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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in History,
#8301
Faxian
340 - 422 (82 years)
Faxian , also referred to as Fa-Hien, Fa-hsien and Sehi, was a Chinese Buddhist monk and translator who traveled by foot from China to India to acquire Buddhist texts. Starting his arduous journey about age 60, he visited sacred Buddhist sites in Central, South, and Southeast Asia between 399 and 412 CE, of which 10 years were spent in India.
Go to Profile#8302
Sima Tan
165 BC - 110 BC (55 years)
Sima Tan was a Chinese astronomer/astrologer and historian during the Western Han dynasty. His work Records of the Grand Historian was completed by his son Sima Qian, who is considered the founder of Chinese historiography.
Go to Profile#8303
Harry Elmer Barnes
1889 - 1968 (79 years)
Harry Elmer Barnes was an American historian who, in his later years, was known for his historical revisionism and Holocaust denial. After receiving a PhD at Columbia University in 1918 Barnes became a professor of history at Clark University before moving to Smith College as a professor of historical sociology in 1923. In 1929 he left teaching to work as a journalist, freelance writer and occasional adjunct professor at smaller schools. In 1919–20 and between 1923 and 1937 he lectured regularly at the New School for Social Research. Through his prodigious scholarly output, Barnes was once highly regarded as a historian.
Go to Profile#8304
Joannes Zonaras
1074 - 1145 (71 years)
Joannes or John Zonaras was a Byzantine Greek historian, chronicler and theologian who lived in Constantinople . Under Emperor Alexios I Komnenos he held the offices of head justice and private secretary to the emperor, but after Alexios' death, he retired to the monastery on the Island of Hagia Glykeria, , where he spent the rest of his life writing books.
Go to Profile#8305
Adam of Bremen
1100 - 1080 (-20 years)
Adam of Bremen was a German medieval chronicler. He lived and worked in the second half of the eleventh century. Adam is most famous for his chronicle Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum . He was "one of the foremost historians and early ethnographers of the medieval period".
Go to Profile#8306
Gertrude Bell
1868 - 1926 (58 years)
Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell, CBE was an English writer, traveller, political officer, administrator, and archaeologist. She spent much of her life exploring and mapping the Middle East, and became highly influential to British imperial policy-making as an Arabist due to her knowledge and contacts built up through extensive travels. During her lifetime, she was highly esteemed and trusted by British officials such as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia Percy Cox, giving her great influence. She participated in both the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the 1921 Cairo Conference, which help...
Go to Profile#8307
Ivane Javakhishvili
1876 - 1940 (64 years)
Ivane Alexandres dze Javakhishvili was a Georgian historian and linguist whose voluminous works heavily influenced the modern scholarship of the history and culture of Georgia. He was one of the founding fathers of the Tbilisi State University and its rector from 1919 to 1926.
Go to Profile#8308
Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner
1854 - 1925 (71 years)
Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, was a British statesman and colonial administrator who played a role in the formulation of British foreign and domestic policy between the mid-1890s and early 1920s. From December 1916 to November 1918, he was one of the most important members of Prime Minister David Lloyd George's War Cabinet.
Go to Profile#8309
August Ludwig von Schlözer
1735 - 1809 (74 years)
August Ludwig von Schlözer was a German historian and pedagogist who laid foundations for the critical study of Russian medieval history. He was a member of the Göttingen School of History. Early career August Ludwig von Schlözer was born at Gaggstatt, Hohenlohe-Kirchberg , Württemberg. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather all were Protestant clergymen. In 1751, he followed them and began his studies in theology in University of Wittenberg, moving in 1754 to the increasingly renowned University of Göttingen to study history. After his studies, in 1755 he went to work as a tutor in S...
Go to Profile#8310
Ibn Hawqal
943 - 988 (45 years)
Muḥammad Abū’l-Qāsim Ibn Ḥawqal , also known as Abū al-Qāsim b. ʻAlī Ibn Ḥawqal al-Naṣībī, born in Nisibis, Upper Mesopotamia; was a 10th-century Arab Muslim writer, geographer, and chronicler who travelled from AD 943 to 969. His famous work, written in 977, is called . The date of his death, known from his writings, was after 368 AH/978 AD.
