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.
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List of the most influential people in Literature,
#9051
Levko Borovykovsky
1806 - 1889 (83 years)
Levko Borovykovsky After graduating in 1830 from Kharkiv University, Borovykovsky taught in a Kursk gymnasium and from 1839 in the Poltava Institute for Daughters of the Nobility. In 1852 he became a gymnasium inspector in Poltava gubernia and retired a few years later. His works were first published in 1828, and he was one of the first poets of the Kharkiv Romantic School.
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Robert Howard
1626 - 1698 (72 years)
Sir Robert Howard was an English playwright and politician. He fought for the Royalist cause in the English Civil War. Life He was born the 6th son of Thomas Howard, 1st Earl of Berkshire and his wife Elizabeth. As the 18-year-old son of a Royalist family, he fought at the battle of Cropredy Bridge and was knighted for the bravery he showed there. In the years after the English Civil War his royalist sympathies led to his imprisonment at Windsor Castle in 1658.
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William Drummond of Logiealmond
1770 - 1828 (58 years)
Sir William James Charles Maria Drummond of Logiealmond FRS FRSE DCL was a Scottish diplomat and Member of Parliament, poet and philosopher. His book Academical Questions is arguably important in the development of the ideas of English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
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Frederik Christian von Haven
1727 - 1763 (36 years)
Frederik Christian von Haven was a Danish philologist and theologian who took part in the Danish expedition to Yemen. Biography Background and early life Frederik von Haven was born on 26 June 1728 in the rectory of Vester Skerninge on the Danish island of Funen, where his father Lambert von Haven was a priest, and christened on 3 July in the Church of Our Lady in Odense. His mother was Maren, née Wielandt. He had three sisters; he was especially close to Pernille Elisabeth von Haven, who never married.
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James Clarke Welling
1825 - 1894 (69 years)
James Clarke Welling was the President of Columbian University, now the George Washington University, Washington, DC, from 1871 to 1894. He was a cofounder of the National Geographic Society. Biography James Clarke Welling was born in Trenton, New Jersey on July 14, 1825. He graduated from Princeton University in 1844. During the Civil War, he wrote for the National Intelligencer. Welling was a professor at Princeton when in 1871 he accepted the presidency of Columbian College. He became the sixth president of the university.
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Eusebiu Popovici
1838 - 1922 (84 years)
Eusebiu Popovici was an Austro-Hungarian-born Romanian Orthodox cleric and professor. Born in Cernăuți, capital of the Duchy of Bukovina, his father Constantin Popoviciu was a professor. After attending high school and the theological institute , he studied church history and canon law at the University of Vienna . Returning to the institute, he was a substitute professor teaching the Old Testament from 1862 to 1866. He then taught in the church history and law department . From 1875 to 1908, he taught in the same department at the new Czernowitz University. During his lengthy teaching caree...
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Domingo Patricio Meagher
1703 - 1772 (69 years)
Domingo Patricio Meagher , known as the Father Meagher was a Spanish Jesuit priest, university professor and writer of Irish descent. He was born in San Sebastian, Spain on 17 March 1703 and died in Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany on 21 September 1772. His father was an Irish merchant, who had settled in the Basque city.
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Frank Jevons
1858 - 1936 (78 years)
Frank Byron Jevons was a polymath, academic and administrator of Durham University. Early life He was educated at Nottingham High School and Wadham College, Oxford and appointed a lecturer in Classics at Durham in 1882.
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Diego Pérez de Valdivia
1510 - 1589 (79 years)
Diego Pérez de Valdivia was a Spanish disciple of John of Ávila who wrote on lay spirituality. Life Born in Baeza, Pérez de Valdivia was sent by John of Ávila to study at Salamanca. He taught philosophy at Granada for three years before becoming Professor of Holy Scripture at the University of Baeza from 1549 to 1577. He was archdeacon of Jaén from 1569 to 1574, but subjected to the Inquisition from 1574 to 1577 on suspicion of alumbradismo. From 1578 to 1589 he was Professor of Scripture at the University of Barcelona. He died on 28 February 1589.
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Dominicus Baudius
1561 - 1613 (52 years)
Dominicus Baudius, a Latinised form of Dominique Baudier, was a French Neo-Latin poet, scholar and historian. From 1603 to 1613 he was a teacher at the University of Leiden. Life Baudius was born in a calvinistic family in the Southern Netherlands in Lille. His original name was probably Dominique Baudier, though sources only show his Latinised name Dominicus Baudius. As a result of the arrival of the new regent of the low countries, the Duke of Alba in 1568, Baudius moved to Aachen along with his parents and sister. After finishing at the local school he proceeded to study theology first in Leiden from 1578 to 1579 and then in Geneva in 1581.
