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,
#6151
Hal V. Barron
#26967
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Hal V. Barron is an American clinician-scientist and drug developer who served as president of research and development at GlaxoSmithKline from March 2018 until 2022, when he resigned in order to join the cellular reprogramming venture Altos Labs in August of that year. Prior to this he served as president of research and development at Calico. He has served as executive vice president, head of global product development, and chief medical officer of Hoffman-La Roche.
Go to Profile#6152
William f. Hickey
#128741
Overall Influence
#6153
James E. Udelson
#128747
Overall Influence
#6154
Steven Michael Opal
#128750
Overall Influence
#6155
Hellmut Federhofer
#104435
Overall Influence
1911 - 2014 (103 years)
Hellmut Federhofer was an Austrian musicologist. Born in Graz, he studied music there and in Vienna at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, graduating in 1936. In 1937, he became a librarian at the library of the Technische Hochschule Graz and later the Universitätsbibliothek Graz. He became director of the BTH in 1940. In 1959 he became professor of music theory. From 1962 until 1979 he was director of the musicology Institute of Mainz University, where he became Emeritus Professor of musicology.
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Ernest McCulloch
#17985
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Ernest Armstrong McCulloch was a University of Toronto cellular biologist, best known for demonstrating – with James Till – the existence of stem cells. Biography McCulloch was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on 27 April 1926, and was educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto.
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Roberts S. Negrin
#128764
Overall Influence
#6158
Mahendra Bhandari
#20501
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Mahendra Bhandari is an Indian surgeon who has made substantial contributions to the specialty of urology, medical training, hospital administration, robotic surgery and medical ethics. For his efforts, he was awarded the Padma Shri by the government of India in 2000. Bhandari is currently Senior Bio-scientist and Director of Robotic Surgery Research & Education at the Vattikuti Urology Institute in Detroit, MI. He was the Symposium coordinator of the International Robotic Urology Symposium. He also has been the CEO of the Vattikuti Foundation since 2010.
Go to Profile#6159
Richard J. Hawkins
#128767
Overall Influence
#6160
Arthur Lawrence Reingold
#128777
Overall Influence
#6161
Frederik Wenz
#128811
Overall Influence
#6162
Manuel Battegay
#128827
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
#6163
David C. Warltier
#128831
Overall Influence
#6164
Sunil Vishwas Rao
#128849
Overall Influence
#6165
Justin Chang
#43069
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Justin Choigee Chang is an American film critic and columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He previously worked for Variety. Early life Justin Chang graduated from the University of Southern California in 2004. Chang first became interested in film critique while in high school because he found it fascinating that "two or three intelligent people could watch a film and come away with completely different reactions to it."
Go to Profile#6166
S. Douglass Gilman
#128866
Overall Influence
#6167
Mitchell Thomashow
#74798
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Mitchell S. Thomashow is a writer, educator, and environmentalist focused on innovations in sustainability and environmental learning. Thomashow is the author of essays in environmental and education anthologies, including as co-founder of Whole Terrain: The Journal of Reflective Environmentalism and Hawk and Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability.
Go to Profile#6168
Cornelia Lass‐flörl
#128870
Overall Influence
#6169
Cecil H. Rorabeck
#128878
Overall Influence
#6170
Frederic J. Seidler
#128882
Overall Influence
#6171
Jane C. Burns
#128885
Overall Influence
#6172
Eva-Maria Mandelkow
#98283
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Eva-Maria Mandelkow is a German neuroscientist and Alzheimer's disease researcher at the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases , Bonn. Biography Eva-Maria Mandelkow studied medicine in Hamburg and Heidelberg, qualifying in 1968. After three years of medical internships, she began doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research, Heidelberg, investigating the enzyme kinetics of the motor protein myosin. She graduated in 1973 with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, then undertook postdoctoral training at Brandeis University in Massachusetts researching cytoskeletal proteins. She c...
Go to Profile#6173
Vincent Larivière
#128918
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (47 years)
#6174
Meg E. Morris
#128929
Overall Influence
#6175
Billy Goldberg
#54155
Overall Influence
1966 - Present (60 years)
Billy Goldberg is a New York City emergency medicine physician at the NYU School of Medicine , where he is also an Assistant Professor and an Assistant Director in the Department of Emergency Medicine. He graduated from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1992.
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Rhea Seddon
#15998
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (79 years)
Margaret Rhea Seddon is an American surgeon and retired NASA astronaut. After being selected as part of the first group of astronauts to include women in 1978, she flew on three Space Shuttle flights: as a mission specialist on STS-51-D and STS-40, and as a payload commander for STS-58, accumulating over 722 hours in space. On these flights, she built repair tools for a US Navy satellite and performed medical experiments.
