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).
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List of the most influential people
#3601
Frances Lowater
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Frances Lowater was a British-American physicist and astronomer. Life and career Lowater studied in England for her undergraduate degrees, at University College, Nottingham, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She then moved to the United States, where she attended Bryn Mawr College and earned her Ph.D. in 1906. While studying for her Ph.D., she took a position as a physics demonstrator, and remained in that position until 1910. She spent a year at Westfield College and four years at Rockford College, then moved to Wellesley College, where she spent the rest of her career; with the exception of a...
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Lewis Salter
1926 - 1989 (63 years)
Lewis Salter was an American theoretical physicist, physics professor, and researcher. He served as the dean of Knox College for 11 years and was the twelfth president of Wabash College. Biography Salter was born in Norman, Oklahoma. He spent three years in the United States Army during World War II, then received his undergraduate education at the University of Oklahoma, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was selected as a Rhodes Scholar, and spent 1949 to 1953 at the University of Oxford, where he received his master's degree and doctorate in theoretical physics.
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John Christopher Draper
1835 - 1885 (50 years)
John Christopher Draper was an American chemist and surgeon. He was a son of multidisciplinary scientist John William Draper and a brother of astronomer Henry Draper. Life and work Draper was born at Christiansville . His father, John William Draper, was an accomplished doctor, chemist, astronomer, botanist, and professor at New York University. Draper's mother, Antonia Coetana de Paiva Pereira Gardner, was a daughter of the personal physician to the John VI of Portugal and Charlotte of Spain.
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Fanny Gates
1872 - 1931 (59 years)
Fanny Cook Gates was an American physicist, an American Physical Society fellow and American Mathematical Society member. She made contributions to the research of radioactive materials, determining that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively. More specifically, Gates showed that the emission of blue light from quinine was temperature dependent, providing evidence that the emitted light is produced from phosphorescence rather than radioactive decay.
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Harry Bateman
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
Harry Bateman FRS was an English mathematician with a specialty in differential equations of mathematical physics. With Ebenezer Cunningham, he expanded the views of spacetime symmetry of Lorentz and Poincare to a more expansive conformal group of spacetime leaving Maxwell's equations invariant. Moving to the US, he obtained a Ph.D. in geometry with Frank Morley and became a professor of mathematics at California Institute of Technology. There he taught fluid dynamics to students going into aerodynamics with Theodore von Karman. Bateman made a broad survey of applied differential equations in...
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Wilson Marcy Powell
1903 - 1974 (71 years)
Wilson Marcy Powell was an American physicist and a member of the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley. Biography The son of Harvard lawyer Wilson Marcy Powell Sr. and Elsie Knapp, Wilson was born in Litchfield, Connecticut. He matriculated into Harvard College in 1922 and graduated in 1926. During his undergraduate years, Powell went on two solar eclipse expeditions sponsored by Swarthmore College. He participated in his final eclipse expedition to the Arctic Circle nearly 50 years later.
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Gaylord Harnwell
1903 - 1982 (79 years)
Gaylord Probasco Harnwell CBE was an American educator and physicist, who was president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1953 to 1970. He also held a great number of positions in a wide variety of national political and educational boards and committees, as well as senior positions in both the Office of the Governor of Pennsylvania and the United States Navy. In the later part of his life he also toured both the Soviet Union and Iran as a promoter of higher education.
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William Mansfield Clark
1884 - 1964 (80 years)
William Mansfield Clark was an American chemist and professor at the Johns Hopkins University. He studied oxidation-reduction reactions and was a pioneer of medical biochemistry. Clark was born in Tivoli, New York, in a clergy family and studied at Hotchkiss School and Williams College before entering Johns Hopkins University, where he received a PhD in chemistry under H.N. Morse with a dissertation on A contribution to the investigation of the temperature coefficient of osmotic pressure: a redetermination of the osmotic pressures of cane sugar at 20°. He then worked on dairy bacteriology in ...
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James Waddell Alexander II
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
James Waddell Alexander II was a mathematician and topologist of the pre-World War II era and part of an influential Princeton topology elite, which included Oswald Veblen, Solomon Lefschetz, and others. He was one of the first members of the Institute for Advanced Study , and also a professor at Princeton University .
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Dexter S. Kimball
1865 - 1952 (87 years)
Dexter Simpson Kimball was an American engineer, professor of industrial engineering at Cornell University, early management author and president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1922–23.
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Saul Kaplun
1924 - 1964 (40 years)
Saul Kaplun was a Polish-American aerodynamicist at the California Institute of Technology . Family Kaplun was the only child of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Morris J. Kaplun , a textile businessman and industrialist and a prominent Zionist philanthropist beginning in the 1930s, and Betty Kaplun . Saul and his parents, who were refugees from Nazi persecution, lived in Lwów until 1939, when they fled Poland; they immigrated to New York shortly before World War II. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1944 and served in the United States Navy from 1944 to 1946.
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Hugo Benioff
1899 - 1968 (69 years)
Victor Hugo Benioff was an American seismologist and a professor at the California Institute of Technology. He is best remembered for his work in charting the location of deep earthquakes in the Pacific Ocean.
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Ross Gunn
1897 - 1966 (69 years)
Ross Gunn was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. The New York Times described him as "one of the true fathers of the nuclear submarine program". From 1927 to 1947, Gunn worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. He was the author of over 28 papers, and received 45 patents. He designed radio devices for controlling aircraft, which were used in the development of the first droness. He was one of the first to appreciate the possibility of using nuclear power for submarine propulsion. During World War II he was involved in the development of thermal diffu...
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Vladimir Ipatieff
1867 - 1952 (85 years)
Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatieff ; was a Russian and American chemist. His most important contributions are in the field of petroleum chemistry and catalysts. Life and career Born in Moscow, Ipatieff first studied artillery in the Mikhailovskaya Artillery Academy in Petersburg, then later studied chemistry in Russia with Alexei Yevgrafovich Favorskii and in Germany. The prominence of his extended family is illustrated by the fact that the July 17, 1918, extermination of Czar Nicholas Romanoff, the Empress and the rest of the royal family took place in the basement of a vacation house owned by the Ipatieff family in Ekaterinburg.
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Richard Söderberg
1895 - 1979 (84 years)
Carl Richard Söderberg was a power engineer and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Background Söderberg was born in the fishing village of Ulvöhamn, in Örnsköldsvik Municipality, Västernorrland County, Sweden. He enrolled at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg. In 1919 he graduated with a degree in naval architecture. On a fellowship from The American-Scandinavian Foundation, he came to MIT, where he was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science in June 1920.
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James Holmes Sturdivant
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
James Holmes Sturdivant was a chemist who worked for several years as the main research assistant to Linus Pauling at Caltech, starting in 1927. He co-authored some seminal papers with Pauling, and was co-advisor of Robert Eugene Rundle.
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Bernard Waldman
1913 - 1986 (73 years)
Bernard Waldman was an American physicist who flew on the Hiroshima atomic bombing mission as a cameraman during World War II. A graduate of New York University, joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1938. During World War II, he served in the United States Navy as an engineering officer. He headed a group that conducted blast measurements for the Trinity nuclear test, and served on Tinian with Project Alberta.
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Herbert L. Anderson
1914 - 1988 (74 years)
Herbert Lawrence Anderson was an American nuclear physicist who was Professor of Physics at the University of Chicago. He contributed to the Manhattan Project. He was also a member of the team which made the first demonstration of nuclear fission in the United States, in the basement of Pupin Hall at Columbia University. He participated in the first atomic bomb test, codenamed Trinity. After the close of World War II, he was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1982. There, he helped Fermi establish the Enrico Fermi Institute and was its director from 1958 to 1962.
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Arthur Amos Noyes
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Amos Noyes was an American chemist, inventor and educator, born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, son of Amos and Anna Page Noyes, née Andrews. He received a PhD in 1890 from Leipzig University under the guidance of Wilhelm Ostwald.
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James P. C. Southall
1871 - 1962 (91 years)
James P. C. Southall was an American physicist, professor at Columbia University , and specialist in optics. He was president of the Optical Society of America and translator of Physiological Optics by Helmholtz.
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Harry B. Greenberg
#3622
Thomas J. Parmley
1897 - 1997 (100 years)
Thomas Jennison Parmley was an American physics professor at the University of Utah. He served as chairman of the UofU's physics department from 1957 to 1963. Parmley was born in Scofield, Utah to William and Mary Veal Parmley. His father was killed in the Scofield Mine disaster in that town in 1900. In 1921, he received his bachelor's degree from the University of Utah where he was a founding member of the Sigma Pi fraternity chapter. While still being an undergraduate, he worked as a chemist for the U.S. Smeltering Company. In 1923 he married LaVern W. Parmley who served as general president of the Primary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .
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Howard Hughes
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Howard Robard Hughes Jr. was an American aerospace engineer, businessman, filmmaker, investor, philanthropist, and pilot. He was best known during his lifetime as one of the most influential and richest people in the world. He first became prominent as a film producer, and then as an important figure in the aviation industry. Later in life, he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder , chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness.
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Ernest Thiele
1895 - 1993 (98 years)
Ernest W. Thiele was an influential chemical engineering researcher at Standard Oil and professor of chemical engineering at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his highly impactful work in chemical reaction engineering, complex reacting systems, and separations, including distillation theory.
