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 …
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List of the most influential people in History,
#2951
Paul E. Ceruzzi
#46087
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Paul E. Ceruzzi is curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. Life Ceruzzi received a BA from Yale University in 1970 and received a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1981, both in American studies. Before joining the National Air and Space Museum, he was a Fulbright scholar in Hamburg, Germany, and taught History of Technology at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. Ceruzzi is the author and co-author of several books on the history of computing and aerospace technology. He has curated or assisted in the mounting of several exhibiti...
Go to Profile#2952
Gaetano Cozzi
#45314
Overall Influence
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Gaetano Cozzi was an Italian historian, professor at Padua University, and researcher with the Giorgio Cini Foundation and Fondazione Benetton Studi e Ricerche. He was a specialist in Venetian history, with special attention to the institutions, the relationship between law and society and the cultural environment.
Go to Profile#2953
Ilya Altman
#70789
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Ilya Alexandrovich Altman is a Russian historian and founder and co-chairman of the Russian Research and Educational Holocaust Center in Moscow. He is also author of over 300 publications on the history of the Holocaust and the Eastern Front , many of which have been published in the United States, Israel and Western Europe.
Go to Profile#2954
Li Xueqin
#37672
Overall Influence
1933 - 2019 (86 years)
Li Xueqin was a Chinese historian, archaeologist, and palaeographer. He served as Director of the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Professor of the Institute of Sinology of Tsinghua University, Chairman of the Pre-Qin History Association of China, and participated in the Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project.
Go to Profile#2955
Qiu Xigui
#47104
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Qiu Xigui is a Chinese historian, palaeographer, and professor of Fudan University. His book Chinese Writing is considered the "single most influential study of Chinese palaeography". Early life and education Qiu Xigui was born in July 1935 in Shanghai of Ningbo ancestry. In 1952 he was admitted to the history department of Fudan University, and was interested in pre-Qin dynasty Chinese history. Under the influence of the renowned oracle bones expert Hu Houxuan , he took interest in the oracle bones and Chinese bronze inscriptions. After graduating in 1956, he became a graduate student of oracle bones and Shang dynasty history, studying under Professor Hu.
Go to Profile#2956
Elliot Sperling
#26492
Overall Influence
1951 - 2017 (66 years)
Elliot Sperling was one of the world's leading historians of Tibet and Tibetan-Chinese relations, and a MacArthur Fellow. He spent most of his scholarly career as an associate professor at Indiana University's Department of Central Eurasian Studies, with seven years as the department's chair.
Go to Profile#2957
John Delury
#41649
Overall Influence
John Delury is an American East Asia scholar, with special interests in the history of China, U.S.-China relations and Korean peninsula affairs. He is professor of history at Yonsei University in Seoul.
Go to Profile#2958
Ludwig W. Adamec
#74116
Overall Influence
1924 - 2019 (95 years)
Ludwig W. Adamec was an Austrian scholar on the Middle East and Afghanistan. He was a professor emeritus in the School of Middle East and North African Studies at the University of Arizona. He wrote and edited numerous books, including the republication of the monumental Historical and political gazetteer of Afghanistan, which had originally been compiled but was unpublished by the government in British India.
Go to Profile#2959
Arnold R. Hirsch
#43108
Overall Influence
1949 - 2018 (69 years)
Arnold Richard Hirsch was an American historian who taught at the University of New Orleans, where he served as Ethel and Herman L. Midlo Endowed Chair for New Orleans Studies. Hirsch was born on March 9, 1949, and raised in Rogers Park, Chicago. His father Nathan died when Hirsch was 13, after which his mother Mollie started working at a bank. Hirsch attended Sullivan High School, then earned undergraduate and advanced degrees in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His graduate advisor was Gilbert Osofsky. He began teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1978. Hirsch published Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960.
