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,
#19201
Édouard Collignon
1831 - 1913 (82 years)
Édouard Charles Romain Collignon was a French engineer and scientist, known for the Collignon projection and for his role in building railways in Russia. Career After graduating from the l'École polytechnique in 1849, he became an ingénieur des ponts et chaussées. He became inspecteur des Ponts et chaussées in 1878.
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Louis Waldenburg
1837 - 1881 (44 years)
Louis Waldenburg was a German physician. Waldenburg was born in Filehne, Posen. He graduated from the University of Berlin . After a postgraduate course at Heidelberg he established himself in Berlin as a specialist in chest and throat diseases. From 1864 to 1868 he co-edited the Allgemeine Medizinische Central-Zeitung . In 1865 he earned the title of Privatdozent at Berlin University. From 1868 until his death he edited the Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift . In 1871 he was appointed assistant professor, and in 1877 department physician, at the Charité hospital in Berlin.
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Georg Forster
1510 - 1568 (58 years)
Georg Forster was a German editor, composer and physician. Forster was born at Amberg, in the Upper Palatinate. While a chorister at Elector Ludwig V’s court in Heidelberg around 1521, he was a colleague of Caspar Othmayr who would also become a composer of renown. Forster received his first instruction in composition from the Kapellmeister Lorenz Lemlin. Forster died at Nuremberg.
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Carl Ebert
1887 - 1980 (93 years)
Carl Anton Charles Ebert , was a German actor, stage director and arts administrator. Ebert's early career was as an actor, training under Max Reinhardt and becoming one of the leading actors in his native Germany during the 1920s. During that decade he was also appointed to administrative posts, both theatrical and academic. In 1929 he directed opera for the first time, and during the 1930s established a reputation as an operatic director in Germany and beyond. A strong opponent of Nazism, he left Germany in 1933 and did not return until 1945.
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Georg Lotheissen
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Georg Lotheissen was an Austrian surgeon born in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1892 he earned his medical doctorate in Vienna, and following graduation was an assistant to Emil Zuckerkandl , and a surgical apprentice under Theodor Billroth and Carl Gussenbauer . From 1895 to 1901, he served as first assistant to Viktor von Hacker at the surgical clinic at Innsbruck, where in 1899 he received his habilitation in surgery. In 1902 he returned to Vienna, where in 1915 he became an associate professor.
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Richard Kroner
1884 - 1974 (90 years)
Richard Kroner was a German neo-Hegelian philosopher, known for his Von Kant bis Hegel , a classic history of German idealism written from the neo-Hegelian point of view. He was a Christian, from a Jewish background. He is known for his formulation of Hegel as 'the Protestant Aquinas'.
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Arthur Groenouw
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Arthur Groenouw was a German ophthalmologist born in Bosatz, a village near Ratibor. He studied medicine in Breslau, and was an assistant to physiologist Rudolf Heidenhain and ophthalmologist Wilhelm Uhthoff . In 1892 he was habilitated for ophthalmology in Breslau, and in 1899 attained the title of professor.
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Henry M. Sheffer
1882 - 1964 (82 years)
Henry Maurice Sheffer was an American logician. Life and career Sheffer was a Polish Jew born in the western Ukraine, who immigrated to the USA in 1892 with his parents and six siblings. He studied at the Boston Latin School before entering Harvard University, learning logic from Josiah Royce, and completing his undergraduate degree in 1905, his master's in 1907, and his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1908.
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Ernst Gräfenberg
1881 - 1957 (76 years)
Ernst Gräfenberg was a German-born physician and scientist. He is known for developing the intra-uterine device , and for his studies of the role of the woman's urethra in orgasm. The G-spot is named after him.
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Peter Choong
Peter Fook Meng Choong is an Australian doctor and professor who specializes in orthopaedics. He is the Director of Orthopaedics at St. Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne and the Hugh Devine Chair of Surgery at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, he became the first surgeon to perform a 3D-printed heel transplant.
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Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Gunapala Piyasena Malalasekera, OBE, JP, was a Sri Lankan academic, scholar and diplomat best known for his Malalasekara English-Sinhala Dictionary. He was Ceylon's first Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Ceylon's High Commissioner to Canada, the United Kingdom and Ceylon's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. He was the Professor Emeritus in Pali and Dean of the Faculty of Oriental Studies.
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Ray Farquharson
1897 - 1965 (68 years)
Ray Fletcher Farquharson was a Canadian medical doctor, university professor, and medical researcher. Born in Claude, Ontario, he attended and taught at the University of Toronto for most of his life, and was trained and employed at Toronto General Hospital. With co-researcher Arthur Squires, Farquharson was responsible for the discovery of the Farquharson phenomenon, an important principle of endocrinology, which is that administering external hormones suppresses the natural production of that hormone.
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John Macmurray
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
John Macmurray was a Scottish philosopher. His thought both moved beyond and was critical of the modern tradition, whether rationalist or empiricist. His thought may be classified as personalist, as his writings focused primarily on the nature of human beings. He viewed persons in terms of their relationality and agency, rather than the modern tendency to characterize them in terms of individualism and cognition.
