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,
#8551
John Sherren Brewer
1810 - 1879 (69 years)
John Sherren Brewer, Jr. was an English clergyman, historian and scholar. He was a brother of E. Cobham Brewer, compiler of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. Birth and education Brewer was born in Norwich, the son of a Baptist schoolmaster. He matriculated at Queen's College, Oxford in 1827, graduating B.A. in 1833, M.A. 1835. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1837, and became chaplain to a central London workhouse. In 1839 he was appointed lecturer in classical literature at King's College London, and in 1858 he became professor of English language and literature and lecturer in modern history, succeeding FD Maurice.
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James MacCaffrey
1875 - 1935 (60 years)
Monsignor James MacCaffrey STL, PhD was an Irish priest, theologian and historian. Biography Monsignor MacCaffrey was born in 1875, at Fivemiletown, Co. Tyrone, he was the son of Francis MacCaffrey of Alderwood, Clogher, Co. Tyrone. He was educated at St. Macartan's Seminary, Monaghan, before going to St. Patrick's College, Maynooth, and was ordained there in 1899.
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Ross J. S. Hoffman
1902 - 1979 (77 years)
Ross John Swartz Hoffman was an American historian, writer, educator, and conservative intellectual who specialized in Modern European History and International Affairs. Life and career Born on February 2, 1902, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Hoffman attended Lafayette College and the University of Pennsylvania . His doctoral dissertation , prepared under the supervision of William Ezra Lingelbach, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1933 and received the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association in 1934.
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Ephraim Emerton
1851 - 1935 (84 years)
Ephraim Emerton was an American educator, author, translator, and historian prominent in his field of European medieval history. Early life and education Ephraim Emerton was born in Salem, Massachusetts, to James and Martha West Emerton. His elder brother was James Henry Emerton , naturalist and arachnologist.
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Adolf Holm
1830 - 1900 (70 years)
Adolf Holm was a German historian of antiquity. Biography Adolf Holm was the son of a producer and distributor of tobacco in Lübeck and was born in a house located between Braunstraße and Holstenstraße by the Trave. He studied at Leipzig and Berlin and obtained a doctorate in 1851. Immediately thereafter he was employed by the Katharineum, a grammar school in Lübeck founded in 1531 for the study of ancient languages. He worked on history and geography of ancient Sicily and Greece and wrote a work in several volumes on the History of Sicily in ancient times. At Lübeck he held several conferenc...
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Douglass Adair
1912 - 1968 (56 years)
Douglass Greybill Adair was an American historian who specialized in intellectual history. He is best known for his work in researching the authorship of disputed numbers of The Federalist Papers, and his influential studies in the history and influence of republicanism in the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the era of the Enlightenment. His most famous essay, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," introduced the pursuit of fame as a new motivation for understanding the actions for the Framers.
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Clemens Baeumker
1853 - 1924 (71 years)
Clemens Baeumker was a German historian of philosophy. Baeumker was born in Paderborn to a gymnasium teacher. He studied philosophy, theology, and philology in Paderborn and later at the University of Münster, from which he obtained a doctorate in 1877. From 1879 he was a gymnasium lecturer in Münster.
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Degory Wheare
1573 - 1647 (74 years)
Degory Wheare, also spelt Digory Whear was an historian, the first Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford. Life He was born in Jacobstow, Cornwall, at the mansion of Berry Court. He matriculated at Broadgates Hall, Oxford, on 6 July 1593, graduated B.A. on 5 February 1597, and proceeded M.A. on 16 June 1600. He was a contemporary of Francis Rous, a lifelong friend; and he was tutor at Broadgates Hall to John Pym . Another Oxford friend was Charles Fitzgeoffrey.
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Matvei Lyubavsky
1860 - 1936 (76 years)
Matvey Kuzmich Lyubavsky was a Russian and Soviet historian, professor, academic and rector of the Moscow University from 1911 to 1917. Biography Lyubavsky was born in to the family of a village deacon. He lost his left eye in an accident during childhood. Lyubavsky graduated from the faculty of History of the Imperial Moscow University in 1882 and received his doctorate in 1901 and became a professor at the Moscow University.