Go to Profile#2960
Sunil Amrith
#52789
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Sunil S. Amrith is a historian who is the Renu and Anand Dhawan Professor of History at Yale University. His research interests include transnational migration in South and Southeast Asia. Amrith was born in Kenya to parents from Tamil Nadu, and grew up in Singapore. He received his postsecondary education and later his doctorate at the University of Cambridge, and then taught at Birkbeck, University of London until 2015, when he became a professor of South Asian history at Harvard University. He also co-directed the Joint Center for History and Economics between Harvard and the University of Cambridge, and was interim director of Harvard's Mahindra Humanities Center.
Go to Profile#2961
John K. Mahon
#86440
Overall Influence
1912 - 2003 (91 years)
John K. Mahon was an American historian. He received his BA from Swarthmore College in 1934, graduating as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. After serving in World War II and working for his family he later returned to his studies and earned his PhD in history from UCLA in 1950.
Go to Profile#2962
Yechiam Weitz
#84478
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Yechiam Weitz is an Israeli professor and historian. Biography Yechiam Weitz is the grandson of Yosef Weitz, director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund, whose son Yechiam was killed in a Palmach operation in 1946.
Go to Profile#2963
Richard G. Salomon
#23014
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Richard G. Salomon is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington. Salomon is a Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit-languages scholar, known for his studies on Indian epigraphy. He is also a specialist in early Indian Buddhism studies.
Go to Profile#2964
Edward G. Lengel
#82167
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Edward "Ed" G. Lengel is an American author and military historian. His previously published books focus on George Washington's life and legacy, and World War I. He is a co-recipient of the National Humanities Medal , and his books have been honored with the Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Book Award, the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. prize, and other awards. He is the author of General George Washington: A Military Life, which was a finalist for the 2006 George Washington Book Prize, and his 2018 release Never in Finer Company: The Men of the Great War’s Lost Battalion.
Go to Profile#2965
Pauline Stafford
#65859
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Pauline Stafford is Professor Emerita of Early Medieval History at Liverpool University and a visiting professor at Leeds University in England. Dr. Stafford is a former vice-president of the Royal Historical Society.
Go to Profile#2966
Myriam Yardeni
#68787
Overall Influence
1932 - 2015 (83 years)
Myriam Yardeni was an Israeli historian and scholar of French history. She was professor of general history at the University of Haifa. Biography Marika Jakobovits was born in Timișoara, in the Romanian multiethnic region of Banat, to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1950, she immigrated to Israel. She studied Hebrew at Ulpan Etzion in Jerusalem and attended a pedagogical seminary founded by Martin Buber. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem she completed a BA in world history and French culture, and an MA in history. Her master's thesis, written in 1961 under the guidance of Jacob Talmon, explored the life and work of Bernard Lazare, a French Jewish anarchist and journalist.
Go to Profile#2967
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia
#49294
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Andrew Roberts, Baron Roberts of Belgravia, , is an English popular historian, journalist and member of the House of Lords. He is the Roger and Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society. He served as a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 2013 to 2021.
Go to Profile#2968
Cynthia Herrup
#61346
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Cynthia Herrup is an American historian of early modern British law who holds the position of Professor of History and Law at the University of Southern California. Herrup's writings center primarily on the social history of criminal law, but she also touches upon the historical impact of gender and sexuality. Her first book, The Common Peace: Participation and the Criminal Law in Seventeenth-Century England, examined how communities without lawyers made decisions about law enforcement—it postulated that people as well as lawyers were important in the history of law. Her second book, A House...
Go to Profile#2969
Olivier Wieviorka
#56311
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Olivier Wiewiorka is a French historian specializing in the history of World War II and the French Resistance. He is a faculty member at the École normale supérieure de Cachan. He is the brother of historian Annette Wiewiorka and sociologist Michel Wiewiorka.
Go to Profile#2970
Charlotte Erickson
#38395
Overall Influence
1923 - 2008 (85 years)
Charlotte J. Erickson was an American historian. Life Erickson was born in Oak Park, Illinois a suburb of Chicago, where her father was a Swedish Lutheran minister. She graduated from Augustana College at Rock Island, Illinois in 1945, and from Cornell University with a MA and a PhD.
