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.
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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).
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List of the most influential people in Criminology,
#1
Jock Young
#2531
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Jock Young was a British sociologist and an influential criminologist. Biography Jock Young was educated at the London School of Economics. His PhD was an ethnography of drug use in Notting Hill, West London, out of which he developed the concept of moral panic. The research was published as The Drugtakers. He was a founding member of the National Deviancy Conferences and a group of critical criminologists in which milieu he wrote the groundbreaking, The New Criminology: For a Social Theory of Deviance in 1973, with Ian Taylor and Paul Walton and The Manufacture of News .
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Travis Hirschi
#1190
Overall Influence
1935 - 2017 (82 years)
Travis Warner Hirschi was an American sociologist and an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Arizona. He helped to develop the modern version of the social control theory of crime and later the self-control theory of crime.
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Albert K. Cohen
#5610
Overall Influence
1918 - 2014 (96 years)
Albert Kircidel Cohen was a prominent American criminologist. He is known for his Subcultural Theory of delinquent urban gangs, including his influential book Delinquent Boys: Culture of the Gang. He has served as Vice President of the American Society of Criminology from 1984–1985 and in 1993 he received the society's Edwin H. Sutherland award.
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Jerzy Sarnecki
#12438
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#5
Freda Adler
#8213
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Freda Adler is a criminologist and educator, currently serving as professor emeritus at Rutgers University and a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She was President of the American Society of Criminology in 1994-1995. She has acted as a consultant to the United Nations on criminal justice matters since 1975, holding various roles within United Nations organizations. A prolific writer, Adler has published in a variety of criminological areas, including female criminality, international issues in crime, piracy, drug abuse, and social control theories.
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David P. Farrington
#19368
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#7
Nils Christie
#6867
Overall Influence
1928 - 2015 (87 years)
Nils Christie was a Norwegian sociologist and criminologist. He was a professor of criminology at the Faculty of Law, University of Oslo. Personal life Christie was born in Oslo on 24 February 1928, a son of Ragnvald Christie and Ruth Hellum. He married Vigdis Margit Moe in 1951, and was later married to .
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Gary Kleck
#5576
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gary Kleck is a criminologist and the David J. Bordua Professor Emeritus of Criminology at Florida State University. Early life and education Kleck was born in Lombard, Illinois, to William and Joyce Kleck. He attended Glenbard East High School before enrolling in the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he received his BA , MA , and PhD , all in Sociology.
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Lawrence W. Sherman
#7641
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Lawrence W. Sherman is an American experimental criminologist and police educator who is the founder of evidence-based policing. Sherman's use of randomized controlled experiments to study deterrence and crime prevention has led him to examine such wide-ranging issues as domestic violence, saturation patrol, gun violence, crack houses, and reintegrative shaming. He has collaborated with over 30 police and justice agencies around the world, and been credited as a key founder of the field of experimental criminology.
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Lonnie Athens
#11870
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#11
George L. Kelling
#2718
Overall Influence
1935 - 2019 (84 years)
George Lee Kelling was an American criminologist, a professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University–Newark, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He previously taught at Northeastern University.
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Louk Hulsman
#8423
Overall Influence
1923 - 2009 (86 years)
Lodewijk Henri Christian Hulsman, known as Louk Hulsman was a Dutch legal scientist and criminologist. Life According to Hulsman, his childhood and adolescence were marked by the time he spent in a religious boarding school that left him traumatized. After graduating from school Hulsman was involved in a resistance movement during World War II. In 1944 he was convicted of using counterfeit identification papers and imprisoned at the Amersfoort concentration camp. While being transferred to Germany he successfully escaped. After returning to the Netherlands he joined the Allied troops as a soldier during the last weeks of the Second World War.
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William Chambliss
#10775
Overall Influence
1933 - 2014 (81 years)
William Joseph Chambliss was an American criminologist and sociologist. He was a professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at The George Washington University for over 20 years. He was a pioneer of the conflict theory which concluded, among other things, that conflict between different social classes is the fundamental force in capitalist societies. In addition to his transformative scholarly contributions, he was a teacher-scholar and mentor to many of today’s leading criminologists and sociologists.
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Alfred Blumstein
#5982
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
#15
John Braithwaite
#12560
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#16
David Matza
#7566
Overall Influence
1930 - 2018 (88 years)
David Matza was an American sociologist who taught at University of California, Berkeley from 1961. Life and Work Born in New York, he received his PhD from Princeton University in 1959. His research fields included deviant behavior, social change, poverty and working class life. He is best known for coauthoring, with Gresham Sykes, techniques of neutralization.
