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 Political Science,
#3901
Clara Bewick Colby
1846 - 1916 (70 years)
Clara Dorothy Bewick Colby was a British-American lecturer, newspaper publisher and correspondent, women's rights activist, and suffragist leader. Born in England, she immigrated to the US, where she attended university and married the former American Civil War general, later Assistant United States Attorney General, Leonard Wright Colby. In 1883, she founded The Woman's Tribune in Beatrice, Nebraska, moving it three years later to Washington, D.C.; it became the country's leading women's suffrage publication. She was an advocate of peace and took part in the great peace conference at San Francisco during the exposition.
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John Hancock
1737 - 1793 (56 years)
John Hancock was an American Founding Father, merchant, statesman, and prominent Patriot of the American Revolution. He served as president of the Second Continental Congress and was the first and third Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He is remembered for his large and stylish signature on the United States Declaration of Independence, so much so that in the United States, John Hancock or Hancock has become a colloquialism for a person's signature. He also signed the Articles of Confederation, and used his influence to ensure that Massachusetts ratified the United States Consti...
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Wilhelm Gesenius
1786 - 1842 (56 years)
Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius was a German orientalist, lexicographer, Christian Hebraist, Lutheran theologian, Biblical scholar and critic. Biography Gesenius was born at Nordhausen. In 1803 he became a student of philosophy and theology at the University of Helmstedt, where Heinrich Henke was his most influential teacher; but the latter part of his university course was taken at Göttingen, where Johann Gottfried Eichhorn and Thomas Christian Tychsen were then at the height of their popularity. In 1806, shortly after graduation, he became Repetent and Privatdozent at Göttingen; and, as he was later proud to say, had August Neander for his first pupil in Hebrew language.
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Leo Stanton Rowe
1871 - 1946 (75 years)
Leo Stanton Rowe was the director general of the Pan-American Union from 1920 to 1946. Life He was born on September 17, 1871, in McGregor, Iowa, to Louis Rowe and Catherine Raff. His family moved to Philadelphia and he attended high school and graduated in 1887. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a Bachelor of Philosophy degree in 1890. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Halle in 1893. He received his J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1895.
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Charles Pierre Henri Rieu
1820 - 1902 (82 years)
Charles Pierre Henri Rieu was a Swiss orientalist, for many years Professor of Arabic in London and Cambridge. Biography Rieu was born in Geneva, the son of soldier and politician Jean-Louis Rieu. He studied at Bonn University, where he studied Arabic under Georg Freytag and Johann Gildemeister, and Sanskrit with Christian Lassen. He received his doctorate in 1843. He entered the British Museum in 1847, and after twenty years of service, a new post, that of Keeper of Oriental Manuscripts, was created for him.
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Camila Henríquez Ureña
1894 - 1973 (79 years)
Camila Henríquez Ureña , was a writer, essayist, educator and literary critic from the Dominican Republic who became a naturalized Cuban citizen. She descended from a family of writers, thinkers and educators; both her parents, Francisco Henríquez y Carvajal and Salomé Ureña, as well as her brothers Pedro and Max, were literary luminaries. Her essays have been published in Instrucción Pública, Ultra, Archipiélago , Casa de las Américas, La Gaceta de Cuba, Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional, Revista de la Universidad de La Habana, and Revista Lyceum. A feminist and a humanist, she lectured durin...
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Richard Glenn Gettell
1912 - 1988 (76 years)
Richard Glenn Gettell was an American educator who served as the 12th President of Mount Holyoke College from 1957 to 1968. His mother, Nelene Groff Gettell , taught at Amherst High School from 1921 to 1923; the 1923 Yearbook was dedicated to her. His father was college football coach and political scientist Raymond G. Gettell. The family moved to Berkeley, California in 1923 after Raymond was appointed head of the political science department at the University of California, which he held until his death.
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Ilya Pavlovich Petrushevsky
1898 - 1977 (79 years)
Ilya Pavlovich Petrushevsky ; was a Soviet Orientalist, Honored Scientist of the USSR. Doctor of Historical Sciences, and Professor. Biography In 1926 Petrushevsky graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of Kharkiv and Baku Universities. From 1926 to 1931 he worked in Baku. In 1931, under the leadership of P. K. Zhoze and Yu. N. Marr, he studied Arabic and Persian languages at the Institute of the Caucasus Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Tbilisi. From 1933 to 1936 he taught at the University of Tbilisi where he completed his Candidate of Historical Sciences in 1935. F...
