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,
#7251
Ottokar II of Bohemia
1233 - 1278 (45 years)
Ottokar II , the Iron and Golden King, was a member of the Přemyslid dynasty who reigned as King of Bohemia from 1253 until his death in 1278. He also held the titles of Margrave of Moravia from 1247, Duke of Austria from 1251, and Duke of Styria from 1260, as well as Duke of Carinthia and landgrave of Carniola from 1269.
Go to Profile#7252
Gerald of Wales
1146 - 1220 (74 years)
Gerald of Wales was a Cambro-Norman priest and historian. As a royal clerk to the king and two archbishops, he travelled widely and wrote extensively. He studied and taught in France and visited Rome several times, meeting the Pope. He was nominated for several bishoprics but turned them down in the hope of becoming Bishop of St Davids, but was unsuccessful despite considerable support. His final post was as Archdeacon of Brecon, from which he retired to academic study for the remainder of his life. Much of his writing survives.
Go to Profile#7253
Aurelius Victor
320 - 390 (70 years)
Sextus Aurelius Victor was a historian and politician of the Roman Empire. Victor was the author of a short history of imperial Rome, entitled De Caesaribus and covering the period from Augustus to Constantius II. The work was published in 361. Under the emperor Julian , Victor served as governor of Pannonia Secunda; in 389 he became praefectus urbi , senior imperial official in Rome.
Go to Profile#7254
Herbert Gutman
1928 - 1985 (57 years)
Herbert George Gutman was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history. Early life and education Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigrant parents in New York City; he was deeply influenced by their leftism. He attended John Adams High School and graduated with a bachelor's degree from Queens College in 1948. During his teens and his college years, Gutman became involved in numerous left-wing and labor causes and worked for the Wallace presidential campaign.
Go to Profile#7255
Charles VI of France
1368 - 1422 (54 years)
Charles VI , nicknamed the Beloved and later the Mad , was King of France from 1380 until his death in 1422. He is known for his mental illness and psychotic episodes that plagued him throughout his life.
Go to Profile#7256
Gilbert Highet
1906 - 1978 (72 years)
Gilbert Arthur Highet was a Scottish American classicist, academic writer, intellectual critic, and literary historian. Biography Born in Glasgow, Scotland, Gilbert Highet is best known as a mid-20th-century teacher of the humanities in the United States. He attended Hillhead High School, Glasgow, Glasgow University and, on both a Snell and a Jenkyns Exhibition, Balliol College, Oxford. His Oxford career was distinguished by a First in Classical Moderations, 1930, an Ireland and Craven Scholarship, 1930, the Chancellor's Prize for Latin Verse, 1931, and a First in Literae Humaniores in 1932....
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William Robertson
1721 - 1793 (72 years)
William Robertson FRSE FSA Scot was a Scottish historian, minister in the Church of Scotland, and Principal of the University of Edinburgh. "The thirty years during which [he] presided over the University perhaps represent the highest point in its history." He made significant contributions to the writing of Scottish history and the history of Spain and Spanish America.
Go to Profile#7258
John Morris
1913 - 1977 (64 years)
John Robert Morris was an English historian who specialised in the study of the institutions of the Roman Empire and the history of Sub-Roman Britain. He is best known for his book The Age of Arthur , which attempted to reconstruct the history of Britain and Ireland during the so-called "Dark Ages" following the Roman withdrawal, based on scattered archaeological and historical records. Much of his other work focused on Britain during this time.
Go to Profile#7259
Alexander Vasiliev
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
Alexander Alexandrovich Vasiliev was considered the foremost authority on Byzantine history and culture in the mid-20th century. His History of the Byzantine Empire remains one of a few comprehensive accounts of the entire Byzantine history, on the par with those authored by Edward Gibbon and Fyodor Uspensky.
