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 Computer Science,
#11551
Ankur Kalra
#181983
Overall Influence
#11552
Javier Andreu-Perez
#173867
Overall Influence
Javier Andreu-Perez is a British computer scientist and a Senior Lecturer and Chair in Smart Health Technologies at the University of Essex. He is also associate editor-in-chief of Neurocomputing for the area of Deep Learning and Machine Learning. Andreu-Perez research is mainly focused on Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence . He also chairs a interdisciplinary lab in this area, HCAI-Essex.
Go to Profile#11553
Altaf Wani
#106343
Overall Influence
Altaf A. Wani is retired a professor in the Department of Radiology and the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology at Ohio State University . He eas a member of Molecular Carcinogenesis and Chemoprevention program of the James Cancer Hospital and Research Institute. Dr. Wani was the Director of Molecular Carcinogenesis Laboratory and conducts Basic Cancer research in the area of DNA damage and repair.
Go to Profile#11554
Linda Vallejo
#90734
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Linda Vallejo is an American artist known for painting, sculpture and ceramics. Her work often addresses her Mexican-American ethnic identity within the context of American art and popular culture. The founder of the commercial art gallery Galería Las Américas, she is also an arts educator and has been involved in traditional Native American and Mexican rituals and ceremonies for many years.
Go to Profile#11555
Tobias Abse
#57083
Overall Influence
Dr. Tobias Abse is a historian. He was a lecturer in the subject at Goldsmiths College of the University of London from 1994 to 2016. Abse has written extensively on the rise of the Fascist Right in Italy prior to World War II. He has been a member of the Socialist Alliance National Executive, the Alliance for Green Socialism National Committee, the Socialist History Society committee and the Revolutionary History editorial board and is a regular contributor to UK socialist newspapers and magazines.
Go to Profile#11556
Joshua Shemer
#39153
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Joshua Shemer is an Israeli professor, doctor, and chair of the Assuta Medical Centers network in Israel, currently building and developing the new advanced highly sophisticated public hospital in the city of Ashdod, the first of its kind built in Israel in the past forty years. He formerly served as Director General of Maccabi Healthcare Services, providing health services to 24% of the Israeli population. Shemer served as director general of the Ministry of Health and Surgeon General of the Israel Defense Forces Military Health Corps, holding the rank of brigadier general.
Go to Profile#11557
Tyra Wolfsberg
#170234
Overall Influence
Tyra Gwendolen Wolfsberg is an American bioinformatician. She is the associate director of the bioinformatics and scientific programming core at the National Human Genome Research Institute. Life Wolfsberg received a A.B. in molecular biology from Princeton University. She earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry and biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco. Her 1995 dissertation was titled Identification and characterization of ADAM, a novel gene family. Wolfsberg transitioned to computationally based research by performing a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at NIH.
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Arthur Polonsky
#91253
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Arthur Polonsky was a figurative painter, draughtsman and educator, known for his explorations of light, water, flight and similarly lyrical motifs that, in esoteric and unsettling ways, alluded to myth, fantasy, music, the Bible, or the poetry of Symbolist and Modernist poets like Rimbaud and Rilke. "The dialogue between color, texture and subject is always alive" the late artist Barbara Swan Fink says of his work. His drawings, in particular, "have the excitement of a direct response to a subject, a daring use of line or tone, a sense of charged intensity. His portrait drawings not only hav...
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Girdhar Kumar Pandey
#157580
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Girdhar Kumar Pandey is an Indian molecular biologist, biochemist, biotechnologist, and a professor at the department of plant molecular biology of the South Campus of the University of Delhi. He is known for his studies on the signal transduction pathways in Arabidopsis and Oryza sativa and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India and the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions...
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Tao Yang
#182061
Overall Influence
#11561
Andrew S. Breidenbaugh
#91536
Overall Influence
Andrew S. Breidenbaugh is an American librarian and director of the Tampa-Hillsborough County Public Library System. He has worked to bring online databases, eBooks, streaming media, music, and courses to the system.
