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,
#1201
Martin Hengel
#13349
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Martin Hengel was a German historian of religion, focusing on the "Second Temple Period" or "Hellenistic Period" of early Judaism and Christianity. Biography Early life Hengel was born in Reutlingen, south of Stuttgart, in 1926 and grew up in nearby Aalen. In 1943 he was conscripted as a 17-year-old schoolboy into the Wehrmacht and served in an anti-aircraft battery on the Western Front. In 1945, after one of the final battles of World War II, he threw away his weapons and uniform and walked home from France, completing his schooling in 1946. In late 1947 Hengel began his theological studies in Tübingen, moving to the University of Heidelberg in 1949.
Go to Profile#1202
Klaus Hentschel
#11200
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Klaus Hentschel is a German physicist, historian of science and professor. He is the head of the University of Stuttgart's History of Science and Technology section of its History department. Life and work Born in Bad Nauheim, Hentschel from 1979 to 1985 studied physics, philosophy, science, history and musicology at the University of Hamburg. He completed his studies in philosophy in 1985 with the master's examination, and a study in physics in 1987. After some studies in the United States, among others in Boston on a DAAD, he in 1989 received his PhD at the University of Hamburg. His thesis...
Go to Profile#1203
Stillman Drake
#24612
Overall Influence
1910 - 1993 (83 years)
Stillman Drake , an American historian of science who moved to Canada in 1967 and acquired Canadian citizenship a few years later, is best known for his work on Galileo Galilei . Including his translations, Drake wrote 16 books on Galileo and contributed to 15 others.
Go to Profile#1204
Vinay Lal
#38183
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Vinay Lal is a historian of India. He is Professor of History and Asian American Studies at UCLA. He writes widely on the history and culture of colonial and modern India, popular and public culture in India, cinema, historiography, the politics of world history, the Indian diaspora, global politics, contemporary American politics, the life and thought of Mohandas Gandhi, Hinduism, and the politics of knowledge systems. He is known for his radical political views and for making his history lectures available for free on his YouTube channel.
Go to Profile#1205
Andrew Gillett
#56689
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Andrew Gillett is an Australian historian who is associate professor of history at the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. A protégé of Walter Goffart of the Toronto School of History, Gillett researches and teaches the field of Late Antiquity.
Go to Profile#1206
Marjorie Chibnall
#38296
Overall Influence
1915 - 2012 (97 years)
Marjorie McCallum Chibnall was an English historian, medievalist and Latin translator. She edited the Historia Ecclesiastica by Orderic Vitalis, with whom she shared the same birthplace of Atcham in Shropshire.
Go to Profile#1207
G. E. R. Lloyd
#16076
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Sir Geoffrey Ernest Richard Lloyd , usually cited as G. E. R. Lloyd, is a historian of ancient science and medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the senior scholar in residence at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, England.
Go to Profile#1208
Thomas Asbridge
#46607
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Thomas Scott Asbridge is a historian at Queen Mary University of London, a position he has held since 1999. He is the author of The First Crusade: A New History , a book which describes the background, events, and consequences of the First Crusade, as well as of The Crusades: The War for the Holy Land , a volume providing a view on the crusading movement, portraying the ideas of justified violence and jihad.
Go to Profile#1209
Ross E. Dunn
#69488
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Ross E. Dunn is an American historian and writer, the author of several books including The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, and coauthor of the highly cited History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past. He is Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University.
Go to Profile#1210
David Oshinsky
#7735
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
David M. Oshinsky is an American historian. He is the director of the Division of Medical Humanities at NYU School of Medicine and a professor in the Department of History at New York University. Background Oshinsky graduated from Cornell in 1965 and obtained his PhD from Brandeis University in 1971. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize in History for his 2005 book, Polio: An American Story. Oshinsky’s most recent book, Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, was published in 2016. His other books include the D.B. Hardeman Prize-winning A Conspiracy S...
Go to Profile#1211
Saidiya Hartman
#7882
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Saidiya Hartman is an American writer and academic focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a University Professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.
Go to Profile#1212
Nico Perrone
#19327
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Nico Perrone is an Italian essayist, historian and journalist. He firstly discovered papers on the plot for killing Enrico Mattei, the Italian state tycoon for oil in the 1950s. He is the author of twenty books, and some fifty shorter essays published in Italy, Denmark and the USA. He is the author also of a thousand leading articles and other contributions to Italian and Swiss newspapers.