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Michael R. Gottfredson
#5660
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Michael Ryan Gottfredson is the former President of the University of Oregon, serving from August 1, 2012 to August 6, 2014. Biography He has a B.A from the University of California, Davis, a M.A. and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Albany.
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David Downes
#41340
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
David Downes is a British sociologist and criminologist and is Professor Emeritus of Social Administration at the London School of Economics. Downes was one of the founder members of the National Deviancy Conference.
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James Alan Fox
#8170
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
James Alan Fox is the Lipman Family Professor of Criminology, Law, and Public Policy and former dean at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, in the United States. Fox holds a bachelor's degree in sociology , a master's degree in criminology , a master's degree in statistics , and a Ph.D. in sociology , all from the University of Pennsylvania.
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Raúl Zaffaroni
#11257
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni is a former Argentine polititian and judge. He served as a member of the Supreme Court of Argentina from 2003 until 2015, when he resigned due to age restrictions to hold the position. He subsequently served in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 2016 to 2022.
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Marvin Wolfgang
#20340
Overall Influence
1924 - 1998 (74 years)
Marvin Eugene Wolfgang was an American sociologist and criminologist. Biography Wolfgang was a soldier in World War II and participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino. After the war he studied at Dickinson College, graduating in 1948, and the University of Pennsylvania, where his principal teacher was Thorsten Sellin. At Penn, Wolfgang took his MA and PhD in sociology/criminology. Until his death in 1998 he was a professor of criminology at the University of Pennsylvania.
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Albert J. Reiss
#15889
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Albert John Reiss Jr. was an American sociologist and criminologist. Career He served as the William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology at Yale University from 1970 until his retirement in 1993. He is recognized for his contributions to social control theory, as well as for his research on police violence. He has been credited with coining the term "proactive" while researching violent incidents between police and private citizens as a research director for Lyndon B. Johnson's President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. This research led Reiss to conclude that t...
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Ronald V. Clarke
#28329
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#24
Tim Newburn
#21979
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
William Henry Timothy Newburn is an academic, specialising in criminology and policing. Career He was president of the British Society of Criminology from 2005–2008, director of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology from 2003-2008 and is currently head of the Department of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science. From 1997, he was Director of the Public Policy Research Unit at Goldsmiths College and has previously worked at the Policy Studies Institute, the National Institute for Social Work, the Home Office and Leicester University.
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Paul Rock
#40148
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Paul Rock is British sociologist and criminologist, and is Professor of Social Institutions at the London School of Economics. He was a founder member of the National Deviancy Conference. Paul Rock has contributed to the field of public criminology. He believes that this field should not be looked away in the eyes of criminologist, however, he does state that public criminology does have flaws. Flaws that may not allow it to "rise" up.
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Shaun L. Gabbidon
#12956
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
#27
Kim Rossmo
#48495
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Dr. Kim Rossmo is a Canadian criminologist specializing in geographic profiling. Vancouver He joined the Vancouver Police Department as a civilian employee in 1978 and became a sworn officer in 1980. In 1987 he received a master's degree in criminology from Simon Fraser University and in 1995 became the first police officer in Canada to obtain a doctorate in criminology. His dissertation research resulted in a new criminal investigative methodology called geographic profiling, based on Rossmo's formula. This technology was integrated into a specialized crime analysis software product called Rigel.
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Leon Radzinowicz
#23113
Overall Influence
1906 - 1999 (93 years)
Sir Leon Radzinowicz, was a criminologist and academic. He was the founding director of the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. Early life Radzinowicz was born on 15 August 1906 in Łódź, Congress Poland. He studied law as an undergraduate student at the University of Paris and the University of Geneva. He went on to study for a doctorate at the University of Cracow. During this time, he spent a year studying under Enrico Ferri at the Institute of Criminology in Rome, Italy. Radzinowicz moved to England in 1938, having been granted funding by the Pol...
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Mimi Ajzenstadt
#20199
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Mimi Ajzenstadt is an Israeli criminologist who was named the Mildred and Benjamin Berger Chair in Criminology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and is the President of the Open University of Israel.
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Daniel Nagin
#20513
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
#31
David Weisburd
#35230
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David L. Weisburd , is an Israeli/American criminologist who is well known for his research on crime and place, policing and white collar crime. Weisburd was the 2010 recipient of the prestigious Stockholm Prize in Criminology, and was recently awarded the Israel Prize in Social Work and Criminological Research, considered the state's highest honor. Weisburd holds joint tenured appointments as Distinguished Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University. and Walter E. Meyer Professor of Law and Criminal Justice in the Institute of Criminology of the Hebrew University Fa...
