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,
#8101
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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Otto Liiv
1905 - 1942 (37 years)
Otto Liiv was an Estonian historian and archivist. He was one of the founders of Estonian archival science as well as one of the most prolific and respected historians in Estonia. Liiv attended school in Narva and Tallinn and enrolled at the University of Tartu in 1923 and graduated in 1927. He was the head of the Estonian State Central Archives from 1929 to 1942. He also lectured at the University of Tartu and was the chief editor of the journal "Ajalooline Ajakiri". Liiv had an academic interest in the history of the 17th century Estonia and contributed to the books "The Economic History of...
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Max Farrand
1869 - 1945 (76 years)
Max Farrand was an American historian who taught at several universities and was the first director of the Huntington Library. Early life He was born in Newark, New Jersey, United States. He graduated from Princeton .
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Austin Lane Poole
1889 - 1963 (74 years)
Austin Lane Poole, FBA was a British mediaevalist. Poole came from an academic lineage, being the son of Reginald Lane Poole , the nephew of Stanley Lane Poole , and the great-nephew of Reginald Stuart Poole .
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John Andrew Boyle
1916 - 1978 (62 years)
John Andrew Boyle , was a British orientalist and historian. Life and career He was born at Worcester Park, Surrey, England, on 10 March 1916. He graduated with first class honours in German at Birmingham University. He later pursued the studies of Oriental languages at the universities of Berlin and Göttingen.
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Peter Elmsley
1773 - 1825 (52 years)
Peter Elmsley was an English classical scholar. Early life and education Peter Elmsley was the younger son of Alexander Elmsley of St Clement Danes, Westminster, who had Scottish ancestry. He was educated at Westminster School and then at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated as a BA in 1794, later being promoted to a Master of Arts in 1797, and receiving the degrees of BD on 30 October 1823 and DD on 7 November 1823. He inherited a fortune in 1802 from his uncle, also named Peter Elmsley, a well-known bookseller in the Strand, and devoted himself to the study of classical authors and m...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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Sergei Tokarev
1899 - 1985 (86 years)
Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was a Russian scholar, ethnographer, historian, researcher of religious beliefs, doctor of historical sciences, and professor at Moscow State University. Birth and education Sergei Aleksandrovich Tokarev was born in Tula on 29 December 1899. He graduated with honors from Tula grammar school and entered Moscow University. Immediately after the revolution, conditions in Moscow in 1918 were dangerous and difficult, and Tokarev went back to the apparent safety of his home province of Tula. He taught Russian and Latin in local schools for four years. Tokarev returned to Moscow University in 1922, where he began social and historical studies.
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Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney
1757 - 1820 (63 years)
Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney was a French philosopher, abolitionist, writer, orientalist, and politician. He was at first surnamed Boisgirais after his father's estate, but afterwards assumed the name of Volney .
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Felix Stähelin
1873 - 1952 (79 years)
Felix Stähelin was a Swiss historian of Basel. He studied ancient history and classical philology in Basel, Bonn and Berlin, completing a doctorate on the Galatians in 1897. He worked as a school teacher from 1902–1907, and as a lecturer at Basel from 1907, receiving tenure as professor of Ancient History in 1931, retiring in 1937.
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James Anthony Froude
1818 - 1894 (76 years)
James Anthony Froude was an English historian, novelist, biographer, and editor of Fraser's Magazine. From his upbringing amidst the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement, Froude intended to become a clergyman, but doubts about the doctrines of the Anglican church, published in his scandalous 1849 novel The Nemesis of Faith, drove him to abandon his religious career. Froude turned to writing history, becoming one of the best-known historians of his time for his History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
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Pyotr Karyshkovsky
1921 - 1988 (67 years)
Petro Karyshkovsky-Ikar - Ukrainian Soviet historian, numismatist, a scholar and lexicographer. Doctor of Historical Sciences, professor, since 1963 and until his last days he headed the department of ancient history and medieval Odesa University.
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John Sherren Brewer
1810 - 1879 (69 years)
John Sherren Brewer, Jr. was an English clergyman, historian and scholar. He was a brother of E. Cobham Brewer, compiler of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Birth and education Brewer was born in Norwich, the son of a Baptist schoolmaster. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford in 1827, graduating B.A. in 1833, M.A. 1835. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1837, and became chaplain to a central London workhouse. In 1839 he was appointed lecturer in classical literature at King's College London, and in 1858 he became professor of English language and literature and lecturer in modern history, succeeding FD Maurice.
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James MacCaffrey
1875 - 1935 (60 years)
Monsignor James MacCaffrey STL, PhD was an Irish priest, theologian and historian. Biography Monsignor MacCaffrey was born in 1875, at Fivemiletown, Co. Tyrone, he was the son of Francis MacCaffrey of Alderwood, Clogher, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at St. Macartan's Seminary, Monaghan, before going to St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained there in 1899.
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Ross J. S. Hoffman
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Ross John Swartz Hoffman was an American historian, writer, educator, and conservative intellectual who specialized in Modern European History and International Affairs. Life and career Born on February 2, 1902, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Hoffman attended Lafayette College and the University of Pennsylvania . His doctoral dissertation , prepared under the supervision of William Ezra Lingelbach, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1933 and received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association in 1934.