Go to Profile#3909
John Woolley
1816 - 1866 (50 years)
John Woolley was an academic and clergyman, the first principal of the University of Sydney, Australia. Early life Woolley was born at Petersfield, Hampshire, England, the second son of George Woolley, physician, and his wife Charlotte, née Gell. Woolley attended Western Grammar School, Brompton, London and then the University College, London from 1830, and during the next two years passed every subject he took with first-class honours. Woolley then won an open scholarship at Exeter College, Oxford, graduating BA, 1836, with a first-class in classics, MA, 1839, and DCL in 1844. Woolley was ordained a deacon on 14 June 1840 and a priest on 4 July 1841.
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Johannes Albrecht Bernhard Dorn
1805 - 1881 (76 years)
Johannes Albrecht Bernhard Dorn , or Boris Andreevich Dorn, was a German orientalist. He specialized in the history and the languages of Iran, Russia and Afghanistan. Biography He studied theology and philology at the universities of Halle and Leipzig, obtaining his habilitation in 1825. At Leipzig University Dorn worked for a while as a lecturer. Later on, he served as a professor of oriental languages at Kharkov University , then in 1835 relocated to St. Petersburg as a professor of history and geography in the Asiatic department of the Russian Ministry of foreign affairs. He taught Sanskrit and Pashtu at St.
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Elizabeth Haldane
1862 - 1937 (75 years)
Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane was a Scottish author, biographer, philosopher, suffragist, nursing administrator, and social welfare worker. She was the sister of Richard Burdon Haldane, 1st Viscount Haldane and John Scott Haldane, and became the first female Justice of the Peace in Scotland in 1920. She was made a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour in 1918.
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Frederick B. Deknatel
1905 - 1973 (68 years)
Frederick Brockway Deknatel was an American art historian and educator. Deknatel was the William Door Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University from 1942 to 1972. Career Born in Chicago, Deknatel graduated from the Lawrenceville School in 1924. He then earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from Princeton University in 1928. Deknatel married Virginia Herrick three years later, and received a Doctor of Philosophy in art history from Harvard University in 1935. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on thirteenth-century Gothic sculpture in the Burgos and León Cathedral. However, Deknatel s...
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Ermolao Barbaro
1453 - 1493 (40 years)
Ermolao or Hermolao Barbaro, also Hermolaus Barbarus , was an Italian Renaissance scholar. Education Ermolao Barbaro was born in Venice, the son of Zaccaria Barbaro, and the grandson of Francesco Barbaro. He was also the uncle of Daniele Barbaro and Marcantonio Barbaro
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Paul Masson-Oursel
1882 - 1956 (74 years)
Paul Masson-Oursel was a French orientalist and philosopher, a pioneer of 'comparative philosophy'. Masson-Oursel was a student of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Henri Bergson, Emile Durkheim, Pierre Janet, André Lalande, Marcel Mauss. With Sylvain Lévy, Alfred Foucher, Chavannes, Clément Huart, he learned Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Arab. La Philosophie Comparée, his Sorbonne doctoral dissertation, attempted to apply Comtean positivism and a comparative method which identified 'analogies' between the philosophies of Europe, India and China. Masson-Oursel argued that "philosophy cannot achieve positivit...
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Harold D. Clarke
#3916
Ben Bowen Thomas
1899 - 1977 (78 years)
Sir Ben Bowen Thomas was a Welsh civil servant and university President. He served as Permanent Secretary to the Welsh Department of the Ministry of Education from 1945 to 1963, and was President of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1964 to 1975. In June 1977 Thomas was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University.
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Victor L. Berger
1860 - 1929 (69 years)
Victor Luitpold Berger was an Austrian–American socialist politician and journalist who was a founding member of the Social Democratic Party of America and its successor, the Socialist Party of America. Born in the Austrian Empire and present-day Romania, Berger immigrated to the United States as a young man and became an important and influential socialist journalist in Wisconsin. He helped establish the so-called Sewer Socialist movement. Also a politician, in 1910, he was elected as the first Socialist to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing a district in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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William Mather Lewis
1878 - 1945 (67 years)
William Mather Lewis was an American teacher, university president, local politician, and a state and national government official. He was mayor of Lake Forest, Illinois from 1915 to 1917, President of George Washington University from 1923 to 1927 and the President of Lafayette College from 1927 to 1945.
