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,
#18401
Robert A Wilson
#18402
Nakai Riken
1732 - 1817 (85 years)
was a leading academic in the Kaitokudo academy tradition of scholarship. He was the younger son of Nakai Shuan , one of the Kaitokudo's two founding leaders, and was influenced by his teacher and mentor Goi Ranju. His intellectualised way of being led to continued engagement with but physical separation from the Kaitokudo. Much is made of his demeanor reflecting his.
Go to Profile#18403
Antonio Comellas y Cluet
1832 - 1884 (52 years)
Antonio Comellas y Cluet was a philosopher. Comellas studied philosophy and theology in Vic, and entered the diocesan seminary in Solsona, Lleida. After his ordination he continued to teach Latin at Solsona until 1862, when he was appointed professor of theology. During his stay there he published two pamphlets. The first was a discourse, delivered at the opening of the scholastic term, 1866–67, in which he tried to explain in a new manner the procession of the Holy Trinity, and the second a translation, accompanied by prologue and notes, of a work by Reginald Baumstark, Pensamientos de un p...
Go to Profile#18404
John William Ballantyne
1861 - 1923 (62 years)
John William Ballantyne FRSE FRCPE was a Scottish physician and obstetrician. In his teaching of female doctors he was a pioneer in the advancement of female professional training in the field of medicine. He made major advances in the field of midwifery in the late 19th and early 20th century, with influences still felt today. He founded the science of antenatal pathology.
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James Tissot
1836 - 1902 (66 years)
Jacques Joseph Tissot , better known as James Tissot , was a French painter, illustrator, and caricaturist. He was born to a drapery merchant and a milliner and decided to pursue a career in art at a young age, coming to incorporate elements of realism, early Impressionism, and academic art into his work. He is best known for a variety of genre paintings of contemporary European high society produced during the peak of his career, which focused on the people and women's fashion of the Belle Époque and Victorian England, but he would also explore many medieval, biblical, and Japoniste subjects throughout his life.
Go to Profile#18406
Ichthyas
Ichthyas , the son of Metallus, was a Greek philosopher and a disciple and successor of Euclid of Megara in the Megarian school. He was a colleague of Thrasymachus of Corinth in the school. Ichthyas is described as a man of great eminence, and Diogenes of Sinope is said to have addressed a dialogue to him.
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Sergei Tolstoy
1863 - 1947 (84 years)
Count Sergei Lvovich Tolstoy was a composer and ethnomusicologist who was among the first Europeans to make an in-depth study of the music of India. He was also an associate of the Sufi mystic, Inayat Khan, and participated in helping the Doukhobors move to Canada.
Go to Profile#18408
James H. Lubowitz
#18409
Paul Cullinan
#18410
Fan Zhongyan
989 - 1052 (63 years)
Fan Zhongyan , courtesy name Xiwen , was a Chinese military strategist, philosopher, poet, and politician of the Song dynasty. After serving the central government for several decades, Fan was appointed Prime Minister or Chancellor over the entire Song empire. Fan's philosophical, educational and political contributions continue to be influential to this day, and his writings remain a core component of the Chinese literary canon. His attitude towards official service is encapsulated by his oft-quoted line on the proper attitude of scholar-officials: "They were the first to worry the worries of All-under-Heaven, and the last to enjoy its joys".
Go to Profile#18411
Thomas J. Walley
#18412
Nusret Fişek
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Hasan Nusret Fişek was a Turkish physician and Minister of Health. Early years Nusret Hasan Fişek was born in Sivas to Hayrullah Fişek, a commander at the Turkish War of Independence, and Mukaddes on November 21, 1914. He had a brother, A. Hicri Fişek. He was registered in Istanbul.
Go to Profile#18413
Joachim Camerarius
1500 - 1574 (74 years)
Joachim Camerarius , the Elder, was a German classical scholar. His critical abilities, his deep understanding of Greek and Latin, and his wide-ranging knowledge of the ancient world made him one of the foremost German scholars of his time.
