Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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Ranking

List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#2801

William Allen Banks

#80792

Overall Influence

#2802

Dionysius of Cyrene

#61477

Overall Influence

Dionysius of Cyrene , lived c. 150 BC, was a Stoic philosopher and mathematician. He was a pupil of Diogenes of Babylon and Antipater of Tarsus. He was famed as a mathematician, and he is probably the Dionysius whose arguments are attacked by Philodemus in his book On Signs , where Dionysius is reported as arguing that the Sun must be very large because it reappears slowly from behind an obstruction.

#2803

Murray Clarke

#65720

Overall Influence

Murray Clarke is a Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada specializing in Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Naturalized Epistemology. He is the author of Reconstructing Reason and Representation.

#2804

Sergey Zagraevsky

Sergey Zagraevsky

#19916

Overall Influence

1964 - 2020 (56 years)

Sergey Zagraevsky was a Russian-Israeli painter, architectural historian, writer and theologian. Biography Zagraevsky was the son of architectural historian Wolfgang Kawelmacher and poet and dramatist Inna Zagraevsky .

#2805

Arshi Pipa

#29424

Overall Influence

1920 - 1997 (77 years)

Arshi Pipa was an Albanian and American writer, philosopher, poet and literary critic. Biography Arshi Pipa was born on 28 July 1920 in Shkodër and attended school there until 1938. Pipa received a BA equivalent degree in philosophy at the University of Florence in 1942. After he completed his studies he was a teacher of Italian language in different schools in Albania.

#2806

Carlo Strenger

#18350

Overall Influence

1958 - 2019 (61 years)

Carlo Strenger was a Swiss and Israeli psychologist, philosopher, existential psychoanalyst and public intellectual who served as professor of psychology and philosophy at Tel Aviv University . He was a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of Terrorism at John Jay College, on the scientific advisory board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna, and a member of the Seminar for Existential Psychoanalysis in Zurich. His research focused on the impact of globalization on meaning, personal and group identity.

#2807

Dimitris Bertsimas

#12898

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Dimitris Bertsimas is an American applied mathematician, and a professor in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2005, Bertsimas was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to optimization theory and stochastic systems and innovative applications in financial engineering and transportation.

#2808

John Francis Nunn

#80916

Overall Influence

#2809

Bruce Waller

#47605

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Bruce Waller was a contemporary American philosopher notable for his theories about the nature of free will and its implications for human society. He was a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University from 1990 until he retired in 2019. Waller died on February 8, 2023, at the age of 76.

#2810

Mitchell Miller

#28104

Overall Influence

Mitchell H. Miller, Jr. is an American philosopher. He was, until his retirement in 2013, the Dexter Ferry Professor in Philosophy at Vassar College. The majority of his work concerns the late dialogues of Plato, but he has also written on Hesiod, Parmenides, and Hegel.

#2811

Tony Cragg

#9616

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977. Early life and training Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool. His father was an aerospace engineer. He first worked as a lab technician for the British Rubber Producers Research Association after high school. He studied art at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, Cheltenham, from 1968 to 1970, and painted at the Wimbledon School of Art, London, from 1970 to 1973. The same year he went on to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London, completing an MA in 1977.

#2812

Sara Negri

#65755

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Sara Negri is a mathematical logician who studies proof theory. She is Italian, worked in Finland for several years, where she was a professor of theoretical philosophy in the University of Helsinki, and currently holds a position as professor of mathematical logic at the University of Genoa.

#2813

John Olney

#20710

Overall Influence

1931 - 2015 (84 years)

John Olney was a medical doctor and a professor of psychiatry, pathology, and immunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. He is known for his work on brain damage. He coined the term excitotoxicity in his 1969 paper published in Science. Olney's lesions are named after him. In 1996 he was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He had campaigned for greater regulation of monosodium glutamate , aspartame and other excitotoxins for over twenty years. He died at his residence on April 14, 2015 at the age of 83.

#2814

Christine K. Cassel

#38044

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Christine K. Cassel is a leading expert in geriatric medicine, medical ethics and quality of care. She is planning dean of the new Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine. Until March 2016, she was president and CEO of the National Quality Forum. Previously, Cassel served as president and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and the ABIM Foundation.

