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,
#3151
Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot
#65725
Overall Influence
1928 - 2005 (77 years)
Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot was an expatriate Colombian philosopher, professor, translator and publisher. Career Rafael Guitérrez Giardot's father, a Conservative politician, was assassinated when Rafael was still a boy, prompting him to find solace and meaning through his studies. In 1947, Rafael attended classes at the recently created Institute of Philosophy at the National University of Colombia. Many of his early essays from this time appeared in the literary section of the conservative daily El Siglo, and he participated in the formation of a short-lived rightist political movement called...
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Miguel de Beistegui
#65145
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Miguel de Beistegui is a continental philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is known for his expertise on Heidegger's thought. Books Heidegger and the Political, Routledge, 1998Philosophy and Tragedy , Routledge, 2000Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements, Indiana University Press, 2003Truth and Genesis: Philosophy as Differential Ontology, Indiana University Press, 2004The New Heidegger, Continuum, 2005Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor, Routledge, 2012Immanence and Philosophy: Deleuze, Edinburgh University Press, 2010Éloge de Chillida/In Praise of C...
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Dany-Robert Dufour
#39425
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Dany-Robert Dufour is a French philosopher, professor of educational sciences at the university Paris-VIII. He teaches regularly abroad, particularly in Latin America. His main focus is symbolic processes with relevance to language philosophy, political philosophy and psychoanalysis. He is a frequent participant in cooperative artistic activities with music, literature or theatre.
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Paul Henry Lang
#20739
Overall Influence
1901 - 1991 (90 years)
Paul Henry Lang was a Hungarian-American musicologist and music critic. Career Lang was born as "Pál Láng" in Budapest, Hungary, and was educated in Catholic schools. In 1918, as World War I was coming to an end, he was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army though he had not completed school, and sent to the Italian front. When the war ended, he had to make his own way home, and then studied at the University of Budapest and the Budapest Music Academy, under Zoltán Kodály and Erno Dohnanyi, among others. Kodály, learning that he only played piano, assigned him to learn to play the bassoon. A...
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Aron Katsenelinboigen
#16497
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Aron Iosifovich Katsenelinboigen was a founder of predispositioning theory, a subject in decision theory and systems theory that models development in the context of uncertainty. Career Katsenelinboigen was born in Izyaslavl in the Ukrainian SSR. At fourteen, he enrolled at the Uzbekistan Institute of Economics, transferring four years later, in 1945, to the Moscow State Institute of Economics. There he graduated the following year and spent a further three years pursuing post-graduate work. He received a PhD in Economics in 1957 and became a Doctor of Economic Science in 1966.
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Roger-Pol Droit
#58046
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Roger-Pol Droit is a French academic and philosopher. An alumnus of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he has written numerous books, most notably 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life, which has been translated into 22 languages. For 25 years, he has studied the way the East is seen in Western philosophy.
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Diane Davis
#41503
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Diane Davis is a post-structuralist rhetorician and professor of Rhetoric and Writing, English, and Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She was the Director of the Digital Writing and Research Lab at UT from 2009 to 2017, and is now the chair of the Department of Rhetoric and Writing. She holds the Kenneth Burke Chair of Rhetoric and Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where she teaches intensive summer seminars on Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas.
Go to Profile#3158
Asao Hirano
#87560
Overall Influence
#3159
John E. Sanders
#37859
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
John E. Sanders is an American Christian theologian. He currently serves as professor of religious studies at Hendrix College. Sanders is best known for his promotion of open theism but he has also written on cognitive linguistics and religious pluralism .
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Nino Raspudić
#48119
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Nino Raspudić is a Croatian conservative philosopher, writer, political analyst and member of the Croatian Parliament. He is a professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb and the Faculty of Humanities in Mostar. He is a columnist for the Večernji list and Nezavisne novine, and is one of the editors of the Reflex, a political show on OBN Televizija.
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Sanjay Gupta
#1434
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Sanjay Gupta is an American neurosurgeon, medical reporter, and writer. He serves as associate chief of the neurosurgery service at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University School of Medicine, member of the National Academy of Medicine and American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is the chief medical correspondent for CNN.
