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.
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7051
Hecataeus of Miletus
600 BC - 475 BC (125 years)
Hecataeus of Miletus , son of Hegesander, was an early Greek historian and geographer. Biography Hailing from a very wealthy family, he lived in Miletus, then under Persian rule in the satrapy of Lydia. He was active during the time of the Greco-Persian Wars. After having travelled extensively, he settled in his native city, where he occupied a high position, and devoted his time to the composition of geographical and historical works. When Aristagoras, acting tyrant of Miletus, held a council of leading Ionians at Miletus to organize a revolt against Persian rule, Hecataeus tried in vain to dissuade his countrymen from the undertaking.
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Ignaz von Döllinger
1799 - 1890 (91 years)
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger , also Doellinger in English, was a German theologian, Catholic priest and church historian who rejected the dogma of papal infallibility. Among his writings which proved controversial, his criticism of the papacy antagonized ultramontanes, yet his reverence for tradition annoyed the liberals.
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Emperor Wu of Han
156 BC - 87 BC (69 years)
Emperor Wu of Han , born Liu Che and courtesy name Tong , was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty from 141 to 87 BC. His reign lasted 54 years – a record not broken until the reign of the Kangxi Emperor more than 1,800 years later — and remains the record for ethnic Han emperors. His reign resulted in a vast expansion of geopolitical influence for the Chinese civilization, and the development of a strong centralized state via governmental policies, economical reorganization and promotion of a hybrid Legalist–Confucian doctrine. In the field of historical social and cultural studies, Empero...
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Marceli Handelsman
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Marceli Handelsman was a Polish historian, a Warsaw University professor, medievalist, modern historian, and historical methodologist. Life Marceli Handelsman was born on 8 July 1882, in Warsaw, to a family of distant Jewish ancestry. After graduating in law from the Russian-language Imperial Warsaw University, he moved to Berlin, where he began studies in the history department of Unter den Linden University. In 1906, however, he was dismissed from the school because of his involvement in socialist organizations. Afterwards Handelsman continued his studies at various European universities in...
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Hans Kohn
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Hans Kohn was an American philosopher and historian. He pioneered the academic study of nationalism, and is considered an authority on the subject. Life Kohn was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from a local German Gymnasium in 1909, he studied philosophy, political science and law at the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.
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Charles Bean
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean , usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial .
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Duke of Zhou
1100 BC - 1032 BC (68 years)
Dan, Duke Wen of Zhou , commonly known as the Duke of Zhou , was a member of the royal family of the early Zhou dynasty who played a major role in consolidating the kingdom established by his elder brother King Wu. He was renowned for acting as a capable and loyal regent for his young nephew King Cheng, and for successfully suppressing the Rebellion of the Three Guards and establishing firm rule of the Zhou dynasty over eastern China. He is also a Chinese culture hero credited with writing the I Ching and the Book of Poetry, and establishing the Rites of Zhou.
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Gerhard Ritter
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter was a nationalist-conservative German historian who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. He studied under Professor Hermann Oncken. A Lutheran, he first became well known for his 1925 biography of Martin Luther and hagiographic portrayal of Prussia. A member of the German People's Party during the Weimar Republic, he was a lifelong monarchist and remained sympathetic to the political system of the defunct German Empire.
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Caratacus
15 - 54 (39 years)
Caratacus was a 1st-century AD British chieftain of the Catuvellauni tribe, who resisted the Roman conquest of Britain. Before the Roman invasion, Caratacus is associated with the expansion of his tribe's territory. His apparent success led to Roman invasion, nominally in support of his defeated enemies. He resisted the Romans for almost a decade, using guerrilla warfare, but when he offered a set-piece battle the Romans won it. After defeat he fled to the territory of Queen Cartimandua, who captured him and handed him over to the Romans. He was sentenced to death, but made a speech before hi...
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Isaac Deutscher
1907 - 1967 (60 years)
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom before the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky was highly influential among the British New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Priscus
410 - 471 (61 years)
Priscus of Panium was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician . Biography Priscus was born in Panion between 410 and 420 AD. In 448/449 AD, he accompanied Maximinus, the head of the Byzantine embassy representing Emperor Theodosius II , on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila the Hun. While there, he met and conversed with a Greek merchant, dressed in "Scythian" fashion, who was captured eight years earlier when the city of Viminacium was sacked by the Huns. The trader explained to Priscus that after the sack of Viminacium, he was a slave of Onegesius, a Hunnic nobleman, but obtained his freedom and chose to settle among the Huns.
