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,
#8401
Nikolay Nikolsky
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Nikolay Vasilyevich Nikolsky was a Russian historian, ethnographer, folklorist, lexicographer of half-Russian half- Chuvash ethnicity. Biography Nikolay Vasilyevich Nikolsky was born in a village of Yurmekeykino, Yadrinsk uyezd in the family of surveyor. After finishing the local Shumatov zemstvo College he enrolled in the Theological College in Cheboksary. After that he studied also in the Theological Seminary in Kazan which Nikolsky finished in 1899 and then continuing to study at the Theological Academy of Kazan. Upon graduation of the academy he obtained the title of magistrate and his...
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Ulrich Köhler
1838 - 1903 (65 years)
Ulrich Köhler was a German archaeologist. Biography He studied at the University of Jena and was appointed secretary of the Prussian embassy at Athens and later was made professor of archaeology at the University of Strassburg. He was governor of the newly founded Archaeological Institute at Athens and was appointed professor of ancient history at Berlin .
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Georg Busolt
1850 - 1920 (70 years)
Georg Busolt was a German historian of Classical history. Busolt, born at Gut Kepurren near Insterburg, was the son of the East Prussian landowner Adolf Julius Busolt . He attended the Gymnasium at Insterburg and studied history and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. In 1874 he received for his dissertation Grundzüge der Erkenntnißtheorie und Metaphysik Spinozas , for which he received his doctorate in the following year, the Kant Prize. Following a research tour of Italy and Greece, Busolt habilitated in 1878 at Königsberg with his work on Sparta.
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Hans Baron
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Hans Baron was a German-American historian of political thought and literature. His main contribution to the historiography of the period was to introduce in 1928 the term civic humanism . Life and career Born in Berlin to a Jewish family, Baron was a student of the liberal Protestant theologian Ernst Troeltsch. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he left Germany, first for Italy and England, then in 1938 for the United States. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1945. He was employed as a librarian and served as Research Fellow and Bibliographer at the Newberry Library from 1949 to 1965 and was a Distinguished Research Fellow at Newberry until 1970, when he retired.
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Ellen McArthur
1862 - 1927 (65 years)
Ellen Annette McArthur was a British economic historian. Biography Ellen Annette McArthur was born on 19 June 1862 in Duffield, Derbyshire. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, where she later became the tutor in history. In 1893 she became the first female lecturer at the University of Cambridge Local Examinations & Lectures Syndicate. She was the first woman to receive the degree of Doctor of Letters from Trinity College Dublin, under arrangements .
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João de Barros
1496 - 1570 (74 years)
João de Barros , nicknamed the "Portuguese Livy", is one of the first great Portuguese historians, most famous for his , a history of the Portuguese in India, Asia, and southeast Africa. Early years João de Barros was born in Viseu, Portugal around 1496. He was the illegitimate son of Lopo de Barros, a squire in the royal household of Manuel I of Portugal and a holder of various judicial posts. Nothing is known of his mother. At a young age his father died and he was placed into service at the royal household, where he became a page to the heir apparent, Dom João, the future João III of Portu...
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Ibn al-Athir
1160 - 1233 (73 years)
Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ash-Shaybānī, better known as ʿAlī ʿIzz ad-Dīn Ibn al-Athīr al-Jazarī was an Hadith expert, historian, and biographer who wrote in Arabic and was from the Ibn Athir family. At the age of twenty-one he settled with his father in Mosul to continue his studies, where he devoted himself to the study of history and Islamic tradition.
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Edward Spencer Beesly
1831 - 1915 (84 years)
Edward Spencer Beesly was an English positivist, trades union activist, and historian. Life He was born on 23 January 1831 in Feckenham, Worcestershire, the eldest son of the Rev. James Beesly and his wife, Mary Fitzgerald, of Queen's county, Ireland. After reading Latin and Greek with his father, in the autumn of 1846 Beesly was sent to King William's College on the Isle of Man, an evangelical establishment whose inadequate instruction and low moral tone were later depicted in Eric, or, Little by Little, by his school friend F. W. Farrar.
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E. F. Jacob
1894 - 1971 (77 years)
Ernest Fraser Jacob was a British medievalist and scholar who was President of the Chetham Society, Lancashire Parish Register Society and Ecclesiastical History Society. Education He was educated at Twyford School, Winchester College, and then for a period at New College, Oxford - broken by service in World War I. He won a fellowship to All Souls College, Oxford, and taught there and at Christ Church where his pupils included A. L. Rowse.
