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,
#3951
Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern
1833 - 1917 (84 years)
Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern was a Dutch linguist and Orientalist. In the literature, he is usually referred to as H. Kern or Hendrik Kern; a few other scholars bear the same surname. Life Hendrik Kern was born to Dutch parents in the Central-Javanese town of Purworejo in the Dutch East Indies,; however, when he was six, his family repatriated to the Netherlands. When he entered grammar school, he added the extra-curricular subjects of English and Italian to his studies.
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Thomas Attributed Name. Hobbes
#3953
Antoine Galland
1646 - 1715 (69 years)
Antoine Galland was a French orientalist and archaeologist, most famous as the first European translator of One Thousand and One Nights, which he called Les mille et une nuits. His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes between 1704 and 1717 and exerted a significant influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Jorge Luis Borges has suggested that Romanticism began when his translation was first read.
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William O'Dwyer
1890 - 1964 (74 years)
William O'Dwyer was an Irish-American politician who served as the 100th Mayor of New York City, holding that office from 1946 to 1950. O'Dwyer went on to serve President Harry Truman as Ambassador to Mexico from 1950–1952. O'Dwyer began his political career by serving as the Kings County District Attorney from 1940–45. His brother Paul O'Dwyer served as President of the City Council from 1973–77, and his nephew Brian O'Dwyer was appointed by Governor Kathy Hochul as New York State Gaming Commission Chair in 2022.
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Filippo Bernardini
1884 - 1954 (70 years)
Filippo Bernardini was an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church. He spent almost his entire career in the diplomatic service of the Holy See and was given the rank of archbishop in 1933. He was Apostolic Delegate to Australia for two years before taking up the position of Apostolic Nuncio to Switzerland where he served from 1935 to 1953. During World War II, he was active in the Catholic resistance to Nazism and provided assistance to Jews during the Nazi Holocaust. He served briefly as Secretary of the Congregation for Propagation of the Faith just before his death. Before entering the dipl...
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Friedrich Eduard Schulz
1799 - 1829 (30 years)
Friedrich Eduard Schulz was a German philosopher and orientalist, who was one of the first to uncover evidence of the Kingdom of Urartu. Research on Urartu In 1827, the French scholar Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin recommended that his government send Schulz, then a young professor at the University of Giessen, to the area around Lake Van in what is now eastern Turkey on behalf of the French Oriental Society. Schulz discovered and copied numerous cuneiform inscriptions, partly in Assyrian and partly in a hitherto unknown language. Schulz also re-discovered the Kelishin stele, bearing an Assyrian-Urartian bilingual inscription, located on the Kelishin pass on the current Iraqi-Iranian border.
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Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
1908 - 1972 (64 years)
Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was an American Baptist pastor and politician who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the United States House of Representatives from 1945 until 1971. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York, as well as the first from any state in the Northeast. Re-elected for nearly three decades, Powell became a powerful national politician of the Democratic Party, and served as a national spokesman on civil rights and social issues. He also urged United States presidents to support emerging nations in Africa and Asia as they gain...
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Theodor Nöldeke
1836 - 1930 (94 years)
Theodor Nöldeke was a German orientalist and scholar. His research interests ranged over Old Testament studies, Semitic languages and Arabic, Persian and Syriac literature. Nöldeke translated several important works of oriental literature and during his lifetime was considered an important orientalist. He wrote numerous studies and contributed articles to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
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Fritz Hommel
1854 - 1936 (82 years)
Fritz Hommel was a German Orientalist. Biography Hommel was born on 31 July 1854 in Ansbach. He studied in Leipzig and was habilitated in 1877 in Munich, where in 1885, he became an extraordinary professor of Semitic languages. He became a full professor in 1892, and after his retirement in 1925, continued to give lectures at the University of Munich. He was the doctoral supervisor of Muhammad Iqbal, who wrote the thesis The Development of Metaphysics in Persia under his supervision.