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Christophe Lambert
#182077
Overall Influence
#11563
Raja Sen
#50138
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Raja Sen is an Indian film and television director and the winner of three National Film Awards from Kolkata, West Bengal, India. He is the father of Rajorshi Sen. Career Raja Sen first received recognition with Subarnalata , a teleserial, he followed it up with Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Arogyo Niketan, few episodes of Desh Amaar Desh are some of the notables of the Bengali television arena.
Go to Profile#11564
Charles Fox
#112852
Overall Influence
1921 - 1991 (70 years)
Charles Richard Jeremy Fox was an English writer and broadcaster who specialised in jazz. He left school at 14 and trained as a draughtsman. His career in journalism began in the 1940s via letters to Melody Maker and jazz magazines of the era such as Jazz Music , Jazz Forum and Jazz Journal. He settled in London in the early 1950s working as a sub-editor on the Recorder newspaper and edited a poetry magazine entitled Ninepence founded with the poets Patrick Brangwyn and Christopher Logue. Fox was part of the group around McCarthy who founded Jazz Monthly magazine in 1955; the magazine continued publication until 1972.
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D. Scott Phoenix
#177399
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (44 years)
D. Scott Phoenix is an American entrepreneur and former cofounder and CEO of Vicarious, an artificial intelligence research company funded by 250M from Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and others that was acquired by Alphabet Inc in 2022.
Go to Profile#11566
Zoran Živković
#182112
Overall Influence
#11567
Thomas L. Kieft
#176124
Overall Influence
Dr. Thomas L. Kieft is an environmental microbiologist who investigates the ecology and biogeochemistry of microbes in extreme environments. He is a professor of Biology at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Go to Profile#11568
Dudley Dillard
#87896
Overall Influence
1913 - 1991 (78 years)
Dudley Dillard was an economist and a professor at the University of Maryland from 1942 until his retirement in 1984. Dillard was born in Ontario, Oregon, and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a doctorate in 1940. In 1948, he published The Economics of John Maynard Keynes, which was translated into several languages. Dillard was the recipient of the Veblen-Commons Award in 1986, and served as vice president of the History of Economics Society. He was also a former chairman of the United States Executive Board of the American College in Paris. He is survived by his w...
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Ozer Schild
#44132
Overall Influence
1930 - 2006 (76 years)
Erling Ozer Schild , a Danish-born Israeli academic, was president of the University of Haifa and president of the College of Judea and Samaria, known as "Ariel College". Biography Schild was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He identified as an Orthodox Jew before the Holocaust, and was not affiliated after the WWII. During the Holocaust he went into hiding under a false identity in Copenhagen, and in Saunte, Denmark.
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Alan Knight
#93960
Overall Influence
1949 - 2017 (68 years)
Alan David Knight was an adjunct Professor at Griffith University, Honorary Research Fellow at the Centre of Asia Studies at Hong Kong University, a visiting professor at the University of Hong Kong and Emeritus Professor at Central Queensland University. He was Head of the Graduate School of Journalism at University of Technology, Sydney and Head of journalism at the Queensland University of Technology from 2005 to 2009.
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Jóhanna Gunnlaugsdóttir
#168651
Overall Influence
Jóhanna Gunnlaugsdóttir is a professor in Information and Records Management and Electronic Communications in the Faculty of Sociology, Anthropology and Folkloristics at the University of Iceland. Professional experience Jóhanna completed a BA in Library Science and History from the University of Iceland in 1985, an MSc in the Management and Operations of Companies, with emphasis on information institutions and companies' information systems from the University of Wales in 1998, and a doctorate in Information Science from the University of Tampere, Finland, in 2006. She is the first Icelander...
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Francesco Negro
#182211
Overall Influence
#11573
Holly Fay
#62509
Overall Influence
Holly Fay is a Canadian contemporary artist in Regina, Saskatchewan. She is known for her oil paintings and drawings, which explore themes of nature, perspective, landscape, representation, and history. Her works have been exhibited across Canada and internationally. She is currently an instructor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Regina and at the Neil Balkwill Civic Arts Centre.
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Jonathan C R Jones
#182228
Overall Influence
#11575
Kevin Lang
#182237
Overall Influence
#11576
Samuel C. O. Holt
#171528
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Samuel C. O. Holt is a radio and television executive who made significant contributions to the early development of the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. As the first programming director at PBS, Holt helped created such programs as Masterpiece Theatre and The MacNeil-Lehrer Report . When NPR was formed in 1970, the leadership of the network followed many of the recommendations in Holt's report, Public Radio Study, which urged noncommercial radio stations to “think about being something other than ... a classical music turntable.”
Go to Profile#11577
Michael Baum
#182243
Overall Influence
#11578
Michael Engel
#182249
Overall Influence
#11579
Elery Hamilton-Smith
#135359
Overall Influence
1929 - 2015 (86 years)
Elery Hamilton-Smith was an Australian interdisciplinary scholar and academic, and later an adjunct professor of Environmental Studies at Charles Sturt University. Background Elery Hamilton-Smith was born on a property named Shady Grove, near Hahndorf and grew up in rural South Australia.
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Lakshman Tamil
#179957
Overall Influence
Lakshman Tamil is a researcher and professor known for his contributions to the fields of wireless communication, telemedicine, machine learning, and quality of life technology. He is also known for his role as a director of University of Texas at Dallas' Quality of Life Labs and advancements in AI for cancer screening.
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Andrea Lawrence
#141761
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Andrea Lawrence is an American computer scientist and educator. She is an associate professor of computer science at Spelman College. Early life and education Lawrence was born in Asheville, North Carolina. She graduated from Allen High School in 1964 and went on to enroll at Spelman College, before ultimately earning a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Purdue University in 1970. She earned Master of Science in computer science from Atlanta University in 1985, and in 1993, she became the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in computer science from Georgia Tech.
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Albert Erives
#129267
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Albert Erives is a developmental geneticist who studies transcriptional enhancers underlying animal development and diseases of development . Erives also proposed the pacRNA model for the dual origin of the genetic code and universal homochirality. He is known for work at the intersection of genetics, evolution, developmental biology, and gene regulation. He has worked at the California Institute of Technology, University of California, Berkeley, and Dartmouth College, and is an associate professor at the University of Iowa.
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Irshad Hussain
#182346
Overall Influence
#11584
John N. Thompson
#85435
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
John Norton Thompson is an American evolutionary biologist. Thompson is Jean H. Langeheim Professor of Plant Ecology and Evolution at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is known for his research on coevolution. He proposed the geographic mosaic theory of coevolution.
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Vicki L. Gregory
#170378
Overall Influence
Dr. Vicki L. Gregory is professor emeritus at the School of Information at the University of South Florida . She and was director of the School from 1999 until 2007. Her fields of specialization include: academic libraries, digital librarianship, technical services, information science, library networking, library automation, and collection development. Prior to teaching at USF Dr. Gregory was Director of Systems and Operations for the Auburn University at Montgomery Library. She is currently President of Beta Phi Mu. She was Treasurer for the Association for Information Science and Technology and the winner of the 2014 Watson Davis Award.
Go to Profile#11586
Edwin H. Land
#120957
Overall Influence
1909 - 1991 (82 years)
Edwin Herbert Land, ForMemRS, FRPS, Hon.MRI was an American scientist and inventor, best known as the co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation. He invented inexpensive filters for polarizing light, a practical system of in-camera instant photography, and the retinex theory of color vision, among other things. His Polaroid instant camera went on sale in late 1948 and made it possible for a picture to be taken and developed in 60 seconds or less.
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Douglas D. Taylor
#180619
Overall Influence
Douglas D. Taylor is an entrepreneur and former academic researcher in the field of extracellular vesicles. Taylor attained a bachelor's degree from the University of Richmond and a Ph.D. from Wake Forest University. He was a post-doctoral fellow at Boston University. Taylor was a professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women's Healthheld at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He was also on the faculty of the University of California, Davis. From 2013 to 2015, he was the Chief Scientific Officer of Aethlon Medical's wholly owned subsidiary,...
Go to Profile#11588
Damien Coyle
#181556
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Damien Hugh Coyle is an Irish computer scientist and researcher, best known for his various publications on computational neuroscience, neuroimaging, neurotechnology, and brain-computer interface. He has served as Professor of Neurotechnology at the Ulster University. He was made a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2013.
Go to Profile#11589
Jules White
#182430
Overall Influence
#11590
Evgeny Pokushalov
#48465
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Evgeny A. Pokushalov is a Russian electrophysiologist. Professional qualifications MD , PhD, Professor of Medicine Present appointment Deputy Director of the clinics network "New medical technologies center"; Advisor to the Chairman of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences
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Dominik Fleitmann
#124455
Overall Influence
Dominik Fleitmann is professor of Quaternary Geology at the University of Basel. Fleitmann primarily researches palaeoclimatology using stalagmites collected from caves in the Middle East and has also linked these records to societal impacts using archaeological and historical evidence.
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P. J. Hyett
#172711
Overall Influence
1985 - Present (41 years)
Phillip Jeffrey Hyett is an American software developer, technology entrepreneur, and a co-founder of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git, which he created with Tom Preston-Werner and Chris Wanstrath in 2008. In 2022 Hyett founded an auto racing team, AO Racing, an IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship GT Daytona program, to compete in GT3 races.
Go to Profile#11593
Emily Black
#176790
Overall Influence
Emily Black is a British environmental scientist. As of June 2022, she is Professor of Meteorology at the University of Reading and a senior research fellow in National Centre for Atmospheric Science .
Go to Profile#11594
Luca Longo
#181460
Overall Influence
Luca Longo is an Italian computer scientist specializing in Explainable artificial intelligence, Deep Learning and Argumentation theory with research in the areas of Human performance modeling. As the founder and general chair of the World Conference on Explainable artificial intelligence, he performs fundamental research in the area of computational models of Cognitive Load and is the editor of books and journals with Springer Publishing and Frontiers Media . He is a public speaker disseminating technical knowledge to the wider public and contributing to the non-profit organization TED "...
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Benjamin Colbert
#116683
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Benjamin Colbert is a British-based American academic who is Reader in English at the University of Wolverhampton and an expert on historical travel writing. Educated at Tulane University, Oxford University and UCLA, he is the author of Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision and the editor of volume 3 of British Satire 1785–1840. He is the editor of the Database of British Travel Writing, 1780–1840.
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Peng Zhou
#182495
Overall Influence
#11597
Margaret Ross
#154504
Overall Influence
Margaret Ross MBE, FBCS is an Emeritus Professor of Software Quality at Southampton Solent University. She serves on the BCSWomen Committee of the British Computer Society. BCS Women is a specialist group for networking and sharing knowledge amongst women computing professionals. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Staffordshire University, Hon FBCS and the John Ivison Award from the BCS. Margaret's work was recognised in 2008 with the MBE.
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Estian Calitz
#40013
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Estian Calitz is the executive director of finance and professor of economics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa since 2003. Calitz was born and grew up in the Western Cape Province town of George, South Africa. After completing his master's degree in economics at Stellenbosch University, he first joined the South African Reserve Bank, then the University of Pretoria and Rand Afrikaans University.
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Wen Gao
#182514
Overall Influence
#11600
Dov Shmotkin
#130702
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Dov Shmotkin is Professor Emeritus in the School of Psychological Sciences and Head of the Herczeg Institute on Aging at Tel Aviv University. Biography Dov Shmotkin was born in 1949 in Rishon Le-Zion, Israel. He is Professor Emeritus in the School of Psychological Sciences and Head of the Herczeg Institute on Aging, both at Tel Aviv University, where he also received his Ph.D. He is a senior clinical psychologist and was formerly the head of the clinical psychology graduate program in the School of Psychological Sciences. Shmotkin was Visiting Scholar in the Institute of Gerontology at the Un...
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