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,
#7701
John Addington Symonds
1807 - 1871 (64 years)
John Addington Symonds was an English physician and author. Life He was born in Oxford, where his father John Symonds was a medical practitioner. His mother was Mary Williams, of Aston, Oxfordshire. Symonds was educated at Magdalen College School; at the age of sixteen he went to the University of Edinburgh for medical training, and graduated M.D. in 1828.
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Simon Henry Gage
1851 - 1944 (93 years)
Simon Henry Gage was a professor of anatomy, Histology, and Embryology at Cornell University and an important figure in the history of American microscopy. His book, The Microscope, appeared in seventeen editions. In 1931, a volume of the American Journal of Anatomy was dedicated to Gage on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.
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Francis X. Shea
1926 - 1977 (51 years)
Francis Xavier "Frank" Shea was an American Jesuit priest and educator who served as president of the College of St. Scholastica and, after leaving the Jesuit order, as chancellor of Antioch College.
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John Murray
1906 - 1984 (78 years)
John Murray was an American playwright best known for writing the 1937 play Room Service with Allen Boretz. Murray was born in New York and attended DeWitt Clinton High School, City College of New York, and Columbia University. His 1937 play, Room Service ran for 500 performances on Broadway and was turned into two films, the first, Room Service, starred the Marx Brothers, the second, Step Lively, starred Frank Sinatra. The play was also adapted for two television productions.
Go to Profile#7705
Pierre de Labriolle
1874 - 1940 (66 years)
Pierre Champagne de Labriolle was a French philologist, Latinist and historian. Biography Pierre Champagne de Labriolle, conventionally known as Pierre de Labriolle, was born in Asnières-sur-Seine, Île-de-France on 18 June 1874. He was educated at the University of Paris. He was employed as a professor of French literature at the Université Laval in Montreal in 1898–1901, and of Latin language and literature at the University of Fribourg in 1904–1919, University of Poitiers in 1919–1926 and University of Paris from 1926 until May 1940.
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Helen Rose Hull
1888 - 1971 (83 years)
Helen Rose Hull was born in Albion, Michigan. She is remembered as a novelist, feminist, and English professor. Beginning her teaching career at Wellesley College and Barnard College, she went on to teach creative writing at the Ivy League institution, Columbia University for forty years with her lifelong partner, Mabel Louise Robinson.
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Olaus Verelius
1618 - 1682 (64 years)
Olaus or Olof Verelius was a Swedish scholar of Northern antiquities who published the first edition of a saga and the first Old Norse-Swedish dictionary and is held to have been the founder of the Hyperborean School which led to Gothicism.
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Thomas Hawkins
1729 - 1772 (43 years)
Thomas Hawkins was an English Anglican priest, academic and literary editor. He edited the second edition of the Hanmer Shakespeare—Sir Thomas Hanmer's Shakespeare edition—which appeared in 1771. His historical work The Origin of the English Drama appeared shortly after his death, in 1773.
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Friedrich August Wilhelm Spohn
1792 - 1824 (32 years)
Friedrich August Wilhelm Spohn was a German classical philologist. He was the son of theologian Gottlieb Lebrecht Spohn . In 1818 he became an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where during the following year he was appointed professor of Greek and Roman literature. He died in Leipzig on 17 January 1824, aged 31.
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Pak Mok-wol
1916 - 1978 (62 years)
Pak Mok-wol was an influential Korean poet and academic. Personal life He was born Pak Yeongjong on January 6, 1916, in Moryang Village, Seo-myeon, Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, in present-day South Korea, to parents Pak Jun-pil and Pak In-jae . He had a younger brother and two younger sisters. He graduated from Keisung Middle School in Daegu in 1935. He lived in Tokyo from April 1937 until late 1939, during which period he devoted his time to writing. From September 1939 to September 1940, he had several of his poems published in the magazine . Afterwards, due to increasing wartime ...
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Alessandro Politi
1679 - 1752 (73 years)
Alessandro Politi , was an Italian philologist. Biography Alessandro Politi was born July 10, 1679, at Florence. After studying under the Jesuits, he entered at the age of fifteen the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, and was conspicuous among its members by his rare erudition. He was called upon to teach rhetoric and peripatetic philosophy at Florence in 1700. Barring a period of about three years, during which he was a professor of theology at Genoa , he spent the greatest part of his life in his native city, availing himself of the manifold resources he could find there to improve his knowledge of Greek literature, his favorite study.
