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 …
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
Loren E. Lomasky is an American philosopher, formerly the Cory Professor of Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at the University of Virginia. Biography Lomasky earned his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and has previously taught at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, the University of Minnesota in Duluth, and the Australian National University in Canberra. He has also been a contributing editor to Reason magazine.
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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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Paul Gyorgy
1893 - 1976 (83 years)
Paul György was a Hungarian-born American biochemist, nutritionist, and pediatrician best known for his discovery of three B vitamins: riboflavin, B6, and biotin. Gyorgy was also well known for his research into the protective factors of human breast milk, particularly for his discoveries of Lactobacillus bifidus growth factor activity in human milk and its anti-staphylococcal properties. He was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 1975 from President Gerald Ford.
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R. G. Collingwood
1889 - 1943 (54 years)
Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .
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Detlev Bronk
1897 - 1975 (78 years)
Detlev Wulf Bronk was a prominent American scientist, educator, and administrator. He is credited with establishing biophysics as a recognized discipline. Bronk served as president of Johns Hopkins University from 1949 to 1953 and as president of The Rockefeller University from 1953 to 1968. Bronk also held the presidency of the National Academy of Sciences between 1950 and 1962.
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Michael Gelfand
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Michael Gelfand, CBE, was a Zimbabwean medical practitioner of tropical medicine, who received a Papal Order of the Knighthood of St. Sylvester. Early life and education Gelfand was born 26 December, 1912 in Wynberg, Cape Province, Union of South Africa to immigrant Jewish-Lithuanian parents. He attended Wynberg Boys' High School and obtained his degree in medicine from the University of Cape Town in 1936. His further medical training was in London.
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Joseph Erlanger
1874 - 1965 (91 years)
Joseph Erlanger was an American physiologist who is best known for his contributions to the field of neuroscience. Together with Herbert Spencer Gasser, he identified several varieties of nerve fiber and established the relationship between action potential velocity and fiber diameter. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1944 for these achievements.
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John Caffey
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
John Patrick Caffey was an American pediatrician and radiologist who is often referred to as one of the founders of pediatric radiology. He was the first to describe shaken baby syndrome, infantile cortical hyperostosis, and Kenny-Caffey syndrome.
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Edward Murray East
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Edward Murray East was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist. He is known for his experiments that led to the development of hybrid corn and his support of 'forced' elimination of the 'unfit' based on eugenic findings. He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait. He is also known as a critic of consumption and as a pioneer of thinking about environmental limits. While some scholars see his population thinking as nothing more than eugenics...
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