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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#2351
S. N. Balagangadhara
#19981
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
S. N. Balagangadhara is a professor emeritus of the Ghent University in Belgium, and was director of the India Platform and the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cutuurwetenschap . Early life and education Balagangadhara was a student of National College, Bangalore and moved to Belgium in 1977 to study philosophy at Ghent University, where he obtained his doctorate under the supervision of Etienne Vermeersch. His doctoral thesis was entitled Comparative Science of Cultures and the Universality of Religion: An Essay on Worlds without Views and Views without the World.
Go to Profile#2352
Samir Okasha
#34191
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Samir Okasha , is a Professor of Philosophy of Science at University of Bristol. He is a winner of Lakatos Award for his book Evolution and the Levels of Selection. He was appointed a Fellow of the British Academy in 2018.
Go to Profile#2353
Jacqueline Lichtenstein
#50934
Overall Influence
1947 - 2019 (72 years)
Jacqueline Lichtenstein was a French philosopher, art historian, and professor of aesthetics and the philosophy of art at the University of Paris IV - Paris-Sorbonne. Her work focused on 17th century- and 18th-century art, and the ways in which people think, talk, and theorize about art. Another theme of her work was the shift, since the 17th century, in how people think about the amateur.
Go to Profile#2354
Steven M. Haffner
#71448
Overall Influence
#2355
C. T. K. Chari
#27880
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
C. T. K. Chari was Head of the Department of Philosophy at Madras Christian College from 1958 to 1969 and the most prominent among contemporary Indian philosophers who paid close attention to psi phenomena. Chari published extensively on extremely diverse topics, such as logic, linguistics, information theory, mathematics, quantum physics, philosophy of mind, and, of course, psi research.
Go to Profile#2356
Fortunatus Victor Costa
#52512
Overall Influence
Fortunatus Victor Costa was a minor Maltese philosopher who specialised in metaphysics. Life Almost nothing is known as yet about the personal life of Costa, only that he hailed from Senglea, Malta, and that in 1806 he was a religious cleric. He might have been studying for the priesthood or else embraced the clerical state on a lifelong basis.
Go to Profile#2357
Daniel Catovsky
#71544
Overall Influence
#2358
Robert Joseph Huebner
#71557
Overall Influence
#2359
Sanjiv Sam Gambhir
#57619
Overall Influence
1961 - 2020 (59 years)
Sanjiv Sam Gambhir was an American physician–scientist. He was the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor in Cancer Research, Chairman of the Department of Radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a professor by courtesy in the departments of Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford University. Additionally, he served as the Director of the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford , Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection and the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center . He authored 680 publications and had over 40 patents pending or granted.
Go to Profile#2360
Jerry Avorn
#29832
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Jerry Avorn is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief Emeritus of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He founded one of the largest programs using health care utilization data to track medication use and outcomes, and invented the practice of "academic detailing" in which pharmacists, nurses, and physicians educate doctors about cost-effective prescribing practices using the same tactics that drug companies employ to market their products. He received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1969 and M.D. from Harvard Med...
Go to Profile#2361
Milton Weinstein
#61562
Overall Influence
Milton C. Weinstein is an American health decision scientist and the Henry J. Kaiser Professor of Health Policy and Management at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Publishing over 300 papers in major journals in multiple fields, he is recognized for his current work around affordable healthcare and its improvements. He received four degrees from Harvard University, an AB and MA , MPP 1972Public Policy 1973
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Joshua Parens
#41250
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Joshua S. Parens is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas. He is the dean of Braniff Graduate School of Liberal Arts. Parens is known for his expertise on Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy.
Go to Profile#2363
Calvin Seerveld
#21184
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Calvin George Seerveld received a BA from Calvin College in 1952 and an MA in English literature and classics from the University of Michigan in 1953. He then went on to study under D. H. Th. Vollenhoven at the Free University in Amsterdam, where his doctoral dissertation dealt with Croce's aesthetics. It was supervised by Vollenhoven and Carlo Antoni. He then taught philosophy and German at Trinity Christian College and went on to teach philosophical aesthetics at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto.
Go to Profile#2364
Ruwen Ogien
#46871
Overall Influence
Ruwen Ogien was a contemporary French philosopher. He was a researcher at the French National Centre for Scientific Research. He focused on moral philosophy and the philosophy of social science. He was the brother of Albert Ogien a sociologist.
Go to Profile#2365
Manon Garcia
#58952
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (39 years)
Manon Garcia is a French philosopher, specializing in feminist philosophy. Her book We Are Not Born Submissive has been translated besides to English into several other languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, German and Spanish.
Go to Profile#2366
Christian Boltanski
#11042
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Christian Liberté Boltanski was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French conceptual style. Early life Boltanski was born in Paris on 6 September 1944. His father, Étienne Alexandre Boltanski, a physician, was Jewish and had come to France from Russia, while Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin, his Roman Catholic mother originated from Corsica, descended from Ukrainian Jews. His Jewish heritage was a large influence in Boltanski's household. During World War II, while living in Paris, his father escaped deportation by hiding in a space under the floorboards of the family apartment for a year and a half.
