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,
#7551
Mario Góngora
1915 - 1985 (70 years)
Mario Góngora del Campo was a Chilean historian considered "one of the most important Chilean historians of the 20th century". Though his work he examined the history of the inquilinos, the encomentaderos, rural vagabondss and Indian Law . He was in charge of university courses on medieval history.
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Joseph Gregor
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Joseph Gregor was an Austrian writer, theater historian and librettist. He served as director of the Austrian National Library. Life and career Joseph Gregor was born in Czernowitz. He studied musicology and philosophy at Vienna University, graduating in 1911. He worked under Max Reinhardt as assistant director and from 1912-1914 as a lecturer in music at the Franz-Josephs-University of Chernivtsi. He was employed at the Austrian National Library in Vienna in 1918. There he founded the Theater Collection in 1922, in which he included film after 1929. He also taught from 1932–1938 and 1943–1945 at the Max-Reinhardt-Seminar for actors, being granted the title "Professor" in 1933.
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Paul Sabatier
1858 - 1928 (70 years)
Charles Paul Marie Sabatier , was a French clergyman and historian who produced the first modern biography of St. Francis of Assisi. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. Life Sabatier was born at Saint-Michel-de-Chabrillanoux in Ardèche, and was educated at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris. In 1885 he became vicar of St Nicolas, Strasbourg, but in 1889, declining an offer of preferment which was conditional on his becoming a German subject, he was expelled.
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Miskawayh
932 - 1030 (98 years)
Ibn Miskawayh , full name Abū ʿAlī Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb Miskawayh al-Rāzī was a Persian chancery official of the Buyid era, and philosopher and historian from Parandak, Iran. As a Neoplatonist, his influence on Islamic philosophy is primarily in the area of ethics. He was the author of the first major Islamic work on philosophical ethics entitled the Refinement of Character , focusing on practical ethics, conduct, and the refinement of character. He separated personal ethics from the public realm, and contrasted the liberating nature of reason with the deception and temptation of nature.
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Whitney Cross
1913 - 1955 (42 years)
Whitney Rogers Cross , was a mid-20th-century historian, best known as the author of The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800 – 1850 .
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Ubbo Emmius
1547 - 1625 (78 years)
Ubbo Emmius was a German historian and geographer. Early life Ubbo Emmius was born on 5 December 1547 in Greetsiel, East Frisia. From the ages of 9 to 18 Emmius studied in a Latin school, before having to leave on the death of his father, a Lutheran preacher. After studying at Rostock, at the age of 30, Emmius took classes in Geneva with Theodorus Beza, a Calvinist who influenced Emmius greatly.
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Thomas Tout
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Thomas Frederick Tout was a British historian of the medieval period. He was one of the founders of the Historical Association in 1906. Early life Born in London, he was a pupil of St Olave's Grammar School, still then at Southwark, a graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, and a fellow of Pembroke, but failing to obtain permanent fellowships at All Souls and Lincoln, his first academic post was at St David's University College, Lampeter , where his job title was 'Professor of English and Modern Languages'.
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Edmond Privat
1889 - 1962 (73 years)
Edmond Privat was a Francophone Swiss Esperantist. A historian, university professor, author, journalist and peace activist, he was a graduate of the University of Geneva and a lecturer for the World Peace Foundation. His collective works consist of original dramas, poems, stories, textbooks and books about the Esperanto movement.
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Ashkharbek Kalantar
1884 - 1942 (58 years)
Ashkharbek Kalantar was an Armenian archaeologist and historian who played an important role in the founding of archaeology in Armenia. Born into the Armenian noble families of Loris-Melikov and Arghutians, he graduated St. Petersburg University in 1911 under Nicholas Marr. He was appointed a Fellow of the Archaeological Institute, of Imperial Russian Archaeological Society and the keeper of the Asiatic Museum in St. Petersburg. He was one of the founders of Yerevan State University. Ashkharbek Kalantar authored more than 80 scholarly articles.
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Moriz Carrière
1817 - 1895 (78 years)
Moriz Carrière was a German philosopher and historian. Carrière was born in Griedel near Darmstadt, Germany. After studying at Giessen, Göttingen and Berlin, he spent a few years in Italy studying the fine arts, and established himself in 1842 at Giessen as a teacher of philosophy. In 1853 he was appointed professor at the University of Munich, where he lectured mainly on aesthetics. In the academy in Munich, he lectured on art history.
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Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill
948 - 1022 (74 years)
Máel Sechnaill mac Domnaill , also called Máel Sechnaill Mór or Máel Sechnaill II , was a King of Mide and High King of Ireland. His great victory at the Battle of Tara against Olaf Cuaran in 980 resulted in Gaelic Irish control of the Kingdom of Dublin.
