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,
#4551
George Brown
#79161
Overall Influence
1931 - 2021 (90 years)
George Hardin Brown was an American scholar of medieval studies. The focus of his scholarship includes Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon literature, especially the work of the Venerable Bede. Brown had a long academic career at many renowned institutions and has studied under other notable scholars in his field. He died on November 6, 2021.
Go to Profile#4552
Helen Matthews Lewis
#77905
Overall Influence
1924 - 2022 (98 years)
Helen Matthews Lewis was an American sociologist, historian, and activist who specialized in Appalachia and women's rights. She was noted for developing an interpretation of Appalachia as an internal United States colony, as well as designing the first academic programs for Appalachian studies. She also specialized in Appalachian oral history, collecting and preserving the experiences of Appalachian working-class women in their own words. She is known as the "grandmother of Appalachian Studies" as her work has influenced a generation of scholars who focus on Appalachia.
Go to Profile#4553
John Powers
#67421
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
John Powers is American born Professor of Asian Studies and Buddhism. Much of his teaching career was at the Australian National University in Canberra. Studies Powers studied at College of the Holy Cross Massachusetts, taking a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Religion there in 1979. He went on to earn a Master of Arts in Indian philosophy at McMaster University in Ontario then a Doctorate of Religious history from the University of Virginia. From 1995 to 2016, Powers taught at the Australian National University, where he was made professor in 2008. Powers, like several others, left t...
Go to Profile#4554
Knut Einar Eriksen
#105923
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Knut Einar Eriksen is a Norwegian historian. He was born in Sarpsborg, and took the cand.philol. degree in 1969. He was an associate professor at the University of Tromsø from 1975 to 1982, and a professor from 1982 to 1986. In 1989 he was appointed as a professor at the University of Oslo. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and from 1988 to 1990 he chaired the Norwegian Historical Association.
Go to Profile#4555
Randall Hansen
#51261
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (55 years)
Randall Hansen is a political scientist and historian at the University of Toronto, where he holds a Canada Research Chair in Global Migration in the Department of Political Science. He is also Director of the Global Migration Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Hansen taught at the Queen Mary University of London and the University of Oxford before taking up his current position.
Go to Profile#4556
Simon Sadler
#45109
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (57 years)
Simon Sadler is a professor in the Department of Design and in the Art History Program at the University of California, Davis. His publications focus on histories, theories and ideologies of architecture, design and urbanism since the mid-twentieth century, and include studies of the Archigram group, the Situationists, and counterculture.
Go to Profile#4557
Lutz von Padberg
#86382
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Lutz E. von Padberg is a German historian whose specialty is medieval history and in particular the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. He is an expert on Saint Boniface, having written biographies of the saint and studies of his veneration.
Go to Profile#4558
Lauri Honko
#13151
Overall Influence
1932 - 2002 (70 years)
Lauri Olavi Honko was a Finnish professor of folklore studies and comparative religion. Life and work Honko was a disciple of Martti Haavio. His 1959 doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki was titled Krankheitsprojektile. Untersuchung über eine urtümliche Krankheitserklärung and developed a special typology for the analysis of ethnographic data in folk medicine. Here he put the Finnish folk tradition explanation of illness and healing into a global perspective and found distinct features and differences in geographical regions.
Go to Profile#4559
Asesela Ravuvu
#82074
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Asesela Ravuvu was a Fijian academic and political leader. The Director of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, Professor Ravuvu was appointed to the Fijian Senate by the Great Council of Chiefs in 2001, to one of the 14 Senate seats allocated to the Great Council. As of September 2005, he held the position of Leader of the House in the Senate, but retired from this body in 2006.
Go to Profile#4560
Jesper Lützen
#90067
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Jesper Lützen is a Danish historian of mathematics and the physical sciences. Biography Lützen graduated in mathematics in 1976 from Aarhus University, where he also earned his PhD in 1980 in the history of science under the supervision of Kirsti Andersen. In 1980 he was a visiting scholar at Yale University and became a temporary lecturer at Odense University and from 1985 a lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. In 1990 he received his habilitation from the University of Copenhagen. There he has been a lecturer since 1989 and since 2005 a professor of mathematics history at the University of Copenhagen's Faculty of Mathematics.
Go to Profile#4561
R. E. A. Palmer
#76408
Overall Influence
1933 - 2006 (73 years)
Robert Everett Allen Palmer II was a historian and a leading figure in the study of archaic Rome. At the time of his death was professor emeritus of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#4562
Brian Kelly
#117485
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (67 years)
Brian Kelly is an American historian and a lecturer in US history, teaching at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. His work is concerned mainly with labor and race in the American South, although much of his most recent scholarship focuses on the formative struggles around slave emancipation during the American Civil War and the Reconstruction Era that followed.
