Most influential person in World History

[mcpon]

After I read Hart's list, I decided to come up with my own. I know that many of the entries are questionable and probably there a lot better entrants than these but oh well.

1. 1. Mohammed
   2. Aristotle
   3. Tsai Lun (credited with the invention of paper)
   4. Johann Gutenberg
   5. Jesus of Nazareth
   6. Paul of Tarsus
   7. Shih Huang Ti
   8. Louis Pasteur
   9. Plato
   10. Siddhartha Guatama
   11. Confucius
   12. Abraham (reportedly the founder of Judaism)
   13. Isaac Newton
   14. Euclid
   15. Sri Krishna (since I included Abraham, I'm going to include him too, his historiocity wasn't challenged until Christian missionaries did so)
   16. Tim Berners Lee (invented the world wide web (with help))
   17. Adolf Hitler
   18. James Watt / Matthew Boulton (Watt invented it, but Boulton manufactured it and made it into big business)
   19. Constantine I (the Great)
   20. Genghis Kahn
   21. Thomas Edison
   22. Karl Marx
   23. Alexander the Great
   24. Albert Einstein
   25. # Nikolai Tesla (invented the radio as found by the Supreme Court & pioneered AC polyphase power distribution system)
   26. # Christopher Columbus
   27. # Hernan Cortes
   28. # Nicolas Copernicus
   29. # Socrates (just because of his reputation)
   30. # Philo T. Farnsworth (invented electronic television that most closely resembles contemporary ones)
   31. # Asoka (for turning Buddhism from a tiny sect into a world religion, brought Mauryan empire to largest land extent)
   32. # Moses
   33. # Gavrilo Princip (unwittingly, triggered the two World Wars and Cold War)
   34. # Augustus Caesar
   35. # Henry Bessemer
   36. # Sui Wen Ti (reunified China)
   37. # Martin Luther
   38. # Umar (greatly expanded the Islamic empire outside of Saudi Arabia and most responsible for establishing the Islamic government of today, and most of his conquests have stayed Muslim)
   39. # Pope Urban II (his speech ignited the Crusades)
   40. # Galileo Galilei
   41. # Sigmund Freud
   42. # St. Thomas Aquinas
   43. # Charles Darwin
   44. # Alexander Graham Bell (telephone would have been invented anyways without him, but still beat Root to it)
   45. # Charlemagne
   46. # Nicolas von Otto (developed a car engine that most closely resembles contemporary ones)
   47. # William the Conqueror
   48. # Francisco Pizarro
   49. # James Clerk Maxwell
   50. # Adam Smith
   51. # Saint Clement of Ohrid (traditionally, credited with the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet)
   52. # Napoleon
   53. # Vladimir Lenin
   54. # Lao Tse
   55. # Zoroaster
   56. # Galen (his emphasis on investigation and observation influenced Arabic science and he was the leading medical authority in the west for around 1400 years)
   57. # Ibn Al-Haytham ("Alhacen," I read a lecture on him that convinced me to put him on here.)
   58. # Wilbur & Orville Wright (Wright brothers)
   59. # Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley (invented the transistor)
   60. # St. Augustine
   61. # Cyrus I (the Great)
   62. # Menes (started the dynastic tradition of Egypt)
   63. # George Washington
   64. # Steve Jobs / Steve Wozniak (invented the personal computer)
   65. # Queen Isabella & Ferdinand
   66. # William Shakespeare
   67. # Michael Faraday
   68. # Jack Kilby / Robert Noyce (for inventing the silicon chip)
   69. # William T. G. Morton
   70. # Mao Zedong
   71. # John Locke
   72. # Alan Turing
   73. # Richard Arkwright
   74. # Sir Alexander Fleming
   75. # Muawiya I (of the Umayyad dynasty)
   76. # Adi Sankara (revived Hinduism after Buddhism and Jainism were starting to take over Southeast Asia)
   77. # Antoine Lavoisier (downgraded because I don't know how much of the credit goes to al-Biruni, etc.)
   78. # Simon Bolivar
   79. # Maharshi Veda Vyasa (I'm going to credit him with the Mahabharata and the Bhagavad Gita or just only the BG)
   80. # Mencius
   81. # Werner Heisenberg
   82. # Madhavira
   83. # John Calvin
   84. # Han Wu Ti ("martial emperor" not the other one)
   85. # Leo Baekeland (invented the first "real" plastic)
   86. # Julius Caesar
   87. # Mani
   88. # Edward Jenner / Lady Montagu
   89. # Joseph Lister
   90. # Al-Khwarizmi / Leonardo Fibonacci (for their parts in getting the West to adopt the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is used by most countries in the world today (along with their other influences on math))
   91. # Nagarjuna
   92. # Louis Daguerre (would have happened anyways, but still beat Fox Talbot to it)
   93. # Du Fu (poet influential in China and Japan)
   94. # Alessandro Volta
   95. # Enrico Fermi
   96. # Johann Karl Frederich Gauss
   97. # Homer (wrote Greece's national epic poems)
   98. # Ferdowsi (wrote Persia's national epic poem)
   99. # Zhu Xi
   100. # Ibn Firnas / Salvino D'Armati (supposed inventors of reading stones and eyeglasses, respectively)

