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
#1
Milton Friedman
#1
Overall Influence
1912 - 2006 (94 years)
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations.
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Karl Popper
#2
Overall Influence
1902 - 1994 (92 years)
Sir Karl Raimund Popper was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can be scrutinised with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with critical rationalism, namely "the first n...
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Jacques Derrida
#3
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French philosopher. He developed the philosophy of deconstruction, which he utilized in a number of his texts, and which was developed through close readings of the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology. He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodern philosophy although he distanced himself from post-structuralism and disowned the word "postmodernity".
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Jürgen Habermas
#4
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher mostly associated with the influential Frankurt School in Germany, part of the Institute for Social Research, at Goethe University Frankfurt, and historically an important center for research on social theory and critical philosophy. Habermas, now 90, earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Bonn in 1954. Habermas is a famed philosopher who has taught a number of influential philosophers, including Hans Joas at the University of Chicago. Habermas is known for his work on communicative rationality, a position that place emphasis on rational...
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Noam Chomsky
#5
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
#6
Herbert A. Simon
#6
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Herbert Alexander Simon was an American political scientist whose work also influenced the fields of computer science, economics, and cognitive psychology. His primary research interest was decision-making within organizations and he is best known for the theories of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1978 and the Turing Award in computer science in 1975. His research was noted for its interdisciplinary nature and spanned across the fields of cognitive science, computer science, public administration, management, and political science.
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Francis Crick
#7
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Francis Harry Compton Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
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Amartya Sen
#8
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
#9
Paul Krugman
#9
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Paul Robin Krugman is an American economist who is the Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a columnist for The New York Times. In 2008, Krugman was the winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contributions to New Trade Theory and New Economic Geography. The Prize Committee cited Krugman's work explaining the patterns of international trade and the geographic distribution of economic activity, by examining the effects of economies of scale and of consumer preferences for diverse goods and services.
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14th Dalai Lama
#10
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
The 14th Dalai Lama , known to the Tibetan people as Gyalwa Rinpoche, is, as the incumbent Dalai Lama, the highest spiritual leader and head of Tibet. He is considered a living Bodhisattva; specifically, an emanation of Avalokiteśvara in Sanskrit, and Chenrezig in Tibetan. He is also the leader and a monk of the Gelug school, the newest school of Tibetan Buddhism, formally headed by the Ganden Tripa. The central government of Tibet, the Ganden Phodrang, invested the Dalai Lama with temporal duties until his exile in 1959.
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Edward Teller
#11
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is known colloquially as "the father of the hydrogen bomb" and one of the creators of the Teller–Ulam design. Teller was known for his scientific ability and his difficult interpersonal relations and volatile personality.
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Marvin Minsky
#12
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence , co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.
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Daniel Dennett
#13
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
#14
Claude Shannon
#14
Overall Influence
1916 - 2001 (85 years)
Claude Elwood Shannon was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist and cryptographer known as the "father of information theory". He is credited alongside George Boole for laying the foundations of the Information Age.
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John Rawls
#15
Overall Influence
1921 - 2002 (81 years)
John Bordley Rawls was an American moral, legal and political philosopher in the liberal tradition. Rawls has been described as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss
#16
Overall Influence
1908 - 2009 (101 years)
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthropology at the Collège de France between 1959 and 1982, was elected a member of the Académie française in 1973 and was a member of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris. He received numerous honors from universities and institutions throughout the world.
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Edward Snowden
#17
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (41 years)
Edward Joseph Snowden is an American and naturalized Russian citizen who was a computer intelligence consultant and whistleblower who leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency in 2013 when he was an employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.
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Willard Van Orman Quine
#18
Overall Influence
1908 - 2000 (92 years)
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
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Paul Samuelson
#19
Overall Influence
1915 - 2009 (94 years)
Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist who was the first American to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. When awarding the prize in 1970, the Swedish Royal Academies stated that he "has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory". Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the "Father of Modern Economics", and The New York Times considers him to be the "foremost academic economist of the 20th century".
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Hilary Putnam
#20
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist and figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He contributed to the studies of philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
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Eugene Wigner
#21
Overall Influence
1902 - 1995 (93 years)
Eugene Paul "E. P." Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who also contributed to mathematical physics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
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Peter Singer
#22
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
#23
Richard Dawkins
#23
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Areas of Specialization: Urban and Media Anthropology Richard Dawkins is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford and former University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science, but he is best known for his work in evolutionary biology. He studied zoology at Balliol College, Oxford, earning a bachelor’s degree, MA, and PhD. Dawkins is a pioneer in the role of genes in evolution. His most well-known book, The Selfish Gene, is an examination of how genetics drive evolutionary change. He also coined the term meme in this book, to describe the behavioral equivalent of a gene. A m...
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Salman Rushdie
#24
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British-American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizationss, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children , won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
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Daniel Kahneman
#25
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
#26
Roger Penrose
#26
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
#27
Donald Knuth
#27
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He is the 1974 recipient of the ACM Turing Award, informally considered the Nobel Prize of computer science. Knuth has been called the "father of the analysis of algorithms".
