Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#18551

Gerald Molloy

1834 - 1906 (72 years)

Gerald Molloy was an Irish Roman Catholic priest, theologian and scientist. Life He was educated at Castleknock College, and subsequently went to Maynooth College. Here he applied himself to theology and the physical sciences.

#18552

Lyco of Troas

299 BC - 225 BC (74 years)

Lyco of Troas , son of Astyanax, was a Peripatetic philosopher and the disciple of Strato, whom he succeeded as the head of the Peripatetic school, c. 269 BC; he held that post for more than forty-four years.

#18553

Herbert Witzenmann

1905 - 1988 (83 years)

Herbert Witzenmann was a German philosopher and anthroposophist. Career Witzenmann received his decisive study and work impulses through personal conversations with Rudolf Steiner. In the 1930s Witzenmann studied with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. His thesis On the Concept of Work According to Nietzsche and Hegel could, however, no longer be accepted because of Jaspers' forced exile under the National Socialists. Evidence for Jasper's acceptance of Witzenmann's promotion candidacy has not been presented. According to Witzenmann his dissertation manuscript was destroyed by fire due to phosphor bombings of Pforzheim by U.S.

#18554

Paddy Whannel

1922 - 1980 (58 years)

Atholl Douglas Whannel was a key figure in the educational work of the British Film Institute throughout the 1960s. He officially joined the faculty at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois in 1972 and taught there until his death in 1980.

#18555

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.

#18556

Otto Kinkeldey

1878 - 1966 (88 years)

Otto Kinkeldey was an American music librarian and musicologist. He was the first president of the American Musicological Society and held the first chair in musicology at any American university. Biography Kinkeldey was born in Manhattan, New York City on November 27, 1878. He received his B.A. in 1898 from City College of New York and his M.A. from New York University in 1900. In a somewhat unusual step for an American at the time, he studied for his doctorate at a German university, the Royal Academic Institute for Church Music in Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1909. In 1910, Ki...

#18557

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.

#18558

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.

#18559

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.

#18560

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...

#18561

Otto Erich Deutsch

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.

#18562

Arthur Prior

1914 - 1969 (55 years)

Arthur Norman Prior , usually cited as A. N. Prior, was a New Zealand–born logician and philosopher. Prior founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior .

#18563

Hans Selye

1907 - 1982 (75 years)

János Hugo Bruno "Hans" Selye was a pioneering Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist who conducted important scientific work on the hypothetical non-specific response of an organism to stressors. Although he did not recognize all of the many aspects of glucocorticoids, Selye was aware of their role in the stress response. Charlotte Gerson considers him the first to demonstrate the existence of biological stress.

#18564

Jean Piaget

1896 - 1980 (84 years)

Jean William Fritz Piaget was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget's theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".

#18565

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.

#18566

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.

#18567

Maxwell Finland

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Maxwell Finland was an American scientist, medical researcher, an expert on infectious diseases. Finland led seminal research of antibiotic treatment of pneumonia. Early life and education Finland was born on March 15, 1902, in Zhashkiv near Kyiv, Ukraine. He immigrated as a child to the United States at the age of 4. Finland graduated from the Boston English High School and cum laude from Harvard College in 1922. He then graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1926.

#18568

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.

#18569

Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno

1903 - 1969 (66 years)

Theodor W. Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment , Minima Moralia , and Negative Dialectics —strongly influenced the European New Le...

#18570

Abraham Wald

1902 - 1950 (48 years)

Abraham Wald was a Jewish Hungarian mathematician who contributed to decision theory, geometry and econometrics, and founded the field of sequential analysis. One of his well-known statistical works was written during World War II on how to minimize the damage to bomber aircraft and took into account the survivorship bias in his calculations. He spent his research career at Columbia University. He was the grandson of Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner.

#18571

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...

#18572

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."

#18573

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.

#18574

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.

#18575

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.

#18576

Bernardo Houssay

Bernardo Houssay

1887 - 1971 (84 years)

Bernardo Alberto Houssay was an Argentine physiologist. Houssay was a co-recipient of the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discovering the role played by pituitary hormones in regulating the amount of glucose in animals, sharing the prize with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Gerty Cori. He is the first Latin American Nobel laureate in the sciences.

#18577

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...

#18578

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...

#18579

Carlos Real de Azúa

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 .

#18580

Andrija Štampar

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...

#18581

Władysław Dobrzaniecki

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.

#18582

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...

#18583

Alessandro Padoa

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.

#18584

Hjalmar August Schiøtz

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.

#18585

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.

#18586

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

#18587

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....

#18588

Theodore Wesley Koch

Theodore Wesley Koch

1871 - 1941 (70 years)

Theodore Wesley Koch was the Director of Northwestern University's library , and the Director of the University of Michigan Library . He also held positions at the Cornell University Library and the Library of Congress.

#18589

Theodore Henry Robinson

1881 - 1964 (83 years)

Theodore Henry Robinson was a British biblical scholar who became professor of Semitic languages at University College, Cardiff. Life Robinson was born in Edenbridge, Kent, on 9 August 1881 to the Baptist minister W. Venis Robinson and his wife Emily Jane. After studying at St. John's College, Cambridge, Regent's Park Baptist College and Göttingen University he taught Hebrew and Syriac at Serampore College, Bengal.