Go to Profile#4563
Robert W. Smith
#90992
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (99 years)
Robert W. Smith is a scholar of history and the classics at the University of Alberta, and he directed the Science, Technology and Society Program in the Faculty of Arts. He researches the history of big science, especially U.S. technology and the history of spaceflight. He wrote The Space Telescope: A Study of NASA, Science, Technology and Politics and he co-edited Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years After the Soviet Satellite. He served as the Walter Hines Page Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 1993–94. He held the Charles A. Lindbergh Chair in Aerospace History at the U.S.
Go to Profile#4564
Giuseppe Mazzotta
#125770
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Giuseppe Mazzotta is an American historian of Italy, currently the Sterling Professor in the Humanities for Italian at Yale University, and also a published author. Mazzotta served as president of the Dante Society of America from 2003-2009.
Go to Profile#4565
Eduardo González Calleja
#63601
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Eduardo González Calleja is a Spanish historian, professor of Contemporary History at the Charles III University of Madrid . He is the author of a long list of scholar works dealing with political violence.
Go to Profile#4566
Mohammed Zniber
#99182
Overall Influence
1923 - 1993 (70 years)
Dr. Mohammed Zniber was a Moroccan writer and historian. He also played an important role in the period of struggle for Morocco's struggle for independence from the French. He was a son of Moufti Boubker Zniber, the initiator of the petition against the Berber Dahir of the colonial French rule. In February 1944, he was arrested by the French together with his brother and father and spent three months in prison. After the war he was a history teacher and head of the history department of the University of Rabat. He is especially well known for his writings on the resistance fighters Frantz Fan...
Go to Profile#4567
An Zuozhang
#73885
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
An Zuozhang was a Chinese historian who specialized in ancient Chinese history and the regional history of Shandong. A lifelong professor of Shandong Normal University, he was considered in China as a leading expert in the history of Qin and Han dynasties.
Go to Profile#4568
Amalia Amaki
#94388
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Amalia K. Amaki is an African-American artist, art historian, educator, film critic and curator who recently resided in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she was Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa from 2007 to 2012.
Go to Profile#4569
Adam Redzik
#60864
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Adam Redzik is a Polish lawyer and historian, a professor at the Warsaw University. He specializes in the history of law and science. Selected works Books Wydział Prawa Uniwersytetu Lwowskiego w latach 1939-1946, Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL 2006, Zarys historii samorządu adwokackiego w Polsce, Warszawa: Naczelna Rada Adwokacka 2007, pp. 208; Jakub Honigsman, Zagłada Żydów lwowskich , przekład i opracowanie: Adam Redzik, Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny 2007, pp. 116; Joanna Ostrowska, Tak musiało być. Wspomnienia, opracował Adam Redzik, Warszawa-Łomianki: LTW 2008, pp. 152; Adwoka...
Go to Profile#4570
Margo J. Anderson
#103033
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Margo J. Anderson is an American social historian and historian of statistics known for her studies of the United States Census and on the history of Pittsburgh and Milwaukee. She is a distinguished professor of history at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and a former president of the Social Science History Association.
Go to Profile#4571
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
#118993
Overall Influence
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen is a history professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the author of American Nietzsche . She was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow in 2014–2015. Education 2003: Ph.D. in History of American Civilization, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts1992: B.A. in History, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.
Go to Profile#4572
William J. Reese
#87687
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
William J. Reese is the Carl F. Kaestle Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Professor of Educational Policy Studies and History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He received a Vilas Distinguished Achievement professorship in May 2015.
Go to Profile#4573
Jan Błoński
#22098
Overall Influence
1931 - 2009 (78 years)
Jan Błoński was a Polish historian, literary critic, publicist and translator. He was a leading representative of the Kraków school of literary criticism, which wielded significant influence in postwar Poland.
Go to Profile#4574
Dorothy Noyes
#87650
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Dorothy Noyes is an American folklorist and ethnologist whose comparative, ethnographic and historical research focuses on European societies and upon European immigrant communities in the United States. Beyond its area studies context, her work has aimed to enrich the conceptual toolkit of folklore studies and ethnology. General problems upon which she has focused attention include the status of "provincial" communities in national and global contexts, heritage policies and politics, problems of innovation and creativity, and the nature of festival specifically and of cultural displays and r...
Go to Profile#4575
Tal Ilan
#56715
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Tal Ilan is an Israeli-born historian, notably of women's history in Judaism, and lexicographer. She is known for her work in rabbinic literature, the history of ancient Judaism, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Jewish historiography, Jewish epigraphy, archaeology and papyrology, onomastics, and ancient Jewish magic. She is the initiator and director of The Feminist Commentary on the Babylonian Talmud . She received her education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently professor of Jewish Studies at the Free University of Berlin .
