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 Psychology,
#4551
Bert Mosselmans
#98261
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Bert Mosselmans is a professor of economics and philosophy. He was the dean of Vesalius College, Brussels, Belgium from 2007 until 2014. He is professor of economics and philosophy at University College Roosevelt, Middelburg, the Netherlands. He received an MSc in Business Engineering , an MA in philosophy and a PhD in economics from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His research focuses on the history of economic thought, mainly the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, and with a special interest in the history of microeconomics and industrial organization. He has p...
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Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi
#70967
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi is educational scholar, curriculum theorist and faculty member of Tarbiat Modares University. The domain of his activities and studies is education. Biography Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi was born on February 2, 1959, in Tehran. He graduated from high school in 1975 and went to the US to continue his studies. He obtained a BS in industrial technology, building construction in 1979 from California State University- Fresno. He then went to San Jose- California to study for his master's degree. Majoring this time in the field of education, he opted to study educational technology and obtained his degree 1n 1981.
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Clara Wing-chung Ho
#186218
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Clara Wing-chung Ho is a history professor at Hong Kong Baptist University. Ho is a Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. Career Ho has been Professor of History at the Hong Kong Baptist University for over 20 years. Her writings cover a variety of subjects, but Ho mainly focuses on women and gender in Imperial China. She has collaborated with international scholars on the history of women and gender, with those collaborations including a 2007 conference about the history of Chinese women and a 2010 workshop about gender in the history of China. Ho is the author of multiple books about women and the history of China.
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Magdalena Smoczyńska
#100403
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Magdalena Smoczyńska, born 25 April 1947 in Kraków, is a Polish psycholinguist and expert in the development of language in children. She is an emeritus reader in the department of linguistics at Jagiellonian University where she was once head of the Child Language Laboratory and now studies specific language impairment at the Institute for Educational Research.
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Denise Susan Walsh
#192132
Overall Influence
#4556
C. Norman Shealy
#63013
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Clyde Norman Shealy is a North American neurosurgeon. Education Shealy graduated from Duke University School of Medicine, and completed his training at Duke University Medical Center, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, and Massachusetts General Hospital. Shealy is also a certified minister of the Nemenhah ITO.
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Anne M. McKim
#180158
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Anne M. McKim is a Scottish-New Zealand academic. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Waikato, with specialities including Medieval Studies and Eighteenth-Century Literature. Selected works Cowie, Bronwen, Rosemary Hipkins, Sally Boyd, Ally Bull, Paul Ashley Keown, Clive McGee, Beverley Cooper et al. "Curriculum implementation exploratory studies." .Petrie, Kirsten Culhane, Alister Jones, and Anne M. McKim. "Effective professional learning in physical activity." .
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Britney L Phippen
#192206
Overall Influence
#4559
Marion Blank
#145780
Overall Influence
Dr. Marion Blank is the creator of the Reading Kingdom program, the creator and former director of the A Light on Literacy program at Columbia University in New York, and most recently the creator of Comprendi, a first-of-its-kind reading system designed specifically to improve reading comprehension. She is a developmental psychologist with a specialization in language and learning.
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Akira Tago
#70658
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Akira Tago was a Japanese psychologist. He was an honorary emeritus of Tokyo Future University and a professor emeritus of Chiba University. He was also the chief of Akira Tago Laboratory. He compiled a best-selling quiz book series Atama no Taisou , from 1966 to his death. There are 23 sequel parts published. He was also known for designing the puzzles of video games, including the Professor Layton series, in which he is cited as a "Puzzle Master" in the credits. In the titular Professor Layton's office, the player can also find a book which the professor is reading written by a puzzle master from abroad--as the games take place in the UK, this is likely referring to Tago.
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Debora Meijers
#173373
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Debora Meijers is an art historian and professor of museum studies at the University of Amsterdam, an educational elective program that she developed herself. Meijers was born in Amsterdam. In 1990 she obtained her doctorate under Rob Scheller. She teaches and writes about the history of art collecting and curation as a science and as a facet of cultural heritage.
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Ngātata Love
#184711
Overall Influence
1937 - 2018 (81 years)
Sir Ralph Heberley Love , known as Ngātata Love, was a New Zealand Waitangi Tribunal negotiator, academic and Māori leader. Love was a Professor Emeritus of Business Development at Victoria University of Wellington's Victoria Management School. In 2016 he was convicted of defrauding his own iwi, taking payments of $1.5 million.
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Charlotte Kohler
#167879
Overall Influence
1908 - 2008 (100 years)
Charlotte Kohler was a literary magazine editor and a university professor. She was born in Richmond, Virginia, attended the city's John Marshall High School, graduated from Vassar College, and obtained both a master's and a PhD from the University of Virginia. As a woman, she was not able to gain employment as an English professor in Virginia, so she taught for two years at Woman's College of the University of North Carolina.
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Susan MacLaury
#113933
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Susan MacLaury is the co-founder and executive director of the non-profit media company Shine Global, a licensed social worker, and a retired educator. She is also an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated producer.