Go to Profile#6177
Joseph A. Aisner
#128932
Overall Influence
#6178
Arne Forsgren
#128959
Overall Influence
#6179
Mario Armando Luna
#128960
Overall Influence
#6180
Frederick R. Singer
#128974
Overall Influence
#6181
David George Huntsman
#128976
Overall Influence
#6182
Andrew f Shorr
#128991
Overall Influence
#6183
Nigel W Bunnett
#129015
Overall Influence
#6184
Michael G. Bissell
#129016
Overall Influence
#6185
Futa Helu
#94776
Overall Influence
1934 - 2010 (76 years)
Futa Helu was a Tongan philosopher, historian, and educator. He studied philosophy under the Australian empiricist John Anderson and in 1963 launched an educational institute named Atenisi . The institute began as a continuing education programme for civil servants, then initiated a high school in 1964 and a university in 1975.
Go to Profile#6186
Daniel A. Weintraub
#129067
Overall Influence
#6187
Mitzi Waltz
#58800
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Mitzi Waltz is a scholar of media and disability studies. As of 2020, she is a research associate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Waltz was formerly an associate lecturer in autism studies at the Autism Centre of Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom. Before her appointment in 2012, she was a lecturer in autism studies at the Autism Centre for Education and Research , University of Birmingham and a senior lecturer at the University of Sunderland.
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Jonathan Carapetis
#80839
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Jonathan Carapetis is an Australian paediatric physician with particular expertise in infectious disease and Indigenous child health. He is a Winthrop Professor at the University of Western Australia, an infectious diseases consultant at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children, and an Honorary Distinguished Research Fellow of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research. Carapetis is the Director of the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth, Western Australia.
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Walter J. Hogan
#129100
Overall Influence
#6190
Jonathan Birch
#51177
Overall Influence
Jonathan Birch is a British philosopher who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work addresses the philosophy of biology, especially questions around the evolution of social behaviour and social norms, animal sentience, and animal welfare.
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S. Morris Engel
#86356
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (95 years)
S. Morris Engel is an author, philosopher, and linguist. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1959, writing on "The philosophy of language in Hobbes and Locke". He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and York University.
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Hossein Gharib
#129114
Overall Influence
#6193
Kjell Asplund
#129124
Overall Influence
#6194
Claus Werning
#129150
Overall Influence
#6195
Gilbert Ling
#36167
Overall Influence
1919 - 2019 (100 years)
Gilbert Ning Ling was a Chinese-born American cell physiologist, biochemist and scientific investigator. In 1944, Ling won the biology slot of the sixth Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, a nationwide competitive examination that allowed Chinese science and engineering students full scholarship to study in a United States university. In 1947 he co-developed the Gerard-Graham-Ling microelectrode, a device that allows scientists to more accurately measure the electrical potentials of living cells. In 1962 he proposed the Association induction hypothesis, which claims to be unifying, general theory of...
Go to Profile#6196
Helen A. Berger
#31828
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Helen Alice Berger is an American sociologist known for her studies of the Pagan community in the United States. Life and career Helen Berger, then an assistant professor at Boston University, first became involved in the study of the Pagan movement in October 1986, when she gave a series of public lectures on the subject of the historical witch trials of New England at the Boston Public Library. She devoted the final lecture to the subject of contemporary Pagan Witches, or Wiccans, who were living in the area, taking her information both from the information published in the works of Margot ...
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Richard Dyer
#57921
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
Richard Dyer is an English academic who held a professorship in the Department of Film Studies at King's College London. Specialising in cinema , queer theory, and the relationship between entertainment and representations of race, sexuality, and gender, he was previously a faculty member of the Film Studies Department at the University of Warwick for many years and has held a number of visiting professorships in the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, and Germany.
Go to Profile#6198
Mark S. George
#70474
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (68 years)
Mark S. George is a Distinguished University Professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences and is the director of the Medical University of South Carolina Center for Advanced Imaging Research as well as the Brain Stimulation Laboratory. As of June 2020, his research has been cited over 47,000 times, with an h-index of 113 and i-10 index of 404.
Go to Profile#6199
Ieuan Hughes
#73179
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Ieuan Arwel Hughes is a paediatric endocrinologist and an emeritus professor of paediatrics at the University of Cambridge. Hughes is most notable for long-standing research into disorders of sex development , established one of the largest and most comprehensive databases of cases of DSD including publishing the Consensus on DSD management framework which, barely eight years after its publication, is now already accepted worldwide as the framework for care of patients and families with DSD.
Go to Profile#6200
Peter Thielst
#128983
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Peter Thielst is a Danish philosopher, author and publisher of philosophical books from the Danish bureau "Det lille forlag" . He has written biographical works on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Bibliography Driftens fortolkninger Den kønspolitiske tænkning Søren og Regine Psykoanalyse og psykoterapi Kierkegaards filosofi Latterens lyst Drømmens veje Narkissos og Ekko Alice Miller Kønnet, kroppen og selvet Selvpsykologi Den europæiske krop Det onde Livet må forstås baglæns, men må leves forlæns Det gode Man bør tvivle om alt - og tro på meget, introduction to philosophy Jeg er ikke noget menneske - jeg er dynamit 5 danske filosoffer fra det 19.
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