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Hsinbyushin
1736 - 1776 (40 years)
Hsinbyushin was king of the Konbaung dynasty of Burma from 1763 to 1776. The second son of the dynasty founder Alaungpaya is best known for his wars with Qing China and Siam, and is considered the most militaristic king of the dynasty. His successful defense against four Qing invasions preserved Burmese independence. His 1765 invasion of Ayutthaya brought an end to the Ayutthaya Kingdom. The near simultaneous victories over Qing and Siam has been referred to as testimony "to a truly astonishing elan unmatched since Bayinnaung." He also raised the Shwedagon Pagoda to its current height in Apr...
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Marin Drinov
1838 - 1906 (68 years)
Marin Stoyanov Drinov was a Bulgarian historian and philologist from the National Revival period who lived and worked in Russia through most of his life. He was one of the originators of Bulgarian historiography. Drinov was a founding member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences , as well as its first chairman.
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John Speed
1551 - 1629 (78 years)
John Speed was an English cartographer, chronologer and historian of Cheshire origins. The son of a citizen and Merchant Taylor in London, he rose from his family occupation to accept the task of drawing together and revising the histories, topographies and maps of the Kingdoms of Great Britain as an exposition of the union of their monarchies in the person of King James I and VI. He accomplished this with remarkable success, with the support and assistance of the leading antiquarian scholars of his generation. He drew upon and improved the shire maps of Christopher Saxton, John Norden and ot...
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Eduard Norden
1868 - 1941 (73 years)
Eduard Norden was a German classical philologist and historian of religion. When Norden received an honorary doctorate from Harvard, James Bryant Conant referred to him as "the most famous Latinist in the world".
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Évariste Lévi-Provençal
1894 - 1956 (62 years)
Évariste Lévi-Provençal was a French medievalist, orientalist, Arabist, and historian of Islam. The scholar who would take the name Lévi-Provençal was born 4 January 1894 in Constantine, French Algeria, as Makhlóuf Evariste Levi , his second name revealing that his North-African Jewish family was already somewhat Gallicized. By the age of nineteen when he published his first paper he had rechristened himself Évariste Lévi-Provençal. He studied at the Lycée in Constantine, and served in the French army during World War I, being wounded in the Dardanelles in 1917. He then joined the Institut des Hautes Etudes Marocaines.
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Georg Voigt
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Georg Voigt was a German historian who was born in 1827 in Königsberg in East Prussia. He died in Leipzig in 1891. Voigt was the son of the historian Johannes Voigt. Voigt belonged to the founders of modern research into the Italian Renaissance along with Jacob Burckhardt.
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Thomas Lionel Hodgkin
1910 - 1982 (72 years)
Thomas Lionel Hodgkin was an English Marxist historian of Africa, who was described by The Times at his death of having done "more than anyone to establish the serious study of African history" in the UK. He was married to the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dorothy Hodgkin.
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Jacques Presser
1899 - 1970 (71 years)
Jacob Presser was a Dutch historian, writer and poet who is known for his book Ashes in the Wind on the history of the persecution of the Jews in the Netherlands during World War II. Presser made a significant contribution to Dutch historical scholarship, as well as to European historical scholarship.
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Eugen Täubler
1879 - 1953 (74 years)
Eugen Täubler was a German historian born in Gostyń. He studied history in Berlin under Otto Hirschfeld , receiving his doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation titled Die Parthernachrichten bei Josephus. From 1910 to 1914 he worked as a lecturer at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin.
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Andrew C. McLaughlin
1861 - 1947 (86 years)
Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin was an American historian known as an authority on U.S. Constitutional history. Background McLaughlin was born in Illinois and received his bachelor's and law degrees from the University of Michigan. His father was David McLaughlin, born in Dalkeith, Scotland in 1830. His mother was Isabella Campbell, born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1819. His parents met on board ship when emigrating to the United States, settling in Beardstown, Illinois. David McLaughlin was a merchant and civic leader in Muskegon, MI, where a school and street are named for him.
