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 History,
#6501
Evliya Çelebi
1611 - 1682 (71 years)
Derviş Mehmed Zillî , known as Evliya Çelebi , was an Ottoman explorer who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands during the empire's cultural zenith. He travelled for over a period of forty years, recording his commentary in a travelogue called the Seyahatnâme . The name Çelebi is an honorific meaning "gentleman" or "man of God".
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Appian
95 - 165 (70 years)
Appian of Alexandria was a Greek historian with Roman citizenship who prospered during the reigns of Emperors of Rome Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. He was born c. 95 in Alexandria. After holding the senior offices in the province of Aegyptus , he went to Rome c. 120, where he practised as an advocate, pleading cases before the emperors . It was in 147 at the earliest that he was appointed to the office of procurator, probably in Egypt, on the recommendation of his friend Marcus Cornelius Fronto, an influential rhetorician and advocate. Because the position of procurator was open only ...
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Pepin the Short
715 - 768 (53 years)
Pepin the Short , was King of the Franks from 751 until his death in 768. He was the first Carolingian to become king. Pepin was the son of the Frankish prince Charles Martel and his wife Rotrude. Pepin's upbringing was distinguished by the ecclesiastical education he had received from the Christian monks of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, near Paris. Succeeding his father as the Mayor of the Palace in 741, Pepin reigned over Francia jointly with his elder brother, Carloman. Pepin ruled in Neustria, Burgundy, and Provence, while his older brother Carloman established himself in Austrasia, Alemannia, and Thuringia.
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Étienne Gilson
1884 - 1978 (94 years)
Étienne Henri Gilson was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. A scholar of medieval philosophy, he originally specialised in the thought of Descartes; he also philosophized in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas, although he did not consider himself a neo-Thomist philosopher. In 1946 he attained the distinction of being elected an "Immortal" of the Académie française. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Zosimus
460 - 520 (60 years)
Zosimus was a Greek historian who lived in Constantinople during the reign of the eastern Roman Emperor Anastasius I . According to Photius, he was a comes, and held the office of "advocate" of the imperial treasury. Zosimus was also known for condemning Constantine’s rejection of the traditional polytheistic religion.
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Manetho
201 BC - Present (2227 years)
Manetho is believed to have been an Egyptian priest from Sebennytos who lived in the Ptolemaic Kingdom in the early third century BC, during the Hellenistic period. He authored the Aegyptiaca in Greek, a major chronological source for the reigns of the kings of ancient Egypt. It is unclear whether he wrote his history and king list during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter or Ptolemy II Philadelphos, but it was completed no later than that of Ptolemy III Euergetes.
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Evagrius Scholasticus
536 - 594 (58 years)
Evagrius Scholasticus was a Syrian scholar and intellectual living in the 6th century AD, and an aide to the patriarch Gregory of Antioch. His surviving work, Ecclesiastical History , comprises a six-volume collection concerning the Church's history from the First Council of Ephesus to the emperor Maurice’s reign until Scholasticus' death.
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William Whewell
1794 - 1866 (72 years)
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics.
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Henri Pirenne
1862 - 1935 (73 years)
Henri Pirenne was a Belgian historian. A medievalist of Walloon descent, he wrote a multivolume history of Belgium in French and became a prominent public intellectual. Pirenne made a lasting contribution to the study of cities that was a controversial interpretation of the end of Roman civilization and the rebirth of medieval urban culture. He also became prominent in the nonviolent resistance to the Germans who occupied Belgium in World War I.
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Sextus Julius Africanus
160 - 240 (80 years)
Sextus Julius Africanus was a Christian traveler and historian of the late-second and early-third centuries. He is important chiefly because of his influence on fellow historian Eusebius, on all the later writers of Church history among the Church Fathers, and on the whole Greek school of chroniclers.
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Werner Sombart
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Werner Sombart was a German economist, historian and sociologist. Head of the "Youngest Historical School," he was one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. The term late capitalism is accredited to him. The concept of creative destruction associated with capitalism is also of his coinage. His magnum opus was Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was published in 3 volumes from 1902 through 1927. In Kapitalismus he described four stages in the development of capitalism from its earliest iteration as it evolved out of feudalism, which he cal...
