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,
#3901
Jiro Suzuki
#100457
Overall Influence
#3902
François Fédier
#59842
Overall Influence
1935 - 2021 (86 years)
François Fédier was a French philosopher and translator. Biography Fédier was a student of Jean Beaufret in the 1950s and began translating the works of Martin Heidegger in 1958. Some controversies surrounded his translations of Heidegger. He became a teacher at the Lycée Pasteur in Neuilly-sur-Seine until his retirement in 2001. He notably taught philosophers and .
Go to Profile#3903
Roger C. Bone
#100474
Overall Influence
#3904
Andrew Kenneth Burroughs
#94896
Overall Influence
1953 - 2014 (61 years)
Andrew K. Burroughs was a British physician, researcher and teacher. He is renowned for his wide contribution to the field of Hepatology; he has been termed one of the greatest hepatologists of our times and the true representative of Dame Sheila Sherlock's legacy.
Go to Profile#3905
Michael Oliver
#75742
Overall Influence
1925 - 2015 (90 years)
Michael Francis Oliver CBE, FRCP, FRSE was a 20th-century British cardiologist who served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh for the period 1985 to 1988. He made major advances in identifying the causes of heart disease.
Go to Profile#3906
Bernard de Give
#80256
Overall Influence
1913 - 2020 (107 years)
Bernard de Give was a Belgian priest and writer who became a monk of Scourmont Abbey. Biography After his secondary studies at Collège Saint-Servais in Liège, de Give joined the Society of Jesus on 23 September 1931. He earned a degree in philosophy at the Faculté de Philosophie S.J. in Egenhoven, and later a degree in philosophy from Université catholique de Louvain. During his studies, he became fluent in Sanskrit and learned of Eastern religions under the direction of Étienne Lamotte. De Give was ordained on 27 July 1944.
Go to Profile#3907
Andreas Laupacis
#100503
Overall Influence
#3908
Brian Brock
#60889
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Brian Brock is an American theologian. He holds a Personal Chair in Christian Ethics at the School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy, University of Aberdeen. Early life and education Brock was born and raised in Baytown, Texas, where he was educated at Robert E. Lee High School. Before training as a theologian, he worked as an investigative reporter and editorialist from 1997 to 1999 for the Baytown Sun.
Go to Profile#3909
Richard L. Guerrant
#92261
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Richard L. Guerrant is an American physician, medical school professor, and medical researcher, specializing in infectious diseases and tropical medicine. Biography Guerrant received his bachelor's degree from Davidson College and his M.D. from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He completed his residency in internal medicine and infectious diseases at Harvard Medical Service at Boston City Hospital, where Maxwell Finland was his supervising attending physician and mentor.
Go to Profile#3910
Franco Bolelli
#78549
Overall Influence
1950 - 2020 (70 years)
Franco Bolelli was an Italian philosopher. His philosophical influences included Nietzsche and Taoism. Biography He was born and lived in Milan. A philosopher and essayist, he was the author of numerous books, including "Con gli occhi della tigre" , "Per tutti i per sempre" , "+Donna +Uomo" , and "Tutta la verità sull'Amore" , all three written with Manuela Mantegazza. He also wrote "Si fa così" , "Giocate!" , and "Viva Tutto!" together with Lorenzo Cherubini, also known as Jovanotti . He designed and staged dozens of events and festivals, including "Il Festival dell'Amore" , "Frontier...
Go to Profile#3911
Nestor of Tarsus
#87631
Overall Influence
Nestor of Tarsus was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Stoic school of thought. He was from Tarsus in Cilikia. Nestor was active at a Stoic school in Athens. Otherwise, little is known about his life. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius contained his biography in Book VII, but that portion of a book has disappeared; only the mention of his name in the table of contents remains. Nestor was a contemporary of Panaetius, either his disciple or a fellow student. He is sometimes mixed with another Nestor of Tarsos, who is said to have been a teacher of Tiberius, bu...
