The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#19101
Grete L. Bibring
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Grete Lehner Bibring was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst who became the first female full professor at Harvard Medical School in 1961. Life Life in Vienna Grete Bibring was born as Margarethe Lehner on January 11, 1899, in Vienna, Austria. She was the youngest child of factory owner Moriz Lehner and his wife Victoria Josefine Lehner, née Stengel. Her siblings were two older brothers, Ernst and Fritz, and a sister, Rosi. Her upbringing was amongst a wealthy Jewish family that often hosted dinner parties and imparted to her an appreciation for music, science, and art. She attended Akademisches Gymnasium until 1918, when she graduated.
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W. W. Bartley III
1934 - 1990 (56 years)
William Warren Bartley III , known as W. W. Bartley III, was an American philosopher specializing in 20th century philosophy, language and logic, and the Vienna Circle. Early life and education Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1934, Bartley was brought up in a Protestant home. He completed his secondary education in Pittsburgh and studied at Harvard University between 1952 and 1956, graduating with a BA degree in philosophy. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he was an editor at The Harvard Crimson newspaper. He spent the winter semester of 1956 and the summer semester of 1957 at the Harvard Divinity School and the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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John Leofric Stocks
1882 - 1937 (55 years)
John Leofric Stocks DSO was a British philosopher and was briefly Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 1937. Biography Stocks was born the sixth of twelve children to John Edward Stocks, the vicar of Market Harborough, Leicestershire.
Go to Profile#19104
Alexander Burns Wallace
1906 - 1974 (68 years)
Alexander Burns Wallace was a Scottish plastic surgeon. He was a founding member and president of the British Association of Plastic Surgeons, and the first editor of the British Journal of Plastic Surgery. In authorship he appears as A. B. Wallace.
Go to Profile#19105
Una Ellis-Fermor
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Una Mary Ellis-Fermor , who also used the pseudonym Christopher Turnley, was an English literary critic, author and Hildred Carlile Professor of English at Bedford College, London . In recognition of her services to London University, there is now an award in her name to provide assistance for research students in the publication of scholarly work, in the fields of English, Irish or Scandinavian drama to which Fermor-Ellis herself had been a notable contributor.
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Charles Norris Cochrane
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Charles Norris Cochrane was a Canadian historian and philosopher who taught at the University of Toronto. He is known for his writings about the interaction between ancient Rome and emerging Christianity.
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Émile Bréhier
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
Émile Bréhier was a French philosopher. His interest was in classical philosophy, and the history of philosophy. He wrote a Histoire de la Philosophie, translated into English in seven volumes. This work inspired Freddie Copleston's own History of Philosophy , initially comprising nine volumes.
Go to Profile#19108
Louis Round Wilson
1876 - 1979 (103 years)
Louis Round Wilson was an important figure to the field of library science, and is listed in "100 of the most important leaders we had in the 20th century," an article in the December 1999 issue of American Libraries. The article lists what he did for the field of library science including dean at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School, directing the library at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and as one of the “internationally oriented library leaders in the U.S. who contributed much of the early history of the International Federation of Library Associations and Inst...
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Philipp Frank
1884 - 1966 (82 years)
Philipp Frank was a physicist, mathematician and philosopher of the early-to-mid 20th century. He was a logical positivist, and a member of the Vienna Circle. He was influenced by Mach and was one of the Machists criticised by Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
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José Gaos
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
José Gaos was a Spanish philosopher who obtained political asylum in Mexico during the Spanish Civil War and became one of the most important Mexican philosophers of the 20th century. He was a member of the Madrid School.
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H. Nida Sen
Hatice Nida Sen is an ophthalmologist researching mechanisms involved in different forms of human uveitis. She is a clinical investigator at the National Eye Institute. Education Hatice Nida Sen obtained a M.D. degree from Hacettepe University Medical School and a Master of Health Sciences from Duke University School of Medicine. She completed an ophthalmology residency at George Washington University and her uveitis and ocular immunology fellowship at the National Eye Institute .
