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,
#8701
Bryan Fuller
#41208
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Bryan Fuller is an American television writer and producer who has created a number of television series, including Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal, American Gods, and Crystal Lake. Fuller worked as writer and executive producer on the Star Trek television series Voyager and Deep Space Nine; he is also the co-creator of Star Trek: Discovery.
Go to Profile#8702
Ashley Gorley
#117638
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (48 years)
Ashley Glenn Gorley is an American songwriter, publisher, and producer from Danville, Kentucky, who is based in Nashville, Tennessee. Gorley has written 60 number 1 songs and has over 300 songs recorded by artists including Luke Bryan, Jason Aldean, Florida Georgia Line, Carrie Underwood, Blake Shelton, Bon Jovi, Nate Smith, Thomas Rhett, Jason Derulo, Kelsea Ballerini, Morgan Wallen and Dan + Shay.
Go to Profile#8703
Monty Denneau
#73512
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (25 years)
Monty M. Denneau is a computer architect and mathematician. Denneau was awarded the 2002 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award for "ingenious and sustained contributions to designs and implementations at the frontier of high performance computing leading to widely used industrial products."
Go to Profile#8704
Glen Morgan
#49831
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (64 years)
Glen Morgan is an American television producer, writer and director. He is best known for co-writing episodes of the Fox science fiction supernatural drama series The X-Files with his partner, James Wong. He served as an executive producer on the show's eleventh season. He also executive produced The Twilight Zone reboot by Jordan Peele's Monkeypaw Productions.
Go to Profile#8705
Sonny Bono
#103872
Overall Influence
1935 - 1998 (63 years)
Salvatore Phillip "Sonny" Bono was an American singer, songwriter, actor, and politician who came to fame in partnership with his second wife, Cher, as the popular singing duo Sonny & Cher. A member of the Republican Party, Bono served as the 16th mayor of Palm Springs, California, from 1988 to 1992, and served as the U.S. representative for California's 44th district from 1995 until his death in 1998.
Go to Profile#8706
Stanley Peart
#108814
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Sir William Stanley Peart was a British medical doctor and clinical researcher who was first to demonstrate the release of noradrenaline after the stimulation of sympathetic nerves. Early life and education Peart was the son of footballer and Fulham Football Club manager John George Peart and Margaret Joan .
Go to Profile#8707
Louis Leithold
#87632
Overall Influence
1924 - 2005 (81 years)
Louis Leithold was an American mathematician and teacher. He is best known for authoring The Calculus, a classic textbook about calculus that changed the teaching methods for calculus in world high schools and universities. Known as "a legend in AP calculus circles," Leithold was the mentor of Jaime Escalante, the Los Angeles high-school teacher whose story is the subject of the 1988 movie Stand and Deliver.
Go to Profile#8708
Georgina Kleege
#116929
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Georgina Kleege is an American writer and a professor of English at University of California, Berkeley. Kleege was diagnosed as legally blind, with macular degeneration, at age 11. Kleege has written classic essays and memoirs in the field of disability studies on blindness and teaches a range of classes at Cal Berkeley with a specialization in creative writing and disability studies. She is best known for her autobiographical collection of essays in 1999 with her book titled Sight Unseen, where she compared her view of the world to the world's view of blindness. Her work often explores the r...
Go to Profile#8709
Alexander Dynin
#191507
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Alexander S. Dynin is a Russian mathematician at Ohio State University who introduced the Agranovich–Dynin formula. Since 2009, Dynin claims to have proved the Yang-Mills Millennium Problem. External links Alexander Dynin
Go to Profile#8710
Marianna Pineda
#108633
Overall Influence
1925 - 1996 (71 years)
Marianna Pineda was an American sculptor, who worked in a stylized realist tradition. The female figure was typically her subject matter, often in a striking or expressive pose. Major work included an eight-foot bronze statue of the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani, for a site between the Hawaii State Capitol and Iolani Palace, which she used as the subject matter of Search for the Queen, a 1996 documentary she produced on the life of her subject and the sculpture-making process. Other significant work includes the figure of a seated woman in The Accusative, for a site in the Honolulu, Hawaii off...
Go to Profile#8711
Jane Rosen
#178003
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Jane Rosen is an American artist, working in sculpture, drawing and printmaking. While Rosen's career was established in her native New York in the 1970s and 80s, with well received exhibitions and a teaching position at the School of Visual Arts, "a trip to Northern California provided an unexpected pivot for her aesthetic vision and her life." She lived on both coasts and subsequently began a teaching position at the University of California, Berkeley. Rosen "made the break from her urban existence as an artist in New York to a life as an artist on her ranch in California."
