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,
#7351
Ignjat Đurđević
1675 - 1737 (62 years)
Ignjat Đurđević was a baroque poet and translator from the Republic of Ragusa, best known for his long poem Uzdasi Mandaljene pokornice . He wrote poetry in three languages: Latin, Italian and Croatian.
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Stefan Pawlicki
1839 - 1916 (77 years)
Stefan Zachariasz Pawlicki was a Polish Catholic priest, philosopher, historian of philosophy, professor and rector of Kraków's Jagiellonian University. Life Stefan Pawlicki came from a merchant family. He began his education in Danzig ; after his family moved to Greater Poland, he continued it in Pleschen . At age thirteen, he lost his parents during an epidemic. He completed progimnazjum thanks to help from a local parish priest, Father Basiński. He continued his education in 1853–58 at a liceum in Ostrów Wielkopolski, where he was one of the best pupils, thanks to a scholarship from Jan K...
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Vasily Modestov
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
Vasily Ivanovich Modestov was a Russian historian, philologist, publicist and translator. A Saint Petersburg University graduate who lectured at the Odessa, Kazan and Kiev Universities, as well as his alma mater , Modestov was a prominent authority on the history and culture of Ancient Rome, as well as earlier Apennine Peninsula cultures . He contributed to Istorichesky Vestnik, Golos, Nov, Filologicheskoye Obozrenye, as well as the Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, providing entries on the history and culture of Rome. Modestov translated into Russian semimal works by Tacitus , Horace, Spinoza, as well as the Reallexikon des classischen Alterthums für Gymnasien.
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Hoshino Hisashi
1839 - 1917 (78 years)
was a Japanese historian, active in the late 19th century debates over the role of Japanese history. Career Hoshino was appointed professor at Tokyo Imperial University in 1888. Historical work had previously been carried out in a government department dedicated to writing the official history of Japan, but it was decided in 1888 to move this work to the university. Hoshino, Kume Kunitake, and Shigeno Yasutsugu were the first three history professors appointed. Hoshino and Kume took opposite views on the historical treatment of Japanese mythology: Hoshino held that the Age of the Gods was a hi...
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Chen Yinke
1890 - 1969 (79 years)
Chen Yinke, or Chen Yinque , was a Chinese historian, linguist, orientalist, politician, and writer. He was a fellow of Academia Sinica, considered one of the most original and creative historians in 20th century China. His representative works are Draft essays on the origins of Sui and Tang institutions , Draft outline of Tang political history , and An Alternative Biography of Liu Rushi .
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Georgius Hornius
1620 - 1670 (50 years)
Georgius Hornius was a German historian and geographer, and professor of history at Leiden University from 1653 until his death. Life He was born in Kemnath, Upper Palatinate as the son of the superintendent of the Reformed church there. His family was forced to move away in the wake of the Catholic victory at White Mountain when Horn was still an infant. In 1635, he visited the gymnasium in Nuremberg, and in 1637 he was enrolled in University of Altdorf as a student of theology and medicine. He later worked as a private tutor, in Gröningen and later in Leiden, in the Dutch Republic. In Leiden, he was also enrolled as a student of Friedrich Spanheim.
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Alfred Götze
1865 - 1948 (83 years)
Alfred Götze was a German prehistorian. Götze may have received the first doctorate in the field of prehistory and early history, and later became one of the first scientists active in the field. He worked for a long time in the Archaeological Preservation in Berlin and Brandenburg and was founder and long-time director of the Steinsburg Museum in Römhild.
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John Spencer Bassett
1867 - 1928 (61 years)
John Spencer Bassett was an American historian. He was a professor at Trinity College , and is best known today for the "Bassett Affair" in 1903 when he publicly criticized racism among Southern elites, and called Booker T. Washington, "all in all the greatest man, save General Lee, born in the South in 100 years." Despite widespread outrage, the college trustees refused to accept Bassett's resignation by a vote of 18 to 7. After Trinity, he became a professor of history at Smith College in Massachusetts. and was the executive director of the American Historical Association for many years.
