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).
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List of the most influential people in History,
#6801
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.
Go to Profile#6802
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.
Go to Profile#6803
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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Ahmet Refik Altınay
1881 - 1937 (56 years)
Ahmet Refik Altınay was a Turkish historian, academic, writer and poet, who gave history lectures at Darülfünun after the First World War. Life Altınay attended Vişnezade Primary School, Beşiktaş Military Secondary School and Kuleli Military School. In 1889 he graduated at the top of his class and joined the military, eventually rising to the rank of captain. As a young lieutenant, Altınay was given teaching jobs instead of being sent out into the field. For four years, he taught geography at the Toptaşı and Soğukçeşme Military Secondary Schools. In 1902 he became a French teacher, and in 1908, a history teacher.
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Constantine Paparrigopoulos
1815 - 1891 (76 years)
Constantine Paparrigopoulos was a Greek historian, who is considered the founder of modern Greek historiography. He is the founder of the concept of historical continuity of Greece from antiquity to the present, establishing the tripartite division of Greek history in ancient, medieval and modern, and sought to set aside the prevailing views at the time that the Byzantine Empire was a period of decadence and degeneration.
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Walter Ullmann
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Walter Ullmann was an Austrian-Jewish scholar who left Austria in the 1930s and settled in the United Kingdom, where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a recognised authority on medieval political thought, and in particular legal theory, an area in which he published prolifically.
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James IV of Scotland
1473 - 1513 (40 years)
James IV was King of Scotland from 11 June 1488 until his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He inherited the throne at the age of fifteen on the death of his father, James III, at the Battle of Sauchieburn, following a rebellion in which the younger James was the figurehead of the rebels. James IV is generally regarded as the most successful of the Stewart monarchs. He was responsible for a major expansion of the Scottish royal navy, which included the founding of two royal dockyards and the acquisition or construction of 38 ships, including the Michael, the largest warship of its time.
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Jacobus de Voragine
1228 - 1298 (70 years)
Jacobus de Voragine was an Italian chronicler and archbishop of Genoa. He was the author, or more accurately the compiler, of the Golden Legend, a collection of the legendary lives of the greater saints of the medieval church that was one of the most popular religious works of the Middle Ages.
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Hastings Rashdall
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Hastings Rashdall was an English philosopher, theologian, historian, and Anglican priest. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and he was a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.
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Matthew Paris
1200 - 1259 (59 years)
Matthew Paris, also known as Matthew of Paris , sometimes confused with the nonexistent Matthew of Westminster, was an English Benedictine monk, chronicler, artist in illuminated manuscripts, and cartographer who was based at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire. He authored a number of historical works, many of which he scribed and illuminated himself, typically in drawings partly coloured with watercolour washes, sometimes called "tinted drawings". Some were written in Latin, others in Anglo-Norman or French verse.
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Hans Rosenberg
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Hans Rosenberg was a German refugee historian whose works influenced a whole generation of post-war German scholars. Life Rosenberg was born in Hannover. Though of Jewish ancestry, he was raised as a Protestant, in Cologne. He took his PhD there in 1927 under Friedrich Meinecke, and received his Habilitation in 1932, despite strong conservative opposition. As the Great Depression unfolded, his attention shifted from the history of ideas and nationalism, which he studied under Meinecke, to economic cycles. The result of this was a 'stunningly original work' on the world economic crisis of 185...
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Henry James Sumner Maine
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, , was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his book Ancient Law that law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status dealing with a particular group while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and...
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Nikolai Lukin
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Nikolai Mikhailovich Lukin was a Soviet Marxist historian and publicist. He was a leader among Soviet historians in the 1930s, after the death of Mikhail Pokrovsky. He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party from 1904.
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Sergei Skazkin
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Sergei Danilovich Skazkin was a Soviet historian, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences . Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences . Skazkin graduated from Moscow State University in 1915 and began teaching at the university in 1920. In 1935, he became Professor of the Faculty of History, and from 1949 he was Head of the Department of Medieval History. He succeeded E. A. Kosminsky.
