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 Philosophy,
#5401
Claudio M. Anasetti
#120001
Overall Influence
#5402
Chris Whitty
#6072
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Sir Christopher John MacRae Whitty is a British epidemiologist, serving as Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK Government since 2019. Whitty was Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department of Health and Social Care and Head of the National Institute for Health and Care Research from 2016 to 2021. He was also the Acting Government Chief Scientific Adviser from 2017 to 2018. He is emeritus Gresham Professor of Physic.
Go to Profile#5403
Kenneth Kaushansky
#43296
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Kenneth Kaushansky, M.D., Master of the American College of Physicians is an American medical doctor, hematologist, former editor of the medical journal Blood, and served as the dean of the Stony Brook University School of Medicine from 2010 to 2021. Prior to moving to Stony Brook, he was the Helen M. Ranney Professor, and chair of the department of medicine at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine.
Go to Profile#5404
William F. Enneking
#120051
Overall Influence
#5405
Grace Slick
#23552
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Grace Slick is an American painter and retired musician whose musical career spanned four decades. Slick was a prominent figure in San Francisco's psychedelic music scene during the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.
Go to Profile#5406
James E. Montie
#120056
Overall Influence
#5407
Roland Mertelsmann
#74859
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Roland Mertelsmann is a German hematologist and oncologist. He was a professor at the Freiburg University Medical Center, Department of Internal Medicine I . Mertelsmann is known for his scientific works in the fields of hematology, oncology, gene therapy and stem cell transplantation.
Go to Profile#5408
Leonard B. Kaban
#54115
Overall Influence
Leonard B. Kaban, D.M.D., M.D., F.A.C.S. is the Walter C. Guralnick Professor and Chair of the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard University. Biography
Go to Profile#5409
Timothy S. Healy
#40030
Overall Influence
1923 - 1992 (69 years)
Timothy Stafford Healy was an American Catholic priest and Jesuit who straddled the religious and secular life, serving as the vice chancellor of the City University of New York, the president of Georgetown University, and the president of the New York Public Library.
Go to Profile#5410
Mary J. Roman
#120135
Overall Influence
#5411
Hans‐jochen Heinze
#120153
Overall Influence
#5412
Nancy J. Cox
#120168
Overall Influence
#5413
Allan Lucas
#120169
Overall Influence
#5414
János Szolcsányi
#120187
Overall Influence
#5415
Allan J. Collins
#120208
Overall Influence
#5416
Sidney J. Winawer
#120230
Overall Influence
#5417
Robert Holbrook Hawes
#120232
Overall Influence
#5418
Andreas Weber
#63553
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (59 years)
Andreas Weber is a German biologist, biosemiotician, philosopher and journalist. Biography Andreas Weber studied biology and philosophy in Berlin, Freiburg, Hamburg and Paris. He became a PhD in philosophy in 2003 with the thesis Natur als Bedeutung. Versuch einer semiotischen Theorie des Lebendigen. He has worked as a journalist for publications such as Die Zeit, GEO, Merian and Greenpeace Magazin. He lives in Berlin and Italy with his wife and two children.
Go to Profile#5419
Max Wintermark
#111300
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Dr. Max Wintermark is a Swiss and American neuroradiologist who pioneered perfusion scanning of the brain. Wintermark is currently a Professor and the Chair of Neuroradiology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Center in Houston, Texas. Previously, he worked at Stanford and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA. He trained in Lausanne, Switzerland and at the University of California, San Francisco . Max Wintermark serves as the chair of the American Society of Neuroradiology research committee.
Go to Profile#5420
W. Illiam E. Grizzle
#120268
Overall Influence
#5421
Tomás González
#89985
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Tomás González is a Colombian writer. He studied philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. He is best known for his debut novel In the Beginning Was the Sea which was translated into English by Frank Wynne and published by Pushkin Press. The translation was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. González lived in the United States for twenty years before returning to his native Colombia in 2002.
Go to Profile#5422
Beat Knechtle
#120275
Overall Influence
#5423
Elaine Sisman
#36716
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Elaine Rochelle Sisman is an American musicologist. The Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music at Columbia University, Sisman specializes in music, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the 18th and 19th centuries, and has written on such topics as memory and invention in late Beethoven, ideas of pathétique and fantasia around 1800, Haydn's theater symphonies, the sublime in Mozart's music, and Brahms's slow movements. She is the author of Haydn and the Classical Variation and Mozart: The 'Jupiter' Symphony and editor of Haydn and His World. Her monograph-length article on "variations" appears in the r...
Go to Profile#5424
Manuel Mindán Manero
#108764
Overall Influence
1902 - 2006 (104 years)
Manuel Mindán Manero was an Aragonese philosopher and priest. Doctor of Philosophy in 1951, from the University of Madrid, he served as professor and civil servant at the Ramiro de Maeztu Institute in Madrid, being secretary of the Luis Vives Institute of Philosophy of the CSIC and director for 25 years of the Spanish Journal of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#5425
David Tuveson
#84871
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
David Arthur Tuveson is an American cancer biologist and is currently Roy J. Zuckerberg Professor of Cancer Research as well as The Cancer Center Director at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Dr. Tuveson is also the Chief Scientist for the Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research. He is known for developing some of the first mouse models of pancreatic cancer and more recently, for his work developing pancreatic cancer organoids.
