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.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in History,

#2901

Józef Andrzej Gierowski

Józef Andrzej Gierowski
#81256
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Józef Andrzej Gierowski was a Polish historian, professor and rector of the Jagiellonian University. Career Soldier of Armia Krajowa during World War II. Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, director of its Institute of History and its Department of History of Silesia . Rector of the Jagiellonian University from 1981 to 1987. Member of the Polish Academy of Learning, from 1990 director of its Philosophical-Historical Sciences Division. Deputy in the Sejm of the People's Republic of Poland 1985-1989.
Go to Profile
#2902

Steven Kaplan

#74730
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Steven Laurence Kaplan is professor emeritus and former Goldwin Smith Professor of European History in the Department of History at Cornell University. His primary fields of expertise are French history, the history of markets, economic regulation, and political economy, and the history of food, specifically the history of bread, the grain trade and provisioning.
Go to Profile
#2903

Arnold Thackray

Arnold Thackray
#63813
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Arnold Thackray is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Initially an English chemist, he became an entrepreneurial American. Thackray founded or extended a series of institutions, initially in Philadelphia , then on a wider scale within the History of Science Society and through Science History Consultants, and the Life Sciences Foundation.
Go to Profile
#2904

Douglas Porch

Douglas Porch
#46240
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Douglas Porch is an American military historian and academic. He currently serves as a Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School, and is the former Chair of the Department of National Security Affairs for the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, California.
Go to Profile
#2905

Philippe Maurice

#35833
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Philippe Maurice was a French criminal sentenced to death by the French courts in 1980 and then pardoned. His death sentence was the last confirmed by the courts. While imprisoned he became a historian and now specialises in medieval history.
Go to Profile
#2906

John Van Antwerp Fine Jr.

#68872
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
John V. A. Fine Jr. is an American historian and author. He is professor of Balkan and Byzantine history at the University of Michigan and has written several books on the subject. Early life and education He was born in 1939 and grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. His father, John Van Antwerp Fine Sr. , was Professor of Greek History in the Classics Department of Princeton University. His mother, Elizabeth Bunting Fine, was also a classicist and taught Latin and Greek at Miss Fine’s School.
Go to Profile
#2907

Elena Abramovna Davidovich

#73610
Overall Influence
1922 - 2013 (91 years)
Elena Abramovna Davidovich was a Russian archaeologist and numismatist, who specialised in the coinages of Central Asia. A founder of the discipline of archaeology in Tajikistan, Davidovich also argued that numismatics was a discipline equal to archaeology as a historical science.
Go to Profile
#2908

K. Indrapala

#56959
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Professor Karthigesu Indrapala is a Sri Lankan academic, historian, archaeologist, author and former dean of the Faculty of Arts, University of Jaffna. Early life and family Indrapala was born on 22 October 1938. He was the son of K. Karthigesu and Kanakambikai Ambal from Vaddukoddai in northern Ceylon. He was educated at Jaffna College. After school he joined the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya in 1956, graduating with a first class honours degree in ancient history.
Go to Profile
#2909

Finn Fuglestad

#114109
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Finn Fuglestad is a Norwegian historian. He became an associate professor at the University of Oslo in 1984, and moved up the ranks to become professor in 1991. Selected bibliography A history of Niger 1850-1960, 1983.Norwegian Missions in African History. Vol.2 Madagascar, 1986.Spansk historie : et riss, Åsmund Egge and Finn Fuglestad , 1990.En ny verden: Omkring Columbus, with Jens Erland Braarvig, 1993.Latin-Amerika og Karibiens historie, 1994.Fra Svartedauden til Wiener-kongressen. Den vesterlandske kulturkretsens historie 1347-1815 i et globalt-sammenliknende perspektiv, 1999.Spanias og Portugals historie.
Go to Profile
#2910

Al Richardson

#61409
Overall Influence
1941 - 2003 (62 years)
Alec Stuart "Al" Richardson was a British Trotskyist historian and activist. Biography Born in Woolley Colliery, a pit village near Barnsley in Yorkshire, Richardson studied theology at the University of Hull before becoming a lecturer at the University of Exeter. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain, but left after reading Isaac Deutscher's biography of Leon Trotsky. Convinced of Trotskyism, Richardson joined the Socialist Labour League , and resigned from the faculty at Exeter to become a history teacher at Forest Hill School, South London. He soon quit the SLL to join the rival I...
Go to Profile
#2911

Elizabeth D. Leonard

#88677
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Elizabeth D. Leonard is an American historian and the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History at Colby College in Maine. Her areas of specialty include American women and the Civil War era.
Go to Profile
#2912