Go to Profile#7260
William Ashley
1860 - 1927 (67 years)
Sir William James Ashley was an English economic historian. His major intellectual influence was in organising economic history in Great Britain and introducing the ideas of the leading German economic historians, especially Gustav von Schmoller and the historical school of economic history. His chief work is The Economic Organisation of England, still a set text on many A-level and University syllabuses.
Go to Profile#7261
Edward Channing
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Edward Perkins Channing was an American historian and an author of a monumental History of the United States in six volumes, for which he won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for History. His thorough research in printed sources and judicious judgments made the book a standard reference for scholars for decades. Channing taught at Harvard 1883–1929 and trained many PhD's who became professors at major universities.
Go to Profile#7262
James Harvey Robinson
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
James Harvey Robinson was an American scholar of history who, with Charles Austin Beard, founded New History, a disciplinary approach that attempts to use history to understand contemporary problems, which greatly broadened the scope of historical scholarship in relation to the social sciences.
Go to Profile#7263
Ernest Scott
1867 - 1939 (72 years)
Sir Ernest Scott was an Australian historian and professor of history at the University of Melbourne from 1913 to 1936. Early life Scott was born in Northampton, England, on 21 June 1867, the son of Hannah Scott, a housekeeper; William Scott, civil engineer, was cited as his father when Ernest married. Ernest Scott was educated at St Katherine's Church of England School, Northampton and worked as a journalist on the London Globe. On 7 May 1892 Scott married Mabel Emily Besant, daughter of Rev. Frank and Annie Besant, the theosophist; they had one child, Muriel .
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Dmytro Yavornytsky
1855 - 1940 (85 years)
Dmytro Ivanovych Yavornytsky , or Dmitry Ivanovich Yavornitsky was a Russian and Ukrainian academician, historian, archeologist, ethnographer, folklorist, and lexicographer. Yavornytsky was a member of , of All-Russian Archaeological Society and an academician of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences .
Go to Profile#7265
Ch'ien Mu
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Ch'ien Mu or Qian Mu was a Chinese historian, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the greatest historians and philosophers of 20th-century China. Ch'ien, together with Lü Simian, Chen Yinke and Chen Yuan, was known as the "Four Greatest Historians" of Modern China .
Go to Profile#7266
George R. Stewart
1895 - 1980 (85 years)
George Rippey Stewart Jr. was an American historian, toponymist, novelist, and a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His 1959 book, Pickett's Charge, a detailed history of the final attack at Gettysburg, was called "essential for an understanding of the Battle of Gettysburg". His 1949 post-apocalyptic novel Earth Abides won the first International Fantasy Award in 1951.
Go to Profile#7267
King Wu of Zhou
1150 BC - 1043 BC (107 years)
King Wu of Zhou was the founder and first king of the Zhou dynasty. The chronology of his reign is disputed but is generally thought to have begun around 1046 BCE and ended with his death three years later.
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Ouyang Xiu
1007 - 1072 (65 years)
Ouyang Xiu , courtesy name Yongshu, also known by his art names Zuiweng and Liu Yi Jushi , was a Chinese historian, calligrapher, epigrapher, essayist, poet, and politician of the Song dynasty. He was a renowned writer among his contemporaries and is considered the central figure of the Eight Masters of the Tang and Song. He revived the Classical Prose Movement and promoted it in imperial examinations, paving the way for future masters like Su Shi and Su Zhe.
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Henryk Łowmiański
1898 - 1984 (86 years)
Henryk Łowmiański was a Polish historian and academic who was an authority on the early history of the Slavic and Baltic people. A researcher of the ancient history of Poland, Lithuania and the Slavs in general, Łowmiański was the author of many works, including most prominently the six-volume monumental monograph Początki Polski .
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Anna Komnene
1083 - 1153 (70 years)
Anna Komnene , commonly Latinized as Anna Comnena, was a Byzantine Greek princess and the author of the Alexiad, an account of the reign of her father, Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos. The Alexiad constitutes the most important primary source of Byzantine history of the late 11th and early 12th centuries. Although she is best known as the author of the Alexiad, Anna played an important part in the politics of the time and attempted to depose her brother, John II Komnenos, as emperor and seize the throne herself.
