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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List of the most influential people in Philosophy,

#3501

Gunnar Beck

#29690

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Gunnar Beck is a German politician, academic and lawyer. He is Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative for Germany party and currently hold the position of deputy leader of the AfD in the European Parliament and Vice-President of the Identity & Democracy Group. He previously was, and currently remains, a reader in law at the SOAS, University of London.

#3502

Thomas R. Dr Demeester

#93783

Overall Influence

#3503

Claus Dierksmeier

#54294

Overall Influence

1971 - Present (55 years)

Claus Dierksmeier is a German philosopher. He holds a chair for globalization ethics at the University of Tübingen and works as a strategic consultant in politics and business. Career After finishing his dissertation at the University of Hamburg in 1997, Dierksmeier obtained a Dr. phil. habil. degree from the University of Jena in 2002. In 2001 and 2002 he was a visiting scholar at various universities in Spain, Uruguay and Argentina before becoming an associate professor at the Institute for Philosophy at Stonehill College, Boston, where he was subsequently a full professor and "Distinguished Professor of Globalization Ethics" since 2011.

#3504

Alicia Miyares Fernández

Alicia Miyares Fernández

#61343

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (63 years)

Alicia Miyares Fernández is a Spanish philosopher, feminist, researcher, and women's rights activists. She has served as the spokesperson for several feminist organizations including anti-womb renting No Somos Vasijas and Recav. She has been involved with the efforts to keep abortion legal, writing the manifesto for the 2014 Tren de la Libertad. Miyares Fernández was active in advocating feminist causes ahead of the 2019 Spanish general elections.

#3505

Pierre Schaeffer

#20160

Overall Influence

1910 - 1995 (85 years)

Pierre Henri Marie Schaeffer was a French composer, writer, broadcaster, engineer, musicologist, acoustician and founder of Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète . His innovative work in both the sciences—particularly communications and acoustics—and the various arts of music, literature and radio presentation after the end of World War II, as well as his anti-nuclear activism and cultural criticism garnered him widespread recognition in his lifetime.

#3506

Jerzy Giedymin

#80013

Overall Influence

1925 - 1993 (68 years)

Jerzy Giedymin was a philosopher and historian of mathematics and science. Life Giedymin, of Polish origin, was born in 1925. He studied at the University of Poznań under Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. In 1953 Jerzy Giedymin succeeded Adam Wiegner at the Chair of Logic at the Faculty of Philosophy.

#3507

Paul E. Lacy

#93855

Overall Influence

#3508

Michael Buckland

#11602

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (85 years)

Michael Keeble Buckland is an emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information and co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative. Buckland was born and grew up in England. He entered library work as a trainee at the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford after studying history at that university. After taking his professional qualification in librarianship from the University of Sheffield in 1965, he joined the staff at the Lancaster University Library in 1965, one year after it was founded. From 1967 to 1972 he was responsible on a day-to-day basis for the Univers...

#3509

Emiel F. M. Wouters

#93862

Overall Influence

#3510

Robert Truog

#68069

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (76 years)

Robert D. Truog is an American bioethicist and pediatrician. He is the Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesiology & Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, where he is also the Director of the Center for Bioethics. He also practices in the pediatric intensive care unit at Boston Children’s Hospital, where he previously served as chair of the Division of Critical Care Medicine.

#3511

Majid Samii

#8755

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

Majid Samii is an Iranian neurosurgeon and medical scientist. Biography Samii was born in Tehran, Iran on 19 June 1937. After having completed his high school education in Iran, he moved to Germany, where he started his medical studies at the University of Mainz.

#3512

Harold Percival Himsworth

#43742

Overall Influence

1905 - 1993 (88 years)

Sir Harold Percival Himsworth, KCB, FRS was a British scientist, best known for his medical research on diabetes mellitus. Early life He was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, the son of Joseph Arnold Himsworth and Amy Eliza Barraclough. He was educated at the local Spring Grove School and King James's Grammar School, Almondbury. He married Charlotte Gray in 1932: they had two sons.

#3513

Philip Hallie

#73257

Overall Influence

1922 - 1994 (72 years)

Philip Paul Hallie was an author, philosopher and professor at Wesleyan University for 32 years. During World War II he served in the US Army. His degrees were from Harvard, Oxford and Grinnell College.

#3514

Robert J. Arceci

#93905

Overall Influence

#3515

Dr. D. J. Hearse

#93937

Overall Influence

#3516

Andrew Nicolaides

#69676

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Andrew Nicolaides is a British-Greek Cypriot surgeon, and an expert in cardiovascular disease and stroke prevention. Early life Nicolaides was born in 1938 in Nicosia, Cyprus. He studied medicine at Guy's Hospital Medical School in London. His postgraduate training was at Guy's, the University of Oxford and King's College School of Medicine.

