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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Sociology,
#2801
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.
Go to Profile#2802
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#2803
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".
Go to Profile#2804
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.
Go to Profile#2805
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.
Go to Profile#2806
James Chaney
1943 - 1964 (21 years)
James Earl Chaney was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality civil rights workers killed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, by members of the Ku Klux Klan on June 21, 1964. The others were Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner from New York City.
Go to Profile#2807
Edison Uno
1929 - 1976 (47 years)
Edison Tomimaro Uno was a Japanese American civil rights advocate, best known for opposing laws used to implement the mass detention of Japanese Americans during World War II and for his role in the early stages of the movement for redress after the war. To many Japanese American activists, Uno was the father of the redress movement.
Go to Profile#2808
Doris R. Entwisle
#2809
Eleanor Roosevelt
1884 - 1962 (78 years)
Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She was the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt's four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States. Through her travels, public engagement, and advocacy, she largely redefined the role of First Lady. Roosevelt then served as a United States Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly from 1945 to 1952, and in 1948 she was given a standing ovation by the assembly upon their adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Go to Profile#2810
Eugeniu Sperantia
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Eugeniu Sperantia was a Romanian poet, aesthetician, essayist, sociologist and philosopher. He was born in Bucharest to folklorist Theodor Speranția and his wife Elena , a relative of poet Mihail Cruceanu. He attended primary and high school in his native city, graduating in 1906. That year, he made his published debut, in Ovid Densusianu's Vieața Nouă. Prior to that, he had frequented Alexandru Macedonski's circle. In 1910, he graduated from the philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest. Two years later, he received a doctorate in literature and philosophy; his thesis dealt with pragmatic apriorism.
Go to Profile#2811
Jay Lovestone
1897 - 1990 (93 years)
Jay Lovestone was an American activist. He was at various times a member of the Socialist Party of America, a leader of the Communist Party USA, leader of a small oppositionist party, an anti-Communist and Central Intelligence Agency helper, and foreign policy advisor to the leadership of the AFL–CIO and various unions within it.
Go to Profile#2812
Dwight Sanderson
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Ezra Dwight Sanderson was an American entomologist and sociologist who worked in the US Department of Agriculture on pest management in cotton before becoming a professor of sociology. He published two textbooks in entomology and wrote several books on rural sociology.
Go to Profile#2813
Arne Runeberg
1912 - 1979 (67 years)
Sven Arne Runeberg was a Finnish anthropologist and linguist, best known for his studies on magic, witchcraft, and sociolinguistics. Arne Runeberg was born in Helsinki into the Swedish-speaking cultural family Runeberg; his great grandfather was Finland's national poet J. L. Runeberg. Arne Runeberg attained his B.A. degree at the University of Helsinki in 1939, but World War II made a stop to his postgraduate studies. In 1947, however, he was the first student to defend his doctoral thesis, Witches, Demons and Fertility Magic, at the new Faculty of Social Sciences in Helsinki University.
Go to Profile#2814
Balthasar H. Meyer
1866 - 1954 (88 years)
Balthasar Henry Meyer was an American government official and professor of economics and sociology. He served for 28 years as a member of the Interstate Commerce Commission. Early life Meyer was born near Mequon, Wisconsin, the son of Henry and Louise Meyer. He attended Oshkosh State Normal School, receiving his bachelor's degree, and then took two degrees, including his doctorate in 1897, from the University of Wisconsin, after doing graduate work at the University of Berlin in 1894–95.
Go to Profile#2815
Willem Bonger
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Willem Adriaan Bonger was a Dutch criminologist and sociologist. He is considered an early Marxist criminologist which through his work, criminology stood out as an autonomous science, making its interrelationship with sociology more evident according to a scientific approach.
Go to Profile#2816
Harvey Warren Zorbaugh
1896 - 1965 (69 years)
Harvey Warren Zorbaugh was Professor of Educational Sociology, at New York University. he was born in East Cleveland, Ohio and educated in sociology at the University of Chicago. He married Geraldine Elizabeth Bone on September 7, 1929, and they had two children: a son, Harvey Jr., and a daughter, Harriet. His classic text, first published in 1929, was The Gold Coast and the Slum, a book based on his PhD thesis completed under the direction of Robert E. Park at the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#2817
Richard Fritz Behrendt
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Richard Fritz Behrendt was a German sociologist.
