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,
#7651
Fritz Kern
1884 - 1950 (66 years)
Fritz Kern was a German medievalist historian who became involved in politics. He held teaching chairs on History at Frankfurt University between 1914 and 1922, and at Bonn University between 1922 and 1946.
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Ernst Stein
1891 - 1945 (54 years)
Ernst Edward Aurel Stein was an Austrian-Jewish Byzantinist and a historian of Late Antiquity. Ernst was the son of Ernst Eduard Stein and Henrietta Rosalie and the nephew of the Hungarian-born British archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein. He married Johanna Brandeis in Vienna on 4 April 1923.
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Thomas W. Talley
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
Thomas Washington Talley was a chemistry professor at Fisk University and a collector of African American folk songs. Early life and education Thomas Washington Talley was born on October 9, 1868, in Shelbyville, Tennessee. He was one of eight children born to former slaves, Charles Washington and Lucinda Talley.
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Hermann Dessau
1856 - 1931 (75 years)
Hermann Dessau was a German ancient historian and epigrapher. He is noted for a key work of textual criticism published in 1889 on the Historia Augusta, which uncovered reasons to believe that this surviving text of ancient Roman imperial history had been written under circumstances very different from those previously believed.
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Ishimoda Shō
1912 - 1986 (74 years)
Ishimoda Shō, born in Sapporo, was a Japanese historian specializing in ancient Japanese history, with a particular interest in the nature of the structural transition from the ancient to the medieval period. As an orthodox materialist, he was a lifetime member of the Communist Party, and influential Marxist scholar in the analyses on Japanese history conducted by members of the post-war Rekiken group. In the 1950s, after the success of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949, he espoused that model as the Asian alternative to Westernization, which had failed in Japan.
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Arthur Stein
1871 - 1950 (79 years)
Arthur Stein was an Austrian-Czech historian and epigrapher. From 1892 to 1897 he studied history, archaeology and epigraphy at the University of Vienna, where his teachers were Eugen Bormann, Otto Benndorf and Emil Szántó. Following graduation, he took an extended study trip to Bulgaria, Italy, Greece and Asia Minor. In 1915 he obtained his habilitation for classical history and archaeology at the University of Prague, where in 1922 he was named a full professor of Roman archaeology and epigraphy. Because of his Jewish heritage, he was imprisoned at Theresienstadt concentration camp from Jul...
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Pavle Popović
1868 - 1939 (71 years)
Pavle Popović was a Serbian literary critic and historian, a professor and rector at the University of Belgrade. He is the brother of Bogdan Popović, also a well-known and equally influential literary critic and university professor.
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Earl J. Hamilton
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Earl Jefferson Hamilton was an American historian, one of the founders of economic history, and a prominent hispanist. Biography Hamilton was born in Houlka, Mississippi. He was married to Gladys Dallas Hamilton, and had one daughter, Sita Hamilton. Earl and Gladys did extensive research on the economic history of Spain.
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Vladimir Kobrin
1930 - 1990 (60 years)
Vladimir Borisovich Kobrin was a leading authority on the aristocracy of late medieval Russia. He graduated from the Moscow University in 1951 and continued Stepan Veselovsky's studies of medieval Russian aristocracy after the latter's death in 1952. He viewed the Oprichnina as a prop for Ivan IV's dictatorship and described it as a social catastrophe. Kobrin's popular biography of Ivan the Terrible was published in 1989.
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A. J. P. Taylor
1906 - 1990 (84 years)
Alan John Percivale Taylor was a British historian who specialised in 19th- and 20th-century European diplomacy. Both a journalist and a broadcaster, he became well known to millions through his television lectures. His combination of academic rigour and popular appeal led the historian Richard Overy to describe him as "the Macaulay of our age". In a 2011 poll by History Today magazine, he was named the fourth most important historian of the previous 60 years.
