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
Evagrius Scholasticus
536 - 594 (58 years)
Evagrius Scholasticus was a Syrian scholar and intellectual living in the 6th century AD, and an aide to the patriarch Gregory of Antioch. His surviving work, Ecclesiastical History , comprises a six-volume collection concerning the Church's history from the First Council of Ephesus to the emperor Maurice’s reign until Scholasticus' death.
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William Whewell
1794 - 1866 (72 years)
William Whewell was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master at Trinity College, Cambridge. In his time as a student there, he achieved distinction in both poetry and mathematics.
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Henri Pirenne
1862 - 1935 (73 years)
Henri Pirenne was a Belgian historian. A medievalist of Walloon descent, he wrote a multivolume history of Belgium in French and became a prominent public intellectual. Pirenne made a lasting contribution to the study of cities that was a controversial interpretation of the end of Roman civilization and the rebirth of medieval urban culture. He also became prominent in the nonviolent resistance to the Germans who occupied Belgium in World War I.
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Sextus Julius Africanus
160 - 240 (80 years)
Sextus Julius Africanus was a Christian traveler and historian of the late-second and early-third centuries. He is important chiefly because of his influence on fellow historian Eusebius, on all the later writers of Church history among the Church Fathers, and on the whole Greek school of chroniclers.
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Werner Sombart
1863 - 1941 (78 years)
Werner Sombart was a German economist, historian and sociologist. Head of the "Youngest Historical School," he was one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century. The term late capitalism is accredited to him. The concept of creative destruction associated with capitalism is also of his coinage. His magnum opus was Der moderne Kapitalismus. It was published in 3 volumes from 1902 through 1927. In Kapitalismus he described four stages in the development of capitalism from its earliest iteration as it evolved out of feudalism, which he cal...
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Jules Michelet
1798 - 1874 (76 years)
Jules Michelet was a French historian and writer. He is best known for his multivolume work Histoire de France , which traces the history of France from the earliest times to the French Revolution. He is considered one of the founders of modern historiography. Michelet was influenced by Giambattista Vico. He admired Vico's emphasis on the role of people and their customs in shaping history, which was a major departure from the emphasis on political and military leaders. Michelet also drew inspiration from Vico's concept of the "corsi e ricorsi", or the cyclical nature of history, in which so...
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Mykola Kostomarov
1817 - 1885 (68 years)
Mykola Ivanovych Kostomarov or Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov was one of the most distinguished Russo–Ukrainian historians, a Professor of Russian History at the St. Vladimir University of Kiev and later at the St. Petersburg University, an Active State Councillor of Russia, an author of many books, including his famous biography of the seventeenth century Hetman of Zaporozhian Cossacks Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the research on the Ataman of Don Cossacks Stepan Razin and his fundamental 3-volume Russian History in Biographies of its main figures .
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William Wallace
1270 - 1305 (35 years)
Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight who became one of the main leaders during the First War of Scottish Independence. Along with Andrew Moray, Wallace defeated an English army at the Battle of Stirling Bridge in September 1297. He was appointed Guardian of Scotland and served until his defeat at the Battle of Falkirk in July 1298. In August 1305, Wallace was captured in Robroyston, near Glasgow, and handed over to King Edward I of England, who had him hanged, drawn and quartered for high treason and crimes against English civilians.
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Paul the Deacon
720 - 799 (79 years)
Paul the Deacon , also known as Paulus Diaconus, Warnefridus, Barnefridus, or Winfridus, and sometimes suffixed Cassinensis , was a Benedictine monk, scribe, and historian of the Lombards. Life An ancestor of Paulus's named Leupichis emigrated to Italy in 568 in the train of Alboin, King of the Lombards. There, he was granted lands at or near Forum Julii . During an invasion by the Avars, Leupichis's five sons were carried away to Pannonia, but one of them, his namesake, returned to Italy and restored the ruined fortunes of his house. The grandson of the younger Leupichis was Warnefrid, who by his wife Theodelinda became the father of Paul.
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Toussaint Louverture
1743 - 1803 (60 years)
François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture also known as Toussaint L'Ouverture or Toussaint Bréda; 20 May 1743 – 7 April 1803 Toussaint Louverture was born as a slave in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, now known as Haiti. He was a devout Catholic, and was manumitted as an affranchi before the French Revolution, identifying as a Creole for the greater part of his life. During his time as an affranchi, he became a salaried employee, an overseer of his former master's plantation, and later became a wealthy slave owner himself; Toussaint Louverture owned several coffee plantations at Petit Cor...
