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,
#8251
Dimitrie Onciul
1856 - 1923 (67 years)
Dimitrie Onciul was a Romanian historian. He was a member of the Romanian Academy and its president from 1920 until his death in 1923. Biography Onciul was born in Straja, at the time in the Duchy of Bukovina, Austrian Empire, now in Suceava County, Romania. He studied at the University of Czernowitz, where he was active in Arboroasa and then in Societatea Academică Junimea, and at the University of Vienna. In 1884, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Czernowitz.
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Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti
1754 - 1822 (68 years)
Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti , full name: Abd al-Rahman bin Hasan bin Burhan al-Din al-Jabarti , often simply known as Al-Jabarti, was a Somali-Egyptian scholar and historian who spent most of his life in Cairo.
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Marcus Lee Hansen
1892 - 1938 (46 years)
Marcus Lee Hansen was an American historian, who won the 1941 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 . Biography Hansen was born in Neenah, Wisconsin. He was one of eight children born to Danish immigrant Marcus Hansen and Norwegian immigrant Gina O Lee Hansen . He received a BA from Central College, an MA from the University of Iowa, and a PhD from Harvard University, where he studied under Frederick Jackson Turner. He was Associate Professor of History and Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Charles Oman
1860 - 1946 (86 years)
Sir Charles William Chadwick Oman, was a British military historian. His reconstructions of medieval battles from the fragmentary and distorted accounts left by chroniclers were pioneering. Occasionally his interpretations have been challenged, especially his widely copied thesis that British troops defeated their Napoleonic opponents by firepower alone. Paddy Griffith, among modern historians, argues that the British infantry's discipline and willingness to attack were equally important.
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Otto of Freising
1109 - 1158 (49 years)
Otto of Freising was a German churchman of the Cistercian order and chronicled at least two texts which carries valuable information on the political history of his own time. He was the bishop of Freising from 1138. Otto participated in the Second Crusade; he lived through the journey and reached Jerusalem, and later returned to Bavaria in the late 1140s, living for another decade back in Europe.
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John II Casimir Vasa
1609 - 1672 (63 years)
John II Casimir Vasa was King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania from 1648 to his abdication in 1668 as well as a claimant to the throne of Sweden from 1648 to 1660. He was the first son of Sigismund III Vasa with his second wife Constance of Austria. John Casimir succeeded his older half-brother, Władysław IV Vasa.
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Harry Pratt Judson
1849 - 1927 (78 years)
Harry Pratt Judson was an American educator and historian and the second president of the University of Chicago. Biography Judson was born at Jamestown, New York and educated at Williams College , where he was a brother of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity . Judson taught at Troy High School in Troy, New York, from 1870 to 1885 and was professor of history and lecturer on pedagogics at the University of Minnesota from 1885 to 1892.
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Charles Webster
1886 - 1961 (75 years)
Sir Charles Kingsley Webster was a British diplomat and historian. He was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Crosby and King's College, Cambridge. After leaving Cambridge University, he went on to become a professor at Harvard, Oxford, and the London School of Economics . He also served as President of the British Academy from 1950 to 1954.
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Mieczysław Żywczyński
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Mieczysław Żywczyński was a Polish historian and priest. He was a professor of Catholic University of Lublin. He was a researcher of the Church's history and general history. He was born in Warsaw and died in Lublin.
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Stanley Vestal
1887 - 1957 (70 years)
Stanley Vestal was an American writer, poet, biographer, and historian, perhaps best known for his books on the American Old West, including Sitting Bull, Champion of the Sioux. Biography Vestal was born Walter Stanley Vestal to Walter Mallory Vestal and the former Isabella "Daisy" Wood near Severy in Greenwood County in southeastern Kansas. Vestal's father died when he was young. His mother remarried, and Vestal took the legal surname Campbell from his stepfather, James Robert Campbell. About 1889, the Campbell family relocated to Guthrie in the newly established Oklahoma Territory, where he...
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Edgar Zilsel
1891 - 1944 (53 years)
Edgar Zilsel was an Austrian-American historian and philosopher of science. He is best known for the Zilsel Thesis, a scientific proposal which traces the origins of western science to the interactions between scholars and skilled artisans. The proposal melded practical experimentation with analytical thought. As part of the left wing of the Vienna Circle he endorsed historical materialism, and sought to establish empirical laws in history and in society.
