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,
#8701
Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin
1715 - 1795 (80 years)
Tadhg Gaelach Ó Súilleabháin , known in English as Timothy O'Sullivan, was a composer of mostly Christian poetry in the Irish language whose Pious Miscellany was reprinted over 40 times in the early 19th century.
Go to Profile#8702
Girolamo Mercuriale
1530 - 1606 (76 years)
Girolamo Mercuriale or Mercuriali was an Italian philologist and physician, most famous for his work De Arte Gymnastica. Biography Born in the city of Forlì, the son of Giovanni Mercuriali, also a doctor, he was educated at Bologna, Padua and Venice, where he received his doctorate in 1555. Settling in Forli, he was sent on a political mission to Rome. The pope at the time was Paul IV.
Go to Profile#8703
Gely Abdel Rahman
1931 - 1990 (59 years)
Gely Abdel Rahman was one of the leading Sudanese poets of the second half of the 20th century. Early life Gely Abdel Rahman was born in Gez'irat Saay, or Saï , a small island in the Nile river in northern Sudan. Ethnically from Mahas Skoot, his father migrated to Egypt in the 1920s, where he worked in Royal Palaces as Guard or in Ansh'as Elramel . Gely came to Egypt with his mother when he was two years old. He has four sisters and three brothers. He began writing poems when he was 7. When he was nine years old, he learned the whole book of Qur'an by heart, for which he has been awarded a Royal prize.
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Albert LeRoy Andrews
1878 - 1961 (83 years)
Albert LeRoy Andrews was a professor of Germanic philology and an avocational bryologist, known as "one of the world’s foremost bryologists and the American authority on Sphagnaceae." From 1922 to 1923 he was the president of the Sullivant Moss Society, renamed in 1970 the American Bryological and Lichenological Society.
Go to Profile#8705
Abai Qunanbaiuly
1845 - 1904 (59 years)
Ibrahim Qunanbaiūly was a Kazakh poet, composer and Hanafi Maturidi theologian philosopher. He was also a cultural reformer toward European and Russian cultures on the basis of enlightened Islam. Among Kazakhs he is known simply as Abai.
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Agostino Mascardi
1590 - 1640 (50 years)
Agostino Mascardi was an Italian rhetorician, historian and poet. Expelled from the Jesuit Order by his superiors, Mascardi pursued a successful career as a secretary for various important figures, and became a renowned writer and professor of rhetoric at the Sapienza University of Rome. He was a member of several learned societies and wrote a seminal treatise, "Dell'arte historica" advocating history as a powerful instrument of ethical and religious persuasion and largely focusing on the interplay between truth and believability.
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Jack Snow
1907 - 1956 (49 years)
John Frederick Snow , born Piqua, Ohio was an American radio writer, writer of ghost stories, and scholar, primarily of the works of L. Frank Baum. When Baum died in 1919, the twelve-year-old Snow offered to be the next Royal Historian of Oz, but was politely turned down by a staffer at Baum's publisher, Reilly & Lee. Snow eventually wrote two Oz books: The Magical Mimics in Oz and The Shaggy Man of Oz , as well as Who's Who in Oz , a thorough guide to the Oz characters, all of which Reilly & Lee published.
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Bernadotte Perrin
1847 - 1920 (73 years)
Bernadotte Perrin was an American classicist. Life He was born in Goshen, Connecticut on September 15, 1847. He was the son of Lavalette Perrin, a Congregational minister, and Ann Eliza Perrin. He died on August 31, 1920, at Saratoga Springs, New York.
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Henry James
1879 - 1947 (68 years)
Henry James III was an American writer who won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1931. James, who was described as "delightful, rather pedantic, crisp, and humorous," was the son of William James and the nephew of novelist Henry James.
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Heinrich Meibom
1555 - 1625 (70 years)
Heinrich Meibom , German historian and poet, was born at Barntrup in Westphalia. He held the chair of history and poetry at Helmstedt from 1583 until his death. He was a writer of Latin verses ; and his talents in this direction were recognized by the emperor Rudolph II, who ennobled him; but his claim to be remembered rests on his services in elucidating the medieval history of Germany.