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Timothy Dwight IV
1752 - 1817 (65 years)
Timothy Dwight was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College . Early life Timothy Dwight was born May 14, 1752, in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Dwight family had a long association with Yale College, as it was then known. Dwight's paternal grandfather, Colonel Timothy Dwight, was born 19 October 1694, and died April 30, 1771. His father, a merchant and farmer known as Major Timothy Dwight, was born May 27, 1726, graduated from Yale in 1744, served in the American Revolutionary War, and died June 10, 1777.
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James I of Aragon
1208 - 1276 (68 years)
James I the Conqueror was King of Aragon and Lord of Montpellier from 1213 to 1276; King of Majorca from 1231 to 1276; and Valencia from 1238 to 1276 and Count of Barcelona. His long reign of 62 years is not only the longest of any Iberian monarch, but one of the longest monarchical reigns in history, ahead of Hirohito but remaining behind Queen Victoria and Ferdinand III of Naples and Sicily. He saw the expansion of the Crown of Aragon in three directions: Languedoc to the north, the Balearic Islands to the southeast, and Valencia to the south. By a treaty with Louis IX of France, he achieve...
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Bernard DeVoto
1897 - 1955 (58 years)
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian, conservationist, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described DeVoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes i...
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Jared Sparks
1789 - 1866 (77 years)
Jared Sparks was an American historian, educator, and Unitarian minister. He served as President of Harvard College from 1849 to 1853. Biography Born in Willington, Connecticut, Sparks studied in the common schools, worked for a time at the carpenter's trade, and then became a schoolteacher. In 1809–1811, he attended the Phillips Exeter Academy, where he met John G. Palfrey, who became a lifelong friend.
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John Fiske
1842 - 1901 (59 years)
John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
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Moritz Cantor
1829 - 1920 (91 years)
Moritz Benedikt Cantor was a German historian of mathematics. Biography Cantor was born at Mannheim. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch of which had established itself in Russia. In his early youth, Moritz Cantor was not strong enough to go to school, and his parents decided to educate him at home. Later, however, he was admitted to an advanced class of the Gymnasium in Mannheim. From there he went to the University of Heidelberg in 1848, and soon after to the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Gauss and Weber...
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Curt Weibull
1886 - 1991 (105 years)
Curt Weibull was a Swedish historian, educator and author. Biography Curt Hugo Johannes Weibull was born in Lund, Sweden. He was a member of the Weibull family. He was the son of professor Martin Weibull and brother of historian Lauritz Weibull . He and his brother both attended the University of Lund. The Weibull brothers have been characterized as influential in raising the scientific standards of history research in Sweden and Denmark.
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George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, , styled Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and then Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. From 1919 to 1924 he served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
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Aziz Suryal Atiya
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Aziz Suryal Atiya was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies. Atiya was the founder of the Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo in the 1950s, and was also the founder of the Middle East Center, University of Utah.
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Francis James Child
1825 - 1896 (71 years)
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
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Heinrich Luden
1778 - 1847 (69 years)
Heinrich Luden was a German historian. Luden was born in Loxstedt in the district of Stade. At the age of 17 Luden went to the Domschule in Bremen. He subsequently studied theology at the University of Göttingen, where he came under the influence of the historians August Ludwig von Schlözer and later Johannes von Müller and devoted himself to the study of history. He was briefly employed as a private tutor in the house of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in Berlin, in 1805 producing his thesis in Jena on Christian Thomasius. He further published biographies of Hugo Grotius and Sir William Temple ...
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Charles Gide
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His nephew was the author André Gide.
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Ziauddin Barani
1285 - 1357 (72 years)
Ziauddin Barani was an Indian Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi , a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq to the first six years of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq; and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, although according to M. Athar Ali it was not based on race or even like the caste system, but taking as a model of ...
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Charles Homer Haskins
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Charles Homer Haskins was a history professor at Harvard University. He was an American historian of the Middle Ages, and an advisor to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. He is widely recognized as the first academic medieval historian in the United States, and the Haskins Medal was named in his honor.
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Meir Balaban
1877 - 1942 (65 years)
Meir Balaban or Majer Samuel Bałaban was one of the most outstanding historians of Polish and Galician Jews, and the founder of Polish Jewish historiography. Early years Balaban was born in 1877 in the city of Lviv . He received a traditional education at home and traditional Jewish schooling in a cheder.