Go to Profile#8311
Ernest Labrousse
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
Camille-Ernest Labrousse was a French historian specializing in social and economic history. Biography Labrousse established a historical model centered on three nodes—economic, social and cultural—inventing the quantitative history sometimes now called "cliometrics". Eschewing biographies and the narrative accounts of individual witnesses, which have provided the backbone of traditional historiography, he applied statistical methods and influenced a whole generation. Fernand Braudel said that if it were not for Labrousse, "historians would never have set to work as willingly as they did on the study of wages and prices".
Go to Profile#8312
Ine of Wessex
670 - Present (1356 years)
Ine, also rendered Ini or Ina, was King of Wessex from 689 to 726. At Ine's accession, his kingdom dominated much of southern England. However, he was unable to retain the territorial gains of his predecessor, Cædwalla, who had expanded West Saxon territory substantially. By the end of Ine's reign, the kingdoms of Kent, Sussex, and Essex were no longer under West Saxon sway; however, Ine maintained control of what is now Hampshire, and consolidated and extended Wessex's territory in the western peninsula.
Go to Profile#8313
Bruce Catton
1899 - 1978 (79 years)
Charles Bruce Catton was an American historian and journalist, known best for his books concerning the American Civil War. Known as a narrative historian, Catton specialized in popular history, featuring interesting characters and historical vignettes, in addition to the basic facts, dates, and analyses. His books were researched well and included footnotes. He won a Pulitzer Prize during 1954 for A Stillness at Appomattox, his study of the final campaign of the war in Virginia.
Go to Profile#8314
Louis Duchesne
1843 - 1922 (79 years)
Louis Marie Olivier Duchesne was a French priest, philologist, teacher and a critical historian of Christianity and Roman Catholic liturgy and institutions. Life Descended from a family of Breton sailors, he was born on 13 September 1843 in Saint-Servan, Ille-et-Vilaine, Place Roulais, now part of Saint-Malo on the Breton coast, and was orphaned in 1849, after the death of his father Jacques Duchesne. Louis' brother, Jean-Baptiste Duchesne, settled in Oregon City, Oregon in 1849.
Go to Profile#8315
George Vernadsky
1887 - 1973 (86 years)
George Vernadsky was a Russian-born American historian and an author of numerous books on Russian history. European years Born in Saint Petersburg on August 20, 1887, Vernadsky stemmed from a respectable family of the Russian intelligentsia. His father was Vladimir Vernadsky, a famous Russian/Ukrainian geologist.
Go to Profile#8316
Carroll Quigley
1910 - 1977 (67 years)
Carroll Quigley was an American historian and theorist of the evolution of civilizations. He is remembered for his teaching work as a professor at Georgetown University, and his seminal works, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, and Tragedy And Hope; A History Of The World In Our Time, in which he states that an Anglo-American banking elite have worked together for centuries to spread certain values globally.
Go to Profile#8317
Hecataeus of Miletus
600 BC - 475 BC (125 years)
Hecataeus of Miletus , son of Hegesander, was an early Greek historian and geographer. Biography Hailing from a very wealthy family, he lived in Miletus, then under Persian rule in the satrapy of Lydia. He was active during the time of the Greco-Persian Wars. After having travelled extensively, he settled in his native city, where he occupied a high position, and devoted his time to the composition of geographical and historical works. When Aristagoras, acting tyrant of Miletus, held a council of leading Ionians at Miletus to organize a revolt against Persian rule, Hecataeus tried in vain to dissuade his countrymen from the undertaking.
Go to Profile#8318
Ignaz von Döllinger
1799 - 1890 (91 years)
Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger , also Doellinger in English, was a German theologian, Catholic priest and church historian who rejected the dogma of papal infallibility. Among his writings which proved controversial, his criticism of the papacy antagonized ultramontanes, yet his reverence for tradition annoyed the liberals.