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Joshua Prawer
1917 - 1990 (73 years)
Joshua Prawer was a notable Israeli historian and a scholar of the Crusades and Kingdom of Jerusalem. His work often attempted to portray Crusader society as a forerunner to later European colonialist expansion. He was also an important figure in Israeli higher education, was one of the founders of the University of Haifa and Ben-Gurion University, and was a major reformer of the Israeli education system.
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Franz Schnabel
1887 - 1966 (79 years)
Franz Schnabel was a German historian. He wrote about German history, particularly the "cultural crisis" of the 19th century in Germany as well as humanism after the end of the Third Reich. He opposed Nazism during the Second World War.
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Bohuslav Balbín
1621 - 1688 (67 years)
Bohuslav Balbín was a Czech writer, historian, geographer and Jesuit, called the "Czech Pliny". He became well known also as an advocate of the Czech language in the time of incoming germanization of the Czech lands.
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Paul Lemerle
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Paul Lemerle was a French Byzantinist, born in Paris. Biography Lemerle taught at the École française d'Athènes , at the Faculté des Lettres of the University of Burgundy at Dijon , at the École Pratique des Hautes Études , at the Sorbonne and at the Collège de France . He completed his doctoral dissertation in 1945, on the city of Philippi and eastern Macedonia during the Byzantine period.
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Gustav Hertzberg
1826 - 1907 (81 years)
Gustav Friedrich Hertzberg was a German historian, author and publicist. He was the Honorary Professor of History at the University of Halle from 1889 until shortly before his death. Early life and education Hertzberg was the eldest son Gustav Ludwig Hertzberg and his wife, the former Friederike Bucholz. From 1835 to 1843 he attended the Pedagogium of the Francke Foundations, where his father worked as a doctor, and passed his Abitur there at the age of 17. He then studied theology at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. In the autumn of 1844 he began studying oriental and ancient philology at the University of Leipzig.
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Jayasimha Siddharaja
1081 - 1143 (62 years)
Jayasiṃha , who assumed the title Siddharāja , was an Indian king who ruled western parts of India. He was a member of the Chaulukya dynasty. Jayasimha's capital was located at Anahilapataka in present-day Gujarat. Besides large parts of Gujarat, his control also extended to parts of Rajasthan: he subdued the Shakambhari Chahamana king Arnoraja, and the former Naddula Chahamana ruler Asharaja acknowledged his suzerainty. Jayasimha also annexed a part of Malwa by defeating the Paramarass. He also waged an inconclusive war against the Chandela king Madanavarman.
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Arnold van Gennep
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Arnold van Gennep, in full Charles-Arnold Kurr van Gennep was a Dutch–German-French ethnographer and folklorist. Biography He was born in Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg . Since his parents were never married, Van Gennep adopted his Dutch mother's name, "van Gennep". When he was six, he and his mother moved to Lyons, France, where she married a French doctor who moved the family to Savoy.
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George Lyman Kittredge
1860 - 1941 (81 years)
George Lyman Kittredge was a professor of English literature at Harvard University. His scholarly edition of the works of William Shakespeare was influential in the early 20th century. He was also involved in American folklore studies and was instrumental in the formation and management of the Harvard University Press. One of his better-known books concerned witchcraft in England and New England.
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Dorothy Hartley
1893 - 1985 (92 years)
Dorothy Rosaman Hartley was an English social historian, illustrator, and author. Daughter of a clergyman, she studied art, which she later taught. Her interest in history led her into writing. Among her books are six volumes of The Life and Work of the People of England, covering six centuries of English history.
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Johann Georg von Eckhart
1664 - 1730 (66 years)
Johann Georg von Eckhart was a German historian and linguist. Biography Eckhart was born at Duingen in the Principality of Calenberg. After preparatory training at Schulpforta, he went to Leipzig, where at first, at the desire of his mother, he studied theology, but soon turned his attention to philology and history. On completing his course he became secretary to Field-Marshal Count Flemming, chief minister to the Elector of Saxony; after a short time, however, he went to Hannover to find a permanent position.
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Eric F. Goldman
1916 - 1989 (73 years)
Eric Frederick Goldman was an American historian, Rollins Professor of History at Princeton University, and Presidential advisor. Life Born in Washington, D.C., United States, he was educated in public schools in Baltimore, Maryland, and graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a Ph.D. in history at age 22. He wrote on national affairs for Time magazine. He joined Princeton University as an assistant professor in 1942. He became a full professor in 1955, until retirement in 1985. He was special advisor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1963 to 1966. He served as president of the Society of American Historians from 1962 to 1969.
