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 Sociology,
#2751
Michel Aflaq
1910 - 1989 (79 years)
Michel Aflaq was a Syrian philosopher, sociologist and Arab nationalist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement; he is considered by several Ba'athists to be the principal founder of Ba'athist thought. He published various books during his lifetime, the most notable being The Battle for One Destiny and The Struggle Against Distorting the Movement of Arab Revolution .
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Sheldon Glueck
1896 - 1980 (84 years)
Sheldon Glueck was a Polish-American criminologist. He and his wife Eleanor Glueck collaborated extensively on research related to juvenile delinquency and developed the "Social Prediction Tables" model for predicting the likelihood of delinquent behavior in youth. They were the first criminologists to perform studies of chronic juvenile offenders and among the first to examine the effects of psychopathy among the more serious delinquents.
Go to Profile#2753
Bobby Sands
1954 - 1981 (27 years)
Robert Gerard Sands was a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who died on hunger strike while imprisoned at HM Prison Maze in Northern Ireland. Sands helped to plan the 1976 Balmoral Furniture Company bombing in Dunmurry, which was followed by a gun battle with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Sands was arrested while trying to escape and sentenced to 14 years for firearms possession.
Go to Profile#2755
László Radványi
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
László Radványi , also known as Johann Lorenz Schmidt, was a Hungarian-German writer and academic. Life Childhood and early career Radványi was born into a Jewish family in Hungary. As a boy, Radványi attended a grammar school on Marko Street in Budapest. While attending grammar school, at the age of 16, he authored a book of poetry, which received a preface from Frigyes Karinthy. Radványi studied economics and philosophy at the University of Budapest from 1918 to 1919, where he became involved in radical politics. With the destruction of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919 he fled to Vienn...
Go to Profile#2756
Nannie Helen Burroughs
1879 - 1961 (82 years)
Nannie Helen Burroughs was an educator, orator, religious leader, civil rights activist, feminist, and businesswoman in the United States. Her speech "How the Sisters Are Hindered from Helping," at the 1900 National Baptist Convention in Virginia, instantly won her fame and recognition. In 1909, she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, DC. Burroughs' objective was at the point of intersection between race and gender.
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Maniruzzaman Islamabadi
1875 - 1950 (75 years)
Munīruzzamān Khān Islāmābādī , also known by the epithet Biplobi Maulana , was a Muslim philosopher, nationalist activist and journalist from Islamabad in Bengal Presidency, British India . He was among the founders of the Jamiat Ulama-e-Hind.
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C. Olin Ball
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Charles Olin Ball was an American food scientist and inventor who was involved in the thermal death time studies in the food canning industry during the early 1920s. This research was used as standard by the United States Food and Drug Administration for calculating thermal processes in canning. He was also a charter member of the Institute of Food Technologists in 1939 and inducted among the first class of its fellows in 1970 for his work in academia and industry.
Go to Profile#2759
Weston J. Morrow
#2760
Erastus Milo Cravath
1833 - 1900 (67 years)
Erastus Milo Cravath was a pastor and American Missionary Association official who after the American Civil War, helped found Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee, and numerous other historically black colleges in Georgia and Tennessee for the education of freedmen. He also served as president of Fisk University for more than 20 years.
Go to Profile#2761
Naim Frashëri
1846 - 1900 (54 years)
Naim bey Frashëri, more commonly Naim Frashëri , was an Albanian historian, journalist, poet, rilindas and translator who was proclaimed as the national poet of Albania. He is regarded as a pioneer of modern Albanian literature and one of the most influential Albanian cultural icons of the 19th century.
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Steve Chase
Steve Chase was the director of the Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability program in the department of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England. He is an activist, organizer, Quaker, lecturer, and editor.
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Théophile Funck-Brentano
1830 - 1906 (76 years)
Théophile Funck-Brentano was a Luxembourgian-French sociologist. He was the son of Jacques Funck, a notary in Luxembourg City that lived with Charles Metz, who was witness to Funck-Bretano's birth. He was the father of Frantz Funck-Brentano.
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Kate Stephens
1853 - 1954 (101 years)
Kate Brown Stephens was an American naturalist and the curator of mollusks and marine invertebrates at the San Diego Natural History Museum from 1910 to 1936. Biography Stephens was born in London, England. Her father, Thomas Brown, was a cab driver; her mother, Mary Tyler Brown, died when Kate was in her late teens or early twenties. Helping to raise her younger brother George while the family lived in the Kensington area of London, Kate is said to have worked at the Natural History Museum. She immigrated to the United States around 1888-1890. She lived for a short time in the city of Sa...
