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 Education,
#2001
Penny Cousineau-Levine
#184803
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Penny Cousineau-Levine is a Canadian photography theorist, curator, artist and professor. Life Cousineau-Levine was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from the University of Manitoba and a Master of Fine Arts from the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.
Go to Profile#2002
Harold Kirker
#189443
Overall Influence
1921 - 2018 (97 years)
Harold Kirker was an American historian . Born in San Francisco, Kirker was a direct descendant of the mountain man James Kirker . After starting at the University of California, Berkeley, Kirker enlisted in the US Army during World War II. Like some other young men with Boy Scout hiking experience, he was recruited into the 10th Mountain Division where he trained alongside Charles Grier Sellers at the high-altitude Camp Hale in Colorado in 1943. Kirker served with the 10th Mountain Division during the Italian campaign. During the war, he was awarded the Bronze Star. During a leave, he sought...
Go to Profile#2003
Daisuke Namikawa
#156627
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (48 years)
is a Japanese actor and singer associated with Stay Luck. He began acting as a child and is sometimes mistaken with Daisuke Hirakawa, as their names only differ by one character when written in kanji. Despite his wide range of roles, he usually plays young heroes, such as Mikage in 07-Ghost, Fay D. Flourite in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, Jellal Fernandes and his counterpart Mystogan in Fairy Tail, Rokuro "Rock" Okajima in Black Lagoon, Jack The Ripper in Black Clover, Keita Ibuki in Black God, Goemon Ishikawa XIII in later instalments of Lupin the Third, and Yu Narukami in Persona 4. He has ...
Go to Profile#2004
Bernard O'Kane
#174505
Overall Influence
Bernard O'Kane is an Irish Islamic studies scholar and Iranologist and Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo. He is known for his works on Islamic architecture and is a winner of Farabi International Award.
Go to Profile#2005
Phoebe Farris
#186204
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Phoebe Farris is an art therapist, author, editor, artist, academic, photographer, free lance arts critic, and curator. Farris received Fulbright and National Endowment of the Humanities grants and was named a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence. She was a resident at Harvard University’s Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and at the Women’s Leadership Institute at Mills College, she earned an international reputation in the field of women’s studies. She identifies as a Powhatan-Renape/Pamunkey Native American. She taught at Purdue University for 22 years, and is now a professor emerita....
Go to Profile#2006
Brian Shefton
#143990
Overall Influence
1919 - 2012 (93 years)
Brian Benjamin Shefton, FBA, FSA , born Bruno Benjamin Scheftelowitz, was a German-born British classical archaeologist. He was the founder of the Shefton Museum, which bore his name.
Go to Profile#2007
Rebecca Hankins
#144899
Overall Influence
Rebecca L. Hankins is the Africana Resources Librarian/Curator at Texas A&M University, whose research interests include women's and gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, the African diaspora, and Islam in science fiction and popular culture.
Go to Profile#2008
Alexis Krasilovsky
#156200
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Alexis Krasilovsky is an American filmmaker, writer and professor. Krasilovsky's first film, End of the Art World documented artists including Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Krasilovsky moved from New York to Los Angeles in the 1970s to pursue her passion for filmmaking, writing and directing films through her company, Rafael Film. She is the writer and director of the global documentary features, Women Behind the Camera and Let Them Eat Cake.
Go to Profile#2009
Richard Marks
#190286
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Richard Marks , is a British art historian. He has held a number of curating and academic posts in art history in the United Kingdom and researched and written extensively on medieval religious images in a variety of media, including stained glass and illuminated manuscripts.
Go to Profile#2010
Antje von Graevenitz
#153484
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Antje von Graevenitz, born Ludwig is a German art historian, art critic, educator and author. Education and career Since 1970, Antje von Graevenitz has lived in Amsterdam. As a professor of general art history, specialized in the history of 20th- and 21st-century art, she taught at the University of Amsterdam and Cologne . In her research she is mainly focused on ephemeral art and interdisciplinary and anthropological topics . Some of her publications are dedicated to Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik. Parallel to studying librarianship , she read art history, archeology and e...
Go to Profile#2011
Christine Ross
#162769
Overall Influence
Christine Ross is a Canadian scholar specializing on contemporary media arts, in particular: the relationship between media, aesthetics and subjectivity; visuality; spectatorship and interactivity studies; augmented reality; and reconfigurations of time and temporality in recent media arts.
Go to Profile#2012
Albert Yee
#189889
Overall Influence
Albert H. Yee is a Korean-American educational psychologist. He taught at universities in the United States and East Asia for forty-three years before retiring in 1995. A 1965 graduate of Stanford University, he is the founding president of the Western Montana Stanford Alumni Club. He was also the president of the Chinese-American Faculty Association of Southern California from 1975 to 1977 and of the Asian American Psychological Association from 1979 to 1982. He was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, San Francisco State University, and Stanford University. He has taught at th...