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Ilia Abuladze
1901 - 1968 (67 years)
Ilia Vladimiri dze Abuladze was a distinguished Georgian historian, philologist and public figure, a Corresponding Member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , Meritorious Science Worker of Georgia , Doctor of Philological Sciences , and professor .
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Władysław Heinrich
1869 - 1957 (88 years)
Władysław Heinrich was a Polish historian of philosophy, psychologist, professor at Kraków University and member of the Polish Academy of Learning. Life Władysław Heinrich studied mathematics, the natural sciences and philosophy. In philosophy he was a student of Richard Avenarius at the University of Zurich and applied his radical positivism to psychology: Heinrich pointed out that the new experimental psychology of the time was based on metaphysical concepts and premises, on constructions and introjections. In opposition to it, he proposed a psychology based on pure experiment .
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Szymon Starowolski
1588 - 1656 (68 years)
Szymon Starowolski was a writer, scholar and historian in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was probably born near Pruzhany, and died near Kraków. He was a very prolific writer, and left behind over 70 works, mostly in Latin. Some of them survived until its translation into Polish.
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Reginald Bassett
1901 - 1962 (61 years)
Reginald Bassett was an English historian and Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics. Career Having left school to become a solicitor's clerk, at the age of 25 Bassett won a scholarship to study for a diploma at Ruskin College, Oxford, and from there proceeded to New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer under the Extra-Mural Studies Delegacy of the University of Oxford, lecturing mainly in Sussex. From 1945-50 he was a tutor at the London School of Economics for a course designed for students from trade unions. He was lecturer in political science from 1950 to 1953, Re...
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Martin Lintzel
1901 - 1955 (54 years)
Martin Lintzel was a German historian, specialising on medieval German history. He studied at the University of Halle during 1919–1925, under Albert Werminghoff. His dissertation on the medieval institution of the Hoftage was published in 1924, supervised by Robert Holtzmann. He was a lecturer at Halle from 1931. In March 1935, he was elected as professor for medieval and modern history at the University of Kiel, but was sent back to Halle in 1936, following a political dispute with the National Socialist press and student organisations in Kiel. He entered military service for two months during 1944, but was discharged due to suffering from depression.
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Peter III of Aragon
1239 - 1285 (46 years)
Peter III of Aragon was King of Aragon, King of Valencia , and Count of Barcelona from 1276 to his death. At the invitation of some rebels, he conquered the Kingdom of Sicily and became King of Sicily in 1282, pressing the claim of his wife, Constance II of Sicily, uniting the kingdom to the crown.
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Orin Grant Libby
1864 - 1952 (88 years)
Orin Grant Libby was an American historian. Biography Libby was the son of farmer Asa Libby and his wife Julia Libby. As well as farming, his father held several local government positions, and worked in several skilled crafts. In 1886, Libby received a diploma from River Falls State Normal School, and then taught in high schools until 1890, when he entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison as a junior. He received a bachelor's degree from Wisconsin in 1892, and stayed to continue his studies in history. In 1893, he submitted a master's thesis with an emphasis on economic history entitled “De Witt Clinton and the Erie Canal — A State Enterprise.” He ultimately received a Ph.D.
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Paul Hazard
1878 - 1944 (66 years)
Paul Gustave Marie Camille Hazard , was a French professor and historian of ideas. Biography Hazard was the son of a school teacher. Starting in 1900, he attended the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He received a doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1910 and became famous for his Ph.D. dissertation La Révolution française et les lettres italiennes .
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Wilhelm Arndt
1838 - 1895 (57 years)
Wilhelm Ferdinand Arndt was a German historian. Biography He graduated from the University of Göttingen and became connected with the University of Leipzig . Works For many years he was a collaborator on the Monumenta Germaniæ Historica .
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Maria Luisa Righini-Bonelli
1917 - 1981 (64 years)
Maria Luisa Righini-Bonelli was an Italian science historian and educator. The daughter of General Luigi Bonelli and Adele Giamperoli, she was born Maria Luisa Bonelli in Pesaro. She studied Spanish language and literature and then taught in the faculty of political science at the University of Florence from 1948 to 1968. She worked with at the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza beginning in 1942. In 1961, she became director of the institute after Corsini died. Righini-Bonelli saved most of the important treasures of the institute during the Flood of Florence in 1966. She was a profes...