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Susobhan Sarkar
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Susobhan Chandra Sarkar was an Indian historian. Background and education Sarkar, son of Suresh Chandra Sarkar, was born into a Brahmo family of Dhaka. He attended Dhaka Collegiate School, studied history at Presidency College, Calcutta and continued his higher education at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1923 to 1925. His daughter Sipra Sarkar was a professor of history at Jadavpur University, Calcutta and Sumit Sarkar was professor of history at Delhi University.
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Jovan Rajić
1726 - 1801 (75 years)
Jovan Rajić was a Serbian writer, historian, theologian, and pedagogue, considered one of the greatest Serbian academics of the 18th century. He was one of the most notable representatives of Serbian Baroque literature along with Zaharije Orfelin, Pavle Julinac, Vasilije III Petrović-Njegoš, Simeon Končarević, Simeon Piščević, and others .
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Arnold Schaefer
1819 - 1883 (64 years)
Arnold Dietrich Schaefer was a German ancient historian, who was a professor of history at the University of Greifswald and then at the University of Bonn . Academic background After attending the from 1833 to 1838, Schaefer studied philology and history at the University of Leipzig. His teachers included Moritz Haupt , Gottfried Hermann , and Wilhelm Wachsmuth . After his graduation, Schaefer initially attempted a habilitation project on Old High German, supervised by Moritz Haupt. Due to a favourable job offer from the educationalist Karl Justus Blochmann , Schaefer was persuaded to relocate to Dresden, where he subsequently taught classes in history and ancient languages at the .
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Roy Franklin Nichols
1896 - 1973 (77 years)
Roy Franklin Nichols was an American historian, who won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Disruption of American Democracy. Biography Nichols was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Franklin Coriell and Annie Cairns Nichols. His wife was the historian Jeannette Paddock Nichols . He graduated from Rutgers University in 1918. He completed a Master of Arts degree from Rutgers in 1919. He was a fellow at Columbia University from 1920 to 1921, and an instructor in history at Columbia from 1921 to 1925. He completed a PhD degree from Columbia in 1923. In 1925 he was appointed assistant professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Will Erich Peuckert
1895 - 1969 (74 years)
Will-Erich Peuckert was a German folklorist. Life Peuckert was born in Töppendorf in Lower Silesia on May 1, 1895. He studied History and Volkskunde at the University of Breslau, where he delivered his dissertation, and went on teach at the Pedagogical Academy in Breslau. There he began to make a name for himself through several publications on German and Silesian folklore. Before he reached professorship, a defamation campaign pressed by a colleague convinced the Nazi authorities to revoke his teaching permissions in 1935. Peuckert doggedly refused to compromise his work with Nazi pressure, ...
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Magnus IV of Sweden
Magnus IV was King of Sweden from 1319 to 1364, King of Norway as Magnus VII from 1319 to 1355, and ruler of Scania from 1332 to 1360. By adversaries he has been called Magnus Smek . Referring to Magnus Eriksson as Magnus II is incorrect. The Swedish Royal Court lists three Swedish kings before him of the same name. A few authors do not count Magnus Nilsson as a Swedish king and have thus called this king Magnus III. He is the second longest-reigning monarch in Swedish history, only surpassed by the current king Carl XVI Gustaf, who surpassed Magnus in 2018.
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John Millar
1735 - 1801 (66 years)
John Millar of Glasgow was a Scottish philosopher, historian and Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Glasgow from 1761 to 1800. Biography Born a son of the manse of the Kirk o' Shotts, Shotts, Lanarkshire, John Millar was educated by an uncle and then on his father being transferred to the parish of Hamilton, at the Old Grammar School of Hamilton Continuing his studies at the University of Glasgow, he became one of the most important followers of Adam Smith, the founder of economic science. For a short time in the 1750s he was tutor in the household of Henry Home, Lord Kames. In 1760 he was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates.
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Jacques de Vitry
1170 - 1240 (70 years)
Jacques de Vitry was a French canon regular who was a noted theologian and chronicler of his era. He was elected bishop of Acre in 1214 and made cardinal in 1229. His Historia Orientalis is an important source for the historiography of the Crusades.
