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.
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List of the most influential people in Psychology,
#5001
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.
Go to Profile#5002
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.
Go to Profile#5003
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.
Go to Profile#5004
Marcel Foucault
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Marcel Foucault was a French philosopher and psychologist. Marcel Foucault was professor of philosophy at the University of Montpellier. In 1906 he founded a laboratory of experimental psychology at the university.
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Henri Ey
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Henri Marie Jean Louis Ey was a French neurologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and philosopher. Biography Ey was born on 10 August 1900 in Banyuls-dels-Aspres, Pyrénées-Orientales, and died there on 9 November 1977.
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Gustav Kafka
1883 - 1953 (70 years)
Gustav Kafka was an Austrian philosopher, psychologist. One of Kafka's most outstanding contributions to the realms of psychology have been his critique of fundamentals and methods, such as his criticism of behaviorism, and other articles in which he revealed new points of view based on concrete investigation.
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John Curtis Gowan
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
John Curtis Gowan was a psychologist who studied, along with E. Paul Torrance, the development of creative capabilities in children and gifted populations. Life John Curtis Gowan was born May 21, 1912, in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduating from Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1929, John Gowan was only 17 when he entered Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree four years later. A master's degree in mathematics followed; he then moved to Culver, Indiana, where he was employed as a counselor and mathematics teacher at Culver Military Academy from 1941 to 1952. Earning a ...
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James Mark Baldwin
#5009
Albert Michotte
1881 - 1965 (84 years)
Albert Edouard, Baron Michotte van den Berck was a Belgian experimental psychologist. Life Family Michotte was born to a distinguished, well-to-do, noble Catholic family. He was second and last child of Edmond Michotte and Marie Bellefroid and younger brother of geographer Paul Michotte.
Go to Profile#5010
Henry Foster Adams
1882 - 1973 (91 years)
Henry Foster Adams was an American psychologist and writer. He published several scientific articles and books on psychology and in particular the psychology of advertising, and advocated the use of empirical and statistical methods to understand people's responses to advertising.
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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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E. Lowell Kelly
1905 - 1986 (81 years)
Everett Lowell Kelly was an American clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, president of the American Psychological Association , and chairman of the Executive Committee for the Boulder Conference on Graduate Training in Clinical Psychology .
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Gregory Zilboorg
1890 - 1959 (69 years)
Gregory Zilboorg was a psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry who is remembered for situating psychiatry within a broad sociological and humanistic context in his many writings and lectures. Life and career Zilboorg was born into a Jewish family in Kiev, Ukraine on December 25, 1890 and studied medicine in St. Petersburg, where he worked under Vladimir Bekhterev. In 1917, after the February Revolution, he served as secretary to the Ministry of Labor under two prime ministers . When the Bolsheviks came to power, he fled to Kiev and established a reputation as a political journalist and dra...
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Richard Meili
1900 - 1991 (91 years)
Richard Meili was an internationally renowned scientist in practical psychology, diagnostics, personality development and intelligence. Biography Meili studied at the University of Jena, University of Bern and University of Berlin. In Berlin he was a student of Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Lewin, and also of Hans Rupp, professor for applied psychology at the institute of psychology.
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Yoichi Ueno
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Yoichi Ueno is a Japanese scholar in the fields of management science and industrial psychology and founder of SANNO Institute of Management. He has been called the "father of Japanese administrative science".
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Ola Raknes
1887 - 1975 (88 years)
Ola Raknes was a Norwegian psychologist, philologist and non-fiction writer. Born in Bergen, Norway, he was internationally known as a psychoanalyst in the Reichian tradition. He has been described as someone who spent his entire life working with the conveying of ideas through many languages and between different epistemological systems of reference, science and religion . For large portions of his life he was actively contributing to the public discourse in Norway. He has also been credited for his contributions to strengthening and enriching the Nynorsk language and its use in the public s...
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Joseph Sir Barcroft
#5018
Bronisław Bandrowski
1879 - 1914 (35 years)
Bronisław Bandrowski was a Polish philosopher and psychologist. He was one of the pupils of Kazimierz Twardowski. Drawing from his mentor's theories and the tradition of the Lwów–Warsaw school, his works dealt with the problem of induction. Bandrowski was also noted for his death in the Tatra Mountains near Zakopane.