Go to Profile#2765
Mirta Aguirre
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
Mirta Aguirre Carreras was a Cuban poet, novelist, journalist and political activist from the LGBTQI movement. She has been called "the most important female academic and woman of letters in post-revolutionary Cuba".
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Ella Eaton Kellogg
1853 - 1920 (67 years)
Ella Eaton Kellogg was an American dietitian known for her work on home economics and vegetarian cooking. She was educated at Alfred University ; and the American School Household Economics . In 1875, Kellogg visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became interested in the subjects of sanitation and hygiene, and a year later enrolled in the Sanitarium School of Hygiene. Later on, she joined the editorial staff of Good Health magazine, and in 1879, married Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
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Roy Wallis
1945 - 1990 (45 years)
Roy Wallis was a sociologist and Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the Queen's University Belfast. He is mostly known for his creation of the seven signs that differentiate a religious congregation from a sectarian church, which he created while researching the Church of Scientology. He introduced the distinction between world-affirming and world-rejecting new religious movements.
Go to Profile#2768
Mary Burnett Talbert
1866 - 1923 (57 years)
Mary Burnett Talbert was an American orator, activist, suffragist and reformer. In 2005, Talbert was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Career Mary Morris Burnett was born in Oberlin, Ohio in 1866. As the only African-American woman in her graduating class from Oberlin College in 1886, Burnett received a Bachelor of Arts degree. She entered the field of education, first as a teacher in 1886 at Bethel University in Little Rock, then as an assistant principal of the Union High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887, the highest position held by an African-American woman in the state.
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Helen Lynd
1896 - 1982 (86 years)
Helen Merrell Lynd was an American sociologist, social philosopher, educator, and author. She is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with her husband, Robert Staughton Lynd; as the coauthor of Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts ; and a pioneer in the use of social surveys. She was also the author of England in the 1880s: Toward a Social Basis for Freedom , Shame and the Search for Identity , and essays on academic freedom. In addition to writing and research, Lynd was a lectu...
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Leo Löwenthal
1900 - 1993 (93 years)
Leo Löwenthal was a German sociologist and philosopher usually associated with the Frankfurt School. Life Born in Frankfurt as the son of assimilated Jews , Löwenthal came of age during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic. He joined the newly founded Institute for Social Research in 1926 and quickly became its leading expert on the sociology of literature and mass culture as well as the managing editor of the journal it launched in 1932, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. Heterodox and independent Marxists, open to new intellectual currents such as psychoanalysis, and predominantly Jewish, the institute's members swiftly fled Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933.
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Ruth Peterson
1900 - Present (126 years)
Ruth Delois Peterson is an American sociologist and criminologist known for her work on racial and ethnic inequality and crime. She earned her PhD in sociology from University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1983. Peterson is emerita professor of sociology at the Ohio State University, former director of the Criminal Justice Research Center , and former president of the American Society of Criminology . She is the namesake of the American Society of Criminology's Ruth D. Peterson Fellowship for Racial and Ethnic Diversity.
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G. Malcolm Trout
1896 - 1990 (94 years)
George Malcolm Trout An American dairy industry pioneer, writer, researcher, and professor emeritus in food science at Michigan State University. Trout is credited with finding the key to the creation of homogenized milk.
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Adolf Sturmthal
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Adolf Fox Sturmthal was a U.S. political scientist, sociologist and journalist of Austrian birth who specialised in labour studies and international relations. Biography Sturmthal earned a PhD in Political Science in 1925 at Vienna University. He was chairman of the Association of Austrian Social Democratic Students and Academics. He moved to Zurich in 1926 to assist Friedrich Adler, the secretary of the Labour and Socialist International, and was editor of International Information. In 1933 and 1934 he organised international aid for German and Austrian socialist refugees from the Austrofascist Dollfuss and Nazi regimes.
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Donald Francis Roy
1909 - 1980 (71 years)
Donald Francis Roy was a sociologist on the faculty of Duke University from 1950 to 1979. Well known for his field work into industrial working conditions, workplace interactions, social conflict, and the role of unions. Roy received a bachelor's degree and master's from the University of Washington where he did ethnographic fieldwork in a Seattle shantytown and his PhD from the University of Chicago. Roy's work surveys much of blue-collar America , and is of great importance to Marxist analysis of the time.
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Arthur C. Dahlberg
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Arthur Chester Dahlberg was an American food scientist specializing in the dairy industry. His research helped to improve the methods of processing milk and milk products. He was Professor and Professor Emeritus of Dairy Industry at Cornell University. He received the 1944 Borden Award for excellence in research in dairy manufacturing.
