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 Engineering,
#9351
John Bloomfield
#97463
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
John Bloomfield was an Australian sport and sport science academic and author. Bloomfield played a crucial role in the development of the Australian high performance sport system between 1973 and 1989, particularly in relation to the Australian Institute of Sport and the Australian Sports Commission. While active in the above, he lectured and conducted research at the University of Western Australia and, from time to time, in North America and Eastern and Western Europe.
Go to Profile#9352
Ben Davis
#77409
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Benjamin Davis is a British cinematographer. His major works include Kick-Ass , Hannibal Rising and the Marvel Studios films Guardians of the Galaxy , Avengers: Age of Ultron , Doctor Strange , Captain Marvel and Eternals . He has collaborated with Matthew Vaughn on four films and Martin McDonagh on three films, including Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri .
Go to Profile#9353
Barbara Rosenthal
#88813
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Barbara Ann Rosenthal is an American avant-garde artist, writer and performer. Rosenthal's existential themes have contributed to contemporary art and philosophy. Rosenthal's pseudonyms are "Homo Futurus," which was taken from the title of one of her books, and "Cassandra-on-the-Hudson," which alludes to "the dangerous world she envisions" while creating art in her studio and residence on the Hudson River in Greenwich Village, NYC. Rosenthal successfully trademarked "Homo Futurus" in 2022.
Go to Profile#9354
Norman Zide
#25191
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (98 years)
Norman H. Zide is an American linguist and specialist in the Munda languages. Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. He taught Hindi and Urdu at the Department of South Asian Languages & Civilization at the Department of Linguistics for four decades and published several books and articles on the subject. However, his greater fame lies in his contributions to the Munda languages and to Austroasiatic linguistics in general. He has also done considerable work as a translator, especially of poetry. In The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, he did or assisted in translations of poetry from both North Indian and Austroasiatic languages.
Go to Profile#9355
Jesse Russell
#191787
Overall Influence
#9356
Robert H. Jackson
#28588
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Robert "Bob" Hill Jackson is an American photographer. In 1964, Jackson, then working for the Dallas Times Herald, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Photography for his photograph of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby.
Go to Profile#9357
Donald Stone Macdonald
#64155
Overall Influence
1919 - 1993 (74 years)
Donald Stone Macdonald was an American academic who specialized in Korean affairs, in particular the bilateral relations between South Korea and the United States. Macdonald had two careers, both concerning Korea. He was first a public servant at the US Department of State in Korean affairs, once serving as mayor of Kwangju and then became an academic on Korean affairs. His death in 1993 marked the end of almost five decades of involvement in Korea, dating from 1945 and the U.S. military occupation.
Go to Profile#9358
Kent R. Brown
#116493
Overall Influence
Kent R. Brown was an American playwright and director. He was Professor Emeritus at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville and former Playwright-In-Residence and Adjunct Professor of English at Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Go to Profile#9359
Stephen Medcalf
#83142
Overall Influence
1936 - 2007 (71 years)
Stephen Ellis Medcalf was a reader in English in the School of European Studies, University of Sussex, from its inception in 1963 to retirement in 2005. An academic and scholar of classics and European literature, he once alerted authorities to an abandoned newborn baby in a telephone box. Medcalf was a student of Iris Murdoch, friend of Anthony Nuttall, colleague of Gabriel Josipovici and teacher of novelist Ian McEwan. Obituaries appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Times, and Church Times.
Go to Profile#9360
Wenjun Zhang
#191546
Overall Influence
Wenjun Zhang from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2012 for contributions to digital television systems and standards.
Go to Profile#9361
Stephen G. R. Brown
#108570
Overall Influence
Stephen G. R. Brown FICME FIMMM FLSW is a materials scientist and head of the Materials Research Centre at Swansea University. Brown is a specialist in computational materials whose work has centred on writing code in finite element, finite difference, cellular automata, Monte Carlo method and data analysis techniques. He has had research collaborations with industry including relationships with Rolls-Royce and Airbus. In 2010 he took over the role as the head of the Materials Research Centre, which was previously held buy Professor Valerie Randle.
Go to Profile#9362
Pat Ward Williams
#117523
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pat Ward Williams is an African-American photographer whose work often engages with the complexities of race, gender, and history. In addition to her smaller-scale photographs and installations, she has designed three public artworks in Los Angeles.
Go to Profile#9363
Connie Imboden
#169661
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Connie Imboden was born in 1953 and is an American photographer known for her work in nudes, using reflections in water and mirrors. Her photographs are represented in many collections including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany, as well as many other public and private collections throughout Europe and the Americas.
