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,
#3151
Peter Throckmorton
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
Edgerton Alvord Throckmorton , known as Peter Throckmorton, was an American photojournalist and a pioneer underwater archaeologist. Throckmorton was a founding member of the Sea Research Society and served on its Board of Advisors until his death in 1990. He was also a trustee for NUMA and was an instructor at Nova Southeastern University.
Go to Profile#3152
Martin Gusinde
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Martín Gusinde was an Austrian priest and ethnologist famous for his work in anthropology, particularly on the native groups of Tierra del Fuego. He was one of the most notable anthropologists in Chile in the first half of the 20th century, together with Max Uhle and Aureliano Oyarzún Navarro.
Go to Profile#3153
Harold K. Schneider
1925 - 1987 (62 years)
Harold K. "Hal" Schneider was an American seminal figure in economic anthropology. Born in Aberdeen, South Dakota, he attended elementary and secondary school in St. Paul, Minnesota, and did his undergraduate work at Macalester College and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, receiving a bachelor's degree in sociology, with a minor in biology, from Macalester in 1949. He then went to Northwestern University, where he was a student of Melville Herskovits, basing his dissertation on field research among the Pokot of Kenya.
Go to Profile#3154
Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa
1885 - 1967 (82 years)
Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa, or Cezaria Anna Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz-Jędrzejewiczowa, was a Polish scientist, art historian, and anthropologist. She was one of the pioneers of ethnology in Poland and one of the first scientists to adopt phenomenology in studies of folk culture.
Go to Profile#3155
Sol Worth
1922 - 1977 (55 years)
Sol Worth was a painter, photography and visual communication scholar. Biography Worth's parents, Ida and Jacob Wishnepolsky, were Russian immigrants who worked in the garment industry and were active members of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. His first language was Yiddish, and he spoke virtually no English until he began school at age 5. Worth attended the founding class of the High School of Music and Art in New York City as an art student from 1936 until 1940; in 1937 one of his paintings was chosen to be part of a student exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Upon gr...
Go to Profile#3156
William John McGee
1853 - 1912 (59 years)
William John McGee, LL.D. was an American inventor, geologist, anthropologist, and ethnologist, born in Farley, Iowa. Biography While largely self-taught, McGee attended a rural one-room schoolhouse north of Farley during the four winter months from about 1858 to 1867. He devoted his early years to reading law and to surveying. He invented and patented several improvements on agricultural implements.
Go to Profile#3157
Camilla Wedgwood
1901 - 1955 (54 years)
Camilla Hildegarde Wedgwood was a British anthropologist and academic administrator. She is best known for her research in the Pacific and her pioneering role as one of the British Commonwealth's first female anthropologists.
Go to Profile#3158
Masao Oka
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
was a Japanese ethnologist and Japanologist. Biography He was born in Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture. He was a graduate of the University of Tokyo and Tohoku University. He served on the faculty of Meiji University, Kanagawa Dental University, Wayo Women's University, Tokyo Metropolitan University and Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.
Go to Profile#3159
Johann Peter Kirsch
1861 - 1941 (80 years)
Johann Peter Kirsch was a Luxembourgish ecclesiastical historian and biblical archaeologist. Life Johann Peter Kirsch was born in Dippach, Luxembourg, the son of Andreas and Katherine Didier Kirsch. At the age of ten, he went to live with his maternal uncle, Johann Jakob Didier, a priest at Fels. He began his high school education at the Atheneum, and then went to the seminary. He was ordained a priest on 23 August 1884. That autumn he was sent to Rome to attend the Collegio Teutonico. From 1884 to 1890 he studied archeology, paleography and diplomacy at the Collegio Apollinare and at other papal universities in Rome.
Go to Profile#3160
Eduard Seler
1849 - 1922 (73 years)
Eduard Georg Seler was a prominent German anthropologist, ethnohistorian, linguist, epigrapher, academic and Americanist scholar, who made extensive contributions in these fields towards the study of pre-Columbian era cultures in the Americas.
Go to Profile#3161
Flinders Petrie
1853 - 1942 (89 years)
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie , commonly known as simply Sir Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt in conjunction with his wife, Hilda Urlin. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah Stele, an opinion with which Petrie himself concurred. Undoubtedly at least as important is his 1905 discovery and correct identification of the character ...
Go to Profile#3162
Giorgi Chitaia
1890 - 1986 (96 years)
Giorgi Chitaia — Georgian ethnographer, worked at the University of Tbilisi. During his fieldwork he travelled throughout the country documenting regional cultures. Giorgi Chitaia was married to another well-known ethnographer Vera Baradavelidze . Chitaia played a vital role in preserving cultural heritage in Georgia during the Soviet occupation and rule. In 1922 he got the position to lead the newly created section of ethnography at Georgian National Museum. He held this position until his death in 1986.