Go to Profile#18414
Edmund Dickinson
1624 - 1707 (83 years)
Edmund Dickinson or Dickenson was an English royal physician and alchemist, author of a syncretic philosophical system. Life He was son of the Rev. William Dickinson, rector of Appleton in Berkshire , by his wife Mary, daughter of Edmund Colepepper, and was born on 26 September 1624. He received his primary education at Eton College, and in 1642 entered Merton College, Oxford, where he was admitted one of the Eton postmasters. He took the degree of B.A. 22 June 1647, and was elected probationer-fellow of his college, On 27 November 1649 he had the degree of M.A. conferred upon him. Applying himself to the study of medicine, he obtained the degree of M.D.
Go to Profile#18415
Thomas Louis Hanna
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
Thomas Louis Hanna was a philosophy professor and movement theorist who coined the term somatics in 1976. He called his work Hanna Somatic Education. He proposed that most negative health effects are due to what he called Sensory Motor Amnesia. He claimed that many common age-related ailments are not simply a matter of time but the result of poor movement habits.
Go to Profile#18416
Nathan Smith Davis
1817 - 1904 (87 years)
Nathan Smith Davis Sr., M.D., LLD was a physician who was instrumental in the establishment of the American Medical Association and was twice elected its president. He became the first editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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James Agee
1909 - 1955 (46 years)
James Rufus Agee was an American novelist, journalist, poet, screenwriter and film critic. In the 1940s, writing for Time Magazine, he was one of the most influential film critics in the United States. His autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family , won the author a posthumous 1958 Pulitzer Prize. Agee is also known as a co-writer of the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and as the screenwriter of the film classics The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter.
Go to Profile#18418
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.
Go to Profile#18419
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...
Go to Profile#18426
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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Cornelius Golightly
1917 - 1976 (59 years)
Cornelius Lacy Golightly was the first black president of the Detroit Board of Education. He was a teacher, civil rights activist, public intellectual, and educational administrator. Early life Cornelius L. Golightly was born on March 23, 1917, in Waterford, Mississippi. His father, Reverend Richmond Mack Golightly, was from Livingston, Alabama. His mother, Margaret Fullilove was from Honey Island, Mississippi. Golightly was one of ten children.
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Jan Rokycana
1396 - 1471 (75 years)
Jan Rokycana was a Czech Hussite theologian in the Kingdom of Bohemia and a key figure of the Bohemian Reformation. Life In his youth, Jan Rokycana entered the Augustinian monastery in Rokycany. Later, he left the monastery to study in Prague, gaining his baccalaureate in 1415. He joined the movement against Jan Želivský, after which he had to flee from Prague. He also opposed the Taborites, most notably at Konopiště in 1423. Later in Prague he opposed Jan Žižka, when he was blamed for the defeat of the Prague militia at Malešov.
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Alexander Crombie
1762 - 1840 (78 years)
Alexander Crombie FRS was a Scottish Presbyterian minister, schoolmaster and philosopher. Biography He was born in Aberdeen on 17 July 1760, the son of Thomas Crombie. He studied at Marischal College. There he was taught divinity by James Beattie, gaining a M.A. in 1778. In 1794 his college awarded him an honorary doctorate .
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Sebastiano Conca
1680 - 1764 (84 years)
Sebastiano Conca was an Italian painter. Biography He was born at Gaeta, then part of the Kingdom of Naples, and apprenticed in Naples under Francesco Solimena. In 1706, along with his brother Giovanni, who acted as his assistant, he settled in Rome, where for several years he worked only in chalk, to improve his drawing. He was patronized by the Cardinal Ottoboni, who introduced him to Clement XI, who commissioned him a well-received Jeremiah painted for the church of St. John Lateran. He also painted an Assunta for the church of Santi Luca e Martina in Rome.