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Marcus Terentius Varro
116 BC - 27 BC (89 years)
Marcus Terentius Varro was a Roman polymath and a prolific author. He is regarded as ancient Rome's greatest scholar, and was described by Petrarch as "the third great light of Rome" . He is sometimes called Varro Reatinus to distinguish him from his younger contemporary Varro Atacinus.
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Charles Kingsley
1819 - 1875 (56 years)
Charles Kingsley was a broad church priest of the Church of England, a university professor, social reformer, historian, novelist and poet. He is particularly associated with Christian socialism, the working men's college, and forming labour cooperatives, which failed, but encouraged later working reforms.
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William of Malmesbury
1080 - 1140 (60 years)
William of Malmesbury was the foremost English historian of the 12th century. He has been ranked among the most talented English historians since Bede. Modern historian C. Warren Hollister described him as "a gifted historical scholar and an omnivorous reader, impressively well versed in the literature of classical, patristic, and earlier medieval times as well as in the writings of his own contemporaries. Indeed William may well have been the most learned man in twelfth-century Western Europe."
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Friedrich Meinecke
1862 - 1954 (92 years)
Friedrich Meinecke was a German historian, with national liberal and antisemitic views, who supported the Nazi invasion of Poland. After World War II, as a representative of an older tradition, he criticized the Nazi regime, but continued to express antisemitic prejudices.
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Jadunath Sarkar
1870 - 1958 (88 years)
Sir Jadunath Sarkar, was a prominent Indian historian and a specialist on the Mughal dynasty. Sarkar was educated in English literature, worked as a teacher for some period of time but later shifted his focus history research writing. He had vast knowledge of Persian language and all his books he wrote in English. He was vice-chancellor of University of Calcutta from 1926–1928 a member of Bengal Legislative Council between 1929-1932. In 1929 British knighted him.
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Sozomen
400 - 450 (50 years)
Salamanes Hermias Sozomenos , also known as Sozomen, was a Roman lawyer and historian of the Christian Church. Family and home He was born around 400 in Bethelia, a small town near Gaza, into a wealthy Christian family of Palestine.
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Ibn Hisham
701 - 828 (127 years)
Abū Muḥammad ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Hishām ibn Ayyūb al-Ḥimyarī al-Muʿāfirī al-Baṣrī , or Ibn Hisham, was a 9th-century Muslim historian and scholar who is known for editing the biography of Islamic prophet Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq. He grew up in Basra, in modern-day Iraq and later moved to Egypt.
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Hippolyte Taine
1828 - 1893 (65 years)
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him. Taine is also remembered for his attempts to provide a scientific account of literature.
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Lewis Mumford
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Lewis Mumford was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. He made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history, and the history of technology.
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Karl Polanyi
1886 - 1964 (78 years)
Karl Paul Polanyi , was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.
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George Syncellus
800 - 810 (10 years)
George Syncellus was a Byzantine chronicler and ecclesiastical official. He had lived many years in Palestine as a monk, before coming to Constantinople, where he was appointed synkellos to Tarasius, patriarch of Constantinople. He later retired to a monastery to write what was intended to be his great work, a chronicle of world history, Ekloge chronographias , or Extract of Chronography. According to Anastasius Bibliothecarius, George "struggled valiantly against heresy [i.e. Iconoclasm] and received many punishments from the rulers who raged against the rites of the Church", although the ...
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Gershom Scholem
1897 - 1982 (85 years)
Gershom Scholem , was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Jacob Burckhardt
1818 - 1897 (79 years)
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a Swiss historian of art and culture and an influential figure in the historiography of both fields. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history. Sigfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."
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Saxo Grammaticus
1150 - 1220 (70 years)
Saxo Grammaticus , also known as Saxo cognomine Longus, was a Danish historian, theologian and author. He is thought to have been a clerk or secretary to Absalon, Archbishop of Lund, the main advisor to Valdemar I of Denmark. He is the author of the , the first full history of Denmark, from which the legend of Amleth would come to inspire the story of Hamlet by Shakespeare.
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Stephen I of Hungary
969 - 1038 (69 years)
Stephen I, also known as King Saint Stephen , was the last Grand Prince of the Hungarians between 997 and 1000 or 1001, and the first King of Hungary from 1000 or 1001, until his death in 1038. The year of his birth is uncertain, but many details of his life suggest that he was born in, or after, 975, in Esztergom. He was given the pagan name Vajk at birth, but the date of his baptism is unknown. He was the only son of Grand Prince Géza and his wife, Sarolt, who was descended from a prominent family of gyulas. Although both of his parents were baptized, Stephen was the first member of his family to become a devout Christian.
