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,
#7551
Constantius Chlorus
250 - 306 (56 years)
Flavius Valerius Constantius "Chlorus" , also called Constantius I, was Roman emperor from 305 to 306. He was one of the four original members of the Tetrarchy established by Diocletian, first serving as caesar from 293 to 305 and then ruling as augustus until his death. Constantius was also father of Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome. The nickname Chlorus was first popularized by Byzantine-era historians and not used during the emperor's lifetime.
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Andreas Alföldi
1895 - 1981 (86 years)
András Ede Zsigmond Alföldi was a Hungarian historian, art historian, epigraphist, numismatist and archaeologist, specializing in the Late Antique period. He was one of the most productive 20th-century scholars of the ancient world and is considered one of the leading researchers of his time. Although some of his research results are controversial, his work in several areas is viewed as groundbreaking.
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John Addington Symonds
1840 - 1893 (53 years)
John Addington Symonds Jr. was an English poet and literary critic. A cultural historian, he was known for his work on the Renaissance, as well as numerous biographies of writers and artists. Although married with children, Symonds supported male love , which he believed could include pederastic as well as egalitarian relationships, referring to it as l'amour de l'impossible . He also wrote much poetry inspired by his same-sex affairs.
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George Lincoln Burr
1857 - 1938 (81 years)
George Lincoln Burr was a US historian, diplomat, author, and educator, best known as a Professor of History and Librarian at Cornell University, and as the closest collaborator of Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell.
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Nikolai Mashkin
1900 - 1950 (50 years)
Nikolai Alexandrovich Mashkin was a Soviet scholar of Roman history . Mashkin authored The History of Ancient Rome , which was translated into several languages, and The Principate of Augustus. Its Origin and Social Essence . In 1950 Mashkin received the Stalin Prize.
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Abigail Adams
1744 - 1818 (74 years)
Abigail Adams was the wife and closest advisor of John Adams, as well as the mother of John Quincy Adams. She was a founder of the United States, and was both the first second lady and second first lady of the United States, although such titles were not used at the time. She and Barbara Bush are the only two women to have been married to U.S. presidents and to have been the mothers of other U.S. presidents.
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Guglielmo Ferrero
1871 - 1942 (71 years)
Guglielmo Ferrero was an Italian historian, journalist and novelist, author of the Greatness and Decline of Rome . Ferrero devoted his writings to classical liberalism and he opposed any kind of dictatorship and unlimited government.
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Casimir III the Great
1310 - 1370 (60 years)
Casimir III the Great reigned as the King of Poland from 1333 to 1370. He also later became King of Ruthenia in 1340, and fought to retain the title in the Galicia-Volhynia Wars. He was the last Polish king from the Piast dynasty.
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John Foxe
1516 - 1587 (71 years)
John Foxe was an English clergyman, theologian, and historian, notable for his martyrology Actes and Monuments , telling of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, but particularly the sufferings of English Protestants and proto-Protestants from the 14th century and in the reign of Mary I. The book was widely owned and read by English Puritans and helped to mould British opinion on the Catholic Church for several centuries.
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Herbert Eugene Bolton
1870 - 1953 (83 years)
Herbert Eugene Bolton was an American historian who pioneered the study of the Spanish-American borderlands and was a prominent authority on Spanish American history. He originated what became known as the Bolton Theory of the history of the Americas which holds that it is impossible to study the history of the United States in isolation from the histories of other American nations, and wrote or co-authored ninety-four works. A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton disagreed with his mentor's Frontier theory and argued that the history of the Americas is best understood by taking a holi...
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Vladimir Sergeyevich Sergeyev
1883 - 1941 (58 years)
Vladimir Sergeyevich Sergeyev was a Soviet historian of classical antiquity. During 1934-41 Sergeev served as the head of Department of Ancient History at the Moscow State University and the Moscow Institute of Philosophy, Literature and History. During 1936-41 worked in the Institute of History Soviet Academy of Sciences. Sergeev concentrated on the history of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome and was author of the first Soviet textbooks about this topic.
