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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Communications,
#451
Lois McMaster Bujold
#2573
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lois McMaster Bujold is an American speculative fiction writer. She is an acclaimed writer, having won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, matching Robert A. Heinlein's record . Her novella The Mountains of Mourning won both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award. In the fantasy genre, The Curse of Chalion won the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature and was nominated for the 2002 World Fantasy Award for best novel, and both her fourth Hugo Award and second Nebula Award were for Paladin of Souls. In 2011 she was awarded the Skylark Award. She has won two Hugo Awards for Best Series, in 2017 for the Vorkosigan Saga and in 2018 for the World of the Five Gods.
Go to Profile#452
Michelle Goldberg
#7163
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Michelle Goldberg is an American journalist and author, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. She has been a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, a columnist for The Daily Beast and Slate, and a senior writer for The Nation. Her books are Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism ; The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power, and the Future of the World ; and The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West .
Go to Profile#453
Aretha Franklin
#2748
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
Aretha Louise Franklin was an American singer, songwriter and pianist. Referred to as the "Queen of Soul", Rolling Stone twice named her as the greatest singer of all time. With global sales of over 75 million records, Franklin is one of the world's best-selling music artists.
Go to Profile#454
Ned Sherrin
#9079
Overall Influence
1931 - 2007 (76 years)
Edward George Sherrin was an English broadcaster, author and stage director. He qualified as a barrister and then worked in independent television before joining the BBC. He appeared in a variety of radio and television satirical shows and theatre shows, some of which he also directed.
Go to Profile#455
Rick Wakeman
#8329
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Richard Christopher Wakeman is an English keyboardist and composer best known as a former member of the progressive rock band Yes across five tenures between 1971 and 2004, and for his solo albums released in the 1970s. AllMusic describes Wakeman as a "classically trained keyboardist extraordinaire who plied his trade with Yes and developed his own brand of live spectacular in a solo act."
Go to Profile#456
Jane H. Hill
#8638
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Frances Jane Hassler Hill was an American anthropologist and linguist who worked extensively with Native American languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family and anthropological linguistics of North American communities.
Go to Profile#457
Arnold Zwicky
#13727
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial visiting professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. Early life and education Zwicky was born on September 6, 1940, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He received a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics at Princeton University . He was a student of Morris Halle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in 1965.
Go to Profile#458
James Matisoff
#10895
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
James Alan Matisoff is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a noted authority on Tibeto-Burman languages and other languages of mainland Southeast Asia.
Go to Profile#459
Clarence Page
#8384
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Clarence Page is an American journalist, syndicated columnist, and senior member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board. Early years Page was born in Dayton, Ohio, and attended Middletown High School in Middletown where he worked on the school's bi-weekly newspaper. After graduating in 1965, he worked freelance as a writer and photographer for The Middletown Journal and The Cincinnati Enquirer, while he earned his Bachelor of Science degree in journalism from Ohio University.
Go to Profile#460
Federico Fellini
#7775
Overall Influence
1920 - 1993 (73 years)
Federico Fellini was an Italian filmmaker. He is known for his distinctive style, which blends fantasy and baroque images with earthiness. He is recognized as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. His films have ranked highly in critical polls such as that of Cahiers du Cinéma and Sight & Sound, which lists his 1963 film as the 10th-greatest film.
Go to Profile#461
Paula Rego
#5588
Overall Influence
1935 - 2022 (87 years)
Dame Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist, widely considered the pre-eminent woman artist of the late 20th and early 21st century, known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal,
Go to Profile#462
Charles Boberg
#18661
Overall Influence
Charles Boberg is an academic specializing in sociolinguistics, particularly North American English. He is an associate professor of linguistics at McGill University in Montreal. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania under William Labov, and later collaborated with him and Sharon Ash in the preparation of The Atlas of North American English, published by De Gruyter in 2006. Boberg has been consulted on matters of national security because of his expertise in identifying regional dialects and vocabulary patterns of North American English.
Go to Profile#463
Malcolm Ross
#16548
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Malcolm David Ross is an Australian linguist. He is the emeritus professor of linguistics at the Australian National University. Ross is best known among linguists for his work on Austronesian and Papuan languages, historical linguistics, and language contact . He was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1996.
Go to Profile#464
Deirdre Bair
#8459
Overall Influence
1935 - 2020 (85 years)
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981. Early life and education Bair was born Deirdre Bartolotta on June 21, 1935 in Pittsburgh. She grew up in nearby Monongahela, Pennsylvania. Her father was a small-business owner, her mother a homemaker. She had one sister and one brother.