Go to Profile#8319
Emperor Wu of Han
156 BC - 87 BC (69 years)
Emperor Wu of Han , born Liu Che and courtesy name Tong , was the seventh emperor of the Han dynasty from 141 to 87 BC. His reign lasted 54 years – a record not broken until the reign of the Kangxi Emperor more than 1,800 years later — and remains the record for ethnic Han emperors. His reign resulted in a vast expansion of geopolitical influence for the Chinese civilization, and the development of a strong centralized state via governmental policies, economical reorganization and promotion of a hybrid Legalist–Confucian doctrine. In the field of historical social and cultural studies, Empero...
Go to Profile#8320
Marceli Handelsman
1882 - 1945 (63 years)
Marceli Handelsman was a Polish historian, a Warsaw University professor, medievalist, modern historian, and historical methodologist. Life Marceli Handelsman was born on 8 July 1882, in Warsaw, to a family of distant Jewish ancestry. After graduating in law from the Russian-language Imperial Warsaw University, he moved to Berlin, where he began studies in the history department of Unter den Linden University. In 1906, however, he was dismissed from the school because of his involvement in socialist organizations. Afterwards Handelsman continued his studies at various European universities in...
Go to Profile#8321
Hans Kohn
1891 - 1971 (80 years)
Hans Kohn was an American philosopher and historian. He pioneered the academic study of nationalism, and is considered an authority on the subject. Life Kohn was born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating from a local German Gymnasium in 1909, he studied philosophy, political science and law at the German part of Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague.
Go to Profile#8322
Charles Bean
1879 - 1968 (89 years)
Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean , usually identified as C. E. W. Bean, was a historian and one of Australia's official war correspondents. He was editor and principal author of the 12-volume Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, and a primary advocate for establishing the Australian War Memorial .
Go to Profile#8323
Duke of Zhou
1100 BC - 1032 BC (68 years)
Dan, Duke Wen of Zhou , commonly known as the Duke of Zhou , was a member of the royal family of the early Zhou dynasty who played a major role in consolidating the kingdom established by his elder brother King Wu. He was renowned for acting as a capable and loyal regent for his young nephew King Cheng, and for successfully suppressing the Rebellion of the Three Guards and establishing firm rule of the Zhou dynasty over eastern China. He is also a Chinese culture hero credited with writing the I Ching and the Book of Poetry, and establishing the Rites of Zhou.
Go to Profile#8324
Gerhard Ritter
1888 - 1967 (79 years)
Gerhard Georg Bernhard Ritter was a nationalist-conservative German historian who served as a professor of history at the University of Freiburg from 1925 to 1956. He studied under Professor Hermann Oncken. A Lutheran, he first became well known for his 1925 biography of Martin Luther and hagiographic portrayal of Prussia. A member of the German People's Party during the Weimar Republic, he was a lifelong monarchist and remained sympathetic to the political system of the defunct German Empire.
Go to Profile#8325
Caratacus
15 - 54 (39 years)
Caratacus was a 1st-century AD British chieftain of the Catuvellauni tribe, who resisted the Roman conquest of Britain. Before the Roman invasion, Caratacus is associated with the expansion of his tribe's territory. His apparent success led to Roman invasion, nominally in support of his defeated enemies. He resisted the Romans for almost a decade, using guerrilla warfare, but when he offered a set-piece battle the Romans won it. After defeat he fled to the territory of Queen Cartimandua, who captured him and handed him over to the Romans. He was sentenced to death, but made a speech before hi...
Go to Profile#8326
Isaac Deutscher
1907 - 1967 (60 years)
Isaac Deutscher was a Polish Marxist writer, journalist and political activist who moved to the United Kingdom before the outbreak of World War II. He is best known as a biographer of Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and as a commentator on Soviet affairs. His three-volume biography of Trotsky was highly influential among the British New Left in the 1960s and 1970s.
