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,
#7001
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#7002
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#7003
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#7004
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#7005
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#7006
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#7007
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#7008
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#7009
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#7010
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#7011
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#7012
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#7013
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#7014
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#7015
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#7016
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#7017
Nicolae Iorga
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, Albanologist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister. A child prodigy, polymath and polyglot, Iorga produced an unusually large body of scholarly works, establishing his international reputation as a medievalist, Byzantinist, Latinist, Slavist, art historian and philosopher of history. Holding teaching positions at the University of Bucharest, the Univ...
Go to Profile#7018
Mandell Creighton
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Mandell Creighton was a British historian and a bishop of the Church of England. A scholar of the Renaissance papacy, Creighton was the first occupant of the Dixie Chair of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, a professorship established around the time that history was emerging as an independent academic discipline. He was also the first editor of the English Historical Review, the oldest English language academic journal in the field of history. Creighton had a second career as a cleric in the Church of England. He served as a parish priest in Embleton, Northumberland ...
Go to Profile#7019
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#7020
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#7021
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 .
Go to Profile#7022
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.
Go to Profile#7023
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...
Go to Profile#7024
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.
Go to Profile#7025
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.
Go to Profile#7026
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.
Go to Profile#7027
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.
Go to Profile#7028
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.
Go to Profile#7029
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.
Go to Profile#7030
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.
Go to Profile#7031
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.
Go to Profile#7032
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...
Go to Profile#7033
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...
Go to Profile#7034
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.
Go to Profile#7035
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.
Go to Profile#7036
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.
Go to Profile#7037
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...
Go to Profile#7038
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...
Go to Profile#7039
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.
Go to Profile#7040
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.
Go to Profile#7041
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...
Go to Profile#7042
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.
Go to Profile#7043
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.
Go to Profile#7044
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.
Go to Profile#7045
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.
Go to Profile#7046
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 ...
Go to Profile#7047
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.
Go to Profile#7048
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 ...
Go to Profile#7049
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.
Go to Profile#7050
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.
Go to Profile