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 History,
#6501
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was a Brazilian historian, writer, journalist and sociologist. His greatest achievement was Raízes do Brasil , a landmark of Brazilian sociology, in which he developed the groundbreaking concept of the "cordial man" as the fundamental Brazilian identity. His son, Chico Buarque de Holanda is an accomplished singer-songwriter and novelist and his daughter Miúcha was also a famous singer. Buarque de Holanda was also a member of the Academia Paulista de Letras.
Go to Profile#6502
H. Morse Stephens
1857 - 1919 (62 years)
H. Morse Stephens was an American historian and professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley who helped to purchase the Bancroft Library, and who worked to build archives of California history, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and World War I.
Go to Profile#6503
Peter Andreas Munch
1810 - 1863 (53 years)
Peter Andreas Munch , usually known as P. A. Munch, was a Norwegian historian, known for his work on the medieval history of Norway. Munch's scholarship included Norwegian archaeology, geography, ethnography, linguistics, and jurisprudence. He was also noted for his Norse legendary saga translations.
Go to Profile#6504
Ibn Hayyan
987 - 1076 (89 years)
Abū Marwān Ḥayyān ibn Khalaf ibn Ḥusayn ibn Ḥayyān al-Qurṭubī , usually known as Ibn Hayyan, was a Berber Muslim historian from Al-Andalus. Born at Córdoba, his father was an important official at the court of the Andalusian ruler al-Mansur, and published several works on history which have only survived in part. His books constitute one of the most important sources for the study of the Andalusianian history, especially the history of Córdoba, and the kings of the taifas. His work also provides an early reference to Viking raiders, called Majus by him.
Go to Profile#6505
Polydore Vergil
1470 - 1555 (85 years)
Polydore Vergil or Virgil , widely known as Polydore Vergil of Urbino, was an Italian humanist scholar, historian, priest and diplomat, who spent much of his life in England. He is particularly remembered for his works the Proverbiorum libellus , a collection of Latin proverbs; De inventoribus rerum , a history of discoveries and origins; and the Anglica Historia , an influential history of England. He has been dubbed the "Father of English History".
Go to Profile#6506
Ernst Bernheim
1850 - 1942 (92 years)
Ernst Bernheim was a German historian who is best known for an influential Lehrbuch der historischen Methode on historical method. Early life He was born in Hamburg as a son of merchant Louis Bernheim and Emma Simon and from 1834 lived in Hamburg.
Go to Profile#6507
Georg Misch
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Georg Misch was a German philosopher. Life Of Jewish descent, Misch was the pupil and son-in-law of Wilhelm Dilthey. Misch attempted to further develop Dilthey's life-philosophical hermeneutics, in particular in relation to the study of logic, comparative philosophy and autobiography. Misch edited a number of volumes of Dilthey's works. Misch concluded his studies with Dilthey in Berlin in 1900 with a dissertation on Die philosophische Begründung des Positivismus in den Schriften von D’Alembert und Turgot. He worked as a professor in Marburg and Göttingen before retiring under pressure from the National Socialist government in 1935.
Go to Profile#6508
George Park Fisher
1827 - 1909 (82 years)
George Park Fisher was an American theologian and historian who was noted as a teacher and a prolific writer. Biography He was born in Wrentham, Massachusetts. He graduated from Brown University in 1847, and then studied theology at Yale Divinity School and the Andover Theological Seminary. He graduated from the latter institution in 1851. In 1853 he visited Germany, where he continued his theological studies.
Go to Profile#6509
George Louis Beer
1872 - 1920 (48 years)
George Louis Beer was a renowned American historian of the "Imperial school". Early life and education Born in Staten Island, New York, to an affluent family that was prominent in New York's German-Jewish community, Beer's father owned a successful tobacco importing business. He studied at Columbia University, where he received the A.B. degree and then an A.M. degree in 1893. Beer's master's thesis was supervised by Professor Herbert Levi Osgood and was immediately published in the Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law.