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Inca Garcilaso de la Vega
1539 - 1616 (77 years)
Inca Garcilaso de la Vega , born Gómez Suárez de Figueroa and known as El Inca, was a chronicler and writer born in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Sailing to Spain at 21, he was educated informally there, where he lived and worked the rest of his life. The natural son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca noblewoman born in the early years of the conquest, he is known primarily for his chronicles of Inca history, culture, and society. His work was widely read in Europe, influential and well received. It was the first literature by an author born in the Americas to enter the western canon.
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Fletcher Pratt
1897 - 1956 (59 years)
Murray Fletcher Pratt was an American writer of history, science fiction, and fantasy. He is best known for his works on naval history and the American Civil War and for fiction written with L. Sprague de Camp.
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Werner Conze
1910 - 1986 (76 years)
Werner Conze was a German historian. Georg Iggers refers to him as "one of the most important historians and mentors of the post-1945 generation of West German historians." Beginning in 1998, Conze's role during the Third Reich and his successful postwar career in spite of this became a subject of great controversy among German historians.
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D. G. E. Hall
1891 - 1979 (88 years)
Daniel George Edward Hall was a British historian, writer, and academic. He wrote extensively on the history of Burma. His most notable work is A History of Southeast Asia, said to "...remain the most important single history of the region, providing encyclopedic coverage of material published up to the time of its 1981 revision." He held professorships in Southeast Asian history at both Cornell University and the University of London – where he eventually became professor emeritus.
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William H. Prescott
1796 - 1859 (63 years)
William Hickling Prescott was an American historian and Hispanist, who is widely recognized by historiographers to have been the first American scientific historian. Despite having serious visual impairment, which at times prevented him from reading or writing for himself, Prescott became one of the most eminent historians of 19th century America. He is also noted for his eidetic memory.
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Robert Mandrou
1921 - 1984 (63 years)
Robert Mandrou , was a French historian, one of the members of the Annales School and the secretary to its journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale . He was also, with Georges Duby one of the pioneers of what Annaliste historians in the 1970s and 80's came to call the "history of mentalities".
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G. G. Coulton
1858 - 1947 (89 years)
George Gordon Coulton was a British historian, known for numerous works on medieval history. He was known also as a keen controversialist. Coulton was born in King's Lynn and educated at King's Lynn Grammar School, Felsted School, and St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
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John of Fordun
1301 - 1384 (83 years)
John of Fordun was a Scottish chronicler. It is generally stated that he was born at Fordoun, Mearns. It is certain that he was a secular priest, and that he composed his history in the latter part of the 14th century. It is probable that he was a chaplain in St Machar's Cathedral of Aberdeen.
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Simon Janashia
1900 - 1947 (47 years)
Simon Janashia was a Georgian historian and public figure. He was a professor of history and one of the founding members of the Georgian Academy of Sciences. Janashia was born in 1900, in Makvaneti in the southwestern Georgian province of Guria. His father, Nikoloz Janashia , was an educator and ethnographer, born in Abkhazia. In 1922, Simon Janashia graduated from the Tbilisi State University. From 1924 to 1947, he served as a lecturer , Associate Professor and Professor there. In 1941, he was one of the founders of the Georgian Academy of Sciences , and from 1941 to 1947, he was Vice-President of the Academy and Director of the Institute of History of the GAS.
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Constantine V
718 - 775 (57 years)
Constantine V was Byzantine emperor from 741 to 775. His reign saw a consolidation of Byzantine security from external threats. As an able military leader, Constantine took advantage of civil war in the Muslim world to make limited offensives on the Arab frontier. With this eastern frontier secure, he undertook repeated campaigns against the Bulgars in the Balkans. His military activity, and policy of settling Christian populations from the Arab frontier in Thrace, made Byzantium's hold on its Balkan territories more secure.
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Richard Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley
1760 - 1842 (82 years)
Richard Colley Wellesley, 1st Marquess Wellesley, was an Anglo-Irish politician and colonial administrator. He was styled as Viscount Wellesley until 1781, when he succeeded his father as 2nd Earl of Mornington. In 1799, he was granted the Irish peerage title of Marquess Wellesley. He was also Lord Wellesley in the Peerage of Great Britain.