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Gyula Mészáros
1883 - 1957 (74 years)
Gyula Mészáros was a Hungarian ethnographer, Orientalist and Turkologist. Later in his career he became involved in a money counterfeiting scheme. Money counterfeiting In 1921, a group of Hungarian nationalists led by Mészáros set up a press in the town of Metzelsdorf outside Graz, Austria. The group managed to produce and put into circulation 60,000 500-Czechoslovak koruna banknotes, with the intent of damaging the Czechoslovak economy. Most of the forgers were arrested in July 1921, by that time the Czechoslovak government was forced to pull the entire sokol note series out of circulation, undermining the credibility of its currency reforms.
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Reynold A. Nicholson
1868 - 1945 (77 years)
Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, FBA , or R. A. Nicholson, was an eminent English orientalist, scholar of both Islamic literature and Islamic mysticism and widely regarded as one of the greatest Rumi scholars and translators in the English language.
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Vasily Bartold
1869 - 1930 (61 years)
Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold , who published in the West under his German baptism name, Wilhelm Barthold, was a Russian orientalist who specialized in the history of Islam and the Turkic peoples . Biography Barthold was born in St. Petersburg to a Russianized German family. His career spanned the last decades of the Russian Empire and the first years of the Soviet Union.
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Miles Franklin
1879 - 1954 (75 years)
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin , known as Miles Franklin, was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901. While she wrote throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936.
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Paul de Lagarde
1827 - 1891 (64 years)
Paul Anton de Lagarde was a German biblical scholar and orientalist, sometimes regarded as one of the greatest orientalists of the 19th century. Lagarde's strong support of anti-Semitism, vocal opposition to Christianity, Social Darwinism and anti-Slavism are viewed as having been among the most influential in supporting the ideology of Nazism.
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Gerrit van Poelje
1884 - 1976 (92 years)
Gerrit Abraham van Poelje was a Dutch civil servant, lawyer and Public Administration scholar. He is considered one of the most important founders of the science of Public Administration in The Netherlands.
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Ármin Vámbéry
1832 - 1913 (81 years)
Ármin Vámbéry , also known as Arminius Vámbéry, was a Hungarian Turkologist and traveller. Early life Vámbéry was born in Svätý Jur Austrian Empire , into a poor Jewish family. According to Ernst Pawel, a biographer of Theodor Herzl, as well as Tom Reiss, a biographer of Kurban Said, Vámbéry's original last name was Wamberger rather than Bamberger. He was raised Jewish, but later became an atheist. Vámbéry was 1 year old when his father died and the family moved to Dunajská Streda .
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Walter White
1893 - 1955 (62 years)
Walter Francis White was an American civil rights activist who led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for a quarter of a century, from 1929 until 1955. He directed a broad program of legal challenges to racial segregation and disfranchisement. He was also a journalist, novelist, and essayist.
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John Turner
1865 - 1934 (69 years)
John Turner was an English-born anarcho-communist shop steward. He referred to himself as "of semi-Quaker descent." Turner was the first person to be ordered deported from the United States for violation of the 1903 Anarchist Exclusion Act.
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Huang Zongxi
1610 - 1695 (85 years)
Huang Zongxi , courtesy name Taichong , was a Chinese naturalist, political theorist, philosopher, and soldier during the latter part of the Ming dynasty into the early part of the Qing. Biography Huang was a native of Yuyao in Zhejiang province. He was the son of Huang Zunsu, an official of the Ming court and an adherent of the Donglin Movement who died in prison after opposing the powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian.
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Finlay Crisp
1917 - 1984 (67 years)
Leslie Finlay Crisp was an Australian academic and political scientist. The son of Leslie Walter Crisp , and Ruby Elizabeth Crisp , née Duff, Leslie Finlay Crisp was born in Sandringham, Victoria on 19 January 1917. He married Helen Craven Wighton , whom he had met at university in Adelaide, on 22 June 1940 in Oxford, U.K. He suffered a heart attack on 19 December 1984, and died, in Canberra, on 21 December 1984.