 

[Julian Delphiki]

86. Julius Caesar

Way too low, imho.

 

[Plotinus]

That's a good list. I'd put Darwin and Marx a lot higher (surely Marx is more influential than Hitler). The same with Luther. I'd also put Augustine higher - certainly higher than Aquinas, who should probably be lower. If Cyril and Methodius are in there, you ought to have Ulfilas, the apostle to the Goths, since he did much the same thing for them. I think Homer should be higher (he was the basis for most classical eductation for about a thousand years), and I'd put Basilides in there too, fairly low down. Oh, also Philo and Origen of Alexandria, who should both be higher than Augustine, since he was really just dealing with their legacy.

 

[Princeps]

That's a good list. I'd put Darwin and Marx a lot higher (surely Marx is more influential than Hitler).

Depends. Marx was, after all, merely an intellectual with untidy hair and a cramped apartment, and Hitler was the absolute leader of a massive empire.

 

[innonimatu]

Depends. Marx was, after all, merely an intellectual with untidy hair and a cramped apartment, and Hitler was the absolute leader of a massive empire.

But the pen can indeed be mightier than the sword... on the long run!

 

[Mirc]

@mcpon: I don't know, but it is beyond me how anyone would put Gutenberg ahead of Jesus... I'm serious, I simply don't get it. That's... unthinkable for me. I mean... wow I don't even know how to explain this.

And I don't think Tsai Lun was really influential either. Paper would simply have been invented later. It's not like everyone saw him and then copied his way of making paper. He did not "invent" and then people copied him. Paper evolved during the centuries. I also think Caesar is way, way too low and Graham Bell is way more influential than... Napoleon??

The list is totally wrong in my opinion, but then again I also believe it is impossible to make one that is even close to the truth, because you cannot know something like this.

 

[mcpon]

@mcpon: I don't know, but it is beyond me how anyone would put Gutenberg ahead of Jesus... I'm serious, I simply don't get it. That's... unthinkable for me. I mean... wow I don't even know how to explain this.

And I don't think Tsai Lun was really influential either. Paper would simply have been invented later. It's not like everyone saw him and then copied his way of making paper. He did not "invent" and then people copied him. Paper evolved during the centuries. I also think Caesar is way, way too low and Graham Bell is way more influential than... Napoleon??

The list is totally wrong in my opinion, but then again I also believe it is impossible to make one that is even close to the truth, because you cannot know something like this.

Well, I don't think that there is a true list at all. I think that all lists like this, like mine, are arbitrary and biased.

Tsai Lun gets the bulk of the credit for the impact of paper because the invention hasn't changed all that much, like with other inventions. And he brought it to the emperor, making it known in the kingdom, so he was largely responsible for spreading it.
Gutenberg gets the bulk of the credit for the printing press because he originated it in Europe (supposedly didn't know of Bi Sheng's) and spread it by creating the Gutenberg Bible.
Jesus did not spread the religion, but kind of got lucky (no offense) because Paul (mainly) took off with it (that is mainly why I downgraded him). And too much of Christianity's teachings are based off of what Paul, early church leaders, etc. said. And half of the Bible is the OT, around 1/4 is Paul's letters, etc.
And I think that how quickly the world has advanced technologically in the last 500 years has a lot to do with Gutenberg and is a phenomena that changed the world more drastically than how Christianity changed the world.

 

[Plotinus]

Depends. Marx was, after all, merely an intellectual with untidy hair and a cramped apartment, and Hitler was the absolute leader of a massive empire.