Go to Profile#2013
Susan Best
#140698
Overall Influence
Susan Best is an art historian with expertise in critical theory and modern and contemporary art. Best is a professor at the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University. Her book, Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde focuses on four artists of the 1960s and 70s: Eva Hesse, Lygia Clark, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. It shows how their work transforms the avant-garde protocols of the period by introducing an affective dimension to late modern art. According to Suzannah Biernoff Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-garde "should be compulsory readin...
Go to Profile#2014
Rachel Scherr
#190927
Overall Influence
Rachel E. Scherr is an American physics educator, currently an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington Bothell. Her research includes studies of responsive teaching and active learning, video and gestural analysis of classroom behavior, and student understanding of energy and special relativity.
Go to Profile#2015
Achilles Fang
#34923
Overall Influence
1910 - 1995 (85 years)
Achilles Chih-t'ung Fang was a Chinese scholar, translator, and educator, best known for his contributions to Chinese literature and comparative literature. Fang was born in Japanese-occupied Korea, but attended university in mainland China. After completing his undergraduate degree, Fang worked for Monumenta Serica, a prominent scholarly journal of Chinese topics. He then moved to the United States, where he took up residency in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying and teaching courses at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#2016
Stein Erik Ulvund
#191164
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Stein Erik Ulvund is a Norwegian educationalist. He was born in Nes i Hallingdal. He took his dr.philos. in 1986 and became professor at the University of Oslo in 1994. He is also assisting professor at the University of Tromsø.
Go to Profile#2017
Tomokazu Seki
#137900
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
is a Japanese voice actor and singer. He has previously worked with Haikyō. He is honorary president of and affiliated with Atomic Monkey and the chairman of theater company HeroHero Q. He is a special lecturer at Japan Newart College.
Go to Profile#2018
Issam Nassar
#144712
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Issam Nassar , is a Palestinian historian of photography in Palestine and the Middle East. He is professor of History at Illinois State University and a research fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He taught at the University of California at Berkeley in 2006; Bradley University in 2003–2006 and Al-Quds University in 1998–2003. Nassar is the co-editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and author of books and articles, among them Laqatat Mughayirah .
Go to Profile#2019
Barbara Barletta
#131947
Overall Influence
1952 - 2015 (63 years)
Barbara A. Barletta was a prominent American Classical archaeologist and architectural historian. Barletta earned a B.A. in Art History at the University of California Santa Barbara and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. From the American Academy in Rome Barletta received the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Classical Studies in 1990. She received a series of awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including an award to support research on the Temple of Athena at Suonion in 2009.
Go to Profile#2020
Rebecca Zorach
#171818
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Rebecca Zorach is an art historian and Mary Jane Crowe Professor in Art and Art History at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on early modern European art, contemporary and activist art. Zorach earned her PhD from the University of Chicago in 1999.
Go to Profile#2021
Véronique Schiltz
#114211
Overall Influence
1942 - 2019 (77 years)
Véronique Schiltz was a French archaeologist, historian of art, and literary translator. She was a specialist in steppes art, in particular that of the Scythians, concentrating on the history and culture of steppe peoples between the first millennium BCE and the first millennium CE. She was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 2011, and an Officer of the Legion of Honour.
Go to Profile#2022
Neil Hollander
#178903
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Neil Gilbert Hollander was an American writer, film director and producer, journalist and sailor. He sailed across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. He has conducted more than thirty interviews with Nobel Prize winners, and his work has been exhibited in a number of museums, among them the Smithsonian, the Deutsches Museum and the Jim Thompson House in Bangkok. As an author, he is largely collected by libraries worldwide.
Go to Profile#2023
Adrian Brown
#111830
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Adrian Brown is a British archivist specializing in digital records preservation. He led development of the widely used PRONOM file format registry and associated DROID software tool. He is the author of Practical Digital Preservation: A How-To Guide for Organizations of Any Size .
Go to Profile#2024
Chris Smith
#139877
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (54 years)
Chris Smith is an American filmmaker. He directed American Movie, which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival. Career Smith completed his first film, American Job, while attending the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee's Graduate Film Program. He was nominated for a "Someone to Watch Award" from the Independent Spirit Awards. Smith met Mark Borchardt, the subject of American Movie, while editing American Job, and began filming a documentary about the making of Borchardt's psychological thriller Coven. Both films played at the Sundance Film Festiva...
Go to Profile#2025
Thomas Leinkauf
#128184
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Thomas Leinkauf is a German philosopher and a professor at Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. His fields of interest are late antique, Renaissance and early modern philosophy, as well as Idealism.