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Judas Maccabeus
Judah Maccabee was a Jewish priest and a son of the priest Mattathias. He led the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire . The Jewish holiday of Hanukkah commemorates the restoration of Jewish worship at the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BCE, after Judah Maccabee removed all of the statues depicting Greek gods and goddesses and purified it.
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Niharranjan Ray
1903 - 1981 (78 years)
Niharranjan Ray was an Indian Bengali historian, well known for his works on the history of art and Indian history. Early life and education He was born on 14 January 1903 at Kayetgram village of Mymensingh District in Bengal province of British India . He completed his initial studies from the Mrityunjaya School and Ananda Mohan College in Mymensingh. In 1924, he passed his B.A. examination in History from Murari Chand College, Sylhet. In 1926, he stood first in the M.A. examination in Ancient Indian History and Culture from the University of Calcutta. He received the Mrinalini Gold Medal in the same year for his Political History of Northern India, AD 600-900.
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Seneca the Elder
54 BC - 39 (93 years)
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Elder , also known as Seneca the Rhetorician, was a Roman writer, born of a wealthy equestrian family of Corduba, Hispania. He wrote a collection of reminiscences about the Roman schools of rhetoric, six books of which are extant in a more or less complete state and five others in epitome only. His principal work, a history of Roman affairs from the beginning of the Civil Wars until the last years of his life, is almost entirely lost to posterity. Seneca lived through the reigns of three significant emperors; Augustus , Tiberius and Caligula . He was the father of Lu...
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Ludwig Dehio
1888 - 1963 (75 years)
Ludwig Dehio was a German archivist and historian. Dehio was born in Königsberg, the son of art historian Georg Dehio. He studied philosophy, philology and history at the University of Strasbourg and received his doctorate in 1912. Later in his career he served as Staatsarchivrat at the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. From 1945 to 1954 he was director of the Hessian state archives in Marburg. He was catalyst in the founding of the "archives school" in Marburg.
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Pulakeshin II
610 - 642 (32 years)
Pulakeshin II populary known as Immadi Pulakeshi, was the greatest Chalukyan Emperor who reigned from Vatapi . During his reign, the Chalukya Empire expanded to cover most of the Deccan region in peninsular India.
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Alexey Okladnikov
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Alexey Pavlovich Okladnikov was a Soviet archaeologist, historian, and ethnographer, an expert in the ancient cultures of Siberia and the Pacific Basin. He was elected a full member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1968, and awarded the honorary title of the Hero of Socialist Labor . The childhood of the scientist took place in Biryulka village in Siberia. From 1938 to 1961, Okladnikov worked in the Leningrad Division of the Archeology Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
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Kan'ichi Asakawa
1873 - 1948 (75 years)
Kan'ichi Asakawa was a Japanese academic, author, historian, curator and peace advocate. Asakawa was Japanese by birth and citizenship though he lived the majority of his life in the United States. Early life and education Asakawa was born in Nihonmatsu, Japan, on December 20, 1873. He was educated at the Fukushima-ken Jinjo School in Fukushima Prefecture and at Waseda University in Tokyo before he traveled to the United States to study at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. There, he was awarded his Bachelor of Letters degree in 1899. He continued his studies at Yale University, ea...
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Ekvtime Takaishvili
1863 - 1953 (90 years)
Ekvtime Takaishvili was a Georgian historian, archaeologist and public benefactor. Born in the village of Likhauri in the western Georgian province of Guria to a local nobleman Svimon Takaishvili, he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1887. From 1887 to 1917, he lectured on the history of Georgia at various prestigious schools in Tbilisi, including the Tbilisi Gymnasium for Nobility. During these years, he was actively involved in extensive scholarly activities and chaired, from 1907 to 1921, the Society of History and Ethnography of Georgia. Between 1907 and 1910, he organized a s...
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Charles Diehl
1859 - 1944 (85 years)
Charles Diehl was a French historian born in Strasbourg. He was a leading authority on Byzantine art and history. Biography He received his education at the École Normale Supérieure, and later taught classes on Byzantine history at the Sorbonne. He was member of the École française de Rome and the École française d'Athènes. In 1910, he became a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres .
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Ilya Ehrenburg
1891 - 1967 (76 years)
Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg was a Soviet writer, revolutionary, journalist and historian. Ehrenburg was among the most prolific and notable authors of the Soviet Union; he published around one hundred titles. He became known first and foremost as a novelist and a journalist – in particular, as a reporter in three wars . His incendiary articles calling for violence against Germans during the Great Patriotic War won him a huge following among front-line Soviet soldiers, but also caused much controversy due to their perceived anti-German sentiment. Ehrenburg later clarified that his writings wer...
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Frederic C. Lane
1900 - 1984 (84 years)
Frederic C. Lane was a historian who specialized in Medieval history with a particular emphasis on the region of Venice. Early life, education, and family The son of Alfred Church Lane and his wife Susanne Foster Lane, Frederic Lane received his B.A. from Cornell University in 1921, his M.A. from Tufts College in 1922, where he wrote a master's thesis on "The economic history of Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century", and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1930 with a doctoral thesis on "Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries." He began hi...
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Augusto César Sandino
1895 - 1934 (39 years)
Augusto C. Sandino , full name Augusto Nicolás Calderón Sandino, was a Nicaraguan revolutionary and leader of a rebellion between 1927 and 1933 against the United States occupation of Nicaragua. Despite being referred to as a "bandit" by the United States government, his exploits made him a hero throughout much of Latin America, where he became a symbol of resistance to American imperialism. Sandino drew units of the United States Marine Corps into an undeclared guerrilla war. The United States troops withdrew from the country in 1933 after overseeing the election and inauguration of President Juan Bautista Sacasa, who had returned from exile.
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Martin Grabmann
1875 - 1949 (74 years)
Martin Grabmann was a German Roman Catholic priest, medievalist and historian of theology and philosophy. He was a pioneer of the history of medieval philosophy and has been called "the greatest Catholic scholar of his time."
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Olaus Magnus
1490 - 1557 (67 years)
Olaus Magnus was a Swedish writer, cartographer, and Catholic clergyman. Biography Olaus Magnus was born in Linköping in October 1490. Like his elder brother, Sweden's last Catholic archbishop Johannes Magnus, he obtained several ecclesiastical preferments, among them a canonry at Uppsala and Linköping, and the archdeaconry of Strängnäs. He was furthermore employed on various diplomatic services after his mission to Rome in 1524, on behalf of Gustav I of Sweden , to procure the appointment of Olaus Magnus' brother Johannes Magnus as archbishop of Uppsala. He remained abroad dealing with for...
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Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
1609 - 1674 (65 years)
Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon , was an English statesman, lawyer, diplomat and historian who served as chief advisor to Charles I during the First English Civil War, and Lord Chancellor to Charles II from 1660 to 1667.
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Samuel Rawson Gardiner
1829 - 1902 (73 years)
Samuel Rawson Gardiner was an English historian, who specialized in 17th-century English history as a prominent foundational historian of the Puritan revolution and the English Civil War. Life The son of Rawson Boddam Gardiner, he was born in Ropley, Hampshire. He was educated at Winchester College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he obtained a first class in Literae Humaniores. He was subsequently elected to fellowships at All Souls and Merton . For some years he was professor of modern history at King's College London, and devoted his life to the subject. In 1896 he was elected to give the first series of Ford Lectures at Oxford University.
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John Wheeler-Bennett
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Sir John Wheeler Wheeler-Bennett was a conservative English historian of German and diplomatic history, and the official biographer of King George VI. He was well known in his lifetime, and his interpretation of the role of the German Army influenced a number of British historians.
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Lady Gregory
1852 - 1932 (80 years)
Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory was an Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager. With William Butler Yeats and Edward Martyn, she co-founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre, and wrote numerous short works for both companies. Lady Gregory produced a number of books of retellings of stories taken from Irish mythology. Born into a class that identified closely with British rule, she turned against it. Her conversion to cultural nationalism, as evidenced by her writings, was emblematic of many of the political struggles to occur in Ireland during her lifetime.
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Somerled
1100 - 1164 (64 years)
Somerled , known in Middle Irish as Somairle, Somhairle, and Somhairlidh, and in Old Norse as Sumarliði , was a mid-12th-century Norse-Gaelic lord who, through marital alliance and military conquest, rose in prominence to create the Kingdom of Argyll and the Isles. Little is certain of Somerled's origins, although he may have been born in northern Ireland and appears to have belonged to a Norse–Gaelic family of some prominence. His father, GilleBride, of royal Irish ancestry, appears to have conducted a marriage alliance with Máel Coluim mac Alaxandair, son of Alexander I of Scotland, and claimant to the Scottish throne.
