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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#8301
Viola S. Wendt
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Viola Sophia Wendt was an American poet and educator. Early life and education Wendt was born into a farming family in Boise, Idaho, in March 1907, the first of two daughters of Carl Wendt. Her parents moved to West Bend, Wisconsin in 1914 in order for her father to pursue new business opportunities. Viola was educated there, graduating from West Bend High School in 1924. She was a bright student, especially excelling at languages, writing, and literary analysis. Accordingly, Wendt entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison , majoring in English Literature. During her time there as an und...
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August Ferdinand Naeke
1788 - 1838 (50 years)
August Ferdinand Naeke was a German classical philologist. He studied classical philology at the University of Leipzig as a pupil of Gottfried Hermann, receiving his doctorate in 1810. After graduation, he worked as a teacher at the Pädagogium of the Francke Foundations in Halle an der Saale. In 1817 he became an associate professor of classical philology, and during the following year, relocated to the University of Bonn, where in 1820 he obtained a full professorship. He is most famous today for having observed that in epic hexameters, it is rare to have a word end a spondaic fourth foot . ...
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Ghulam Abbas
1909 - 1982 (73 years)
Ghulam Abbas was a short story writer from Pakistan. Personal life His second wife was a Greek-Scottish-Romanian woman named Christian Vlasto with whom he had a son and three daughters. Style Of Writing Ghulam Abbas has also written stories, plays and poems for children, his main field is fiction. He has a very high position in modern Urdu fiction. He takes the plot of the fiction from around him and writes it so skillfully that the reader gets lost in its details. And is shocked at the end of it. Their characters belong to the real world. Their language is simple. The narration is lively and engaging.
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Ubaidullah Al Ubaidi Suhrawardy
1832 - 1885 (53 years)
Ubaidullah Al Ubaidi Suhrawardy was a Bengali Islamic scholar, educationist and writer from Midnapore. Early life Suhrawardy was born in 1832, in the village of Chitwa in Midnapore district, Bengal Presidency. He belonged to the noble Bengali Muslim Suhrawardy family who had arrived to Hussain Shahi Sultanate of Bengal in the 15th century, and were bestowed with the Jaagirdaari of Ghoramara. Suhrawardy was a direct descendant of the Sufi author Shihab al-Din 'Umar al-Suhrawardi, who was in turn a descendant of Abu Bakr, the first Rashidun caliph.
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Ezequiel Uricoechea
1834 - 1880 (46 years)
Ezequiel Uricoechea Rodríguez was a Colombian linguist and scientist. He is considered one of the first Colombian scientists and a pioneer in Spanish-language linguistics. Biography Uricoechea was born in Santa Fe de Bogotá in what was then the Republic of New Granada, his family being of Basque origin. His father was José María de Uricoechea y Zornoza, and his mother Mariana Rodríguez Moreno. He had a brother, Sabas María, and a sister; Filomena. He graduated from Yale Medical School in 1852. In 1853 he became Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen, after which he went to Brussels where he assisted Adolphe Quetelet at the Royal Observatory of Belgium.
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Robert Strachan Wallace
1882 - 1961 (79 years)
Sir Robert Strachan Wallace was an Australian academic, army officer and film censor. Wallace served as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney from 1928 to 1947. He was Australia's chief censor from 1922 to 1927 and served as a member of the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1932 to 1935.
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John Doran
1807 - 1878 (71 years)
John Doran was an English editor and miscellaneous writer of Irish parentage, wrote a number of works dealing with the lighter phases of manners, antiquities, and social history, often bearing punning titles, e.g., Table Traits with Something on Them , and Knights and their Days. He edited Horace Walpole's Journal of the Reign of George III.. Among other posts, Doran was for a short time editor of The Athenaeum.
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A. R. D. Fairburn
1904 - 1957 (53 years)
Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn , commonly known by his initials A. R. D. Fairburn and otherwise as Rex, was a New Zealand poet who was born and died in Auckland. Fairburn was born in Auckland in 1904. His grandfather, the surveyor, thinker and traveller Edwin Fairburn, was one of the first Pākehā born in New Zealand in 1827. His great-grandfather, William Thomas Fairburn, had come to New Zealand as a missionary for the New Zealand Church Missionary Society in 1819.
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Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi
899 - 997 (98 years)
Muḥammad ibn al-ʿAbbās Abū Bakr al-Khwārazmī, better simply known as Abu Bakr al-Khwarazmi was a 10th-century Iranian poet and secretary, who throughout his long career served in the court of the Hamdanids, Samanids, Saffarids and Buyids. He is best known as the author of the early encyclopedia Mafātīḥ al-ʿulūm in the Arabic language.
