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,
#9101
Konrad Nielsen
1875 - 1953 (78 years)
Konrad Hartvig Isak Rosenvinge Nielsen was a Norwegian philologist. He spent most of his career as a professor at the Royal Frederick University as a lecturer, textbook writer, lexicographer and translator. His specialty was Sami languages, also called Lapp languages in his day.
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Sam Thompson
1916 - 1965 (49 years)
Sam Thompson was a Northern Irish playwright best known for his controversial plays Over the Bridge, which exposes sectarianism, and Cemented with Love, which focuses on political corruption. His works fall into the social realist genre but are distinct in their dramatisation of Northern Irish issues; they were ground-breaking in documenting sectarian violence before the eruption of the Troubles.
Go to Profile#9103
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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Einar Høigård
1907 - 1943 (36 years)
Einar Musæus Høigård was a Norwegian educator and civil resistance member. Biography Høigård was born in Stavanger, the son of Jonas Bernhard Høigård and Caroline Hansine Musæus. Among his works is a dissertation on Henrik Anker Bjerregaard from 1934 and a monograph on the history of Oslo Cathedral School from 1942. During the German occupation of Norway he played a central role in the teachers' resistance against Nazification of schools and youth organizations. He was arrested in 1943 during an escape attempt to Sweden, tortured by the Gestapo and committed suicide during interrogation.
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Brian Higgins
1930 - 1965 (35 years)
Brian Higgins was an Irish poet, mathematician and professional rugby league footballer. ‘Born at Batley in 1930, bored at Bradford in 1940, in 1950 he had an affair with the gamma function. He was educated in 1960 at the "York Minster", Soho.’ Thus states the biographical note on the endpaper of Brian Higgins's first book of poems, "The Only Need". Brian Higgins died in 1965, before his third book of poems "The Northern Fiddler" appeared. In an introduction to this book the poet George Barker wrote that Higgins "had perceived that the secret at the heart of affairs constituted the most in...
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John Hennig
1911 - 1986 (75 years)
John Hennig was a German theologian, businessman and scholar of Irish and German Literature. Origins Hennig was born in Leipzig on 3 March 1911, the son of a teacher, Max Hennig, and his wife Johanna Clemen. Like his brother Karl , later to be a theologian and pastor, Hans, as he was known, frequented the Thomasschule in Leipzig. The family was Lutheran. Hennig's mother was a deaconess at her marriage and his father had a doctorate in the psychology of religious perception and was an ordained minister, though he had chosen to become a high-school religion teacher rather than a pastor. A brot...
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Einar Löfstedt
1880 - 1955 (75 years)
Haimon Einar Harald Löfstedt was a Swedish Latinist and classical philologist. His father, also named Einar Löfstedt, was a scholar of Greek. He was Professor of Roman Oratory and Poetry at Lund University from 1913. Löfstedt was a member of the Swedish Academy, of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
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John Henry Whyte
1928 - 1990 (62 years)
John Henry Whyte was an Irish historian, political scientist and author of books on Northern Ireland, divided societies and church-state affairs in Ireland. Early life Whyte was born in 1928 in Penang, Malaya. His father was manager of a rubber plantation on the mainland. Whyte's family left Malaya, and returned to Europe when he was three, eventually settling in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland. The Whytes are a well known County Down family recorded in the area since at least 1713. The Whyte family is said to have come to Ireland from South Wales with Strongbow in 1170 and settled in Leinster.
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Antranig Dzarugian
1913 - 1989 (76 years)
Antranig Dzarugian was an influential diasporan Armenian writer, poet, educator, and journalist in the 20th century. Antranig Dzarugian was born in Gürün, Sivas Vilayet, Ottoman Empire in 1913. He was related to Chello Toros , one of the fighters of the Armenian irregular units against the Ottoman Empire. During the years of the Armenian genocide, Dzarugian separated from his mother as a result of the death marches in the Syrian desert and spent his childhood in the Armenian Orphanage of Aleppo. In 1921, he met his own mother in Aleppo and moved to the local Haygazian Armenian School to receive his elementary education.
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David Bell
1915 - 1959 (44 years)
Ernest David Bell was an English-born writer and curator, who was a controversial figure in Welsh arts by challenging the country's artistic heritage, but was also a supporter of young Welsh talent in the field of contemporary arts in the 20th century.
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Charles Rann Kennedy
1808 - 1867 (59 years)
Charles Rann Kennedy was an English lawyer and classicist, best remembered for his involvement in the Swinfen will case and the issues of contingency fee agreements and legal ethics that it involved.
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Lewis Packard
1836 - 1884 (48 years)
Lewis Richard Packard was an American scholar best known for his work, ‘’Morality and Religion of the Greeks’’. Early life He was born on August 22, 1836 in Philadelphia. His father was Friedrich Adolphus Packard. He graduated from Yale in 1856 with the intention of entering the ministry, but following a year of study at Berlin in 1857-8, a tour of Greece confirmed him as a Hellenist.
