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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.

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List of the most influential people in History,

#7401

Andrew Forest Muir

1916 - 1969 (53 years)

Andrew Forest Muir was an American historian and university professor. Early life Andrew Forest Muir was born on January 8, 1916, in Houston to J.B. and Annie Jane Muir. He grew up in Houston and attended public schools. He enrolled at the Rice University and earned a baccalaureate degree in 1838.

#7402

Ulrich Hugwald

1496 - 1571 (75 years)

Ulrich Hugwald was a Swiss humanist scholar and Reformer. Born in Wilen near Bischofszell, county of Thurgau, he was enrolled in the theological faculty in Basel University from 1519. He published critical pamphlets with Basel printer Adam Petri from 1520. He was in correspondence with a number of reformers, such as Vadianus, Michael Stifel, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Guillaume Farel. He also opened a private school of rhetorics in Basel. In 1524, he debated with Oecolampadius and Thomas Müntzer on the topic of believer's baptism. He joined the Basel Anabaptists in 1525, and was consequently imprisoned.

#7403

Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs

1511 - 1579 (68 years)

Erasmus Oswald Schreckenfuchs was an Austrian humanist, astronomer and Hebraist. Life He was born in Merckenstein, near Bad Vöslau in Lower Austria, and studied in Vienna, Ingolstadt and Tübingen. He became a student and friend of Sebastian Münster. Together they translated the Form of the Earth of Abraham bar Hiyya, with work of Elijah ben Abraham Mizrahi.

#7404

Hristo Gandev

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Hristo Gandev was a Bulgarian professor and historian.

#7405

Ignacio de Arbieto

1585 - 1670 (85 years)

Ignacio de Arbieto was a Jesuit philosopher and historian of Peru. Biography Arbieto was born in Madrid. He joined the Jesuit Order in 1603 and was ordained as a priest in Lima, Peru, in 1612. He was appointed chair of philosophy in Quito, Ecuador, then he went to Arequipa and finally back to Lima.

#7406

Oscar Osburn Winther

1903 - 1970 (67 years)

Oscar Osburn Winther was a history professor, specializing in the history of the western United States. He was the president of the Western History Association from 1963 to 1964 and the president of the Oral History Association from 1969 to 1970.

#7407

Johann Georg Neumann

Johann Georg Neumann

1661 - 1709 (48 years)

Johann Georg Neumann was a German Lutheran theologian and church historian. Born in Mörz and educated in Zittau, Neuman enrolled in Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg in 15 May 1680, receiving the rank of magister in less than a year, on 25 April 1681 and he became a member of the philosophical faculty in 1684, and full professor for poetics in 1690. Neumann then decided to study theology and began to hold sermons. He received his doctorate in theology in 1692 and became ordinary professor of theology in Wittenberg. Neumann was a pronounced opponent of Pietism and outspoken critic...

#7408

Reidar Omang

1897 - 1964 (67 years)

Reidar Omang was a Norwegian historian, librarian and archivist. Reidar Omang was born in Kristiania , Norway. His father, Simen Oscar Fredrik Omang , was a noted botanist. Omang took matriculation from the Skien public school in 1916. He took his Cand.mag. degree at the University of Oslo in 1924 and Cand. philol. in 1930.

#7409

Anders Leonard Bygdén

Anders Leonard Bygdén

1844 - 1929 (85 years)

Anders Leonard Bygdén was a Swedish historian and author. He founded the in 1880. Biography He was born on 3 March 1844 in Spånga, Sweden to Olof Bygdén. Bygdén enrolled at Uppsala University in 1863 and graduated with a B.A. in 1870 and Ph.D. in 1872. The university then hired him as an associate professor of philosophy. He founded the with Henrik Schück in 1880. He was made a member of the in 1890 and the in 1899. He published from 1923 to 1928. He died on 22 November 1929 in Uppsala, Sweden.

