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,
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Franz Dölger
1891 - 1968 (77 years)
Franz Dölger was a German Byzantinist. He is most notable for his crucial contributions to Byzantine diplomatics, and as the chief editor of the journal Byzantinische Zeitschrift from 1931 to 1963. A member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, he received honorary doctorates from the universities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Sofia. In 1962, he was awarded the Order Pour le Mérite.
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Gyula Farkas
1894 - 1958 (64 years)
Farkas Gyula de Kisbarnak, or Julius von Farkas de Kisbarnak Biography He was born into the Roman Catholic Transdanubian Hungarian noble family Farkas de Kisbarnak. His father was Ferenc Farkas de Kisbarnak , captain of the Hungarian Royal army, notary of Kismarton and his mother was Gizella Pottyondy de Potyond und Csáford . His paternal grandfather was Farkas Ferenc de Kisbarnak , administrator of the states of Réde, property of the county Esterházys, and his paternal grandmother was Cecília Hoffmann . His maternal grandparents were dr. Ágoston Pottyondy de Potyond et Csáford, lawyer, and Mária Grohmann .
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Richard Laqueur
1881 - 1959 (78 years)
Richard Laqueur was a German historian and philologist born in Strassburg. He studied classical literature and history at the Universities of Bonn and Strassburg, and in 1904 received his doctorate of philosophy. In 1912 he became a full professor at Strassburg, and during the same year was appointed professor at the University of Giessen. From 1914 to 1918 he performed military duties during World War I, and in 1919 returned to Giessen, where he remained until 1930. Laqueur was rector at the university in 1922/23.
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Erich Swoboda
1896 - 1964 (68 years)
Erich Swoboda was an Austrian historian and ancient Roman archaeologist. In 1946, he became an associate professor at the University of Graz and became the director of the Institute for the History of Antiquity and Antiquity in Vienna. From 1951 to 1953, he served as a dean, and from 1960 to 1961 was the rector of the university. He received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art.
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Jarl Gallén
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Jarl Wilhelm Erik Gallén was a Finnish historian and Swedish-speaking professor in history at Helsinki University from 1964 to 1975. Biography Gallén was born in Helsinki in 1908. He had an interest in history from a young age. Gallén became a student in 1925, bachelor of philosophy in 1929, master of arts in 1932, licentiate in 1946 and doctor in 1947. During his studies he converted to Catholicism and founded Academicum Catholicum, of which he was president from 1936 to 1946. He took an active part in debates on ideology and politics and helped found the student society, and served as edit...
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Haralampije Polenaković
1909 - 1984 (75 years)
Haralampije Polenaković , was a Macedonian literary historian and lexicographer. Polenaković was born into a family of ethnic Serbs in the town of Gostivar, which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. He graduated from Philosophical Faculty in Skopje and then continued his studies in Zagreb where he obtained a PhD. During the Bulgarian occupation of Macedonia in World War Two he escaped to Belgrade where he founded the "Society of Refugees from South Serbia".
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Andreas Hofgaard Winsnes
1889 - 1972 (83 years)
Andreas Hofgaard Winsnes was a Norwegian literary historian and educator. Biography Winsnes was born in Nord-Odal, Norway. He was the son of Frederik Vilhelm Vinsnes and Agnete Helweg . He completed his examen artium in 1908 at Oslo Cathedral School. He became Cand.philol. from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 1913 and Dr.philos. in 1920.
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Jian Youwen
1896 - 1978 (82 years)
Jian Youwen was a Chinese historian, public official, and sometime Methodist pastor, known in particular for his writings on the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. He taught at Yenching University, the University of Hong Kong, and Yale University.
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Kenneth Hyde
1930 - 1986 (56 years)
John Kenneth Hyde was an English historian, known for his research on the city in medieval Italy, and on medieval descriptions of cities. He held the chair in medieval history of the University of Manchester .
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Zurab Avalishvili
1876 - 1944 (68 years)
Zurab Avalishvili was a Georgian historian, jurist and diplomat in the service of the Democratic Republic of Georgia . He was also known as Zurab Davidovich Avalov in a Russian manner. Born in Tbilisi, Georgia , into the family of Prince David Avalishvili, he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1900 and took post-graduate courses at the Department of Law, University of Paris from 1900 to 1903. He became a Docent at the St. Petersburg University in 1904 and a Professor of Public Law at the St. Petersburg Polytechnical Institute in 1907. He was an official adviser to the Russian Ministr...
