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,
#4001
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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Julius Heinrich Petermann
1801 - 1876 (75 years)
Julius Heinrich Petermann was a German Orientalist. Biography In 1829, Petermann received his PhD in Berlin for a dissertation on the Targum Jonathan of the Pentateuch. Between 1830 and 1837, he was first a lecturer, then from 1837 an associate professor of Oriental philology at the University of Berlin. Between 1852 and 1855, Johann Gottfried Wetzstein, the German consul in Damascus, and the Prussian king sponsored his travel to Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia. From 1868 to 1869, he was consul in Jerusalem. He learned Armenian from the Mekhitarist Father Eduard on the island of San Lazzaro, which is part of Venice.
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Howard Williams
1837 - 1931 (94 years)
Howard Williams was an English humanitarianism and vegetarianism activist, and writer. He was noted for authoring The Ethics of Diet, a history of vegetarianism, which was influential on the Victorian vegetarian movement.
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Sir Edmund Backhouse, 2nd Baronet
1873 - 1944 (71 years)
Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet was a British oriental scholar, Sinologist, and linguist whose books exerted a powerful influence on the Western view of the last decades of the Qing dynasty . Since his death, however, it has been established that the major source of his China Under the Empress Dowager is a forgery, most likely by Backhouse himself.
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Robert Caesar Childers
1838 - 1876 (38 years)
Robert Caesar Childers was a British Orientalist and the compiler of the first PaliEnglish dictionary to be published. He was the father of the Irish nationalist Erskine Childers and the paternal grandfather of the fourth president of Ireland, Erskine Hamilton Childers.
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Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke
1656 - 1733 (77 years)
Thomas Herbert, 8th Earl of Pembroke and 5th Earl of Montgomery, , styled The Honourable Thomas Herbert until 1683, was an English and later British statesman during the reigns of William III and Anne.
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Bruce Lannes Smith
1909 - 1987 (78 years)
Bruce Lannes Smith was an American political scientist, communication theorist, and propaganda specialist. His primary research focus was the various uses and techniques of propaganda and persuasion employed by governments that were considered enemies of the United States. He taught at Michigan State College and other institutions. After the Second World War he was involved with research on propaganda and mass persuasion on a mass audience while also questioning the methods used by the Nazi propaganda theorist Franz Six.
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Carl Brockelmann
1868 - 1956 (88 years)
Carl Brockelmann German Semiticist, was the foremost orientalist of his generation. He was a professor at the universities in Breslau, Berlin and, from 1903, Königsberg. He is best known for his multi-volume Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur which included all writers in Arabic to 1937, and remains the fundamental reference volume for all Arabic literature, apart from the Christian Arabic texts .
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Julije Makanec
1904 - 1945 (41 years)
Julije Makanec was a Croatian politician, teacher, philosopher and writer. During the World War II in Yugoslavia, he was the Minister of Education of the Independent State of Croatia and a high-ranking member of the Ustashas.
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William Richards Castle Jr.
1878 - 1963 (85 years)
William Richards Castle Jr. was an American educator and diplomat. He rose rapidly to the highest levels of the United States Department of State and took a strong interest in Pacific issues, in part because of his family's background in Hawaii.
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Johann Gildemeister
1812 - 1890 (78 years)
Johann Gildemeister was a German Orientalist born in Kröpelin. Biography He studied Oriental languages and theology at the Universities of Göttingen and Bonn and graduated from the latter institution in 1838. Following a study trip to Leiden and Paris, he became a lecturer at Bonn, where he taught classes in Sanskrit, Oriental languages and literature as well as Old Testament exegesis. Later on he served as an associate professor of Oriental languages . In 1845 he relocated to the University of Marburg as a professor of theology and Oriental literature. In 1859 he returned to Bonn as a profes...
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William Ballantyne Hodgson
1815 - 1880 (65 years)
William Ballantyne Hodgson was a Scottish educational reformer and political economist. Life The son of William Hodgson, a printer, he was born in Edinburgh on 6 October 1815. In 1820 the family were living at 54 Bristo Street in the city. In 1823 he entered the Edinburgh High School, and, after working for a short time in a lawyer's office, matriculated in November 1829, when just turned 14, at the University of Edinburgh. He took no degree as a student.
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Richard Butler
1743 - 1791 (48 years)
Richard Butler was an officer in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War who was later killed while he was fighting Native Americans in the United States in a battle that is known as St. Clair's Defeat.
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Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu
1900 - 1954 (54 years)
Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu was a Romanian communist politician and leading member of the Communist Party of Romania , also noted for his activities as a lawyer, sociologist and economist. For a while, he was a professor at the University of Bucharest. Pătrășcanu rose to a government position before the end of World War II and, after having disagreed with Stalinist tenets on several occasions, eventually came into conflict with the Romanian Communist government of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej. He became a political prisoner and was ultimately executed. Fourteen years after Pătrășcanu's death, Romania's new...
