The Most Influential People Across History
Find the most influential people in 24 academic disciplines and numerous subdisciplines
Find famous and important people related to your research. This is an excellent tool for research papers, topic papers, and building a bibliography. Using our influence-based algorithm, our rankings synthesize data from Wikipedia, Wikidata, Semantic Scholar, and CrossRef.
Students and researchers now have a fast and reliable way to find influential thinkers from 24 disciplines and 300 sub-disciplines (and growing). If you want to find history’s most influential philsosophers, or the world’s most influential mathematicians currently, now you can.
We also provide custom rankings of people by discipline as well as interviews with influential academics who are currently active.
To use this tool, select the discipline (and optional subdiscipline) relevant to your research, and specify influential academics by history, world, or US. Even results that are counterintuitive are often enlightening (our algorithm always picks up a signal).
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#7501
Walter Tobagi
1947 - 1980 (33 years)
Walter Tobagi was an Italian journalist and writer. He was killed in a terrorist attack by the Brigade XXVIII March, a left-wing terrorist group. Biography Youth Walter Tobagi was born on 18 March 1947 in San Brizio, a neighborhood of the Italian district of Spoleto in Umbria, Italy. As an eight-year-old child he moved with his family in Bresso, close to the Italian city of Milan, mainly because of his father's work as a railway worker. His career as a journalist began during his early high school years, as the editor of the Parini high school's newspaper La zanzara, which became notorious f...
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Virgínia Rau
1907 - 1973 (66 years)
Virgínia de Bivar Robertes Rau was a Portuguese archaeologist and historian. She was an expert on Portuguese and Portuguese colonial history and author of many history books. She was the daughter of Luís Rau, Jr. of German descent, and his wife Matilde de Bivar de Paula Robertes of Spanish descent, who married in Lisbon in 1902. She enrolled in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lisbon in 1927, but the following year went aboard, where she attended several courses including at the University of Toulouse. In 1939, due to the beginning of the Second World War, she returned to Lisbon, where she joined the Historical and Philosophical Sciences of the Faculty of Arts.
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Arthur R. M. Spaid
1866 - 1936 (70 years)
Arthur Rusmiselle Miller Spaid was an American educator, school administrator, lecturer, and writer. He served as principal of Alexis I. duPont High School in Wilmington, Delaware, superintendent of New Castle County Public Schools in Delaware, superintendent of Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, and Delaware State commissioner of Education .
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William Greenfield
1755 - 1827 (72 years)
William Greenfield FRSE was a Scottish minister, professor of rhetoric and belles lettres, literary critic, reviewer, and author whose clerical career ended in scandal, resulting in him being excommunicated from the Church of Scotland, having his university degrees withdrawn, and his family assuming his wife's patronymic Rutherfurd.
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Rufus King
1893 - 1966 (73 years)
Rufus Frederick King was an American author of whodunit crime novels. He created four series of detective stories: the first one with Reginald De Puyster, a sophisticated detective similar to Philo Vance; the second one with his more famous character, Lieutenant Valcour; the third with Colin Starr, who appeared in four stories in the Strand Magazine during 1940–41; and the fourth with Chief Bill Dugan, who appeared in three stories in The Saint Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 1956–57.
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Hryhoriy Tiutiunnyk
1920 - 1961 (41 years)
Hryhoriy Mykhailovych Tiutiunnyk was a Ukrainian lyric poet, writer. His brother was the writer Hryhir Tiutiunnyk. External links Hryhoriy Tiutiunyk in the Ukrainian Soviet EncyclopediaNakonechna, S. And their pines still make noise. Ukrayina Moloda. 20 September 2006
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Giuseppe Gené
1780 - 1847 (67 years)
Carlo Giuseppe Gené was an Italian naturalist and author. Gené was born at Turbigo in Lombardy and studied at the University of Pavia. He published a number of papers on natural history, particularly entomology. In 1828 he became an assistant lecturer in natural history at the university, and in the following year he traveled to Hungary, returning with a collection of insect specimens. Between 1833 and 1838 he made four trips to Sardinia collecting insects.