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Dineshchandra Sircar
1907 - 1984 (77 years)
Dineshchandra Sircar , also known as D. C. Sircar or D. C. Sarkar, was an epigraphist, historian, numismatist and folklorist, known particularly in India and Bangladesh for his work deciphering inscriptions. He was the Chief Epigraphist of the Archaeological Survey of India , Carmichael Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the University of Calcutta and the General President of the Indian History Congress. In 1972, Sircar was awarded the Sir William Jones Memorial Plaque.
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Frederick Banting
1891 - 1941 (50 years)
Sir Frederick Grant Banting was a Canadian medical scientist, physician, painter, and Nobel laureate noted as the co-discoverer of insulin and its therapeutic potential. In 1923, Banting and John Macleod received the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Banting shared the honours and award money with his colleague, Charles Best. That same year, the government of Canada granted Banting a lifetime annuity to continue his work. To this day, Frederick Banting, who received the Nobel Prize at age 32, remains the youngest Nobel laureate for Physiology/Medicine.
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Saul Hertz
1905 - 1950 (45 years)
Saul Hertz, M.D. was an American physician who devised the medical uses of radioactive iodine. Hertz pioneered the first targeted cancer therapies. Hertz is called the father of the field of theranostics, combining diagnostic imaging with therapy in a single or paired chemical substance.
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Joachim Ritter
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Joachim Ritter was a German philosopher and founder of the so-called Ritter School of liberal conservatism. Biography Born in Geesthacht, Ritter studied philosophy, theology, German literature and history in Heidelberg, Marburg, Freiburg and Hamburg. A disciple of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, he obtained his doctorate at Hamburg with a dissertation on Nicolas of Cusa in 1925, and was both Cassirer's assistant and a lecturer there. A Marxist in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, he became a member of the Nazi Party in 1937 and an officer of the German Wehrmacht in 1940. After World W...
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Peter Anthony Bertocci
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Peter Bertocci was an American philosopher and Borden Parker Bowne professor of philosophy, emeritus, at Boston University. He was a president of the Metaphysical Society of America. Bertocci was an advocate of theistic finitism, proposing that "God is all-good but not all-powerful".
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Broda Otto Barnes
1906 - 1988 (82 years)
Broda Otto Barnes was an American physician and professor of medicine who studied endocrine dysfunction, particularly hypothyroidism. In the 1970s, Barnes published several books arguing that hypothyroidism was underdiagnosed in the U.S. and was responsible for a wide range of health problems. Barnes' views on the prevalence of hypothyroidism were never widely accepted by the medical community and run counter to its current understanding of thyroid function, but they have been embraced by some elements of the alternative medicine community.
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Bernard Lonergan
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Bernard Joseph Francis Lonergan was a Canadian Jesuit priest, philosopher, and theologian, regarded by many as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. Lonergan's works include Insight: A Study of Human Understanding and Method in Theology , as well as two studies of Thomas Aquinas, several theological textbooks, and numerous essays, including two posthumously published essays on macroeconomics. The projected 25-volume Collected Works with the University of Toronto Press is now complete. Lonergan held appointments at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome; Regis College, T...
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Andreas Speiser
1885 - 1970 (85 years)
Andreas Speiser was a Swiss mathematician and philosopher of science. Life and work Speiser studied in Göttingen, starting in 1904, notably with David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Hermann Minkowski. In 1917 he became full-time professor at the University of Zurich but later relocated in Basel. During 1924/25 he was president of the Swiss Mathematical Association.
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Carleton B. Joeckel
1886 - 1960 (74 years)
Carleton Bruns Joeckel , was an American librarian, advocate, scholar, decorated soldier, and co-writer, with Enoch Pratt Free Library Assistant Director Amy Winslow, A National Plan for Public Library Service that provided the foundation for nationwide public library services.
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Edwin Arthur Burtt
1892 - 1989 (97 years)
Edwin Arthur Burtt , usually cited as E. A. Burtt, was an American philosopher who wrote extensively on the philosophy of religion. His doctoral thesis published as a book under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science has had a significant influence upon the history of science that is not generally recognized, according to H. Floris Cohen.
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Maurice Mandelbaum
1908 - 1987 (79 years)
Maurice Mandelbaum was an American philosopher and phenomenologist . He was professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University with stints at Dartmouth College and Swarthmore College. He held two degrees from Dartmouth and a PhD from Yale University. He was known for his work in phenomenology, epistemology, philosophy of perception , and the history of ideas.