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William Wallace
1860 - 1940 (80 years)
William Wallace was notable as a Scottish classical composer and writer. He served as Dean of the Faculty of Music in the University of London. Early life and education Born at Greenock, Wallace studied ophthalmology at the University of Glasgow, and in Vienna and Paris. He became a qualified ophthalmic surgeon, but was also a poet, dramatist, writer on music and a painter.
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William S. Willis
1921 - 1983 (62 years)
William Shedrick Willis Jr. was born July 11, 1921, in Waco, Texas. He was an ethnohistorian, and an early pioneer in African American anthropology. He is best known for his publication of "Skeletons in the Anthropological Closet". He was the first Black scholar to the faculty of Southern Methodist University. While at SMU he was instrumental in the establishing of the African American Studies Program.
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Johann Nestroy
1801 - 1862 (61 years)
Johann Nepomuk Eduard Ambrosius Nestroy was a singer, actor and playwright in the popular Austrian tradition of the Biedermeier period and its immediate aftermath. He participated in the 1848 revolutions and his work reflects the new liberal spirit then spreading throughout Europe.
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H. B. Goodwin
1827 - 1893 (66 years)
Hannah Elizabeth Bradbury Goodwin Talcott was an American novelist, poet and educator from Maine who resided in Boston for many years. She wrote under various pen names, including H. B., H. E. B., H. B. G., Mrs. H. B. Goodwin, and Mrs. Goodwin-Talcott.
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Robert Lowry
1826 - 1899 (73 years)
Robert Lowry was an American preacher who became a popular writer of gospel music in the mid- to late-19th century. His best-known hymns include "Shall We Gather at the River", "Christ Arose!", "How Can I Keep from Singing?" and "Nothing But The Blood Of Jesus".
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Ainsworth O'Brien-Moore
1897 - 1936 (39 years)
Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore was an American classical philologist. Biography The brother of actress Erin O'Brien-Moore, Ainsworth O’Brien-Moore attended Harvard School in Los Angeles and studied classics at Princeton University, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1916, his master's degree in 1918 and his Ph.D. in 1922. He worked as instructor in Latin at Princeton and in 1923 at Brown University. From 1925 he was assistant professor of classics at Yale, and was appointed associate professor in 1936.
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Ewan MacColl
1915 - 1989 (74 years)
James Henry Miller , better known by his stage name Ewan MacColl, was a British folk singer-songwriter, folk song collector, labour activist and actor. Born in England to Scottish parents, he is known as one of the instigators of the 1960s folk revival as well as for writing such songs as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Dirty Old Town".
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Hans Herter
1899 - 1984 (85 years)
Hans Herter was a German Classical philologist who was for many years Director of the Rheinischen Museum für Philologie, Bonn. His main interests lay in the works of Thucydides and Plato. Among his prominent students is Heinz-Günther Nesselrath.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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...
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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
#9077
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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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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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Edward Southey Joynes
1834 - 1917 (83 years)
Edward Southey Joynes was an American textbook author and university professor of modern languages, especially German and French. Although he taught at the College of William & Mary before the American Civil War, the bulk of his career was spent teaching foreign languages at other Southern universities during the Reconstruction Era.
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George Smith
1713 - 1776 (63 years)
George Smith was an English landscape painter and poet, known as "George Smith of Chichester". He and his two brothers, all artists, are known as the "Smiths of Chichester". Life and work George was born at Chichester in Sussex, where his father, William Smith, was a tradesman and Baptist minister. He was the second and most gifted of three brothers, who all practised painting and were known as 'the Smiths of Chichester.' When a boy he was placed with his uncle, a cooper, but, preferring art, became a pupil of his brother William, whom he accompanied to Gloucester; there and in other places ...
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Valentine Mason Johnson
1838 - 1909 (71 years)
Valentine Mason Johnson was a professor of mathematics and the Superintendent of the West Florida Seminary during the American Civil War. Johnson was born in Spotsylvania County, Virginia and was an 1860 graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. Johnson died in Mountville, Virginia.
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Edward B. Bunn
1896 - 1972 (76 years)
Edward Bernard Bunn was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who became the president of Loyola College in Maryland and later of Georgetown University. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, he was educated at Loyola College before entering the Society of Jesus in 1919. He continued his education at St. Andrew-on-Hudson Woodstock College, and the Pontifical Gregorian University and then taught at Brooklyn Preparatory School and Canisius College.
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