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Gilbert Burnet
1643 - 1715 (72 years)
Gilbert Burnet was a Scottish philosopher and historian, and Bishop of Salisbury. He was fluent in Dutch, French, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Burnet was highly respected as a cleric, a preacher, an academic, a writer and a historian. He was always closely associated with the Whig party, and was one of the few close friends in whom King William III confided.
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Walter Lynwood Fleming
1874 - 1932 (58 years)
Walter Lynwood Fleming was an American historian of the South and Reconstruction. He was a leader of the Dunning School of scholars in the early 20th century, who addressed Reconstruction era history using historiographical technique. He was a professor at Vanderbilt University from 1917 through his career, also serving as Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, and Director of the Graduate School. A prolific writer, he published ten books and 166 articles and reviews. The son of a plantation owner who had slaves, Fleming was sympathetic to White supremacist arguments and Democratic Party p...
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Wilhelm Maurenbrecher
1838 - 1892 (54 years)
Karl Peter Wilhelm Maurenbrecher was a German historian. He was born in Bonn and studied in Berlin and Munich under Leopold von Ranke and Heinrich von Sybel, being especially influenced by the latter historian. After conducting research work at Simancas in Spain, he successively became an associate and full professor of history at the University of Dorpat .
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Feliks Koneczny
1862 - 1949 (87 years)
Feliks Karol Koneczny was a Polish historian, theatrical critic, librarian, journalist and social philosopher. He founded the original system of the comparative science of civilizations. Biography Koneczny was born in Kraków on 1 November 1862. His father was of Moravian origin. Koneczny's mother abandoned him at a young age while his father studied, although he had to work at a train station due to being expelled from the Jagiellonian University for partaking in the Kraków uprising.
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Nikolay Nikolsky
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Nikolay Vasilyevich Nikolsky was a Russian historian, ethnographer, folklorist, lexicographer of half-Russian half- Chuvash ethnicity. Biography Nikolay Vasilyevich Nikolsky was born in a village of Yurmekeykino, Yadrinsk uyezd in the family of surveyor. After finishing the local Shumatov zemstvo College he enrolled in the Theological College in Cheboksary. After that he studied also in the Theological Seminary in Kazan which Nikolsky finished in 1899 and then continuing to study at the Theological Academy of Kazan. Upon graduation of the academy he obtained the title of magistrate and his...
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Ulrich Köhler
1838 - 1903 (65 years)
Ulrich Köhler was a German archaeologist. Biography He studied at the University of Jena and was appointed secretary of the Prussian embassy at Athens and later was made professor of archaeology at the University of Strassburg. He was governor of the newly founded Archaeological Institute at Athens and was appointed professor of ancient history at Berlin .
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Georg Busolt
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
Georg Busolt was a German historian of Classical history. Busolt, born at Gut Kepurren near Insterburg, was the son of the East Prussian landowner Adolf Julius Busolt . He attended the Gymnasium at Insterburg and studied history and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. In 1874 he received for his dissertation Grundzüge der Erkenntnißtheorie und Metaphysik Spinozas , for which he received his doctorate in the following year, the Kant Prize. Following a research tour of Italy and Greece, Busolt habilitated in 1878 at Königsberg with his work on Sparta.
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Hans Baron
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Hans Baron was a German-American historian of political thought and literature. His main contribution to the historiography of the period was to introduce in 1928 the term civic humanism . Life and career Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, Baron was a student of the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he left Germany, first for Italy and England, then in 1938 for the United States. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945. He was employed as a librarian and served as Research Fellow and Bibliographer at the Newberry Library from 1949 to 1965 and was a Distinguished Research Fellow at Newberry until 1970, when he retired.