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Lazăr Șăineanu
1859 - 1934 (75 years)
Lazăr Șăineanu was a United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia-born philologist, linguist, folklorist and cultural historian. A specialist in Oriental and Romance studies, as well as a Germanist, he was primarily known for his contribution to Yiddish and Romanian philology, his work in evolutionary linguistics, and his activity as a literary and philological comparatist. Șăineanu also had innovative contributions to the investigation and anthologizing of Romanian folklore, placed in relation to Balkan and East Central European traditions, as well as to the historical evolution of Romanian in a larger Balkan context, and was a celebrated early contributor to Romanian lexicography.
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Friedrich Dannemann
1859 - 1936 (77 years)
Friedrich Dannemann was a German physicist, high school teacher and historian of science. In the judgment of George Sarton, Dannemann's four-volume Natural sciences in their development and context was "the first satisfactory textbook dealing with the history of science as a whole". In 1927, aged sixty-eight, Dannemann became an unsalaried professor in the history of science at the University of Bonn. Dannemann also helped Abraham Wolf with his A History of Science, Technology, and Philosophy in the 16th and 17th Centuries.
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Franz Dölger
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
Franz Dölger was a German Byzantinist. He is most notable for his crucial contributions to Byzantine diplomatics, and as the chief editor of the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift from 1931 to 1963. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, he received honorary doctorates from the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Sofia. In 1962, he was awarded the Order Pour le Mérite.
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Gyula Farkas
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Farkas Gyula de Kisbarnak, or Julius von Farkas de Kisbarnak Biography He was born into the Roman Catholic Transdanubian Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak. His father was Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak , captain of the Hungarian Royal army, notary of Kismarton and his mother was Gizella Pottyondy de Potyond und Csáford . His paternal grandfather was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys, and his paternal grandmother was Cecília Hoffmann . His maternal grandparents were dr. Ágoston Pottyondy de Potyond et Csáford, lawyer, and Mária Grohmann .
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Richard Laqueur
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Richard Laqueur was a German historian and philologist born in Strassburg. He studied classical literature and history at the Universities of Bonn and Strassburg, and in 1904 received his doctorate of philosophy. In 1912 he became a full professor at Strassburg, and during the same year was appointed professor at the University of Giessen. From 1914 to 1918 he performed military duties during World War I, and in 1919 returned to Giessen, where he remained until 1930. Laqueur was rector at the university in 1922/23.
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Erich Swoboda
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Erich Swoboda was an Austrian historian and ancient Roman archaeologist. In 1946, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz and became the director of the Institute for the History of Antiquity and Antiquity in Vienna. From 1951 to 1953, he served as a dean, and from 1960 to 1961 was the rector of the university. He received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
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Jarl Gallén
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Jarl Wilhelm Erik Gallén was a Finnish historian and Swedish-speaking professor in history at Helsinki University from 1964 to 1975. Biography Gallén was born in Helsinki in 1908. He had an interest in history from a young age. Gallén became a student in 1925, bachelor of philosophy in 1929, master of arts in 1932, licentiate in 1946 and doctor in 1947. During his studies he converted to Catholicism and founded Academicum Catholicum, of which he was president from 1936 to 1946. He took an active part in debates on ideology and politics and helped found the student society, and served as edit...
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Haralampije Polenaković
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Haralampije Polenaković , was a Macedonian literary historian and lexicographer. Polenaković was born into a family of ethnic Serbs in the town of Gostivar, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. He graduated from Philosophical Faculty in Skopje and then continued his studies in Zagreb where he obtained a PhD. During the Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia in World War Two he escaped to Belgrade where he founded the "Society of Refugees from South Serbia".
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Andreas Hofgaard Winsnes
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Andreas Hofgaard Winsnes was a Norwegian literary historian and educator. Biography Winsnes was born in Nord-Odal, Norway. He was the son of Frederik Vilhelm Vinsnes and Agnete Helweg . He completed his examen artium in 1908 at Oslo Cathedral School. He became Cand.philol. from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1913 and Dr.philos. in 1920.
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Jian Youwen
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Jian Youwen was a Chinese historian, public official, and sometime Methodist pastor, known in particular for his writings on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He taught at Yenching University, the University of Hong Kong, and Yale University.