Go to Profile#3912
Basilides
#87627
Overall Influence
Basilides , was a Stoic philosopher who denied the existence of incorporeal entities. Nothing is known about the life of Basilides. From a table of contents in one of the medieval manuscripts, we know that he was listed in the missing part of Book VII of Diogenes Laërtius' Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. His position in the table of contents indicates that he lived around the time of Antipater of Tarsus in the 2nd century BC.
Go to Profile#3913
Mnasagoras
#87630
Overall Influence
Mnasagoras was an ancient Greek stoic philosopher. He was probably from Alexandria Troas. Almost nothing is known about the life of Mnasagoras. He was either the disciple of Antipater of Tarsos or Diogenes of Babylon . The book VII of Diogenes Laërtius' work Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers has contained his biography, but the section containing it has been lost; only a reference to it in the table of contents remains.
Go to Profile#3914
Sosigenes
#87628
Overall Influence
Sosigenes was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Stoic school. He was a student of Antipater of Tarsus. There is not much known about Sosigenes and his thought. The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius in Book VII contained his biography, but that portion of the book has disappeared; only the mention of the name in the table of contents remains. According to Alexander of Aphrodisias, Sosigenes was influenced by Aristotle and modified stoic doctrines accordingly.
Go to Profile#3915
Heraclides of Tarsus
#87629
Overall Influence
Heraclides of Tarsus was a Stoic philosopher native to Tarsus, Mersin. He was a friend of Antipater of Tarsus, the sixth scholarch of the Stoa. As a pupil of Antipater, he studied with Archedemus of Tarsus and Aristocreon, the nephew of Chrysippus.
Go to Profile#3916
George D Dangas
#100737
Overall Influence
#3917
M. D. Robert J. Ginsberg
#100749
Overall Influence
#3918
Marcello Ferrada de Noli
#9527
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Marcello Ferrada de Noli is a Swedish professor emeritus of epidemiology, and medicine doktor in psychiatry . He was research fellow and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and was later head of the research group of International and Cross-Cultural Injury Epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute until 2009. Ferrada de Noli is known for his investigations on suicidal behaviour associated with severe trauma. He is the founder of the NGO Swedish Doctors for Human Rights, SWEDHR. He is also a writer, and painting artist.
Go to Profile#3919
Hope Rugo
#58214
Overall Influence
Hope S. Rugo is professor of medicine and the director of the breast oncology clinical trials program at the University of California at San Francisco, and an investigator of SPORE in the Bay Area.
Go to Profile#3920
Peter H. Bennett
#100816
Overall Influence
#3921
Sergio Aragonés
#6224
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Sergio Aragonés Domenech is a Spanish/Mexican cartoonist and writer best known for his contributions to Mad magazine and creating the comic book Groo the Wanderer. Among his peers and fans, Aragonés is widely regarded as "the world's fastest cartoonist". The Comics Journal has described Aragonés as "one of the most prolific and brilliant cartoonists of his generation". Mad editor Al Feldstein said, "He could have drawn the whole magazine if we'd let him."
Go to Profile#3922
Matteo Motterlini
#59533
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Matteo Motterlini is an Italian philosopher of science, behavioral and neuroeconomist. He teaches at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan, Italy. Academic career and publications Former Adviser for Social and Behavioral Sciences for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers in Italy
Go to Profile#3923
Matthew Kieran
#90543
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Matthew Kieran is a British philosopher and was Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at the University of Leeds. He is known for his works on aesthetics. Books Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements. Cambridge: Cambridge University PressAesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. Oxford University PressKnowing Art: Essays in Aesthetics and Epistemology. Philosophical Studies Series. SpringerMedia and Values: Intimate Transgressions in a Changing Moral and Cultural Landscape. IntellectContemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Contemporary Debates in Philosophy.
Go to Profile#3924
Peter Bogdanovich
#13429
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Peter Bogdanovich was an American director, writer, actor, producer, critic, and film historian. He started his career as a film critic for Film Culture and Esquire before becoming a prominent filmmaker as part of the New Hollywood movement. He received accolades including a BAFTA Award and Grammy Award, as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#3925
Stuart J. Youngner
#87907
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Stuart J. Youngner is Professor of Bioethics and Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine. He received his BA from Swarthmore. and his MD from Case, where he also did an internship in pediatrics and a residency in psychiatry. Youngner subsequently studied bioethics at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. He is certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. He is a nationally and internationally recognized scholar in the areas of definitions of death, ethics of organ transplantation and procurement, clinical ethics consultation, and ...