Go to Profile#6510
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton was an American historian of the South, author, and the founder of the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he spent most of his academic career. He published books and articles about the history of Reconstruction but his most influential role was as an archivist, collecting manuscripts from around the South that form the core of the Southern Historical Collection.
Go to Profile#6511
Ladislaus the Posthumous
1440 - 1457 (17 years)
Ladislaus V, more commonly known as Ladislaus the Posthumous , was Duke of Austria and King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia. He was the posthumous son of Albert of Habsburg with Elizabeth of Luxembourg. Albert had bequeathed all his realms to his future son on his deathbed, but only the estates of Austria accepted his last will. Fearing an Ottoman invasion, the majority of the Hungarian lords and prelates offered the crown to Vladislaus III of Poland. The Hussite noblemen and towns of Bohemia did not acknowledge the hereditary right of Albert's descendants to the throne, but also did not elect...
Go to Profile#6512
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés
1478 - 1557 (79 years)
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés , commonly known as Oviedo, was a Spanish soldier, historian, writer, botanist and colonist. Oviedo participated in the Spanish colonization of the West Indies, arriving in the first few years after Christopher Columbus became the first European to arrive at the islands in 1492. Oviedo's chronicle Historia general de las Indias, published in 1535 to expand on his 1526 summary La Natural hystoria de las Indias , forms one of the few primary sources about it. Portions of the original text were widely read in the 16th century in Spanish, English, Italian and F...
Go to Profile#6513
Matija Murko
1861 - 1952 (91 years)
Matija Murko, also known as Mathias Murko , was a Slovenian scholar, known mostly for his work on oral epic traditions in Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian. Life Murko was born in the small village of Drstelja near Ptuj, Lower Styria, in what was then the Austrian Empire and is now in Slovenia, and baptized Mathias Murko. He attended high school in Ptuj and Maribor. He studied Slavic and Germanic philology at the University of Vienna, where he was a pupil of Franz Miklosich. After obtaining his PhD in Vienna in 1886, he went to postdoctoral studies to Moscow. From 1897 to 1902, he taught Slavic ph...
Go to Profile#6514
Paolo Giovio
1483 - 1552 (69 years)
Paolo Giovio was an Italian physician, historian, biographer, and prelate. Early life Little is known about Giovio's youth. He was a native of Como; his family was from the Isola Comacina of Lake Como. His father, a notary, died around 1500. He was educated under the direction of his elder brother Benedetto, a humanist and historian. Although interested in literature, he was sent to Padua to study medicine. He graduated in 1511.
Go to Profile#6515
James Westfall Thompson
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
James Westfall Thompson was an American historian specializing in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly of the Holy Roman Empire and France. He also made noteworthy contributions to the history of literacy, libraries and the book trade in the Middle Ages.
Go to Profile#6516
Walter Schlesinger
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Walter Schlesinger was a German historian of medieval social and economic institutions, particularly in the context of German regional history . Schlesinger is widely recognized as one of the most influential and prolific scholars of medieval social history in the post-war period.
Go to Profile#6517
Nikephoros I
760 - 811 (51 years)
Nikephoros I , also known as Nicephorus I, was the Byzantine emperor from 802 to 811. He began his career as genikos logothetēs under Empress Irene, but later overthrew her to seize the throne. Prior to becoming emperor, he was sometimes referred to as "the Logothete" and "Genikos" or "Genicus" , in recognition of his previous role.
Go to Profile#6518
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , known as Goldie, was a British political scientist and philosopher. He lived most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
Go to Profile#6519
Karolina Lanckorońska
1898 - 2002 (104 years)
Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, philanthropist, and historian. Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now, for the most part, be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.
Go to Profile#6520
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably , sometimes known as Abbé de Mably, was a French philosopher, historian, and writer, who for a short time served in the diplomatic corps. He was a popular 18th-century writer.
Go to Profile#6521
Sten Lindroth
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Sten Hjalmar Lindroth was a Swedish historian of learning and science. Lindroth was born in the university town of Lund in Southern Sweden, but grew up and went to school in Gothenburg after his father Hjalmar Lindroth had been appointed to the Chair of Nordic languages at Gothenburg University. After finishing school in Gothenburg at Göteborgs högre latinläroverk, he matriculated at Uppsala University in 1933 and eventually became a student of Johan Nordström, holder of the Emilia and Gustaf Carlberg Chair of the history of ideas and learning, the first of its kind at Uppsala. Lindroth event...