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Kenneth Hyde
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
John Kenneth Hyde was an English historian, known for his research on the city in medieval Italy, and on medieval descriptions of cities. He held the chair in medieval history of the University of Manchester .
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Zurab Avalishvili
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Zurab Avalishvili was a Georgian historian, jurist and diplomat in the service of the Democratic Republic of Georgia . He was also known as Zurab Davidovich Avalov in a Russian manner. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia , into the family of Prince David Avalishvili, he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1900 and took post-graduate courses at the Department of Law, University of Paris from 1900 to 1903. He became a Docent at the St. Petersburg University in 1904 and a Professor of Public Law at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1907. He was an official adviser to the Russian Ministr...
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Geoffrey Barraclough
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Geoffrey Barraclough was an English historian, known as a medievalist and historian of Germany. Biography He was educated at Bootham School in York and at Bradford Grammar School . He read History as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1926–1929, spent the following two years studying in Munich and Rome, then returned to Oxford, to Merton College, where he was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar and a Junior Research Fellow .
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John Selwyn Bromley
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Professor John Selwyn Bromley , was a prominent British Naval Historian. Biography Born in 1913, John Selwyn Bromley was educated at Bedford School and at New College, Oxford. He joined the Civil Service and was Private Secretary to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury between 1941 and 1946. He was Fellow in Modern History at Keble College, Oxford, between 1947 and 1960, and Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton, between 1960 and 1977. He published widely and is best known for Volume VI of the New Cambridge Modern History, published in 1970.
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Menahem Stern
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Menahem Stern was an internationally acclaimed Israeli historian of the Second Temple period. He was murdered in Jerusalem by Palestinians during the First Intifada. Biography Menahem Stern was born in 1925 in Białystok, Poland. His father was a Lithuanian misnaged while his mother came from a Hasidic family. In his childhood he studied Hebrew and religious texts, but later acquired a general education that included Latin. In 1938 he immigrated to Palestine with his parents via Vienna. They settled in Haifa, where he studied at the Hebrew Reali School. When the family moved to Tel Aviv, he sw...
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Franklin Lafayette Riley Jr.
1868 - 1929 (61 years)
Franklin Lafayette Riley Jr. was an American historian. The title of his dissertation was Colonial Origins of New England Senates. After taking his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University he was appointed as the first Professor of History at Ole Miss. In his capacity as a professor at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, he helped to establish the Mississippi Historical Society and later the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. In 1902, he wrote a paper detailing the lineage of his grandfather, Edward Riley, and his descendants.
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Wallace Sterling
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
John Ewart Wallace Sterling was an American educator who served as the 5th President of Stanford University between 1949 and 1968. Life and career Sterling was born in Linwood, Ontario, the son of Annie and William Sterling, a Methodist clergyman. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Alberta.
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Margaret Shove Morriss
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
Margaret Shove Morriss was an American academic historian, She was the Dean of Women in charge of Pembroke College in Brown University from 1923 to 1950. Early life and education Margaret Shove Morriss was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of William Hayles Morriss and Mary Elizabeth Hairland Morriss. She completed undergraduate studies at Goucher College in 1904, and was granted a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1911, for her research on trade in colonial Maryland.
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Jan Romein
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Jan Marius Romein was a Dutch historian, journalist, literary scholar and professor of history at the University of Amsterdam. A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popularizing books of Dutch national history, jointly authored with his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Indonesian and Japanese.
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Alexander Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Count Alexander von Stauffenberg was a German aristocrat and historian. His twin brother Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and younger brother Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg were among the leaders of the 20 July Plot against Hitler in 1944.
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Seiichi Iwao
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Seiichi Iwao was a Japanese academic, an historian and author. He was for many years a professor at the University of Tokyo. Early life Seiichi was born in Tokyo. He attended the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1925.