Go to Profile#2026
Erla Bergendahl Hohler
#178044
Overall Influence
1937 - 2019 (82 years)
Erla Karine Bergendahl Hohler was a Norwegian archaeologist, museum curator, and art historian. Career Hohler graduated from the University of Oslo before attending the Courtauld Institute in London. In 1975 she was assistant professor at the Institute of Art History at the University of Oslo. In 1987 she became Keeper of the Medieval Department at the University Museum of National Antiquities. In 1993 she became Professor of the Department of Archaeology, Art History and Numismatics before, in 1994, moving to the University of Tromsø as Professor of Art History.
Go to Profile#2027
Samantha Womack
#170836
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Samantha Zoe Womack is an English actress, singer, model and director who has worked in film, television and stage. Womack initially planned a career in singing and she represented the United Kingdom in the 1991 Eurovision Song Contest. Her song for the contest, "A Message to Your Heart", was released as her first single in April 1991 and reached number 30 in the UK Singles Chart.
Go to Profile#2028
Melanie La Rosa
#189618
Overall Influence
Melanie La Rosa is an American filmmaker and is currently a professor at Pace University in New York City. Her cinematic work has primarily opted for a documentarian approach that promotes social activism. Many of her films have been met with critical acclaim and applause at human rights festivals and organizations. La Rosa is currently working on her third feature-length documentary entitled Greenbreakers: How to Power a City. Her two previous films depict LGBT and women's rights issues in lieu of the misrepresentation of these figures.
Go to Profile#2029
Kunitoshi Manda
#158565
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Kunitoshi Manda is a Japanese film director, screenwriter and film critic. Biography Kunitoshi Manda was a student at Rikkyo University, where he took Shigehiko Hasumi's filmology class. Manda directed his first feature film, Unloved, in 2001. It won the Grand Rail d'Or prize and the Future Talent prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.
Go to Profile#2030
Tomaso Montanari
#89183
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (53 years)
Tomaso Montanari is an Italian art historian, academic and essayist. Life He was born in Florence and there attended the liceo classico Dante, before graduating from the University of Pisa and studying alongside Paola Barocchi at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. He became ordinary professor of Modern Art History at the Università per Stranieri di Siena after teaching at the Università della Tuscia, the Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata and the Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II.
Go to Profile#2031
Virginia Walcott Beauchamp
#160290
Overall Influence
1920 - 2019 (99 years)
Virginia Walcott Beauchamp was an American educator and writer who was the founding coordinator of the Women's studies program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Walcott was born in Sparta, Michigan, the daughter of two teachers. She earned a B.A. in English at the University of Michigan in 1942, and after serving with the Red Cross during World War II, she returned to Michigan to complete an M.A. in 1948. She received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in 1955.
Go to Profile#2032
Rosa Bruno-Jofré
#122913
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Rosa del Carmen Bruno-Jofré is a historian. She is a professor and former Dean of Education at Queen's University. In 2019, Bruno-Jofré was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Career Bruno-Jofré moved to Canada in 1977. After earning her PhD from the University of Calgary, she accepted academic positions with Western Washington University and the University of Manitoba. After serving three years at the University of Manitoba as an Associate Dean of Education, she joined the faculty of Queen's University as the Dean of Education. She spent 10 years in this role before being replaced.
Go to Profile#2033
James S. Coles
#112806
Overall Influence
1913 - 1996 (83 years)
James Stacy Coles was the ninth president of Bowdoin College. Life and career After having graduated from Columbia University in 1936, Coles earned a PhD in chemistry at Columbia and taught at several educational institutions including Middlebury College and Brown University before becoming president of Bowdoin. Additionally, for his work in anti-submarine warfare during World War II done at the Underwater Explosives Research Laboratory at Woods Hole, he was awarded the President’s Certificate of Merit.
Go to Profile#2034
Tom Mardikes
#143548
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Anastasios "Tom" Mardikes is an American sound designer and theatre educator. He currently serves as Professor and Head of Graduate Sound Design for UMKC Theatre, an academic department of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Go to Profile#2035
William R. Harvey
#187225
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
William Robert Harvey is an American educator, academic administrator, and businessman who served as president of Hampton University from 1978 to 2022. He is the longest serving president in the school's history. Harvey became the first African-American owner in the soft drink bottling industry when he and his wife, Norma Baker Harvey, purchased a Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company franchise together in 1986.
Go to Profile#2036
Kotono Mitsuishi
#139154
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
is a Japanese actress and narrator. She was affiliated with Arts Vision and Lasley Arrow, but is now freelance. Mitsuishi lived in Nagareyama, Chiba. She graduated from high school and entered the Katsuta Voice Actor's Academy in 1986. She is well known for her roles as Usagi Tsukino in Sailor Moon series, Misato Katsuragi in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Sayaka Mine in Yaiba, Boa Hancock in One Piece, Murrue Ramius, Haro and Narrator in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED and Mobile Suit Gundam SEED DESTINY, and Rena Mizunashi in Detective Conan.