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Adam Ferguson
1723 - 1816 (93 years)
Adam Ferguson, , also known as Ferguson of Raith , was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community. Ferguson has been called "the father of modern sociology" for his contributions to the early development of the discipline. His best-known work is his Essay on the History of Civil Society.
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Sulla
138 BC - 78 BC (60 years)
Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix , commonly known as Sulla, was a Roman general and statesman. He won the first large-scale civil war in Roman history and became the first man of the Republic to seize power through force.
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James Mill
1773 - 1836 (63 years)
James Mill was a Scottish historian, economist, political theorist and philosopher. He is counted among the founders of the Ricardian school of economics. He also wrote The History of British India and was one of the prominent historians to take a colonial approach. He was the first writer to divide Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British, a classification which has proved surpassingly influential in the field of Indian historical studies.
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R. H. Tawney
1880 - 1962 (82 years)
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist, Christian socialist, and important proponent of adult education. The Oxford Companion to British History explained that Tawney made a "significant impact" in these "interrelated roles". A. L. Rowse goes further by insisting that "Tawney exercised the widest influence of any historian of his time, politically, socially and, above all, educationally".
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Imam Shamil
1797 - 1871 (74 years)
Imam Shamil was the political, military, and spiritual leader of North Caucasian resistance to Imperial Russia in the 1800s, the third Imam of the Caucasian Imamate , and a Sunni Muslim shaykh of the Naqshbandi Sufis.
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Tyrannius Rufinus
345 - 411 (66 years)
Tyrannius Rufinus, also called Rufinus of Aquileia , was a monk, philosopher, historian, and theologian who worked to translate Greek patristic material, especially the work of Origen, into Latin. Life Rufinus was born in 344 or 345 in the Roman city of Julia Concordia , near Aquileia at the head of the Adriatic Sea. It appears that both of his parents were Christians.
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Karl Lamprecht
1856 - 1915 (59 years)
Karl Gotthard Lamprecht was a German historian who specialized in German art and economic history. Biography Lamprecht was born in Jessen in the Province of Saxony. As a student, he trained in history, political science, economics, and art at the universities of Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich. Lamprecht taught at the university in Marburg and later at Leipzig, where he founded the Institut für Kultur und Universalgeschicht center dedicated to comparative world and cultural history.
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Paolo Giovio
1483 - 1552 (69 years)
Paolo Giovio was an Italian physician, historian, biographer, and prelate. Early life Little is known about Giovio's youth. He was a native of Como; his family was from the Isola Comacina of Lake Como. His father, a notary, died around 1500. He was educated under the direction of his elder brother Benedetto, a humanist and historian. Although interested in literature, he was sent to Padua to study medicine. He graduated in 1511.
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James Westfall Thompson
1869 - 1941 (72 years)
James Westfall Thompson was an American historian specializing in the history of medieval and early modern Europe, particularly of the Holy Roman Empire and France. He also made noteworthy contributions to the history of literacy, libraries and the book trade in the Middle Ages.
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Walter Schlesinger
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Walter Schlesinger was a German historian of medieval social and economic institutions, particularly in the context of German regional history . Schlesinger is widely recognized as one of the most influential and prolific scholars of medieval social history in the post-war period.
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Nikephoros I
760 - 811 (51 years)
Nikephoros I , also known as Nicephorus I, was the Byzantine emperor from 802 to 811. He began his career as genikos logothetēs under Empress Irene, but later overthrew her to seize the throne. Prior to becoming emperor, he was sometimes referred to as "the Logothete" and "Genikos" or "Genicus" , in recognition of his previous role.
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Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
1862 - 1932 (70 years)
Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , known as Goldie, was a British political scientist and philosopher. He lived most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
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Karolina Lanckorońska
1898 - 2002 (104 years)
Countess Karolina Maria Adelajda Franciszka Ksawera Małgorzata Edina Lanckorońska was a Polish noble, World War II resistance fighter, philanthropist, and historian. Lanckorońska bequeathed her family's enormous art collection to Poland only after her homeland became free from communism and Soviet domination during the Revolutions of 1989. The Lanckoronski Collection may now, for the most part, be seen in Warsaw's Royal Castle and Kraków's Wawel Castle.