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Arnold Toynbee
1852 - 1883 (31 years)
Arnold Toynbee was an English economic historian also noted for his social commitment and desire to improve the living conditions of the working classes. Life and career Toynbee was born in Syria, the son of the physician Joseph Toynbee, a pioneering otolaryngologist. His sister was the bacteriologist Grace Frankland.
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John Clapham
1873 - 1946 (73 years)
Sir John Harold Clapham, CBE, FBA was a British economic historian. He was educated at The Leys School in Cambridge and King's College, Cambridge. From 1889 to 1902 he was a lecturer in History and Economics at Leeds University and was Professor of Economics there from 1902 to 1908. He was the first Professor of Economic History at Cambridge University from 1928 to 1938, and Vice-Provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1933 until 1943 when he received a knighthood.
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Mariya Sergeyenko
1891 - 1987 (96 years)
Mariya Yefimovna Sergeyenko was a Soviet scholar of Roman history and philologist . Sergeyenko authored over 100 scholar works, many of which remain in manuscripts. She was awarded the Medal "For the Defence of Leningrad" and the medal "For Valorous Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" for her service on the Eastern Front of World War II. Sergeyenko researched the Roman agriculture and the Roman daily life. She also translated Arrian's The Anabasis of Alexander and early Christian authors .
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Naitō Torajirō
1866 - 1934 (68 years)
#8424
Harold Temperley
1879 - 1939 (60 years)
Harold William Vazeille Temperley, was an English historian, Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge from 1931, and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Overview Temperley was born in Cambridge, the son of Ernest Temperley, a Fellow and Bursar of Queens' College, Cambridge. He was educated at Sherborne School and King's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a First in History. He became a lecturer at the University of Leeds in 1903, before taking a fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1905.
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Karl von Hegel
1813 - 1901 (88 years)
Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Hegel was a German historian and son of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. During his lifetime he was a well-known and well-reputed historian who received many awards and honours. He was one of the major urban historians during the second half of the 19th century.
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Boris Turayev
1868 - 1920 (52 years)
Boris Alexandrovich Turayev was a scholar who studied the Ancient Near East . He was admitted into the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1918. After graduating from the University of St Petersburg Turayev studied under Gaston Maspero and Adolf Erman and worked in museums of Berlin, Paris and London. Since 1896, he delivered lectures at the University of St Petersburg. He was an ordinary professor of this university since 1911. After the establishment of the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts, Turayev persuaded Vladimir Golenishchev to sell his collection of ancient Egyptian statuary and curiosities to the museum.
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Taira no Kiyomori
1118 - 1181 (63 years)
was a military leader and kugyō of the late Heian period of Japan. He established the first samurai-dominated administrative government in the history of Japan. Early life Kiyomori was born in Heian-kyō, Japan, in 1118 as the first son of Taira no Tadamori, who was the head of the Taira clan. It has been speculated that Kiyomori was actually an illegitimate son of Emperor Shirakawa. His mother, Gion no Nyogo, was a palace servant according to The Tale of the Heike.
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Fyodor Uspensky
1845 - 1928 (83 years)
Fyodor Ivanovich Uspensky or Uspenskij was a Russian Empire and Soviet Byzantinist. His works are considered to be among the finest illustrations of the flowering of Byzantine studies in the Russian Empire.
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Ludwig III of Bavaria
1845 - 1921 (76 years)
Ludwig III was the last King of Bavaria, reigning from 1913 to 1918. Initially, he served in the Bavarian military as a lieutenant and went on to hold the rank of Oberleutnant during the Austro-Prussian War. He entered politics at the age of 18 becoming a member of the Bavarian parliament and was a keen participant in politics, supporting electoral reforms. Later in life, he served as regent and de facto head of state from 1912 to 1913, ruling for his cousin, Otto. After the Bavarian parliament passed a law allowing him to do so, Ludwig deposed Otto and assumed the throne for himself. He led Bavaria during World War I.
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Henrik Gabriel Porthan
1739 - 1804 (65 years)
Henrik Gabriel Porthan was a professor and rector at the Royal Academy of Turku. He was a scholar sometimes known as The Father of Finnish History. Biography He was born at Viitasaari in Tavastland, Finland. His parents were Sigfrid Porthan and Kristina Juslenius. His father was a vicar who became mentally ill in 1744. He was raised by his uncle Gustaf Juslenius who was the vicar of Kronoby in the county of Ostrobothnia. In 1754, at the age of 15, Porthan entered the Royal Academy of Turku . He was a student of professor Daniel Juslenius who later served at Bishop of the Diocese of Borgå.
