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 Anthropology,
#2951
David G. Mandelbaum
1911 - 1987 (76 years)
David Goodman Mandelbaum was an American anthropologist. He majored in anthropology at Northwestern University, studying with Melville J. Herskovits. His major published work dealt with the Plains Cree people of Saskatchewan, Canada and he was well regarded for his study of society in India. He earned his doctorate at Yale University in 1936.
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Jocelyn Toynbee
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
Jocelyn Mary Catherine Toynbee, was an English archaeologist and art historian. "In the mid-twentieth century she was the leading British scholar in Roman artistic studies and one of the recognized authorities in this field in the world." Having taught at St Hugh's College, Oxford, the University of Reading, and Newnham College, Cambridge, she became Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge from 1951 to 1962, the first and so far only female to hold this position.
Go to Profile#2953
Friedrich Solmsen
1904 - 1989 (85 years)
Friedrich W. Solmsen was a philologist and professor of classical studies. He published nearly 150 books, monographs, scholarly articles, and reviews from the 1930s through the 1980s. Solmsen's work is characterized by a prevailing interest in the history of ideas. He was an influential scholar in the areas of Greek tragedy, particularly for his work on Aeschylus, and the philosophy of the physical world and its relation to the soul, especially the systems of Plato and Aristotle.
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Victor Ehrenberg
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Victor Ehrenberg was a German Jewish historian. Life Ehrenberg was born in Altona, Hamburg to a noted German Jewish family. He was the younger brother of Hans Ehrenberg and the nephew of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and a nephew of economist Richard Ehrenberg.
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Yulian Bromley
1921 - 1990 (69 years)
Yulian Vladimirovich Bromley was a Soviet and Russian anthropologist who gained an international recognition. He became Director of the Institute of Ethnography at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1966 and held the post until 1989.
Go to Profile#2956
Carleton S. Coon
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Carleton Stevens Coon was an American anthropologist. A professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, lecturer and professor at Harvard University, he was president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists. Coon's theories on race were widely disputed in his lifetime and are considered pseudoscientific in modern anthropology.
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Čestmír Loukotka
1895 - 1966 (71 years)
Čestmír Loukotka was a Czechoslovak linguist and ethnologist. His daughter was Jarmila Loukotková. Career Loukotka proposed a classification for the languages of South America based on several previous works. This classification contained a lot of unpublished material and was therefore superior to all previous classifications. He divided the languages of South America and the Caribbean into 77 different families, based upon similarities of vocabulary and available lists. His classification of 1968 is the most influential and was based upon two previous schemes , which were similar to those pr...
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Karl Richard Lepsius
1810 - 1884 (74 years)
Karl Richard Lepsius was a pioneering Prussian Egyptologist, linguist and modern archaeologist. He is widely known for his magnum opus Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien. Early life Karl Richard Lepsius was the son of Karl Peter Lepsius, a classical scholar from Naumburg, and his wife Friederike , who was the daughter of composer Carl Ludwig Traugott Gläser. The family name was originally "Leps" and had been Latinized to "Lepsius" by Karl's paternal great-grandfather Peter Christoph Lepsius. He was born in Naumburg on the Saale, Saxony.
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Carl Bovallius
1849 - 1907 (58 years)
Carl Erik Alexander Bovallius was a Swedish biologist and archaeologist. Biography Carl Bovallius was born at Stockholm, Sweden. He was the son of Robert Mauritz Bowallius . His father was a historian and National Archivist 1874–1882.
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Heinrich Schurtz
1863 - 1903 (40 years)
Heinrich Schurtz was a German ethnologist and historian. His most significant work is said to be Altersklassen und Männerbünde which emphasized the role gender and generational issues have in social institutions and argued that basing the society on the family was a step backwards. His notion of Männerbünde placed male associations, where he deemed masculinity more "unfettered", in opposition to the family which he saw as dominated by women. Notions of Männerbünde, though not just Schurtz's, would have an influence on Nazi Germany's SS while in a very different way his ideas on same-sex bond...
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Ernst Platner
1744 - 1818 (74 years)
Ernst Platner was a German anthropologist, physician and Rationalist philosopher, born in Leipzig. He was the father of painter Ernst Zacharias Platner . Life Following the death of his father in 1747, the philologist Johann August Ernesti became his foster father. He received his early education at the gymnasium in Altenburg, the Thomasschule in Leipzig and at the gymnasium in Gera. Afterwards, he studied at the University of Leipzig, where in 1770 he became an associate professor of medicine. Later at Leipzig, he was appointed a full professor of physiology and philosophy . In 1783/84 and ...
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Teofil Żebrawski
1800 - 1887 (87 years)
Teofil Wincenty Żebrawski was a Polish mathematician, bibliographer, architect, biologist, archeologist, cartographer and geodesist; an erudite and polymath. Pioneer of the modern Polish mathematical bibliography.
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William Curry Holden
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
William Curry Holden was an American historian and archaeologist. In 1937, he became the first director of the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Early years, education, military Holden was one of three sons born to Robert Lee Holden and Grace Holden née Davis in Coolidge, Texas. Both families moved west to Colorado City, Texas, and after 1907 the Holdens farmed near Rotan, Texas, where William completed high school in 1914.
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Johanna Mestorf
1828 - 1909 (81 years)
Johanna Mestorf was a German prehistoric archaeologist, the first female museum director in the Kingdom of Prussia and usually said to be the first female professor in Germany. Life and career Johanna was the youngest of four surviving children of the physician and antiquarian Jacob Heinrich Mestorf and his wife Sophia Katharina Georgine, née Körner. When he died in 1837, she moved with her mother to Itzehoe, where she attended the Blöcker Institute upper school for girls. In 1849 she went to Sweden as a governess to the family of Count Piper at Ängsö Castle, and there also studied Scandinavian languages.
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Martha Warren Beckwith
1871 - 1959 (88 years)
Martha Warren Beckwith was an American folklorist and ethnographer who was the first chair in folklore at any university or college in the U.S. Early life and education Beckwith was born in Wellesley Heights, Massachusetts to George Ely and Harriet Winslow Beckwith, both schoolteachers, before the family moved to Maui, Hawaii, where they had relatives descended from early missionaries. There, Beckwith made friends with many locals including members of the wealthy Alexander family who later sponsored her folklore work, and she developed an early interest in Hawaiian folk dancing.
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Hugo Obermaier
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Hugo Obermaier was a distinguished Spanish-German prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning. Although he was born in Germany, he was later naturalized as a Spanish citizen in 1924. He is particularly associated with his work on the diffusion of mankind in Europe during the Ice Age, and in connection with north Spanish cave art, and resisted placing his science at the disposal of nationalistic and racialist interests in the Germany of the 1930s.
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Pierre Huard
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Pierre Huard was a French physician , historian of medicine and anthropologist, long in post in Indochina, dean of several faculties of medicine , rector of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a pioneer in the history of medicine.
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Max Mallowan
1904 - 1978 (74 years)
Sir Max Edgar Lucien Mallowan was a prominent British archaeologist, specialising in ancient Middle Eastern history. He was the second husband of Dame Agatha Christie. Life and work Born Edgar Mallowan in Wandsworth on 6 May 1904, he was the son of Frederick Mallowan and his wife Marguerite , whose mother was mezzo-soprano Marthe Duvivier. His father's family was from Austria. He was educated at Rokeby School and Lancing College and studied classics at New College, Oxford.
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Wilhelm Unverzagt
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Wilhelm Unverzagt was a German prehistorian and archaeologist. Education and First World War Born in Wiesbaden, Rhenish Hesse, Unverzagt studied classical philology, archaeology, and geography at the universities of Bonn, Munich, and Berlin between 1911 and 1914. As a student, he became a member of the Christian student associations Bonner Wingolf and Munich Wingolf.
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George Andrew Reisner
1867 - 1942 (75 years)
George Andrew Reisner Jr. was an American archaeologist of Ancient Egypt, Nubia and Palestine. Biography Reisner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His parents were George Andrew Reisner I and Mary Elizabeth Mason. His father's parents were of German descent. Reisner gained B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, before becoming a travelling fellow.
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August Böckh
1785 - 1867 (82 years)
August Böckh or Boeckh was a German classical scholar and antiquarian. Life He was born in Karlsruhe, and educated at the local gymnasium; in 1803 he left for the University of Halle, where he studied theology. F. A. Wolf was teaching there, and creating an enthusiasm for classical studies; Böckh transferred from theology to philology, and became the best of Wolf's scholars.
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Christoph Theodor Aeby
1835 - 1885 (50 years)
Christoph Theodor Aeby was a Swiss anatomist, anthropologist, and academic. His main scientific interest comparative anatomy and his studies were said to be facilitated by a large collection of bones, which he assembled in Bern. He is particularly noted for his work on the bronchial tree, which was published as a monograph in 1880. Through his work, a term in anthropology was named after him - the "Aeby's plane", which pertains to the plane through the nasion and brasion.
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Julius Kollmann
1834 - 1918 (84 years)
Julius Kollmann was a German anatomist, zoologist and anthropologist. He studied at the universities of Munich and Berlin, then furthered his education in London and Paris. In 1859 he received his doctorate, qualifying as lecturer at Munich in 1862. Beginning in 1878, he served as a full professor of anatomy at the University of Basel. In 1888 he was chosen as university rector.
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Xia Nai
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Xia Nai was a pioneering Chinese archaeologist. He was born in Wenzhou, southern Zhejiang province. He was the second son of Xia Yuyi who was a wealthy farmer. Xia was given the first name of Guodong but later requested to be named Nai and styled himself as Ming when he became an intellectual upon secondary education. He majored in Economic History at Tsinghua University in Beijing , winning a scholarship to study abroad. On advice from his mentor Li Ji, he went to University College London and studied Egyptology, earning a doctorate that was finally awarded to him in 1946. In the meantim...
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Philip Phillips
1900 - 1994 (94 years)
Philip Phillips was an influential archaeologist in the United States during the 20th century. Although his first graduate work was in architecture, he later received a doctorate from Harvard University under advisor Alfred Marston Tozzer. His first archaeological experiences were on Iroquois sites, but he specialized in the Mississippian culture, especially its Lower Mississippi Valley incarnation.
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Barbara E. Ward
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Barbara E. Ward was a British social anthropologist and academic, who specialised in Chinese society. Life Ward was born in 1919. She studied history at Newnham College, an all-women's college of the University of Cambridge. She then attended the University of London, where she gained a diploma in education in 1942. For the next five years she taught in England and West Africa. While teaching in Ghana, she became interested in social anthropology. In 1949, she completed a master's degree from the London School of Economics having studied the Ewe speaking people of Ghana.
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Johann Joachim Winckelmann
1717 - 1768 (51 years)
Johann Joachim Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the differences between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology", Winckelmann was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art. Many consider him the father of the discipline of art history. He was one of the first to separate Greek Art into periods, and time classifications.
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Charles E. Snow
1910 - 1967 (57 years)
Charles Ernest Snow was an American anthropologist. Career Born in Boulder, Colorado, Snow attended the University of Colorado and Harvard University. He assisted in a Bureau of Home Economics study examining growth patterns in young children. He then worked on an archaeological project with the Tennessee Valley Authority under William Snyder Webb; after the beginning of the Second World War ended the project, Webb hired Snow at the University of Kentucky Museum, and later in the anthropology and anatomy departments. The two co-wrote The Adena People, "one of the major publications one eastern United States archaeology" at the time.