Go to Profile#465
Mike Royko
#5119
Overall Influence
1932 - 1997 (65 years)
Michael Royko Jr. was an American newspaper columnist from Chicago. Over his 30-year career, he wrote over 7,500 daily columns for the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune. A humorist who focused on life in Chicago, he was the winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.
Go to Profile#466
Scott Adams
#1189
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Scott Raymond Adams is an American author and cartoonist. He is the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, and the author of several nonfiction works of business, commentary, and satire. Adams worked in various clerical roles before he became a full-time cartoonist in 1995. While working at Pacific Bell in 1989, Adams created Dilbert; by the mid-1990s the strip had gained national prominence in America and began to reach a worldwide audience. Dilbert remained popular throughout the following decades, spawning several books written by Adams and becoming a cultural touchstone until it was dropped from syndication.
Go to Profile#467
James Paul Gee
#5565
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
James Gee is a retired American researcher who has worked in psycholinguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, bilingual education, and literacy. Gee most recently held the position as the Mary Lou Fulton Presidential Professor of Literacy Studies at Arizona State University, originally appointed there in the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education. Gee has previously been a faculty affiliate of the Games, Learning, and Society group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a member of the National Academy of Education.
Go to Profile#468
Andrew Pawley
#14885
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Andrew Kenneth Pawley , FRSNZ, FAHA, is Emeritus Professor at the School of Culture, History & Language of the College of Asia & the Pacific at the Australian National University. Career Pawley was born in Sydney but moved to New Zealand at the age of 12. He was educated at the University of Auckland, gaining a PhD in anthropology in 1966.
Go to Profile#469
Walter V. Robinson
#17660
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Walter V. Robinson is an American investigative reporter serving as editor-at-large at The Boston Globe, where he has worked as reporter and editor for 34 years. From 2007 to 2014, he was a distinguished professor of journalism at the Northeastern University School of Journalism. Robinson is the Donald W. Reynolds Visiting Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University, and a professor of practice at the Northeastern University School of Journalism. He has reported for the Globe from 48 states and more than 30 countries.
Go to Profile#470
Pina Bausch
#9068
Overall Influence
1940 - 2009 (69 years)
Philippine "Pina" Bausch was a German dancer and choreographer who was a significant contributor to a neo-expressionist dance tradition now known as . Bausch's approach was noted for a stylized blend of dance movement, prominent sound design, and involved stage sets, as well as for engaging the dancers under her to help in the development of a piece, and her work had an influence on modern dance from the 1970s forward. Her work, regarded as a continuation of the European and American expressionist movements, incorporated many expressly dramatic elements and often explored themes connected to trauma, particularly trauma arising out of relationships.
Go to Profile#471
Lars Johanson
#12407
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Lars Johanson is a Swedish Turcologist and linguist, an emeritus professor at the University of Mainz, and docent at the Department of Linguistics and Philology, University of Uppsala, Sweden. He has been instrumental in transforming the field of Turcology, which was traditionally more philologically oriented, into a linguistic discipline. Apart from his contributions to Turcology, Lars Johanson made a number of pioneering contributions to general linguistics and language typology, in particular to the typology of tense and aspect systems and the theory of language contact.
Go to Profile#472
E. F. K. Koerner
#16552
Overall Influence
1939 - 2022 (83 years)
Ernst Frideryk Konrad Koerner was a German author, researcher, professor of linguistics, and historian of linguistics. Early life and education Koerner was born on the family manor in Mlewiec, near Toruń, at the time of his birth located in the Polish Corridor. The town was previously known as Hofleben bei Thorn, Marienwerder, West Prussia, Germany. He was the second son of the economist Johann Jakob Friedrich Koerner and his wife Annelise, née Koerner . He has two well-known great grandfathers; one was the Lord Mayor of Thorn 1842–1871, Theodor Eduard Koerner , the other the Berlin oriental...
Go to Profile#473
Paul Krassner
#2706
Overall Influence
1932 - 2019 (87 years)
Paul Krassner was an American writer and satirist. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine The Realist, first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining.
Go to Profile#474
Brian May
#3230
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Sir Brian Harold May is an English musician, songwriter, singer, astrophysicist and animal rights activist. He achieved worldwide fame as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen, which he co-founded with singer Freddie Mercury and drummer Roger Taylor. His guitar work and songwriting contributions helped Queen become one of the most successful acts in music history.
Go to Profile#475
Helmuth Rilling
#8154
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (91 years)
Helmuth Rilling is a German choral conductor and an academic teacher. He is the founder of the Gächinger Kantorei , the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart , the Oregon Bach Festival , the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart and other Bach Academies worldwide, as well as the "Festival Ensemble Stuttgart" and the "Junges Stuttgarter Bach Ensemble" . He taught choral conducting at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule from 1965 to 1989 and led the Frankfurter Kantorei from 1969 to 1982.