#3517

Walter Schulz

#66994

Overall Influence

1912 - 2000 (88 years)

Walter Schulz was a German philosopher. Schulz studied classical philology, philosophy and protestant theology at the University of Marburg, University of Breslau and University of Leipzig. After being seriously wounded as a soldier in World War II, Schulz took his doctorate in 1944 with Hans-Georg Gadamer in Leipzig, and habilitated in 1950 in Heidelberg.

#3518

Thomas J Kipps

#93962

Overall Influence

#3519

Rudolf Stephan

#42386

Overall Influence

1925 - 2019 (94 years)

Rudolf Stephan was a German musicologist. Life Stephan was born in Bochum. After studying violin at the conservatory, he entered the Institute of Heidelberg, where he studied musicology at the University under the direction of Wolfgang Fortner. With Heinrich Besseler, Stephan went to the University of Göttingen, where he obtained his doctorate in 1950 with a work on Die Tenores der Motetten ältesten Stils by musicologist Rudolf Gerber . Carl Dahlhaus, Ludwig Finscher and Joachim Kaiser were among his classmates. He became known to the German-speaking public at large as the publisher of volume five of Das Fischer Lexikon's "Language", published in the Fischer Library in Frankfurt in 1957.

#3520

Francesco Casetti

#29155

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Francesco Casetti is an Italian naturalized US citizen film and television theorist. He is Sterling Professor of Humanities and Film and Media Studies at Yale University. He has been described as "the best analyst of cinematographic enunciation."

#3521

Alessandro Serretti

#93972

Overall Influence

#3522

Edison Liu

#18882

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Edison T. Liu is an American chemist who is the former president and CEO of The Jackson Laboratory, and the former director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center . Before joining The Jackson Laboratory, he was the founding executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore , chairman of the board of the Health Sciences Authority, and president of the Human Genome Organization . As the executive director of the GIS, he brought the institution to international prominence as one of the most productive genomics institutions in the world.

#3523

Frederick Burkhardt

#51575

Overall Influence

1912 - 2007 (95 years)

Frederick Burkhardt was an American educator and foundation administrator. He was President of the American Council of Learned Societies , then after his retirement devoted decades of work on The Correspondence of Charles Darwin.

#3524

Michael Von Korff

#83235

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Michael Rehn Von Korff is an American epidemiologist and medical researcher who studies the treatment of chronic pain and major depressive disorder. He works as a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente's Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle, Washington. He is the co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, as well as a fellow of both AcademyHealth and the Society of Behavioral Medicine. He was named an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in 2002.

#3525

Irving Singer

#69175

Overall Influence

1925 - 2015 (90 years)

Irving Singer was an American professor of philosophy who was on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 55 years and wrote over 20 books. He was the author of books on various topics, including cinema, love, sexuality, and the philosophy of George Santayana. He also wrote on the subject of film, including writings about the work of film directors Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock.

#3526

Armen H. Jr. Tashjian

#94017

Overall Influence

#3527

Maciej Banach

#94046

Overall Influence

1977 - Present (49 years)

#3528

John Robert Perfect

#94085

Overall Influence

#3529

Kenneth Clatterbaugh

#47687

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (26 years)

Kenneth C. Clatterbaugh is an American philosopher. He was Chair of the department of Philosophy at the University of Washington for fifteen years. He retired in 2012. His interests are modern philosophy, social philosophy, and gender studies, philosophy of religion. His latest book is a satirical look at some aspects of American Christianity. It is a novel, not an academic book although it contains considerable philosophical argument.

#3530

Kevin Chi Chung

#94130

Overall Influence

#3531

Jacob Klapwijk

#27279

Overall Influence

1933 - 2021 (88 years)

Jacob Klapwijk was a Dutch philosopher, and Emeritus Professor of Modern and Systematic Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, known for his work on Ernst Troeltsch and historicism, Reformational thinking, the transformational task of Christian philosophy, and the theory of emergent evolution.

#3532

Hourya Benis Sinaceur

#55236

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Hourya Sinaceur is a Moroccan philosopher. She is an expert in the theory and history of mathematics. Biography Hourya Benis was born in 1940 in Casablanca in Morocco. Sinaceur worked for Paris-Sorbonne University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research which is also in Paris, and the URS in Rabat. She has also served as a member of the National French Committee of History and Philosophy of Science

#3533

David H. M. Brooks

#64744

Overall Influence

1950 - 1996 (46 years)

David Havard Macleod Brooks was a South African philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Cape Town. He went to Cordwalles Preparatory School in Pietermaritzburg where his father, Ronald Charles Brooks, was headmaster. He then went to Michaelhouse and on to university in Pietermaritzburg. His second degree was his MA at Emmanuel College, Cambridge and his doctorate was from the University of Cape Town.