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Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Hendrick Peter Godfried Quack was a Dutch legal scholar, economist and historian, who is best known for his work De socialisten: Personen en stelsels . Biography Quack, born in Zetten to a beer brewer and his wife, commenced studies at Utrecht in 1853, followed by law studies at the Amsterdam Athenaeum Illustre. In Amsterdam, he attended lectures by Jeronimo de Bosch Kemper and Martinus des Amorie van der Hoeven, both Christian critics of liberalism. Following the example of his professors, Quack became convinced that liberalism could not address the social problems of his day. He submitted a...
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Aleksije Jelačić
1892 - 1941 (49 years)
Aleksije Jelačić was a Serbian historian. Jelačić was born in Kiev to a family of South Slavic descent; reportedly his ancestors moved to Russia in the 18th century from the Habsburg Empire. His ancestors came from Croatia.
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William Wells Newell
1839 - 1907 (68 years)
William Wells Newell was an American folklorist, school teacher, minister and philosophy professor. Biography Newell was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Divinity School. After trying his hand at ministry, he was a faculty member at the new philosophy department at Harvard University for a few years. However, the bulk of Newell's career was as a school teacher. He taught at the Wells Schoolfounded by his grandfather, William Wellssituated on Elmwood Avenue. Newell founded the American Folklore Society in 1888 where he edited the Journal of American Folklore.
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Joseph Spence
1699 - 1768 (69 years)
Joseph Spence was a historian, literary scholar and anecdotist, most famous for his collection of anecdotes that are an invaluable resource for historians of 18th-century English literature . Early life Spence was born on 28 April 1699, at Kingsclere, Hampshire, the son of Joseph and Mirabella .
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Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani
1896 - 1956 (60 years)
Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani was an Iranian literary scholar, historian, translator, and man of letters. Eqbal Ashtiani was born in Ashtian. He was educated at Dar ul-Funun in Tehran and University of Paris. In 1944 Eqbal founded the monthly periodical Yādgār. Eqbal Ashtiani died in Rome, Italy and was buried at the Shah-Abdol-Azim shrine in Rey, Iran.
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Beryl Smalley
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Beryl Smalley was an English historian best known for her work The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1941, but revised many times, a book that laid the foundations of modern study of the medieval popular Bible.
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Johann Daniel Ritter
1709 - 1775 (66 years)
Johann Daniel Ritter was a German historian. In 1732 he received his magister degree from the University of Leipzig, where in 1735 he became an associate professor of philosophy. In 1742 he was appointed professor of history at the University of Wittenberg.
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Menassa Youhanna
1899 - 1930 (31 years)
Father Menassa Youhanna was a Coptic priest, historian and theologian, most noted for his work on the history of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. Biography He was born in August, 1899 in Mallawi in Upper Egypt and died on Friday May 16, 1930, at the age of 30. Born in a Coptic Orthodox family, his father was also a priest.
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Antonio Schinella Conti
1677 - 1749 (72 years)
Antonio Schinella Conti , also known by his religious title as Abate Conti, was an Italian writer, translator, mathematician, philosopher and physicist. He was born in Padua on 22 January 1677 and died there on 6 April 1749.
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Henry Sheldon
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Henry Davidson Sheldon was an American educator and historian. Sheldon was born while his parents were en route to Oregon from the New York area. He was educated at the University of the Pacific and Stanford University. He continued his education at Clark University, where he received a doctorate in education.
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Emanuel Rostworowski
1923 - 1989 (66 years)
Emanuel Mateusz Rostworowski was a Polish historian, professor at Kraków's Jagiellonian University, and member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He specialized in 18th-century history. In 1965-89 he was editor-in-chief of Polski Słownik Biograficzny.
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Albert Houtin
1867 - 1926 (59 years)
Albert Houtin was a French Catholic theologian and historian with a focus on the history of doctrine and on modernism in French religion. Born in La Flèche, he grew up to become a priest and was ordained in 1891. Following the turn of the century, he became disenchanted with religion and came to regard all religious belief systems as fraudulent. In 1907, he had attended the Fourth International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston, which had been organised by Unitarians.