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William Vere Cruess
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
William Vere Cruess was an American food scientist who pioneered the use of fruits to produce fruit-juice beverages, fruit-based concentrates and syrups. He was one of the first investigators in the United States to use freezing storage for preservation of fruits and fruit products. Cruess's research also proved beneficial in the rebirth of the wine industry in California after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933.
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Ira De Augustine Reid
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Ira De Augustine Reid was a prominent sociologist, who wrote extensively on the lives of black immigrants and communities in the United States. He was also influential in the field of educational sociology. He held faculty appointments at Atlanta University, New York University, and Haverford College, one of very few African American faculty members in the United States at white institutions during the era of "separate but equal" and the first to be awarded tenure at a prestigious Northern institution .
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Tony Bennett
Tony Bennett is a British sociologist who has held academic positions in the United Kingdom and Australia. His work focusses on cultural studies and cultural history. Early life and education Bennett was born in Manchester and earned a BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University in 1968 and a PhD in sociology at Sussex University in 1972.
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Willard Waller
1899 - 1945 (46 years)
Willard Walter Waller was an American sociologist. Much of his research concerned the sociology of the family, sociology of education and the sociology of the military. His The Sociology of Teaching was described as an "early classic" in the field of the sociology of education. Before his sudden death, he was recognized as one of the most prominent scholars in the field of sociology.
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Maynard A. Joslyn
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Maynard Alexander Joslyn was a Russian Empire-born, American food scientist who involved in the rebirth of the American wine industry in California following the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Joslyn was also involved in the development of analytical chemistry as it applied to food, leading to the advancement of food chemistry as a scientific discipline.
Go to Profile#2781
George A. Lundberg
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
George Andrew Lundberg was an American sociologist. Background Lundberg was born in Fairdale, North Dakota. His parents, Andrew J. Lundberg and Britta C. Erickson, were immigrants from Sweden. Lundberg received his bachelor's degree from the University of North Dakota in 1920, a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1922, and a doctorate in 1925 from the University of Minnesota, where he studied under and F. Stuart Chapin.
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Richard LaPiere
1899 - 1986 (87 years)
Richard Tracy LaPiere was a professor of sociology at Stanford University from 1929 to 1965. Early years and education Born in Beloit, Wisconsin, LaPiere obtained his B.A. in Economics , followed by his M.A in Sociology and his Ph.D in Sociology , all at Stanford University.
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T. H. Marshall
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Thomas Humphrey Marshall was an English sociologist who is best known for his essay "Citizenship and Social Class," a key work on citizenship that introduced the idea that full citizenship includes civil, political, and social citizenship.
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Ernest Burgess
1886 - 1966 (80 years)
Ernest Watson Burgess was a Canadian-American urban sociologist born in Tilbury, Ontario. He was educated at Kingfisher College in Oklahoma and continued graduate studies in sociology at the University of Chicago. In 1916, he returned to the University of Chicago, as a faculty member. Burgess was hired as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago. Burgess also served as the 24th President of the American Sociological Association .
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Donald Cressey
1919 - 1987 (68 years)
Dr. Donald Ray Cressey was an American penologist, sociologist, and criminologist who made innovative contributions to the study of organized crime, prisons, criminology, the sociology of criminal law, white-collar crime.
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John M. Gillette
1866 - 1949 (83 years)
John Morris Gillette was an American sociologist, specializing in rural sociology, and the 18th president of the American Sociological Association . Biography Before pursuing an academic career, in 1895 Gillette briefly served as a Presbyterian minister in Dodge City, Kansas. He received his MA from Princeton University in 1895 and his Ph.D. from the Chicago Theological Seminary in 1899 and then in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1901.
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E. Franklin Frazier
1894 - 1962 (68 years)
Edward Franklin Frazier , was an American sociologist and author, publishing as E. Franklin Frazier. His 1932 Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book titled The Negro Family in the United States ; it analyzed the historical forces that influenced the development of the African-American family from the time of slavery to the mid-1930s. The book was awarded the 1940 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for the most significant work in the field of race relations. It was among the first sociological works on blacks researched and written by a black person.
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Thorsten Sellin
1896 - 1994 (98 years)
Johan Thorsten Sellin was a Swedish American sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, a penologist and one of the pioneers of scientific criminology. Biography Sellin was born in Örnsköldsvik in Västernorrland County, Sweden and came to Canada with his parents when he was 17 years old. He received his bachelor's degree from Augustana College in Illinois when he was 19. He went on to receive a master's degree and doctoral degree in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1922 until becoming Professor Emeritus in 1967.