#7410

Axel von Harnack

1895 - 1974 (79 years)

Friedrich Hermann Julius Axel von Harnack was a German librarian, historian and philologist. He was the cousin of Arvid and Falk Harnack and worked to get Arvid and his wife, Mildred Harnack released from Nazi detention after they were arrested in connection with the Red Orchestra. He was the first in the family to be told of Arvid and Mildred's arrest, which had been kept secret by the Nazis. In 1947, he published a memoir of the trial that convicted Arvid and Mildred Harnack of high treason and sentenced them to death.

#7411

Rudolf Reicke

1825 - 1905 (80 years)

Rudolf Reicke was a German historian and scholar of Immanuel Kant. From 1847 to 1852 he studied at the University of Königsberg, where his influences included Karl Rosenkranz and Friedrich Wilhelm Schubert. From 1858 he was associated with the university library and was named head librarian in 1894. In 1864, he founded the , a journal for "Kantiana".

#7412

Richard White of Basingstoke

Richard White of Basingstoke

1539 - 1611 (72 years)

Richard White was an English jurist and historian, in later life an expatriate scholar who became a Catholic priest. Life He was son of Henry White of Basingstoke, Hampshire, who died at the siege of Boulogne in 1544. His mother was Agnes, daughter of Richard Capelin of Hampshire. He was born at Basingstoke, entered Winchester School in 1553, and was admitted perpetual fellow of New College, Oxford, in 1557. He took the degree of B.A. on 30 May 1559. On the advice of John Boxall he travelled abroad to study law; his fellowship was declared void in 1564.

#7413

Isobel D. Thornley

1893 - 1941 (48 years)

Isobel Dorothy Thornley FRHS FSA was a British historian of medieval England who compiled and edited works on legal history, the Yorkists, Richard II, and medieval sanctuary. She was a lecturer at University College London and later an independent scholar editing medieval law reports. She died when her home was hit by a bomb during the London Blitz. She left money to the University of London who award grants from her bequest for the publication of books that would not otherwise be published and to support candidates registered for a PhD at the university.

#7414

George William Daniels

1878 - 1937 (59 years)

George William Daniels was a British political economist and historian who was vice-president of the Chetham Society and President of the Manchester Statistical Society. Career Daniels was born in Manchester and educated at the Victoria University of Manchester where he gained his Master of Arts and Master of Commerce degrees and was later appointed Stanley Jeavons Professor of Political Economy. He worked with the economists John Jewkes and Harry Campion.

#7415

William H. Leary

1881 - 1957 (76 years)

William Henry Leary was the Dean of the University of Utah College of Law, now known as the S.J. Quinney College of Law, from 1915 to 1950. Leary was born in Hatfield, Massachusetts in 1881. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College in 1903, and a Juris Doctor from the University of Chicago Law School in 1908.

#7416

Eric W. Cochrane

1928 - 1985 (57 years)

Eric Willam Cochrane Jr. was an American academic who specialized in the Italian Renaissance. Cochrane was from Berkeley, California. He was awarded the Fulbright Scholarship from 1951 to 1953, and completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1954. Cochrane then taught at Stanford University before serving in the United States Army. Upon his discharge, Cochrane joined the University of Chicago faculty. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961, and the University of Chicago's Llewellyn John and Harriet Manchester Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1965. He fell ill on a train traveling from Florence to Bologna on November 27, 1985, and died.

#7417

Karl Heinz Bremer

1911 - 1942 (31 years)

Karl Heinz Bremer was a German historian who died during the Second World War. He had taught German at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale before the Second World War. He joined the Nazi Party 1 May 1937. Following the fall of France, Bremer was the associate director of the German Institute in Paris, from its creation in the fall of 1940 until he was sent to the Russian front 27 February 1942. The German Institute was responsible for editing the French press, and for controlling newly published French books during the occupation.

#7418

Philip Nelson

1872 - 1953 (81 years)

Philip Nelson was a 20th century physician, antiquary and collector of ancient cuneiform tablets, coins and stained glass most of which is now held together at the Liverpool Museum under the title of the Nelson Collection.

