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,
#7201
Vasily Dmitriyevich Smirnov
1846 - 1922 (76 years)
Vasily Dmitriyevich Smirnov was a Russian orientalist, specializing in the history and literature of the Ottoman Empire.
Go to Profile#7202
Nicolae Cartojan
1883 - 1944 (61 years)
Nicolae Cartojan was a Romanian literary historian. Born in Uzunu, Giurgiu County, his parents were Anghel Cartojan and Maria . He graduated from Bucharest's Saint Sava National College in 1902. He then enrolled in the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest, where Ioan Bianu was one of his professors, and graduated in 1906. Early on, he developed an interest in early Romanian literature and in researching the manuscripts of the Romanian Academy Library, where he worked from 1906 to 1912. At the same time, he was a teaching assistant. From 1912 to 1914, Cartojan attended speciality courses at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.
Go to Profile#7203
Ernst Moritz Arndt
1769 - 1860 (91 years)
Ernst Moritz Arndt was a German nationalist historian, writer and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany. Arndt had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars and the 19th century movement for German unification. After the Carlsbad Decrees, the forces of the restoration counted him as a demagogue.
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Peter Erasmus Müller
1776 - 1834 (58 years)
Peter Erasmus Müller , was a Danish historian, linguist, theologian, and bishop of the Diocese of Zealand from 1830 until his death. Career Müller studied at the University of Copenhagen, where he passed his theological examination in 1791. After spending some time at various German universities, he visited France and England. Returning to Denmark, he wrote numerous works and was appointed professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1801. During his time as a professor, he produced a large number of essays and books about theology, history, and linguistics. As a result of the fame...
Go to Profile#7205
Ludvig Ludvigsen Daae
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Ludvig Ludvigsen Daae was a Norwegian historian and author. He was a professor at the University of Oslo for more than thirty years. Biography He was born in Aremark in Østfold and died in Kristiania , Norway. He was the son of Ludvig Daae and Sara Jessine Louise Brock . He was a student at Christiania Cathedral School and graduated during 1852. He studied classical philology at the University of Kristiania and graduated in 1859.
Go to Profile#7206
Herman Theodoor Colenbrander
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Herman Theodoor Colenbrander was a Dutch historian, the first director of the Commissie van Advies voor 's Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, which has become the Institute of Dutch History. In 1908 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#7207
Charles Herbert Levermore
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Charles Herbert Levermore was an American academic and peace activist. He was a founder and the first president of Adelphi University from 1896 to 1912. He won the American Peace Award in 1924. He was corresponding secretary of the World's Court League in 1919, secretary of the League of Nations Union, and secretary of the New York Peace Society. He was a founding member of the Union League in New York City.
Go to Profile#7208
Gene Weltfish
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Gene Weltfish was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She had studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people of the Midwest Plains. Her 1965 ethnography, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.
Go to Profile#7209
Henry Bamford Parkes
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Henry Bamford Parkes was a writer and professor of history at New York University. He was born in Sheffield, England. Background After reading history at Oxford University, Parkes came to the United States to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1929 and joined the history faculty of New York University in 1930. He had also lectured at Barnard College, the University of Wyoming, the New School for Social Research and the University of Washington. From 1956 to 1957, Parkes was a Fulbright Fellow, working at the University of Athens i...
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Gustav Mayer
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Gustav Mayer was a German journalist and historian with a particular focus on the Labour movement. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and lived the final years of his life in England. Life Gustav Mayer was born into a long-established Jewish mercantile family in Prenzlau, a small town in central northern Germany. The family had settled in Prentzlau in 1677, having previously lived in Oderberg. His upbringing combined traditional Jewish values and beliefs with a keen appreciation of German intellectual developments more generally. While growing up he acquired a deep knowledge of the German classics which would underpin his subsequent work.
Go to Profile#7211
Sargis Kakabadze
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Sargis N. Kakabadze was a Georgian historian and philologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor. He was born in 1886, in a small village Kukhi . In 1910 he graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the St.Petersburg University . In 1911-1918 he was a teacher of History of the Georgian Gymnasium of Tbilisi, in 1919-1967 Professor of the Tbilisi State University , in 1921-1926 Director of the State Historical Archive of Georgia, in 1945-1961 head of the Department of the Old Acts of this Archive.
