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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To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7901
Carl Christian Rafn
1795 - 1864 (69 years)
Carl Christian Rafn was a Danish historian, translator and antiquarian. His scholarship to a large extent focused on translation of Old Norse literature and related Northern European ancient history. He was also noted for his early advocacy of the recognition of Norse colonization of North America.
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Michel Le Quien
1661 - 1733 (72 years)
Michel Le Quien was a French historian and theologian. He studied at Plessis College, Paris, and at twenty entered the Dominican convent in Faubourg Saint-Germain, where he made his profession in 1682. Excepting occasional short absences he never left Paris. At the time of his death he was librarian of the convent in Rue Saint-Honoré, a position which he had filled almost all his life, lending assistance to those who sought information on theology and ecclesiastical antiquity. Under the supervision of Père Marsollier he mastered the classical languages, Arabic and Hebrew, to the detriment, it...
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Granville Sharp
1735 - 1813 (78 years)
Granville Sharp was a British scholar, devout Christian, philanthropist and one of the first campaigners for the abolition of the slave trade in Britain. Born in Durham, he initially worked as a civil servant in the Board of Ordnance. His involvement in abolitionism began in 1767 when he defended a severely injured slave from Barbados in a legal case against his master. Increasingly devoted to the cause, he continually sought test cases against the legal justifications for slavery, and in 1769 he published the first tract in England that explicitly attacked the concept of slavery.
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Juan Bautista de Anza
1736 - 1788 (52 years)
Juan Bautista de Anza Bezerra Nieto was an expeditionary leader, military officer, and politician primarily in California and New Mexico under the Spanish Empire. He is credited as one of the founding fathers of Spanish California and served as an official within New Spain as Governor of the province of New Mexico.
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Anant Sadashiv Altekar
1898 - 1960 (62 years)
Anant Sadashiv Altekar was a historian, archaeologist, and numismatist from Maharashtra, India. He was the Manindra Chandra Nandy's Professor and Head of the Department of Ancient Indian History and Culture at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India, and later the director of the Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute and University Professor of Ancient Indian History and Culture at the Patna University, both in Patna, India.
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Cecil Sharp
1859 - 1924 (65 years)
Cecil James Sharp was an English collector of folk songs, folk dances and instrumental music, as well as a lecturer, teacher, composer and musician. He was a key figure in the folk-song revival in England during the Edwardian period. According to Roud's Folk Song in England, Sharp was the country's "single most important figure in the study of folk song and music."
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Darius III
380 BC - 330 BC (50 years)
Darius III was the last Achaemenid King of Kings of Persia, reigning from 336 BC to his death in 330 BC. Contrary to his predecessor Artaxerxes IV Arses, Darius was a distant member of the Achaemenid dynasty. During his early career, he was reportedly an obscure figure among his peers and first rose to prominence during the Cadusian expedition of Artaxerxes III in the 350s BC. As a reward for his bravery, he was given the Satrapy of Armenia. Around 340 BC, he was placed in charge of the royal "postal service," a high-ranking position. In 338 BC, Artaxerxes III met an abrupt end after being po...
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Harold Nicolson
1886 - 1968 (82 years)
Sir Harold George Nicolson was a British politician, diplomat, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, journalist, broadcaster, and gardener. His wife was the writer Vita Sackville-West.
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Leopold Janauschek
1827 - 1898 (71 years)
Leopold Janauschek was an Austrian Cistercian historian. Life Janauschek was born at Brünn, Moravia. In 1846 he received the religious habit at the Cistercian Zwettl Abbey, Lower Austria, where he was professed in 1848. His superiors then sent him to their house of studies at Heiligenkreuz Abbey near Vienna, where he studied philosophy and theology. After his ordination to the priesthood in 1851, he was made professor of church history and canon law. His scholarly works attracted attention and won for him in 1858 the chair of ecclesiastical history in the University of Vienna.
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Alexander Afanasyev
1826 - 1871 (45 years)
Alexander Nikolayevich Afanasyev was a Russian Slavist and ethnographer who published nearly 600 Russian fairy and folk taless, one of the largest collections of folklore in the world. This collection was not strictly Russian, but included folk tales from Ukraine and Belarus alongside Russian folk tales. The first edition of his collection was published in eight volumes from 1855 to 1867, earning him the reputation of being the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm.