Go to Profile#3163
Rudolf Virchow
1821 - 1902 (81 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Carl Virchow was a German physician, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist, writer, editor, and politician. He is known as "the father of modern pathology" and as the founder of social medicine, and to his colleagues, the "Pope of medicine".
Go to Profile#3164
Otto Schoetensack
1850 - 1912 (62 years)
Otto Karl Friedrich Schoetensack was a German industrialist and later professor of anthropology, having retired from the chemical firm which he had founded. During a 1908 archeological dig, he oversaw the worker Daniel Hartmann who found the lower jaw of a hominid, the oldest human fossil then known, which Schoetensack later described formally as Homo heidelbergensis.
Go to Profile#3165
Howard Carter
1874 - 1939 (65 years)
Howard Carter was a British archaeologist and Egyptologist who discovered the intact tomb of the 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Tutankhamun in November 1922, the best-preserved pharaonic tomb ever found in the Valley of the Kings.
Go to Profile#3166
Knud Rasmussen
1879 - 1933 (54 years)
Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen was a Greenlandic-Danish polar explorer and anthropologist. He has been called the "father of Eskimology" and was the first European to cross the Northwest Passage via dog sled. He remains well known in Greenland, Denmark and among Canadian Inuit.
Go to Profile#3167
Senarath Paranavithana
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Senarath Paranavitana, was a Sri Lankan archeologist and epigraphist, who pioneered much of post-colonial archaeology in Sri Lanka. He served as the Commissioner of Archeology from 1940 to 1956 and there after as Professor of Archeology at the University of Ceylon from 1957 to 1961.
Go to Profile#3168
William Johnson Sollas
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Prof William Johnson Sollas PGS FRS FRSE LLD was a British geologist and anthropologist. After studying at the City of London School, the Royal College of Chemistry and the Royal School of Mines he matriculated to St. John's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded First Class Honours in geology. After some time spent as a University Extension lecturer he became lecturer in Geology and Zoology at University College, Bristol in 1879, where he stayed until he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at Trinity College Dublin. In 1897 he was offered the post of Professor of Geology at the Un...
Go to Profile#3169
Victor Guérin
1821 - 1891 (70 years)
Victor Guérin was a French intellectual, explorer and amateur archaeologist. He published books describing the geography, archeology and history of the areas he explored, which included Greece, Asia Minor, North Africa, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.
Go to Profile#3170
Dmitry Anuchin
1843 - 1923 (80 years)
Dmitry Nikolayevich Anuchin was a Russian Empire anthropologist, ethnographist, archaeologist, and geographer. He was a member of the Russian Geographical Society and convened the ethnographic sub-section of the 12th Congress of Russian Natural Scientists and Physicians held in Moscow in 1909. Here he pushed for the professionalisation of ethnography as compared to missionaries and amateurs. However he opposed Lev Sternberg's call for the establishment of an imperial bureau of ethnography, fearing that the discipline would become too tied up with the Tsarist bureaucracy.
Go to Profile#3171
Hans Reinerth
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Hans Reinerth was a German archaeologist. He was a pioneer of Palynology and modern settlement archaeology, but is controversial because of his role before and during the period of National Socialism.
Go to Profile#3172
Frans Blom
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Frans Blom was a Danish explorer and archaeologist. He was most associated with his research of the Maya civilization of Mexico and Central America. Biography Frans Ferdinand Blom was born in Copenhagen, Denmark to a middle-class family of antique merchants. He passed a matriculation exam at Rungsted and received a trade education in Germany and Belgium. He started travelling, eventually reaching Mexico in 1919, where he found work in the oil industry conducting map and geologically survey the states of Veracruz, Tabasco, and Chiapas. Travelling to remote locations in the Mexican jungle, he became interested in the Maya ruins which he encountered where he was working.
Go to Profile#3173
Theodor Mommsen
1817 - 1903 (86 years)
Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen was a German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician and archaeologist. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest classicists of the 19th century. His work regarding Roman history is still of fundamental importance for contemporary research. He received the 1902 Nobel Prize in Literature for being "the greatest living master of the art of historical writing, with special reference to his monumental work, A History of Rome", after having been nominated by 18 members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. He was also a prominent German politician, as a member of the Prussian and German parliaments.
Go to Profile#3174
Caroline Bond Day
1889 - 1948 (59 years)
Caroline Stewart Bond Day was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation.
Go to Profile#3175
Gutorm Gjessing
1906 - 1979 (73 years)
Gutorm Gjessing was a Norwegian archaeologist and ethnographer. He was director of the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Oslo and as major contributor to Circumpolar studies. Biography Gjessing was born at Ålesund in Møre og Romsdal, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Marcus Jacob Gjessing and Julie Kathrine Monrad .