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Cyril Hopkirk
1894 - 1987 (93 years)
Cyril Spottiswoode Moy Hopkirk was a New Zealand animal science administrator and veterinary scientist. He was a world authority on bovine mastitis. Early career Born at Hamua, north of Eketāhuna, in 1894, Hopkirk started his scientific career as a cadet in the laboratory of the Biology Department of Victoria University College and in 1912 became a laboratory assistant at the Wallaceville Animal Diagnostic and Research Laboratory.
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Arthur Hutchings
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Arthur James Bramwell Hutchings was an English musicologist, composer and professor of music. Life Born in Sunbury-on-Thames, Hutchings had no formal musical education but played piano and violin to a high standard and sang as a chorister. He taught, performed and composed, and was appointed organist at All Saints Church, East Sheen in 1929. While training as a teacher in London he made some key musical friendships during the 1930s: with Constant Lambert, Cecil Gray, Sorabji, Cyril Rootham and Edmund Rubbra .
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Harvey E. Jordan
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
Harvey Ernest Jordan was a professor of anatomy and dean of the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Harvey Jordan was born in Coopersburg, Pennsylvania to Genaah and Emma Jordan. Jordan earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from Lehigh University, and his doctorate from Princeton University. He joined the faculty at UVA in 1907. He became Dean of the School of Medicine in 1939. Jordan was president of the American Genetic Association and the Virginia Academy of Science, which awarded him its Science Research Prize in 1931. He was well recognized for his research in histology and e...
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Walter Kaufmann
1921 - 1980 (59 years)
Walter Arnold Kaufmann was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet. A prolific author, he wrote extensively on a broad range of subjects, such as authenticity and death, moral philosophy and existentialism, theism and atheism, Christianity and Judaism, as well as philosophy and literature. He served more than 30 years as a professor at Princeton University.
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Charles W. Morris
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Charles William Morris was an American philosopher and semiotician. Early life and education A son of Charles William and Laura Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901, in Denver, Colorado.
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Cornelis de Langen
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Cornelis Douwe de Langen was a Dutch physician. He spent a substantial part of his career in Java, Indonesia where he did extensive work on tropical medicine and observed an association between dietary cholesterol intake and incidence of gallstones, arteriosclerosis and other "Western diseases".
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Edward Conze
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Edward Conze, born Eberhard Julius Dietrich Conze was a scholar of Marxism and Buddhism, known primarily for his commentaries and translations of the Prajñāpāramitā literature. Biography Conze's parents, Dr. Ernst Conze and Adele Louise Charlotte Köttgen , both came from families involved in the textile industry in the region of Langenberg, Germany. Ernst had a doctorate in Law and served in the Foreign Office and later as a judge. Conze was born in London while his father was Vice Consul and thus entitled to British citizenship.
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Claude Fortier
1921 - 1986 (65 years)
Claude Fortier was a Canadian physiologist and expert on the pituitary gland. From 1974 to 1975, he was the president of the Royal Society of Canada. Honours In 1970, he was made a Companion of the Order of Canada.In 1980, he was awarded the Quebec government's Prix Marie-Victorin.In 1998, he was inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.
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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.
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A. C. Ewing
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Alfred Cyril Ewing , usually cited as A. C. Ewing, was an English philosopher and a sympathetic critic of idealism. Biography Ewing studied at Oxford, where he gained the John Locke Lectureship and the Green Prize in Moral Philosophy. He taught for four years in Swansea/Wales, and became lecturer in Moral Science at Cambridge in 1931, based at Trinity Hall, and reader in Moral Science in 1954. He was an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and one of Wittgenstein's foremost critics.
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Karl Evang
1902 - 1981 (79 years)
Karl Evang was a Norwegian physician and civil servant. He was born in Kristiania as a son of assisting secretary Jens Ingolf Evang and Anna Beate Wexelsen . He was a brother of Vilhelm Evang, and a relative of Vilhelm Andreas Wexelsen, Per Kvist and Gunnar Jahn. His sister Anne Beate married another civil servant, Karl Ludvig Bugge. Karl Evang met physician Gerda S. Landmark Moe in 1926, and married her in 1929.
