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 female people in Psychology,
#1351
Bluma Zeigarnik
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Bluma Zeigarnik was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so-called Vygotsky Circle. She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.
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Virginia Satir
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Virginia Satir was an American author and psychotherapist, recognized for her approach to family therapy. Her pioneering work in the field of family reconstruction therapy honored her with the title "Mother of Family Therapy". Her most well-known books are Conjoint Family Therapy, 1964, Peoplemaking, 1972, and The New Peoplemaking, 1988.
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Charlotte Bühler
1893 - 1974 (81 years)
Charlotte Bühler was a German-American developmental psychologist. Life Bühler was born Charlotte Berta Malachowski in Berlin, the elder of two children of Jewish government architect Hermann Malachowski, and his wife Rose .
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Mary Whiton Calkins
1863 - 1930 (67 years)
Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist, whose work informed theory and research of memory, dreams and the self. In 1903, Calkins was the twelfth in a listing of fifty psychologists with the most merit, chosen by her peers. Calkins was refused a Ph.D. by Harvard University because of her gender.
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Margaret Floy Washburn
1871 - 1939 (68 years)
Margaret Floy Washburn , was a leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology ; the second woman, after Mary Whiton Calkins, to serve as president of the American Psychological Association ; and the first woman elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Washburn as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, and Robert S.
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Karen Horney
1885 - 1952 (67 years)
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who practised in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. She is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women, and like Adler, she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.
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Mimí Langer
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Marie "Mimí" Lisbeth Langer was an Austrian-born Latin American psychoanalyst and human rights activist. She was a cofounder of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association. Biography The daughter of Rudolf Glas and Margarethe Glas, Langer was born in Vienna in 1910. She had a sister, Gusti Eva Glas. Langer attended a private girls' school started by educator Eugenie Schwarzwald. After finishing medical school , she attended Freud's Psychoanalytic Institute.
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Selma Fraiberg
1918 - 1981 (63 years)
Selma Fraiberg was an American child psychoanalyst, author and social worker. At the time of her death, Selma Fraiberg was a professor of child psychoanalysis at the University of California, San Francisco and a clinician who devoted her career to helping troubled children. She was also professor emeritus of child psychoanalysis at the University of Michigan Medical School, where she had taught from 1963 to 1979, and had also been director of the Child Developmental Project in Washtenaw County, Mich., for children with emotional problems.
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Ruth Winifred Howard
1900 - 1997 (97 years)
Ruth Winifred Howard was an American psychologist. She is best known for her psychological work concerning students with special needs at Children's Provident Hospital School. She is one of the first African American women to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology. Howard was an active participant in the American Psychological Association, the International Council of Women Psychologists, the American Association of University Women, the National Association of College Women , and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. She also received instruction from Florence Goodenough.
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Margaret McFarland
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
Margaret Beall McFarland was an American child psychologist and a consultant to the television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. She was the co-founder and director of the Arsenal Family and Children's Center in Pittsburgh, and much of her work focused on the meaning of the interactions between mothers and children. Fred Rogers referred to McFarland as his major professional influence.
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Christine Ladd-Franklin
1847 - 1930 (83 years)
Christine Ladd-Franklin was an American psychologist, logician, and mathematician. Early life and education Christine Ladd, sometimes known by the nickname "Kitty", was born on December 1, 1847, in Windsor, Connecticut, to Eliphalet, a merchant, and Augusta Ladd. During her early childhood, she lived with her parents and younger brother Henry in New York City. In 1853 the family moved back to Windsor, Connecticut, where her sister Jane Augusta Ladd McCordia was born the following year. Family correspondence shows that Augusta and one of her sisters were both staunch supporters of women's rights.
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Isoko Hatano
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Isoko Hatano was a Japanese developmental psychologist and writer. Her 1951 book, Shōnenki, was a national bestseller that was adapted into a feature film. She was awarded the Order of the Precious Crown in 1976.
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Susan Sutherland Isaacs
1885 - 1948 (63 years)
Susan Sutherland Isaacs, CBE was a Lancashire-born educational psychologist and psychoanalyst. She published studies on the intellectual and social development of children and promoted the nursery school movement. For Isaacs, the best way for children to learn was by developing their independence. She believed that the most effective way to achieve this was through play, and that the role of adults and early educators was to guide children's play.