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Ernest L. Hettich
1897 - 1973 (76 years)
Ernest Leopold Hettich was an American scholar of classics. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., the son of Dr. Leonhard Hettich and his wife Ella Elfriede Helene von Dobschütz. He graduated from Brooklyn Boys High School. He graduated from Cornell University in 1919. He earned an M.A. from Cornell in 1920 and worked for seven years at the New York Public Library. In 1933 he earned his PhD at Columbia University. Hettich joined the faculty of New York University in 1927 as Professor of Classics, taught there for many years, and served as Director of Libraries.
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John Wallace
1842 - 1908 (66 years)
John Wallace was a teacher, lawyer, political leader and judge in Florida. Wallace served in the Union Army after being freed by federal soldiers during the American Civil War. He served in the Florida Legislature during the Reconstruction era. He also became a lawyer and argued cases before the Florida Supreme Court. He putatively wrote "Carpetbag Rule in Florida: The Inside Workings of Civil Government in Florida After the Close of the Civil War". At the time of his death, he had held public office longer than any other Black elected official.
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Luis Martín
1846 - 1906 (60 years)
Luis Martín García was a Spanish Jesuit, elected the twenty-fourth Superior General of the Society of Jesus. Early years and formation The third of six brothers, Martín was born of humble parentage in Melgar de Fernamental. After primary education in his own village he entered the seminary of Burgos in 1858, where he spent six years. His intellectual inclination led him to join the Society of Jesus in 1864. He began his philosophy studies in Léon, but revolution in Spain and anti-clericalism forced him to move to France where he completed his courses, first in Vals, and then in Poyanne. There, he also taught humanities and rhetoric before doing his theology .
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Martin Routh
1755 - 1854 (99 years)
Martin Joseph Routh was an English classical scholar and President of Magdalen College, Oxford . Birthplace and Oxford career Routh was born at South Elmham, Suffolk, son of the Rev. Peter Routh, rector there, and his wife, Mary Reynolds. He matriculated at The Queen's College, Oxford, on 31 May 1770 and on 24 July 1771, was elected to a demyship at Magdalen College. He graduated B.A. on 5 February 1774 and was elected on 25 July 1775 to a fellowship of his college. On 23 October 1776 he took an MA, proceeding B.D. in 1786, and D.D. on 6 July 1790. On 21 December 1777, he received deacon's orders from Philip Yonge, Bishop of Norwich; but did not take priest's orders until 1810.
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Daniel Seltzer
1933 - 1980 (47 years)
Daniel Seltzer was a professor of English at Princeton University, an actor and a Shakespeareanan scholar. He was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play in 1976 for his performance in Jules Feiffer's Knock Knock and had a role in director Paul Mazursky's 1978 film An Unmarried Woman starring Jill Clayburgh.
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Fortunat Strowski
1866 - 1952 (86 years)
Fortunat Joseph Strowski de Robkowa was a French literary historian, essayist and critic. A specialist on Pascal and Montaigne, he superintended the first critical edition of Montaigne's Essays. Life Fortunat Strowski was born in Carcassonne to a Jewish family from Galicia, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was educated in France, where he was a student of Ferdinand Brunetière.
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Cecil Peabody
1855 - 1934 (79 years)
Cecil Hobart Peabody was an American mechanical engineer, born on August 9 in Burlington, Vermont. He was very influential in the development of the Mechanical Engineering Department and in founding the Department of Naval Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology .
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Percy Heath
1884 - 1933 (49 years)
Percy Heath was an American screenwriter and playwright. He was nominated at the 5th Academy Awards in the category of Best Adapted Screenplay for his work on the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His nomination was shared with Samuel Hoffenstein.
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Samuel A. Derieux
1881 - 1922 (41 years)
Samuel Arthur Derieux was an American writer, known especially for short stories, set in the South, about dogs, hunting, or both. He was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1881. His undergraduate education was in the South, at Wofford College from 1897 to 1899, and at Richmond College , where he received his B.A. in 1904. He spent two years of graduate work at Johns Hopkins, and received his M.A. at University of Chicago in 1910.
