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.

Search Influential People

Clear Form

List of the most influential people in Education,

#1651

Wanda M. Corn

#168317
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Wanda M. Corn is an American art and cultural historian. Corn is a scholar of art and photography from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries movements. She is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor emerita of art history at Stanford University. She held the professorship for eight years before retiring from the university in March 2017. Over her career as an art professor at Stanford she brought John D. Rockefeller's personal collection to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, which included a "a body of 110 paintings described as the museums’ “single most important gift of art." She served as acting director of the Stanford Art Museum now known as the Iris & B.
Go to Profile
#1652

Robert Salisbury

#131104
Overall Influence
Sir Robert Salisbury is an educationalist, and a "leading expert" on education funding. He has an international reputation for his ideas on leadership styles and staff motivation. He is most noted for transforming a failing secondary school in a pit village in Nottinghamshire into a "beacon of success" at the heart of its community, winning a number of awards and attracting a stream of famous visitors.
Go to Profile
#1653

J. Harvey Littrell

#184074
Overall Influence
1912 - 2001 (89 years)
J. Harvey Littrell was an American pedagogist and genealogist. Littrell was born in Waterloo, Iowa to Frank N. Littrell and his wife, Flora May Ault. He earned a bachelor's degree from Iowa State Teachers College in 1935 and a master's degree from the Iowa State University four years later. In 1950 he received a doctorate from the University of Missouri.
Go to Profile
#1654

Catherine Beaudry

#144853
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Catherine Beaudry is a Canadian social scientist, currently a Full Professor and Canada Research Chair at Polytechnique Montréal. She is an alumnus of the Global Young Academy from 2010 to 2014. She completed a Bachelor of Engineering degree in electrical engineering with a specialization in satellite technology at Polytechnique Montréal followed by graduate and doctoral studies in economics at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Go to Profile
#1655

David Ganz

#184039
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
David Ganz is a German art historian and academic. Since 2019, he has been Professor of Art History of the Middle Ages at the University of Zurich. Born in Stuttgart in 1970, from 1990 to 2000 Ganz variously studied at Heidelberg, Marburg, the University of Bologna, the Art History Institute at Florence, the Bibliotecha Hertziana in Rome and the University of Hamburg, completing a PhD at the latter in 2000; he completed his habilitation at the University of Konstanz in 2006.
Go to Profile
#1656

John Howard

#116036
Overall Influence
1934 - 2007 (73 years)
John Douglas "Hezzy" Howard was an American educator and college lacrosse player and coach. He coached the University of Maryland lacrosse team from 1966 to 1969 and amassed a 32–7–1 record. He attended Washington College, where in 1956 he received the Jack Turnbull Award as the nation's best attackman. Howard was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1978. At the University of Maryland, Howard also taught as an English professor and held various posts in the school's English department including acting chairman from 1979 to 1980.
Go to Profile
#1657

Stedman Graham

Stedman Graham
#133575
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Stedman Graham is an American educator, author, businessman, and public speaker. He is the long-term partner of Oprah Winfrey. Early life and education Graham was born on March 6, 1951, in the Whitesboro section of Middle Township, New Jersey, the son of Mary Jacobs Graham and Stedman Graham Sr. He is one of six children. He stands tall. He received a bachelor's degree in social work from Abilene Christian University in 1974 and a master's degree in education from Ball State University in 1979. Graham played college basketball at Hardin-Simmons.
Go to Profile
#1658

Meredith Clausen

#106662
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Meredith L. Clausen is an American architectural historian, and professor in the School of Art and the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, USA. She is known for research and writing on American architect Pietro Belluschi and on Art Nouveau architecture.
Go to Profile
#1659

Summer Edward

Summer Edward
#132898
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Summer Edward is a Trinidadian American writer, children's editor, educator, literary activist and children's literature specialist based in the USA. In 2010, at the age of 24, she founded Anansesem ezine, the first children's literature publication in the English-speaking Caribbean and served as its editor-in-chief for 10 years. At 26, she became one of the Caribbean's youngest literary editors. Anansesem has published some of the most distinctive and distinguished voices in Caribbean literature for young people including Floella Benjamin, Gerald Hausman, Ibi Zoboi, Itah Sadu, Lynn Joseph, Margarita Engle, Nadia L.
Go to Profile
#1660