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Ephraim Emerton
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Ephraim Emerton was an American educator, author, translator, and historian prominent in his field of European medieval history. Early life and education Ephraim Emerton was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to James and Martha West Emerton. His elder brother was James Henry Emerton , naturalist and arachnologist.
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Adolf Holm
1830 - 1900 (70 years)
Adolf Holm was a German historian of antiquity. Biography Adolf Holm was the son of a producer and distributor of tobacco in Lübeck and was born in a house located between Braunstraße and Holstenstraße by the Trave. He studied at Leipzig and Berlin and obtained a doctorate in 1851. Immediately thereafter he was employed by the Katharineum, a grammar school in Lübeck founded in 1531 for the study of ancient languages. He worked on history and geography of ancient Sicily and Greece and wrote a work in several volumes on the History of Sicily in ancient times. At Lübeck he held several conferenc...
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Douglass Adair
1912 - 1968 (56 years)
Douglass Greybill Adair was an American historian who specialized in intellectual history. He is best known for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of The Federalist Papers, and his influential studies in the history and influence of republicanism in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the Enlightenment. His most famous essay, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," introduced the pursuit of fame as a new motivation for understanding the actions for the Framers.
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Clemens Baeumker
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
Clemens Baeumker was a German historian of philosophy. Baeumker was born in Paderborn to a gymnasium teacher. He studied philosophy, theology, and philology in Paderborn and later at the University of Münster, from which he obtained a doctorate in 1877. From 1879 he was a gymnasium lecturer in Münster.
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Degory Wheare
1573 - 1647 (74 years)
Degory Wheare, also spelt Digory Whear was an historian, the first Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Life He was born in Jacobstow, Cornwall, at the mansion of Berry Court. He matriculated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, on 6 July 1593, graduated B.A. on 5 February 1597, and proceeded M.A. on 16 June 1600. He was a contemporary of Francis Rous, a lifelong friend; and he was tutor at Broadgates Hall to John Pym . Another Oxford friend was Charles Fitzgeoffrey.
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Matvei Lyubavsky
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Matvey Kuzmich Lyubavsky was a Russian and Soviet historian, professor, academic and rector of the Moscow University from 1911 to 1917. Biography Lyubavsky was born in to the family of a village deacon. He lost his left eye in an accident during childhood. Lyubavsky graduated from the faculty of History of the Imperial Moscow University in 1882 and received his doctorate in 1901 and became a professor at the Moscow University.
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Carl Brinkmann
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Carl Brinkmann was a German sociologist and economist, focusing on socioeconomics and the history of political economy. Brinkmann was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, now in Kaliningrad, and died in Oberstdorf, Allgäu. In 1904 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He taught as a professor at the Heidelberg University , Berlin University , and Tübingen University .
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Lucy Maynard Salmon
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Lucy Maynard Salmon was an American historian. She was a professor of history at Vassar College from 1889 until her death. She was the first woman to be a member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association. She published widely in historical journals and general magazines, and was highly active in civic affairs, supporting civil service reform and world and women suffrage.
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Tommaso Fazello
1498 - 1570 (72 years)
Tommaso Fazello was an Italian Dominican friar, historian and antiquarian. He is known as the father of Sicilian history. He is the author of the first printed history of Sicily: De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, published in Palermo in 1558 in Latin. He was born in Sciacca, Sicily and died in Palermo, Sicily.
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Norman Davis
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Norman Davis was a New Zealand-born professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. Early life and career Davis was born in 1913 at Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his education at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he was taught by Professor Herbert Ramsay. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 and studied comparative philology. From 1937 to 1938, he lectured in English at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania, and then at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, 1938–39.
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Fred Albert Shannon
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Fred Albert Shannon was an American historian. He had many publications related to American history, and he won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865 .
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Georges Haupt
1928 - 1978 (50 years)
Georges Haupt, also known as George or Gheorghe Haupt , was Romanian and French a historian of socialism, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International.
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Alexander Soloviev
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Alexander Vasilievich Soloviev was a Russian émigré jurist, slavist, and historian of Serbia and Serbian law. His academic activity included research on the Bogumils, Serbian heraldry, philately and archeology, and he also published translations from Russian and French into Serbian. Having fled from Russia not long after the October Revolution, he settled in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where he became a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law . After the end of World War II he briefly served as the first dean of the Sarajevo Law School , before Communist repressi...
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Dana Carleton Munro
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Dana Carleton Munro was an American historian, brother of Wilfred Harold Munro, born at Bristol, R.I. He was educated at Brown and in Europe at Strassburg and Freiburg. He taught at Penn , at Wisconsin until 1915, then at Princeton. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1901. Brown gave him the degree of Doctor of humane letters in 1912. He edited Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History . He was co-author of Mediœval Civilization and Essays on the Crusades .
