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,
#3201
Ernest Hébrard
1875 - 1933 (58 years)
Ernest Hébrard was a French architect, archaeologist and urban planner, best known for his urban plan for the center of Thessaloniki, Greece, after the great fire of 1917. Background Hebrard studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1904 won the Grand Prix de Rome, allowing him to study at the Académie de France in Rome, located in the Villa Medici. It was here that he chose to study Diocletian's palace at Split, eventually leading to the 1912 publication of a monograph containing what is still regarded as the most accurate image of the original appearance of the Palace. At the Academie, he...
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Walter Lehmann
1878 - 1939 (61 years)
Walter Hartmut Traugott Erdmann Lehmann was a German ethnologist, linguist and archeologist, known for his documentation of many indigenous cultures and languages of Central America. He studied under Eduard Seler, a renowned specialist in Mesoamerican cultures. Between 1907 and 1909 he undertook an expedition traveling from Panama to Mexico, in which he collected artefacts and ethnographic and linguistic data. He collected the only known documentation of several indigenous languages of Central America before they became extinct. His 1915 habilitation thesis was a vocabulary of the Rama language, and an historical analysis of the Subtiaba language.
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Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen
1864 - 1947 (83 years)
Friedrich Hiller von Gaertringen was a German archeologist and philologist, a specialist in Greek epigraphy. Life Hiller von Gaertringen was the son of the Prussian army officer Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen and Helene Luise Kramsta . He studied ancient history, first with Alfred von Gutschmid at Tübingen, then with Theodor Mommsen in Berlin. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1886 he continued at Göttingen with Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.
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Jindřich Wankel
1821 - 1897 (76 years)
Jindřich Wankel was a Bohemian palaeontologist and archaeologist. Wankel was born to Damian Wankel, a clerk, and his wife Magdalena, née Schwarz, in a bilingual environment. He attended German schools in Prague and later studied Medicine at the University of Prague as a student of Josef Hyrtl.
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Jodi Byrd
Jodi Byrd holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. (2002) in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism’s Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before moving to Cornell University, she taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, and before that she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012.
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Alice Kober
1906 - 1950 (44 years)
Alice Elizabeth Kober was an American classicist best known for her work on the decipherment of Linear B. Educated at Hunter College and Columbia University, Kober taught classics at Brooklyn College from 1930 until her death. In the 1940s, she published three major papers on the script, demonstrating evidence of inflection; her discovery allowed for the deduction of phonetic relationships between different signs without assigning them phonetic values, and would be a key step in the eventual decipherment of the script.
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Theodor Koch-Grunberg
1872 - 1924 (52 years)
Theodor Koch-Grünberg was a German ethnologist and explorer who made a valuable contribution to the study of the Indigenous peoples in South America, in particular the Pemon of Venezuela and other indigenous peoples in the Amazon region extending South-Western Brazil and a large part of the Vaupés region in Colombia. The 2015 film El abrazo de la serpiente fictionalizes his illness and final days based on his journals. He was played by actor .
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Walter Bryan Emery
1903 - 1971 (68 years)
Walter Bryan Emery, CBE, was a British Egyptologist. His career was devoted to the excavation of archaeological sites along the Nile Valley. During the Second World War, he served with distinction as an officer in the British Army and, in the immediate aftermath, in the Diplomatic Service, both still in Egypt.
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Wendell Phillips
1925 - 1975 (50 years)
Wendell Phillips was an American archaeologist and oil magnate who led some of the first archaeological expeditions in the areas that are part of modern-day Yemen and Oman. Excavating primarily in the 1950s, Phillips unearthed artifacts from the ancient kingdom of Sabaʾ. He was famous in the United States for his dashing style and adventurous stories, leading to his nickname, "America's Lawrence of Arabia".
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Jan Filip
1900 - 1981 (81 years)
Jan Filip was a Czechoslovak prehistorian. Life Filip was Professor of prehistory at Prague University, director of the Archaeological Institute and member of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He wrote numerous scholarly publications, among them two of the fundamental reference works for archaeological research in Central Europe. He also founded the professional journal Archeologické rozhledy, published since 1949.
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James Penrose Harland
1891 - 1973 (82 years)
James Penrose Harland was an American archaeologist of the ancient Aegean. Harland earned his BA , MA, and PhD from Princeton University and also completed service with the United States Navy during World War I. In addition to Princeton, he studied at the University of Bonn . He would teach archaeology at the University of Michigan and the University of Cincinnati before joining the faculty of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1922 as an assistant professor of classics. Harland became associate professor of archaeology in 1927 and professor of archaeology in 1929....