Go to Profile#1213
William Woodruff
#45491
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
William Woodruff was a professor of world history and author. His two autobiographical works, The Road to Nab End and its sequel Beyond Nab End, both became bestsellers in the United Kingdom. The memoirs, covering Woodruff's impoverished upbringing in an English weaving community during the Great Depression, contain significant amounts of social commentary about the conditions in which he lived.
Go to Profile#1214
Kenneth W. Harl
#37368
Overall Influence
Kenneth W. Harl is an American scholar, author, and classicist. He received his B.A. in Classics and History at Trinity College, and his M.A. and PhD at Yale University. He was a Professor of History at Tulane University in New Orleans until his retirement in 2022.
Go to Profile#1215
Joseph Dauben
#18716
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Joseph Warren Dauben is a Herbert H. Lehman Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University. His fields of expertise are the history of science, the history of mathematics, the scientific revolution, the sociology of science, intellectual history, the 17th and 18th centuries, the history of Chinese science, and the history of botany.
Go to Profile#1216
Kiran Klaus Patel
#47872
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kiran Klaus Patel is a German historian. He holds a Chair at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Education and career Patel studied history at the University of Freiburg and at Humboldt University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#1217
Klaus Schroeder
#16217
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Klaus Schroeder is a German political scientist and historian. He teaches at the Free University of Berlin and the Otto Suhr Institute. He is prolific as an author and commentator on the history of the German Democratic Republic and on the enduring post-German reunification conflicts and tensions in Germany.
Go to Profile#1218
Merritt Roe Smith
#20021
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Merritt Roe Smith is an American historian. He is the Leverett and William Cutten Professor of the History of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Life Smith graduated from Georgetown University, and Pennsylvania State University with a Ph.D. His research focuses on the history of technological innovation and social change. He is currently writing a monograph on technology and the American Civil War. Smith is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he is past president of the Society for the History of Technology.
Go to Profile#1219
John Baptist Wolf
#35676
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
John Baptist Wolf was an American historian, specializing in modern European history. Life Born in Ouray, Colorado, on July 16, 1907, Wolf was the son of a German immigrant. Wolf received his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Colorado, then attended Northwestern University, before entering the doctoral program at the University of Minnesota. He received his doctorate in 1934 for a dissertation on the diplomatic history of the Baghdad Railway, published in 1936.
Go to Profile#1220
Carl Chinn
#43256
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Carl Steven Alfred Chinn is an English historian, writer and broadcaster whose working life has been devoted to the study and popularisation of the city of Birmingham. He broadcast a programme on the BBC from the mid-1990s focusing on Birmingham's history.
Go to Profile#1221
Hans Medick
#41639
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Hans Medick is a German historian. Life Born in Wuppertal, Medick studied history, philosophy, English and political science at the universities of Cologne, Heidelberg and Erlangen from 1959 to 1966. After graduating with a master's degree, he was a research assistant at the University of Erlangen from 1967 to 1973, where he also received his doctorate under Kurt Kluxen in 1971. In July 1972, he received the faculty prize for his dissertation. From 1973 to 2004, he worked as a research assistant at the Göttingen Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. After vario...
Go to Profile#1222
Tony Badger
#39551
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Anthony John "Tony" Badger is a British academic and historian. Until 2014 he was Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and Master of Clare College, Cambridge. He is a specialist in post-World War II Southern American political history.
Go to Profile#1223
Miri Rubin
#27554
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Miri Rubin is a historian and Professor of Medieval and Early Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. She was educated at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Cambridge, where she gained her doctorate and was later awarded a research fellowship and a post-doctoral research fellowship at Girton College. Rubin studies the social and religious history of Europe between 1100 and 1500, concentrating on the interactions between public rituals, power, and community life.
Go to Profile#1224
Denis Crouzet
#27973
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Denis Bertrand Yves Crouzet is a French historian specialising in the history of the early modern period and particularly in the French Wars of Religion during the reformation. He is a professor at Paris-Sorbonne University where he holds the chair in History of the 16th Century. He is married to the historian Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan.
Go to Profile#1225
Donnchadh Ó Corráin
#40753
Overall Influence
1942 - 2017 (75 years)
Donnchadh Ó Corráin was an Irish historian and Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at University College Cork. He earned his BA in history and Irish from that institution, graduating in 1964. He was an early Irish and mediaeval historian and published on the Viking Wars, Ireland in the pre-Hiberno-Norman period and the origin of Irish language names. In addition to his position at UCC, he held academic positions at University College Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, Cambridge University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Oslo and Oxford University, where he was a Visi...
