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,
#6851
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...
Go to Profile#6852
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.
Go to Profile#6853
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.
Go to Profile#6854
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."
Go to Profile#6855
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.
Go to Profile#6856
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.
Go to Profile#6857
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.
Go to Profile#6858
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.
Go to Profile#6859
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.
Go to Profile#6860
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.
Go to Profile#6861
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.
Go to Profile#6862
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 ...
Go to Profile#6863
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.
Go to Profile#6864
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."
Go to Profile#6865
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.
Go to Profile#6866
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.
Go to Profile#6867
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.
Go to Profile#6868
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.
Go to Profile#6869
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.
Go to Profile#6870
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".
Go to Profile#6871
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.
Go to Profile#6872
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.
Go to Profile#6873
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.
Go to Profile#6874
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...
Go to Profile#6875
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.
Go to Profile#6876
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.
Go to Profile#6877
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.
Go to Profile#6878
John Knox Laughton
1830 - 1915 (85 years)
Sir John Knox Laughton was a British naval historian and arguably the first to delineate the importance of the subject of Naval history as an independent field of study. Beginning his working life as a mathematically trained civilian instructor for the Royal Navy, he later became professor of modern history at King's College London and a co-founder of the Navy Records Society. A prolific writer of lives, he penned the biographies of more than 900 naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography.
Go to Profile#6879
Vasile Pârvan
1882 - 1927 (45 years)
Vasile Pârvan was a Romanian historian and archaeologist. Biography Pârvan was born in Perchiu, Huruiești commune, Bacău County. He came from a modest family, being the first child of the teacher Andrei Pârvan and of Aristița Chiriac . He received the first name Vasile, as well as his uncle, Vasile Conta .
Go to Profile#6880
Goldwin Smith
1823 - 1910 (87 years)
Goldwin Smith was a British historian and journalist, active in the United Kingdom and Canada. In the 1860s he also taught at Cornell University in the United States. Life and career Early life and education Smith was born at Reading, Berkshire. He was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, and after a brilliant undergraduate career he was elected to a fellowship at University College, Oxford. He threw his energy into the cause of university reform with another fellow of University College, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. On the Royal Commission of 1850 to inquire into the reform of ...
Go to Profile#6881
Basil II
958 - 1025 (67 years)
Basil II Porphyrogenitus , nicknamed the Bulgar Slayer , was the senior Byzantine emperor from 976 to 1025. He and his brother Constantine VIII were crowned before their father Romanos II died in 963, but they were too young to rule. The throne thus went to two generals, Nikephoros Phokas and John Tzimiskes before Basil became senior emperor, though his influential great-uncle Basil Lekapenos remained as the de facto ruler until 985. His reign of 49 years and 11 months was the longest of any Roman emperor.
Go to Profile#6882
William Wilson Hunter
1840 - 1900 (60 years)
Sir William Wilson Hunter was a Scottish historian, statistician, a compiler and a member of the Indian Civil Service. He is most known for The Imperial Gazetteer of India on which he started working in 1869, and which was eventually published in nine volumes in 1881, then fourteen, and later as a twenty-six volume set after his death.
Go to Profile#6883
Orderic Vitalis
1075 - 1142 (67 years)
Orderic Vitalis was an English chronicler and Benedictine monk who wrote one of the great contemporary chronicles of 11th- and 12th-century Normandy and Anglo-Norman England. Working out of the Abbey of Saint-Evroul, he is credited with writing the Historia Ecclesiatica, a work detailing the history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the birth of Jesus Christ into his own age. The son of a cleric, he was of born into a noble family, claiming both English and Norman heritage. While he is known primarily for the Historia Ecclesiastica, he also was able to ascend to various positions within the church including that script master, librarian, and cantor.
Go to Profile#6884
Robert Wipper
1859 - 1954 (95 years)
Robert Yuryevich Wipper was a Russian, Latvian and Soviet historian of classical antiquity, and the medieval and modern periods. Biography Born in Moscow, Wipper graduated from the faculty of history and philology at the Moscow University in 1880. In 1894, he had become the Doctor of General History and in 1901–1919 was the Professor in Ordinary of the Department of General History. He later attained the professorship. Wipper lectured the history of prehistoric culture, the history of the Ancient East, Greece, the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, as well as social ideas and the methodology of history.
Go to Profile#6885
Ōkubo Toshimichi
1830 - 1878 (48 years)
was a Japanese statesman and one of the Three Great Nobles regarded as the main founders of modern Japan. Ōkubo was a samurai of the Satsuma Domain and joined the movement to overthrow the ruling Tokugawa Shogunate during the Bakumatsu period. Upon the founding of the new Empire of Japan, Ōkubo became a leading member of the Meiji Restoration and a prominent member of the Meiji oligarchy. Following his return from the Iwakura Mission in 1873, he became Lord of Home Affairs and used his office's authority to rapidly expand his influence within the Restoration government. Shortly thereafter, he had firmly established himself as the country's de facto dictator.
Go to Profile#6886
Francis Parkman
1823 - 1893 (70 years)
Francis Parkman Jr. was an American historian, best known as author of The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life and his monumental seven-volume France and England in North America. These works are still valued as historical sources and as literature. He was also a leading horticulturist, briefly a professor of horticulture at Harvard University and author of several books on the topic. Parkman wrote essays opposed to legal voting for women that continued to circulate long after his death. Parkman was a trustee of the Boston Athenæum from 1858 until his death in 1893.
Go to Profile#6887
Alexander Jannaeus
127 BC - 76 BC (51 years)
Alexander Jannaeus was the second king of the Hasmonean dynasty, who ruled over an expanding kingdom of Judaea from 103 to 76 BCE. A son of John Hyrcanus, he inherited the throne from his brother Aristobulus I, and married his brother's widow, Queen Salome Alexandra. From his conquests to expand the kingdom to a bloody civil war, Alexander's reign has been generalised as cruel and oppressive with never-ending conflict. The major historical sources of Alexander's life are Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War.
