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 in Anthropology,
#3151
I. Murphy Lewis
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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.
Go to Profile#3153
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
#3169
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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Edwin R. Thiele
1895 - 1986 (91 years)
Edwin Richard Thiele was an American Seventh-day Adventist missionary in China, editor, archaeologist, writer, and scholar of the Old Testament. He is best known for his chronological studies of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel.
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Jovan Erdeljanović
1874 - 1944 (70 years)
Jovan Erdeljanović was a Serbian and Yugoslav ethnologist. Biography Jovan Erdeljanović was born in Pančevo, Austria-Hungary. He studied at the universities of Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig and Prague. In 1905 he obtained his doctorate as Doctor of Philosophy at Charles University in Prague. In 1906, Erdeljanović began working at the University of Belgrade, elected Professor at Department of Ethnology of the philosophical Faculty since 1922. He remained at the University until 1941 and was member of Serbian Academy of Sciences.
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Osman Aqçoqraqlı
1879 - 1938 (59 years)
Osman Nuri-Asan oğlu Aqçoqraqlı , also written as Aqchoqraqli or Akchokrakli, was a Crimean Tatar writer, journalist, historian, archaeologist, ethnographer, and teacher. Early life Osman Nuri-Asan oğlu Aqçoqraqlı was born in the city of Bakhchysarai into the family of an Arabic script calligrapher on 15 January 1879. He received his primary education at the Zincirli Madrasa, before later studying at the Daoud Pasha gymnasium in Istanbul from 1894 to 1896. In 1908, he moved to Cairo and began taking private lessons on eastern history, Arabic literature, and archaeology from Al-Azhar University.
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Richard Bentley
1662 - 1742 (80 years)
Richard Bentley FRS was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. Considered the "founder of historical philology", Bentley is widely credited with establishing the English school of Hellenism. In 1892, A. E. Housman called Bentley "the greatest scholar that England or perhaps that Europe ever bred".
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David George Hogarth
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
David George Hogarth , also known as D. G. Hogarth, was a British archaeologist and scholar associated with T. E. Lawrence and Arthur Evans. He was Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford from 1909 to 1927.
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Ida Halpern
1910 - 1987 (77 years)
Ida Halpern was a Canadian ethnomusicologist. Halpern was born in Vienna, Austria. She arrived in Canada in order to flee Nazism in her native country, becoming a Canadian citizen in 1944. She worked among Native Americans of coastal British Columbia during the mid-20th century, collecting, recording, and transcribing their music and documenting its use in their cultures. Many of these recordings were released as LPss, with extensive liner notes and transcriptions. More recently, her collection has also been released digitally.
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Georg Karo
1872 - 1963 (91 years)
Georg Heinrich Karo was a German archaeologist, known for his research into the Mycenaean and Etruscan cultures. He was twice director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens , in which capacity he excavated the Mycenaean site of Tiryns and the Temple of Artemis on Corfu. A colleague of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who had worked with Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Karo published the findings from Schliemann's excavations of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, a work considered his greatest contribution to scholarship.
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Bronwyn Fredericks
Bronwyn Fredericks is an Indigenous Australian academic and administrator. Her scholarship extends across education, health, community development, policy, and Indigenist research methods, including a focus on work relevant to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people using participatory and community led approaches. Her contributions have been recognised through the NAIDOC Education Award in 2022 and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Award in 2019. She is currently the Deputy Vice Chancellor at the University of Queensland.
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Francis J. Haverfield
1860 - 1919 (59 years)
Francis John Haverfield, was an English ancient historian, archaeologist, and academic. From 1907 to 1919 he held the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. Education Educated at Winchester College and New College, University of Oxford. At Oxford he gained a First in Classical Moderations in 1880 and a Second in Literae Humaniores in 1883. He worked for a time under Theodor Mommsen. He won the Conington Prize at Oxford in 1891 and in the following year was appointed a Student [Fellow] of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1907 he moved to Brasenose College to become Cam...
