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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.

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List of the most influential people in History,

#7751

Max Simon

1844 - 1918 (74 years)

Maximilian Simon was a German historian of mathematics and mathematics teacher. He was concerned mostly with mathematics in the antiquity. Born into a Jewish family, he studied from 1862 to 1866 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, obtaining his Ph.D. from Karl Weierstrass und Ernst Eduard Kummer He was a mathematics teacher in Berlin from 1868 to 1871, and in Strasbourg from 1871 to 1912, where he became an honorary professor of the university.

#7752

Henry Adams Bellows

Henry Adams Bellows

1885 - 1939 (54 years)

Henry Adams Bellows was a newspaper editor and radio executive who was an early member of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. He is also known for his translation of the Poetic Edda for The American-Scandinavian Foundation.

#7753

Helge Groth

1913 - 1966 (53 years)

Helge Otto Aars Groth was a Norwegian literary historian and diplomat. He was born in Stavanger, and took the cand.philol. degree in 1938. He was a lecturer in European literature at the University of Oslo from 1939 to 1953, and also as held lectures on foreign affairs in Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation radio from 1946 to 1953. Books include Hovedlinjer i mellomkrigstidens norske litteratur and Olav Aukrust, Problematikk og utvikling .

#7754

James Monroe Smith

1888 - 1949 (61 years)

James Monroe Smith was an American educator and academic administrator in Louisiana. In 1931, he was appointed president of Louisiana State University by Huey Long. Smith was referred to as "Jimmy the Stooge" by students of the university.

#7755

Ernst Weyden

1805 - 1869 (64 years)

Ernst Weyden was a scholar and member of the Faculty at the University of Cologne. Publications All publications in German, unless otherwise noted.Cöln's Vorzeit: Geschichten, Legenden und Sagen Cöln's nebst einer Auswahl cölnischer Volkslieder. Cöln a. Rh: Schmitz, 1826. Aventures merveilleuses de Siegfried Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Fréderic et Gela. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Drachenfels et Rolandsech. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Loreley Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. La dame Richmodis. Sagas. Paris: L. Janet, 1833. Germain Joseph. Sagas. P. 43-47: [1] f. de pl, 1833. Albertus Magnus.

#7756

Adam Szelągowski

1873 - 1961 (88 years)

Adam Wiktor Szelągowski was a Polish historian, teacher and professor of the Jan Kazimierz University. Szelągowski was a member of the National League. Works Najstarsze drogi z Polski na Wschód: w okresie bizantyńsko-arabskim, Kraków 1909.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. I. Egipt. Babilon i Assyrya. Syrya i Palestyna. Azya Mniejsza. Iran i Turan. Indye, Chiny i Pacyfik. Warszawa 1913.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. II. Grecya archaiczna. Grecya bohaterska. Grecya wolna. Panowanie Grecyi nad światem. Warszawa 1914.Dzieje powszechne i cywilizacyi. Vol. III. Rzym – miasto. Rzym – państwo.

#7757

George Smith

1800 - 1868 (68 years)

George Smith was an English businessman, historian and theologian. He is now best known for historical work relating to the Methodist conference. Life Born at Condurrow, near Camborne, Cornwall, on 31 August 1800, he was the son of William Smith, a carpenter and small farmer at Condurrow , by his wife, Philippa Moneypenny . He was educated at the British and Foreign schools in Falmouth, and in Plymouth where his father retired in 1808, when the lease of his farm expired. In 1812 he returned with his parents to Cornwall, and was employed for several years in farm work and carpentering. Having ...

#7758

Prabodh Chandra Sengupta

1876 - 1962 (86 years)

Prabodh Chandra Sengupta was a historian of ancient Indian astronomy. He was a Professor of Mathematics at Bethune College in Calcutta and a lecturer in Indian Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of Calcutta.

#7759

Jerrilyn McGregory

Jerrilyn McGregory is a professor of African American folklore at Florida State University and an author. She wrote Wiregrass Country and Downhome Gospel; African American Spriritual Activism in Wiregrass Country. She has been researching celebrations of Boxing Day in the Caribbean.

#7760

Maximilian Curtze

1837 - 1903 (66 years)

Ernst Ludwig Wilhelm Maximilian Curtze was a German mathematician and historian of mathematics. He translated many classical mathematical texts. Curtze was born in Ballenstedt, in the Principality of Anhalt-Bernburg, the fourth son of physician Eduard Curtze and Johanna Nicolai. After attending the Carolinum grammar school at Bernburg, he graduated from the University of Greifswald in 1857 after training under Johann August Grunert. He then passed the examination for teachers in 1861 and taught at the Thorn Gymnasium until his retirement in 1896. A colleague was the Copernicus scholar Leopold Prove.

