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 Management,
#51
Robert Scheer
#5409
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Robert Scheer is an American left-wing journalist who has written for Ramparts, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Hustler Magazine, Truthdig, Scheerpost and other publications as well as having written many books. His column for Truthdig was nationally syndicated by Creators Syndicate in publications such as The Huffington Post and The Nation. He is a clinical professor of communications at the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California. Scheer is the former editor in-chief for the Webby Award-winning online magazine Truthdig. For many years, he co-...
Go to Profile#52
Hunter Lovins
#8051
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
L. Hunter Lovins is an American environmentalist, author, sustainable development proponent, co-founder of Rocky Mountain Institute, and president of the nonprofit organization Natural Capitalism Solutions.
Go to Profile#53
Nancy J. Adler
#47784
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Nancy J. Adler is professor of Organizational Behavior and Samuel Bronfman Chair in Management at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Early life and education Originally from the Inglewood, California, United States, she completed her undergraduate and graduate studies entirely at the University of California, Los Angeles , beginning with a Bachelor of Arts in economics, followed by a Master of Business Administration, and finally with a Doctor of Philosophy specializing in management.
Go to Profile#54
Robert R. Locke
#65465
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (92 years)
Robert R. Locke is an American educator, historian and economist and emeritus professor of history, business, and management at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He received his PhD from University of California at Los Angeles in 1965 and was a Fulbright fellow in Germany and England.
Go to Profile#55
Bill Ward
#34278
Overall Influence
1919 - 1998 (79 years)
William Hess Ward , was an American cartoonist notable as a good girl artist and creator of the risqué comics character Torchy. Biography Early life and career Born in Brooklyn, New York, Ward grew up in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where his father was an executive with the United Fruit Company.
Go to Profile#56
Gary Hamel
#80922
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Gary P. Hamel is an American management consultant. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago. Biography Hamel graduated from Andrews University in 1975, and from Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 1990.
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Dawn Iacobucci
#51554
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (64 years)
Dawn Iacobucci is an American quantitative psychologist and marketing researcher, Professor in Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management, known for her work in the field of foundations of marketing research.
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T. Marshall Hahn
#8238
Overall Influence
1926 - 2016 (90 years)
Thomas Marshall Hahn Jr. was an American educator. He served as President of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University from 1962 to 1974 and CEO of Georgia-Pacific Corporation from 1983 to 1993.
Go to Profile#59
Samer Takriti
#79895
Overall Influence
Samer Takriti is a Syrian management scientist. He received his Ph.D. in Operations Research from the University of Michigan. An expert in energy markets, he worked for Enron in 1999-2000. He has also been a senior manager in the Mathematical Sciences Department at IBM Research. The initiatives of this department were reported on in a BusinessWeek cover story. The story has received substantial media coverage; another paper Takriti contributed to on the impact of outsourcing has also received some media attention.
Go to Profile#60
Dennis H. Holtschneider
#14082
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
Dennis Henry Holtschneider is president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Previously, he was the executive vice president and chief operations officer for Ascension Health, serving from July 2017 through June 2019. Prior to this, he served as president of DePaul University in Chicago, United States, serving from July 2004 through June 2017.
Go to Profile#61
Eric D. Green
#34716
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Eric D. Green is an American genomics researcher who had significant involvement in the Human Genome Project. He is the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health , a position he has held since 2009.
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Leonard Schlesinger
#46722
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Leonard A. Schlesinger is an American author, educator, and business leader. He is currently the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and President Emeritus of Babson College where he served as the college's 12th President from 2008 through 2013.
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Paul Leonardi
#75777
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Paul M. Leonardi was the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was also the Investment Group of Santa Barbara Founding Director of the Master of Technology Management Program. Leonardi moved to UCSB to found the Technology Management Program and start its Master of Technology Management and Ph.D. programs. Before joining UCSB, Leonardi was a faculty member in the School of Communication, the McCormick School of Engineering, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Go to Profile#64
Myles Brand
#10125
Overall Influence
1942 - 2009 (67 years)
Myles Neal Brand was a philosopher and university administrator who served as the 14th president of the University of Oregon, the 16th president of Indiana University, and the fourth president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association of the United States.
Go to Profile#65
Richard Lyons
#21428
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (63 years)
Richard Kent Lyons was the 14th Dean of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, until 2018. In 2020 he became UC Berkeley's first Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer.