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John Richardson
1667 - 1753 (86 years)
John Richardson was an English Quaker minister and autobiographer. Early life John Richardson was born in 1667, probably in the village of North Cave, East Riding of Yorkshire, where his father, William Richardson , a shepherd, had been converted to Quakerism by William Dewsberry or Dewsbury in about 1652. He was twelve when his father died, leaving his mother with a livestock farm to run and five children. John had one older sister, who died about 1682, and three younger brothers, of whom the youngest was born about 1676.
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Henry Thirkill
1886 - 1971 (85 years)
Sir Henry Thirkill was an English physicist and academic administrator. Thirkill was born in Bradford and spent his whole career at Clare College, Cambridge. After completing his degree he was appointed Fellow in 1910; and Demonstrator in Experimental Physics in 1912. He was an officer with the Royal Engineers during World War I, and won the Military Cross during the East African Campaign. On his return he was appointed Lecturer in Experimental Physics in 1918. He was Tutor at Clare from 1920 to 1939; President from 1920 to 1939; and its Master from 1939 to 1958; and Fellow again from 1959 until his death.
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Charles Goeller
1901 - 1955 (54 years)
Charles Goeller was an American artist best known for precise and detailed paintings and drawings in which, he once said, he aimed to achieve "emotion expressed by precision." Employing, as one critic wrote, an "exquisitely meticulous realism," he might take a full year to complete work on a single picture. Early in his career he achieved critical recognition for his still lifes, in which one critic saw an "acumen of genius" working to produce "truly superb achievement of team work between eyes that see and hands that do." Later, he also became known for cityscapes in which he employed precis...
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Heinrich von Rustige
1810 - 1900 (90 years)
Heinrich Franz Gaudenz von Rustige was a German painter specializing in historical subjects and genres. Life and work From 1828, he was a student of Wilhelm von Schadow at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. After 1832, he began participating in exhibitions there.
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Germán Valdés
1915 - 1973 (58 years)
Germán Genaro Cipriano Teodoro Gómez Valdés y Castillo , known professionally as Tin-Tan, was a Mexican actor, singer and comedian who was born in Mexico City but was raised and began his career in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. He often displayed the pachuco dress and employed pachuco slang in many of his movies, some with his brothers Manuel "El Loco" Valdés and Ramón Valdés. He made the language of the border Mexican, known in Spanish as fronterizos pachucos, famous in Mexico. A "caló" based in Spanglish, it was a mixture of Spanish and English in speech based on that of Mexicans on the Mexican...
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Roslyn Brogue
1919 - 1981 (62 years)
Roslyn Brogue was an American pianist, violinist, music educator, classics scholar, poet, author and composer. She was born in Chicago, Illinois, and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1937, from Radcliffe College in 1943 and from Harvard University in 1947 with a Ph.D.
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Noé de la Flor Casanova
1904 - 1986 (82 years)
Noé de la Flor Casanova was a Mexican lawyer, cantautor, writer, poet and politician who served for four years as Governor of Tabasco, before being removed from office following a scandal. Life and work De la Flor y Casanova was the son of Manuel de la Flor Hernández, a master tailor, and Elodia Casanova de de la Flor, the family was extremely poor. After completing primary school in Teapa he moved to Villahermosa to attend the Instituto Juárez, a preparatory school founded by Manuel Sánchez Mármol. With a scholarship, obtained for him by José Vasconcelos at the request of fellow Tabascan Carlos Pellicer, De la Flor Casanova enrolled in the National Preparatory School in Mexico City.
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Józef Tretiak
1841 - 1923 (82 years)
Józef Tretiak was a Polish writer. Tretiak wrote a major critical biography of Józef Bohdan Zaleski . External links
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John North
1645 - 1683 (38 years)
John North was the fifth of fourteen children of Sir Dudley North, 4th Baron North. He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1672 to 1674, and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1677 to 1683.