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Lev Karsavin
1882 - 1952 (70 years)
Lev Platonovich Karsavin was a Russian religious philosopher, historian-medievalist, and poet. Biography Early years Lev Platonovich Karsavin was born into the family of Platon Konstantinovich Karsavin, a ballet actor at the Mariinsky Theatre, and his wife Anna Iosifovna, née Khomyakova, the daughter of the cousin of Aleksey Khomyakov, a famous Slavophile. He was the brother of the ballerina Tamara Karsavina.
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Giorgi Chubinashvili
1885 - 1973 (88 years)
Giorgi Chubinashvili was a Georgian art historian. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia he studied psychology at the universities of Leipzig and Halle , and Georgian-Armenian-Persian philology at the Petrograd University . Returning to Georgia, he served as a professor at the Tbilisi State University . He was one of the founding fathers and the first rector of Tbilisi State Academy of Arts
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Denis Jean Achille Luchaire
1846 - 1908 (62 years)
Denis Jean Achille Luchaire was a French historian. Biography Luchaire was born in Paris. In 1879 he became a professor at Bordeaux and in 1889 professor of mediaeval history at the Sorbonne; in 1895 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, where he obtained the Jean Reynaud prize just before his death.
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James Alexander Robertson
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
James Alexander Robertson was an American academic historian, archivist, translator and bibliographer. He is most noted for his contributions to the history and historiography of the Philippines and other former territorial possessions of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
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Stanisław Kutrzeba
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Stanisław Marian Kutrzeba was a Polish historian and politician who was Professor of the Jagiellonian University from 1908, and then until the end of his life the Chair of Studies in Polish law. He was chair of the Law Department , university's rector , General Secretary of Polish Academy of Learning and its president . He was one of many professors of Jagiellonian University arrested by Nazis during Sonderaktion Krakau in 1939. After being freed in 1940, he took part in the underground education. In 1945, he was deputy to the State National Council.
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Fritz Hartung
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Fritz Hartung was a political and constitutional historian of Germany. Life Fritz Hartung was born in Saarmund, a short distance to the west of Potsdam. His father worked in the Prussian government service. However, he attended secondary school far to the west in Freiburg , and then in Berlin where he passed his school final exams . He went on to study history at Heidelberg and Berlin, with a particular focus on constitutional and legal history. He was taught by a number of the leading historians of the time including Gustav Schmoller, Heinrich Brunner and Otto Hintze. It was Hintz...
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Thomas Blackwell
1701 - 1757 (56 years)
Thomas Blackwell the younger was a classical scholar, historian and "one of the major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment." Life He was born on 4 August 1701 in the city of Aberdeen, son of Rev Dr Thomas Blackwell , ministers of the Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen and later Principal of Marischal College and his wife Christian Johnston . His father was Patron of the Seven Incorporated Trades of Aberdeen from 1714 to 1728.
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Matsusaburo Fujiwara
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Matsusaburo Fujiwara was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Fujiwara graduated in June 1902 from secondary school at the Third Higher School in Kyoto and then studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated in 1905. His most important teacher was Rikitaro Fujisawa . In 1906 he became a secondary school teacher at the First Higher School Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō in Tokyo. In 1908 Fujiwara and Tsuruichi Hayashi were appointed professors at Tohoku University in Sendai. To prepare for his professorial duties, Fujiwara was sent to study from 1908 to 1911 in Göttingen, Paris and Berlin.
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Eliyahu Ashtor
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Eliyahu Ashtor was an Austrian-Israeli historian He was from a Zionist family. Studying at Vienna University, he completed a doctorate in Oriental studies in 1936. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1938, following the Anschluss to Nazi Germany, and worked in the National Libtary of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Completing another doctorate at Jerusalem University in 1944, he at first specialized on the history of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain but soon moved to the medieval history of the Near East, and especially social and economic history medieval Egypt, drawing from the manuscripts of the Cairo Geniza.
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Otto Liiv
1905 - 1942 (37 years)
Otto Liiv was an Estonian historian and archivist. He was one of the founders of Estonian archival science as well as one of the most prolific and respected historians in Estonia. Liiv attended school in Narva and Tallinn and enrolled at the University of Tartu in 1923 and graduated in 1927. He was the head of the Estonian State Central Archives from 1929 to 1942. He also lectured at the University of Tartu and was the chief editor of the journal "Ajalooline Ajakiri". Liiv had an academic interest in the history of the 17th century Estonia and contributed to the books "The Economic History of...
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Max Farrand
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Max Farrand was an American historian who taught at several universities and was the first director of the Huntington Library. Early life He was born in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He graduated from Princeton .