#2815

Kenneth Calman

#12216

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Sir Kenneth Charles Calman, HonFAcadMEd is a Scottish doctor and academic who formerly worked as a surgeon, oncologist and cancer researcher and held the position of Chief Medical Officer of Scotland, and then England. He was Warden and Vice-Chancellor of Durham University from 1998 to 2006 before becoming Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. He held the position of Chair of the National Cancer Research Institute from 2008 until 2011. From 2008 to 2009, he was convener of the Calman Commission on Scottish devolution.

#2816

Cercops

#26115

Overall Influence

Cercops was one of the oldest Orphic poets. He was called a Pythagorean by Clement of Alexandria. Cicero, was said by Epigenes of Alexandria to have been the author of an Orphic epic poem entitled the "Descent to Hades", which seems to have been extant in the Alexandrian period. Others attribute this work to Prodicus of Samos, or Herodicus of Perinthus, or Orpheus of Camarina.

#2817

Kathy Wilkes

#36636

Overall Influence

1946 - 2003 (57 years)

Kathleen Vaughan Wilkes was an English philosopher and academic who played an important part in rebuilding the education systems of former Communist countries after 1990. She established her reputation as an academic with her contributions to the philosophy of mind in two major works and many articles in professional journals. As a conscientious college tutor, she won the respect and affection of her students and academic colleagues. Her most notable contribution lay in her clandestine activities behind the Iron Curtain, which led to the establishment of underground universities and academic networks in Soviet-controlled Eastern Europe.

#2818

Peter Jüni

#37024

Overall Influence

Peter Jüni is a Swiss physician, general internist, and epidemiologist based in England. He was previously both a member of, and the scientific director of, the Ontario COVID-19 Science Advisory Table, and also a director of a research centre at St Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

#2819

Shahrokh Shariat

#61653

Overall Influence

1974 - Present (50 years)

Shahrokh François Shariat is currently professor and chairman of the Department of Urology, Medical University of Vienna, Vienna General Hospital, Vienna, Austria. He is also adjunct professor of urology at Weill Cornell Medical Center, New York, NY; adjunct professor of urology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA; adjunct professor of urology at the Faculty of Medicine, Charles University, Prague, CZ; adjunct professor of urology at I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University, Moscow, RU; honorary professor of urology, University of Jordan, Amman, ...

#2820

Jesse Roth

#42176

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (90 years)

Jesse Roth is an American physician and endocrinologist, currently at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research. He received his BA in 1955 from Columbia University, his MD in 1959 from Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed a residency in internal medicine at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in 1961, and a fellowship in endocrinology at Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center in 1963. Beginning with his fellowship work with Solomon Berson and Rosalyn Yalow, Jesse Roth's research career focused on insulin action. His laboratory at the National Institutes of Health elucidated much o...

#2821

Juliana González Valenzuela

#63276

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (88 years)

Juliana González Valenzuela is a Mexican philosopher. Academic biography Juliana Gonzalez is a Mexican philosopher who has worked primarily in the areas of Greek Philosophy, Ontology, Ethics and Bioethics. She was born in Mexico City in 1936. She studied in the Faculty of Philosophy and Literature of the National Autonomous University where she received an ample humanistic education in philosophy, psychology, theater and history. The time she attended university was marked by an intellectual boom due mainly to the presence of the Spanish exiles that arrived in Mexico from 1939 until the end of the Spanish Civil War.

#2822

Ronald A. Kuipers

#21322

Overall Influence

Ronald A. Kuipers is a Canadian philosopher of religion based in Toronto, Ontario. History Ronald A. Kuipers was born in Edmonton, Canada. From 1989 to 1990, Kuipers worked as the Entertainment Editor of The Gateway newspaper. In 2012, Kuipers became an Associate Professor of the philosophy of religion at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto, Canada.

#2823

Melissa Lane

#52608

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Melissa Lane is a full professor of politics at Princeton University, a position she has held since 2009. Prior to this, she was a Senior Research Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Associate Director of their Centre for History and Economics. She was a lecturer at Cambridge from 1994 to 2009. Her expertise is in political theory.

#2824

Eduard Verhagen

#30702

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Eduard Verhagen is an attorney and the medical director of the department of pediatrics at the University Medical Center Groningen . He is mainly known for his involvement in infant euthanasia in the Netherlands.

