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,

#13401

Hiroshi Senju

Hiroshi Senju
#46573
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Hiroshi Senju is a Japanese Nihonga painter known for his large scale waterfall paintings. Biography Hiroshi Senju was born in Tokyo. He has one brother, composer Akira Senju, and one sister, violinist Mariko Senjyu. He completed the BFA, Tokyo University of the Arts in 1982. He completed the MFA program in Fine Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1984. He completed the doctoral course at Tokyo University of the Arts in 1987. His graduation work was purchased by The University of Tokyo. The End of Dream, solo exhibition, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, Sydney, Australia was held in 1989.
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#13402

Francis Naumann

#101652
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Francis M. Naumann is a scholar, curator, and art dealer, specializing in the art of the Dada movement and the Surrealist periods. He has an MFA degree in painting from the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York .
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#13403

Edward S Rice

#191827
Overall Influence
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#13404

Alan Loehle

#185935
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Alan David Loehle is an American contemporary artist and professor of art at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. Education and career Born in Chicago, Illinois, Loehle received his B.F.A. from the University of Georgia in 1975 and his M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1979. He began exhibiting his paintings in Atlanta and New York City in 1983, and his work was featured in a 1999 print exhibition in the Paris Review. He has been teaching at Oglethorpe since 2001, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Painting in 2007.
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#13405

Bryan J Pavlovic

#191840
Overall Influence
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#13406

Johannes Sandven

#189508
Overall Influence
1909 - 2000 (91 years)
Johannes Sandven was a Norwegian educator. He was born in Fana. He was appointed professor at the University of Oslo from 1950 to 1979. He was a co-founder and editor of the journal Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research. He was decorated Knight, First Class of the Order of St. Olav in 1980.
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#13407

Rumy Hasan

#191844
Overall Influence
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#13408

Andrew Bernstein

#124412
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (125 years)
Andrew Bernstein is an American television director and producer. Biography Bernstein is the son of Judith and Walter Bernstein, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. In 2002, he directed his first film, the short Rooftop Kisses, starring Allison Janney, Maura Tierney, and Anton Yelchin.
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#13409

Benjamin Yandell

#167218
Overall Influence
1951 - 2004 (53 years)
Benjamin Hart Yandell was an American author, known as the posthumous winner of the 2008 Euler Book Prize. He graduated in 1973 with a bachelor's degree from Stanford University. On 26 August 1974, he married Janet Alaine Nippell , who was for some years on the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Times. They wrote a book about walks they took together in various neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Their book Mostly on Foot: A Year in L.A. was published in 1989.
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#13410

Philip A Vieira

#191851
Overall Influence
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#13411

Martin Boyce

#61043
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Martin Boyce is a Scottish sculptor inspired by early 20th century modernism. Boyce was born in Hamilton, South Lanarkshire and educated at Holy Cross High School in Hamilton. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art, graduating with a BA in environmental art in 1990, then a MFA in 1997. He lives in Glasgow with his wife and children.
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#13412

Jon-Håkon Schultz

#133887
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Jon-Håkon Schultz is a Norwegian educational psychologist and researcher on violence, terrorism and crisis psychology. He is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Centre for Violence and Traumatic Stress Studies and Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Tromsø.
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#13413

John Sumpter

#99474
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
John Philip Sumpter is a distinguished professor of Brunel University, UK. He is an ecotoxicologist, and was amongst the team that first discovered endocrine disruption in fish, and the role of endocrine disrupting chemicals. He also developed the yeast estrogen assay .
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#13414

Vanalyne Green

#101201
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Vanalyne Green is an American artist who also teaches and writes about culture. She has screened her video work extensively in the United States and abroad, including The Whitney Biennial , American Film Institute, Rotterdam International Film Festival, the Videotheque de Paris, The Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, The Guggenheim Museum and many other museums, universities and film festivals. She has received a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, as well as grants from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation , the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council of the Arts, and a Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome .
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#13415

Shahriar Rouhani

#143047
Overall Influence
Shahriar Rouhani is an Iranian physicist and political activist affiliated with the Freedom Movement of Iran. During the early days of Iranian Revolution in 1979, he took over the revolutionary Iranian embassy in the United States.
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#13416