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Luisa Banti
1894 - 1978 (84 years)
Luisa Banti was an Italian archaeologist, art historian, and educator specializing in the Etruscan and Minoan civilizations. Her best known work is Il mondo degli Etruschi . First published in 1960 and translated into several languages, it influenced scholarly opinion for many years and became a classic text.
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Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis
1864 - 1953 (89 years)
Anton Willem Nieuwenhuis was a Dutch explorer and physician who travelled extensively in central Borneo in the 1890s, recording valuable ethnographic information about the Dayak people and making biological collections.
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Frederik David Holleman
1887 - 1958 (71 years)
Frederik 'Frits' David Holleman was a Dutch and South African academic, ethnologist, and jurist, best known for his research into the indigenous legal systems of the Dutch East Indies and South Africa.
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William Wilkins
1778 - 1839 (61 years)
William Wilkins was an English architect, classical scholar and archaeologist. He designed the National Gallery and University College London, and buildings for several Cambridge colleges. Life Wilkins was born in the parish of St Giles, Norwich, the son of William Wilkins , a successful builder who also managed the Norwich Theatre Circuit, a chain of theatres. His younger brother George Wilkins became Archdeacon of Nottingham.
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James Burton
1788 - 1862 (74 years)
James Burton was an early British Egyptologist, known for his pioneering exploration and mapping of the Valley of the Kings, during which he became the first individual of the modern age to enter KV5; his pioneering excavations at Karnak, during which he discovered the Karnak king list; and his excavations at Medinet Habu, during which he was part of the team that discovered TT391.
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Harold F. Cherniss
1904 - 1987 (83 years)
Harold Fredrik Cherniss was an American classicist and historian of ancient philosophy. While at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he was said to be "the country's foremost expert on Plato and Aristotle."
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Harri Moora
1900 - 1968 (68 years)
Harri Moora was an Estonian archaeologist. He was a recipient of the national Cross of Liberty. In 1925, he graduated from the University of Tartu. Between 1930–1942, he was a museum director. In 1931, he studied at Baltic Institute in Stockholm and developed a scholarly working relationship with Finnish archaeologist Ella Kivikoski, who was one of his main contacts with Scandinavian archaeologists.
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Dong Zuobin
1895 - 1963 (68 years)
Dong Zuobin or Tung Tso-pin was a Chinese archaeologist. He was a leading authority on the oracle bone and turtle shell inscriptions of the Shang dynasty . In 1928, Dong supervised the first archaeological dig of Anyang, the Shang capital. Dong was a professor at National Taiwan University and director of the institute of philology and history at Academia Sinica from 1950 to 1954. Dong's construction of a Shang chronology was his most important research achievement.
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Johanna van Lohuizen-de Leeuw
1919 - 1983 (64 years)
Johanna Engelberta van Lohuizen-de Leeuw was a Dutch archaeologist and art historian, specializing in South and South-east Asia. Fluent in Sanskrit, she contributed important research to the study of antiquities in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka, as well as in Thailand and Indonesia. Along with Raymond and Bridget Allchin, Jan van Lohuizen, and Harold Bailey, she founded the Ancient and Indian Iran Trust in Cambridge in 1978 to support historical and archaeological research in those regions, which later became a center of academic research in the field. She made notable contributions to the history of Kusana art.
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Cardale Babington
1808 - 1895 (87 years)
Charles Cardale Babington was an English botanist and archaeologist. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1851. Babington was the son of Joseph Babington and Cathérine née Whitter, and a nephew of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He was educated at Charterhouse and St John's College, Cambridge, obtaining his Bachelor of Arts in 1830 and his Master of Arts in 1833. He overlapped at Cambridge with Charles Darwin, and in 1829 they argued over who should have the pick of beetle specimens from a local dealer. He obtained the chair of botany at the University of Cambridge in 1861 and wrote several papers on insects.
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Gabriel Gustafson
1853 - 1915 (62 years)
Gabriel Adolf Gustafson was a Swedish-Norwegian archaeologist. He was responsible for the excavation and conservation of the Oseberg Ship . Biography Gabriel Gustafson was born in Visby, in Gotland County, Sweden. Gustafson studied at the Uppsala University earning a degree in Archaeology . He was a professor at Uppsala University . Gustafson was employed by the University of Bergen as a conservator from 1889 to 1900. In 1900, following the death of Oluf Rygh, he was appointed manager of the University Museum of National Antiquities at University of Kristiania, and professor of archaeology...
