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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in History,
#7601
Carroll Quigley
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Carroll Quigley was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is remembered for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, and his seminal works, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, and Tragedy And Hope; A History Of The World In Our Time, in which he states that an Anglo-American banking elite have worked together for centuries to spread certain values globally.
Go to Profile#7602
Hecataeus of Miletus
600 BC - 475 BC (125 years)
Hecataeus of Miletus , son of Hegesander, was an early Greek historian and geographer. Biography Hailing from a very wealthy family, he lived in Miletus, then under Persian rule in the satrapy of Lydia. He was active during the time of the Greco-Persian Wars. After having travelled extensively, he settled in his native city, where he occupied a high position, and devoted his time to the composition of geographical and historical works. When Aristagoras, acting tyrant of Miletus, held a council of leading Ionians at Miletus to organize a revolt against Persian rule, Hecataeus tried in vain to dissuade his countrymen from the undertaking.
Go to Profile#7603
Ignaz von Döllinger
1799 - 1890 (91 years)
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger , also Doellinger in English, was a German theologian, Catholic priest and church historian who rejected the dogma of papal infallibility. Among his writings which proved controversial, his criticism of the papacy antagonized ultramontanes, yet his reverence for tradition annoyed the liberals.
Go to Profile#7604
Emperor Wu of Han
156 BC - 87 BC (69 years)
Emperor Wu of Han , born Liu Che and courtesy name Tong , was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty from 141 to 87 BC. His reign lasted 54 years – a record not broken until the reign of the Kangxi Emperor more than 1,800 years later — and remains the record for ethnic Han emperors. His reign resulted in a vast expansion of geopolitical influence for the Chinese civilization, and the development of a strong centralized state via governmental policies, economical reorganization and promotion of a hybrid Legalist–Confucian doctrine. In the field of historical social and cultural studies, Empero...
Go to Profile#7605
Marceli Handelsman
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Marceli Handelsman was a Polish historian, a Warsaw University professor, medievalist, modern historian, and historical methodologist. Life Marceli Handelsman was born on 8 July 1882, in Warsaw, to a family of distant Jewish ancestry. After graduating in law from the Russian-language Imperial Warsaw University, he moved to Berlin, where he began studies in the history department of Unter den Linden University. In 1906, however, he was dismissed from the school because of his involvement in socialist organizations. Afterwards Handelsman continued his studies at various European universities in...
Go to Profile#7606
Hans Kohn
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Hans Kohn was an American philosopher and historian. He pioneered the academic study of nationalism, and is considered an authority on the subject. Life Kohn was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from a local German Gymnasium in 1909, he studied philosophy, political science and law at the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.
Go to Profile#7607
Charles Bean
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean , usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial .
Go to Profile#7608
Duke of Zhou
1100 BC - 1032 BC (68 years)
Dan, Duke Wen of Zhou , commonly known as the Duke of Zhou , was a member of the royal family of the early Zhou dynasty who played a major role in consolidating the kingdom established by his elder brother King Wu. He was renowned for acting as a capable and loyal regent for his young nephew King Cheng, and for successfully suppressing the Rebellion of the Three Guards and establishing firm rule of the Zhou dynasty over eastern China. He is also a Chinese culture hero credited with writing the I Ching and the Book of Poetry, and establishing the Rites of Zhou.
Go to Profile#7609
Gerhard Ritter
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter was a nationalist-conservative German historian who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. He studied under Professor Hermann Oncken. A Lutheran, he first became well known for his 1925 biography of Martin Luther and hagiographic portrayal of Prussia. A member of the German People's Party during the Weimar Republic, he was a lifelong monarchist and remained sympathetic to the political system of the defunct German Empire.
Go to Profile#7610
Caratacus
15 - 54 (39 years)
Caratacus was a 1st-century AD British chieftain of the Catuvellauni tribe, who resisted the Roman conquest of Britain. Before the Roman invasion, Caratacus is associated with the expansion of his tribe's territory. His apparent success led to Roman invasion, nominally in support of his defeated enemies. He resisted the Romans for almost a decade, using guerrilla warfare, but when he offered a set-piece battle the Romans won it. After defeat he fled to the territory of Queen Cartimandua, who captured him and handed him over to the Romans. He was sentenced to death, but made a speech before hi...