Go to Profile#66
H. Naylor Fitzhugh
#35971
Overall Influence
1909 - 1992 (83 years)
Howard Naylor Fitzhugh was an American academic and one of the first African-American graduates of Harvard Business School. Fitzhugh is credited with creating the concept of target marketing. Early life Fitzhugh was born on October 31, 1909, in Washington, D.C. He earned a full scholarship to Harvard at the age of sixteen while still a student at Dunbar High School. Fitzhugh, intent on becoming a doctor, studied science and graduated cum laude from Harvard University in 1930. Three years later, he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School in 1933.
Go to Profile#67
P. George Benson
#44500
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Paul George Benson is an American academic, and the former President of the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. Early life and education Benson was born in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania to Paul Benson and Anna Louise Stolz Benson . His father was the CEO of Royal Imprints, Inc. and his mother taught mathematics at Bucknell University. In 1951, Benson's brother Charles Edward Benson was born. In 1960, his father sold Royal Imprints and returned to teaching statistics and mathematics at Bucknell University, which he had done for several years in the 1940s. After being a homemaker i...
Go to Profile#68
Elizabeth A. Mannix
#79848
Overall Influence
Elizabeth A. Mannix is the professor of Management and Organizations at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the Director of the Institute for the Social Sciences at Cornell University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Chicago.
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David B. Yoffie
#49733
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
David B. Yoffie is the Max and Doris Starr Professor of International Business Administration at Harvard Business School . Education and career Yoffie received his bachelor's degree pa from Brandeis University and his Master's and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford, where he taught for two years, and spent more than three years as a visiting scholar between 1995 and 2020. Over the last two decades, he has chaired the Harvard Business School's Strategy department, Harvard's Advanced Management Program, Harvard's Young Presidents' Organization program, Harvard's World President's Organization, Harvard's YPO Gold program, as well as several other executive programs.
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Kenneth Morse
#32291
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (78 years)
Kenneth Paul Morse was an early employee at Aspen Technology, Inc., and four other startups. He is the former managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and chairman of Entrepreneurship Ventures, Inc. He holds the chair in Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Competitiveness at Delft University of Technology.
Go to Profile#71
Stewart D. Friedman
#43934
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Stewart D. Friedman is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Wharton Leadership Program and Wharton's Work/Life Integration Project. He has been on the Wharton faculty since 1984 and became the Management Department's first Practice Professor in recognition of his work within the fields of Leadership Development, Human Resources and Work–Life Integration on the application theory and research on the real challenges facing organizations. In 2001, Friedman completed a two-year assignment as the director of the Leadership ...
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Alison Davis-Blake
#28810
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Alison Davis-Blake is an American academic administrator. She served as the eighth president of Bentley University. Before Bentley, she served as dean of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota and of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. At Ross, Davis-Blake was the school’s first female dean, and at the time of her appointment she was the highest-ranking female dean at any U.S. business school.
Go to Profile#73
Richard M. Freeland
#6426
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Richard Middleton Freeland was president of Northeastern University from 1996 to 2006 and served as the Commissioner of Higher Education for Massachusetts from 2008 until 2015. Freeland grew up in Mountain Lakes, New Jersey, and was a 1959 graduate of Mountain Lakes High School; he was inducted into the school's hall of fame in 2014. He was granted a bachelor's degree in American Studies from Amherst College and a doctorate in American Civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.
Go to Profile#74
Albert Carnesale
#14193
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Albert Carnesale is an American academic and a specialist in arms control and national security. He is a former chancellor of the University of California, Los Angeles, provost of Harvard University, and dean of the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was also acting president of Harvard while President Neil L. Rudenstine was on leave for three months. He has also been active in international diplomacy on nuclear arms control and nuclear non-proliferation. From 1970-72, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union—a major step towards controlling nuclear weapons.
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Ralph Cicerone
#26098
Overall Influence
1943 - 2016 (73 years)
Ralph John Cicerone was an American atmospheric scientist and administrator. From 1998 to 2005, he was the chancellor of the University of California, Irvine. From 2005 to 2016, he was the president of the National Academy of Sciences . He was a "renowned authority" on climate change and atmospheric chemistry, and issued an early warning about the grave potential risks of climate change.
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John Hussman
#24121
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (62 years)
John Peter Hussman , is an American philanthropist, economist, and hedge fund manager. Early life Hussman holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University, as well as a master's degree in education and social policy and a bachelor's degree in economics from Northwestern University.