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Ebenezer Alfred Johnson
1813 - 1891 (78 years)
Ebenezer Alfred Johnson was an American classical scholar. Johnson was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on August 18, 1813, the son of Ebenezer and Sarah B. Johnson, Johnson graduated from Yale College in 1833. After teaching for two years in New Canaan, Conn., he became a tutor in Yale College, and during his tutorship of two years he was also engaged in study at Yale Law School. He was then admitted to the New Haven bar, but a year later accepted a call to an assistant professorship of Greek and Latin in the University of the City of New York. In 1840 he was made full Professor of Latin, and this chair he retained until his death.
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James Scholefield
1789 - 1853 (64 years)
James Scholefield , English classical scholar, was born at Henley-on-Thames. He was educated at Christ's Hospital and Trinity College, Cambridge, and was in 1825 appointed professor of Greek in the university. He was for some time curate to Charles Simeon, the evangelical churchman, and his low church views involved him in disputes with his own parishioners at St Michael's, Cambridge, of which he was perpetual curate from 1823 till his death at Hastings on 4 April 1853. From 1849 until his death he was canon of Ely.
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Franz Gehring
1838 - 1884 (46 years)
Franz Gehring was a German writer on music. Gehring was a lecturer on mathematics, at first in Bonn, then from 1871 at Vienna University, but became known for his writings on music, particularly his biographies. Among the most notable are his biography of Mozart published in Francis Hueffer's The Great Musicians series of books, and several articles contributed to the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
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T. B. L. Webster
1905 - 1974 (69 years)
Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster was a British archaeologist and Classicist, known for his studies of Greek comedy. Background He was the son of Sir Thomas Lonsdale Webster. During World War I he attended Charterhouse. As a student at Oxford University, he first studied Greek vases that John Beazley had brought in, but soon switched to Menander and developed a lifelong interest in Greek comedy that resulted in "reconstructions of the plots of lost plays and ... collections of evidence from widely disparate sources bearing on the history of the Greek theater".
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Nikolaos Kontopoulos
1889 - 1958 (69 years)
Nikolaos Kontopoulos was a Greek writer. He was born in the village of Lousika in Achaea, Greece. He studied in Athens and later studied as a student and as a professor at the polytechnical school. He wrote many books.
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Jane Stafford
Jane Stafford is a New Zealand literature academic, and as of 2019 is a full professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. Academic career After a 1986 PhD titled 'An examination of the "De Passione" Section of John of Grimestone's Preaching Book' at the Victoria University of Wellington, Stafford moved to staff, rising to full professor.
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Donald F. Bond
1898 - 1987 (89 years)
Donald F. Bond was professor emeritus of English at the University of Chicago. He was the editor of the standard edition of The Spectator in five volumes, published in 1965, selections from which may be found in The Norton Anthology of English Literature. He was also the joint editor of the scholarly edition of the first three volumes of The Tatler. He was a contributor to the Encyclopædia Britannica. He was a Guggenheim Fellow.
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I. A. Richards
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH , known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of the New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
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Arthur Nock
1902 - 1963 (61 years)
Arthur Darby Nock was an English classicist and theologian, regarded as a leading scholar in the history of religion. He was a professor at Harvard University from 1930 until his death. Early life Nock was born in Portsmouth, England in 1902 to Cornelius and Alice Mary Ann Nock. He was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School.
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A. Starker Leopold
1913 - 1983 (70 years)
Aldo Starker Leopold was an American author, forester, zoologist and conservationist. He also served as professor at the University of California, Berkeley for thirty years. Throughout his life, Leopold was active in numerous wildlife and conservation groups throughout the United States. Leopold later defended his ideas of Land ethic which was a new way to connect nature, land and people.
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Ronald Syme
1903 - 1989 (86 years)
Sir Ronald Syme, was a New Zealand-born historian and classicist. He was regarded as the greatest historian of ancient Rome since Theodor Mommsen and the most brilliant exponent of the history of the Roman Empire since Edward Gibbon. His great work was The Roman Revolution , a masterly and controversial analysis of Roman political life in the period following the assassination of Julius Caesar.