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Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
1485 - 1556 (71 years)
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer of the New World, and one of four survivors of the 1527 Narváez expedition. During eight years of traveling across what is now the US Southwest, he became a trader and faith healer to various Native American tribes before reconnecting with Spanish civilization in Mexico in 1536. After returning to Spain in 1537, he wrote an account, first published in 1542 as La relación y comentarios , which in later editions was retitled Naufragios y comentarios . Cabeza de Vaca is sometimes considered a proto-anthropologist for his detailed accounts of the ...
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Stith Thompson
1885 - 1976 (91 years)
Stith Thompson was an American folklorist: he has been described as "America's most important folklorist". He is the "Thompson" of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index, which indexes folktaless by type, and the author of the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, a resource for folklorists that indexes motifs, granular elements of folklore.
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Thietmar of Merseburg
975 - 1018 (43 years)
Thietmar , Prince-Bishop of Merseburg from 1009 until his death in 1018, was an important chronicler recording the reigns of German kings and Holy Roman Emperors of the Ottonian dynasty. Two of Thietmar's great-grandfathers, both referred to as Liuthar, were the Saxon nobles Lothar II, Count of Stade, and Lothar I, Count of Walbeck. They were both killed fighting the Slavs at the Battle of Lenzen.
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Nicolaus of Damascus
64 BC - 4 (68 years)
Nicolaus of Damascus was a Greek historian and philosopher who lived during the Augustan age of the Roman Empire. His name is derived from that of his birthplace, Damascus. His output was vast, but is nearly all lost. His chief work was a universal history in 144 books. There exist considerable remains of two works of his old age; a life of Augustus, and an autobiography. He also wrote a life of Herod, some philosophical works, and some tragedies and comedies.
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Eric Bloodaxe
895 - 954 (59 years)
Eric Haraldsson , nicknamed Bloodaxe and Brother-Slayer , was a Norwegian king. He ruled as King of Norway from 932 to 934, and twice as King of Northumbria: from 947 to 948, and again from 952 to 954.
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Vladimir Ćorović
1885 - 1941 (56 years)
Vladimir Ćorović was a Serb historian, university professor, author, and academic. His bibliography consists of more than 1000 works. Several of his books on the history of Serb, Yugoslav, Bosnian and Herzegovinian uprisings are considered to be definitive works on the subject.
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Kume Kunitake
1839 - 1931 (92 years)
Kume Kunitake was a historian in Meiji and Taishō period Japan. He had a son, Kume Keiichirō, who was a noted painter. Biography Kume was born in Saga Domain, Hizen , and was active in attempting to assist the administrative reform of Saga domain during the Bakumatsu period.
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Justin Harvey Smith
1857 - 1930 (73 years)
Justin Harvey Smith was an American historian and specialist on the Mexican–American War. Smith was educated at Dartmouth College and Union Theological Seminary . Smith worked for Charles Scribner's Sons publishers 1881–1883 and Ginn & Co. 1883–1898 ; he was Professor of Modern History at Dartmouth 1899–1908. He resigned his professorship in 1908 to pursue historical research, and published The Annexation of Texas in 1911 and The War with Mexico in 1919. For the latter, he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1920 and the first Loubat Prize in 1923. From 1917 to 1923, Smith was chairman of the Hi...
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Malhar Rao Holkar
1693 - 1766 (73 years)
Malhar Rao Holkar was a noble subedar of the Maratha Empire, in present-day India. He was one of the early officers along with Ranoji Scindia to help spread the Maratha rule to northern states and was given the estate of Indore to rule by the Peshwas, during the reign of the Maratha emperor Shahu I. He was founder of the Holkar dynasty that ruled Malwa.
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Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
1830 - 1889 (59 years)
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges was a French historian. Joseph M. McCarthy argues that his first great book, The Ancient City , was based on his in-depth knowledge of the primary Greek and Latin texts. The book argued that:Religion was the sole factor in the evolution of ancient Greece and Rome, the bonding of family and state was the work of religion, that because of ancestor worship the family, drawn together by the need to engage in the ancestral cults, became the basic unit of ancient societies, expanding to the gens, the Greek phratry, the Roman tribe, to the patrician city state, and tha...