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Arthur Adams
1820 - 1878 (58 years)
Arthur Adams was an English physician and naturalist. Adams was assistant surgeon Royal Navy on board HMS Samarang during the survey of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, from 1843 to 1846. He edited the Zoology of the voyage of H.M.S. Samarang . Adam White collaborated with him in the descriptions of the Crustacea from the voyage. In 1857, during the Second China War whilst serving as Surgeon on HMS Actaeon, he was present at the storming of Canton and awarded the China War Medal. He retired as Staff Surgeon aboard flagship HMS Royal Adelaide at Plymouth in 1870.
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Salvatore Satta
1902 - 1975 (73 years)
Salvatore Satta was an Italian jurist and writer. He is famous for the novel The Day of Judgment , and for several important studies on civil law. Biography He was the youngest son of notary Salvatore Satta and Antonietta Galfrè, and relative of Sebastiano Satta. After attending the Liceo classico in Nuoro and Sassari, he graduated in law in 1924 at the University of Sassari. He is considered one of Italy's foremost jurists, in particular for his works on the Italian civil code after the second world war, and one of the greatest Sardinian authors.
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Katyayanidas Bhattacharya
1917 - 1966 (49 years)
Katyayanidas Bhattacharya was an Indian scholar and philosopher of Indian and Western philosophy. Early life and education Born on 17 October 1917 , to Bhubaneswar Bhattacharya, an Ayurveda physician and Shailaja Devi, Katyayanidas passed his Matriculation Examination from his village school in Chunta and Intermediate Arts Examination from Bridaban College , Habiganj , in 1936 and 1939 respectively. In Intermediate Examination, he stood first in logic in the University of Calcutta and was awarded Saradaprasad Prize by the university. In between, he pursued traditional courses in Sanskrit for a year under Pandit Surendra Chandra Tarka-Sankhya-Vedantatirtha.
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Arnold Edward Ortmann
1863 - 1927 (64 years)
Arnold Edward Ortmann was a Prussian-born United States naturalist and zoologist who specialized in malacology. Biography Ortmann was born in Magdeburg, Prussia on April 8, 1863. A student of Ernst Haeckel, he graduated from the University of Jena in 1885 with a Ph.D.; he had also studied at the University of Kiel and the University of Strasbourg. From 1886 on, he worked as an instructor at the University of Strasbourg. Together with Haeckel, he participated in an expedition to Zanzibar in 1890/91. Three years later, he emigrated to the United States, where he got a post as the curator of the department of invertebrate paleontology at Princeton University.
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Sigismondo Boldoni
1597 - 1630 (33 years)
Sigismondo Boldoni was an Italian writer, philosopher, and physician. Boldoni was born in Bellano and died in Pavia from the plague shortly before his 33rd birthday. At the time of his death he held the principal chair in philosophy at the University of Pavia. His literary works included a description of the geography and history of Lake Como entitled Larius and the epic poem La caduta de' Longobardi . His letters of 1629 describing the advance of invading German armies in the region around Lake Como and the plague epidemic they brought in their wake were used by Manzoni as a source for his ...
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Gilbert Austin Davies
1868 - 1948 (80 years)
Gilbert Austin Davies was an English classical scholar. Life Davies was born in London. After education at Aldenham Grammar School and Owen’s College, Manchester, Davies went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a scholar in 1887. He began his academic career at Trinity, where he was a Fellow from 1892 to 1898, during which time he produced a school edition of the first book of Tacitus's Histories in 1896.
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Arnold Ridley
1896 - 1984 (88 years)
William Arnold Ridley, OBE was an English playwright and actor, earlier in his career known for writing the play The Ghost Train and later in life in the British TV sitcom Dad's Army as the elderly bumbling Private Godfrey, as well as in spin-offs including the feature film version and the stage production.
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John Brown
1810 - 1882 (72 years)
John Brown was a Scottish physician and essayist known for his three-volume Horae Subsecivae , containing essays and papers on art, medical history and biography. Best remembered are his dog story "Rab and his Friends" and his essays "Pet Marjorie" , on Marjorie Fleming, the ten-year-old prodigy and alleged "pet" of Walter Scott, "Our Dogs", "Minchmoor", and "The Enterkine". Brown was half-brother to the organic chemist Alexander Crum Brown.
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William C. deMille
1878 - 1955 (77 years)
William Churchill deMille , also spelled de Mille or De Mille, was an American screenwriter and film director from the silent film era through the early 1930s. He was also a noted playwright prior to moving into film. Once he was established in film he specialized in adapting Broadway plays into silent films.