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John Williams
1752 - 1806 (54 years)
John Williams was an American physician and politician from Salem, New York. He was most notable for his service in the United States House of Representatives from 1795 to 1799. Life Williams was born in Barnstaple, Devonshire, England in September 1752. He received a liberal education, studied medicine and surgery in St. Thomas' Hospital, London, and served for one year as surgeon’s mate on an English man-of-war. He immigrated to America in 1773 and settled in New Perth, Charlotte County, New York , where he engaged in an extensive medical practice. He married Susanna Turner, and they had four children.
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Ferdinand de Lesseps
1805 - 1894 (89 years)
Ferdinand Marie, Comte de Lesseps was a French diplomat and later developer of the Suez Canal, which in 1869 joined the Mediterranean and Red Seas, substantially reducing sailing distances and times between Europe and East Asia.
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Eduard Sachau
1845 - 1930 (85 years)
Carl Eduard Sachau was a German orientalist. He taught Josef Horovitz and Eugen Mittwoch. Biography He studied oriental languages at the Universities of Kiel and Leipzig, obtaining his PhD at Halle in 1867. Sachau became a professor extraordinary of Semitic philology and a full professor at the University of Vienna, and in 1876, a professor at the University of Berlin, where he was appointed director of the new Seminar of Oriental languages .
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Cristoforo Negri
1809 - 1896 (87 years)
Cristoforo Negri was an Italian geographer, economist and diplomat. Biography Cristoforo Negri was born in Padua in 1809. He became a professor of constitutional law at the University of Padua. Following the upheavals of 1848 he fled to Piedmont, where he was appointed to the consular division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Vincenzo Gioberti. He was confirmed in this position by Massimo d'Azeglio. From 1859 he held various government posts in the course of which he visited many cities in the Mediterranean to develop Italian political and economic relationships.
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James Roscoe Day
1845 - 1923 (78 years)
The Rev. James Roscoe Day, D.D., L.L.D. was an American Methodist minister, educator and chancellor of Syracuse University. Early life and education Day was born in Whitneyville, Maine, on October 17, 1845 to Thomas and Mary Plummer Hillman Day. He attended Maine Wesleyan Seminary and then studied at Bowdoin College but had to stop due to poor health; he eventually received his degree in 1874. He married Anna E. Richards of Auburn, Maine in 1873. In 1872, he was ordained a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church and served as a pastor at Bath, Maine, from 1872 to 1874; Portland, Maine, fr...
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John Graham, 1st Viscount Dundee
1648 - 1689 (41 years)
John Graham, 7th of Claverhouse, 1st Viscount Dundee was a Scottish soldier and nobleman, a Tory and an Episcopalian. He was responsible for policing southwest Scotland during and after the religious unrest and rebellion of the late 17th century, and went on to lead the Jacobite rising of 1689.
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Ted Hill
1915 - 1988 (73 years)
Edward Fowler Hill was an Australian barrister, lawyer and communist activist. He was chairman of the Communist Party of Australia from 1964 to 1986. History Hill was born on 23 April 1915 in Mildura, Victoria to James and Alice Hill. He attended school at Hamilton High School, where his father was head teacher. After leaving school he worked as a clerk for Bill Slater, a local barrister who was also the local Labor Member of Parliament. In 1933 he moved to Melbourne to study law at the University of Melbourne. Despite being awarded for his academic knowledge he did not finish his legal degree until 1981.
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Antonio Possevino
1533 - 1611 (78 years)
Antonio Possevino was a Jesuit protagonist of Counter Reformation as a papal diplomat and a Jesuit controversialist, encyclopedist and bibliographer. He was the first Jesuit to visit Muscovy, Sweden, Denmark, Livonia, Hungary, Pomerania, and Saxony in amply documented papal missions between 1578 and 1586 where he championed the enterprising policies of Pope Gregory XIII.
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Charles Bastable
1855 - 1945 (90 years)
Charles Francis Bastable, FBA was an Irish economist. He was Whately Professor of Political Economy and Regius Professor of Laws at Trinity College, Dublin. The son of a priest, he studied at Trinity College, Dublin from 1873 to 1878, graduating with a first-class BA in history and political science. After graduating, Bastable considered a legal career and was called to the bar in Ireland in 1881, but the following year he successfully sat the five-yearly examination for the Whatley Professorship and during his tenure the statutes were altered allowing him to be re-elected without examination.
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Augustine Henry
1857 - 1930 (73 years)
Augustine Henry was a British-born Irish plantsman and sinologist. He is best known for sending over 15,000 dry specimenss and seeds and 500 plant samples to Kew Gardens in the United Kingdom. By 1930, he was a recognised authority and was honoured with society membership in Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Finland, France, and Poland. In 1929 the Botanical Institute of Peking dedicated to him the second volume of Icones plantarum Sinicarum, a collection of plant drawings. In 1935, John William Besant was to write: 'The wealth of beautiful trees and flowering shrubs which adorn gardens in all temper...
