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).
Methodology: How and Why We Rank by Influence …
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List of the most influential people in Communications,
#251
William Colby
#1726
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
William Egan Colby was an American intelligence officer who served as Director of Central Intelligence from September 1973 to January 1976. During World War II, Colby served with the Office of Strategic Services. After the war, he joined the newly created Central Intelligence Agency . Before and during the Vietnam War, Colby served as chief of station in Saigon, chief of the CIA's Far East Division, and head of the Civil Operations and Rural Development effort and oversaw the Phoenix Program. After the war, Colby became Director of Central Intelligence and during his tenure, under intense p...
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Jane Jacobs
#383
Overall Influence
1916 - 2006 (90 years)
Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
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Helen McCarthy
#6440
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Helen McCarthy is the British author of such anime reference books as 500 Manga Heroes and Villains, Anime!, The Anime Movie Guide and Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation. She is the co-author of The Erotic Anime Movie Guide and the exhaustive The Anime Encyclopedia with Jonathan Clements. She also designs needlework and textile art.
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Gavyn Wright
#2418
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Gavyn Wright is a British violinist and orchestra leader with the London Session Orchestra and Penguin Cafe Orchestra. He is best known for his orchestral arrangements on pop productions as well as numerous TV and movie soundtracks .
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Anna Politkovskaya
#1193
Overall Influence
1958 - 2006 (48 years)
Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya was a Russian journalist and human rights activist, who reported on political and social events in Russia, in particular, the Second Chechen War . It was her reporting from Chechnya that made Politkovskaya's national and international reputation. For seven years, she refused to give up reporting on the war despite numerous acts of intimidation and violence. Politkovskaya was arrested by Russian military forces in Chechnya and subjected to a mock execution. She was poisoned while flying from Moscow via Rostov-on-Don to help resolve the 2004 Beslan school hostage c...
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Harvey Kurtzman
#2368
Overall Influence
1924 - 1993 (69 years)
Harvey Kurtzman was an American cartoonist and editor. His best-known work includes writing and editing the parodic comic book Mad from 1952 until 1956, and writing the Little Annie Fanny strips in Playboy from 1962 until 1988. His work is noted for its satire and parody of popular culture, social critique, and attention to detail. Kurtzman's working method has been likened to that of an auteur, and he expected those who illustrated his stories to follow his layouts strictly.
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Einar Haugen
#9953
Overall Influence
1906 - 1994 (88 years)
Einar Ingvald Haugen was an American linguist, writer, and professor at University of Wisconsin–Madison and Harvard University. Biography Haugen was born in Sioux City, Iowa, to Norwegian immigrants from the village of Oppdal in Trøndelag, Norway. When he was a young child, the family moved back to Oppdal for a few years, but then returned to the United States. He attended Morningside College in Sioux City but transferred to St. Olaf College to study with Ole Edvart Rølvaag. He earned his B.A. in 1928 and immediately went on to graduate studies in Scandinavian languages under professor George T.
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Alan Prince
#6634
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Alan Sanford Prince is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.
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Robert Lado
#10738
Overall Influence
1915 - 1995 (80 years)
Dr. Robert Lado was an American expert on modern linguistics. Early life His parents were Spanish immigrants who relocated to Spain before he had a chance to learn English. He returned to the United States at the age of 21 and began to learn English as an adult. This allowed him to develop an understanding of and sensitivity to the challenges confronting immigrants and speakers of other languages learning English as a second language.
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Derek Taylor
#2303
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Derek Taylor was an English journalist, writer, publicist and record producer. He is best known for his role as press officer to the Beatles, with whom he worked in 1964 and then from 1968 to 1970, and was one of several associates to earn the moniker "the Fifth Beatle". Before returning to London to head the publicity for the Beatles' Apple Corps organisation in 1968, he worked as the publicist for California-based bands such as the Byrds, the Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas. Taylor was known for his forward-thinking and extravagant promotional campaigns, exemplified in taglines such as "The Beatles Are Coming" and "Brian Wilson Is a Genius".
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Martin Bashir
#2314
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martin Henry Bashir is a British former journalist. He was a presenter on British and American television and for the BBC's Panorama programme, for which he gained an interview with Diana, Princess of Wales under false pretences in 1995. Although the interview was much heralded at the time, it was later determined that he used forgery and deception to gain it.