Go to Profile#9364
Issei Suda
#88624
Overall Influence
1940 - 2019 (79 years)
Issei Suda was a Japanese photographer who "[combined] a pure appreciation of Japanese customs with a sharp investigative eye". Life and career Born—as Kazumasa Suda —in Kanda, Tokyo on 24 April 1940, Suda dropped out of Toyo University in 1961 and entered Tokyo College of Photography, from which he graduated in 1962.
Go to Profile#9365
Lynne Bentley-Kemp
#190079
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Dr. Lynne Austin Bentley-Kemp is an American fine arts photographer, photography educator, and researcher. Prior to becoming professor of photography at Florida Keys Community College,was an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology. She holds a Ph.D. from Florida Atlantic University . Bentley-Kemp has researched the act of collecting photos. Her work includes the 34 black-and-white infrared photographs series entitled, Windows to the Sun. Most recently she has designed three illustrated books and exhibited a solo show of iPhone images titled ‘Atmospheric Conditions’ at the Studios of Key West in 2020.
Go to Profile#9366
Masumi Hayashi
#115932
Overall Influence
1945 - 2006 (61 years)
Dr. Masumi Hayashi was an American photographer and artist who taught art at Cleveland State University, in Cleveland, Ohio, for 24 years. She won a Cleveland Arts Prize; three Ohio Arts Council awards; a Fulbright fellowship; awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Arts Midwest, and Florida Arts Council; as well as a 1997 Civil Liberties Educational Fund research grant.
Go to Profile#9367
Gus Stager
#98024
Overall Influence
1927 - 2019 (92 years)
Augustus Pingree "Gus" Stager, Jr. was an American swimmer and swimming coach. He was the swimming coach for the 1960 U.S. Olympic team and the swimming coach at the University of Michigan for 25 years . His Michigan swimming teams won four NCAA national championships in 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1961. He also led Fordson High School to Michigan state championships three consecutive years from 1952 to 1954. In total, he swam for or coached on five NCAA championship teams, three Michigan high school championship teams, and the 1960 U.S. Olympic team—all before his 35th birthday. In 1982, he was i...
Go to Profile#9368
Edward S Rice
#191827
Overall Influence
#9369
An-My Lê
#38968
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
An-My Lê is a Vietnamese American photographer, and professor at Bard College. She is a 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has received the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship , the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program Award , and the Tiffany Comfort Foundation Fellowship . Her work was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial.
Go to Profile#9370
Bryan J Pavlovic
#191840
Overall Influence
#9371
Jian Song
#191849
Overall Influence
Jian Song from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2016 for contributions to digital television broadcasting. Song was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to aerospace engineering, environmental protection, science and technology administration, and fostering international technical cooperation.
Go to Profile#9372
Julian N. Wasserman
#185713
Overall Influence
2000 - 2003 (3 years)
Julian Noa Wasserman was an American scholar of English, having been a Provost Distinguished Professor at Loyola University, New Orleans.
Go to Profile#9373
Andrea Modica
#129437
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Andrea Modica is an American photographer and professor of photography at Drexel University. She is known for portrait photography and for her use of platinum printing, created using an 8"x10" large format camera. Modica is the author of many monographs, including Treadwell and Barbara .
Go to Profile#9374
E. U. Essien-Udom
#81415
Overall Influence
1928 - 2002 (74 years)
Professor Essien Udosen Essien-Udom was born in Ikot Osong, Eastern Provinces, Nigeria , the first son of Timothy and Adiaha Essien. He was educated in the local primary school and Holy Family College, Abak, Eastern Nigeria; Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio ; and the University of Chicago .
Go to Profile#9375
Celia Brackenridge
#172511
Overall Influence
1950 - 2018 (68 years)
Celia Brackenridge OBE was a British sportswoman, campaigner and academic. In the mid-1980s, Brackenridge was recognised as the most capped Great Britain lacrosse player. She founded the Women's Sports Foundation UK and also conducted research into the physical and sexual abuse of young sportspeople by coaches.
Go to Profile#9376
John Douglas Simon
#86403
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
John D. Simon was the 14th President of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2021. He previously served as executive vice president and provost at the University of Virginia.
Go to Profile#9377
Ovadia Harari
#98581
Overall Influence
1943 - 2012 (69 years)
Ovadia Harari was an Egyptian-born Israeli aerospace engineer. He was a two-time recipient of the Israel Defense Prize and a recipient of the Israel Prize, the country's highest civilian honor, in 1987 for his contribution to the IAI Lavi project.
