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.
List of the most influential people in Education,
#251
Michael Peters
#83828
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Michael Adrian Peters is a New Zealand education academic. He is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
Go to Profile#252
Juri Lotman
#2605
Overall Influence
1922 - 1993 (71 years)
Juri Lotman was a prominent Russian-Estonian literary scholar, semiotician, and historian of Russian culture, who worked at the University of Tartu. He was elected a member of the British Academy , Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters , Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Estonian Academy of Sciences . He was a founder of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School. The number of his printed works exceeds 800 titles. His archive which includes his correspondence with a number of Russian and Western intellectuals, is immense.
Go to Profile#253
Paul Oskar Kristeller
#7172
Overall Influence
1905 - 1999 (94 years)
Paul Oskar Kristeller was a scholar of Renaissance humanism. He was awarded the Haskins Medal in 1992. He was last active as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York, where he mentored both Irving Louis Horowitz and A. James Gregor.
Go to Profile#254
Reynaldo Martorell
#68530
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Reynaldo Martorell is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of International Nutrition at Emory University. He has been on faculty at Cornell University and Stanford University. He is also a director of the International Nutrition Foundation, vice president of the Pan American Health and Education Foundation and an advisor to UNICEF, the World Food Program, the World Health Organization, and the World Bank. He has also been President of the Society for International Nutrition Research.
Go to Profile#255
Stephanie Pace Marshall
#41927
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Stephanie Anne Pace Marshall , is an American educator and the founding president of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy. Education Stephanie Anne Pace was born to Dominick Martin and Anne Pace in the Bronx, New York on July 19, 1945, and grew up in the New York city area. She graduated from East Meadow High School in 1963. Pace attended Muhlenberg College from 1963 to 1965 before transferring to Queens College, City University of New York where she completed a B.A. in education and sociology in 1967. In 1971, she earned an M.A. in curriculum philosophy from the University of Chicago.
Go to Profile#256
Cláudia Costin
#35629
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Cláudia Maria Costin is a Brazilian academic and civil servant. The daughter of Maurício and Lídia Costin, she was born in São Paulo. She is of Romanian descent. Costin studied public administration at the Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo and, in 1986, received a master's degree in economics from the same institution. While a student, she was active in the Partido Comunista do Brasil and was arrested twice. She was a co-founder of the .
Go to Profile#257
Becky Francis
#52019
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Rebecca Jane Francis, is a British educationalist and academic, who specialises in educational inequalities. Since January 2020, she has been Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation . Before joining the EEF, she was Director of the UCL Institute of Education at University College London. She has also taught and researched at the University of Greenwich, London Metropolitan University, Roehampton University, and King's College London. She has also been Director of Education at the Royal Society of Arts and an advisor to the Education Select Committee of the House of Commons sin...
Go to Profile#258
Tara Brabazon
#47058
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
Tara Brabazon is Dean of Graduate Research and Professor of Cultural Studies at Charles Darwin University, in Darwin, Australia, moving from the same position at Flinders University in 2023. She has previously held academic positions in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, won six teaching awards, published 20 books, and written 250 refereed articles and contributed essays and opinion pieces on higher education and the arts.
Go to Profile#259
Mark Featherstone-Witty
#61041
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Mark Featherstone-Witty OBE is an educator and entrepreneur. He is the Founding Principal and Chief Executive of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts which he founded, with Paul McCartney, in the mid-1990s, after establishing the British Record Industry Trust BRIT School in Croydon with Richard Branson.
Go to Profile#260
Frank Macchiarola
#41750
Overall Influence
1941 - 2012 (71 years)
Frank J. Macchiarola , was an American academic. His interests and expertise spanned the legal, academic, executive management and public service areas. From 2008 until his death, Macchiarola was the Chancellor of St. Francis College, after having been the college's president from 1996 to 2008.
Go to Profile#261
Nevra Necipoğlu
#13451
Overall Influence
Nevra Necipoğlu is a Turkish historian of the Byzantine Empire who is a professor of history at Boğaziçi University. Early life and education She was educated and graduated from Robert College. She then graduated from Wellesley College with a double major in History and Economics in 1982. She received her Ph.D. in Byzantine History from Harvard University in 1990. She is the sister of Gülru Necipoğlu, who is the Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Art and director of the Aga Khan Program of Islamic Architecture at Harvard University.
Go to Profile#262
Kevin Kumashiro
#69328
Overall Influence
Kevin Kumashiro is the former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. He was previously a professor of Asian American Studies and Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is the immediate past president of the National Association for Multicultural Education .
