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,
#2801
Jean Stoetzel
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Jean Stoetzel was a French sociologist. Biography He had Alsacian and Lorrainian descent. Stoetzel had studied in Lycée Louis-le-Grand, in a preparatory class for superior schools In 1932, he entered École normale supérieure in Parisе.
Go to Profile#2802
Everett Stonequist
1901 - 1979 (78 years)
Everett Verner Stonequist was an American Sociologist perhaps best known for his 1937 book, The Marginal Man Life & Work Stonequist was born in Worcester, Mass. and received his A.B. degree in History and Sociology at Clark University. He later studied at Cornell University, Columbia University, and the University of Paris. He received his doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago in 1930.
Go to Profile#2803
Roderick D. McKenzie
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Roderick Duncan McKenzie was a Canadian-American sociologist, who became head of the sociology department at the University of Michigan. McKenzie served as the 2nd Vice-President of the American Sociological Association in 1932–1933, and was a charter member of the Sociological Research Association.
Go to Profile#2804
George M. Simmel
#2805
Ali Shariati
1933 - 1977 (44 years)
Ali Shariati Mazinani was an Iranian revolutionary and sociologist who focused on the sociology of religion. He is held as one of the most influential Iranian intellectuals of the 20th century, and has been called the "ideologue of the Islamic Revolution", although his ideas did not end up forming the basis of the Islamic Republic.
Go to Profile#2806
Jacob Riis
1849 - 1914 (65 years)
Jacob August Riis was a Danish-American social reformer, "muckraking" journalist, and social documentary photographer. He contributed significantly to the cause of urban reform in the United States of America at the turn of the twentieth century. He is known for using his photographic and journalistic talents to help the impoverished in New York City; those impoverished New Yorkers were the subject of most of his prolific writings and photography. He endorsed the implementation of "model tenements" in New York with the help of humanitarian Lawrence Veiller. Additionally, as one of the most fa...
Go to Profile#2807
Neva Boyd
1876 - 1963 (87 years)
Neva Leona Boyd was an American sociologist. She founded the Recreational Training School at the Hull House in Chicago. The school taught a one-year educational program in group games, gymnastics, dancing, dramatic arts, play theory, and social problems. She was on the faculty of Northwestern University from 1927 to 1941.
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Kurt Albert Gerlach
1886 - 1922 (36 years)
Kurt Albert Gerlach was a German professor and sociologist. Life Gerlach was the son of the chemist and later director of the Continental AG Albert Gerlach and his wife Martha Friedmann. He had studied at the university of Kiel under Ferdinand Tönnies and received his doctorate in 1911 with a work on the role of Denmark in global economy. He then studied at the University of Leipzig. In 1911 and 1912 he went to England and studied at the London School of Economics and became a member of the Fabian Society. In 1913 he habilitated in Leipzig with a treaty on protective measures for female factory workers in England.
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Eugen Steinach
1861 - 1944 (83 years)
Eugen Steinach was an Austrian physiologist and pioneer in endocrinology. Steinach played a significant role in discovering the relationship between sex hormones and human physical identifiers. Life and career Steinach was born on 28 January 1861, in Hohenems, County of Tyrol, Austrian Empire. His family were well-off and had been prominent in Jewish affairs in Hohenems for several generations. His father and his grandfather were both physicians; his father studied under Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke, a leading German physiologist.
Go to Profile#2810
Rose Goldsen
1917 - 1985 (68 years)
Rose Kohn Goldsen was a professor of sociology at Cornell University and a pioneer in studying the effects of television and popular culture. Prior to coming to Cornell, Goldsen worked for the Office of Radio Research, Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research. Goldsen came to Cornell as a research associate and felt that she encountered employment discrimination because she was a woman. In 1958, a faculty position opened up and she demanded to be considered, resulting in her appointment to the faculty.
Go to Profile#2811
Frank Tannenbaum
1893 - 1969 (76 years)
Frank Tannenbaum was an Austrian-American historian, sociologist and criminologist, who made significant contributions to modern Mexican history during his career at Columbia University. Early life Tannenbaum was born in Austria on 4 March 1893. His Eastern European Jewish family immigrated to the United States in 1905. He ran away from home as an adolescent and never finished high school. He worked at a number of menial jobs and became involved in radical labor politics of the era.