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Manuel I Komnenos
1118 - 1180 (62 years)
Manuel I Komnenos , Latinized Comnenus, also called Porphyrogennetos , was a Byzantine emperor of the 12th century who reigned over a crucial turning point in the history of Byzantium and the Mediterranean. His reign saw the last flowering of the Komnenian restoration, during which the Byzantine Empire had seen a resurgence of its military and economic power and had enjoyed a cultural revival.
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Johann Daniel Schöpflin
1694 - 1771 (77 years)
Johann Daniel Schöpflin was a professor of history, rhetoric and law at the University of Strasbourg. He was one of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s teachers. Biography Schöpflin was well known in Europe and had a sphere of influence that went far beyond Strasbourg. His correspondence provides not only a revealing look at university and academic life of the time, but also at culture and diplomacy in the Age of Enlightenment. His comments on his contemporaries and current events are now an important source for this era. Schöpflin’s correspondents included the scholars of the Sankt Blasien Abbey in the Black Forest, Martin Gerbert and Rustenus Heer.
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Max Lenz
1850 - 1932 (82 years)
Max Albert Wilhelm Lenz was a German historian. Biography Lenz was born to a Prussian and devoutly Lutheran notary in Greifswald, Province of Pomerania. After graduating from school, he studied history and classical philology under Heinrich von Sybel for three semesters in Bonn. He served in the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War and was wounded in the Battle of Villiers. He then continued his studies, at first in Greifswald for one semester, and then in Berlin.
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Nada Klaić
1920 - 1988 (68 years)
Nada Klaić was a Croatian historian. She was a Croatian medievalist of the 20th century. A substantial part of the work was devoted to criticism of medieval sources. Academic career Nada Klaić was born in Zagreb, the granddaughter of the historian Vjekoslav Klaić and sister of landscape architect Smiljan Klaić. She was a university professor and a prominent Croatian medievalist, graduated at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb, the same faculty where she was involved in teaching for 45 years. She started her teaching and scientific career at the faculty's Department of History in 1943, to become a full professor of the Croatian medieval history in 1969.
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Victor Gardthausen
1843 - 1925 (82 years)
Victor Emil Gardthausen was a German ancient historian, palaeographer, librarian, and Professor from Leipzig University. He was author and co-author of some books; editor of ancient texts. Life Gardthausen was born on 26 August 1843 at Copenhagen.
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Charles-Victor Langlois
1863 - 1929 (66 years)
Charles-Victor Langlois was a French historian, archivist and paleographer, who specialized in the study of the Middle Ages and was a lecturer at the Sorbonne, where he taught paleography, bibliography, and the history of the Middle Ages.
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Leonard Krieger
1918 - 1990 (72 years)
Leonard Krieger was an American historian who paid particular attention to Modern Europe, especially Germany. He was influential as an intellectual historian, and particularly for his discussion of historicism. He has been called "the most intellectual historian in the United States during the Cold War". He was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
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Carl Jacob Burckhardt
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Carl Jacob Burckhardt was a Swiss diplomat and historian. His career alternated between periods of academic historical research and diplomatic postings; the most prominent of the latter were League of Nations High Commissioner for the Free City of Danzig and President of the International Committee of the Red Cross .
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Jayavarman VII
1125 - 1218 (93 years)
Jayavarman VII, posthumous name of Mahaparamasaugata , was king of the Khmer Empire. He was the son of King Dharanindravarman II and Queen Sri Jayarajacudamani. He was the first king devoted to Buddhism, as only one prior Khmer king was a Buddhist. He then built the Bayon as a monument to Buddhism. Jayavarman VII is generally considered the most powerful of the Khmer monarchs by historians. His government built many projects including hospitals, highways, rest houses, and temples. With Buddhism as his motivation, King Jayavarman VII is credited with introducing a welfare state that served th...
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Colin Westerbeck
1900 - Present (126 years)
Colin Leslie Westerbeck Jr. is a curator, writer, and teacher of the history of photography. Before moving to Los Angeles, where he has taught at UCLA and USC, he was curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. He is a regular contributor to publications such as the Los Angeles Times and West Magazine. Before he began writing on photography, he was a film critic for Commonweal.
