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 Mathematics,
#8551
Mark Allinson
#116460
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (58 years)
Mark Allinson is an academic at the University of Bristol, where he is currently associate pro vice-chancellor . He has previously served as undergraduate dean of arts between 2013 and 2019, head of the School of Modern Languages from 2006 to 2010, and head of the German department between 2003 and 2006.
Go to Profile#8552
Howard Gordon
#49314
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Howard Gordon is an American television writer and producer. He is well known for his work on the Fox action series 24 alongside the Showtime thriller Homeland, which he co-developed with Alex Gansa and Gideon Raff, and for the FX political drama Tyrant, which he co-developed with Craig Wright. He also produced the NBC science fiction thriller Awake.
Go to Profile#8553
T. V. Venkatachala Sastry
#66008
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (92 years)
Togere Venkatasubbasastry Venkatachala Sastry, commonly known as T. V. Venkatachala Shastry, is a Kannada-language writer, grammarian, critic, editor and lexicographer. He has authored in excess of 100 books, translations and has edited collections of essays, biographical sketches and felicitation volumes. Recipient of the Kannada Sahitya Akademi Award , Sastry is an authority on Kannada language grammar and its various facets ranging from the metre scale on which he has written extensively to the history of Kannada literature spanning two millennia.
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Jacobus Verhoeff
#84317
Overall Influence
1927 - 2018 (91 years)
Jacobus "Koos" Verhoeff was a Dutch mathematician, computer scientist, and artist. He is known for his work on error detection and correction, and on information retrieval. He has also held exhibitions of his mathematically inspired sculptures.
Go to Profile#8555
Graham Barnfield
#42497
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Graham Barnfield is a British academic and pundit associated with the hard left Revolutionary Communist Party . In 1993 he began writing on cultural politics in the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Barnfield also comments on documentary representation, leading to some radio and television appearances discussing reality television and happy slapping. He teaches journalism at the University of East London.
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Dion O'Neale
#171070
Overall Influence
Dion O'Neale is a New Zealand applied mathematician who specialises in the area of complex systems and network science. His work involves the analysis of empirical data to inform computer simulations to predict how interacting parts and structures of networks can affect the dynamics and properties of systems. During COVID-19, O'Neale created mathematical models to build understanding of how the network of interractions of the virus was spread, and during this period, was a frequent commentator in the New Zealand media about the country's response to the pandemic. He is a senior lecturer in phy...
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Sherwood Schwartz
#55570
Overall Influence
1916 - 2011 (95 years)
Sherwood Charles Schwartz was an American television screenwriter and producer. He worked on radio shows in the 1940s, but he now is best known for creating the 1960s television series Gilligan's Island on CBS and The Brady Bunch on ABC. On March 7, 2008, Schwartz, at the time still active in his 90s, was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That same year, Schwartz was also inducted into the Television Hall of Fame.
Go to Profile#8558
Jacob Noel-Storr
#109463
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Jacob Noel-Storr is an astrophysics researcher and science education and outreach specialist researcher, Presently the lecturer for practical astronomy and X-Lab-PAM team leader at the University of Groningen and president of InsightSTEM, Inc. He was an assistant research professor and director of the Insight Lab for Science Outreach and Learning Research at Rochester Institute of Technology, and assistant staff scientist in the Steward Observatory and Flandrau Science Center at the University of Arizona. He is known for contributions to the study of Active Galactic Nuclei / Supermassive Black...
Go to Profile#8559
Daniel McGee
#186724
Overall Influence
Daniel McGee is an American statistician and professor emeritus of statistics at Florida State University, where he formerly chaired the department of statistics. Before joining the faculty of Florida State in 2002, he worked for the United States Public Health Service and in academic medicine. He chaired Florida State's department of statistics from 2005 to 2011 and retired from the faculty there in May 2019. He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1992.
Go to Profile#8560
Eva Ferreira
#99835
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (62 years)
María Eva Ferreira García is the Rector of the University of the Basque Country . She graduated from the University of the Basque Country with a degree in Mathematics. She obtained a master's degree in Probability and Statistics from the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and a PhD in Economics from the University of the Basque Country. Since 2005, she has held a full professorship in Applied Economics. On 25 January 2021, she was named Rector of the University of the Basque Country .
Go to Profile#8561
Bobby Wilson
#144908
Overall Influence
Bobby Wilson is a mathematician and assistant professor at the University of Washington. Professional career and research Wilson obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2015 under the supervision of Wilhelm Schlag. He was an undergraduate at Morehouse College. He was a CLE Moore Instructor at MIT 2015–2018. He was twice an MSRI Postdoctoral Fellow and will participate in the MSRI program Mathematical problems in fluid dynamics in 2021. His research "has been primarily concerned with questions concerning structure theory of measures and the dynamics of dispersive evolutionary equati...
