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,
#9351
Héloïse
1101 - 1164 (63 years)
Héloïse , variously Héloïse d'Argenteuil or Héloïse du Paraclet, was a French nun, philosopher, writer, scholar, and abbess. Héloïse was a renowned "woman of letters" and philosopher of love and friendship, as well as an eventual high-ranking abbess in the Catholic Church. She achieved approximately the level and political power of a bishop in 1147 when she was granted the rank of prelate nullius.
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William Mitchell Ramsay
1851 - 1939 (88 years)
Sir William Mitchell Ramsay FBA was a British archaeologist and New Testament scholar. By his death in 1939 he had become the foremost authority of his day on the history of Asia Minor and a leading scholar in the study of the New Testament.
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Paul Zarifopol
1874 - 1934 (60 years)
Paul Zarifopol was a Romanian literary and social critic, essayist, and literary historian. The scion of an aristocratic family, formally trained in both philology and the sociology of literature, he emerged in the 1910s as a rebel, highly distinctive, voice among the Romanian press and book reviewers. He was a confidant and publisher of the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale, building his theories on Caragiale's already trenchant appraisals of Romanian society and culture. Zarifopol defended art for art's sake even against the Marxism of his father-in-law, Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, and the Poporanism of his friend, Garabet Ibrăileanu.
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José de Alencar
1829 - 1877 (48 years)
José Martiniano de Alencar was a Brazilian lawyer, politician, orator, novelist and dramatist. He is considered to be one of the most famous and influential Brazilian Romantic novelists of the 19th century, and a major exponent of the literary tradition known as "Indianism". Sometimes he signed his works with the pen name Erasmo. He was patron of the 23rd chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters.
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Thomas Lodge
1558 - 1625 (67 years)
Thomas Lodge was an English writer and medical practitioner whose life spanned the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Biography Thomas Lodge was born about 1557 in West Ham, the second son of Sir Thomas Lodge, Lord Mayor of London, by his third wife Anne , daughter of Henry Luddington , a London grocer.
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Jean Stafford
1915 - 1979 (64 years)
Jean Stafford was an American short story writer and novelist. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford in 1970. Biography She was born in Covina, California, to Mary Ethel and John Richard Stafford, a Western pulp writer. As a youth Stafford attended the University of Colorado Boulder and, with friend James Robert Hightower, won a one-year fellowship to study philology at the University of Heidelberg from 1936 to 1937.
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Francis William Newman
1805 - 1897 (92 years)
Francis William Newman was an English classical scholar and moral philosopher, prolific miscellaneous writer and activist for vegetarianism and other causes. He was the younger brother of John Henry Newman. Thomas Carlyle in his life of John Sterling called him a "man of fine attainments, of the sharpest-cutting and most restlessly advancing intellect and of the mildest pious enthusiasm." George Eliot called him "our blessed St. Francis" and his soul "a blessed yea".
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Robert Henryson
1425 - 1506 (81 years)
Robert Henryson was a poet who flourished in Scotland in the period c. 1460–1500. Counted among the Scots makars, he lived in the royal burgh of Dunfermline and is a distinctive voice in the Northern Renaissance at a time when the culture was on a cusp between medieval and renaissance sensibilities. Little is known of his life, but evidence suggests that he was a teacher who had training in law and the humanities, that he had a connection with Dunfermline Abbey and that he may also have been associated for a period with Glasgow University. His poetry was composed in Middle Scots at a time when this was the state language.
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Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel
1820 - 1878 (58 years)
Wilhelm Siegmund Teuffel , German classical scholar, was born at Ludwigsburg in the Kingdom of Württemberg. In 1849 he was appointed extraordinary, in 1857 ordinary professor in the university of Tübingen, which post he held till his death.
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Julia de Burgos
1914 - 1953 (39 years)
Julia de Burgos García was a Puerto Rican poet. As an advocate of Puerto Rican independence, she served as Secretary General of the Daughters of Freedom, the women's branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was also a civil rights activist for women and African/Afro-Caribbean writers.