Lorne Campbell

#100662
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Ian Lorne Campbell is a Scottish art historian and curator. Campbell was Beaumont Senior Research Curator at the National Gallery, London from 1996 to 2012, and from 1974 to 1996 lectured on the Northern Renaissance at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. He has curated major exhibitions at the National Gallery and other museums, including ones on Rogier van der Weyden at Leuven in 2009 and the Prado in 2015.
Go to Profile
#1661

John Harris

John Harris
#99760
Overall Influence
1931 - 2022 (91 years)
John Frederick Harris OBE was an English curator, historian of architecture, gardens and architectural drawings, and the author of more than 25 books and catalogues, and 200 articles. He was a Fellow and Curator Emeritus of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects, founding Trustee of Save Britain's Heritage and Save Europe's Heritage, and founding member and Honorary Life President of the International Confederation of Architectural Museums.
Go to Profile
#1662

Myra Roper

#107096
Overall Influence
1911 - 2002 (91 years)
Myra Ellen Roper was a British-born Australian educationalist, author, broadcaster, and expert on China. She was principal of University Women's College, at the University of Melbourne from 1947 to 1960.
Go to Profile
#1663

Peter Kidson

#153620
Overall Influence
1925 - 2019 (94 years)
Peter Kidson was a British Emeritus Professor and Honorary Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art where he lectured on Medieval Architecture until 1990. In his obituary in The Telegraph, he was described as “the most influential historian of medieval architecture of his generation in the English-speaking world”.
Go to Profile
#1664

Tom Lord-Alge

#32325
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Tom Lord-Alge is an American music engineer and mixer. He began his career at Unique Recording in New York. Subsequently, he was the resident mixer at what used to be known as "South Beach Studios", located on the ground floor of the Marlin Hotel.
Go to Profile
#1665

Cheryl Finley

#171069
Overall Influence
Cheryl Finley is an art historian, author, curator and critic. She is a professor at Cornell University and Director of the AUC Art History + Curatorial Studies Collective. She won Bard Graduate Center's Horowitz Book Prize for her book, Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon in 2019.
Go to Profile
#1666

K. Tsianina Lomawaima

#185929
Overall Influence
Go to Profile
#1667

Michelle Hinn

#159926
Overall Influence
Michelle Hinn is the current chairperson of the IGDA's Game Accessibility Special Interest Group, a video game industry advocacy group for creating mainstream games accessible to gamers with disabilities. She is involved with GameAccessibility.com, a game accessibility project funded by the Bartiméus Accessibility Foundation, and is the Vice-President of the Game Division of DonationCoder.com.
Go to Profile
#1668

Kimberly Johnson

#71247
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Kimberly Johnson is an American poet and Renaissance scholar. Life Johnson was raised in Utah. She earned her MA in 1995 from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, her MFA in 1997 Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in 2003 from University of California, Berkeley.
Go to Profile
#1669

Rose Kekedo

#156217
Overall Influence
1942 - 2005 (63 years)
Dame Rosalina Violet Kekedo , better known as Rose Kekedo, was a leading educator in Papua New Guinea and the first woman to be chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea. Early life Rosalina Violet Kekedo's parents, Mary Angela and Walter Kekedo came from Milne Bay Province and Central Province in Papua New Guinea. Rose, as she would be known, was born in 1942 in Abau, Central Province, where her father, Walter, worked as a clerk and her mother, Mary, was a teacher. She was the second eldest in a family of ten children, six girls and four boys. When she was three years old, the famil...
Go to Profile
#1670

Joan Kee

#86777
Overall Influence
Joan Kee is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her book, Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, published by University of Minnesota Press in 2013, is credited with sparking global interest in Dansaekhwa, a major constellation of abstract paintings produced in South Korea from the 1960s. In 2014, she curated From All Sides: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method, a group show of representative Tansaekhwa artists that was widely acclaimed. She has been cited as Tansaekhwa's most prominent Anglophone scholar. Kee teaches at the University of Michigan where she is Associate Professor in the History of Art.
Go to Profile
#1671

