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 …
See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.
List of the most influential people in Philosophy,
#13301
Fatmah Baothman
#155058
Overall Influence
Fatmah Baothman is Saudi Arabian computer scientist who is the first woman in the Middle East with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. She was recently appointed the board president for the Artificial Intelligence Society. Baothman has worked over 25 years as, and is currently, an assistant professor at King Abdulaziz University Faculty of Computing & Information Technology Baothman established the women's Department which is the foundation of the Computer Science College at King Abdulaziz University, and became the first teaching assistant faculty member.
Go to Profile#13302
Melih Abdulhayoğlu
#174371
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (58 years)
Melih Abdulhayoğlu is the CEO of MAVeCap, an incubator Venture Capital firm funded by his family office. MAVeCap focusses on building tomorrow's technology platform companies. His first company was Comodo. The firm is now branded as Sectigo.
Go to Profile#13303
Sandra Welner
#113746
Overall Influence
1958 - 2001 (43 years)
Sandra Welner was an American physician, inventor, and advocate for disabled women's healthcare. Early life and education Sandra Leah Welner was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Nikodem and Barbara Safier Welner. Her parents were both Polish-born and British-educated; her father was a civil engineer, and her mother was a nurse. Sandra graduated from Hillel Academy in 1975, as valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. Welner enrolled in an accelerated medical education program, where she completed undergraduate work at Lehigh University, and earned her medical degree from the Medical College of Pennsylvania, in 1981 .
Go to Profile#13304
Takeshi Morishita
#191887
Overall Influence
1932 - Present (94 years)
Takeshi Morishita is a Japanese physician and scholar on cardiological imaging in Japan, an ex-professor at Toho University, school of medicine, Tokyo, and a councillor of the university. Born in Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan in 1932, he graduated from Toho University in 1962. In 1979, he became vice-director of Omori Hospital attached to Toho University. After retiring as a professor in 1998, he served as director of Ofuna Chūō General Hospital in Kamakura until March 2006. He became director of Nukada Memorial Hospital in Kamakura in June 2006.
Go to Profile#13305
Padmini Murthy
#137453
Overall Influence
Padmini Murthy is a physician, Professor and Global Health Director at New York Medical College. In 2016 she was awarded the Elizabeth Blackwell Medal by the American Medical Women's Association for her contribution to the field of women in medicine.
Go to Profile#13306
Allan Hamilton
#112338
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Allan J. Hamilton is an American physician and medical consultant to ABC's medical drama Grey’s Anatomy based in Tucson, Arizona. A professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Arizona College of Medicine – Tucson, Dr. Hamilton was elected a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons in 1994. In 1995, Dr. Hamilton was promoted to Chief of Neurosurgery and became Chairman of the Department of Surgery in 1998. He currently holds a tenured professorship in Neurosurgery, as well as additional professorships in the Departments of Psychology, Radiation Oncology, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Go to Profile#13307
Anthony Costello
#46808
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Anthony Costello is a British paediatrician. Until 2015 Costello was Professor of International Child Health and Director of the Institute for Global Health at the University College London. Costello is most notable for his work on improving survival among mothers and their newborn infants in poor populations of developing countries. From 2015 to 2018 he was director of maternal, child and adolescent health at the World Health Organization in Geneva.
Go to Profile#13308
Marius Flothuis
#180979
Overall Influence
1914 - 2001 (87 years)
Marius Flothuis, born and died in Amsterdam, was a Dutch composer, musicologist and music critic. Biography Flothuis first took courses at Vossius Gymnasium in Amsterdam. There he studied piano and music theory with . His musicology studies continued at the University of Amsterdam under the direction of Albert Smijers and . Flothuis graduated in 1969 with a thesis on the arrangements of the works of Mozart.
Go to Profile#13309
Trilok Chandra Goel
#85887
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Trilok Chandra Goel worked as a Professor of Surgery in King George's Medical University, Lucknow, India between 1986 and 1999. He was re-appointed Emeritus Professor in 2015. Early life Son of Ganga Prasad Goel and his wife Sharbati Goel, Trilok Chandra Goel was born in Dankaur, a village in greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, India. He was educated in Ghaziabad and then graduated with Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree from King George's Medical University, Lucknow, India topping the final examination to win Hewett Medal in 1962. In 1965, he completed his Master of Surgery from t...
Go to Profile#13310
Ernst Rothauser
#168278
Overall Influence
1931 - 2015 (84 years)
Ernst Rothauser was an Austrian computer scientist. As member of Heinz Zemanek's "Mailüfterl-Team", he worked on the country's first transistor computer. After finishing his dissertation he was hired by IBM Zurich Research Laboratory, retiring in 1995.