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I. Murphy Lewis
#2980
Francisc Rainer
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Francisc Iosif Rainer was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian pathologist, physiologist and anthropologist. From an immigrant family, he earned early recognition for his experimental work in anatomy, and helped reform Romanian medical science. He spent much of his youth training himself in anatomical pathology and the various areas of natural science, gaining direct experience as a microbiologist, surgeon, and military physician. With teaching positions at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, where he established specialized sections, Rainer became a noted promoter of science and an innovator in his field.
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T. T. Waterman
1885 - 1936 (51 years)
Thomas Talbot Waterman was an American anthropologist. Early life Waterman was born in Hamilton, Missouri, and raised in Fresno, California. Education Waterman matriculated University of California, Berkeley in Hebrew, later at Columbia University, New York completed a Ph.D. in Anthropology.
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Roger Bastide
1898 - 1974 (76 years)
Roger Bastide was a French sociologist and anthropologist, specialist in sociology and Brazilian literature. He was raised as a Protestant and studied philosophy in France, developing at the same time an interest for sociological issues. His first sociological field research, in 1930–31, was about immigrants from Armenia to Valence, France. As scholars later noticed, already in his first works about the Armenians he was interested in how the memory of a different culture survives when a group of people moves to a faraway land, a theme that will become crucial in his studies of African populat...
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Erik Sjöqvist
1903 - 1975 (72 years)
Erik Sjöqvist was a Swedish archaeologist and educator. Sjöqvist conducted archaeological fieldwork in Cyprus while participating in Swedish Cyprus Expedition. He was director of Swedish Institute at Rome and professor of classical archaeology at Princeton University. He is most commonly associated with development of the excavations of the archaeological sites at Morgantina in Sicily.
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Henry Morselli
1852 - 1929 (77 years)
Enrico "Henry" Agostino Morselli was an Italian physician and psychical researcher. Morselli was professor at the University of Turin. He is best known for the publication of his influential book, Suicide: An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics claiming that suicide was primarily the result of the struggle for life and nature's evolutionary process.
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Reginald Campbell Thompson
1876 - 1941 (65 years)
Reginald Campbell Thompson was a British archaeologist, assyriologist, and cuneiformist. He excavated at Nineveh, Ur, Nebo and Carchemish among many other sites. Biography Thompson was born in Kensington, and educated at Colet Court, St Paul's School and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read oriental languages.
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August Kalkmann
1853 - 1905 (52 years)
August Kalkmann was a German classical archaeologist and art historian. He studied under Franz Bücheler, Hermann Usener and Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz at the University of Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1881 with a dissertation on Euripides' Hippolytus. In 1885 he qualified as a lecturer, and in 1900 became an associate professor at the University of Berlin.
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Anatole von Hügel
1854 - 1928 (74 years)
Anatole von Hügel was the second son of the Austrian nobleman. Early life Born into the German noble House of Hügel, he was the son of Baron Charles von Hügel and his Scottish wife Elizabeth Farquharson. His elder brother was Friedrich von Hügel and his sister was Pauline von Hügel.
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Konstantine Hovhannisyan
1911 - 1984 (73 years)
Konstantine Hovhannisyan was an Armenian professor, architect and archaeologist. He was the head of an excavation team that was responsible for the excavations of the ancient Urartian city of Erebuni .
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George Stephens
1813 - 1895 (82 years)
George Stephens was an English archeologist and philologist, who worked in Scandinavia, especially on interpreting runic inscriptions. Born at Liverpool, Stephens studied at University College London. In 1834, he married Mary Bennett and moved to Sweden, studying Scandinavian medieval literature and folklore. His collection of fairy tales together with Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius was often reprinted. Stephens moved to Denmark, became a lecturer in English at Copenhagen University in 1851, and a professor in 1855. He published regularly in The Gentleman's Magazine. In 1860, he published the first edition of the Waldere fragments.
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Thomas J. Preston Jr.
1862 - 1955 (93 years)
Thomas Jex Preston Jr. was an American archeology professor and academic administrator. Early life Preston was born on October 26, 1862, in Hastings on Hudson, New York. He graduated from Princeton University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and earned a bachelor's degree followed by a master's degree and a PhD. He also studied abroad at the Sorbonne University for two years, and at the University of Rome.