Go to Profile#2818
Georges Sorel
1847 - 1922 (75 years)
Georges Eugène Sorel was a French social thinker, political theorist, historian, and later journalist. He has inspired theories and movements grouped under the name of Sorelianism. His social and political philosophy owed much to his reading of Proudhon, Karl Marx, Giambattista Vico, Henri Bergson , and later William James. His notion of the power of myth in collective agency inspired socialists, anarchists, Marxists, and fascists. Together with his defense of violence, the power of myth is the contribution for which he is most often remembered.
Go to Profile#2819
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
1890 - 1998 (108 years)
Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development. Moving to Miami as a young woman to work for The Miami Herald, she became a freelance writer, producing over one hundred short stories that were published in popular magazines. Her most influential work was the book The Everglades: River of Grass , which redefined the popular conception of the Everglades as a treasured river instead of a worthless swamp. Its impact has been compared to that of Rachel Carson's influential book Silent Spring .
Go to Profile#2820
Andrej Sirácky
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Andrej Sirácky was a Slovak sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and communist official. Biography After graduating from the grammar school in Vrbas in 1921, he applied to study philosophy at Charles University in Prague, which he finished with a doctorate in 1926.
Go to Profile#2821
Edward C. Hayes
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Edward Cary Hayes was a pioneer in American sociology and was a founder and president of the American Sociological Association. Edward Cary Hayes was born on February 10, 1868, in Lewiston, Maine, to Professor Benjamin Francis Hayes. He received a bachelor's degree from Bates College and then studied at the Cobb Divinity School. He then became a pastor in Augusta, Maine until 1896 when he became a Dean at Keuka College. In 1899 he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study philosophy but soon began to study sociology. He studied under Albion Small and alongside George Herbert Mead, John Dewey and James Tufts.
Go to Profile#2822
Frances Willard
1839 - 1898 (59 years)
Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898. Her influence continued in the next decades, as the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution were adopted. Willard developed the slogan "Do Everything" for the WCTU and encouraged members to engage in a broad array of social reforms by lobbying, petitioning, preaching, publishing, and education. During her lifetime, Willard su...
Go to Profile#2823
Leon Winiarski
1865 - 1915 (50 years)
Leon Winiarski was a Polish sociologist. Pupil of Vilfredo Pareto and later Professor of Sociology at the University of Geneva. Notes Further reading Ian Steedman, Socialism and Marginalism in Economics, Routledge, 1995, , Google Print, p.199-200
Go to Profile#2824
Thomas F. Gieryn
#2825
Tomáš Masaryk
1850 - 1937 (87 years)
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk was a Czechoslovak statesman, political activist and philosopher who served as the first president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935. He is regarded as the founding father of Czechoslovakia.
Go to Profile#2826
Marion Talbot
1858 - 1948 (90 years)
Marion Talbot was an American educator who served as Dean of Women at the University of Chicago from 1895 to 1925, and an influential leader in the higher education of women in the United States during the early 20th century. In 1882, while still a student, she co-founded the American Association of University Women with her mentor Ellen Swallow Richards. During her long career at the University of Chicago, Talbot fought tenaciously and often successfully to improve support for women students and faculty, and against efforts to restrict equal access to educational opportunities.
Go to Profile#2827
Tommy Douglas
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Thomas Clement Douglas was a Canadian politician who served as the seventh premier of Saskatchewan from 1944 to 1961 and Leader of the New Democratic Party from 1961 to 1971. A Baptist minister, he was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation . He left federal politics to become Leader of the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and then the seventh Premier of Saskatchewan. His government introduced the continent's first single-payer, universal health care program.
Go to Profile#2828
Jean Martin
1923 - 1979 (56 years)
Jean Isobel Martin FASSA was an Australian sociologist who was a pioneer of the discipline in Australia. Many of her works examined the role of immigrants in Australian society. Her academic career "spanned teaching and research appointments in seven Australian universities".
Go to Profile#2829
Frederick Charles Frey
1891 - Present (135 years)
Frederick Charles Frey was born near Amite, Louisiana, on November 8, 1891. He was a graduate of Amite High School, Louisiana State University, and the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 1929.
Go to Profile#2830
Margaret Hodgen
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Margaret Trabue Hodgen was an American sociologist and author. Hodgen was a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Hodgen wrote the highly influential Doctrine of the Survivals, first published as a book in 1936, but originally launched in the journal American Anthropology in 1931.