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Jean Mabillon
1632 - 1707 (75 years)
Dom Jean Mabillon, O.S.B., was a French Benedictine monk and scholar of the Congregation of Saint Maur. He is considered the founder of the disciplines of palaeography and diplomatics. Early life Mabillon was born in the town of Saint-Pierremont, then in the ancient Province of Champagne, now a part of the Department of Ardennes. He was the son of Estienne Mabillon and his wife Jeanne Guérin. At the age of 12 he became a pupil at the Collège des Bons Enfants in Reims. Having entered the seminary in 1650, he left after three years and in 1653 became instead a monk in the Maurist Abbey of Saint-Remi.
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Edward Shepherd Creasy
1812 - 1878 (66 years)
Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy was an English historian and jurist. Life The son of a land agent, he was born in Bexley, Kent, England, and educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar in 1837 and appointed assistant judge at the Westminster sessions court.
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Mihail Kogălniceanu
1817 - 1891 (74 years)
Mihail Kogălniceanu was a Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania on October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He was several times Interior Minister under Cuza and Carol. A polymath, Kogălniceanu was one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals of his generation. Siding with the moderate liberal current for most of his lifetime, he began his political career as a collaborator of Prince Mihail Sturdza, while serving ...
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Nicolae Iorga
1871 - 1940 (69 years)
Nicolae Iorga was a Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, Albanologist, poet and playwright. Co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party , he served as a member of Parliament, President of the Deputies' Assembly and Senate, cabinet minister and briefly as Prime Minister. A child prodigy, polymath and polyglot, Iorga produced an unusually large body of scholarly works, establishing his international reputation as a medievalist, Byzantinist, Latinist, Slavist, art historian and philosopher of history. Holding teaching positions at the University of Bucharest, the Univ...
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Mandell Creighton
1843 - 1901 (58 years)
Mandell Creighton was a British historian and a bishop of the Church of England. A scholar of the Renaissance papacy, Creighton was the first occupant of the Dixie Chair of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, a professorship established around the time that history was emerging as an independent academic discipline. He was also the first editor of the English Historical Review, the oldest English language academic journal in the field of history. Creighton had a second career as a cleric in the Church of England. He served as a parish priest in Embleton, Northumberland ...
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John I Tzimiskes
925 - 976 (51 years)
John I Tzimiskes was the senior Byzantine emperor from 969 to 976. An intuitive and successful general who married into the influential Skleros family, he strengthened and expanded the Byzantine Empire to include Thrace and Syria by warring with the Rus under Sviatoslav I and the Fatimids respectively.
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William Whiston
1667 - 1752 (85 years)
William Whiston was an English theologian, historian, natural philosopher, and mathematician, a leading figure in the popularisation of the ideas of Isaac Newton. He is now probably best known for helping to instigate the Longitude Act in 1714 and his important translations of the Antiquities of the Jews and other works by Josephus . He was a prominent exponent of Arianism and wrote A New Theory of the Earth.
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Richard Hakluyt
1552 - 1616 (64 years)
Richard Hakluyt was an English writer. He is known for promoting the English colonization of North America through his works, notably Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation .
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Nikolai Rubinshtein
1897 - 1963 (66 years)
Nikolai Leonidovich Rubinshtein was a Soviet historian known for his historiographical works and his research into the economic history of Russia and the formation of capitalism in that country. Early life and education Rubinshtein was born on 11 December 1897 in Odessa. He received his advanced education at Novorossiia University in Odessa from which he graduated in 1922.
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Hermann Aubin
1885 - 1969 (84 years)
Hermann Aubin was an Austrian-German historian. Biography Hermann Aubin was born in Reichenberg, Austria on 23 December 1885. His father was a wealthy factory owner. The Aubin family were descended from French Huguenots who had settled in Frankfurt in the 16th century AD. Aubin graduated at the top of his class from the gymnasium at Reichenberg in July 1904, and subsequently volunteered for a year as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army. Since 1905, Aubin studied history and economics at the universities of Munich and Freiburg. He gained a PhD at Freiburg in 1910 under the supervision of Ge...
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Herbert Baxter Adams
1850 - 1901 (51 years)
Herbert Baxter Adams was an American educator and historian who brought German rigor to the study of history in America; a founding member of the American Historical Association, and one of the earliest educators using the seminar for teaching history. With a fresh PhD from the Heidelberg University in Germany, Johns Hopkins University brought Adams in as a teaching fellow in history during their inaugural year. Adams stayed with Johns Hopkins until his health failed.