Go to Profile#2812
George Edgar Vincent
1864 - 1941 (77 years)
George Edgar Vincent was an American sociologist and university president. Biography He was born at Rockford, Illinois, the son of Bishop John H. Vincent. He studied at Yale, where he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and served on the thirteenth editorial board of The Yale Record. After graduating in 1885, he engaged in journalistic and literary work.
Go to Profile#2813
Charles Richmond Henderson
1848 - 1915 (67 years)
Charles Richmond Henderson was an American Baptist minister and sociologist. After being a pastor for nearly 20 years in Terre Haute and Detroit, he took an appointment as an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago, where he became a tenured professor. He published several works on society in the United States, the prison system, and the sociology of charities.
Go to Profile#2814
Margaret Fuller
1810 - 1850 (40 years)
Sarah Margaret Fuller , sometimes referred to as Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.
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St. Clair Drake
1911 - 1990 (79 years)
John Gibbs St. Clair Drake was an African-American sociologist and anthropologist whose scholarship and activism led him to document much of the social turmoil of the 1960s, establish some of the first Black Studies programs in American universities, and contribute to the independence movement in Ghana. Drake often wrote about challenges and achievements in race relations as a result of his extensive research.
Go to Profile#2816
Eilert Sundt
1817 - 1875 (58 years)
Eilert Lund Sundt was a Norwegian theologist and sociologist, known for his work on mortality, marriage and other subjects among the working class. He was an early pioneer of the field of sociology in Norway.
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Pan Guangdan
1898 - 1967 (69 years)
Pan Guangdan known in English as Quentin Pan, was a Chinese sociologist, eugenicist, and writer. He was one of the most distinguished sociologists and eugenicists of China. Educated at Tsinghua University on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, Dartmouth College and Columbia University, where he was trained by Charles B. Davenport, Pan was also a renowned expert on education. His wide research scope included eugenics, education policy, matrimony policy, familial problems, prostitute policy, and intellectual distributions. Pan's wide-ranging intellect led to his active participation in the Crescent...
Go to Profile#2818
Józef Chałasiński
1904 - 1979 (75 years)
Józef Chałasiński was a Polish sociologist, academic and university professor. Biography He studied at the University of Poznań under the famous Polish sociologist, Florian Znaniecki, gaining a PhD in 1927. He joined the faculty of the University of Warsaw in 1935. Since 1945 he became involved with the University of Łódź . Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, founding member of the Polish Sociological Association, guest lecturer at the University of California , he retired in 1974 and died in 1979.
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Richard Titmuss
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Richard Morris Titmuss was a pioneering British social researcher and teacher. He founded the academic discipline of social administration and held the founding chair in the subject at the London School of Economics.
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Robert Staughton Lynd
1892 - 1970 (78 years)
Robert Staughton Lynd was an American sociologist and professor at Columbia University, New York City. He is best known for conducting the first Middletown studies of Muncie, Indiana, with his wife, Helen 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. He was also the author of Knowledge for What? The Place of the Social Sciences in American Culture . In addition to writing and research, Lynd taught at Columbia from 1931 to 1960. He also served on U.S. gover...
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Oliver Cox
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Oliver Cromwell Cox was a Trinidadian-Americann sociologist. Cox was often misconceived as a Marxist due to his focus on class conflict and capitalism, however, Cox fundamentally disagreed with Marx's analysis of Capitalism. While Marx and other classical economists viewed foreign trade as trade in surpluses, Cox felt that foreign trade was the primary driving force in capitalist development. For Cox, capitalist systems were not isolated, but rather there was an interconnected network of global capitalist systems.
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Mildred Parten Newhall
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Mildred Bernice Parten Newhall was an American sociologist, a researcher at University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 1929. In it she developed the theory of six stages of child's play, which led to a series of influential publications.
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Carey D. Miller
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Carey Dunlap Miller was an American food scientist and a University of Hawaii at Manoa food and nutrition professor and department chair from 1922-1958. Early life and education Miller was born to immigrant parents that owned a ranch in Idaho. She graduated from Boise High School in 1912. She received her bachelor's degree with honors from the University of California, Berkeley and later her master's degree at Columbia University.
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M. S. A. Rao
1926 - 1985 (59 years)
Madhugiri Shamarao Anathapadmanabha Rao was a professor of sociology who had been a founder-member in 1959 of the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi, India. He wrote and edited extensively on subjects such as the social aspects of nutrition, both urban and rural sociology, the sociology of migration, and social dominance. He conducted much fieldwork as a part of his researches.