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Esther Boise Van Deman
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Esther Boise Van Deman was a leading archaeologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She developed techniques that allowed her to estimate the building dates of ancient buildings in Rome. Life Esther Boise Van Deman was born in South Salem, Ohio, to Joseph Van Deman and his second wife, Martha Millspaugh. She was the youngest of six children, including two boys by her father's first marriage.
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Ioannis Svoronos
1863 - 1922 (59 years)
Ioannis N. Svoronos was a Greek archaeologist and numismatist. Life Ioannis Svoronos was born in 1863 on the island of Mykonos. After completing school he enrolled in the Law School of the University of Athens, but abandoned his studies to dedicate himself to archaeology and numismatics. He studied the latter in the universities of Berlin, London and Paris . On his return to Greece he was hired by the Numismatic Museum of Athens, where he worked until his death, serving also as its director from 1899. In 1918–1920 he was also Professor of Numismatics at the University of Athens. From 1898 he published the journal Journal International d’Archéologie Numismatique.
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Sidney Smith
1889 - 1979 (90 years)
Sidney Smith was an Assyriologist who has been described as the architect of Mesopotamian studies. Life He was born in Leeds, 29 August 1889, studied in City of London School, and went to Queens' College, Cambridge on a Classical Exhibition. During WWI he served as a subaltern in an infantry battalion. In 1955 he retired to Barcombe, near Lewes in Sussex.
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Harold North Fowler
1859 - 1955 (96 years)
Harold North Fowler was an American classicist. He was married to Mary Blackford Fowler. He was the original translator of a number of Plato's works for the Loeb Classical Library collection. External links
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Heinrich Bulle
1867 - 1945 (78 years)
Heinrich Bulle was a German archaeologist born in Bremen. He studied classical archaeology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Munich, where he was a student of Heinrich Brunn . From 1898 to 1902, he was a lecturer at the University of Würzburg, followed by an associate professorship at the University of Erlangen. In 1908, he returned to Würzburg as a professor, where he was also director of the "Martin von Wagner Museum". Bulle was a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
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Benedikt Niese
1849 - 1910 (61 years)
Jürgen Anton Benedikt Niese , also known as Benedict, Benediktus or Benedictus Niese, was a German classical scholar. Niese was born in Burg, on the island of Fehmarn, then part of the German Confederation but ruled by King Frederick VII of Denmark. His father was Emil August Niese, pastor in the town, and his mother was born Benedicte Marie Matthiessen. He was educated at the Domgymnasium in Schleswig and then from 1867 at Bonn and Kiel, studying under Alfred von Gutschmid. After volunteering for the army during the Franco-Prussian War, he was awarded a PhD in 1872. After teaching for a short time in a secondary school in Flensburg, he travelled in Italy and France.
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Sergei Teploukhov
1888 - 1934 (46 years)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Teploukhov was an archaeologist from the Soviet Union. From 1920 to 1932, Teploukhov conducted research on the archaeological remains of various periods in Siberia and Central Asia. He was the first to devise a classification of the archaeological cultures of Southern Siberia. Teploukhov was arrested on suspicions of nationalism on November 26, 1933 and was found dead in his cell on March 10, 1934.
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William Sanders Scarborough
1852 - 1926 (74 years)
William Sanders Scarborough is generally thought to be the first African American classical scholar. Born into slavery, Scarborough served as president of Wilberforce University between 1908 and 1920. He wrote a popular university textbook on Classical Greek that was widely used in the 19th century.
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Johann Matthias Gesner
1691 - 1761 (70 years)
Johann Matthias Gesner was a German classical scholar and schoolmaster. Life He was born at Roth an der Rednitz near Ansbach. His father, Johann Samuel Gesner, a pastor in Auhausen, died in 1704, leaving the family in straitened circumstances. Gesner's mother, Maria Magdalena , remarried, and Johann Matthias's stepfather, Johann Zuckermantel, proved supportive.
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Gerhard Lindblom
1887 - 1969 (82 years)
Karl Gerhard Lindblom was an ethnographer from Sweden who worked in East Africa in the 1910s. He was the principal author of materials on the Akamba peoples. Additionally, he worked as the Director of the Museum of Stockholm beginning in 1928 and in 1935 he became a professor at the University of Stockholm.