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Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú
1882 - 1967 (85 years)
Enrique Ruiz Guiñazú was an Argentine politician who is best remembered for his spell as Minister of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship in the 1940s. His daughter is Magdalena Ruiz Guiñazú, an Argentine writer and journalist.
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Miriam Van Waters
1887 - 1974 (87 years)
Miriam Van Waters was an American prison reformer of the early to mid-20th century whose methods owed much to her upbringing as an Episcopalian involved in the Social Gospel movement. During her career as a penologist, which spanned most of the years from 1914 through 1957, she served as superintendent of three prisons: Frazier Detention Home for boys and girls in Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles County Juvenile Hall for girls, and the Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Framingham, then called the Massachusetts Reformatory for Women. While in California, Van Waters established an experimental reformatory school, El Retiro, for girls age 14 to 19.
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Paul Deussen
1845 - 1919 (74 years)
Paul Jakob Deussen was a German Indologist and professor of philosophy at University of Kiel. Strongly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, Deussen was a friend of Friedrich Nietzsche and Swami Vivekananda. In 1911, he founded the Schopenhauer Society . Professor Deussen was the first editor, in 1912, of the scholarly journal Schopenhauer Yearbook .
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Christian Lassen
1800 - 1876 (76 years)
Christian Lassen was a Norwegian-born, German orientalist and Indologist. He was a professor of Old Indian language and literature at the University of Bonn. Biography He was born at Bergen, Norway where he attended Bergen Cathedral School. Having received an education at the University of Oslo, he moved to Germany and continued his studies at the University of Heidelberg and the University of Bonn where Lassen acquired a sound knowledge of Sanskrit. He spent three years in Paris and London, engaged in copying and collating manuscripts, and collecting materials for future research, especially with reference to Hindu drama and philosophy.
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Peter H. Odegard
1901 - 1966 (65 years)
Peter H. Odegard was an American political scientist and college administrator. A specialist in the study of propaganda, he was special assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury at the start of the World War II War Bonds campaign. From 1945 to 1948 he was president of Reed College.
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Nishi Tokujirō
1847 - 1912 (65 years)
Baron Nishi Tokujirō was a statesman and diplomat in Meiji period Japan. Biography Nishi was from a samurai family of the Satsuma Domain . After the Meiji Restoration, he joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the new Meiji government, and was sent as a student to study the Russian language in St Petersburg, Russia in 1870. From 1870-1873, he traveled extensively through Central Asia, visiting Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Ürümqi and other areas of Xinjiang. After serving as First Secretary at the Japanese legation in Paris, France in 1874, he returned to Japan. In June 1886, he was appoin...
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Edward Henry Strobel
1855 - 1908 (53 years)
Edward Henry Strobel was a United States diplomat and a scholar in international law. Strobel was born in Charleston, South Carolina on December 7, 1855. He was educated at Harvard College and at Harvard Law School. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1883. In 1885 he was appointed Secretary of the Legation of the United States to Spain, serving until 1890.
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Paul Nizan
1905 - 1940 (35 years)
Paul-Yves Nizan was a French philosopher and writer. He was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire and studied in Paris where he befriended fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre at the Lycée Henri IV. He became a member of the French Communist Party, and much of his writing reflects his political beliefs, although he resigned from the party soon after the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. He died in the Battle of Dunkirk, fighting against the German army in World War II.
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Hattori Hanzō
1542 - 1597 (55 years)
Hattori Hanzō or Second Hanzō, nicknamed , was a famous ninja of the Sengoku era, who served the Tokugawa clan as a ninja, credited with saving the life of Tokugawa Ieyasu and then helping him to become the ruler of united Japan. He is often a subject of varied portrayals in modern popular culture. Hanzō was known as an expert tactician and a master of sword fighting.
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Edward Randolph
1632 - 1703 (71 years)
Edward Randolph was an English colonial administrator, best known for his role in effecting significant changes in the structure of England's North American colonies in the later years of the 17th century.