Go to Profile#2831
Elmer Louis Struening
#2832
Maud Gonne
1866 - 1953 (87 years)
Maud Gonne MacBride was an Irish republican revolutionary, suffragette and actress. She was of Anglo-Irish descent and was won over to Irish nationalism by the plight of people evicted in the Land Wars. She actively agitated for Home Rule and then for the republic declared in 1916. During the 1930s, as a founding member of the Social Credit Party, she promoted the distributive programme of C. H. Douglas. Gonne was well known for being the muse and long-time love interest of Irish poet W. B. Yeats.
Go to Profile#2833
Roger Casement
1864 - 1916 (52 years)
Roger David Casement , known as Sir Roger Casement, CMG, between 1911 and 1916, was a diplomat and Irish nationalist executed by the United Kingdom for treason during World War I. He worked for the British Foreign Office as a diplomat, becoming known as a humanitarian activist, and later as a poet and Easter Rising leader. Described as the "father of twentieth-century human rights investigations", he was honoured in 1905 for the Casement Report on the Congo and knighted in 1911 for his important investigations of human rights abuses in the rubber industry in Peru.
Go to Profile#2834
Carl Kelsey
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Carl Kelsey was an American sociologist and professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Biography A native of Grinnell, Iowa, Kelsey was educated at Iowa College, Andover Theological Seminary, the University of Göttingen, and the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a social worker in Helena, Montana in 1895, before moving to do the same job in Buffalo, New York, Boston, and Chicago. In 1903, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and joined their faculty as an instructor the same year. He became an assistant professor there in 1904, and a full professor in 1907.
Go to Profile#2835
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea was a Romanian Marxist theorist, politician, sociologist, literary critic, and journalist. He was also an entrepreneur in the city of Ploiești. Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea was the father of communist activist Alexandru Dobrogeanu-Gherea and of philosopher Ionel Gherea.
Go to Profile#2836
James Q. Dealey
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
James Quayle Dealey was a British American sociologist, journalist, academic, and newspaper editor. Dealey served as the tenth president of the American Sociological Association. Early life and education Dealey was born on 13 August 1861 in Manchester, England to George and Mary Ann Dealey, née Nellins. Dealey was first educated in secondary schools in Liverpool. At the age of nine, Dealey's family moved to Galveston, Texas where attended the local public schools there. When he was seventeen, Dealy was hired at the Galveston News, working alongside his two brothers Thomas and George. Dealey w...
Go to Profile#2837
Marcel Boll
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Marcel Boll was a French scientist, sociologist, philosopher, educator, scientific journalist , and a founding member of the Rationalist Union . Boll was one of the most prolific contributors of articles to Les Cahiers Rationalistes and Raison Présente , two journals published by the Rationalist Union. He was one of the main popularizers of the theory of relativity, the quantum theory, and other aspects of the physical sciences during the interwar period and in the early 1950s. An advocate of neopositivism, his numerous works on physics, philosophy, sociology, education, and other subjects all reflect his neopositivist perspective.
Go to Profile#2838
Alexandru Claudian
1898 - 1962 (64 years)
Alexandru Claudian was a Romanian sociologist, political figure, and poet. A student and practitioner of Marxism, he worked as a schoolteacher, entry-level academic, field researcher, and journalist, before finally earning a professorship at the University of Iași. An anti-fascist, Claudian enlisted with the Romanian Social Democratic Party during the interwar, moving closer to the anti-communist center by the late 1940s, and became that faction's main theoretician. His condemnation of Marxism and totalitarianism made him an enemy of the communist regime, which imprisoned him for several year...
Go to Profile#2839
Fred Hampton
1948 - 1969 (21 years)
Fredrick "Chairman Fred" Allen Hampton Sr. was an American activist. He came to prominence in his late teens and very early 20s in Chicago as deputy chairman of the national Black Panther Party and chair of the Illinois chapter. As a progressive African American, he founded the anti-racist, anti-classist Rainbow Coalition, a prominent multicultural political organization that initially included the Black Panthers, Young Patriots , and the Young Lords , and an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them end infighting and work for social change. A Marxist–Leninist, Hampton considere...