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Julio Torri
1889 - 1970 (81 years)
Julio Torri Maynes was a Mexican writer and teacher who formed part of the Ateneo de la Juventud . He wrote mainly in the essay form, although his limited production included short stories and scholarly works as well. Considered one of the best prose stylists of Latin America, he was admitted to the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua in 1952. His parents were Julio S. Torri and Sofía Maynes de Torri.
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Fred Lewis Pattee
1863 - 1950 (87 years)
Fred Lewis Pattee was an American author and scholar of American literature. As a professor of American literature at the Pennsylvania State University, Pattee wrote the lyrics of the Penn State Alma Mater. Pattee is sometimes labeled the "first Professor of American Literature", a position he held at Penn State from 1895 until 1928.
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Hubert Harrison
1883 - 1927 (44 years)
Hubert Henry Harrison was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".
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Charles Lloyd
1775 - 1839 (64 years)
Charles Lloyd II was an English poet who was a friend of Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey. His best-known poem is "Desultory Thoughts in London".
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Alice Roosevelt Longworth
1884 - 1980 (96 years)
Alice Lee Roosevelt Longworth was an American writer and socialite. She was the eldest child of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt and his only child with his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt. Longworth led an unconventional and controversial life. Her marriage to Representative Nicholas Longworth III, a Republican Party leader and 38th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, was shaky, and her only child, Paulina, was from her affair with Senator William Borah.
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Eric Morecambe
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
John Eric Bartholomew , known by his stage name Eric Morecambe, was an English comedian who together with Ernie Wise formed the double act Morecambe and Wise. The partnership lasted from 1941 until Morecambe's death in 1984. Morecambe took his stage name from his home town, the seaside resort of Morecambe in Lancashire.
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Charles L. Shadwell
1840 - 1919 (79 years)
Charles Lancelot Shadwell was Provost of Oriel College, Oxford, from 1905 until 1914. Shadwell was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, where he matriculated in 1859 and graduated B.A. in 1863. He was subsequently a Fellow of Oriel. He was called to the bar in 1872 and lectured at Oxford on jurisprudence.
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Adolf Kirchhoff
1826 - 1908 (82 years)
Johann Wilhelm Adolf Kirchhoff was a German classical scholar and epigraphist. Biography The son of historical painter Johann Jakob Kirchhoff, he was born in Berlin, and educated there. He then taught in various colleges until, in 1865, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Berlin, where he remained for the rest of his life. Kirchhoff's scientific studies covered a wide range in linguistics, antiquities, and Greek epigraphy. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1888.
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Kasym Tynystanov
1901 - 1938 (37 years)
Kasym Tynystanov was a prominent Kyrgyz linguist, politician and poet. Biography Kasym Tynystanov was born in 1901 in the village of Chyrpykty, Semirechye Oblast . According to his autobiography he learned to read and write the Arabic alphabet from his father. He went to school between 1912 and 1916 in Karakol and Sazonovka village .
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Sabine Baring-Gould
1834 - 1924 (90 years)
Sabine Baring-Gould of Lew Trenchard in Devon, England, was an Anglican priest, hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist, folk song collector and eclectic scholar. His bibliography consists of more than 1,240 publications, though this list continues to grow.
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Felix Jacoby
1876 - 1959 (83 years)
Felix Jacoby was a German classicist and philologist. He is best known among classicists for his highly important work Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, a collection of text fragments of ancient Greek historians.
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Felix Emanuel Schelling
1858 - 1945 (87 years)
Felix Emanuel Schelling was an American educator. Biography In 1881 he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the degree of LL.B. in 1883 and that of A.M. in 1884, and of Litt.D. in 1903 and LL.D. in 1909. Beginning in 1893 he was John Welsh Centennial professor of English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Schelling was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, of the American Philosophical Society and of the Modern Language Association of America.