#7761

Robert Howard

1585 - 1653 (68 years)

Sir Robert Howard KB was an English landowner, member of parliament, and Royalist soldier. He was involved in a scandal when his mistress Frances Coke, Viscountess Purbeck, was found guilty of adultery and was twice summoned to explain her pregnancy with his son to the Court of High Commission. During the English Civil War, Howard was in command of the defence of Bridgnorth Castle when it surrendered to the Parliamentarians in 1646.

#7762

Archer Taylor

1890 - 1973 (83 years)

Archer Taylor was one of America's "foremost specialists in American and European folklore", with a special interest in cultural history, literature, proverbs, riddles and bibliography. Early life and education Taylor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on August 1, 1890.

#7763

Nagao Ariga

1860 - 1921 (61 years)

Nagao Ariga also spelled Nagao Aruga was a Japanese legal expert during the Meiji period. In addition to law, he also studied sociology at Tokyo Imperial University. During the Sino-Japanese war, he advised Field-Marshall Ōyama Iwao on issues of international law. In 1913 he accepted the invitation by Yuan Shikai, to prepare a draft constitution for the new Chinese republic, together with . Ariga doubted that China was ready to implement a liberal democracy and recommended a balance between monarchy and republic.

#7764

Rachel Moss

Rachel Moss is an Irish art historian and professor specialising in medieval art, with a particular interest in Insular art, medieval Irish Gospel books and monastic history. She is the current head of the Department of the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin, where she became a fellow in 2022.

#7765

Marc Bloch

1886 - 1944 (58 years)

Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France over the course of his career. As an academic, he worked at the University of Strasbourg , the University of Paris , and the University of Montpellier .

#7766

William Bascom

1912 - 1981 (69 years)

William R. Bascom was an award-winning American folklorist, anthropologist, and museum director. He was a specialist in the art and culture of West Africa and the African Diaspora, especially the Yoruba of Nigeria.

#7767

Solomon Zeitlin

1892 - 1976 (84 years)

Solomon Zeitlin was an American Jewish historian, Talmudic scholar and in his time the world's leading authority on the Second Commonwealth, also known as the Second Temple period. His work The Rise and Fall of the Judean State is about the Second Temple period.

#7768

Richard Harrison Shryock

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Richard Harrison Shryock was an American medical historian, specializing in the connection of medical history with general history. Biography Shryock studied at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy and then at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating there with a bachelor's degree in 1917 and a PhD in American history in 1924. Before 1917 he taught school in Philadelphia. During WWI he served as a private in the United States Army Ambulance Service. He was instructor of history from 1921 to 1924 at Ohio State University and from 1924 to 1925 at the University of Pennsylvania. In Duke Univers...

#7769

Allan Nevins

1890 - 1971 (81 years)

Joseph Allan Nevins was an American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and John D. Rockefeller, as well as his public service. He was a leading exponent of business history and oral history.

#7770

Merle Curti

1897 - 1996 (99 years)

Merle Eugene Curti was an American progressive historian who influenced peace studies, intellectual history and social history, including by using cliometrics . At Columbia University and for decades at the University of Wisconsin, Curti directed 86 finished Ph.D. dissertations and had a wide range of correspondents. He was known for his commitment to democracy, as well as the Turnerian thesis that social and economic forces shape American life, thought and character.

#7771

Roland Bainton

1894 - 1984 (90 years)

Roland Herbert Bainton was a British-born American Protestant church historian. Life Bainton was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire, England, and came to the United States in 1902. He received an AB degree from Whitman College, and BD and PhD. degrees from Yale University. He also received a number of honorary degrees including a DD from Meadville Theological Seminary and from Oberlin College, Dr. Theologiae from the University of Marburg, Germany, and LittD from Gettysburg College. A specialist in Reformation history, Bainton was for 42 years Titus Street Professor of ecclesiastical history at Yal...

#7772

Carl Benjamin Boyer

Carl Benjamin Boyer

1906 - 1976 (70 years)

Carl Benjamin Boyer was an American historian of sciences, and especially mathematics. Novelist David Foster Wallace called him the "Gibbon of math history". It has been written that he was one of few historians of mathematics of his time to "keep open links with contemporary history of science."

