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,
#7801
Lu Kanru
1903 - 1978 (75 years)
Lu Kanru was a scholar of classical Chinese literature and a lifelong collaborator of his wife Feng Yuanjun. Like his wife, he worked at Shandong University for most of his career.
Go to Profile#7802
John Fleming
1785 - 1857 (72 years)
John Fleming FRSE FRS FSA was a Scottish Free Church minister, naturalist, zoologist and geologist. He named and described a number of species of molluscs. During his life he tried to reconcile theology with science.
Go to Profile#7803
Josef Augusta
1903 - 1968 (65 years)
Josef Augusta was a Czech paleontologist, geologist, and science popularizer. From 1921 to 1925 Augusta studied at the Masaryk University in Brno. Between 1933 and 1968 he held posts at the Charles University in Prague as lecturer, professor, and dean of the faculty.
Go to Profile#7804
Arnold Wall
1869 - 1966 (97 years)
Arnold Wall was a New Zealand university professor, philologist, poet, mountaineer, botanist, writer and radio broadcaster. Early life and education He was born in Nuwara Eliya, Ceylon in 1869; his father was George Wall. His daughter Hilary married the adult educator Norman Richmond in 1926. He is the brother of Rowena Seymour, Duchess of Somerset and the uncle of Evelyn Seymour, 17th Duke of Somerset.
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John Lundie Michie
1882 - 1946 (64 years)
John Lundie Michie was the first professor of Classics at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Early life John Lundie Michie was born on 4 June 1882 in Lochnalair, Crathie, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He attended Robert Gordon's College in Aberdeen, Scotland winning a Classics Gold Medal in 1899. He graduated with an M.A. and first class honours in classics in 1904 from the University of Aberdeen. He was awarded the Ferguson classical scholarship in his final year at Aberdeen. He was an equally enthusiastic athlete as he was a scholar, with skills in the hammer and sh...
Go to Profile#7806
Cecco d'Ascoli
1269 - 1327 (58 years)
Cecco d'Ascoli is the popular name of Francesco degli Stabili , an Italian encyclopaedist, physician and poet. Cecco is the diminutive of Francesco, Ascoli was the place of his birth. The lunar crater Cichus is named after him.
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Edward Maturin
1812 - 1881 (69 years)
Edward Maturin was born in Dublin, Ireland, on 18 June 1812 and died in New York City on 25 May 1881. He was naturalised as an American and worked as a professor of Greek. His fiction and poetry generally dealt with historical themes, while his work as a Gothic novelist often had an Irish background.
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Rita Felski
#7809
Konrad Nielsen
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Konrad Hartvig Isak Rosenvinge Nielsen was a Norwegian philologist. He spent most of his career as a professor at the Royal Frederick University as a lecturer, textbook writer, lexicographer and translator. His specialty was Sami languages, also called Lapp languages in his day.
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Sam Thompson
1916 - 1965 (49 years)
Sam Thompson was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.
Go to Profile#7811
Robert Lester Stallman
1930 - 1980 (50 years)
Robert Lester Stallman was an American literary critic, English professor and science fiction writer, author of the Book of the Beast trilogy. He wrote under the name of Robert L. Stallman in his academic writings, and Robert Stallman for his fiction.
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Mabel Normand
1892 - 1930 (38 years)
Amabel Ethelreid Normand , better known as Mabel Normand, was an American silent film actress, director and screenwriter. She was a popular star and collaborator of Mack Sennett in their Keystone Studios films, and at the height of her career in the late 1910s and early 1920s had her own film studio and production company, the Mabel Normand Feature Film Company. On screen, she appeared in twelve successful films with Charlie Chaplin and seventeen with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, sometimes writing and directing films featuring Chaplin as her leading man. In the 1920s Normand's name was linked wit...
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Lyubomir Nikolov Vladikin
1891 - 1948 (57 years)
Lubomir N. Vladikin a jurist, writer, and Bulgarian nationalist of the 20th century. Biography Early life Vladikin was born on September 3, 1891, in the village of Golyamo Belovo, Pazardzhik area. His mother, Maria Morfova, sister of the opera singer Hristina Morfova and the composer Aleksandar Morfov, studied French Philology in Geneva. His father, Nikola Yonkov Vladikin, was a well-known journalist, scholar, writer, publicist, historian and political activist. Over the period from 1890 to 1912 he was an MP for three consecutive terms. He was a nephew of the Bishop of South Bulgaria , known...