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Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
1709 - 1785 (76 years)
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably , sometimes known as Abbé de Mably, was a French philosopher, historian, and writer, who for a short time served in the diplomatic corps. He was a popular 18th-century writer.
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Sten Lindroth
1914 - 1980 (66 years)
Sten Hjalmar Lindroth was a Swedish historian of learning and science. Lindroth was born in the university town of Lund in Southern Sweden, but grew up and went to school in Gothenburg after his father Hjalmar Lindroth had been appointed to the Chair of Nordic languages at Gothenburg University. After finishing school in Gothenburg at Göteborgs högre latinläroverk, he matriculated at Uppsala University in 1933 and eventually became a student of Johan Nordström, holder of the Emilia and Gustaf Carlberg Chair of the history of ideas and learning, the first of its kind at Uppsala. Lindroth event...
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Frederick York Powell
1850 - 1904 (54 years)
Frederick York Powell was an English historian and scholar. Biography He was born on 4 January 1850 at 43 Woburn Place, Bloomsbury, London, the son of Frederick Powell, a commissariat merchant, and his wife Mary Powell, daughter of Dr James Powell. He was educated at the Manor House School at Hastings, and Rugby School. He matriculated at the University of Oxford in 1868 as an unattached student, the following year joining Christ Church, where he took a first-class degree in law and modern history in 1872. Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society.
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Charles Cutler Torrey
1863 - 1956 (93 years)
Charles Cutler Torrey was an American historian, archaeologist and scholar. Career He is known for, presenting through his books, manuscript evidence supporting alternate views on the origins of Christian and Islamic religious texts. He founded the American School of Archaeology at Jerusalem in 1901.
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Élie Halévy
1870 - 1937 (67 years)
Élie Halévy was a French philosopher and historian who wrote studies of the British utilitarians, the book of essays Era of Tyrannies, and a history of Britain from 1815 to 1914 that influenced British historiography.
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Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis
1892 - 1965 (73 years)
Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis was a Dutch historian of science. Career Dijksterhuis studied mathematics at the University of Groningen from 1911 to 1918. His Ph.d. thesis was entitled "A Contribution to the Knowledge of the Flat Helicoid."
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Aleksandar Teodorov-Balan
1859 - 1959 (100 years)
Aleksandar Stoyanov Teodorov-Balan was a Bulgarian linguist, historian and bibliographer. Balan was born in the village of Kubey in the Russian Empire, today in Odesa Oblast, Ukraine, to a Bessarabian Bulgarian family. The Bulgarian general Georgi Todorov was his brother. Balan studied in Prague and Leipzig graduating in Slavistics from the Charles University in Prague. In 1884 he settled in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria, spending four years working for the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment. He became professor of Slavic ethnography and dialectology and history of the Bul...
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Stanisław Arnold
1895 - 1973 (78 years)
Stanisław Arnold was a Polish historian, professor of the University of Warsaw, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, chief of Marksistowskie Zrzeszenie Historyków . Biography He was the son of Jan, director of a mine, and Romana née Bojanowski. In 1920 he defended his PhD thesis Władztwo biskupie na grodzie wolborskim w wieku XIII under supervision of Marceli Handelsman. Later he became an employee of the Warsaw University, with which he was connected until retirement in 1966. From 1924 to 1928 he was working as a history teacher at Gimnazjum im. Stefana Batorego in Warsaw.
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Kazimierz Piwarski
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Kazimierz Piwarski was a Polish historian, professor of Jagiellonian University in Kraków since 1946 and Poznań University in years 1953-1955, member of Polish Academy of Skills since 1945, and member of Polish Academy of Sciences since 1958.
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Theodore Saloutos
1910 - 1980 (70 years)
Theodore Saloutos was an American historian. His areas of research included agrarian politics and reform movements, immigration studies, and Greek immigration to the United States Early life Saloutos was born in Milwaukie, Wisconsin on August 3, 1910. His parents were immigrants from Greece.
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Gerardus Vossius
1577 - 1649 (72 years)
Gerrit Janszoon Vos , often known by his Latin name Gerardus Vossius, was a Dutch classical scholar and theologian. Life He was the son of Johannes Vos, a Protestant from the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Electorate of the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerardus was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education,...
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Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol was a Romanian historian, philosopher, professor, economist, sociologist, and author. Among his many major accomplishments, he is the Romanian historian credited with authoring the first major synthesis of the history of the Romanian people. His daughter Margareta Xenopol became a well-known Romanian composer.
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