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Piotr Chmielowski
1848 - 1904 (56 years)
Piotr Chmielowski was a Polish philosopher, literary historian and critic. Life After studying at Warsaw's Main School in Russian Poland and at Leipzig University , Chmielowski taught till 1898 in Warsaw private schools. From 1903 he was a professor at Lwów University in Austrian Poland.
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Caesarion
47 BC - 30 BC (17 years)
Ptolemy XV Caesar , nicknamed Caesarion , was the last pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt, reigning with his mother Cleopatra VII from 2 September 44 BC until her death by 12 August 30 BC, then as sole ruler until his death was ordered by Octavian .
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Walter Bower
1385 - 1449 (64 years)
Walter Bower was a Scottish canon regular and abbot of Inchcolm Abbey in the Firth of Forth, who is noted as a chronicler of his era. He was born about 1385 at Haddington, East Lothian, in the Kingdom of Scotland. In 1991, Donald Watt said of Bower's Scotichronicon that "We are more and more convinced that this book is one of the national treasures of Scotland, which should be studied in depth for many different kinds of enquiry into Scotland's past."
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Sherman Kent
1903 - 1986 (83 years)
Sherman Kent , was a Yale University history professor who, during World War II and through 17 years of Cold War-era service in the Central Intelligence Agency, pioneered many of the methods of intelligence analysis. He is often described as "the father of intelligence analysis".
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David Cohen
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
David Cohen was a Dutch classicist and papyrologist and one of the two chairs of the during the occupation of the Netherlands in World War II. He was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Amsterdam and a prominent Zionist leader.
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Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, more commonly known as A.L. Srivastava, born 16 September 1899, in Andhana, Uttar Pradesh, died 12 July 1973, in Agra district, was an Indian historian specialising in medieval, early modern and modern history of India.
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Walter Besant
1836 - 1901 (65 years)
Sir Walter Besant was an English novelist and historian. William Henry Besant was his brother, and another brother, Frank, was the husband of Annie Besant. Early life and education The son of wine merchant William Besant , he was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire and attended school at St Paul's, Southsea, Stockwell Grammar, London and King's College London. In 1855, he was admitted as a pensioner to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1859 as 18th wrangler.
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S. Srikanta Sastri
1904 - 1974 (70 years)
Sondekoppa Srikanta Sastri was an Indian historian, Indologist, and polyglot. He authored around 12 books, over two hundred articles, several monographs and book reviews over four decades in English, Kannada, Telugu and Sanskrit. These include "Sources of Karnataka History", "Geopolitics of India & Greater India", "Bharatiya Samskruthi" and "Hoysala Vastushilpa" . S. Srikanta Sastri was a polyglot well versed in fourteen languages spanning Greek, Latin, Pali, Prakrit, Sanskrit and German among others. He was Head of the Department of History & Indology at Maharaja College, University of Mysore between 1940 and 1960.
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Julius von Ficker
1826 - 1902 (76 years)
Julius von Ficker, or Johann Kaspar Julius Ficker von Feldhaus was a Roman Catholic German historian. In 1898 he was awarded the Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts. Career Born at Paderborn, Ficker studied history and law at Bonn, Münster, and Berlin, and during 1848-49 lived in Frankfurt, where he was closely associated with the noted historian Johann Friedrich Böhmer, who proved himself a generous friend and patron. In 1852 he proceeded to Bonn, but shortly afterwards accepted an invitation from Count Leopold Thun-Hohenstein, the reorganizer of the Austrian system of education, to settle at Innsbruck as professor of general history.
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Nikola Vulić
1872 - 1945 (73 years)
Nikola Vulić ; was a Serbian historian, classical philologist, prominent archaeologist, doctor of philosophy and professor at the University of Belgrade. Biography Born in Scutari in 1872 during the period of Ottoman rule, he left for Serbia where he studied Latin, Old Church Slavonic, Ancient Greek, and ancient history. He graduated from the University of Belgrade in history. For his post-graduate studies he went to the University of Munich, where he received his doctorate. Upon his return to Belgrade, he was named professor at his alma mater. During World War I, Serbia's Minister of Education in-exile in Greece concluded that professors and teachers should be seconded from the army.
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