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Arthur Michael
1853 - 1942 (89 years)
Arthur Michael was an American organic chemist who is best known for the Michael reaction. Life Arthur Michael was born into a wealthy family in Buffalo, New York in 1853, the son of John and Clara Michael, well-off real-estate investor. He was educated in that same city, learning chemistry both from a local teacher and in his own homebuilt laboratory. An illness thwarted Michael's plans to attend Harvard, and instead in 1871 he traveled to Europe with his parents and decided to study in Germany.
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Fritz Zwicky
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Fritz Zwicky was a Swiss astronomer. He worked most of his life at the California Institute of Technology in the United States of America, where he made many important contributions in theoretical and observational astronomy. In 1933, Zwicky was the first to use the virial theorem to postulate the existence of unseen dark matter, describing it as "".
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John B. Peddle
1868 - 1933 (65 years)
John Bailey Peddle was an American mechanical engineer, Professor of Machine Design at the Rose Polytechnic Institute and author, known for his seminal work Construction of Graphical Charts, 1910. Life and work Peddle was the son of Charles R. and Mary Elizabeth Ball Peddle. He graduated at the Rose Rose Polytechnic Institute in 1888, and after six years in business joint the faculty in 1894 as instructor in machine design. From 1897 until 1933 he was Professor of Machine Design back at the Rose Polytechnic Institute.
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Theodosius Dobzhansky
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky was a prominent Russian and American geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the modern synthesis. Born in the Russian Empire, Dobzhansky emigrated to the United States in 1927, aged 27.
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Beno Gutenberg
1889 - 1960 (71 years)
Beno Gutenberg was a German-American seismologist who made several important contributions to the science. He was a colleague and mentor of Charles Francis Richter at the California Institute of Technology and Richter's collaborator in developing the Richter magnitude scale for measuring an earthquake's magnitude.
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Alan Perlis
1922 - 1990 (68 years)
Alan Jay Perlis was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.
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Harley A. Wilhelm
1900 - 1995 (95 years)
Harley A. Wilhelm was an American chemist who helped to establish the United States Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory at Iowa State University. His uranium extraction process helped make it possible for the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bombs.
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Allan V. Cox
1926 - 1987 (61 years)
Allan Verne Cox was an American geophysicist. His work on dating geomagnetic reversals, with Richard Doell and Brent Dalrymple, made a major contribution to the theory of plate tectonics. Allan Cox won numerous awards, including the prestigious Vetlesen Prize, and was the president of the American Geophysical Union. He was the author of over a hundred scientific papers, and the author or editor of two books on plate tectonics. On January 27, 1987, Cox died in an apparent suicide.
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Wilhelm Magnus
1907 - 1990 (83 years)
Hans Heinrich Wilhelm Magnus known as Wilhelm Magnus was a German-American mathematician. He made important contributions in combinatorial group theory, Lie algebras, mathematical physics, elliptic functions, and the study of tessellations.
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Philippe Le Corbeiller
1891 - 1980 (89 years)
Philippe Emmanuel Le Corbeiller was a French-American electrical engineer, mathematician, physicist, and educator. After a career in France as an expert on the electronics of telecommunications, he became a professor of applied physics and general education at Harvard University. His most important scientific contributions were in the theory and applications of nonlinear systems, including self-oscillators.
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F. W. Hutchinson
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Francis William Hutchinson was an engineer, and a pioneer in HVAC research. Hutchinson graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1931, and received an M.S. and M.E. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937. He was a professor of engineering at Berkeley and at Purdue University. At Purdue, he established a solar energy research program in which two experimental solar houses were built on the Purdue campus in the summer of 1945. By analyzing this experiment, Hutchinson concluded that the solar gain through the double glazed house was greater than the excess heat loss.
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John Gamble Kirkwood
1907 - 1959 (52 years)
John "Jack" Gamble Kirkwood was a noted chemist and physicist, holding faculty positions at Cornell University, the University of Chicago, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Early life and background Kirkwood was born in Gotebo, Oklahoma, the oldest child of John Millard and Lillian Gamble Kirkwood. His father was educated as an attorney and was a distributor for the Goodyear Corporation in the state of Kansas. In addition to Jack Kirkwood, there were two younger sisters: Caroline and Margaret .
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Roscoe G. Dickinson
1894 - 1945 (51 years)
Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson was an American chemist, known primarily for his work on X-ray crystallography. As professor of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology , he was the doctoral advisor of Nobel laureate Linus Pauling and of Arnold O. Beckman, inventor of the pH meter.
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John M. Wilcox
1925 - 1983 (58 years)
John Marsh Wilcox was an American geophysicist. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley at the Space Sciences Laboratory from 1964 to 1971. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford University from 1971 until his death.
