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,
#8451
King Zhou of Shang
1105 BC - 1046 BC (59 years)
King Zhou was the pejorative posthumous name given to Di Xin of Shang or King Shou of Shang , the last king of the Shang dynasty of ancient China. He is also called Zhou Xin . In Chinese, his name Zhòu also refers to a horse crupper, the part of a saddle or harness that is most likely to be soiled by the horse. It is not to be confused with the name of the succeeding dynasty, which has a different character and pronunciation .
Go to Profile#8452
Friedrich Baethgen
1890 - 1972 (82 years)
Friedrich Jürgen Baethgen was a German historian born in Greifswald. He specialized in medieval studies and in history of the papacy. He studied history at the Universities of Berlin and Heidelberg, earning his doctorate in 1913 under the guidance of Karl Hampe with a thesis on Pope Innocent III. Afterwards, he was a lecturer and associate professor at Heidelberg, then becoming a professor of history at the University of Königsberg . From 1939 to 1948 he taught classes in Berlin.
Go to Profile#8453
Raphael Mahler
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Raphael Mahler was a Galician-born Jewish historian who worked in Poland, America, and Israel. Life Mahler was born on August 15, 1899, in Nowy Sącz, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, the son of a scholarly and business family. He attended the Nowy Sącz municipal public school, where he was the only Jewish student, went to the Nowy Sącz yeshiva, and studied with private tutors.
Go to Profile#8454
William Milligan Sloane
1850 - 1928 (78 years)
William Milligan Sloane was an American educator and historian. Career William Milligan Sloane was born in Richmond, Ohio on November 12, 1850. He graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University, where he was a member of the Philolexian Society, in 1868, and afterward was employed as instructor in classics at the Newell School in Pittsburgh until 1872. From 1872 to 1876 he studied at the universities of Berlin and Leipzig. He studied history under Mommsen and Droysen, and much of the time he worked as private secretary to George Bancroft, United States Minister at Berlin. He received a...
Go to Profile#8455
Herbert Dingle
1890 - 1978 (88 years)
Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.
Go to Profile#8456
Alcée Fortier
1856 - 1914 (58 years)
Alcée Fortier was a renowned Professor of Romance Languages at Tulane University in New Orleans. In the late 19th and early 20th century, he published numerous works on language, literature, Louisiana history and folklore, Louisiana Creole languages, and personal reminiscence. He had French Creole ancestry dating to the colonial period.
Go to Profile#8457
Alois Vojtěch Šembera
1807 - 1882 (75 years)
Alois Vojtěch Šembera, also Alois Adalbert Sembera or Alois Adalbert Schembera was a Czech linguist, historian of literature, writer, journalist and patriot. Life and work He was born in Vysoké Mýto, Bohemia, Austrian Empire. During 1819–1826 he studied at the gymnasium in Litomyšl, during 1826/27 philology at the Charles University in Prague and then law at the same university .
Go to Profile#8458
Harry Bresslau
1848 - 1926 (78 years)
Harry Bresslau was a German historian and scholar of state papers and of historical and literary muniments . He was born in Dannenberg/Elbe and died in Heidelberg. He is the father of Ernst Bresslau and his daughter, Helene married the polymath, Albert Schweitzer.
Go to Profile#8459
Xu Fuguan
1904 - 1982 (78 years)
Hsu Fu-kuan or Xu Fuguan ; 1902/03 – 1982 Biography Xu was born in 1902 or 1903 in a family of farmers and scholars in Hubei Province, China. Hsu's father taught at a private school established for village children who showed academic promise and could sit the imperial examinations to become scholar officials. In his teen-age years, Xu made his way to the provincial capital Wuhan which was then the cultural center where foreign influences and trends abounded. Wuhan was also an important staging area for the 1911 Republican Revolution that ended China's 2000-year-old imperial rule. Xu spent fifteen years with the Nationalist army attaining the rank of senior colonel.
Go to Profile#8460
William Dodd
1869 - 1940 (71 years)
William Edward Dodd was an American historian, author and diplomat. A liberal Democrat, he served as the United States Ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1937 during the Nazi era. Initially a holder of the slightly antisemitic notions of his times, he went to Germany with instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to do what he could to protest Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany "unofficially," while also attempting to follow official State Department instructions to maintain cordial official diplomatic relations. Convinced from firsthand observation that the Nazis were an increasing t...