Go to Profile#3176
Johannes Ranke
1836 - 1916 (80 years)
Johannes Ranke was a German physiologist and anthropologist. He was the son of theologian Friedrich Heinrich Ranke , the brother of pediatrician Heinrich von Ranke and father to pulmonologist Karl Ernst Ranke .
Go to Profile#3177
Ludwig Feuerbach
1804 - 1872 (68 years)
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was a German anthropologist and philosopher, best known for his book The Essence of Christianity, which provided a critique of Christianity that strongly influenced generations of later thinkers, including Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Engels, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Go to Profile#3178
Alfred William Howitt
1830 - 1908 (78 years)
Alfred William Howitt , , also known by author abbreviation A.W. Howitt, was an Australian anthropologist, explorer and naturalist. He was known for leading the Victorian Relief Expedition, which set out to establish the fate of the ill-fated Burke and Wills expedition.
Go to Profile#3179
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae
1821 - 1885 (64 years)
Jens Jacob Asmussen Worsaae was a Danish archaeologist, historian and politician, who was the second director of the National Museum of Denmark . He played a key role in the foundation of scientific archaeology. Worsaae was the first to excavate and use stratigraphy to prove C. J. Thomsen's sequence of the Three-age system: Stone, Bronze, Iron. He was also a pioneer in the development of paleobotany through his excavation work in the peat bogs of Jutland. Worsaae served as Kultus Minister of Denmark for Christen Andreas Fonnesbech from 1874 to 1875.
Go to Profile#3180
Mikhail Masson
1897 - 1986 (89 years)
Mikhail Yevgenyevich Masson was a Soviet archaeologist. He was the founder of the archaeology school in Central Asia and a professor, doctor of historical and archaeological sciences and member of the Turkmen Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#3181
Hugo Bernatzik
1897 - 1953 (56 years)
Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer. Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology. Biography Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik . After school in 1915, he volunteered to join the Austro–Hungarian Army and was deployed among other places in Albania. In 1920, he abandoned his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast , he embarked on extensive travels and expe...
Go to Profile#3182
Rudolf Martin
1864 - 1925 (61 years)
Rudolf Martin was a Swiss anthropologist, specializing in physical anthropology. Martin's second wife, Stefanie Oppenheim, survived him and edited a second edition of his physical anthropology textbook.
Go to Profile#3183
Charles Warren
1840 - 1927 (87 years)
General Sir Charles Warren, was an officer in the British Royal Engineers. He was one of the earliest European archaeologists of the Biblical Holy Land, and particularly of the Temple Mount. Much of his military service was spent in British South Africa. Previously he was Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, the head of the London Metropolitan Police, from 1886 to 1888 during the Jack the Ripper murders. His command in combat during the Second Boer War was criticised, but he achieved considerable success during his long life in his military and civil posts.
Go to Profile#3184
Robert Knox
1791 - 1862 (71 years)
Robert Knox was a Scottish anatomist and ethnologist best known for his involvement in the Burke and Hare murders. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Knox eventually partnered with anatomist and former teacher John Barclay and became a lecturer on anatomy in the city, where he introduced the theory of transcendental anatomy. However, Knox's incautious methods of obtaining cadavers for dissection before the passage of the Anatomy Act 1832 and disagreements with professional colleagues ruined his career in Scotland. Following these developments, he moved to London, though this did not revive his car...
Go to Profile#3185
Sven Nilsson
1787 - 1883 (96 years)
Sven Nilsson was a Swedish zoologist and archaeologist. Life and work Nilsson was director of the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet from 1828 to 1831, professor of Natural History at Lund University from 1832 to 1856, and rector of Lund University from 1845 to 1846.
Go to Profile#3186
W. J. Perry
1887 - 1949 (62 years)
William James Perry , usually known as W. J. Perry, was an academic in cultural anthropology at University College, London. Megalith culture, according to him, was transmitted to the rest of the world from Egypt.
Go to Profile#3187
Sarat Chandra Roy
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Sarat Chandra Roy was an Indian scholar of anthropology. He is sometimes regarded as the 'father of Indian ethnography', the 'first Indian ethnographer', and as the 'first Indian anthropologist'. Early life Born on 4 November 1871 to Purna Chandra Roy, a member of the Bengal Judicial Service, in a village in Khulna district , young Sarat came in contact with tribal people after his father was posted in Purulia. After his father's death in 1885, he was educated at his maternal uncle's home in Calcutta. In 1892, he graduated in English literature from the General Assembly's Institution . He ear...
Go to Profile#3188
Yevgeni Pakhomov
1880 - 1965 (85 years)
Yevgeni Alexandrovich Pakhomov was a Russian, Georgiann and Azerbaijani numismatist and archaeologist and a recognized authority in the numismatics of the Caucasus. Biography Born in Stavropol, he graduated from the Tiflis Realschule in 1896, the St. Petersburg Archeological Institute in 1900, and the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1902. In 1920, he helped to organize the Museum of Azerbaijani History and was elected to the Academic Association of the University of Baku where he chaired the Department of Archeology and Numismatics from 1922 to 1930. He attained to the title of Pro...