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Frank Sullivan
Frank Sullivan is a Scottish medical doctor who works as a general practitioner and who is a medical researcher. He is Director of Research at the School of Medicine at University of St Andrews. He was the first Gordon F. Cheesbrough Research Chair in Family and Community Medicine at North York General Hospital, Canada. He was the director of the Scottish School of Primary Care from 2007 to 2014.
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Mário Ferreira dos Santos
1907 - 1968 (61 years)
Mário Ferreira dos Santos was a Brazilian philosopher, translator, writer and anarchist activist. Born in Tietê, São Paulo, Ferreira dos Santos was raised in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, and graduated in Law and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
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Satyaprajna Tirtha
Satyaprajna Tirtha was an Indian philosopher, Hindu spiritual leader, guru, saint and the pontiff of Uttaradi Math, a matha dedicated to the Dvaita philosophy, which has a large following in southern India. He was the 39th pontiff of Uttaradi Math since Madhvacharya, reformer of the Dvaita philosophy from 24 March 1942 to 14 April 1945.
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George Bogdan
1859 - 1930 (71 years)
George Bogdan was a Romanian physician and university professor. Bogdan attended the National College in Iași, graduating in 1876. He studied medicine in France, and earned a doctorate in psychiatry there. After returning home, he began work as a doctor at Sfântul Spiridon Hospital and as a teacher at the National College, where he offered a course on hygiene. In 1891, he became a part-time professor at the forensic medicine department of the University of Iași. The same year, he was named dean of the medical faculty and a member of the university senate. As such, he argued for an increase in...
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George Brown
1835 - 1917 (82 years)
George Brown was an English Methodist missionary and ethnographer. Early life and education George Brown was born at Barnard Castle, Durham, England, the son of George Brown, barrister, and his wife Elizabeth, née Dixon, sister of the wife of Rev. Thomas Buddle, missionary in New Zealand. Brown was educated at a private school and on leaving, became an assistant in a doctors surgery, was afterwards with a chemist, and then in a draper's shop. Brown reacted to his stepmother's discipline and attempted to run away to sea.
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Aristo of Ceos
Aristo of Ceos was a Peripatetic philosopher and a native of the island of Ceos. His birthplace was the town of Ioulis. He is not to be confused with Aristo of Chios, a Stoic philosopher of the mid 3rd century BC.
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Juan de Celaya
1490 - 1558 (68 years)
Juan de Celaya was a Spanish mathematician, physicist, cosmologist, philosopher and theologian. He was a member of the so-called Calculators, using ideas from Merton College. He is known for his work on motion and in logic.
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Rickman Godlee
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Sir Rickman John Godlee, 1st Baronet was an English surgeon. In 1884 he became one of the first doctors to surgically remove a brain tumor, founding modern brain surgery. Early life Godlee was born in Upton, Essex, to a Quaker family, the second son of Rickman Godlee , a barrister at Middle Temple, and Mary Godlee , daughter of Joseph Jackson Lister. He was thus a nephew of Joseph Lister — whose biography he later wrote.
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Georgy Aleksandrov
1908 - 1961 (53 years)
Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov was a Marxist philosopher and a Soviet politician. Biography Childhood and education Aleksandrov was born in 1908 in Saint Petersburg in a worker's family of Russian ethnicity, but became homeless during the Russian Civil War. In 1924-1930, he studied Communist philosophy in Borisoglebsk and Tambov and then transferred to the Moscow Institute of History and Philosophy. He became a member of the Communist Party in 1928. After graduating in 1932, Aleksandrov remained with the Institute for graduate studies, eventually becoming a professor, a deputy director and th...
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Christian Sibelius
1869 - 1922 (53 years)
Christian Sibelius was a Finnish doctor and professor of psychiatry. Sibelius became a bachelor of arts in 1889 and a doctor of medicine in 1897, and in the same year became an associate professor of pathological anatomy at the University of Helsinki. He studied under Ernst Alexander Homén. His doctoral thesis, Bidrag till kännedomen om de histologiska förändringarna i ryggmärgen, de spinala rötterna och ganglierna vid progressiv paralysi , discussed both normal histological and pathological conditions, and demonstrated the relationship between paralysis and spinal cord damage. It placed him ...