Go to Profile#6522
Frederick York Powell
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Frederick York Powell was an English historian and scholar. Biography He was born on 4 January 1850 at 43 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury, London, the son of Frederick Powell, a commissariat merchant, and his wife Mary Powell, daughter of Dr James Powell. He was educated at the Manor House School at Hastings, and Rugby School. He matriculated at the University of Oxford in 1868 as an unattached student, the following year joining Christ Church, where he took a first-class degree in law and modern history in 1872. Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society.
Go to Profile#6523
Charles Cutler Torrey
1863 - 1956 (93 years)
Charles Cutler Torrey was an American historian, archaeologist and scholar. Career He is known for, presenting through his books, manuscript evidence supporting alternate views on the origins of Christian and Islamic religious texts. He founded the American School of Archaeology at Jerusalem in 1901.
Go to Profile#6524
Élie Halévy
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Élie Halévy was a French philosopher and historian who wrote studies of the British utilitarians, the book of essays Era of Tyrannies, and a history of Britain from 1815 to 1914 that influenced British historiography.
Go to Profile#6525
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis was a Dutch historian of science. Career Dijksterhuis studied mathematics at the University of Groningen from 1911 to 1918. His Ph.d. thesis was entitled "A Contribution to the Knowledge of the Flat Helicoid."
Go to Profile#6526
Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan
1859 - 1959 (100 years)
Aleksandar Stoyanov Teodorov-Balan was a Bulgarian linguist, historian and bibliographer. Balan was born in the village of Kubey in the Russian Empire, today in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine, to a Bessarabian Bulgarian family. The Bulgarian general Georgi Todorov was his brother. Balan studied in Prague and Leipzig graduating in Slavistics from the Charles University in Prague. In 1884 he settled in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria, spending four years working for the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment. He became professor of Slavic ethnography and dialectology and history of the Bul...
Go to Profile#6527
Stanisław Arnold
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Stanisław Arnold was a Polish historian, professor of the University of Warsaw, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, chief of Marksistowskie Zrzeszenie Historyków . Biography He was the son of Jan, director of a mine, and Romana née Bojanowski. In 1920 he defended his PhD thesis Władztwo biskupie na grodzie wolborskim w wieku XIII under supervision of Marceli Handelsman. Later he became an employee of the Warsaw University, with which he was connected until retirement in 1966. From 1924 to 1928 he was working as a history teacher at Gimnazjum im. Stefana Batorego in Warsaw.
Go to Profile#6528
Kazimierz Piwarski
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Kazimierz Piwarski was a Polish historian, professor of Jagiellonian University in Kraków since 1946 and Poznań University in years 1953-1955, member of Polish Academy of Skills since 1945, and member of Polish Academy of Sciences since 1958.
Go to Profile#6529
Theodore Saloutos
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Theodore Saloutos was an American historian. His areas of research included agrarian politics and reform movements, immigration studies, and Greek immigration to the United States Early life Saloutos was born in Milwaukie, Wisconsin on August 3, 1910. His parents were immigrants from Greece.
Go to Profile#6530
Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
Go to Profile#6531
Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was a Romanian historian, philosopher, professor, economist, sociologist, and author. Among his many major accomplishments, he is the Romanian historian credited with authoring the first major synthesis of the history of the Romanian people. His daughter Margareta Xenopol became a well-known Romanian composer.
Go to Profile#6532
Christian Molbech
1783 - 1857 (74 years)
Christian Molbech was a Danish historian, literary critic, writer, and theater director. He was a professor of literature at the University of Copenhagen and was the founding editor of Historisk Tidsskrift
Go to Profile#6533
David Feuerwerker
1912 - 1980 (68 years)
David Feuerwerker was a French Jewish rabbi and professor of Jewish history who was effective in the resistance to German occupation the Second World War. He was completely unsuspected until six months before the war ended, when he fled to Switzerland and his wife and baby went underground in France. The French government cited him for his bravery with several awards. After the war, he and his wife re-established the Jewish community of Lyon. He settled in Paris, teaching at the Sorbonne. In 1966, he and his family, grown to six children, moved to Montreal, where he developed a department of ...