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Hilda Petrie
1871 - 1956 (85 years)
Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie , was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie, the father of scientific archaeology. Having studied geology, she was hired by Flinders Petrie at age 25 as an artist, which led to their marriage and a working partnership that endured for their lifetimes.
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William Greenwell
1820 - 1918 (98 years)
William Greenwell, was an English archaeologist and Church of England priest. Early life William Greenwell was born 23 March 1820 at the estate known as Greenwell Ford near Lanchester, County Durham, England. He was the eldest son of William Thomas Greenwell and Dorothy Smales. He had three brothers Francis, Alan , and Henry, and a sister Dorothy who published poetry under the name Dora Greenwell.
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Gyula Mészáros
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Gyula Mészáros was a Hungarian ethnographer, Orientalist and Turkologist. Later in his career he became involved in a money counterfeiting scheme. Money counterfeiting In 1921, a group of Hungarian nationalists led by Mészáros set up a press in the town of Metzelsdorf outside Graz, Austria. The group managed to produce and put into circulation 60,000 500-Czechoslovak koruna banknotes, with the intent of damaging the Czechoslovak economy. Most of the forgers were arrested in July 1921, by that time the Czechoslovak government was forced to pull the entire sokol note series out of circulation, undermining the credibility of its currency reforms.
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Andrew Smith
1797 - 1872 (75 years)
Sir Andrew Smith was a British surgeon, explorer, ethnologist and zoologist. He is considered the father of zoology in South Africa having described many species across a wide range of groups in his major work, Illustrations of the Zoology of South Africa.
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Ilmari Manninen
1894 - 1933 (39 years)
Ilmari Justus Andreus Manninen was a Finnish professor, writer and ethnographer. He led the Estonian National Museum when it opened at Raadi Manor. Life Manninen was born in Viipuri in 1894. in 1919 Tartu University was allowed to become a university that taught all its lessons in the Estonian language. This was a new venture and the ambition was limited by the number of Estonian speaking lecturers. To fill the gap a number of foreigners were invited, including Manninen, to assist.
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Richard Daniel Handler
#2997
David Webster
1945 - 1989 (44 years)
David Webster was an academic and anti-apartheid activist. He worked as an anthropologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, where he was a senior lecturer at the time of his assassination. Webster was a founding member of the Detainees' Parents' Support Committee in 1981, a founder member of the Five Freedoms Forum, and a committed comrade in the United Democratic Front. Webster was also an active member of the Orlando Pirates supporters' club and he assisted in the mobilisation and organisation of South African musicians during the Struggle in the 1980s.
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Karl Friederichs
1831 - 1871 (40 years)
Karl Friederichs was a German classical philologist and archaeologist. He studied philology at the universities of Göttingen and Erlangen, where he was influenced by Carl Friedrich Nagelsbach. In 1853 he obtained his PhD with a dissertation on the Greek chorus in the works of Euripides and Sophocles, Chorus Euripideus comparatus cum Sophocleo. In 1858 he became an associate professor of archeology at the University of Berlin.
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Bernhard Eduardovich Petri
1884 - 1937 (53 years)
Bernhard Eduardovich Petri was a Russian anthropologist and archaeologist. Petri organized archeology and ethnographic expeditions to Lake Baikal, while employed by the Kunstkamera during the 1910s.
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Miloje Vasić
1869 - 1956 (87 years)
Miloje Vasić was a Serbian archaeologist, regarded as one of the most distinguished representatives of the humanistic studies in Serbia. Professor at the University of Belgrade and member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, he was the first educated Serbian archaeologist, and is considered as the founder of the modern archaeology in Serbia. Also known for his widely eclectic interests outside of archaeology, his most significant accomplishment was discovery of the Neolithic site of Vinča culture in 1905 and subsequent excavation, which began in 1908.
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