#7419

Max Simon

1844 - 1918 (74 years)

Maximilian Simon was a German historian of mathematics and mathematics teacher. He was concerned mostly with mathematics in the antiquity. Born into a Jewish family, he studied from 1862 to 1866 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, obtaining his Ph.D. from Karl Weierstrass und Ernst Eduard Kummer He was a mathematics teacher in Berlin from 1868 to 1871, and in Strasbourg from 1871 to 1912, where he became an honorary professor of the university.

#7420

Henry Adams Bellows

Henry Adams Bellows

1885 - 1939 (54 years)

Henry Adams Bellows was a newspaper editor and radio executive who was an early member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He is also known for his translation of the Poetic Edda for The American-Scandinavian Foundation.

#7421

Helge Groth

1913 - 1966 (53 years)

Helge Otto Aars Groth was a Norwegian literary historian and diplomat. He was born in Stavanger, and took the cand.philol. degree in 1938. He was a lecturer in European literature at the University of Oslo from 1939 to 1953, and also as held lectures on foreign affairs in Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation radio from 1946 to 1953. Books include Hovedlinjer i mellomkrigstidens norske litteratur and Olav Aukrust, Problematikk og utvikling .

#7422

James Monroe Smith

1888 - 1949 (61 years)

James Monroe Smith was an American educator and academic administrator in Louisiana. In 1931, he was appointed president of Louisiana State University by Huey Long. Smith was referred to as "Jimmy the Stooge" by students of the university.

#7423

Ernst Weyden

1805 - 1869 (64 years)

Ernst Weyden was a scholar and member of the Faculty at the University of Cologne. Publications All publications in German, unless otherwise noted.Cöln's Vorzeit: Geschichten, Legenden und Sagen Cöln's nebst einer Auswahl cölnischer Volkslieder. Cöln a. Rh: Schmitz, 1826. Aventures merveilleuses de Siegfried Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Fréderic et Gela. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Drachenfels et Rolandsech. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Loreley Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. La dame Richmodis. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Germain Joseph. Sagas. P. 43-47: [1] f. de pl, 1833. Albertus Magnus.

#7424

Adam Szelągowski

1873 - 1961 (88 years)

Adam Wiktor Szelągowski was a Polish historian, teacher and professor of the Jan Kazimierz University. Szelągowski was a member of the National League. Works Najstarsze drogi z Polski na Wschód: w okresie bizantyńsko-arabskim, Kraków 1909.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. I. Egipt. Babilon i Assyrya. Syrya i Palestyna. Azya Mniejsza. Iran i Turan. Indye, Chiny i Pacyfik. Warszawa 1913.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. II. Grecya archaiczna. Grecya bohaterska. Grecya wolna. Panowanie Grecyi nad światem. Warszawa 1914.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. III. Rzym – miasto. Rzym – państwo.

#7425

George Smith

1800 - 1868 (68 years)

George Smith was an English businessman, historian and theologian. He is now best known for historical work relating to the Methodist conference. Life Born at Condurrow, near Camborne, Cornwall, on 31 August 1800, he was the son of William Smith, a carpenter and small farmer at Condurrow , by his wife, Philippa Moneypenny . He was educated at the British and Foreign schools in Falmouth, and in Plymouth where his father retired in 1808, when the lease of his farm expired. In 1812 he returned with his parents to Cornwall, and was employed for several years in farm work and carpentering. Having ...

#7426

Prabodh Chandra Sengupta

1876 - 1962 (86 years)

Prabodh Chandra Sengupta was a historian of ancient Indian astronomy. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Bethune College in Calcutta and a lecturer in Indian Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of Calcutta.

#7427

Jerrilyn McGregory

Jerrilyn McGregory is a professor of African American folklore at Florida State University and an author. She wrote Wiregrass Country and Downhome Gospel; African American Spriritual Activism in Wiregrass Country. She has been researching celebrations of Boxing Day in the Caribbean.