Go to Profile#263
Lynn Fuchs
#50369
Overall Influence
Lynn Fuchs is an educational psychologist known for research on instructional practice and assessment, reading disabilities, and mathematics disabilities. She is the Dunn Family Chair in Psychoeducational Assessment in the Department of Special Education at Vanderbilt University.
Go to Profile#264
Rupert Wegerif
#62140
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Rupert Wegerif is a professor of education at the University of Cambridge in England. Overview Prof. Wegerif is a writer and researcher in the field of dialogic education and dialogic education with technology. He has proposed a dialogic theory of education for the Internet Age, and conducted research on education technology as a support for teaching dialogue in classrooms as well as designing for dialogue with the Internet. He was the founder of the Elsevier journal Thinking Skills and Creativity and lead editor until 2017. He is founder and director of the Digital Education Futures Initiati...
Go to Profile#265
Mary Ellen Mazey
#29253
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Mary Ellen Mazey is an American academic who is President Emeritus of Bowling Green State University. Career Mazey served as Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Auburn University, as Dean of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University, and as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Wright State University. In 1996-1997, Mazey was the appointed Director of the Office of University Partnerships for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development . In that capacity, she had oversight of HUD's $25 million in grant programs to colleges and universities across the country.
Go to Profile#266
Randall E. Schumacker
#85859
Overall Influence
#267
Dorothy Heathcote
#55627
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Dorothy Heathcote MBE was a British drama teacher and academic who used the method of "teacher in role" as an approach to teaching across the curriculum in schools and later in other settings. She was a highly accomplished teacher of theatre and drama for learning and amongst her many achievements she defined and developed "mantle of the expert" as an approach to teaching. The book she wrote with Gavin Bolton, that explains her Mantle of the expert approach to education, is Drama for Learning . The most significant previous book that explains her approach was written by Betty Jane Wagner a...
Go to Profile#268
Mary Bunting
#28391
Overall Influence
1910 - 1998 (88 years)
Mary Ingraham Bunting was a bacterial geneticist and an influential American college president; Time profiled her as the magazine's November 3, 1961, cover story. She became Radcliffe College's fifth president in 1960 and was responsible for fully integrating women into Harvard University.
Go to Profile#269
Larry Michaelsen
#63238
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Larry K. Michaelsen is a David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of Oklahoma. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the University of Central Missouri, a Carnegie Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and former Editor of the Journal of Management Education.
Go to Profile#270
Tim Benton
#38929
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Tim Benton is Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at the Open University in the UK as well as a writer and broadcaster. He has also taught at Columbia University, Williams College, and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. He has written extensively on the modernist architect Le Corbusier. A large collection of photographs by Tim Benton is held in the Courtauld Institute of Art's Conway Library archive, which is currently undergoing a digitisation project.
Go to Profile#271
Marie Battiste
#59714
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Marie Ann Battiste is an author and educator working as a professor in Canada at the University of Saskatchewan in the Department of Educational Foundations. From the Potlotek First Nation in Nova Scotia, Battiste is the daughter of Mi'kmaq parents John and Annie Battiste and is one of four children. Battiste was raised in Houlton, Maine, where she attended high school graduating in 1967. From there she went on to the University of Maine graduating from the Farmington campus in 1971 with her teaching certificate and a bachelor of science in both elementary and junior high education. She went...
Go to Profile#272
Eve Ewing
#31926
Overall Influence
1986 - Present (38 years)
Eve Louise Ewing is an American sociologist, author, poet, and visual artist from Chicago, Illinois. Ewing is a tenured professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her academic research in the sociology of education includes her 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago's South Side, a study of school closures in Chicago. She is the former editor at Seven Scribes and the author of the poetry collection Electric Arches which was released in September 2017. In 2019, she published 1919, a poetry collection centered around the Chicago race riot of 1919.
Go to Profile#273
Richard Elmore
#8751
Overall Influence
Richard Frazier Elmore was the Gregory R. Anrig Research Professor of Educational Leadership in the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he taught for 24 years commencing in 1990. Professor Elmore was known for his modes of learning framework, and instructional rounds.
Go to Profile#274
Marian Small
#45413
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Marian Small is a Canadian educational researcher, academic, author, and public speaker. She has co-authored mathematics textbooks used in Canada, Austria, and the United States, and is a proponent of a constructivist approach to mathematical instruction within K–12 classrooms.
Go to Profile#275
Richard Lomax
#59474
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Richard G. Lomax is a tenured professor of education at the School of Educational Policy and Leadership and the College of Education and Human Ecology at Ohio State University. His research interests include multivariate analysis, models of literacy acquisition, structural equation models, graphics, and statistics in sports.