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Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko
1884 - 1973 (89 years)
Nataliia Polonska-Vasylenko was one of the foremost Ukrainian historians of the 20th century. She was a wife of the Ukrainian academician of history and statesman Mykola Vasylenko. Life and career Polonska-Vasylenko belonged to Russian nobility; her father was a Russian Imperial officer Dmytro Menshov . Polonska-Vasylenko studied history under Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky at Kyiv University and from 1912 was a member of the Kyiv-based Historical Society of Nestor the Chronicler. From 1916, she was a lecturer at Kyiv University and Director of its archeological museum. During the 1920s, the most l...
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James Bass Mullinger
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
James Bass Mullinger , sometimes known by his pen name Theodorus, was a British author, historian, lecturer and scholar. A longtime university librarian and lecturer at St. John's College, Cambridge, Mullinger was the author of several books detailing the college's history and similar academic subjects. He was also a contributor to many periodicals of the Victorian era, most especially, Cambridge History of Modern Literature, the Dictionary of National Biography and Encyclopædia Britannica.
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José Antonio Maravall
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
José Antonio Maravall Casesnoves was a Spanish historian and essayist associated with the Generation of '36 movement. Biography Maravall studied philosophy and law at the University of Murcia, where he completed his final degree in political science and economics at the Central University, where he was a student of Jose Ortega y Gasset. He became a university professor in Spain and abroad. Maravall was head of the department at the University of La Laguna and the Complutense University of Madrid. He also became a member of the Real Academia de la Historia and the president of the Spanish A...
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Eduard Winkelmann
1838 - 1896 (58 years)
Eduard Winkelmann was a German historian. Biography He was born at Danzig in the Province of Prussia. He studied at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen, worked at the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and in 1869 became professor of history at the University of Bern, and four years later at Heidelberg. He also spent some time in the Russian Empire, where he was headmaster at the knight and chapter school in Reval beginning in 1860, and was later appointed professor at the University of Dorpat . He died at Heidelberg.
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Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany
1807 - 1876 (69 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany was a German Lutheran theologian, historian, librarian and publicist. His rationalist outlook, influenced by Georg Friedrich Daumer, forced him to retire from his post as vicar at St. Aegidius parish in Nuremberg. He became city librarian in Nuremberg in 1841. His early publications are pamphlets against Lutheran bigotry, specifically agitating against the Old Lutheran president of the Lutheran assembly in Munich, Friedrich von Roth. In 1855, Ghillany moved to Munich, but he did not succeed in finding employment as a civil servant or diplomat, and he went on to publish multi-volume works on European history.
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Johann Georg Graevius
1632 - 1703 (71 years)
Johann Georg Graevius was a German classical scholar and critic. He was born in Naumburg, in the Electorate of Saxony. Life Graevius was originally intended for the law, but made the acquaintance of Johann Friedrich Gronovius during a casual visit to Deventer, under whose influence he abandoned jurisprudence for philology. He completed his studies under Daniel Heinsius at Leiden, and among others under the Protestant theologian David Blondel at Amsterdam.
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Tadeusz Sulimirski
1898 - 1983 (85 years)
Tadeusz Joseph Sulimirski was a Polish-born British historian and archaeologist, who emigrated to the United Kingdom soon after the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Sulimirski was a pioneer and leading expert in the study of the archaeology of steppe nomads, particularly the Cimmerians, Scythians and Sarmatians.
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Karl Theodor von Heigel
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Karl Theodor von Heigel was a German historian. He was the brother of novelist Karl August von Heigel. He studied history at the University of Munich, obtaining his habilitation for history in 1873. In 1879 he became an associate professor, and several years later, a full professor at the Polytechnic Institute in Munich. In 1885 he was appointed professor and director of the historical seminary at the university.
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Louise Nalbandian
1926 - 1974 (48 years)
Louise Ziazan Nalbandian was an American Armenian historian and professor in the History Department at California State University, Fresno from 1964 to 1974. She was the author of The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties Through the Nineteenth Century.
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Dušan Pirjevec
1921 - 1977 (56 years)
Dušan Pirjevec, known by his nom de guerre Ahac , was a Slovenian Partisan, literary historian and philosopher. He was one of the most influential public intellectuals in post–World War II Slovenia.
