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 Anthropology,
#3001
Otto Benndorf
1838 - 1907 (69 years)
Otto Benndorf was a German-Austrian archaeologist who was a native of Greiz, Principality of Reuss-Greiz. He was the father of physicist Hans Benndorf . Life and career He studied under Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker , Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl at the University of Bonn. Later, he worked as an instructor at Schulpforta, where one of his students was Friedrich Nietzsche. From 1864 to 1868 he was a member of a scientific expedition that toured Italy , Sicily, Greece and Asia Minor. In 1868 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Göttingen under the guidance of Friedrich Wieseler .
Go to Profile#3002
Hans Seger
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Hans Seger was a German prehistorian. Life Hans Seger studied Classical Archeology and Art History in Breslau with August Rossbach, Robert Vischer, and August Schmarsow and in Munich with Heinrich von Brunn, Richard Muther, and Berthold Riehl. In December 1892 he succeeded Eugen von Czihaks as director of the Museum schlesischer Alterthümer in Breslau. He habilitated in 1907 and worked as honorary professor at the University of Breslau. His specialization was the prehistory of Silesia. He excavated a Neolithic settlement near Jordansmühl, which gave rise to the term Jordansmühl Culture. His ...
Go to Profile#3003
Petro Yefymenko
1835 - 1908 (73 years)
Petro Yefymenko , was a Ukrainian ethnographer and historian, statistician by profession. Life and work Petro Yefymenko studied at Kharkiv University until his expulsion and Moscow University . As a student, he belonged to secret student societies, including Kharkiv-Kyiv Secret Society .
Go to Profile#3004
Henri Cordier
1849 - 1925 (76 years)
Henri Cordier was a French linguist, historian, ethnographer, author, editor and Orientalist. He was President of the Société de Géographie in Paris. Cordier was a prominent figure in the development of East Asian and Central Asian scholarship in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Though he had little actual knowledge of the Chinese language, Cordier had a particularly strong impact on the development of Chinese scholarship, and was a mentor of the noted French sinologist Édouard Chavannes.
Go to Profile#3005
T. E. Lawrence
1888 - 1935 (47 years)
Thomas Edward Lawrence was a British archaeologist, army officer, diplomat, and writer who became renowned for his role in the Arab Revolt and the Sinai and Palestine Campaign against the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. The breadth and variety of his activities and associations, and his ability to describe them vividly in writing, earned him international fame as Lawrence of Arabia, a title used for the 1962 film based on his wartime activities.
Go to Profile#3006
William Jones
1871 - 1909 (38 years)
William Jones was a Native American anthropologist of the Fox nation. Alternate name: Megasiáwa . Born in Indian Territory on March 28, 1871, after studying at Hampton Institute he graduated from Phillips Academy and went on to receive his B.A. from Harvard. When in 1904 he received his PhD from Columbia University as a student of Franz Boas, he became the fourth person to receive a PhD in linguistic anthropology, twelfth person to receive a PhD in anthropology, and first Native American PhD in anthropology.
Go to Profile#3007
John Garstang
1876 - 1956 (80 years)
John Garstang was a British archaeologist of the Ancient Near East, especially Egypt, Sudan, Anatolia and the southern Levant. He was the younger brother of Professor Walter Garstang, FRS, a marine biologist and zoologist. Garstang is considered a pioneer in the development of scientific practices in archaeology as he kept detailed records of his excavations with extensive photographic records, which was a comparatively rare practice in early 20th-century archaeology.
Go to Profile#3008
Adolf Furtwängler
1853 - 1907 (54 years)
Johann Michael Adolf Furtwängler was a German archaeologist, teacher, art historian and museum director. He was the father of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and grandfather of the German archaeologist Andreas Furtwängler.
Go to Profile#3009
E. L. Peters
1916 - 1987 (71 years)
Emrys Lloyd Peters was a British social anthropologist. Life Peters grew up in Merthyr Tydfil and studied Geography and History at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, graduating immediately before the Second World War. He served in the Royal Air Force from 1939 to 1945, primarily in photographic reconnaissance in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. In 1945 he enrolled at Downing College, Cambridge, to study under E. E. Evans-Pritchard, following him to Oxford in 1947. Between 1948 and 1950 Peters conducted fieldwork among the Bedouin of Cyrenaica. Later in the 1950s and 1960s he spent further periods of fieldwork in Lebanon and Libya.