Go to Profile#4576
Claude-Hélène Perrot
#87818
Overall Influence
1928 - 2019 (91 years)
Claude-Hélène Perrot was a French historian and Africanist who specialized in the history of Côte d'Ivoire. She served as a professor of contemporary African history at the University of Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne from 1983 to 1993. Perrot's main areas of research concerned the history of the Akan of Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana before colonization, mainly the Anyi and the Eotile; the use of oral tradition by historians; as well as relations between traditional African religions and political power. She was honored as Commander, Order of Ivory Merit.
Go to Profile#4577
Oto Luthar
#58113
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Oto Luthar is a Slovenian historian. Since 1992, he has served as the director of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Ljubljana, the second largest research institution in Slovenia.
Go to Profile#4578
Leonid Petrov
#128963
Overall Influence
Leonid Petrov is a university academic and researcher in the study of North Korea and international relations in North East Asia. He is also has expertise in Asian history, Asian cultural studies, tourism management and multicultural studies.
Go to Profile#4579
L. Perry Curtis
#91814
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Lewis Perry Curtis Jr. was an American historian specializing in 19th-century Irish history. He also covered modern culture and media. Early life and education L. Perry Curtis was born in London, England, the son of Lewis Perry Curtis, associate professor of history at Yale , and his wife, Bryn Mawr College-graduate Jeanet Ellinwood , daughter of an insurance company executive. Curtis was educated at the Foote School, at New Haven, Connecticut, Brooks School, at North Andover, Massachusetts, then at Yale and Christ Church, Oxford, transferring after two years to Nuffield College, Oxford. He s...
Go to Profile#4580
Dan Gibson
#94476
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Daniel Gibson is a Canadian author studying the early history of Arabia and Islam. He is the author of Early Islamic Qiblas: A survey of mosques built between 1AH/622 C.E. and 263 AH/876 C.E, which advances the claim that early mosques were oriented towards Petra, rather than towards Mecca or Jerusalem as traditionally accepted by archaeologists and historians of Islam.
Go to Profile#4581
Dariusz Gawin
#35952
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Dariusz Gawin is a Polish historian and sociologist, deputy director of the Warsaw Uprising Museum dedicated to the memory of the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, and located in the Wola district of Warsaw, Poland. Gawin serves as an Adiunkt at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is a contributor to leading Polish magazines such as Przegląd Polityczny, Res Publica Nowa, Tygodnik Powszechny and Rzeczpospolita, as well as historical and scientific journals such as Teologia Polityczna and Krytyka Polityczna. He was the host of a TV programme Trzeci punkt widz...
Go to Profile#4582
Richard Baxell
#123566
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Richard Baxell is a British historian and the author of three books on the Spanish Civil War. Between 2015 and 2018 he was the Chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. He received his Doctor of Philosophy from the London School of Economics in 2002 with a thesis titled The British Battalion of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. As of 2020 he is a research fellow at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#4583
Debra Hamel
#116641
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Debra Hamel is an American historian specializing in ancient Greece. Life and career Hamel was born in 1964 in New Haven, Connecticut. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1989 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in classics with departmental and general honors. Hamel studied at Yale University and graduated with an M.A. and M.Phil. in classical languages and literatures in 1993. She received her Ph.D. in 1996, with the dissertation Athenian Strategoi: The Extent and Exercise of Authority in the Military Sphere, 501/0-322/1 three years later. From 1998 to 2001 Hamel was Visiting Assistant...
Go to Profile#4584
Marc Venard
#139358
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Marc Venard was a French historian. A student at the École Normale Supérieure, he was agrégé and doctor in history and a specialist of religious history of the 16th century. He was emeritus professor of modern history at the Universities of Rouen and Paris West University Nanterre La Défense and member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen.
Go to Profile#4585
Richard H. Helmholz
#168116
Overall Influence
#4586
Benedikt Isserlin
#78330
Overall Influence
1916 - 2005 (89 years)
Benedikt Sigmund Johannes Isserlin was a scholar of Hebrew who was Head of the Department of Semitic Studies at the University of Leeds. Early life and education Isserlin was born in Munich in 1916. He left Germany in the early 1930s and completed his schooling in Switzerland. In 1935 he went to the University of Edinburgh to read History and Archaeology. He graduated in 1939 and moved to Magdalen College, Oxford to read Oriental Languages, specialising in Hebrew and Arabic.
Go to Profile#4587
Patricia Peck Gossel
#83510
Overall Influence
1944 - 2004 (60 years)
Patricia Peck Gossel was an American science historian and curator, who chaired the Science, Medicine and Society Division at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Early life and education Patricia Louise Peck was born during World War II in Inglewood, California, the daughter of Elsa G. Erickson Peck and Harold G. Peck. She grew up in Murdo, South Dakota, where her father owned an elevator company. Peck attended Augustana College as an undergraduate, then earned a master's degree in bacteriology from Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. In 1988 she completed her doc...
