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,
#8201
Martin Hertz
1818 - 1895 (77 years)
Martin Julius Hertz was a German classical philologist, a student and biographer of Karl Lachmann. He studied philology at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin, where his instructors included August Boeckh and Karl Lachmann , the latter being an important influence to Hertz' career. He earned his doctorate in 1842, followed by his habilitation a few years later . Afterwards, he embarked on an educational journey throughout Europe .
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Johann Georg Jacobi
1740 - 1814 (74 years)
Johann Georg Jacobi was a German poet. Biography The elder brother of the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Johann Georg was born at Pempelfort near Düsseldorf. He studied theology at Göttingen and jurisprudence at Helmstedt, and in 1766 was appointed professor of philosophy in Halle. That year he made the acquaintance of J. W. L. Gleim, who, attracted by the young poet's Poetische Versuche , became his friend. A lively literary correspondence ensued between Gleim in Halberstadt and Jacobi in Halle. In order to have Jacobi near him, Gleim succeeded in procuring for him a prebendal stall ...
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Johann Heinrich Joseph Düntzer
1813 - 1901 (88 years)
Johann Heinrich Joseph Düntzer was a German philologist and historian of literature. Biography He was born at Cologne. After studying philology and especially ancient classics and Sanskrit at Bonn and Berlin , he took the degree of doctor of philosophy and established himself in 1837 at Bonn as privatdozent for classical philology. He had already, in his Goethes Faust in seiner Einheit und Ganzheit and Goethe als Dramatiker , advocated a new critical method in interpreting the German classics, which he wished to see treated like the ancient classics.
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Karl Schenkl
1827 - 1900 (73 years)
Karl Schenkl was an Austrian classical philologist. Biography Schenkl studied classical philology and law from 1845 to 1849 at the University of Vienna. After 1850 he taught at various gymnasiums, and in 1858 was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Innsbruck, where he founded the Philological Institute in 1860. In 1863 he left for the University of Graz, and in the same year started a philological seminar and became a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences; in 1868 he became a full member. Schenkl was rector at Graz from 1869 to 1870, and in 1870 became a member of the Gymnasialreformkommission .
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Julien Louis Geoffroy
1743 - 1814 (71 years)
Julien Louis Geoffroy was a French literary critic. He was born at Rennes, and educated there and at the Collège Louis le Grand in Paris. He took orders and for some time was a mere usher, eventually becoming professor of rhetoric at the Collège des Quatre-Nations. His tragedy, Caton, was accepted at the Théâtre Français, but was never performed. On the death of Élie Fréron in 1776 the other collaborators in the Année littéraire asked Geoffroy to succeed him, and he conducted the journal until its closure in 1792.
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Arthur W. Ryder
1877 - 1938 (61 years)
Arthur William Ryder was a professor of Sanskrit at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for translating a number of Sanskrit works into English, including the Panchatantra and the Bhagavad Gita.
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Len Lye
1901 - 1980 (79 years)
Leonard Charles Huia Lye was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley. Lye's sculptures are found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum. Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
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Barbara Sleigh
1906 - 1982 (76 years)
Barbara Grace de Riemer Sleigh was an English children's writer and broadcaster. She is remembered most for her Carbonel series about a king of cats. Family and career Barbara Sleigh was born on 9 January 1906 in Birmingham, the daughter of an artist, Bernard Sleigh, and his wife Stella, née Phillp, who had married in 1901. Both parents came from a Methodist background, but she was brought up an Anglican. The family moved to Chesham for a time, then back to Birmingham. Their marriage broke up in about 1914. Her older brother, Brocas Linwood Sleigh , would also become a writer.
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Chen Wangdao
1891 - 1977 (86 years)
Chen Wangdao was a Chinese scholar and educator. He is recognized as the first and only person to translate the Communist Manifesto into Chinese completely so far. He also served as president of Fudan University from 1949 to 1977.
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Richard Lovelace
1617 - 1658 (41 years)
Richard Lovelace was an English poet in the seventeenth century. He was a cavalier poet who fought on behalf of Charles I during the English Civil War. His best known works are "To Althea, from Prison", and "To Lucasta, Going to the Warres".