Go to Profile#3189
Gaston Maspero
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Sir Gaston Camille Charles Maspero was a French Egyptologist known for popularizing the term "Sea Peoples" in an 1881 paper. Maspero's son, Henri Maspero, became a notable sinologist and scholar of East Asia.
Go to Profile#3190
Josef Ladislav Píč
1847 - 1911 (64 years)
Josef Ladislav Píč was Czech archaeologist and paleontologist, one of founders of modern Czech archaeology. Píč studied history and Slavic languages at the Charles University in Prague . In 1883, he became docent of history at the university. Since 1893, he was named custodian and later director of archeologic collection at the National Museum in Prague. Píč created and maintained collection prehistoric artefacts. His major literary work was Starožitnosti země české , in three parts, about ancient history of Czech lands.
Go to Profile#3191
William Ridgeway
1853 - 1926 (73 years)
Sir William Ridgeway, FBA FRAI was an Anglo-Irish classical scholar and the Disney Professor of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge. Early life and education Ridgeway was born 6 August 1853, in Ballydermot in King's County, Ireland, the son of Rev. John Henry Ridgeway and Marianne Ridgeway. He was a direct descendant of one of Cromwell's settlers in Ireland. He was educated at Portarlington School and Trinity College, Dublin, then studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge before entering Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he completed the Classical tripos in 1880.
Go to Profile#3192
Ernesto de Martino
1908 - 1965 (57 years)
Ernesto de Martino was an Italian anthropologist, philosopher and historian of religions. He studied with Benedetto Croce and Adolfo Omodeo, and did field research with Diego Carpitella into the funeral rituals of Lucania and tarantism.
Go to Profile#3193
Margaret Murray
1863 - 1963 (100 years)
Margaret Alice Murray was a British-Indian Egyptologist, archaeologist, anthropologist, historian, and folklorist who was born in India. The first woman to be appointed as a lecturer in archaeology in the United Kingdom, she worked at University College London from 1898 to 1935. She served as president of the Folklore Society from 1953 to 1955, and published widely over the course of her career.
Go to Profile#3194
William Stukeley
1687 - 1765 (78 years)
William Stukeley was an English antiquarian, physician and Anglican clergyman. A significant influence on the later development of archaeology, he pioneered the scholarly investigation of the prehistoric monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury in Wiltshire. He published over twenty books on archaeology and other subjects during his lifetime.
Go to Profile#3195
Carl Blegen
1887 - 1971 (84 years)
Carl William Blegen was an American archaeologist who worked at the site of Pylos in Greece and Troy in modern-day Turkey. He directed the University of Cincinnati excavations of the mound of Hisarlik, the site of Troy, from 1932 to 1938.
Go to Profile#3196
Emil Ludwig Schmidt
1837 - 1906 (69 years)
Emil Ludwig Schmidt was a German anthropologist and ethnologist. He was son-in-law to art historian Johannes Adolph Overbeck . Schmidt was born in Upper Eichstätt. Originally trained as a doctor, he studied medicine at the Universities of Jena, Leipzig and Bonn. From 1862 to 1865 he served as a surgical assistant to Wilhelm Busch at Bonn, afterwards working as a physician in Essen .
Go to Profile#3197
Ludwig Borchardt
1863 - 1938 (75 years)
Ludwig Borchardt was a German Egyptologist. He is best known for finding a famous bust of Nefertiti at Amarna. Life Born in Berlin in 1863 into a well-established Jewish family, Borchardt was the second-oldest of six children of the merchant Hermann Borchardt and Bertha, née Levin . Also known as Herbert, Borchardt initially studied Architecture and later Egyptology under Adolf Erman. In 1895 he journeyed to Cairo and produced, with Gaston Maspero, the Catalogue of the Egyptian Museum .
Go to Profile#3198
John R. Napier
1917 - 1987 (70 years)
John Russell Napier, MRCS, LRCP, D.Sc. was a British primatologist, paleoanthropologist, and physician, who is notable for his work with Homo habilis and OH 7, as well as on human and primate hands/feet. During his life he was widely considered a leading authority on primate taxonomy, but is perhaps most famous to the general public for his research on Bigfoot.
Go to Profile#3199
Gerhard Fischer
1890 - 1977 (87 years)
Gerhard Fischer was a Norwegian architect and archaeologist. Biography Johan Adolf Gerhard Fischer was born in Bergen, Norway. He was the son of architect Adolph Fischer and Dorothea Margaretha Elisabeth Wilcken . Fischer studied at the Bergen Technical School , the Norwegian National Academy of Craft and Art Industry in Oslo and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
Go to Profile#3200
Gertrude Bell
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...
Go to Profile