by Jonathan Hobratsch

The following are list of influential thinkers from world history that either cannot be categorized in my other lists, or I had left them off the other lists, but my readers have encouraged me to add them to a list of “Most Influential People”. Everyone listed is a candidate for inclusion for my eventual list of top 100 most influential people of all time. 

To be considered one of the most influential people in world history, a person must obviously have done three things: a) done something to significantly and permanently alter the world, b) left an influence that is still greatly felt in 2016, and c) the influence must be directly or indirectly worldwide, and not just regional or national. 

Please let me know if I am missing someone from this list and/or if I am missing something from my criteria for inclusion. Here is the list below:

Zoroaster (c.650bc)

Sappho (c.620bc-c.570bc)

Mencius (c. 372bc-c.289bc)

Eratosthenes (c. 276bc-c.195bc)

Mani (c. 216-274)

Marco Polo (1254-13234)

Dante Alighieri (c.1265-1321)

Henry the Navigator (1394-1460)

Joan of Arc (c. 1412-1431)

Christopher Columbus (c.1450-1506)

Vasco da Gama (c. 1460-1524)

Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480-1521)

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1475-1541)

Hernan Cortes (1485-1547)

Akbar (1542-1605)

Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643)

Caravaggio (1571-1610)

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680)

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)

Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Alexander Hamilton (c. 1755-1804)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)

Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Jose de San Martin (1778-1850)

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906)

Claude Debussy (1862-1918)

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)

Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)

James Joyce (1881-1941)

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969)

Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946)

Claude Shannon (1916-2001)

Wole Soyinka (1934)