Go to Profile#4588
Giorgio Otranto
#107503
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Giorgio Otranto was an Italian historian, specialized in the history of early Christianity. Life and career Born in Corigliano Calabro, the son of a tailor, Otranto graduated in Classical Literature at the University of Bari.
Go to Profile#4589
Leslie Bethell
#168150
Overall Influence
#4590
Nahema Hanafi
#98995
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Nahema Hanafi is a French historian and a lecturer in modern and contemporary history at the University of Angers. She is interested in the history of epistolary practices and self-narratives, the history of medicine, women's place in history, and gender studies. She is co-editor of the journal , and is the director of the master's degree in gender studies co-accredited by the University of Angers, University of Western Brittany, Le Mans University, University of Nantes, and Rennes 2 University. Hanafi is a Sigerist prize laureate.
Go to Profile#4592
Jarle Simensen
#152366
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (88 years)
Jarle Simensen is a Norwegian historian. He took the cand.philol. degree at the University of Oslo in 1966, and worked as a research assistant at the same university, a research fellow at the Norwegian Research Council and Institute of Social Research and, briefly, associate professor at the University of Trondheim before taking the dr.philos. degree in Trondheim in 1976. He was then a professor there from 1980 to 2004. He returned to the University of Oslo in 1996 to hold the position of adjunct professor ; he is currently professor emeritus there.
Go to Profile#4593
Francisca de Haan
#111482
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Francisca de Haan is a Dutch historian and writer who specializes in women's and gender history. From 2002 until 2022, she has taught at the Central European University, first in Budapest and since 2020 located in Vienna, where she is now Professor Emerita of Gender Studies and History, as well as being a fellow at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Her publications include A Biographical Dictionary of Women's Movements and Feminisms: Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe, 19th and 20th Centuries and she is the founding editor of Aspasia: The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern and South Eastern European Women’s and Gender History .
Go to Profile#4594
Douglas Burgess
#111962
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Douglas Burgess is an American author and historian specializing in maritime and legal history. He is credited as the first scholar to suggest a link between the definitions of piracy and terrorism in law. He is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post and is currently a professor of history in Yeshiva University and affiliated professor at Benjamin N Cardozo School of Law.
Go to Profile#4595
Kåre Johannessen
#161596
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Kåre Johannessen is a Danish historian, writer, lecturer and presenter. He is the former curator of the museum of Trelleborg and Middelaldercentret, where he worked from 1994 to 1999 and again from 2004 to 2015. Today, he is a self-employed historian. While working at Trelleborg he recreated the Viking game of knattleikr and injured his knee so badly that he had to use crutches for a time.
Go to Profile#4596
David Freeman Hawke
#93631
Overall Influence
2000 - 1999 (-1 years)
David Freeman Hawke was an American historian. His book Benjamin Rush: Revolutionary Gadfly became a National Book Award nominee in 1972. Hawke was born in Philadelphia and held degrees from Swarthmore College, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania. He taught at Pace College for 14 years before joining Lehman College in 1972. He retired in 1986.
Go to Profile#4597
Nabi Bakhsh Baloch
#63889
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Nabi Bakhsh Khan Baloch was a Pakistani research scholar, historian, sindhologist, educationist, linguist and writer. He predominantly wrote in Sindhi, but sometimes in Urdu, English, Persian and Arabic. He has been described as the "moving library" of the Pakistani province of Sindh.
Go to Profile#4598
Michael Duffy
#136398
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Michael Duffy is a naval historian, specialising in the Napoleonic war period. He is reader in British history and director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies at the University of Exeter. Academic career Duffy earned his BA in history, MA, and DPhil in history at the University of Oxford. Appointed to the faculty of the University of Exeter, he has been assistant lecturer, lecturer, senior lecturer, head of history and dean of arts. Appointed director of the Centre for Maritime Historical Studies in 1991, he was promoted to reader in British history in 2001.
Go to Profile#4599
Harold B. Mattingly
#150608
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
Harold Braithwaite Mattingly was a British historian of Roman civilization, epigrapher and numismatist who was Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leeds. Biography Mattingly was born in Finchley, London, the son of the historian and numismatist Harold Mattingly. He attended The Leys School in Cambridge and took a double first in Classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge in 1948. He subsequently held a Craven Scholarship from 1948 to 1950, writing a thesis on the Roman Imperial Senate.
Go to Profile#4600
Meng Man
#119931
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Meng Man is a Chinese scholar and a professor at the College of History and Culture, Minzu University of China. She is best known for conducting lecture series about Chinese literature on the CCTV-10 television programme Lecture Room.
Go to Profile