Go to Profile#7814
William Leroy Broun
1827 - 1902 (75 years)
William Leroy Broun was the President of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama, then known as the Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now known as Auburn University, from 1882 to 1902, with a one-year hiatus in 1883.
Go to Profile#7815
Alexander Petrie
1881 - 1979 (98 years)
Alexander Petrie was the first Professor of Classics at the University of Natal . Academic career Petrie graduated with an MA from Aberdeen University in 1903, where he received the Liddle Prize for Latin Verse . He won the Ferguson Scholarship in 1904. He also attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA from the University of Cambridge in 1907. He was appointed lecturer in Greek at Aberdeen in 1908, but in 1910 moved to South Africa to take up the position of Professor of Classics at the recently formed Natal University College, where he stayed until his retirement in 1946. He...
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Frank Frost Abbott
1860 - 1924 (64 years)
Frank Frost Abbott was an American classical scholar. Life Born in Redding, Connecticut, he taught at the University of Chicago, then moved to Princeton University in 1907. He died in Montreux, Switzerland.
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John Bright
1908 - 1989 (81 years)
John Milton Bright was an American journalist, screenwriter and political activist. Bright was born in Baltimore and worked with Ben Hecht as a newspaper journalist in Chicago. With fellow journalist Kubec Glasmon, Bright co-wrote a series of stories adapted as screenplays. The most notable of these, Beer and Blood, became the 1931 film The Public Enemy starring James Cagney. The two were nominated for a 1931 Academy Award for Best Story.
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Nicolas-Hubert de Mongault
1674 - 1746 (72 years)
Nicolas-Hubert Mongault was a French ecclesiastic and translator of the classics. He was an illegitimate son of Gilbert Colbert, Marquis de Saint-Pouange, a cousin of Louis XIV's powerful minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
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Warren Miller
1921 - 1966 (45 years)
Warren Miller was an American writer. He gained fame for his books dealing with issues of race, as in The Cool World and The Siege of Harlem , and for his more political books such as Looking for The General and Flush Times .
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Khachik Dashtents
1910 - 1974 (64 years)
Khachik Dashtents was an ethnic Armenian Soviet writer, poet and translator. Biography Khachik Dashtents was born in a shepherd's family on May 25, 1910 in Dashtadem, Sasun, Western Armenia . After the Armenian genocide, he moved to Yerevan and graduated from the Yerevan State University in 1932, and later studied at the Moscow State Linguistic University .
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Walter Bagehot
1826 - 1877 (51 years)
Walter Bagehot was an English journalist, businessman, and essayist, who wrote extensively about government, economics, literature and race. He is known for co-founding the National Review in 1855, and for his works The English Constitution and Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market .
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Barbara P. McCarthy
1904 - 1988 (84 years)
Barbara Philippa McCarthy was an American Hellenist and academic. McCarthy is mainly known for her work on Lucian of Samosata and his interactions with the Menippean satire. Education McCarthy completed her B.A. at Pembroke College, the private women's college of Brown University, in 1925. Between 1925 and 1927 McCarthy was a postgraduate student at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. She was awarded an M.A. by the University of Missouri in 1927. McCarthy completed her PhD at Yale University in 1929 with a dissertation titled The originality of Lucian's Satiric Dialogues, under the supervision of A.
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Wilhelm Gnapheus
1493 - 1568 (75 years)
Wilhelm Gnapheus was a Dutch-born Protestant religious figure and writer. After studying at the University of Cologne, in 1520 Gnapheus became dean of a Latin school in The Hague, where he encountered Reformation ideas. When in 1523 he and Cornelis Hoen were arrested, he met Jan de Bakker , the first Protestant martyr in the Netherlands. Gnapheus had been incarcerated together with de Bakker, but was released, then had to flee the inquisition.