Go to Profile#3010
Mikhail Andreyev
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Mikhail Stepanovich Andreyev was a Russian-Uzbek and Soviet orientalist, cultural researcher of Central Asia, ethnographer, linguist, and archaeologist. He was initially supervised by Vladimir Nalivkin, and was the teacher of Olga Alexandrovna Sukhareva. He was a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3011
Howard Crosby Butler
1872 - 1922 (50 years)
Howard Crosby Butler was an American archaeologist. Butler graduated from Princeton University, and later pursued special studies at the Columbia School of Architecture and at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome and in Athens. In 1899, 1904, and 1909, he was at the head of archaeological expeditions in Syria. He became professor of the history of architecture at Princeton in 1905. Turkey's unsolicited request that he oversee the excavation of Sardis represented a rare distinction for an American and a Christian. He directed five seasons of archaeological work at Sardis from 1910 to 1914, interrupted by the World War I.
Go to Profile#3012
Nelson Annandale
1876 - 1924 (48 years)
Thomas Nelson Annandale CIE FRSE was a British zoologist, entomologist, anthropologist, and herpetologist. He was the founding director of the Zoological Survey of India. Life The eldest son of Thomas Annandale, the regius professor of clinical surgery at the University of Edinburgh. His maternal grandfather was a publisher, William Nelson. Thomas was educated at Rugby School, Balliol College, Oxford where he studied under Ray Lankester and E. B. Tylor , and at the University of Edinburgh where he studied anthropology, receiving a D.Sc. . As a student he made visits to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands.
Go to Profile#3013
Philip Drucker
1911 - 1982 (71 years)
Philip Drucker was an American anthropologist and archaeologist who specialized in the Native American peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America. He also played an important part in the early excavations under Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian of the Olmec culture in Mexico, especially the site of La Venta.
Go to Profile#3014
James Henry Breasted
1865 - 1935 (70 years)
James Henry Breasted was an American archaeologist, Egyptologist, and historian. After completing his PhD at the University of Berlin in 1894, he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1901 he became director of the Haskell Oriental Museum at the university, where he continued to concentrate on Egypt. In 1905 Breasted was promoted to full professor, and held the first chair in Egyptology and Oriental History in the United States.
Go to Profile#3015
Gilbert Livingston Wilson
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Gilbert Livingston Wilson was an American ethnographer and a Presbyterian minister. He and his brother recorded the lives of three Hidatsa family members; Buffalo Bird Woman, her brother Henry Wolf Chief, and her son Edward Goodbird. Wilson's extensive and detailed writings remain an important source of information for historians and anthropologists, as well as the Hidatsa people.
Go to Profile#3016
John Marshall
1876 - 1958 (82 years)
Sir John Hubert Marshall was an English archaeologist who was Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928. He oversaw the excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Go to Profile#3017
Paul Arndt
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Paul Julius Arndt was a German classical archaeologist born in Dresden. He studied classical art under Johannes Overbeck at the University of Leipzig, and classical archeology with Heinrich Brunn at the University of Munich. In 1887 he graduated with a dissertation on Greek vases, afterwards working as an assistant to Heinrich Brunn in Munich. Following Brunn's death in 1894, Arndt became an assistant to Adolf Furtwängler , and was responsible for edition of "Denkmäler griechischer und römischer Skulptur".
Go to Profile#3018
Hermann Volrath Hilprecht
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
Hermann Volrath Hilprecht was a German-American Assyriologist and archaeologist. Biography Hilprecht was born in 1859 at Hohenerxleben , Kingdom of Prussia. He graduated from Herzogliches Gymnasium at Bernburg in 1880. Afterwards he went on to the University of Leipzig where he studied theology, philology, and law. In 1882, he spent two months in the British Museum studying cuneiform literature. He received his Ph.D. from Leipzig in 1883. He then spent two years in Switzerland for his health. From 1885 to 1886 he became an instructor in Old Testament theology at the University of Erlangen. ...