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Gustaaf Schlegel
1840 - 1903 (63 years)
Gustaaf Schlegel was a Dutch sinologist and field naturalist. Life and career Gustaaf Schlegel was born on 30 September 1840 in Oegstgeest. The son of Hermann Schlegel—a native of Saxony who had moved to the Netherlands in 1827 to work at the natural history museum of Leiden and became its second director—Gustaaf begun to study Chinese at the age of 9 with Leiden japanologist J. J. Hoffmann initially, it seems, without the knowledge of his parents. Gustaaf made his first trip to China in 1857 in order to collect bird specimens, but his notoriety as naturalist was overshadowed by that of Robe...
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Charles E. Hill
1881 - 1936 (55 years)
Charles Edward Hill was an American professor of political science at George Washington University. He was a leading expert on international law, particularly when it came to issues involving confined bodies of water.
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Florence Ayscough
1878 - 1942 (64 years)
Florence Ayscough MacNair was a sinologist, writer and translator of Chinese literature. Early life and education Florence Ayscough, née Wheelock, was born in Shanghai, China, to Canadian father Thomas Reed Wheelock and American mother Edith H. Clarke.
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Joseph Halévy
1827 - 1917 (90 years)
Joseph Halévy was an Ottoman born Jewish-French Orientalist and traveller. His most notable work was done in Yemen, which he crossed during 1869 to 1870 in search of Sabaean inscriptions, no European having traversed that land since AD 24; the result was a most valuable collection of 800 inscriptions.
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Henry Masauko Blasius Chipembere
1930 - 1974 (44 years)
Henry Masauko Blasius Chipembere was a Malawian nationalist politician who played a significant role in bringing independence from colonial rule to his native country, formerly known as Nyasaland. From an early age Chipembere was a strong believer in natural justice and, on his return in 1954 from university in South Africa, he joined his country's independence struggle as a nationalist strategist and spokesman. In 1957, considering that the independence movement needed a strong leader similar to Kwame Nkrumah, and considering himself too young for this task, he joined with other young natio...
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Alessandro Farnese
1520 - 1589 (69 years)
Alessandro Farnese , an Italian cardinal and diplomat and a great collector and patron of the arts, was the grandson of Pope Paul III , and the son of Pier Luigi Farnese, Duke of Parma, who was murdered in 1547. He should not be confused with his nephew, Alessandro Farnese, Governor of the Spanish Netherlands, grandson of Emperor Charles V and great-grandson of Pope Paul III.
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Hazel Hunkins Hallinan
1890 - 1982 (92 years)
Hazel Hunkins Hallinan was an American women's rights activist, journalist, and suffragist. Early life and education Hunkins Hallinan was born on June 6, 1890, in Aspen, Colorado, and grew up in Billings, Montana. She was the only daughter of Lewis Hunkins, a jeweller, watchmaker, and civil war veteran, and an Englishwoman, Ann Whittingham.
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Yang Lien-sheng
1914 - 1990 (76 years)
Yang Lien-sheng who often wrote under the name L.S. Yang, was a Chinese-American sinologist and professor at Harvard University. He was the first full-time historian of China at Harvard and a prolific scholar specializing in China's economic history.
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Masaru Aoki
1887 - 1964 (77 years)
Masaru Aoki was a Japanese Sinologist. Works Aoki wrote an article named "Hu Shih and the Chinese Literary Revolution" which was published in Chinese Study in 1920. During the 1930s and 1940s, Aoki's work was considered an important contribution to translating and studying Chinese literature.
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Julius Fürst
1805 - 1873 (68 years)
Julius Fürst , born Joseph Alsari, was a Jewish German orientalist and the son of noted maggid, teacher, and Hebrew grammarian Jacob Alsari. Fürst was a distinguished scholar of Semitic languages and literature. During his years as professor in the department of oriental languages and literature at the University of Leipzig , he wrote many works on literary history and linguistics.
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August Fischer
1865 - 1949 (84 years)
August Fischer was a German orientalist. From 1883 to 1889 he studied theology and Oriental philology at the universities of Berlin, Marburg and Halle, receiving his doctorate with a thesis on the source biographies of Ibn Ishaq, Biographien von Gewährsmännern des Ibn Ishaq. In 1890 he obtained his habilitation for Oriental philology at the University of Halle, and several years later became an associate professor in Berlin. From 1900 to 1930 he was a full professor of Oriental philology at the University of Leipzig, where in 1914/15 he served as dean to the faculty of philosophy. For several...
