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,
#9151
Liviu Rebreanu
1885 - 1944 (59 years)
Liviu Rebreanu was a Romanian novelist, playwright, short story writer, and journalist. Life Born in Felsőilosva , then part of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, he was the second of thirteen children born to Vasile Rebreanu, a schoolteacher, and Ludovica Diuganu, descendants of peasants. His father had been a classmate of George Coșbuc's and was an amateur folklorist. Liviu Rebreanu went to primary school in Major , where he was taught by his father, and then in Naszód and Beszterce , to military school at Sopron and then to the Ludovica Military Academy in Budapest. He worked as an ...
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Thomas Moore
1779 - 1852 (73 years)
Thomas Moore , also known as Tom Moore, was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his Irish Melodies. His setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish to English. Politically, Moore was recognised in England as a press, or "squib", writer for the aristocratic Whigs; in Ireland he was accounted a Catholic patriot.
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Isaac Rosenberg
1890 - 1918 (28 years)
Isaac Rosenberg was an English poet and artist. His Poems from the Trenches are recognized as some of the most outstanding poetry written during the First World War. Early life Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 at 5 Adelaide Place near St. Mary Redcliffe. He was the second of six children and the eldest son of his parents, Barnett and Hacha Rosenberg, who were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Britain from Dvinsk . In 1897, the family moved to Stepney, a poor district of the East End of London, and one with a large Jewish community. Isaac Rosenberg attended St. Paul's Primary School at Wellclose Square, St George in the East parish.
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Antonin Artaud
1896 - 1948 (52 years)
Antoine Marie Joseph Paul Artaud, better known as Antonin Artaud , was a French writer, poet, dramatist, visual artist, essayist, actor and theatre director. He is widely recognized as a major figure of the European avant-garde. In particular, he had a profound influence on twentieth-century theatre through his conceptualization of the Theatre of Cruelty. Known for his raw, surreal and transgressive work, his texts explored themes from the cosmologies of ancient cultures, philosophy, the occult, mysticism and indigenous Mexican and Balinese practices.
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Masamune Atsuo
1881 - 1958 (77 years)
Masamune Atsuo was a researcher of Japanese literature and a poet. Biography Masamune Atsuo was born in Wake District Honami , Okayama Prefecture, he was the younger brother of novelist and literary critic Masamune Hakuchō. While his brother moved to Tokyo to work, Atsuo remained home and ran the family business. He studied waka under the guidance of Inoue Michiyasu, and was friends with Shimaki Akahiko and Saitō Mokichi. In addition to work, he wrote waka and researched Japanese literature. Due to his achievements, in 1952 he became a professor at Notre Dame Seishin University in Okayama.
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Justus Lipsius
1547 - 1606 (59 years)
Justus Lipsius was a Flemish Catholic philologist, philosopher, and humanist. Lipsius wrote a series of works designed to revive ancient Stoicism in a form that would be compatible with Christianity. The most famous of these is De Constantia . His form of Stoicism influenced a number of contemporary thinkers, creating the intellectual movement of Neostoicism. He taught at the universities in Jena, Leiden, and Leuven.
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John Trumbull
1750 - 1831 (81 years)
John Trumbull was an American poet. Biography Trumbull was born in what is now Watertown, Connecticut, where his father was a Congregational preacher. At the age of seven he passed his entrance examinations at Yale University, but did not enter until 1763; he graduated in 1767, studied law there, and in 1771–1773 was a tutor .
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Adelaide Crapsey
1878 - 1914 (36 years)
Adelaide Crapsey was an American poet. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Rochester, New York. Her parents were the businesswoman Adelaide T. Crapsey and the Episcopal priest Algernon Sidney Crapsey, who moved from New York City to Rochester.
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Charles Williams
1886 - 1945 (59 years)
Charles Walter Stansby Williams was a British poet, novelist, playwright, theologian and literary critic. Most of his life was spent in London, where he was born, but in 1939 he moved to Oxford with the university press for which he worked and was buried there following his early death.
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Johan Ihre
1707 - 1780 (73 years)
Johan Ihre was a Swedish philologist and historical linguist. Life Ihre was born in Lund, son of the theologian Thomas Ihre and his spouse Brita Steuchia. After his father's death in 1720, Johan Ihre was raised in the house of his grandfather Archbishop Mattias Stechius in Uppsala, and studied at Uppsala University, where he completed his magister degree in 1730. In 1730-1733 he studied abroad, in Oxford, London and Paris. He was in 1734 appointed docent in Uppsala, 1735 librarian at the University Library, and was from 1737 until his death holder of the Skyttean professorship in Eloquence and Government.