Go to Profile#7611
Isaac Deutscher
1907 - 1967 (60 years)
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom before the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky was highly influential among the British New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#7612
Priscus
410 - 471 (61 years)
Priscus of Panium was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician . Biography Priscus was born in Panion between 410 and 420 AD. In 448/449 AD, he accompanied Maximinus, the head of the Byzantine embassy representing Emperor Theodosius II , on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila the Hun. While there, he met and conversed with a Greek merchant, dressed in "Scythian" fashion, who was captured eight years earlier when the city of Viminacium was sacked by the Huns. The trader explained to Priscus that after the sack of Viminacium, he was a slave of Onegesius, a Hunnic nobleman, but obtained his freedom and chose to settle among the Huns.
Go to Profile#7613
Gu Jiegang
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Gu Jiegang was a Chinese folklorist, historian, and sinologist who was best known for his seven-volume work Gushi Bian . He was a co-founder and the leading force of the Doubting Antiquity School, and was highly influential in the 20th century development of Chinese historiography.
Go to Profile#7614
Vasily Vasilievsky
1838 - 1899 (61 years)
Vasily Grigorievich Vasilievsky was a Russian historian who founded the St. Petersburg school of medieval studies and was a major force in Byzantine studies during the second half of the 19th century.
Go to Profile#7615
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor was an Anglo-Saxon English king and saint. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066. Edward was the son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy. He succeeded Cnut the Great's son – and his own half-brother – Harthacnut. He restored the rule of the House of Wessex after the period of Danish rule since Cnut conquered England in 1016. When Edward died in 1066, he was succeeded by his wife's brother Harold Godwinson, who was defeated and killed in the same year at the Battle of Hastings by the Normans under William the Conqueror.
Go to Profile#7616
Servius Tullius
600 BC - 535 BC (65 years)
Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned from 578 to 535 BC. Roman and Greek sources describe his servile origins and later marriage to a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's first Etruscan king, who was assassinated in 579 BC. The constitutional basis for his accession is unclear; he is variously described as the first Roman king to accede without election by the Senate, having gained the throne by popular and royal support; and as the first to be elected by the Senate alone, with support of the reigning queen but withou...
Go to Profile#7617
Theodore H. White
1915 - 1986 (71 years)
Theodore Harold White was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series. White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to draw international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.
Go to Profile#7618
Burebista
90 BC - 44 BC (46 years)
Burebista was the king of the Getae and Dacian tribes from 82/61BC to 45/44BC. He was the first king who successfully unified the tribes of the Dacian kingdom, which comprised the area located between the Danube, Tisza, and Dniester rivers, and modern day Romania and Moldova. In the 7th and 6thcenturies BC it became home to the Thracian peoples, including the Getae and the Dacians. From the 4thcentury to the middle of the 2ndcentury BC the Dacian peoples were influenced by La Tène Celts who brought new technologies with them into Dacia. Sometime in the 2ndcentury BC the Dacians expelled the Celts from their lands.
Go to Profile#7619
Dmitry Ilovaysky
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaysky was an anti-Normanist conservative Russian historian who penned a number of standard history textbooks. Ilovaysky graduated from the Moscow University in 1854 and first attracted critical attention with his thesis on the Principality of Ryazan in 1858. He was wounded during the Siege of Plevna, in which he took an active part.
Go to Profile#7620
Leo Africanus
1483 - 1600 (117 years)
Johannes Leo Africanus was a Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa in 1550, centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. The book was regarded among his scholarly peers in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject until the modern exploration of Africa. For this work, Leo became a household name among European geographers. He converted from Islam to Christianity and changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis .
Go to Profile#7621
Thomas Hutchinson
1711 - 1780 (69 years)
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified ...
Go to Profile#7622
Ahmad Amin
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Ahmad Amin , was an Egyptian historian and writer. He wrote a series of books on the history of the Islamic civilization , a famous autobiography , as well as an important dictionary of Egyptian folklore .
