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 Political Science,
#3951
Harold D. Clarke
#3952
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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Nikolay Veselovsky
1848 - 1918 (70 years)
Nikolai Ivanovich Veselovsky was a Russian archaeologist and orientalist. Born in Moscow, Veselovsky went to school in Vologda, and then studied at Saint Petersburg State University. Reader in 1877, extraordinarius in 1884, ordinarius from 1890.
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John Wesley Hill
1863 - 1936 (73 years)
John Wesley Hill was an American Methodist minister, political activist, author, and the chancellor of Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee, from 1916 to 1936. Early life Hill was born on May 8, 1863, in Kalida, Ohio. Hill's father was John Wesley Hill . Hill's mother was Elizabeth Hughes Hill . Hill attended Ohio Northern University and then took classes at the Methodist Boston Theological Seminary.
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George A. Kennedy
1901 - 1960 (59 years)
George Alexander Kennedy , was an American sinologist known for his studies of classical Chinese and for his teaching of Chinese to students. Life and career George Kennedy was born on 17 May 1901 in Moganshan, Zhejiang Province, China, where his parents Alexander and Ada Kennedy were serving as Protestant missionaries. Although his family spoke English at home, Kennedy grew up speaking the local Chinese dialect, a form of Wu Chinese, and often said that Chinese was his native language. The Kennedy family left China in 1918 after George's father and brother Fred died less than a month apart. They returned to the United States, where Kennedy attended the College of Wooster.
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Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare
1856 - 1924 (68 years)
Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare, was a British orientalist, Fellow of University College, Oxford, and Professor of Theology at the University of Oxford. Biography Conybeare was born in Coulsdon, Surrey, the third son of a barrister, John Charles Conybeare, and grandson of the geologist William Daniel Conybeare. He took an interest in the Order of Corporate Reunion, an Old Catholic organization, becoming a Bishop in it in 1894. Also in the 1890s he wrote a book on the Dreyfus case, as a Dreyfusard, and translated the Testament of Solomon and other early Christian texts. As well, he did influential work on Barlaam and Josaphat.
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Carl Robert Osten-Sacken
1828 - 1906 (78 years)
Carl Robert Osten-Sacken or Carl-Robert Romanovich, Baron von der Osten-Sacken, Baron Osten Sacken was a Russian diplomat and entomologist. He served as the Russian consul general in New York City during the American Civil War, living in the United States from 1856 to 1877. He worked on the taxonomy of flies in general and particularly of the family Tipulidae .
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Thomas Hyde
1636 - 1703 (67 years)
Thomas Hyde was an English linguist, historian, librarian, classicist, and orientalist. His chief work was the 1700 [On the Ancient Religion of the Persians], the first attempt to use Arab and Persian sources to correct the errors of Greek and Roman historians in their descriptions of Zoroastrianism and the other beliefs of the ancient Persians.
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Hugh Gladney Grant
1888 - 1972 (84 years)
Hugh Gladney Grant was an American diplomat from the state of Alabama. Grant was educated at Samford University in Homewood, Alabama. He later taught at Auburn University, , before entering government service.
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Werner Krauss
1900 - 1976 (76 years)
Werner Krauss was a German university professor . During the 1940s he became a political activist and resistance fighter against the Nazi regime. In 1943 he was found guilty of preparing to commit high treason and condemned to death. Following the intervention of influential fellow-intellectuals the sentence was commuted to a five-year prison term in 1944.
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Gustav Weil
1808 - 1889 (81 years)
Gustav Weil was a German orientalist. Biography Weil was born in Sulzburg, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden. Being destined for the rabbinate, he was taught Hebrew, as well as German and French; and he received instruction in Latin from the minister of his native town. At the age of twelve he went to Metz, where his grandfather was rabbi, to study the Talmud. For this, however, he developed very little taste, and he abandoned his original intention of entering upon a theological career. In 1828 he entered the University of Heidelberg, devoting himself to the study of philology and history; at the same time he studied Arabic under Umbreit.
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James D. Theberge
1930 - 1988 (58 years)
James Daniel Theberge was a United States ambassador to Nicaragua and Chile . Early life and education He was born in Oceanside, New York, and received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1952, an M.A. from Oxford University in 1960, and did graduate work at Heidelberg University. He later received an M.P.A. from Harvard University in 1965. He was a Littauer Fellow at Harvard.
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William Robertson Smith
1846 - 1894 (48 years)
William Robertson Smith was a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar, professor of divinity, and minister of the Free Church of Scotland. He was an editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica and contributor to the Encyclopaedia Biblica. He is also known for his book Religion of the Semites, which is considered a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.
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Morris Jastrow Jr.
1861 - 1921 (60 years)
Morris Jastrow Jr. was a Polish-born American orientalist and librarian associated with the University of Pennsylvania. Biography He was born in Warsaw in Congress Poland, and came to Philadelphia in 1866 when his father, Marcus Jastrow, a renowned Talmudic scholar, accepted a position as Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom. He was educated in the schools of Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. His original intention was to become a rabbi. For this purpose, he carried on theological studies at the first modern rabbinical seminary in Central Europe, the new...
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George H. Jackson
1863 - 1943 (80 years)
George H. Jackson was an American lawyer, consul, and political activist. He is sometimes confused with George Henry Jackson , who was elected to the Ohio State House of Representatives in 1892 and who was appointed treasurer at the founding meeting of the Niagara Movement.
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Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt
1861 - 1938 (77 years)
Carl Ferdinand Friedrich Lehmann-Haupt was a German orientalist and historian. He specialized in Urartian research, and was co-author of Corpus Inscriptionum Chaldicarum, a corpus of Urartian inscriptions.
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