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Alice Dalgliesh
1893 - 1979 (86 years)
Alice Dalgliesh was a naturalized American writer and publisher who wrote more than 40 fiction and non-fiction books, mainly for children. She has been called "a pioneer in the field of children's historical fiction". Three of her books were runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal, the partly autobiographical The Silver Pencil, The Bears on Hemlock Mountain, and The Courage of Sarah Noble, which was also named to the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award list.
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Walter of Châtillon
1135 - 1201 (66 years)
Walter of Châtillon was a 12th-century French writer and theologian who wrote in the Latin language. He studied under Stephen of Beauvais and at the University of Paris. It was probably during his student years that he wrote a number of Latin poems in the Goliardic manner that found their way into the Carmina Burana collection. During his lifetime, however, he was more esteemed for a long Latin epic on the life of Alexander the Great, the Alexandreis, sive Gesta Alexandri Magni, a hexameter epic, full of anachronisms; he depicts the Crucifixion of Jesus as having already taken place during the days of Alexander the Great.
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Jacques Delille
1738 - 1813 (75 years)
Jacques Delille was a French poet who came to national prominence with his translation of Virgil’s Georgics and made an international reputation with his didactic poem on gardening. He barely survived the slaughter of the French Revolution and lived for some years outside France, including three years in England. The poems on abstract themes that he published after his return were less well received.
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Johannes R. Becher
1891 - 1958 (67 years)
Johannes Robert Becher was a German politician, novelist, and poet. He was affiliated with the Communist Party of Germany before World War II. At one time, he was part of the literary avant-garde, writing in an expressionist style.
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Thomas Bell
1792 - 1880 (88 years)
Thomas Hornsey Bell FRS FLS was an English zoologist, dental surgeon and writer, born in Poole, Dorset, England. Career Bell, like his mother Susan, took a keen interest in natural history which his mother also encouraged in his younger cousin Philip Henry Gosse. Bell left Poole in 1813 for his training as a dental surgeon in London. He is listed in 1817 as having an address at number 17 Fenchurch Street, and as being a committee member of the newly formed London Peace Society. By 1819 his address is given as 18 Bucklersbury, also in the city of London. He combined two careers, becoming Professor of Zoology at King's College London in 1836 and lecturing on anatomy at Guy's Hospital.
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Marian Engel
1933 - 1985 (52 years)
Marian Ruth Engel was a Canadian novelist and a founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada. Her most famous and controversial novel was Bear , a tale of erotic love between an archivist and a bear.
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Ch'ien Mu
1895 - 1990 (95 years)
Ch'ien Mu or Qian Mu was a Chinese historian, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the greatest historians and philosophers of 20th-century China. Ch'ien, together with Lü Simian, Chen Yinke and Chen Yuan, was known as the "Four Greatest Historians" of Modern China .
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John Richardson
1787 - 1865 (78 years)
Sir John Richardson FRS FRSE was a Scottish naval surgeon, naturalist and Arctic explorer. Life Richardson was born at Nith Place in Dumfries the son of Gabriel Richardson, Provost of Dumfries, and his wife, Anne Mundell. He was educated at Dumfries Grammar School. He was then apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Dr James Mundell, a surgeon in Dumfries.
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Owen Dodson
1914 - 1983 (69 years)
Owen Vincent Dodson was an American poet, novelist, and playwright. He was one of the leading African-American poets of his time, associated with the generation of black poets following the Harlem Renaissance. He received a fellowship from the Rosenwald Foundation for a series of one-act plays.
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Liang Shih-chiu
1903 - 1987 (84 years)
Liang Shih-chiu , also romanized as Liang Shiqiu, and also known as Liang Chih-hwa , was a renowned educator, writer, translator, literary theorist and lexicographer. Biography Liang was born in Beijing in 1903. His father, Liang Xianxi , was a xiucai in the Qing dynasty. He was educated at Tsinghua College in Beijing from 1915 to 1923. He went on to study at Colorado College and later pursued his graduate studies at Harvard and Columbia Universities. At Harvard, he studied literary criticism under Irving Babbitt, whose New Humanism helped shape his conservative literary tenets.