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Thomas Sergeant Perry
1845 - 1928 (83 years)
Thomas Sergeant Perry was an American editor, academic, literary critic, literary translator, and literary historian. He was a lifelong friend and associate of Henry James and a member of the faculty at Harvard University.
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Ferdynand Goetel
1890 - 1960 (70 years)
Ferdynand Goetel was a Polish novelist, playwright, essayist, screen writer, and political activist; member of the prestigious Polish Academy of Literature from 1935; president of the Polish PEN Club as well as the Union of Polish Writers in interwar Poland. He established a prominent place in Polish literary circles between the wars and was the recipient of the "Golden Laurel" awarded by the Polish Academy of Literature for his contributions to Polish literature. He was forced to leave Poland after World War II due to his involvement in the German investigation of the Katyn massacre and died...
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Franz Skutsch
1865 - 1912 (47 years)
Franz Skutsch was a German classical philologist and linguist born in Neisse. He was the father of classical philologist Otto Skutsch . He studied classical philology and Indo-European studies at the Universities of Heidelberg and Breslau, where he was a student of Georg Wissowa . In 1888 he earned his doctorate at the University of Bonn, later obtaining his habilitation at Breslau in 1890. In 1896 he became a full professor at the University of Breslau and the successor to Friedrich Marx .
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W. F. R. Hardie
1902 - 1990 (88 years)
William Francis Ross Hardie was a Scottish classicist, philosopher and academic. He was President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, from 1950 to 1969. Early life and education Hardie was born on 25 April 1902 in Edinburgh, Scotland to William Hardie, classical scholar. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy, then an all-boys private school. He studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating with a double first Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924: he was awarded a number of undergraduate prizes in classics and philosophy.
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Francis Kelsey
1858 - 1927 (69 years)
Francis Willey Kelsey was an American classicist, professor, and archaeologist that would go on to lead the first expedition to the Near-East done by the University of Michigan . His papyrus findings and the collection of antiquities he acquired for the university brought him fame not only among University of Michigan faculty but around the world. Originally hailing from New York, he would teach at Lake Forest University, in Illinois, eventually coming to the University of Michigan. He was the secretary of the Archaeological Institute of America, Vice President, and eventually President, of t...
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Ivan Lopukhin
1756 - 1816 (60 years)
Ivan Vladimirovich Lopukhin was an Imperial Russian philosopher, mystic, writer and humanitarian. Born to the wealthy Lopukhin family in 1756 in Voskreskenskoye, Lopukhin joined the Preobrazhensky Lifeguard regiment in 1775. He retired a colonel 7 years later due to health concerns. After serving as a counselor and later court president on the Moscow Criminal court between 1782 and 1785, he was introduced to rosicrucianism, martinism and freemasonry through his friend Nikolay Novikov and began a career as a writer and printer, while entering civil service. He became Senator in 1798.
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Ernie Kovacs
1919 - 1962 (43 years)
Ernest Edward Kovacs was an American comedian, actor, and writer. Kovacs's visually experimental and often spontaneous comedic style influenced numerous television comedy programs for years after his death. Kovacs has been credited as an influence by many individuals and shows, including Johnny Carson, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Jim Henson, Max Headroom, Chevy Chase, Conan O'Brien, Jimmy Kimmel, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Pee-wee's Playhouse, The Muppet Show, Dave Garroway, Andy Kaufman, You Can't Do That on Television, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Uncle Floyd, among others.
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Ernst von Wildenbruch
1845 - 1909 (64 years)
Ernst von Wildenbruch was a German poet and dramatist. Biography Wildenbruch was born at Beirut in Lebanon, the son of the Prussian consul-general, Ludwig von Wildenbruch, who was himself an illegitimate son of Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia. Having passed his early years at Athens and Constantinople, where his father was attached to the Prussian legation, he came in 1857 to the Kingdom of Prussia, received his early schooling at the Padagogium at Halle and the Französische Gymnasium in Berlin, and, after passing through the cadet school, became, in 1863, an officer in the Prussian Army. T...
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Ernst Schwarz
1895 - 1983 (88 years)
Ernst Schwarz was an Austro-Hungarian-born German philologist who was Professor of Ancient German language and Literature at Charles University, and later Professor of Germanic and German Philology at the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. Schwarz specialized in Germanic studies, especially dialectology and onomastics, with a particular focus on the Sudeten Germans.