Go to Profile#3926
Nelson B. Schiller
#100860
Overall Influence
#3927
Roald Bahr
#100862
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
#3928
Ira F. Stone
#33448
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rabbi Ira F. Stone is a leading figure in the contemporary renewal of the Musar movement, a Jewish ethical movement. Career Stone was ordained as a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1979, and proceeded to serve congregations in Seattle and Philadelphia while also teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He served as rabbi of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in Philadelphia from 1988 until his retirement in 2015. Stone became the founding director of the Center for Contemporary Mussar in 2017.
Go to Profile#3929
John Nevil Insall
#100923
Overall Influence
#3930
Richard Huxtable
#53464
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Richard Huxtable is the Director and Professor in Medical Ethics and Law at the Centre for Ethics in Medicine, at the University of Bristol. He is known principally for his work on legal and ethical issues in end-of-life decision-making and euthanasia, surgery and paediatrics and is the author of a number of books on these themes; Law, Ethics and Compromise at the Limits of Life: To Treat or Not to Treat? , Euthanasia, Ethics and the Law: From Conflict to Compromise and The Cambridge Medical Ethics Workbook . He has also produced numerous chapters, and articles for both academic journals an...
Go to Profile#3931
Jean-Claude Michéa
#53003
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jean-Claude Michéa, born in 1950, is a retired philosophy professor and French philosopher, author of several essays devoted in particular to the thought and work of George Orwell. Libertarian socialist, he is known for his committed positions against the dominant currents of the left which, according to him, has lost all spirits of anti-capitalist struggle to make way for the “religion of progress”. Advocating several moral values near the socialism of George Orwell, Jean-Claude Michéa excoriates the leftist intelligentsia that has, in his view, gotten away from the proletarian and popular world.
Go to Profile#3932
Alexander S. Nadas
#100945
Overall Influence
#3933
Sardar Fazlul Karim
#34631
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Sardar Fazlul Karim was a Bangladeshi academic, philosopher and essayist. Early life and family Sardar Fazlul Karim was born on 1 May 1925, to a lower middle class family in the village of Atipara located in the Backergunge District of the Bengal Presidency . His father, Khabiruddin Sardar, was a farmer, and his mother, Safura Begum, was a housewife. He had one brother and three sisters, and they grew up in the village.
Go to Profile#3934
Herbert Lepor
#100985
Overall Influence
#3935
Ernst Knobil
#57217
Overall Influence
1926 - 2000 (74 years)
Ernst Knobil was a scientist known for his pioneering research in endocrinology. His discoveries were important for the field of reproductive endocrinology, the development of hormonal contraceptives, and treatments for infertility.
Go to Profile#3936
Dean Komel
#61546
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Dean Komel is a Slovenian philosopher. He was born in the small village of Bilje in the Goriška region of Slovenia, then part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. After finishing the Nova Gorica Grammar School, he studied philosophy and comparative literature at the University of Ljubljana. After further studies under Bernhard Waldenfels and Klaus Held in Germany, he obtained his PhD in 1995 on the theme of a hermeneutic critique of the anthropological orientation in contemporary philosophy. He is the professor of contemporary philosophy and the philosophy of culture at the Department of Philosophy at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana.
Go to Profile#3937
Olof Johnell*
#101020
Overall Influence
#3938
Tia DeNora
#36252
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Tia DeNora is Professor of Sociology of Music and Director of Research, in the Department of Sociology/Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Biography DeNora's undergraduate studies were in musicology and sociology. She completed her PhD in Sociology in 1989 at the University of California, San Diego. From then until 1992, she worked at University of Wales, Cardiff, where DeNora was a University of Wales Fellow from 1989-1991. DeNora moved to Exeter in 1992. DeNora was Chair of the European Sociological Association Network on Sociology of the Arts from 1999–2001 and is a Vice President of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Sociology of the Arts.