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J. Frank Dobie
1888 - 1964 (76 years)
James Frank Dobie was an American folklorist, writer, and newspaper columnist best known for his many books depicting the richness and traditions of life in rural Texas during the days of the open range. He was known in his lifetime for his outspoken liberal views against Texas state politics, and he carried out a long, personal war against what he saw as braggart Texans, religious prejudice, restraints on individual liberty, and the mechanized world's assault on the human spirit. He was instrumental in saving the Texas Longhorn breed of cattle from extinction.
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Perry Miller
1905 - 1963 (58 years)
Perry Gilbert Eddy Miller was an American intellectual historian and a co-founder of the field of American Studies. Miller specialized in the history of early America, and took an active role in a revisionist view of the colonial Puritan theocracy that was cultivated at Harvard University beginning in the 1920s. Heavy drinking led to his premature death at the age of 58. "Perry Miller was a great historian of Puritanism but the dark conflicts of the Puritan mind eroded his own mental stability."
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Nur Jahan
1577 - 1645 (68 years)
Nur Jahan , born Mehr-un-Nissa was the twentieth wife and chief consort of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. More decisive and proactive than her husband, Nur Jahan is considered by certain historians to have been the real power behind the throne for more than a decade. Wielding a level of power and influence unprecedented for a Mughal empress, she was granted honours and privileges never enjoyed by any of her predecessors or successors like issuing having coinage struck in her name. Her pre-eminence was in part made possible by her husband Jahangir's addiction to hunting, alcohol and opium and his...
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Joseph Justus Scaliger
1540 - 1609 (69 years)
Joseph Justus Scaliger was a Franco-Italian Calvinist religious leader and scholar, known for expanding the notion of classical history from Greek and Ancient Roman history to include Persian, Babylonian, Jewish and Ancient Egyptian history. He spent the last sixteen years of his life in the Netherlands.
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John Stow
1525 - 1605 (80 years)
John Stow was an English historian and antiquarian. He wrote a series of chronicles of English history, published from 1565 onwards under such titles as The Summarie of Englyshe Chronicles, The Chronicles of England, and The Annales of England; and also A Survey of London . A. L. Rowse has described him as "one of the best historians of that age; indefatigable in the trouble he took, thorough and conscientious, accurate – above all things devoted to truth".
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Johann Christoph Gatterer
1727 - 1799 (72 years)
Johann Christoph Gatterer was a German historian who was a native of Lichtenau. He was the father of cameralist Christoph Wilhelm Jacob Gatterer and poet Magdalena Philippine Engelhard . He was a member of the Göttingen School of History.
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Carl Christian Rafn
1795 - 1864 (69 years)
Carl Christian Rafn was a Danish historian, translator and antiquarian. His scholarship to a large extent focused on translation of Old Norse literature and related Northern European ancient history. He was also noted for his early advocacy of the recognition of Norse colonization of North America.
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Michel Le Quien
1661 - 1733 (72 years)
Michel Le Quien was a French historian and theologian. He studied at Plessis College, Paris, and at twenty entered the Dominican convent in Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he made his profession in 1682. Excepting occasional short absences he never left Paris. At the time of his death he was librarian of the convent in Rue Saint-Honoré, a position which he had filled almost all his life, lending assistance to those who sought information on theology and ecclesiastical antiquity. Under the supervision of Père Marsollier he mastered the classical languages, Arabic and Hebrew, to the detriment, it...
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Granville Sharp
1735 - 1813 (78 years)
Granville Sharp was a British scholar, devout Christian, philanthropist and one of the first campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Born in Durham, he initially worked as a civil servant in the Board of Ordnance. His involvement in abolitionism began in 1767 when he defended a severely injured slave from Barbados in a legal case against his master. Increasingly devoted to the cause, he continually sought test cases against the legal justifications for slavery, and in 1769 he published the first tract in England that explicitly attacked the concept of slavery.
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