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,
#8551
Denis Jean Achille Luchaire
1846 - 1908 (62 years)
Denis Jean Achille Luchaire was a French historian. Biography Luchaire was born in Paris. In 1879 he became a professor at Bordeaux and in 1889 professor of mediaeval history at the Sorbonne; in 1895 he became a member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, where he obtained the Jean Reynaud prize just before his death.
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James Alexander Robertson
1873 - 1939 (66 years)
James Alexander Robertson was an American academic historian, archivist, translator and bibliographer. He is most noted for his contributions to the history and historiography of the Philippines and other former territorial possessions of the Viceroyalty of New Spain.
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Stanisław Kutrzeba
1876 - 1946 (70 years)
Stanisław Marian Kutrzeba was a Polish historian and politician who was Professor of the Jagiellonian University from 1908, and then until the end of his life the Chair of Studies in Polish law. He was chair of the Law Department , university's rector , General Secretary of Polish Academy of Learning and its president . He was one of many professors of Jagiellonian University arrested by Nazis during Sonderaktion Krakau in 1939. After being freed in 1940, he took part in the underground education. In 1945, he was deputy to the State National Council.
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Fritz Hartung
1883 - 1967 (84 years)
Fritz Hartung was a political and constitutional historian of Germany. Life Fritz Hartung was born in Saarmund, a short distance to the west of Potsdam. His father worked in the Prussian government service. However, he attended secondary school far to the west in Freiburg , and then in Berlin where he passed his school final exams . He went on to study history at Heidelberg and Berlin, with a particular focus on constitutional and legal history. He was taught by a number of the leading historians of the time including Gustav Schmoller, Heinrich Brunner and Otto Hintze. It was Hintz...
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Thomas Blackwell
1701 - 1757 (56 years)
Thomas Blackwell the younger was a classical scholar, historian and "one of the major figures in the Scottish Enlightenment." Life He was born on 4 August 1701 in the city of Aberdeen, son of Rev Dr Thomas Blackwell , ministers of the Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen and later Principal of Marischal College and his wife Christian Johnston . His father was Patron of the Seven Incorporated Trades of Aberdeen from 1714 to 1728.
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Matsusaburo Fujiwara
1881 - 1946 (65 years)
Matsusaburo Fujiwara was a Japanese mathematician and historian of mathematics. Education and career Fujiwara graduated in June 1902 from secondary school at the Third Higher School in Kyoto and then studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, where he graduated in 1905. His most important teacher was Rikitaro Fujisawa . In 1906 he became a secondary school teacher at the First Higher School Daiichi Kōtō Gakkō in Tokyo. In 1908 Fujiwara and Tsuruichi Hayashi were appointed professors at Tohoku University in Sendai. To prepare for his professorial duties, Fujiwara was sent to study from 1908 to 1911 in Göttingen, Paris and Berlin.
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Rodolphe Guilland
1888 - 1981 (93 years)
Rodolphe Joseph Guilland was a French Byzantinist. Life Born in 1888, he completed his thesis on Nikephoros Gregoras , and succeeded his teacher Charles Diehl in the seat of Byzantine studies at the Sorbonne in 1934, which he held until his retirement in 1958. His chief interest was in the late Byzantine period , particularly the Palaiologan period, and his main areas of research were the history of the Great Palace of Constantinople, and of the offices, dignities, and administrative apparatus of the Byzantine state.
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Eliyahu Ashtor
1914 - 1984 (70 years)
Eliyahu Ashtor was an Austrian-Israeli historian He was from a Zionist family. Studying at Vienna University, he completed a doctorate in Oriental studies in 1936. He emigrated to Mandate Palestine in 1938, following the Anschluss to Nazi Germany, and worked in the National Libtary of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Completing another doctorate at Jerusalem University in 1944, he at first specialized on the history of the Golden age of Jewish culture in Spain but soon moved to the medieval history of the Near East, and especially social and economic history medieval Egypt, drawing from the manuscripts of the Cairo Geniza.