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George William Hunter
1874 - 1948 (74 years)
George William Hunter was an American writer. He wrote Civic Biology, the text at the center of the Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925. George William Hunter Jr. spent his later years lecturing at the Claremont Colleges. He died on February 4, 1948, at the age of 74, in Claremont, California. He is buried in Hillside Cemetery in Redlands, California.
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Benjamin Farrington
1891 - 1974 (83 years)
Benjamin Farrington was an Irish scholar and professor of Classics, teaching in Ireland , South Africa , and Great Britain . Although his academic career spanned several disciplines, he is most well known for his contributions to the history of Greek science. Moreover, within the development of the discipline, his books were some of the first written in the English language that focused specifically on Greek science. In addition to his professional academic career he was also active in socialist politics, using his intellectual capabilities to speak and write on it. While beginning his acade...
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Martin Bell
1918 - 1978 (60 years)
Vincent Martin Oliver Bell was an English poet who was a key member of The Group, an informal group of poets who met in London from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. Biography Bell was born in Hampshire, England. He attended the University of Southampton, then called University College, Southampton, where he read for an external London Honours degree in English, followed in 1939 by a diploma in Education. He served from 1939 to 1946 with the Royal Engineers in Lebanon, Syria and Italy.
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Oleh Olzhych
1907 - 1944 (37 years)
Oleh Oleksandrovych Kandyba , better known by the pen name of Oleh Olzhych , was a Ukrainian poet and political activist. He was forced to emigrate from Ukraine in 1923 due to occupation by the Soviet Russia and lived in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He graduated in 1929 from Charles University with a degree in archaeology. In 1929 he joined the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and became head of their cultural and educational branch.
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Paul Albar
800 - 861 (61 years)
Paul Albar was a Mozarab Andalusi scholar, poet and theologian of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule. He is most notable for his writings around the time of a rising high civilization of Islam, owing to the Caliph's efforts. He also wrote the Vita Eulogii , a biography of his close friend and fellow theologian Eulogius of Córdoba. Although Christians living in Córdoba and the rest of Muslim Iberia during his time lived under relative religious freedom, Albar was amongst the Christians who perceived the many restrictions on the practice of their faith to be unacceptable persecution; they...
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Sidney Lanier
1842 - 1881 (39 years)
Sidney Clopton Lanier was an American musician, poet and author. He served in the Confederate States Army as a private, worked on a blockade-running ship for which he was imprisoned , taught, worked at a hotel where he gave musical performances, was a church organist, and worked as a lawyer. As a poet he sometimes used dialects. Many of his poems are written in heightened, but often archaic, American English. He became a flautist and sold poems to publications. He eventually became a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and is known for his adaptation of musical meter to poetry.
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Sophie Jewett
1861 - 1909 (48 years)
Sophie Jewett , also known under the pseudonym Ellen Burroughs, was an American lyric poet, translator, and professor at Wellesley College. Much of her poetry contains lesbian themes. Family Jewett was born in Moravia, New York, one of four children of Charles Carroll Jewett, a doctor, and Ellen Ransom Jewett. Her mother died when she was 7 and her father when she was 9, after which she was raised by an uncle, Daniel Burroughs, and her grandmother in Buffalo. Her sister Louise became a noted art historian. In Buffalo, she developed a friendship with Mary Whiton Calkins, the daughter of her mi...
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Ewen MacLachlan
1775 - 1822 (47 years)
Ewen MacLachlan was a Scottish scholar and poet. He is noted for his translations of ancient classical literature into Gaelic, for his own Gaelic verse, and for his contribution to Gaelic dictionaries.
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Ludwig Lange
1825 - 1885 (60 years)
Christian Conrad Ludwig Lange was a German philologist and archaeologist. Biography He studied at the University of Göttingen under Karl Friedrich Hermann, and in 1855 became a full professor of classical philology at the University of Prague. In 1859 he relocated as a professor to the University of Giessen, and in 1871 moved to Leipzig, where in 1879/80 he served as university rector.
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David Friedrich Weinland
1829 - 1915 (86 years)
David Friedrich Weinland was a German zoologist and novelist. The son of a pastor, Weinland attended the Protestant Seminary in Maulbronn from 1843 to 1847. He studied theology at the University of Tübingen 1847–51, followed by two semester of studying natural sciences. He earned his PhD in 1852. then worked as an assistant at the Zoological Museum in Berlin. From 1855 he conducted scientific investigations in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean and worked for three years in Louis Agassiz's microscopical laboratory at Harvard University.