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F. R. Leavis
1895 - 1978 (83 years)
Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York.
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Benjamin Dean Meritt
1899 - 1989 (90 years)
Benjamin Dean Meritt was a classical scholar, professor and epigraphist of ancient Greece. His father, Arthur Herbert Meritt, was a professor of Greek and Latin at Trinity College . Meritt was educated at Hamilton College and Princeton University . He was an assistant director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, is notable for his development of the Athenian Tribute Lists and worked extensively on Athenian calendaring.
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Lionel Trilling
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling , whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.
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Kurt von Fritz
1900 - 1985 (85 years)
Karl Albert Kurt von Fritz was a German classical philologist. Appointed to an extraordinary professorship for Greek at the University of Rostock in 1933, he was one of the two German professors to refuse to swear the Hitler Oath in 1934, and was dismissed. He then held posts at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Reed College, and Columbia University.
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William Abbott Oldfather
1880 - 1945 (65 years)
William Abbott Oldfather was an American classical scholar. He was influential for building strong academic traditions in classical studies at the University of Illinois and for his studies of ancient Locris in Greece.
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Charles Glicksburg
1900 - 1998 (98 years)
#7543
Eric A. Havelock
1903 - 1988 (85 years)
Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas, Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the cla...
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George M. A. Hanfmann
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
George Maxim Anossov Hanfmann was a famous archaeologist and scholar of ancient Mediterranean art. Biography He studied at the University of Jena under Ernst Buschor and Hans Diepolder, and then at the University of Berlin with Werner Jaeger, where he earned his first doctorate. He emigrated to the United States, becoming naturalized in 1940. Hanfmann became a student of David Moore Robinson, earning a second Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1935. During World War II he served in the Office of War Information in London as radio editor. He returned to Harvard and became a curator at the Fogg Art Museum.
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E. R. Dodds
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Eric Robertson Dodds was an Irish classical scholar. He was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford from 1936 to 1960. Early life and education Dodds was born in Banbridge, County Down, the son of schoolteachers. His father Robert was from a Presbyterian family and died of alcoholism when Dodds was seven. His mother Anne was of Anglo-Irish ancestry. When Dodds was ten, he moved with his mother to Dublin, and he was educated at St Andrew's College and at Campbell College in Belfast. He was expelled from the latter for "gross, studied, and sustained insolence".
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Alfred Harbage
1901 - 1976 (75 years)
Alfred Bennett Harbage was an American Shakespeare scholar and crime fiction writer. Early life and education Alfred Bennett Harbage was born in Philadelphia and received his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. He lectured on Shakespeare both there and at Columbia University.
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Thomas Thompson
1933 - 1982 (49 years)
Thomas Thompson was a journalist and author. Career Thompson was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Clarence Arnold Thompson and Ruth Oswalt . He graduated from the University of Texas in 1955. He then worked as a reporter and editor at the Houston Press.
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Lee M. Hollander
1880 - 1972 (92 years)
Lee Milton Hollander was an American philologist who specialized in Old Norse studies. Hollander was for many years head of the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin. He is best known for his research on Old Norse literature.
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Arthur Garfield Kennedy
1880 - 1954 (74 years)
Arthur Garfield Kennedy was an American philologist who served as Professor of English at Stanford University from 1914 to 1945. Biography Kennedy was born in Weeping Water, Nebraska on June 29, 1880, and attended Doane College at Crete, Nebraska. He received his master's degree from the University of Nebraska and his doctor's degree from Stanford University. From 1914 to 1945 Kennedy was Professor of English at Stanford University. He was the author of several books on the English language. In 1925 he, with Kemp Malone and Louise Pound, founded the journal American Speech and he was a frequent contributor.
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Antony Andrewes
1910 - 1990 (80 years)
Antony Andrewes, was an English classical scholar and historian. He was Wykeham Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1953 to 1977. Early life Andrewes was born in Tavistock, Devon, England, on 12 June 1910. He was educated at Winchester College from 1923 to 1929. He studied at New College, Oxford, between 1929 and 1933.
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