Go to Profile#3019
Paul Hambruch
1882 - 1933 (51 years)
Paul Hambruch was a German ethnologist and folklorist. Biography He studied natural sciences, chemistry and mathematics at the University of Göttingen and geography, anthropology and ethnology in Berlin, where his instructors were Ferdinand von Richthofen and Felix von Luschan. In 1904 he began work as an assistant at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. By way of a request from the Jaluit Gesellschaft, he traveled to Nauru in an effort to fight a disease affecting coconuts.
Go to Profile#3020
E. O. James
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Edwin Oliver James was an anthropologist in the field of comparative religion. He was Professor Emeritus of the History and Philosophy of Religion in the University of London, Fellow of University College London and Fellow of King's College London. During his long career he had been Professor of History and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Leeds, Lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and Wilde Lecturer at the University of Oxford.
Go to Profile#3021
Kristian Schreiner
1874 - 1957 (83 years)
Kristian Schreiner was a Norwegian professor of medicine. He was born in Ekeberg as a son of wholesaler Christian Emil Schreiner and Bethy Gerhardine Bødtker . He was a relative of educator Emil Schreiner. In September 1900 he married Alette Falch. They had a son Johan Schreiner, and through another son Fredrik Schreiner they had the grandson Per Schreiner.
Go to Profile#3022
Robert von Heine-Geldern
1885 - 1968 (83 years)
Robert Freiherr von Heine-Geldern , known after 1919 as Robert Heine-Geldern, was a noted Austrian ethnologist, ancient historian, and archaeologist, and a grandnephew of poet Heinrich Heine. Biography Heine-Geldern was born in Grub, Austria, and was a descendant of Gustav Heine von Geldern. He studied first at the University of Munich, then art history and ethnography under Father Wilhelm Schmidt at the University of Vienna. In 1910 he traveled to the India / Burma boundary to study local populations, completing his thesis in 1914 on The Mountain Tribes of Northeastern Burma.
Go to Profile#3023
Alexander Cunningham
1814 - 1893 (79 years)
Major General Sir Alexander Cunningham was a British Army engineer with the Bengal Engineer Group who later took an interest in the history and archaeology of India. In 1861, he was appointed to the newly created position of archaeological surveyor to the government of India; and he founded and organised what later became the Archaeological Survey of India.
Go to Profile#3024
William Mitchell Ramsay
1851 - 1939 (88 years)
Sir William Mitchell Ramsay FBA was a British archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
Go to Profile#3025
Fedir Vovk
1847 - 1918 (71 years)
Fedir Kindratovych Vovk also known as Khvedir Vovk was a Ukrainian anthropologist-archaeologist, the curator of the Alexander III Museum in St. Petersburg. Vovk graduated from Kyiv University in 1871. He was an active member of the Kyiv Hromada. From 1887 to 1905 he lived in Paris to escape tsarist persecution; he earned a Ph.D. in 1900, and won the Godard Prize for his dissertation. In 1905 he returned to Russia, where, along with his position at the Alexander III Museum, he held a lecturership at Saint Petersburg University. He was granted a professorship at Kiev University in 1917 but die...
Go to Profile#3026
Auguste Mariette
1821 - 1881 (60 years)
François Auguste Ferdinand Mariette was a French scholar, archaeologist and Egyptologist, and the founder of the Egyptian Department of Antiquities, the forerunner of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Go to Profile#3027
Erwin Bälz
1849 - 1913 (64 years)
Erwin Otto Eduard von Bälz , often simply known as Erwin Bälz without the noble "von" particle, was a German internist, anthropologist, and personal physician to the Japanese Imperial Family and cofounder of modern western medicine in Japan.