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Pierre Huard
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Pierre Huard was a French physician , historian of medicine and anthropologist, long in post in Indochina, dean of several faculties of medicine , rector of the Université Félix Houphouët-Boigny, a pioneer in the history of medicine.
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Axel Olrik
1864 - 1917 (53 years)
Axel Olrik was a Danish folklorist and scholar of mediaeval historiography, and a pioneer in the methodical study of oral narrative. Olrik was born in Frederiksberg, the son of the artist Henrik Olrik. Artist Dagmar Olrik, judge Eyvind Olrik, historian Hans Olrik and cultural historian Jørgen Olrik were siblings of his.
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Ignacy Chrzanowski
1866 - 1940 (74 years)
Ignacy Chrzanowski was a Polish historian of literature, professor of the Jagiellonian University, arrested by the Nazis as part of the Sonderaktion Krakau and killed in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
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Matthias Christian Sprengel
1746 - 1803 (57 years)
Matthias Christian Sprengel was a German geographer and historian. He was notably the author of works on North American history, the American Revolution and Maratha history. He studied history at the University of Göttingen as a pupil of August Ludwig von Schlözer. In 1778 he became an associate professor, and during the following year, relocated to the University of Halle as a full professor of history. At Halle he worked closely with Johann Reinhold Forster, who in time, became Sprengel's father-in-law.
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Giovanni Costigan
1905 - 1990 (85 years)
Giovanni Costigan was a historian and specialist in Irish and English history. Costigan was educated at the University of Oxford. He received a Master of Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison where he earned his PhD. In 1934 he joined the history department at the University of Washington where he served for 41 years. He was a staunch critic of American involvement in the Vietnam war. One Seattle reporter stated Costigan was a "combative man of peace."
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John W. Olmsted
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
John W. Olmsted was an American Rhodes scholar and historian of early modern Europe. He taught history at University of California, Los Angeles for 24 years and served as faculty representative to the Pacific Coast Conference for seven years. He also served as the first chairman of University of California, Riverside's Humanities Division.
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Edward Rosen
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
Edward Rosen was an American historian, whose main field of study was early modern science and, in particular, the work of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Academic life Edward Rosen's academic life, including his education, was spent in New York. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1926 and he received his master's and doctoral degrees from Columbia University. He was a teacher at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York until his retirement in 1977, with two interruptions: he was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1957–1958, and at Indiana University in 1963–1964.
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Francis Wade
1907 - 1987 (80 years)
Francis C. Wade was an American Jesuit and professor of philosophy at Marquette University. Biography Wade was born on November 11, 1907, in Whitesboro, Texas, where he was baptized in St. Thomas Church. He was the son of George H. Wade and Virginia M. Wade. He was educated at Whitesboro Public School and at St. Mary's College High School, St. Marys, Kansas. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1925. He was awarded his B.A. from Xavier University in 1930, his M.A. from Saint Louis University in 1932, and his S.T.L. from Saint Louis University in 1939.
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Courtenay Edward Stevens
1905 - 1976 (71 years)
Courtenay Edward Stevens was a British classicist. He was educated at Winchester College and received a first class degree in literae humaniores from New College, Oxford. Stevens remained at Oxford after graduation, receiving scholarships and, in 1933, a research fellowship at Magdalen College. During the Second World War he worked for British military intelligence, specialising in propaganda. Stevens produced German-language newspapers and broadcasts and suggested the use of the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony for Allied broadcasts. After the war he returned to Magdalen, taking on a huge teaching workload of up to 72 hours per week.
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Paul Scheffer-Boichorst
1843 - 1902 (59 years)
Paul Scheffer-Boichorst was a German historian of the Middle Ages. He studied history at the universities of Innsbruck, Göttingen and Berlin, receiving his doctorate from Leipzig University in 1867. Later on, he worked on the Monumenta Germaniae Historica project in Munich and Berlin. In 1875, he became an associate professor of history at the University of Giessen, then relocated to Strasbourg as a full professor during the following year. From 1890 onward, he taught classes at the University of Berlin.
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