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Arthur Stanley Tritton
1881 - 1973 (92 years)
Arthur Stanley Tritton was a British Arabist. He wrote a number of books on Islam and its history, and from 1938 to 1946 was Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Life Tritton was born on 25 February 1881. His father was the senior pastor of a Congregational church in Great Yarmouth, but when Tritton was still young the family moved to Wandsworth.
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Michael Postan
1899 - 1981 (82 years)
Sir Michael Moissey Postan FBA was a British historian. He was known informally as Munia Postan. Biography Postan was born to a Jewish family in Bendery, in the Bessarabia Governorate of the Russian Empire, and studied at the St Vladimir University in Kyiv, leaving Russia in 1919 after the October Revolution and settling in the UK. He held positions at University College London and at the London School of Economics, before being appointed Professor of Economic History at the University of Cambridge, from 1937. He was known as an economic historian of medieval Europe. Eric Hobsbawm notes he wa...
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Owen Lattimore
1900 - 1989 (89 years)
Owen Lattimore was an American Orientalist and writer. He was an influential scholar of China and Central Asia, especially Mongolia. Although he never earned a college degree, in the 1930s he was editor of Pacific Affairs, a journal published by the Institute of Pacific Relations, and then taught at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1938 to 1963. He was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations there from 1939 to 1953. During World War II, he was an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek and the American government and contributed extensively to the public debate on American policy in Asia.
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Charles A. Beard
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
Charles Austin Beard was an American historian and professor, who wrote primarily during the first half of the 20th century. A history professor at Columbia University, Beard's influence is primarily due to his publications in the fields of history and political science. His works included a radical re-evaluation of the Founding Fathers of the United States, whom he believed to be more motivated by economics than by philosophical principles. Beard's most influential book, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States , has been the subject of great controversy ever since its publication.
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Frederick L. Schuman
1904 - 1981 (77 years)
Frederick Lewis Schuman was an American professor of history, political science and international relations at Williams College. Career Schuman was a professor of history at University of Chicago and then for 32 years at Williams College. He analyzed international relations and social science, focusing on the period between World War I and World War II.
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Herbert J. Muller
1905 - 1980 (75 years)
Herbert J. Muller was an American historian, academic, government official and writer. He received his education at Cornell University. He taught at Cornell, Purdue and Indiana University , served in the Department of State, the War Production Board, and frequently lectured abroad.
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Thomas J. Wertenbaker
1879 - 1966 (87 years)
Thomas Jefferson Wertenbaker was a leading American historian and the second Edwards Professor of American History at Princeton University. Early and family life Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, he was the youngest son of former CSA Colonel Charles C. Wertenbaker and his wife Fanny .
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Hugh Pemberton
Hugh R. Pemberton, FRHistS, is an academic historian specialising in the late twentieth-century British politics and British social and economic policy. As of 2018, he is Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Bristol.
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Lewis Eldon Atherton
1905 - 1989 (84 years)
Lewis Eldon Atherton was an American historian and academic from Missouri. He taught at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, for over 30 years. Early life Atherton was born on March 1, 1905, in the small town of Bosworth, Missouri. He was the son of Caleb Franklin Atherton and Ethel Framer. Although born in Missouri, his family originated from Brown County, Ohio. His early years were spent on the family farm.
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Romilly Jenkins
1907 - 1969 (62 years)
Romilly James Heald Jenkins was a British scholar in Byzantine and Modern Greek studies. He occupied the prestigious seat of Koraes Professor of Modern Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King's College London, in 1946–1960.
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Andreas Hillgruber
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Andreas Fritz Hillgruber was a conservative German historian who was influential as a military and diplomatic historian who played a leading role in the Historikerstreit of the 1980s. In his controversial book Zweierlei Untergang, he wrote that historians should "identify" with the Wehrmacht fighting on the Eastern Front and asserted that there was no moral difference between Allied policies towards Germany in 1944 and 1945 and the genocide waged against the Jews. The British historian Richard J. Evans wrote that Hillgruber was a great historian whose once-sterling reputation was in ruins as ...