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Friedrich Eduard Beneke
1798 - 1854 (56 years)
Friedrich Eduard Beneke was a German psychologist and post-Kantian philosopher. Life Beneke was born in Berlin. He studied at the universities of Halle and Berlin, and served as a volunteer in the War of 1815. After studying theology under Schleiermacher and de Wette, he turned to pure philosophy, studying English writers and the German modifiers of Kantianism, such as Jacobi, Fries and Schopenhauer. In 1820, he published Erkenntnisslehre, Erfahrungsseelenlehre als Grundlage alles Wissens, and his inaugural dissertation De Veris Philosophiae Initiis. His marked opposition to the philosophy o...
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David Katz
1884 - 1953 (69 years)
David Katz was a German-born Swedish psychologist and educator who specialized in Gestalt psychology and phenomenology. He was a professor Emeritus at the University of Stockholm. Prior to the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany, he served as the chair of psychology and education at the State University of Mecklenburg in Rostock.
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Shepherd Ivory Franz
1874 - 1933 (59 years)
Shepherd Ivory Franz was an American psychologist. He was the first chairman of the psychology department at the University of California, Los Angeles and served as president of the American Psychological Association. Franz was the editor of multiple psychological journals and he contributed research to the concepts of neuroplasticity, afterimages and cerebral localization. He spent many years affiliated with George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences and the Government Hospital for the Insane, later known as St. Elizabeth's Hospital.
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Carveth Read
1848 - 1931 (83 years)
Carveth Read was a 19th- and 20th-century British philosopher and logician. Life He was born 16 March 1848 in Falmouth, Cornwall, England. He was the third son of Edward Read and Elizabeth Truscott. He attended the University of Cambridge . He received a B.A. in 1873 and an M.A. in 1877. He was the Hilbert travelling scholar, studying at Leipzig and Heidelberg Universities in 1874-1877. In 1877 he married Evelyn Thompson. From 1878 he lectured at Wren's 'Coaching' establishment . He was Grote professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College London from 1903 to 1911. From 1911 to 1921 he was Lecturer in Comparative Psychology at UCL.
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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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Howard C. Warren
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Howard Crosby Warren was an American psychologist and the first chairman of the Princeton University Psychology department. He was also president of the American Psychological Association in 1913. The Society of Experimental Psychologists awards the Howard Crosby Warren Medal each year in his honor.
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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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Graham Reed
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Graham F. Reed was a Canadian psychologist. He is best known for his major work on anomalistic psychology entitled The Psychology of Anomalous Experience , which seeks to better understand the psychology behind seemingly bizarre experiences. He was also a CSI Fellow.
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Livingston Farrand
1867 - 1939 (72 years)
Livingston Farrand was an American physician, anthropologist, psychologist, public health advocate and academic administrator. Early life and education Born in Newark, New Jersey, to Dr. Samuel Ashbel Farrand, headmaster of the historic Newark Academy, and Rachel Louise Farrand, Farrand received an undergraduate degree from Princeton in 1888, and went on to the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he earned his M.D. in 1891.
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Frey Svenson
1866 - 1927 (61 years)
Frey Svenson was a Swedish medical doctor and professor of psychology, born in Vetlanda, Sweden. In the year of 1899 he worked at Upsala Hospital, which at that time was a psychiatric hospital rather than a medical hospital. Here he met the Swedish poet Gustaf Fröding. Svenson tried to help Fröding deal with his mental illness and also became his friend. This was the basis of a book called Gustaf Frödings diktning. Bidrag till dess psykologi
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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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Hans-Lukas Teuber
1916 - 1977 (61 years)
Hans-Lukas Teuber was a professor of psychology and head of the psychology department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was one of the founders of neuropsychology and studied perception. He coined the term double dissociation. He also introduced the "Corollary Discharge" hypothesis. He gave the classic definition of agnosia as "a normal percept stripped of its meaning".
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Havelock Ellis
1859 - 1939 (80 years)
Henry Havelock Ellis was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He developed the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.
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Thomas Cogswell Upham
1799 - 1872 (73 years)
Thomas Upham was an American philosopher, psychologist, pacifist, poet, author, and educator. He was an important figure in the holiness movement. He became influential within psychology literature and served as the Bowdoin College professor of mental and moral philosophy from 1825-1868. His most popular work, Mental Philosophy received 57 editions over a 73-year period. Additionally, he produced a volume of 16 other books and the first treatise on abnormal psychology, as well as several other works on religious themes and figures. Specific teachings included a conception of mental faculties...