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John Reeves
1774 - 1856 (82 years)
John Reeves was an English naturalist. He developed a notable collection of Chinese drawings of animals and plants. Reeves was the son of Reverend Jonathan Reeves of West Ham, Essex. Orphaned young, he was educated at Christ's Hospital and started working with a tea merchant. His knowledge of teas got him an appointment of inspector of tea in 1808. In 1812 he was sent to China in the employment of the British East India Company. He was responsible for the introduction of a number of garden plants to the West including Wisteria. Reeves was a correspondent of the Horticultural Society of London to which he sent specimens.
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Wilhelm Cloetta
1857 - 1911 (54 years)
Wilhelm Cloetta was a German Romance philologist and medievalist. He studied languages at the University of Zürich as a pupil of Heinrich Breitinger and Heinrich Schweizer-Sidler, and from 1877 continued his education in Paris, where his influences included Gaston Paris, Arsène Darmesteter and Paul Meyer. In 1884 he received his doctorate at the University of Göttingen with the dissertation Abfassungszeit und ueberlieferung des Poème Moral. In 1893 he relocated to Jena, where from 1895 to 1909 he taught classes as a full professor of Romance philology. Afterwards, he served as a professor at ...
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Francis Hastings Doyle
1810 - 1888 (78 years)
Sir Francis Hastings Charles Doyle, 2nd Baronet was a British poet. Biography Doyle was born near Tadcaster, Yorkshire, to a military family which produced several distinguished officers, including his father, Major-General Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, 1st Baronet, who was created a baronet in 1828. He succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his father in 1839.
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William Spalding
1809 - 1859 (50 years)
William Spalding was a Scottish writer and academic. For the last twenty years of his life he served as professor of rhetoric and logic, in addition to authoring essays, reviews and historical texts.
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Bernhard Blume
1901 - 1978 (77 years)
Bernhard Blume was an emigre from Nazi Germany who became a professor of German literature at Mills College, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and the University of California, San Diego. In addition to scholarly works, he authored several plays, a novel, and an autobiography.
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David Kalstone
1933 - 1986 (53 years)
David Kalstone was an American writer and literary critic. Biography Kalstone, born in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and studied at the University of Cambridge. He taught at Harvard University starting in 1959 and was a professor of English at Rutgers University from 1967 until his death.
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Ole Olsen
1892 - 1963 (71 years)
John Sigvard "Ole" Olsen was an American vaudevillian and comedian. Biography Olsen was married twice. He had four children with his first wife, Lillian Clem: John Charles, Robert Clem, Joy, and Moya. They were later divorced. His son, Robert died of miliary tuberculosis at age 2; son J. C., an actor, died by suicide in 1956. Moya married William P. Lear of Learjet fame in 1942. Ole was involved in a serious automobile accident in 1950 and recuperated at the Lear home. In June 1961 Ole married Eileen Maria Osthoff, a dancer and choreographer he had known for eight years.
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T. M. Chummar
1899 - 1987 (88 years)
Thattassery Mathai Chummar , commonly identified as T. M. Chummar, was an Indian academic and writer of Malayalam literature, best known for his books on its history. An associate of G. Sankara Kurup and Vailoppilli Sreedhara Menon, Chummar's books on Kunchan Nambiar and C. V. Raman Pillai detail their literary contributions. He was a recipient of the title Sahitya Nipunan, conferred on him by the Rajah of Cochin. The Kerala Sahitya Akademi honoured him with the distinguished fellowship in 1986.
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Manuel Ramos Otero
1948 - 1990 (42 years)
Manuel Ramos Otero was a Puerto Rican writer. He is widely considered to be the most important openly gay twentieth-century Puerto Rican writer who wrote in Spanish, and his work was often controversial due to its sexual and political content. Ramos Otero died in San Juan, Puerto Rico, due to complications from AIDS.
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Wolfgang von Wurzbach
1879 - 1957 (78 years)
Wolfgang von Wurzbach was an Austrian Romance language scholar, literary scholar, and collector. Life and work Alfred Wolfgang Ritter Wurzbach von Tannenberg was the son of Alfred von Wurzbach and Eugenie v. Wurzbach, the daughter of the banker Joseph Lippmann von Lissingen. He was a great-grandson of the Ljubljana lawyer Maximilian von Wurzbach, who had been raised to the nobility, and the grandson of the biographical lexicographer Constantin von Wurzbach. He studied at the University of Vienna, where he received his doctorate in 1902. He completed his habilitation1906/07 in Vienna for Romance literary history, 1911 expanded to Romance philology.
