often associated with the Jugendstil movement. Life From 1887 to 1890 he studied at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig and, from 1890 to 1892 was a student of Leon Pohle and Ferdinand Pauwels at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. After his studies, he became a free-lance painter in Meißen, where he received a stipendium, awarded to Saxon painters by the "Munkeltsche Legat". This enabled him to work for three years with no financial worries. In 1898, he presented his first large collection of paintings to the public.
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