Go to Profile#7623
Mzilikazi
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
Mzilikazi Moselekatse, Khumalo was a Southern African king who founded the Ndebele Kingdom now called Matebeleland which is now part of Zimbabwe. His name means "the great river of blood". He was born the son of Mashobane kaMangethe near Mkuze, Zululand , and died at Ingama, Matabeleland . Many consider him to be the greatest Southern African military leader after the Zulu king, Shaka. In his autobiography, David Livingstone referred to Mzilikazi as the second most impressive leader he encountered on the African continent.
Go to Profile#7624
Chancellor Williams
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Chancellor Williams was an American sociologist, historian and writer. He is noted for his work on African civilizations prior to encounters with Europeans; his major work is The Destruction of Black Civilization .
Go to Profile#7625
Andrés Bonifacio
1863 - 1897 (34 years)
Andrés Bonifacio y de Castro was a Filipino revolutionary leader. He is often called "The Father of the Philippine Revolution", and considered one of the national heroes of the Philippines. He was one of the founders and later the Kataastaasang Pangulo of the Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan or more commonly known as the "Katipunan", a movement that sought the independence of the Philippines from Spanish colonial rule and started the Philippine Revolution.
Go to Profile#7626
Otto Hintze
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Otto Hintze was a German historian of public administration. He was Professor of Political, Constitutional, Administrative and Economic History at the University of Berlin. Influenced by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, he emphasized the continuity and rationality of Western institutions.
Go to Profile#7627
Kunio Yanagita
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Kunio Yanagita was a Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist. He began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions. This led to a change in his career. His pursuit of this led to his eventual establishment of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku, as an academic field in Japan. As a result, he is often considered to be the father of modern Japanese folklore studies.
Go to Profile#7628
Zhu Xi
1130 - 1200 (70 years)
Zhu Xi , formerly romanized Chu Hsi, was a Chinese calligrapher, historian, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. Zhu was influential in the development of Neo-Confucianism. He contributed greatly to Chinese philosophy and fundamentally reshaped the Chinese worldview. His works include his editing of and commentaries to the Four Books , his writings on the process of the "investigation of things" , and his development of meditation as a method for self-cultivation.
Go to Profile#7629
T. Harry Williams
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Thomas Harry Williams was an American academic and author. For the majority of his academic career between the 1930s to 1970s, Williams taught history at Louisiana State University. While at LSU, Williams was a Boyd Professor of History from 1953 to 1979. Near the end of his tenure at LSU, the university created the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History. Additional academic institutes Williams taught at include extension schools, in Wisconsin and at the Municipal University of Omaha.
Go to Profile#7630
Vasil Zlatarski
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Vasil Nikolov Zlatarski was a Bulgarian historian-medievalist, archaeologist, and epigraphistist. Life Vasil Zlatarski was born in Veliko Tarnovo in 1866, the youngest child of the teacher Nikola Zlatarcheto who was a prominent activist in the educational movement and the religious and national struggle in the Tarnovo region before the Liberation. Zlatarski obtained his education in Veliko Tarnovo and in the Peter and Paul Seminary at Liaskovets, near Tarnovo where he was preparing for priesthood. After the early death of his father, he went to his brother in Russia, where in 1887 he graduated the First Classical Lyceum in St.
Go to Profile#7631
Barthold Georg Niebuhr
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish–German statesman, banker, and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. By 1810 Niebuhr was inspiring German patriotism in students at the University of Berlin by his analysis of Roman economy and government. Niebuhr was a leader of the Romantic era and symbol of German national spirit that emerged after the defeat at Jena. But he was also deeply rooted in the classical spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in his intellectual presuppositions, his use of philologic analysis, and h...
Go to Profile#7632
Justin
101 - 200 (99 years)
Justin was a Latin writer and historian who lived under the Roman Empire. Life Almost nothing is known of Justin's personal history, his name appearing only in the title of his work. He must have lived after Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, whose work he excerpted, and his references to the Romans and Parthians having divided the world between themselves would have been anachronistic after the rise of the Sassanians in the third century. His Latin appears to be consistent with the style of the second century. Ronald Syme, however, argues for a date around AD 390, immediately before the compilation...