#7773

Lily Ross Taylor

1886 - 1969 (83 years)

Lily Ross Taylor was an American academic and author, who in 1917 became the first female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Biography Born in Auburn, Alabama, Lily Ross Taylor developed an interest in Roman studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, earning an A.B. in 1906. She went to Bryn Mawr College as a graduate student that year, and received her Ph.D. in Latin in 1912. Her dissertation advisor was Tenney Frank. From 1912 until 1927, she taught at Vassar, and, in 1917, she became the fourth female Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

#7774

Crane Brinton

1898 - 1968 (70 years)

Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as a historian of ideas. His most famous work, The Anatomy of Revolution likened the dynamics of revolutionary movements to the progress of fever.

#7775

Michael Postan

1899 - 1981 (82 years)

Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA was a British historian. He was known informally as Munia Postan. Biography Postan was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kyiv, leaving Russia in 1919 after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He held positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe. Eric Hobsbawm notes he wa...

#7776

Owen Lattimore

1900 - 1989 (89 years)

Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia.

#7777

A. H. M. Jones

1904 - 1970 (66 years)

Arnold Hugh Martin Jones FBA , known as A. H. M. Jones or Hugo Jones, was a prominent 20th-century British historian of classical antiquity, particularly of the later Roman Empire. Biography Jones's best-known work, The Later Roman Empire, 284–602 , is sometimes considered the definitive narrative history of late Rome and early Byzantium, beginning with the reign of the Roman tetrarch Diocletian and ending with that of the Byzantine emperor Maurice. One of the most common modern criticisms of this work is its almost total reliance on literary and epigraphic primary sources, a methodology which mirrored Jones's own historiographical training.

#7778

Kenneth Scott Latourette

Kenneth Scott Latourette

1884 - 1968 (84 years)

Kenneth Scott Latourette was an American historian and professor, specialized in Chinese studies, Japanese studies, and the history of Christianity. His formative experiences as a Christian missionary and educator in early 20th-century Imperial China shaped his life's work. Although he did not learn the Chinese language, he became known for his study of the history of China, the history of Japan, his magisterial scholarly surveys on world Christianity, and of American relations with East Asia.

#7779

Erwin Ackerknecht

Erwin Ackerknecht

1906 - 1988 (82 years)

Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht was an active and influential Trotskyist in the 1930s who had to flee Germany in 1933 after Hitler’s rise to power. It was in the United States, the country that granted him citizenship, that Ackerknecht became an influential historian of medicine. He wrote groundbreaking works on the social and ecological dimensions of disease and was a forerunner of contemporary trends in social and cultural history. He became the first Chair in the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin; the second such position in the United States.

#7780

Richard Hofstadter

Richard Hofstadter

1916 - 1970 (54 years)

Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century. Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historical materialist approach to history, in the 1950s he came closer to the concept of "consensus history", and was epitomized by some of his admirers as the "iconic historian of postwar liberal consensus." Others see in his work an early critique of the one-dimensional society, as Hofstadter was equally critical of socialist and capitalist models of society, and bemoaned the "consensus" w...

#7781

Lynn Thorndike

1882 - 1965 (83 years)

Lynn Thorndike was an American historian of medieval science and alchemy. He was the son of a clergyman, Edward R. Thorndike, and the younger brother of Ashley Horace Thorndike, an American educator and expert on William Shakespeare, and Edward Lee Thorndike, known for being the father of modern educational psychology.

#7782

Margot Finn

Margot C. Finn, is a British historian and academic, who specialises in Britain and the British colonial world during the long nineteenth century. She has been Professor of Modern British History at the University College, London since 2012. Finn was previously the President of the Royal Historical Society and a trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum.

#7783

Ronald Syme

1903 - 1989 (86 years)

Sir Ronald Syme, was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. He was regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon. His great work was The Roman Revolution , a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.

#7784

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold J. Toynbee

1889 - 1975 (86 years)

Arnold Joseph Toynbee was an English historian, a philosopher of history, an author of numerous books and a research professor of international history at the London School of Economics and King's College London. From 1918 to 1950, Toynbee was considered a leading specialist on international affairs; from 1924 to 1954 he was the Director of Studies at Chatham House, in which position he also produced 34 volumes of the Survey of International Affairs, a "bible" for international specialists in Britain.

#7785

Samuel Eliot Morison

Samuel Eliot Morison

1887 - 1976 (89 years)

Samuel Eliot Morison was an American historian noted for his works of maritime history and American history that were both authoritative and popular. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1912, and taught history at the university for 40 years. He won Pulitzer Prizes for Admiral of the Ocean Sea , a biography of Christopher Columbus, and John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography . In 1942, he was commissioned to write a history of United States naval operations in World War II, which was published in 15 volumes between 1947 and 1962. Morison wrote the popular Oxford History of the Ame...