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Austin Lane Poole
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Austin Lane Poole, FBA was a British mediaevalist. Poole came from an academic lineage, being the son of Reginald Lane Poole , the nephew of Stanley Lane Poole , and the great-nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole .
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John Andrew Boyle
1916 - 1978 (62 years)
John Andrew Boyle , was a British orientalist and historian. Life and career He was born at Worcester Park, Surrey, England, on 10 March 1916. He graduated with first class honours in German at Birmingham University. He later pursued the studies of Oriental languages at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen.
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Peter Elmsley
1773 - 1825 (52 years)
Peter Elmsley was an English classical scholar. Early life and education Peter Elmsley was the younger son of Alexander Elmsley of St Clement Danes, Westminster, who had Scottish ancestry. He was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated as a BA in 1794, later being promoted to a Master of Arts in 1797, and receiving the degrees of BD on 30 October 1823 and DD on 7 November 1823. He inherited a fortune in 1802 from his uncle, also named Peter Elmsley, a well-known bookseller in the Strand, and devoted himself to the study of classical authors and m...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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Sergei Tokarev
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was a Russian scholar, ethnographer, historian, researcher of religious beliefs, doctor of historical sciences, and professor at Moscow State University. Birth and education Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was born in Tula on 29 December 1899. He graduated with honors from Tula grammar school and entered Moscow University. Immediately after the revolution, conditions in Moscow in 1918 were dangerous and difficult, and Tokarev went back to the apparent safety of his home province of Tula. He taught Russian and Latin in local schools for four years. Tokarev returned to Moscow University in 1922, where he began social and historical studies.
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Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney
1757 - 1820 (63 years)
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, abolitionist, writer, orientalist, and politician. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais after his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney .
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Felix Stähelin
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Felix Stähelin was a Swiss historian of Basel. He studied ancient history and classical philology in Basel, Bonn and Berlin, completing a doctorate on the Galatians in 1897. He worked as a school teacher from 1902–1907, and as a lecturer at Basel from 1907, receiving tenure as professor of Ancient History in 1931, retiring in 1937.
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James Anthony Froude
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
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Pyotr Karyshkovsky
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Petro Karyshkovsky-Ikar - Ukrainian Soviet historian, numismatist, a scholar and lexicographer. Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, since 1963 and until his last days he headed the department of ancient history and medieval Odesa University.
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John Sherren Brewer
1810 - 1879 (69 years)
John Sherren Brewer, Jr. was an English clergyman, historian and scholar. He was a brother of E. Cobham Brewer, compiler of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Birth and education Brewer was born in Norwich, the son of a Baptist schoolmaster. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford in 1827, graduating B.A. in 1833, M.A. 1835. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1837, and became chaplain to a central London workhouse. In 1839 he was appointed lecturer in classical literature at King's College London, and in 1858 he became professor of English language and literature and lecturer in modern history, succeeding FD Maurice.
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James MacCaffrey
1875 - 1935 (60 years)
Monsignor James MacCaffrey STL, PhD was an Irish priest, theologian and historian. Biography Monsignor MacCaffrey was born in 1875, at Fivemiletown, Co. Tyrone, he was the son of Francis MacCaffrey of Alderwood, Clogher, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at St. Macartan's Seminary, Monaghan, before going to St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained there in 1899.
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Ross J. S. Hoffman
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Ross John Swartz Hoffman was an American historian, writer, educator, and conservative intellectual who specialized in Modern European History and International Affairs. Life and career Born on February 2, 1902, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Hoffman attended Lafayette College and the University of Pennsylvania . His doctoral dissertation , prepared under the supervision of William Ezra Lingelbach, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1933 and received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association in 1934.
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Ephraim Emerton
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Ephraim Emerton was an American educator, author, translator, and historian prominent in his field of European medieval history. Early life and education Ephraim Emerton was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to James and Martha West Emerton. His elder brother was James Henry Emerton , naturalist and arachnologist.
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Adolf Holm
1830 - 1900 (70 years)
Adolf Holm was a German historian of antiquity. Biography Adolf Holm was the son of a producer and distributor of tobacco in Lübeck and was born in a house located between Braunstraße and Holstenstraße by the Trave. He studied at Leipzig and Berlin and obtained a doctorate in 1851. Immediately thereafter he was employed by the Katharineum, a grammar school in Lübeck founded in 1531 for the study of ancient languages. He worked on history and geography of ancient Sicily and Greece and wrote a work in several volumes on the History of Sicily in ancient times. At Lübeck he held several conferenc...