Hitler only ruled a massive empire (and it wasn't that massive) for a few years. Marx has been massively influential for a century and a half. Without Marx, there might never have been a Hitler, since the over-inflated fear of communism was one of the factors which allowed the rise of the fascist dictators. And Marx' ideas are still going today, whereas Hitler's are rather unfashionable.

Jesus did not spread the religion, but kind of got lucky (no offense) because Paul (mainly) took off with it (that is mainly why I downgraded him). And too much of Christianity's teachings are based off of what Paul, early church leaders, etc. said. And half of the Bible is the OT, around 1/4 is Paul's letters, etc.

Actually only seven of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul are considered uncontroversially authentic today, so that's a lot less than a quarter of the 66 books of the Bible, most of which are much longer than the epistles anyway. I think people greatly over-estimate Paul's importance as a missionary. He was simply one of many missionaries at the time. The idea that Christianity only took off because Paul re-invented it and spread it around is quite distorted, not least because Paul's teachings are probably more similar to those of Jesus than most people think. Also, Paul only seems more important in retrospect because his letters were preserved and became enormously influential on Christian theology later; they make it seem as though Paul was more significant within the Christian movement than he probably really was. The same is true of Acts, which was written by someone who obviously revered Paul a lot more than he understood him.

 

[Mirc]

Well, I don't think that there is a true list at all. I think that all lists like this, like mine, are arbitrary and biased.

I totally agree. That was exactly my point

 

[mcpon]

Hitler only ruled a massive empire (and it wasn't that massive) for a few years. Marx has been massively influential for a century and a half. Without Marx, there might never have been a Hitler, since the over-inflated fear of communism was one of the factors which allowed the rise of the fascist dictators. And Marx' ideas are still going today, whereas Hitler's are rather unfashionable.



Actually only seven of the letters traditionally attributed to Paul are considered uncontroversially authentic today, so that's a lot less than a quarter of the 66 books of the Bible, most of which are much longer than the epistles anyway. I think people greatly over-estimate Paul's importance as a missionary. He was simply one of many missionaries at the time. The idea that Christianity only took off because Paul re-invented it and spread it around is quite distorted, not least because Paul's teachings are probably more similar to those of Jesus than most people think. Also, Paul only seems more important in retrospect because his letters were preserved and became enormously influential on Christian theology later; they make it seem as though Paul was more significant within the Christian movement than he probably really was. The same is true of Acts, which was written by someone who obviously revered Paul a lot more than he understood him.

Interesting and informative . . .
So, who would you pick? You seem to know your stuff (It's a compliment!).

 

[Plotinus]

Well, I gave some ideas a few posts up... my knowledge probably isn't wide enough to be very reliable though...

 

[Tee Kay]

# 100 Ibn Firnas / Salvino D'Armati (supposed inventors of reading stones and eyeglasses, respectively)

Way too low imho (I wear glasses so I should know )

 

[aronnax]

I think Aristole is way to high, he deserves more like around 20 then his inevitable high rank. Napoleon should be much higher. His laws and reforms are used in many countries today. And why is Ze Dong on the list?

 

[Plotinus]

The very word "influential", used in this thread title, comes from scholastic philosophy, which comes from Aristotle.

 

[Julian Delphiki]

You know way too much things (i am just jealous, as i appreciate knowledge so much).

 

[Naskra]

The word "influential" in its non-literal meaning, comes from astrology, one of the fields Aristotle neglected.

 

[ohcrapitsnico]

I can't disagree with #1.

Where is Ibn Sina on that list? If you put Ibn al-Haytham on there you have to put Ibn Sina. Just with his book, The Canon of Medicine should earn him a spot, not counting his numerous other achievements. I also might exchange Jesus for Aristotle.

 

[JohnRM]

I vote (Steve) Gutenberg

 

[Plotinus]

The word "influential" in its non-literal meaning, comes from astrology, one of the fields Aristotle neglected.

That is a subsidiary meaning, though. The word itself comes from the Latin for "flowing in", and reflects the scholastic belief that all changes occur as a result of a quality or qualities passing from one substance to another. Both the astrological use of the word and our modern vernacular use derive from this, which itself rests upon the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and quality.

 

[Naskra]

That dog won't hunt, Dr. P. "Influx stellarum" dates at least as far back as Firmicus (who was certainly no scholastic), long before any Latin version of Aristotle. Aristotles term for "influence" is usually some variant of dunamai; his Latin translators followed this "power" usage. E.g. vis, momentum,
potenta.