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 Theology,
#4951
Bela Bates Edwards
1802 - 1852 (50 years)
Bela Bates Edwards was an American man of letters. Biography Edwards was born at Southampton, Massachusetts, on 4 July 1802. He graduated at Amherst College in 1824, was a tutor there from 1827 to 1828, graduated at Andover Theological Seminary in 1830, and was licensed to preach. From 1828 to 1833 he was assistant Secretary of the American Education Society , and from 1828 to 1842 was editor of the society's newsletter, which after 1831 was called the American Quarterly Register.
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William Henry Furness
1802 - 1896 (94 years)
William Henry Furness was an American clergyman, theologian, Transcendentalist, abolitionist, and reformer. Biography Furness was born in Boston, where he attended the Boston Latin School and developed a lifelong friendship with schoolmate Ralph Waldo Emerson. He graduated from the Harvard Divinity School in 1823. He preached in Watertown and Boston, Massachusetts and in Baltimore, Maryland in early 1823. At the age of 22 he became the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, which had operated without a minister for 29 years. He served there from 1825 until his retirement in 1875.
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Francis J. Hall
1857 - 1932 (75 years)
Francis Joseph Hall was an American Episcopal theologian and priest in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. Hall was the one of the first to attempt an Anglican systematic theology. Early life and education Hall was born on December 24, 1857, in Ashtabula, Ohio, as the son of Joseph and Juliet E. Giswold Hall and grandson of John Hall , an early missionary priest in Ohio and later rector of St. Peter's Church, Ashtabula. He was educated in the local schools in Ashtabula until 1866, when he and his parents moved to Chicago, Illinois. His grandfather, with his parents' permission, dedicated his life to the church at his birth.
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Božo Milanović
1890 - 1980 (90 years)
Msgr. Božo Milanović , was a Croatian priest, theologian and politician from Istria, and, along with Antonio Santino, one of the greatest anti-fascists of Istria. He is credited with decisively contributing to the unification of Istria with Croatia.
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John of La Rochelle
1190 - 1245 (55 years)
John of La Rochelle , was a French Franciscan and theologian. Life He was born in La Rochelle , towards the end of the 12th century, and seems to have entered the Franciscan Order at an early age. He was a pupil of Alexander of Hales and was the first Franciscan to receive a bachelor's degree of theology from the University of Paris. He produced multiple treatises, sermons, commentaries on scripture, and also played a large role in the Summa fratris Alexandri, a theological Summa written by Alexander. “Hales left the beginnings of the theological Summa, and it was completed by John of la Rochelle and others”.
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Pavel Djidjov
1919 - 1952 (33 years)
Pavel Djidjov was a Bulgarian theologian who was executed after a show trial and beatified in 2002 by Pope John Paul II. Education, career Pavel Djidjov was born to a Latin rite Catholic family in Plovdiv. He was baptized on 2 August 1919 and given the name Joseph. He took the name Pavel when he entered the Assumptionist novitiate in Nozeroy, France, in October 1938.
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Reuben H. Sawyer
1866 - 1962 (96 years)
Reuben H. Sawyer or Reuben Herbert Sawyer was an American clergyman and a leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Oregon. As an important advocate of Anglo Israelism , he associated religious beliefs with ultra-conservative and radical political activism.
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Eadmer
1060 - 1120 (60 years)
Eadmer or Edmer was an English historian, theologian, and ecclesiastic. He is known for being a contemporary biographer of his archbishop and companion, Saint Anselm, in his Vita Anselmi, and for his Historia novorum in Anglia, which presents the public face of Anselm. Eadmer's history is written to support the primacy of Canterbury over York, a central concern for Anselm.
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David Caspari
1648 - 1702 (54 years)
David Caspari was a German Lutheran theologian. He was the father of Georg Caspari. Born in Königsberg, Duchy of Prussia, Caspari studied at the Albertina and the universities of Jena, Wittenberg, Leipzig, Altdorf, Strassburg, and Helmstedt. He became sub-inspector at the Albertina in 1676. Two years later he was appointed rector of Riga Cathedral's school. Caspari died in Riga as the school's superintendent.
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