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Carl Brinkmann
1885 - 1954 (69 years)
Carl Brinkmann was a German sociologist and economist, focusing on socioeconomics and the history of political economy. Brinkmann was born in Tilsit, East Prussia, now in Kaliningrad, and died in Oberstdorf, Allgäu. In 1904 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at The Queen's College, Oxford. He taught as a professor at the Heidelberg University , Berlin University , and Tübingen University .
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Lucy Maynard Salmon
1853 - 1927 (74 years)
Lucy Maynard Salmon was an American historian. She was a professor of history at Vassar College from 1889 until her death. She was the first woman to be a member of the executive committee of the American Historical Association. She published widely in historical journals and general magazines, and was highly active in civic affairs, supporting civil service reform and world and women suffrage.
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Tommaso Fazello
1498 - 1570 (72 years)
Tommaso Fazello was an Italian Dominican friar, historian and antiquarian. He is known as the father of Sicilian history. He is the author of the first printed history of Sicily: De Rebus Siculis Decades Duae, published in Palermo in 1558 in Latin. He was born in Sciacca, Sicily and died in Palermo, Sicily.
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Norman Davis
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Norman Davis was a New Zealand-born professor of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. Early life and career Davis was born in 1913 at Dunedin, New Zealand. He received his education at Otago Boys' High School and the University of Otago, where he was taught by Professor Herbert Ramsay. He was awarded a Rhodes scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1934 and studied comparative philology. From 1937 to 1938, he lectured in English at the University of Kaunas in Lithuania, and then at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria, 1938–39.
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Fred Albert Shannon
1893 - 1963 (70 years)
Fred Albert Shannon was an American historian. He had many publications related to American history, and he won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for History for The Organization and Administration of the Union Army, 1861-1865 .
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Georges Haupt
1928 - 1978 (50 years)
Georges Haupt, also known as George or Gheorghe Haupt , was Romanian and French a historian of socialism, politically active in the Romanian Communist Party and the French Section of the Workers' International.
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Alexander Soloviev
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Alexander Vasilievich Soloviev was a Russian émigré jurist, slavist, and historian of Serbia and Serbian law. His academic activity included research on the Bogumils, Serbian heraldry, philately and archeology, and he also published translations from Russian and French into Serbian. Having fled from Russia not long after the October Revolution, he settled in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, where he became a professor at the University of Belgrade Faculty of Law . After the end of World War II he briefly served as the first dean of the Sarajevo Law School , before Communist repressi...
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Dana Carleton Munro
1866 - 1933 (67 years)
Dana Carleton Munro was an American historian, brother of Wilfred Harold Munro, born at Bristol, R.I. He was educated at Brown and in Europe at Strassburg and Freiburg. He taught at Penn , at Wisconsin until 1915, then at Princeton. He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1901. Brown gave him the degree of Doctor of humane letters in 1912. He edited Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of History . He was co-author of Mediœval Civilization and Essays on the Crusades .
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Gustave Lanctot
1883 - 1975 (92 years)
Gustave Lanctot , also spelled Gustave Lanctôt, was a Canadian historian and archivist. Born in Saint-Constant, Quebec, he studied law at Université de Montréal and was called to the Quebec Bar in 1907. A Rhodes Scholar, he studied political science and history from 1909 to 1911 while at Oxford University. He was also a member of the Oxford Canadians ice hockey team. In 1912, he joined the National Archives of Canada. During World War I, he served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
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Robert von Pöhlmann
1852 - 1914 (62 years)
Robert von Pöhlmann was a German ancient historian . From 1870 to 1874 he studied classical philology and history at the universities of Munich, Göttingen and Leipzig. While a student his influences included Georg Waitz at Gottingen and Wilhelm Roscher at Leipzig University. In 1884 he became an associate professor at the University of Erlangen, where in 1886 he attained a full professorship. From 1901 onward, he was a professor of ancient history at the University of Munich.