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Ahmet Refik Altınay
1881 - 1937 (56 years)
Ahmet Refik Altınay was a Turkish historian, academic, writer and poet, who gave history lectures at Darülfünun after the First World War. Life Altınay attended Vişnezade Primary School, Beşiktaş Military Secondary School and Kuleli Military School. In 1889 he graduated at the top of his class and joined the military, eventually rising to the rank of captain. As a young lieutenant, Altınay was given teaching jobs instead of being sent out into the field. For four years, he taught geography at the Toptaşı and Soğukçeşme Military Secondary Schools. In 1902 he became a French teacher, and in 1908, a history teacher.
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Constantine Paparrigopoulos
1815 - 1891 (76 years)
Constantine Paparrigopoulos was a Greek historian, who is considered the founder of modern Greek historiography. He is the founder of the concept of historical continuity of Greece from antiquity to the present, establishing the tripartite division of Greek history in ancient, medieval and modern, and sought to set aside the prevailing views at the time that the Byzantine Empire was a period of decadence and degeneration.
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Walter Ullmann
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Walter Ullmann was an Austrian-Jewish scholar who left Austria in the 1930s and settled in the United Kingdom, where he became a naturalised citizen. He was a recognised authority on medieval political thought, and in particular legal theory, an area in which he published prolifically.
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James IV of Scotland
1473 - 1513 (40 years)
James IV was King of Scotland from 11 June 1488 until his death at the Battle of Flodden in 1513. He inherited the throne at the age of fifteen on the death of his father, James III, at the Battle of Sauchieburn, following a rebellion in which the younger James was the figurehead of the rebels. James IV is generally regarded as the most successful of the Stewart monarchs. He was responsible for a major expansion of the Scottish royal navy, which included the founding of two royal dockyards and the acquisition or construction of 38 ships, including the Michael, the largest warship of its time.
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Jacobus de Voragine
1228 - 1298 (70 years)
Jacobus de Voragine was an Italian chronicler and archbishop of Genoa. He was the author, or more accurately the compiler, of the Golden Legend, a collection of the legendary lives of the greater saints of the medieval church that was one of the most popular religious works of the Middle Ages.
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Hastings Rashdall
1858 - 1924 (66 years)
Hastings Rashdall was an English philosopher, theologian, historian, and Anglican priest. He expounded a theory known as ideal utilitarianism, and he was a major historian of the universities of the Middle Ages.
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Matthew Paris
1200 - 1259 (59 years)
Matthew Paris, also known as Matthew of Paris , sometimes confused with the nonexistent Matthew of Westminster, was an English Benedictine monk, chronicler, artist in illuminated manuscripts, and cartographer who was based at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire. He authored a number of historical works, many of which he scribed and illuminated himself, typically in drawings partly coloured with watercolour washes, sometimes called "tinted drawings". Some were written in Latin, others in Anglo-Norman or French verse.
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Hans Rosenberg
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Hans Rosenberg was a German refugee historian whose works influenced a whole generation of post-war German scholars. Life Rosenberg was born in Hannover. Though of Jewish ancestry, he was raised as a Protestant, in Cologne. He took his PhD there in 1927 under Friedrich Meinecke, and received his Habilitation in 1932, despite strong conservative opposition. As the Great Depression unfolded, his attention shifted from the history of ideas and nationalism, which he studied under Meinecke, to economic cycles. The result of this was a 'stunningly original work' on the world economic crisis of 185...
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Henry James Sumner Maine
1822 - 1888 (66 years)
Sir Henry James Sumner Maine, , was a British Whig comparative jurist and historian. He is famous for the thesis outlined in his book Ancient Law that law and society developed "from status to contract." According to the thesis, in the ancient world individuals were tightly bound by status dealing with a particular group while in the modern one, in which individuals are viewed as autonomous agents, they are free to make contracts and form associations with whomever they choose. Because of this thesis, Maine can be seen as one of the forefathers of modern legal anthropology, legal history and...
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Nikolai Lukin
1885 - 1940 (55 years)
Nikolai Mikhailovich Lukin was a Soviet Marxist historian and publicist. He was a leader among Soviet historians in the 1930s, after the death of Mikhail Pokrovsky. He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party from 1904.