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Joseph Stiglitz
#28
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
#29
Richard Stallman
#29
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Richard Matthew Stallman , also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
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Alonzo Church
#30
Overall Influence
1903 - 1995 (92 years)
Alonzo Church was an American mathematician, computer scientist, logician, and philosopher who made major contributions to mathematical logic and the foundations of theoretical computer science. He is best known for the lambda calculus, the Church–Turing thesis, proving the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem , the Frege–Church ontology, and the Church–Rosser theorem. He also worked on philosophy of language . Alongside his doctoral student Alan Turing, Church is considered one of the founders of computer science.
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Gilles Deleuze
#31
Overall Influence
1925 - 1995 (70 years)
Gilles Louis René Deleuze was a French philosopher who, from the early 1950s until his death in 1995, wrote on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari. His metaphysical treatise Difference and Repetition is considered by many scholars to be his magnum opus.
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Hans Bethe
#32
Overall Influence
1906 - 2005 (99 years)
Hans Albrecht Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics, and solid-state physics, and who won the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis. For most of his career, Bethe was a professor at Cornell University.
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Murray Rothbard
#33
Overall Influence
1926 - 1995 (69 years)
Murray Newton Rothbard was an American economist of the Austrian School, economic historian, political theorist, and activist. Rothbard was a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement, particularly its right-wing strands, and was a founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, history, economics, and other subjects.
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Pierre Bourdieu
#34
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields . During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
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Richard Rorty
#35
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, he had strong interests and training in both the history of philosophy and in contemporary analytic philosophy. Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative literature at Stanford University. Among his most influential books are Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature , Consequences of Pragmatism , and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity .
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Harold Bloom
#36
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Harold Bloom was an American literary critic and the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. In 2017, Bloom was called "probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world." After publishing his first book in 1959, Bloom wrote more than 50 books, including over 40 books of literary criticism, several books discussing religion, and one novel. He edited hundreds of anthologies concerning numerous literary and philosophical figures for the Chelsea House publishing firm. Bloom's books have been translated into more than 40 languages. He was elected to the American ...
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James Watson
#37
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Areas of Specialization: Molecular Biology, Genetics James D. Watson is a zoologist, geneticist and molecular biologist. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Chicago and a PhD from Indiana University. He is most recently well-known due to his controversial comments about race and genetics, for which he has been largely ostracized. Prior to his unfortunate foray into racial genetics, he was highly regarded and famous for his work on molecular biology. He is credited for significant contributions to our understanding of cancer, neurological diseases and the genetic basis for cancer and other diseases.
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Alexander Grothendieck
#38
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Alexander Grothendieck was a French mathematician who became the leading figure in the creation of modern algebraic geometry. His research extended the scope of the field and added elements of commutative algebra, homological algebra, sheaf theory, and category theory to its foundations, while his so-called "relative" perspective led to revolutionary advances in many areas of pure mathematics. He is considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century.
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Thomas Kuhn
#39
Overall Influence
1922 - 1996 (74 years)
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
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Stephen Jay Gould
#40
Overall Influence
1941 - 2002 (61 years)
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.
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Ronald Coase
#41
Overall Influence
1910 - 2013 (103 years)
Ronald Harry Coase was a British economist and author. Coase received a bachelor of commerce degree and a PhD from the London School of Economics, where he was a member of the faculty until 1951. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991. Coase believed economists should study real-world wealth creation, in the manner of Adam Smith, stating, "It is suicidal for the field to slide into a hard science of choice, i...
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Judith Butler
#42
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
#43
Graham Greene
#43
Overall Influence
1904 - 1991 (87 years)
Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers . He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. He was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize.
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Robert Mueller
#44
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Robert Swan Mueller III is an American lawyer who served as the sixth director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2001 to 2013. A graduate of Princeton University and New York University, Mueller served as a Marine Corps officer during the Vietnam War, receiving a Bronze Star for heroism and a Purple Heart. He subsequently attended the University of Virginia School of Law. Mueller is a registered Republican in Washington, D.C., and was appointed and reappointed to Senate-confirmed positions by presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.
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Kenneth Arrow
#45
Overall Influence
1921 - 2017 (96 years)
Kenneth Joseph Arrow was an American economist, mathematician, writer, and political theorist. Along with John Hicks, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1972. In economics, Arrow was a major figure in post-World War II neoclassical economic theory. Many of his former graduate students have gone on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize themselves. His most significant works are his contributions to social choice theory, notably "Arrow's impossibility theorem," and his work on general equilibrium analysis. He has also provided foundational work in many other areas of economics, i...
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Frank Gehry
#46
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
Frank Owen Gehry is a Canadian-born American architect and designer. A number of his buildings, including his private residence in Santa Monica, California, have become world-renowned attractions.
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Martin Gardner
#47
Overall Influence
1914 - 2010 (96 years)
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century".
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Paul Erdős
#48
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open...
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Alasdair MacIntyre
#49
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
#50
Linus Pauling
#50
Overall Influence
1901 - 1994 (93 years)
Linus Carl Pauling was an American chemist, biochemist, chemical engineer, peace activist, author, and educator. He published more than 1,200 papers and books, of which about 850 dealt with scientific topics. New Scientist called him one of the 20 greatest scientists of all time, For his scientific work, Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1954. For his peace activism, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. He is one of five people to have won more than one Nobel Prize . Of these, he is the only person to have been awarded two unshared Nobel Prizes, and one of two peo...
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