Go to Profile#8712
Kannan Krishnan
#186127
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Kannan M. Krishnan is the Campbell Chair Professor of Materials Sciences & Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Physics at the University of Washington, Seattle, Washington. He was named Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2013 for contributions to nano-magnetic technology in medicine.
Go to Profile#8713
Barbara Stripling
#191525
Overall Influence
Barbara Stripling is an American librarian and is the President of the Freedom to Read Foundation, a non-profit legal and educational organization affiliated with the American Library Association. Stripling served as president of the American Library Association from 2013 to 2014. During her term as president, she stressed that "Libraries Change Lives."
Go to Profile#8714
Allan Sly
#130700
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Allan Sly FRBS is an English sculptor and senior lecturer at Wimbledon College of Art, a constituent college of University of the Arts London. Sly was elected a Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in 1992.
Go to Profile#8715
Wolf Erlbruch
#29649
Overall Influence
1948 - 2022 (74 years)
Wolf Erlbruch was a German illustrator and writer of children's books, who became professor at several universities. He combined various techniques for the artwork in his books, including cutting and pasting, drawing, and painting. His style was sometimes surrealist and is widely copied inside and outside Germany. Some of his storybooks have challenging themes such as death and the meaning of life. They won many awards, including the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis in 1993 and 2003. Erlbruch received the Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2006 for his "lasting contribution" as a children's illustrator.
Go to Profile#8716
Juan Soto
#191543
Overall Influence
#8717
Marija Ujević-Galetović
#131093
Overall Influence
1933 - 2023 (90 years)
Marija Ujević Galetović was a Croatian sculptor and painter. She lived and worked in Zagreb. Work and artistic career Ujević-Galetović's work included portraits and figures. She studied sculpture at the Central School of Art and Design in London. Since 1987 she had been teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb, where she was appointed full professor in 1995. She was also an active member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She was the creator of numerous outdoor and indoor public sculptures located in places such as Virovitica, Vrsar, Zagreb, Marija Bistrica, Sinj, Slavonski Brod, Krk, Cres, Rijeka, Osijek, Labin, Visoko, Bihać, and Novi Sad.
Go to Profile#8718
Ron Miller
#39996
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
Ron Miller is an illustrator and writer who lives and works in South Boston, Virginia. He now specializes in astronomical, astronautical and science fiction books for adults and young adults. Miller was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He holds a BFA from Columbus, Ohio, College of Art and Design. He worked as a commercial artist and designer for six years, before taking a position as art director for the National Air and Space Museum's Albert Einstein Planetarium. He left there in 1977 to become a freelance illustrator and author; to date he has nearly sixty book titles to his credit, and his...
Go to Profile#8719
Frances Langford
#165375
Overall Influence
1913 - 2005 (92 years)
Julia Frances Newbern-Langford was an American singer and actress who was popular during the Golden Age of Radio and made film and television appearances for over two decades. She was known as the "GI Nightingale", an American armed-forces sweetheart, who entertained troops touring often with Bob Hope.
Go to Profile#8720
Bradford Morrow
#54090
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (74 years)
Bradford Morrow is an American novelist, editor, essayist, poet, and children's book writer. Professor of literature and Bard Center Fellow at Bard College, he is the founding editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.
Go to Profile#8721
Lewis Seifert
#121096
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (63 years)
Lewis Carl Seifert is a professor of French Literature at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Seifert holds a DEA from the Université de Paris III and a PhD from the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan .
Go to Profile#8722
Kaj Nyström
#191580
Overall Influence
Kaj Nyström is a Swedish mathematician currently at Uppsala University and was awarded the Göran Gustafsson Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#8723
David Nolan
#142326
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
David Nolan is a British television producer and author, specialising in music and popular culture biographies, covering subjects from the Sex Pistols to Simon Cowell. He is a former lecturer at Salford University.
Go to Profile#8724
Bruce Morton
#178855
Overall Influence
1926 - 2012 (86 years)
Bruce Morton was an Australian/New Zealand applied mathematician. Early life and education Morton was born in Wellington, New Zealand and educated at Auckland Grammar School. He gained a government scholarship to attend the University of Auckland, where he completed a double degree in mathematics and physics. Whilst at the University of Auckland he was an active member of the mountaineering club and climbed with Edmund Hillary. In 1949, Morton was awarded the Rutherford fellowship to study for a BA mathematical tripos at St John's College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#8725
Andrzej Dłużniewski
#115477
Overall Influence
1939 - 2012 (73 years)
Andrzej Dluzniewski was considered one of the greatest contemporary Polish sculptors. He died in Warsaw, Poland when he was 73 years old. See also Overview of Works and StyleBiography
Go to Profile#8726
Joe Kelly
#134252
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (54 years)
Joseph Kelly is an American comic book writer, penciler and editor who has written such titles as Deadpool, Uncanny X-Men, Action Comics, and JLA, as well as award-winning work on The Amazing Spider-Man and Superman. As part of the comics creator group Man of Action Studios, Kelly is one of the creators of the animated series Ben 10.