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Arthur Edward Ruark
1899 - 1979 (80 years)
Arthur Edward Ruark was an American physicist and academic known for his role in the development of quantum mechanics. He wrote the book Atoms, Molecules, and Quanta with Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Harold Clayton Urey in 1930, and is the author of numerous scientific papers on quantum physics.
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Armin Joseph Deutsch
1918 - 1969 (51 years)
Armin Joseph Deutsch , was an American astronomer and science fiction writer. Life and career Deutsch was born in Chicago and earned a BS from the University of Arizona in 1940 and, after wartime service as an instructor at the Army Air Force at Chanute Field in Illinois, a PhD from the University of Chicago in 1946 with a dissertation on the spectra of A-type variable stars.
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Kate Scholberg
Kate Scholberg is a Canadian and American neutrino physicist whose research has included experimental studies of neutrino oscillation and the detection of supernovae. She is currently the Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics and Bass Fellow at Duke University.
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Elmer Kraemer
1898 - 1943 (45 years)
Elmer Otto Kraemer was an American chemist whose studies and published results materially aided in the transformation of colloid chemistry from a qualitative to a quantitative science. For eleven years, from 1927 to 1938, he was the leader of research chemists studying fundamental and industrial colloid chemistry problems and a peer of Wallace Hume Carothers at the Experimental Station of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours Company where both men contributed to the invention of nylon that was publicly announced on October 27, 1938. The 1953 Nobel Laureate in chemistry, Hermann Staudinger, had a high...
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William Thatcher
1888 - 1966 (78 years)
William Sutherland Thatcher, M.C. was Censor of Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge from 1924 to 1954. Thatcher educated at Farnworth Grammar School, Liverpool College and Fitzwilliam House, Cambridge. On graduation he went as a lecturer in economics to the University of Allahabad. During World War I he served as an officer with the 10th Baluch Regiment. In 1918 he returned to Cambridge 1918 as a Lecturer in Geography.
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Wayne B. Hales
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Wayne Brockbank Hales was an American physicist, educator and academic administrator. He was president of Snow College from 1921 to 1924. He also taught at Ricks College and Weber College , before joining Brigham Young University in 1930, where he remained until his retirement in 1972.
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Louis Dunn
1908 - 1979 (71 years)
Louis Gerhardus Dunn was a South African-born engineer who played a key role in the development of early American missiles and launch vehicles. Caltech Dunn received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in aeronautical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. During that time the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at Caltech , a prestigious aeronautical engineering research facility, was led by Theodore von Kármán. By 1943 Dunn had joined the Caltech faculty and become a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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Beebe Steven Lynk
1872 - 1948 (76 years)
By James Barham, PhD Beebe Steven Lynk continues to be a highly searched and highly influential chemist who paved the way for Black Americans in chemistry, particularly Black women. Lynk (née Beebe Steven) was born in Mason, a small town in western Tennessee lying about halfway between Jackson and Memphis. She is one of the first female, African-American, professional chemists in the US. Her early life and social background are poorly documented. For example, the educational backgrounds and professions of her parents are not known. Beebe Steven, as she was then known, obtained a degree in 1892...
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Katharine Blunt
1876 - 1954 (78 years)
Katharine Blunt was an American chemist, professor, and nutritionist who specialized in the fields of home economics, food chemistry and nutrition. Most of her research was on nutrition, but she also made great improvements to research on calcium and phosphorus metabolism and on the basal metabolism of women and children. She served as the third president of Connecticut College.
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Theodore Theodorsen
1897 - 1978 (81 years)
Theodore Theodorsen was a Norwegian-American theoretical aerodynamicist noted for his work at NACA and for his contributions to the study of turbulence. Early years Theodorsen was born at Sandefjord in Vestfold, Norway to parents Ole Christian Theodorsen, a chief engineer in the Norwegian merchant marine, and his wife Andrea Larsen. He was the oldest of six children. When Theodore’s father took the examinations for a merchant marine engineer's license, he was the only applicant who correctly answered a particularly difficult question. To his father’s surprise his then 12-year-old son was als...
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Jerry Donohue
1920 - 1985 (65 years)
Jerry Donohue was an American theoretical and physical chemist. He is best remembered for steering James D. Watson and Francis Crick towards the correct structure of DNA with some crucial information.
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Samuel Jefferson Mason
1921 - 1974 (53 years)
Samuel Jefferson Mason was an American electronics engineer. Mason's invariant and Mason's rule are named after him. He was born in New York City, but he grew up in a small town in New Jersey. It was so small, in fact, that it only had a population of 26. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rutgers University in 1942, and after graduation, he joined the Antenna Group of MIT Radiation Laboratory as a staff member. Mason went on to earn his S.M. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from MIT in 1947 and 1952, respectively. After World War II, the Radiation Laboratory was renamed the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, where he became the associate director in 1967.
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