Go to Profile#5426
Emily Oken
#120309
Overall Influence
#5427
Andrew M. Kaunitz
#120317
Overall Influence
#5428
Charles E. Samuel
#120319
Overall Influence
#5429
Meyer‐michel Samama
#120344
Overall Influence
#5430
Eric A. Jaffe
#120347
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
#5431
Tracey Rouault
#93703
Overall Influence
Tracey Ann Rouault is an American rheumatologist and physician-scientist who researches mammalian iron-sulfur proteins. Rouault is a senior investigator at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and she heads the section on human iron metabolism.
Go to Profile#5432
Safiya Noble
#17247
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Safiya Umoja Noble is a professor at UCLA, and is the co-founder and co-director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is the author of Algorithms of Oppression, and co-editor of two edited volumes: The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture and Emotions, Technology & Design. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. She was appointed a Commissioner to the University of Oxford Commission on AI and Good Governance in 2020. In 2020 she was nominated to the Global Future Council on Artificial Intelligence for Humanity ...
Go to Profile#5433
Frederick Chapman Robbins
#5310
Overall Influence
1916 - 2003 (87 years)
Frederick Chapman Robbins was an American pediatrician and virologist. He was born in Auburn, Alabama, and grew up in Columbia, Missouri, attending David H. Hickman High School. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1954 along with John Franklin Enders and Thomas Huckle Weller, making Robbins the only Nobel laureate born in Alabama. The award was for breakthrough work in isolating and growing the poliovirus in tissue culture, paving the way for vaccines developed by Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. He attended the University of Missouri and Harvard University.
Go to Profile#5434
Karina W. Davidson
#105858
Overall Influence
Karina W. Davidson is senior vice president of research at Northwell Health and director of the Institute of Health System Science at the Feinstein Institutes of Medical Research.She was previously vice-dean of organizational effectiveness and executive director of the Center for Behavioral Cardiovascular Health at Columbia University Medical Center. She was also Chief Academic Officer at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
Go to Profile#5435
Abraham Bos
#81515
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Abraham P. Bos is a retired professor in Ancient and Patristic philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, specializing in the philosophy of Aristotle His doctoral thesis in 1971 was "Een onderzoek naar de kosmologie van Aristoteles in de eerste jaren van zijn wijsgerige activiteit" His inaugural lecture in 1976 was "Providentia Divina: The Theme of Divine Pronoia in Plato and Aristotle"
Go to Profile#5436
Seth Love
#120398
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
#5437
Eckhard Thiel
#120415
Overall Influence
#5438
Patrick Hwu
#120427
Overall Influence
#5439
René A. Adam
#120430
Overall Influence
#5440
Alicja Gescinska
#107471
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Alicja Anna Gescinska is a Polish-Belgian philosopher. Academic career Alicja Gescinska obtained a master's degree summa cum laude in Moral Sciences at Ghent University. She became Doctor of Philosophy at the same university in 2012, having written a dissertation on the philosophy of Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla: Freedom and Persons: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Meaning of Human Agency in the Thought of Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla.
Go to Profile#5441
Anthony Seaton
#25067
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Anthony Seaton qualified in medicine from Cambridge University in 1962, and after training in Liverpool was appointed assistant professor of medicine at the University of West Virginia, USA in 1969. He became consulting chest physician at the University of Wales in 1971, and was named director of the Institute of Occupational Medicine at Edinburgh in 1978. Seaton became the head of the Department of Environmental and Occupational Medicine at the University of Aberdeen in 1988 and on retiring in 2003 became emeritus professor. He continues to write and teach and has active research interests ...
Go to Profile#5442
Ivo Pitanguy
#10865
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Ivo Hélcio Jardim de Campos Pitanguy was a plastic surgeon based in Rio de Janeiro. Pitanguy studied at the Bethesda North Hospital in Cincinnati, where he worked with John Longacre. Soon after, Pitanguy went to France and England where he studied plastic surgery.
Go to Profile#5443
Robert E. Brown
#49548
Overall Influence
1927 - 2005 (78 years)
Robert Edward "Bob" Brown was an American ethnomusicologist who is credited with coining the term "world music". He was also well known for his recordings of music from Indonesia. Many of these recordings, among the first widely distributed and commercially available in the United States, inspired a generation of musicians to study and perform Indonesian gamelan music.
Go to Profile#5444
Louise D. Mccullough
#120508
Overall Influence
#5445
Joseph P. Huston,
#120515
Overall Influence
#5446
Alan Bennett
#10945
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Alan Bennett is an English playwright, author, actor and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George . In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
Go to Profile#5447
Satyatma Tirtha
#95684
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Sri Satyatma Tirtha , is an Indian Hindu philosopher, guru, scholar, spiritual leader, saint and the present pontiff of Uttaradi Math. He is the 42nd pontiff of Uttaradi Math since Madhvacharya, the chief proponent and the one who rejuvenated the Dvaita philosophy . Satyatma Tirtha founded Vishwa Madhwa Maha Parishat, a non-profit, religious and social organization in 1998.
Go to Profile#5448
Jørn Dyerberg
#120554
Overall Influence
#5449
Christian J. Lambertsen
#10545
Overall Influence
1917 - 2011 (94 years)
Christian James Lambertsen was an American environmental medicine and diving medicine specialist who was principally responsible for developing the United States Navy frogmen's rebreathers in the early 1940s for underwater warfare. Lambertsen designed a series of rebreathers in 1940 and in 1944 and first called his invention breathing apparatus. Later, after the war, he called it Laru and finally, in 1952, he changed his invention's name again to SCUBA . Although diving regulator technology was invented by Émile Gagnan and Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1943 and was unrelated to rebreathers, the current use of the word SCUBA is largely attributed to the Gagnan-Cousteau invention.
Go to Profile#5450
M. Roseann Diehl
#120558
Overall Influence