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Kate Soper
#164985
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (44 years)
Kate Soper is a composer and vocalist. She was a recent Rome Prize winner American Academy in Rome and Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellow as well as a 2012–13 fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her chamber opera, Ipsa Dixit.
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James Wilson
#189402
Overall Influence
#8564
C. F. Jeff Wu
#189418
Overall Influence
#8565
Nancy Springer
#34381
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
Nancy Springer is an American author of fantasy, young adult literature, mystery, and science fiction. Her novel Larque on the Wing won the Tiptree Award in 1994. She also received the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her novels Toughing It in 1995 and Looking for Jamie Bridger in 1996. Additionally, she received the Carolyn W. Field Award from the Pennsylvania Library Association in 1999 for her novel I am Mordred. She has written more than fifty books over a career that has spanned nearly four decades.
Go to Profile#8566
Edna Schechtman
#181517
Overall Influence
1948 - 2022 (74 years)
Edna Schechtman was an Israeli statistician, a professor emeritus of statistics at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. She is best known for development of statistical tools that utilize the Gini Mean Difference as the measure of association.
Go to Profile#8567
Eamonn O'Brien
#188634
Overall Influence
Eamonn Anthony O'Brien is a professor of mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, known for his work in computational group theory and -groups. Education O'Brien obtained his B.Sc. from the National University of Ireland in 1983. He completed his Ph.D. in 1988 at the Australian National University. His dissertation, The Groups of Order Dividing 256, was supervised by Michael F. Newman.
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Mauricio Antón
#35287
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Mauricio Antón Ortuzar is a paleoartist and illustrator specializing in the scientific reconstruction of extinct life, well known for his influential paintings of hominids, extinct carnivores and other vertebrate fossil groups. His works illustrate a great number of books, scientific papers, private collections and museums in many parts of the world. He currently works in association with the Natural Science Museum in Madrid.
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Christophe Breuil
#189476
Overall Influence
#8570
Tetsuji Shioda
#189501
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Tetsuji Shioda is a Japanese mathematician who introduced Shioda modular surfaces and who used Mordell–Weil lattices to give examples of dense sphere packings. He was an invited speaker at the ICM in 1990.
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Ekhaguere Godwin Osakpemwoya Samuel
#188661
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Godwin Osakpemwoya Samuel Ekhaguere is a Nigerian professor of mathematics at the University of Ibadan and the founder and president of the International Centre for Mathematical & Computer Sciences . He was a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany, a former sub Dean of Faculty of Science University of Ibadan and is a member of the African Academy of Sciences. He is also a recipient of the Nigerian National Order of Merit which was conferred on him by President Muhammadu Buhari.
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Boris Ford
#35510
Overall Influence
1917 - 1998 (81 years)
Richard Boris Ford , was a literary critic, writer, editor and educationist. Early life The son of an Indian Army officer, Brigadier Geoffrey Noel Ford, and his Russian wife Ekaterina, Ford was a chorister at King's College, Cambridge, eventually becoming head chorister under Boris Ord. He was then educated at Gresham's School, and through his English master there, Denys Thompson, was introduced to F.R. Leavis under whom he studied at Downing College, Cambridge. Even before graduating, Ford's essay on Wuthering Heights was published by Leavis in Scrutiny in March 1939. Although he came to sh...
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Shirley Temple
#86693
Overall Influence
1928 - 2014 (86 years)
Shirley Temple Black was an American actress, singer, dancer, and diplomat, who was Hollywood's number-one box-office draw as a child actress from 1934 to 1938. Later, she was named United States Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia, and also served as Chief of Protocol of the United States.
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David Bevan
#84223
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
David Bevan is an English mathematician, computer scientist and software developer. He is known for Bevan's theorem, which gives the asymptotic enumeration of grid classes of permutations and for his work on enumerating the class of permutations avoiding the pattern 1324. He is also known for devising weighted reference counting, an approach to computer memory management that is suitable for use in distributed systems.
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C. F. Jeff Wu
#189611
Overall Influence
#8576
Brian Schulz
#161153
Overall Influence
1901 - Present (124 years)
Brian Schulz is a three-time New York Emmy Award winning producer for Major League Baseball Productions in New York City. He's also one of MLB's lead cinematographers dispatched across the country to capture the game's most indelible images. Brian can also be found behind the camera shooting and directing television commercials and music videos.