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John Leonard Clive
1924 - 1990 (66 years)
John Leonard Clive was an American historian. He was a professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago. He is most well known for his biography of Thomas Babington Macaulay: The Shaping of the Historian, for which he won the National Book Award for Biography and History.
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Noël Denholm-Young
1904 - 1975 (71 years)
Noël Denholm-Young was an English historian. He was a Fellow and archivist of Magdalen College, Oxford specialising in the political history of late medieval England. He worked as keeper of Western manuscripts at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and later in the faculty of the University College of North Wales, Bangor. Among his publications was an edition of the chronicle Vita Edwardi Secundi.
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C. Doris Hellman
1910 - 1973 (63 years)
Clarisse Doris Hellman Pepper was an American historian of science, "one of the first professional historians of science in the United States". She specialized in 16th- and 17th-century astronomy, wrote a book on the Great Comet of 1577, and was the translator of another book, a biography of Johannes Kepler. She became a professor at the Pratt Institute and later at the Queens College, City University of New York, and was recognized by membership in several selective academic societies.
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John Bowle
1905 - 1988 (83 years)
John Edward Bowle was an English historian and writer. Education He was educated at Marlborough College. There his contemporaries included John Betjeman, who became a friend, and Anthony Blunt, about whom he was consistently negative. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was counted as an Aesthete. Bowle left Oxford with a Third in Modern History, 1927.
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Levette J. Davidson
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Levette J. Davidson was a nationally acclaimed expert in folklore, especially that of Colorado and the West. He was born in Eureka, Illinois May 16, 1894, one of four children. Because his grand uncle was past-President of Eureka College, a Christian seminary, Davidson was reared in the school's shadow with the option of becoming either a teacher or a preacher. He chose teaching and was awarded his B.A. from Eureka in 1915. A year later he received his A.M. degree from the University of Illinois where he received Phi Beta Kappa honors. In 1917 he earned his M.A. in social science and history at Harvard University.
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Francis Dvornik
1893 - 1975 (82 years)
Francis Dvornik , in Czech František Dvorník, was a Catholic priest and academic. He is considered one of the leading twentieth-century experts on Slavic and Byzantine history, and on relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.
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August C. Krey
1887 - 1961 (74 years)
August Charles Krey was an American medievalist. He was chairman of the Department of History at the University of Minnesota from 1944 to 1955. Biography Born in Germany, he immigrated to Wisconsin with his family as a child. He earned all his degrees from the University of Wisconsin between 1907 and 1914. He taught at the University of Texas and at the University of Illinois . In 1913, he joined the University of Minnesota, where he spent the rest of his career, heading the Department of History from 1944 until his retirement in 1955. He was a member of the council of the American Historica...
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John Tate Lanning
1902 - 1976 (74 years)
John Tate Lanning was a historian of Spanish America and held the James B. Duke Professor Emeritus position at Duke University. He was a major scholar of colonial Spanish American history and worked to strengthen organizations devoted to Latin American scholarship. In one obituary he was called, “a true giant” in the field. His work on the Spanish Enlightenment in Spanish America challenged received understandings of Spanish obscurantism.
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Harold James Dyos
1921 - 1978 (57 years)
Harold James Dyos was a British historian, known for his contributions to urban history. He wrote many essays addressing the issue of urbanization. Career He graduated B.A. from the London School of Economics in 1949, and gained a Ph.D. there in 1952. He taught his entire career at the University of Leicester.
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Arthur Lyon Cross
1873 - 1940 (67 years)
Arthur Lyon Cross was an American historian specializing in English history. Born in Portland, Maine, he received his doctorate from Harvard and joined the faculty of the University of Michigan in 1899.
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Ivy Pinchbeck
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Ivy Pinchbeck was a British economic and social historian, specialising in the history of women. Her book of 1930,Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750 – 1850 was a pioneering effort in women's history, and highly influential in the next half-century. She concluded that women overall gained more than they lost from the Industrial Revolution, as compared to the dangers and unsanitary and harsh working conditions of the previous era.
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Rodman W. Paul
1912 - 1987 (75 years)
Rodman Wilson Paul was an American historian who taught at the California Institute of Technology. He was known primarily as a foremost authority on California mining and agricultural Native American history.
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James Schouler
1839 - 1920 (81 years)
James Schouler was an American lawyer and historian best known for his historical work History of the United States under the Constitution, 1789–1865. Biography Schouler was born in West Cambridge , Massachusetts. He was the son of William Schouler, who from 1847 to 1853 edited the Boston Atlas, one of the leading Whig journals of New England. The son graduated at Harvard in 1859, studied law in Boston and was admitted to the bar there in 1862. In 1869 he removed to Washington, where for three years he published the United States Jurist.
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Ronald Crane
1886 - 1967 (81 years)
Ronald Salmon Crane was a literary critic, historian, bibliographer, and professor. He is credited with the founding of the Chicago School of Literary Criticism. Early life Ronald Crane was born in Tecumseh, Michigan. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan in 1908 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1911. That same year he became an instructor of English at Northwestern University. He was soon promoted to assistant professor, and then to associate professor in 1920. He continued to teach there until 1924, when he moved to the University of Chicago.
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Higashionna Kanjun
1882 - 1963 (81 years)
Higashionna Kanjun also Higaonna Kanjun was an Okinawan scholar who specialized in the history of Okinawa. Alongside Iha Fuyū and Majikina Ankō, he is considered one of the pioneers of modern Okinawan studies. After reading Japanese history at Tokyo Imperial University, where he wrote his dissertation on the approach of the Shimazu clan towards the Ryūkyū Kingdom, his subsequent career included posts at Hosei University and Takushoku University and travels in Southeast Asia and India. His extensive body of writings, collected as Higashionna Kanjun zenshū in ten volumes, centre around Ryukyuan history and culture, personal and place names, and classics such as the Omoro Sōshi.
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Paul Woolley
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Paul Woolley was professor of Church history at Westminster Theological Seminary from its inception in 1929 until his retirement in 1977. Woolley studied at Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, but left to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in 1936.
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Al-Suyuti
1445 - 1505 (60 years)
Jalal al-Din al-Suyuti , or Al-Suyuti, was an Egyptian Sunni polymath. Considered the Mujtahid and Mujaddid of the Islamic 10th century. Foremost leading muhaddith , mufassir , faqīh , usuli , sufi , theologian, grammarian, linguist, rhetorician, philologist, lexicographer and historian, who authored works in virtually every Islamic science. For this reason, he was honoured one of the most prestigious and rarest titles; Shaykh al-Islām.
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Robert Ensor
1877 - 1958 (81 years)
Sir Robert Charles Kirkwood Ensor was a British writer, poet, journalist, liberal intellectual and historian. He is best known for England: 1870-1914 , a volume in the Oxford History of England series edited by George Clark.
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Jean-Jacques Dessalines
1758 - 1806 (48 years)
Jean-Jacques Dessalines was a Haitian revolutionary, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, and the first ruler of an independent Haiti under the 1805 constitution. Initially regarded as governor-general, Dessalines was later named Emperor of Haiti as Jacques I by generals of the Haitian Revolution Army and ruled in that capacity until being assassinated in 1806. He has been referred to as the father of the nation of Haiti.
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Jalmari Jaakkola
1885 - 1964 (79 years)
Kaarle Jalmari Jaakkola was a Finnish historian and a professor of Finnish history at the University of Helsinki between 1932 and 1954. Jaakkola is known as a historian who primarily researched medieval history and sought to put forth that Finland existed as an entity already during that period. Some of Jaakkola's hypotheses are today considered to be overtly nationalist and outdated, but his influence during his lifetime remains undisputed.
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Petrus Johannes Blok
1855 - 1929 (74 years)
Petrus Johannes Blok was a Dutch historian. Biography Born in Den Helder, Blok studied at the Latin School of Alkmaar and read classics at Leiden University, receiving his doctorate for a study of Sextus Pompeius. After this, he got a position at the Leiden Latin School, and published two books on the city's Medieval and Burgundian history.
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Aleksandr Zimin
1920 - 1980 (60 years)
Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Zimin was one of the most prolific and well-known Soviet medievalists. His area of expertise was late medieval Muscovy. Zimin was born in a noble family in Moscow. In the 1950s, Zimin edited the official historical series dedicated to the history of Moscow. However, at least seven of his monographs were not published during his lifetime. His 1964 essay attempted to prove that The Song of Igor's Campaign was fabricated in the 1770s. It met skepticism and hostility from the academic community and was eventually banned from being printed.
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Svend Grundtvig
1824 - 1883 (59 years)
Svend Hersleb Grundtvig was a Danish literary historian and ethnographer. He was one of the first systematic collectors of Danish traditional music, and he was especially interested in Danish folk songs. He began the large project of editing Danish ballads. He also co-edited Icelandic ballads. He was the son of N. F. S. Grundtvig.
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Norman H. Baynes
1877 - 1961 (84 years)
Norman Hepburn Baynes was a 20th-century British historian of the Byzantine Empire. Career Baynes was Professor of Byzantine History at University College London from 1931 until 1942. He was given the title of Emeritus Professor in 1943 and Doctor of Literature honoris causa in 1951. His work included two fully annotated volumes of Hitler's pre-war speeches.
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Wolfgang Lazius
1514 - 1565 (51 years)
Wolfgang Laz, better known by his Latinized name Wolfgang Lazius , was an Austrian humanist who worked as a cartographer, historian, and physician. Lazius was born in Vienna, and first studied medicine, becoming professor in the medical faculty at the University of Vienna in 1541. He later became curator of the imperial collections of the Holy Roman Empire and official historian to Emperor Ferdinand I. In that capacity, he authored a number of historical works, in research for which he traveled widely, amassing documents from numerous monasteries and other libraries. He also produced maps of Austria, Bavaria, Hungary, and Greece, now considered important in the history of cartography.
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Ignace Gelb
1907 - 1985 (78 years)
Ignace Jay Gelb was a Polish-American ancient historian and Assyriologist who pioneered the scientific study of writing systems. Early life Born in Tarnów, Austria-Hungary , he earned his PhD from the University of Rome in 1929, then went to the University of Chicago where he was a professor of Assyriology until his death.
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Harvey Goldberg
1922 - 1987 (65 years)
Harvey Goldberg was an American historian and political activist. Biography Harvey Goldberg was born in Orange, New Jersey. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1943. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1951; the subject of his dissertation Jaurès and French foreign policy, was French Socialist leader Jean Jaurès.
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Ilmari Salomies
1893 - 1973 (80 years)
Ilmari Johannes Salomies, previously Salonen , was the Archbishop of Turku, and the spiritual head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland between 1951 and 1964. Biography Salomies was born on 17 July 1893 in Mikkeli, the son of Edvard Salonen and Hedvig Sofia Salonen.
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Joseph Aschbach
1801 - 1882 (81 years)
Joseph Ritter von Aschbach was a German historian who studied the Visigoths, writing "Geschichte der Westgoten" in 1827. Aschbach was born in Höchst . He initially studied theology and philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, but his focus soon turned to history, being influenced by Friedrich Christoph Schlosser. Since 1823 he was professor at the gymnasium of Frankfurt.
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Auguste Bouché-Leclercq
1842 - 1923 (81 years)
Auguste Bouché-Leclercq was a French historian. Life Auguste Bouché-Leclercq was born in 1842 at Francières, Oise as son of Louis-Thomas Bouché and Marie-Joséphine Leclercq. His parents were farmers. He was educated at seminaries and took his school-leaving exam in 1861 in Paris. Later he travelled as private tutor several months through Italian and German cities. In 1866 he was grammar school teacher at Meaux. In 1872 he received his doctorate in philosophy and was from 1873-1878 professor of ancient literature at the philosophical faculty of Montpellier. In 1876 he married Marie Julie Guillaume and had with her three sons and one daughter.
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N. H. Gibbs
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Norman Henry Gibbs was Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford University for 24 years from 1953 to 1977, the longest tenure of all who have held the chair since its establishment in 1909.
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