Search People Result | Academic Influence

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.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people in History,

#6551

George Barton Cutten

1874 - 1962 (88 years)

George Barton Cutten was a Canadian-born psychologist, moral philosopher, historian and university administrator. He was president of Acadia University from 1910 to 1922 and Colgate University from 1922 to 1942.

#6552

Paul Leser

1899 - 1984 (85 years)

Paul Leser was a German-American ethnologist. Life Paul Leser came from a well-to-do Jewish family in Frankfurt. His father was a provincial high court judge. Leser attended the Goethe-Gymnasium, Frankfurt from 1908 to 1917 and studied ethnology at the University of Bonn in 1919. He was a student of Fritz Graebner and was conferred a doctorate by him in March 1925. From 1928 until 1930 he was employed as a scientific laborer at the Museum for Ethnology in Frankfurt am Main. In 1929 he lectured at the Technical University at Darmstadt and became an associate professor for ethnology. From 1929 until 1933 he taught as an associate professor for ethnology on the Technical College of Darmstadt .

#6553

Agnieszka Biedrzycka

1900 - Present (126 years)

Agnieszka Biedrzycka is a Polish historian and writer from the Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences . She obtained her doctorate in December 2002 from the Faculty of History of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Biedrzycka serves as research scientist and editor for the multi-volume Polish Biographical Dictionary published by PAN incrementally. She is in charge of the History of Poland in the Early Modern era department. Since the 1989 return to democracy from under the Soviet-led totalitarian control, many distortions printed there have already been corrected. H...

#6554

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor

1878 - 1950 (72 years)

Robert Digges Wimberly Connor was an American historian who served as the first state archivist of North Carolina from 1907 to 1921, and later as the first Archivist of the United States from 1934 to 1941.

#6555

Edward Everett Dale

1879 - 1972 (93 years)

Edward Everett Dale was an American historian and longtime faculty member of the University of Oklahoma. He was a proponent of Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis" and is known as a major influence on the historian Angie Debo.

#6556

Arthur James Grant

1862 - 1948 (86 years)

Arthur James Grant was an English historian. Early life and education Born in Farlesthorpe, Lincolnshire, Grant was the son of Samuel Grant. He was educated at Boston Grammar School and King's College, Cambridge where he graduated BA in Classics in 1884, with a first class in both parts of the tripos and a distinction in Ancient History. He became a University Extension lecturer.

#6557

Louis Halphen

1880 - 1950 (70 years)

Louis Sigismond Isaac Halphen was a French medieval specialist and the author of many important books over a long career. He was noteworthy as the editor of a modern edition of the famous classic Einhard's "Vie de Charlemagne" , He was also known as being one of the general editors of the monumental series Peuples et civilisations.

#6558

Luc Lacourcière

1910 - 1989 (79 years)

Luc Lacourcière, CC was a Quebec writer and ethnographer, who established himself during his lifetime as a leading figure in folklore studies. Trained by Marius Barbeau, he in turn influenced renowned researchers such as linguist Claude Poirier. In 1944, Lacourcière founded the Archives de folklore , which he directed until 1975. Since 1978, a Luc-Lacourcière medal has been awarded every two years.

#6559

Robert Howard Hodgkin

Robert Howard Hodgkin

1877 - 1951 (74 years)

Robert Howard Hodgkin , who went by Robin, was an English historian. Hodgkin taught at the Queen's College, Oxford, from 1900 to 1937 and served as its provost from 1937 until 1946. He was particularly known for his 1935 work, A History of the Anglo-Saxons, and for his 1949 book, Six Centuries of an Oxford College.

#6560

J. B. Black

1883 - 1964 (81 years)

John Bennett Black was a Scottish historian whose primary topic of study was of Elizabethan England. From 1930 to 1953 he was Burnett-Fletcher Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen where a prize is awarded each year in his name.

#6561

Elwyn B. Robinson

1905 - 1985 (80 years)

Elwyn B. Robinson was an American historian of the North American Great Plains who focused on the US state of North Dakota. He was a professor of history at the University of North Dakota from 1953 until his retirement in 1970. He is notable both for his radio presentations “Heroes of Dakota” and for his comprehensive work History of North Dakota, which received the Award of Merit of the American Association for State and Local History. The history contained his most famous thesis, the six themes of North Dakota history, which were widely publicized and reprinted and proved to be a dominan...

#6562

Hendrik Willem van Loon

Hendrik Willem van Loon

1882 - 1944 (62 years)

Hendrik Willem van Loon was a Dutch-American historian, journalist, and children's book author. Life Van Loon was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the son of Hendrik Willem van Loon and Elisabeth Johanna Hanken. He immigrated to the United States in 1902 to study at Harvard University and then Cornell University, where he received his AB in 1905. In 1906 he married Eliza Ingersoll Bowditch , daughter of a Harvard professor, by whom he had two sons, Henry Bowditch and Gerard Willem. The newlyweds moved to Germany, where van Loon received his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1911 with a dissertation that became his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic .

#6563

Ernesto Buonaiuti

1881 - 1946 (65 years)

Ernesto Buonaiuti was an Italian historian, philosopher of religion, Catholic priest and anti-fascist. He lost his chair at the University of Rome owing to his opposition to the Fascists. As a scholar in History of Christianity and religious philosophy he was one of the most important exponents of the modernist current.

#6564

Frank Heywood Hodder

Frank Heywood Hodder

1860 - 1935 (75 years)

Frank Heywood Hodder was an American historian and a professor first at Cornell University and later at the University of Kansas. Biography Hodder took his degrees from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1883, studying under Charles Kendall Adams. He then served in the Federal government at Washington, D.C., through 1885. Hodder later studied in Germany at the universities of Göttingen and Freiburg, 1890-1891 and took a full professorship at Kansas in the early 1890s, and was elevated the chairman of the History Department in 1908. Hodder was a member of the Organization of America...

#6565

Bogusław Leśnodorski

Bogusław Leśnodorski

1914 - 1985 (71 years)

Bogusław Leśnodorski was a Polish historian, professor of the University of Warsaw and author of many books and articles. He was editor of "Kwartalnik Historyczny" from 1953 to 1974. Further reading Anna Rosner: Bogusław Leśnodorski. In: Profesorowie Wydziału Prawa i Administracji Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 1808-2008. Grażyna Bałtruszajtys . Wyd. 1. Warszawa: Lexis-Nexis, 2008, s. 267-269. .

#6566

Nicholas Adontz

Nicholas Adontz

1871 - 1942 (71 years)

Nicholas Adontz was an Armenian historian, specialising in Byzantine and Armenian studies, and a philologist. Adontz was the author of Armenia in the Period of Justinian, a highly influential work and landmark study on the social and political structures of early Medieval Armenia.

#6567

Furio Jesi

1941 - 1980 (39 years)

Furio Jesi was an Italian historian, writer, archaeologist, and philosopher. Biography The only son of "war hero" Bruno Jesi, Furio Jesi was an independent scholar of myth, Egyptology, history of Mediterranean religions, philology and archeology, most notable for his work on extending the ideas of Károly Kerényi including studies of the science of myth and the difference between classic Myths and "Technified Myths".

#6568

Boris Porshnev

1905 - 1972 (67 years)

Boris Fyodorovich Porshnev was a Soviet historian known for his works on popular revolts in Ancien Régime France and a doctor of social sciences working on psychology, prehistory, and neurolinguistics as relating to the origins of man.

#6569

Joseph Vogt

1895 - 1986 (91 years)

Joseph Vogt was a German classical historian, one of the leading 20th-century experts on Roman history. Following his studies at the universities of Tübingen and Berlin, he earned his doctorate in history in 1921 and his Habilitation in 1923. Subsequently he became Professor of Classical History at the University of Tübingen. He was Professor at the universities of Würzburg , Breslau , Tübingen and Freiburg im Breisgau , before he returned to Tübingen again in 1946 and taught there until his retirement in 1963.

#6570

Hernán Ramírez Necochea

1917 - 1979 (62 years)

Hernán Ramírez Necochea was a Chilean Marxist historian. In 1968 he became director of the faculty of Philosophy and Education in the University of Chile. Following the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat he went to exile in Paris, France where he lectured in the Paris-Sorbonne University.

#6571

Pinkhos Churgin

1894 - 1957 (63 years)

Pinkhos Churgin was an Israeli scholar who was the first President of Bar-Ilan University. Biography Churgin was born in Pohost, Belorussia, a shtetl near Pinsk. In 1907 he and his parents immigrated to Palestine, and settled in Jerusalem. In 1910 he went to study at the Volozhin Yeshiva. Churgin returned to Palestine in 1912. In 1915 he went to the United States and taught Hebrew. He studied as an undergraduate at Clark College, and then at Yale University, earning a Ph.D. in the field of Semitics, as a student of the famous researcher Charles C. Torrey. His dissertation, "Targum Jonathan to the Prophets", was published by Yale in 1927 and has since become a classic.

#6572

Jan Zawidzki

1866 - 1928 (62 years)

Jan Wiktor Tomasz Zawidzki was a Polish physical chemist and historian of chemistry. He researched mainly chemical kinetics, thermochemistry and autocatalysis. Zawidzki was a professor of the Akademia Rolnicza in Dublany , Jagiellonian University , University of Warsaw , rector of the University of Warsaw , member of the Academy of Learning , co-founder of the Polish Chemical Society and magazine Roczniki Chemii.