Go to Profile#8727
Jeff Pinkner
#62641
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (61 years)
Jeff Pinkner is an American television and movie writer and producer. Life and career Born to a Jewish family, Pinkner graduated from Pikesville High School in Baltimore, Maryland in 1983, Northwestern University in 1987, and Harvard Law School in 1990. He is known for his work on Alias where he served as executive producer. In 2006 and 2007, he worked as an executive producer and writer for the mystery series Lost. The Lost writing staff, including Pinkner, were nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2007 ceremony for their work on the second and third seasons of Lost.
Go to Profile#8728
Lev Kerbel
#37873
Overall Influence
1917 - 2003 (86 years)
Lev Yefimovich Kerbel was a Soviet and Russian sculptor of socialist realist works. Kerbel's creations included statues of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Yuri Gagarin, which were sent by Soviet Government as gifts to socialist and the Third World countries across the world.
Go to Profile#8729
Johannes Heesters
#162519
Overall Influence
1903 - 2011 (108 years)
Johan Marius Nicolaas Heesters , known professionally as Johannes Heesters, was a Dutch actor of stage, television and film, as well as a vocalist of numerous recordings and performer on the concert stage with a career dating back to the 1920s. He worked as an actor until his death and was one of the oldest performing entertainers in history, performing shortly before his death at the age of 108. Heesters was almost exclusively active in the German-speaking world from the mid-1930s and became a film star in Nazi Germany, which later led to controversy in his native country. He was able to main...
Go to Profile#8730
Bryce Zabel
#108716
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (71 years)
Bryce H. Zabel is an American television producer, director, writer, and occasional actor. With hundreds of hours of produced film and television credits, Zabel has scripted a trio of mini-series which aired in the U.S. He also coauthored a book titled AD: After Disclosure, with prominent UFOlogist Richard Dolan. His mini-series include the medical thriller Pandemic , the pirate adventure Blackbeard , and the disaster epic The Poseidon Adventure .
Go to Profile#8731
Wing Hung Wong
#191672
Overall Influence
#8732
Van C. Gessel
#88207
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Van C. Gessel is a former Dean of the BYU College of Humanities at Brigham Young University. He also served as chair of the Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages at BYU. He has become renowned for his work as the primary translator for Japanese novelist Endo Shusaku. He is also a prominent editor of several Japanese translations including The Columbia Anthology of Modern Japanese Literature .
Go to Profile#8733
Shamim Sikder
#42070
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
Shamim Sikder was a Bangladeshi sculptor. Sikder served as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka between 1980–2001. She was awarded the Ekushey Padak in 2000 by the Government of Bangladesh.
Go to Profile#8734
Léonce Bekemans
#45461
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Léonce Bekemans is a Belgian economist and scholar of European studies. Since 2002, he holds the Jean Monnet Chair in "Globalisation, Intercultural Dialogue and Inclusiveness in the EU" at the University of Padua. He is a former professor at the College of Europe in Bruges, where he was associate professor 1991–95 and full professor 1995–2001. He has previously been a research fellow at the European University Institute.
Go to Profile#8735
Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf
#191698
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (42 years)
Johann Friedrich Tolksdorf is a German prehistoric archaeologist and researcher with the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments. Tolksdorf is also affiliated with the University of Marburg and Technische Universität Darmstadt. He specializes in prehistory, sediments, geology, and landscape archaeology.
Go to Profile#8736
Robert Mondavi
#121323
Overall Influence
1913 - 2008 (95 years)
Robert Gerald Mondavi was an American winemaker. His technical and marketing strategies brought worldwide recognition for the wines of the Napa Valley in California. From an early period, Mondavi promoted labeling wines varietally rather than generically, which became the standard for New World wines. The Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at the University of California, Davis opened in October 2008 in his honor.
Go to Profile#8737
Yoann Doignon
#191703
Overall Influence
1989 - Present (36 years)
#8738
Ashley Taylor Dawson
#180137
Overall Influence
1982 - Present (43 years)
Philip Ashley Taylor Dawson , known as Ashley Taylor Dawson, is an English actor and singer. He is known for portraying the role of Darren Osborne in the Channel 4 soap opera Hollyoaks, as well as being a member of the pop group allSTARS*.
Go to Profile#8739
Stephen Uhalley
#146676
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Stephen Uhalley Jr. is a Chinese historian, specializing in aerospace. He has written China and Christianity: Burdened Past, Hopeful Future, A History of the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Tse-tung, a Critical Biography, as well as being a frequent contributor to multiple journals.
