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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William James Sidis
1898 - 1944 (46 years)
William James Sidis was an American child prodigy with exceptional mathematical and linguistic skills. He wrote the book The Animate and the Inanimate, published in 1925 , in which he speculated about the origin of life in the context of thermodynamics.
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Clara Louise Thompson
1884 - Present (142 years)
Clara Louise Thompson was an American educator, Latinist, activist, feminist, and suffragette. She is the only woman to be awarded the American Fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome .
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Jesse Lee Cuninggim
1870 - 1950 (80 years)
Jesse Lee Cuninggim was an American Methodist clergyman and university professor and administrator. After serving as Head of the Department of Religious Education at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, he served as the President of Scarritt College for Christian Workers, which he moved from Kansas City, Missouri to Nashville, Tennessee.
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Franz Alexander
1891 - 1964 (73 years)
Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology. Life Franz Gabriel Alexander, in Hungarian Alexander Ferenc Gábor, was born into a Jewish family in Budapest in 1891, his father was Bernhard Alexander, a philosopher and literary critic, his nephew was Alfréd Rényi, a Hungarian mathematician who made contributions in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory but mostly in probability theory. Alexander studied in Berlin; there he was part of an influential group of Germa...
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Edgar Rubin
1886 - 1951 (65 years)
Edgar John Rubin was a Danish psychologist/phenomenologist, remembered for his work on figure-ground perception as seen in such optical illusions like the Rubin vase. Born to Jewish parents, Rubin was born and raised in Copenhagen. Enrolling at the University of Copenhagen in 1904, he majored in psychology and finished his magister artium examination in philosophy in 1910.
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Wilhelm Wundt
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person ever to call himself a psychologist.
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William James
1842 - 1910 (68 years)
William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology."
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Jacques Lacan
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris, from 1953 to 1981, and published papers that were later collected in the book Écrits. Transcriptions of his seminars, given between 1954 and 1976, were also published. His work made a significant impact on continental philosophy and cultural theory in areas such as post-structuralism, critical theory, feminist theory and film theory, as well as on the practice of psychoanalysis itself.
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Alfred Adler
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Alfred Adler was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, family constellation and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as a...
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Anna Freud
1895 - 1982 (87 years)
Anna Freud CBE was a British psychoanalyst of Austrian–Jewish descent. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Hermine Hug-Hellmuth and Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.
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G. Stanley Hall
1846 - 1924 (78 years)
Granville Stanley Hall was a pioneering American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard College in the nineteenth century. His interests focused on human life span development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.
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Lev Vygotsky
1896 - 1934 (38 years)
Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky was a Russian and Soviet psychologist, best known for his work on psychological development in children and creating the framework known as cultural-historical activity theory.
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John B. Watson
1878 - 1958 (80 years)
John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who popularized the scientific theory of behaviorism, establishing it as a psychological school. Watson advanced this change in the psychological discipline through his 1913 address at Columbia University, titled Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It. Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising, as well as conducting the controversial "Little Albert" experiment and the Kerplunk experiment. He was also the editor of Psychological Review from 1910 to 1915. A Review of General Psy...
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James McKeen Cattell
1860 - 1944 (84 years)
James McKeen Cattell was the first professor of psychology in the United States, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He was a long-time editor and publisher of scientific journals and publications, including Science, and served on the board of trustees for Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public from 1921 to 1944.
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Melanie Klein
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distress...
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Ernest Jones
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Alfred Ernest Jones was a Welsh neurologist and psychoanalyst. A lifelong friend and colleague of Sigmund Freud from their first meeting in 1908, he became his official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world. As President of both the International Psychoanalytical Association and the British Psycho-Analytical Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Jones exercised a formative influence in the establishment of their organisations, institutions and publications.
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Pierre Janet
1859 - 1947 (88 years)
Pierre Marie Félix Janet was a pioneering French psychologist, physician, philosopher, and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory. He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology. He was the first to introduce the link between past experiences and present-day disturbances and was noted for his studies involving induced somnambulism.
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Alfred Binet
1857 - 1911 (54 years)
Alfred Binet , born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test. In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.
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Lightner Witmer
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Lightner Witmer was an American psychologist. He introduced the term "clinical psychology" and is often credited with founding the field that it describes. Witmer created the world's first "psychological clinic" at the University of Pennsylvania in 1896, including the first journal of clinical psychology and the first clinical hospital school in 1907.
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Otto Rank
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Otto Rank was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher. Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud's publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist. In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.
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Max Wertheimer
1880 - 1943 (63 years)
Max Wertheimer was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book, Productive Thinking, and for conceiving the phi phenomenon as part of his work in Gestalt psychology.
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John Bowlby
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Edward John Mostyn Bowlby, CBE, FBA, FRCP, FRCPsych was a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
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Edward B. Titchener
1867 - 1927 (60 years)
Edward Bradford Titchener was an English psychologist who studied under Wilhelm Wundt for several years. Titchener is best known for creating his version of psychology that described the structure of the mind: structuralism. After becoming a professor at Cornell University, he created the largest doctoral program at that time in the United States. His first graduate student, Margaret Floy Washburn, became the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology .
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Joseph Jastrow
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
Joseph Jastrow was a Polish-born American psychologist notorious for inventions in experimental psychology, design of experiments, and psychophysics. He also worked on the phenomena of optical illusions, and a number of well-known optical illusions that were either first reported in or popularized by his work. Jastrow believed that everyone had their own, often incorrect, preconceptions about psychology. One of his ultimate goals was to use the scientific method to identify truth from error, and educate the layperson, which Jastrow accomplished through speaking tours, popular print media, a...
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Gustav Fechner
1801 - 1887 (86 years)
Gustav Theodor Fechner was a German physicist, philosopher, and experimental psychologist. A pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics , he inspired many 20th-century scientists and philosophers. He is also credited with demonstrating the non-linear relationship between psychological sensation, which became known as the Weber–Fechner law.
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Kurt Koffka
1886 - 1941 (55 years)
Kurt Koffka was a German psychologist and professor. He was born and educated in Berlin, Germany; he died in Northampton, Massachusetts, from coronary thrombosis. He was influenced by his maternal uncle, a biologist, to pursue science. He had many interests including visual perception, brain damage, sound localization, developmental psychology, and experimental psychology. He worked alongside Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler to develop Gestalt psychology. Koffka had several publications including "The Growth of the Mind: An Introduction to Child Psychology" and "The Principles of Gestalt P...
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Hermann Ebbinghaus
1850 - 1909 (59 years)
Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve. He was the father of the neo-Kantian philosopher Julius Ebbinghaus.
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James Mark Baldwin
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
James Mark Baldwin was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh and who was one of the founders of the Department of Psychology at Princeton and the University of Toronto. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.
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Alexander Luria
1902 - 1977 (75 years)
Alexander Romanovich Luria was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology. He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria's magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man , is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Work...
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