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Madeline Gleason
1903 - 1979 (76 years)
Madeline Gleason was a United States poet and dramatist. She was the founder of the San Francisco Poetry Guild. In 1947, she became the director of the first poetry festival in the United States, laying the groundwork for what became known as the San Francisco Renaissance. She was, with Helen Adam, Barbara Guest, and Denise Levertov, one of only four women whose work was included in Donald Allen's landmark anthology, The New American Poetry 1945-1960 .
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France Balantič
1921 - 1943 (22 years)
France Balantič was a Slovene poet. His works were banned from schools and libraries during the Titoist regime in Slovenia, but since the late 1980s he has been re-evaluated as one of the foremost Slovene poets of the 20th century.
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Samuel Madden
1686 - 1765 (79 years)
Samuel Madden was an Irish author. His works include Themistocles; The Lover of His Country, Reflections and Resolutions Proper for the Gentlemen of Ireland, and Memoirs of the Twentieth Century. Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote of him, "His was a name which Ireland ought to honour". He suggested that the Royal Dublin Society initiate a scheme to fund improvements in agriculture and arts in Ireland via the use of premiums – the source of his nickname Premium.
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Leonard William King
1869 - 1919 (50 years)
Leonard William King, FSA was an English archaeologist and Assyriologist educated at Rugby School and King's College, Cambridge. He collected stone inscriptions widely in the Near East, taught Assyrian and Babylonian archaeology at King's College for a number of years, and published a large number of works on these subjects. He is also known for his translations of ancient works such as the Code of Hammurabi. He became Assistant Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum.
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Barbara Leonard Reynolds
1915 - 1990 (75 years)
Barbara Leonard Reynolds , was an American author who became a Quaker, peace activist and educator. In 1951, Reynolds moved with her husband to Hiroshima where he conducted a three-year study on the effects of radiation on children who had survived the first atomic bomb. She and her family then became peace activists, sailing around the world to protest nuclear weapons. In the early 1960s, she traveled around the world with atomic bomb survivors to show world leaders, first-hand, the horrors of nuclear warfare. She then established the World Friendship Center, devoting 13 years to it, and don...
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William of Moerbeke
1215 - 1286 (71 years)
William of Moerbeke, O.P. , was a prolific medieval translator of philosophical, medical, and scientific texts from Greek into Latin, enabled by the period of Latin rule of the Byzantine Empire. His translations were influential in his day, when few competing translations were available, and are still respected by modern scholars.
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Archibald Campbell Jordan
1906 - 1968 (62 years)
Archibald Campbell Mzolisa "A.C." Jordan was a novelist, literary historian and intellectual pioneer of African studies in South Africa. Early life He was born at the Mbokothwane Mission in the Tsolo district, Pondoland , the son of an Anglican church minister. Jordan trained as a teacher at St John's College, Mthatha, completed his junior certificate at Lovedale College, Alice, and then won a scholarship to Fort Hare University College. His literary and linguistic training consisted in a BA Degree , followed by a Master's thesis, submitted to the University of Cape Town in 1942, entitled "S...
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Huang Kan
1886 - 1935 (49 years)
Huang Kan , courtesy name Jigang , born into a family of Hubei ancestry in Chengdu, Sichuan province, was a Chinese phonologist, philologist and revolutionary. As a teen, he tested into Wuchang School, a prestigious secondary school, but then was expelled for spreading anti-Qing sentiments. He then went to study in Japan and became a student of the Chinese scholar and philologist Zhang Taiyan. Huang was regarded as the most important phonologist since the high Qing and gained recognition at first through his literary criticism of the sixth century. Later on, he taught at a number of universit...
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William Vaughn Moody
1869 - 1910 (41 years)
William Vaughn Moody was an American dramatist and poet. Moody was author of The Great Divide, first presented under the title of The Sabine Woman at the Garrick Theatre in Chicago on April 12, 1906, and then on Broadway at the Princess Theatre, running for 238 performances from October 3, 1906, to March 24, 1907. His poetic dramas are The Masque of Judgment , The Fire Bringer , and The Death of Eve . His best-known poem is "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," on the Spanish-American War; others include "Gloucester Moor," "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines," "The Brute," "Harmonics" , "Until...