Go to Profile#6534
John Joseph Saunders
1910 - 1972 (62 years)
John Joseph Saunders was a British historian whose work focused on medieval Islamic and Asian history. Born in Alphington, Devon, he was educated at Exeter University. He was a lecturer at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Geoffrey Rice wrote of him: John Saunders was an only child, and books were his best companions from an early age. He also displayed artistic ability with pen and ink drawing, having something of a gift for cartoons and caricature. At school at Mount Radford in Exeter he showed particular aptitude for languages, literature and history. One of the masters who noticed his potential, Theodore Vine, became a lifelong friend.
Go to Profile#6535
Militsa Nechkina
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Militsa Vasilyevna Nechkina was a Soviet historian. She taught at Moscow State University and extensively studied the Decembrist revolt of 1825. Biography Nechkina was born in Nizhyn, Russian Empire. She attended Kazan University, graduating in 1921. She began teaching history at Moscow State University in 1924 and became a doctor of historical sciences in 1936. She specialized in the study of the Decembrist revolt and was the first historian to write in detail about the social and ideological aspects of the revolt. As a historian, she also contributed to Soviet history topics in the Great So...
Go to Profile#6536
Geoffrey Bruun
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Geoffrey Bruun was a historian and biographer who taught at New York University from 1927 until 1941. He was born in Montreal, Quebec and received a bachelor's degree from the University of British Columbia, and master's and doctoral degrees from Cornell University. After retiring as a professor of history from N.Y.U., he was a visiting professor at Cornell, Mt. Holyoke College, Smith College, the University of Illinois, and Georgetown University.
Go to Profile#6537
Şihabetdin Märcani
1818 - 1889 (71 years)
Şihabetdin Märcani was a Tatar Hanafi Maturidi theologian and historian. He studied in madrassas of Tashkichu , Bukhara and Samarkand. Beginning in 1850 he served as the imam of the First Cathedral Mosque. Later, in 1867, he became a muhtasib of Kazan. At the same time, in 1876-1884 he lectured on religion in the Tatar Teachers' School. Märcani became the first Muslim member of The Society for Archaeology, History and Ethnography at Kazan State University. In his papers he illustrated his ideas about the renovation and the perfection of the Tatar educational system. As a historian, he was the...
Go to Profile#6538
Samuel Johnson
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
The Rev. Samuel Johnson was an Anglican priest and historian of the Yoruba. Biography Samuel Johnson was born a recaptive Creole in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the third of seven children of Henry Erugunjinmi Johnson and Sarah Johnson on June 24, 1846. His father, who gave himself the Yoruba name Erugunjinmi, was born in 1810 in the town of Oyo-Ile, capital of the Oyo Empire. Henry was an Omoba of the Oyo clan, and was a grandson of the 18th-century alaafin Abiodun. He was later captured in the Atlantic Slave Trade but fortunately was rerouted to Sierra Leone, like many Yorubas, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and others.
Go to Profile#6539
Godefroid Kurth
1847 - 1916 (69 years)
Godefroid Kurth was a Belgian historian and pioneering Christian democrat. He is known for his histories of the city of Liège in the Middle Ages and of Belgium, his Catholic account of the formation of modern Europe in Les Origines de la civilisation moderne, and his defence of the medieval guild system.
Go to Profile#6540
Ephraim Lipson
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Ephraim Lipson, or E. Lipson was a British economic historian. The son of a Jewish furniture dealer, Lipson attended Sheffield Royal Grammar School followed by Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a First class degree in History.