Go to Profile#9378
Mandy Haberman
#184554
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Mandy Nicola Haberman is an English inventor and entrepreneur. She is founding member and Freeman of the Guild of Entrepreneurs, Director of the Intellectual Property Awareness Network and a visiting Fellow at Bournemouth University, from where she has an honorary doctorate. She is best known for her successfully upheld patent enforcement battles and inventing the Haberman Feeder, the Anywayup Cup and the Suckle Feeder.
Go to Profile#9379
James Baker Hall
#76681
Overall Influence
1935 - 2009 (74 years)
James Baker Hall was an American poet, novelist, photographer and teacher. Biography James Baker Hall was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1935. He was raised in a southern family of means and social standing, only to have a family scandal turn tragic when he was eight years old. This trauma, and its enduring consequence, would shape Hall's life work as an artist, which began when he took up photography at age eleven.
Go to Profile#9380
Diego Abatantuono
#123429
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Diego Abatantuono is an Italian cinema and theatre actor, and screenwriter, three-time winner of the Nastro d'Argento. Biography and career Abatantuono was born in Milan to a father of Apulian origin and a mother from Como. The latter worked as wardrober in a Milanese jazz and later cabaret club, Derby, whose owner was Abatantuono's uncle. He started to work at Derby first in lighting, then as artistic director and later as an actor.
Go to Profile#9381
John Hoyt
#93102
Overall Influence
1905 - 1991 (86 years)
John Hoyt was an American actor. He began his acting career on Broadway, later appearing in numerous films and television series. He is perhaps best known for his roles in the films The Lawless , When Worlds Collide , Julius Caesar , Blackboard Jungle , Spartacus , Cleopatra , Flesh Gordon and the television series Gimme a Break! .
Go to Profile#9382
Pierre Larthomas
#120438
Overall Influence
1915 - 2000 (85 years)
Pierre Henri Larthomas was a French theatre theorist. Larthomas entered the French Army in 1930 as a cadet officer and in the spring of 1940 was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Shortly thereafter he was taken prisoner and spent the next five years in German P.O.W. camps. It was during that period that he began to write. After WWII he was a schoolmaster at Lycees in Bordeaux and Paris.
Go to Profile#9383
John Read
#159839
Overall Influence
1920 - 2006 (86 years)
John Owen Read was a British television producer, cinematographer and director. Read was born in Chalfont St Giles. He is widely associated with the productions of Gerry Anderson. Having served as director of photography on Four Feather Falls , Crossroads to Crime , Supercar , Stingray and Thunderbirds , Read worked on the latter show's second series, the film Thunderbirds Are Go and the subsequent series Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons as associate producer. He returned to cinematography for the film Doppelgänger . When filming clouds at 12,000 feet for Supercar, Read told Anderson tha...
Go to Profile#9384
Huaguang Zhang
#191811
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Huaguang Zhang is an engineer at Northeastern University China in Shenyang, China. He was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2015 for his contributions to stability analysis of recurrent neural networks and intelligent control of nonlinear systems.
Go to Profile#9385
Graham Diprose
#91950
Overall Influence
Grapham Diprose is a British photographer and author. During the 1970s and 1980s, Diprose worked as a freelance advertising photographer in central London, while teaching studio photography part-time. In the 1980s and 1990s, he was a full-time lecturer at the London College of Communication, becoming Lead Tutor in Photography within the Faculty of Design. Later, he was Lead Tutor at the Speos Institute in London. He has an interest in both traditional photography and digital photography.
Go to Profile#9386
Margareta Niculescu
#88288
Overall Influence
1926 - 2018 (92 years)
Margareta Niculescu was a Romanian artist, puppeteer, director, teacher and theater director. She contributed to the renewal, since 1950s, of the art of puppetry in Europe and the rest of the world. She was director of Tandarica Theatre of Bucharest. From 2000 until 2004 she was president of the International Puppetry Association in Charleville-Mezieres, in Ardennes, and co-founded with Jacques Felix, the National School of Puppetry Arts in that city. In 1978 she won the Erasmus Prize together with other noted puppeteers Yves Joly, Peter Schumann and the Napoli brothers.
Go to Profile#9387
Barbara J. Hager
#191954
Overall Influence
#9388
Chidananda Dasgupta
#111795
Overall Influence
1921 - 2011 (90 years)
Chidananda Das Gupta —family name sometimes spelled 'Dashgupta' and 'Dasgupta'—was an Indian filmmaker, film critic, a film historian and one of the founders of Calcutta Film Society with Satyajit Ray in 1947. He lived and worked in Calcutta and Santiniketan.