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Roberto A. Bolli
#87646
Overall Influence
#3163
Mitchell Lazar
#54768
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mitchell Lazar is an endocrinologist and physician-scientist known for his discovery of the hormone resistin and his contributions to the transcriptional regulation of metabolism. Lazar is the Willard and Rhoda Ware Professor in Diabetes and Metabolic Diseases, and the Director of the Institute for Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Philippe Couillard
#3186
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Philippe Couillard is a Canadian business advisor and former neurosurgeon, university professor and politician who served as 31st premier of Quebec from 2014 to 2018. Between 2003 and 2008, he was Quebec's Minister of Health and Social Services in Jean Charest's Liberal government and was MNA for Mont-Royal until he resigned in 2008. In the 2014 election, Couillard moved to the riding of Roberval, where he resides. He was the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party from 2013 to 2018. He resigned as Liberal leader and MNA on October 4, 2018.
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J. Roger Hindley
#10244
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
J. Roger Hindley is a prominent British logician best known for the Hindley–Milner type inference algorithm. Since 1998, he has been an Honorary Research Fellow at Swansea University. Education Hindley graduated in 1960 from Queen's University Belfast, remaining to earn an M.Sc. in 1961.
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Manfred Spitzer
#59951
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Manfred Spitzer is a German neuroscientist, psychiatrist and author. Life Manfred Spitzer was born on May 27, 1958, in Lengfeld, Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany. After his Abitur at the Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Groß-Umstadt, he studied medicine, philosophy and psychology at the University of Freiburg. During this time he earned his money for living as a street musician among other professions. Spitzer is the publisher of the trade journal Nervenheilkunde and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Louisenlund. He has a controversial opinion on smartphones, saying that they make children "krank" , "dumm" and "süchtig" and should only be allowed without supervision at age 18 and up.
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Jean-Émile Charon
#29110
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
Jean-Émile Charon was a French nuclear physicist, philosopher and writer. He was the author of over 20 books on physics, scientific philosophy, and computer science. He conducted nuclear research at France's Commissariat à l'énergie atomique .
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Jay Newman
#73434
Overall Influence
1948 - 2007 (59 years)
Jay Newman was a philosopher and Professor at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario. Biography Newman was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Lou Newman and his wife, Kitty. He received his B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1968 before acquiring his master's degree from Brown University in 1969 and his Ph.D. from York University in Toronto, Canada, in 1971.
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Nicholas Campion
#20552
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Nicholas Campion is a British astrologer and historian of astrology and cultural astronomy. He is the author of a number of books and currently pursues an academic career. Career Astrology Campion is a former Daily Mail astrologer, where he took over from John Naylor, the son of R. H. Naylor, the first sun sign astrologer. He was president of the Astrological Lodge of London from 1985 to 1987 and of the Astrological Association of Great Britain from 1994 to 1999. He published a number of books on the practice of astrology between 1987 and 2004 .
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Ulrich L. Lehner
#19724
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
Ulrich L. Lehner is the Warren Foundation Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He is a trained philosopher, theologian and historian. Life and Education After graduating from the in Straubing in 1996 he received a B.A. in philosophy from the Munich School of Philosophy and a B.A. in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1999, and a diploma in theology from the University of Munich in 2003. In 2006 he received his PhD in theology from the Universität Regensburg with a thesis on the concept of providence of Immanuel Kant and Protestant scholasticism. In ...
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Adrian Parr
#42294
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Adrian Parr is an Australian-born philosopher and cultural critic. She specializes in environmental philosophy and activism. In addition, she published on the sustainability movement, climate change politics, activist culture, and creative practice.
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John C. Jr. Burnett
#87980
Overall Influence
#3173
Robert McKim
#66105
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert McKim is an Irish philosopher of religion. He was born in Collooney , Co. Sligo and attended Wesley College for his Secondary Education in Dublin. As a student he worked in London during summer vacations. He has degrees in philosophy from Trinity College Dublin and from the University of Calgary, and a Ph.D. in religious studies and philosophy from Yale University. He is Professor of Religion and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
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Stephen L. Harris
#21341
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Stephen L. Harris was Professor of Humanities and Religious Studies at California State University, Sacramento. He served there ten years as department chair and was named a Woodrow Wilson Fellow. He received his MA and PhD degrees from Cornell University. Harris was a member of the American Academy of Religion, a fellow at the Westar Institute, a fellow of the controversial Jesus Seminar, and authored several books on religion, some of which are used in introductory university courses.