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George Edmund Haynes
1881 - 1960 (79 years)
George Edmund Haynes was an American sociology scholar and federal civil servant, a co-founder and first executive director of the National Urban League, serving 1911 to 1918. A graduate of Fisk University, he earned a master's degree at Yale University, and was the first African American to earn a doctorate degree from Columbia University, where he completed one in sociology.
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Carl F. Kraenzel
1906 - 1980 (74 years)
Carl Frederick Kraenzel was an American sociologist. Most of Kraenzel's work focuses on the people of the Great Plains, covering a range of topics including quality of life, power relations, resource use, and mental health. Kraenzel has been widely published in a variety of professional journals, monographs, research bulletins, special reports, and books in the fields of rural sociology, Great Plains sociology, and natural resource sociology. His best known work, The Great Plains in Transition, describes the challenges of social life and connections to the natural environments in the North American semiarid region located between the 98th meridian and the Rocky Mountains.
Go to Profile#2827
Ruth Glass
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Ruth Glass was a German-born British sociologist, urban planner and founder of the Centre for Urban Studies at University College London . Life She was born in Berlin on 30 June 1912, the daughter of Eli Lazarus, who was Jewish, and Lilly Leszczynska. She left Germany in 1932, studying at the London School of Economics. After spending two years from 1941 at the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, she returned to the United Kingdom in 1943. She concentrated on town planning and social planning.
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Georges Davy
1883 - 1976 (93 years)
Georges Davy was a French sociologist. He was a student and disciple of Émile Durkheim. With Marcel Mauss and Paul Huvelin he pioneered anthropological studies of the origins of the idea of contract.
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Valtazar Bogišić
1834 - 1908 (74 years)
Valtazar Bogišić , also known as Baltazar Bogišić, was a Serbian jurist and a pioneer in sociology. In the domain of private law his most notable research was on family structure and the unique Montenegrin civil code of 1888. He is considered to be a pioneer in the sociology of law and sociological jurisprudence. He was also a follower of the German Historical School of law, and may be considered a transitional figure between the Historical School and sociological approaches to law. In 1902 Bogišić was elected president of the International Institute of Sociology in Paris.
Go to Profile#2830
Ulysses G. Weatherly
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Ulysses Grant Weatherly Professor of Sociology at Indiana University and a founding member of the American Sociological Society, and on its executive committee from 1907 to 1910. He was appointed as vice president in 1920 and President in 1923.
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Gabriel Le Bras
1891 - 1970 (79 years)
Gabriel Le Bras was a French legal scholar and sociologist. Early life Gabriel Le Bras was born on July 23, 1891, in Paimpol, France. He received a Doctorate and the Agrégation in Laws in 1922. Career Le Bras was a Professor of Law at the University of Strasbourg from 1923 to 1929. He was director of research in the Sociology of Religion at the École pratique des hautes études from 1945 to 1962. He served as the Dean of the Law School at the University of Paris from 1959 to 1962.
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Robert McKenzie
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Robert Trelford McKenzie was a Canadian professor of politics and sociology, and a psephologist . He is perhaps best known in Britain as one of the main presenters of the BBC's General Election programmes.
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John L. Gillin
1871 - 1958 (87 years)
John Lewis Gillin was an American sociologist, specializing in applied sociology, and the 16th president of the American Sociological Association . He was also active in the activities of the American Red Cross.
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Minnie Louise Haskins
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Minnie Louise Haskins was a British poet and an academic in the field of sociology, best known for being quoted by King George VI in his Royal Christmas Message of 1939. Early life Haskins was born at 2 Kingswood Hill, Oldland, South Gloucestershire, six miles east of Bristol, and she grew up in the neighbouring village of Warmley. Her father was Joseph Haskins, a grocer, and her mother was Louisa Bridges. Her father acquired a pottery at Warmley making drain pipes, which was continued after his death by her mother. The family lived at Warmley House.
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Lewis Wade Jones
1910 - 1979 (69 years)
Lewis Wade Jones was a sociologist and teacher. He was born in Cuero, Texas, the son of Wade E. and Lucynthia McDade Jones. A member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity, he received his AB degree from Fisk University in 1931, and followed it with postgraduate study as a Social Science Research Council Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1931–1932.
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Charles A. Ellwood
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Charles Abram Ellwood was one of the leading American sociologists of the interwar period, studying intolerance, communication and revolutions and using many multidisciplinary methods. He argued that sociology should play a role in directing cultural evolution through education of society.