Go to Profile#476
Howard Fineman
#8560
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Howard David Fineman is an American journalist and television commentator. In a career that spanned nearly five decades, Fineman has covered nine presidential campaigns as a reporter, writer, and analyst. For 30 years, he drove Newsweek magazine's political coverage. At the height of the publication's influence, Fineman was its chief political correspondent, senior editor and deputy Washington bureau chief. His "Living Politics" column was posted weekly on Newsweek.com. Following Newsweek,he was named global editorial director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group.
Go to Profile#477
Phyllida Lloyd
#10131
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Phyllida Christian Lloyd, is an English film and theatre director and producer. Her theatre work includes directing productions at the Royal Court Theatre and Royal National Theatre, and opera director for Opera North and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden. Her adaptation of three Shakespeare plays received acclaim from critics, with The Guardian calling it "one of the most important theatrical events of the past 20 years".
Go to Profile#478
Martin Haspelmath
#14163
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Martin Haspelmath is a German linguist working in the field of linguistic typology. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, where he worked from 1998 to 2015 and again since 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. He is also an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Leipzig.
Go to Profile#479
Jim Horn
#3128
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
James Ronald Horn is an American saxophonist, woodwind player, and session musician. Biography Horn was born in Los Angeles, and after replacing saxophonist Steve Douglas in 1959, he toured with member Duane Eddy for five years, playing sax and flute on the road, and in the recording studio. Along with Bobby Keys and Jim Price he became one of the most in-demand horn session players of the 1970s and 1980s.
Go to Profile#480
Olivier Messiaen
#11194
Overall Influence
1908 - 1992 (84 years)
Olivier Eugène Prosper Charles Messiaen was a French composer, organist, and ornithologist who was one of the major composers of the 20th century. His music is rhythmically complex. Harmonically and melodically, he employed a system he called modes of limited transposition, which he abstracted from the systems of material his early compositions and improvisations generated. He wrote music for chamber ensembles and orchestra, voice, solo organ, and piano, and experimented with the use of novel electronic instruments developed in Europe during his lifetime.
Go to Profile#481
Bill Simmons
#2787
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
William John Simmons III is an American podcaster, sportswriter, and cultural critic who is the founder and CEO of the sports and pop culture website The Ringer. Simmons first gained attention with his website as "The Boston Sports Guy" and was recruited by ESPN in 2001, where he eventually operated the website Grantland and worked until 2015. At ESPN, he wrote for ESPN.com, hosted his own podcast on ESPN.com titled The B.S. Report and was an analyst for two years on NBA Countdown.
Go to Profile#482
Stephen Wurm
#15906
Overall Influence
1922 - 2001 (79 years)
Stephen Adolphe Wurm was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-speaking Anna Novroczky. He was christened Istvan Adolphe Wurm. His father died before Stephen was born.
Go to Profile#483
Pentti Aalto
#15976
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Pentti Aalto was a Finnish linguist who was the University of Helsinki Docent of Comparative Linguistics 1958–1980. Aalto was a student of G. J. Ramstedt. He defended his doctoral dissertation in 1949 in Helsinki.
Go to Profile#485
Gilles Fauconnier
#9790
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
Gilles Fauconnier was a French linguist, researcher in cognitive science, and author, who worked in the U.S. He was distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department of Cognitive Science.
Go to Profile#486
Dan Slobin
#9158
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Dan Isaac Slobin is a professor emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Slobin has made major contributions to the study of children's language acquisition, and his work has demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison for the study of language acquisition and psycholinguistics in general.
Go to Profile#487
Don Lemon
#4165
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
Don Lemon is an American television journalist best known for being a host on CNN from 2014 until 2023. He anchored weekend news programs on local television stations in Alabama and Pennsylvania during his early days as a journalist. Lemon worked as a news correspondent for NBC on its programming, such as Today and NBC Nightly News. Lemon is also a recipient of an Edward R. Murrow Award in 2002 for his coverage of the capture of the Washington, D.C. snipers. He also received three regional Emmy Awards for his special report on real estate in Chicago and a business feature on craigslist.
Go to Profile#488
Patti Smith
#4575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Patricia Lee "Patti" Smith is an American singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and author who became an influential component of the New York City punk rock movement with her 1975 debut album Horses. Called the "punk poet laureate", Smith fused rock and poetry in her work. Her most widely known song, "Because the Night", co-written with Bruce Springsteen, reached number 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1978 and number five on the UK Singles Chart. In 2005, Smith was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. In 2007, she was inducted into the R...
Go to Profile#489
Willem Adelaar
#14180
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Willem F. H. Adelaar is a Dutch linguist specializing in Native American languages, specially those of the Andes. He is Professor of indigenous American Linguistics and Cultures at Leiden University.
Go to Profile#490
Juha Janhunen
#10736
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Juha Janhunen is a Finnish linguist whose wide interests include Uralic and Mongolic languages. Since 1994, he has been Professor in East Asian studies at the University of Helsinki. He has done fieldwork on Samoyedic languages and on Khamnigan Mongol. More recently, he has collaborated with Chinese scholar Wu Yingzhe to produce a critical edition of two newly discovered Liao Dynasty epitaphs written in the Khitan small script.
Go to Profile#491
Maurice Gross
#16848
Overall Influence
1934 - 2001 (67 years)
Maurice Gross was a French linguist and scholar of Romance languages. Beginning in the late 1960s he developed Lexicon-Grammar, a method of formal description of languages with practical applications.
Go to Profile#492
Barney Hoskyns
#5398
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Barney Hoskyns is a British music critic and editorial director of the online music journalism archive Rock's Backpages. Biography Hoskyns graduated from Oxford with a first class degree in English. He began writing about music for Melody Maker and New Musical Express, quitting his job as staff writer at NME to research a book about soul music. The result was Say It One Time For The Brokenhearted . He went on to write more than fifteen books on musicians and music history.
Go to Profile#493
Peter Jackson
#5601
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Sir Peter Robert Jackson is a New Zealand film director, screenwriter and producer. He is best known as the director, writer and producer of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy , both of which are adapted from the novels of the same name by J. R. R. Tolkien. Other notable films include the critically lauded drama Heavenly Creatures , the horror comedy The Frighteners , the epic monster remake film King Kong , the World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old and the documentary The Beatles: Get Back . He is the fourth-highest-grossing film director of all-time, his ...
Go to Profile#494
Oliver Stone
#3575
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
William Oliver Stone is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. Stone is known as a controversial but acclaimed director, tackling subjects ranging from the Vietnam war, and American politics to musical biopics and crime dramas. He has received numerous accolades including four Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and five Golden Globe Awards.
Go to Profile#495
Robert W. Young
#19687
Overall Influence
1912 - 2007 (95 years)
Robert W. Young , professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, was an American linguist known for his work on the Navajo language. From the late 1930s, Young cooperated with the Navajo linguist and scholar William Morgan, publishing a "practical orthography" in 1937.
Go to Profile#496
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#7471
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Karlheinz Stockhausen was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundbreaking work in electronic music, for introducing controlled chance into serial composition, and for musical spatialization.
Go to Profile#497
Calvert Watkins
#11209
Overall Influence
1933 - 2013 (80 years)
Calvert Watkins was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book How to Kill a Dragon. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retirement went to serve as professor-in-residence at UCLA.
Go to Profile#498
Robert Burchfield
#13929
Overall Influence
1923 - 2004 (81 years)
Robert William Burchfield CNZM, CBE was a lexicographer, scholar, and writer, who edited the Oxford English Dictionary for thirty years to 1986, and was chief editor from 1971. Education and career Born in Whanganui, New Zealand, he studied at Wanganui Technical College and Victoria University in Wellington. After war service in the Royal Regiment of New Zealand Artillery, he graduated MA from Wellington in 1948 and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford University, in England, where he was tutored by C. S. Lewis. He became a Fellow of Magdalen and lecturer in English straight after graduating , subsequently moving colleges to Christ Church and St Peter's .
Go to Profile#499
Carol Chomsky
#10380
Overall Influence
1930 - 2008 (78 years)
Carol Doris Chomsky was an American linguist and education specialist who studied language acquisition in children. Biography Carol Doris Schatz was born in Philadelphia on July 1, 1930. She married Noam Chomsky in 1949, the two having known each other since she was five years old and he was seven. Her mother had been a teacher at a Hebrew school where his father was the principal. She was awarded a bachelor's degree in French from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951.
Go to Profile#500
Howard Goldblatt
#6366
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Howard Goldblatt is a literary translator of numerous works of contemporary Chinese fiction, including The Taste of Apples by Huang Chunming and The Execution of Mayor Yin by Chen Ruoxi. Goldblatt also translated works of Chinese novelist and 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan, including six of Mo Yan's novels and collections of stories. He was a Research Professor of Chinese at the University of Notre Dame from 2002 to 2011.
Go to Profile