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William Wadden Turner
1810 - 1859 (49 years)
William Wadden Turner was an English-born American philologist and librarian. Turner was born in London, England, October 23, 1810; died in Washington, D.C., 29 November 29, 1859. He came to New York in 1818, and, after a public-school education, was apprenticed to the carpenter's trade, but subsequently became a printer. At the age of twenty-six he was master of French, Latin, German, and Hebrew. Afterward he studied Arabic with Professor Isaac Nordheimer, and they proposed to write together an Arabic grammar, but, receiving no encouragement, they prepared instead A Critical Grammar of the H...
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Zachary Boyd
1585 - 1653 (68 years)
Zachary Boyd was a Scottish minister and university administrator who wrote many sermons, scriptural versifications and other devotional works. He served as Dean of Faculties, Rector and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Glasgow during the 1630s and 1640s, and bequeathed a generous legacy to the university including his library and large manuscript collection of unpublished sermons and verse.
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Dewi Havhesp
1831 - 1884 (53 years)
David Roberts was a British poet known as ‘Dewi Havhesp’. Profession David Roberts was a successful tailor with a comfortable income. His family were wealthy landowners and obtained revenue from numerous farms and land. Roberts eventually died in penury at the workhouse at Bala.
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Bjarne Berulfsen
1906 - 1970 (64 years)
Bjarne Berulfsen was a Norwegian philologist and professor, best known for establishing the Friends of Folk Song Club in 1946 and for writing many books translated into several languages. Berulfsen was born in Solum, Norway . He passed his university admission exam in 1925 and then received a candidatus philologiæ degree in historical linguistics in 1932. He taught at Christian High School in Oslo, and then became the principal of the Oslo Commerce School in 1936. He received his PhD in 1949 with the dissertation Kulturtradisjon fra en storhetstid , which was based on private correspondence from the 15th century, and he was also hosted at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1958.
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Oscar Levant
1906 - 1972 (66 years)
Oscar Levant was an American concert pianist, composer, conductor, author, radio game show panelist, television talk show host, comedian, and actor. He was known for his performances in the films Rhapsody in Blue , The Barkleys of Broadway , An American in Paris , and The Band Wagon . He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 for recordings featuring his piano performances. He was as equally famous for his mordant character and witticisms, on radio and later in movies and television, as for his music. He was portrayed by Sean Hayes in the Broadway play Good Night, Oscar, written by Doug Wright.
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Harvey Oxenhorn
1952 - 1990 (38 years)
Harvey Oxenhorn was an American academic and author most famous for writing the book, Tuning the Rig. He was the Director of the Public Policy Communications Program at Harvard University. Oxenhorn was born in New York City. He got a Bachelor of Arts degree at Swarthmore College and a Doctorate in English from Stanford University. His thesis was entitled "Elemental Things: The Poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid". He taught at both Stanford and Tufts University before accepting a position at Harvard, first as an instructor, and then as Director in 1983. In addition to nonfiction, he also wrote poetry. ...
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Bengt Hesselman
1875 - 1952 (77 years)
Bengt Ivar Hesselman was a Swedish linguist and philologist, specialising in Scandinavian languages. Early life Hesselman was born either in Stockholm or in Å, Östergötland, on 21 December 1875. His parents were the factory owner Bror August Hesselman and Marie Louise Hesselman, née Åberg. He had several brothers, including the botanist Henrik Hesselman and the civil engineer Jonas Hesselman.
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Dallas Lore Sharp
1870 - 1929 (59 years)
Dallas Lore Sharp was an American author and university professor, born in the Haleyville section of Commercial Township, in Cumberland County, New Jersey. He graduated at Brown University in 1895, served as a Methodist Episcopal minister for four years, and graduated at the Boston University School of Theology in 1899. He married Grace Hastings and the couple had four sons, including Waitstill Sharp.
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Isaac ben Joseph ibn Pulgar
1201 - 1500 (299 years)
Isaac ben Joseph ibn Pulgar or Isaac ben Joseph ibn Polkar or Isaac Polqar was a Spanish Jewish philosopher, poet, and controversialist, who flourished in the first half of the fourteenth century. Life Where he lived is not known, for though "Avilla" is given at the end of his translation of Al-Ghazali's Maqasid, the town-name as well as the date is probably the copyist's. He was a warm defender of Isaac Albalag, and continued his translation of Al-Ghazali's-work. It seems from his Ezer ha-Dat that he had been a friend of Abner of Burgos; but when the latter, after conversion, sent him one of ...