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Taro Takemi
1904 - 1983 (79 years)
Taro Takemi, , was a Japanese physician who served as 11th President of the Japan Medical Association for 25 years from 1957 to 1982, and also served as president of the World Medical Association from 1975 to 1976.
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Lauren Klein
Lauren Klein is an American academic who works as an associate professor, and director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory University. Klein is best known for her work in digital humanities and for co-authoring the book Data Feminism with Catherine D'Ignazio.
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Gunnar Dahlberg
1893 - 1956 (63 years)
Gunnar Dahlberg was a Swedish physician, eugenist and geneticist. From 1922 to 1924 he was the assistant of Herman Lundborg at Statens institut för rasbiologi. In 1935, when Lundborg retired, Dahlberg succeeded him as the head of the institute. Dahlberg held the post until his death in 1956 and was succeeded by the geneticist Jan Arvid Böök.
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Gerald Heard
1889 - 1971 (82 years)
Henry FitzGerald Heard , commonly called Gerald Heard, was a British-born American historian, science writer and broadcaster, public lecturer, educator, and philosopher. He wrote many articles and over 35 books.
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Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Andrew Seth, FBA, DCL , who changed his name to Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in 1898 to fulfill the terms of a bequest, was a Scottish philosopher. His brother was James Seth, also a philosopher. Early life and education Their father, Smith Kinmont Seth, was the son of a farmer from Fife and a bank clerk in the head office of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. Their mother, Margaret, was the daughter of Andrew Little a farmer from Berwickshire. An elder brother died in infancy.
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Sigmund Spaeth
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth was an American musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music for the general public. His extensive knowledge of both the classical repertoire and popular song enabled him to trace the melodies of current hits back to earlier sources; this talent garnered him fame as the "Tune Detective," a role he played as an entertainer, educator, and as an expert witness in cases of plagiarism and infringement of copyrighted music.
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Max Seiffert
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Maximilian Seiffert was a German musicologist and editor of Baroque music. Biography Seiffert was born in Beeskow an der Spree, Kingdom of Prussia, the son of a teacher. He was first educated at the Joachimsthal Gymnasium, in Berlin, where he studied under Philipp Spitta, and then at the University of Berlin where he received a Ph.D. in 1891 for his dissertation J. P. Sweelinck und seine direkten deutschen Schüler .
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Wilhelm Dilthey
1833 - 1911 (78 years)
Wilhelm Dilthey was a German historian, psychologist, sociologist, and hermeneutic philosopher, who held G. W. F. Hegel's Chair in Philosophy at the University of Berlin. As a polymathic philosopher, working in a modern research university, Dilthey's research interests revolved around questions of scientific methodology, historical evidence and history's status as a science. He could be considered an empiricist, in contrast to the idealism prevalent in Germany at the time, but his account of what constitutes the empirical and experiential differs from British empiricism and positivism in it...
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Walker Percy
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
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John S. Richards
1892 - 1979 (87 years)
John S. Richards was a librarian who served as the president of the American Library Association from 1955 to 1956. Early life and career John Stewart Richards was born February 16, 1892, in Chicago, Illinois. His family moved to the Pacific Northwest when he was four years old, and he grew up in Yakima Valley. In 1912 Richards began his studies at the University of Washington; under the tutelage of University Librarian William E. Henry, Richards studied library science and became the first alumnus to graduate from the University of Washington Library School with an A.B. degree in 1916.
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Bernhard Fischer-Wasels
1877 - 1941 (64 years)
Bernhard Fischer-Wasels , known as Bernhard Fischer until 1926, was a German physician and anatomical pathologist, who served as Director of the Senckenberg Institute of Pathology , Professor of Pathology and Rector of the Goethe University Frankfurt . He was a leading cancer researcher and is world-renowned as the father of petrochemical carcinogenesis.
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Penelope Mackie
1900 - Present (126 years)
Penelope Mackie was a British philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and philosophical logic, and was best known for her work on essence and modality. Mackie spent the majority of her career in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham , having also held appointments at the University of Birmingham, Virginia Commonwealth University, and New College, Oxford.
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Paul Grice
1913 - 1988 (75 years)
Herbert Paul Grice , usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British philosopher of language who created the theory of implicature and the cooperative principle , which became foundational concepts in the linguistic field of pragmatics. His work on meaning has also influenced the philosophical study of semantics.
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Robert Bruce Raup
1888 - 1976 (88 years)
Robert Bruce Raup , was a Professor in the Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. He was a well-known writer in the 1930s, whose writings were influenced by his own teacher and mentor, the American philosopher John Dewey. Like his mentor, Professor Raup is often associated with the pedagogical concept of promoting practical judgment as something appropriate and necessary within the context of a modern democratic society. He was best known for his criticism of the American public education system, which he claimed was inadequate and ineffective in its methods.