Go to Profile#2037
Mary Sue Coleman
#188481
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Mary Sue Wilson Coleman is an American chemist and academic administrator who served as the 13th president of the University of Michigan from 2002 to 2014, interim president of the University of Michigan in 2022, and the 18th president of the University of Iowa from 1995 to 2002.
Go to Profile#2038
Dorothy Habel
#173343
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Dorothy Metzger Habel is an American historian of Ancient Roman art, currently a Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee.
Go to Profile#2039
Robert Bruce-Gardner
#183859
Overall Influence
1943 - 2017 (74 years)
Sir Robert Henry Bruce-Gardner was an art conservator at the Courtauld Institute of Art and expert in the use of X-Rays in examining paintings. See also Bruce-Gardner baronets
Go to Profile#2040
John Lowden
#168600
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
John Hopkins Lowden is a British art historian who is Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, which he joined in 1982. Lowden is a graduate of Cambridge University and previously taught at St. Andrews. His specialism is in illuminated manuscripts.
Go to Profile#2041
Valeriano Bozal
#69027
Overall Influence
1940 - 2023 (83 years)
Valeriano Bozal Fernández was a Spanish historian and philosopher. He was a participant in the collaborative project . Biography Born in Madrid on 24 November 1940, Bozal graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid and worked as a secondary school teacher before returning to teach at his alma mater in 1969. In 1974, he became a professor of contemporary and modern philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid.
Go to Profile#2042
Aya Hirano
#127875
Overall Influence
1987 - Present (37 years)
is a Japanese actress and singer. Beginning in the entertainment industry as a child actor in television commercials, she appeared in her first voice acting role in the anime television series Angel Tales .
Go to Profile#2043
Neil Diamond
#169797
Overall Influence
Neil Diamond is a Cree-Canadian filmmaker based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, born and raised in Waskaganish, Quebec. Working with Rezolution Pictures, Diamond has directed the documentary films Reel Injun, The Last Explorer, One More River, Heavy Metal: A Mining Disaster in Northern Quebec and Cree Spoken Here, along with three seasons of DAB IYIYUU, a series for the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network about Cree elders.
Go to Profile#2044
Paul Rosenthal
#176604
Overall Influence
Paul Rosenthal is an American community activist, teacher and politician who served in the Colorado House of Representatives from 2013 to 2019. He represented House District 9. Rosenthal ran for re-election in 2018 but was eliminated in the Democratic primary, so he was not a candidate in the general election.
Go to Profile#2045
Haruka Tomatsu
#169399
Overall Influence
1990 - Present (34 years)
is a Japanese actress and singer, employed by Music Ray'n. She received the Rookie of the Year award at the 3rd Seiyu Awards and the Synergy Award at the 9th Seiyu Awards. Tomatsu voiced Asuna Yuuki in Sword Art Online, Zero Two in Darling in the Franxx, Lala Satalin Deviluke in To LOVE-Ru, Kyoko Hori in Horimiya, Morgiana in Magi: The Labyrinth of Magic and Naruko "Anaru" Anjo in Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day.
Go to Profile#2046
Lore Segal
#40549
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
Lore Segal , née Lore Groszmann, is an American novelist, translator, teacher, short story writer, and author of children's books. Her novel Shakespeare's Kitchen was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
Go to Profile#2047
Mildred Leigh
#189208
Overall Influence
1902 - 1997 (95 years)
Mildred Leigh was a teacher and administrator from Illinois who gained most of her renown at Montana State College in Bozeman, Montana, as the director of Hamilton Hall and the Student Union. She was active in the Bozeman community. She received an honorary doctorate from MSU, and the Leigh Lounge in the Student Union Building was dedicated to her.
Go to Profile#2048
Alistair Smart
#173930
Overall Influence
1922 - 1992 (70 years)
Peter Alistair Marshall Smart was a 20th-century British historian and expert on Allan Ramsay. Life He was born in Cambridge on 30 April 1922 the son of Prof John Couch Adams, grandson of his namesake astronomer grandfather, John Couch Adams.
Go to Profile#2049
Olga Raggio
#36604
Overall Influence
1925 - 2009 (84 years)
Olga Raggio was an art historian and curator who worked with the Metropolitan Museum of Art for over 60 years, and discovered the 'lost' bust of Cosimo I de' Medici by Bartolommeo Bandinelli. Early life Olga Raggio was born in Rome on 5 February 1926. Her father was Italian, while her mother was Russian.
Go to Profile#2050
Christoph Dreher
#187824
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Christoph Dreher is a German filmmaker, musician and scriptwriter. From 2000 until 2020, he was a professor of audiovisual media. After studying political science and philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, he studied filmmaking at DFFB between 1978 and 1983.
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