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Gresham Sykes
#18530
Overall Influence
1922 - 2010 (88 years)
Gresham M'Cready Sykes was an American sociologist and criminologist. He earned a Bachelor of Arts at Princeton University and a Ph.D. at Northwestern University. He taught at Princeton, Dartmouth, and Northwestern prior to becoming sociology professor at the University of Virginia. Sykes's study of New Jersey State Prison has been described as a pioneering look at the issues faced by guards, as well as the pains of imprisonment encountered by inmates . His most famous work is The Society of Captives, which is sometimes considered the first work in the genre of prison sociology. He coauthored...
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Mike Sutton
#18262
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Michael Robert Sutton is an ex-reader in criminology in the School of Social Sciences at Nottingham Trent University, where he established the now defunct Centre for Study and Reduction of Bias, Prejudice and Hate Crime and is co-founder and chief editor of the Internet Journal of Criminology. He was joint winner of the 1998 British Journal of Criminology Prize for his research on hackers, and publicised the market reduction approach for tackling theft. Sutton has published journal articles on the subject of inter-racial relationships and violence.
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Marie-Andrée Bertrand
#41271
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Marie-Andrée Bertrand was a French-Canadian criminologist, a feminist and anti-prohibitionist. Biography Bertrand was born in Montreal and started her career as a social worker for female offenders, mainly sex workers. In 1963, she received a master's degree from the Université de Montréal. She went on to study criminology at the School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley, where she got her Ph.D. in 1967. She held a professorship in criminology at the School of Criminology, Université de Montréal. She continued to work, until her death, doing research, teaching and publishing.
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Alain Bauer
#13816
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Alain Bauer is a French criminologist who has been a professor of criminology at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers since 2009. He is also a senior research fellow at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the China University of Political Science and Law . There were many protests in the scientific community in France against the appointment because he had not received a PhD.
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Karuppannan Jaishankar
#28403
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
#37
Anthony Bottoms
#29055
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Sir Anthony Edward Bottoms FBA is a British criminologist. He is life fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, having previously been a Wolfson Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge from 1984 to 2006 and until December 2007 a professor of criminology jointly at the universities of Cambridge and Sheffield.
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Roger Matthews
#35309
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Roger Matthews , was a British criminologist. He was a Professor of Criminology at the University of Kent, Canterbury, United Kingdom. Prior to joining the University of Kent, he was a professor of criminology at London South Bank University and Middlesex University.
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John Lea
#46954
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John Lea is a British left realist criminologist. For many years he was based at the Centre for Criminology and the Crime and Conflict Research Centre, Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. Career He graduated from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London with a BSc in Economics in 1967, before gaining MSc's in Economics and Social Policy there too.
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Grant Duwe
#30783
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Grant Duwe is an American criminologist and research director at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, as well as a non-visiting scholar at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. Duwe holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from Florida State University.
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Francis T. Cullen
#62231
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Francis Thomas Cullen, Jr. is an American criminologist and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at the University of Cincinnati's School of Criminal Justice. Education and career Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1951, Cullen enrolled at Bridgewater State College in 1968, hoping to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War by getting a grade point average of 2.0 or higher. He graduated in 1972 with a B.A. in psychology. He later received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1974 and 1979, respectively. Both his graduate degrees were in sociology and education. He taught at Wes...
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Alex Piquero
#46311
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
#43
Kevin Beaver
#37295
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (47 years)
#44
Anthony Walsh
#22178
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
#45
Adrian Raine
#86028
Overall Influence
#46
Michael Tonry
#27617
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
#47
Joan McCord
#49815
Overall Influence
1930 - 2004 (74 years)
Joan Fish McCord was an American professor of Criminology at Temple University. Through her experimental studies of delinquency, including the Cambridge Somerville Youth Study, and her philosophical perspective, she made important contributions to the understanding of developmental criminology, the differing roles of mothers, fathers, and neighborhoods, and the importance of differentiating between discipline and punishment. McCord was a recipient of the Herbert Bloch Award from the American Society of Criminology. and the International Society of Criminologys Emile Durkheim prize.
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James B. Jacobs
#25040
Overall Influence
1947 - 2020 (73 years)
James Barrett Jacobs was the Warren E. Burger Professor of Constitutional Law and the Courts at New York University School of Law, where he was a faculty member since 1982. He was a specialist in criminal law, criminal procedure, and criminal justice.
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Robert A. D'amico
#93596
Overall Influence
#50
Gary LaFree
#28427
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Gary LaFree is a Professor and Chair of the Criminology and Criminal Justice department at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Director of the Maryland Crime Research and Innovation Center and the Founding Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism . His main areas of expertise are sociology, criminology, race and crime, cross-national comparative research and political violence and terrorism.
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