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Natascha McNamara
#89212
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (91 years)
Natascha Duschene McNamara is an Ngarrindjeri Australian academic, activist, and researcher. She co-founded the Aboriginal Training and Cultural Institute in Balmain, New South Wales and served as President of the Aboriginal Children's Advancement Society Ltd. Her affiliations include: Fellowship, Centre of Indigenous Development Education and Research, University of Wollongong ; member, Australian Press Council; and Member, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Council.
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Deborah Akers
#91965
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Deborah S. Akers is an assistant professor of Cultural Applied Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio. She is both an author and researcher and currently has a segment with Talk Radio News, DC where she discusses her research findings on posttraumatic stress disorder and meditation and the benefits of Asian meditation techniques and holistic stress-free living.
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Josephine Kane
#184656
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Josephine Kane is a British academic and historian of architecture and the built environment. Publications The architecture of pleasure: British amusement parks 1900-1939 . Ashgate Press.
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René Drucker Colín
#33247
Overall Influence
1937 - 2017 (80 years)
René Raúl Drucker Colín was a Mexican scientist, investigator and journalist in the fields of physiology and neuroscience. He was born in United states. From 1985 through 1990, he was the Director of Neuroscience at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was also the President of the Mexican Academy of Sciences from 2000 through 2008
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Donald Pennington
#180293
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Donald C. Pennington is a British psychologist and was pro-vice-chancellor of Coventry University. He is the author of a number of psychology textbooks.
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Tadanobu Tsunoda
#42810
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Tadanobu Tsunoda is a physician and a Japanese author, most known for his ideas regarding the "Japanese brain". Theory According to Tsunoda's theory, the Japanese people use their brains in a unique way, different from "western" brains. The Japanese brain, argues Tsunoda, hears or processes music using the left hemisphere, where western brains use the opposite or right hemisphere to process music. Tsunoda further argues that brains use languages as operating systems, thus the user "giving meaning to vowels." Tsunoda has had one essay, "An approach to an integrated sensorimotor system in the hu...
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Craig Mahoney
#108971
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Craig Mahoney was the Vice-Chancellor of the University of West of Scotland until the end of 2021, and then spent six months as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Law. He is a chartered psychologist and academic.
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Morton Prince
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Morton Henry Prince was an American physician who specialized in neurology and abnormal psychology, and was a leading force in establishing psychology as a clinical and academic discipline. He was part of a handful of men who disseminated European ideas about psychopathology, especially in understanding dissociative phenomenon; and helped found the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906, which he edited until his death.
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Wilfred Bion
1897 - 1979 (82 years)
Wilfred Ruprecht Bion DSO was an influential English psychoanalyst, who became president of the British Psychoanalytical Society from 1962 to 1965. Early life and military service Bion was born in Mathura, North-Western Provinces, India, and educated at Bishop's Stortford College in England. After the outbreak of the First World War, he served in the Tank Corps as a tank commander in France, and was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order , and the Croix de Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He first entered the war zone on 26 June 1917, and was promoted to temporary lieutenant on 10 ...
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James Rowland Angell
1869 - 1949 (80 years)
James Rowland Angell was an American psychologist and educator who served as the 16th President of Yale University between 1921 and 1937. His father, James Burrill Angell , was president of the University of Vermont from 1866 to 1871 and then the University of Michigan from 1871 to 1909.
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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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Georg Elias Müller
1850 - 1934 (84 years)
Georg Elias Müller was a significant early German experimental psychologist who is credited with the theory of retroactive interference. Biography Early life Georg Elias Müller was born in Grimma, Saxony on 20 July 1850 to August Friedrich Müller and Rosalie Zehme Müller. His father was a theologian and professor of religion at a nearby royal academy. His family was deeply involved in a revivalist orthodoxy that he eventually broke away from. As a child he attended the Gymnasium at Leipzig.
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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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Théodule-Armand Ribot
1839 - 1916 (77 years)
Théodule-Armand Ribot was a French psychologist. He was born at Guingamp, and was educated at the Lycée de St Brieuc. He is known as the founder of scientific psychology in France, and gave his name to Ribot's Law regarding retrograde amnesia.
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Sigmund Freud
#4580
James J. Gibson
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S.
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Charles Hubbard Judd
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Charles Hubbard Judd was an American educational psychologist who played an influential role in the formation of the discipline. Part of the larger scientific movement of this period, Judd pushed for the use of scientific methods to the understanding of education and, thus, wanted to limit the use of theory in the field. Judd who was known for applying scientific methods to the study of educational issues.
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James Strachey
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
James Beaumont Strachey was a British psychoanalyst, and, with his wife Alix, a translator of Sigmund Freud into English. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, "the international authority".
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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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Cyril Burt
1883 - 1971 (88 years)
Sir Cyril Lodowic Burt, FBA was an English educational psychologist and geneticist who also made contributions to statistics. He is known for his studies on the heritability of IQ. Shortly after he died, his studies of inheritance of intelligence were discredited after evidence emerged indicating he had falsified research data, inventing correlations in separated twins which did not exist, alongside other fabrications.