Go to Profile#13311
Paul Morris
#114678
Overall Influence
Paul Morris, MA McM, PhD Lanc, is a religious studies scholar and an Emeritus Professor at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He was the Programme Director for Religious Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, and provides regular comment to the media on matters of religious diversity. He is the author of the New Zealand National Statement on Religious Diversity.
Go to Profile#13312
David Epstein
#147550
Overall Influence
1930 - 2002 (72 years)
David Mayer Epstein was an American composer, conductor, and music scientist who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the author of Shaping Time: Music, the Brain, and Performance, a work on the neurological basis for various elements of music theory, and co-editor of Beauty and the Brain: Biological Aspects of Aesthetics.
Go to Profile#13313
Zvi Keren
#168613
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Zvi Keren was a New York-born Israeli pianist, musicologist and composer. Upon his death was the last living pupil who was personally authorized by Joseph Schillinger. Considered to be among the pioneers of jazz playing in Israel, and the pioneer in an academic approach to jazz education in Israel, where he settled in 1951. Played an important role in the Israeli music scene as a composer, arranger and educator for generations of Israeli musicians.
Go to Profile#13314
Afua Adwo Jectey Hesse
#50684
Overall Influence
Afua Adwo Jectey Hesse, , is a Ghanaian surgeon and the first Ghanaian-trained female doctor to become a paediatric surgeon. In August 2010, she became the first Ghanaian and second African to be elected President of the Medical Women's International Association .
Go to Profile#13315
Mohamed Ghoneim
#21617
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Mohamed Ahmed Ghoneim is an Egyptian urologist. Career Ghoneim is a graduate of the University of Cairo. He is one of the founders of the Ghoneim Urology and Nephrology Center for Management of Renal and Urological Disorders . He is a member of the International Society of Urology, and a member of both the British and the American Urology Associations. He is a colleague of Professor Nils Kock, the inventor of the Kock pouch.
Go to Profile#13316
A. James Hudspeth
#51813
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
A. James Hudspeth is the F.M. Kirby Professor at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he is director of the F.M. Kirby Center for Sensory Neuroscience. His laboratory studies the physiological basis of hearing.
Go to Profile#13317
Adam Sterling
#65878
Overall Influence
1983 - Present (43 years)
Adam Sterling was the executive director of the Sudan Divestment Task Force, a project of the Genocide Intervention Network, and a graduate of University of California, Los Angeles with degrees in Political Science and African American Studies.
Go to Profile#13318
Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger
#93023
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (86 years)
Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger is a Swiss musicologist. He became known through his activities as a juror and publications on Chopin. Life Born in Neuchâtel, Eigeldinger studied at the University of Neuchâtel, the Sorbonne and the Conservatoire de Musique de Genève.
Go to Profile#13319
Daniel Levy
#82117
Overall Influence
Daniel Levy is a cardiologist who is the director of the Framingham Heart Study at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, a division of the National Institutes of Health . He is also Professor of Medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. He is known for his research on the epidemiology and genetics of heart failure and hypertension.
Go to Profile#13320
Chukwuedu Nwokolo
#79003
Overall Influence
1921 - 2014 (93 years)
Chukwuedu Nathaniel II Nwokolo was a Nigerian physician specialist in tropical diseases. He was recognised for discovering and mapping out the area of paragonimiasis lung disease in Eastern Nigeria, with a study of the disease in Africa and clinical research for its control. He founded SICREP: Sickle Cell Research Programme to effectively fight the disease in Nigeria and globally.
Go to Profile#13321
Gary I. Wadler
#80719
Overall Influence
1939 - 2017 (78 years)
Gary Irwin Wadler was an American internist with special expertise in the field of drug use in sports. The lead author of the book Drugs and the Athlete, Wadler served on the World Anti-Doping Agency's Prohibited List and Methods Committee and on its Health, Medicine, and Research Committee. Additionally, he served as: Medical Advisor to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, a Trustee of the Board of the American College of Sports Medicine and of the Women’s Sports Foundation. Among his other sports medicine activities, he served as Tournament Physician of the U.S. Open Ten...
Go to Profile#13322
Pablo César
#180435
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Pablo César is an Argentine film director, film producer, screenwriter and film professor. He began his filmmaking career in the Buenos Aires independent short film scene shot in the Super 8 format, making more than twenty works between the 1970s and 1980s, among which Del génesis , Ecce civitas nostra —co-directed with Jorge Polaco—and Memorias de un loco stand out. In 1983, César directed his first feature film De las caras del espejo, shot in Super-8. He turned to the 35 mm film format from his second feature onwards, La sagrada familia , an ironic film that works as a critique of the abu...