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Douglass Adair
1912 - 1968 (56 years)
Douglass Greybill Adair was an American historian who specialized in intellectual history. He is best known for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of The Federalist Papers, and his influential studies in the history and influence of republicanism in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the Enlightenment. His most famous essay, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," introduced the pursuit of fame as a new motivation for understanding the actions for the Framers.
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Clemens Baeumker
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
Clemens Baeumker was a German historian of philosophy. Baeumker was born in Paderborn to a gymnasium teacher. He studied philosophy, theology, and philology in Paderborn and later at the University of Münster, from which he obtained a doctorate in 1877. From 1879 he was a gymnasium lecturer in Münster.
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Degory Wheare
1573 - 1647 (74 years)
Degory Wheare, also spelt Digory Whear was an historian, the first Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Life He was born in Jacobstow, Cornwall, at the mansion of Berry Court. He matriculated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, on 6 July 1593, graduated B.A. on 5 February 1597, and proceeded M.A. on 16 June 1600. He was a contemporary of Francis Rous, a lifelong friend; and he was tutor at Broadgates Hall to John Pym . Another Oxford friend was Charles Fitzgeoffrey.
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Matvei Lyubavsky
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Matvey Kuzmich Lyubavsky was a Russian and Soviet historian, professor, academic and rector of the Moscow University from 1911 to 1917. Biography Lyubavsky was born in to the family of a village deacon. He lost his left eye in an accident during childhood. Lyubavsky graduated from the faculty of History of the Imperial Moscow University in 1882 and received his doctorate in 1901 and became a professor at the Moscow University.
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Carl Brinkmann
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Carl Brinkmann was a German sociologist and economist, focusing on socioeconomics and the history of political economy. Brinkmann was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, now in Kaliningrad, and died in Oberstdorf, Allgäu. In 1904 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He taught as a professor at the Heidelberg University , Berlin University , and Tübingen University .
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Lucy Maynard Salmon
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Lucy Maynard Salmon was an American historian. She was a professor of history at Vassar College from 1889 until her death. She was the first woman to be a member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association. She published widely in historical journals and general magazines, and was highly active in civic affairs, supporting civil service reform and world and women suffrage.
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Tommaso Fazello
1498 - 1570 (72 years)
Tommaso Fazello was an Italian Dominican friar, historian and antiquarian. He is known as the father of Sicilian history. He is the author of the first printed history of Sicily: De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, published in Palermo in 1558 in Latin. He was born in Sciacca, Sicily and died in Palermo, Sicily.
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Norman Davis
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Norman Davis was a New Zealand-born professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. Early life and career Davis was born in 1913 at Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his education at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he was taught by Professor Herbert Ramsay. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 and studied comparative philology. From 1937 to 1938, he lectured in English at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania, and then at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, 1938–39.
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Fred Albert Shannon
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Fred Albert Shannon was an American historian. He had many publications related to American history, and he won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865 .
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Georges Haupt
1928 - 1978 (50 years)
Georges Haupt, also known as George or Gheorghe Haupt , was Romanian and French a historian of socialism, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International.
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Alexander Soloviev
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Alexander Vasilievich Soloviev was a Russian émigré jurist, slavist, and historian of Serbia and Serbian law. His academic activity included research on the Bogumils, Serbian heraldry, philately and archeology, and he also published translations from Russian and French into Serbian. Having fled from Russia not long after the October Revolution, he settled in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where he became a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law . After the end of World War II he briefly served as the first dean of the Sarajevo Law School , before Communist repressi...
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Dana Carleton Munro
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Dana Carleton Munro was an American historian, brother of Wilfred Harold Munro, born at Bristol, R.I. He was educated at Brown and in Europe at Strassburg and Freiburg. He taught at Penn , at Wisconsin until 1915, then at Princeton. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1901. Brown gave him the degree of Doctor of humane letters in 1912. He edited Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History . He was co-author of Mediœval Civilization and Essays on the Crusades .
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Gustave Lanctot
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Gustave Lanctot , also spelled Gustave Lanctôt, was a Canadian historian and archivist. Born in Saint-Constant, Quebec, he studied law at Université de Montréal and was called to the Quebec Bar in 1907. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied political science and history from 1909 to 1911 while at Oxford University. He was also a member of the Oxford Canadians ice hockey team. In 1912, he joined the National Archives of Canada. During World War I, he served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
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Robert von Pöhlmann
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
Robert von Pöhlmann was a German ancient historian . From 1870 to 1874 he studied classical philology and history at the universities of Munich, Göttingen and Leipzig. While a student his influences included Georg Waitz at Gottingen and Wilhelm Roscher at Leipzig University. In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Erlangen, where in 1886 he attained a full professorship. From 1901 onward, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Munich.
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