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Ernst Langlotz
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Ernst Langlotz was a German classical archaeologist and art historian, who specialized in Greek sculpture of the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. He studied classical archaeology, philology and art history at the universities of Leipzig and Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1921. As a student, his influences were archaeologist Franz Studniczka and art historian Heinrich Wölfflin . Following graduation, he took a study trip to Italy and Greece, where he met with Ernst Buschor in Athens. In 1925 he qualified as a lecturer at the University of Würzburg, and subsequently worked as a conservator at th...
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Theodor Schreiber
1848 - 1912 (64 years)
Georg Theodor Schreiber was a German archaeologist and art historian. From 1868 to 1872 he studied at the University of Leipzig, where he was a pupil of Johannes Overbeck. In 1874, by way of a travel stipend from the German Archaeological Institute, he traveled to Rome and studied under Wilhelm Henzen and Wolfgang Helbig. Afterwards, he continued his educational journey to Greece. In 1879 he obtained his habilitation for archaeology at Leipzig, where in 1885 he became an associate professor.
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Otto Weinreich
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Otto Karl Weinreich was a German classical philologist. He is noted for his study of the Lukan Befreiungswunder through his work Gebet und Wunder. Weinrich's works were focused on the so-called liberation miracles such as the miracles of the Dionysian "circles" . The miracles also included the miraculous escape of Moses; two liberations in the text Life of Apollonius of Tyana; and, the divine deliverances in the New Testament's Acts. He was also one of the editors of the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft .
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André Parrot
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
André Charles Ulrich Parrot was a French archaeologist specializing in the ancient Near East. He led excavations in Lebanon, Iraq and Syria, and is best known for his work at Mari, Syria, where he led important excavations from 1933 to 1975.
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Ludwig Ross
1806 - 1859 (53 years)
Ludwig Ross was a German classical archaeologist. He is chiefly remembered for the rediscovery and reconstruction of the Temple of Athena Nike in 1835–1836, and for his other excavation and conservation work on the Acropolis of Athens. He was also an important figure in the early years of archaeology in the independent Kingdom of Greece, serving as Ephor General of Antiquities between 1834 and 1836.
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August Rossbach
1823 - 1898 (75 years)
August Rossbach was a German classical philologist and archaeologist. He is known for his investigations of ancient Greek metrics, defined as a discipline that studies the patterns and arrangements of syllables and words that characterize Greek poetry.
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Georg Friedrich Creuzer
1771 - 1858 (87 years)
Georg Friedrich Creuzer was a German philologist and archaeologist. Life He was born at Marburg, the son of a bookbinder. After studying at Marburg and at the University of Jena, he went to Leipzig as a private tutor; but in 1802 he was appointed professor at Marburg, and two years later professor of philology and ancient history at Heidelberg. He held the latter position for nearly forty-five years, with the exception of a short time spent at the University of Leiden, where his health was affected by the Dutch climate. He was one of the principal founders of the Philological Seminary established at Heidelberg in 1807.
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J. R. Aspelin
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Johannes Reinhold Aspelin was a Finnish archaeologist and professor who was the first state archaeologist of Finland, as well as the first professor of archaeology in Finland. He was a leading figure in the establishment of the National Museum of Finland.
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Ernst Buschor
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Ernst Buschor was a German archaeologist and translator. Biography From 1905 he studied at the University of Munich as a pupil of classical archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, earning his doctorate in 1912. After serving as a soldier in the Balkans during World War I, he became an associate professor of classical archaeology at the University of Erlangen. In 1920 he became a full professor at the University of Freiburg. From 1921 to 1929, he was director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens. From 1929 to 1959, he served as a professor of classical archaeology at Munich.
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Shelomo Dov Goitein
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Shelomo Dov Goitein was a German-Jewish ethnographer, historian and Arabist known for his research on Jewish life in the Islamic Middle Ages, and particularly on the Cairo Geniza. Biography Shelomo Dov Goitein was born in the town of Burgkunstadt in Upper Franconia, Germany. His father, Dr. Eduard Goitein, was born in Hungary to a long line of rabbis. The name Goitein may be derived from Kojetín as the city of origin of the family. He was brought up with both secular and Talmudic education. In 1914, his father died and the family moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he finished high school and...