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Carl von Noorden
1833 - 1883 (50 years)
Carl Friedrich Johannes von Noorden was a German historian who was a native of Bonn. He was a grandson to psychiatrist Christian Friedrich Nasse and the father of pathologist Carl von Noorden . Biography He studied at the Universities of Marburg, Berlin and Bonn, where he was a pupil of Heinrich von Sybel . In 1868 he became a professor of history at the University of Greifswald. Afterwards he served as a professor at Marburg , Tübingen , Bonn and Leipzig . At the University of Leipzig, one of his students was Karl Lamprecht . After his death, his position at Leipzig was filled by his frie...
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Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky
1867 - 1934 (67 years)
Mitrofan Viktorovich Dovnar-Zapol'skiy was a historian, ethnographer, and diplomat of Belarusian origin. He hailed from the family of land-less smaller nobility and was the son of Collegiate Secretary.
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Wacław Tokarz
1873 - 1937 (64 years)
Wacław Tokarz was a Polish historian and military officer. A Colonel of the Polish Army and a professor of both the Warsaw University and Jagiellonian University, he authored numerous books on the 19th century military history of Poland, notably two monumental monographs on the Battle of Warsaw and the Warsaw Uprising of 1794.
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Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson Books A History of the Jewish People, Harvard University Press, 1976,
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Thomas Dempster
1579 - 1625 (46 years)
Thomas Dempster was a Scottish scholar and historian. Born into the aristocracy in Aberdeenshire, which comprises regions of both the Scottish highlands and the Scottish lowlands, he was sent abroad as a youth for his education. The Dempsters were Catholic in an increasingly Protestant country and had a reputation for being quarrelsome. Thomas' brother James, outlawed for an attack on his father, spent some years as a pirate in the northern islands, escaped by volunteering for military service in the Low Countries and was drawn and quartered there for insubordination. Thomas' father lost the ...
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George Elliott Howard
1849 - 1928 (79 years)
George Elliott Howard was an American educator and author. He was a professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln from 1889 to 1891, and a professor at Stanford from 1891 to 1901. He was also the president of the American Sociological Society in 1917.
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Guðni Jónsson
1901 - 1974 (73 years)
Guðni Jónsson was an Icelandic professor of history and editor of Old Norse texts. Life and career Guðni was born at Gamla-Hraun at Eyrarbakki into a poor family who had a total of 17 children. He was raised by relatives at Leirubakki until he was twelve, worked two seasons as a fisherman and then was taken in by his married sister in Reykjavík, enabling him to attend evening school there. He received a middle school certificate in Flensburg in 1921 and a school certificate from Menntaskólinn í Reykjavík in 1924. In 1923 he served as president of the student society Framtíðin. He then attended the University of Iceland, first in theology and then in the faculty of Old Norse studies.
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James Alton James
1864 - 1962 (98 years)
James Alton James was an American educator and historian. Biography James was born on September 17, 1864, in Jefferson, Wisconsin. He spent two years at the Platteville Normal School, and then, after teaching high school two years to pay for the university, entered the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated as valedictorian with an LL.B. in 1888. He received a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1893.
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Julius von Pflugk-Harttung
1848 - 1919 (71 years)
Julius von Pflugk-Harttung was a German historian, best known as an authority on Papal and medieval history. Biography He was born at Wernikow, and served as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War. He studied history and philology at the universities of Bonn, Berlin and Göttingen. In 1877 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Tübingen, where shortly afterwards he became an associate professor. In 1886, he was named a professor of history at Basel. Thence he went to Berlin, where in 1893 he became head of the Secret State Archives.
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Thomas Gordon
1788 - 1841 (53 years)
Major-General Thomas Gordon was a British army officer and historian. He is remembered for his role in the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s and 1830s and his History of the war published in 1832.
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Shmuel Sambursky
1900 - 1990 (90 years)
Shmuel Sambursky, or Samuel Sambursky Hebrew: שמואל סמבורסקי was a German, Palestinian, and Israeli physicist, professor, and author during the respective epochs of his country —Germany, Mandatory Palestine, and Israel.
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Heinrich Rückert
1823 - 1875 (52 years)
Heinrich Rückert was a German historian and Germanist. He was the son of orientalist and poet Friedrich Rückert . From 1840 to 1844 he studied classical and German philology at the universities of Erlangen, Bonn and Berlin. In 1845 he obtained his habilitation for German history and archaeology at the University of Jena, and later on, relocated to Breslau, where in 1852 he became an associate professor . In 1852 he was a founding member of the Verein für Thüringische Geschichte und Alterthumskunde .