#7428

Maximilian Curtze

1837 - 1903 (66 years)

Ernst Ludwig Wilhelm Maximilian Curtze was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He translated many classical mathematical texts. Curtze was born in Ballenstedt, in the Principality of Anhalt-Bernburg, the fourth son of physician Eduard Curtze and Johanna Nicolai. After attending the Carolinum grammar school at Bernburg, he graduated from the University of Greifswald in 1857 after training under Johann August Grunert. He then passed the examination for teachers in 1861 and taught at the Thorn Gymnasium until his retirement in 1896. A colleague was the Copernicus scholar Leopold Prove.

#7429

Robert Howard

1585 - 1653 (68 years)

Sir Robert Howard KB was an English landowner, member of parliament, and Royalist soldier. He was involved in a scandal when his mistress Frances Coke, Viscountess Purbeck, was found guilty of adultery and was twice summoned to explain her pregnancy with his son to the Court of High Commission. During the English Civil War, Howard was in command of the defence of Bridgnorth Castle when it surrendered to the Parliamentarians in 1646.

#7430

Albert T. Olmstead

1880 - 1945 (65 years)

Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead was an American historian and academic, who specialized in Assyriology. Olmstead was born in 1880 in New York, and died in 1945 in Chicago. He was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Among his doctoral students was Neilson C. Debevoise, later an influential historian of the Parthian Empire.

#7431

Nagao Ariga

1860 - 1921 (61 years)

Nagao Ariga also spelled Nagao Aruga was a Japanese legal expert during the Meiji period. In addition to law, he also studied sociology at Tokyo Imperial University. During the Sino-Japanese war, he advised Field-Marshall Ōyama Iwao on issues of international law. In 1913 he accepted the invitation by Yuan Shikai, to prepare a draft constitution for the new Chinese republic, together with . Ariga doubted that China was ready to implement a liberal democracy and recommended a balance between monarchy and republic.

#7432

Philip Taft

1902 - 1976 (74 years)

Philip Taft was an American labor historian whose research focused on the labor history of the United States and the American Federation of Labor. Early life Taft was born on March 22, 1902, in Syracuse, New York. His father died when he was still a young boy. His mother moved the family to New York City, where she took up work as a house cleaner.

#7433

Irving A. Leonard

1896 - 1996 (100 years)

Irving Albert Leonard was an American historian and translator, specializing in Hispanic history and art. His best known publications are Books of the Brave and Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places and Practices , which won the Conference on Latin American History award for the best book in English. Books of the Brave, a valuable account of the introduction of literary culture to Spain's New World, was updated in 1992. He had many papers published in the American Historical Review and the Hispanic American Historical Review, such as A Frontier Library, 1799 .

#7434

Archer Taylor

1890 - 1973 (83 years)

Archer Taylor was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore", with a special interest in cultural history, literature, proverbs, riddles and bibliography. Early life and education Taylor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 1890.

#7435

Rachel Moss

Rachel Moss is an Irish art historian and professor specialising in medieval art, with a particular interest in Insular art, medieval Irish Gospel books and monastic history. She is the current head of the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, where she became a fellow in 2022.

#7436

Solomon Zeitlin

1892 - 1976 (84 years)

Solomon Zeitlin was an American Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar and in his time the world's leading authority on the Second Commonwealth, also known as the Second Temple period. His work The Rise and Fall of the Judean State is about the Second Temple period.

#7437

Richard Harrison Shryock

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Richard Harrison Shryock was an American medical historian, specializing in the connection of medical history with general history. Biography Shryock studied at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy and then at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating there with a bachelor's degree in 1917 and a PhD in American history in 1924. Before 1917 he taught school in Philadelphia. During WWI he served as a private in the United States Army Ambulance Service. He was instructor of history from 1921 to 1924 at Ohio State University and from 1924 to 1925 at the University of Pennsylvania. In Duke Univers...

#7438

Roland Bainton

1894 - 1984 (90 years)

Roland Herbert Bainton was a British-born American Protestant church historian. Life Bainton was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, England, and came to the United States in 1902. He received an AB degree from Whitman College, and BD and PhD. degrees from Yale University. He also received a number of honorary degrees including a DD from Meadville Theological Seminary and from Oberlin College, Dr. Theologiae from the University of Marburg, Germany, and LittD from Gettysburg College. A specialist in Reformation history, Bainton was for 42 years Titus Street Professor of ecclesiastical history at Yal...

