Rank
| Name
| Influence
|
| 1
| Muhammad
| Prophet of Islam; ruler of Arabia
|
| 2
| Isaac Newton
| physicist, theory of universal gravitation, laws of motion, major developments in mathematics, optics
|
| 3
| Jesus of Nazareth
| founder of Christianity
|
| 4
| Gautama Buddha
| founder of Buddhism
|
| 5
| Confucius
| founder of Confucianism
|
| 6
| St. Paul
| proselytizer of Christianity
|
| 7
| Cai Lun
| inventor of paper
|
| 8
| Johann Gutenberg
| developed movable type and made great advances in printing
|
| 9
| Christopher Columbus
| explorer, led Europe to Americas
|
| 10
| Albert Einstein
| physicist, relativity, Einsteinian physics
|
| 11
| Louis Pasteur
| scientist, pasteurization, Germ Theory
|
| 12
| Galileo Galilei
| astronomer, accurately described heliocentric solar system, led way to Newton's work
|
| 13
| Aristotle
| influential Greek philosopher
|
| 14
| Euclid of Alexandria
| mathematician, Euclidean geometry, author of a very influential study book
|
| 15
| Moses
| major prophet of Judaism
|
| 16
| Charles Robert Darwin
| biologist, described evolution
|
| 17
| Qin Shi Huang
| emperor who united China
|
| 18
| Caesar Augustus
| Roman ruler
|
| 19
| Nicolaus Copernicus
| astronomer, taught heliocentricity
|
| 20
| Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier
| father of modern chemistry, philosopher, economist
|
| 21
| Constantine the Great
| Roman emperor who made Christianity the state religion
|
| 22
| James Watt
| developed steam engine
|
| 23
| Michael Faraday
| physicist, chemist, discovery of Electromagnetic induction
|
| 24
| James Clerk Maxwell
| physicist, electromagnetic spectrum
|
| 25
| Martin Luther
| founder of Protestantism and Lutheranism
|
| 26
| George Washington
| first president of the United States, general during American Revolution
|
| 27
| Karl Heinrich Marx
| founder of Communism
|
| 28
| Orville and Wilbur Wright
| inventors of the airplane
|
| 29
| Genghis Khan
| Mongol conqueror
|
| 30
| Adam Smith
| economist, expositor of capitalism
|
| 31
| Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford
| Possibly wrote works attributed to William Shakespeare
|
| 32
| John Dalton
| chemist, physicist, atomic theory, law of partial pressures (Dalton's law)
|
| 33
| Alexander the Great
| Macedonian conqueror
|
| 34
| Napoleon Bonaparte
| French conqueror
|
| 35
| Thomas Alva Edison
| inventor of light bulb, phonograph, etc.
|
| 36
| Antony van Leeuwenhoek
| microscopes, studied microscopic life
|
| 37
| William Thomas Green Morton
| pioneer in anesthesiology
|
| 38
| Guglielmo Marconi
| inventor of radio
|
| 39
| Adolf Hitler
| conqueror, led Axis Powers in WWII
|
| 40
| Plato
| founder of Platonism
|
| 41
| Oliver Cromwell
| English political and military leader
|
| 42
| Alexander Graham Bell
| inventor of telephone
|
| 43
| Alexander Fleming
| penicillin, advances in bacteriology, immunology and chemotherapy
|
| 44
| John Locke
| philosopher and liberal theologian
|
| 45
| Ludwig van Beethoven
| composer
|
| 46
| Werner Karl Heisenberg
| Codified the uncertainty principle
|
| 47
| Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre
| an inventor/pioneer of photography
|
| 48
| Simon Bolivar
| National hero of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia
|
| 49
| René Descartes
| Rationalist philosopher and mathematician
|
| 50
| Michelangelo
| painter, sculptor, architect
|
| 51
| Pope Urban II
| called for First Crusade
|
| 52
| Umar ibn al-Khattab
| Second Caliph, expanded Muslim empire
|
| 53
| Ashoka
| king of India who converted to and spread Buddhism
|
| 54
| Saint Augustine
| Early Christian theologian
|
| 55
| William Harvey
| discovered the circulation of blood
|
| 56
| Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson
| physicist, pioneer of Particle physics
|
| 57
| John Calvin
| Protestant reformer, founder of Calvinism
|
| 58
| Gregor Johann Mendel
| Mendelian genetics
|
| 59
| Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck
| physicist, thermodynamics
|
| 60
| Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister
| principal discoverer of antiseptics which greatly reduced surgical mortality
|
| 61
| Nikolaus August Otto
| built first four-stroke internal combustion engine
|
| 62
| Francisco Pizarro
| Spanish conqueror in South America, brought down Tahuantinsuyu (Inca empire).