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Sigmund von Riezler
1843 - 1927 (84 years)
Sigmund Riezler or Siegmund Riezler was a German historian. Biography He was educated at the University of Munich, and became a docent in 1869, and after ten years as head of the archives and library of Donaueschingen was made court and city librarian in Munich, in 1883, and director of the Maximilianeum in 1885.
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Ulysse Chevalier
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Ulysse Chevalier was a French bibliographer and historian. Born in Rambouillet, he published many works on the history of Dauphiné, e.g. the cartularies of the church and the town of Die , of the abbey of Saint André le-Bas at Vienne , of the abbey of Notre Dame at Bonnevaux in the diocese of Vienne , of the abbey of Saint Chaifre at Le Monestier , the inventories and several collections of archives of the dauphins of Viennais, and a Bibliothèque liturgique in six volumes , the third and fourth volumes of which constitute the Repertorium hymnologicum, containing more than 20,000 articles.
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Yevgeni Pakhomov
1880 - 1965 (85 years)
Yevgeni Alexandrovich Pakhomov was a Russian, Georgiann and Azerbaijani numismatist and archaeologist and a recognized authority in the numismatics of the Caucasus. Biography Born in Stavropol, he graduated from the Tiflis Realschule in 1896, the St. Petersburg Archeological Institute in 1900, and the St. Petersburg Technological Institute in 1902. In 1920, he helped to organize the Museum of Azerbaijani History and was elected to the Academic Association of the University of Baku where he chaired the Department of Archeology and Numismatics from 1922 to 1930. He attained to the title of Pro...
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Herbert L. Osgood
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Herbert Levi Osgood was an American historian of colonial American history. As a professor at Columbia University he directed numerous dissertations of scholars who became major historians. Osgood was a leader of the "Imperial historians" who studied, and often praised, the inner workings of the British Empire in the 18th century.
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Zhang Xuecheng
1738 - 1801 (63 years)
Zhang Xuecheng was a Chinese historian and philosopher during the Qing dynasty. His father and his grandfather had been government officials, but, although Zhang achieved the highest civil service examination degree in 1778, he never held high office. Zhang's ideas about the historical process were revolutionary in many ways and he became one of the most enlightened historical theorists of the Qing dynasty, but he spent much of his life in near poverty without the support of a patron and, in 1801, he died, poor and with few friends. It was not until the late 19th century that Chinese scholars began to accept the validity of Zhang's ideas.
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Antti Aarne
1867 - 1925 (58 years)
Antti Amatus Aarne was a Finnish folklorist. Background Aarne was a student of Kaarle Krohn, the son of the folklorist Julius Krohn. He further developed their historic-geographic method of comparative folkloristics, and developed the initial version of what became the Aarne–Thompson classification system of classifying folktales, first published in 1910 and extended by Stith Thompson first in 1927 and again in 1961.
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Ignaz Aurelius Fessler
1756 - 1839 (83 years)
Ignaz Aurelius Fessler, aka Feßler was a Hungarian ecclesiastic, politician, historian, and freemason. Biography Fessler was born in the village of Zurndorf in the Hungarian Moson County. In 1773, he joined the order of Capuchin friars, and in 1779 was ordained priest. He had meanwhile continued his classical and philological studies, and his liberal views brought him into frequent conflict with his superiors.
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Wilhelm Wachsmuth
1784 - 1866 (82 years)
Wilhelm Gottfried Wachsmuth was a German historian and academic. From 1803 to 1806 he studied philology and theology at the University of Halle, and following graduation he worked as a teacher at the monastery school in Magdeburg. In 1815 he became an associate professor of philology at Halle. He was Professor ordinarius of classical philology at the University of Kiel from 1820 to 1826, and Professor ordinarius of history of philosophy at the University of Leipzig from 1826 to 1865. On seven separate occasions he was dean to the faculty of philosophy at Leipzig and in 1835/36 he served as un...