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Pieter Helbert Damsté
1860 - 1943 (83 years)
Pieter Helbert Damsté was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography Damsté was born in Wilsum as the son of preacher Barteld Roelof Damsté and Richardina Jacoba Gesina Gallé. His 1885 dissertation was called Adversaria critica ad C. Valerii Flacci Argonautica. He taught Latin at Utrecht University.
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Gonçalo Sampaio
1865 - 1937 (72 years)
Gonçalo António da Silva Ferreira Sampaio was a Portuguese botanist. He studied mathematics at the University of Coimbra and chemistry, mineralogy and botany at the Polytechnic Academy of Porto. From 1890 he served as an assistant naturalist at the Polytechnic Academy. From 1912 to 1935 he was a professor of botany at the faculty of sciences of the University of Porto. As a taxonomist he described around 50 new species of vascular plants, five new species of desmids and about 70 new taxa of lichens that included the genus Carlosia . The mycological genus Sampaioa commemorates his name.
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Risieri Frondizi
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Risieri Frondizi was an Argentine philosopher, anthropologist, and rector of the University of Buenos Aires. Background Risieri Frondizi Ercoli was born on 20 November 1910 in Posadas, Argentina. His parents were Julio Frondizi and Isabel Ercoli, who had arrived in the 1890s from Gubbio, Umbria, Italy. Frondizi had seven brothers and six sisters. They included Arturo Frondizi , Ricardo and Silvio . Frondizi studied at Harvard University. In 1943, Frondizi received his MA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. In 1950, he received a doctorate from the National Autonomous University...
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Antal Hekler
1882 - 1940 (58 years)
Antal Hekler was a Hungarian/German classical archaeologist and art historian. He was a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Life He wrote his doctoral thesis in political science in 1903 and then studied classical archaeology in Munich under Adolf Furtwängler, where he wrote his second doctoral thesis, before he returned to his birthplace Budapest, where he first worked at the city's national museum and later held a chair for Christian archaeology and history of art at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Budapest.
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Anastasios Orlandos
1887 - 1979 (92 years)
Anastasios Orlandos was a Greek architect and historian of architecture. Biography A descendant of Ioannis Orlandos, Anastasios was born and died in Athens. He studied as a civil engineer in the National Technical University of Athens, and completed his studies in archaeology at the University of Athens, where he later served as a professor. He was among the leading researchers in ancient and Byzantine architecture, and responsible for the restoration of many ancient and medieval monuments throughout the country. He was also chairman of the Academy of Athens in 1950, and from 1951 until his d...
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Karl Otfried Müller
1797 - 1840 (43 years)
Karl Otfried Müller was a German professor, scholar of classical Greek studies and philodorian. Biography He was born at Brieg in Silesia, then in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father was a chaplain in the Prussian army, and he was raised in the atmosphere of Protestant Pietism. He attended the gymnasium of his town. His university education was partly in Breslau and partly in Berlin. In Berlin, he was spurred towards the study of Greek literature, art and history by the influence of Philipp August Böckh. In 1817, after the publication of his first work, Aegineticorum liber, on the Aegineta...
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Poliziano
1454 - 1494 (40 years)
Agnolo Ambrogini , commonly known as Angelo Poliziano or simply Poliziano, anglicized as Politian, was an Italian classical scholar and poet of the Florentine Renaissance. His scholarship was instrumental in the divergence of Renaissance Latin from medieval norms and for developments in philology. His nickname Poliziano, by which he is chiefly identified to the present day, was derived from the Latin name of his birthplace, Montepulciano .
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Alexander Khakhanov
1864 - 1912 (48 years)
Aleksandr Solomonovich Khakhanov born Aleksandre Khakhanashvili was a Georgian-Russian historian, archaeologist, and one of the most acclaimed scholars of Georgian literature. He was born in Gori, Georgia, then part of Imperial Russia, and studied at Tbilisi . Having graduated from Moscow University in 1888, he delivered lectures on Georgian language and literature at Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages since 1889 and at Moscow University since 1900. He authored numerous works on Georgian history and literature, including the resonant Очерки по истории грузинской словесности , published in Russian from 1895 to 1907.