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Gu Jiegang
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Gu Jiegang was a Chinese folklorist, historian, and sinologist who was best known for his seven-volume work Gushi Bian . He was a co-founder and the leading force of the Doubting Antiquity School, and was highly influential in the 20th century development of Chinese historiography.
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Vasily Vasilievsky
1838 - 1899 (61 years)
Vasily Grigorievich Vasilievsky was a Russian historian who founded the St. Petersburg school of medieval studies and was a major force in Byzantine studies during the second half of the 19th century.
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Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor was an Anglo-Saxon English king and saint. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066. Edward was the son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy. He succeeded Cnut the Great's son – and his own half-brother – Harthacnut. He restored the rule of the House of Wessex after the period of Danish rule since Cnut conquered England in 1016. When Edward died in 1066, he was succeeded by his wife's brother Harold Godwinson, who was defeated and killed in the same year at the Battle of Hastings by the Normans under William the Conqueror.
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Servius Tullius
600 BC - 535 BC (65 years)
Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned from 578 to 535 BC. Roman and Greek sources describe his servile origins and later marriage to a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's first Etruscan king, who was assassinated in 579 BC. The constitutional basis for his accession is unclear; he is variously described as the first Roman king to accede without election by the Senate, having gained the throne by popular and royal support; and as the first to be elected by the Senate alone, with support of the reigning queen but withou...
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Theodore H. White
1915 - 1986 (71 years)
Theodore Harold White was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series. White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to draw international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.
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Burebista
90 BC - 44 BC (46 years)
Burebista was the king of the Getae and Dacian tribes from 82/61BC to 45/44BC. He was the first king who successfully unified the tribes of the Dacian kingdom, which comprised the area located between the Danube, Tisza, and Dniester rivers, and modern day Romania and Moldova. In the 7th and 6thcenturies BC it became home to the Thracian peoples, including the Getae and the Dacians. From the 4thcentury to the middle of the 2ndcentury BC the Dacian peoples were influenced by La Tène Celts who brought new technologies with them into Dacia. Sometime in the 2ndcentury BC the Dacians expelled the Celts from their lands.
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Dmitry Ilovaysky
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaysky was an anti-Normanist conservative Russian historian who penned a number of standard history textbooks. Ilovaysky graduated from the Moscow University in 1854 and first attracted critical attention with his thesis on the Principality of Ryazan in 1858. He was wounded during the Siege of Plevna, in which he took an active part.
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Leo Africanus
1483 - 1600 (117 years)
Johannes Leo Africanus was a Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa in 1550, centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. The book was regarded among his scholarly peers in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject until the modern exploration of Africa. For this work, Leo became a household name among European geographers. He converted from Islam to Christianity and changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis .
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Thomas Hutchinson
1711 - 1780 (69 years)
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified ...
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Ahmad Amin
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Ahmad Amin , was an Egyptian historian and writer. He wrote a series of books on the history of the Islamic civilization , a famous autobiography , as well as an important dictionary of Egyptian folklore .
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Mzilikazi
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
Mzilikazi Moselekatse, Khumalo was a Southern African king who founded the Ndebele Kingdom now called Matebeleland which is now part of Zimbabwe. His name means "the great river of blood". He was born the son of Mashobane kaMangethe near Mkuze, Zululand , and died at Ingama, Matabeleland . Many consider him to be the greatest Southern African military leader after the Zulu king, Shaka. In his autobiography, David Livingstone referred to Mzilikazi as the second most impressive leader he encountered on the African continent.
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Chancellor Williams
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Chancellor Williams was an American sociologist, historian and writer. He is noted for his work on African civilizations prior to encounters with Europeans; his major work is The Destruction of Black Civilization .
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Andrés Bonifacio
1863 - 1897 (34 years)
Andrés Bonifacio y de Castro was a Filipino revolutionary leader. He is often called "The Father of the Philippine Revolution", and considered one of the national heroes of the Philippines. He was one of the founders and later the Kataastaasang Pangulo of the Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan or more commonly known as the "Katipunan", a movement that sought the independence of the Philippines from Spanish colonial rule and started the Philippine Revolution.
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Otto Hintze
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Otto Hintze was a German historian of public administration. He was Professor of Political, Constitutional, Administrative and Economic History at the University of Berlin. Influenced by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, he emphasized the continuity and rationality of Western institutions.
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Kunio Yanagita
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Kunio Yanagita was a Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist. He began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions. This led to a change in his career. His pursuit of this led to his eventual establishment of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku, as an academic field in Japan. As a result, he is often considered to be the father of modern Japanese folklore studies.