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Jane Pauley
#3264
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Margaret Jane Pauley is an American television host, and author, active in news reporting since 1972. Pauley first became widely known as Barbara Walters's successor on the NBC morning show Today, beginning at the age of 25, where she was a co-anchor from 1976 to 1989, at first with Tom Brokaw, and later with Bryant Gumbel; for a short while in the late 1980s she and Gumbel worked with Deborah Norville. In 1989, with her job apparently threatened by Norville's addition to the program, she asked to be released from her contract, but her request was denied. Her next regular anchor position was ...
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Robert A. Leonard
#5966
Overall Influence
Robert Andrew Leonard is an American linguist. He is best known for his work in forensic linguistics, which relates to investigating problems of the law by using the study of language. This includes analyzing legal material work such as notes, audio and video tape recordings, contracts, and confessions. Prior to his academic career, Leonard was a founding member of the rock band Sha Na Na and performed at Woodstock.
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Jeffrey Goldberg
#1420
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Jeffrey Mark Goldberg is an American journalist and editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine. During his nine years at The Atlantic prior to becoming editor, Goldberg became known for his coverage of foreign affairs. Goldberg joined Washington Week as moderator in August 2023.
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Robert Hilburn
#1151
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Robert Hilburn is an American pop music critic, author, and radio host. As critic and music editor at the Los Angeles Times from 1970 to 2005, his reviews, essays and profiles appeared in publications around the world. Hilburn has since written a memoir and best-selling biographies of Johnny Cash and Paul Simon. He was a member of the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for more than twenty years, and lives in Los Angeles.
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Ivan Sag
#10188
Overall Influence
1949 - 2013 (64 years)
Ivan Andrew Sag was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics. Personal life Born in Alliance, Ohio on November 9, 1949, Sag attended the Mercersburg Academy but was expelled shortly before graduation. He received a BA from the University of Rochester, an MA from the University of Pennsylvania—where he studied comparative Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, and sociolinguistics—and a PhD from MIT in 1976, writing his dissertation on ellipsis.
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Jerry Pournelle
#475
Overall Influence
1933 - 2017 (84 years)
Jerry Eugene Pournelle was an American scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, a science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he worked in the aerospace industry, but eventually focused on his writing career. In an obituary in Gizmodo, he is described as "a tireless ambassador for the future."
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Kate Adie
#5073
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Kathryn Adie is an English journalist. She was Chief News Correspondent for BBC News between 1989 and 2003, during which time she reported from war zones around the world. She retired from the BBC in early 2003 and works as a freelance presenter with From Our Own Correspondent on BBC Radio 4.
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Victoria Fromkin
#8321
Overall Influence
1923 - 2000 (77 years)
Victoria Alexandra Fromkin was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors, which she applied to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.
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Frank R. Palmer
#7769
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Frank Robert Palmer was a British linguist who was instrumental in the development of the Department of Linguistic Science at the University of Reading. Academic career As a child, Palmer lived with his parents in Kendleshire . Palmer took his first school lessons at the Hambrook School , enrolling there on 30 August 1926, as recorded in the Admission Register 1922–1946. On 2 September 1932, he went to Bristol Grammar School. Later, Palmer was educated at New College, Oxford.
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Clay Felker
#6522
Overall Influence
1925 - 2008 (83 years)
Clay Schuette Felker was an American magazine editor and journalist who co-founded New York magazine in 1968. He was known for bringing numerous journalists into the profession. The New York Times wrote in 1995, "Few journalists have left a more enduring imprint on late 20th-century journalism—an imprint that was unabashedly mimicked even as it was being mocked—than Clay Felker."
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Laurie Thompson
#12235
Overall Influence
1938 - 2015 (77 years)
Laurie Thompson was a British academic and translator, noted for his translations of Swedish literature into English. Thompson was born in York, England, and lived in northern Sweden for a few years. He was the editor of Swedish Book Review between 1983 and 2002, and a lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and the University of Wales, Lampeter.
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Michael Pollan
#1370
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Michael Kevin Pollan is an American author and journalist, who is currently Professor of the Practice of Non-Fiction and the first Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer at Harvard University. Concurrently, he is the Knight Professor of Science and Environmental Journalism and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism where in 2020 he cofounded the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, in which he leads the public-education program. Pollan is best known for his books that explore the socio-cultural impacts of...