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F. Stuart Chapin
1888 - 1974 (86 years)
Francis Stuart Chapin was an American sociologist and educator; he was a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota from 1922 to 1953. Background He received his bachelor's degree from Columbia University in 1909, as well as his PhD from the same school in 1911.
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A.K. Nazmul Karim
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Abul Khair Nazmul Karim was a Bangladeshi sociologist and academic. He was posthumously awarded Ekushey Padak for his contribution to education by the government of Bangladesh in 2012. Personal life Karim was born in the Noakhali/Comilla area, now known as Lakshmipur. His parental residence was at Falgoonkora village in the Comilla District. He was the seventh of eight children of Abu Rashid Nizamuddin Mahmood Ahmed and Mossammat Shamsun Neda Khatun. He came from an educated family of school inspectors, private tutors, diwans, and magistrates. His mother came from a zamindari family.
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William Z. Ripley
1867 - 1941 (74 years)
William Zebina Ripley was an American economist, lecturer at Columbia University, professor of economics at MIT, professor of political economy at Harvard University, and racial anthropologist. Ripley was famous for his criticisms of American railroad economics and American business practices in the 1920s and 1930s, and later for his tripartite racial theory of Europe. His work of racial anthropology was later taken up by racial physical anthropologists, eugenicists, white supremacists, Nordicists, and racists in general, and it was considered a valid academic work at the time, although today...
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Muriel Rukeyser
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist. She wrote poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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Achille Ouy
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
Achille Ouy was a French philosopher and sociologist. Ouy taught philosophy at various lycees, and was involved with the Mercure de France. "A follower of René Worms and Gaston Richard, Ouy "performed many day-to-day tasks that held the R.I.S. and IIS together from 1919 to 1940."
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Gunnar Landtman
1878 - 1940 (62 years)
Gunnar Landtman was a Finnish philosopher as well as a sociology and philosophy professor. A pupil of Edvard Westermarck, he graduated from the University of Helsinki in 1905. He later became an associate professor there from 1910 to 1927 and then a temporary professor until his death in 1940. At the university, Landtman was a member of the Prometheus Society, a student society promoting freedom of religion. Landtman was the first modern sociological anthropologist. His most important journey was a two-year trip to Papua New Guinea where he lived with the Kiwai Papuans from 1910 to 1912. He w...
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Olgerd Bochkovsky
1885 - 1939 (54 years)
Olgerd Ipolyt Bochkovsky – Ukrainian sociologist, journalist, diplomat and political activist whose political writings were published in Ukrainian newspapers in Canada, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other countries. His selected writings have recently appeared in a three-volume edition. Born in a Polish-Lithuanian family in Dolynska village, Kherson Gubernia , he studied in St. Petersburg, where he was involved in the socialist movement. After the revolution in 1905 he emigrated to Austro-Hungary and settled in Prague. In 1909 he graduated from Charles University . At that time he was involved i...
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Viola Klein
1908 - 1973 (65 years)
Viola Klein was a sociologist in Great Britain. Her work demonstrated that objective ideas about women's attributes are socially constructed. Although her early training was in psychology and philosophy, her most prolific research engagements concerned women's social roles and how these changed after the Industrial Revolution. She was one of the first scholars to bring quantitative evidence to bear on this socio-economic topic. Her research not only illuminated the changing roles of women in society, but she also wrote and lectured on concrete social and political changes that would help faci...
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Annie Marion MacLean
1869 - 1934 (65 years)
Annie Marion MacLean was a pioneering American sociologist of the women's Chicago School, and is sometimes referred to as the "mother of contemporary ethnography". She was one of the first women to pursue a professional career in sociology.
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Yasuma Takada
1883 - 1972 (89 years)
Yasuma Takata was an influential sociologist and economist and is most widely known for his power theory of economics. A fruit - the Yasuma - was named after him after he discovered it on one of his many trips to Greece.
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Lawrence D. Bobo
1900 - Present (125 years)
Lawrence D. Bobo is the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences and the Dean of Social Science at Harvard University. His research focuses on the intersection of social psychology, social inequality, politics, and race.
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Georges Gurvitch
1894 - 1965 (71 years)
Georges Gurvitch was a Russian-born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall.
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E. Wight Bakke
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.
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Reuben Hill
1912 - 1985 (73 years)
Reuben Lorenzo Hill Jr. was an American sociologist. He specialized in the sociology of the family. He was the seventh president of the International Sociological Association . He has been called "the founding father of family sociology".
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