The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in History,
#7901
Dmitry Ilovaysky
1832 - 1920 (88 years)
Dmitry Ivanovich Ilovaysky was an anti-Normanist conservative Russian historian who penned a number of standard history textbooks. Ilovaysky graduated from the Moscow University in 1854 and first attracted critical attention with his thesis on the Principality of Ryazan in 1858. He was wounded during the Siege of Plevna, in which he took an active part.
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Leo Africanus
1483 - 1600 (117 years)
Johannes Leo Africanus was a Andalusi diplomat and author who is best known for his 1526 book Cosmographia et geographia de Affrica, later published by Giovanni Battista Ramusio as Descrittione dell'Africa in 1550, centered on the geography of the Maghreb and Nile Valley. The book was regarded among his scholarly peers in Europe as the most authoritative treatise on the subject until the modern exploration of Africa. For this work, Leo became a household name among European geographers. He converted from Islam to Christianity and changed his name to Johannes Leo de Medicis .
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Thomas Hutchinson
1711 - 1780 (69 years)
Thomas Hutchinson was an American merchant, politician, historian, and colonial administrator who repeatedly served as governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay in the years leading up to the American Revolution. He has been described as "the most important figure on the loyalist side in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts". Hutchinson was a successful merchant and politician who was active at high levels of the Massachusetts colonial government for many years, serving as lieutenant governor and then governor from 1758 to 1774. He was a politically polarizing figure who came to be identified ...
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Ahmad Amin
1886 - 1954 (68 years)
Ahmad Amin , was an Egyptian historian and writer. He wrote a series of books on the history of the Islamic civilization , a famous autobiography , as well as an important dictionary of Egyptian folklore .
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Mzilikazi
1790 - 1868 (78 years)
Mzilikazi Moselekatse, Khumalo was a Southern African king who founded the Ndebele Kingdom now called Matebeleland which is now part of Zimbabwe. His name means "the great river of blood". He was born the son of Mashobane kaMangethe near Mkuze, Zululand , and died at Ingama, Matabeleland . Many consider him to be the greatest Southern African military leader after the Zulu king, Shaka. In his autobiography, David Livingstone referred to Mzilikazi as the second most impressive leader he encountered on the African continent.
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Chancellor Williams
1893 - 1992 (99 years)
Chancellor Williams was an American sociologist, historian and writer. He is noted for his work on African civilizations prior to encounters with Europeans; his major work is The Destruction of Black Civilization .
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Andrés Bonifacio
1863 - 1897 (34 years)
Andrés Bonifacio y de Castro was a Filipino revolutionary leader. He is often called "The Father of the Philippine Revolution", and considered one of the national heroes of the Philippines. He was one of the founders and later the Kataastaasang Pangulo of the Kataastaasan, Kagalanggalangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan or more commonly known as the "Katipunan", a movement that sought the independence of the Philippines from Spanish colonial rule and started the Philippine Revolution.
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Otto Hintze
1861 - 1940 (79 years)
Otto Hintze was a German historian of public administration. He was Professor of Political, Constitutional, Administrative and Economic History at the University of Berlin. Influenced by Ernst Troeltsch and Max Weber, he emphasized the continuity and rationality of Western institutions.
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Kunio Yanagita
1875 - 1962 (87 years)
Kunio Yanagita was a Japanese author, scholar, and folklorist. He began his career as a bureaucrat, but developed an interest in rural Japan and its folk traditions. This led to a change in his career. His pursuit of this led to his eventual establishment of Japanese native folkloristics, or minzokugaku, as an academic field in Japan. As a result, he is often considered to be the father of modern Japanese folklore studies.
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Zhu Xi
1130 - 1200 (70 years)
Zhu Xi , formerly romanized Chu Hsi, was a Chinese calligrapher, historian, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. Zhu was influential in the development of Neo-Confucianism. He contributed greatly to Chinese philosophy and fundamentally reshaped the Chinese worldview. His works include his editing of and commentaries to the Four Books , his writings on the process of the "investigation of things" , and his development of meditation as a method for self-cultivation.
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T. Harry Williams
1909 - 1979 (70 years)
Thomas Harry Williams was an American academic and author. For the majority of his academic career between the 1930s to 1970s, Williams taught history at Louisiana State University. While at LSU, Williams was a Boyd Professor of History from 1953 to 1979. Near the end of his tenure at LSU, the university created the T. Harry Williams Chair of American History. Additional academic institutes Williams taught at include extension schools, in Wisconsin and at the Municipal University of Omaha.