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William Fielding Ogburn
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
William Fielding Ogburn was an American sociologist who was born in Butler, Georgia and died in Tallahassee, Florida. He was also a statistician and an educator. Ogburn received his B.A. degree from Mercer University and his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. He was a professor of sociology at Columbia from 1919 until 1927, when he became chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Chicago.
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Nicholas Timasheff
1886 - 1970 (84 years)
Nicholas Sergeyevitch Timasheff was a Russian sociologist, professor of jurisprudence and writer. Biography Timasheff "came from an old family of Russian nobility"; his father was Minister of Trade and Industry under Nicholas II. In St. Petersburg, where he was born, he attended a classical high school; he went on to attend the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the University of Strasbourg, and the Saint Petersburg State University . At the latter university he met the Polish-Russian jurist Leon Petrazycki, who was a significant influence on him throughout his life. Two years later he began teaching sociological jurisprudence at the University of Petrograd.
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Lowell Juilliard Carr
1885 - 1963 (78 years)
Lowell Juilliard Carr was an American sociologist, author, and long-time university professor. He is best known for his book Willow Run, which discusses the sociological conditions arising from the wartime increase in the worker population at the Willow Run bomber plant during World War II. He was also a pioneer in the field of studying the underlying social causes for juvenile delinquency.
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Mary Frank Fox
Mary Frank Fox is Dean's Distinguished Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She is a pioneer and leader in the study of women and men in academic and scientific occupations and organizations. Her work has introduced and established the ways that participation and performance in science reflect and are affected by complex social-organizational processes. Fox's research is published in over 60 different scholarly and scientific journals, books, and collections, including Social Studies of Science, Science, Technology, and Human Values, Sociology of Edu...
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Samuel A. Stouffer
1900 - 1960 (60 years)
Samuel Andrew Stouffer was a prominent American sociologist and developer of survey research techniques. Stouffer spent much of his career attempting to answer the fundamental question: How does one measure an attitude?
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Morris Janowitz
1919 - 1988 (69 years)
Morris Janowitz was an American sociologist and professor who made major contributions to sociological theory, the study of prejudice, urban issues, and patriotism. He was one of the founders of military sociology and made major contributions, along with Samuel P. Huntington, to the establishment of contemporary civil-military relations. He was a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago and held a five-year chairmanship of the Sociology Department at University of Chicago. He was the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago.
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Louis Wirth
1897 - 1952 (55 years)
Louis Wirth was an American sociologist and member of the Chicago school of sociology. His interests included city life, minority group behavior, and mass media, and he is recognised as one of the leading urban sociologists.
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Morris Ginsberg
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Morris Ginsberg was a British sociologist, who played a key role in the development of the discipline. He served as editor of The Sociological Review in the 1930s and later became the founding chairman of the British Sociological Association in 1951 and its first President . He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1942 to 1943, and helped draft the UNESCO 1950 statement titled The Race Question.
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Edwin Sutherland
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Edwin Hardin Sutherland was an American sociologist. He is considered one of the most influential criminologists of the 20th century. He was a sociologist of the symbolic interactionist school of thought and is best known for defining white-collar crime and differential association, a general theory of crime and delinquency. Sutherland earned his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1913.
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Max Horkheimer
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Max Horkheimer was a German philosopher and sociologist who was famous for his work in critical theory as a member of the Frankfurt School of social research. Horkheimer addressed authoritarianism, militarism, economic disruption, environmental crisis, and the poverty of mass culture using the philosophy of history as a framework. This became the foundation of critical theory. His most important works include Eclipse of Reason , Between Philosophy and Social Science and, in collaboration with Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment . Through the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer planned, suppo...
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Theodore Fred Abel
1896 - 1988 (92 years)
Theodore Fred Abel was an American sociology professor who collected the largest single archive of first person accounts from people who joined Hitler's National Socialist movement. The collection of men's accounts was published in 1938 in a book titled Why Hitler Came to Power. The women's accounts were set aside to publish at a later date. Those accounts were lost and then rediscovered in the archives of the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto, after which three Florida State University professors arranged to have them transcribed, translated and digitized. This collection of first person account...
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Bernard Berelson
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Bernard Reuben Berelson was an American behavioral scientist, known for his work on communication and mass media. He was a leading proponent of the broad idea of the "behavioral sciences", a field he saw as including areas such as public opinion. In Chapter 14 of Voting , he enunciated what has become known as Berelson's paradox on democracy: while classical theories of its success assume voters committed to interest in public life, this fails to correspond with practical politics, while the system itself functions.
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