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Martin Meyerson
#24627
Overall Influence
1922 - 2007 (85 years)
Martin Meyerson was an American city planner, academic, and president of the University of Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1981. His research, mentorship, essays, and consulting were focused on post-World War II urban policy at the municipal and federal levels.
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John J. DeGioia
#8216
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
John Joseph DeGioia is an American academic administrator and philosopher who has been the president of Georgetown University since 2001. He is the first lay president of the school and is currently its longest-serving president. Upon his appointment, he also became the first lay president of any Jesuit university in the United States. Having spent his entire career at Georgetown, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, DeGioia was the dean of student affairs and held various vice presidential positions before becoming president.
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Edward T. Foote II
#20181
Overall Influence
1937 - 2016 (79 years)
Edward Thaddeus "Tad" Foote II was an American academic administrator, attorney, and journalist who served as the fourth president of the University of Miami from 1981 through 2001. Early life and education Foote was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on December 15, 1937. He graduated from John Burroughs School in Ladue, Missouri. He earned a bachelor's degree from Yale University and a law degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
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Harold Pollack
#17528
Overall Influence
Harold Pollack is an American professor at the University of Chicago who has been appointed to two Institute of Medicine committees. His research has focused on public health and health policy. At the University of Chicago, he has chaired the Center for Health Administration Studies. A special correspondent for the New Republic during 2009 and 2010, he writes frequently about public policy for a variety of national publications. Pollack is a frequent contributor to Healthinsurance.org, where he has conducted interviews with other prominent health policy bloggers, including Jonathan Cohn. He i...
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James R. Bailey
#79922
Overall Influence
James Russell Bailey is an American business scholar, a professor of management and Hochberg Professorial Fellow of Leadership Development at George Washington University and Fellow in the Centre of Management Development at London Business School. He is the editor-in-chief of the Academy of Management Learning and Education.
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Nalin Kulatilaka
#66646
Overall Influence
Professor Nalin Kulatilaka is a Sri Lankan born American academic and researcher. Currently, Nalin Kulatilaka is The Wing Tat Lee Family Professor of Management as well as Professor of Finance in the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Director of the Impact Measurement and Allocation Program, Director of the Susilo Institute of Ethics in a Global Economy, and the Associate Director at the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability.
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Peter Likins
#26564
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (88 years)
Peter William Likins was president of the University of Arizona from 1997 until his retirement in summer 2006. Previous posts in order of most recent were:President of Lehigh UniversityProvost for professional schools at Columbia University,Dean of Columbia's engineering school.At each of these universities, Likins was a professor of engineering.
Go to Profile#84
Karen Holbrook
#19344
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Karen Ann Holbrook is the regional chancellor of University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee since January 2, 2018. Career Holbrook earned her B.S. and M.S. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in zoology. After teaching biology at Ripon College, she earned a Ph.D. in biological structure from the University of Washington School of Medicine in 1972, where she served as a postdoctoral fellow in dermatology, faculty member and research administrator. She then pursued further training in dermatology. She is an alumna of Gamma Phi Beta sorority.
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William Henry Danforth
#10673
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
William Henry Danforth II was an American physician, professor of medicine, academic administrator, and philanthropist. He was chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1971 until 1995. Danforth was the grandson of Ralston-Purina founder and St. Louis businessman William H. Danforth, and the brother of former U.S. Senator John Danforth.
Go to Profile#86
Robert Mehrabian
#10092
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Robert Mehrabian is an Armenian-American materials scientist and the executive chairman of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated. He assumed this position on January 1, 2019. He was chairman, president, and chief executive officer of the company from 2000 to December 31, 2018, and president and a chief executive officer from 1999 to 2000. Mehrabian held various senior executive positions at Allegheny Teledyne Incorporated starting in July 1997 before the spin-off of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated in November 1999. Previously he was president of Carnegie Mellon University from 1990 to 1997....
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Frank Miller
#13586
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Frank Miller is an American comic book artist, comic book writer, and screenwriter known for his comic book stories and graphic novels such as his run on Daredevil, for which he created the character Elektra, and subsequent Daredevil: Born Again, The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Sin City, and 300.
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Özalp Özer
#47564
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Özalp Özer is an American business professor specializing in pricing science and operations research. He is the Ashbel Smith Professor of Management Science at the Naveen Jindal School of Management and also currently serves as an affiliated faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Management.