Go to Profile#6541
Tsiang Tingfu
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Tsiang Tingfu , was a historian and diplomat of the Republic of China who published in English under the name T.F. Tsiang. Early life and education Tsiang was born in Shaoyang, Hunan. Tsiang's education from his teenage years had been Western and largely Christian, and he converted to Christianity at 11. Having been urged to study in the US by his teacher from a missionary school, he was sent in 1911 to study in the United States, where he attended the Park Academy, Oberlin College and Columbia University. His dissertation, "Labor and Empire: A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as...
Go to Profile#6542
Hugo Obermaier
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Hugo Obermaier was a distinguished Spanish-German prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning. Although he was born in Germany, he was later naturalized as a Spanish citizen in 1924. He is particularly associated with his work on the diffusion of mankind in Europe during the Ice Age, and in connection with north Spanish cave art, and resisted placing his science at the disposal of nationalistic and racialist interests in the Germany of the 1930s.
Go to Profile#6543
Aldo Mieli
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Aldo Mieli was an influential historian of science, and a pioneer of gay rights. Early life and education Born in 1879 in Livorno, Italy to a wealthy Jewish family, Mieli was raised in Chianciano, a small spa town in Tuscany, to which his family moved in 1880.
Go to Profile#6544
Reginald Lane Poole
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Reginald Lane Poole, FBA was a British historian. He was Keeper of the Archives and a lecturer in diplomatics at the University of Oxford, where he gave the Ford Lectures in 1912 on the subject of "The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century". Son of Edward Stanley Poole, the "Lane" in his surname comes from his paternal grandmother Sophia Lane Poole, author of An Englishwoman in Egypt . He was the father of Austin Lane Poole , also a historian and Ford's Lecturer; the brother of the orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole; the nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole; and the great-nephew of Edward William Lane.
Go to Profile#6545
Robert Winslow Gordon
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Robert Winslow Gordon was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs. Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. In 1923, he was asked by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman to run the folk music column "Old Songs Men Have Sung" in Hoffman's magazine, Adventure. Gordon accepted and used the Adventure column to collect information on traditional American music from the magazine's readers.
Go to Profile#6546
Elias Joseph Bickerman
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Elias Bickerman , also spelled as Bickermann or Bikerman, was a leading scholar of Greco-Roman history and the Hellenistic world. Biography Bickerman was born in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family. He left Russia during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war for Germany, where he received education from German classicists and Hellenists. Due to the rise of the Nazi Party to power and his Jewish heritage, he fled to France. He soon had to abandon that country as well after the Battle of France. Since 1942 he lived in the U.S. His research interests extended to Judaism and some aspects of Iranian history.
Go to Profile#6547
Arthur I, Duke of Brittany
1187 - 1203 (16 years)
Arthur I was 4th Earl of Richmond and Duke of Brittany between 1196 and 1203. He was the posthumous son of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany, and Constance, Duchess of Brittany. His father, Geoffrey, was the son of Henry II, King of England.
Go to Profile#6548
Montagu Burrows
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Montagu Burrows was a British historian. Following a career as an officer in the Royal Navy, he was the first Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, holding the Chair from 1862 until his death. He was probably the first academic to lecture on naval history at Oxford or at any university in Britain.
Go to Profile#6549
Hayam Wuruk
1334 - 1389 (55 years)
Hayam Vuruk , also called Rajasanagara, Pa-ta-na-pa-na-wu, or Bhatara Prabhu after 1350, was a Javanese Hindu emperor from the Rajasa dynasty and the 4th emperor of the Majapahit Empire. Together with his prime minister Gajah Mada, he reigned the empire at the time of its greatest power. During his reign, the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, became ingrained in the culture and worldview of the Javanese through the wayang kulit . He was preceded by Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, and succeeded by his son-in-law Wikramawardhana.
Go to Profile#6550
Giorgio Levi Della Vida
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Giorgio Levi Della Vida was an Italian Jewish linguist whose expertise lay in Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages, as well as on the history and culture of the Near East. Biography Born in Venice to a Jewish family originally from Ferrara, he moved with them first to Genoa and then to Rome, from whose university he graduated in 1909 with the Hebraist Ignazio Guidi. Immediately after graduation, he participated in numerous research expeditions to Cairo, Athens , and Crete.
Go to Profile