Go to Profile#7633
Vercingetorix
80 BC - 46 BC (34 years)
Vercingetorix was a Gallic king and chieftain of the Arverni tribe who united the Gauls in a failed revolt against Roman forces during the last phase of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. After surrendering to Caesar and spending almost six years in prison, he was executed in Rome.
Go to Profile#7634
Adolf Schulten
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Adolf Schulten was a German historian and archaeologist. Schulten was born in Elberfeld, Rhine Province, and received a doctorate in geology from the University of Bonn in 1892. He studied in Italy, Africa and Greece with support from the Institute of Archaeology. After obtaining the chair of ancient history at the University of Erlangen, he continued his work in Spain with great dedication and to this day is considered a key influence upon archaeological study in Spain.
Go to Profile#7635
Cheikh Anta Diop
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
Go to Profile#7636
Velleius Paterculus
19 BC - 31 (50 years)
Marcus Velleius Paterculus was a Roman historian, soldier and senator. His Roman history, written in a highly rhetorical style, covered the period from the end of the Trojan War to AD 30, but is most useful for the period from the death of Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Augustus in AD 14.
Go to Profile#7637
Samuel Johnson
1846 - 1901 (55 years)
The Rev. Samuel Johnson was an Anglican priest and historian of the Yoruba. Biography Samuel Johnson was born a recaptive Creole in Freetown, Sierra Leone, as the third of seven children of Henry Erugunjinmi Johnson and Sarah Johnson on June 24, 1846. His father, who gave himself the Yoruba name Erugunjinmi, was born in 1810 in the town of Oyo-Ile, capital of the Oyo Empire. Henry was an Omoba of the Oyo clan, and was a grandson of the 18th-century alaafin Abiodun. He was later captured in the Atlantic Slave Trade but fortunately was rerouted to Sierra Leone, like many Yorubas, such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and others.
Go to Profile#7638
Godefroid Kurth
1847 - 1916 (69 years)
Godefroid Kurth was a Belgian historian and pioneering Christian democrat. He is known for his histories of the city of Liège in the Middle Ages and of Belgium, his Catholic account of the formation of modern Europe in Les Origines de la civilisation moderne, and his defence of the medieval guild system.
Go to Profile#7639
Ephraim Lipson
1888 - 1960 (72 years)
Ephraim Lipson, or E. Lipson was a British economic historian. The son of a Jewish furniture dealer, Lipson attended Sheffield Royal Grammar School followed by Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a First class degree in History.
Go to Profile#7640
Tsiang Tingfu
1895 - 1965 (70 years)
Tsiang Tingfu , was a historian and diplomat of the Republic of China who published in English under the name T.F. Tsiang. Early life and education Tsiang was born in Shaoyang, Hunan. Tsiang's education from his teenage years had been Western and largely Christian, and he converted to Christianity at 11. Having been urged to study in the US by his teacher from a missionary school, he was sent in 1911 to study in the United States, where he attended the Park Academy, Oberlin College and Columbia University. His dissertation, "Labor and Empire: A Study of the Reaction of British Labor, Mainly as...
Go to Profile#7641
Hugo Obermaier
1877 - 1946 (69 years)
Hugo Obermaier was a distinguished Spanish-German prehistorian and anthropologist who taught at various European centres of learning. Although he was born in Germany, he was later naturalized as a Spanish citizen in 1924. He is particularly associated with his work on the diffusion of mankind in Europe during the Ice Age, and in connection with north Spanish cave art, and resisted placing his science at the disposal of nationalistic and racialist interests in the Germany of the 1930s.
Go to Profile#7642
Aldo Mieli
1879 - 1950 (71 years)
Aldo Mieli was an influential historian of science, and a pioneer of gay rights. Early life and education Born in 1879 in Livorno, Italy to a wealthy Jewish family, Mieli was raised in Chianciano, a small spa town in Tuscany, to which his family moved in 1880.