Go to Profile#1226
Pauline Allen
#45716
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Pauline Allen, is an Australian scholar of early Christianity. She is Research Professor of Early Christian Studies and the Director of the Centre for Early Christian Studies at the Australian Catholic University.
Go to Profile#1227
Steven Hahn
#41742
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Steven Howard Hahn is Professor of History at New York University. Life Hahn was born on July 18, 1951, in New York City. Educated at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Eugene Genovese and Herbert Gutman, Hahn received his PhD degree from Yale University. His dissertation was overseen by C. Vann Woodward, and later Howard R. Lamar.
Go to Profile#1228
John W. Blassingame
#46053
Overall Influence
1940 - 2000 (60 years)
John Wesley Blassingame was an American historian and pioneer in the study of slavery in the United States. He was the former chairman of the African-American studies program at Yale University. Biography Blassingame was born on March 23, 1940, in Covington, Georgia, to Grady and Odessa Blassingame. He received a bachelor's degree at Fort Valley State College , a master's degree at Howard University , and a master's degree and a doctorate at Yale University. His doctoral dissertation, written under the supervision of C. Vann Woodward, was titled A Social and Economic Study of the Negro in N...
Go to Profile#1229
Andrzej Ajnenkiel
#51115
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Andrzej Ajnenkiel was a Polish historian. He specialized in the political history of Poland and the history of Polish law, especially constitutional law. He was a son of Stefan and Janina. From 1949 to 1954 Ajnenkiel studied law at the University of Warsaw. Since 1979 Ajnenkiel had been a professor at the Institute of History at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. In 1991 he gained a professor degree, the highest academic degree in Poland, and later a habilitation. He was a member and director of several historical societies, including the Polish Historical Society.
Go to Profile#1230
Jean H. Baker
#34327
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Jean Hogarth Harvey Baker is an American historian and professor emerita at Goucher College, where she was the Bennett-Hartwood Professor of History. Baker was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow in 1982.
Go to Profile#1231
Hal Brands
#37985
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Hal Brands is an American political scientist and writer. He is an international relations scholar of U.S. foreign policy. He is the Henry A. Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He graduated from Stanford University with a BA in history and political science and earned his MA, MPhil, and PhD in history from Yale University. His father is historian H. W. Brands.
Go to Profile#1232
Michael Sells
#18785
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Michael Anthony Sells is John Henry Barrows Professor of Islamic History and Literature in the Divinity School and in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. Michael Sells studies and teaches in the areas of Qur'anic studies, Sufism, Arabic and Islamic love poetry, mysticism , and religion and violence.
Go to Profile#1233
Massimo Montanari
#33599
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Massimo Montanari, currently Professor of Medieval History at Bologna University, is a scholar in Food studies. His interest in the subject stems from his researches and studies in Medieval Agrarian History. He has been invited as visiting professor to a number of leading universities in Europe, Japan, the United States, Mexico and Canada.
Go to Profile#1234
Robert Gildea
#48949
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Robert Nigel Gildea is professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and is the author of several influential books on 20th century French history. Biography Robert Gildea was born on 12 September 1952. He was educated at Dulwich College and at Merton College, Oxford, before attending St Antony's for a D.Phil under the supervision of Theodore Zeldin. His D.Phil. research was in French provincial education. Before being appointed Fellow in Modern History at Merton in 1979, he was a lecturer at King's College, London.
Go to Profile#1235
Timothy Reuter
#43221
Overall Influence
1947 - 2002 (55 years)
Timothy Alan Reuter , grandson of the former mayor of Berlin Ernst Reuter, was a German-British historian who specialized in the study of medieval Germany, particularly the social, military and ecclesiastical institutions of the Ottonian and Salian periods .
Go to Profile#1236
Bülent İplikçioğlu
#71215
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Bülent İplikçioğlu , is Turkish historian, epigrapher and professor of ancient history at the Marmara University in Istanbul. İplikçioğlu studied History, Ancient History, Classics and Archaeology at the universities of Ankara and Vienna in the years 1970–1982. In Vienna, he received his PhD with a thesis on “Die Repräsentanten des senatorischen Reichsdienstes in Asia bis Diokletian im Spiegel der ephesischen Inschriften” in 1982. Until 1984, he was a university assistant to the Chair of Ancient History at the University of Ankara, from 1984 to 1986 an assistant professor in the Department of ...
Go to Profile#1237
Osmo Jussila
#66956
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
Osmo Tapio Jussila , was a Finnish historian. Jussila was 1980-83 assistant professor in political history at Helsinki University and professor 1983-2001. He had in his research treated foremost the Finland–Russia relations. Suomen tie 1944-1948 is a research about the acts of the Finnish communist party after the second world war.