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Jonathan Lynn
#43837
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Jonathan Lynn is an English stage and film director, producer, writer, and actor. He directed the comedy films Clue, Nuns on the Run, My Cousin Vinny, and The Whole Nine Yards. He also co-created and co-wrote the television series Yes Minister.
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Simon Thornley
#135266
Overall Influence
Simon James Thornley is a New Zealand medical doctor and academic specialising in epidemiology and biostatistics, and as of 2021 is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland. Career Thornley trained as a medical doctor prior to joining the University of Auckland as a public health academic specialising in epidemiology and biostatistics. He graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Human Biology in 1997, a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery in May 2000, and Master of Public Health with First Class Honours in 2006 and a Doctor of Philosophy in Medicine in 2015.
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Norman Newell
#65822
Overall Influence
1919 - 2004 (85 years)
Norman Newell was an English record producer, who was mainly active in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also the co-writer of many notable songs. As an A&R manager for EMI, he worked with musicians such as Shirley Bassey, Dalida, Claude François, Vera Lynn, Russ Conway, Bette Midler, Judy Garland, Petula Clark, Jake Thackray, Malcolm Roberts, Bobby Crush and Peter and Gordon.
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Jean-Yves Jaffray
#152355
Overall Influence
1939 - 2009 (70 years)
Jean-Yves Jaffray was a French mathematician and economist who made influential contributions in the fields of decision theory and mathematical statistics. He pioneered methods in decision theory such as linear utility theory for belief functions, bridging the gap between expected utility and the maximin rule by using subjective probability to encompass belief functions.
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Dennis Johnson
#172507
Overall Influence
1938 - 2018 (80 years)
Dennis Lee Johnson was a mathematician and minimal composer. He is the namesake of the Johnson homomorphism in the study of mapping class groups of surfaces. Johnson’s early talent for mathematics earned him a full scholarship to the Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire, where he completed high school. He enrolled to study mathematics at the California Institute of Technology in 1956. But after a year he became disillusioned, and although he had studied the piano only casually as a child, he decided to transfer to the University of California, Los Angeles , to study music.
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K. T. Chandy
#24807
Overall Influence
1913 - 2006 (93 years)
K. T. Chandy was an Indian management education administrator and business executive. He was the founder-director of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, the first Indian Institute of Management.
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Steven N. Goodman
#48158
Overall Influence
Steven N. Goodman is an American Professor of Epidemiology and Population Health and of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. He has extensively contributed to foundations of scientific and statistical inference within the biosciences, and in 1999 he coined the term "p-value fallacy".
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Åsmund Reikvam
#178477
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Åsmund Ragnar Reikvam is a Norwegian professor in medicine and former politician. Education He graduated as dr. med. in 1976 and became a specialist in Internal medicine and Heart disease in 1981. He worked at Ullevål university hospital and Sogn og Fjordane central hospital, the latter as head physician in 1983–1984 and 1989–1992. In 1999 he was appointed professor in pharmacotherapeutics at the University of Oslo.
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Richard Allen Hunt
#173860
Overall Influence
1937 - 2009 (72 years)
Richard Allen Hunt was an American mathematician. He graduated from Washington University in St. Louis in 1965 with a dissertation entitled Operators acting on Lorentz Spaces. An important result of states that the Fourier expansion of a function in Lp, p > 1, converges almost everywhere. The case p=2 is due to Lennart Carleson, and for this reason the general result is called the Carleson-Hunt theorem. Hunt was the 1969 recipient of the Salem Prize. He was a faculty member at Purdue University from 1969 to 2000, when he retired as professor emeritus.
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Luc Tartar
#189739
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Luc C. Tartar is a French-American mathematician currently the University Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University.
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Dennis Tirpak
#187330
Overall Influence
Dennis Tirpak is a climate change scientist. Tirpak was the director of the Global Climate Change Policy Division at the United States Environmental Protection Agency from 1984–1992. He was the coordinator of science and technology at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for nine years. He was the head of the climate change unit at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development for three years.
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Kirill Ilinski
#187009
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Kirill Ilinski is a Russian born British businessman and scientist. He is the founder and Chief Investment Officer of Fusion Asset Management and the author of "Physics of Finance: Gauge Modelling in Non-Equilibrium Pricing" Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Fusion Asset Management.
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Abe Peck
#89329
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (80 years)
Abe Peck is a magazine consultant, writer, editor and professor, known for having been an editor and writer at the Chicago Seed underground newspaper from 1968 to 1971. Biography Early life and education Peck was born in the Bronx, New York on Jan 18, 1945. He graduated from New York University with a degree in history and pursued graduate studies before dropping out of school and into New York's East Village.