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Jean Macfarlane
1894 - 1989 (95 years)
Jean Walker Macfarlane was an American psychologist. She was born in Selma, California. In 1922 she earned a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley; she was the second person ever to do so, the first being Olga Bridgman in 1915. In 1927 Macfarlane founded the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Human Development, originally called the Institute of Child Welfare.
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Beatrice Edgell
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Beatrice Edgell was a British psychologist, researcher and university teacher. She taught at Bedford College in the University of London from 1897 to 1933. She was the first British woman to earn a PhD in psychology and the first British woman to be named a professor of psychology. She was also the first female president of the British Psychological Society, the Aristotelian Society, the Mind Association and the Psychological Division of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Karin Stephen
1889 - 1953 (64 years)
Karin Stephen was a British psychoanalyst and psychologist. Early life and education Karin Stephen was born Catherine Elizabeth Costelloe. Her mother, Mary Costelloe had been a Philadelphia Quaker, and her father, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe a Northern Irish convert to Roman Catholicism. The relationship between her parents was difficult, and her mother left her husband when Karin and her sister Rachel were very young. Her father died in 1899 when she was ten years old, so the sisters were then looked after by their grandmother. While at boarding school she won a scholarship for Newnh...
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Franziska Baumgarten
1883 - 1970 (87 years)
Franziska Baumgarten-Tramèr was an industrial psychologist, professor, and researcher. She is known for her work on the effects of war and trauma, aptitude testing, and gifted schoolchildren. Early life Baumgarten was born in Łódź, Poland in 1886 or 1883. She graduated from gymnasium in 1901 and then in 1905 went to study literature and philosophy at the University of Krakow. There her interest in understanding human emotion led her to the field of psychology. In 1908 she moved to the University of Zurich where she worked with Gustav Störring, before moving to the University of Bonn and then to Berlin.
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Catharine Cox Miles
1890 - 1984 (94 years)
Catharine Morris Cox Miles was an American psychologist known for her work on intelligence and genius. Born in San Jose, CA, to Lydia Shipley Bean and Charles Elwood Cox. In 1927 married psychologist Walter Richard Miles. Her sister was classics scholar and Quaker administrator Anna Cox Brinton.
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Susan Speer
1900 - Present (126 years)
Susan "Sue" Speer C.Psychol, FHEA is a senior lecturer at the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester. From 2005 to 2006 Speer was an ESRC-SSRC collaborative visiting fellow in the department of sociology at the University of California at Los Angeles .
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Kristine Mann
1873 - 1945 (72 years)
Kristine Mann was an American educator and physician, with a particular interest in working women's health. She was an early practitioner of psychoanalysis in North America. Early life and education Kristine Mann was born August 29, 1873, in Orange, New Jersey. In 1885 Kristine and her family began spending summers at Bailey Island , a location that was reminiscent of her mother's native Denmark. Summering at Bailey Island would prove to be a lifelong ritual for Kristine.
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Inez Beverly Prosser
1895 - 1934 (39 years)
Inez Beverly Prosser was a psychologist, teacher and school administrator. She is often regarded as the first African-American female to receive a Ph.D in psychology. Her work was very influential in the hallmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. After growing up in Texas, Prosser was educated at Prairie View Normal College, the University of Colorado and the University of Cincinnati. She was killed in a car accident a short time after earning her doctorate.
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Eleanor Gamble
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
Eleanor Acheson McCulloch Gamble was an influential American psychologist from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. Gamble published most of her work on audition and memory influenced by Georg Elias Müller, Edward B. Titchener, Mary Whiton Calkins, and Ernst Heinrich Weber. Despite her chronic eye conditions she was successful in editing volumes of textbooks, her own papers, and directing many master's degree students. She earned her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College in 1889. She went on to obtain her doctorate from Cornell University in 1898. She held several teac...
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Leta Stetter Hollingworth
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Leta Stetter Hollingworth was an American psychologist, educator, and feminist. Hollingworth also made contributions in psychology of women, clinical psychology, and educational psychology. She is best known for her work with gifted children.
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