Go to Profile#2971
Joan M. Hussey
#82189
Overall Influence
1907 - 2006 (99 years)
Joan Mervyn Hussey was a British Byzantine scholar and historian. Education Hussey was educated privately at home, at Trowbridge High School for Girls , and at the Lycée Victor Duruy in Paris. She went on to St Hugh's College, Oxford, graduating with a BA and MA in Modern History in 1925. Following a period of supervision under Sir David Ross, she moved to the University of London and in 1935 completed a PhD supervised by Norman H. Baynes.
Go to Profile#2972
Anindita Ghosh
#77558
Overall Influence
Anindita Ghosh is a British historian, and Professor of Modern Indian History at the University of Manchester. Ghosh was born in India. She was educated at New Delhi, India , and earned a PHD from the University of Cambridge.
Go to Profile#2973
Adolph P. Yushkevich
#31326
Overall Influence
1906 - 1993 (87 years)
Adolph-Andrei Pavlovich Yushkevich was a Soviet historian of mathematics, leading expert in medieval mathematics of the East and the work of Leonhard Euler. He is a winner of George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for a lifetime of scholarly achievement.
Go to Profile#2974
Vladas Drėma
#74530
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Vladas Drėma was one of the most prominent Lithuanian art historians, critics, and art conservation specialists. He is also a known artist. One of the most remembered publications of Vladas Drėma's is Dingęs Vilnius .
Go to Profile#2975
Ibrahim al-Marashi
#40453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Doctor Ibrahim al-Marashi is an associate professor at California State University, San Marcos, researching modern Iraqi history. He holds a doctor of philosophy in history from Oxford University , where his thesis was on the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait; a master's degree in political science from Georgetown University, which he had received in 1997; and a bachelor's degree in history and Near Eastern studies from the University of California Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#2976
Birdsall S. Viault
#110092
Overall Influence
1932 - 2012 (80 years)
Birdsall S. Viault was Professor Emeritus of History at Winthrop University , Rock Hill, South Carolina. He has also taught at Adelphi University , where he had attained his B.S. and M.A. degrees. He succeeded at gaining an M.A. and Ph.D. in history while studying at Duke University. He also studied at the Leibniz Kolleg of the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Go to Profile#2977
Jacques Leider
#27717
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Jacques Pierre Leider is a French and Luxembourgian historian, teacher and former diplomat. He is known for his historical research on Burma/Myanmar, particularly pre-colonial Buddhism, the history of Arakan, today called Rakhine, in the Bay of Bengal and the ethno-historical background of the Burma/Myanmar-Bangladesh borderlands.
Go to Profile#2978
Peter Aronsson
#111749
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Peter Aronsson is the Vice-Chancellor of Linnaeus University since 2017. He is a Swedish historian specializing in early-modern political culture and public history. Academic career Peter Aronsson is born into a family of medium enterprisers in Gemla, Småland. His grandfather and father ran a toy factory in Gemla. In the late 1980s Aronsson took up doctoral studies in history at Uppsala University and later Lund University where he studied under Professor Eva Österberg. His PhD thesis, Bönder gör politik was successfully defended in 1992. In his thesis, Aronsson argues that the Swedish political culture has been shaped through a local practice with roots centuries back in time.
Go to Profile#2979
Daniel Blatman
#73191
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Blatman is an Israeli historian, specializing in history of the Holocaust. Blatman is the head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Blatman was a visiting scholar at the Centre for European Studies at Harvard University, 2012–13.
Go to Profile#2980
Geraldine Heng
#39787
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Geraldine Heng is Mildred Hajek Vacek and John Roman Vacek Chair in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where, as of November 2022, she was also affiliated with Middle Eastern studies, Women’s studies, Jewish Studies, and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Social Justice. Heng's work focuses on literary, social and cultural encounters between societies in the period 500–1500 CE. She is noted as a key figure in the development of postcolonial approaches to the European Middle Ages, premodern critical race studies, and critical early global studies.