Go to Profile#8461
Anne Hyde
1637 - 1671 (34 years)
Anne Hyde was the first wife of James, Duke of York, who later became King James II and VII. Anne was the daughter of a member of the English gentry—Edward Hyde —and met her future husband when they were both living in exile in the Netherlands. She married James in 1660 and two months later gave birth to the couple's first child, who had been conceived out of wedlock. Some observers disapproved of the marriage, but James's brother, King Charles II of England, wanted the marriage to take place. Another cause of disapproval was the public affection James showed toward Anne. They had eight child...
Go to Profile#8462
Nugroho Notosusanto
1930 - 1985 (55 years)
Brigadier General Raden Panji Nugroho Notosusanto was an Indonesian short story writer turned military historian who served as professor of history at the University of Indonesia. Born to a noble family in Central Java, he exhibited a high degree of nationalism from a young age. During the Indonesian National Revolution from 1945 to 1949 he saw active service as a member of the Student Army, working reconnaissance. Despite wanting to remain in the military, under influence by his father he continued his education, eventually enrolling in the faculty of literature at the University of Indonesia.
Go to Profile#8463
Walter Muir Whitehill
1905 - 1978 (73 years)
Walter Muir Whitehill was an American writer, historian, medievalist, preservationist, and the Director and Librarian of the Boston Athenaeum from 1946 to 1973. He was also editor for publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts from 1946 to 1978. From 1951 to 1972, Whitehill was a professor at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#8464
Archibald Cary Coolidge
1866 - 1928 (62 years)
Archibald Cary Coolidge was an American educator and diplomat. He was a professor of history at Harvard College from 1908 and the first director of the Harvard University Library from 1910 until his death. Coolidge was also a scholar in international affairs, a planner of the Widener Library, a member of the United States Foreign Service, and editor-in-chief of the policy journal Foreign Affairs.
Go to Profile#8465
Dorothy Stimson
1890 - 1988 (98 years)
Dorothy Stimson was an American academic. She served as the dean of Goucher College from 1921 to 1947 and was a professor of history at the college until 1955. Stimson served as the president of the History of Science Society between 1953 and 1957. Her research included the reception of the Copernican theory. She also edited a collection of papers by George Sarton, considered to be the founder of the discipline of the history of science.
Go to Profile#8466
Patrick Weston Joyce
1827 - 1914 (87 years)
Patrick Weston "P. W." Joyce was an Irish historian, writer and music collector, known particularly for his research in Irish etymology and local place names of Ireland. Biography He was born in Ballyorgan in the Ballyhoura Mountains, on the borders of counties Limerick and Cork in Ireland, and grew up in nearby Glenosheen. The family claimed descent from one Seán Mór Seoighe , a stonemason from Connemara, County Galway.
Go to Profile#8467
Herbert Grundmann
1902 - 1970 (68 years)
Herbert Grundmann was a German historian, soldier and professor who was the editorial director of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Education Grundmann was born in 1902 in Meerane, Saxony, and grew up in Chemnitz, Saxony. After graduating from high school in 1921, he enrolled in the University of Leipzig. He first majored in political economy, thinking he would take over his father's factory. After several exchange semesters at Heidelberg and Munich, he decided to specialize in medieval history. He wrote his dissertation under Walter Goetz in Leipzig, the topic being Joachim of Fiore. Grun...
Go to Profile#8468
Konstantin Nevolin
1806 - 1855 (49 years)
Konstantin Alekseevich Nevolin was a Russian legal historian. Academic career He started his academic career as a professor of law in Berlin in 1829. In 1834 he returned to Kiev after he was appointed rector of the newly founded University of Kiev. Later he also served as a professor of law at Saint Petersburg State University from 1843.
Go to Profile#8469
Douglas Hyde
1860 - 1949 (89 years)
Douglas Ross Hyde , known as , was an Irish academic, linguist, scholar of the Irish language, politician and diplomat who served as the first President of Ireland from June 1938 to June 1945. He was a leading figure in the Gaelic revival, and the first President of the Gaelic League, one of the most influential cultural organisations in Ireland at the time.
Go to Profile#8470
Wilbur Henry Siebert
1866 - 1961 (95 years)
Wilbur Henry Siebert was an educator and historian from the United States. Biography Wilbur Henry Siebert was born in Columbus, Ohio on August 30, 1866. His father had emigrated from Frankfurt, Germany in 1832. The son graduated from Ohio State University in 1888, from Harvard in 1889 and received his A.M. at Harvard in 1890. He studied in Germany from 1890 to 1891.
