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,
#10151
Alexander Aigner
1909 - 1988 (79 years)
Alexander Aigner was a number theorist and a full university professor for mathematics at the Karl Franzens University in Graz. During World War II he was part of a group of five mathematicians, which was recruited by the military cryptanalyst Wilhelm Fenner, and which included Ernst Witt, Georg Aumann, Oswald Teichmueller and Johann Friedrich Schultze, to form the backbone of the new mathematical research department in the late 1930s, which would eventually be called Section IVc of Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht. . The group was led by the German professor of mathe...
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David McCord
1897 - 1997 (100 years)
David Thompson Watson McCord was an American poet and college fundraiser. Life He grew up in Portland, Oregon and graduated from Harvard University. His work appeared in Harper's. He raised millions of dollars as executive director of the Harvard College Fund.
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John Owen
1564 - 1622 (58 years)
John Owen was a Welsh epigrammatist, most known for his Latin epigrams, collected in his Epigrammata. He is also cited by various Latinizations including Ioannes Owen, Joannes Oweni, Ovenus and Audoenus.
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Stefanos Koumanoudis
1818 - 1899 (81 years)
Stefanos Koumanoudis was a Greek archaeologist, teacher and writer of the 19th century. Biography He was born in 1818 in Adrianople to a rich merchant family. In an early age, his family settled in Bucharest, and later in Silistra where he spent most of his childhood. He graduated from the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Paris. Fellow university students of Koumanoudis were Efthymios Kastorchis, Iraklis Mitsopoulos, Lysandros Kavtantzoglou and Emmanuel Kokkinos, who became notable teachers and archaeologists as well.
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Munis Tekinalp
1883 - 1961 (78 years)
Moiz Cohen was a Turkish writer, philosopher, and journalist of Jewish heritage. He became an ideologue of different movements at different times: Ottomanism, Pan-Turkism, and Kemalism. Born to a Jewish family, he later changed his name to Munis Tekinalp.
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C. H. Herford
1853 - 1931 (78 years)
Charles Harold Herford, FBA was an English literary scholar and critic. He is remembered principally for his biography and edition of the works of Ben Jonson in 11 volumes. This major scholarly project was published from 1925 onwards by Oxford University Press, and completed with Percy and Evelyn Simpson. It took half a century, being agreed on in 1902.
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Thomas of Cantimpré
1201 - 1270 (69 years)
Thomas of Cantimpré was a Flemish Catholic medieval writer, preacher, theologian and a friar belonging to the Dominican Order. He is best known for his encyclopedic work on nature De natura rerum, for the moral text Bonum universale de Apibus and for his hagiographical writings.
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Anthony Farmer
1657 - Present (369 years)
Anthony Farmer was an Englishman nominated by King James II to the office of President of Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1687. Life Farmer was admitted to St John's College, Cambridge, in 1672, and migrated to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1675. After he volunteered for the king's cause in the Monmouth Rebellion, James II nominated him for the Magdalen Presidency in his mandate of 5 April 1687. As Farmer was not a member of the college, and was widely believed to be a secret Roman Catholic, his appointment was rejected by the Fellows of the College. Farmer's appointment and subsequent rejecti...
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Porter Garnett
1871 - 1951 (80 years)
Porter Garnett was a playwright, critic, editor, librarian, teacher, and printer. Biography Porter Garnett was born in 1871 in San Francisco. He was an active member in San Francisco's literary scene and a member of the Bohemian Club, writing and directing plays at Bohemian Grove. In 1896, he joined The Lark, founded the previous year by Gelett Burgess and Bruce Porter. In 1907 he became assistant curator of Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley.
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An Sugil
1911 - 1977 (66 years)
Ahn Soo-kil was a Korean novelist and journalist who devoted much of his life to depicting the lives of the Korean settlers in Jiandao, Manchuria. Life An Sugil was born on November 3, 1911, in Hamhŭng, Hamgyŏngnamdo, in present-day North Korea. His family relocated to Manchuria when he was eleven and returned to their hometown after he finished middle school. In 1927, An withdrew from Hamheung High School after leading a student protest, and transferred to Kyungshin School in Seoul. He was arrested and eventually expelled for his involvement with the Gwangju Student Movement. In 1931, he en...
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Eileen Duggan
1894 - 1972 (78 years)
Eileen May Duggan was a New Zealand poet and journalist, from an Irish Roman Catholic family. She worked in Wellington as a journalist, and wrote a weekly article for the Catholic weekly The New Zealand Tablet for almost fifty years.