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Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse
1797 - 1855 (58 years)
Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse was a German philologist, son of Johann Christian August Heyse, father of the novelist Paul Johann Ludwig von Heyse, born at Oldenburg. He received his early education at gymnasiums in Oldenburg and Nordhausen, and from 1812 to 1815, studied at a private institute in Vevey, Switzerland. After briefly serving as a tutor to the youngest son of Wilhelm von Humboldt, he enrolled in classes at the University of Berlin . Here, he studied philology under Philipp August Böckh. From 1819 to 1827, he was a private tutor to the family of banker Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy .
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Samuel Smiles
1812 - 1904 (92 years)
Samuel Smiles was a British author and government reformer. Although he campaigned on a Chartist platform, he promoted the idea that more progress would come from new attitudes than from new laws. His primary work, Self-Help , promoted thrift and claimed that poverty was caused largely by irresponsible habits, while also attacking materialism and laissez-faire government. It has been called "the bible of mid-Victorian liberalism" and had lasting effects on British political thought.
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Jean-Baptiste Tavernier
1605 - 1689 (84 years)
Jean-Baptiste Tavernier was a 17th-century French gem merchant and traveler. Tavernier, a private individual and merchant traveling at his own expense, covered, by his own account, 60,000 leagues in making six voyages to Persia and India between the years 1630 and 1668. In 1675, Tavernier, at the behest of his patron Louis XIV, published Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier .
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G. Wilson Knight
1897 - 1985 (88 years)
George Richard Wilson Knight was an English literary critic and academic, known particularly for his interpretation of mythic content in literature, and The Wheel of Fire, a collection of essays on Shakespeare's plays. He was also an actor and theatrical director, and considered an outstanding lecturer.
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Matthew Prior
1664 - 1721 (57 years)
Matthew Prior was an English poet and diplomat. He is also known as a contributor to The Examiner. Early life Prior was probably born in Middlesex. He was the son of a Nonconformist joiner at Wimborne Minster, East Dorset. His father moved to London, and sent him to Westminster School, under Dr Richard Busby. After his father's death, he left school, and was cared for by his uncle, a vintner in Channel Row. Here, Lord Dorset found him reading Horace, and set him to translate an ode. He did so well that the Earl offered to contribute to the continuation of his education at Westminster.
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Apostolo Zeno
1668 - 1750 (82 years)
Apostolo Zeno was a Venetian poet, librettist, journalist, and man of letters. Early life Apostolo Zeno was born in Venice to a colonial branch of the Zeno family, an ancient Venetian patrician family. His family had been transplanted from Venice to the Kingdom of Candia in the 13th century in order to maintain Venetian order and suppress any rebellious subjects. Following the assault on the island by the Ottoman Empire, the remaining members of his family returned to Venice. Upon return they were not readmitted to the patrician class, but were only able to obtain status as ordinary citizens....
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Eduard Schwartz
1858 - 1940 (82 years)
Eduard Schwartz was a German classical philologist. Born in Kiel, he studied under Hermann Sauppe in Göttingen, under Hermann Usener and Franz Bücheler in Bonn, under Theodor Mommsen in Berlin and under Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff in Greifswald. In 1880 he obtained his doctorate from the University of Bonn.
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Richard Porson
1759 - 1808 (49 years)
Richard Porson was an English classical scholar. He was the discoverer of Porson's Law. The Greek typeface Porson was based on his handwriting. Early life Richard Porson was born at East Ruston, near North Walsham, Norfolk, the eldest son of Huggin Porson, parish clerk. His mother was the daughter of a shoemaker from the neighbouring village of Bacton. He was sent first to the Bacton village school, kept by John Woodrow, and then to that of Happisburgh, kept by Mr Summers, where his extraordinary powers of memory and aptitude for arithmetic were discovered. His literary skill was partly due t...