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Eugene Halliday
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
Eugene Halliday was a British artist, writer, and teacher. For a large part of his life he lived and taught in Manchester and Altrincham, England, lecturing , running groups and giving personal tuition to a large number of interested people. He was an artist, a writer of books, plays and poetry as well as possessing understandings of philosophy, religion and the science of his day. Much of his work centred on his interpretation of the esoteric ideas behind religion. He practised and taught an approach to psychotherapy. He was a friend of the artist Käthe Schuftan, giving the tribute at her ...
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Avguštin Stegenšek
1875 - 1920 (45 years)
Avguštin Stegenšek was a Slovene theologian, philosopher and art historian. After earning a bachelor's degree in theology, he left for Rome to study archaeology and art history, under the supervision of Joseph Wilpert. Later, he was awarded a doctor's degree of philosophy sciences at the university of Graz in 1906. He took part in the Historic Society for Slovene Styria, founded 1906, and was appointed honorary conservator in Styria by Committee for the Protection of Monuments in Vienna. Stegenšek was the pioneer of the monumental topography on the territory of Slovenia. He framed the monumen...
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Joseph Demarco
1718 - 1789 (71 years)
Joseph Demarco was a Maltese medical practitioner, a scientist, and a major philosopher. His areas of specialisation in philosophy were mostly philosophical psychology and physiology. Demarco's extensive interests make him quite unique. Indeed, though his main concern was human health, this must be understood in the widest of meanings. He was fascinated by the mechanisms of the human body but also with its infirmities, especially within their psychological and social contexts. This brought him to be very much attracted to the philosophical underpinnings of the human condition in all of its aspects.
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Yang Rongguo
1907 - 1978 (71 years)
Yang Rongguo was a Chinese academic and philosopher who was involved in the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign of the Cultural Revolution. Yang initially began his study of Confucius with a publication in 1947 which was revised and published again in 1973. During the Cultural Revolution he was a professor at Zhongshan University. He published an article on July 7, 1973, in People's Daily entitled "Confucius-A Thinker Who Stubbornly Upheld the Slave System." This article, coupled with his republication of work, brought him into significance. He began publicly connecting Lin Biao, ...
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Leonard J. Russell
1884 - 1971 (87 years)
Leonard James Russell, FBA was a British philosopher. He was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham from 1925 to 1950. Early life and education Russell was born on 18 October 1884 in Birmingham, where his father was working as a missionary. His older brother was the agricultural scientist Sir John Russell. The family moved to Barnsley, where Russell attended a local school and then they moved again to Glasgow, when Russell was aged 13, after his father became a Unitarian minister there. He then attended Hutchesons' Grammar School before studying mathematics and natural philo...
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Richard Helsham
1683 - 1738 (55 years)
Richard Helsham was an Irish physician and natural philosopher at Trinity College Dublin. He was the inaugural Erasmus Smith's Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy from 1724 and Regius Professor of Physic from 1733.
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Richard Specht
1870 - 1932 (62 years)
Richard Specht was an Austrian lyricist, dramatist, musicologist and writer. Specht, who had studied music with Ignaz Brüll, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Franz Schrecker, is most well known for his writings on classical music, and in his time was seen as a leading music journalist. He was a great authority on the music of Gustav Mahler, and in later life became a regular acquaintance of his widow, Alma Mahler-Werfel.
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Antonio Persio
1542 - 1612 (70 years)
Antonio Persio was an Italian philosopher of the Platonic school who opposed the Aristotelianism which predominated in the universities of his time. He was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei and an associate of Galileo Galilei.
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Lokenath Brahmachari
1730 - 1860 (130 years)
Baba Lokenath Brahmachari was a Bengali yogi. External links
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