Go to Profile#2840
Constantin Dimitrescu-Iași
1849 - 1923 (74 years)
Constantin Dimitrescu-Iași was a Moldavian, later Romanian philosopher, sociologist and pedagogue. Biography Born in Iași, his father was the magistrate Dimitrie Dimitrescu. He attended primary school in his native city from 1856 to 1860, followed by high school from 1860 to 1867. His classmates there included Alexandru Lambrior, George Panu, and Calistrat Hogaș. From 1867 to 1869, he attended the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Iași, and at the same time worked as a substitute Latin teacher. From 1869 to 1870, Dimitrescu-Iași taught at Botoșani. He again taught at Iași from 1870 to 1872, continuing his university studies in the process.
Go to Profile#2841
Sjoerd Hofstra
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Sjoerd Hofstra was a Dutch sociologist and anthropologist, best known as the first Dutch person to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in Africa, where he lived among the Mende in Sierra Leone. Hofstra was an animal protection advocate.
Go to Profile#2842
Virgil I. Bărbat
1879 - 1931 (52 years)
Virgil Iuliu Bărbat was a Romanian sociologist. Born in Rasa, Călărași County, he graduated from Brăila's Nicolae Bălcescu High School in 1897, followed by the social sciences faculty of the University of Geneva, where he received his degree in 1905. Subsequently, he took courses on sociology, ethics and economics at Heidelberg and Leipzig. In 1909, he defended his thesis, in philosophy, at the University of Bern. Titled Nietzsche – tendances et problèmes, this was published at Zürich in 1911. After taking his doctorate, he remained abroad, embarking on a number of study trips. His destinatio...
Go to Profile#2843
Alexander Sergeyevich Lappo-Danilevsky
1863 - 1919 (56 years)
Alexander Sergeyevich Lappo-Danilevsky was a Russian historian and sociologist. He attended the University of St. Petersburg, graduating from the Faculty of History and Philology in 1886. He played an influential role in introducing Nikolai Kondratiev to sociology, economics and scientific method.
Go to Profile#2844
M. Carey Thomas
1857 - 1935 (78 years)
Martha Carey Thomas was an American educator, suffragist, and linguist. She was the second president of Bryn Mawr College, a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Early life and education Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland on January 2, 1857. She was the daughter of James Carey Thomas and Mary Thomas. She was conceived "in full daylight", because her father, a doctor, thought this would diminish the chance of his wife miscarrying.
Go to Profile#2845
Graham Taylor
1851 - 1938 (87 years)
Graham Taylor was a Minister, Social Reformer, Chicago Theological Seminary faculty member, Educator and Founder of Chicago Commons Settlement House along with Jane Addams.
Go to Profile#2846
Víctor Jara
1932 - 1973 (41 years)
Víctor Lidio Jara Martínez was a Chilean teacher, theater director, poet, singer-songwriter and Communist political activist. He developed Chilean theater by directing a broad array of works, ranging from locally produced plays to world classics, as well as the experimental work of playwrights such as Ann Jellicoe. He also played a pivotal role among neo-folkloric musicians who established the Nueva canción chilena movement. This led to an uprising of new sounds in popular music during the administration of President Salvador Allende.
Go to Profile#2847
Chen Xujing
1903 - 1967 (64 years)
Chen Xujing was a leading Chinese sociologist. Biography Chen Xujing was born in Hainan. He was schooled in Singapore and at Lingnan Middle School, at which he enrolled in 1920. He graduated from Fudan University in 1925. After receiving a PhD in Political Science from the University of Illinois in 1928, he published his thesis on theories of sovereignty in the following year. While holding a sociology post at Lingnan University, he travelled to study in Germany. He became a professor at Nankai University, heading the Economic Research Institute and School of Politics and Economics, and serving as vice president of the university.
Go to Profile#2848
Margaret Jarman Hagood
1907 - 1963 (56 years)
Margaret Loyd Jarman "Marney" Hagood was an American sociologist and demographer who "helped steer sociology away from the armchair and toward the calculator". She wrote the books Mothers of the South and Statistics for Sociologists , and later became president of the Population Association of America and of the Rural Sociological Society.
Go to Profile#2849
Mary Wollstonecraft
1759 - 1797 (38 years)
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Go to Profile#2850
George Jackson
1941 - 1971 (30 years)
George Lester Jackson was an American author, activist and convicted felon. While serving an indeterminate sentence for stealing $70 from a gas station in 1961, Jackson became involved in revolutionary activity and co-founded the prison gang Black Guerrilla Family.
Go to Profile