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Lawrence S. Thompson
1916 - 1986 (70 years)
Lawrence Sidney Thompson worked at the University of Kentucky as the Director of Libraries and as a faculty member in the classics department. He wrote extensively on the processes of printing and publication. Thompson also researched processes for cataloging materials, frequently corresponding with European colleagues.
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Chassar Moir
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Chassar Moir CBE was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at The University of Oxford. "One whose contributions were so outstanding as to make Chassar Moir’s an immortal name in the history of Obstetrics and Gynaecology". Sir Norman Jeffcoate
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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.
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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.
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Curt John Ducasse
1881 - 1969 (88 years)
Curt John Ducasse was a French-born American philosopher who taught at the University of Washington and Brown University. Career Ducasse was born in Angoulême, France. He obtained A.B. and A.M. degrees in philosophy from University of Washington. In 1912, he obtained his PhD from Harvard University.
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Rudolf Allers
1883 - 1963 (80 years)
Rudolf Allers was an Austrian psychiatrist who was a member of the first group of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Life and career Rudolf Allers was born in Vienna on January 13, 1883. He was the son of a doctor, Mark Allers and Augusta Grailich . In 1908, he married Carola Meitner .
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Stanhope Bayne-Jones
1888 - 1970 (82 years)
Stanhope Bayne-Jones was an American physician, bacteriologist, medical historian and a United States Army medical officer with the rank of brigadier general. Early life and education Bayne-Jones was born on November 6, 1888, in New Orleans as the son of physician. His grandfather Joseph Jones was also a physician and served in the medical department of the Confederate States Army during the American Civil War. In this way, Bayne-Jones was influenced in his future career choice.
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Archibald McIndoe
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Sir Archibald Hector McIndoe was a New Zealand plastic surgeon who worked for the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. He improved the treatment and rehabilitation of badly burned aircrew. Early life Archibald McIndoe was born 4 May 1900 in Forbury, in Dunedin, New Zealand, into a family of four. His father was John McIndoe, a printer and his mother was the artist Mabel McIndoe née Hill. He had three brothers and one sister. McIndoe studied at Otago Boys' High School and later medicine at the University of Otago. After his graduation he became a house surgeon at Waikato Hospital.
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H. A. Hodges
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Herbert Arthur Hodges was a British philosopher and theologian. He was Professor of Philosophy at Reading University from 1934 to 1969. He was a member of The Moot, the discussion and study group begun by J. H. Oldham. Its purpose was "to continue, in an informal, confidential but serious way, exploration of the relation between church and society and the realisation of Christian ethics in the public sphere." Other members included T. S. Eliot, with whom Hodges corresponded. Eliot suggested to Karl Mannheim that Hodges was closer to Mannheim than others in the Moot, in at least some areas of ...
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Gerhard Gentzen
1909 - 1945 (36 years)
Gerhard Karl Erich Gentzen was a German mathematician and logician. He made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics, proof theory, especially on natural deduction and sequent calculus. He died of starvation in a Czech prison camp in Prague in 1945, having been interned as a German national after the Second World War.
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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.
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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.
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Henry Kaplan
1918 - 1984 (66 years)
Henry Seymour Kaplan was an American radiologist who pioneered in radiation therapy and radiobiology. Career Kaplan earned his degree from Rush Medical College in Chicago, after which he trained at the University of Minnesota, Yale University and the National Cancer Institute. He once said he became interested in oncology after his father died of lung cancer, the same disease which killed Dr. Kaplan, a non-smoker.
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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.
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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.
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Max Black
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Max Black was an Azerbaijani-born British-American philosopher who was a leading figure in analytic philosophy in the years after World War II. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies of the work of philosophers such as Frege. His translation of Frege's published philosophical writing is a classic text.
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Franz J. Ingelfinger
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Franz Joseph Ingelfinger was a German-American physician, researcher and journal editor. He served as Chief of Gastroenterology at Evans Memorial Department of Clinical Research, part of Boston University School of Medicine. He also served as Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine from 1967 to 1976. His work was influential in the field of science journalism.
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