Go to Profile#9389
Judy Irola
#181079
Overall Influence
1943 - 2021 (78 years)
Judith Carol Irola was an American cinematographer, film producer, and director. The third woman accepted into the American Society of Cinematographers, she was head of the cinematography department at USC School of Cinematic Arts for 15 years and held the Conrad Hall Chair in Cinematography there. Irola co-founded a National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians branch in San Francisco in 1969, and was a founding member of the short-lived Cine Manifest film collective in 1972.
Go to Profile#9390
Günther Selichar
#171262
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Günther Selichar is an Austrian visual artist . Biography Günther Selichar studied history of art and classical archeology at the University of Salzburg 1979–1986 and at the Art Institute of Chicago , but decided short time before finishing the studies to quit and concentrate on his work as an artist. Between 2007 and 2013 he was professor of media art at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig, where he founded the class „Mass Media Research and Art in Public Media Space“. His work is about technological and formal aspects of mass media technologies which is shown in series of abstract photography and other visual media.
Go to Profile#9391
Amy Stein
#168709
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Amy Stein is an American photographer. Some of her photo series include Stranded and Domesticated. Her work has been shown at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.. In 2007 she was one of fifteen "emerging artists" selected by American Photo magazine.
Go to Profile#9392
Grae Worster
#55496
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Michael Grae Worster is a British fluid dynamicist at the University of Cambridge. He is a professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Since 2007, he has been the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. He is also an associate faculty member of the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. In 2006, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the European Mechanics Society.
Go to Profile#9393
Steven L. Danver
#62023
Overall Influence
Steven Laurence Danver is an American historian. He is Managing Editor of the Journal of the West and has taught widely and written numerous influential works on the history of the Western United States, Native Americans, environmental policy and other subjects.
Go to Profile#9394
Emanuel V. Towfigh
#120292
Overall Influence
1978 - Present (48 years)
Emanuel V. Towfigh holds the Chair in Public Law, Empirical Legal Research and Law & Economics at EBS Law School and is Professor for Law & Economics at the EBS Business School. He served as the Law School’s Dean from 2018 to 2020. Since August 2021 he holds the position of Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Peking University School of Transnational Law.
Go to Profile#9395
Leza Lowitz
#82836
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan and in the American Southwest. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society. She is also an internationally renown yoga and mindfulness teacher recognized for her work bridging poetry and the spiritual path through disciplines like yoga and mindfulness.
Go to Profile#9396
Sheila Pinkel
#172828
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Sheila Pinkel is an American visual artist, activist and educator whose practice includes experimental light studies, photography, conceptual and graphic works, and public art. She first gained notice for cameraless photography begun in the 1970s that used light-sensitive emulsions and technologies to explore form; her later, socially conscious art combines research, data visualization, and documentary photography, making critical and ethical inquiries into the military-industrial complex and nuclear industry, consumption and incarceration patterns, and the effects of war on survivors, among other subjects.
Go to Profile#9397
Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh
#22212
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Pirouz Mojtahedzadeh is an Iranian political scientist and historian. He is a prominent Iranologist, geopolitics researcher, historian and political scientist. He teaches geopolitics at the Tarbiat Modares University of Tehran. He has been the advisor of the United Nations University. Mojtahedzadeh has published more than 20 books in Persian, English and Arabic on the geopolitics of Persian Gulf region and modern discourses in international relations. Since 2004, he has been a member of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. He has been a member of the British Institute of Iranian Studies since 1993.
Go to Profile#9398
David H. Wells
#104647
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
David H. Wells is a photographer and film-maker affiliated with Aurora Photos. Life and work Wells received a B.A in Liberal Arts from Pitzer College of the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, CA. He has taught classes at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Rhode Island, and workshops at the Maine Media Workshops. He is on the faculty of the International Center for Photography in New York City. He was featured in Photo District News as a "Best Workshop Instructor." He served as a judge for the Alexia Foundation in 1996.
Go to Profile#9399
Robin Jeffrey
#191464
Overall Influence
1939 - 2018 (79 years)
Robin Campbell Jeffrey was a Scottish engineer and businessman, who became executive chairman of British Energy. Early life He was the son of Robert Jeffrey and Catherine Campbell McSporran. He attended Lenzie Academy and Kelvinside Academy, and studied for a BSc in Mechanical Engineering at the Royal College of Science and Technology , where he was later a visiting professor, and a PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#9400
Justin Picard
#191687
Overall Influence
Justin Picard is a Swiss-Canadian engineer and entrepreneur who currently serves as the chief technology officer of Scantrust, a company he co-founded in 2013. He is the inventor of the copy detection pattern , a digital authentication technology for detecting product and document counterfeiting.
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