Go to Profile#276
Bill Nye
#17345
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
William Sanford Nye is an American mechanical engineer, science communicator, and television presenter. He is best known as the host of the science education television show Bill Nye the Science Guy and as a science educator in pop culture.
Go to Profile#277
Butet Manurung
#51886
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (52 years)
Butet Manurung or Saur Marlina Manurung is a pioneer for alternative education for indigenous people in isolated and remote areas in Indonesia. Like other young Batak girls, she was called "Butet". Therefore, she is well known as Butet Manurung.
Go to Profile#278
Jay P. Greene
#59388
Overall Influence
Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He was previously a distinguished professor and head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Greene’s current areas of research interest include school choice and the effects of education on character formation and civic values. He is also known for his work studying culturally enriching field trips to art museums and theaters, his efforts to improve the accurate reporting of high school graduation rates, address financial incentives in special education, and the use of standardized tests to cu...
Go to Profile#279
Charles Bazerman
#9856
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Charles Bazerman is an American educator and scholar. He was born and raised in New York. He has contributed significantly to the establishment of writing as a research field, as evidenced by the collection of essays written by international scholars in Writing as A Human Activity: Implications and Applications of the Work of Charles Bazerman. Best known for his work on genre studies and the rhetoric of science, he is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he also served as Chair of the Program in Education for eight years. He served as Chair of the Con...
Go to Profile#280
Ronald Ferguson
#36135
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Ronald F. Ferguson in Cleveland, Ohio is an economist who researches factors that affect educational achievement. Major themes in his work include the race-related achievement gap in the United States and how to improve schools and identify effective teachers.
Go to Profile#281
Cecilia Nembou
#38467
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Cecilia Nembou is an educator and women's rights advocate from Papua New Guinea. Background Nembou trained as a mathematician, receiving a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Papua New Guinea , MSc in Operations Research from the University of Sussex , and PGDip in Statistics from Canberra College of Advanced Education . In 1992 she received her PhD in Operations Research from the University of New South Wales.
Go to Profile#282
Beaumont Newhall
#13294
Overall Influence
1908 - 1993 (85 years)
Beaumont Newhall was an American curator, art historian, writer, photographer, and the second director of the George Eastman Museum. His book The History of Photography remains one of the most significant accounts in the field and has become a classic photographic history textbook. Newhall was the recipient of numerous awards and accolades for his accomplishments in the study of photo history.
Go to Profile#283
Kristine Stiles
#12489
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Kristine Stiles is the France Family Distinguished Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University. She is an art historian, curator, and artist specializing in global contemporary art and trauma. Her most recent book is Concerning Consequences: Studies in Art, Destruction, and Trauma, University of Chicago Press, 2016. She is best known for her scholarship on artists’ writings, performance art, feminism, destruction and violence in art, and trauma in art. Stiles joined the faculty of Duke in 1988, and she has taught at the University of Bucharest and Venice International University.
Go to Profile#284
Donald Kuspit
#9923
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Donald Kuspit is an American art critic and poet, known for his practice of psychoanalytic art criticism. He has published on the subjects of avant-garde aesthetics, postmodernism, modern art, and conceptual art.
Go to Profile#285
Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi
#70967
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi is educational scholar, curriculum theorist and faculty member of Tarbiat Modares University. The domain of his activities and studies is education. Biography Mahmoud Mehrmohammadi was born on February 2, 1959, in Tehran. He graduated from high school in 1975 and went to the US to continue his studies. He obtained a BS in industrial technology, building construction in 1979 from California State University- Fresno. He then went to San Jose- California to study for his master's degree. Majoring this time in the field of education, he opted to study educational technology and obtained his degree 1n 1981.
Go to Profile#286
Oliver Grau
#6401
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (59 years)
Oliver Grau is a German art historian and media theoretician with a focus on image science, modernity and media art as well as culture of the 19th century and Italian art of the Renaissance. Main Areas of Research are: Digital Art, Media Art History, immersion, digital humanities, documentation and conservation strategies of born-digital media art. He is founder and director of the Archive for Digital Art and founder and head of the Society for MediaArtHistories and its biennial conference series . His monograph "Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion" is among the most cited works in rece...
Go to Profile#287
Waldemar Łysiak
#38052
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
Waldemar Łysiak is a bestselling Polish writer, art historian and journalist, who has written under his own name as well as the pseudonyms 'Valdemar Baldhead' , 'Archibald', 'Mark W. Kingden', 'Rezerwowy Ł.'. He is notable as an author of numerous books on the Napoleonic era, both historical and fiction. He also owns a large number of rare prints and manuscripts, among others the poems by Norwid and the only surviving copy of Kochanowski's Treny.