Go to Profile#2981
Elliot R. Wolfson
#49471
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Elliot R. Wolfson is a scholar of Jewish studies. Wolfson earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Near Eastern and Judaic studies from Brandeis University, where he trained under the supervision of Alexander Altmann.
Go to Profile#2982
Claudia Lauper Bushman
#78599
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Claudia Marian Lauper Bushman is an American historian specializing in domestic women's history, especially as it relates to the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints . She helped found, and was the first editor of, the progressive LDS magazine Exponent II, has written American and LDS history books, and established a Mormon women oral history project at Claremont Graduate University.
Go to Profile#2983
David Biale
#39320
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
David Biale is an American historian specializing in Jewish history. Biale earned a degree in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971, and remained at the institution to complete a master's degree in modern European history in 1972. During his doctoral studies, Biale specialized in Jewish history, and obtained a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1977. Between 1986 and 1999, Biale was the Koret Professor of Jewish History and director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union. He subsequently joined the University of California, Davis, as Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History.
Go to Profile#2984
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt
#67753
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Heinz-Gerhard Haupt was born on 21 March 1943 in Göttingen. Since 1998 he is Professor of Social History at Faculty of History, Theology, and Philosophy at the Bielefeld University. Academia Heinz-Gerhard Haupt is Professor of Social History at the Bielefeld University, but until August 30, 2011, on a Sabbatical at the European University Institute in Florence. He heads two research projects of the Collaborative Research Center 584 “The Political as Communication Space in History”. He is co-applicant of the German Research Foundation's research unit “Youth Violence“ and board member of the Institute for interdisciplinary research on conflict and violence.
Go to Profile#2985
Judith Sealander
#84958
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Judith Sealander is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History at Bowling Green State University. Education Sealander received a Ph.D. in history in 1977 from Duke University. Career Sealander has researched women's history, business and educational progressivism and philanthropy. She has studied American government efforts to promote health, opportunity and security to children and pronounces them as failures.
Go to Profile#2986
David Sedley
#12183
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
David Neil Sedley FBA is a British philosopher and historian of philosophy. He was the seventh Laurence Professor of Ancient Philosophy at Cambridge University. Early life Sedley was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class honours degree in Literae Humaniores in 1969. He was awarded a PhD in 1974 by University College London for a text, translation and commentary on Book XXVIII of Epicurus' On Nature.
Go to Profile#2987
Seth Schwartz
#102224
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Seth Schwartz is an American historian and the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization at Columbia University. Schwartz earned a B.A. from Yeshiva University in 1979, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1985.
Go to Profile#2988
Girolamo Arnaldi
#93224
Overall Influence
1929 - 2016 (87 years)
Girolamo Arnaldi was an Italian historian. Born in Pisa, in 1951 Arnaldi graduated in Medieval History at the University of Naples, and then completed his postgraduate studied at the in the same city. He was professor of Medieval History at the University of Bologna from 1964 to 1970 and at the Sapienza University of Rome from 1970 to 1999. Between 1966 and 1970 he was president of the in Rome.
Go to Profile#2989
Patricia Graham
#40335
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Patricia Albjerg Graham is a historian of American education. She began her teaching career in Deep Creek, Virginia, and went on to become a lecturer at Indiana University, professor of history and education at Barnard College and TC, Columbia University, dean of the Radcliffe Institute and of Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was President of the Spencer Foundation from 1991 to 2000. On May 28, 2015, Graham was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2990
Brian Patrick McGuire
#95645
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Brian Patrick McGuire is an American–Danish professor emeritus of history, lecturer and author. Family He is the son of sports journalist and publicity director of the San Francisco 49ers, Dan Francis McGuire and high school teacher Phyllis Evelyn Goemmer , the fourth of nine children. He married Ann Kirstin Pedersen in 1970 and adopted a son from Korea in 1980.