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Charles Cotton
1630 - 1687 (57 years)
Charles Cotton was an English poet and writer, best known for translating the work of Michel de Montaigne from French, for his contributions to The Compleat Angler, and for the influential The Compleat Gamester attributed to him.
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Diego de Torres Villarroel
1693 - 1770 (77 years)
Diego de Torres Villarroel was a Spanish writer, poet, dramatist, doctor, mathematician, priest and professor of the University of Salamanca. His most famous work is his autobiography, Vida, ascendencia, nacimiento, crianza y aventuras del Doctor Don Diego de Torres Villarroel .
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Thomas Kingo
1634 - 1703 (69 years)
Thomas Hansen Kingo was a Danish bishop, poet and hymnwriter born in Slangerup, near Copenhagen. His work marked the high point of Danish baroque poetry. Early life and education His parents were Hans Thomsen Kingo and Karen Sørensdatter. His father was born in Crail, Scotland, and moved to Helsingør, Denmark, as a two-year old; he became a weaver of modest means. The name Kingo is a shortening of the Scottish name Kinghorn. Although his parents were not wealthy, he was sent to Frederiksborg Latin School at the age of 16 in 1650. He studied theology at the University of Copenhagen, enrolling ...
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William Craigie
1867 - 1957 (90 years)
Sir William Alexander Craigie was a philologist and a lexicographer. A graduate of the University of St Andrews, he was the third editor of the Oxford English Dictionary and co-editor of the 1933 supplement. From 1916 to 1925 he was also Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford. Among the students he tutored was the one who would succeed him in the Anglo-Saxon chair, J. R. R. Tolkien. He married Jessie Kinmond Hutchen of Dundee daughter of William.
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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
1698 - 1759 (61 years)
Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Prussian Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great.
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Lew Wallace
1827 - 1905 (78 years)
Lewis Wallace was an American lawyer, Union general in the American Civil War, governor of New Mexico Territory, politician, diplomat, artist, and author from Indiana. Among his novels and biographies, Wallace is best known for his historical adventure story, Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ , a bestselling novel that has been called "the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century."
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Arthur Murphy
1727 - 1805 (78 years)
Arthur Murphy , also known by the pseudonym Charles Ranger, was an Irish writer. Biography Murphy was born at Cloonyquin, County Roscommon, Ireland, the son of Richard Murphy and Jane French. He studied at the Jesuit-run College of Saint-Omer, France, and was a gifted student of the Latin and Greek classics.
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William Watson Goodwin
1831 - 1912 (81 years)
William Watson Goodwin was an American classical scholar, for many years Eliot professor of Greek at Harvard University. Biography He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of Hersey Bradford Goodwin and Lucrettia Watson.
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Aaron Hill
1685 - 1750 (65 years)
Aaron Hill was an English dramatist and miscellany writer. Biography The son of a country gentleman of Wiltshire, Hill was educated at Westminster School, and afterwards travelled in the East. He was the author of 17 plays, some of them, such as his versions of Voltaire's Zaire and Mérope, being adaptations. He also wrote poetry, which is of variable quality. Having written some satiric lines on Alexander Pope, he received in return a mention in The Dunciad, which led to a controversy between the two writers. Afterwards a reconciliation took place. He was a friend and correspondent of Samuel Richardson, whose Pamela he highly praised.
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Sally Benson
1897 - 1972 (75 years)
Sally Benson was an American writer of short stories and screenwriter. She is best known for her humorous tales of modern youth collected in Junior Miss and her semi-autobiographical stories collected in Meet Me in St. Louis.
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Erico Verissimo
1905 - 1975 (70 years)
Érico Lopes Verissimo was an important Brazilian writer, born in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Biography Érico Verissimo was the son of Sebastião Verissimo da Fonseca and Abegahy Lopes Verissimo. His father, heir of a rich family in Cruz Alta, met financial ruin during his son's youth and, as a result, Erico didn't complete secondary school because of the need to work.
