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,
#8651
William Brede Kristensen
1867 - 1953 (86 years)
William Brede Kristensen was a Norwegian born, Dutch theologian, professor and historian of religion. Biography William Brede Kristensen was born at Kristiansand in Vest-Agder, Norway. He was the son of parish priest Kristian Nicolai Kristensen and Caroline Emilie Bjørnson . His mother was a sister of Nobel Prize winning author Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson .
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Séraphin Marion
1896 - 1983 (87 years)
Seraphin Marion was a Canadian professor, historian and literary critic. Biography Marion was born in Ottawa on November 25, 1896. He was a vocal advocate of francophone rights outside Quebec. Marion graduated from the University of Ottawa with a BA in 1918 and MA in 1922. After receiving his doctorate from the Université de Paris, he taught French at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario . From 1926 to 1954 he taught French and French-Canadian literature at the University of Ottawa, later being named professor emeritus. He authored 20 studies, including a nine-volume collection entitled Les Lettres canadiennes d’autrefois .
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Johannes Gerard van Dillen
1883 - 1969 (86 years)
Johannes Gerard van Dillen was a Dutch economic historian. Van Dillen completed gymnasium in Amsterdam and earned his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1914. From 1915 to 1921, he served as privatdozent in economic history at the university. In 1920, he assumed a role at the Bureau for the Rijks Geschiedkundige Publicatiën , an institution dedicated to publishing historical sources. Additionally, he held the position of secretary in the editorial committee of the Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis, Land- en Volkenkunde.
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Philip van Ness Myers
1846 - 1937 (91 years)
Philip van Ness Myers was an American historian who was Professor of Economics and History at the University of Cincinnati and an author of several notable works on history. Biography Philip van Ness Myers was born in Tribes Hill, New York on August 10, 1846. He attended Gilmore Academy at Ballston Spa, New York, and graduated from Williams College in 1871. From 1873 and 1874 Myers studied law at Yale University and took graduate a graduate course in economics.
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Jaakko Suolahti
1918 - 1987 (69 years)
Jaakko Suolahti was a Finnish classical scholar and historian Suolahti was one of the leading classicists during his time and reached international recognition within the areas of political- and social culture in the Roman Republic.
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Hugh Last
1894 - 1957 (63 years)
Hugh Macilwain Last was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford and Principal of Brasenose College, Oxford. Early life Last was born in London on 3 December 1894; his father was William Last, director of the Science Museum. He was educated at St Paul's School, London and then Lincoln College, Oxford. Starting late at university because of health problems, he obtained a first-class degree in literae humaniores in 1918.
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Maxime Leroy
1873 - 1957 (84 years)
Maxime Leroy was a French jurist and social historian. Career Maxime Leroy studied law at the university of Nancy, where he obtained his doctorate in 1898. A friend of Victor Griffuelhes and Alphonse Merrheim, he devoted his first works to the development of trade unionism and its legal and social impact. In 1909 he founded the "Société des amis du lac" at Soorts-Hossegor, where writers such as J.-H. Rosny jeune, Paul Margueritte and Gaston Chérau had been meeting for some years. A member of the Human Rights League of France and a supporter of the League of Nations, he participated in numerous international meetings and had a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and H.G.
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Edmund Garratt Gardner
1869 - 1935 (66 years)
Edmund Garratt Gardner, FBA was an English scholar and writer, specializing in Italian history and literature. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he was regarded as one of the foremost British Dante scholars.
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Frederick Wood
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Frederick Lloyd Whitfeld Wood was a notable New Zealand historian and university professor. Biography He was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia in 1903. His father was George Arnold Wood who taught history at the University of Sydney. Wood Jr. was educated at Sydney Grammar School, Sydney University, and Balliol College, Oxford. When he returned to Sydney, he privately tutored the later Nobel-laureate Patrick White.
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Themistocles Zammit
1864 - 1935 (71 years)
Sir Themistocles "Temi" Zammit was a Maltese archaeologist and historian, professor of chemistry, medical doctor, researcher and writer. He served as Rector of the Royal University of Malta and first Director of the National Museum of Archaeology in his native city, Valletta.
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Niccolò Rodolico
1873 - 1969 (96 years)
Niccolò Rodolico was an Italian historian, a professor in the University of Messina and the University of Florence. Born at Trapani, a fishing port in Sicily, after attending the Liceo Ximenes in his home town, where he was a friend of Giovanni Gentile, Rodolico went on to the University of Bologna. There, he was a student of Giosuè Carducci, who directed him towards focussing on the study of history. At first his interests centred on the Late Middle Ages, with particular regard to the social history of Florence. Later, he turned his attention towards modern history and above all that of Tuscany and Southern Italy in the eighteenth century.
