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 …
List of the most influential people
#51
Charles Winter Wood
1869 - 1953 (84 years)
Charles Winter Wood was an American educator and actor who graduated from Beloit College in Beloit, WI. He was the second head football coach at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama and he held that position for four seasons, from 1897 until 1901. His coaching record at Tuskegee was 1–3. Wood spent 30 years at the Tuskegee Institute in the English and Drama departments. He was also an actor.
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Gilbert Morgan Smith
1885 - 1959 (74 years)
Gilbert Morgan Smith was a botanist and phycologist, who worked primarily on the algae. He was best known for his books, particularly the Freshwater Algae of the United States, the Marine Algae of the Monterey Peninsula and the two volumes of Cryptogamic Botany.
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John D. Wickhem
1888 - 1949 (61 years)
John Dunne Wickhem was an American lawyer and jurist from Beloit, Wisconsin. He was a justice of the Wisconsin Supreme Court from 1930 until his death in 1949. Biography John D. Wickhem was born in Beloit, Wisconsin, in May 1888. He was raised and educated in Beloit, and went on to earn his bachelor's degree from Beloit College in 1910. After graduating, he taught school in Beloit for four years until entering the University of Wisconsin Law School. He graduated after just two years, speeding up his progression with summer courses. After law school, he went to work in the law office of Burr W.
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Garfield V. Cox
1893 - 1970 (77 years)
Garfield Vestal Cox was a leading authority on business fluctuations and forecasting. He was one of the first people to study the performance of experts versus novices in forecasting stock prices. He was also the Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business.
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W. B. Olds
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
William Benjamin Olds was an American musician, professor, composer, and scholar. His book Bird songs for children was published in 1914. The Musical Quarterly published an article he wrote about bird songs in 1922. Arrangements he made of bird songs were performed.
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Felton Grandison Clark
1903 - 1970 (67 years)
Felton Grandison Clark was an African-American academic administrator from Louisiana. He served as the president of Southern University , a historically black university and land-grant college in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1938 to 1969. During this period, he led decades of expansion that resulted in the number of students increasing from 1,500 to over 11,000. By the time of his retirement, SU had grown to be America's largest historically black university by enrollment.
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John L. Griffith
1877 - 1944 (67 years)
John Lorenzo Griffith was an American football, basketball, and baseball player, track athlete, coach, and college athletics administrator. He served as the first commissioner of the Big Ten Conference from 1922 until his death in 1944.
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F. S. C. Northrop
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrop was an American legal philosopher and influential comparative philosopher. After receiving a B.A. from Beloit College in 1915, and an MA from Yale University in 1919, he went on to Harvard University where he earned another MA in 1922 and a Ph.D. in 1924. At Harvard, Northrop studied under Alfred North Whitehead. He was appointed to the Yale faculty in 1923 as an instructor in Philosophy, and later was named professor in 1932. In 1947 he was appointed Sterling Professor of Philosophy and Law. He chaired the Philosophy department from 1938 to 1940 and was the fir...
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Roy Chapman Andrews
1884 - 1960 (76 years)
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He led a series of expeditions through the politically disturbed China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia. The expeditions made important discoveries and brought the first-known fossil dinosaur eggs to the museum. Chapman's popular writing about his adventures made him famous.
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