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Carel Gabriel Cobet
1813 - 1889 (76 years)
Carel Gabriel Cobet was a Dutch classical scholar. Biography He was born in Paris, but educated in the Netherlands, at the Gymnasium Haganum and the University of Leiden. The university conferred on him an honorary degree, and recommended him to the government for a travelling pension. The ostensible purpose of his journey was to collate the texts of Simplicius of Cilicia, which, however, engaged but little of his time. He contrived to study almost every Greek manuscript in the Italian libraries, and returned after five years with an intimate knowledge of palaeography.
Go to Profile#8712
Gerald Gould
1885 - 1936 (51 years)
Gerald Gould was an English writer, known as a journalist and reviewer, essayist and poet. Life He was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire, and brought up in Norwich, and studied at University College London and Magdalen College, Oxford. He had a position at University College from 1906, and was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1909 to 1916.
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Nicolae Quintescu
1841 - 1913 (72 years)
Nicolae Chiriac Quintescu was a Wallachian, later Romanian philologist, essayist and translator. He was born in Craiova; his father seems to have been Chiriac Chintescu, who farmed a nearby plot of land given to him on lease. Chiriac appears in a petition of 1831 and was on the city council in 1848. Nicolae later described himself as a "son of Oltenia" who grew up "in the fortifying atmosphere.... in which Ioan Maiorescu had worked". He graduated from Saint Sava College in Bucharest, and in 1861 left for Germany. There, he took a degree in classical philology from Bonn University and, in 1867, a doctorate in literature from the University of Berlin.
Go to Profile#8714
Elinor Glyn
1864 - 1943 (79 years)
Elinor Glyn was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction, which was considered scandalous for its time, although her works are relatively tame by modern standards. She popularized the concept of the it-girl, and had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and, possibly, on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and, especially, Clara Bow.
Go to Profile#8715
Ted Lewis
1940 - 1982 (42 years)
Ted Lewis was a British writer known for his crime fiction. Early life Alfred Edward Lewis was born in Stretford, Manchester and was an only child. In 1946, the family moved to Barton-upon-Humber in Lincolnshire. As a child, Lewis contracted rheumatic fever and spent almost a year away from school in bed rest. During that time he read books and comics and drew constantly. From a young age he was a fan of film, particularly Western epics, B-movies and gangster pictures. He had a strict upbringing and his parents did not want their son to go to art school, but his English teacher Henry Treece, recognising his creative talents in writing and art, persuaded them not to stand in his way.
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Carl Abel
1837 - 1906 (69 years)
Carl Abel was a German comparative philologist from Berlin who wrote Linguistic Essays in 1880. Abel also acted as Ilchester lecturer on comparative lexicography at the University of Oxford and as the Berlin correspondent of the Times and the Standard. His 400-page dictionary of Egyptian-Semitic-Indo-European roots appeared in 1886. His essay "On the antithetical meanings of primal words" was discussed by Sigmund Freud in an identically titled piece, which, in turn, was discussed by Jacques Derrida as a precursor to deconstruction's semantic insights. He also translated some of Shakespeare'...
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Arthur Napier
1853 - 1916 (63 years)
Arthur Sampson Napier was a British philologist. He was Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford, from 1885 and also Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon since 1903. Napier was appointed a fellow of Merton College, Oxford, in 1885 and of the British Academy in 1904.
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F. B. E. Charatan
#8719
William Pole
1814 - 1900 (86 years)
William Pole was an English engineer, astronomer, musician and an authority on Whist. Life He was born in Birmingham on 22 April 1814, the son of Thomas Pole. Pole was apprenticed as an engineer to Charles H. Capper in Birmingham around 1828. He then went to India in 1844 as professor of engineering at Elphinstone College, Bombay, where he had organized a course of instruction for Indian students; his health obliged him to return to England in 1848. For the next ten years he worked in London under James Simpson and James Meadows Rendel, and was appointed in 1859 to the chair of civil engineering at University College, London.
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Samuel Butler
1774 - 1839 (65 years)
Samuel Butler was an English classical scholar and schoolmaster of Shrewsbury School, and Bishop of Lichfield. His grandson was Samuel Butler, the author of the novel Erewhon. Life Butler was born at Kenilworth, Warwickshire. He was educated at Rugby School, and in 1791 was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge. He obtained three of Sir William Browne's medals, for the Latin and Greek odes, the medal for the Greek ode in 1792 being won by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In 1793 Butler was elected to the Craven scholarship, amongst the competitors being John Keate, afterwards headmaster of Eton, and Coleridge.