Go to Profile#7212
Yi Pyong-do
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Yi Pyong-do was a Korean historian. Biography He started working in Korean History Compilation Committee in 1927. In 1934 he founded Jindan Institute. From 1945 to 1962 he was Professor of Seoul Nation University. From 1955 to 1982 he was Committee of Korean Nation History Editor. In April 1960, he became the Minister of Education, but later resigned in August of that year.
Go to Profile#7213
William Miller
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
William Miller, FBA was a British-born medievalist and journalist. Biography The son of a Cumberland mine owner, Miller was educated at Rugby School and Oxford, where he gained a double first, and was called to the bar in 1889, but never practised law. He married Ada Mary Wright in 1895, and in 1896 published The Balkans, followed in 1898 by Travels and Politics in the Near East.
Go to Profile#7214
Martti Haavio
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Martti Henrikki Haavio was a Finnish poet, folklorist and mythologist, writing poetry under the pen name P. Mustapää. He was born on 22 January 1899 in Temmes, and died on 4 February 1973 in Helsinki. He was also a professor of folklore and an influential researcher of Finnish mythology. In 1960, Haavio married Aale Tynni, after his first wife Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio died in 1951 of cancer. His daughter, Elina Haavio-Mannila, is a social scientist. During Haavio's early career, he was a member of the Tulenkantajat literature club.
Go to Profile#7215
Ángel Valbuena Prat
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Ángel Valbuena Prat was a Spanish philologist and historian. Biography Born in Barcelona, he studied at the University of Barcelona, and later became an assistant professor at the Central University of Madrid. His doctoral thesis, Los Autos Sacramentales de Calderón, earned him various awards. After a tour of various university centers , finally, perhaps as a punishment for his political attitudes of Catalan regionalist nature, he was transferred to the University of Murcia, where he remained for more than twenty five years.
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Mathieu Auguste Geffroy
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Mathieu Auguste Geffroy was a French historian born in Paris. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, he held history professorships at various lycées. His French thesis for the doctorate of letters, Étude sur les pamphlets politiques et religieux de Milton , showed that he was attracted towards foreign history, a study for which he soon qualified himself by mastering the Germanic and Scandinavian languagess.
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William Curry Holden
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
William Curry Holden was an American historian and archaeologist. In 1937, he became the first director of the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Early years, education, military Holden was one of three sons born to Robert Lee Holden and Grace Holden née Davis in Coolidge, Texas. Both families moved west to Colorado City, Texas, and after 1907 the Holdens farmed near Rotan, Texas, where William completed high school in 1914.
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Edward Murray Wrong
1889 - 1928 (39 years)
Edward Murray Wrong was a Canadian-born historian, vice-president of Magdalen College, Oxford . Biography Known as Murray, he was the son of Canadian historian George MacKinnon Wrong, and of Sophia Hume Wrong, daughter of the politician Edward Blake. He was the brother of diplomat Humphrey Hume Wrong. He was educated at St Andrew's College, Toronto. Like all his siblings and his father, Wrong studied at the University of Toronto. He then proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford as a commoner, where he was tutored by A. L. Smith, and obtained first-class honours in modern history in 1913.
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Friedrich Hultsch
1833 - 1906 (73 years)
Friedrich Otto Hultsch was a German classical philologist and historian of mathematics in antiquity. Biography After graduating from the Dresden Kreuzschule, Friedrich Hultsch studied classical philology at the University of Leipzig from 1851 to 1855. After a probationary year at the Kreuzschule, he was employed in 1857 as a second Adjunkt at the Alte Nikolaischule in Leipzig. In 1858 he became a teacher at the Zwickau Gymnasium. In 1861 Hultsch was again employed at the Kreuzschule, where he was the rector from 1868 until his retirement in 1889. From 1879 to 1882 he also headed the newly fou...
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Wacław Maciejowski
1792 - 1883 (91 years)
Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski was a Polish historian. Maciejowski was born in Cierlicko near Cieszyn. He studied in Warsaw, Berlin, and Göttingen, and became professor of law at the University of Warsaw in 1819.