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Ellen McArthur
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Ellen Annette McArthur was a British economic historian. Biography Ellen Annette McArthur was born on 19 June 1862 in Duffield, Derbyshire. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she later became the tutor in history. In 1893 she became the first female lecturer at the University of Cambridge Local Examinations & Lectures Syndicate. She was the first woman to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College Dublin, under arrangements .
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João de Barros
1496 - 1570 (74 years)
João de Barros , nicknamed the "Portuguese Livy", is one of the first great Portuguese historians, most famous for his , a history of the Portuguese in India, Asia, and southeast Africa. Early years João de Barros was born in Viseu, Portugal around 1496. He was the illegitimate son of Lopo de Barros, a squire in the royal household of Manuel I of Portugal and a holder of various judicial posts. Nothing is known of his mother. At a young age his father died and he was placed into service at the royal household, where he became a page to the heir apparent, Dom João, the future João III of Portu...
Go to Profile#7281
Ibn al-Athir
1160 - 1233 (73 years)
Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ash-Shaybānī, better known as ʿAlī ʿIzz ad-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī was an Hadith expert, historian, and biographer who wrote in Arabic and was from the Ibn Athir family. At the age of twenty-one he settled with his father in Mosul to continue his studies, where he devoted himself to the study of history and Islamic tradition.
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Edward Spencer Beesly
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian. Life He was born on 23 January 1831 in Feckenham, Worcestershire, the eldest son of the Rev. James Beesly and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, of Queen's county, Ireland. After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.
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E. F. Jacob
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Ernest Fraser Jacob was a British medievalist and scholar who was President of the Chetham Society, Lancashire Parish Register Society and Ecclesiastical History Society. Education He was educated at Twyford School, Winchester College, and then for a period at New College, Oxford - broken by service in World War I. He won a fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford, and taught there and at Christ Church where his pupils included A. L. Rowse.
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Hsinbyushin
1736 - 1776 (40 years)
Hsinbyushin was king of the Konbaung dynasty of Burma from 1763 to 1776. The second son of the dynasty founder Alaungpaya is best known for his wars with Qing China and Siam, and is considered the most militaristic king of the dynasty. His successful defense against four Qing invasions preserved Burmese independence. His 1765 invasion of Ayutthaya brought an end to the Ayutthaya Kingdom. The near simultaneous victories over Qing and Siam has been referred to as testimony "to a truly astonishing elan unmatched since Bayinnaung." He also raised the Shwedagon Pagoda to its current height in Apr...
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Marin Drinov
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Marin Stoyanov Drinov was a Bulgarian historian and philologist from the National Revival period who lived and worked in Russia through most of his life. He was one of the originators of Bulgarian historiography. Drinov was a founding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences , as well as its first chairman.
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John Speed
1551 - 1629 (78 years)
John Speed was an English cartographer, chronologer and historian of Cheshire origins. The son of a citizen and Merchant Taylor in London, he rose from his family occupation to accept the task of drawing together and revising the histories, topographies and maps of the Kingdoms of Great Britain as an exposition of the union of their monarchies in the person of King James I and VI. He accomplished this with remarkable success, with the support and assistance of the leading antiquarian scholars of his generation. He drew upon and improved the shire maps of Christopher Saxton, John Norden and ot...
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Eduard Norden
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Eduard Norden was a German classical philologist and historian of religion. When Norden received an honorary doctorate from Harvard, James Bryant Conant referred to him as "the most famous Latinist in the world".
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Évariste Lévi-Provençal
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Évariste Lévi-Provençal was a French medievalist, orientalist, Arabist, and historian of Islam. The scholar who would take the name Lévi-Provençal was born 4 January 1894 in Constantine, French Algeria, as Makhlóuf Evariste Levi , his second name revealing that his North-African Jewish family was already somewhat Gallicized. By the age of nineteen when he published his first paper he had rechristened himself Évariste Lévi-Provençal. He studied at the Lycée in Constantine, and served in the French army during World War I, being wounded in the Dardanelles in 1917. He then joined the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines.