Go to Profile#8721
Otto Weinreich
1886 - 1972 (86 years)
Otto Karl Weinreich was a German classical philologist. He is noted for his study of the Lukan Befreiungswunder through his work Gebet und Wunder. Weinrich's works were focused on the so-called liberation miracles such as the miracles of the Dionysian "circles" . The miracles also included the miraculous escape of Moses; two liberations in the text Life of Apollonius of Tyana; and, the divine deliverances in the New Testament's Acts. He was also one of the editors of the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft .
Go to Profile#8722
Anton Naum
1829 - 1917 (88 years)
Anton Naum was a Moldavian, later Romanian poet and translator. Born in Iași, his parents were Theodor Naum, a small-time merchant and landlord, and his wife Zamfira ; both were of Aromanian origin. He studied at Academia Mihăileană in his native city. This was followed, from 1858 to 1865, by courses at the literature faculty of the University of Paris and the Collège de France. Upon his return home in 1865 and until 1892, he began working as a high school teacher, offering classes in history and French at Iași's Institutele Unite, Central High School, military school and Vasile Lupu Normal School.
Go to Profile#8723
Thomas William Allen
1862 - 1950 (88 years)
Thomas William Allen, was an English classicist, scholar of Ancient Greek and palaeographer. He was a fellow of The Queen's College, Oxford, from 1890 until his death sixty years later. He is best known for his editions of Homer for Oxford Classical Texts and work on Greek Palaeography.
Go to Profile#8724
John Milton
1562 - 1646 (84 years)
John Milton was an English composer and father of poet John Milton. His compositions were mostly religious in theme. A financial worker by trade, he also wrote poetry. He lived in London for most of his life.
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Robert Priebsch
1866 - 1935 (69 years)
Robert Priebsch was a German professor and philologist. From 1898 to 1931 he was a professor at University College London. With one of his students, W. E. Collinson, he published The German Language . His two-volume Deutsche Handschriften in England is a standard in the field.
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David Murray
1567 - 1629 (62 years)
Sir David Murray of Gorthy was an officer in the household of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, in England from 1603 to 1612, and poet. Family background A member of the Scottish Murray family, David's father, Robert Murray, was the Laird of Abercairney, near Crieff; his mother was Katherine Murray, a daughter of William Murray of Tullibardine. David had an older brother, William, and younger brothers, Mungo Murray of Craigie, John Minister of Dunfermline and Leith, Andrew, Quintigern, and James. His two sisters were Nicola, who married Robert Douglas of Spott Lord Belhaven, who had been Prin...
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Edmund Yard Robbins
1867 - 1942 (75 years)
Edmund Yard Robbins was an American philosopher. He was Ewing Professor of the Greek Language and Literature at Princeton University. In 1889, he obtained a Bachelors, and in 1890 a master's degree from Princeton. From 1891 to 1894, he furthered his studies at the University of Leipzig. On his return he was as an instructor at Princeton University in Greek. In 1897 he was appointed assistant professor. After his graduation to Doctor of Letters with unpublished work of the Greek orator Isaeus , he was appointed full professor in 1902. In 1910, he succeeded S. Stanhope Orris in the Ewing Professorship.
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Charles Cotin
1604 - 1682 (78 years)
Charles Cotin or Abbé Cotin was a French abbé, philosopher and poet in the Baroque Précieuses style. He was made a member of the Académie française on 7 January 1655. Cotin was born and died in Paris. He was a scholar of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac, an advisor to Louis XIV, and renowned in his time for his sermons, poetry, and erudition. He frequented the Paris literary salons, particularly that of the Hôtel de Rambouillet as a friend of Mlle de Gournay, and his translation of the Song of Songs is more notable for its flavor of fashionable salons than of sacred poetry.
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Heinrich Schmidt
1874 - 1935 (61 years)
Heinrich Schmidt was a German archivist, naturalist, philosopher, professor and a student of Ernst Haeckel. Early life and education Schmidt was born in Heubach in the German State of Thuringia. From 1890 to 1894 he attended a teacher training school in Hildburghausen and then worked as an elementary school teacher. In 1897 he moved on to scientific training in Jena. He studied there under the financial support of Ernst Haeckel and in 1900 became his private secretary. Since Schmidt lacked formal college training, Haeckel sent him the University of Zurich to study under his former student, Arnold Lang.