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Daniel Chwolson
1819 - 1911 (92 years)
Daniel Abramovich Chwolson or Chwolsohn or Khvolson – Biography Chwolson was born in Vilnius, which was then part of the Russian Empire. As he showed marked ability in the study of Hebrew and Talmud, his parents, who were very religious, destined him for the rabbinate, and placed him at the yeshiva of Rabbi Israel Günzburg. Up to his eighteenth year he did not know any other language than Hebrew, but in three years he acquired a fair knowledge of German, French, and Russian.
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Bruce Campbell Hopper
1892 - 1973 (81 years)
Bruce Campbell Hopper was a World War I aviator, newspaper reporter, author, historian, and lecturer who served as an associate professor of government at Harvard University from 1930 to 1961. He was an early expert on the Soviet Union, authoring influential articles, informing US State department policy, and lecturing extensively for over thirty years. Among his many students were Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy. Dr. Hopper advised John F. Kennedy on the completion of his thesis at Harvard, eventually published as "Why England Slept".
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Stanisław Żółkiewski
1547 - 1620 (73 years)
Stanisław Żółkiewski was a Polish nobleman of the Lubicz coat of arms, magnate, military commander and a chancellor of the Polish crown of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, who took part in many campaigns of the Commonwealth and on its southern and eastern borders. He occupied a number of high-ranking posts in the administration of the Commonwealth, including castellan of Lwów , voivod of the Kiev Voivodeship and Great Chancellor of the Crown . From 1588 he was also a Field Crown Hetman, and in 1618 was promoted to Grand Hetman of the Crown. During his military career he won major battles a...
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Wilhelm Geiger
1856 - 1943 (87 years)
Wilhelm Ludwig Geiger was a German Orientalist in the fields of Indo-Iranian languages and the history of Iran and Sri Lanka. He was known as a specialist in Pali, Sinhala language and the Dhivehi language of the Maldives. He is especially known for his work on the Sri Lankan chronicles Mahāvaṃsa and Cūlavaṃsa and made critical editions of the Pali text and English translations with the help of assistant translators.
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Charles King
1844 - 1933 (89 years)
Charles King was an American soldier and a distinguished writer. Biography Born in New York capital, Albany, King was the son of Civil War general Rufus King, grandson of Columbia University president Charles King, and great grandson of Rufus King, who was one of the signers of the United States Constitution on September 17, 1787, in Philadelphia. He graduated from West Point in 1866 and served in the Army during the Indian Wars under George Crook. He was wounded in the arm and head during the Battle of Sunset Pass forcing his retirement from the regular army as a captain in 1879. During this time he became acquainted with Buffalo Bill Cody.
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Samuel Lee
1783 - 1852 (69 years)
Samuel Lee was an English Orientalist, born in Shropshire; professor at Cambridge, first of Arabic and then of Hebrew language; was the author of a Hebrew grammar and lexicon, and a translation of the Book of Job.
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Josef Horovitz
1874 - 1931 (57 years)
Josef Horovitz was a Jewish German orientalist. A son of Markus Horovitz , an Orthodox rabbi, Josef Horovitz studied with Eduard Sachau at the University of Berlin and was there since 1902 as a docent. From 1907 to 1915, he worked in India, at the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College at Aligarh and taught Arabic at the request of the Indian government curator for Islamic inscriptions. In this role, he prepared the collection Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica . After his return to Germany he was from 1914 until his death professor of Semitic languages at the Oriental Seminar of the University of Frankfu...
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Johann Andreas Eisenmenger
1654 - 1704 (50 years)
Johann Andreas Eisenmenger was a German Orientalist Scholar from the Electorate of the Palatinate, now best known as the author of Entdecktes Judenthum , which was published in two volumes in 1711 and 1714.