Athan Theoharis

#15177
Overall Influence
1936 - 2021 (85 years)
Athan George Theoharis was an American historian, professor of history at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As well as his extensive teaching career, he was noteworthy as an expert on the Federal Bureau of Investigation , J. Edgar Hoover, and U.S. intelligence agencies, having written and edited many books on these and related subjects.
Go to Profile
#2913

Jukka Nevakivi

#102096
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Jukka Taneli Nevakivi, , is a Finnish historian. He studied at the University of London, completing his Ph.D. in 1963. Nevakivi was a journalist between 1954 and 1963 for Kaleva and Suomen Kuvalehti. Between 1963 and 1979 he served in the Finnish foreign département in Budapest, Cairo and Paris. In 1980-95 he was professor in political history at Helsinki University.
Go to Profile
#2914

Pierre Riché

Pierre Riché
#37556
Overall Influence
1921 - 2019 (98 years)
Pierre Riché was a French historian specializing in the early Middle Ages and the year 1000 . Biography After studying at the Faculté des lettres de Paris, he passed the aggregation of history in 1948, and taught at the high school of Constantine and at Le Mans. In 1953, he was appointed assistant at the Sorbonne.
Go to Profile
#2915

Elizabeth Redgate

#56165
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Anne Elizabeth Redgate or A. E. Redgate was born in Lancashire and educated at Bolton School Girls Division and St. Anne's College, Oxford. Since completing her education, she has taught Early Medieval History as a lecturer at the Newcastle University. Her book The Armenians covers the entire eventful career of the Armenian people occupying the most south-easterly outpost of Europe from their still-mysterious origins around 1165 BC until present day.
Go to Profile
#2916

Henrietta Harrison

#41073
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Henrietta Katherine Harrison, is a British historian, sinologist, and academic. Since 2012, she has been Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the University of Oxford. She was previously a junior research fellow at St Anne's College, Oxford , a lecturer in Chinese at the University of Leeds , and a professor at Harvard University .
Go to Profile
#2917

John D. Turner

#15788
Overall Influence
1938 - 2019 (81 years)
John D. Turner was the Cotner Professor of Religious Studies and Charles J. Mach University Professor of Classics and History Classics & Religious Studies at the University of Nebraska. He was well known for his translations of the Nag Hammadi library.
Go to Profile
#2918

Ronald Fraser

#40419
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Ronald Angus Fraser was a British historian noted for his oral histories and in particular for Blood of Spain, his oral history of the Spanish Civil War. Born in Hamburg to an upper-middle class Scottish father and wealthy American mother, Fraser was educated at boarding school in England and the USA and undertook further studies in Switzerland and France. He chronicled his upbringing in his oral history In Search of a Past: The Rearing of an English Gentleman, 1933-1945 , in which interviews with the servants at his family's Berkshire country house served as a counterpoint to his own memories.
Go to Profile
#2919

Maya Shatzmiller

#60582
Overall Influence
Maya Shatzmiller is a historian whose scholarship focusses on the economic history of the Muslim world. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2003. She received her PhD from the University of Provence in 1973, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in 1992. Shatzmiller is a professor of history at the University of Western Ontario.
Go to Profile
#2920

Charles Verlinden

#85373
Overall Influence
1907 - 1996 (89 years)
Charles Verlinden was a Belgian medievalist with a particular interest in the history of slavery in Europe. In 1970 he was awarded by the Premio Internazionale Galileo Galilei dei Rotary Italiani for his contribution in Italian history.
Go to Profile
#2921

Annette Becker

#77038
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Annette Becker is a French historian specializing in study of World War I. She is daughter of historian Jean-Jacques Becker. Works 14-18Collab. with Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, La Grande Guerre : 1914-1918, Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Découvertes Gallimard" , 1998.
Go to Profile
#2922

Brad S. Gregory

#92537
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Brad Stephan Gregory holds the Dorothy G. Griffin Collegiate Chair in European History at the University of Notre Dame. After spending the spring 2002 semester as a visiting scholar with the Erasmus Institute at Our Lady's University, Gregory came to Notre Dame in 2003 after teaching at Stanford University, where he received early tenure in 2001. He became a full professor of history at Notre Dame in 2012. Gregory formerly served as the director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Studies, which was founded in 2008, from 2013 to 2019. Together with Randall C. Zachman, Gregory also serves...
Go to Profile
#2923