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Jules Michelet
1798 - 1874 (76 years)
Jules Michelet was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work Histoire de France , which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. He is considered one of the founders of modern historiography. Michelet was influenced by Giambattista Vico. He admired Vico's emphasis on the role of people and their customs in shaping history, which was a major departure from the emphasis on political and military leaders. Michelet also drew inspiration from Vico's concept of the "corsi e ricorsi", or the cyclical nature of history, in which so...
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Mykola Kostomarov
1817 - 1885 (68 years)
Mykola Ivanovych Kostomarov or Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov was one of the most distinguished Russo–Ukrainian historians, a Professor of Russian History at the St. Vladimir University of Kiev and later at the St. Petersburg University, an Active State Councillor of Russia, an author of many books, including his famous biography of the seventeenth century Hetman of Zaporozhian Cossacks Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the research on the Ataman of Don Cossacks Stepan Razin and his fundamental 3-volume Russian History in Biographies of its main figures .
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William Wallace
1270 - 1305 (35 years)
Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who became one of the main leaders during the First War of Scottish Independence. Along with Andrew Moray, Wallace defeated an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297. He was appointed Guardian of Scotland and served until his defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in July 1298. In August 1305, Wallace was captured in Robroyston, near Glasgow, and handed over to King Edward I of England, who had him hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason and crimes against English civilians.
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Paul the Deacon
720 - 799 (79 years)
Paul the Deacon , also known as Paulus Diaconus, Warnefridus, Barnefridus, or Winfridus, and sometimes suffixed Cassinensis , was a Benedictine monk, scribe, and historian of the Lombards. Life An ancestor of Paulus's named Leupichis emigrated to Italy in 568 in the train of Alboin, King of the Lombards. There, he was granted lands at or near Forum Julii . During an invasion by the Avars, Leupichis's five sons were carried away to Pannonia, but one of them, his namesake, returned to Italy and restored the ruined fortunes of his house. The grandson of the younger Leupichis was Warnefrid, who by his wife Theodelinda became the father of Paul.
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Toussaint Louverture
1743 - 1803 (60 years)
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda; 20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803 Toussaint Louverture was born as a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti. He was a devout Catholic, and was manumitted as an affranchi before the French Revolution, identifying as a Creole for the greater part of his life. During his time as an affranchi, he became a salaried employee, an overseer of his former master's plantation, and later became a wealthy slave owner himself; Toussaint Louverture owned several coffee plantations at Petit Cor...
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Marcus Terentius Varro
116 BC - 27 BC (89 years)
Marcus Terentius Varro was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" . He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.
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Charles Kingsley
1819 - 1875 (56 years)
Charles Kingsley was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labour cooperatives, which failed, but encouraged later working reforms.
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William of Malmesbury
1080 - 1140 (60 years)
William of Malmesbury was the foremost English historian of the 12th century. He has been ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a gifted historical scholar and an omnivorous reader, impressively well versed in the literature of classical, patristic, and earlier medieval times as well as in the writings of his own contemporaries. Indeed William may well have been the most learned man in twelfth-century Western Europe."
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Friedrich Meinecke
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Friedrich Meinecke was a German historian, with national liberal and antisemitic views, who supported the Nazi invasion of Poland. After World War II, as a representative of an older tradition, he criticized the Nazi regime, but continued to express antisemitic prejudices.
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Jadunath Sarkar
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Sir Jadunath Sarkar, was a prominent Indian historian and a specialist on the Mughal dynasty. Sarkar was educated in English literature, worked as a teacher for some period of time but later shifted his focus history research writing. He had vast knowledge of Persian language and all his books he wrote in English. He was vice-chancellor of University of Calcutta from 1926–1928 a member of Bengal Legislative Council between 1929-1932. In 1929 British knighted him.
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Sozomen
400 - 450 (50 years)
Salamanes Hermias Sozomenos , also known as Sozomen, was a Roman lawyer and historian of the Christian Church. Family and home He was born around 400 in Bethelia, a small town near Gaza, into a wealthy Christian family of Palestine.