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Timothy Montler
#15812
Overall Influence
Timothy Montler is an American academic and linguist. Montler is a professor of linguistics at the University of North Texas, as of 2013. He has worked to preserve the Klallam language since 1990. Montler collaborated with Adeline Smith, a Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe elder, to create the first Klallam language alphabet. He and Smith also composed the world's first Klallam language dictionary, which was published in December 2012 by the University of Washington Press. Montler and Smith had collaborated on the Klallam lexicon throughout the 1990s, 2000–02, and early 2010s. Adeline Smith added 12,000 words and phrases, the largest single contribution to the dictionary.
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Bruce Nauman
#2070
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Bruce Nauman is an American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance. Nauman lives near Galisteo, New Mexico.
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Alvin Toffler
#596
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Alvin Eugene Toffler was an American writer, futurist, and businessman known for his works discussing modern technologies, including the digital revolution and the communication revolution, with emphasis on their effects on cultures worldwide. He is regarded as one of the world's outstanding futurists.
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Edward Vajda
#8011
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Edward J. Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University, Washington State, United States. He is known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of North America. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union; he interviewed Ket speakers in Germany and later traveled to Tomsk in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in no...
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Bernd Heine
#13721
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Bernd Heine is a German linguist and specialist in African studies. From 1978 to 2004 Heine held the chair for African Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany, now being a Professor Emeritus. His main focal points in research and teaching are African linguistics, sociolinguistics, grammaticalization theory and language contact and discourse grammar. The grammaticalisation theory, which deals with the changes in grammar, and to which he contributed 7 books and numerous articles, is his main focal point. Jointly with Tania Kuteva and Gunther Kaltenböck, Heine is the founder of the framewo...
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Allen Walker Read
#6325
Overall Influence
1906 - 2002 (96 years)
Allen Walker Read was an American etymologist and lexicographer. Born in Minnesota, he spent much of his career as a professor at Columbia University in New York. Read's work Classic American Graffiti is well regarded in the study of latrinalia and obscenity. His etymological career included his discovery of the origin of the word "OK", a longtime puzzle, and his scholarly study of the history and use of the common English vulgarity "fuck."
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George L. Trager
#11445
Overall Influence
1906 - 1992 (86 years)
George Leonard Trager was an American linguist. He was the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1960. He was born in Newark, New Jersey. During his years at Yale in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a close associate of Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Charles Hockett, and after 1941, Leonard Bloomfield. From 1937, he collaborated with Whorf on historical-comparative Azteco-Tanoan languages, but further planned collaboration was cut short by Whorf's death in 1941. He wrote the entries on Language and Linguistics for the 14th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Like...
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Peter Morgan
#3855
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Peter Julian Robin Morgan, is a British screenwriter and playwright. He gained acclaim for writing for theatre, films and television often writing about historical events or figures such as Queen Elizabeth II who he has covered extensively in all major mediums. He received numerous accolades including five BAFTA Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for two Academy Awards, a Tony Award and a Laurence Olivier Award. In February 2017, Morgan was awarded a British Film Institute Fellowship.
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Sarah Thomason
#9394
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sarah Grey Thomason is an American scholar of linguistics, Bernard Bloch distinguished professor emerita at the University of Michigan. She is best known for her work on language contact, historical linguistics, pidgins and creoles, Slavic Linguistics, Native American languages and typological universals. She also has an interest in debunking linguistic pseudoscience, and has collaborated with publications such as the Skeptical Inquirer, The Encyclopedia of the Paranormal and American Speech, in regard to claims of xenoglossy.
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Richard Hamilton
#4049
Overall Influence
1922 - 2011 (89 years)
Richard William Hamilton CH was an English painter and collage artist. His 1955 exhibition Man, Machine and Motion and his 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?, produced for the This Is Tomorrow exhibition of the Independent Group in London, are considered by critics and historians to be among the earliest works of pop art. A major retrospective of his work was at Tate Modern in 2014.
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Ridley Scott
#3155
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Sir Ridley Scott is an English filmmaker. He is best known for directing films in the science fiction, crime, and historical drama genres. His work is known for its atmospheric and highly concentrated visual style. Scott has received many many accolades, including the BAFTA Fellowship for lifetime achievement in 2018, two Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award. In 2003, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
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Donald Ringe
#10943
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist. Ringe graduated from University of Kentucky and received a Master of Philosophy in linguistics as a Marshall Scholar from the University of Oxford. He received a Ph.D in linguistics at Yale University in 1984, under the supervision of Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985. Since 1985, he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a full professor since 1996.