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Vladimir Ikonnikov
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Vladimir Stepanovich Ikonnikov was a Russian Imperial historian specializing in study of the Russian historiography. Ikonnikov was an academician of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, a professor and a dean of the History and Philology faculty of the Kiev University.
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Peter Young
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Brigadier Peter Young, was a British Army officer who, during the Second World War, served with distinction with the British Commandos. Subsequently, he commanded a regiment of the Arab Legion, then returned to England in staff appointments. In 1959 he retired from the army as a brigadier and became head of Military History at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst.
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Eugene Kosminsky
1886 - 1959 (73 years)
Eugene Alekseyevich Kosminsky was a Soviet historian and medievalist, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union . He was a professor at the Lomonosov Moscow State University , first Head of the Department of History of the Middle Ages at MSU Faculty of History from 1934 to 1949. Laureate of the 1942 Stalin Prize.
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Andronikos I Komnenos
1118 - 1185 (67 years)
Andronikos I Komnenos , Latinized as Andronicus I Comnenus, was Byzantine emperor from 1183 to 1185. He was the son of Isaac Komnenos and the grandson of the emperor Alexios I. In later Byzantine historiography, Andronikos I became known under the epithet "Misophaes" in reference to the great number of enemies he had blinded.
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Konrad Maurer
1823 - 1902 (79 years)
Konrad Maurer, since 1876 Konrad von Maurer was a German legal historian. He was the son of legal historian and statesman Georg Ludwig von Maurer . Maurer is considered one of the most significant researchers of Nordic legal and constitutional history.
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Abraham Berliner
1833 - 1915 (82 years)
Abraham Berliner was a German theologian and historian, born in Obersitzko, in the Grand Duchy of Posen, Prussia. He was initially educated by his father, who was the teacher in Obersitzko. He continued his education under various rabbis, later studying at the University of Leipzig where he received the degree of doctor of philosophy.
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Max Koch
1855 - 1931 (76 years)
Max Koch was a German historian and literary critic. Biography He studied at the University of Munich as a pupil of Michael Bernays, receiving his PhD in 1878. Subsequently, he continued his education in Berlin, London and Paris, and became a docent at the University of Marburg in 1879. He was appointed an assistant professor of literary history at the University of Breslau in 1890, where in 1895 he became a full professor. In 1918 he was named university rector.
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Wilbur Cortez Abbott
1869 - 1947 (78 years)
Wilbur Cortez Abbott was an American historian and educator, born at Kokomo, Indiana. He graduated from Wabash College in 1892. Afterward, he studied at Cornell University and at Oxford in 1897 where he received the degree of B.Litt.
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Rasmus Nyerup
1759 - 1829 (70 years)
Rasmus Nyerup was a Danish literary historian, philologist, folklorist and librarian. Biography He was born at the village of Nyrup near Glamsbjerg on Funen, Denmark. After graduating from Odense Lærde Skole, Nyerup studied philology and theology and took exams in resp. 1779 and 1780. He was assistant at the Royal Library from 1778, and its secretary during 1709–1803. In the period 1790–1797, he was editor of the literary-critical journal Kiøbenhavnske lærde Efterretninger. He became a professor of literary history at the University of Copenhagen in 1796. From 1803, he was head librarian ...
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Johann Matthias Schröckh
1733 - 1808 (75 years)
Johann Matthias Schröckh was an Austrian-German historian and literary scholar born in Vienna. He was a grandson to Pietist preacher Matthias Bel . In 1751 he began his studies at the University of Göttingen, where he had as instructors, church historian Johann Lorenz von Mosheim and Orientalist Johann David Michaelis . He continued his education at the University of Leipzig, earning his master's degree in 1755. During the following year he received his habilitation, and in 1762 became an associate professor of philosophy. Later he relocated to the University of Wittenberg, where in 1775 he ...
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Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch
1746 - 1812 (66 years)
Dietrich Hermann Hegewisch was a German historian who was a native of Quakenbrück. He was the father of political publicist Franz Hermann Hegewisch . Hegewisch studied theology and history at the University of Göttingen. Following graduation he was a private tutor, then later worked as a newspaper editor in Hamburg. From 1782 to 1812 he was a full professor of history at the University of Kiel. In 1805 he was appointed Etatsrat by the Danish monarchy.
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