#18590

George Barton Cutten

1874 - 1962 (88 years)

George Barton Cutten was a Canadian-born psychologist, moral philosopher, historian and university administrator. He was president of Acadia University from 1910 to 1922 and Colgate University from 1922 to 1942.

#18591

Ralph Munn

1894 - 1975 (81 years)

Ralph W. Munn was an eminent figure in the field of American and international library and information science. Recognized by the journal American Libraries as one of "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century", and described as an "administrator, educator, and author ... known for his fairness, clarity, and grace", he was also widely known within the profession as "the father of the modern library movement in Australia and New Zealand".

#18592

Giorgio Fano

1885 - 1963 (78 years)

Giorgio Fano was an Italian philosopher and linguist. He belonged to the school of Italian neo-idealist thinkers, among a group of artists and writers who made Trieste of the early Twentieth Century a notable center of intellectual activity. Fano read and interpreted the work of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile from an original point of view. In particular, he recognized the importance of the natural sciences and mathematics, which in his system are not pseudo-concepts. He also stressed the major importance of the simplest and most basic aspects of the life of mind, inspired by reflection...

#18593

Othmar Spann

1878 - 1950 (72 years)

Othmar Spann was a conservative Austrian philosopher, sociologist and economist. His radical anti-liberal and anti-socialist views, based on early 19th century Romantic ideas expressed by Adam Müller et al. and popularized in his books and lecture courses, helped antagonise political factions in Austria during the interwar years.

#18594

Shashibhusan Dasgupta

1911 - 1964 (53 years)

Shashibhusan Dasgupta, or Shashi Bhushan Dasgupta, Shashibhusan and Shashi Bhusan Das Gupta was a Bengali scholar of philosophy, languages, literature , literary critic, author and theologian. Dasgupta was born in Chandrahar Village in modern Barisal Division, South-Central Bangladesh. He obtained his IA from B M College, Barisal, his BA in Philosophy from Scottish Church College, Kolkata, West Bengal, India. His MA in Bengali Language and Literature was from Calcutta University in 1935, and he subsequently joined Calcutta University's Bengali Department as a Researcher. Winning the 1937 Pr...

#18595

Kazimierz Pelczar

1894 - 1943 (49 years)

Kazimierz Pelczar was a Polish academic and physician. Professor of the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius and pioneer of oncology research and treatment, he was murdered in the Ponary massacre. Biography Kazimierz Pelczar was born on 2 August 1894 in Truskawiec. His father, Z. Pelczar, was a physician himself, owner of a sanatorium and author of about 20 articles. In the years 1912–1914 he studied medicine at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. During the First World War he was conscripted by the Austro-Hungarian Army, he was taken prisoner of war by the Imperial Russian Army in 1915 and soon joined the Red Cross.

#18596

Arnold Buffum Chace

Arnold Buffum Chace

1845 - 1932 (87 years)

Arnold Buffum Chace was an American textile businessman, mathematics scholar, and eleventh chancellor of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Family Arnold was born November 10, 1845, in Cumberland, Rhode Island. His paternal grandfather Oliver Chace was founder of the Valley Falls textile company, which later became Berkshire Hathaway. His parents Samuel Buffington Chace and Elizabeth Buffum Chace were Quakers and prominent anti-slavery activists. His maternal grandfather, Arnold Buffum, was president of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. His sister Lillie became an author and so...

#18597

Willi Kahl

1893 - 1962 (69 years)

Theodor Friedrich Wilhelm Willi Kahl was a German musicologist. Life Born in Saverne The focal points of his academic work are the history of piano music, Schubert research, as well as the music history of the Rhineland and the music bibliography.

#18598

Rudolf Stammler

Rudolf Stammler

1856 - 1938 (82 years)

Karl Eduard Julius Theodor Rudolf Stammler was an influential German philosopher of law. He distinguished a purely formal concept of law from the ideal, the realization of justice. He thought that, rather than reacting and adjusting the law to economic pressures, the law should be deliberately steered towards the current ideal.

#18599

Karl Leichter

1902 - 1987 (85 years)

Karl Leichter was an Estonian musicologist. He graduated in 1929 in theory and composition, studying under Heino Eller with pupils such as Eduard Tubin, Alfred Karindi, Eduard Oja and Olav Roots. Between 1929 and 1931 he worked in the Estonian Folklore Archives. Following World War II and the ensuing Soviet occupation of Estonia, he worked hard to re-establish functioning musical education and musicological research. For a short period, he was dean of Tallinn State Conservatory, but quickly lost his position due to political reasons. Only after Stalin's death could he slowly work his way bac...

#18600

Gotthold Frotscher

1897 - 1967 (70 years)

Gotthold Frotscher was a German music historian and musicologist. Life Born in , Frotscher was the son of Oberkirchenrat Dr. Paul G. Frotscher and his wife Ida H. Berger. Frotscher finished his schooling at the humanistic grammar school in Freiberg in 1916 as . He then began to study mainly musicology, German and philosophy at the University of Leipzig and the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. His professors included Hermann Abert, Albert Köster, Felix Krueger, Hugo Riemann, Arnold Schering, Eduard Spranger and Wilhelm Wundt.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions