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,
#7601
Kasym Tynystanov
1901 - 1938 (37 years)
Kasym Tynystanov was a prominent Kyrgyz linguist, politician and poet. Biography Kasym Tynystanov was born in 1901 in the village of Chyrpykty, Semirechye Oblast . According to his autobiography he learned to read and write the Arabic alphabet from his father. He went to school between 1912 and 1916 in Karakol and Sazonovka village .
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Sabine Baring-Gould
1834 - 1924 (90 years)
Sabine Baring-Gould of Lew Trenchard in Devon, England, was an Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist, folk song collector and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1,240 publications, though this list continues to grow.
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Felix Jacoby
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Felix Jacoby was a German classicist and philologist. He is best known among classicists for his highly important work Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, a collection of text fragments of ancient Greek historians.
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Felix Emanuel Schelling
1858 - 1945 (87 years)
Felix Emanuel Schelling was an American educator. Biography In 1881 he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the degree of LL.B. in 1883 and that of A.M. in 1884, and of Litt.D. in 1903 and LL.D. in 1909. Beginning in 1893 he was John Welsh Centennial professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Schelling was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of the American Philosophical Society and of the Modern Language Association of America.
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Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse
1797 - 1855 (58 years)
Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse was a German philologist, son of Johann Christian August Heyse, father of the novelist Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse, born at Oldenburg. He received his early education at gymnasiums in Oldenburg and Nordhausen, and from 1812 to 1815, studied at a private institute in Vevey, Switzerland. After briefly serving as a tutor to the youngest son of Wilhelm von Humboldt, he enrolled in classes at the University of Berlin . Here, he studied philology under Philipp August Böckh. From 1819 to 1827, he was a private tutor to the family of banker Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy .
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Samuel Smiles
1812 - 1904 (92 years)
Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His primary work, Self-Help , promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and had lasting effects on British political thought.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
1605 - 1689 (84 years)
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was a 17th-century French gem merchant and traveler. Tavernier, a private individual and merchant traveling at his own expense, covered, by his own account, 60,000 leagues in making six voyages to Persia and India between the years 1630 and 1668. In 1675, Tavernier, at the behest of his patron Louis XIV, published Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier .
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G. Wilson Knight
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
George Richard Wilson Knight was an English literary critic and academic, known particularly for his interpretation of mythic content in literature, and The Wheel of Fire, a collection of essays on Shakespeare's plays. He was also an actor and theatrical director, and considered an outstanding lecturer.
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Matthew Prior
1664 - 1721 (57 years)
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner. Early life Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.
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Apostolo Zeno
1668 - 1750 (82 years)
Apostolo Zeno was a Venetian poet, librettist, journalist, and man of letters. Early life Apostolo Zeno was born in Venice to a colonial branch of the Zeno family, an ancient Venetian patrician family. His family had been transplanted from Venice to the Kingdom of Candia in the 13th century in order to maintain Venetian order and suppress any rebellious subjects. Following the assault on the island by the Ottoman Empire, the remaining members of his family returned to Venice. Upon return they were not readmitted to the patrician class, but were only able to obtain status as ordinary citizens....
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Eduard Schwartz
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Eduard Schwartz was a German classical philologist. Born in Kiel, he studied under Hermann Sauppe in Göttingen, under Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler in Bonn, under Theodor Mommsen in Berlin and under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Greifswald. In 1880 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Bonn.
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Richard Porson
1759 - 1808 (49 years)
Richard Porson was an English classical scholar. He was the discoverer of Porson's Law. The Greek typeface Porson was based on his handwriting. Early life Richard Porson was born at East Ruston, near North Walsham, Norfolk, the eldest son of Huggin Porson, parish clerk. His mother was the daughter of a shoemaker from the neighbouring village of Bacton. He was sent first to the Bacton village school, kept by John Woodrow, and then to that of Happisburgh, kept by Mr Summers, where his extraordinary powers of memory and aptitude for arithmetic were discovered. His literary skill was partly due t...
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Charles Cotton
1630 - 1687 (57 years)
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the influential The Compleat Gamester attributed to him.
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Diego de Torres Villarroel
1693 - 1770 (77 years)
Diego de Torres Villarroel was a Spanish writer, poet, dramatist, doctor, mathematician, priest and professor of the University of Salamanca. His most famous work is his autobiography, Vida, ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza y aventuras del Doctor Don Diego de Torres Villarroel .
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Thomas Kingo
1634 - 1703 (69 years)
Thomas Hansen Kingo was a Danish bishop, poet and hymnwriter born in Slangerup, near Copenhagen. His work marked the high point of Danish baroque poetry. Early life and education His parents were Hans Thomsen Kingo and Karen Sørensdatter. His father was born in Crail, Scotland, and moved to Helsingør, Denmark, as a two-year old; he became a weaver of modest means. The name Kingo is a shortening of the Scottish name Kinghorn. Although his parents were not wealthy, he was sent to Frederiksborg Latin School at the age of 16 in 1650. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, enrolling ...
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William Craigie
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-editor of the 1933 supplement. From 1916 to 1925 he was also Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. Among the students he tutored was the one who would succeed him in the Anglo-Saxon chair, J. R. R. Tolkien. He married Jessie Kinmond Hutchen of Dundee daughter of William.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Lew Wallace
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."
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Arthur Murphy
1727 - 1805 (78 years)
Arthur Murphy , also known by the pseudonym Charles Ranger, was an Irish writer. Biography Murphy was born at Cloonyquin, County Roscommon, Ireland, the son of Richard Murphy and Jane French. He studied at the Jesuit-run College of Saint-Omer, France, and was a gifted student of the Latin and Greek classics.
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William Watson Goodwin
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
William Watson Goodwin was an American classical scholar, for many years Eliot professor of Greek at Harvard University. Biography He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Hersey Bradford Goodwin and Lucrettia Watson.
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Aaron Hill
1685 - 1750 (65 years)
Aaron Hill was an English dramatist and miscellany writer. Biography The son of a country gentleman of Wiltshire, Hill was educated at Westminster School, and afterwards travelled in the East. He was the author of 17 plays, some of them, such as his versions of Voltaire's Zaire and Mérope, being adaptations. He also wrote poetry, which is of variable quality. Having written some satiric lines on Alexander Pope, he received in return a mention in The Dunciad, which led to a controversy between the two writers. Afterwards a reconciliation took place. He was a friend and correspondent of Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela he highly praised.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Erico Verissimo
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Érico Lopes Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Biography Érico Verissimo was the son of Sebastião Verissimo da Fonseca and Abegahy Lopes Verissimo. His father, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, met financial ruin during his son's youth and, as a result, Erico didn't complete secondary school because of the need to work.
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Otto Manninen
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Otto Manninen was a Finnish writer, poet, and a celebrated translator of world classics into Finnish language. Along with Eino Leino in the early 20th century, he is considered as a pioneer of Finnish poetry. Manninen translated the works of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Heine, Ibsen, Petőfi and Runeberg into Finnish.
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Melchiorre Cesarotti
1730 - 1808 (78 years)
Melchiorre Cesarotti was an Italian poet, translator and theorist. Biography He was born at Padua, of a noble but impoverished family. He studied in the Seminary of Padua, where he obtained, immediately after the end of his studies, the chair of Rhetoric. At the University of Padua his literary progress gained him the professorship of Greek and Hebrew in 1768, and then of Rhetorics and Literature in 1797. As a supporter of the Enlightenment ideas, he wrote in favor of the French on their invasion of Italy in 1797; he received a pension, and was made knight of the iron crown by Napoleon I, t...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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J. B. Bury
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
John Bagnell Bury was an Anglo-Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin , before being Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge from 1902 until his death.
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Șerban Cioculescu
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Șerban Cioculescu was a Romanian literary critic, literary historian and columnist, who held teaching positions in Romanian literature at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, as well as membership of the Romanian Academy and chairmanship of its Library. Often described as one of the most representative Romanian critics of the interwar period, he took part in the cultural debates of the age, and, as a left-wing sympathizer who supported secularism, was involved in extended polemics with the traditionalist, far right and nationalist press venues. From early on in his career, ...
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Robert Walser
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
#7630
Saeed Nafisi
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Saeed Nafisi was an Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet. He was a prolific writer in Persian. Nafisi was born in Tehran, where he conducted numerous research projects on Iranian culture, literature and poetry. He first emerged as a serious thinker when he joined Mohammad-Taqi Bahar, Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, Gholamreza Rashid-Yasemi and Abdolhossein Teymourtash to found one of the first literary magazines to be published in Iran, called Daneshkade, in 1918. He subsequently published many articles on Iran, Persian literary texts and Sufism and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide.
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Mohitlal Majumdar
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Mohitlal Majumdar was a renowned Indian poet and essayist in the Bengali-language. He began his journey as a poet, but later became literary critic. Life Majumder was born in a Baidya family on 26 October 1888 in the village of Kanchrapara in Nadia district, India at his maternal uncle's house. His native village was Balagarh in Hooghly District of present-day West Bengal. He graduated in arts in 1908 from Ripon College , Kolkata. He began his career as a teacher at Calcutta High School in 1908 and continued in this profession until 1928. He also worked briefly as a kanungo in the Settlement Department.
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Giulio Salvadori
1862 - 1928 (66 years)
Giulio Salvadori was an Italian poet, literary critic and educator. Life Salvadori was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he became a friend of Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1885, he converted to Roman Catholicism, leading to a parting of the ways from d'Annunzio.
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Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu
1911 - 1975 (64 years)
Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu was a Turkish painter, mosaic-maker, muralist, writer and poet. His art work was inspired by Anatolian village scenes and folk literature, and included traditional handicraft folk patterns.
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Ingram Bywater
1840 - 1914 (74 years)
Ingram Bywater, FBA was an English classical scholar. He was born in Islington, London and first educated first at University College School and King's College School, then at Queen's College, Oxford. He obtained a first class in Moderations and in the final classical schools , and became fellow of Exeter College, Oxford , reader in Greek , Regius Professor of Greek , and Student of Christ Church. He received honorary degrees from various universities, and was elected corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
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George Cram Cook
1873 - 1924 (51 years)
George Cram Cook or Jig Cook was an American theatre producer, director, playwright, novelist, poet, and university professor. Believing it was his personal mission to inspire others, Cook led the founding of the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod in 1915; their "creative collective" was considered the first modern American theatre company. During his seven-year tenure with the group, Cook oversaw the production of nearly one-hundred new plays by fifty American playwrights. He is particularly remembered for producing the first plays of Eugene O'Neill, along with those of Cook's wife Susan Glasp...
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Julius Firmicus Maternus
400 - 400 (0 years)
Julius Firmicus Maternus was a Roman Latin writer and astrologer, who received a pagan classical education that made him conversant with Greek; he lived in the reign of Constantine I and his successors. His triple career made him a public advocate, an astrologer and finally a Christian apologist. The explicit, or end-tag, of the sole surviving manuscript of his De errore profanarum religionum gives his name as Iulius Firmicus Maternus V C, identifying him as a vir clarissimus and a member of the senatorial class. He was also author of the most extensive surviving text of Roman astrology, Matheseos libri octo written around 334–337.
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Christopher Brennan
1870 - 1932 (62 years)
Christopher John Brennan was an Australian poet, scholar and literary critic. Biography Brennan was born in Haymarket, an inner suburb of Sydney, to Christopher Brennan , a brewer, and his wife Mary Ann née Carroll , both Irish immigrants. His education took place at two schools in Sydney: he first attended St Aloysius' College, and after gaining a scholarship from Patrick Moran, he boarded at St Ignatius' College, Riverview.
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Michael Bernays
1834 - 1897 (63 years)
Michael Bernays was a German literary historian, and an important Goethe and Shakespeare scholar. Life He was born in Hamburg. His father, Isaac Bernays, died when he was fourteen years old. His adjustments were radically different from that of his two brothers, Jacob Bernays and Berman Bernays , due to the traumatic loss of his father at an early age or other factors. He studied first law and then literature at Bonn and Heidelberg.
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Nahum Norbert Glatzer
1903 - 1990 (87 years)
Nahum Norbert Glatzer was an Austrian and American scholar of Jewish history and philosophy from antiquity to mid 20th century. Life Glatzer was born in Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire . At the start of World War I his family moved westward to Bodenbach in Silesia where Norbert attended Gymnasium. At age 17, his father sent him to study with Solomon Breuer in Frankfurt, Germany with the intention that he would become a Rabbi. After encountering the circle of Jewish intellectuals, including Franz Rosenzweig, around Rabbi Nehemiah Anton Nobel he decided against the rabbinate. ...
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Nahum Slouschz
1872 - 1966 (94 years)
Nahum Slouschz was a Russian-born Israeli writer, translator and archaeologist. He was known for his studies of the "secret" Jews of Portugal and the history of the Jewish communities in North Africa, mostly, in Libya and Tunisia.
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Shi Nai'an
1296 - 1372 (76 years)
Shi Nai'an was a Chinese writer from the Yuan and early Ming periods. Shuihu zhuan , one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, is traditionally attributed to him. There are few reliable sources for his biography, much less his literary activity.
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Theodor Gartner
1843 - 1925 (82 years)
Theodor Gartner was an Austrian linguist, Romance philologist and professor. Biography He is also known for his study of the Ukrainian language and as a co-author of the monograph and textbook on the grammar of the Ukrainian language. After graduating from the University of Vienna, from 1868 to 1885 he taught in schools in Hungary. Since 1885, he was a professor of Romance Philology at the University of Chernivtsi. He conducted studies of Romanian accents on the territory of Bukovina.
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M. Ageyev
1898 - 1973 (75 years)
M. Ageyev was the pen name of the writer of the Russian Novel with Cocaine. He is believed to be Mark Lazarevich Levi . Biography His best-known work, Novel With Cocaine , was published in 1934 in the Parisian émigré publication, Numbers. Nikita Struve alleged it to be the work of another Russian author employing a pen name - Vladimir Nabokov; this idea was debunked by Nabokov's son Dmitri in his preface to "The Enchanter", where he claims Ageyev is Mark Levi. Levi's life is shrouded in mystery and conjecture. He seems to have returned to the U.S.S.R. in 1942 and spent the rest of his life...
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Heciyê Cindî
1908 - 1990 (82 years)
Heciyê Cindî was a Kurdish linguist and researcher from Armenia. Cindî was born into a Yazidi Kurdish family in the village of Yemençayir near Kars in modern Turkey. During World War I and Turkish and Soviet invasions, his family fled to Armenia and settled in the village of Elegez. Later on, he lost all his family to disease and massacre. In 1919, he stayed in the American orphanage in Alexandropol, and in 1926 was transferred to the orphanage in Leninakan, Armenia.
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Jan F. E. Celliers
1865 - 1940 (75 years)
Jan Francois Elias Celliers, almost universally known as Jan F.E. Celliers, but occasionally as Jan F.E. Cilliers was an Afrikaans-language poet, essayist, dramatist and reviewer. Celliers was one of the three outstanding Afrikaans-language poets who wrote in the immediate wake of the Second Boer War; together with Totius and C. Louis Leipoldt, Celliers' youthful poetry writes of the devastation of the war in the youthful language of Afrikaans. His best poems appear in the 1908 collection Die Vlakte en ander gedigte .
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Ignjat Đurđević
1675 - 1737 (62 years)
Ignjat Đurđević was a baroque poet and translator from the Republic of Ragusa, best known for his long poem Uzdasi Mandaljene pokornice . He wrote poetry in three languages: Latin, Italian and Croatian.
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Otto Basler
1892 - 1975 (83 years)
Otto Basler was a German philologist. Basler studied German, Romance studies, English and history at the University of Freiburg. In World War I, he was a reserve officer. After his graduation, he was a librarian at the University of Freiburg until 1936, when he became the librarian at the German army library from 1936 to 1945 in Berlin. In 1943, he started teaching at the University of Munich, first with a training order for German philology and folklore, and in 1947, he became a professor at the university. From 1952 to his retirement, he taught at Freiburg University. He left Freiburg im Breisgau, where he taught since 1952 as a fee professor to 1959.
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Marcel Aymé
1902 - 1967 (65 years)
Marcel Aymé was a French novelist and playwright, who also wrote screenplays and works for children. Biography Marcel André Aymé was born in Joigny, in the Burgundy region of France, the youngest of six children. His father, Joseph, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Emma Monamy, died when he was two years old, after the family had moved to Tours. Marcel was sent to live with his maternal grandparents in the village of Villers-Robert, a place where he would spend the next eight years, and which would serve as the model for the fictitious village of Claquebue in what is perhaps the most well-known of his novels, La Jument verte.
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Wolfgang Golther
1863 - 1945 (82 years)
Wolfgang Golther was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. A professor at the University of Rostock, Golther was a prominent authority on Medieval German literature and Germanic religion.
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Theophan Prokopovich
1681 - 1736 (55 years)
Feofan/Theophan Prokopovich was a Russian Imperial Orthodox theologian, writer, poet, mathematician, and philosopher of Ukrainian origin. Rector of the Academia Mohileana in Kiev , and Archbishop of Novgorod. He elaborated upon and implemented Peter the Great's reform of the Russian Orthodox Church. Prokopovich wrote many religious verses and some of the most enduring sermons in the Russian language.
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