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Otto Manninen
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Otto Manninen was a Finnish writer, poet, and a celebrated translator of world classics into Finnish language. Along with Eino Leino in the early 20th century, he is considered as a pioneer of Finnish poetry. Manninen translated the works of Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Heine, Ibsen, Petőfi and Runeberg into Finnish.
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Melchiorre Cesarotti
1730 - 1808 (78 years)
Melchiorre Cesarotti was an Italian poet, translator and theorist. Biography He was born at Padua, of a noble but impoverished family. He studied in the Seminary of Padua, where he obtained, immediately after the end of his studies, the chair of Rhetoric. At the University of Padua his literary progress gained him the professorship of Greek and Hebrew in 1768, and then of Rhetorics and Literature in 1797. As a supporter of the Enlightenment ideas, he wrote in favor of the French on their invasion of Italy in 1797; he received a pension, and was made knight of the iron crown by Napoleon I, t...
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Myles Dillon
1900 - 1972 (72 years)
Myles Patrick Dillon was an Irish scholar whose primary interests were comparative philology, Celtic studies, and Sanskrit. Life Myles Dillon was born in Dublin; he was one of six children of John Dillon and his wife Elizabeth Mathew; James Dillon, the leader of Fine Gael, was his younger brother.
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J. B. Bury
1861 - 1927 (66 years)
John Bagnell Bury was an Anglo-Irish historian, classical scholar, Medieval Roman historian and philologist. He objected to the label "Byzantinist" explicitly in the preface to the 1889 edition of his Later Roman Empire. He was Erasmus Smith's Professor of Modern History at Trinity College Dublin , before being Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of King's College, Cambridge from 1902 until his death.
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Șerban Cioculescu
1902 - 1988 (86 years)
Șerban Cioculescu was a Romanian literary critic, literary historian and columnist, who held teaching positions in Romanian literature at the University of Iași and the University of Bucharest, as well as membership of the Romanian Academy and chairmanship of its Library. Often described as one of the most representative Romanian critics of the interwar period, he took part in the cultural debates of the age, and, as a left-wing sympathizer who supported secularism, was involved in extended polemics with the traditionalist, far right and nationalist press venues. From early on in his career, ...
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Robert Walser
1878 - 1956 (78 years)
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Saeed Nafisi
1896 - 1966 (70 years)
Saeed Nafisi was an Iranian scholar, fiction writer and poet. He was a prolific writer in Persian. Nafisi was born in Tehran, where he conducted numerous research projects on Iranian culture, literature and poetry. He first emerged as a serious thinker when he joined Mohammad-Taqi Bahar, Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, Gholamreza Rashid-Yasemi and Abdolhossein Teymourtash to found one of the first literary magazines to be published in Iran, called Daneshkade, in 1918. He subsequently published many articles on Iran, Persian literary texts and Sufism and his works have been translated into more than 20 languages worldwide.
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Mohitlal Majumdar
1888 - 1952 (64 years)
Mohitlal Majumdar was a renowned Indian poet and essayist in the Bengali-language. He began his journey as a poet, but later became literary critic. Life Majumder was born in a Baidya family on 26 October 1888 in the village of Kanchrapara in Nadia district, India at his maternal uncle's house. His native village was Balagarh in Hooghly District of present-day West Bengal. He graduated in arts in 1908 from Ripon College , Kolkata. He began his career as a teacher at Calcutta High School in 1908 and continued in this profession until 1928. He also worked briefly as a kanungo in the Settlement Department.
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Giulio Salvadori
1862 - 1928 (66 years)
Giulio Salvadori was an Italian poet, literary critic and educator. Life Salvadori was educated at the Sapienza University of Rome, where he became a friend of Gabriele d'Annunzio. In 1885, he converted to Roman Catholicism, leading to a parting of the ways from d'Annunzio.
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