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William Edmondstoune Aytoun
1813 - 1865 (52 years)
William Edmondstoune Aytoun FRSE was a Scottish poet, lawyer by training, and professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh. He published poetry, translation, prose fiction, criticism and satire and was a lifelong contributor to the Edinburgh literary periodical Blackwood's Magazine. He was also a collector of Scottish ballads.
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Richard Simpson
1820 - 1876 (56 years)
Richard Simpson was a British Roman Catholic writer and literary scholar. He was born at Beddington, Surrey, into an Anglican family, and was educated at Merchant Taylors' School and at Oriel College, Oxford. He obtained a BA degree on 9 February 1843. He was ordained in the Church of England, and became the vicar of Mitcham in Surrey, in 1844, the same year that he married his cousin, Elizabeth Mary Cranmer. He resigned his position some time before being received into the Catholic Church on 1 August 1846. He then spent more than a year on the continent, becoming very proficient as a linguis...
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Camillo Ranzani
1775 - 1841 (66 years)
Camillo Ranzani was an Italian priest and a naturalist. He was director of the Museum of Natural History of Bologna from 1803 to 1841 . Ranzani wrote Elementi di zoologia which was published in Bologna from 1819 to 1825.
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Hugo Blümner
1844 - 1919 (75 years)
Hugo Blümner was a German classical archaeologist and philologist. Biography Blümner studied with Otto Jahn in Bonn and wrote his doctoral thesis 1866 in Berlin on Lucian. He taught in the universities of Breslau and Königsberg, and after 1877 was professor in the University of Zürich. He is author and editor of many philological and archaeological works, of which the most important are: Die gewerbliche Thätigkeit der Völker des klassischen Altertums , Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei Griechen und Römern , Leben und Sitten der Griechen , Der Maximaltarif des Diokletian, with Theodor Mommsen and Pausaniæ Græciæ Descriptio .
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T. J. Morgan
1907 - 1986 (79 years)
Thomas John Morgan , better known as T. J. Morgan, was a Welsh academic. He was Professor of Welsh at Swansea University from 1961 to 1975. Life Morgan was born at "Ynys-y-mwn", in the village of Glais, near Swansea, and he studied Welsh at Swansea University. In 1926, he met his future wife, Huana Rees, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales. The couple wed in 1935. They had two sons: the politician Rhodri Morgan and historian Prys Morgan .
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Frederic Stanley Dunn
1872 - 1937 (65 years)
Frederic "Freddie" Stanley Dunn was an American scholar of classical studies on the faculty of the University of Oregon , and a Ku Klux Klan leader. Early life and education Born in Eugene, Oregon, on August 3, 1872, Dunn was the son of Francis Berrian Dunn and Christiann Cecilia Dunn. He was on the roll of honor in 1879 for being "neither absent nor tardy during the month." He received A.B. degrees from UO and Harvard University ; he earned A.M. degrees from UO and Harvard .
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Juan Bautista Pablo Forner
1756 - 1797 (41 years)
Juan Bautista Pablo Forner , Spanish a satirist and scholar, was born in Mérida . He studied at the University of Salamanca and was called to bar in Madrid in 1783. During the next few years under the pseudonyms of Tome Cecial, Pablo Segarra, Don Antonio Varas, Bartolo, Pablo Ignocausto, El Bachiller Regañadientes, and Silvio Liberio Forner was engaged in a series of polemics with García de la Huerta, Iriarte and other writers; the violence of his attacks was so extreme that he was finally forbidden to publish any controversial pamphlets, and was transferred to a legal post at Seville. In 1796 he became crown prosecutor at Madrid, where he died on 7 March 1799.
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Richard T. Sullivan
1908 - 1981 (73 years)
Richard T. Sullivan was a novelist, short-story writer, and member of the faculty of the University of Notre Dame. His novels and short story collections include The World of Idella May, The Three Kings, Summer After Summer, The Dark Continent, and First Citizen. He wrote numerous book reviews for The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. He was a popular teacher at Notre Dame.
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Johann Major
1533 - 1600 (67 years)
Johann Major was a German Protestant theologian, humanist and poet. Life Major was born in Sankt Joachimsthal in the Kingdom of Bohemia. He matriculated in 1549 at the University of Wittenberg, and died in Zerbst.
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Jakob Schipper
1842 - 1915 (73 years)
Jakob Markus Schipper was a German-Austrian philologist and English scholar . Biography He was the son of a farmer. He studied modern languages in Bonn, Paris, Rome, and Oxford, collaborated on the revision of Bosworth's Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, and was professor of English philology at Königsberg from 1872 until 1877, when he received a like position in Vienna. There he was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1887. He was rector of the University of Vienna 1901–02, and retired in 1913.