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Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller
1768 - 1835 (67 years)
Ernst Friedrich Karl Rosenmüller was a German Orientalist and Protestant theologian. Biography He was the eldest son of the rationalist theologian Johann Georg Rosenmüller. He became identified with the University of Leipzig, first as a student, in 1792 as a tutor, extraordinary professor of Arabic in 1796, and ordinary professor of Oriental languages from 1813 to the time of his death, 1835. He promoted the study of the Arabic language, brought within the reach of theologians the rapidly increasing knowledge of his day with reference to the conditions of the East, and endeavored to raise the...
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Hellmut Ritter
1892 - 1971 (79 years)
Hellmut Ritter was a leading German Orientalist specializing in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, and an authority on Sufi ritual and mystical beliefs. Biography The son of a Protestant minister, his brothers were the conservative historian Gerhard Ritter and the theologist Karl Bernhard Ritter. He was educated at Halle where he studied under Carl Brockelmann and Paul Kahle, then at Strasbourg under Carl Heinrich Becker. He then served as a military interpreter during World War I in Iraq, Palestine and Iran. In 1919 he became a teaching assistant at the University of Hamburg, researching classical Arabic literature and Greek and medieval alchemy.
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Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen
1894 - 1969 (75 years)
Otto John Maenchen-Helfen was an Austrian academic, sinologist, historian, author, and traveler. From 1927 to 1930, he worked at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and from 1930 to 1933 in Berlin. When the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, he returned to Austria, and after the Anschluss in 1938 he emigrated to the United States, eventually becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was the author of several oft-cited books, including a history of the Huns.
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Francis Walsingham
1532 - 1590 (58 years)
Sir Francis Walsingham was principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I of England from 20 December 1573 until his death and is popularly remembered as her "spymaster". Born to a well-connected family of gentry, Walsingham attended Cambridge University and travelled in continental Europe before embarking on a career in law at the age of twenty. A committed Protestant, during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I of England he joined other expatriates in exile in Switzerland and northern Italy until Mary's death and the accession of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.
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Oscar Straus
1850 - 1926 (76 years)
Oscar Solomon Straus was an American politician and diplomat. He served as United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor under President Theodore Roosevelt from 1906 to 1909, making him the first Jewish United States Cabinet Secretary.
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Friedrich Hirth
1845 - 1927 (82 years)
Friedrich Hirth, Ph.D. was a German-American sinologist. Biography He was educated at the universities of Leipzig, Berlin, and Greifswald . He was in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1870 to 1897. In 1902, Professor Hirth was appointed to the first Dean Lung Professorship of Chinese at Columbia University .
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Friedrich Schwally
1863 - 1919 (56 years)
Friedrich Zacharias Schwally was a German Orientalist with professorships at Strasbourg, Gießen and Königsberg. He held the degrees of PhD, Lic. Theol., Dr. Habil., and the Imperial honour of the Order of the Red Eagle, Class IV.
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Marius Canard
1888 - 1982 (94 years)
Marius Canard FBA was a French Orientalist and historian. Biography He was born in a small village in the region of Morvan, where his father was a school teacher. Canard studied at the Collège Bonaparte in Autun and completed his studies in the Faculty of Letters of the University of Lyon, where he learned the Arabic, Turkish and Persian languages under the guidance of his coeval Gaston Wiet .
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Hermann Guthe
1849 - 1936 (87 years)
Hermann Guthe was a German Semitic scholar. He was educated at Göttingen and Erlangen, and afterwards worked for several years as a private tutor. In 1884 he became a professor of Old Testament exegesis at Leipzig University.
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Theophilus Siegfried Bayer
1694 - 1738 (44 years)
Theophilus Siegfried Bayer , was a German classical scholar with specialization in Sinology. He was a Sinologist and professor of Greek and Roman Antiquities at St Petersburg Academy of Sciences between 1726 and 1737.
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Johannes Rahder
1898 - 1988 (90 years)
Johannes Rahder , Dutch Orientalist, professor of Japanese at the University of Leiden and Yale University . Biography Rahder was born in Lubuk Begalung, the Dutch East Indies, now a subdistrict of Padang, where his father was governor of the west coast of Sumatra. The fact that he requested as a birthday present a library when he was five years old suggests that he was a precocious child.
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