Go to Profile#7824
Pasquale Festa Campanile
1927 - 1986 (59 years)
Pasquale Festa Campanile was an Italian screenwriter, film director and novelist, best known as a prominent exponent of the commedia all'italiana genre. Life and career Born at Melfi, in the province of Potenza, he moved to Rome at young age. He started as a writer and literary critic. La nonna Sabella, one of his novels, was later adapted by Dino Risi into the movie of the same name, internationally known as Oh! Sabella .
Go to Profile#7825
Johann Andreas Michael Nagel
1710 - 1788 (78 years)
Johann Andreas Michael Nagel was a German Hebrew scholar and Orientalist. Life Nagel was born in Sulzbach, to the east of Nuremberg. He was taught by the local Cantor who later moved on to teach at the St. Lawrence School in Nuremberg. Additionally, he received his early instruction in Latin and Religion from his father. Other tutors also came to the house, in the first instance with the intention of preparing him for a life in business. In the end, however, he was redirected to a theological career. Now taught not in the vernacular but in Latin, by a deacon who covered the middle eastern languages, he moved on to the Gymnasium in Nuremberg.
Go to Profile#7826
Alexander William Mair
1875 - 1928 (53 years)
Alexander William Mair was a 20th century Scottish scholar who was a professor of Greek at the University of Edinburgh. He was an authority on the works of the Greek poet Hesiod. Life Mair was born in Edinburgh on 9 June 1875, the son of Rev Alexander Mair of the United Presbyterian Church. The family lived at 7 Abbotsford Park in the Morningside district. He studied Classics at the University of Cambridge.
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Harry Hayden Clark
1901 - 1971 (70 years)
Harry Hayden Clark was a professor of English, specializing in American literature. He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic year 1931–1932. Clark graduated in 1923 with A.B. from Connecticut's Trinity College and in 1924 from Harvard University. At Yale University he was an instructor in English for the academic year 1924–1925. In the English department of Vermont's Middlebury College, he was from 1925 to 1926 an instructor and from 1926 to 1928 an assistant professor. From 1928 until his death in 1971 he was a faculty member of the English department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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Ézsaiás Budai
1760 - 1841 (81 years)
Ézsaiás Budai was a Hungarian Protestant theologian and philologue. Life His family was noble and his uncle, Budai Ferenc , was also a Protestant priest and the author of a scientific-historic lexicon published by his nephew after his death. Ézsaiás Budai studied at the Reformed University, which became later the University of Debrecen. From 1792 to 1794, he followed classes with Christian Gottlob Heyne, Christoph Meiners, August Ludwig von Schlözer und Ludwig Timotheus Spittler. After a journey to the Netherlands and England and a short period as a philosophy professor at the University of G...
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J. R. E. Lee
1864 - 1944 (80 years)
John Robert Edward Lee Sr. was an early leader in African-American education. He served as the third President of Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, a historically black college, from 1924 to 1944.
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Worth Tuttle Hedden
1896 - 1985 (89 years)
Worth Tuttle Hedden was an American writer who released four books between the 1940s and 1950s. Of her works, Wives of High Pasture became available in 1944 while The Other Room came out in 1947. The following year,The Other Room received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction. After publishing Love is a Wound in 1952, Two and Three Make One was made public in 1956 under her pen name Winifred Woodley. Apart from books, Tuttle wrote for the Encyclopædia Britannica between 1927 and 1928 while also writing for magazines such as The World Tomorrow. She advocated for civil rights. She won a Sou...
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Dennis Day
1916 - 1988 (72 years)
Dennis Day was an American actor, comedian and singer. He was of Irish descent. Early life Day was born and raised in the Throggs Neck Clason Point section of the Bronx, New York City, the second of five children born to Irish immigrants Patrick McNulty and Mary McNulty. His father was a factory electric power engineer. Day graduated from the Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary and attended Manhattan College in the Bronx, where he sang in the glee club.
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James Jamieson
1875 - 1966 (91 years)
James Dalgleish Hamilton Jamieson FRSE FDSE was a Scottish dentist and author. Life He was born on 10 September 1875 at 52 Rankeillor Street, a ground floor and basement flat in Edinburgh’s South Side, the son of Agnes Boyd and her husband, James Jamieson , a surgeon. He was educated at George Watsons College. He then studied dentistry at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1899.