#2825

Carl Erik Mogensen

#81296

Overall Influence

#2826

C. Kenneth Waters

C. Kenneth Waters

#48768

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (68 years)

C. Kenneth Waters holds the Canada Research Chair in Logic and the Philosophy of Science and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Calgary, where he specializes in philosophy of biology. Education and career Waters received his undergraduate education from the University of Vermont and his M.A and PhD from Indiana University. Waters has taught at the University of Calgary since 2014, and has held previous appointments at John Carroll University, Rice University, and the University of Minnesota. Waters was the Samuel Russell Chair of Humanities at the University of Minnesota and was ...

#2827

Michel Seymour

#33790

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Michel Seymour is a Canadian philosopher from Quebec and a professor at the Université de Montréal, where he has been teaching analytical philosophy since 1990. Biography After having obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières in 1986, he continued to study in the same field for several years at the Oxford University under the direction of John McDowell and at the University of California, Los Angeles under the direction of Tyler Burge. He was president of the Société de philosophie du Québec from 1994 to 1996.

#2828

Hákon Hákonarson

#80931

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Hákon Hákonarson is an Icelandic genomics researcher and physician. He is the founder and director of the Center for Applied Genomics, endowed chair in genomics at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, and a professor of pediatrics at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

#2829

Helen Caldicott

Helen Caldicott

#7182

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Helen Mary Caldicott is an Australian physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate. She founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of nuclear power, depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, and military action in general.

#2830

Grover Hutchins

#68438

Overall Influence

1933 - 2010 (77 years)

Grover M. Hutchins was an American professor of pathology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, for more than 30 years, including 22 years as director of autopsy services. He was a world-renowned expert in the fields of cardiac and pediatric pathology.

#2831

Ashton Nichols

#20445

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Brooks Ashton Nichols is the Walter E. Beach ’56 Distinguished Chair Emeritus in Sustainable Studies and Professor of English Language and Literature Emeritus at Dickinson College. His interests are in literature, contemporary ecocriticism, Romanticism, and nature writing. Nichols taught courses in Romanticism, 19th century literature, literature and the environment, and nature writing. He is especially well-known for his study of James Joyce's literary concept of "epiphany," his definition of Romantic natural histories, and his coinage of the phrase "Urbanatural roosting," an idea which link...

#2832

Jeffrey M. Friedman

Jeffrey M. Friedman

#9553

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (70 years)

Jeffrey M. Friedman is a molecular geneticist at New York City's Rockefeller University and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His discovery of the hormone leptin and its role in regulating body weight has had a major role in the area of human obesity. Friedman is a physician scientist studying the genetic mechanisms that regulate body weight. His research on various aspects of obesity received national attention in late 1994, when it was announced that he and his colleagues had isolated the mouse ob gene and its human homologue. They subsequently found that injections ...

#2833

Paul Ziff

#51111

Overall Influence

1920 - 2003 (83 years)

Paul Ziff was an American artist and philosopher specializing in semantics and aesthetics. Life and career He was born in New York City in 1920 to William Ziff and Bessie Goldstein Ziff. His brother Morton was born three years earlier. He studied art at Columbia University and New York's Master Institute of Arts in 1937–1939, and was a practicing artist, partially subsidized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation until 1942. He returned to New York in 1945 after serving in the United States Coast Guard to study art and philosophy at Cornell University, receiving his BFA in January 1949, and...

#2834

Ivan Focht

#59903

Overall Influence

1927 - 1992 (65 years)

Ivan Focht was a Yugoslav philosopher and mycologist. Focht was born in Sarajevo to a Jewish family on June 7, 1927. All members of his family were killed during the Holocaust. He finished elementary and high school in Sarajevo. Focht graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, after which he returned to Sarajevo where he was elected assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo. Shortly after he moved back to Zagreb where he lived for the rest of his life, until his death. Focht was philosopher of phenomenological orientation, who in the early works departed from the Marxist and psychological interpretations of art.

#2835

William Peter Castelli

#81556

Overall Influence

#2836

Micha Brumlik

#17041

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Micha Brumlik is professor of education at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. From October 2000 to 2005 he was director of the Fritz Bauer Institute for the Study and Documentation of the History of the Holocaust.

#2837

Hideo Yagita

#81652

Overall Influence

#2838

Michael Schmidt-Salomon

#42849

Overall Influence

1967 - Present (57 years)

Michael Schmidt-Salomon is a German author, philosopher, and public relations manager. As chairman of the Giordano Bruno Foundation, a humanist organization that is critical of religion, he has been identified as Germany's "Chief Atheist." His books include the Manifesto of Evolutionary Humanism: A Plea for a Contemporary Culture, and Die Kirche im Kopf . His children's book Wo bitte geht's zu Gott?, fragte das kleine Ferkel caused controversy for its depiction of religion.