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Moncure D. Conway
1832 - 1907 (75 years)
Moncure Daniel Conway was an American abolitionist minister and radical writer. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, he descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. He led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel, now Conway Hall.
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Robert MacGregor Dawson
1895 - 1958 (63 years)
Robert MacGregor Dawson was a Canadian political scientist who served as Professor of Political Economy at the University of Toronto. He is best known as coauthor with Norman Ward of the 1947 textbook The Government of Canada.
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Reinhold Rost
1822 - 1896 (74 years)
Reinhold Rost was a German orientalist, who worked for most of his life at St Augustine's Missionary College, Canterbury in England and as head librarian at the India Office Library, London. Life He was the son of Christian Friedrich Rost, a Lutheran minister, and his wife Eleonore Glasewald, born at Eisenberg in Saxen-Altenburg on 2 February 1822. He was educated at the Eisenberg gymnasium school, and, after studying under Johann Gustav Stickel and Johann Gildemeister, graduated Ph.D. at the University of Jena in 1847. In the same year he came to England, to act as a teacher in German at the King's School, Canterbury.
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Hasan Shaheed Suhrawardy
1890 - 1965 (75 years)
Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy , also known as Shahid Suhrawardy was a Bengali diplomat, translator, poet and art critic. Family and education Shahid Suhrawardy's father, Sir Zahid Suhrawardy, was a Justice of the Calcutta High Court and his younger brother Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy was a politician and 5th Prime Minister of Pakistan. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, his first cousin, was an intellectual and diplomat.
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Seit Devdariani
1879 - 1937 (58 years)
Seit Devdariani was a Georgian philosopher and political activist who was a deputy of the National Council of Georgia and the Constituent Assembly of Georgia . He was executed during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.
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Wiktor Weintraub
1908 - 1988 (80 years)
Wiktor Weintraub was a Polish historian who specialized in history of Polish literature. Born in a Polish Jewish family, Weintraub fled Poland during World War II. During this period, he worked for the Polish government in exile.
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Frederick Douglass
1817 - 1895 (78 years)
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
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Carsun Chang
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Carsun Chang Biography A pioneering theorist of human rights in the Chinese context, Chang established his own small "Third Force" democratic party during the Nationalist era. Chang supported German-style social democracy while opposing capitalism, communism, and guild socialism. He supported socialization of major industries such as railroads and mines to be run by a combination of government officials, technicians, and consumers. The development of a mixed economy in China, like that advocated by the Social Democratic Party of Germany under Philipp Scheidemann.
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Wolfram Eberhard
1909 - 1989 (80 years)
Wolfram Eberhard was a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley focused on Western, Central and Eastern Asian societies. Biography Born in Potsdam, German Empire, he had a strong family background of astrophysicists and astronomers.
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Alois Musil
1868 - 1944 (76 years)
Alois Musil was a Czech theologian, orientalist, explorer and bilingual Czech and German writer. Biography Musil was the oldest son born in 1868 into an poor farming family in Moravia . His birthplace of Rychtářov was in an area surrounded by German-speakers, allowing him and his brothers to learn to read and write both German and Czech. He was a second cousin of Robert Musil, an Austrian writer. In the years 1887–1891 he studied Roman Catholic theology at the University of Olomouc, was consecrated as a priest in 1891 and received a doctorate in theology in 1895. In the years 1895–1898 he studied at the Dominican Biblical School in Jerusalem, in 1897-1898 at the Jesuit University of St.
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Enno Littmann
1875 - 1958 (83 years)
Ludwig Richard Enno Littmann was a German orientalist. In 1906 he succeeded Theodor Nöldeke as chair of Oriental languages at the University of Strasbourg. Later on, he served as a professor of Oriental languages at the Universities of Göttingen , Bonn and Tübingen .
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James E. Campbell
1843 - 1924 (81 years)
James Edwin Campbell was an American attorney and Democratic politician from Ohio. He served in the United States House of Representatives from 1884 to 1889 and as the 38th governor of Ohio from 1890 to 1892.
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