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Zhu Xi
1130 - 1200 (70 years)
Zhu Xi , formerly romanized Chu Hsi, was a Chinese calligrapher, historian, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. Zhu was influential in the development of Neo-Confucianism. He contributed greatly to Chinese philosophy and fundamentally reshaped the Chinese worldview. His works include his editing of and commentaries to the Four Books , his writings on the process of the "investigation of things" , and his development of meditation as a method for self-cultivation.
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T. Harry Williams
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Thomas Harry Williams was an American academic and author. For the majority of his academic career between the 1930s to 1970s, Williams taught history at Louisiana State University. While at LSU, Williams was a Boyd Professor of History from 1953 to 1979. Near the end of his tenure at LSU, the university created the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History. Additional academic institutes Williams taught at include extension schools, in Wisconsin and at the Municipal University of Omaha.
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Vasil Zlatarski
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Vasil Nikolov Zlatarski was a Bulgarian historian-medievalist, archaeologist, and epigraphistist. Life Vasil Zlatarski was born in Veliko Tarnovo in 1866, the youngest child of the teacher Nikola Zlatarcheto who was a prominent activist in the educational movement and the religious and national struggle in the Tarnovo region before the Liberation. Zlatarski obtained his education in Veliko Tarnovo and in the Peter and Paul Seminary at Liaskovets, near Tarnovo where he was preparing for priesthood. After the early death of his father, he went to his brother in Russia, where in 1887 he graduated the First Classical Lyceum in St.
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Barthold Georg Niebuhr
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish–German statesman, banker, and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. By 1810 Niebuhr was inspiring German patriotism in students at the University of Berlin by his analysis of Roman economy and government. Niebuhr was a leader of the Romantic era and symbol of German national spirit that emerged after the defeat at Jena. But he was also deeply rooted in the classical spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in his intellectual presuppositions, his use of philologic analysis, and h...
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Justin
101 - 200 (99 years)
Justin was a Latin writer and historian who lived under the Roman Empire. Life Almost nothing is known of Justin's personal history, his name appearing only in the title of his work. He must have lived after Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, whose work he excerpted, and his references to the Romans and Parthians having divided the world between themselves would have been anachronistic after the rise of the Sassanians in the third century. His Latin appears to be consistent with the style of the second century. Ronald Syme, however, argues for a date around AD 390, immediately before the compilation...
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Vercingetorix
80 BC - 46 BC (34 years)
Vercingetorix was a Gallic king and chieftain of the Arverni tribe who united the Gauls in a failed revolt against Roman forces during the last phase of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. After surrendering to Caesar and spending almost six years in prison, he was executed in Rome.
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Adolf Schulten
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Adolf Schulten was a German historian and archaeologist. Schulten was born in Elberfeld, Rhine Province, and received a doctorate in geology from the University of Bonn in 1892. He studied in Italy, Africa and Greece with support from the Institute of Archaeology. After obtaining the chair of ancient history at the University of Erlangen, he continued his work in Spain with great dedication and to this day is considered a key influence upon archaeological study in Spain.
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Cheikh Anta Diop
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
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Velleius Paterculus
19 BC - 31 (50 years)
Marcus Velleius Paterculus was a Roman historian, soldier and senator. His Roman history, written in a highly rhetorical style, covered the period from the end of the Trojan War to AD 30, but is most useful for the period from the death of Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Augustus in AD 14.
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Henry V of England
1386 - 1422 (36 years)
Henry V , also called Henry of Monmouth, was King of England from 1413 until his death in 1422. Despite his relatively short reign, Henry's outstanding military successes in the Hundred Years' War against France made England one of the strongest military powers in Europe. Immortalised in Shakespeare's "Henriad" plays, Henry is known and celebrated as one of the greatest warrior-kings of medieval England.
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Vladimir Minorsky
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
Vladimir Fyodorovich Minorsky was a Russian academic, historian, and scholar of Oriental studies, best known for his contributions to the study of history of Iran and the Iranian peoples such as Persians, Laz people, Lurs, and Kurds.
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Firishta
1560 - 1620 (60 years)
Firishta or Ferešte , full name Muhammad Qasim Hindu Shah Astarabadi , was a Persian historian, who later settled in India and served the Deccan Sultans as their court historian. He was born in 1570 and died in 1620. The name Firishta means 'angel' in Persian.
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Gerhard Friedrich Müller
1705 - 1783 (78 years)
Gerhard Friedrich Müller was a Russian–German historian and pioneer ethnologist. Early life Müller was born in Herford and educated at Leipzig. In 1725, he was invited to St. Petersburg to co-found the Imperial Academy of Sciences.