David Gollaher

David Gollaher
#37266
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David L. Gollaher was the founding President & CEO of the California Healthcare Institute , 1993–2014, from which he joined Gilead Sciences. Initially, in 1998, he was a charter member of Gilead's Health Policy Advisotry Board, then, from 2014 to 2018, he served as the company's head of worldwide Government Affairs and Policy. Subsequently, in early 2019, he was appointed Senor Vice President of global policy and government affairs at Vir Biotechnology, an emerging growth biotech company focused on infectious diseases. He retired from Vir in 2021. Previously, in 2018, he was appointed Senior Fellow at the Leonard D.
Go to Profile
#2924

James R. Beniger

#28130
Overall Influence
1946 - 2010 (64 years)
James Ralph Beniger was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society.
Go to Profile
#2925

Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs

#77580
Overall Influence
1930 - 1994 (64 years)
Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs was a historian specializing in Isaac Newton's occult studies. Her works include The Foundations of Newtons Alchemy, or the Hunting of the Green Lyon, Alchemical Death and Resurrection, and The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought. She was a professor of history at the University of California, Davis from 1991 to 1994.
Go to Profile
#2926

Gilbert Trausch

#78365
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Gilbert Trausch was a Luxembourgish historian. He and other colleagues of the post-World War II generation of Luxembourg historians, such as Paul Margue, brought a new concern for Luxembourg's international relations to their study of its history.
Go to Profile
#2927

Robert M. Beachy

#77867
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Robert Beachy is associate professor of history at the Underwood International College at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea. He was raised in Mennonite communities in Puerto Rico and Indiana. He formerly taught at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland.
Go to Profile
#2928

Rafael Medoff

Rafael Medoff
#38692
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rafael Medoff is an American professor of Jewish history and the founding director of The David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, which is based in Washington, D.C. and focuses on issues related to America's response to the Holocaust.
Go to Profile
#2929

José Antonio de Armas Chitty

#73640
Overall Influence
1908 - 1995 (87 years)
José Antonio de Armas Chitty was a Venezuelan historian, poet, chronicler, essayist, biographer and researcher. Armas Chitty was born in Caracas on 30 November 1908, when he was six years old, moved to Santa María de Ipire, a town in Guárico state, lived there until he was 27.
Go to Profile
#2930

Michael Denning

Michael Denning
#39206
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Michael Denning is an American cultural historian and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies at Yale University. His work has been influential in shaping the field of American Studies by importing and interpreting the work of British Cultural Studies theorists. Although he received his Ph.D. from Yale University and studied with Fredric Jameson, perhaps the greatest influence on his work is the time he spent at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies working with Stuart Hall.
Go to Profile
#2931

Nancy Siraisi

#49043
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Nancy Gillian Siraisi is an American historian of medicine, and distinguished professor emerita in history at Hunter College, and City University of New York. Life Siraisi received a B.A. and an M.A. from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. from the City University of New York. She was a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
Go to Profile
#2932

Tadeusz Olejnik

#96297
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Tadeusz Olejnik is a Polish historian. He published works about regional history, World War II and history of the Polish fire service. Director of the Museum of Wieluń Land in Wieluń. From 1997 until his retirement in 2005 professor of the Piotrków branch of the Jan Kochanowski University. Member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile
#2933

Matthew Connelly

#33107
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Matthew James Connelly is an American professor of international and global history at Columbia University. His areas of expertise include the global Cold War, official secrecy, population control, decolonization, and methods to predict catastrophic threats. He is the author of Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era, The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets, and articles on international and domestic politics for The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The National Interest, and Le Monde.
Go to Profile
#2934

Abdelmajid Benjelloun

#87483
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
For the author of 'On Childhood', born in Casablanca in 1919 see Abdelmajid Benjelloun Abdelmajid Benjelloun is a Moroccan author, historian and poet. He is a specialist in the history of North Morocco. He taught Public Law at the Casablanca University since 1983. He is a member of 'la Maison de la poésie du Maroc' and professor in the history of international relations at the department of Law at the Mohammed V University in Rabat since 2002. Since 1999 he produces a French language program on Moroccan radio , Paroles d’esplanade. Benjelloun is also a painter.
Go to Profile
#2935

Férnand Braudel

#117099
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#2936

Ronald E. Powaski

Ronald E. Powaski
#88931
Overall Influence
1943 - 2019 (76 years)
Ronald E. Powaski was an American historian and teacher. He taught American history in high schools and colleges in Ohio and wrote on the 20th century foreign policies of the United States and Europe.
Go to Profile
#2937

Nicholas Doumanis

#90148
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Nicholas Doumanis is a historian of Europe and the Mediterranean world. Born in Australia in 1964, he studied at the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales, where he acquired his PhD.
Go to Profile
#2938