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John Piper
#7162
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
John Egerton Christmas Piper CH was an English painter, printmaker and designer of stained-glass windows and both opera and theatre sets. His work often focused on the British landscape, especially churches and monuments, and included tapestry designs, book jackets, screen-prints, photography, fabrics and ceramics. He was educated at Epsom College and trained at the Richmond School of Art followed by the Royal College of Art in London. He turned from abstraction early in his career, concentrating on a more naturalistic but distinctive approach, but often worked in several different styles thr...
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Jan-carel Zadoks
#88134
Overall Influence
#3177
Michael John Rand
#88152
Overall Influence
#3178
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord
#60901
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.
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Ömer Naci Soykan
#52702
Overall Influence
1945 - 2017 (72 years)
Ömer Naci Soykan was a Turkish philosopher. Life He was born in 1945. He graduated from Trabzon High School in 1965. He studied Philosophy, Sociology, Ancient Greek and Latin in İstanbul University during his undergraduate period from 1965 to 1971. He was a visiting student in Hamburg University from 1969 to 1971. Soykan received his PhD in 1982 with his thesis entitled as “Forms of Being and Art in Schelling.” In the same year, he began to lecture in Mimar Sinan University. He worked as an assistant professor in Sociology Department of İnönü University from 1984 to 1986. He joined in Sociology Department of Mimar Sinan University in 1986.
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J. Caleb Clanton
#88171
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (46 years)
J. Caleb Clanton was Professor of Philosophy at Lipscomb University. He taught previously at Vanderbilt University and Pepperdine University. In May 2023 he was named director of the Frances Marlin Mann Center for Ethics and Leadership and Mann Family Professor in Ethics and Leadership at Samford University. Clanton is known for his research on philosophy of religion and moral philosophy.
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Peter Pagin
#57382
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Peter Pagin is Professor of Philosophy at Stockholm University. He is a specialist in the philosophy of language and has worked extensively on foundational issues in semantics and on technical and philosophical problems about the compositionality of meaning.
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Ronald A. Dubner
#88244
Overall Influence
#3183
Ernest C. Borden
#88248
Overall Influence
#3184
Darío Sztajnszrajber
#51611
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Darío Gabriel Sztajnszrajber , also known as Darío Szeta, is an Argentine philosopher, essayist, teacher, and television presenter. Personal life Sztajnszrajber was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina to a family of Polish descent. According to Sztajnszrajber himself, his surname means "the one who writes in stone". His family is Jewish, although he's a self-proclaimed agnostic. His brother, Mauro Szeta, is a journalist who specializes in police matters. Sztajnszrajber is a supporter of the football club Estudiantes.
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Ravindra Gupta
#35354
Overall Influence
Professor Ravindra "Ravi" Kumar Gupta is a professor of clinical microbiology at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the faculty of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa.
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Alan Seymour Cohen
#88307
Overall Influence
#3187
Nick Black
#76851
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Sir Nicholas Andrew Black is a British physician and health services researcher. Black studied medicine at the University of Birmingham, graduating in 1974, worked for Save the Children Fund in Nepal for 18 months before undertaking a doctorate and training in public health at Oxford from 1978 to 1982. He was then a lecturer at the Open University for three years, writing a distance-learning course 'Health and Disease' with biologists, sociologists and economists.
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Peter Rohs
#75672
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Peter Rohs is a German philosopher. Academic career Born in Jena, Rohs received his doctorate in 1964 from Christian-Albrechts-Universität at Kiel with a thesis on logic by Hegel and habilitated in 1975 at Goethe University in Frankfurt. He was a private lecturer for philosophy since 1975 and from 1985 to 1986 he was managing director of the Forum für Philosophie in Bad Homburg.