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Karl Lehmann
1894 - 1960 (66 years)
Karl Leo Heinrich Lehmann was a German-born American art historian, archaeologist, and professor. He was known for archaeology work in Samothrace, Greece and the related publications. He was a professor at New York University Institute of Fine Arts from 1935, until his death in 1960. Lehmann was the founder and director of the Archaeological Research Fund at New York University
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Richard Delbrück
1875 - 1957 (82 years)
Richard Delbrück was a German classical archaeologist who specialized in the field of ancient Roman portraiture. Career In 1899 he graduated from the University of Bonn, where he was a student of Georg Loeschcke. From 1911 to 1915, he was head of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome. He was later a professor of classical archaeology at the Universities of Giessen and Bonn .
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Isaac Casaubon
1559 - 1614 (55 years)
Isaac Casaubon was a classical scholar and philologist, first in France and then later in England. His son Méric Casaubon was also a classical scholar. Life Early life He was born in Geneva to two French Huguenot refugees. The family returned to France after the Edict of Saint-Germain in 1562, and settled at Crest in Dauphiné, where Arnaud Casaubon, Isaac's father, became minister of a Huguenot congregation. Until he was nineteen, Isaac had no education other than that given him by his father. Arnaud was away from home for long periods in the Calvinist camp, and the family regularly fled to the hills to hide from bands of armed Catholicss who patrolled the country.
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Stefanos Koumanoudis
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Stefanos Koumanoudis was a Greek archaeologist, teacher and writer of the 19th century. Biography He was born in 1818 in Adrianople to a rich merchant family. In an early age, his family settled in Bucharest, and later in Silistra where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Paris. Fellow university students of Koumanoudis were Efthymios Kastorchis, Iraklis Mitsopoulos, Lysandros Kavtantzoglou and Emmanuel Kokkinos, who became notable teachers and archaeologists as well.
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Elli Köngäs-Maranda
1932 - 1982 (50 years)
Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda was an internationally renowned anthropologist and feminist folklorist. She studied Finnish language and folklore at the University of Helsinki, where she received her B.A. in 1954 and her M.A. in 1955. She continued her studies in the United States of America and did her doctoral dissertation in 1963 at Indiana University. She was a lecturer at Columbia University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. Köngäs-Maranda was elected a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. The Society's Women's section inaugurated 1983 two prizes in her memory.
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Boris Farmakovsky
1870 - 1928 (58 years)
Boris Vladimirovich Farmakovsky was a Russian archaeologist, who began professional excavations of the ancient Greek colony of Olbia in Ukraine. Farmakovsly served on many archeological commissions and was the curator of antiquities at the Hermitage from 1924-1928. His excavations at Olbia in 1896, 1901–1915, 1924-1926 provided significant insights into the ancient history of South Ukraine.
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Dmitry Samokvasov
1843 - 1911 (68 years)
Dmitry Yakovlevich Samokvasov was a Russian archaeologist and legal historian who excavated the Black Grave in Chernigov and several other sites important for the history of Kievan Rus. He graduated from the St. Petersburg University in 1868 and worked in the Warsaw University, administering its law faculty and becoming its dean in 1891. Three years later, he moved to the Moscow University. He was instrumental in establishing the Moscow Archaeological Institute . His last years were spent sorting out historical archives in Moscow. In 1891, Samokvasov donated his sizable collection of archaeological artifacts to the State Historical Museum.
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James Verne Dusenberry
1906 - 1966 (60 years)
James Verne Dusenberry was a well educated and publicly acclaimed scholar. He is best known for his writings on and the relationships he built with many of the various Montana tribes throughout his lifetime.
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George Ricker Berry
1865 - 1945 (80 years)
George Ricker Berry, D.D., Ph.D., was an internationally known Semitic scholar and archaeologist, and Professor Emeritus of Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament , of which American editions are generally published with Berry's Lexicon and New Testament Synonyms, is a widely used Bible study aid.
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