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Michael the Brave
1558 - 1601 (43 years)
Michael the Brave , born as Mihai Pătrașcu, was the Prince of Wallachia , Prince of Moldavia and de facto ruler of Transylvania . He is considered one of Romania's greatest national heroes. Since the 19th century, Michael the Brave has been regarded by Romanian nationalists as a symbol of Romanian unity, as his reign marked the first time all principalities inhabited by Romanians were under the same ruler.
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Cochise
1812 - 1874 (62 years)
Cochise was the leader of the Chiricahui local group of the Chokonen and principal nantan of the Chokonen band of a Chiricahua Apache. A key war leader during the Apache Wars, he led an uprising that began in 1861 and persisted until a peace treaty was negotiated in 1872. Cochise County is named after him.
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Peter II of Russia
1715 - 1730 (15 years)
Peter II Alexeyevich was Emperor of Russia from 1727 until 1730, when he died at the age of 14. He was the only son of Tsarevich Alexei Petrovich and Charlotte Christine of Brunswick-Lüneburg. After Catherine I's death, Alexander Menshikov controlled Peter II, but was thwarted by his opponents and exiled by Peter. Peter was also influenced by favorites like Prince Aleksey Dolgorukov, leading to a neglect of state affairs and the tightening of serfdom. Peter's reign was marked by disengagement, disorder, and indulgence. He was engaged to Ekaterina Dolgorukova, but died suddenly of smallpox bef...
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Joseph Jacobs
1854 - 1916 (62 years)
Joseph Jacobs was a New South Welsh-born British-Jewish folklorist, translator, literary critic, social scientist, historian and writer of English literature who became a notable collector and publisher of English folklore.
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William Camden
1551 - 1623 (72 years)
William Camden was an English antiquarian, historian, topographer, and herald, best known as author of Britannia, the first chorographical survey of the islands of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Annales, the first detailed historical account of the reign of Elizabeth I of England.
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Horemheb
1350 BC - 1292 BC (58 years)
Horemheb, also spelled Horemhab or Haremhab , was the last pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty of Egypt . He ruled for at least 14 years between 1319 BC and 1292 BC. He had no relation to the preceding royal family other than by marriage to Mutnedjmet, who is thought to have been the daughter of his predecessor Ay; he is believed to have been of common birth.
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Theopompus
400 BC - 320 BC (80 years)
Theopompus was an ancient Greek historian and rhetorician. Biography Theopompus was born on the Aegean island of Chios. In early youth, he seems to have spent some time at Athens, along with his father, who had been exiled on account of his Laconian sympathies. Here he became a pupil of Isocrates, and rapidly made great progress in rhetoric; we are told that Isocrates used to say that Ephorus required the spur but Theopompus the bit.
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Charles Seignobos
1854 - 1942 (88 years)
Charles Seignobos was a French scholar of historiography and a historian who specialized in the history of the French Third Republic, and was a member of the Human Rights League. Personal life and education Seignobos was born to a Republican Protestant family in 1854 at Lamastre in the Ardèche department of France, the son of Charles-André Seignobos, the deputy for Ardèche from 1871 to 1881 and again from 1890 to 1892 and also the Councillor of Lamastre from 1852–1892. He passed his baccalaureat in 1871 at Tournon, where he studied with the French Symbolist poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé. ...
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Yu the Great
2297 BC - 2197 BC (100 years)
Yu the Great or Yu the Engineer was a legendary king in ancient China who was famed for "the first successful state efforts at flood control," his establishment of the Xia dynasty which inaugurated dynastic rule in China, and his upright moral character. He figures prominently in the Chinese legend of "Great Yu Controls the Waters" .
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John Robert Seeley
1834 - 1895 (61 years)
Sir John Robert Seeley, KCMG was an English Liberal historian and political essayist. A founder of British imperial history, he was a prominent advocate for the British Empire, promoting a concept of Greater Britain. This he expounded in his most widely known book The Expansion of England . While he was an early advocate of the establishment of political science as a distinct academic discipline, he retained a theological approach in which this was embedded.
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Edward the Elder
874 - 924 (50 years)
Edward the Elder was King of the Anglo-Saxons from 899 until his death in 924. He was the elder son of Alfred the Great and his wife Ealhswith. When Edward succeeded to the throne, he had to defeat a challenge from his cousin Æthelwold, who had a strong claim to the throne as the son of Alfred's elder brother and predecessor, Æthelred I.
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