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Gerrit Glas
#61152
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gerrit Glas studied Medicine at the University of Amsterdam and Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit. He worked as a psychiatrist at the Ziekenhuis Zwolse Poort in the Netherlands and got his promotion in 1990 on the subject anxiety disorder. Since 1991, he has been a professor of Reformational philosophy at the Universiteit van Leiden. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Christian Philosophy at the VU University Amsterdam. He has written a broad chapter about Anthropology in the book Kennis en werkelijkheid. Glas is associated with the Association for Reformational Philosophy. Along with prof.
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Larry Siedentop
#23238
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Sir Larry Alan Siedentop is an American-born British political philosopher with a special interest in 19th-century French liberalism. He is the author of Democracy in Europe and an occasional contributor to several major British daily newspapers, including the Financial Times and The Times.
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Nicholas Everitt
#73407
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Nicholas Everitt is an English philosopher and atheist writer who specializes in epistemology and philosophy of religion. Biography Everitt obtained his degree in Moral Science from University of Cambridge and a postgraduate degree from University of Oxford. He was Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and taught briefly at Fairfield University and Ngee Ann Polytechnic. He taught for the Open University as an Associate Lecturer and after retirement currently teaches the AA308 course, "Thought and Experience – Themes in the Philosophy of Mind" and "The Existence of God...
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Pierre Assouline
#7289
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Pierre Assouline is a French writer and journalist. He was born in Casablanca, Morocco to a Jewish family. He has published several novels and biographies, and also contributes articles for the print media and broadcasts for radio.
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Steve F. Sapontzis
#82714
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Steven Frederic Sapontzis is an American philosopher and professor emeritus of philosophy at California State University, East Bay who specializes in animal ethics, environmental ethics and meta-ethics.
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Ivica Šola
#88442
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ivica Šola is a Croatian theologian, communication scientist, columnist and university professor. Šola was born in 1968 in Đakovo. He received a bachelor's degree from University of Zagreb in 1994, a master's degree from Pontifical Lateran University in Rome in 1998, and a doctoral degree in 2012 in Zagreb with a dissertation titled "Ethical aspects of philosophy of Luigi Pareyson: truth, ontos and freedom".
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Björn Dahlbäck
#64871
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Björn Dahlbäck is a Swedish physician, medical researcher, and professor of clinical chemistry, specializing in hematology and the molecular mechanisms of blood coagulation. He determined that activated protein C resistance is the most common inherited risk factor of venous thrombosis.
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Pierre Fenaux
#88490
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
#3197
Michael Lockwood
#54533
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Michael John Lockwood was a British philosopher. Life Lockwood studied philosophy and psychology at Exeter College, Oxford, and did his doctorate at that university under the supervision of A. J. Ayer. For five years he was Assistant Professor in Philosophy at New York University, and was subsequently employed as a systems analyst for the New York and American Stock Exchanges.
Go to Profile#3198
Alexander Kluge
#29628
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Alexander Kluge is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director. Early life, education and early career Kluge was born in Halberstadt, Province of Saxony , Germany. After growing up during World War II, he studied history, law and music at the University of Marburg Germany, and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He received his doctorate in law in 1956.
Go to Profile#3199
Harold A. Netland
#29227
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Harold A. Netland , is a missionary educator turned academic. He is the author or editor of nine books and many journal articles on the topic of religion and philosophy. Career Netland did his undergraduate work at Biola University and received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University. He worked in Japan for the Evangelical Free Church of America for nine years. In 1993 he moved back to the United States and joined Trinity Evangelical Divinity School as Professor of Philosophy of Religion and Intercultural Studies. He is the Director of the PhD/Intercultural Studies program at 'T...
Go to Profile#3200
Harvey Sindima
#49459
Overall Influence
Harvey J Sindima is a Malawian theologian, philosopher, professor and author. He has written extensively on matters of African philosophy, religious ethics and spirituality. He is the original voice behind the Malawian philosophy of personhood: "umunthu". He also works on independent charity project called Blantyre North Relief Project in Blantyre, Malawi with his wife Gertrude Sindima.
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