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Ibn Hisham
701 - 828 (127 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām ibn Ayyūb al-Ḥimyarī al-Muʿāfirī al-Baṣrī , or Ibn Hisham, was a 9th-century Muslim historian and scholar who is known for editing the biography of Islamic prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq. He grew up in Basra, in modern-day Iraq and later moved to Egypt.
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Hippolyte Taine
1828 - 1893 (65 years)
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.
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Lewis Mumford
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology.
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Karl Polanyi
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Karl Paul Polanyi , was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
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George Syncellus
800 - 810 (10 years)
George Syncellus was a Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastical official. He had lived many years in Palestine as a monk, before coming to Constantinople, where he was appointed synkellos to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople. He later retired to a monastery to write what was intended to be his great work, a chronicle of world history, Ekloge chronographias , or Extract of Chronography. According to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, George "struggled valiantly against heresy [i.e. Iconoclasm] and received many punishments from the rulers who raged against the rites of the Church", although the ...
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Gershom Scholem
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Gershom Scholem , was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Jacob Burckhardt
1818 - 1897 (79 years)
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."
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Saxo Grammaticus
1150 - 1220 (70 years)
Saxo Grammaticus , also known as Saxo cognomine Longus, was a Danish historian, theologian and author. He is thought to have been a clerk or secretary to Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, the main advisor to Valdemar I of Denmark. He is the author of the , the first full history of Denmark, from which the legend of Amleth would come to inspire the story of Hamlet by Shakespeare.
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Stephen I of Hungary
969 - 1038 (69 years)
Stephen I, also known as King Saint Stephen , was the last Grand Prince of the Hungarians between 997 and 1000 or 1001, and the first King of Hungary from 1000 or 1001, until his death in 1038. The year of his birth is uncertain, but many details of his life suggest that he was born in, or after, 975, in Esztergom. He was given the pagan name Vajk at birth, but the date of his baptism is unknown. He was the only son of Grand Prince Géza and his wife, Sarolt, who was descended from a prominent family of gyulas. Although both of his parents were baptized, Stephen was the first member of his family to become a devout Christian.
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Adam Ferguson
1723 - 1816 (93 years)
Adam Ferguson, , also known as Ferguson of Raith , was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community. Ferguson has been called "the father of modern sociology" for his contributions to the early development of the discipline. His best-known work is his Essay on the History of Civil Society.
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Sulla
138 BC - 78 BC (60 years)
Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix , commonly known as Sulla, was a Roman general and statesman. He won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history and became the first man of the Republic to seize power through force.
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James Mill
1773 - 1836 (63 years)
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher. He is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics. He also wrote The History of British India and was one of the prominent historians to take a colonial approach. He was the first writer to divide Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British, a classification which has proved surpassingly influential in the field of Indian historical studies.
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R. H. Tawney
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education. The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in these "interrelated roles". A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".
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Imam Shamil
1797 - 1871 (74 years)
Imam Shamil was the political, military, and spiritual leader of North Caucasian resistance to Imperial Russia in the 1800s, the third Imam of the Caucasian Imamate , and a Sunni Muslim shaykh of the Naqshbandi Sufis.
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Tyrannius Rufinus
345 - 411 (66 years)
Tyrannius Rufinus, also called Rufinus of Aquileia , was a monk, philosopher, historian, and theologian who worked to translate Greek patristic material, especially the work of Origen, into Latin. Life Rufinus was born in 344 or 345 in the Roman city of Julia Concordia , near Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic Sea. It appears that both of his parents were Christians.
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Karl Lamprecht
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Karl Gotthard Lamprecht was a German historian who specialized in German art and economic history. Biography Lamprecht was born in Jessen in the Province of Saxony. As a student, he trained in history, political science, economics, and art at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich. Lamprecht taught at the university in Marburg and later at Leipzig, where he founded the Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschicht center dedicated to comparative world and cultural history.
