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
#201
Fred Rodell
1907 - 1980 (73 years)
Fred Rodell was an American law professor most famous for his critiques of the U.S. legal profession. A professor at Yale Law School for more than forty years, Rodell was described in 1980 as the "bad boy of American legal academia" by Charles Alan Wright.
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William Harry Jellema
1893 - 1982 (89 years)
William Harry Jellema was the founder of Calvin College's philosophy department. He taught at Calvin College from 1920 to 1936, transferred to Indiana University and then returned to Calvin from 1948 to 1963. Following his mandatory retirement from Calvin College, Jellema taught for a year at Haverford College and was invited by James Zumberge to found the philosophy department at Grand Valley State College in Allendale, Michigan, and continue his teaching for another five years.
Go to Profile#203
Sigmund Spaeth
1885 - 1965 (80 years)
Sigmund Gottfried Spaeth was an American musicologist who sought to de-mystify classical music for the general public. His extensive knowledge of both the classical repertoire and popular song enabled him to trace the melodies of current hits back to earlier sources; this talent garnered him fame as the "Tune Detective," a role he played as an entertainer, educator, and as an expert witness in cases of plagiarism and infringement of copyrighted music.
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John F. Benton
1931 - 1988 (57 years)
John F. Benton was the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at the California Institute of Technology. Education He graduated from Haverford College, with a BA in 1953, from Princeton University with an MA in 1955, and PhD in 1959. He taught at Reed College and the University of Pennsylvania.
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Robert Braucher
1916 - 1981 (65 years)
Robert Braucher was an associate justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from January 18, 1971, until his death. Early years Braucher was born in New York City in 1916. He was graduated from Haverford College with high honors in 1936 and from Harvard Law School in 1939, magna cum laude and salutatorian of his class. He served as editor of the Harvard Law Review, was a finalist in the Ames moot court competition, and winner of the Beale Prize for the best paper on the conflict of laws. From 1939 to 1941 he practiced law in New York City. He entered the United States Army Air Forces...
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Frederic Prokosch
1906 - 1989 (83 years)
Frederic Prokosch was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator. Biography Prokosch was born in Madison, Wisconsin, into an intellectual family that travelled widely. His father, Eduard Prokosch, an Austrian immigrant, was Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale University at the time of his death in 1938, and his sister Gertrude Prokosch Kurath was a dancer and a prominent ethnomusicologist. Prokosch was graduated from Haverford College in 1925 and received a Ph.D. in English in 1932 from Yale University. In his youth, he...
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Douglas Waples
1893 - 1978 (85 years)
Douglas Waples was a pioneer of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in the areas of print communication and reading behavior. Waples authored one of the first books on library research methodology, a work directed at students supervised through correspondence courses. Jesse Shera credits Waples’s scholarly research into the social effects of reading as the foundation for the approaches to the study of knowledge known as social epistemology. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century".
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Theodore William Richards
1868 - 1928 (60 years)
Theodore William Richards was the first American scientist to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, earning the award "in recognition of his exact determinations of the atomic weights of a large number of the chemical elements."
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