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Anton Matthias Sprickmann
1749 - 1833 (84 years)
Anton Matthias Sprickmann was a German writer and lawyer. He was born and died in Münster.
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Ruth Lee Kennedy
1895 - 1988 (93 years)
Ruth Lee Kennedy was an American linguist known for her work on the 17th century Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina. Kennedy was the first American woman to lecture at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
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Bruno Keil
1859 - 1916 (57 years)
Bruno Keil was a German classical philologist. He studied classical philology, archaeology and Germanistics in Berlin, Bonn and Greifswald, obtaining his doctorate in 1884 at the University of Greifswald with a highly regarded thesis on Isocrates. As a student, his influences were Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Georg Kaibel and Rudolf Hercher. He took scientific travels to Italy, Spain and France, and beginning in 1888, worked at the Sophiengymnasium in Berlin. In 1890 he became an associate professor at the University of Strasbourg, where he gained a full professorship in 1901. From the...
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Friedrich Bechtel
1855 - 1924 (69 years)
Friedrich Bechtel was a German philologist and linguist of Indo-European languages, known for his research of Greek dialects. He studied languages at the University of Göttingen, where his influences included philologists Theodor Benfey and August Fick. In 1878 he obtained his habilitation for comparative linguistics at Göttingen, becoming an associate professor in 1884. From 1881 onward, he was editor of the journal Göttingschen Gelehrten Anzeigen. In 1895 he was appointed professor of comparative linguistics at the University of Halle.
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Christian Frederick Matthaei
1744 - 1811 (67 years)
Christian Frederick Matthaei , a Thuringian, palaeographer, classical philologist, professor first at Wittenberg and then at Moscow. Life He was rector of the University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1803 he was appointed to the Professorship of Classical Literature at Moscow University. In Moscow he found a large number of Greek manuscripts, both Biblical and Patristic, originally brought from Athos, quite uncollated, and almost entirely unknown in the West Europe. He collated seventy manuscripts of the New Testament. He also gave a big collection of biblical citations in the writings of Chrysostom.
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Frank Parker Day
1881 - 1950 (69 years)
Frank Parker Day was a Canadian athlete, academic and author. Since Day's father was a Methodist minister who moved to a new congregation every three years, Day spent his youth living throughout Nova Scotia, living in Wallace, Acadia Mines, Mahone Bay, Boylston, and Lockeport.
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August Ferdinand Mehren
1822 - 1907 (85 years)
August Ferdinand Michael van Mehren was a Danish Orientalist and philologist. Early life and education Mehren was born in Helsingør, the son of merchant Johann Friedrich van Mehren and Claudine Amalie Liebmann . He studied at the Universities of Copenhagen, Leipzig and Kiel, obtaining his doctorate in 1845. In Leipzig he was a student of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer , and in Kiel he studied under Justus Olshausen .
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Samuel Johnson
1691 - 1773 (82 years)
Samuel Johnson was an English dancing-master, dramatist and violinist, known especially for his 1729 stage work Hurlothrumbo. This was satirised by Henry Fielding. Life, stage and music Johnson was a native of Cheshire. In 1722 he gave a ball at Manchester, noted by John Byrom, and in 1724 he was in London with his fiddle. He worked to have staged his Hurlothrumbo, which he had shown to Byrom and other friends in Manchester in the previous year.
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Kate Sanborn
1839 - 1917 (78 years)
Kate Sanborn was an American author, teacher and lecturer. Also a reviewer, compiler, essayist, and farmer, Sanborn was famous for her cooking and housekeeping. Early years and education Katherine Abbott Sanborn was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, July 11, 1839. Her father was the educator Edwin David Sanborn, who occupied the chair of Latin and English literature, at Dartmouth College, for nearly fifty years, In 1859, he accepted the Latin professorship and presidency of Washington University in St. Louis, returning four years later to the chair of oratory and literature at Dartmouth, which he held until he retired from active work.
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Mykhailo Petrenko
1817 - 1862 (45 years)
Mykhailo Mykolayovych Petrenko was a Ukrainian romantic poet notable for his musical works, and a member of the Kharkiv Romantic School. Biography Petrenko was born in the town Sloviansk to a family of petty officials in 1817. Petrenko studied at the juridical faculty of Kharkov University during 1837–1841. He served in the judicial institutions: in Kharkov , Vovchansk , Lebedyn , rising to collegiate assessor .
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Hildegard Schaeder
1902 - 1984 (82 years)
Hildegard Schaeder was a German theologian and church historian. In her research, she focused on the history and theology of Eastern orthodox churches, with studies not only in Breslau and Hamburg but also in Prague and the Soviet Union where she lived when the Nazis came to power.
