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,
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Ben Shahn
1898 - 1969 (71 years)
Ben Shahn was an American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content. Biography Shahn was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, to Jewish parents Joshua Hessel and Gittel Shan. His father was exiled to Siberia for possible revolutionary activities in 1902, at which point Shahn, his mother, and two younger siblings moved to Vilkomir . In 1906, the family immigrated to the United States where they rejoined Hessel, a carpenter, who had fled Siberia and emigrated to the US by way of South Africa.
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John Plamenatz
1912 - 1975 (63 years)
John Petrov Plamenatz was a Montenegrin political philosopher, who spent most of his academic life at the University of Oxford. He is best known for his analysis of political obligation and his theory of democracy.
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George Hourani
1913 - 1984 (71 years)
George Fadlo Hourani was a British philosopher, historian, and classicist. He is best known for his work in Islamic philosophy, which focused on classical Islamic rationalism and ethics. Biography George Hourani was born into a prosperous British family of Lebanese Christian extraction in Didsbury, Manchester. He was the fourth of six children, having three older sisters and two younger brothers. His brothers were Albert Hourani and Cecil Hourani.
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Eudo Mason
1901 - 1969 (68 years)
Eudo Colecestra Mason was a scholar and professor of German at Edinburgh University, joining in 1946 and becoming Chair of German in 1951, a position he held until his death in 1969, only the third person to take the role since 1919. He had previously worked as a lecturer in Münster, Leipzig, and Basle.
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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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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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Albert Lautman
1908 - 1944 (36 years)
Albert Lautman was a French philosopher of mathematics, born in Paris. An escaped prisoner of war, he was shot by the Nazi authorities in Toulouse on 1 August 1944. Family His father was a Jewish emigrant from Vienna who became a medical doctor after he was seriously wounded in the First World War.
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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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Georg Waaler
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Georg Waaler was a Norwegian physician, a professor of forensic medicine, and chairman of the Norwegian Board of Forensic Medicine. Personal life Waaler was born in Hamar on 21 March 1895 to physician Peder Ferdinand Waaler and musician Fredrikke Amalie Holtemann Rynning, and was a brother of Rolf and Erik Waaler. In 1920 he married Sophie Amalie Koller.
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