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,
#4351
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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Joseph White
1745 - 1814 (69 years)
Joseph White was an English orientalist and theologian, Laudian Professor of Arabic and then Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Oxford. Early life and career He was born in Gloucestershire, the son of Thomas White, a journeyman weaver. He received his earliest education in one of the Gloucester charity schools, and started life in his father's employment. Wealthy neighbours enabled him to pursue his studies at Ruscomb and Gloucester, and with support from John Moore he entered Wadham College, Oxford, as a commoner on 6 June 1765. In September of that year he became scholar of his...
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Ferdinand Justi
1837 - 1907 (70 years)
Ferdinand Justi was a German linguist and Orientalist. He finished his studies of linguistics at the University of Marburg and the University of Göttingen. In 1861 he lived in Marburg, where in 1865 he became associate and in 1869 full professor of comparative linguistics and Germanic philology.
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Adriaan Reland
1676 - 1718 (42 years)
Adriaan Reland was a noted Dutch Orientalist scholar, cartographer and philologist. Even though he never left the Netherlands, or visited the Holy Land, he made significant contributions to Middle Eastern and Asian linguistics and cartography, including Persia, Japan and the Holy Lands.
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Friedrich Carl Andreas
1846 - 1930 (84 years)
Friedrich Carl Andreas was an orientalist of German, Malay, and Armenian parentage . He was the husband of psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé. He received his education in Iranian and other oriental studies at several German universities, obtaining his doctorate at Erlangen in 1868 with a thesis on the Pahlavi language. Following graduation, he continued his research of Pahlavi in Copenhagen. From 1875 he spent several years conducting field studies in Persia and India, during which time, he also worked as a postmaster.
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Hendrik Arent Hamaker
1789 - 1835 (46 years)
Hendrik Arent Hamaker was a Dutch Assyriologist, philologist and orientalist. He studied most European and Asian languages, and the history and geography of the East. He was an associate of the orientalist Johannes Hendricus van der Palm, and Theodor Juynboll was among his pupils.
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Samuel Johnson
1649 - 1703 (54 years)
Samuel Johnson was an English clergyman and political writer, sometimes called "the Whig" to distinguish him from the author and lexicographer of the same name. He is one of the best known pamphlet writers who developed Whig resistance theory.
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George Hermonymus
1452 - 1508 (56 years)
George Hermonymus , also known as Hermonymus of Sparta, was a 15th-century Greek scribe, diplomat, scholar and lecturer. He was the first person to teach Greek at the Collège de Sorbonne in Paris. Life Although he claimed to originally be from Sparta, that city no longer existed in the 15th century, so it most likely referred to Mystra, the second largest city in the rapidly decaying Byzantine Empire of the time. Mystra was located in the hills overlooking the ancient ruins of Sparta, was the centre of a major revival in Greek literature at the time, and was the home of Gemistus Pletho.
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Robert Wood
1717 - 1771 (54 years)
Robert Wood was an Irish-British traveller, classical scholar, civil servant and politician. He was the son of the Revd James Wood of Summerhill, County Meath and educated at Glasgow University and the Middle Temple . His father was a patron of Hercules Rowley of Summerhill House.
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Eugen Prym
1843 - 1913 (70 years)
Eugen Prym was a German orientalist, who specialized in Semitic languages, especially Arabic and Aramaic. He was the brother of mathematician Friedrich Prym , and is the great-great grandfather of historian, philosopher, and MacArthur Fellow Jacob Soll.
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William Hunter
1774 - 1849 (75 years)
William Hunter Jr. was an American politician and diplomat and owner of the Hunter House, now a museum. Life and career Hunter was born in Newport, Rhode Island, as the youngest son of seven children of Debora Malbone Hunter and Dr. William Hunter, a prominent Newport doctor, scholar and merchant. He attended the Rogers School and graduated from the College of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at Providence in 1791. In 1791 he went to England to study medicine, but when he arrived there he changed his mind and studied law. He returned to the United States in 1793 and established a law practice in Newport.
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Julián Ribera
1858 - 1934 (76 years)
Julián Ribera y Tarragó was a Spanish Arabist and academic. Career Ribera studied under Prof. Francisco Codera y Zaidín at Madrid from 1882 to 1885. In 1887 at age 29 he became catedrático of Arabic at the University of Zaragoza. There Prof. Ribera founded the Revista de Aragón. Later, in Madrid he co-founded the journal Cultura Española . He had transferred from Zaragoza to become catedrático of History at the University of Madrid, then of Literature in 1913. Prof. Ribera and his former student Prof. Asín collaborated on various academic projects. His career was celebrated by his peers in his Jubilación of 1927.
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Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau
1876 - 1966 (90 years)
Marie-Louise Puech-Milhau was a French pacifist, feminist and journal editor. In 1900, she went to Canada where she became a lecturer at McGill University until 1908 when she returned to France. In 1911, she subscribed to the newspaper La Française, the source of her appetite for feminism. After the end of the First World War, she became Secretary of the Union pour le Suffrage des Femmes and President of the Union Féminine pour la Société des Nations. She is also remembered for the extensive correspondence she maintained with family members, former students and war veterans.
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Ruth E. Bacon
1908 - 1985 (77 years)
Ruth Elizabeth Bacon was an American foreign service officer, a Far East specialist. She was one of the first six annual recipients of the Federal Woman's Award, in 1961. In 1968, she retired as director of the Office of Regional Affairs in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at the United States Department of State.
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John Stallo
1823 - 1900 (77 years)
John Bernhard Stallo was a German-American academic, jurist, philosopher, and ambassador. Early life Stallo was born in Sierhausen in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg on March 16, 1823, the son of a schoolmaster, Johann Heinrich Stallo and his wife, Anna Maria Adelheid Moormann . Stallo studied at home and at a free, Catholic normal school at Vechta. Because the family lacked the funds to send him to a gymnasium , Stallo emigrated to the United States in 1839, establishing himself in Cincinnati, Ohio, not far from his uncle, the utopian socialist, Franz Joseph Stallo,, where many other family...
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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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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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