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Carmelo Samonà
1926 - 1990 (64 years)
Carmelo Samonà was an Italian academic and writer, as well one of the most important Italian Hispanists. Biography He came from the Sicilian aristocratic family Samonà, and was the son of the architect Giuseppe Samonà. In 1936 he settled in Rome.
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Benjamín Carrión
1898 - 1932 (34 years)
Manuel Benjamín Carrión Mora was an Ecuadorian writer, diplomat and cultural promoter. Biography He was born into an aristocratic family in Loja. He was a lawyer by training, and occupied various positions in the public arena, including Minister of Education and legislator. He was also a diplomat in several countries of Europe and the Americas and most notably served as the ambassador to Mexico and Chile.
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Cyrus Northrop
1834 - 1922 (88 years)
Cyrus Northrop was an American university president. Early life Cyrus Northrop, Sr. was born in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University in 1857 where he was a member of both Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity and of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity Northrop graduated from the Yale Law School in 1859. Two years later he was appointed clerk of the Connecticut House of Representatives and in 1862 clerk of the Connecticut State Senate. About these early appointments, one of his fraternities wrote in a 1916 retrospective, that:"This [was] a rare distinction and indicates the great vers...
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Willis Henry Bocock
1865 - 1947 (82 years)
Willis Henry Bocock was a prominent administrator and professor of Classics at the University of Georgia. One of the highlights of his career was his appointment as the first Dean of the newly formed University of Georgia Graduate School in 1910. Much of the present success of graduate programs at the University of Georgia can be traced to his visionary leadership. Throughout his career, Bocock maintained a reputation for excellence in scholarship and leadership. Bocock was, as were many members of the first graduate faculty, a Virginian. He was born in 1865, the son of a prominent Presbyterian clergyman.
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Tom Arnold
1823 - 1900 (77 years)
Thomas Arnold , also known as Thomas Arnold the Younger, was an English literary scholar. Life He was the second son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, and his wife Mary Penrose. He was the younger brother of the poet Matthew Arnold and older brother of author and colonial administrator William Delafield Arnold. After gaining a first class degree at University College, Oxford, Arnold grew discontented with Victorian Britain and attempted to take up farming in New Zealand. Failing to make a success of this career, in 1850 he moved to Tasmania, having been invited to take the job of Inspector of Schools by Governor William Denison.
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Lucas Fernández
1474 - 1542 (68 years)
Lucas Fernández was a Spanish dramatist and musician, writer in Leonese language. He was born and educated at Salamanca, and was a professor of music there from 1522. The surviving work of Lucas Fernández consists of six plays. Although showing the influence of his rival Juan del Encina, they are notable for their dialogue, humor, and the effective interleaving of song and music with the action of play. The best of the works is an Easter play Auto de la Pasión, while his Dialogo para cantar is an early example of the zarzuela.
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Heinrich Wilhelm Grauert
1804 - 1852 (48 years)
Heinrich Wilhelm Grauert was a Dutch born, German historian and classical philologist. From 1821 he studied history and philology at the University of Bonn, where he was a pupil of Karl Friedrich Heinrich and August Ferdinand Naeke. At Bonn, he came under the influence of historian Barthold Georg Niebuhr, of whom he worked as a tutor to his son Marcus. In 1825 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on the fabulist Aesop, titled De Aesopo et fabulis Aesopicis. In 1827 he was appointed associate professor of history and classical studies at the Academy of Münster, where in 1836 he attained a full professorship of history.
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Paavo Cajander
1846 - 1913 (67 years)
Paavo Emil Cajander was a Finnishish poet and translator. Cajander was born in Hämeenlinna on December 24, 1846, to Frans Henrik Cajander and Maria Sofia Ylén. He was renowned for his translation into Finnish of Shakespeare's works and of Johan Ludvig Runeberg's The Tales of Ensign Stål, whose first verse is currently the Finnish national anthem. Cajander died in Helsinki on June 14, 1913, and is buried at the Hietaniemi Cemetery.
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Bud Abbott
1897 - 1974 (77 years)
William Alexander "Bud" Abbott was an American comedian, actor and producer. He was best known as the straight man half of the comedy duo Abbott and Costello. Early life Abbott was born in Asbury Park, New Jersey on October 2, 1897, into a show business family. His parents, Rae Fisher and Harry Abbott, had met while working for the Barnum and Bailey Circus. She was a bareback rider of German Jewish background and he was a concessionaire and forage agent. Bud was the third of the couple's four children. When Bud was a toddler, the family relocated to Harlem, then to the Coney Island section of...