#7439

Carl Benjamin Boyer

Carl Benjamin Boyer

1906 - 1976 (70 years)

Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."

#7440

Lily Ross Taylor

1886 - 1969 (83 years)

Lily Ross Taylor was an American academic and author, who in 1917 became the first female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Biography Born in Auburn, Alabama, Lily Ross Taylor developed an interest in Roman studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning an A.B. in 1906. She went to Bryn Mawr College as a graduate student that year, and received her Ph.D. in Latin in 1912. Her dissertation advisor was Tenney Frank. From 1912 until 1927, she taught at Vassar, and, in 1917, she became the fourth female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

#7441

Lynn Townsend White Jr.

1907 - 1987 (80 years)

Lynn Townsend White Jr. was an American historian. He was a professor of medieval history at Princeton from 1933 to 1937, and at Stanford from 1937 to 1943. He was president of Mills College, Oakland, from 1943 to 1958 and a professor at University of California, Los Angeles from 1958 until 1987. Lynn White helped to found the Society for the History of Technology and was president from 1960 to 1962. He won the Pfizer Award for "Medieval Technology and Social Change" from the History of Science Society and the Leonardo da Vinci medal and Dexter prize from SHOT in 1964 and 1970. He was president of the History of Science Society from 1971 to 1972.

#7442

Sherburne F. Cook

1896 - 1974 (78 years)

Sherburne Friend Cook was an American physiologist and demographist, who served as professor and chairman of the department of physiology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was notable as a pioneer in population studies of the native peoples of North America and Mesoamerica and in field methods and quantitative analysis in archaeology.

#7443

Albrecht Goetze

1897 - 1971 (74 years)

Albrecht Ernst Rudolf Goetze was a German-American Hittitologist. Goetze was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1897. His father, Rudolf Goetze, was a psychiatrist. He began studies in Munich in 1915, but left to fight in World War I. Returning in 1918, he received his degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1922 and taught there for five years.

#7444

J. R. Partington

1886 - 1965 (79 years)

James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry , for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.

#7445

Thomas McKeown

1912 - 1988 (76 years)

Thomas McKeown was a British physician, epidemiologist and historian of medicine. Largely based on demographic data from England and Wales, McKeown argued that the population growth since the late eighteenth century was due to improving economic conditions, i.e. better nutrition, rather than to better hygiene, public health measures and improved medicine . This became known as the "McKeown thesis".

#7446

George Sarton

1884 - 1956 (72 years)

George Alfred Leon Sarton was a Belgian-American chemist and historian. He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study. His most influential works were the Introduction to the History of Science, which consists of three volumes and 4,296 pages and the journal Isis. Sarton ultimately aimed to achieve an integrated philosophy of science that provided a connection between the sciences and the humanities, which he referred to as "the new humanism".

#7447

Arthur N. Holcombe

1884 - 1977 (93 years)

Arthur Norman Holcombe was an American political scientist and educator who taught at Harvard University from 1910 until his retirement in 1955. He was known for his studies of government structure.

#7448

Richard B. Morris

1904 - 1989 (85 years)

Richard Brandon Morris was an American historian best known for his pioneering work in colonial American legal history and the early history of American labor. In later years, he shifted his research interests to the constitutional, diplomatic, and political history of the American Revolution and the making of the United States Constitution.

#7449

George Wynn Brereton Huntingford

1901 - 1978 (77 years)

George Wynn Brereton Huntingford was an English linguist, anthropologist and historian. He lectured in East African languages and cultures at SOAS, University of London from 1950 until 1966. In 1966, Huntingford went to Canada to organise the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Brunswick at Fredericton, and retired to Málaga the next year, where he lived after his retirement.

#7450

Frank Stenton

1880 - 1967 (87 years)

Sir Frank Merry Stenton FBA was an English historian of Anglo-Saxon England, a professor of history at the University of Reading , president of the Royal Historical Society , Reading University's vice-chancellor .

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