Go to Profile#8471
Samuel Daniel
1562 - 1619 (57 years)
Samuel Daniel was an English poet, playwright and historian in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras. He was an innovator in a wide range of literary genres. His best-known works are the sonnet cycle Delia, the epic poem The Civil Wars Between the Houses of Lancaster and York, the dialogue in verse Musophilus, and the essay on English poetry A Defense of Rhyme. He was considered one of the preeminent authors of his time and his works had a significant influence on contemporary writers, including William Shakespeare. Daniel's writings continued to influence authors for centuries after his death, especially the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth.
Go to Profile#8472
Carl Richard Unger
1817 - 1897 (80 years)
Carl Richard Unger was a Norwegian historian and philologist. Unger was professor of Germanic and Romance philology at the University of Christiania from 1862 and was a prolific editor of Old Norse texts.
Go to Profile#8473
Harinath De
1877 - 1911 (34 years)
Harinath De was an Indian historian, scholar and a polyglot, who later became the first Indian librarian of the National Library of India from 1907 to 1911. In a life span of thirty four years, he learned 34 languages.
Go to Profile#8474
Francis Bull
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Francis Bull was a Norwegian literary historian, professor at the University of Oslo for more than thirty years, essayist and speaker, and magazine editor. Early and personal life Bull was born in Kristiania, son of medical doctor Edvard Isak Hambro Bull and Ida Marie Sofie Paludan . He was brother to theatre director Johan Peter Bull, historian and politician Edvard Bull and genealogist Theodor Bull. Through Edvard Bull he was the uncle of historian Edvard Bull. He was also nephew to military officer Karl Sigwald Johannes Bull, grandnephew to Anders Sandøe Ørsted Bull, great-grandson to Geo...
Go to Profile#8475
John Veitch
1829 - 1894 (65 years)
John Veitch , Scottish philosopher, poet and historian. He was born in Peebles, the only son of Peninsular War veteran James Veitch and his wife Nancy Ritchie, a woman steeped in the folk traditions of the Borders. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh.
Go to Profile#8476
Vasily Dmitriyevich Smirnov
1846 - 1922 (76 years)
Vasily Dmitriyevich Smirnov was a Russian orientalist, specializing in the history and literature of the Ottoman Empire.
Go to Profile#8477
Nicolae Cartojan
1883 - 1944 (61 years)
Nicolae Cartojan was a Romanian literary historian. Born in Uzunu, Giurgiu County, his parents were Anghel Cartojan and Maria . He graduated from Bucharest's Saint Sava National College in 1902. He then enrolled in the literature and philosophy faculty of the University of Bucharest, where Ioan Bianu was one of his professors, and graduated in 1906. Early on, he developed an interest in early Romanian literature and in researching the manuscripts of the Romanian Academy Library, where he worked from 1906 to 1912. At the same time, he was a teaching assistant. From 1912 to 1914, Cartojan attended speciality courses at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin.
Go to Profile#8478
Ernst Moritz Arndt
1769 - 1860 (91 years)
Ernst Moritz Arndt was a German nationalist historian, writer and poet. Early in his life, he fought for the abolition of serfdom, later against Napoleonic dominance over Germany. Arndt had to flee to Sweden for some time due to his anti-French positions. He is one of the main founders of German nationalism during the Napoleonic wars and the 19th century movement for German unification. After the Carlsbad Decrees, the forces of the restoration counted him as a demagogue.
Go to Profile#8479
Peter Erasmus Müller
1776 - 1834 (58 years)
Peter Erasmus Müller , was a Danish historian, linguist, theologian, and bishop of the Diocese of Zealand from 1830 until his death. Career Müller studied at the University of Copenhagen, where he passed his theological examination in 1791. After spending some time at various German universities, he visited France and England. Returning to Denmark, he wrote numerous works and was appointed professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen in 1801. During his time as a professor, he produced a large number of essays and books about theology, history, and linguistics. As a result of the fame...
Go to Profile#8480
Ludvig Ludvigsen Daae
1834 - 1910 (76 years)
Ludvig Ludvigsen Daae was a Norwegian historian and author. He was a professor at the University of Oslo for more than thirty years. Biography He was born in Aremark in Østfold and died in Kristiania , Norway. He was the son of Ludvig Daae and Sara Jessine Louise Brock . He was a student at Christiania Cathedral School and graduated during 1852. He studied classical philology at the University of Kristiania and graduated in 1859.
Go to Profile#8481
Herman Theodoor Colenbrander
1871 - 1945 (74 years)
Herman Theodoor Colenbrander was a Dutch historian, the first director of the Commissie van Advies voor 's Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën, which has become the Institute of Dutch History. In 1908 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Go to Profile#8482
Charles Herbert Levermore
1856 - 1927 (71 years)
Charles Herbert Levermore was an American academic and peace activist. He was a founder and the first president of Adelphi University from 1896 to 1912. He won the American Peace Award in 1924. He was corresponding secretary of the World's Court League in 1919, secretary of the League of Nations Union, and secretary of the New York Peace Society. He was a founding member of the Union League in New York City.