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Henrietta Gould Rowe
1835 - 1910 (75 years)
Henrietta Gould Rowe was an American litterateur and author of the long nineteenth century. Biography Henrietta Gould was born in East Corinth, Maine, 1835. She was the daughter of Aaron and Sarah Gould. Rowe received an academic education.
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Friedrich von Gerok
1786 - 1865 (79 years)
Friedrich von Gerok was a German theologian. After studying Gerok began his professional career in 1806, and from 1809 to 1811 he was librarian at Tübingen. From 1811 to 1814 he was assistant to the professor of classical literature at the University of Tübingen. In 1813 and 1814 he was a deacon in Vaihingen an der Enz and in 1815 at the Stuttgart Collegiate. In 1836 he was deacon and preacher at the hospital in Stuttgart. In 1848 he was appointed General Superintendent in Ludwigsburg, a position he held until his retirement in 1860.
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Chariton Charitonidis
1878 - 1954 (76 years)
Chariton Charitonidis was a Greek classical philologist, professor at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and member of the Academy of Athens. Life Chariton Charitonidis was born in Makri, Asia Minor. He was educated at the Pythagorian Gymnasium of Samos, but graduated from the 3rd Gymnasium of Athens. He then studied philology at the University of Athens. There he was associated with the circle of Professor Konstantinos S. Kontos. He received his degree in 1902. In 1909 he was awarded a Ph.D. of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Athens. In 1907 he was appointed to Arsakeio ...
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Ernst W. Selmer
1890 - 1971 (81 years)
Ernst Westerlund Selmer was a Norwegian philologist and phonetician. A professor at the University of Oslo from 1937 to 1960, he was best known for his work on Low German and North Frisian. Personal life He was born in Funbo, Sweden as a son of Ludvig Marius Selmer and Nina Maria Mathilda Westerlund . He grew up in Kristiania. He was a nephew of and Jens Selmer, and a second cousin of Fredrik Selmer.
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Ludvig Vibe
1803 - 1881 (78 years)
Frederik Ludvig Vibe was a Norwegian classical philologist and educator. He was Professor of Greek language at the Royal Frederick University from 1838. Vibe was born in Bergen as a son of County Governor, General War Commissioner and chamberlain Niels Andreas Vibe and Margery Kierulff . He was a nephew of Johan Vibe and Ditlev Wibe, brother of Henriette Gislesen, brother-in-law of Heinrich Arnold Thaulow and second cousin of Ludvig Cæsar Martin Aubert. The family moved to Christiania in 1811.
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Charles de Gaulle
1837 - 1880 (43 years)
Charles Jules-Joseph de Gaulle was a French writer who was a pioneer of Pan-Celticism and the bardic revival. He is also known as Charlez Vro-C'hall, the Breton language version of his name. He was the uncle of the army officer and statesman Charles de Gaulle.
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Johann von Kelle
1828 - 1909 (81 years)
Johann von Kelle was a German philologist who studied the German language. Biography He attended the University of Munich where he studied classical philology. Inspired by Johann Andreas Schmeller, he turned his attention to the German language, and received a Ph.D. from the University of Würzburg in 1854. From 1855 to 1857, he was an editor for a Berlin publisher, where he oversaw the development of an encyclopedia. During this time, he got to know the Grimm brothers. In 1857 he was made a full professor of German language and literature at the University of Prague, where he remained until his retirement in 1899.
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Lawrence Edward Watkin
1901 - 1981 (80 years)
Lawrence Edward Watkin was an American writer and film producer. He was known primarily as a scriptwriter for a series of 1950s Walt Disney films. Life Watkin was born in Camden , New York in 1901. He died in 1981, a few days after his 80th birthday, in San Joaquin County, California.
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Henry Simmons Frieze
1817 - 1889 (72 years)
Henry Simmons Frieze was an American educator and academic administrator. He was an instructor at Brown University and its University Grammar School, a professor at the University of Michigan, and served three separate times as acting president of the University of Michigan.