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Ernst Toller
1893 - 1939 (46 years)
Ernst Toller was a German author, playwright, left-wing politician and revolutionary, known for his Expressionist plays. He served in 1919 for six days as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, after which he became the head of its army. He was imprisoned for five years for his part in the armed resistance by the Bavarian Soviet Republic to the central government in Berlin. While in prison Toller wrote several plays that gained him international renown. They were performed in London and New York City as well as in Berlin.
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Arnold Möller
1581 - 1655 (74 years)
Arnold Möller , was a German calligrapher. Biography Möller was a 17th-century German writing and arithmetic teacher who worked as a calligrapher in Lübeck. His publications were still reissued in the 18th century. He was trained in the Netherlands, possibly by Jan van de Velde the Elder in Haarlem, since his portrait was painted by the Haarlem artist Frans Hals. Möller is remembered today for his calligraphy and magic square puzzles left in the St. Catherine's Church, Lübeck, where he is buried. His numerous works are in the Archives of the Hanseatic city of Lübeck and the city library.
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Thomas Mitchell
1892 - 1962 (70 years)
Thomas John Mitchell was an American actor and writer. Among his most famous roles in a long career are those of Gerald O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, Doc Boone in Stagecoach, Uncle Billy in It's a Wonderful Life, Pat Garrett in The Outlaw, and Mayor Jonas Henderson in High Noon. Mitchell was the first male actor to gain the Triple Crown of Acting by winning an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Tony Award.
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Ewald Flügel
1863 - 1914 (51 years)
Ewald Flügel was one of the international pioneers of the study of Old and Middle English Literature and Language and one of the founding professors of English Studies at Stanford University. Biography Flügel, whose father and grandfather were involved in lexicographic projects and the teaching of English, was educated at the famous Nicolai School in Leipzig. He attended Leipzig University and received his doctoral degree with a dissertation on Thomas Carlyle in 1885, his postdoctoral degree with a study of Philip Sidney in 1888. From 1888 to 1892 he taught as "Privatdozent" at Leipzig and became coeditor of Anglia, Germany's second academic journal dedicated to the study of English.
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Howard Crosby
1826 - 1891 (65 years)
Howard Crosby was an American Presbyterian preacher, scholar and professor. He was Chancellor of New York University. Biography Crosby was born in New York City in 1826 to William Bedlow Crosby and Harriet Ashton Clarkson. His ancestors included Judge Joseph Crosby of Massachusetts, Gen. William Floyd of New York, a signer of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Rip Van Dam, and Matthias Nicoll. He is also the father of Ernest Howard Crosby, and a relative of Fanny Crosby.
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Joseph Anglade
1868 - 1930 (62 years)
Joseph Anglade was a French philologist. He specialized in Romance languages, particularly Occitan, and studied the lyrics of the troubadours. He was instrumental in formalizing the term Occitan for the language of Provence.
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Thomas Day Seymour
1848 - 1907 (59 years)
Thomas Day Seymour was an American classical scholar. He spent most of his career as a Professor of Greek at Yale University and published primarily on the works of Homer. Life Born in Hudson, Ohio, Seymour graduated with a B.A. in 1870 at Western Reserve College, present day Case Western Reserve University, where his father, Nathan Perkins Seymour, was for many years Professor of Greek and Latin. He received an ad eundem degree from Yale in 1870, and honorary LL.D. degrees from Western Reserve in 1894, from Glasgow University in 1901, and from Harvard University in 1906.
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Károly Molter
1890 - 1981 (91 years)
Károly Molter was a Hungarian novelist, dramatist, literary critic, journalist and academic. He spent most of his life in the region of Transylvania, being successively a national of Austria-Hungary and Romania.
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Edward Parmelee Morris
1853 - 1938 (85 years)
Edward Parmelee Morris was an American classicist. Life He was born on September 17, 1853, in Auburn, New York. He graduated from Yale College in 1874, then moved to Cincinnati where his father was living. On January 2, 1879, he married Charlotte Webster Humphrey; her father was the Reverend Z. M. Humphrey and a professor at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. Humphrey and Morris had four children, Frances Humphrey , Edward , Margaret , and Humphrey . Edward died in infancy. Frances and Margaret both attended Bryn Mawr College. Morris died on November 16, 1938, in New York City.
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James Ingram
1774 - 1850 (76 years)
James Ingram was an English academic at the University of Oxford, who was Rawlinsonian Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1803 to 1808 and President of Trinity College, Oxford, from 1824 until his death.