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Dimitri Baramki
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Dimitri Constantine Baramki, often styled D. C. Baramki , was a Palestinian archaeologist who served as chief archaeologist at the Department of Antiquities of the Government of Mandatory Palestine from 1938 to 1948. From 1952 until his retirement, he was the curator of the Archaeological Museum at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, where he served as a professor of archaeology.
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Thomas Dempster
1579 - 1625 (46 years)
Thomas Dempster was a Scottish scholar and historian. Born into the aristocracy in Aberdeenshire, which comprises regions of both the Scottish highlands and the Scottish lowlands, he was sent abroad as a youth for his education. The Dempsters were Catholic in an increasingly Protestant country and had a reputation for being quarrelsome. Thomas' brother James, outlawed for an attack on his father, spent some years as a pirate in the northern islands, escaped by volunteering for military service in the Low Countries and was drawn and quartered there for insubordination. Thomas' father lost the ...
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Joseph George Cumming
1812 - 1868 (56 years)
Joseph George Cumming, MA Cantab., was an English geologist and archaeologist. His major works concerned the geology and history of the Isle of Man. Biography Born at Matlock in Derbyshire where his mother and father ran the Old Bath Hotel at Matlock Bath. Cumming was educated at Oakham School, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, taking the degree of MA, and entering holy orders in 1835. Joseph's elder cousin, James was Professor of Chemistry in Cambridge from 1815.
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Francis H. Snow
1840 - 1908 (68 years)
Francis Huntington Snow was an American naturalist and educator. He spent more than forty years at the University of Kansas, first as a professor of natural history and then as chancellor. He was interested in several fields of science including botany, ornithology and geology but his primary focus was entomology. He was well-known as a field naturalist, based on 26 years of field collecting trips that he organized and led throughout Kansas, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. During these excursions, he and his students collected a quarter-million insect specimens representing some 21,...
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Charles Pickering Bowditch
1842 - 1921 (79 years)
Charles Pickering Bowditch was an American financier, archaeologist, cryptographer and linguistics scholar who specialized in Mayan epigraphy. Bowditch was born in Boston into the Massachusetts Bowditch family of mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch, his grandfather, and physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch, his brother, son of Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch and Lucy Orme Nichols. He received his undergraduate degree in 1863 and his master's in 1866, both from Harvard University. During the American Civil War he served as an officer in the 55th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, a colored regiment,...
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Charles Lenormant
1802 - 1859 (57 years)
Charles Lenormant was a French archaeologist. Biography After pursuing his studies at the Lycée Charlemagne and the Lycée Napoléon, he took up law, but a visit to Italy and Sicily made him an enthusiastic archaeologist. In 1825 he was named sub-inspector of fine arts and a few months later married Amelia Syvoct, niece and adopted daughter of the celebrated Mme Récamier. He visited Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and accompanied Jean-François Champollion to Egypt in July 1828, where he devoted himself to the study of architectural works.
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Friedrich Blass
1843 - 1907 (64 years)
Friedrich Blass was a German classical scholar. Biography After studying at Göttingen and Bonn from 1860 to 1863, Blass lectured at several gymnasia and at the University of Königsberg. In 1876 he was appointed extraordinary professor of classical philology at Kiel, and ordinary professor in 1881. In 1892 he accepted a professorship at Halle, where he later died.
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Caspar Reuvens
1793 - 1835 (42 years)
Caspar Jacob Christiaan Reuvens was a Dutch historian and archaeologist. He was the founding director of the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the world's first ever professor of archaeology , and conducted the first excavations at the Roman provincial site Forum Hadriani in the Netherlands.
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Ross Gilmore Marvin
1880 - 1908 (28 years)
Ross Gilmore Marvin was an American explorer who took part in Robert Peary's 1905–1906 and 1908–1909 expeditions to the Arctic. It was initially believed that Marvin drowned during the second expedition, but an Inuit member of the expedition later stated he shot and killed Marvin.
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John Haskell Hewitt
1835 - 1920 (85 years)
John Haskell Hewitt was an American classical scholar and educator, notable for serving as acting president of Williams College from 1901 to 1902. Born in Preston, Connecticut, to Charles Hewitt and Eunice , Hewitt entered Yale University in 1855, initially intending to study law. While at Yale he befriended Franklin Carter, a relationship that would prove beneficial in later years. After graduating with an A.B. in 1859, Hewitt then earned an advanced degree from the Yale Divinity School in 1863. He served as a librarian at Yale's Brothers in Unity Library until 1865, until he accepted a position teaching Latin and Greek at Olivet College.
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