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Moses Schönfinkel
1888 - 1942 (54 years)
Moses Ilyich Schönfinkel was a logician and mathematician, known for the invention of combinatory logic. Life Moses Schönfinkel was born on in Ekaterinoslav, Russian Empire . Moses Schönfinkel was born to a Jewish family. His father was Ilya Girshevich Schönfinkel, a merchant of first guild, who was in а grocery store trade, and his mother, Maria “Masha” Gertsovna Schönfinkel came from a prominent Lurie family. Moses had siblings named Deborah, Natan, Israel and Grigoriy. Schönfinkel attended the Novorossiysk University of Odessa, studying mathematics under Samuil Osipovich Shatunovskii , who worked in geometry and the foundations of mathematics.
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Matila Ghyka
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Prince Matila Costiescu Ghyka , was a Romanian naval officer, novelist, mathematician, historian, philosopher, academic and diplomat. He did not return to Romania after World War II, and was one of the most significant members of the Romanian diaspora. His first name is sometimes written as Matyla.
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Ernst Fritz Schmid
1904 - 1960 (56 years)
Ernst Fritz Schmid was a German musicologist and Mozart scholar. Life Born in Tübingen, Schmid was the son of Wilhelm Schmid from Graz and grandson of Karl Emil Kauffmann. Initially, Schmid studied violin, viola and viola d'amore at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich from 1924 to 1927 and was also active as a violist in Düsseldorf in 1927. He then studied musicology in Freiburg, Tübingen and Vienna. He received his doctorate in 1929 and his habilitation in 1934. From 1935 to 1937 he was Extraordinarius for Musicology at the University of Tübingen and its university music director. Around 193...
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Éric Weil
1904 - 1977 (73 years)
Éric Weil was a French-German philosopher noted for the development of a theory that places the effort to understand violence at the center of philosophy. Calling himself a post-Hegelian Kantian, Weil was a key figure in the 20th century reception of Hegel in France, as well as the renewed interest in Kant in that country. The author of major original works, critical studies, and numerous essays in French his adopted language, as well as German and English, Weil was both an active academic as well as public intellectual. Involved in various fecund moments of French intellectual life, Weil was...
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Paul Pulewka
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Paul Pulewka was a German pharmacologist from Elbing . Pulewka graduated from the Königsberg Medical Faculty in 1923 and earned doctorates in pharmacology and toxicology from the Pharmacology Institute of the same university in 1927. Pulewka was appointed Docent at the University of Tübingen in 1929. In May 1933, he was promoted to Professor Extraordinarius of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Tübingen where he lectured on the toxicology of poisonous gases and the protection against them. He was elected to the university's Senate. However, Behrend Behrens, Pulewka's former assistant whom he and ...
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Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
1888 - 1973 (85 years)
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was a historian and social philosopher, whose work spanned the disciplines of history, theology, sociology, linguistics and beyond. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, the son of a prosperous banker, he converted to Christianity in his late teens, and thereafter the interpretation and reinterpretation of Christianity was a consistent theme in his writings. He met and married Margrit Hüssy in 1914. In 1925, the couple legally combined their names. They had a son, Hans, in 1921.
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Harold Foster Hallett
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Harold Foster Hallet , was a British philosopher Work He is the author of numerous books and articles on philosophy; most noteworthy is his seminal work in the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. His "Spinoza The Elements of His Philosophy" stands as the most comprehensive and erudite analysis of Spinoza's system in the entire extant.
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Franklin David Keim
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Franklin David Keim was a professor at the University of Nebraska where he studied plant genetics, grasses, and grazing. He served as the chair of the University of Nebraska Department of Agronomy for 22 years from 1930 to 1952. He was elected a fellow of the American Society of Agronomy in 1937 and served as the president of the American Society of Agronomy in 1943. The University of Nebraska's Keim Hall is named in his honor.
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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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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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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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Heinrich Frenkel
1860 - 1931 (71 years)
Heinrich Simon Frenkel was a Swiss physician and neurologist born in Heiden, a town overlooking Lake Constance. He was an early practitioner of neuro-rehabilitation, advocating a regimen of special exercises for patients with neurological disorders.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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Guillermo Feliú Cruz
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Guillermo Feliú Cruz was a Chilean historian, bibliographer and librarian. He learned historical method by José Toribio Medina who later successfully proposed Feliú Cruz as curator of Biblioteca Americana in the Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.
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Paul Dudley White
1886 - 1973 (87 years)
Paul Dudley White was an American physician and cardiologist. He was considered one of the leading cardiologists of his day, and a prominent advocate of preventive medicine. Early life and education White was born in Roxbury, Massachusetts, the son of Herbert Warren White and Elizabeth Abigail Dudley. White's interest in medicine was sparked early in life, when he accompanied his father, a family practitioner, on rounds and house calls in a horse and buggy. A 1903 graduate of the Roxbury Latin School, his undergraduate education at Harvard College encompassed history and forestry as well as pre-medical courses.
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William Blair-Bell
1871 - 1936 (65 years)
William Blair-Bell was a British medical doctor and gynaecologist who was most notable as the founder of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in 1929. Blair-Bell was considered the greatest gynaecologist of the 20th century, raising it from what was then a branch of general surgery into a separate medical specialism.
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Walter B. Pitkin
1878 - 1953 (75 years)
Walter Boughton Pitkin was an American author and university professor. He taught at Columbia University for 38 years, and he authored more than 30 books, including the 1932 best-selling book, Life Begins at Forty.
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