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Sergei Skazkin
1890 - 1973 (83 years)
Sergei Danilovich Skazkin was a Soviet historian, Academician of the USSR Academy of Sciences . Doctor of Sciences in Historical Sciences . Skazkin graduated from Moscow State University in 1915 and began teaching at the university in 1920. In 1935, he became Professor of the Faculty of History, and from 1949 he was Head of the Department of Medieval History. He succeeded E. A. Kosminsky.
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Timothy Dwight IV
1752 - 1817 (65 years)
Timothy Dwight was an American academic and educator, a Congregationalist minister, theologian, and author. He was the eighth president of Yale College . Early life Timothy Dwight was born May 14, 1752, in Northampton, Massachusetts. The Dwight family had a long association with Yale College, as it was then known. Dwight's paternal grandfather, Colonel Timothy Dwight, was born 19 October 1694, and died April 30, 1771. His father, a merchant and farmer known as Major Timothy Dwight, was born May 27, 1726, graduated from Yale in 1744, served in the American Revolutionary War, and died June 10, 1777.
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James I of Aragon
1208 - 1276 (68 years)
James I the Conqueror was King of Aragon and Lord of Montpellier from 1213 to 1276; King of Majorca from 1231 to 1276; and Valencia from 1238 to 1276 and Count of Barcelona. His long reign of 62 years is not only the longest of any Iberian monarch, but one of the longest monarchical reigns in history, ahead of Hirohito but remaining behind Queen Victoria and Ferdinand III of Naples and Sicily. He saw the expansion of the Crown of Aragon in three directions: Languedoc to the north, the Balearic Islands to the southeast, and Valencia to the south. By a treaty with Louis IX of France, he achieve...
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Bernard DeVoto
1897 - 1955 (58 years)
Bernard Augustine DeVoto was an American historian, conservationist, essayist, columnist, teacher, editor, and reviewer. He was the author of a series of Pulitzer-Prize-winning popular histories of the American West and for many years wrote The Easy Chair, an influential column in Harper's Magazine. DeVoto also wrote several well-regarded novels and during the 1950s served as a speech-writer for Adlai Stevenson. His friend and biographer, Wallace Stegner described DeVoto as "flawed, brilliant, provocative, outrageous, ... often wrong, often spectacularly right, always stimulating, sometimes i...
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Jared Sparks
1789 - 1866 (77 years)
Jared Sparks was an American historian, educator, and Unitarian minister. He served as President of Harvard College from 1849 to 1853. Biography Born in Willington, Connecticut, Sparks studied in the common schools, worked for a time at the carpenter's trade, and then became a schoolteacher. In 1809–1811, he attended the Phillips Exeter Academy, where he met John G. Palfrey, who became a lifelong friend.
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John Fiske
1842 - 1901 (59 years)
John Fiske was an American philosopher and historian. He was heavily influenced by Herbert Spencer and applied Spencer's concepts of evolution to his own writings on linguistics, philosophy, religion, and history.
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Moritz Cantor
1829 - 1920 (91 years)
Moritz Benedikt Cantor was a German historian of mathematics. Biography Cantor was born at Mannheim. He came from a Sephardi Jewish family that had emigrated to the Netherlands from Portugal, another branch of which had established itself in Russia. In his early youth, Moritz Cantor was not strong enough to go to school, and his parents decided to educate him at home. Later, however, he was admitted to an advanced class of the Gymnasium in Mannheim. From there he went to the University of Heidelberg in 1848, and soon after to the University of Göttingen, where he studied under Gauss and Weber...
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Curt Weibull
1886 - 1991 (105 years)
Curt Weibull was a Swedish historian, educator and author. Biography Curt Hugo Johannes Weibull was born in Lund, Sweden. He was a member of the Weibull family. He was the son of professor Martin Weibull and brother of historian Lauritz Weibull . He and his brother both attended the University of Lund. The Weibull brothers have been characterized as influential in raising the scientific standards of history research in Sweden and Denmark.
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George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston
1859 - 1925 (66 years)
George Nathaniel Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, , styled Lord Curzon of Kedleston between 1898 and 1911 and then Earl Curzon of Kedleston between 1911 and 1921, was a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who served as Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905. From 1919 to 1924 he served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
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