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Herman Tollius
1742 - 1822 (80 years)
Herman Tollius was a Dutch philologist and historian. He studied jurisprudence in Leiden, earning his doctorate of law in 1763. From 1767 he served as a professor of rhetoric and Greek at the University of Harderwijk. Beginning in 1784 he was a private tutor to the children of Stadtholder William V. In 1809 he was appointed professor of statistics and diplomacy at Leiden, where he later worked as a professor of Greek and Latin languages.
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Wilhelm Xylander
1532 - 1576 (44 years)
Wilhelm Xylander was a German classical scholar and humanist. He served as rector of Heidelberg University in 1564. Biography Born at Augsburg, he studied at Tübingen, and in 1558, when very short of money , he was appointed to succeed Jakob Micyllus in the professorship of Greek at the University of Heidelberg; he exchanged it for a chair of logic in 1562.
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Wallace Lindsay
1858 - 1937 (79 years)
Wallace Martin Lindsay was a classical scholar of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and a palaeographer. He was Professor of Humanity at University of St Andrews. Biography Lindsay was born in Pittenweem, Fife, to Alexander Lindsay, a Free Church minister, and his wife Susan Irvine . Educated at Edinburgh Academy, the University of Glasgow, where he was Blackstone Scholar, and Balliol College, Oxford. He was a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, from 1880 to 1899, when he was appointed as Professor of Humanity at the University of St Andrews.
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Zvi Preigerzon
1900 - 1969 (69 years)
Zvi-Gersh Preigerzon was a Ukrainian Jewish author who specialized in historical prose of a historically fictional nature. The author wrote his books in the Original Hebrew while in the Soviet Union – which caused his arrest. Preigerzon was also a scientist and inventor in the mineral processing field. Further recognized for his scientific works by being named Dean of the Moscow State Mining University.
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Jonathan Martin
1782 - 1838 (56 years)
Jonathan Martin was an English arsonist, famous for setting fire to York Minster in 1829. Early life Martin was born at Highside House, near Hexham in Northumberland, one of the twelve children of William Fenwick Martin and Isabella, née Thompson. Among his siblings was the artist John Martin and the philosopher William Martin. Jonathan was tongue tied and spoke with an impediment. He was brought up by his aunt, Ann Thompson, a staunch Protestant with a vivid image of hell.
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Francis Owen
1886 - 1975 (89 years)
Francis Owen was a Canadian philologist and military officer. He was Professor of German and Chairman of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Alberta, and the author of the first complete scholarly work on the history and early culture of the Germanic peoples. His works on this subject are still cited in modern scholarship.
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Italo Svevo
1861 - 1928 (67 years)
Aron Hector Schmitz , better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo , was an Italian and Austro-Hungarian writer, businessman, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. A close friend of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce, Svevo was considered a pioneer of the psychological novel in Italy and is best known for his modernist novel La coscienza di Zeno , which became a widely appreciated classic of Italian literature. He was also the cousin of the Italian academic Steno Tedeschi.
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Johannes Messenius
1579 - 1636 (57 years)
Johannes Messenius was a Swedish historian, dramatist and university professor. He was born in the village of Freberga, in Stenby parish in Östergötland, and died in Oulu, in modern-day Finland. Childhood He was the son of a miller named Jöns Thordsson. At an early age his brilliance caught the attention of a monastery priest named Magnus Andreae, who gave him guidance and taught him. Unbeknownst to the boy's parents, the priest sent him to the Jesuit school in Braunsberg, which was specialized in educating boys for winning Scandinavia back from Protestantism.
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Evert Taube
1890 - 1976 (86 years)
Axel Evert Taube was a Swedish author, artist, composer and singer. He is widely regarded as one of Sweden's most respected musicians and the foremost troubadour of the Swedish ballad tradition in the 20th century.
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Choe Jeong-hui
1912 - 1990 (78 years)
Choe Jeong-hui was one of the most successful early women writers in South Korea. Life She was born in Dancheon, South Hamgyong Province and was educated in Seoul. She worked at a kindergarten in Tokyo and as a journalist in Seoul before starting her writing career in 1931; she worked for the magazine Samcheolli and the newspaper The Chosun Ilbo . She was associated with the Korean Artists' Proletarian Federation, and was jailed in 1934 as a result.