Go to Profile#13323
Robert Arellano
#170636
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Robert Arellano is an American author, musician and educator from Talent, Oregon. His literary production includes pioneering work in electronic publishing, graphic-novel editions for Soft Skull Press/Counterpoint, and five novels published by Akashic Books. His guitar-playing for Bonnie 'Prince' Billy is featured on 'I See a Darkness', which Pitchfork magazine named one of the Top 10 albums of the 1990s, and since the 1980s he has been writing and recording songs for solo projects and his group Havanarama.
Go to Profile#13324
Ian Jones
#178538
Overall Influence
1931 - 2018 (87 years)
Ian Edward Swainson Jones was an Australian television writer and director and an author specialising in the history of notorious outlaw Ned Kelly and his gang. Career Jones had a long career in Australian television, and is best remembered for his writing and directing work at Crawford Productions on shows such as Homicide, Matlock Police, The Bluestone Boys and The Sullivans, and for Against the Wind, a highly successful mini-series, created in collaboration with Bronwyn Binns, which explored Australia's convict past.
Go to Profile#13325
Noriko Kamakura
#81419
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Noriko Kamakura :22 was a practitioner, researcher, and academic leader in occupational therapy. She was in the initial generation of people who became occupational therapists in Japan. She greatly influenced how occupational therapy developed in that country, contributing especially in clinical approaches to persons with central nervous disorders of executive functions. In addition, she explored function of the hand in enough detail to develop a system of taxonomies that can account for the vast majority of postures and movements of the hand.
Go to Profile#13326
Jan Millsapps
#175385
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Jan Millsapps is a U.S. digital filmmaker, fiction writer, and Professor Emerita in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University. She has produced films, videos and interactive cinema on subjects ranging from domestic violence to global terrorism, and has published in traditional print and online venues.
Go to Profile#13327
Bertil H. van Boer
#104587
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Bertil H. van Boer is an American musicologist, composer, conductor and violist. Life and career Bertil Hermann van Boer studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Master of Arts at the University of Oregon and his PhD in Music History from Uppsala University.
Go to Profile#13328
Lothar Voigtländer
#184371
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Lothar Voigtländer is a German composer. Life Voigtländer was born in Leisnig. He received his formative musical education between 1954 and 1962 as a choirboy and later as choir prefect in the Dresdner Kreuzchor under Rudolf Mauersberger. From 1961 to 1968 he studied conducting with Rolf Reuter and music composition with Fritz Geißler at the Leipzig Academy of Music and from 1970 to 1972 as a master student at the Akademie der Künste der DDR with Günter Kochan.
Go to Profile#13329
Ann Rockley
#102407
Overall Influence
Ann Rockley is a content manager. She is the founder and President of The Rockley Group, based in the greater Toronto Area. She regularly presents papers and workshops on subjects involving the efficient creation, management and delivery of content for organizations in North America and Europe. She was the lead analyst for The XML & Component Content Management Report on Content Management Systems Watch.
Go to Profile#13330
Junichiro Ito
#31654
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Junichiro Ito is a Japanese medical researcher and a psychiatrist. He is currently the director of the Department of Psychiatric Rehabilitation, National Institute of Mental Health, Japan. Ito's research interests include Assertive Community Treatment and assistance programs for socially withdrawn individuals, called hikikomori.
Go to Profile#13331
Laurent Gagnebin
#106357
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Laurent Gagnebin is a philosopher and Protestant theologian born in Lausanne in 1939. He has been pastor of the Reformed Church of France in Paris in the Liberal Protestant congregations of the Oratory of the Louvre and the from 1963 to 1981 and professor of practical theology at the Protestant Faculty of Theology in Paris.
Go to Profile#13332
Venko Filipče
#81022
Overall Influence
1977 - Present (49 years)
Venko Filipče is a Macedonian neurosurgeon and the former health minister of North Macedonia from 2017 to 2022. He served as the health minister during the COVID-19 pandemic in North Macedonia. In addition to his work as a surgeon and health minister, Filipče has also published scientific articles in medical neurosurgical journals.
Go to Profile#13333
Kentaro Higuchi
#90580
Overall Influence
1907 - 1994 (87 years)
was a Japanese dermatologist and educator. Personal history Higuchi was born in Fukuoka Prefecture and graduated from Kyushu Imperial University in 1934. He studied mycology under Mokutaro Kinoshita or Masao Ota. In 1942 he became assistant professor in the Department of Dermatology at Kyushu Imperial University. One year later, he became professor of dermatology at Jakarta University. He was a professor of dermatology at Kurume University in 1947 and at Kyushu University in 1948. In 1957 he studied in Germany. In 1971 he retired from Kyushu University and became professor of dermatology at F...