Go to Profile#288
Angela Little
#69381
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Angela W. Little is Professor Emerita at the Institute of Education, University of London. She is known for her work in primary education policy and practice in developing countries as well as education planning, program evaluation and assessment. In particular she has focussed in seven main areas:Education for All and the Millennium Development GoalsMultigrade educationGlobalisation and educationQualifications, motivation and aspirationsEducation in Sri LankaEducation in ChinaEducation and developmentShe has been adviser to various governmental, multilateral and non-profit organisations on ed...
Go to Profile#289
Edward A. Shanken
#7693
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Edward A. Shanken is an American art historian, whose work focuses on the entwinement of art, science and technology, with a focus on experimental new media art and visual culture. Shanken is Professor, Arts Division, at UC Santa Cruz. His scholarship has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and has been translated into many languages. Shanken is the author of Art and Electronic Media , among other titles.
Go to Profile#290
Yōji Takikawa
#51816
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
Yōji Takikawa is a Japanese pedagogist and professor at the Center for Educational Research and Development, Tokai University, specializing in science education curricula. In 1986, he organized a circle for practice in science education, which has ultimately developed into a nonprofit organization named Garireo-Kōbō with Takikawa being the chairperson of trustees.
Go to Profile#291
James Lawson
#18208
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (96 years)
James Morris Lawson Jr. is an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
Go to Profile#292
Bogdan Suchodolski
#46754
Overall Influence
1903 - 1992 (89 years)
Bogdan Suchodolski was a Polish philosopher, historian of science and culture and teacher. He served as a senior marshal of the Sejm from 1985 to 1989. Biography Bogdan Suchodolski was born in Sosnowiec, Poland, on 27 December 1903. He was a professor at the University of Lviv in 1938 and at the University of Warsaw from 1946 to 1970. He was also university director of the Institute of Pedagogical Sciences 1958–68.
Go to Profile#293
Charles Basch
#36559
Overall Influence
Charles Basch is the Richard March Hoe Professor of Health and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, New York. He teaches courses related to epidemiology, planning and evaluation. Before coming to Teachers College, he was Assistant Professor of Community Health Education at Russell Sage College in Troy, New York.
Go to Profile#294
Gregory L. Fenves
#15091
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Gregory Louis Fenves is a structural engineer, professor and college administrator who is the twenty-first president of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Fenves was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2014 for contributions to computational modeling, creation of open source software for earthquake engineering analysis, and academic leadership.
Go to Profile#295
Tim Brighouse
#52593
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Sir Timothy Robert Peter Brighouse is a British educator. He was the Schools Commissioner for London between 2002–2007, where he led the London Challenge. Biography He was born in Leicestershire and was brought up there and in East Anglia. He was educated at Loughborough Grammar School and at Lowestoft County Grammar School and St Catherine's College, Oxford. He took his PGCE at the Oxford University Department of Education in 1961. He began his career as a schoolteacher, becoming a deputy head in a South Wales secondary modern school in 1966.
Go to Profile#296
Mieke Bal
#8444
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Maria Gertrudis "Mieke" Bal is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Previously she also was Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam.
Go to Profile#297
James E. Ryan
#21945
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (58 years)
James Edward Ryan is an American legal scholar and lawyer, currently serving as the ninth president of the University of Virginia since August 2018. He previously served as the eleventh dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 2013 to 2018.
Go to Profile#298
Robert Farris Thompson
#11545
Overall Influence
1932 - 2021 (89 years)
Robert Farris Thompson was an American art historian and writer who specialized in Africa and the Afro-Atlantic world. He was a member of the faculty at Yale University from 1965 to his retirement more than fifty years later and served as the Colonel John Trumbull Professor of the History of Art. Thompson coined the term "black Atlantic" in his 1983 book Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy – the expanded subject of Paul Gilroy's book The Black Atlantic.
Go to Profile#299
Jay Lemke
#38297
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Jay Lemke is an American semiotician and science education scholar with a background in physics. He is professor of education at the University of Michigan. Biography Lemke obtained his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1966, his M.S. from the University of Chicago in 1968, and his Ph.D. from the *University of Chicago 1973.
Go to Profile#300
Tim Burton
#4899
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Timothy Walter Burton is an American filmmaker, animator, and artist. Known for pioneering goth culture in the American film industry, Burton is revered for his gothic horror and fantasy films. These include Beetlejuice , Edward Scissorhands , The Nightmare Before Christmas , Ed Wood , Sleepy Hollow , Corpse Bride , Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street , Dark Shadows and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children , as well as the television series Wednesday . Burton also directed the superhero films Batman and Batman Returns , the sci-fi film Planet of the Apes , the fantasy-dram...
Go to Profile