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Richard Rudolf Walzer
1900 - 1975 (75 years)
Richard Rudolf Walzer, FBA was a German-born British scholar of Greek philosophy and of Arabic philosophy. Education: Werner-Siemens-Realgymnasium, Berlin-Schöneberg; Frederick William University of Berlin.
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Charles Knapp
1868 - 1936 (68 years)
Charles Knapp was an American classical scholar. Biography He was born in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University at age 19 and received a Doctorate of Philosophy in 1890 at 22 years of age, having been prize fellow 1887-1890. He became tutorial fellow in Latin and was appointed instructor in Latin and Greek , and adjunct professor of classical philology . In 1906, he became a noted professor of classical philology at Barnard College, a women's liberal arts college affiliated with Columbia University.
Go to Profile#8742
Najm al-Din Kubra
1145 - 1221 (76 years)
Najm ad-Din Kubra was a 13th-century Khwarezmian Sufi from Khwarezm and the founder of the Kubrawiya, influential in the Ilkhanate and Timurid dynasty. His method, exemplary of a "golden age" of Sufi metaphysics, was related to the Illuminationism of Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi as well as to Rumi's Shams Tabrizi. Kubra was born in 540/1145 and died in 618/1221.
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Wolfgang Lange
1915 - 1984 (69 years)
Wolfgang Friedrich-Karl Lange was a German philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Biography Wolfgang Lange was born in Kiel, Germany on 29 June 1915. After gaining his abitur in Wilhelmshaven in 1934, Lange did labor service in the Wehrmacht. Since 1935, Lange studied German, history, philosophy, anthropology, music and art at the University of Kiel. At Kiel, Lange came under the influence of Otto Höfler, who inspired himself to specialize in Germanic studies, particularly Old Norse studies. In 1939, Lange accompanied Höfler to the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he gained his Ph.D.
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William John Woodhouse
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
William John Woodhouse was a classical scholar and author, professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. Early life Woodhouse was born at Clifton, Westmorland, England, the son of Richard Woodhouse, a station master, and his wife Mary, née Titterington. Educated at Sedbergh School, Yorkshire, Woodhouse won an open exhibition to Queen's College, Oxford, . He graduated with a first class in classical and a first class in the final school of Literae Humaniores, was appointed a Newton student at the British School at Athens, and during 1890 travelled in Greece and directed the excavations at Megalopolis.
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Ahmed Mohamed Al-Hofi
1910 - 1983 (73 years)
Ahmed Mohamed Al-Hofi was an Egyptian writer and an expert in literary studies. Biography Al-Hofi earned a PhD and an MBA at the University of Cairo. He got the literature State Award
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Nicolae Drăganu
1884 - 1939 (55 years)
Nicolae Drăganu was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian linguist, philologist, and literary historian. Biography Born in Zagra, Bistrița-Năsăud County, into a Greek-Catholic family, he attended primary school in his native village, followed by the Gymnasium in nearby Năsăud. Early on, he developed a reverence for local native George Coșbuc, on whose literary beginnings he later shed light. In 1902, he entered the literature faculty of Budapest University. There, he studied classical languages and Romanian language and literature. He soon earned a doctorate, in 1906, on the composition of Romanian words.
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Laurence Senelick
#8748
Bob Russell
1914 - 1970 (56 years)
Bob Russell was an American songwriter born Sidney Keith Rosenthal in Passaic, New Jersey. Career Russell attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He worked as an advertising copywriter in New York; for a time, his roommate there was Sidney Sheldon, later a novelist. He turned to writing material for vaudeville acts, and then for film studios, ultimately writing complete scores for two movies: Jack and the Beanstalk and Reach for Glory. The latter film received the Locarno International Film Festival prize in 1962. A number of other movies featured compositions by Russell, incl...
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Dag Strömbäck
1900 - 1978 (78 years)
Dag Alvar Strömbäck was a Swedish folklorist, historian of religion and philologist. He was a professor at Uppsala University and also headed the Swedish Institute for Language and Folklore at Uppsala.
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Renzo Novatore
1890 - 1922 (32 years)
Abele Rizieri Ferrari , better known by the pen name Renzo Novatore, was an Italian individualist anarchist, illegalist and anti-fascist poet, philosopher and militant, now mostly known for his posthumously published book Toward the Creative Nothing and associated with ultra-modernist trends of futurism. His thought was influenced by Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Palante, Oscar Wilde, Henrik Ibsen, Arthur Schopenhauer and Charles Baudelaire.
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