Jennifer Reeder

#180697
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Jennifer Reeder is an American artist, filmmaker, and screenwriter. Her short film A Million Miles Away was nominated for a Tiger Award for Short Films at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and screened at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. Short Narrative Films category. In 2003, she had a solo screening at Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. She received a Rockefeller Grant for New Media in 2002 and a Creative Capital grant in 2015 to support the production of her first experimental feature-length film, Knives and Skin. She won a 2018–19 SFFILM Rainin Grant for scriptwriting, and was the 2019 recipient of the Alpert Film Award residency at the MacDowell Colony.
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#13417

Harry Keyishian

#79637
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Harry Keyishian is an editor and academic. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University and serves on the Editorial Board of Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. He directed Fairleigh Dickinson University Press from 1977 to 2017 and worked extensively on William Shakespeare and Armenian literature. As a teacher at the State University of New York , his refusal to sign an oath that he was not a member of the Communist Party led him to be the lead plaintiff in the Keyishian v. Board of Regents Supreme Court case that ruled states cannot prohibit employees from being me...
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#13418

Sreyashi Jhumki Basu

Sreyashi Jhumki Basu
#63511
Overall Influence
1977 - 2008 (31 years)
Sreyashi Jhumki Basu was a professor of Science Education at New York University who is best known for her work to encourage urban minority students to succeed through the study of science. Background Basu attended Stanford University, where she received a B.A. in Human Biology in 1998 and completed her doctorate in Science Education at Teachers College, Columbia University in 2006. For her PhD thesis titled How urban youth express critical agency in a 9th grade conceptual physics classroom, she received the Outstanding Dissertation Award in Division K from the American Educational Research ...
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#13419

Magda Cordell McHale

#18670
Overall Influence
1921 - 2008 (87 years)
Magda Cordell McHale was a Hungarian artist, futurist, and educator. She was a founding member of the Independent Group which was a British movement that originated Pop Art which grew out of a fascination with American mass culture and post-WWII technologies. Later, she was a faculty member in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture & Planning.
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#13420

Lorenzo Relova

#103471
Overall Influence
1916 - 2014 (98 years)
Lorenzo Relova was a Filipino judge who served as the 103rd Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from May 14, 1982, until January 19, 1986, during the Marcos era. He was the country's oldest living Supreme Court justice at the time of his death in 2014.
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#13421

Byron Breedlove

#191873
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
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#13422

Akshay Nair

#191590
Overall Influence
Akshay Nair is an Indian ophthalmologist based in Mumbai, India. He specializes in oculoplastics, orbital surgery and ocular oncology. Currently, Dr. Nair is the Director of Ophthalmic plastic surgery and ocular oncology services at the Mumbai units of Dr. Agarwal's Eye Hospital: Advanced Eye Hospital and Institute and Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital.
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#13423

Calvin Albert

#149328
Overall Influence
1918 - 2007 (89 years)
Calvin Albert was a member of American Abstract Artists, and Professor of Art at the Pratt Institute, from 1950 to 1985. He was a 1966 Guggenheim Fellow. He won an American finalist to the 1953 International Sculpture Competition.
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#13424

Julian N. Wasserman

#185713
Overall Influence
2000 - 2003 (3 years)
Julian Noa Wasserman was an American scholar of English, having been a Provost Distinguished Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans.
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#13425

Alain Goldschlager

Alain Goldschlager
#123498
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Alain Joseph Goldschläger , is a professor at the University of Western Ontario . He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto . He specializes in French language and literature, literature of the Shoah and testimonial writing.
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#13426

Stephanie Peay

Stephanie Peay
#169294
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Stephanie Peay is a British ecologist and crayfish researcher. Life and work Peay studied at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Hull, and in 2014 was awarded a PhD by the University of Leeds. She is a member of the Institute of Ecology and Environmental Management and a Chartered Environmentalist.
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#13427

Rodrigo Montoya

#190149
Overall Influence
1996 - Present (30 years)
Rodrigo Montoya is a Mexican racquetball player. He is the current International Racquetball Federation World Champion in both the Men's Team competition and Mixed Doubles , winning those titles at the 2022 Championships in San Luis Potosí, Mexico. That was his 4th IRF World Championship, as he won the 2018 Men's Singles in Costa Rica and the 2021 Men's Doubles with Javier Mar in Guatemala City, so Montoya is the first player to win singles, doubles and mixed doubles at Worlds. He is also the current Pan American Games champion in both Men's Singles and Doubles with Mar, winning those events at the 2019 Pan Am Games in Lima.
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#13428

Cevdet Erek

#175038
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Cevdet Erek is a Turkish artist and musician. Cevdet Erek was the recipient of the Nam Jun Paik Award in 2012. Education Erek studied architecture at Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts, while working at various architectural practices as well as in the music band Nekropsi. He left the master's program he had started at MSU for Istanbul Technical University's Center for Advanced Studies in Music , where he studied Sound Engineering and Design and worked as a research assistant from 2002 to 2011. Erek was an artist in residence at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam between 2005 and 2006.
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#13429

Emiliano Alessandri

#191881
Overall Influence
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#13430

Edmund Cranch

#134197
Overall Influence
1922 - 2015 (93 years)
Edmund Titus Cranch was an American engineering educator and academic administrator who served two terms as chair of the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell, and as dean of the Cornell University College of Engineering from 1972 to 1978. He was the 12th president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 1978-1985.
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#13431

David Mbah

#173456
Overall Influence
David Mbah is a professor of Mechanical engineering at the University of Lagos. He is a fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Science who was elected into the Academy’s Fellowship at its Annual General Meeting held in January, 2015. In 2010, he won the Ludwig Mond Award for outstanding contributions to the field of Engineering.
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#13432

Tristram Seidler

#191884
Overall Influence
Tristram G. Seidler is an American botanist, ecologist and professor at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His work includes studying sampling biases in herbarium collections, seed dispersal patterns, and curating plant and plant cell culture collections for use in research.
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#13433

Scott W. Browning

#191886
Overall Influence
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#13434

Tim Anderson

#176876
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Tim Anderson is an Australian academic and activist. He was a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney until early 2019, and the author of several books on independent development and anti-imperialism. In 1979, he was convicted and imprisoned for an alleged Ananda Marga conspiracy to murder a National Front leader Robert Cameron, but was pardoned in 1985 after an inquiry and awarded compensation. In a linked case, in 1990 he was convicted of ordering the 1978 Sydney Hilton Hotel bombing and sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment, but was acquitted on appeal in 1991. He subsequently beca...
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#13435

Harry Leonard Sawatzky

#112012
Overall Influence
1931 - 2008 (77 years)
Harry Leonard Sawatzky was a Canadian scholar in the field of human geography. Sawatzky grew up in a traditional Plautdietsch-speaking Russian Mennonite community in southern Manitoba. He got his BA from the University of Manitoba in 1961. In 1963 he got his MA and in 1967 his PhD, both from the University of California, Berkeley. In 1963 he began his teaching at the University of Manitoba.
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#13436

Stefanie Tschegg

#176855
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Stefanie Tschegg is an emeritus at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. Life Tschegg received her doctoral degree from the University of Vienna in 1971. From 1980 to 1981, she was a visiting associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She finished her habilitation in physics in 1982. In 1989, she became a professor of physics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.
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#13437

E. U. Essien-Udom

#81415
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Professor Essien Udosen Essien-Udom was born in Ikot Osong, Eastern Provinces, Nigeria , the first son of Timothy and Adiaha Essien. He was educated in the local primary school and Holy Family College, Abak, Eastern Nigeria; Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio ; and the University of Chicago .
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#13438

Jonathan Bradshaw

#107283
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Richard Bradshaw, is a British academic, specialising in social policy, poverty and child welfare. He is Professor Emeritus of Social Policy at the University of York and a part-time Professor of Social Policy at Durham University. Since 2013, he has served as chairman of the policy committee of Child Poverty Action Group.
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#13439

John van de Geer

John van de Geer
#158787
Overall Influence
1926 - 2008 (82 years)
Johannes Petrus "John" van de Geer was a Dutch psychologist, and Professor of Experimental Psychology at Leiden University, particularly known for his "Introduction to multivariate analysis for the social sciences".
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#13440

Frank Knopfelmacher

#88601
Overall Influence
1923 - 1995 (72 years)
Frank Knopfelmacher was a Czech Jew who migrated to Australia in 1955 and became a psychology lecturer and anticommunist political commentator at the University of Melbourne. He engaged in vigorous polemics with many members of the left-wing intelligentsia from the Vietnam War period onwards, and through his teaching had a formative impact on many Australian postwar thinkers and writers such as Raimond Gaita and Robert Manne.
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#13441

Kay Dian Kriz

#160072
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Kay Dian Kriz is professor emerita of art and architecture at Brown University. She is a specialist in British landscape painting and the visual culture of British colonialism and West Indian slavery.
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#13442

Matthew Sanders

#180090
Overall Influence
Matthew Roy Sanders is a parenting researcher and professor at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. In 2018, he was named as one of the Queensland Greats by Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk in a ceremony at the Queensland Art Gallery on 8 June 2018.
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#13443

Urs Erwin Gasser

#191904
Overall Influence
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#13444

Laerke Recht

#191905
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Laerke Recht is a Professor of Early Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Graz. Recht’s research focuses on the archaeology of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean. Her most recent project is “The Spirited Horse: Human-equid relations in the Bronze Age Near East.”
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#13445

Berrin Yanıkkaya

#178851
Overall Influence
Berrin Yanıkkaya is a full professor at the Yeditepe University in Turkey. Academic career After a 2004 PhD at titled 'Women voices in the city women's self-expression through cultural products in istanbul after 1990s ' at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University , she worked as professor at Yeditepe University in Turkey before moving to the Auckland University of Technology as full professor. She left AUT at the end of 2018.
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#13446

Said Faiq

#137327
Overall Influence
Said Faiq is an established academic in the field of Translation, Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication. He has worked in Africa, the Middle East and Europe practicing in translation and intercultural briefing for 16 years. Initially, Faiq worked in the United Kingdom at the University of Salford and the University of Leeds. At Salford, Faiq was the director of studies for Arabic/English translation & interpreting undergraduate and graduate programs from 1995 to 2001. He later moved to the American University of Sharjah where he became the director of the Master of Arts in English...
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#13447

Robin Darwall-Smith

#75696
Overall Influence
Robin Haydon Darwall-Smith FRHistS is a British archivist, based in Oxford and associated with several Oxford University College archives. Robin Darwall-Smith studied classics at University College, Oxford under George Cawkwell, as an undergraduate and postgraduate. He then trained as an archivist at the University of Liverpool. While at Oxford, Darwall-Smith represented University College on the television quiz show University Challenge in 1987, reaching the series final.
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#13448

Peter G. Delaney

#188816
Overall Influence
Peter G. Delaney is the Executive Director of LFR International and a road safety researcher responsible for the Lay First Responder Model of emergency medical services development in resource-limited countries, awarded the Prince Michael International Road Safety Award in 2020.
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#13449

Suzy Castor

Suzy Castor
#48087
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Suzy Castor is a Haitian historian, educator and human rights activist. She was born in Port-au-Prince and studied social sciences at the École normale supérieure there. In Haiti in 1958 she got a diploma in social sciences from the Higher Normal School of Haiti. Castor earned a PhD in history from the National Autonomous University of Mexico . While living in exile in Mexico, she was a professor of political science and of philosophy and letters at UNAM from 1968 to 1986. In the latter year, following the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, Castor and her husband Gérard Pierre-Charles returned to Haiti.
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#13450

Kenneth Matengu

#109429
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Kenneth Kamwi Matengu is a Namibian professor and vice-chancellor of the University of Namibia since 2018 after he replaced retired Prof. Lazarus Hangula in August 2018. He was Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research, Innovation and Resources Mobilization at the University of Namibia from 2016 to 2018. On 29 June 2018, Matengu was appointed as the third vice-chancellor of the University of Namibia becoming the youngest person to assume the position.
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