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,
#4251
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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Arthur von Rosthorn
1862 - 1945 (83 years)
Arthur von Rosthorn was an Austrian diplomat and sinologist. He obtained his education in Vienna and Oxford, where he was a student of sinologist James Legge. From 1883 to 1893 he was associated with the Seezollverwaltung in China. In 1895 he received his doctorate from the University of Leipzig, and afterwards worked for the Austrian diplomatic service; serving as a legation secretary and counselor in China, and later as an envoy in Tehran and Beijing . In 1922 he was named an honorary professor at the University of Vienna, where up until 1939, he taught classes in Chinese language, litera...
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Edmund Castell
1606 - 1685 (79 years)
Edmund Castell was an English orientalist. He was born at Tadlow, in Cambridgeshire. At the age of fifteen he entered Emmanuel College, Cambridge, gaining his BA in 1624-5 and his MA in 1628. Appointed Professor of Arabic in 1666, with the full title 'Sir Thomas Adams Professor of Arabic'. He moved to St John's in 1671, because of the valuable library there. His great work, the Lexicon Heptaglotton Hebraicum, Chaldaicum, Syriacum, Samaritanum, Aethiopicum, Arabicum, et Persicum , took him eighteen years to complete, working from sixteen to eighteen hours a day. He employed fourteen assistant...
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Edgar Lane
1923 - 1964 (41 years)
Edgar Lane was a professor of political science at the University of California Santa Barbara. He was the author and editor of many scholarly articles, book reviews, and a book on lobbying reform. He made substantial contributions to the regulation of lobbying by assisting the House Select Committee on Lobbying Activities .
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Henri Massé
1886 - 1969 (83 years)
Henri Massé was a 20th-century French orientalist. He was first professor of Arabic and Persian literatures at the faculté des lettres d'Alger, then professor of Persian language at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes of Paris , of which he was administrator from 1948 to 1958 and a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
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Samuel Beal
1825 - 1889 (64 years)
Samuel Beal was an Oriental scholar, and the first Englishman to translate directly from the Chinese the early records of Buddhism, thus illuminating Indian history. Life and work Samuel Beal was born in Devonport, Devon, and went to Kingswood School and Devonport. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1847. He was the son of a Wesleyan minister, reverend William Beal; and brother of William Beal and Philip Beal who survived a shipwreck in Kenn Reef.
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Hermann von der Hardt
1660 - 1746 (86 years)
Hermann von der Hardt was a German historian and orientalist. He was born at Melle, in Westphalia . He studied oriental languages at the universities of Jena and Leipzig, and in 1690 he was called to the chair of oriental languages at Helmstedt. He resigned his position in 1727, but lived at Helmstedt until his death.
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William C. F. Robinson
1834 - 1897 (63 years)
Sir William Cleaver Francis Robinson was an Irish colonial administrator and musical composer, who wrote several well-known songs. He was born in County Westmeath, Ireland, and was educated at home and at the Royal Naval School. He joined the Colonial Office service in 1858 and became the president of Montserrat in 1862.
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Ambrose Burnside
1824 - 1881 (57 years)
Ambrose Everett Burnside was an American army officer and politician who became a senior Union general in the Civil War and three-time Governor of Rhode Island, as well as being a successful inventor and industrialist.
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Gustav Haloun
1898 - 1951 (53 years)
Gustav Haloun was a Czech sinologist. He studied in Vienna under Arthur von Rosthorn and in Leipzig under August Conrady from where he received his Dr. phil. in 1923. He obtained habilitation at Charles University in Prague where he lectured in 1926-1927. Afterwards he taught at Halle University , and Göttingen University , before becoming Chair of Chinese Language and History at Cambridge University, succeeding Arthur Christopher Moule and preceding Edwin G. Pulleyblank in that position.
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William O. Hall
1914 - 1977 (63 years)
William Oscar Hall was the U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia from 1967 to 1971, during the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I. Biography William O. Hall was born May 22, 1914, in Roswell, New Mexico. He moved with his family to Prineville, Oregon, when he was seven years old. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon in 1936, pursued graduate studies at the University of Minnesota, served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and served in the U.S. Foreign Service thereafter. He worked in the consular service, the United Nations, and the Agency for International Development.
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Pierre Beaumarchais
1732 - 1799 (67 years)
Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais was a French polymath. At various times in his life, he was a watchmaker, inventor, playwright, musician, diplomat, spy, publisher, horticulturist, arms dealer, satirist, financier and revolutionary .
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Spenser Wilkinson
1853 - 1937 (84 years)
Henry Spenser Wilkinson was the first Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford University. While he was an English writer known primarily for his work on military subjects, he had wide interests. Earlier in his career he was the drama critic for London's Morning Post.
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Harold W. Chase
1922 - 1982 (60 years)
Harold William Chase was an American professor of political science. He was also a major general in the United States Marine Corps Reserve who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs in the administration of President Jimmy Carter.
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William Miller Collier
1867 - 1956 (89 years)
William Miller Collier was United States Ambassador to Spain from 1905 to 1909, the president of George Washington University from 1918 to 1921, and United States Ambassador to Chile from 1921 to 1928.
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