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Prosper Mérimée
1803 - 1870 (67 years)
Prosper Mérimée was a French writer in the movement of Romanticism, one of the pioneers of the novella, a short novel or long short story. He was also a noted archaeologist and historian, an important figure in the history of architectural preservation. He is best known for his novella Carmen, which became the basis of Bizet's opera Carmen. He learned Russian, a language for which he had great affection, before translating the work of several notable Russian writers, including Pushkin and Gogol, into French. From 1830 until 1860 he was the inspector of French historical monuments, responsible...
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Henry Adams
1838 - 1918 (80 years)
Henry Brooks Adams was an American historian and a member of the Adams political family, descended from two U.S. presidents. As a young Harvard graduate, he served as secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, Abraham Lincoln's ambassador to the United Kingdom. The posting influenced the younger man through the experience of wartime diplomacy, and absorption in English culture, especially the works of John Stuart Mill. After the American Civil War, he became a political journalist who entertained America's foremost intellectuals at his homes in Washington and Boston.
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William Stubbs
1825 - 1901 (76 years)
William Stubbs was an English historian and Anglican bishop. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford between 1866 and 1884. He was Bishop of Chester from 1884 to 1889 and Bishop of Oxford from 1889 to 1901.
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George Bancroft
1800 - 1891 (91 years)
George Bancroft was an American historian, statesman and Democratic politician who was prominent in promoting secondary education both in his home state of Massachusetts and at the national and international levels.
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Nicolae Iorga
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, Albanologist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister. A child prodigy, polymath and polyglot, Iorga produced an unusually large body of scholarly works, establishing his international reputation as a medievalist, Byzantinist, Latinist, Slavist, art historian and philosopher of history. Holding teaching positions at the University of Bucharest, the Univ...
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Mandell Creighton
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Mandell Creighton was a British historian and a bishop of the Church of England. A scholar of the Renaissance papacy, Creighton was the first occupant of the Dixie Chair of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, a professorship established around the time that history was emerging as an independent academic discipline. He was also the first editor of the English Historical Review, the oldest English language academic journal in the field of history. Creighton had a second career as a cleric in the Church of England. He served as a parish priest in Embleton, Northumberland ...
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John I Tzimiskes
925 - 976 (51 years)
John I Tzimiskes was the senior Byzantine emperor from 969 to 976. An intuitive and successful general who married into the influential Skleros family, he strengthened and expanded the Byzantine Empire to include Thrace and Syria by warring with the Rus under Sviatoslav I and the Fatimids respectively.
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William Whiston
1667 - 1752 (85 years)
William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, natural philosopher, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus . He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth.
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Richard Hakluyt
1552 - 1616 (64 years)
Richard Hakluyt was an English writer. He is known for promoting the English colonization of North America through his works, notably Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation .
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Nikolai Rubinshtein
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
Nikolai Leonidovich Rubinshtein was a Soviet historian known for his historiographical works and his research into the economic history of Russia and the formation of capitalism in that country. Early life and education Rubinshtein was born on 11 December 1897 in Odessa. He received his advanced education at Novorossiia University in Odessa from which he graduated in 1922.
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Hermann Aubin
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Hermann Aubin was an Austrian-German historian. Biography Hermann Aubin was born in Reichenberg, Austria on 23 December 1885. His father was a wealthy factory owner. The Aubin family were descended from French Huguenots who had settled in Frankfurt in the 16th century AD. Aubin graduated at the top of his class from the gymnasium at Reichenberg in July 1904, and subsequently volunteered for a year as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Since 1905, Aubin studied history and economics at the universities of Munich and Freiburg. He gained a PhD at Freiburg in 1910 under the supervision of Ge...
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Herbert Baxter Adams
1850 - 1901 (51 years)
Herbert Baxter Adams was an American educator and historian who brought German rigor to the study of history in America; a founding member of the American Historical Association, and one of the earliest educators using the seminar for teaching history. With a fresh PhD from the Heidelberg University in Germany, Johns Hopkins University brought Adams in as a teaching fellow in history during their inaugural year. Adams stayed with Johns Hopkins until his health failed.
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