Go to Profile#2991
Olaf Blaschke
#77160
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Olaf Blaschke is a German historian. His research has focused on the modern and contemporary periods. Several of his more substantial publications have involved the Roman Catholic church. Life Blaschke was born in Bielefeld, a substantial manufacturing city located between Dortmund and Hanover. He undertook his first university level studies at Bielefeld University, concluding in 1991. During this period he achieved a Master of Arts degree and passed both levels of the national teaching qualification.
Go to Profile#2992
Anna Marie Roos
#42251
Overall Influence
Anna Marie Roos is a historian of early modern English science, noted for her research on the early Royal Society. She is a professor in the School of History and Heritage at the University of Lincoln, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a Fellow of the Linnean Society, and the Editor-in-Chief of Notes and Records.
Go to Profile#2993
Joan Beaumont
#80587
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Joan Errington Beaumont, is an Australian historian and academic, who specialises in foreign policy and the Australian experience of war. She is professor emerita in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.
Go to Profile#2994
Nadja Durbach
#20494
Overall Influence
Nadja Durbach is a professor of History at the University of Utah. She is a specialist of modern Britain and co-editor of the Journal of British Studies. Her research, grounded in her first book, Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907, focuses on immunization, vaccination, and alternative medicine politics in the nineteenth century. Her research has also focused on the history of the body and food politics in Britain. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016.
Go to Profile#2995
Morris Rossabi
#52879
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Morris Rossabi is an American historian and associate adjunct professor at Columbia University. He specialises in Inner Asian, East Asian, and Chinese history. Morris Rossabi was born in Alexandria, Egypt. He moved to the United States when he was young and then received his PhD from Columbia University in 1970.
Go to Profile#2996
Arnold Krammer
#34805
Overall Influence
1941 - 2018 (77 years)
Arnold Paul Krammer was an American historian who specialized in German and United States history and a professor in the College of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. He was twice a Fulbright scholar: between 1992–1993, he studied at the University of Tübingen and, between 2002–2003, he studied at the University of Jena.
Go to Profile#2997
Antoni Czubiński
#72382
Overall Influence
1928 - 2003 (75 years)
Antoni Czubiński was a Polish historian and director of the Western Institute in Poznań from 1978 to 1990. He was the Polish-side Chairman of German-Polish Textbook Commission from 1984 to 1990. He represented leftist views, and in his works consequently defended the role of the left in preserving Polish statehood in face of both Hitler and Stalin during 20th century. After 1989 he was a moderate defender of the previous system, underlining its achievements in regards to reducing poverty and increasing Polish independence from Soviet Union. He was convinced that in time People's Republic of ...
Go to Profile#2998
Oliver Henry Radkey
#89651
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Oliver Henry Radkey Jr. was an American historian of Russian and Soviet history. He was a professor of Russian history at the University of Texas at Austin. Radkey received his degree from the University of Texas. Later he attended Harvard University, where he was influenced by Sidney Bradshaw Fay. Radkey went on a traveling fellowship through Central Europe and Russia until he returned to the United States aboard the SS Normandie. He married Jakoba Balt in 1936. He studied at Stanford University and taught at the University of Cincinnati before moving to the University of Texas.
Go to Profile#2999
Edward N. Peterson
#90209
Overall Influence
1925 - 2005 (80 years)
Edward N. Peterson was an American historian and professor at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls from 1954 until his death in 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1953. His specialty was German history, particularly the World War II period and the German Democratic Republic, a field in which he wrote a number of books.
Go to Profile#3000
Herbert A. Strauss
#63977
Overall Influence
1918 - 2005 (87 years)
Herbert Arthur Strauss was a German-born American historian. Life Strauss spent his youth in his home town of Würzburg, Bavaria. After school he began a commercial apprenticeship. In 1936 he moved to Berlin, where he headed the Nationale Jugendbüro at the Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden. From 1936 until its closure in 1942, he studied at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin to prepare for his emigration to Palestine. In March 1942 he obtained his Abitur.
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