|
| 63
| Hernando Cortes
| conquered Mexico for Spain
|
| 64
| Thomas Jefferson
| 3rd President of the United States, central author of the Declaration of Independence
|
| 65
| Isabella of Castile
| united Spain, patron of Christopher Columbus
|
| 66
| Joseph Stalin
| revolutionary and ruler of the USSR
|
| 67
| Gaius Julius Caesar
| Roman general and politician
|
| 68
| William the Conqueror
| laid foundation of modern England
|
| 69
| Sigmund Freud
| founder of Freudian school of psychology, psychoanalysis
|
| 70
| Edward Jenner
| discoverer of the vaccination for smallpox
|
| 71
| Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen
| discovered X-rays
|
| 72
| Johann Sebastian Bach
| composer
|
| 73
| Lao Tzu
| founder of Taoism
|
| 74
| Voltaire
| writer and philosopher
|
| 75
| Johannes Kepler
| astronomer, planetary motions
|
| 76
| Enrico Fermi
| initiated the atomic age, father of atomic bomb
|
| 77
| Leonhard Euler
| physicist, mathematician, differential and integral calculus and algebra
|
| 78
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau
| French deistic philosopher and author
|
| 79
| Niccolò Machiavelli
| author of The Prince (influential political treatise)
|
| 80
| Thomas Robert Malthus
| economist, wrote Essay on the Principle of Population
|
| 81
| John Fitzgerald Kennedy
| president of the United States, guiding force behind the US Space/Moon Program
|
| 82
| Gregory Goodwin Pincus
| endocrinologist, developed birth control pill
|
| 83
| Mani
| founder of Manicheanism
|
| 84
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
| Russian revolutionary and ruler
|
| 85
| Emperor Wen of Sui China
| Unified China, founder of the Sui dynasty
|
| 86
| Vasco da Gama
| navigator, discovered route from Europe to India
|
| 87
| Cyrus the Great
| founder of Persian empire
|
| 88
| Peter the Great
| forged Russia into a great European nation
|
| 89
| Mao Zedong
| founder of Maoism, Chinese form of Communism
|
| 90
| Francis Bacon
| philosopher, delineated inductive scientific method
|
| 91
| Henry Ford
| developed modern assembly line
|
| 92
| Mencius
| philosopher, founder of a school of Confucianism
|
| 93
| Zoroaster
| founder of Zoroastrianism
|
| 94
| Queen Elizabeth I
| British monarch, restored Church of England to power after Queen Mary
|
| 95
| Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev
| Russian premier who was instrumental to the collapse of Communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe
|
| 96
| Menes
| unified Upper and Lower Egypt
|
| 97
| Charlemagne
| Holy Roman Empire created with his baptism in 800 AD
|
| 98
| Homer
| epic poet
|
| 99
| Justinian I
| Roman emperor, reconquered Mediterranean empire, made great advances in law
|
| 100
| Mahavira
| founder of Jainism
|
Any list of this nature will necessarily be subjective - even if there were a consensus regarding the identity of the 100 most influential people in history (and there is no such consensus), the order in which they are placed will always be a matter of debate. Hart's criteria appear somewhat arbitrary, perhaps giving undue weight to some authorities (for example, few Shakespearean scholars believe that Oxford wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare).
It should also be noted that assessments of historical significance depend on a perspective which only time can provide. To rate the historical importance of contemporary figures is almost impossible, while in other cases ranking will depend on an individual's assessment of the relative importance of the fields of scientific, cultural and religious endeavour. An authoritative ranking will also depend on a detailed knowledge of each field.
To take a simple and apparently uncontentious example: few would dispute that JS Bach, inventor of equal temperament, is one of the most influential figures in musical history, but without Guido d'Arezzo's invention of musical notation there could be no Bach. Which of the two is more influential? Perhaps it is simply that Bach is better-known - yet had the list been written in the years between Bach's death and Felix Mendelssohn's legendary 1829 performance of the St. Matthew Passion, Bach might have been considered an obscure composer of unfashionably archaic music, a footnote in the history of music. And without Edison's phonograph we would probably not consider music especially important or relevant in the first place.