Aaron Scharf

Aaron Scharf
#64949
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Aaron Scharf was an American-born British art historian who contributed in particular to the history of photography in which he had developed an interest while studying at the Courtauld Institute. His investigation uncovered links between painting and photography, and evidence for artists using photography for reference and other purposes, as well as the way photographers with aspirations as artists referred to painting in their work. He thus pioneered a new field of art history when Pop Art and other movements in the 1960s were reincorporating the medium of photography and reference to popular photographic images, into mainstream artistic practice.
Go to Profile
#1672

Trudy Krisher

#108577
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Trudy Krisher is an American author of young adult novels, children's books, a college textbook, and a scholarly biography. She is a former professor of liberal arts in Dayton, Ohio. Early life and education Krisher was born in Macon, Georgia. Her parents were Whitley Herron Butner and Lois Drane Butner. She graduated from The College of William and Mary in 1968 and received a master's in education from Trenton State College in 1972.
Go to Profile
#1673

Ricardo Punzalan

#121833
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (49 years)
Ricardo L. Punzalan is a Filipino American archivist who is an Associate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information. He has shaped the fields of archival science, virtual reunification, repatriation, reparative description, and has studied the nature of collections in both museums and archives. He holds undergraduate and Masters degrees from the University of the Philippines and a doctorate in information science from the University of Michigan.
Go to Profile
#1674

Paul Dresang

#184666
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Paul Dresang is an American ceramic artist and professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Working mainly with glass, porcelain, and clay, Dresang’s “highly individual, sensuous, salt-fired porcelain forms are decorated with an obsessive amount of detail.” He defines his work primarily as “post-modern fertility pieces".” Dresang aims to create surreal images with ceramics by often focusing on everyday items in his work, and by exploring “opposing ideas of constraint and breaking free”. After receiving his MFA, Dresang has gone on to become a highly sought-after potter. He has p...
Go to Profile
#1675

Julia Bryan-Wilson

#136775
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (51 years)
Julia Bryan-Wilson is the Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. Career Bryan-Wilson received her BA from Swarthmore College in 1995 and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. In addition to teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, Bryan-Wilson has also taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, California College of the Arts, the University of California, Irvine, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She also served as one of the Robert...
Go to Profile
#1676

Reina Lewis

#76307
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Reina Lewis is a British art historian and author. She is currently a Professor of Cultural Studies at the London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London. Early life Lewis was born in northeast London. She trained in Fine Art and Art History at the University of Leeds, and received her MA in English: Critical Theory from Sussex University. Her PhD in Humanities at Middlesex University on western women orientalist artists and writers marked a new development in understandings of gender and imperial cultures.
Go to Profile
#1677

Nancy Wicker

#106163
Overall Influence
Nancy L. Wicker is professor of art history at the University of Mississippi. She was previously professor in the department of art at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Career Wicker graduated BA with High Honors from Eastern Illinois University, majoring in art history and studio art, in 1975. She took her MA in art history from the University of Minnesota in 1979, followed by her Ph.D. also from Minnesota in 1990, with work on interdisciplinary art history, archaeology, and Germanic philology. In 1988 she was awarded the Aurora Borealis Prize of the Society for the Advancement of Scandina...
Go to Profile
#1678

Gülru Necipoğlu

#41800
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Gülru Necipoğlu is a Turkish American professor of Islamic Art/Architecture. She has been the Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University since 1993, where she started teaching as Assistant Professor in 1987. She received her Harvard Ph.D. in the Department of History of Art and Architecture , her BA in Art History at Wesleyan , her high school degree in Robert College, Istanbul . She is married to the Ottoman historian and Harvard University professor Cemal Kafadar. Her sister is the historian Nevra Necipoğlu.
Go to Profile
#1679

Misael Acosta Solís

Misael Acosta Solís
#28658
Overall Influence
1911 - 1994 (83 years)
Misael Acosta Solís was an Ecuadorian naturalist. He earned a doctorate degree from the School of Natural Science of the Central University of Ecuador. In 1939 he became a corresponding member of the National Geographic Society of Washington DC. He was the Botanical Director of the Cinchona Mission in Ecuador of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He founded the Forestry Department of Ecuador. He was a professor of Botany and Ecology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador. He wrote the 5-volume resource encyclopedia Los recursos naturales del Ecuador y su conservación , which was aw...
Go to Profile
#1680

