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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Harry Guntrip
1901 - 1975 (74 years)
Henry James Samuel Guntrip was a British psychoanalyst known for his major contributions to object relations theory or school of Freudian thought. He was a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a psychotherapist and lecturer at the Department of Psychiatry, Leeds University, and also a Congregationalist minister. He was described by Dr Jock Sutherland as "one of the psychoanalytic immortals".
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Victor Henri
1872 - 1940 (68 years)
Victor Henri was a French-Russian physical chemist and physiologist. He was born in Marseilles as a son of Russian parents. He is known mainly as an early pioneer in enzyme kinetics. He published more than 500 papers in a variety of disciplines including biochemistry, physical chemistry, psychology, and physiology. Aleksey Krylov was his half-brother.
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Edward Wheeler Scripture
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
Edward Wheeler Scripture was an American physician and psychologist. He founded the experimental psychology laboratory at Yale University, directed the Vanderbilt Speech Clinic at Columbia University and was a founder of the American Psychological Association. Trained under experimental psychology pioneer Wilhelm Wundt, Scripture became best known for his contributions to speech science.
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Géza Róheim
1891 - 1953 (62 years)
Géza Róheim was a Hungarian psychoanalyst and anthropologist. Considered by some as the most important anthropologist-psychoanalyst, he is often credited with founding the field of psychoanalytic anthropology; was the first psychoanalytically trained anthropologist to do field research; and later developed a general cultural theory.
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Charles Baudouin
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Charles Baudouin was a French psychoanalyst and pacifist. His psychoanalytical work combined Freudianism with elements of the thought of Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Biography Baudouin was born in Nancy, France. After studying literature, Charles Baudouin continued his education in philosophy at the Sorbonne, where he became interested by the personalities of Pierre Janet and Henri Bergson. In 1913, as a young graduate in philosophy, Baudouin was interested by the work of Emile Coué and contributed to making him famous.
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Robert Morris Ogden
1877 - 1959 (82 years)
Robert Morris Ogden was an American psychologist and academic. He served as the dean of the Cornell University College of Arts and Sciences from 1923 to 1945. He was the first proponent of Gestalt psychology in the United States.
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Orval Hobart Mowrer
1907 - 1982 (75 years)
Orval Hobart Mowrer was an American psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Illinois from 1948 to 1975 known for his research on behaviour therapy. Mowrer practiced psychotherapy in Champaign-Urbana and at Galesburg State Research Hospital. In 1954 Mowrer held the position of president of the American Psychological Association. Mowrer founded Integrity Groups and was instrumental in establishing GROW groups in the United States. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Mowrer as the 98th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Walther Poppelreuter
1886 - 1939 (53 years)
Walther Poppelreuter was a German psychologist and neurologist. He dealt mainly with brain injuries of soldiers during the First World War and developed psychometric examination procedures that were used in the treatment of brain-injured patients and in industrial aptitude tests. He was among the first high school teachers who advocated openly for Nazism before the "seizure of power" . His psychometric tests are often used in visual neuropsychology, especially the Poppelreuter figure visual perceptual function test.
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James H. Hyslop
1854 - 1920 (66 years)
James Hervey Hyslop, Ph.D., LL.D, was an American psychical researcher, psychologist, and professor of ethics and logic at Columbia University. He was one of the first American psychologists to connect psychology with psychic phenomena. In 1906 he helped reorganize the American Society for Psychical Research in New York City and served as the secretary-treasurer for the organization until his death.
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James V. McConnell
1925 - 1990 (65 years)
James V. McConnell was an American biologist and animal psychologist. He is most known for his research on learning and memory transfer in planarians conducted in the 1950s and 1960s. McConnell also published several science fiction short stories in the mid-1950s.
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Carl Seashore
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
Carl Emil Seashore, born Sjöstrand was a prominent American psychologist and educator. He was the author of numerous books and articles principally regarding the fields of speech–language pathology, music education, and the psychology of music and art. He served as Dean of the Graduate College of University of Iowa from 1908–1937. He is most commonly associated with the development of the Seashore Tests of Musical Ability.
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Robert Waelder
1900 - 1967 (67 years)
Robert Waelder was a noted Austrian psychoanalyst and member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Waelder studied under Anna Freud and Hermann Nunberg. He was known for his work bringing together psychoanalysis and politics and wrote extensively on the subject.
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Ralph Hefferline
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Ralph Franklin Hefferline was a psychology professor at Columbia University. Hefferline became a patient of Fritz Perls around 1946. He joined a small training group led by Perls in 1948 in New York, and went on to contribute a chapter to the book which defined Gestalt Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality, co-authored by Perls, Paul Goodman and Hefferline, published in 1951. He was the third and junior author and provided the section containing practical exercises.
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Charles Augustus Strong
1862 - 1940 (78 years)
Charles Augustus Strong was an American philosopher and psychologist. He spent the earlier part of his career teaching in the United States, but after his wife died, in 1906 he settled with their daughter in Italy, near Florence. Between 1918 and 1936 he wrote most of his works there.