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Jonathan Holloway
1900 - Present (125 years)
Jonathan Scott Holloway is an American historian, academic administrator, and the 21st president of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Holloway was named as the president of Rutgers University in January 2020 becoming the first person of color and first African American to be named president of Rutgers. He assumed the position on July 1, 2020. Before coming to Rutgers, he was the provost of Northwestern University, a position he held between August 1, 2017, and July 1, 2020. Before that, he was the dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies at Yale University.
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Agnes Mure Mackenzie
1891 - 1956 (65 years)
Agnes Mure Mackenzie CBE was a Scottish historian and writer. Her middle name is frequently misspelled Muir. Life Mackenzie was the daughter of physician and surgeon Dr Murdoch Mackenzie and Sarah Agnes Mackenzie ; Agnes was born in Stornoway on Lewis, then a busy fishing port. In childhood she was taken seriously ill with scarlet fever, the after-effects of which left her with poor hearing and eyesight. Educated at home until the age of fourteen, she then attended the Nicolson Institute until the age of seventeen. She then left Lewis for Aberdeen. As an undergraduate at the University of Abe...
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William Page
1861 - 1934 (73 years)
William Henry Page was a British prolific and pioneering historian and editor. For the last three decades of his life he was general editor of the Victoria County History. Life William Page was born at his family's house at Norfolk Square, Paddington, London on 4 September 1861, the fifth of six children of merchant Henry Page and Georgina . He was privately schooled locally at Dr Westmacott's School and then entered Westminster School, where his education was cut short by the death of his father in 1875. The family moved to "a genteel part" of Lewisham, and Page was articled to a civil engineer.
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Claude H. Van Tyne
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Claude Halstead Van Tyne was an American historian. He was a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania in 1902. He taught history at the University of Michigan from 1903 to 1930 and wrote several books on the American Revolution. He won the Pulitzer Prize for The War of Independence in 1930.
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Barbara Wertheimer
1926 - 1983 (57 years)
Barbara Mayer Wertheimer was an American historian and labor organizer. Her research specialized in United States labor and gender history. Wertheimer served as an associate professor at Cornell University from 1977 to 1983, where she cofounded and directed the Institute for Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School. Wertheimer was also the first president and founding member of the New York Labor History Association, and is known for her monograph We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America .
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Otto Brunner
1898 - 1982 (84 years)
Otto Brunner was an Austrian historian. He is best known for his work on later medieval and early modern European social history. Brunner's research made a sharp break with the traditional forms of political and social history practiced in German and Austrian academia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, proposing in its place a new model of social history informed by attention to "folkish" cultural values, particularly as related to political violence and ideas of lordship and leadership.
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Marijan Mole
1924 - 1963 (39 years)
Marijan Molé was a Slovenian-Polish scholar of Middle and Modern Iranian studies, who also contributed to the fields of Islamic and particularly Sufi studies. Biography His father, Vojeslav Molé , was a Slovenian writer and historian of art who lectured at the University of Ljubljana. In 1925 he moved as a visiting professor to Poland, the native land of Marijan's mother. Molé showed an early interest in linguistics and mathematics. When World War II broke out, his family escaped to Leopoli in Ukraine. Back in Poland, he obtained his doctorate in Iranian philology under the direction of Tadeusz Jan Kowalski at the Jagiellonian University.
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Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri
1892 - 1957 (65 years)
Hem Chandra Raychaudhuri was an Indian historian, known for his studies on ancient India. Early life and education He came from a Baidya family. He was the son of Manoranjan Raychaudhuri, the Zamindar of Ponabalia in the present-day Jhalokati District in Bangladesh, and his wife Tarangini Devi. He completed his schooling at Brajamohan Institution in Barisal. He passed the University of Calcutta's entrance examination in 1907, standing first. He then joined Scottish Church College, Calcutta and after that Presidency College, Calcutta, standing First in the First Class in his B.A. examination in 1911.
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Julius Ruska
1867 - 1949 (82 years)
Julius Ferdinand Ruska was a German orientalist, historian of science and educator. He was a critical scholar of alchemical literature, and of Islamic science, raising many issues on attributions and sources of the texts, and providing translations. The range of his studies was wide, including the Emerald Tablet, a basic hermetic text. From 1924 he headed an institute in Heidelberg, where he has been a student.
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