#6573

Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich

1901 - 1979 (78 years)

Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich was a German novelist and historian of the classical period. As a writer she concerned herself with two distinct cultures: that of Ancient Greece and that of the "North American Indians" . As an East German academic she was an influential authority on Ancient Greece. Away from the university she wrote novels concerned with the North American Indians which became classics of East German children's literature.

#6574

Boris Eikhenbaum

1886 - 1959 (73 years)

Boris Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum was a Russian Empire and Soviet literary scholar and historian of Russian literature. He is a representative of Russian formalism. Biography Eikhenbaum was born in Voronezh, the grandson of Jewish mathematician and poet Jacob Eichenbaum. His childhood and adolescence were spent there. After finishing elementary school in 1905, Eikhenbaum went to Petersburg and enrolled in the Military Medical Academy, soon thereafter in 1906, he enrolled in the biological faculty of the Free High School of P. F. Lesgaft. In parallel he studied music . In 1907 Eikhenbaum left this school and enrolled in the Musical school of E.

#6575

Nalini Kanta Bhattasali

Nalini Kanta Bhattasali

1888 - 1947 (59 years)

Nalini Kanta Bhattasali was an Indian Bengali historian, archaeologist, numismatist, epigraphist and antiquarian. Career Bhattasali completed his master's degree in 1912. He then joined the Comilla Victoria College as a teacher in history. After that he joined Balurghat High School as its headmaster. In July 1914, he joined Dhaka Museum as its curator, a position he held until his death in 1947. He wrote reports and research papers on the contribution of important objects to the history and chronology of ancient Bengal. East Bengal was his special field of study.

#6576

Ruth Ann Musick

1897 - 1974 (77 years)

Ruth Ann Musick was an American writer and folklorist specializing in West Virginia. She was the sister of artist Archie Musick and niece of writer John R. Musick. Biography Youth and education Born in Kirksville, Missouri, to Levi Prince Musick and Zada Goeghegan, Musick received a Bachelor of Science degree in Education from Kirksville State Teacher's College in 1919. From September 1919 to June 1921 Musick taught at Luana High School, Luana, Iowa, before moving to Garwin, Iowa, in 1921, where she taught at Garwin High School until June 1922. She then continued her education at the State University of Iowa, graduating with a Master of Science in mathematics in 1928.

#6577

Paul Kluke

1908 - 1990 (82 years)

Professor Paul Otto Alfred Kluke was director of the German Historical Institute London from August 1975 to July 1977.

#6578

Lawrence Henry Yaw Ofosu-Appiah

1920 - 1990 (70 years)

Lawrence Henry Yaw Ofosu-Appiah was a Ghanaian academic who taught classics at the University of Ghana and was subsequently Director of the Encyclopedia Africana. Background Ofosu-Appiah was born in a village called Kukua near Adawso in the Eastern Region of Ghana. His parents were Seth Fianko — a teacher and a descendant of the royal family of Kubease, Larteh, Ghana — and Agnes Fianko — also a teacher and a descendant of the royal family of Akropong, Akwapim, Ghana. His education started at Adawso Presbyterian Primary School. In January 1932, he joined Achimota Secondary School for his secondary education.

#6579

Peter Berglar

1919 - 1989 (70 years)

Peter Berglar was a German historian, professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Cologne, and was known for his many publications. His biography of Thomas More is considered one of the best.

#6580

Maurice Garland Fulton

1877 - 1955 (78 years)

Maurice Garland Fulton was an American historian and English professor. He was a professor of English and History at the New Mexico Military Institute for three decades. He was the author or editor of several books, and "an authority on the Lincoln County War and Southwestern history."

#6581

Paul Wentzcke

1879 - 1960 (81 years)

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Paul Wentzcke was a German academic, archivist, and historian. He proposed a national flag for West Germany in 1948. The flag that Paul Wentzcke proposed for West Germany, called the "Republican Tricolour"

#6582

Julian P. Boyd

1903 - 1980 (77 years)

Julian Parks Boyd was an American professor who was Professor of history at Princeton University. He served as president of the American Historical Association in 1964. For his efforts in preserving the site of the Battle of Hastings, he was appointed an honorary Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

#6583

Arthur Maheux

1884 - 1967 (83 years)

Monsignor Joseph Thomas Arthur Maheux, SM, OBE, FRSC was a Canadian priest and historian. He was a leading proponent of Canadian unity as well as a trenchant critic of Quebec society. He was president of the Société du parler français au Canada from 1924 to 1925 and president of the Canadian Historical Association from 1948 to 1949.