Go to Profile#3939
Theofilus Johannes Visser
#101033
Overall Influence
#3940
Melvin J. Glimcher
#45604
Overall Influence
1925 - 2014 (89 years)
Melvin Jacob Glimcher was an American pioneer in the development of artificial limbs. He helped develop the “Boston Arm,” the electronically-operated design of which was incorporated in many later prostheses.
Go to Profile#3941
Alan R. White
#83709
Overall Influence
1922 - 1992 (70 years)
Alan Richard White was an analytic philosopher who worked mainly in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and, latterly, legal philosophy. Peter Hacker notes that he was "the most skillful developer of Rylean ... ideas in philosophical psychology" and that "if anyone surpassed Austin in subtlety and refinement in the discrimination of grammatical differences, it was White." Richard Swinburne remarks that "during the heyday of 'ordinary language philosophy' no tongue practised it better."
Go to Profile#3942
Ari Berman
#44241
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Ari Berman is an American-Israeli Modern Orthodox / Religious Zionist rabbi and academic administrator who serves as the fifth President of Yeshiva University. Early life and education Berman was raised in Queens in New York City, and graduated from the Marsha Stern Talmudical Academy in 1987. He studied in Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shevut before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yeshiva College, graduating magna cum laude in 1991, rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and an M.A. in Medieval Jewish Philosophy from Bernard Revel Graduate School.
Go to Profile#3943
Ben Katchor
#9966
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ben Katchor is an American cartoonist and illustrator best known for the comic strip Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer. He has contributed comics and drawings to The Forward, The New Yorker, Metropolis, and weekly newspapers in the United States. A Guggenheim Fellowship and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, Katchor was described by author Michael Chabon as "the creator of the last great American comic strip."
Go to Profile#3944
Romanas Plečkaitis
#75338
Overall Influence
1933 - 2009 (76 years)
Romanas Plečkaitis was a Lithuanian philosopher, logic, philosophy, history researcher, Doctor habil, Professor. Romanas Plečkaitis translated the main Immanuel Kant works into Lithuanian language, wrote the history of Lithuanian philosophy and logic issues, published over 300 publications in various academic, has developed 27 PhDs.
Go to Profile#3945
Mario Maj
#101094
Overall Influence
#3946
Andrew Janiak
#83416
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Andrew Janiak is a professor of philosophy at Duke University, where he directs the Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. He received an M.A. from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. from Indiana University. His dissertation was directed by Michael Friedman. . He received the Richard K. Lublin Distinguished Award for Teaching Excellence in 2009. Janiak writes on the philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, and the history of modern philosophy, especially on the philosophical works of Isaac Newton.
Go to Profile#3947
Diana Tietjens Meyers
#70530
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Diana Meyers is a philosopher working in the philosophy of action and in the philosophy of feminism. Meyers is professor emerita of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. Biography Diana Meyers holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a master's degree and PhD from The Graduate Center, CUNY. She mostly works "in three main areas of philosophy: philosophy of action, feminist ethics, and human rights theory".
Go to Profile#3948
Didier Trono
#57855
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Didier Trono is a Swiss virologist and a professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne . He is known for his research on virus-host interactions and the development of lentiviral vectors for gene therapy.
Go to Profile#3949
Mark Wainberg
#27572
Overall Influence
1945 - 2017 (72 years)
Mark Arnold Wainberg, was a Canadian HIV/AIDS researcher and HIV/AIDS activist. He was the Director of the McGill University AIDS Centre at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital and Professor of Medicine and of Microbiology at McGill University. His laboratory primarily studies HIV reverse transcriptase, the molecular basis for drug resistance, and gene therapy. He received a B.Sc. from McGill University in 1966, a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1972, and did his post-doctoral research at Hadassah Medical School of the Hebrew University.
Go to Profile#3950
Gene Strandness
#31397
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Donald Eugene Strandness was an American physician, university professor, and research scientist. Dr. Strandness, known as Gene, was influential in the development of Doppler ultrasound as a diagnostic tool in vascular medicine, and did research that established much of the clinical grading criteria in the field of vascular ultrasound.
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