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Royall Tyler
1757 - 1826 (69 years)
Royall Tyler was an American jurist and playwright. He was born in Boston, graduated from Harvard University in 1776, and then served in the Massachusetts militia during the American Revolution. He was admitted to the bar in 1780, became a lawyer, and fathered eleven children. In 1801, he was appointed a Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court. He wrote a play, The Contrast, which was produced in 1787 in New York City, shortly after George Washington's inauguration. It is considered the first American comedy. Washington attended the production, which was well-received, and Tyler became a li...
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Kit Pedler
1927 - 1981 (54 years)
Christopher Magnus Howard "Kit" Pedler was a British medical scientist, parapsychologist and science fiction author. Biography He was the head of the electron microscopy department at the Institute of Ophthalmology, University of London, where he published a number of papers. Pedler's first television contribution was for the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
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Vicente Medina
1866 - 1937 (71 years)
Vicente Tomás Medina was a Spanish poet, dramatist and editor, and a symbol of local identity for the Murcia region of southeastern Spain. His best-known work, Aires murcianos , was taken up as a reference point for local cultural and social criticism, and was widely praised by contemporaries. In his time Medina was considered in Spain to be one of the country's most important writers, referred to as "the great contemporary Spanish poet" and "the Spanish poet of poets". His fame has since declined, and he is now little read; but he remains an important figure as the greatest poet to have writ...
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Thomas McGrath
1916 - 1990 (74 years)
Thomas Matthew McGrath, was a celebrated American poet and screenwriter of documentary films. McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. He served in the Aleutian Islands with the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford. McGrath also pursued postgraduate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. He taught at Colby College in Maine and at Los Angeles State College, from which he was dismissed in connection with his appearance, as an unfriendly witness, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953.
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Nakamura Kusatao
1901 - 1983 (82 years)
Nakamura Kusatao was a Japanese haiku poet. Nakamura was born on July 27, 1901, in Amoy, Fujian Province, China, the son of a Japanese diplomat. A few years later his mother brought him to Japan, where he was educated in various schools in Matsuyama and Tokyo. One of those schools was Seinan Elementary School in Tokyo. When returning to that school twenty years later, he wrote perhaps his most famous haiku, reflecting on the falling snow and the passing of the Meiji era:In 1977, the haiku was inscribed on a stone monument at the school unveiled by Nakamura. In 1925, he attended Tokyo Univer...
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Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider
1750 - 1822 (72 years)
Johann Gottlob Theaenus Schneider was a German classicist and naturalist. Biography Schneider was born at Collm in Saxony. In 1774, on the recommendation of Christian Gottlob Heine, he became secretary to the famous Strasbourg scholar Richard François Brunck, and in 1811 became professor of ancient languages and eloquence at Breslau where he died in 1822.
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Su Xuelin
1897 - 1999 (102 years)
Su Xuelin or Su Hsüeh-lin was a Chinese writer and scholar. Early life Su Xuelin was born to a family of officials native to Anhui province in 1897. Her grandfather, Su Jinxin, served as a magistrate in several counties in Zhejiang province, where Su Xuelin was born. Her mother was surnamed Tu, but had no formal first name, instead going by the nickname To-Ni. Su's father held a minor official position, first under the Qing dynasty and then the Republic of China. Su had three brothers and two sisters.
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Okot p'Bitek
1931 - 1982 (51 years)
Okot p'Bitek was a Ugandan poet, who achieved wide international recognition for Song of Lawino, a long poem dealing with the tribulations of a rural African wife whose husband has taken up urban life and wishes everything to be westernised. Song of Lawino was originally written in the Acholi dialect of Southern Luo, translated by the author into English, and published in 1966. It was a breakthrough work, creating an audience among anglophone Africans for direct, topical poetry in English; and incorporating traditional attitudes and thinking in an accessible yet faithful literary vehicle. It ...
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Joseph Paul Gaimard
1793 - 1858 (65 years)
Joseph Paul Gaimard was a French naval surgeon and naturalist. Biography Gaimard was born at Saint-Zacharie on January 31, 1793. He studied medicine at the naval medical school in Toulon, subsequently earning his qualifications as a naval surgeon. Along with Jean René Constant Quoy, he served as naturalist on the ships L'Uranie under Louis de Freycinet 1817–1820, and L'Astrolabe under Jules Dumont d'Urville 1826–1829. During this voyage they discovered the now extinct giant skink of Tonga, Tachygia microlepis.