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Marc Thomas
#164557
Overall Influence
1950 - 2017 (67 years)
Marc Phillip Thomas was a professor of computer science and mathematics, retired chair and a system administrator of Computer Science department at CSU Bakersfield.His successful research projects include the resolution of the commutative Singer–Wermer conjecture and construction of a non-standard closed ideal in a certain radical Banach algebra of power series and their quotients.
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Kenzie
#92831
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (49 years)
Kim Yeon-jung , known professionally as Kenzie, is a South Korean songwriter and record producer who signed under SM Entertainment. She has composed, arranged and written mostly songs for SM artists such as BoA, Isak N Jiyeon, Super Junior, The Grace, TVXQ, Girls' Generation, Shinee, f, Exo, Red Velvet, SuperM, and NCT, as well as non-SM acts such as Twice, CIX, BAE173, and The Boyz.
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Hartmut Vogtmann
#80892
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Hartmut Vogtmann is honored as a pioneer in organic agriculture in Germany as well as other countries. He contributes his knowledge and direct engagement to promote organic agriculture in many countries. Specially, he acted as an advisor to Prince Charles since the 1980s in organic agriculture. From 2012 to February 2015 he was president of the umbrella NGO "German League for Nature and Environment" with an individual membership of more than 5 million. He served this organisation from 2008 until 2012 as its first vice-president. From 2008 until 2011 he was the president of the foundation for...
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Guðlaugur Kristinn Óttarsson
#114785
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Guðlaugur Kristinn Óttarsson is an Icelandic musician. Music career Early bands Steinblóm was his first group. It was a trio formed by Guðlaugur , Haraldur Johannessen and Gunnar Magnússon . Steinblóm played punk versions of artists such as Bob Dylan and Donovan, Guðlaugur originals and folk songs. At that time, he was experimenting with homemade electro-acoustic guitars and amplifiers. Steinblóm played gigs in Reykjavík and the suburbs.
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Evan Dorkin
#87203
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Evan Dorkin is an American comics artist and cartoonist. His best known works are the comic books Milk and Cheese and Dork. His comics often poke fun at fandom, even while making it clear that Dorkin is a fan himself.
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David Weinrib
#104407
Overall Influence
1924 - 2016 (92 years)
David Weinrib was an American artist most renowned for sculpture and ceramic art. Biography In 1952, with his wife Karen Karnes, Weinrib was a resident potter during the first Crafts Institute at Black Mountain College. Lasting October 15–29, 1952, the workshop also included instruction by Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Dr. Soetsu Yanagi and Marguerite Wildenhain. At this time, Weinrib began experimenting in his practice of art production, creating tiles, "slab" pottery, and sculpted pots.
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James F. Howard Jr.
#119172
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (77 years)
James Francis Howard Jr. is a Professor of Neurology and Medicine at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Career Howard was born on May 3, 1948, in Bellows Falls, Vermont. He received a BA in 1970 and a M.D. in 1974, both from the University of Vermont.
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Steve Miller
#82625
Overall Influence
Steve Miller is a game designer and editor who has worked on a number of products for the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy role-playing game from Wizards of the Coast, and other role-playing games. Early life and education Steve Miller wanted to be a writer from an early age: "Actually, when I was in first grade, I wanted to be a sheriff's deputy... Then I wrote a little book in first grade called 'The Man Who Watches' about a sheriff's deputy, and I won some sort of prize for it. From then on, I wanted to be a writer." After Miller graduated from the University of Utah with a degree in English, wit...
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Shaun Tan
#67287
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (51 years)
Shaun Tan is an Australian artist, writer and film maker. He won an Academy Award for The Lost Thing, a 2011 animated film adaptation of a 2000 picture book he wrote and illustrated. Other books he has written and illustrated include The Red Tree and The Arrival.
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Ralf Bender
#189959
Overall Influence
#8600
Roger Nichols
#73570
Overall Influence
1944 - 2011 (67 years)
Roger Scott Nichols was an American recording engineer, producer, and inventor. Nichols is best known for his work with the group Steely Dan and John Denver. He was also the audio engineer for numerous major music acts including the Beach Boys, Stevie Wonder, Frank Zappa, Crosby Stills & Nash, Al Di Meola, Rosanne Cash, Roy Orbison, Cass Elliot, Plácido Domingo, Gloria Estefan, Diana Ross, Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, Rickie Lee Jones, Kenny Loggins, Mark Knopfler, Eddie Murphy, Michael McDonald, James Taylor, and Toots Thielemans, among others. On February 11, 2012, Nichols was awarded a S...
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