Go to Profile#2367
Paul Piccone
#35913
Overall Influence
1940 - 2004 (64 years)
Paul Piccone was an Italian-American philosopher, critical theorist, intellectual historian, and most notably the founder and long-time editor of the journal Telos. He was born in L'Aquila in Italy to a family that emigrated to Rochester, New York in the mid-1950s. In 1968, he and others started the journal Telos, which he edited until his death in 2004.
Go to Profile#2368
Norman Pittenger
#42182
Overall Influence
1905 - 1997 (92 years)
William Norman Pittenger was an Anglican minister, teacher, and theologian. He wrote about and promoted process theology, and became one of the first acknowledged Christian defenders for the open acceptance of homosexual relations among Christians. He served as Vice-Chairman and the Chairman of the Theological Commission of the World Council of Churches from the mid-1950s through the early 1960s. He lived most of his life in the United States, though from 1966 until his death he lived at King's College at Cambridge University as an honorary member of the university.
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Michel E. Safar
#71810
Overall Influence
#2370
Ratnakīrti
#42958
Overall Influence
Ratnakīrti was an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the Yogācāra and epistemological schools who wrote on logic, philosophy of mind and epistemology. Ratnakīrti studied at the Vikramaśīla monastery in modern-day Bihar. He was a pupil of Jñānaśrīmitra, and Ratnakīrti refers to Jñānaśrīmitra in his work as his guru with phrases such as yad āhur guravaḥ.
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Thoralf Mauritz Sundt
#71829
Overall Influence
#2372
Eva Picardi
#63144
Overall Influence
1948 - 2017 (69 years)
Eva Picardi was an Italian philosopher. Picardi's contributions have been in analytic philosophy and linguistics. Early life and education Picardi graduated from the University of Bologna, in 1970, under the supervision of Alberto Pasquinelli. In 1984, she received her PhD at Somerville College, Oxford under the supervision of Michael Dummett, with a dissertation on assertibility and truth. She studied at Erlangen/Nürnberg as a Von Humboldt Fellow and served as visiting professor at the University of Helsinki in 1986 and at the University of Bielefeld. In 2009, Picardi was visiting fellow at ...
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Diana Schaub
#16773
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Diana J. Schaub is professor of political science at Loyola University Maryland. Schaub received both her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. She teaches and writes on a wide range of issues in political philosophy and American political thought. Schaub was also a member of The President's Council on Bioethics.
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Robert Sinnerbrink
#63787
Overall Influence
Robert Sinnerbrink is an Australian philosopher and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is an ARC Future Fellowship recipient and a former Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy . Sinnerbrink is known for his research on aesthetics and philosophy of film.
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Daniel J. Drucker
#33903
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Daniel Joshua Drucker is a Canadian endocrinologist. A Fellow of the Royal Society, he is a professor of medicine at the Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Mount Sinai Hospital, Toronto. He is known for his research into intestinal hormones and their use in the treatment of diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
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Friedrich Kambartel
#58572
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Friedrich Kambartel was a German philosopher. Biography Kambartel was born on 17 February 1935 in Münster, Germany. He studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Münster, where he received his PhD and his “habilitation”, the postdoctoral lecture qualification . In 1966 he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Constance, where he took active part in making it a reform university . Kambartel had close ties to the Erlangen School of constructivist philosophy of science. He taught in Frankfurt am Main from 1993 until his retirement in 2000. He died on A...
Go to Profile#2377
John W. Kirklin
#72017
Overall Influence
#2378
Juha Sihvola
#37331
Overall Influence
1957 - 2012 (55 years)
Juha Sihvola was a Finnish philosopher and historian. He was a university professor of general history from 2000, and part of The Academy of Finland's Centre of Excellence program upon Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics, serving as the Deputy Director of the Centre of Excellence from 2008. In the years 2004–2009, he was the Director of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies.
Go to Profile#2379
Andrei Oișteanu
#13920
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Andrei Oișteanu is a Romanian historian of religions and mentalities, ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, literary critic and novelist. Specialized in the history of religions and mentalities, he is also noted for his investigation of rituals and magic and his work in Jewish studies and the history of antisemitism. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, he also became noted for his articles and essays on the Holocaust in Romania.
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Patrick Mollison
#67858
Overall Influence
1914 - 2011 (97 years)
Patrick Loudon Mollison, , was a British haematologist, described as 'the father of transfusion medicine'. Life Mollison was born on 17 March 1914, to Beatrice Marjorie, née Walker, and William Mayhew Mollison. His father was an ear, nose and throat surgeon at Guy's Hospital, and his paternal grandfather, William Loudon Mollison, was a Scottish mathematician and Master of Clare College, Cambridge.
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John Newsome Crossley
#40813
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
John Newsome Crossley is a British-Australian mathematician and logician who writes in the field of logic in computer science, history of mathematics and medieval history. He is involved in the field of mathematical logic in Australia and South East Asia.