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Stanisław Herbst
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Stanisław Herbst was a Polish historian, researcher of modern history, and military historian. He was a professor at the University of Warsaw and the Dzerzhinsky Political-Military Academy in Warsaw, and was also the president of the Polish Historical Society. Pupils of his included Zdzisław Spieralski and Tomasz Strzembosz.
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Max Lehmann
1845 - 1929 (84 years)
Max Lehmann was a German historian. He studied philology and history at the universities of Königsberg, Bonn and Berlin, receiving his doctorate at the latter institution in 1867. In 1879 Lehmann began to teach in the Berlin Military Academy, and in 1887 was made a member of the Prussian Academy. A year later, he succeeded Max Lenz at Marburg as a professor of history. In 1893 he was appointed to a similar position at the University of Leipzig, and later the same year, relocated to the University of Göttingen as a professor of medieval and modern history. Famed Polish historian Szymon Askenaz...
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Francis J. Haverfield
1860 - 1919 (59 years)
Francis John Haverfield, was an English ancient historian, archaeologist, and academic. From 1907 to 1919 he held the Camden Professorship of Ancient History at the University of Oxford. Education Educated at Winchester College and New College, University of Oxford. At Oxford he gained a First in Classical Moderations in 1880 and a Second in Literae Humaniores in 1883. He worked for a time under Theodor Mommsen. He won the Conington Prize at Oxford in 1891 and in the following year was appointed a Student [Fellow] of Christ Church, Oxford. In 1907 he moved to Brasenose College to become Cam...
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Isaak Mints
1896 - 1991 (95 years)
Isaak Izrailevich Mints was the leading Soviet historian in the early and mid-twentieth century. In 1949 he lost most of his academic positions following a campaign against him by his colleague Arkady Sidorov that was part of the drive by Joseph Stalin to eliminate the "rootless cosmopolitans", most of whom were Jewish.
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Władysław Witwicki
1878 - 1948 (70 years)
Władysław Witwicki was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator , historian and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland. Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of , theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów–Warsaw school.
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Sydney E. Ahlstrom
1919 - 1984 (65 years)
Sydney Eckman Ahlstrom was an American historian. He was a Yale University professor and a specialist in the religious history of the United States. Biography Ahlstrom was born on December 16, 1919, in Cokato, Minnesota, the son of Joseph T. Ahlstrom and Selma Ahlstrom , who were Swedish-American Lutherans. He graduated from Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minnesota, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1941, and served in the US Army during the Second World War. He earned a master's degree at the University of Minnesota in 1946 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Harvard University in 1952.
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Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt was a German orientalist and historian. He specialized in Urartian research, and was co-author of Corpus Inscriptionum Chaldicarum, a corpus of Urartian inscriptions.
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Sven Lagerbring
1707 - 1787 (80 years)
Sven Lagerbring was a Swedish professor and historian. He has been described as "the first Swedish historian in the modern sense." Lagerbring was a professor at Lund University. He initiated more modern, critical research in Swedish history alongside Olof von Dalin. He published a wide range of works, including the influential four-volume . Lagerbring became a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of History and Antiquities in 1786.
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Wilhelm von Giesebrecht
1814 - 1889 (75 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm von Giesebrecht was a German historian. He was born in Berlin, the son of Karl Giesebrecht , and a nephew of the poet Ludwig Giesebrecht . He studied under Leopold von Ranke, and his first important work, Geschichte Ottos II., was contributed to Ranke's Jahrbücher des deutschen Reichs unter dem sächsischen Hause . In 1841 he published his Jahrbücher des Klosters Altaich, a reconstruction of the lost Annales Altahenses, a medieval source of which fragments only were known to be extant, and these were obscured in other chronicles. The brilliance of this performance was shown i...
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Vyacheslav Volgin
1879 - 1962 (83 years)
Vyacheslav Petrovich Volgin was a Soviet and Russian historian who wrote a number of books on early forms or precursors of communism, and who became vice-president of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
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George Pachymeres
1242 - 1310 (68 years)
George Pachymeres was a Byzantine Greek historian, philosopher, music theorist and miscellaneous writer. Biography Pachymeres was born at Nicaea, in Bithynia, where his father had taken refuge after the capture of Constantinople by the Latins in 1204. Upon the recovery of Constantinople from the Latin Empire by Michael VIII Palaeologus, Pachymeres settled there, studied law, entered the church, and subsequently became chief advocate of the church and chief justice of the imperial court.