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Lao She
1899 - 1966 (67 years)
Shu Qingchun , known by his pen name Lao She, was a Chinese novelist and dramatist. He was a writer of 20th-century Chinese literature, known for his novel Rickshaw Boy and the play Teahouse . He was of Manchu ethnicity, and his works are known for their vivid use of the Beijing dialect.
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Pier Paolo Pasolini
1922 - 1975 (53 years)
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an Italian poet, film director, writer, screenwriter, actor and playwright. He is considered one of the defining public intellectuals in 20th-century Italian history, influential both as an artist and a political figure.
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J. V. Cunningham
1911 - 1985 (74 years)
James Vincent Cunningham was an Americann poet, literary critic and teacher. Background Cunningham is described as a neo-classicist or anti-modernist. His poetry was distinguished by its clarity, brevity and traditional formality of rhyme and rhythm at a time when many American poets were breaking away from traditional fixed meters.
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Monty Banks
1897 - 1950 (53 years)
Montague Banks was a 20th century Italian-born American comedian, film actor, director and producer who achieved success in the United States and Britain. Career Banks was born Mario Bianchi in Cesena, Italy. In 1914, Bianchi emigrated to the United States, first trying his luck on the New York stage. By 1918, he was an actor in Hollywood with the Arbuckle Company, performing in over 35 silent short comedies by the early 1920s, and then, starring in feature-length action comedy-thrillers as Play Safe . .
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Bruno Migliorini
1896 - 1975 (79 years)
Bruno Migliorini was an Italian linguist and philologist. He was the author of one of the first scientific histories of Italian language and was president of the Accademia della Crusca. Biography Migliorini was born in Rovigo.
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Wilhelm von Christ
1831 - 1906 (75 years)
Wilhelm von Christ was a German classical scholar. Biography The son of a baker and a miller's daughter, Christ was born in Geisenheim in Hesse-Nassau. He attended the Gymnasium in Hadamar and studied in Munich from 1850 under Karl Halm, Friedrich Thiersch, Karl von Prantl, and Leonhard Spengel, then in Berlin under Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, August Boeckh und Franz Bopp. In 1853 he received his doctorate at Berlin for a work on Aristotle and the next year he became a teacher at the in Munich. In 1860, Christ was appointed extraordinary profossor of Classical philology at the University of Munich; he became an ordinary professor in 1863.
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Arrigo Boito
1842 - 1918 (76 years)
Arrigo Boito was an Italian librettist, composer, poet and critic whose only completed opera was Mefistofele. Among the operas for which he wrote the libretti are Giuseppe Verdi's monumental last two operas Otello and Falstaff as well as Amilcare Ponchielli's La Gioconda.
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John Hughes
1677 - 1720 (43 years)
John Hughes was an English poet, essayist and translator. Various of his works remained in print for a century after his death, but if he is remembered at all today it is for the use others made of his work. Texts of his were set by the foremost composers of the day and his translation of the Letters of Abelard and Heloise was a major source for Alexander Pope's Eloisa to Abelard.
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Oliver Elton
1861 - 1945 (84 years)
Oliver Elton, FBA was an English literary scholar whose works include A Survey of English Literature in six volumes, criticism, biography, and translations from several languages including Icelandic and Russian. He was King Alfred Professor of English at Liverpool University. He also helped set up the Department of English at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan.
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Jacques Prévert
1900 - 1977 (77 years)
Jacques Prévert was a French poet and screenwriter. His poems became and remain popular in the French-speaking world, particularly in schools. His best-regarded films formed part of the poetic realist movement, and include . He published his first book in 1946.
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René Clair
1898 - 1981 (83 years)
René Clair , born René-Lucien Chomette, was a French filmmaker and writer. He first established his reputation in the 1920s as a director of silent films in which comedy was often mingled with fantasy. He went on to make some of the most innovative early sound films in France, before going abroad to work in the UK and USA for more than a decade. Returning to France after World War II, he continued to make films that were characterised by their elegance and wit, often presenting a nostalgic view of French life in earlier years. He was elected to the Académie Française in 1960. Clair's best know...