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Henry Maundrell
1665 - 1701 (36 years)
Henry Maundrell was an academic at Oxford University and later a Church of England clergyman, who served from 20 December 1695 as chaplain to the Levant Company in Syria. His Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter A.D. 1697 , which had its origins in the diary he carried with him on his Easter pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1697, has become an often reprinted "minor travel classic." It was included in compilations of travel accounts from the mid-18th century, and was translated into three additional languages: French , Dutch and German . By 1749, the seventh edition was printed.
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Kenneth Willis Clark
1898 - 1979 (81 years)
Kenneth Willis Clark was a professor at Duke University, Greek palaeographer; area of interest: Greek New Testament manuscripts, and author of numerous books. Clark catalogued the Greek New Testament manuscripts housed in the libraries of the United States and Canada . Clark described and catalogued manuscripts housed in the library of the Saint Catherine's Monastery during his an expedition the Mount Sinai . According to his report two-thirds of that library comprised Greek manuscripts with items in Arabic, Persian, Georgian, Syriac, Ethiopian and Slavonic. He also catalogued the manuscripts...
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John Anderson
1870 - 1952 (82 years)
John George Clark Anderson was a classical scholar, who was Camden Professor of Ancient History at the University of Oxford from 1927 to 1936. Personal life and career J. G. C. Anderson, the son of a Scottish clergyman, was born on 6 December 1870, and was educated at Aberdeen University and Christ Church, Oxford. He was a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1897 to 1900, during which time he carried out archaeological explorations in Asia Minor. He returned to Christ Church on his appointment as a Senior Student in 1900, and won the university's Conington Prize in 1903. He served suc...
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Christopher Andreas Holmboe
1796 - 1882 (86 years)
Christopher Andreas Holmboe was a Norwegian philologist, orientalist and numismatist. Holmboe was born at Vang in Oppland, Norway. He was son of parish priest Jens Holmboe and brother of mathematician Bernt Michael Holmboe. He attended the Oslo Cathedral School and graduated as cand.theol. in 1818. He was professor of oriental languages at the University of Christiania from 1825 to 1876. He also served as warden of the University Coin Cabinet.
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Robert Shaw
1927 - 1978 (51 years)
Robert Archibald Shaw was an English actor, novelist, playwright and screenwriter. Beginning his career in theatre, Shaw joined the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre after the Second World War and appeared in productions of Macbeth, Henry VIII, Cymbeline, and other Shakespeare plays. With the Old Vic company , he continued primarily in Shakespearean roles. In 1959 he starred in a West End production of The Long and the Short and the Tall.
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Mikhail De Pulet
1822 - 1885 (63 years)
Mikhail Fyodorovich De Pulet was a Russian literary critic and historian, publicist, journalist, editor and pedagogue. A Kharkiv University alumnus , De Pulet started out as a teacher in Russian language and history in Voronezh, at the Mikhaylovsky Cadet Corps. In 1862–63 he edited the regional newspaper Voronezh Governorate News. In 1865 he was sent to Vilno as an inspector of the city's First Gymnasium and for three years co-edited the newspaper Vilensky Vestnik. Since 1857 De Pulet worked as a literary critic, first for Moskovskiye Vedomosti and later for Atheneum, Russkaya Beseda, Russky Vestnik, Den, Russkoye Slovo.
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Herbert Böhme
1907 - 1971 (64 years)
Herbert Böhme was a German poet who wrote poems and battle hymns for the Nazi Party. In 1930 he became one of the newly formed Junge Mannschaft, a group of semi-official Nazi poets that also included Heinrich Anacker, Gerhard Schumann and Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach. Böhme joined the Nazi Party on 1 May 1933 and its original paramilitary wing, the Brownshirts, on 1 September 1933. After the Second World War he became involved with neo-fascism.
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Johann Georg Daniel Arnold
1780 - 1829 (49 years)
Johann Georg Daniel Arnold was a lawyer and writer. Life Arnold was born the son of a master cooper. His mother passed away very early. From 1787 Arnold attended high school in Strasbourg. Due to the French Revolution, the family became impoverished and from 1795 he hired himself as a clerk in the war bureau of the Bas-Rhin department.
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August Hermann Niemeyer
1754 - 1828 (74 years)
August Hermann Niemeyer was a German Protestant theologian, teacher, a librettist, a poet, a travel writer, a Protestant church song poet and a Prussian political educator. He was professor of theology in 1780, then vice-chancellor of the University of Halle-Wittenberg.
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