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William Robert Shepherd
1871 - 1934 (63 years)
William Robert Shepherd was an American cartographer and historian specializing in American and Latin American history. In 1896, Shepherd completed his PhD at Columbia University. He then studied in Berlin and finally became professor of history at Columbia University. He is best known for his Historical Atlas, published in several editions during the early twentieth century. He is considered a pioneer in the field of Latin American history. Shepherd's address to the 1909 meeting of the American Historical Association was "probably the first time that a part of the program of the annual meeting was devoted to the history of other peoples in the Americas".
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Semyon Vengerov
1855 - 1920 (65 years)
Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov was the preeminent literary historian of Imperial Russia. Vengerov was the son of Chonon Vengerov and memoirist Pauline Wengeroff, a prominent Jewish family. His parents were of the few acculturated Russian Jews, and sent him to a Christian school, of which he once was expelled for refusing to kneel before an icon. As academic careers were barred to Jews, he converted to Orthodoxy after matriculating. He was the pater familias of an artistic clan that included his sisters Isabelle Vengerova, a co-founder of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and Zinaida Venger...
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Catharine Macaulay
1731 - 1791 (60 years)
Catharine Macaulay , was an English Whig republican historian. Early life Catharine Macaulay was a daughter of John Sawbridge and his wife Elizabeth Wanley of Olantigh. Sawbridge was a landed proprietor from Wye, Kent, whose ancestors were Warwickshire yeomanry.
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George Buchanan
1506 - 1582 (76 years)
George Buchanan was a Scottish historian and humanist scholar. According to historian Keith Brown, Buchanan was "the most profound intellectual sixteenth century Scotland produced." His ideology of resistance to royal usurpation gained widespread acceptance during the Scottish Reformation. Brown says the ease with which King James VII was deposed in 1689 shows the power of Buchananite ideas.
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Odoric of Pordenone
1286 - 1331 (45 years)
Odoric of Pordenone , was a Franciscan friar and missionary explorer from the historical Patriarch of Friuli in northeast Italy. He journeyed through India, Sumatra, Java, and China, where he spent three years in the imperial capital of Khanbaliq . After more than ten years of travel, he returned home and dictated a narrative of his experiences and observations called the Relatio, highlighting various cultural, religious, and social peculiarities he encountered in Asia.
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Pei Songzhi
372 - 451 (79 years)
Pei Songzhi , courtesy name Shiqi, was a Chinese historian and politician who lived in the late Eastern Jin dynasty and the Liu Song dynasty. His ancestral home was in Wenxi County, Shanxi, but he moved to the Jiangnan region later. He is best known for making annotations to the historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms written by Chen Shou in the third century, providing additional details omitted from the original work. His commentary, completed in 429, became integral to later editions of the Sanguozhi, making the joint work three times as long as the original. His son, Pei Yin , and g...
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Frederick Merk
1887 - 1977 (90 years)
Frederick Merk was an American historian. He taught at Harvard University from 1924 to 1956. Biography Frederick Merk was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1887. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1911 and then worked for five years at the Wisconsin Historical Society. In 1916 he went to Harvard University to study under Frederick Jackson Turner. Upon Turner's retirement in 1924, Merk took up his position with Turner's support. He taught at Harvard until 1956, and oversaw several dozen graduate students.
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Erik Pontoppidan
1698 - 1764 (66 years)
Erik Ludvigsen Pontoppidan was a Danish author, a Lutheran bishop of the Church of Norway, a historian, and an antiquarian. His Catechism of the Church of Denmark heavily influenced Danish and Norwegian religious thought and practice for roughly the next 200 years after its 1737 publication.
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Stanoje Stanojević
1874 - 1937 (63 years)
Stanoje Stanojević was a Serbian historian, university professor, academic and a leader of many scientific and publishing enterprises. Career Stanojević finished university studies in Belgrade's Grandes écoles and post-graduate studies in philosophy in Vienna, where he received his PhD in 1896. He was a student of Konstantin Jireček, Vatroslav Jagić and Karl Krumbacher, and a follower of Ilarion Ruvarac and his school of historiography. Stanojević belongs to the first generation of Serbian historians educated abroad, at European universities. In 1903, he became a professor of the Grande école , his alma mater.