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John Hill
1747 - Present (279 years)
John Hill FRSE was a Scottish minister and classicist. In 1783 he was one of the joint founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Life He was born in St Andrews on 27 April 1747 the son of Rev John Hill , minister of St Andrews, and his wife Elizabeth Gowdie, daughter of John Gowdie. His mother died at or soon after his birth. His father remarried and had more children, including George Hill. He attended St Andrews Grammar School then the University of St Andrews where he graduated MA around 1767.
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Thomas Morong
1827 - 1894 (67 years)
Rev. Thomas Morong was an American botanist and clergyman. Biography Morong was born in Cahawba, Alabama to a Massachusetts-born father, Thomas Morong, and a Maryland-born mother Jane Travers. His father owned a store and a plantation. After the death of his father, 15-year-old Morong and his family moved to Woburn, Massachusetts.
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Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton
1792 - 1862 (70 years)
Nathaniel Sheldon Wheaton was an American priest. He was born in Washington, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale College in 1814. He pursued a course of theological study in Maryland, where he resided four years, and was ordained by Bishop Clagett, deacon and priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1818 he was chosen rector of Christ Church, Hartford, Connecticut, and for over twelve years he discharged with marked efficiency the duties of that post. He resigned the rectorship in 1831 to become the second President of Trinity College, then called Washington College, succeeding Bishop Thomas Church Brownell.
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Arthur Wallace Peach
1886 - 1956 (70 years)
Arthur Wallace Peach was an American poet, the first English chair at Norwich University, and the director of the Vermont Historical Society. His poetry has been covered extensively in scholarly sources, and have been published in many poetry collections.
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Richard Malcolm Johnston
1822 - 1898 (76 years)
Richard Malcolm Johnston was an American author. Biography Johnson was born in Powelton, Hancock County, Georgia. His father was a Baptist minister, and his early education was received at a country school and finished at Mercer University. After graduating there he spent a year teaching and then took up the study of law and was admitted to the bar in 1843. In 1857, he accepted an appointment to the chair of belles-lettres and oratory at the University of Georgia in Athens, retaining it until the opening of the Civil War, when he began a school for boys on his farm near Sparta. This he kept going during the war, serving also for a time on the staff of Confederate general Joseph E.
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James C. Greenough
1829 - 1924 (95 years)
James Carruthers Greenough was an American educator who served as the third principal of the Rhode Island Normal School, sixth president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, and seventh principal of the Westfield State Normal School. He was also an outspoken advocate of Christian teachings in public academic institutions, a fellow of the American Institute of Instruction, and author of a treatise on the British education system.
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Walter Allen Jenkins
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Walter Allen Jenkins was an English academic. He served as the 7th vice-chancellor of the University of Dhaka during 1953–1956. Education Jenkins graduated from Emmanuel College in London. Later he obtained a D.Sc. degree from Sheffield University in 1925 and Legum Doctor degree from Cambridge University.
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Liu Bowen
1311 - 1375 (64 years)
Liu Ji , courtesy name Bowen, better known as Liu Bowen, was a Chinese military strategist, philosopher, and politician who lived in the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties. He was born in Qingtian County . He served as a key advisor to Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, the founder of the Ming dynasty, in the latter's struggle to overthrow the Yuan dynasty and unify China proper under his rule. Liu is also known for his prophecies and has been described as the "Divine Chinese Nostradamus". He and Jiao Yu co-edited the military treatise known as the Huolongjing .
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Herbert Warren
1853 - 1930 (77 years)
Sir Thomas Herbert Warren, KCVO was a British academic and administrator who was president of Magdalen College, Oxford for 43 years and vice-chancellor of Oxford University . Early life and education Warren was born in Bristol, the eldest son of magistrate Algernon William Warren, , and Cecil Thomas, both born in Carmarthenshire, Wales. Architect Edward Prioleau Warren was his younger brother. His sister, Anna Letitia Warren, studied at Somerville College, Oxford. At age 15, he entered the newly opened Clifton College, under its first headmaster John Percival. At Clifton, he played rugby an...