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Shang Yue
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Shang Yue was a Chinese Marxist economic historian, author and professor at the School of History at Renmin University of China. Before becoming a historian, he also wrote fiction. He taught literature to Kim Il Sung for a short time at Yuwen Middle School in Manchuria. In China, he is primarily known for his work on the idea of the sprouts of capitalism: that proto-capitalism and class struggle had existed in the earlier Chinese history. His purge in 1958 foreshadowed the Chinese Cultural Revolution as his ideas on Chinese economic history conflicted with those of Mao Zedong. After his purge he continued to work on history, but stayed out of public until Mao's death in 1976.
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Clement Eaton
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Clement Eaton was an American historian who specialized in the American South. He received his education from the University of North Carolina, where he was president of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated in 1919. He also attended Harvard University. He was chair of the History Department at Lafayette College from 1931 to 1942 and then a faculty member of the University of Kentucky.
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George Grub
1812 - 1892 (80 years)
George Grub was a Scottish law professor and church historian. Life Grub was born at Old Aberdeen on 4 April 1812, the only child of George Grub, a respectable citizen and convener of the trades at Old Aberdeen, and his wife, Christian Yolum.
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Vincent T. Harlow
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Vincent Todd Harlow was a prominent English historian of the British Empire. From 1938 to 1949, he was the second Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. In 1950, he succeeded Reginald Coupland as the Beit Professorship of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until his death in 1963. His early work was on the seventeenth-century Caribbean but he is best known for his book, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793, the first volume of which was published in 1952. His second volume, subtitled "New Continents and Changing Values", was published posthumously in 1964.
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Anna Lewis
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Anna Lewis was a noted teacher, historian and writer, who specialized in American history, and particularly the history of the Southwest. Born in what was then Indian Territory to a family of mixed Choctaw and European ancestry, she earned doctoral degrees from University of California, Berkeley and University of Oklahoma . She was the first woman to receive a Ph. D. at the University of Oklahoma. Lewis spent her educational career at the Oklahoma College for Women . She wrote two books and numerous articles for publications in her area of interest before retiring in 1956 to a home she had built in southern Oklahoma .
Go to Profile#7226
David Williams
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
David Williams was a Welsh historian. Williams was born at Llan-y-Cefn, Pembrokeshire. From 1945 until his retirement in 1967, Williams was Professor of Welsh History in the University of Wales. He is best known for his classic History of Modern Wales.
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Józef Feldman
1899 - 1946 (47 years)
Józef Feldman was a Polish historian of Jewish ethnicity, professor of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a member of the Polish Academy of Learning. Life and career 1917–1939 He was the son of Wilhelm Feldman, a writer, playwright, literary critic and historian, and Maria Kleinman, a translator of Western literature. His family was of Polish Jewish ethnicity. He graduated from secondary school in Kraków in 1917, then studied law and history in the Jagiellonian University, among others under the direction of Władysław Konopczyński and Stanisław Kot. During 1918-1920 he served as a ...
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Carl Ferdinand Allen
1811 - 1871 (60 years)
Carl Ferdinand Allen was a Danish historian and professor. Biography Carl Ferdinand Allen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was the son of Robert A. Allen and Karen Olsdatter. In 1826 he entered Metropolitanskolen. He studied at the University of Copenhagen and received a cand. theo. degree in 1836. He spent three years researching at the archives of England, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany; upon completion of this task, he returned to Denmark. In 1851 he became a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen and, in 1862, a professor of history and northern archaeology.
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Werner Caskel
1896 - 1970 (74 years)
Werner Caskel was a German historian of Muslim people. Caskel's specialties were Islamic history and tribal genealogy. He taught as professor at the University of Berlin , University of Cologne . Literary works Arabic inscriptions, 1936Die Beduinen , 2 vols., 1939-1944Kalbī, Hišām Ibn-Muḥammad al-: Ǧamharat an-nasab, 2 vols., 1966
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Filip Friedman
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
Filip Friedman was a Polish-Jewish historian and the author of several books on history and economics. Philip Friedman was born in Lwów in 1901. After graduation from Gymnasia in Lwów, Friedman studied at the Jan Kazimierz University in Lwów, the University of Vienna and the Jewish Paedagogium under Salo Baron. He moved to Łódź in 1925 after receiving his doctorate from the University of Vienna. Friedman taught at a leading Hebrew secondary school in Łódź, as well as at the People's University of that city, at YIVO in Vilna , and at the Taḥkemoni of Warsaw . He also continued his historical research.