Go to Profile#8740
Dmitry Kolker
#147822
Overall Influence
1968 - 2022 (54 years)
Dmitry Borisovich Kolker was a Russian physicist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, member of the Institute of Laser Physics, head of the Laboratory of Quantum Optical Technologies of Novosibirsk State University.
Go to Profile#8741
Gillian Jagger
#183281
Overall Influence
1930 - 2019 (89 years)
Gillian Jagger was a British multimedia sculptor and installation artist, based in the Hudson Valley of the United States. She is known for her plaster castings of manhole covers on the streets of New York City in the 1960s, during which time she was "erroneously being identified as a Pop artist". In her work Jagger "[appropriates] materials from nature", and incorporates tracings, rubbingss, and castings of found objects in both urban and rural environments.
Go to Profile#8742
Marshall Goldsmith
#130341
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (76 years)
Marshall Goldsmith is an American executive leadership coach and author. Early life and education Goldsmith was born in Valley Station, Kentucky, and received a degree in mathematical economics from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1970; where he was also a brother of the Theta Xi Kappa Chapter Fraternity. He then earned an MBA from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business in 1972, and a PhD from UCLA Anderson School of Management in Los Angeles, California in 1977.
Go to Profile#8743
Helen J. Walker
#181223
Overall Influence
1953 - 2017 (64 years)
Helen Joan Walker was a UK space scientist. Personal life She was born in Warwick on 2 January 1953. She died in Wantage, Oxfordshire, on 19 September 2017, after a five-month illness, and her funeral was in Oxfordshire on 9 October.
Go to Profile#8744
Tony Tan
#183315
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (85 years)
Tony Tan Keng Yam is a Singaporean former politician who served as the seventh president of Singapore between 2011 and 2017. Prior to his presidency, he went on to serve as Minister for Education between 1980 and 1991, Minister for Finance between 1983 and 1985, and Minister for Defence between 1985 and 1991, Deputy Prime Minister between 1995 and 2005, and Coordinating Minister for National Security between 2003 and 2005. He is currently the oldest living former president, since the death of S. R. Nathan in 2016.
Go to Profile#8745
Jiří Toman
#90679
Overall Influence
1938 - 2020 (82 years)
Jiří Toman was a Czech-born Swiss jurist and professor. He was an expert in the field of international law. From 1992 to 1998, he directed the Henry-Dunant Institute in Geneva, which he had joined in 1969. From 1998 to 2018, Toman was a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law.
Go to Profile#8746
Jake Braun
#78673
Overall Influence
1975 - Present (50 years)
Jacob H. Braun is an American politician, cyber and national security expert. He was appointed by President Joseph Biden as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary's Senior Advisor to the Management Directorate. Braun is also a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies where he teaches courses on cyber policy and election security. He previously served as the Executive Director for the University of Chicago Harris Cyber Policy Initiative .
Go to Profile#8747
Jon Stone
#79849
Overall Influence
1931 - 1997 (66 years)
Jon Arthur Stone was an American writer, director, and producer who was best known as an original crewmember on the children's television show Sesame Street and is credited with helping to develop characters such as Cookie Monster, Oscar the Grouch and Big Bird. Stone won 18 television Emmy Awards. Many regard him as among the best children's television writers.
Go to Profile#8748
Anne Wright
#176360
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Anne Margaret Wright is a British academic and academic administrator. She was educated at King's College London . She was a Lecturer in English at Lancaster University from 1969 to 1971 then Senior Lecturer in Modern English at Hatfield Polytchnic from 1971 to 84. She served as Vice Chancellor of the University of Sunderland from 1992 to 1998. She was Chair of the National Lottery Commission 2005 to 2013. She was made a CBE in 1997.
Go to Profile#8749
Robert J. Marshall
#72688
Overall Influence
1918 - 2008 (90 years)
Robert James Marshall was an American clergyman and religious leader who was president of the Lutheran Church in America in the 1970s, at the time the largest Lutheran church in the United States. During his leadership, he played a pivotal role in the merger of his Lutheran Church in America with the American Lutheran Church and the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches to form the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Go to Profile#8750
Joe Harris
#76077
Overall Influence
1928 - 2017 (89 years)
Joseph Benjamin Harris III was an American illustrator and storyboard artist. He is best known for creating the Trix Rabbit, the cartoon mascot for General Mills' Trix breakfast cereal, who debuted in 1959. He also penned the Trix rabbit's memorable commercial tagline, "Silly rabbit! Trix are for kids", which is still utilized in General Mills' advertising campaign, as of 2017. Additionally, in 1959 Harris, Chet Stover, and W. Watts Biggers co-founded Total Television, which produced Saturday morning cartoons. Harris created some of Total Television's best known characters and series, including King Leonardo and His Short Subjects , Klondike Kat , and Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales .
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