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Adolf Wilhelm
1864 - 1950 (86 years)
Adolf Wilhelm was an Austrian classical philologist and epigrapher. From 1882 to 1886 he studied classical philology at the University of Graz, and from 1889 to 1892, conducted research in Greece and Asia Minor. In 1894 he obtained his habilitation at the University of Vienna, where from 1905 to 1933 he taught classes as a professor of ancient Greek philology and epigraphy.
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Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley
1872 - 1936 (64 years)
Frances Garnet Wolseley, 2nd Viscountess Wolseley was an English gardening author and instructor. Her Glynde College for Lady Gardeners in East Sussex had the patronage of famous gardening names such as Gertrude Jekyll, Ellen Willmott, and William Robinson.
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Ernst Stadler
1883 - 1914 (31 years)
Ernst Stadler was a German Expressionist poet. He was born in Colmar, Alsace-Lorraine and educated in Strasbourg and Oxford; in 1906 he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Magdalen College, Oxford.
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Johannes Østrup
1867 - 1938 (71 years)
Johannes Elith Østrup was a Danish philologist and professor at the University of Copenhagen where he served as rector from 1934 to 1935. In 1893, after a study tour in the Middle East, he rode on horseback back to Copenhagen, crossing much of Asia Minor and continental Europe.
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John Duncan Spaeth
1868 - 1954 (86 years)
John Duncan Ernst Spaeth was an American philologist. A professor of English at Princeton University and later President of the University of Kansas, Spaeth was considered one of the foremost authorities on William Shakespeare in the United States.
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Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė
1886 - 1958 (72 years)
Sofija Čiurlionienė née Kymantaitė was a Lithuanian writer, educator, and activist. After studies at girls' gymnasiums in Saint Petersburg and Riga, she studied philosophy, literature, art history at the and Jagiellonian University. She returned to Lithuania in 1907 and joined the cultural life of Vilnius. In January 1909, she married painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, but he died in April 1911 leaving her with an infant daughter. Until the start of World War I, she taught Lithuanian language and literature at teachers' courses established by the Saulė Society in Kaunas. She lectured at the Vytautas Magnus University from 1925 to her retirement in 1938.
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William Cranston Lawton
1853 - 1941 (88 years)
William Cranston Lawton was an American author and educator. He graduated from Harvard in 1873; studied at Berlin in 1882–83, the year before having been a member of the Assos expedition; from 1895 to 1907 was professor of Greek language and literature in Adelphi College, Brooklyn.
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Tjan Tjoe Som
1903 - 1969 (66 years)
Tjan Tjoe Som was an Indonesian Chinese intellectual and sinologist at the University of Indonesia. Early life Tjan was the son of a prominent Muslim Chinese family in Surakarta, Dutch East Indies. His first education was in the local HCS and then in the AMS in Yogyakarta.
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Zola Helen Ross
1912 - 1989 (77 years)
Zola Helen Ross was a Pacific Northwest writer. She also taught writing and co-founded the Pacific Northwest Writers Association with Lucile Saunders McDonald of The Seattle Times. She wrote in various genres, including adventure, children's fiction, crime, mystery, and suspense. She was also the author of several Western historical novels; her male counterpart was Louis L'Amour. The Pacific Northwest and the Great Basin are the settings for her stories, and they include the towns of Reno, San Francisco, and Seattle. Ross occasionally wrote under the pseudonyms Helen Arre and Bert Iles. She ...
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Varvara Adrianova-Peretz
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Professor Varvara Pavlovna Adrianova-Peretz was a Soviet and Russian philologist and medievalist specializing in Old Russian literature, folklore, and hagiography. She was a corresponding member of the All-Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union .
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Jasobanta Dasa
1487 - Present (539 years)
Jasobanta Dasa was an Odia poet, litterateur and mystic. He was one of the five great poets in Odia literature, the Panchasakha during the Bhakti age of literature. He is known for his work Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita.
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Lü Liuliang
1629 - 1683 (54 years)
Lü Liuliang was a Han Chinese poet and author from Tongxiang, Zhejiang province. He was born under the Ming dynasty but died under the Manchu Qing dynasty. Career In 1647 one of his nephews was executed for anti-Qing activity. Lü took active part in the anti-Manchu military movement that followed the fall of the Ming in 1644. After the failure of the Ming loyalist movement, he became a hermit and a physician. He refused to serve the new dynasty, despite frequent requests, because he argued that upholding the difference between Hua and barbarians was more important than respecting the righteou...
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