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Henry Hart Milman
1791 - 1868 (77 years)
Henry Hart Milman was an English historian and ecclesiastic. Life He was born in London, the third son of Sir Francis Milman, 1st Baronet, physician to King George III . Educated at Eton and at Brasenose College, Oxford, his university career was brilliant. He won the Newdigate prize with a poem on the Apollo Belvidere in 1812, was elected a fellow of Brasenose in 1814, and in 1816 won the English essay prize with his Comparative Estimate of Sculpture and Painting. In 1816 he was ordained, and two years later became parish priest of St Mary's, Reading.
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Jacques Godechot
1907 - 1989 (82 years)
Jacques Léon Godechot was a French historian of the French Revolution and a pioneer of Atlantic history. As a frequent and varied contributor to the Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, he acted as "a mediator, an intermediary between readers of the journal and Anglo-Saxon and Italian historiography of the Revolution". His emphasis on the international dimension of the late-18th- and early-19th-century revolutions was crystallized in the concepts of Atlantic history and 'occidental revolution'. In 1955, Godechot collaborated with the Yale historian Robert Roswell Palmer to present ...
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Gotthard Deutsch
1859 - 1921 (62 years)
Gotthard Deutsch was a scholar of Jewish history. Education Deutsch was born in Dolní Kounice, Moravia, Austria, as Eliezer Deutsch, the son of Bernhard L. Deutsch, a merchant, and Elise Wiener. He always called himself Gotthard, an attempted translation into German of his Jewish given name. Deutsch entered Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau in October 1876. While attending seminary classes, he also enrolled in afternoon classes at the University of Breslau. At the seminary, he was influenced by the noted Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz. Matriculating in 1879 at the University of Vienna, two years later he received his Ph.D.
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Thomas Hearne
1678 - 1735 (57 years)
Thomas Hearne or Hearn was an English diarist and prolific antiquary, particularly remembered for his published editions of many medieval English chronicles and other important historical texts. Life Hearne was born at Littlefield Green in the parish of White Waltham, Berkshire, the son of George Hearn, the parish clerk. Having received his early education from his father, he showed such taste for study that a wealthy neighbour, Francis Cherry of Shottesbrooke , a celebrated nonjuror, interested himself in the boy, and sent him to the school at Bray "on purpose to learn the Latin tongue". Soo...
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Guy Chapman
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Major Guy Patterson Chapman was an English historian and author. He served in the British army in both world wars. Early life and education Chapman was educated at Westminster School, Christ Church, Oxford and the London School of Economics.
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John Symonds
1730 - 1807 (77 years)
John Symonds was an English academic, who became professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge. Biography Born at Horringer, Suffolk, he was the eldest son of Rev. John Symonds , rector of the parish, by his wife, Mary Spring , daughter of Sir Thomas Spring, 3rd Baronet of Pakenham and Hon. Merelina Jermyn, daughter of Thomas Jermyn, 2nd Baron Jermyn. His younger brother was British Naval Captain Thomas Symonds, who was the father of Admiral Sir William Symonds. John inherited the family estates while his brother went to sea.
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E. J. Rapson
1861 - 1937 (76 years)
Edward James Rapson FBA was a British numismatist, philologist and professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge. He was a fellow of St. John's College. Rapson died following a sudden collapse at dinner at St. John's.
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Christopher Lloyd
1906 - 1986 (80 years)
Charles Christopher Lloyd was a British naval historian, who served as Professor of History at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, 1962–1966. Early life and education The son of E. S. Lloyd CSI, Christopher Lloyd was educated at Marlborough College and Lincoln College, Oxford. In 1938, he married Katherine Brenda Sturge, with whom he had one son and one daughter.
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Mikhail Tikhomirov
1893 - 1965 (72 years)
Mikhail Nikolayevich Tikhomirov was a leading Soviet specialist in medieval Russian paleography. Tikhomirov was born and spent his whole life in Moscow, where he was in charge of the Archaeographic Commission of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR . He was responsible for the Soviet edition of the Full Collection of Russian Chronicles and edited collections of many other medieval documents, including the Russkaya Pravda and Sobornoye Ulozhenie.
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