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Charles A. Holloway
#30346
Overall Influence
Charles Arthur Holloway has been a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business since 1968 and has been a member of SRI International's board of directors since 2003. In 1990, he founded the Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing at Stanford. He is also a co-founder of the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and serves on the boards of Annuity Systems, Freedom Financial Corporation, Lexy, Neato Robots and Occam.
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Richard H. Brodhead
#5887
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Richard Halleck Brodhead is an American scholar of 19th-century American literature and served as the 9th president of Duke University in North Carolina from 2004 to 2017. Early life and education Brodhead was born April 17, 1947, in Dayton, Ohio. His family moved to Fairfield, Connecticut when he was six years old, where he attended public schools. He attended Phillips Academy, where his high school classmates included Dick Wolf and George W. Bush. He attended Yale University, where, during his senior year, he was tapped for membership in the secret society Manuscript and as a member of the Elizabethan Club.
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Edward B. Roberts
#144944
Overall Influence
1935 - Present (89 years)
Edward Baer Roberts is a faculty member at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He became the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology in 1974. Ed Roberts, one of the leading authorities on entrepreneurship wrote "Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond" on high-tech business creation and growth. The book won the Association of American Publishers Award for Outstanding Book in Business and Management in 1991. Dr. Roberts is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Chair of the Sloan School’s Mana...
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Steven A. Cohen
#35978
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Steven A. Cohen is an American academic who has taught public management and environmental policy at Columbia University since 1981. He is the former executive director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and now serves as a senior advisor for the institute. He is a professor in the practice of public affairs at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He is also the director of the Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy in the School of International and Public Affairs and the director of the Master of Science in Sustainability Management in the School of Professional Studies.
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Cynthia Warrick
#66075
Overall Influence
Cynthia Warrick is the seventh president of Stillman College, a liberal arts college in the West Tuscaloosa area of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Before starting a career in higher education, she practiced as a licensed pharmacist. Warrick has two children, Alan Warrick II, a member of the San Antonio City Council, and Whitney Blair Craig, a federal and state lobbyist.
Go to Profile#94
Trisha Brown
#8882
Overall Influence
1936 - 2017 (81 years)
Trisha Brown was an American choreographer and dancer, and one of the founders of the Judson Dance Theater and the postmodern dance movement. Brown’s dance/movement method, with which she and her dancers train their bodies, remains pervasively impactful within international postmodern dance.
Go to Profile#95
David B. Ashley
#52724
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
David Brian Ashley was the eighth president of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, appointed to the position on July 1, 2006 and relieved of his duties by the Board of Regents on July 10, 2009. Ashley attended MIT, becoming a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, and graduated in 1973. His bachelor's degree and master's degree, also of MIT, are both in civil engineering; he has a second master's degree and a doctorate from Stanford University. He served as the founding executive vice chancellor and provost at the University of California, Merced starting in 2001 and was the dean of the College...
Go to Profile#96
Jonna Mazet
#36214
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
Jonna Ann Keener Mazet is an American epidemiologist and Executive Director of the University of California, Davis One Health Institute. Recognized for her innovative and holistic approach to emerging environmental and global health threats, she is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Mazet is a professor of Epidemiology and Disease Ecology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, where she focuses on global health problem solving, especially for emerging infectious disease and conservation challen...
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Jerome Katz
#76219
Overall Influence
Jerome A. Katz is an American professor, consultant and author who specializes in entrepreneurship. He is the Robert H. Brockhaus Endowed Chair of Entrepreneurship at Saint Louis University in St Louis, Missouri and Director of the Billiken Angels Network.
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Rebecca Chopp
#11369
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Rebecca S. Chopp is an academic administrator and professor. She was the chancellor of the University of Denver, and the first female chancellor in the institution's history. Prior to that, Chopp was a president of Swarthmore College and Colgate University.
Go to Profile#99
Jacqueline Liebergott
#21732
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Weis Liebergott assumed the presidency of Emerson College as its first female president in September 1993 and during her tenure spearheaded the college's move from Boston's Back Bay to the theatre district. This move resulted in unprecedented growth and success for the institution.
Go to Profile#100
Lisa Mainiero
#111881
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (67 years)
Lisa Adeline Mainiero is an American writer and academic in the field of management. Her career focuses on the careers of women and men, and workplace romance. Mainiero is one of the first researchers to investigate romance in the workplace, and crafted the Kaleidoscope Career Model with her co-author Sherry E. Sullivan.
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