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Benedetto Stay
1714 - 1801 (87 years)
Benedetto Stay was a Ragusan Roman Catholic clergyman, educated by Jesuits, he attended the academic assemblies of Marin Sorgo, beginning the composition of a poem on Alexander Farnese. Later on, he published "Saggio sull'uomo", based on the system of Descartes.
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Matija Grbić
1505 - 1559 (54 years)
Matthias Garbitius or Matija Grbić was a German humanist, classical philologist and translator. Born in Istria, he emigrated to Nuremberg. Between 1545 and 1557 he was the dean of the philosophical faculty at the University of Tübingen. He is the first known Protestant from the Balkans.
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N. E. Cameron
1903 - 1983 (80 years)
N. E. Cameron was a writer from Guyana who wrote on almost every topic from history and mathematics to politics. Biography Early years and education Norman Eustace Cameron was born in New Amsterdam, Guyana. He attended Queen's College in Georgetown, and in 1921 won the Guyana Scholarship, achieving First-Class Honours at the Oxford and Cambridge Higher Examination, with five distinctions in Latin, French, English, Mathematics and Religious Knowledge, placing him first among candidates from Barbados and Guyana.
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Klaus Wittkugel
1910 - 1985 (75 years)
Klaus Wittkugel was one of the most important commercial and poster artists in the German Democratic Republic . For many years he was also a professor at the Berlin-Weißensee Arts Academy. Life Wittkugel was born in Kiel in the extreme north of the country. His father was a businessman. Klaus Wittkugel himself undertook a commercial training in Hamburg between 1927 and 1929, while also attending the Hamburg State Arts Academy, and then studied in Essen at the Folkwang University of the Arts till 1932. Here he was a master-scholar of Max Burchartz. He then relocated to Berlin where between 1932 and 1935 he was employed as a commercial artist by a retail chain.
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Adam of Dryburgh
1140 - 1212 (72 years)
Adam of Dryburgh , in later times also known as Adam the Carthusian, Adam Anglicus and Adam Scotus, was an Anglo-Scottish theologian, writer and Premonstratensian and Carthusian monk. Life He was born around 1140 in the Anglo-Scottish border area to parents whose names and identities are unknown. The details of his earliest education are not known. He is known to have rejected a clerical life in favour of monasticism, entering the Premonstratensian house of Dryburgh Abbey as a young man and becoming a priest there in 1165 at the age of twenty-five.
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Heinrich Landesmann
1821 - 1902 (81 years)
Heinrich Landesmann , more commonly known by his pseudonym, Hieronymus Lorm, was an Austrian poet and philosophical writer. From his earliest childhood he was very sickly; at the age of fifteen his sight and hearing were almost completely destroyed; and later in life he became totally blind. He developed the Lorm alphabet, a form of tactile signing named after him.
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Luigi Chiarini
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Luigi Chiarini was an Italian film theorist, essayist, screenwriter and film director. Life and career Born in Rome, Chiarini wrote extensively about film theory and in 1935 he founded the drama school Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He later founded and directed the Centro's official journal Bianco e Nero and the magazine Rivista del cinema italiano. In 1961 he was appointed the first chair of film studies in Italy, at the University of Pisa.
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Edwin Whitfield Fay
1865 - 1920 (55 years)
Edwin Whitfield Fay was a United States philologist. Biography He graduated from Southwestern Presbyterian University in 1883, received the degree of Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University in 1890, and studied at the University of Leipzig in 1891–92. In 1890-91 he was instructor in Sanskrit and classics at the University of Michigan, in 1892-93 he was acting associate professor of Latin at the University of Texas, in 1893-99 professor of Latin at Washington and Lee College, and beginning 1899 professor of Latin at the University of Texas until his death in Pittsburgh while visiting his sister.
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Martin R. P. McGuire
1897 - 1969 (72 years)
Martin Rawson Patrick McGuire was an American classicist and the senior editor of The New Catholic Encyclopedia, for which he wrote 114 articles. Early life Martin Rawson Patrick McGuire was born in 1897.
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