#3534

Wolfgang Koenig

#94161

Overall Influence

#3535

Ian Janssen

#94164

Overall Influence

#3536

Maxence Caron

#42156

Overall Influence

1976 - Present (50 years)

Maxence Caron is a French writer, poet, philosopher and musicologist. Biography He is agrégé in Philosophy , Docteur ès lettres Maxence Caron is the author of literary texts and poems and of several works about German thinking and about saint Augustine. Pianist, musicologist, Maxence Caron graduated with honours from the Conservatoire National de Paris in 1990.

#3537

Ülo Kaevats

#37961

Overall Influence

1947 - 2015 (68 years)

Ülo Kaevats was an Estonian statesman, academic and philosopher. In 1972, he graduated from the Faculty of Physics and Chemistry of the University of Tartu with a qualification from a physicist and a research philosopher. Kaevats obtained a PhD from Vilnius State University in Lithuania. He served for many years as editor-in-chief of the Estonian Encyclopaedia, the main national work of reference; earlier, he worked as a research fellow at the Estonian and the USSR Academies of Sciences, mostly in the History of Science field. Until 2011, when he became emeritus, he was professor and chair of philosophy at Tallinn University of Technology .

#3538

Rolf Luft

#94194

Overall Influence

#3539

Paul Humphreys

#61924

Overall Influence

1950 - 2022 (72 years)

Paul Humphreys was a British professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, specialising in philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. His interests included the metaphysics and epistemology of emergence, computational science, empiricism and realism.

#3540

Soumya Swaminathan

Soumya Swaminathan

#41215

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Soumya Swaminathan is an Indian paediatrician and clinical scientist known for her research on tuberculosis and HIV. From 2019 to 2022, she served as the chief scientist at the World Health Organization under the leadership of Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Previously, from October 2017 to March 2019, she was the Deputy Director General of Programmes at the World Health Organization.

#3541

Bob Meyer

#83890

Overall Influence

1932 - 2009 (77 years)

Robert Kenneth Meyer was a logician and Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University. First trained to be a minister at the Union Congregational Church by the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1956, he completed his graduate studies in philosophy and logic at the University of Pittsburgh. He moved to Australia and joined the Australian National University in 1974. He worked on the semantics of relevant logic.

#3542

Annie Cohen-Solal

#15953

Overall Influence

Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer, historian, cultural diplomat and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades. Born in Algiers, in a Jewish family from multiple Mediterranean origins , she faced numerous geographical displacements and devoted her entire career to issues of migration and creation. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. An award-winning writer from Sartre: 1905-1980 to Leo & His Circle: the Life of Leo Castelli and A Foreigner Called Picasso , her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large.

#3543

Thomas C. Chalmers

Thomas C. Chalmers

#48064

Overall Influence

1917 - 1995 (78 years)

Thomas Clark Chalmers, MD, FACP was famous for his role in the development of the randomized controlled trial and meta-analysis in medical research. Chalmers began his higher education as an English major at Yale College. He obtained his medical degree from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1943. He spent one year as an intern at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, and completed his residency at the Boston City Hospital.

#3544

Dr. David E. Comings

#94311

Overall Influence

#3545

William T. Abraham

#94343

Overall Influence

#3546

Annette C. Baier

#94351

Overall Influence

#3547

W. D. Hart

#80852

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Wilbur Dyre Hart is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1969 to 1974, the University College London from 1974 to 1991, and the University of New Mexico from 1992 to 1993. Hart is known for his research on logic, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

#3548

Urs A. Meyer

#50929

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Urs Albert Meyer is a Swiss physician-scientist and clinical pharmacologist. Life Meyer is professor emeritus of pharmacology at the Biozentrum University of Basel. After clinical and research training at the University of California, San Francisco, USA, he worked as assistant professor in clinical pharmacology at the same institution. In 1974, he became Head of Clinical Pharmacology at the University Hospital of Zurich. From 1983 to 2008, Meyer carried out research and taught as professor of pharmacology at the Biozentrum University of Basel, where he also acted as Chairman. He has served in ...

#3549

Dale Beyerstein

#94389

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (74 years)

Dale Beyerstein is a philosopher who has taught at Malaspina College, Douglas College, Kwantlen College, the University of British Columbia, and Langara College. Dale is a co-founder of the BC Skeptics, and director-at-large of the foundation.

#3550

Peter Gershon Isaacson

#94406

Overall Influence

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