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Clarence Budington Kelland
1881 - 1964 (83 years)
Clarence Budington "Bud" Kelland was an American writer. Prolific and versatile, he was a prominent literary figure in his heyday, and he described himself as "the best second-rate writer in America".
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Wilhelm Wackernagel
1806 - 1869 (63 years)
Wilhelm Wackernagel was a German-Swiss philologist specializing in Germanic studies. He was the father of Indo-Europeanist Jacob Wackernagel. He studied Classical and Germanic literature at the University of Berlin as a pupil of August Boeckh and Karl Lachmann. In 1833 he moved to Basel, where from 1835 to 1869, he was a professor of German language and literature at the university. While at Basel, he turned down offers for professorships in Berlin, Munich, Tübingen and Vienna.
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Hiram Corson
1828 - 1911 (83 years)
Hiram Corson was an American professor of literature. Life Corson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He held a position in the library of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. , was a lecturer on English literature in Philadelphia , and was professor of English at Girard College, Philadelphia , and in St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland . In 1870-1871 he was professor of rhetoric and oratory at Cornell University, where he was professor of Anglo-Saxon and English literature , of English literature and rhetoric , and from 1890 to 1903 of English literature, a chair formed for him.
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August Fick
1833 - 1916 (83 years)
Friedrich Conrad August Fick was a German philologist. He spent his life chiefly at Göttingen, where he first studied philology under Theodor Benfey; became a teacher in the Gymnasium, and eventually in 1876 professor of comparative philology at the university; in 1887 accepted a professorship in Breslau, but retired four years later; author of a variety of learned works on philology.
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James A. Blaisdell
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
James Arnold Blaisdell was an American minister, theologian, and academic administrator. He was the fourth president of Pomona College and founder and "head fellow" of the Claremont Colleges . Life and career He was born in Beloit, Wisconsin; his father was a philosophy professor at Beloit College. Blaisdell graduated from Beloit College in 1889, and went on to become a minister in Waukesha, Wisconsin for a time, until he went back to Beloit College to be the Chair of the Bible Department, as well as the director of the library, in 1903.
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Robert P. T. Coffin
1892 - 1955 (63 years)
Robert Peter Tristram Coffin was an American poet, educator, writer, editor and literary critic. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1936, he was the poetry editor for Yankee magazine. Early life Born Robert Peter Coffin, the youngest of ten children to James William Coffin, a descendant of Tristram Coffin and Alice Mary Coombs on a saltwater farm on Sebascodegan Island he earned his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in 1913 and then his Masters of Arts from Princeton University in 1918. In 1922 Coffin was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature by Oxford University where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
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Theodor Panofka
1800 - 1858 (58 years)
Theodor Sigismund Panofka was a German archaeologist, art historian, and philologist. He was one of the first scholars to make a systematic study of the pottery of Ancient Greece, and one of the founders of the institution later to become the German Archaeological Institute .
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Ella Young
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
Ella Young was an Irish poet and Celtic mythologist active in the Gaelic and Celtic Revival literary movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in Ireland, Young was an author of poetry and children's books. She emigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1925 as a temporary visitor and lived in California. For five years she gave speaking tours on Celtic mythology at American universities, and in 1931 she was involved in a publicized immigration controversy when she attempted to become a citizen.
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Mikayel Nalbandian
1829 - 1866 (37 years)
Mikayel Nalbandian was a Russian-Armenian writer, poet, political theorist and activist. Nalbandian was born in Nakhichevan-on-Don, an Armenian town in southern Russia, and traveled extensively, although he visited Armenia itself only once. A radical intellectual, Nalbandian was an avid advocate of secularism and anti-clericalism, the use of modern Armenian and a vocal critic of the conservative clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church. He also espoused anti-Catholicism. Inspired by the Enlightenment and the Italian unification, Nalbandian advocated reform, cultural nationalism and agrarianism among Armenians.