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Matthew Carter
#4764
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts. Carter's career began in the early 1960s and has bridged all three major technologies used in type design: physical type, phototypesetting and digital font design, as well as the design of custom lettering.
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Massimo Vignelli
#4863
Overall Influence
1931 - 2014 (83 years)
Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer who worked in a number of areas including packaging, houseware, furniture, public signage, and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella. His motto was, "If you can design one thing, you can design everything," which the broad range of his work reflects.
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Bruce Springsteen
#1201
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen is an American rock singer, songwriter and guitarist. Nicknamed "The Boss", he has released 21 studio albums during a career spanning six decades, most of which feature his backing band, the E Street Band. Springsteen is an originator of heartland rock, a genre combining mainstream rock music with poetic and socially conscious lyrics that feature narratives primarily concerning working-class American life. He is known for his descriptive lyrics and energetic concerts, with performances that can last for more than four hours.
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James Gleick
#890
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
James Gleick is an American author and historian of science whose work has chronicled the cultural impact of modern technology. Recognized for his writing about complex subjects through the techniques of narrative nonfiction, he has been called "one of the great science writers of all time". He is part of the inspiration for Jurassic Park character Ian Malcolm.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
#2469
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American author, journalist, and activist. He gained a wide readership during his time as national correspondent at The Atlantic, where he wrote about cultural, social, and political issues, particularly regarding African Americans and white supremacy.
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Edward Tufte
#1095
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Edward Rolf Tufte , sometimes known as "ET", is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization.
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Paula Scher
#6314
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art educator in design. She also served as the first female principal at Pentagram, which she joined in 1991. Education Scher studied at the Tyler School of Art, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970.
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Kenneth Lee Pike
#9080
Overall Influence
1912 - 2000 (88 years)
Kenneth Lee Pike was an American linguist and anthropologist. He was the originator of the theory of tagmemics, the coiner of the terms "emic" and "etic" and the developer of the constructed language Kalaba-X for use in teaching the theory and practice of translation.
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Peter Saville
#4483
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Peter Andrew Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He designed many record sleeves for Factory Records, which he co-founded in 1978 alongside Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus. Early life Peter Saville was born in Manchester, Lancashire, and attended St Ambrose College. He studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975 to 1978.
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Jancis Robinson
#4174
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jancis Mary Robinson OBE, ComMA, MW is a British wine critic, journalist and wine writer. She currently writes a weekly column for the Financial Times, and writes for her website JancisRobinson.com, updated daily. She provided advice for the wine cellar of Queen Elizabeth II.
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Juliane House
#11011
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Juliane House is a German linguist and translation studies scholar. Biography House received a degree in English and Spanish Translation and International Law from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Later, she worked as a translator and researcher. She earned her BEd, MA and PhD in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the University of Toronto, Canada.
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Walter Isaacson
#658
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Walter Seff Isaacson is an American author, journalist, and professor. He has been the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan policy studies organization based in Washington, D.C., the chair and CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time.
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Douglas Coupland
#1610
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Douglas Coupland is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, popularized the terms Generation X and McJob. He has published 13 novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the Financial Times, as well as a frequent contributor to The New York Times, e-flux journal, DIS Magazine, and Vice. His art exhibits include Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything, which was...
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Tim Russert
#3161
Overall Influence
1950 - 2008 (58 years)
Timothy John Russert was an American television journalist and lawyer who appeared for more than 16 years as the longest-serving moderator of NBC's Meet the Press. He was a senior vice president at NBC News, Washington bureau chief and also hosted an eponymous CNBC/MSNBC weekend interview program. He was a frequent correspondent and guest on NBC's The Today Show and Hardball. Russert covered several presidential elections, and he presented the NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey on the NBC Nightly News during the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Time magazine included Russert in its list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2008.
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Aharon Dolgopolsky
#11245
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Aharon Dolgopolsky, also spelled Aron was a Russian-Israeli linguist who is known as one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics. Biography Born in Moscow, he arrived at the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis in the 1960s, at around the same time but independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych. Together with Illich-Svitych, he was the first to undertake a multilateral comparison of the supposed daughter languages of Nostratic. Teaching Nostratics at Moscow University for 8 years, Dolgopolsky moved to Israel in 1976, and taught at the University of Haifa.
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