Go to Profile#8327
Priscus
410 - 471 (61 years)
Priscus of Panium was a 5th-century Eastern Roman diplomat and Greek historian and rhetorician . Biography Priscus was born in Panion between 410 and 420 AD. In 448/449 AD, he accompanied Maximinus, the head of the Byzantine embassy representing Emperor Theodosius II , on a diplomatic mission to the court of Attila the Hun. While there, he met and conversed with a Greek merchant, dressed in "Scythian" fashion, who was captured eight years earlier when the city of Viminacium was sacked by the Huns. The trader explained to Priscus that after the sack of Viminacium, he was a slave of Onegesius, a Hunnic nobleman, but obtained his freedom and chose to settle among the Huns.
Go to Profile#8328
Gu Jiegang
1893 - 1980 (87 years)
Gu Jiegang was a Chinese folklorist, historian, and sinologist who was best known for his seven-volume work Gushi Bian . He was a co-founder and the leading force of the Doubting Antiquity School, and was highly influential in the 20th century development of Chinese historiography.
Go to Profile#8329
Vasily Vasilievsky
1838 - 1899 (61 years)
Vasily Grigorievich Vasilievsky was a Russian historian who founded the St. Petersburg school of medieval studies and was a major force in Byzantine studies during the second half of the 19th century.
Go to Profile#8330
Edward the Confessor
Edward the Confessor was an Anglo-Saxon English king and saint. Usually considered the last king of the House of Wessex, he ruled from 1042 until his death in 1066. Edward was the son of Æthelred the Unready and Emma of Normandy. He succeeded Cnut the Great's son – and his own half-brother – Harthacnut. He restored the rule of the House of Wessex after the period of Danish rule since Cnut conquered England in 1016. When Edward died in 1066, he was succeeded by his wife's brother Harold Godwinson, who was defeated and killed in the same year at the Battle of Hastings by the Normans under William the Conqueror.
Go to Profile#8331
Servius Tullius
600 BC - 535 BC (65 years)
Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned from 578 to 535 BC. Roman and Greek sources describe his servile origins and later marriage to a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's first Etruscan king, who was assassinated in 579 BC. The constitutional basis for his accession is unclear; he is variously described as the first Roman king to accede without election by the Senate, having gained the throne by popular and royal support; and as the first to be elected by the Senate alone, with support of the reigning queen but withou...
Go to Profile#8332
Theodore H. White
1915 - 1986 (71 years)
Theodore Harold White was an American political journalist and historian, known for his reporting from China during World War II and the Making of the President series. White started his career reporting for Time magazine from wartime China in the 1940s. He was the first foreigner to report on the Chinese famine of 1942–43 and helped to draw international attention to the shortcomings of the Nationalist government.
Go to Profile#8333
Burebista
90 BC - 44 BC (46 years)
Burebista was the king of the Getae and Dacian tribes from 82/61BC to 45/44BC. He was the first king who successfully unified the tribes of the Dacian kingdom, which comprised the area located between the Danube, Tisza, and Dniester rivers, and modern day Romania and Moldova. In the 7th and 6thcenturies BC it became home to the Thracian peoples, including the Getae and the Dacians. From the 4thcentury to the middle of the 2ndcentury BC the Dacian peoples were influenced by La Tène Celts who brought new technologies with them into Dacia. Sometime in the 2ndcentury BC the Dacians expelled the Celts from their lands.
Go to Profile#8334
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.
Go to Profile#8335
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 .
Go to Profile#8336
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 ...
Go to Profile#8337
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 .
Go to Profile#8338
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.
Go to Profile#8339
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 .
Go to Profile#8340
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.
Go to Profile#8341
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.
Go to Profile#8342
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.
Go to Profile#8343
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.
Go to Profile#8344
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.
Go to Profile#8345
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.
Go to Profile#8346
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...
Go to Profile#8347
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...
Go to Profile#8348
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.
Go to Profile#8349
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.
Go to Profile#8350
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.
Go to Profile