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William McDougall
1871 - 1938 (67 years)
William McDougall FRS was an early 20th century psychologist who spent the first part of his career in the United Kingdom and the latter part in the United States. He wrote a number of influential textbooks, and was important in the development of the theory of instinct and of social psychology in the English-speaking world.
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Sergei Rubinstein
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Sergei Leonidovich Rubinstein was a Soviet psychologist and philosopher and one of the founders of the Marxist tradition in Soviet psychology. The pioneer of distinct tradition of "activity approach" in Soviet and, subsequently, international psychology.
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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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Kazimierz Dąbrowski
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Kazimierz Dąbrowski was a Polish psychologist, psychiatrist, and physician. He is best known for his theory of "positive disintegration" as a mechanism in personality development. He was also a poet who used the pen name "Paul Cienin, Paweł Cienin".
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Karl Bühler
1879 - 1963 (84 years)
Karl Ludwig Bühler was a German psychologist and linguist. In psychology he is known for his work in gestalt psychology, and he was one of the founders of the Würzburg School of psychology. In linguistics he is known for his organon model of communication and his treatment of deixis as a linguistic phenomenon.
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Alexander Mitscherlich
1908 - 1982 (74 years)
Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich was a German psychoanalyst. Life Alexander Mitscherlich grew up in Munich and took up studies in history, the history of art, and philosophy at Munich University. When Mitscherlich's Jewish-born dissertation thesis supervisor Paul Joachimsen died, in 1932, his chair was passed to an antisemite, Karl Alexander von Müller, who declined to take over the dissertation projects begun by his predecessor. This is why Mitscherlich left Munich for Berlin in order to open a bookstore there, where he sold writings critical of the current developments in Germany, bringing him to the attention of the SA.
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Egon Brunswik
1903 - 1955 (52 years)
Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa was a psychologist who made contributions to functionalism and the history of psychology. Life Early life and education Brunswik was born in Budapest, Hungary, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He graduated from the Theresianische Akademie in 1921, after studying mathematics, science, classics, and history. He enrolled as a student of psychology at the University of Vienna, where he became an assistant in Karl Bühler's Psychological Institute and received a PhD in 1927. While a graduate student in psychology, he also passed the state examination for G...
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Yūjirō Motora
1858 - 1912 (54 years)
Yūjirō Motora , sometimes also known as Yuzero Motora, was one of the earliest Japanese psychologists. He was known for conducting research on the attention spans of school-aged children, and he set up the first psychological laboratory in Japan.
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James Ward
1843 - 1925 (82 years)
James Ward was an English psychologist and philosopher. He was a Cambridge Apostle. Life Ward was born in Kingston upon Hull, the eldest of nine children. His father was an unsuccessful merchant. Ward was educated at the Liverpool Institute and Mostyn House, but his formal schooling ended when his father became bankrupt.
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Frank Angell
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Frank Angell was an early American psychologist and the former athletic director at Stanford University. Biography Angell was born in 1857 in Scituate, Rhode Island. He graduated from the University of Vermont with an undergraduate degree in 1878. Angell spent several years teaching high school physics in Washington, DC. He earned his PhD in the Leipzig laboratory of Wilhelm Wundt. He then founded the experimental psychology laboratories at Cornell University and Stanford University . He remained at Stanford for the rest of his career, working primarily on psychophysics and as director of athletics.
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Gustave Gilbert
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Gustave Mark Gilbert was an American psychologist best known for his writings containing observations of high-ranking Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials. His 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship was an attempt to profile the Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler using as reference the testimonials of Hitler's closest generals and commanders. Gilbert's published work is still a subject of study in many universities and colleges, especially in the field of psychology.
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Knight Dunlap
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Knight Dunlap was an American psychologist. He founded the Journal of Psychology, was the first editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, and was the President of the American Psychological Association. Dunlap authored numerous books and articles regarding psychology and was a talented inventor. His concentration was in experimental psychology and some of his best known inventions were the Dunlap chronoscope, the Dunlap tapping plate, and the Dunlap chair for vestibular investigation.
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Wolfgang Metzger
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Wolfgang Metzger is considered one of the main representatives of Gestalt psychology in Germany. Metzger's most widely acclaimed work is Psychologie: Die Entwicklung ihrer Grundannahmen seit der Einführung des Experiments . It portrays systematically the foundations of psychology, including the different kinds of psychological reality, the problems associated with reference systems, order, and much more. Pivotal in its discussions is the cumulative knowledge, at that time, of the entire Gestalt school.
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James Sully
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
James Sully was an English psychologist, philosopher and writer. Biography James Sully was born at Bridgwater, Somerset, the son of J. W. Sully, a liberal Baptist merchant and ship-owner. He was educated at the Independent College in Taunton, Regent's Park College, at the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Hermann Lotze, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he studied under Emil du Bois-Reymond and Hermann von Helmholtz.
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C. Lloyd Morgan
1852 - 1936 (84 years)
Conwy Lloyd Morgan, FRS was a British ethologist and psychologist. He is remembered for his theory of emergent evolution, and for the experimental approach to animal psychology now known as Morgan's Canon, a principle that played a major role in behaviourism, insisting that higher mental faculties should only be considered as explanations if lower faculties could not explain a behaviour.
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