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Leonard Carmichael
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
Leonard Carmichael was an American educator and psychologist. In addition, he became the seventh secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in 1953. Education and academic career Carmichael, the son of a physician and a teacher, was born in 1898, in Germantown, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. degree from Tufts University in 1921, and his PhD from Harvard University in 1924. He was a brother in the Theta Delta Chi fraternity during his time at Tufts. He became an instructor at Princeton University's Department of Psychology in 1924 and was appointed to assistant professor in 1926. In 1927 he ...
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Kit Pedler
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Christopher Magnus Howard "Kit" Pedler was a British medical scientist, parapsychologist and science fiction author. Biography He was the head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London, where he published a number of papers. Pedler's first television contribution was for the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
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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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Ashley Montagu
#5037
George M. Stratton
1865 - 1957 (92 years)
George Malcolm Stratton was an American psychologist who pioneered the study of perception in vision by wearing special glasses which inverted images up and down and left and right. He studied under one of the founders of modern psychology, Wilhelm Wundt, and started one of the first experimental psychology labs in America, at the University of California, Berkeley. Stratton's studies on binocular vision inspired many later studies on the subject. He was one of the initial members of the philosophy department at Berkeley, and the first chair of its psychology department. He also worked on sociology, focusing on international relations and peace.
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Everett Franklin Lindquist
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Everett Franklin Lindquist was a professor of education at the University of Iowa College of Education. He is best known as the creator of the ACT and other standardized tests. His contributions to the field of educational testing are significant and still evident today.
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George E. Partridge
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
George Everett Partridge was an American psychologist credited with popularizing the term sociopath in 1930 that Karl Brinbaum had suggested in 1909. He worked with the influential G. Stanley Hall at Clark University. One year after his death, the George Everett Partridge Memorial Foundation was incorporated in 1954 by the Partridge family to memorialize his life's work in the study and treatment of mental and personality disorders. The Foundation focused on developing programs to promote treatment centers for mentally disabled children, often referred to as the "forgotten children." Partridge schools were established.
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Henry J. Watt
1879 - 1925 (46 years)
Henry Jackson Watt was a Scottish experimental psychologist. He was student of Oswald Külpe and a member of the Würzburg School. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on mental set in problem solving, what he referred to as "Einstellung" or "task mental set".
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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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Herman George Canady
1901 - 1970 (69 years)
Herman George Canady was an American social psychologist. Canady, who was black, was the first psychologist to examine the role of the race of the examiner as a bias factor in IQ testing. Early life Canady was born in 1901 in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to Rev. Howard T and Mrs. Anna Canady. He attended Douglass Elementary School and Favor High School in Guthrie, Oklahoma. He graduated from the high school at George R. Smith College in Sedalia, Missouri, in 1922. In 1923, Canady enrolled in the Northwestern University Theological School as a Charles F. Grey scholarship student, where he developed an interest in the behavioral sciences and majored in sociology.
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Klaus F. Riegel
1925 - 1977 (52 years)
Klaus F. Riegel was professor of psychology at the University of Michigan from 1959 to 1977. His research and theory contributions encompassed psycholinguistics, gerontology, developmental psychology, and dialectical psychology. Riegel edited the international journal Human Development from 1970 to 1977. In 1975, the Gerontological Society of America presented Riegel with the Robert W. Kleemeier Award for outstanding research in the field of gerontology.
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Walter Bowers Pillsbury
1872 - 1960 (88 years)
Walter Bowers Pillsbury was an American psychologist, born at Burlington, Iowa. He studied for two years at Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, graduated from the University of Nebraska , and subsequently completed a Ph.D. at Cornell University . Pillsbury taught at the University of Michigan after 1897, in 1905–1910 as junior professor of philosophy and director of the psychological laboratory and afterward as professor of psychology. In 1908–1909 he lectured at Columbia. He served as president of the Western Philosophical Association in 1907 and of the American Psychological Association in 1910....
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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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Adolph Stöhr
1855 - 1921 (66 years)
Adolph Stöhr was professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His lectures and publications covered subjects such as logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, experimental psychology, psychology of perception, and psychology of association.
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Wilhelm Wirth
1876 - 1952 (76 years)
Wilhelm Wirth was a German psychologist. He was taught by Wilhelm Wundt. External links http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~psycho/hist2.html
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Edwin Diller Starbuck
1866 - 1947 (81 years)
Edwin Diller Starbuck born Edwin Eli Starbuck was an American educational psychologist who took a special interest in the teaching of morals and character in children independent of religious instruction. His idea was to imbue morals through indirect means where students would learn by inference.
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