Go to Profile#6888
John William Draper
1811 - 1882 (71 years)
John William Draper was an English-born American scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with pioneering portrait photography and producing the first detailed photograph of the moon in 1840. He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#6889
Karl Julius Beloch
1854 - 1929 (75 years)
Karl Julius Beloch was a German classical and economic historian. Biography From 1872 to 1875, he studied classical philology and ancient history in Freiburg, Heidelberg and Rome, obtaining his PhD from the University of Rome in 1875 . In 1879 he became an associate professor at Rome, where, from 1891 to 1912, he served as a full professor of ancient history. In 1912/13, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Leipzig.
Go to Profile#6890
G. D. H. Cole
1889 - 1959 (70 years)
George Douglas Howard Cole was an English political theorist, economist, and historian. As a believer in common ownership of the means of production, he theorised guild socialism . He belonged to the Fabian Society and was an advocate for the co-operative movement.
Go to Profile#6891
Vasil Kanchov
1862 - 1902 (40 years)
Vasil Kanchov was a geographer, ethnographer and teacher who served as Minister of Education of Bulgaria. Early life and education Vasil Kanchov was born in Vratsa. Upon graduating from High school in Lom, Bulgaria, and later he entered the University of Harkov, then in the Russian empire. During the Serbo-Bulgarian War 1885 he suspended his education and took part in the war. Later, he went on to pursue studies at universities in Munich and Stuttgart, but in 1888 he interrupted his education again due to an illness.
Go to Profile#6892
Frederic William Maitland
1850 - 1906 (56 years)
Frederic William Maitland was an English historian and jurist who is regarded as the modern father of English legal history. From 1884 until his death in 1906, he was reader in English law, then Downing Professor of the Laws of England at the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#6893
Theodor Schieder
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Theodor Schieder was an influential mid-20th century German historian. Born in Oettingen, Western Bavaria, he relocated to Königsberg in East Prussia in 1934 at the age of 26. [p. 56] He joined the Nazi Party in 1937. During the Nazi era, Schieder became part of a group of German conservative historians antagonistic towards the Weimar Republic. He pursued a racially-oriented social history , and warned about the supposed dangers of Germans mixing with other nations. During this time, Schieder used ethnographic methods to justify German supremacy and expansion. He was the author of the "Memora...
Go to Profile#6894
Pierre Duhem
1861 - 1916 (55 years)
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem was a French theoretical physicist who worked on thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity. Duhem was also a historian of science, noted for his work on the European Middle Ages, which is regarded as having created the field of the history of medieval science. As a philosopher of science, he is remembered principally for his views on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria .
Go to Profile#6895
Albert Soboul
1914 - 1982 (68 years)
Albert Marius Soboul was a historian of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. A professor at the Sorbonne, he was chair of the History of the French Revolution and author of numerous influential works of history and historical interpretation. In his lifetime, he was internationally recognized as the foremost French authority on the Revolutionary era.
Go to Profile#6896
Hans Rothfels
1891 - 1976 (85 years)
Hans Rothfels was a German nationalist conservative historian. He supported an idea of authoritarian German state, dominance of Germany over Europe and was hostile to Germany's eastern neighbours. After his applications for honorary Aryan status were rejected, due to his Jewish ancestry and increased persecution of Jewish people by Nazis, he was forced to emigrate to the United Kingdom and later to the United States during the Second World War, after which he became opposed to the Nazi regime. Rothfels returned to West Germany after 1945 where he continued to influence history teaching and be...
Go to Profile#6897
Nicolae Bălcescu
1819 - 1852 (33 years)
Nicolae Bălcescu was a Romanian Wallachian soldier, historian, journalist, and leader of the 1848 Wallachian Revolution. Early life Born in Bucharest to a family of low-ranking nobility, he used his mother's maiden name, in place of his father's name, Petrescu . His siblings were Costache, Barbu, Sevasta and Marghioala, and his father died in 1824.
Go to Profile#6898
Ephorus
400 BC - 330 BC (70 years)
Ephorus of Cyme was an ancient Greek historian known for his universal history. Biography Information on his biography is limited. He was born in Cyme, Aeolia, and together with the historian Theopompus was a pupil of Isocrates in rhetoric. He does not seem to have made much progress as a speaker, and at the suggestion of Isocrates himself he took up literary composition and the study of history. According to Plutarch, Ephorus declined Alexander the Great's offer to join him on his Persian campaign as the official historiographer. His son Demophilus followed in his footsteps as a historian.
Go to Profile#6899
František Graus
1921 - 1989 (68 years)
František Graus was a Czech historian whose work focused on the social and economic history of medieval Europe, particularly the history of social movements and of ethnic and religious minorities. Life and academic career Born to a prosperous German-speaking Jewish family in Brno in 1921, the young Graus was interned at Theresienstadt during World War II and lost most of his family in the Holocaust. Following the war, he returned to Prague, where he completed his degree in at the Charles University and began teaching medieval history at the Czech state Academy of Sciences. Following the Pragu...
Go to Profile#6900
Mōri Motonari
1497 - 1571 (74 years)
Mōri Motonari was a prominent daimyō in the western Chūgoku region of Japan during the Sengoku period of the 16th century. The Mōri clan claimed descent from Ōe no Hiromoto , an adviser to Minamoto no Yoritomo. Motonari was called the "Beggar Prince". He was known as a great strategist who began as a small local warlord of Aki Province and extended his clan's power to nearly all of the Chūgoku region through war, marriage, adoption and assassination.
Go to Profile