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Lucian Müller
1836 - 1898 (62 years)
Lucian Müller was a German classical scholar. Life Müller was born in Merseburg in the Province of Saxony. After studying at the universities of Berlin and Halle, he lived for five years in the Netherlands, working on his Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlanden . Unable to obtain a university appointment in Germany, he accepted the professorship of Latin at the Imperial Historico-Philological Institute in St Petersburg.
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Vera Lachmann
1904 - 1985 (81 years)
Vera Lachmann was a German poet, classicist and educator. After founding a school for Jewish children in Nazi Germany, she emigrated to the United States in 1939 and established Camp Catawba, a summer camp for boys.
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William Henry Ogilvie
1869 - 1963 (94 years)
William Henry Ogilvie was a Scottish-Australian narrative poet and horseman, jackaroo, and drover, and described as a quiet-spoken handsome Scot of medium height, with a fair moustache and red complexion. He was also known as Will Ogilvie, by the pen names including 'Glenrowan' and the lesser 'Swingle-Bar', and by his initials, WHO.
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Peadar O'Donnell
1893 - 1986 (93 years)
Peadar O'Donnell was one of the foremost radicals of 20th-century Ireland. O'Donnell became prominent as an Irish republican, socialist activist, politician and writer. Early life Peadar O'Donnell was born into an Irish-speaking family in Meenmore, near Dungloe, County Donegal in 1893. He was the fifth son of James O'Donnell, a kiln worker, migrant labourer, and musician, and Brigid Rodgers. His uncle Peter was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World in Butte, Montana, whom Peadar met on trips home to Ireland.
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Viktorin Kornel of Všehrdy
1460 - 1520 (60 years)
Viktorin Kornel ze Všehrd or simply Všehrd , was a Czech humanist and lawyer, working towards the end of the 15th century as Vice-scribe at the Land Court in the Prague Castle. He is famous for the most penetrating analysis of the Czech common law that he has put forward on some 460 pages under the title "On the Laws of the Czech Land Nine Books" . He has also translated some Latin texts.
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John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
1647 - 1680 (33 years)
John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was an English poet and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court, who reacted against the "spiritual authoritarianism" of the Puritan era. Rochester embodied this new era, and he became as well known for his rakish lifestyle as for his poetry, although the two were often interlinked. He died as a result of a sexually transmitted infection at the age of 33.
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Curt Wachsmuth
1837 - 1905 (68 years)
Curt Wachsmuth was a German historian and classical philologist. He was a son-in-law to philologist Friedrich Ritschl. Academic biography From 1856 to 1860 he studied at the universities of Jena and Bonn, where he later received his habilitation in classical philology and ancient history. In 1864 he became a professor in ancient history at the University of Marburg, followed by professorships in classical philology at the universities of Göttingen and Heidelberg . From 1885 to 1905 he was a professor of classical philology and ancient history at the University of Leipzig. In 1897/98 he serve...
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August Fischer
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
August Fischer was a German orientalist. From 1883 to 1889 he studied theology and Oriental philology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Halle, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on the source biographies of Ibn Ishaq, Biographien von Gewährsmännern des Ibn Ishaq. In 1890 he obtained his habilitation for Oriental philology at the University of Halle, and several years later became an associate professor in Berlin. From 1900 to 1930 he was a full professor of Oriental philology at the University of Leipzig, where in 1914/15 he served as dean to the faculty of philosophy. For several...
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Robert Benchley
1889 - 1945 (56 years)
Robert Charles Benchley was an American humorist best known for his work as a newspaper columnist and film actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.
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Sultan Walad
1226 - 1312 (86 years)
Baha al-Din Muhammad-i Walad , more popularly known as Sultan Walad was the eldest son of Jalal Al-Din Rumi, Persian poet, Sufi, Hanafi Maturidi Islamic scholar and one of the founders of the Mawlawiya order.
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Pelham Edgar
1871 - 1948 (77 years)
Oscar Pelham Edgar was a Canadian teacher. He was a full professor and head of the Department of English at the Victoria College, Toronto from 1910 to 1938. He wrote many articles and several monographs on English literature. He had a talent for identifying and encouraging promising new authors. He was an active member of various literary societies, and was the force behind the establishment of the Canadian Writers’ Foundation to help needy authors.
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