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William Warde Fowler
1847 - 1921 (74 years)
William Warde Fowler was an English historian and ornithologist, and tutor at Lincoln College, Oxford. He was best known for his works on ancient Roman religion. Among his most influential works was Roman Festivals of the Period of the Republic . H. H. Scullard, in the introduction to his 1981 book on a similar topic, singled out Fowler's book as a particularly valuable resource despite its age, writing, "I have not been so presumptuous as to attempt to provide an alternative."
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May Hill Arbuthnot
1884 - 1969 (85 years)
May Hill Arbuthnot was an American educator, editor, writer, and critic who devoted her career to the awareness and importance of children's literature. Her efforts expanded and enriched the selection of books for children, libraries, and children's librarians alike. She was selected for American Libraries article “100 Most Important Leaders we had for the 20th Century”.
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Nariman Narimanov
1870 - 1925 (55 years)
Nariman Karbalayi Najaf oghlu Narimanov was an Azerbaijani Bolshevik revolutionary, writer, publicist, politician and statesman. For just over one year beginning in May 1920, Narimanov headed the government of Soviet Azerbaijan. He was subsequently elected chairman of the Union Council of the Transcaucasian SFSR. He was also Party Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet Union from 30 December 1922 until the day of his death.
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Helen Adolf
1895 - 1998 (103 years)
Helen Adolf was an Austrian–American linguist and literature scholar. Early life and education Helen Adolf was born in 1895 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. Her family was Jewish. Her mother, Hedwig Adolf, was an artist, while her father, Jakob Adolf, was a lawyer. Adolf had one older sister, Anna Adolf Spiegel. She was a first cousin of writer Leonie Adele Spitzer.
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Hermann Sauppe
1809 - 1893 (84 years)
Hermann Sauppe was a German classical philologist and epigraphist born in Weesenstein, near Dresden. In 1832 he earned his doctorate from the University of Leipzig, where he was a student of Gottfried Hermann , who was a profound influence to Sauppe's career. Beginning in 1833, he taught classes at a secondary school in Zurich, where in 1838 he became an associate professor at the university. In 1837 he was appointed chief librarian at the cantonal library at Zurich.
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John Latham
1740 - 1837 (97 years)
John Latham was an English physician, naturalist and author. His main works were A General Synopsis of Birds and General History of Birds . He was able to examine specimens of Australian birds which reached England in the last twenty years of the 18th century, and was responsible for providing English names for many of them. He named some of Australia's most famous birds, including the emu, sulphur-crested cockatoo, wedge-tailed eagle, superb lyrebird, Australian magpie, magpie-lark and pheasant coucal. He was also the first to describe the hyacinth macaw. Latham has been called the "grandfa...
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Robert Hayden
1913 - 1980 (67 years)
Robert Hayden was an American poet, essayist, and educator. He served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1976 to 1978, a role today known as US Poet Laureate. He was the first African American writer to hold the office.
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Albert Schultens
1686 - 1750 (64 years)
Albert Schultens was a Dutch philologist. Biography He was born at Groningen, where he studied for the church. He went on to the University of Leiden, applying himself specially to Hebrew and the cognate tongues. His thesis Dissertatio theologico-philologica de utilitate linguae Arabicae in interpretenda sacra lingua appeared in 1706. After a visit to Reland in Utrecht, he returned to Groningen ; then, having taken his degree in theology , he returned to Leiden, and devoted himself to the study of the manuscript collections there until 1711, when he became pastor at Wassenaer.
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Thomas Southerne
1660 - 1746 (86 years)
Thomas Southerne was an Irish dramatist. Biography Thomas Southerne, born on 12 February 1660, in Oxmantown, near Dublin, was an Irish dramatist. He was the son of Francis Southerne and Margaret Southerne.
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Adrian Ross
1859 - 1933 (74 years)
Arthur Reed Ropes , better known under the pseudonym Adrian Ross, was a prolific writer of lyrics, contributing songs to more than sixty British musical comedies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the most important lyricist of the British stage during a career that spanned five decades. At a time when few shows had long runs, nineteen of his West End shows ran for over 400 performances.
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Francisco Monterde
1894 - 1985 (91 years)
Francisco de Asís Monterde García Icazbalceta was a prolific and multifaceted Mexican writer whose career spanned over fifty years. He was an important promoter of the arts and culture in Mexico in the years following the Revolution.