Ramona Edelin

Ramona Edelin
#148314
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Ramona Hoage Edelin is an American academic, activist and consultant. Edelin is credited with introducing the term "African American" into the general vernacular. She has been named one of the most influential Black Americans by Ebony. Today, she serves as executive director of the DC Association of Charter Schools.
Go to Profile
#1681

Kristopher Jansma

#166212
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (42 years)
Kristopher Jansma is an American fiction writer and essayist. Born in the Lincroft section of Middletown Township, New Jersey, he attended Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. Career and accolades His short fiction has appeared in ZYZZVA, Adult Magazine, Recommended Reading, Columbia Magazine, and The Blue Mesa Review. His "Why We Write" was selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2014, after being published in Slice Magazine. He has also written essays and reviews for The New York Times, Salon, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, The Millions, Johns Hopkins Magazine, an...
Go to Profile
#1682

Richard Guy Wilson

#49739
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Richard Guy Wilson is a noted architectural historian and Commonwealth Professor in Architectural History at the University of Virginia. Wilson was born and raised in Los Angeles . He received his B.A. at the University of Colorado in 1963, and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Michigan in 1968 and 1972 respectively. Wilson taught at Michigan and Iowa State University before moving to the University of Virginia in 1976. He received the outstanding professor award at Virginia in 2001.
Go to Profile
#1683

Miguel Méndez

#52775
Overall Influence
1930 - 2013 (83 years)
Miguel Méndez was the pen name for Miguel Méndez Morales, a Mexican American author best known for his novel Peregrinos de Aztlán . He was a leading figure in the field of Chicano literature. Biography
Go to Profile
#1684

Ericka Beckman

#150499
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ericka Beckman is an American filmmaker who began to make films in the 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation. Her films concern the relationship between people and images, and how images structure people's perception of themselves and of reality.
Go to Profile
#1685

William W. Clark

#103101
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
William W. Clark is a professor of art history in the medieval studies program at the Graduate Center at Queens College, City University of New York. He is a widely published expert on early medieval, Romanesque, and Gothic art and architecture.
Go to Profile
#1686

Ann Gunter

#178677
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Ann C. Gunter is an art historian and Bertha and Max Dressler Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on visual and material culture of the ancient Near East and neighboring parts of the eastern Mediterranean.
Go to Profile
#1687

Lawrence Hott

Lawrence Hott
#110374
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Lawrence "Larry" Hott is an American academic and documentary filmmaker. Hott is a co-founding partner of Florentine Films, joining Ken Burns, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires in documentary production in 1978. He has produced and directed documentary films for PBS, the Library of American Landscape History, the American Antiquarian Society and others. He has twice been nominated for an Academy Award, received a Peabody Award, the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and five blue ribbons from the American Film Festival. Hott has taught courses in the University Without Walls program...
Go to Profile
#1688

Arnold Allen

#96613
Overall Influence
Arnold Oral Allen was an American instructor, public speaker, and writer who worked at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and specialized in the analysis and mathematical modelling of computer performance. Biography Allen earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at UCLA in 1962 under Angus Taylor with a dissertation entitled Banach and Hilbert Spaces of Analytic Functions, where he later lectured. At IBM, he taught at the Information Systems Management Institute in Los Angeles, California. Later, at Hewlett-Packard, he was a member of the Performance Technology Center, then a researcher at the Advanced Technology...
Go to Profile
#1689

Joan Marter

#113206
Overall Influence
Joan Marter is an American academic, art critic and author. A 1968 graduate of Temple University, Marter is the "Distinguished Professor of Art History" at Rutgers University. Marter is the co-editor of the Woman's Art Journal, and the editor of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art.
Go to Profile
#1690

Tom Lowrie

#156590
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Professor Tom Lowrie was appointed a Centenary Professor at the University of Canberra, Australia, in 2014. He has an established international research profile in the discipline area of STEM education and mathematics education.
Go to Profile
#1691

Virgil Mihaiu

Virgil Mihaiu
#155680
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
Virgil Mihaiu is a Romanian writer, jazz critic, diplomat, jazz aesthetics professor, polyglot, and performer. He was co-founder and the first director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Lisbon, and served as minister-counselor at the Romanian embassy in Portugal. Since 2015 he is director of the Casa do Brasil / Brazilian Cultural Centre, as well as the Biblioteca de Estudios Latinoamericanos, both institutions functioning under the aegis of Cluj's principal University.
Go to Profile
#1692