#6584

Viola Florence Barnes

1885 - 1979 (94 years)

Viola Florence Barnes was an American historian and writer, one of the most prominent female historians in the US in the first half of 20th century. Life Born in Albion, Nebraska, Barnes was educated at the University of Nebraska and Yale University. She taught at Smith College and Mount Holyoke College . In 1940, she was honored by the Women's Centennial Congress as one of a hundred successful women in fields formerly closed to women.

#6585

Leland Sage

1899 - 1989 (90 years)

Leland Livingston Sage was an American professor emeritus of history at the University of Northern Iowa. He was deeply interested in Iowa history, and wrote two books on it, both of which won national recognition from the American Association for State and Local History. In 1983, Sage was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

#6586

Herodotus

484 BC - 425 BC (59 years)

Herodotus was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He is known for having written the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. Herodotus was the first writer to perform systematic investigation of historical events. He is referred to as "The Father of History", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero.

#6587

Charlemagne

748 - 814 (66 years)

Charlemagne was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Emperor from 800, all until his death. Charlemagne succeeded in uniting the majority of Western and Central Europe, and he was the first recognized emperor to rule Western Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire approximately three centuries earlier. Charlemagne's rule saw a program of political and societal changes that had a lasting impact on Europe in the Middle Ages.

#6588

Strabo

64 BC - 23 (87 years)

Strabo was a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian who lived in Asia Minor during the transitional period of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Life Strabo was born to an affluent family from Amaseia in Pontus in around 64BC. His family had been involved in politics since at least the reign of Mithridates V. Strabo was related to Dorylaeus on his mother's side. Several other family members, including his paternal grandfather, had served Mithridates VI during the Mithridatic Wars. As the war drew to a close, Strabo's grandfather had turned several Pontic fortresses over to the Romans.

#6589

Plutarch

40 - 120 (80 years)

Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus .

#6590

Voltaire

1694 - 1778 (84 years)

François-Marie Arouet , known by his nom de plume M. de Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, philosopher , satirist, and historian. Famous for his wit and his criticism of Christianity and of slavery, Voltaire was an advocate of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state.

#6591

Tacitus

54 - 120 (66 years)

Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus , was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories —examine the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors . These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus to the death of Domitian , although there are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts.

#6592

Alexander the Great

Alexander the Great

356 BC - 323 BC (33 years)

Alexander III of Macedon , commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip II to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, and spent most of his ruling years conducting a lengthy military campaign throughout Western Asia and Egypt. By the age of 30, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India. He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered to be one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders.

#6593

Thucydides

460 BC - 395 BC (65 years)

Thucydides was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.

#6594

David Hume

1711 - 1776 (65 years)

David Hume was a Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, historian, economist, librarian, and essayist, who is best known today for his highly influential system of philosophical empiricism, skepticism, and naturalism. Beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature , Hume strove to create a naturalistic science of man that examined the psychological basis of human nature. Hume followed John Locke in rejecting the existence of innate ideas, concluding that all human knowledge derives solely from experience. This places him with Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley as an empiric...

#6595

Livy

59 BC - 17 (76 years)

Titus Livius , known in English as Livy , was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled , covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding in 753 BC through the reign of Augustus in Livy's own lifetime. He was on good terms with members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and was a friend of Augustus, whose young grandnephew, the future emperor Claudius, he encouraged to take up the writing of history.

#6596

Joan of Arc

1412 - 1431 (19 years)

Joan of Arc is a patron saint of France, honored as a defender of the French nation for her role in the siege of Orléans and her insistence on the coronation of Charles VII of France during the Hundred Years' War. Claiming to be acting under divine guidance, she became a military leader who transcended gender roles and gained recognition as a savior of France.

#6597

Edward Gibbon

1737 - 1794 (57 years)

Edward Gibbon was an English essayist, historian, and politician. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organised religion.

#6598

Josephus

37 - 100 (63 years)

Flavius Josephus was a Roman–Jewish historian and military leader. Best known for writing The Jewish War, he was born in Jerusalem—then part of the Roman province of Judea—to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry.

#6599

W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois

1868 - 1963 (95 years)

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, and Pan-Africanist civil rights activist. Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Du Bois grew up in a relatively tolerant and integrated community. After completing graduate work at the Friedrich Wilhelm University and Harvard University, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, he became a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University. Du Bois was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909.

#6600

Polybius

200 BC - 120 BC (80 years)

Polybius was a Greek historian of the middle Hellenistic period. He is noted for his work , a universal history documenting the rise of Rome in the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries BC. It covered the period of 264–146 BC, recording in detail events in Italy, Iberia, Greece, Macedonia, Syria, Egypt and Africa, and documented the Punic Wars and Macedonian Wars among many others.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions