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,
#13651
João Pontes Nogueira
#190964
Overall Influence
João Pontes Nogueira is an academic at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. He is an editor for the peer-reviewed English language academic journal, International Political Sociology. He has many published journal articles in Portuguese but few, if any, in English.
Go to Profile#13652
Jacob M Kolman
#192158
Overall Influence
#13653
Dennis H. Farber
#147412
Overall Influence
1946 - 2017 (71 years)
Dennis "Denny" H. Farber was an American painter, photographer and educator. Faber was the director of the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art from 2000 to 2004 and co-chair of MICA’s Foundations department from 2010 to 2011.
Go to Profile#13654
Robin MacPherson
#177936
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Robin MacPherson is a filmmaker and was Chair in Creative Industries at the University of the Highlands and Islands before retiring. Previously he was Professor of Screen Media at Edinburgh Napier University, director of Screen Academy Scotland and of the Institute for Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier.
Go to Profile#13655
Bob Jahnke
#132547
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Hans George Jahnke is a New Zealand artist and educator, well-known for his graphic and sculptural artwork. He is a professor of Māori visual arts at Massey University. Biography and education Jahnke was born in 1951 in the Gisborne region and grew up in Waipiro Bay. His heritage is Māori, Samoan and Pākehā and he affiliates with the iwi Ngati Porou through three hapū: Ngāi Taharora, Te Whānau a Iritekura, and Te Whānau a Rakairoa. He has German and Irish ancestry on his Pākehā side. He was educated at Hato Paora College.
Go to Profile#13656
Patsy R. Smith
#192165
Overall Influence
Patsy R. Smith is an assistant professor at the Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences. Smith is the President of the Association of Black Nursing Faculty, as well as a Women in Science Denistry Medicine and Health (WiSDMH) Executive Committee Member. Her research focuses on substance abuse and mental illiness in older adults in vulnerable communities.
Go to Profile#13657
Cecily Hennessy
#188330
Overall Influence
Cecily Jane Hennessy, FSA, is the Academic Director of Christie's Education, London. She has promoted studies on the imagery of children and is an authority on the representation of children, adolescents and the family in Byzantium.
Go to Profile#13658
Brendan McConville
#121776
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Brendan McConville is an American author and professor of history at Boston University. His books on American history include The King's Three Faces and The American Revolution, 1763-1789 . Career McConville was educated at Brown University and Reed College, Portland. His research focuses on the intersection of politics and social developments in Early America, and his interests include colonial history and the English Reformation.
Go to Profile#13659
Amel Grami
#108960
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Amel Grami is a Tunisian academic, writer, and women's rights activist. Grami has worked as a professor of Islamic studies at Manouba University. She has advocated for Islamic modernism and Islamic feminism, and she argues that the Quran opposes heavy legal restrictions on women. She has been the subject of protest for her teachings on Islam and feminism, including an on-campus sermon in November 2011 that condemned her presence at the university.
Go to Profile#13660
Louisa Chase
#139553
Overall Influence
1951 - 2016 (65 years)
Louisa Lizbeth Chase was an American neo-expressionist painter and printmaker. Life Chase was born in 1951 in Panama City, Panama. She grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She earned her BFA in printmaking from Syracuse University in 1973 and her MFA in fine art from Yale University School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975. In the year of her graduation she had her first New York exhibition, at the alternative gallery Artists Space.
Go to Profile#13661
Riché J. Daniel Barnes
#192166
Overall Influence
Riché J. Daniel Barnes is a sociocultural anthropologist whose teaching and research specializations are at the intersection of black feminist theories, work and family policy, and African Diasporic raced, gendered, and classed identity formation. Her research focus has been on Black women and Black motherhood. She is currently the Dean of Pierson College at Yale University. Her ethnographic field research focus is the U.S. South and the Black Diaspora broadly defined. Dr. Barnes received her B.A. in Political Science from Spelman College, her M.S. in Urban Studies from the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University and her M.A.
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Alan Cline
#178888
Overall Influence
Alan Cline is an American computer scientist, and as of 2016 was the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor #2 at the University of Texas at Austin.
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Mehdi Noorbakhsh
#85612
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mehdi Noorbakhsh is an Iranian academic and political activist affiliated with the Freedom Movement of Iran. He is a professor of international affairs & business at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, having previously taught at the Center for International Studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and worked at Harvard University's Center for Middle Eastern Studies as a postdoctoral fellow. Noorbakhsh is vice president of World Affairs Councils of America's chapter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#13664
Juan Ignacio Pérez Iglesias
#159674
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#13665
Jonathan Augustin
#192170
Overall Influence
#13666
Mitsuhiro Takemura
#192172
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Mitsuhiro Takemura is a Japanese scholar specializing in the study of media design, professor at Sapporo City University. Takemura graduated from Nihon University in 1976 and received a master's degree from the same school in 1978.
Go to Profile#13667
Theresa Cameron
#171839
Overall Influence
1954 - 2012 (58 years)
Theresa Ann Cameron was the first African-American woman to be awarded tenure in the College of Design at Arizona State University, in 2000. Background After spending her entire childhood in foster care, Cameron put herself through college, with a full scholarship to Boston College and then a transfer to the State University of New York, Buffalo. She eventually obtained her Doctorate in Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991. Her difficult childhood experiences are chronicled in her book Foster Care Odyssey in America: A Black Girl's Story published in 2002, and detailed by Chr...
Go to Profile#13668
Christine Lang
#47562
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Christine Lang is a German microbiologist and entrepreneur. Life and work Lang was raised in Bochum, West Germany, with her brother Joachim Lang. She studied biology from 1976 to 1981 at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Sussex. In 1985, she obtained a Dr. rer. nat. in Biology in Bochum on the molecular genetics of fungi, with her thesis entitled "Extrachromosomal in vitro genetics in fungi: chondriome vectors in yeasts." She then worked in industrial research at the Hüls Chemie research center . In 1993 she moved to the Technical University of Berlin and habilitated in the field of microbiology and molecular genetics under the supervision of Ulf Stahl.
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Robert Fitzpatrick
#180625
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Robert Fitzpatrick is an Irish-American art academic and executive, entrepreneur, and politician. Early life Fitzpatrick was born in Toronto in 1940. Career In 1972, he was elected as Baltimore, Maryland's youngest city council member while also serving as a professor of medieval French literature and dean of students at Johns Hopkins University. Time Magazine named him one of its "200 Faces for the Future" in 1974.
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Paolo Knill
#60681
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Paolo Knill was a Swiss scientist, artist, and therapist. Knill was a professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he helped to found their graduate program in Expressive Arts Therapy. In 1994, Knill founded the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.
Go to Profile#13671
Mark Jason Dominus
#192185
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
#13672
Barbara Tisserat
#181442
Overall Influence
1951 - 2017 (66 years)
Barbara Tisserat was an American artist and lithographer born in Denver, Colorado. She taught lithography at Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts. She was a member of One/Off Printmakers and also taught at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Robinson House lithography workshop with Marilyn Bevilacqua. She was active with the Richmond Printmaking Workshop and served on the Advisory Board of Studio Two-Three in Richmond, Virginia. She was a member of the Summer 2007 graphics faculty at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and was a visiting artist and lecturer in the Lyceum program ...
Go to Profile#13673
Alfonso Rangel Guerra
#75360
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Alfonso Rangel Guerra is a Mexican lawyer, educator, writer and administrator. Career He received his law degree from the Autonomous University of Nuevo León in 1953. From 1958 to 1959, he had a scholarship which enabled him to study French literature at the Instituto Francés de América Latina and the Sorbonne. He served as Rector at UANL from 1962 to 1964, and is currently the Director of UANL's Center for Humanistic Studies. Over the years, he has held many professorships and administrative positions there. He has twice served as the Secretary of Education and Culture for the state of Nuev...
Go to Profile#13674
Hryhorii Tereshchuk
#107548
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Hryhorii Vasylovych Tereshchuk is a Ukrainian educator, doctor of pedagogical sciences , professor , and corresponding member of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine . Early life He graduated from the Ternopil Pedagogical Institute .
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Peter Larsen
#127313
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Peter Larsen is professor of media studies at the University of Bergen, Norway. Larsen's research areas include textual and sociohistorical studies of older as well as newer visual media. His theoretical and analytical work is informed by linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and recent advances in rhetoric.
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Emory Tolbert
#110471
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Emory J. Tolbert was an American historian, educator, and activist. His scholarship centers on Marcus Garvey and Garveyism, as well as wider aspects of African American history. Early years and education Emory Tolbert was born on December 26, 1946, to John and Johnie Mae Tolbert in Sanford, Florida. When he was three his family moved to Rochester, New York. Tolbert graduated cum laude from Atlantic Union College with a B.A. in History in 1968. In 1975, he earned a PhD in History from UCLA. His dissertation was a groundbreaking study of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association a...
Go to Profile#13678
Noboru Iwamura
#30535
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Noboru Iwamura was a Japanese biologist, medical doctor and professor of medicine. He was the only survivor, amongst eighty high school classmates, of the 1945 Hiroshima bombing. This experience led him to resolve to live his life for others. Under the UMN program, Iwamura was the first Japanese volunteer to arrive in Nepal, a nation struck with a pandemic of tuberculosis. He spent 22 years helping those living in deprivation and his efforts laid the foundation for the establishment of multiple medical facilities around the area.
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Craig Jamieson
#124328
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Craig Jamieson is Keeper of Sanskrit Manuscripts at the University of Cambridge. Before Cambridge he taught Buddhism in the Study of Religion Department at the University of Leicester. His best-known works are Perfection of Wisdom , which has a preface by the Dalai Lama, and Nagarjuna's Verses . A facsimile edition of the Lotus Sutra made available in print two Cambridge palm leaf manuscripts from around one thousand years ago, Add. 1682 and Add. 1683.
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Rachel E. Dinero
#192197
Overall Influence
#13681
Adib Farhadi
#107288
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Adib Farhadi is an assistant professor at University of South Florida and coordinator of USF's Executive Education Program. Farhadi is a former Afghanistan Deputy Minister of Commerce. Early life and education Farhadi was born in Kabul, Afghanistan and raised in Greenville, North Carolina, where he attended Rose High School. Farhadi earned his B.S. Degree at East Carolina University in 1994, his master's degree at New York University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in economy at University of Canberra in 2014. Farhadi completed his doctoral thesis, "Stabilization for Sustainable Economic Growth in Frag...
Go to Profile#13682
Robert S. Kemp
#169837
Overall Influence
Robert "Bob" S. Kemp is a Ramon W. Breeden, Sr, Research Professor in the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for over 30 years. He is a respected member of the finance department faculty and is trusted in areas such as finance, pension funds, and financial statement analysis. His work has been published in The Australian Financial Review, Journal of Financial Research, Advances in Accounting, Benefits Quarterly, Journal of Mathematics Applied in Business and Industry, Journal of Accountancy, Journal of Commercial Bank Lending, The Journal of Bank Ac...
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Stephanos Constantinides
#75351
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Stephanos Constantinides is a Canadian scholar. Biography Education Stephanos Constantinides was educated at the University of Athens , then in Paris at the Sorbonne. At the Sorbonne he studied Thucydides with famous scholar Jacqueline de Romilly, with whom he obtained a master's degree. In 1974 he obtained a Ph.D. in Political Sociology from the University of Paris I and in 1976 a Ph.D. in Political Science from Panthéon-Assas University.
Go to Profile#13684
Ron Mock
#70611
Overall Influence
Ron Mock is Professor of Politics and Peace Studies at George Fox University. He is also a Quaker author in the area of peace studies and conflict resolution. Mock was previously a practicing attorney, an instructor at University of Detroit Law School and a founding director of the Christian Conciliation Service of Southeastern Michigan.
Go to Profile#13685
Bruno Kurz
#174265
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Bruno Kurz is a German painter. He primarily works on reflective surfaces such as metal, creating paintings of great luminosity and depth – expansive colour fields with vague allusions to landscape and flora. Apart from painting, his work comprises large art installations fashioned through light.
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Scott D. G. Ventureyra
#192204
Overall Influence
Scott D. G. Ventureyra completed several undergraduate degrees (including one in economics from the University of Ottawa, a master of arts in theology from , and a PhD in philosophical theology from Carleton University/Dominican University College. He is the author of two books, including the Amazon bestseller, On the Origin of Consciousness: An Exploration through the Lens of the Christian Conception of God and Creation (Wipf and Stock). He has published in academic journals such as Science et Esprit, The American Journal of Biblical Theology, Studies in Religion, Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, and Maritain Studies.
Go to Profile#13687
Sadeka Halim
#93088
Overall Influence
Sadeka Halim is an academic. She is current vice-chancellor of Jagannath University, appointed by the President of Bangladesh since November 2023. She was a professor of the Dhaka University and the first female dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the university. She is the first female to be the Information Commissioner of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#13688
Bohdan Buiak
#108018
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Bohdan Buiak or Bohdan Buyak is a Ukrainian educator, public figure, political scientist, doctor of philosophy , professor , correspondent member of the National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine . Honored Worker of Education of Ukraine .
Go to Profile#13689
Rogers Brown
#192207
Overall Influence
#13690
Constance A Owens
#192208
Overall Influence
#13691
Diego Gutiérrez
#191894
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Diego Gutiérrez is a Cuban singer-songwriter. In 2018, Gutiérrez was nominated for his album Palante el Mambo! to the Latin Grammy Award for Best Tropical Fusion Album. Early years Diego Gutiérrez was born in Ciego de Ávila, where he lived during his childhood and adolescence. His brothers taught him to play the guitar, being themselves self-taught, and soon he began to sing the Trova Tradicional Cuban classics and also the songs of the Nueva Trova movement. Since he was little he got the influences of Cuban country and popular music through the old vinyls listened at home, which marked his ...
Go to Profile#13692
Piotr Tomasz Nowakowski
#78652
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Piotr Tomasz Nowakowski is a Polish researcher, Doctor of Pedagogy, Assistant Professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin. He is a Member of the International Cultic Studies Association , Florida . He holds the position of a secretary for international cooperation at the Polish quarterly "Społeczeństwo i Rodzina". He is "ICSA Today’s" news correspondent for Eastern Europe, is a Member of Editorial Board of the US annual "International Journal of Cultic Studies" , and a consulting editor for Nigerian quarterly "Journal of Educational Review".
Go to Profile#13693
Chris Sier
#124408
Overall Influence
Chris Sier is a professor at Newcastle University Business School. He has been appointed by the Financial Conduct Authority to chair its working group on disclosure of costs and charges for institutional investors.
Go to Profile#13694
Richard R. Baker
#120143
Overall Influence
1909 - 1993 (84 years)
#13695
Sean K. Wilson
#192212
Overall Influence
#13696
Sun Dongdong
#152700
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Sun Dongdong is the head of Peking University's forensics department and also runs Peking University's judicial expertise centre. In April 2009, Sun was heavily criticized because of statements he made about petitioners in China and the xinfang petition system. According to The Wall Street Journal, he supports "the forced hospitalizations of mentally ill petitioners" and has said, "When [a petitioner] insists on his particular point of view, that point of view is a symptom of paranoia. ... Hospitalization of is the greatest safeguard." Sun later issued an apology for his comments, saying he ...
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Jean Brihault
#112675
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Jean Brihault was a professor at the University of Rennes 2 which he holds as position of President from 1996 to 2001. Alongside his teaching activities, he held executive positions in the world of Handball. He was the President of European Handball Federation and the vice-president of International Handball Federation from 2012 to 2016.
Go to Profile#13698
B. B. Chakrabarti
#34850
Overall Influence
Binay Bhushan Chakrabarti, commonly known as B. B. Chakrabarti, is an Indian academic and professor of management and finance. He was the Director of Indian Institute of Management Ranchi . Now the director is Prof Shailendra Singh, another professor of IIM Lucknow.
Go to Profile#13699
Antonio García Martínez
#190021
Overall Influence
Antonio García Martínez, also known by his initials AGM, is a New York Times best-selling author and tech entrepreneur. He is a former product manager for Facebook, the CEO-founder of AdGrok, and a former quantitative analyst for Goldman Sachs.
Go to Profile#13700
Przemysław Turek
#172222
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Przemysław Wacław Turek is a Polish orientalist of the Institute of Middle and Far Eastern Studies , Jagiellonian University Membership in Organizations and Societies Polish Oriental Society.American Oriental Society since 2014.International Association of Maltese Linguistics since 2014.European Association of Israel Studies since 2017.Royal Asiatic Society since 2017.European Association of Biblical Studies since 2018.
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