#7786

R. G. Collingwood

R. G. Collingwood

1889 - 1943 (54 years)

Robin George Collingwood was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including The Principles of Art and the posthumously published The Idea of History .

#7787

J. R. Partington

1886 - 1965 (79 years)

James Riddick Partington was a British chemist and historian of chemistry who published multiple books and articles in scientific magazines. His most famous works were An Advanced Treatise on Physical Chemistry and A History of Chemistry , for which he received the Dexter Award and the George Sarton Medal.

#7788

Daniel Waugh

Daniel C. Waugh is a historian based at the University of Washington. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University, and in 1963 graduated with a B.A. in Physics. In 1965, he finished his Master's on the Regional Studies of the Soviet Union at Harvard University, and seven years later he completed his Ph.D. at the same institution. The same year, 1972, he began his employment at the University of Washington, and has remained there ever since. He taught in three different departments, namely the departments of History, International Studies, and Slavic and East European Languages and Literature until 2006.

#7789

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy

1873 - 1962 (89 years)

Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book The Great Chain of Being , on the topic of that name, which is regarded as 'probably the single most influential work in the history of ideas in the United States during the last half century'. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1932. In 1940, he founded the Journal of the History of Ideas.

#7790

Mircea Eliade

1907 - 1986 (79 years)

Mircea Eliade was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. A leading interpreter of religious experience, he established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most instrumental contributions to religious studies was his theory of eternal return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but actually parti...

#7791

John Farquhar Fulton

John Farquhar Fulton

1899 - 1960 (61 years)

John Farquhar Fulton was an American neurophysiologist and historian of science. He received numerous degrees from Oxford University and Harvard University. He taught at Magdalen College School of Medicine at Oxford and later became the youngest Sterling Professor of Physiology at Yale University. His main contributions were in primate neurophysiology and history of science.

#7792

N. S. B. Gras

1884 - 1956 (72 years)

Norman Scott Brien Gras , known as N. S. B. Gras, was a Canadian professor at the Harvard Business School who invented the academic discipline of business history. Early life Gras was born in 1884 in Toronto, Ontario. He graduated from the University of Western Ontario. He went on to receive a PhD in economics from Harvard University.

#7793

Herbert Feis

1893 - 1972 (79 years)

Herbert Feis was an American historian, author, and economist who was the Advisor on International Economic Affairs in the US Department of State during the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations.

#7794

Victor Ehrenberg

1891 - 1976 (85 years)

Victor Ehrenberg was a German Jewish historian. Life Ehrenberg was born in Altona, Hamburg to a noted German Jewish family. He was the younger brother of Hans Ehrenberg and the nephew of the jurist Victor Ehrenberg, and a nephew of economist Richard Ehrenberg.

#7795

Rayford Logan

1897 - 1982 (85 years)

Rayford Whittingham Logan was an African-American historian and Pan-African activist. He was best known for his study of post-Reconstruction America, a period he termed "the nadir of American race relations". In the late 1940s he was the chief advisor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on international affairs. He was professor emeritus of history at Howard University.

#7796

William Scott Ferguson

1875 - 1954 (79 years)

William Scott Ferguson was a Canadian-American classical scholar. Biography William Scott Ferguson was born in Marshfield, Prince Edward Island on November 11, 1875, the son of Senator Donald Ferguson.

#7797

Arthur H. Cole

1889 - 1974 (85 years)

Arthur Harrison Cole was an American economic historian and was the head of the Harvard University Business School's library. Cole created the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History that was addressed by Joseph Schumpeter, and that had as participants several graduate students who later went on to distinguished careers in economic history.

#7798

Herbert Heaton

1890 - 1973 (83 years)

Herbert Heaton was a British-born economic historian. He held posts at the University of Tasmania, Queen's University, Kingston, and the University of Minnesota, where he was head of the Department of History from 1954 until his retirement in 1958. Heaton was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1945.

#7799

Albert T. Olmstead

1880 - 1945 (65 years)

Albert Ten Eyck Olmstead was an American historian and academic, who specialized in Assyriology. Olmstead was born in 1880 in New York, and died in 1945 in Chicago. He was Professor of Oriental History at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Among his doctoral students was Neilson C. Debevoise, later an influential historian of the Parthian Empire.

#7800

Ralph Henry Gabriel

1890 - 1987 (97 years)

Ralph Henry Gabriel was an American historian. He held the Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and was the founding father of the American Studies Association. Early life and education Gabriel was born on April 29, 1890, in Reading, New York, to parents Cleveland and Alta Monroe Gabriel. He earned his Bachelor of Arts, Masters of Arts and Ph.D. at Yale University before serving in the U.S. Army Infantry during World War I.

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