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Dorothy M. Johnson
1905 - 1984 (79 years)
Dorothy Marie Johnson was an American writer best known for her Western fiction. Biography Early life Dorothy Marie Johnson was born in McGregor, Iowa, the only daughter of Lester Eugene Johnson and Mary Louisa Barlow. Soon after her birth, the family moved to Montana.
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Milan Bogdanović
1892 - 1964 (72 years)
Milan Bogdanović was a Serbian writer and literary critic. Biography He finished elementary school and gymnasium in Pozarevac where his father was the then administrator of the royal estate Ljubičevo . He was a volunteer in Serbian Army during the Balkan Wars in 1912-1913. He was wounded during the First World War and he subsequently received the Medal of Miloš Obilić.
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Gustav Roethe
1859 - 1926 (67 years)
Gustav Roethe was a German philologist. Life Roethe studied classical and Germanic philology in Göttingen, Leipzig and Berlin, obtaining his PhD in 1881 . In 1888 he succeeded Karl Goedeke as an associate professor of German philology at the University of Göttingen, and two years later, succeeded Wilhelm Konrad Hermann Müller as a full professor of German language and literature. In 1902 he relocated to the University of Berlin, where in 1923/24 he served as rector.
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Jules Perrot
1810 - 1892 (82 years)
Jules-Joseph Perrot was a dancer and choreographer who later became Ballet Master of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg, Russia. He created some of the most famous ballets of the 19th century including Pas de Quatre, La Esmeralda, Ondine, and Giselle with Jean Coralli.
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Francisco Pérez Bayer
1711 - 1794 (83 years)
Francisco Pérez Bayer was a Spanish philologist, jurist and writer. Works Catalog of the Royal Library of El Escorial. Damaiuis et Laurentius Hispani, Rome, 1756.Alphabet and language of the Phoenicians and their colonies, 1772.Travel literature. Valencia: Institution Alfonso the Magnanimous, 1998.Etymology of the Spanish language.Archeological journey from Valencia to Andalusia and Portugal.De Numis Hebraeo-Samaritanis, 1781From Temple Hebraeorum ToletanoInstitutions of the Hebrew language.Origin of Spanish voices derived from Hebrew.
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Robert Lowth
1710 - 1787 (77 years)
Robert Lowth was a Bishop of the Church of England, Oxford Professor of Poetry and the author of one of the most influential textbooks of English grammar. Life Lowth was born in Hampshire, England, Great Britain, the son of Dr William Lowth, a clergyman and Biblical commentator. He was educated at Winchester College and became a scholar of New College, Oxford in 1729. Lowth obtained his BA in 1733 and his Master of Arts degree in 1737. In 1735, while still at Oxford, Lowth took orders in the Anglican Church and was appointed vicar of Ovington, Hampshire, a position he retained until 1741, w...
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Sudhindranath Dutta
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
Sudhindranath Dutta was an Indian poet, essayist, journalist and critic. Sudhindranath is one of the most notable poets after the Tagore-era in Bengali literature. Education Sudhindranath Dutt went to the Theosophical High School in Varanasi between 1914 and 1917, and later attended the Oriental Seminary in Kolkata. Later he graduated from the Scottish Church College. He later studied law at the Law College , while also simultaneously preparing for his finals for an MA in English literature from the University of Calcutta. However, he did not complete a degree in either subject.
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Chiang Yee
1903 - 1977 (74 years)
Chiang Yee , self-styled as "The Silent Traveller" , was a Chinese poet, author, painter and calligrapher. The success of The Silent Traveller: A Chinese Artist in Lakeland was followed by a series of books in the same vein, all of which he illustrated himself.
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Heinrich Keil
1822 - 1894 (72 years)
Theodor Heinrich Gottfried Keil was a German classical philologist. He was a son-in-law to educator Friedrich August Eckstein . He studied classical philology at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn, receiving his doctorate in 1843 with a textual critique on the Roman poet Propertius. From 1844 to 1846 he conducted manuscript studies at libraries in Italy. After his return to Germany, he became an instructor at the Francke Foundation Pädagogium in Halle an der Saale.
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Ants Oras
1900 - 1982 (82 years)
Ants Oras was an Estonian translator and writer. Oras was born in Tallinn and studied at the University of Tartu, graduating with a Master of Philosophy degree in 1923. He also obtained a Bachelor of Literature degree from Oxford University.
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