According to a list published by Young-Ho Eom at Université de Toulouse in 2014, these would be the most influential individuals ever.
Carl von Linné
Jesus
Aristotle
Napoleon
Adolf Hitler
Julius Caesar
Plato
William Shakespeare
Albert Einstein
Elizabeth II
I certainly disagree. The only one from this list I would keep on mine is Plato. Aristotle could be considered, but I don't think I would include him.
The influence of warlords and politicians is too short-lived to be of any genuine long-term significance, and the influence of great creative artists only rarely stretches beyond their specific field of activity. A list like this must contain people who shaped lives or thinking for ages and over a significant part of the world. Without spending too much time and effort on this, and without pretending to provide a final list, my sketch would be as follows. (The order is random rather than following an order of importance.)
The Prophet Mohammed and Buddha Gautama. Not Jesus, he has not, as an individual, influenced so many, even though his name has become a famous trademark.
Paul, or St. Paul, Before him, Christianity did not exist in any genuine sense, it was still a Jewish sect. Roughly, Christianity is 1/3 Judaism, 1/3 Plato, and 1/3 Paul.
K'ung-fu-tzu or Kongfuzi, that is Confucius. His importance for Chinese culture is monumental. An objection could be that his influence is limited to China, Korea and Japan, but the population in this area of the world is and has been so large that it makes an essential part of humanity, much larger than Europeans.
Plato, whom I have previously ranked as the most influential individual ever. He is one of the pillars of as different convictions as Christianity, Islam, and Communism. No other old Greek is even close to his influence.
Karl Marx has influenced a large part of humanity, and continues to do so.
Immanuel Kant. He has influenced all branches of philosophy and science as no one else the past 2000 years. No doubt, the most important European thinker after the Antiquity.
Let's also include Charles Darwin, whose ideas changed the thinking far beyond the science he was practising.
At last, a choice that will surprise many of you. Kurt Gödel. The only one on my list who has lived in the 1900s. Whether he belongs here is something we will not be really sure of until 200 or 300 years from now, but I hold him to be the most important thinker of the 1900s, and perhaps more than that. The consequences of his work have not yet been fully realised.
Finally, since we are all in one way or another involved in cryptocurrency, let's ask ourselves if Satoshi Nakamoto will be on a list like this some time in the future. Today he is not, but we still cannot discern the full extension of his work's influence, and perhaps we will not do that within our own lifetime.
There are obvious problems associated with the compilation of a list like this.
1. It is hard to know to what extent an individual had genuine influence or just happened to become a symbol for something without significantly shaping it, a trademark, or even was a puppet on a string - with an unknown puppet master.
2. Many important things have been done anonymously. The individual behind them was never known, not even pseudonymously, or has been forgotten in the mists of time.
3. Many shapers of civilisation belonged to a mythological or semi-mythological world, where today it is impossible to make a distinction between humans and deities; people such as Hermes Trismegistus or the Yellow Emperor - both, if human, well worth a place in this list. I have avoided references to characters from such a mythological borderland.
“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people; those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.”
(Indira Gandhi)
As for Young-Ho Eom's list, I want to comment the choice of warlords: Napoleon, Hitler, and Julius Caesar. It's an interesting observation that losers are better remembered than winners. Julius Caesar was not direct a loser, but he was murdered; in a way that made him, too, a loser. Napoleon and Hitler, however, were genuine losers, still they will be remembered for centuries. People are fascinated by losers. It would not surprise me if those two will be the longest remembered warlords from the previous millennium, still legends when all others are forgotten in the mists of history.
Why Napoleon and Hitler?
I think that part of the explanation is that they lived their own myths. Each one of them was the main character of a drama, a great drama in real life, which they practically designed themselves. They created a myth and they lived it. A work of art, a great and terrible tragedy, conclusively ending with total collapse.
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I don't know if I have an absolute list. Certainly, many of these names would be on mine. I would probably add Confucious, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Emeline Pankhurst, Galileo, Satoshi Nakamoto, and more that I can't think of.
Of course, influence is subjective. What I might consider influential you may not, as evidenced by the fact that you largely disagree with the presented list and I generally don't. I guess such a thing isn't objective enough to state empirically that certain individuals are more or less influential than others. The commenter below put it better than I.