Go to Profile#8483
Gene Weltfish
1902 - 1980 (78 years)
Gene Weltfish was an American anthropologist and historian working at Columbia University from 1928 to 1953. She had studied with Franz Boas and was a specialist in the culture and history of the Pawnee people of the Midwest Plains. Her 1965 ethnography, The Lost Universe: Pawnee Life and Culture, is considered the authoritative work on Pawnee culture to this day.
Go to Profile#8484
Henry Bamford Parkes
1904 - 1972 (68 years)
Henry Bamford Parkes was a writer and professor of history at New York University. He was born in Sheffield, England. Background After reading history at Oxford University, Parkes came to the United States to pursue his graduate studies at the University of Michigan. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan in 1929 and joined the history faculty of New York University in 1930. He had also lectured at Barnard College, the University of Wyoming, the New School for Social Research and the University of Washington. From 1956 to 1957, Parkes was a Fulbright Fellow, working at the University of Athens i...
Go to Profile#8485
Gustav Mayer
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Gustav Mayer was a German journalist and historian with a particular focus on the Labour movement. He fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and lived the final years of his life in England. Life Gustav Mayer was born into a long-established Jewish mercantile family in Prenzlau, a small town in central northern Germany. The family had settled in Prentzlau in 1677, having previously lived in Oderberg. His upbringing combined traditional Jewish values and beliefs with a keen appreciation of German intellectual developments more generally. While growing up he acquired a deep knowledge of the German classics which would underpin his subsequent work.
Go to Profile#8486
Sargis Kakabadze
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Sargis N. Kakabadze was a Georgian historian and philologist, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Professor. He was born in 1886, in a small village Kukhi . In 1910 he graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Languages of the St.Petersburg University . In 1911-1918 he was a teacher of History of the Georgian Gymnasium of Tbilisi, in 1919-1967 Professor of the Tbilisi State University , in 1921-1926 Director of the State Historical Archive of Georgia, in 1945-1961 head of the Department of the Old Acts of this Archive.
Go to Profile#8487
Yi Pyong-do
1896 - 1989 (93 years)
Yi Pyong-do was a Korean historian. Biography He started working in Korean History Compilation Committee in 1927. In 1934 he founded Jindan Institute. From 1945 to 1962 he was Professor of Seoul Nation University. From 1955 to 1982 he was Committee of Korean Nation History Editor. In April 1960, he became the Minister of Education, but later resigned in August of that year.
Go to Profile#8488
William Miller
1864 - 1945 (81 years)
William Miller, FBA was a British-born medievalist and journalist. Biography The son of a Cumberland mine owner, Miller was educated at Rugby School and Oxford, where he gained a double first, and was called to the bar in 1889, but never practised law. He married Ada Mary Wright in 1895, and in 1896 published The Balkans, followed in 1898 by Travels and Politics in the Near East.
Go to Profile#8489
Martti Haavio
1899 - 1973 (74 years)
Martti Henrikki Haavio was a Finnish poet, folklorist and mythologist, writing poetry under the pen name P. Mustapää. He was born on 22 January 1899 in Temmes, and died on 4 February 1973 in Helsinki. He was also a professor of folklore and an influential researcher of Finnish mythology. In 1960, Haavio married Aale Tynni, after his first wife Elsa Enäjärvi-Haavio died in 1951 of cancer. His daughter, Elina Haavio-Mannila, is a social scientist. During Haavio's early career, he was a member of the Tulenkantajat literature club.
Go to Profile#8490
Ángel Valbuena Prat
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Ángel Valbuena Prat was a Spanish philologist and historian. Biography Born in Barcelona, he studied at the University of Barcelona, and later became an assistant professor at the Central University of Madrid. His doctoral thesis, Los Autos Sacramentales de Calderón, earned him various awards. After a tour of various university centers , finally, perhaps as a punishment for his political attitudes of Catalan regionalist nature, he was transferred to the University of Murcia, where he remained for more than twenty five years.
Go to Profile#8491
Mathieu Auguste Geffroy
1820 - 1895 (75 years)
Mathieu Auguste Geffroy was a French historian born in Paris. After studying at the École Normale Supérieure, he held history professorships at various lycées. His French thesis for the doctorate of letters, Étude sur les pamphlets politiques et religieux de Milton , showed that he was attracted towards foreign history, a study for which he soon qualified himself by mastering the Germanic and Scandinavian languagess.