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Vasil Zlatarski
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Vasil Nikolov Zlatarski was a Bulgarian historian-medievalist, archaeologist, and epigraphistist. Life Vasil Zlatarski was born in Veliko Tarnovo in 1866, the youngest child of the teacher Nikola Zlatarcheto who was a prominent activist in the educational movement and the religious and national struggle in the Tarnovo region before the Liberation. Zlatarski obtained his education in Veliko Tarnovo and in the Peter and Paul Seminary at Liaskovets, near Tarnovo where he was preparing for priesthood. After the early death of his father, he went to his brother in Russia, where in 1887 he graduated the First Classical Lyceum in St.
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Barthold Georg Niebuhr
1776 - 1831 (55 years)
Barthold Georg Niebuhr was a Danish–German statesman, banker, and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography. By 1810 Niebuhr was inspiring German patriotism in students at the University of Berlin by his analysis of Roman economy and government. Niebuhr was a leader of the Romantic era and symbol of German national spirit that emerged after the defeat at Jena. But he was also deeply rooted in the classical spirit of the Age of Enlightenment in his intellectual presuppositions, his use of philologic analysis, and h...
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Justin
101 - 200 (99 years)
Justin was a Latin writer and historian who lived under the Roman Empire. Life Almost nothing is known of Justin's personal history, his name appearing only in the title of his work. He must have lived after Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, whose work he excerpted, and his references to the Romans and Parthians having divided the world between themselves would have been anachronistic after the rise of the Sassanians in the third century. His Latin appears to be consistent with the style of the second century. Ronald Syme, however, argues for a date around AD 390, immediately before the compilation...
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Vercingetorix
80 BC - 46 BC (34 years)
Vercingetorix was a Gallic king and chieftain of the Arverni tribe who united the Gauls in a failed revolt against Roman forces during the last phase of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. After surrendering to Caesar and spending almost six years in prison, he was executed in Rome.
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Adolf Schulten
1870 - 1960 (90 years)
Adolf Schulten was a German historian and archaeologist. Schulten was born in Elberfeld, Rhine Province, and received a doctorate in geology from the University of Bonn in 1892. He studied in Italy, Africa and Greece with support from the Institute of Archaeology. After obtaining the chair of ancient history at the University of Erlangen, he continued his work in Spain with great dedication and to this day is considered a key influence upon archaeological study in Spain.
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Cheikh Anta Diop
1923 - 1986 (63 years)
Cheikh Anta Diop was a Senegalese historian, anthropologist, physicist, and politician who studied the human race's origins and pre-colonial African culture. Diop's work is considered foundational to the theory of Afrocentricity, though he himself never described himself as an Afrocentrist. The questions he posed about cultural bias in scientific research contributed greatly to the postcolonial turn in the study of African civilizations.
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Velleius Paterculus
19 BC - 31 (50 years)
Marcus Velleius Paterculus was a Roman historian, soldier and senator. His Roman history, written in a highly rhetorical style, covered the period from the end of the Trojan War to AD 30, but is most useful for the period from the death of Caesar in 44 BC to the death of Augustus in AD 14.
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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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Aziz Suryal Atiya
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Aziz Suryal Atiya was an Egyptian Coptologist who was a Coptic historian and scholar and an expert in Islamic and Crusades studies. Atiya was the founder of the Institute of Coptic Studies in Cairo in the 1950s, and was also the founder of the Middle East Center, University of Utah.
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Francis James Child
1825 - 1896 (71 years)
Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of English and Scottish ballads now known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry. In 1876 he was named Harvard's first Professor of English, a position which allowed him to focus on academic research. It was during this time that he began work on the Child Ballads.
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Heinrich Luden
1778 - 1847 (69 years)
Heinrich Luden was a German historian. Luden was born in Loxstedt in the district of Stade. At the age of 17 Luden went to the Domschule in Bremen. He subsequently studied theology at the University of Göttingen, where he came under the influence of the historians August Ludwig von Schlözer and later Johannes von Müller and devoted himself to the study of history. He was briefly employed as a private tutor in the house of Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland in Berlin, in 1805 producing his thesis in Jena on Christian Thomasius. He further published biographies of Hugo Grotius and Sir William Temple ...
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Charles Gide
1847 - 1932 (85 years)
Charles Gide was a French economist and historian of economic thought. He was a professor at the University of Bordeaux, at Montpellier, at Université de Paris and finally at Collège de France. His nephew was the author André Gide.
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Ziauddin Barani
1285 - 1357 (72 years)
Ziauddin Barani was an Indian Muslim political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate located in present-day Northern India during Muhammad bin Tughlaq and Firuz Shah's reign. He was best known for composing the Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi , a work on medieval India, which covers the period from the reign of Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq to the first six years of the reign of Firoz Shah Tughluq; and the Fatwa-i-Jahandari which promoted a hierarchy among Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent, although according to M. Athar Ali it was not based on race or even like the caste system, but taking as a model of ...
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