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Eduard Spranger
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Eduard Spranger was a German philosopher and psychologist. A student of Wilhelm Dilthey, Spranger was born in Berlin and died in Tübingen. He was considered a humanist who developed a philosophical pedagogy as an act of 'self defense' against the psychology-oriented experimental theory of the times.
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George Estabrooks
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
George Hoben Estabrooks was a Canadian-American psychologist and an authority on hypnosis during World War II. He was a Harvard University graduate, a Rhodes Scholar, and chairman of the Department of Psychology at Colgate University. He claimed to have used hypnosis to help spies have split personalities to not actually know they were spies in case of capture. He stated it was easy to create and easy to cure using hypnosis.
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Karl Zener
1903 - 1964 (61 years)
Karl Edward Zener was a perceptual psychologist best known for his affiliation with Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine and their work in the field of extra-sensory perception . Biography Zener was born in Indianapolis, Indiana the son of German-descent Clarence and Ida Zener, and brother of Katharine and Clarence . He received a Ph.B. from the University of Chicago in 1923, followed by M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Harvard University in 1924 and 1926. He then went on to spend a year as a United States National Research Council Fellow at the University of Berlin before returning to the U.S. A...
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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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William Thetford
1923 - 1988 (65 years)
William Thetford was an American psychologist, medical psychologist and professor. He is best known for his collaboration with Helen Schucman in typing the original manuscript and being on the editing team for A Course in Miracles , a self-study curriculum in spiritual psychology. He died in 1988, aged 65, in Tiburon, California, after having made his involvement with the ACIM material and its study the most central focus of his life.
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Kurt Schneider
1887 - 1967 (80 years)
Kurt Schneider was a German psychiatrist known largely for his writing on the diagnosis and understanding of schizophrenia, as well as personality disorders then known as psychopathic personalities.
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Carl Murchison
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
Carl Allanmore Murchison was an American psychologist and an early promoter of the discipline of psychology. Unlike most psychologists who became prominent in the history books, Murchison was not an influential theorist or researcher. Instead, he was an extremely active organizer, publisher, and editor.
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Erich Neumann
1905 - 1960 (55 years)
Erich Neumann was a German psychologist, philosopher, writer, and student of Carl Jung. Life and career Neumann was born in Berlin to a Jewish family. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg in 1927 and then continued to study medicine at the University of Berlin, where he acquired his first degree in medicine in 1933. In 1934 Neumann and his wife Julie, who had been Zionists since they were teenagers, spurred on by fear of persecution of Jews by the Nazi government, moved to Tel Aviv. For many years, he regularly returned to Zürich, Switzerland to give lectures at the C.
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James Braid
1795 - 1860 (65 years)
James Braid was a Scottish surgeon, natural philosopher, and "gentleman scientist". He was a significant innovator in the treatment of clubfoot, spinal curvature, knock-knees, bandy legs, and squint; a significant pioneer of hypnotism and hypnotherapy, and an important and influential pioneer in the adoption of both hypnotic anaesthesia and chemical anaesthesia. He is regarded by some, such as Kroger , as the "Father of Modern Hypnotism"; however, in relation to the issue of there being significant connections between Braid's "hypnotism" and "modern hypnotism" , let alone "identity", Weitzenh...
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Theodor Waitz
1821 - 1864 (43 years)
Theodor Waitz was a German psychologist and anthropologist. His research in psychology brought him into touch with anthropology, and he will be best remembered by his monumental work in six volumes, Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker .
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Matatarō Matsumoto
1865 - 1943 (78 years)
was a Japanese psychologist who set up the first psychological laboratory in Japan. He has been described as "the most eminent figure in the history of psychology in Japan". He founded the Japanese Journal of Psychology and the Japanese Psychological Association.
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Graham Wallas
1858 - 1932 (74 years)
Graham Wallas was an English socialist, social psychologist, educationalist, a leader of the Fabian Society and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Biography Born in Monkwearmouth, Sunderland, Wallas was the older brother of Katharine, later to become a politician. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was at Oxford that Wallas abandoned his religion. He taught at Highgate School until 1885, when he resigned rather than participate in communion and was President of the Rationalist Press Association.
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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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Paul Diel
1893 - 1972 (79 years)
Paul Diel was a French psychologist of Austrian origin who developed the method of introspective analysis and the psychology of motivation. Life Diel was born in Vienna, Austria, on 11 July 1893, to a teacher of German origin and an unknown man. He was orphaned at the age of 13 after spending 8 years in a religious orphanage, but was able to obtain his baccalauréat with the support of a benefactor. Diel did not pursue formal higher education, but instead became an actor, novelist, and poet before teaching himself philosophy. Inspired by the philosophers Plato, Kant and Spinoza, and also b...
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Vladimir Asnin
1904 - 1956 (52 years)
Vladimir Ilyich Asnin , Soviet developmental psychologist, a representative of Kharkov School of Psychology, head of the Department of psychology at the Kharkov State pedagogical institute in 1944–1950.
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