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Vladimir Vikentyev
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Vladimir Mikhailovich Vikentyev was an Egyptologist from the Russian Empire. He graduated from the Romano-German department of the faculty of Historical philology at Moscow University with a first class diploma. In 1915 he was hired by the Historical museum named after Tsar Alexander III. In 1922 he went abroad. He taught Egyptian philology and the ancient history of the Near East at Cairo University.
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Vasile Grecu
1885 - 1972 (87 years)
Vasile Grecu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian philologist and Byzantinist. Born in Mitocu Dragomirnei, north of Suceava, his parents were Manole Greciuc and Ana . He studied at the Greek-Orthodox Gymnasium in Suceava , followed by the Universities of Vienna and Czernowitz , where Sextil Pușcariu was his professor. From 1910 to 1914, he taught Latin and Greek at the state high school in Câmpulung Moldovenesc. After the outbreak of World War I, he took refuge in the Romanian Old Kingdom. There, he was a proofreader at Monitorul Oficial in Bucharest and a substitute teacher at Mircea cel Batrân High School in Constanța until Romania entered the war in August 1916.
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Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Francisco Javier Sánchez Cantón was a Spanish art historian, who from 1960 to 1968 was Director of the Museo del Prado. Life Born in Pontevedra, Galicia , on 14 July 1891, in 1913 he obtained a doctorate from the Central University, Madrid, with a thesis on Los pintores de cámara de los reyes de España . He started work at the Museo del Prado the same year. He was also attached to the Centro de Estudios Históricos , and was for some years the editor-in-chief of the journal Archivo Español de Arte. In 1929 he curated an exhibition of the work of Anton Raphael Mengs at the Prado.
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John Knight Fotheringham
1874 - 1936 (62 years)
John Knight Fotheringham FBA was a British historian who was an expert on ancient astronomy and chronology. He established the chronology of the Babylonian dynasties. J.K. Fotheringham was educated at the City of London School and Merton College, Oxford, where he held an exhibition and received first class degrees in Literae Humaniores and modern history . During 1898–1902, he held a senior demyship at Magdalen College, Oxford, and started to study ancient chronology. In 1904, he was appointed a lecturer in classical literature at King's College London and taught there until 1915.
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T. S. Ashton
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Thomas Southcliffe Ashton was an English economic historian. He was professor of economic history at the London School of Economics at the University of London from 1944 until 1954, and Emeritus Professor until his death in 1968. His best known work is the 1948 textbook The Industrial Revolution , which put forth a positive view on the benefits of the era.
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Mark Dvorzhetski
1908 - 1975 (67 years)
Mark Dvorzhetski was an Israeli physician, historian and Holocaust survivor. Biography Mark Dvortzhetski was born in Lithuania . He immigrated to Israel after World War II. He authored a number of books on the Holocaust, in particular with reference to the Baltic States and the medical profession.
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Gustave Cohen
1879 - 1958 (79 years)
Gustave Cohen was a French medievalist. Cohen was born and grew up in Brussels. He fought for the French army in World War I. He became professor of medieval literature at the Sorbonne, encouraging his students to put on dramatic productions of medieval material. After the Vichy government forced him to resign in 1940, Cohen emigrated to the United States. In February 1942 he helped found the New York École libre des hautes études with Henri Focillon and Jacques Maritain. He established the Entretiens de Pontigny, symposiums of French cultural activity held at Mount Holyoke College in 1942, 1...
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Tadeusz Estreicher
1871 - 1952 (81 years)
Tadeusz Kazimierz Estreicher was a Polish chemist, historian and cryogenics pioneer. Life Tadeusz Estreicher was born in Kraków when the city was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of an influential dynasty of professors at the Jagiellonian University. His father, Karol Józef Estreicher, was a historian of literature and the chief librarian of the university. His brother, Stanisław, was a historian of law and his sister, Maria, was one of the first women in Austria-Hungary to earn a doctorate .
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Aage Friis
1870 - 1949 (79 years)
Aage Friis was a Danish historian and professor at the University of Copenhagen. Biography Aage Friis was born in Korsør in Slagelse, Denmark. He was the son of Johan Frederik Friis and Juliane Marie Landkilde . His father was a parish priest who also taught his children together with other children from the village.