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Saralabala Sarkar
1875 - 1961 (86 years)
Saralabala Sarkar was an Indian Bengali writer. Early life Saralabala Sarkar was born on 10 December 1875 in Katalpora, Nadia District, Bengal Presidency, British Raj. Her ancestral house was in Bhar Ramdia, Faridpur District, Bengal Presidency. She was home schooled. She was married to Sarat Chandra Sarkar when she was twelve years old. Her husband died when she was twenty-three. Her grandmother was Shreemati Rasasundari, a writer herself, notable for her autobiography that provided a keen insight into the life of a 19th-century Bengali housewife.
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Johann Bernhard Vermehren
1774 - 1803 (29 years)
Johann Bernhard Vermehren was an early Romantic poet and scholar. He earned a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1799, obtaining habilitation one year later and teaching as Privatdozent until his early death from scarlet fever.
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Matthias Hiller
1646 - 1725 (79 years)
Matthias Hiller was a German Protestant theologian and Orientalist. Life Matthias Hiller was born at Stuttgart on 15 February 1646, the son of a Württemberg government secretary. He became professor of logic and metaphysics in 1692, and of Oriental languages and theology in 1698. In 1716 he exchanged these offices for the priory of Königsbronn, where he died on 11 February 1725.
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Adalbert Seligmann
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Adalbert Franz Seligmann was an Austrian painter and art critic. He signed his criticism with the name "Plein-Air", in reference to a style of landscape painting known as En plein air. Biography His father was the Viennese medical historian, Romeo Seligmann so, from his youth, he was exposed to the intellectual circles of Austria. From 1880 to 1884, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, under Christian Griepenkerl, after which he transferred to the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. This was followed by study trips to France, Italy and Turkey. In 1896, he received a small gold medal at t...
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Evelyn Eaton
1902 - 1983 (81 years)
Evelyn Sybil Mary Eaton was a Canadian novelist, short-story writer, poet and academic known for her early novels set in New France, and later writings which explored spirituality. Life account Born in Montreux, Switzerland, Eaton was the daughter of Canadians Lieutenant-Colonel Daniel Isaac Vernon Eaton, an army officer from Nova Scotia, and Myra Fitzrandolph of New Brunswick. Eaton was the younger of two daughters. Lt.-Col. Eaton was killed in 1917, while directing the artillery assault at the battle of Vimy Ridge in France, when Evelyn Eaton was just 14. Evelyn's older sister, Helen Moira...
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Robert Herrick
1868 - 1938 (70 years)
Robert Welch Herrick was a novelist who was part of a new generation of American realists. His novels deal with the turbulence of industrialized society and the turmoil it can create in sensitive, isolated people. He was also briefly acting-Governor of the United States Virgin Islands in 1935.
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Abby Leach
1855 - 1918 (63 years)
Abby Leach was as an American educator and professor of Greek and Latin at Vassar College. She was appointed as the first female president of the American Philological Association in 1899. Formative years and family Born in Brockton, Massachusetts on May 28, 1855, Abby Leach was one of five children of Marcus and Eliza Paris Bourne Leach. Her father was an owner of a shoemaking business.
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Antonina Riasanovsky
1895 - 1985 (90 years)
Antonina Riasanovsky was a Russian Empire-born writer who, under the pen name Nina Fedorova, wrote The Family, the tenth highest selling fiction book in the United States 1940. The book won the 1940 $10,000 fiction novel prize from the Atlantic Monthly. The Family tells the story of an exiled White Russian family in Tianjin, China.
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Marion Cummings
1876 - 1926 (50 years)
Alice Marion Cummings was a California-born poet, philosopher, and academic. She taught philosophy, psychology, and the history of education for most of her career at University of Arizona. Cummings edited two poetry anthologies and her own poetry was published in popular periodicals such as Smart Set, Harper's, Commonwealth, Lippincott's, and The Forum. Cummings had a short-lived but intense friendship with poet Sara Teasdale, who wrote several poems about Cummings. The two continued their friendship through correspondence.
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Mary Nourse
1880 - 1971 (91 years)
Mary Augusta Nourse was an American educator and writer on China and the Far East, and a co-founder of Jinling College in Nanjing. The best-known of her several books was her first, a popular history of China titled The Four Hundred Million.
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Peter Arnott
1931 - 1990 (59 years)
Peter D. Arnott was a puppeteer and Professor of drama at Tufts University. He wrote many books and translated many classical plays. Early life Arnott was born in Ipswich, England in 1931 where he earned bachelor's degrees from both the University of Wales and Oxford University. He earned a PhD in drama from the University of Wales before moving to the United States where he taught drama at the University of Iowa. In 1969, Arnott was hired by Tufts University where he was their youngest professor.
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