Heini Paas

#169989
Overall Influence
1918 - 2021 (103 years)
Heini Paas was an Estonian art historian. Personal life and education Heini Rosilda Paas was born on 6 October 1918 in Mõniste Parish in Võru County. She was from a farming family. She attended Mõniste primary school followed by Valga Common Gymnasium and left in 1938. She attended the University of Tartu from 1938 until 1945, studying art history as her major subject in the Faculty of Philosophy. Voldemar Vaga was among the lecturers. In 1968, after working under the supervision of Voldemar Vaga, she was awarded a candidate's degree for her dissertation on the work of the sculptor Ferdi Sann...
Go to Profile
#1693

Fabrice Jaumont

#163717
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Fabrice Jaumont is a French-born author and educator best known for his advocacy for dual-language bilingual education around the world. He is the author of several books translated in multiple languages.
Go to Profile
#1694

Lisa E. Bloom

#113263
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Lisa E. Bloom is an American cultural critic, educator and feminist art historian specializing in polar studies, contemporary art, environmental art, history of photography, visual culture and film studies and is known for her books and essay contributions to these areas.
Go to Profile
#1695

Joan Braderman

Joan Braderman
#51654
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Joan Braderman is an American video artist, director, performer, and writer. Braderman's video works are considered to have created her signature style known as "stand up theory." Via this "performative embodiment," she deconstructs and analyzes popular media by inserting chroma-keyed cut-outs of her own body into appropriated mass media images, where she interrogates the representation of ideology and the transparency of photographic space in U.S. popular culture.
Go to Profile
#1696

John O'Brian

#83653
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
John O'Brian is an art historian, writer, and curator. He is best known for his books on modern art, including Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, one of The New York Times "Notable Books of the Year" in 1986, and for his exhibitions on nuclear photography such as Camera Atomica, organized for the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2015. Camera Atomica was the first comprehensive exhibition on postwar nuclear photography. From 1987 to 2017 he taught at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he held the Brenda & David McLean Chair in Canadian Studies and was an associate of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
Go to Profile
#1697

Sereana Naepi

#176390
Overall Influence
Sereana Elina Naepi is a New Zealand academic and works at the University of Auckland. She is of Fijian and Pākehā descent. Academic career Naepi completed undergraduate study at the University of Auckland. Her 2012 master of arts thesis was titled: The Voices of Taciqu. Teaching and Learning Practices in Non-Lecture Settings for Māori and Pasifika Success in the First Year of a Bachelor of Arts. She moved to Canada for a 2018 PhD titled 'Beyond the Dusky Maiden : Pasifika women's experiences working in higher education' at the University of British Columbia, before returning to the Univer...
Go to Profile
#1698

Fred Bachrach

Fred Bachrach
#108556
Overall Influence
1914 - 2009 (95 years)
Albert Gustave Herbert "Fred" Bachrach was a Dutch literary and art historian of French and German descent whose academic work featured in a number of prominent exhibitions and research works in Britain and the Netherlands and who founded the Sir Thomas Browne Institute for the study of Anglo-Dutch relations at Leiden University. Bachrach had also served in the Dutch Army during the Second World War and spent three years as a Japanese prisoner of war, suffering starvation, torture, and deprivation that haunted him for the rest of his life.
Go to Profile
#1699

Chris Hegedus

Chris Hegedus
#98276
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Chris Hegedus is an American documentary filmmaker. She and her husband, filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker, founded the company Pennebaker Hegedus Films. Hegedus was nominated for an Academy Award for The War Room, a behind-the-scenes film about President Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign. The film also won the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures prize for Best Documentary. In 2001, she was awarded the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for Startup.com. The film is a boom-bust story of two young internet entrepreneurs, co-produced with Jehane Noujaim. Hegedus...
Go to Profile
#1700

Naomi Sargant

#177091
Overall Influence
1933 - 2006 (73 years)
Naomi Ellen Sargant, Baroness McIntosh of Haringey was a British academic specialising in adult education and a television executive. Early life The daughter of Thomas Sargant, first secretary of JUSTICE, and Czech-born philologist Marie Hlouskova, Sargant was educated at Friends School Saffron Walden, later graduating from Bedford College, University of London with a degree in sociology.
Go to Profile