#2839

W. Norris Clarke

#61988

Overall Influence

1915 - 2008 (93 years)

William Norris Clarke, SJ was an American Thomist philosopher and Jesuit priest. He was a president of the Metaphysical Society of America, as well as founder and editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly.

#2840

Hossein Ziai

#43377

Overall Influence

1944 - 2011 (67 years)

Hossein Ziai was a professor of Islamic Philosophy and Iranian Studies at UCLA where he held the inaugural Jahangir and Eleanor Amuzegar Chair in Iranian Studies until his passing. He received his B.S. in Intensive Physics and Mathematics from Yale University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Islamic Philosophy from Harvard University in 1976. Prior to UCLA, Ziai taught at Tehran University, Sharif University, Harvard University, Brown University, and Oberlin College. As Director of Iranian Studies at UCLA, where he taught since 1988, Ziai established an undergraduate major in Iranian in the Department ...

#2841

J. wayne Streilein

#81743

Overall Influence

#2842

Nader Rifai

#81758

Overall Influence

#2843

Maria Márkus

#58928

Overall Influence

1936 - 2017 (81 years)

Maria Renata Márkus was a Polish sociologist and philosopher. She was educated in philosophy at the Lomonosov University in Moscow from 1952 to 1957 and was awarded her master's degree in Poland in 1957. She moved to Hungary in 1957 and became a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and was a founding member of the Institute of Sociology at the Academy. In 2010, a Festschrift was published in her honour.

#2844

Diogenes Allen

#31495

Overall Influence

1932 - 2013 (81 years)

Diogenes Allen was an American philosopher and theologian who served as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church, which he served from 1958. He died in Newtown, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

#2845

Stephan Körner

#25215

Overall Influence

1913 - 2000 (87 years)

Stephan Körner, FBA was a British philosopher, who specialised in the work of Kant, the study of concepts, and in the philosophy of mathematics. Born to a Jewish family in what would soon become Czechoslovakia, Körner left that country to avoid certain death at the hands of the Nazis after the German occupation in 1939, and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee, where he began his study of philosophy; by 1952 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, taking up a second professorship at Yale in 1970. He was married to Edith Körner, and was the father of the mathematician Thomas Körner and the biochemist, writer and translator Ann M.

#2846

Mohammad Khatami

Mohammad Khatami

#4423

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

#2847

Larisa Maksimova

#23221

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (81 years)

Larisa Lvovna Maksimova is a Russian mathematical logician known for her research in non-classical logic. Education and career Maksimova was born on November 5, 1943, in Kochenyovo, the daughter of two biologists who had temporarily moved there from Tomsk State University to escape the war. She grew up in Novosibirsk, where her parents became geographers at the Novosibirsk Pedagogical Institute. She studied mechanics and mathematics at Novosibirsk State University, publishing her first paper on Wilhelm Ackermann's axioms for strict implication in relevance logic in 1964 and graduating in 1965...

#2848

Valerie G. Hardcastle

#39963

Overall Influence

Valerie G. Hardcastle is a professor of Philosophy and Psychology at The University of Cincinnati who grew up in Houston, Texas. Education She was a double major at the University of California, Berkeley, earning bachelor's degrees in Political Science and Philosophy in 1986, and then a master's degree in Philosophy from The University of Houston, and an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Philosophy from the University of California, San Diego. Her coursework has been affiliated with areas such as; Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and has most recently been focusing her time and research on the study of the neuroscience of violence.

#2849

Chuck Yeager

#588

Overall Influence

1923 - 2020 (97 years)

Brigadier General Charles Elwood Yeager was a United States Air Force officer, flying ace, and record-setting test pilot who in October 1947 became the first pilot in history confirmed to have exceeded the speed of sound in level flight.

#2850

Peter Wright

#37233

Overall Influence

Peter Edwin Wright is a scientist, an NMR spectroscopist and a professor at the Scripps Research Institute. He serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Molecular Biology. Education and early life Wright is from New Zealand and studied at the University of Auckland. He graduated in 1968 with a Bachelor of Science degree followed by a Master of Science degree in 1969. He completed his PhD in chemistry in 1972 with a thesis on the physico-chemical properties of metal ion sites in cuproproteins: an investigation of selected copper complexes.

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