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Georg Voigt
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Georg Voigt was a German historian who was born in 1827 in Königsberg in East Prussia. He died in Leipzig in 1891. Voigt was the son of the historian Johannes Voigt. Voigt belonged to the founders of modern research into the Italian Renaissance along with Jacob Burckhardt.
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Thomas Lionel Hodgkin
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Thomas Lionel Hodgkin was an English Marxist historian of Africa, who was described by The Times at his death of having done "more than anyone to establish the serious study of African history" in the UK. He was married to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin.
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Jacques Presser
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Jacob Presser was a Dutch historian, writer and poet who is known for his book Ashes in the Wind on the history of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during World War II. Presser made a significant contribution to Dutch historical scholarship, as well as to European historical scholarship.
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Eugen Täubler
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Eugen Täubler was a German historian born in Gostyń. He studied history in Berlin under Otto Hirschfeld , receiving his doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation titled Die Parthernachrichten bei Josephus. From 1910 to 1914 he worked as a lecturer at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin.
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Andrew C. McLaughlin
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin was an American historian known as an authority on U.S. Constitutional history. Background McLaughlin was born in Illinois and received his bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Michigan. His father was David McLaughlin, born in Dalkeith, Scotland in 1830. His mother was Isabella Campbell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1819. His parents met on board ship when emigrating to the United States, settling in Beardstown, Illinois. David McLaughlin was a merchant and civic leader in Muskegon, MI, where a school and street are named for him.
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Arnold Toynbee
1852 - 1883 (31 years)
Arnold Toynbee was an English economic historian also noted for his social commitment and desire to improve the living conditions of the working classes. Life and career Toynbee was born in Syria, the son of the physician Joseph Toynbee, a pioneering otolaryngologist. His sister was the bacteriologist Grace Frankland.
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John Clapham
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Sir John Harold Clapham, CBE, FBA was a British economic historian. He was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and King's College, Cambridge. From 1889 to 1902 he was a lecturer in History and Economics at Leeds University and was Professor of Economics there from 1902 to 1908. He was the first Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University from 1928 to 1938, and Vice-Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1933 until 1943 when he received a knighthood.
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Mariya Sergeyenko
1891 - 1987 (96 years)
Mariya Yefimovna Sergeyenko was a Soviet scholar of Roman history and philologist . Sergeyenko authored over 100 scholar works, many of which remain in manuscripts. She was awarded the Medal "For the Defence of Leningrad" and the medal "For Valorous Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" for her service on the Eastern Front of World War II. Sergeyenko researched the Roman agriculture and the Roman daily life. She also translated Arrian's The Anabasis of Alexander and early Christian authors .
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Naitō Torajirō
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
#7298
Harold Temperley
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Harold William Vazeille Temperley, was an English historian, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge from 1931, and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Overview Temperley was born in Cambridge, the son of Ernest Temperley, a Fellow and Bursar of Queens' College, Cambridge. He was educated at Sherborne School and King's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a First in History. He became a lecturer at the University of Leeds in 1903, before taking a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1905.
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Karl von Hegel
1813 - 1901 (88 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Hegel was a German historian and son of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. During his lifetime he was a well-known and well-reputed historian who received many awards and honours. He was one of the major urban historians during the second half of the 19th century.
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Boris Turayev
1868 - 1920 (52 years)
Boris Alexandrovich Turayev was a scholar who studied the Ancient Near East . He was admitted into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1918. After graduating from the University of St Petersburg Turayev studied under Gaston Maspero and Adolf Erman and worked in museums of Berlin, Paris and London. Since 1896, he delivered lectures at the University of St Petersburg. He was an ordinary professor of this university since 1911. After the establishment of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, Turayev persuaded Vladimir Golenishchev to sell his collection of ancient Egyptian statuary and curiosities to the museum.
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