Go to Profile#1238
Khursheed Kamal Aziz
#33310
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Khursheed Kamal Aziz better known as K. K. Aziz, was a Pakistani historian, admired for his books written in the English Language. However, he also wrote Urdu prose and was a staunch believer in the importance of the Persian language to enhance one's knowledge about the world.
Go to Profile#1239
Theodore Roszak
#4562
Overall Influence
1933 - 2011 (78 years)
Theodore Roszak was an American academic and novelist who concluded his academic career as Professor Emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay. He is best known for his 1969 text The Making of a Counter Culture.
Go to Profile#1240
Pierre Toubert
#39984
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Pierre Toubert is a French historian. He is a professor of medieval history at the University of Paris and the Collège de France. Focusing on medieval history, his most monumental work is Les structures du Latium médiéval : Le Latium méridional et la Sabine du IXe siècle à la fin du XIIe siècle , in which he outlines an influential, in-depth study of incastellamento in the Lazio region of Italy.
Go to Profile#1241
Maria Tatar
#15524
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Maria Magdalene Tatar is an American academic whose expertise lies in children's literature, German literature, and folklore. She is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#1242
Jeffrey Wasserstrom
#16535
Overall Influence
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is an American historian of modern China. He is Chancellor's Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. Wasserstrom's research interests began with the role of student protest and have grown to include the social history of China and comparative social history. Wasserstrom also writes about China for a popular audience.
Go to Profile#1243
Frederick W. Mote
#38629
Overall Influence
1922 - 2005 (83 years)
Frederick Wade "Fritz" Mote was an American sinologist and a professor of History at Princeton University for nearly 50 years. His research and teaching interests focused on China during the Yuan and Ming dynasties. In collaboration with Denis C. Twitchett and John K. Fairbank he helped create The Cambridge History of China, a monumental history of China.
Go to Profile#1244
Djibril Tamsir Niane
#16841
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Djibril Tamsir Niane was a Guinean historian, playwright, and short story writer. Biography Born in Conakry, Guinea, his secondary education was in Senegal and his degree from the University of Bordeaux. He was an honorary professor of Howard University and the University of Tokyo. He is noted for introducing the Epic of Sundiata, about Sundiata Keita , founder of the Mali Empire, to the Western world in 1960 by translating the story told to him by Djeli Mamoudou Kouyate, a griot or traditional oral historian. He also edited Volume IV —Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century— of the UNESCO General History of Africa and did other UNESCO projects.
Go to Profile#1245
Dariusz Stola
#48649
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Dariusz Stola is a professor of history at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Career Stola teaches modern history and studies 20th-century human migrations, the Holocaust, Polish-Jewish relations, and the history of postwar Poland's communist regime. From 2014 to 2019 he was director of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews. He is the author or co-author of seven books and over one hundred scholarly papers.
Go to Profile#1246
Martin Blumenson
#20479
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Martin Blumenson was an American military historian who served as a historical officer with the Third and Seventh Armies in World War II and later became a prolific author. His works included a biography of General George S. Patton.
Go to Profile#1247
Roman Serbyn
#70762
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Roman Serbyn is an historian, and a professor emeritus of Russian and East European history at the University of Quebec at Montreal, and an expert on Ukraine. He currently resides in Montreal, Canada.
Go to Profile#1248
Stephen Snobelen
#24552
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stephen Snobelen is a professor of the history of science and technology at the University of King's College in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His current teaching and research interests are History of science ; Isaac Newton and Newton's theological writings and prophetic writings, Science and religion; The popularization of science; Radical theology in the Early Modern period; and Millenarianism.
Go to Profile#1249
Nicholas Tarling
#46391
Overall Influence
1931 - 2017 (86 years)
Peter Nicholas Tarling was a historian, academic, and author. He specialised in Southeast Asian history, and wrote on 18th- and 19th-century Malaysia, North Borneo, Philippines, and Laos, especially regarding foreign involvement in those countries.
Go to Profile#1250
Barre Toelken
#7024
Overall Influence
1935 - 2018 (83 years)
John Barre Toelken was an award-winning American folklorist, noted for his study of Native American material and oral traditions. Early life and education Barre Toelken was born in Enfield, Massachusetts, to parents John and Sylvia Toelken. The family later moved to Springfield. He began to attend the Utah State University in 1953, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in English. Toelken completed a master's degree in English literature from Washington State University, followed by a doctorate from the University of Oregon.
Go to Profile