Go to Profile#3028
Gisela Richter
1882 - 1972 (90 years)
Gisela Marie Augusta Richter was a British-American classical archaeologist and art historian. She was a prominent figure and an authority in her field. Early life Gisela Richter was born in London, England, the daughter of Jean Paul and Louise Richter. Both of her parents and her sister, Irma, were art historians specialised in Italian Renaissance. Richter was educated at Maida Vale School, one of the finest schools for women at the time. She decided to become a classical archaeologist while attending Emmanuel Loewy's lectures at the University of Rome around 1896. In 1901, she began attending Girton College at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#3029
George Bird Grinnell
1849 - 1938 (89 years)
George Bird Grinnell was an American anthropologist, historian, naturalist, and writer. Originally specializing in zoology, he became a prominent early conservationist and student of Native American life. Grinnell has been recognized for his influence on public opinion and work on legislation to preserve the American bison. Mount Grinnell in Glacier National Park in Montana is named after Grinnell.
Go to Profile#3030
R. H. Barlow
1918 - 1951 (33 years)
Robert Hayward Barlow was an American author, avant-garde poet, anthropologist and historian of early Mexico, and expert in the Nahuatl language. He was a correspondent and friend of horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, who appointed Barlow as the executor of his literary estate.
Go to Profile#3031
J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Jan Petrus Benjamin de Josselin de Jong was a founding father of modern Dutch anthropology and of structural anthropology at Leiden University. Biography In his early career, he was a museum curator. His area of specialty was Americann and Indonesian ethnography. He held two anthropology chairs at Leiden University, the first a chair in general ethnology ; the second a chair in general ethnology and Indonesian ethnography . His nephew, Patrick Edward de Josselin de Jong succeeded him on the second chair in 1957.
Go to Profile#3032
Hermann Baumann
1902 - 1972 (70 years)
Hermann Baumann was an influential German Africa expert. In 1928, Baumann became editor-in-chief of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, Berlin, a post which he held until 1941. During the Third Reich, he was active as a government adviser, working on the eventual restoration of German colonies in Africa. After the war, he continued to work as a government adviser.
Go to Profile#3033
Li Ji
1896 - 1979 (83 years)
Li Ji , also commonly romanized as Li Chi, was an influential Chinese archaeologist. He is considered to be one of the foremost figures in modern Chinese archaeology and his work was instrumental in proving the historical authenticity of the Shang Dynasty.
Go to Profile#3034
Wilhelm Dörpfeld
1853 - 1940 (87 years)
Wilhelm Dörpfeld was a German architect and archaeologist, a pioneer of stratigraphic excavation and precise graphical documentation of archaeological projects. He is famous for his work on Bronze Age sites around the Mediterranean, such as Tiryns and Hisarlik , where he continued Heinrich Schliemann's excavations. Like Schliemann, Dörpfeld was an advocate of the historical reality of places mentioned in the works of Homer. While the details of his claims regarding locations mentioned in Homer's writings are not considered accurate by later archaeologists, his fundamental idea that they correspond to real places is accepted.
Go to Profile#3035
Yervand Lalayan
1864 - 1931 (67 years)
Yervand Lalayan was an Armenian ethnographer, archaeologist, folklorist. He was also the founder and the first director of the History Museum of Armenia from 1919 to 1927. Biography In 1885 he left Tiflis's Nersisian School and worked in Akhaltsikhe, Akhalkalaki, and Alexandropol as a teacher. In 1894 ending the faculty of social sciences in the University of Geneva. Receiving the level of Candidate of sociological sciences, he worked for the Mkhitarians of Venice.
Go to Profile#3036
Kazimierz Michałowski
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Kazimierz Józef Marian Michałowski was a Polish archaeologist and Egyptologist, art historian, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, professor ordinarius of the University of Warsaw as well as the founder of the Polish school of Mediterranean archaeology and a precursor of Nubiology.
Go to Profile#3037
Jacques de Mahieu
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Jacques de Mahieu, whose real name was Jacques Girault, was a French Argentine anthropologist and Peronist. He wrote several books on esoterism, which he mixed with anthropological theories inspired by scientific racism.
Go to Profile#3038
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...
Go to Profile#3039
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.
Go to Profile#3040
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.
Go to Profile#3041
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...
Go to Profile#3042
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 ...
Go to Profile#3043
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.
Go to Profile#3044
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.
Go to Profile#3045
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.
Go to Profile#3046
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.
Go to Profile#3047
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.
Go to Profile#3048
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.
Go to Profile#3049
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.
Go to Profile#3050
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.
Go to Profile