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John Bach McMaster
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
John Bach McMaster was an American historian. McMaster was born in Brooklyn, New York. His father, a native of New York, was a banker and planter at New Orleans at the beginning of the Civil War. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1872, worked as a civil engineer in 1873–1877, was instructor in civil engineering at Princeton University in 1877–1883, and in 1883 became professor of American history in the University of Pennsylvania. McMaster was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1884. McMaster was the second president of The Franklin Inn Club, servin...
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Hector Boece
1465 - 1536 (71 years)
Hector Boece , known in Latin as Hector Boecius or Boethius, was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and the first Principal of King's College in Aberdeen, a predecessor of the University of Aberdeen.
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Jean van Heijenoort
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Jean Louis Maxime van Heijenoort was a historian of mathematical logic. He was also a personal secretary to Leon Trotsky from 1932 to 1939, and an American Trotskyist until 1947. Life Jean van Heijenoort, a renowned mathematician and logician, was born in Creil, France. His parents had immigrated from the Netherlands before his birth. Unfortunately, when van Heijenoort was only two years old, his father passed away, leaving his family in financial hardship. Despite these challenges, he pursued his education and became proficient in French. Throughout his life, he maintained strong connection...
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Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr
624 - 692 (68 years)
Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam was the leader of a caliphate based in Mecca that rivaled the Umayyads from 683 until his death. The son of al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam and Asma bint Abi Bakr, and the grandson of the first caliph Abu Bakr, Ibn al-Zubayr belonged to the Quraysh, the leading tribe of the nascent Muslim community, and was the first child born to the Muhajirun, Islam's earliest converts, thus a Companion of the Prophet. As a youth, he participated in the early Muslim conquests alongside his father in Syria and Egypt, and later played a role in the Muslim conquests of North Africa and northern Iran in 647 and 650, respectively.
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Lin Zexu
1785 - 1850 (65 years)
Lin Zexu , courtesy name Yuanfu, was a Chinese political philosopher and politician. He was a head of state , Governor General, scholar-official, and under the Daoguang Emperor of the Qing dynasty best known for his role in the First Opium War of 1839–42. He was from Fuzhou, Fujian Province. Lin's forceful opposition to the opium trade was a primary catalyst for the First Opium War. He is praised for his constant position on the "moral high ground" in his fight, but he is also blamed for a rigid approach which failed to account for the domestic and international complexities of the problem. Th...
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Ibn Sa'd
784 - 845 (61 years)
Abū ‘Abd Allāh Muḥammad ibn Sa‘d ibn Manī‘ al-Baṣrī al-Hāshimī or simply Ibn Sa'd and nicknamed Scribe of Waqidi , was a scholar and Arabian biographer. Ibn Sa'd was born in 784/785 CE and died on 16 February 845 CE . Ibn Sa'd was from Basra, but lived mostly in Baghdad, hence the nisba al-Basri and al-Baghdadi respectively. He is said to have died at the age of 62 in Baghdad and was buried in the cemetery of the Syrian gate.
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Percy Ernst Schramm
1894 - 1970 (76 years)
Percy Ernst Schramm was a German historian who specialized in art history and medieval history. Schramm was a Chair and Professor of History at the University of Göttingen from 1929 to 1963. Early life and education Schramm was born to a wealthy and cosmopolitan family in Hamburg, that belonged to the class of Hanseatic families. His father, Max Schramm, was a lawyer, senator and second mayor from 1925 to 1928. His grandfather Ernst Schramm had been a major sugar merchant in Hamburg and Brazil. His mother Olga O'Swald, grandniece of William Henry O'Swald, also belonged to a prominent Hansea...
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Francesco Guicciardini
1483 - 1540 (57 years)
Francesco Guicciardini was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, The History of Italy, Guicciardini paved the way for a new style in historiography with his use of government sources to support arguments and the realistic analysis of the people and events of his time.
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Charles I of Hungary
1288 - 1342 (54 years)
Charles I, also known as Charles Robert , was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1308 to his death. He was a member of the Capetian House of Anjou and the only son of Charles Martel, Prince of Salerno. His father was the eldest son of Charles II of Naples and Mary of Hungary. Mary laid claim to Hungary after her brother, Ladislaus IV of Hungary, died in 1290, but the Hungarian prelates and lords elected her cousin, Andrew III, king. Instead of abandoning her claim to Hungary, she transferred it to her son, Charles Martel, and after his death in 1295, to her grandson, Charles. On the other hand, ...
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