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Geoffrey Barraclough
1908 - 1984 (76 years)
Geoffrey Barraclough was an English historian, known as a medievalist and historian of Germany. Biography He was educated at Bootham School in York and at Bradford Grammar School . He read History as an undergraduate at Oriel College, Oxford University in 1926–1929, spent the following two years studying in Munich and Rome, then returned to Oxford, to Merton College, where he was a Harmsworth Senior Scholar and a Junior Research Fellow .
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John Selwyn Bromley
1913 - 1985 (72 years)
Professor John Selwyn Bromley , was a prominent British Naval Historian. Biography Born in 1913, John Selwyn Bromley was educated at Bedford School and at New College, Oxford. He joined the Civil Service and was Private Secretary to the Financial Secretary to the Treasury between 1941 and 1946. He was Fellow in Modern History at Keble College, Oxford, between 1947 and 1960, and Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton, between 1960 and 1977. He published widely and is best known for Volume VI of the New Cambridge Modern History, published in 1970.
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Menahem Stern
1925 - 1989 (64 years)
Menahem Stern was an internationally acclaimed Israeli historian of the Second Temple period. He was murdered in Jerusalem by Palestinians during the First Intifada. Biography Menahem Stern was born in 1925 in Białystok, Poland. His father was a Lithuanian misnaged while his mother came from a Hasidic family. In his childhood he studied Hebrew and religious texts, but later acquired a general education that included Latin. In 1938 he immigrated to Palestine with his parents via Vienna. They settled in Haifa, where he studied at the Hebrew Reali School. When the family moved to Tel Aviv, he sw...
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Franklin Lafayette Riley Jr.
1868 - 1929 (61 years)
Franklin Lafayette Riley Jr. was an American historian. The title of his dissertation was Colonial Origins of New England Senates. After taking his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins University he was appointed as the first Professor of History at Ole Miss. In his capacity as a professor at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, he helped to establish the Mississippi Historical Society and later the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. In 1902, he wrote a paper detailing the lineage of his grandfather, Edward Riley, and his descendants.
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Wallace Sterling
1906 - 1985 (79 years)
John Ewart Wallace Sterling was an American educator who served as the 5th President of Stanford University between 1949 and 1968. Life and career Sterling was born in Linwood, Ontario, the son of Annie and William Sterling, a Methodist clergyman. He pursued his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and received a Master of Arts degree from the University of Alberta.
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Margaret Shove Morriss
1884 - 1975 (91 years)
Margaret Shove Morriss was an American academic historian, She was the Dean of Women in charge of Pembroke College in Brown University from 1923 to 1950. Early life and education Margaret Shove Morriss was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, the daughter of William Hayles Morriss and Mary Elizabeth Hairland Morriss. She completed undergraduate studies at Goucher College in 1904, and was granted a PhD from Bryn Mawr College in 1911, for her research on trade in colonial Maryland.
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Jan Romein
1893 - 1962 (69 years)
Jan Marius Romein was a Dutch historian, journalist, literary scholar and professor of history at the University of Amsterdam. A Marxist and a student of Huizinga, Romein is remembered for his popularizing books of Dutch national history, jointly authored with his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Italian, Polish, Indonesian and Japanese.
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Alexander Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg
1905 - 1964 (59 years)
Count Alexander von Stauffenberg was a German aristocrat and historian. His twin brother Berthold Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and younger brother Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg were among the leaders of the 20 July Plot against Hitler in 1944.
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Seiichi Iwao
1900 - 1988 (88 years)
Seiichi Iwao was a Japanese academic, an historian and author. He was for many years a professor at the University of Tokyo. Early life Seiichi was born in Tokyo. He attended the University of Tokyo, graduating in 1925.
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Vladimir Vikentyev
1882 - 1960 (78 years)
Vladimir Mikhailovich Vikentyev was an Egyptologist from the Russian Empire. He graduated from the Romano-German department of the faculty of Historical philology at Moscow University with a first class diploma. In 1915 he was hired by the Historical museum named after Tsar Alexander III. In 1922 he went abroad. He taught Egyptian philology and the ancient history of the Near East at Cairo University.
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