Go to Profile#8492
William Curry Holden
1896 - 1993 (97 years)
William Curry Holden was an American historian and archaeologist. In 1937, he became the first director of the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Early years, education, military Holden was one of three sons born to Robert Lee Holden and Grace Holden née Davis in Coolidge, Texas. Both families moved west to Colorado City, Texas, and after 1907 the Holdens farmed near Rotan, Texas, where William completed high school in 1914.
Go to Profile#8493
Edward Murray Wrong
1889 - 1928 (39 years)
Edward Murray Wrong was a Canadian-born historian, vice-president of Magdalen College, Oxford . Biography Known as Murray, he was the son of Canadian historian George MacKinnon Wrong, and of Sophia Hume Wrong, daughter of the politician Edward Blake. He was the brother of diplomat Humphrey Hume Wrong. He was educated at St Andrew's College, Toronto. Like all his siblings and his father, Wrong studied at the University of Toronto. He then proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford as a commoner, where he was tutored by A. L. Smith, and obtained first-class honours in modern history in 1913.
Go to Profile#8494
Friedrich Hultsch
1833 - 1906 (73 years)
Friedrich Otto Hultsch was a German classical philologist and historian of mathematics in antiquity. Biography After graduating from the Dresden Kreuzschule, Friedrich Hultsch studied classical philology at the University of Leipzig from 1851 to 1855. After a probationary year at the Kreuzschule, he was employed in 1857 as a second Adjunkt at the Alte Nikolaischule in Leipzig. In 1858 he became a teacher at the Zwickau Gymnasium. In 1861 Hultsch was again employed at the Kreuzschule, where he was the rector from 1868 until his retirement in 1889. From 1879 to 1882 he also headed the newly fou...
Go to Profile#8495
Wacław Maciejowski
1792 - 1883 (91 years)
Wacław Aleksander Maciejowski was a Polish historian. Maciejowski was born in Cierlicko near Cieszyn. He studied in Warsaw, Berlin, and Göttingen, and became professor of law at the University of Warsaw in 1819.
Go to Profile#8496
Shang Yue
1902 - 1982 (80 years)
Shang Yue was a Chinese Marxist economic historian, author and professor at the School of History at Renmin University of China. Before becoming a historian, he also wrote fiction. He taught literature to Kim Il Sung for a short time at Yuwen Middle School in Manchuria. In China, he is primarily known for his work on the idea of the sprouts of capitalism: that proto-capitalism and class struggle had existed in the earlier Chinese history. His purge in 1958 foreshadowed the Chinese Cultural Revolution as his ideas on Chinese economic history conflicted with those of Mao Zedong. After his purge he continued to work on history, but stayed out of public until Mao's death in 1976.
Go to Profile#8497
Clement Eaton
1898 - 1980 (82 years)
Clement Eaton was an American historian who specialized in the American South. He received his education from the University of North Carolina, where he was president of Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated in 1919. He also attended Harvard University. He was chair of the History Department at Lafayette College from 1931 to 1942 and then a faculty member of the University of Kentucky.
Go to Profile#8498
George Grub
1812 - 1892 (80 years)
George Grub was a Scottish law professor and church historian. Life Grub was born at Old Aberdeen on 4 April 1812, the only child of George Grub, a respectable citizen and convener of the trades at Old Aberdeen, and his wife, Christian Yolum.
Go to Profile#8499
Vincent T. Harlow
1898 - 1961 (63 years)
Vincent Todd Harlow was a prominent English historian of the British Empire. From 1938 to 1949, he was the second Rhodes Professor of Imperial History at King's College London. In 1950, he succeeded Reginald Coupland as the Beit Professorship of Commonwealth History at the University of Oxford, a post he held until his death in 1963. His early work was on the seventeenth-century Caribbean but he is best known for his book, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 1763-1793, the first volume of which was published in 1952. His second volume, subtitled "New Continents and Changing Values", was published posthumously in 1964.
Go to Profile#8500
Anna Lewis
1885 - 1961 (76 years)
Anna Lewis was a noted teacher, historian and writer, who specialized in American history, and particularly the history of the Southwest. Born in what was then Indian Territory to a family of mixed Choctaw and European ancestry, she earned doctoral degrees from University of California, Berkeley and University of Oklahoma . She was the first woman to receive a Ph. D. at the University of Oklahoma. Lewis spent her educational career at the Oklahoma College for Women . She wrote two books and numerous articles for publications in her area of interest before retiring in 1956 to a home she had built in southern Oklahoma .
Go to Profile