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Gustave Lanctot
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Gustave Lanctot , also spelled Gustave Lanctôt, was a Canadian historian and archivist. Born in Saint-Constant, Quebec, he studied law at Université de Montréal and was called to the Quebec Bar in 1907. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied political science and history from 1909 to 1911 while at Oxford University. He was also a member of the Oxford Canadians ice hockey team. In 1912, he joined the National Archives of Canada. During World War I, he served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
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Robert von Pöhlmann
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
Robert von Pöhlmann was a German ancient historian . From 1870 to 1874 he studied classical philology and history at the universities of Munich, Göttingen and Leipzig. While a student his influences included Georg Waitz at Gottingen and Wilhelm Roscher at Leipzig University. In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Erlangen, where in 1886 he attained a full professorship. From 1901 onward, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Munich.
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Carl von Noorden
1833 - 1883 (50 years)
Carl Friedrich Johannes von Noorden was a German historian who was a native of Bonn. He was a grandson to psychiatrist Christian Friedrich Nasse and the father of pathologist Carl von Noorden . Biography He studied at the Universities of Marburg, Berlin and Bonn, where he was a pupil of Heinrich von Sybel . In 1868 he became a professor of history at the University of Greifswald. Afterwards he served as a professor at Marburg , Tübingen , Bonn and Leipzig . At the University of Leipzig, one of his students was Karl Lamprecht . After his death, his position at Leipzig was filled by his frie...
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Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Mitrofan Viktorovich Dovnar-Zapol'skiy was a historian, ethnographer, and diplomat of Belarusian origin. He hailed from the family of land-less smaller nobility and was the son of Collegiate Secretary.
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Wacław Tokarz
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Wacław Tokarz was a Polish historian and military officer. A Colonel of the Polish Army and a professor of both the Warsaw University and Jagiellonian University, he authored numerous books on the 19th century military history of Poland, notably two monumental monographs on the Battle of Warsaw and the Warsaw Uprising of 1794.
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Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson Books A History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976,
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Thomas Dempster
1579 - 1625 (46 years)
Thomas Dempster was a Scottish scholar and historian. Born into the aristocracy in Aberdeenshire, which comprises regions of both the Scottish highlands and the Scottish lowlands, he was sent abroad as a youth for his education. The Dempsters were Catholic in an increasingly Protestant country and had a reputation for being quarrelsome. Thomas' brother James, outlawed for an attack on his father, spent some years as a pirate in the northern islands, escaped by volunteering for military service in the Low Countries and was drawn and quartered there for insubordination. Thomas' father lost the ...
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George Elliott Howard
1849 - 1928 (79 years)
George Elliott Howard was an American educator and author. He was a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1889 to 1891, and a professor at Stanford from 1891 to 1901. He was also the president of the American Sociological Society in 1917.
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Guðni Jónsson
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Guðni Jónsson was an Icelandic professor of history and editor of Old Norse texts. Life and career Guðni was born at Gamla-Hraun at Eyrarbakki into a poor family who had a total of 17 children. He was raised by relatives at Leirubakki until he was twelve, worked two seasons as a fisherman and then was taken in by his married sister in Reykjavík, enabling him to attend evening school there. He received a middle school certificate in Flensburg in 1921 and a school certificate from Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík in 1924. In 1923 he served as president of the student society Framtíðin. He then attended the University of Iceland, first in theology and then in the faculty of Old Norse studies.
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James Alton James
1864 - 1962 (98 years)
James Alton James was an American educator and historian. Biography James was born on September 17, 1864, in Jefferson, Wisconsin. He spent two years at the Platteville Normal School, and then, after teaching high school two years to pay for the university, entered the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated as valedictorian with an LL.B. in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1893.
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Julius von Pflugk-Harttung
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Julius von Pflugk-Harttung was a German historian, best known as an authority on Papal and medieval history. Biography He was born at Wernikow, and served as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War. He studied history and philology at the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Tübingen, where shortly afterwards he became an associate professor. In 1886, he was named a professor of history at Basel. Thence he went to Berlin, where in 1893 he became head of the Secret State Archives.
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Thomas Gordon
1788 - 1841 (53 years)
Major-General Thomas Gordon was a British army officer and historian. He is remembered for his role in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s and 1830s and his History of the war published in 1832.
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Shmuel Sambursky
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Shmuel Sambursky, or Samuel Sambursky Hebrew: שמואל סמבורסקי was a German, Palestinian, and Israeli physicist, professor, and author during the respective epochs of his country —Germany, Mandatory Palestine, and Israel.
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Heinrich Rückert
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
Heinrich Rückert was a German historian and Germanist. He was the son of orientalist and poet Friedrich Rückert . From 1840 to 1844 he studied classical and German philology at the universities of Erlangen, Bonn and Berlin. In 1845 he obtained his habilitation for German history and archaeology at the University of Jena, and later on, relocated to Breslau, where in 1852 he became an associate professor . In 1852 he was a founding member of the Verein für Thüringische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde .
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Sigmund von Riezler
1843 - 1927 (84 years)
Sigmund Riezler or Siegmund Riezler was a German historian. Biography He was educated at the University of Munich, and became a docent in 1869, and after ten years as head of the archives and library of Donaueschingen was made court and city librarian in Munich, in 1883, and director of the Maximilianeum in 1885.
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