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Ernesto Schiffrin
#72094
Overall Influence
Ernesto Luis Schiffrin is an Argentinian-Canadian physician and researcher specialized in cardiovascular diseases. Schiffrin is a distinguished James McGill Professor of Medicine at the Department of Medicine, McGill University . Canada Research Chair in Hypertension and Vascular Research at the Lady Davis Institute, and Physician-in-Chief at Jewish General Hospital.
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Douglas P. Lackey
#21653
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Douglas P. Lackey is an American philosopher and playwright who is also a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York. Lackey was born in Staten Island, New York. As a graduate student, he studied under J. N. Findlay at Yale University. His post-graduate work on the ethics of nuclear warfare was influenced by his attention to earlier works by Bertrand Russell. His drama Kaddish in East Jerusalem was produced in 2003. The play was later expanded and revised as The Gandhi Nonviolent Soccer Club. He has also had plays produced about Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, and Lud...
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Victor Vasarely
#3479
Overall Influence
1906 - 1997 (91 years)
Victor Vasarely was a Hungarian-French artist, who is widely accepted as a "grandfather" and leader of the Op art movement. His work titled Zebra, created in 1937, is considered by some to be one of the earliest examples of Op art.
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Jeroen Groenendijk
#60314
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Jeroen Antonius Gerardus Groenendijk , was a Dutch logician, linguist and philosopher, working on philosophy of language, formal semantics, pragmatics. Groenendijk wrote a joint Ph.D. dissertation with Martin Stokhof on the formal semantics of questions, under the supervision of Renate Bartsch and Johan van Benthem. He was also an important figure in the development of dynamic semantics . His later work was mainly focused on studying and developing the recently founded framework of inquisitive semantics.
Go to Profile#2386
Jaroslav Peregrin
#50744
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Jaroslav Peregrin is a professor of logic at Charles University in Prague and also a faculty member at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He has published almost a hundred books and articles in several languages. Peregrin writes in Czech, English, German and Portuguese.
Go to Profile#2387
Susanna Schellenberg
#47301
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. She specializes in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language and is best known for her work on perceptual experience, evidence, capacities, mental content, and imagination. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Award, a Humboldt Prize, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for a project on the Neuroscience of Perception. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence .
Go to Profile#2388
Herbert e. Kaufman
#72184
Overall Influence
#2389
Eugene H. Blackstone
#72202
Overall Influence
#2390
Gerald J. Gleich
#72206
Overall Influence
#2391
John D. Lantos
#43868
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
John D. Lantos is an American pediatrician and a leading expert in medical ethics. He is Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Medicine and Director of the Children's Mercy Bioethics Center at Children's Mercy Hospital.
Go to Profile#2392
Alan Code
#49816
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Alan Dodd Code is Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Classics at Stanford University, and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He is a leading scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, especially well known for his articles on Aristotle's metaphysics, science, and logic.
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Charles T. Esmon
#72250
Overall Influence
#2394
Paul E. Griffiths
#34090
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Paul Griffiths is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney and works primarily in the Philosophy of Science and more particularly Philosophy of Biology. Born in England in 1962, he received a B.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1984 and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Australian National University in 1989 under the supervision of Kim Sterelny. He taught previously at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Queensland and the University of Otago. He spends part of each year at the University of Exeter in the Egenis: the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences. Griffith...
Go to Profile#2395
Renato Baserga
#72295
Overall Influence
#2396
Sally Sedgwick
#54776
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Sally Sedgwick is an American philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at Boston University, and was previously the LAS Distinguished Professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago .
Go to Profile#2397
Miguel Abensour
#27154
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Miguel Abensour was a French philosopher specializing in political philosophy. Beginning his academic career as a professor of political science at Dijon, then at the University of Reims, before teaching political philosophy at the Paris Diderot University , where he became emeritus professor. Founder and director of the editorial collection "Critique de la politique" at Payot and president of the Collège international de philosophie from 1985 to 1987, he is generally viewed as a left-libertarian thinker and as a theoretician of radical democracy.
Go to Profile#2398
Kian Fan Chung
#72347
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#2399
Ole Fogh Kirkeby
#41740
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Ole Fogh Kirkeby is a Danish philosopher and a professor at Copenhagen Business School in the Philosophy of Leadership. Education He is a Doctor of Philosophy from Aarhus University, graduated with honours, 1994, with the dissertation "Event and Body-mind. A phenomenological-hermeneutic Analysis". He has an MA in the History of Ideas from Aarhus University.
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Denis MacEoin
#12457
Overall Influence
1949 - 2022 (73 years)
Denis M. MacEoin was a British academic, scholar and writer with a focus on Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies. He authored several academic books and articles, as well as many pieces of journalism. Since 2014 he published a number of essays on current events with a Middle Eastern focus at the Gatestone Institute, of which he was a Senior Fellow. He was a Senior Editor from 2009 to 2010 at Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the American think tank Middle East Forum, where he was also a Fellow.
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