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Robert Lee Wolff
1915 - 1980 (65 years)
Robert Lee Wolff was a Harvard history professor, known for his 1956 book The Balkans in our time and his library collection of English novels of the Victorian period with over 18,000 items. Wolff received his bachelor's degree and his master's degree from Harvard University, where he was a teaching fellow from 1937 to 1941, when he left Harvard to join the Office of Strategic Services . As a leading expert on the Balkans, he was assistant to the director of the Balkans section of the O.S.S. After the end of World War II, Wolff taught for four years at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and then in 1950 became an associate professor in the Harvard history department.
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Paul Monceaux
1859 - 1941 (82 years)
Étienne-Paul-Victor Monceaux was a 19th-20th-century French historian. A professor at the Collège de France from 1907 to 1937, he was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1912. His major speciality was Christian Latinity in the Roman provinces of North Africa.
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Ernest Staples Osgood
1888 - 1983 (95 years)
Ernest Staples Osgood was an American historian of the American West and Guggenheim Fellow best known for his book The Day of the Cattleman and for his work on the field notes of Captain William Clark.
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Rodolphe Reuss
1841 - 1924 (83 years)
Rodolphe Ernest Reuss was a French historian from Alsace. He also published under the pseudonym Anton Schweidnitz. Biography Rodolphe Reuss was born to Protestant theologian Edouard Reuss and his wife Julie . He was educated at Strasbourg, receiving a bachelor at the Faculty of Arts in 1861. Subsequently, he spent three years at different universities in Germany, at first in Munich, then Jena, Berlin, and finally Göttingen, where he attended the lectures of German historian Georg Waitz and where he finished his PhD thesis on Count Ernst von Mansfeld in Bohemia in October 1864. He earned a Dr....
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Georges Lacour-Gayet
1856 - 1935 (79 years)
Georges Lacour-Gayet was a French historian who taught at the École Navale and the École Polytechnique. His books on the French navy under Louis XV and Louis XVI are much-quoted and were considered references when published, although they betray his patriotic bias. His master work was a four-volume biography of Talleyrand.
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Herbert Butterfield
1900 - 1979 (79 years)
Sir Herbert Butterfield was an English historian and philosopher of history, who was Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is remembered chiefly for a short volume early in his career entitled The Whig Interpretation of History and for his Origins of Modern Science . Butterfield turned increasingly to historiography and man's developing view of the past. Butterfield was a devout Christian and reflected at length on Christian influences in historical perspectives.
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Michael Tangl
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
Michael Tangl was an Austrian scholar of history and diplomatics, and one of the main editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, for whom he published the correspondence of Saint Boniface, an edition still used by scholars and considered the definitive edition.
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Gilbert Ballet
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Gilbert Ballet was a French psychiatrist, neurologist and historian who was a native of Ambazac in the department of Haute-Vienne. He studied medicine in Limoges and Paris, and subsequently became Chef de clinique under Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière. In 1900 he became a professor of psychiatry, and in 1904 established the department of psychiatry at Hôtel-Dieu de Paris. In 1909 he succeeded Alix Joffroy as chair of clinical psychiatry and brain disorders at the Hôpital Sainte-Anne.
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Henry V of England
1386 - 1422 (36 years)
Henry V , also called Henry of Monmouth, was King of England from 1413 until his death in 1422. Despite his relatively short reign, Henry's outstanding military successes in the Hundred Years' War against France made England one of the strongest military powers in Europe. Immortalised in Shakespeare's "Henriad" plays, Henry is known and celebrated as one of the greatest warrior-kings of medieval England.
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Vladimir Minorsky
1877 - 1966 (89 years)
Vladimir Fyodorovich Minorsky was a Russian academic, historian, and scholar of Oriental studies, best known for his contributions to the study of history of Iran and the Iranian peoples such as Persians, Laz people, Lurs, and Kurds.
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