John W. Chaffee

#93546
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
John William Chaffee is an American historian specializing in the history of China especially the Song dynasty. He is currently Distinguished Service Professor of History and Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University.
Go to Profile
#2939

Tatsuhiko Seo

#24463
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Tatsuhiko Seo is a Japanese historian and professor who has written a number of books about Japan and China. As of 2008 he is a professor of Chuo University's Faculty of Literature. Biography Born in 1952 in a town in Hiroshima Prefecture and raised in West Tokyo, he graduated in 1977 from Ritsumeikan University Faculty of Letters, Department of Oriental History. In 1979 he received a master's degree from Osaka University Graduate School of Letters. In 1983, he received his PhD degree from the same university, same department. After graduation, he became an associate professor, serving at the Hokkaido University of Education and then the University of Tsukuba .
Go to Profile
#2940

Donald E. Pienkos

#70739
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Donald Edward Pienkos is a Polish-American historian at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee specializing in the history of Polish-American community. He received the Officer’s Cross of Merit from the President of Poland, November 2010.
Go to Profile
#2941

H. C. Erik Midelfort

H. C. Erik Midelfort
#71305
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Hans Christian Erik Midelfort , is C. Julian Bishko Professor Emeritus of History and Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is a specialist of the German Reformation and the history of Christianity in Early Modern Europe.
Go to Profile
#2942

Arnved Nedkvitne

#39647
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Arnved Nedkvitne is a Norwegian historian of the Middle Ages and Professor Emeritus of mediaeval history. He held the chair of Norwegian mediaeval history at the University of Trondheim from 1991 to 1993 and at the University of Oslo from 1993 to 2009. He is a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and was elected in 1993. Nedkvitne is regarded as "one of Norway's preeminent commercial historians" and as Norway's foremost mediaeval historian. His research has focused on Norwegian urban history, foreign trade, the economy of coastal communities and pre-modern social organisation.
Go to Profile
#2943

Laura Gowing

#94022
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Laura Gowing is professor of early modern history at King's College London where she works on women’s and gender history. She received her PhD from Royal Holloway, London, supervised by Lyndal Roper, where she was subsequently a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. She lectured at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Essex before King’s, and is one of the editors of History Workshop Journal. Gowing was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.
Go to Profile
#2944

Wolfgang Behringer

#94565
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Wolfgang Behringer is a German historian specialising in the witchcraft beliefs of Early Modern Europe. He has worked at the University of Munich, University of York and the University of Bonn as well as published multiple books. He is the author of the book Shaman of Oberstdorf. He also authored A Cultural History of Climate. First published in German in 2000, it was translated into English in 2009. Since 2003, Behringer teaches at Saarland University.
Go to Profile
#2945

André Raymond

#58704
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
André Raymond was professor emeritus at the University of Provence. He was an expert on the history of the city in the Arab world. Honours and awards Honours 1983 : Knight of the Legion of Honour 1981 : Officier of the Ordre des Palmes académiques 1979 : Commander of the National Order of Merit of Tunisia1975 : Officier of the Order of Civil Merit of the Syrian Arab Republic 1969 : Officier of the Order of Merit
Go to Profile
#2946

Naoíse Mac Sweeney

#87701
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Naoíse Mac Sweeney is a classical archaeologist and ancient historian. Since 2020 she has been Professor of Classical Archaeology in the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Vienna.
Go to Profile
#2947

Jack Scarisbrick

#79120
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Professor John Joseph Scarisbrick MBE FRHistS is a British historian who taught at the University of Warwick. He is also noted as the co-founder with his wife Nuala Scarisbrick of Life, a British pro-life charity founded in 1970.
Go to Profile
#2948

Franklin W. Knight

#82349
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Franklin W. Knight is a historian of Latin America and the Caribbean. He is an emeritus professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he was the Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History from 1993 to 2014 and director of the Centre for Africana Studies. He was awarded a Gold Musgrave Medal for literature in 2013.
Go to Profile
#2949

Israel Yuval

Israel Yuval
#62595
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Israel Jacob Yuval is an Israeli academic who is Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is also the founder of Scholion - Interdisciplinary research center in the Humanities and Jewish Studies.
Go to Profile
#2950

Rebecca J. Scott

#32101
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Rebecca Jarvis Scott is an American historian, and Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law, at University of Michigan. Early life and education Scott was born on July 18, 1950, in Athens, Georgia to parents Andrew and Anne Scott. She graduated from Radcliffe College with an A.B., from the London School of Economics with an M.Phil. in economic history and from Princeton University with a Ph.D.
Go to Profile