Go to Profile#7231
James Tait
1863 - 1944 (81 years)
James Tait, was an English medieval historian. With Thomas Frederick Tout, he was the second major figure in the "Manchester School of History". Life He was born in Broughton, Salford, on 19 June 1863, the son of Robert Ramsay Tait, a seed merchant, and his wife Annie Case. He entered Owens College, Manchester, aged 16, and in 1883 graduated there, in history, the institution having meanwhile become part of the federal Victoria University, with other colleges in Leeds and Liverpool. He then studied at Balliol College, Oxford under Arthur Lionel Smith, and obtained a first class degree in 1887.
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Dmitry Odinets
1883 - 1950 (67 years)
Dmitry Mikhaylovich Odinets was a Russian Empire politician and Ukrainian statesman. In 1917-18 he was a minister of Great Russian Affairs in the Council of People's Ministers in Ukraine. In 1940s Odinets chaired the Union of Russian Patriots, a pro-Soviet organization of Russian émigrés in France. After Odinets was exiled to USSR along with other members of the Union, he settled in Kazan and taught Latin at the Kazan State University.
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Philipp Clüver
1580 - 1622 (42 years)
Philipp Clüver was an Early Modern German geographer and historian. Life Clüver was born in Danzig , in Royal Prussia, a province of the Kingdom of Poland. After spending some time at the Polish court of Sigismund III Vasa, he began the study of law at the University of Leiden , but soon he turned his attention to history and geography, which were then taught there by Joseph Scaliger.
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Nikolay Kun
1877 - 1940 (63 years)
Nikolay Albertovich Kun was a Russian historian, writer, and educator. He is best known for his book Greek Myths and Legends , which was extremely popular with readers in the Soviet Union. First published in 1914, it has been republished many times since and translated into a number of European languages.
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Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann
1900 - 1973 (73 years)
Joseph Ehrenfried Hofmann was a German historian of mathematics, known for his research on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Life and work After graduating from high school in 1919 at the Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich, Hofmann studied at University of Munich with Walther von Dyck and George Faber, gaining Ph.D. in 1927. He was briefly an assistant in Munich and Darmstadt, before he went into the teaching profession in Gunzburg, Nördlingen.
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Matija Mesić
1826 - 1878 (52 years)
Matija Mesić was a Croatian historian, university professor, the first rector of the University of Zagreb. He graduated philosophy at the Royal Academy of Science in 1844, and theology at the Vienna Pázmáneum in 1848. After being ordained and a short chapel service, he worked as a probationary professor of history and geography at the gymnasium in Zagreb. In the period 1851–1853 he studied history and geography in Vienna and Prague. He received a professorship at the Law Academy in Zagreb in 1854, working as a director of the same institution since 1871.
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Philipp Jaffé
1819 - 1870 (51 years)
Philipp Jaffé was a German historian and philologist. The Schwersenz native, despite discrimination against his Jewish religion, was one of the most important German medievalists of the 19th century.
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Dumitru Caracostea
1879 - 1964 (85 years)
Dumitru Caracostea was a Romanian folklorist, literary historian and critic. Biography Origins and early career He was born in Slatina, Olt County to Nicolae Caracostea, a magistrate of Aromanian descent, and his wife Eufrosina , a French teacher. His father's family had become wealthy through engaging in commerce, which opened the possibility of higher education for its members. He attended primary school and one year of high school in his native town, completing his secondary education at Saint Sava High School in Bucharest in 1900. That year, he enrolled in the literature and philosophy f...