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Ignác Martinovics
1755 - 1795 (40 years)
Ignác Martinovics was a Hungarian scholar, chemist, philosopher, writer, secret agent, Freemason and a leader of the Hungarian Jacobin movement. He was condemned to death for high treason and beheaded on 20 May 1795, along with count Jakab Sigray, Ferenc Szentmarjay, József Hajnóczy and others. As the founder of the Hungarian Jacobin Clubss, he was considered an idealistic forerunner of great thought by some, and an unscrupulous adventurer by others.
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Stanisław Srokowski
1872 - 1950 (78 years)
Stanisław Józef Srokowski was a Polish geographer and diplomat. Srokowski joined the Polish diplomatic service in 1920 and became the Polish Consul at Odessa and Königsberg. In 1923-1924 he was the Voivode of the Wołyń Voivodeship and became the Director of the Polish Baltic Institute at Toruń in 1926.
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Johan David Åkerblad
1763 - 1819 (56 years)
Johan David Åkerblad was a Swedish diplomat and orientalist. Career In 1778 he began his studies of classical and oriental languages at the University of Uppsala. In 1782 he defended his graduate thesis before Professor Eric Michael Fant. From 1783, he improved his language skills at the Swedish royal chancery in Constantinople.
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Mikheil Tsereteli
1878 - 1965 (87 years)
Prince Mikheil "Mikhako" G. Tsereteli also known as Michael von Zereteli was a Georgian prince, historian, philologist, sociologist and public benefactor. He was born in 1878, in a village Tskhrukveti . His father was Prince Giorgi Tsereteli. His brother Vasil Tsereteli was a famous Georgian physician, writer and public benefactor.
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Mamai
Mamai was a powerful Mongol military commander of the Golden Horde. Contrary to popular misconception, he was not a khan , but was a kingmaker for several khans, and dominated parts or all of the Golden Horde for a period of almost two decades in the 1360s and 1370s. Although he was unable to stabilize central authority during the war of succession known as the Great Troubles, Mamai remained a remarkable and persistent leader for decades, while others came and went in rapid succession. His defeat in the Battle of Kulikovo marked the beginning of the decline of the Horde, as well as his own ra...
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Algernon Sidney
1623 - 1683 (60 years)
Algernon Sidney or Sydney was an English politician, republican political theorist and colonel. A member of the middle part of the Long Parliament and commissioner of the trial of King Charles I of England, he opposed the king's execution. Sidney was later charged with plotting against Charles II, in part based on his most famous work, Discourses Concerning Government, which was used by the prosecution as a witness at his trial. He was executed for treason. After his death, Sidney was revered as a "Whig patriot—hero and martyr".
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Esther Chapa
1904 - 1970 (66 years)
Esther Chapa Tijerina was a Mexican medical surgeon, educator, writer, feminist, suffragist, trade unionist, and women's and children's rights activist. In her medical practice she specialized in clinical analysis and microbiology, and she taught microbiology at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
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Annah May Soule
1859 - 1905 (46 years)
Annah May Soule was a professor of American history and political economy at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Early life Annah May Soule was born in Port Huron, Michigan, and raised in Jackson, Michigan, the daughter of Major Harrison Soule and Mary E. Parker Soule. She had an older sister, Mary Eva Soule Clark . Harrison Soule was an officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War when Annah and her sister were small. After the war, he served as treasurer at the University of Michigan.
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Georg August Wallin
1811 - 1852 (41 years)
Georg August Wallin was a Finnish orientalist, explorer and professor remembered for his journeys in the Middle East during the 1840s. The Finnish translators of Wallin's letters state that Wallin has become a kind of "patron saint of Finnish oriental research". Among other things, the Finnish Oriental Society holds its annual meeting on his birthday. Internationally, it has been estimated that Wallin was one of the most capable Europeans to set foot in Arabia. His qualifications have been compared to U. J. Seetzen and J. L. Burckhardt, because he has been characterized as an Arabian scholar ...
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Walter Simon
1893 - 1981 (88 years)
Ernest Julius Walter Simon, was a German sinologist and librarian. He was born in Berlin and lived there, being educated at the University of Berlin, until he fled the Nazis to London in 1934, where he spent all the rest of his life except for brief periods as a visiting professor in various countries, teaching Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London from 1947 to 1960. He made great contributions to historical Chinese phonology and Sino-Tibetan linguistics. As a sinologist, he had a Chinese name, Ximen Huade .
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Ralph C. Guzmán
1924 - 1985 (61 years)
Ralph C. Guzmán served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State of Latin America in the Carter Administration and was one of the nation's leading Latino educators. He co-founded the Oakes College at the University of California at Santa Cruz and later was appointed Provost at UCSC's Merrill College. Guzmán played an influential role in the early years of the Chicano Movement, and was a key figure in the Mexican-American community nationwide. During his time in the State Department, he was responsible for formulating and implementing much of the nation's policy in Central and South America.
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David Stuart
1753 - 1814 (61 years)
David Stuart was a Virginia physician, politician, and correspondent of George Washington. When Washington became President of the United States, he made Stuart one of three commissioners appointed to design a new United States capital city.
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