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David Robertson
1806 - 1896 (90 years)
David Robertson FLS, FGS was a Scottish naturalist and geologist who founded the University Marine Biological Station, Millport. Robertson was born in Glasgow. From age 8 he worked as a herd boy in Ayrshire, but eventually went on to gain a medical degree. His interests turned to the study of Natural History in the town he regularly visited, Millport, in the Firth of Clyde. He studied the local flora and fauna and established Millport as a significant area for marine biological research. In 1885 he had the 'Ark', an old floating laboratory, drawn up on shore, at Port Loy, Cumbrae. He persuade...
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Gracie Fields
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Dame Gracie Fields was an English actress, singer, comedian and star of cinema and music hall who was one of the top ten film stars in Britain during the 1930s and was considered the highest paid film star in the world in 1937. She was known affectionately as Our Gracie and the Lancashire Lass and for never losing her strong, native Lancashire accent. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and an Officer of the Venerable Order of St John in 1938, and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979.
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A. M. Dale
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Amy Marjorie Dale, , published as A. M. Dale, was a British classicist and academic. Life Dale was born in 1901. She studied Classics as an undergraduate at Somerville College, Oxford. She subsequently studied under Ludwig Radermacher at the University of Vienna, and at the University of Lund under Albert Wifstrand. Her first academic post, from 1927 to 1929, was at Westfield College in the University of London, followed by a further post at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
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Hilarius
1075 - 1150 (75 years)
Hilarius, also known as Hilary the Englishman , was a Latin poet who is supposed to have been an Englishman. Life He was one of the pupils of Pierre Abélard at his oratory of the Paraclete, and addressed to him a copy of verses with its refrain in the vulgar tongue, "Tort avers vos li mestre", Abelard having threatened to discontinue his teaching because of certain reports made by his servant about the conduct of the scholars.
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Gene Gauntier
1885 - 1966 (81 years)
Gene Gauntier was an American screenwriter and actress who was one of the pioneers of the motion picture industry. A writer, director, and actress in films from mid 1906 to 1920, she wrote screenplays for 42 films. She performed in 87 films and is credited as the director of The Grandmother .
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Ingemar Düring
1903 - 1984 (81 years)
Ingemar Düring was a Swedish Classical Philologist. From 1945 to 1970 he was a professor at Gothenburg University. His most notable work is Aristotle in the Ancient Biographical Tradition.
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Hugo Paul Thieme
1870 - 1940 (70 years)
Hugo Paul Thieme was an American literary critic, bibliographer, and university professor. Works La littérature française du dix-neuvième siècle. Bibliographie des principaux prosateurs, poètes, auteurs dramatiques et critiques, Paris 1897 Guide bibliographique de la littérature française de 1800 à 1906. Prosateurs, poètes, auteurs dramatiques et critiques, Paris 1907, Grenoble 2010 Women of modern France, Philadelphia 1907, Project Gutenberg 2005 A French grammar, New York 1908, 1912Essai sur l'histoire du vers français, Paris 1916, New York 1971La civilisation française jugée par un Améri...
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James Southall Wilson
1880 - 1963 (83 years)
James Southall Wilson was an author, University of Virginia professor, and founder of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He organized the 1931 Southern Writers Conference. His wife, Julia Tyler, was the granddaughter of President John Tyler and a founder of Kappa Delta sorority. Wilson wrote the College of William & Mary's spirit song, "Our Alma Mater."
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Renata von Scheliha
1901 - 1967 (66 years)
Renata Johanna von Scheliha was a German classical philologist. She authored a number of books, treatises and monographs and carried out several translations. Life Scheliha was born in Zessel, Oels, Silesia , as the daughter of Prussian aristocrat and officer Rudolph von Scheliha. Her mother was a daughter of the Prussian Minister of Finance Johann von Miquel. Her older brother by four years was the diplomat and resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha who was executed in December 1942 by the Nazis on a charge of being a member of the Red Orchestra
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Maurice F. Egan
1852 - 1924 (72 years)
Maurice Francis Egan was an American writer and diplomat. He was a prolific writer and had a long and successful career as a Catholic journalist, literary critic, and novelist. He was a professor of English at two universities, and served as United States Minister in Copenhagen.
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William Stewart
1476 - 1548 (72 years)
William Stewart was a Scottish poet working in the first half of the 16th century. Life William Stewart was great-grandson of one of the illegitimate sons of Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan. He was educated like his namesake William Stewart , the future bishop of Aberdeen, at the University of St Andrews. Destined for the church, he later became a courtier. In 1527 he held a pension from James V of Scotland, and the last payment was recorded in the accounts of 1541. He died before 1560.
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Elizabeth Bentley
1767 - 1839 (72 years)
Elizabeth Bentley was an English poet, one of a small wave of British and Irish writers from the labouring classes in the eighteenth century. She was a local poet who was nonetheless engaged with larger political and social issues.
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