Go to Profile#7643
Reginald Lane Poole
1857 - 1939 (82 years)
Reginald Lane Poole, FBA was a British historian. He was Keeper of the Archives and a lecturer in diplomatics at the University of Oxford, where he gave the Ford Lectures in 1912 on the subject of "The Exchequer in the Twelfth Century". Son of Edward Stanley Poole, the "Lane" in his surname comes from his paternal grandmother Sophia Lane Poole, author of An Englishwoman in Egypt . He was the father of Austin Lane Poole , also a historian and Ford's Lecturer; the brother of the orientalist Stanley Lane-Poole; the nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole; and the great-nephew of Edward William Lane.
Go to Profile#7644
Robert Winslow Gordon
1888 - 1961 (73 years)
Robert Winslow Gordon was an American academic, known as a collector of folk songs. Gordon was educated at Harvard University. He joined the English faculty at the University of California at Berkeley in 1918. In 1923, he was asked by Arthur Sullivant Hoffman to run the folk music column "Old Songs Men Have Sung" in Hoffman's magazine, Adventure. Gordon accepted and used the Adventure column to collect information on traditional American music from the magazine's readers.
Go to Profile#7645
Elias Joseph Bickerman
1897 - 1981 (84 years)
Elias Bickerman , also spelled as Bickermann or Bikerman, was a leading scholar of Greco-Roman history and the Hellenistic world. Biography Bickerman was born in Kishinev, then part of the Russian Empire, to a secular Jewish family. He left Russia during the Bolshevik revolution and the Russian civil war for Germany, where he received education from German classicists and Hellenists. Due to the rise of the Nazi Party to power and his Jewish heritage, he fled to France. He soon had to abandon that country as well after the Battle of France. Since 1942 he lived in the U.S. His research interests extended to Judaism and some aspects of Iranian history.
Go to Profile#7646
Arthur I, Duke of Brittany
1187 - 1203 (16 years)
Arthur I was 4th Earl of Richmond and Duke of Brittany between 1196 and 1203. He was the posthumous son of Geoffrey II, Duke of Brittany, and Constance, Duchess of Brittany. His father, Geoffrey, was the son of Henry II, King of England.
Go to Profile#7647
Montagu Burrows
1819 - 1905 (86 years)
Montagu Burrows was a British historian. Following a career as an officer in the Royal Navy, he was the first Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, holding the Chair from 1862 until his death. He was probably the first academic to lecture on naval history at Oxford or at any university in Britain.
Go to Profile#7648
Hayam Wuruk
1334 - 1389 (55 years)
Hayam Vuruk , also called Rajasanagara, Pa-ta-na-pa-na-wu, or Bhatara Prabhu after 1350, was a Javanese Hindu emperor from the Rajasa dynasty and the 4th emperor of the Majapahit Empire. Together with his prime minister Gajah Mada, he reigned the empire at the time of its greatest power. During his reign, the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, became ingrained in the culture and worldview of the Javanese through the wayang kulit . He was preceded by Tribhuwana Wijayatunggadewi, and succeeded by his son-in-law Wikramawardhana.
Go to Profile#7649
Giorgio Levi Della Vida
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Giorgio Levi Della Vida was an Italian Jewish linguist whose expertise lay in Hebrew, Arabic, and other Semitic languages, as well as on the history and culture of the Near East. Biography Born in Venice to a Jewish family originally from Ferrara, he moved with them first to Genoa and then to Rome, from whose university he graduated in 1909 with the Hebraist Ignazio Guidi. Immediately after graduation, he participated in numerous research expeditions to Cairo, Athens , and Crete.
Go to Profile#7650
Romesh Chunder Dutt
1848 - 1909 (61 years)
Romesh Chunder Dutt was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata. He was one of the prominent proponents of Indian economic nationalism. Early life and education Dutt was born into a distinguished Bengali Maulika Kayastha family. His parents were Thakamani and Isan Chunder Dutt, a Deputy Collector in Bengal, whom Romesh often accompanied on official duties. He was educated in various Bengali District schools, then at Hare School, Calcutta. After his father's untimely death in a boat accident in eastern Bengal, his uncle, Shoshee Chunder Dutt, an accomplished writer, became his guardian in 1861.
Go to Profile