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Georg Stadtmüller
1909 - 1985 (76 years)
Georg Stadtmüller was German historian and Albanologist. Biography He studied German history, classic and oriental philology and history in Freiburg in period 1927–1931. He was president of History department on Munich University, specialist for history of European Orient and history of Albanians. In his 1942 work he published the controversial thesis in which he traced the origin of Albanians back to the region of Mat. Stadtmüller and later Stavro Skendi supported the controversial assertion about crypto-religious groups existing in the Balkans in all places where the population converted to Islam.
Go to Profile#7240
Carlton C. Qualey
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Carlton Chester Qualey was an American academic, author, and historian. His research specialized principally in Norwegian-American immigration. An eminent historian, his publications include books, articles and reviews produced over a 60-year career. He is most frequently associated with his 1938 study, Norwegian Settlement in the United States.
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Eduard Burdzhalov
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Eduard Nikolaevich Burdzhalov was a Soviet historian. Burdzhalov graduated from Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature in 1932. He then taught at various Moscow universities, including the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute. In 1957 he was dismissed as deputy editor of the journal Questions of History after he published an article about the Bolshevik's confusion following the February Revolution in 1917. However in 1959 he was appointed professor.
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Frank W. Blackmar
1854 - 1931 (77 years)
Frank Wilson Blackmar was an American sociologist, historian and educator. He served as the 9th President of the American Sociological Society . Biography He was born on November 3, 1854, in Springfield Township, Erie County, Pennsylvania.
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Lorenz von Westenrieder
1748 - 1829 (81 years)
Lorenz von Westenrieder was a well-known author and historian in Bavaria and a critic of the Elector Karl Theordor and supporter of Maximilian IV Joseph. There are several memorials to him in Munich.
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Anson D. Morse
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Anson Daniel Morse was an educator, historian, and professor at Amherst College. Morse was born in Cambridge, Vermont. He received his bachelor's degree from Amherst College in 1871. He joined the faculty of Amherst College in 1876, and held positions as lecturer in political economics and professor of history. He retired in 1907.
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Mary Hayden
1862 - 1942 (80 years)
Mary Teresa Hayden was an Irish historian, Irish-language activist and campaigner for women's causes. Biography Mary Hayden was educated initially at the Dominican College, Eccles Street and then at Alexandra College in Dublin. She attended the Royal University of Ireland where she graduated with a BA and an MA in Modern Languages. With Agnes O'Farrelly she campaigned for women's rights in the university.
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William Holden Hutton
1860 - 1930 (70 years)
William Holden Hutton was a British historian and a priest of the Church of England. He was Dean of Winchester from 1919 to 1930. Biography William Holden Hutton was born in England on 24 May 1860, in Lincolnshire, where his father was rector of Gate Burton. He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first class degree in Modern History in 1881. He was a fellow at St John's College, Oxford, from 1884 to 1923, and an honorary fellow thereafter; and from 1889 to 1909 was a tutor at the college. Between 1895 and 1897 he also lectured on Church history at Cambridge University.
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Ilya Shifman
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Ilya Sholeimovich Shifman Ilya Shifman studied Oriental studies at the Leningrad State University but in connection with the closure of the faculty moved to the faculty of history. From 1959 to 1960 he did post-graduate studies at the department of Ancient Greece and Rome of the Faculty of History of the Leningrad State University, concentrating on the Phoenician colonization of the Western Mediterranean area. Thereafter he worked at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as at the Leningrad State University. He mainly published works on Carthago and Phoenicia.
Go to Profile#7248
Gustav Storm
1845 - 1903 (58 years)
Gustav Storm was a Norwegian historian, a professor at the Royal Frederick University in Christiania from 1877. He was a driving force in the research of Scandinavian history and literature of the Middle Ages.
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Erik Gustaf Geijer
1783 - 1847 (64 years)
Erik Gustaf Geijer was a Swedish writer, historian, poet, romantic critic of political economy, philosopher, and composer. His writings served to promote Swedish National Romanticism. He was an influential advocate of conservatism, but switched to liberalism later in life.
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Hiraizumi Kiyoshi
1895 - 1984 (89 years)
was a Japanese historian and professor of history at the Imperial University of Tokyo. He is best known for Kōkoku Shikan theory and was highly influential in Japanese conservative and nationalist politics. He was also a shinto priest at Heisenji Hakusan Shrine.
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