Go to Profile#13334
H. Winter Griffith
#130041
Overall Influence
1926 - 1993 (67 years)
Dr. H. Winter Griffith was an American physician who authored 27 popular medical books. His books include The Complete Guide to Symptoms, Illness, and Surgery and Complete Guide to Prescription and Nonprescription Drugs. Multiple editions have been published, even after his death, and these books are the basis for the health library on the popular web site MDadvice.com . Griffith's books have been renowned as easy for patients to read and understand.
Go to Profile#13335
Neema Kaseje
#93323
Overall Influence
Neema Kaseje is an American pediatric surgeon and public health specialist in Boston, with Doctors Without Borders, and at University Hospitals Geneva. She is the founder and director of the Surgical Systems Research Group in Kisumu, Kenya. She has recently been appointed the head of the World Health Program in Emergency and Essential Surgical Care, and leads a Wellcome Trust funded COVID-19 health intervention in Siaya, Kenya.
Go to Profile#13336
Roser Bru
#112944
Overall Influence
1923 - 2021 (98 years)
Roser Bru Llop was a Spanish-born Chilean painter and engraver associated with the neo-figurative art movement. Biography Roser Bru was born in Barcelona in 1923. The following year her family went into exile in Paris, France, as a result of the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. Four years later, they returned to their hometown where Bru studied at the Montessori School and later, in 1931, at the . After the Spanish Civil War, in 1939, she moved back to France, where she embarked for Chile on the SS Winnipeg. She arrived in Valparaíso on 3 September of that year.
Go to Profile#13337
Hermann Schmitz
#187772
Overall Influence
1928 - 2021 (93 years)
Hermann Schmitz was a German philosopher who founded neo-phenomenology. He was a professor at the University of Kiel.
Go to Profile#13338
Laurent Bavay
#124158
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Laurent Bavay is a Belgian Egyptologist who has been director of the Institut français d'archéologie orientale since June 2015.
Go to Profile#13339
Mark M. Davis
#38189
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Mark Morris Davis is an American immunologist. He is the director of and Avery Family Professor of Immunology at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University. Education Davis was educated at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology where he was awarded a PhD in 1981 for research supervised by Leroy E. Hood.
Go to Profile#13340
Hans Grüß
#175442
Overall Influence
1929 - 2001 (72 years)
Hans Ludwig Kurt Reinhold Grüß was a German musicologist and ensemble leader. Life Childhood and studies He spent his childhood and adolescence in Freiberg since his father taught as professor of mathematics and technical mechanics at the Bergakademie Freiberg from 1936. As a grammar school student he was drafted to the Volkssturm and was only able to take his Abitur after he had been a prisoner of war.
Go to Profile#13341
John Howard
#115653
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
John Howard is an English singer-songwriter, pianist and recording artist and published author. With his February 1975 debut album Kid in a Big World , Howard emerged as a late voice of the glam-pop wave of the early 1970s. Across a musical career that has included two main periods of recording activity – 1974-84 and 2004–present – Howard has released 20 studio albums and 12 studio EPs. In March 2018, he became a published author, his first autobiography, Incidents Crowded With Life, covering his childhood up to 1976, was published by Fisher King Publishing. In August 2020, the second volume ...
Go to Profile#13342
Sean D. Kirkland
#113528
Overall Influence
Sean D. Kirkland is an American philosopher and associate professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He is known for his expertise on Ancient Greek Philosophy. Kirkland won the 2013 Symposium Book Award for his monograph The Ontology of Socratic Questioning in Platos Early Dialogues.
Go to Profile#13343
Jo Zayner
#78449
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Jo Zayner is a biohacker, artist, and scientist best known for their self-experimentation and work making hands-on genetic engineering accessible to a lay audience, including CRISPR. Education At the age of 19, Zayner worked at Motorola as a programmer. She has a BA in plant biology from Southern Illinois University and a Ph.D in biophysics from the University of Chicago. Before receiving their Ph.D, Zayner earned a MSc in cell and molecular biology from Appalachian State University.
Go to Profile#13344
Januarius Jingwa Asongu
#190614
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Januarius Jingwa Asongu is an American philosopher, scholar, journalist, author, entrepreneur, and activist. Born in the city of Lewoh, in the former British Southern Cameroons, Africa, he moved to the United States in the mid-1990s, where he is now a naturalized citizen.
Go to Profile#13345
Jacqueline Couti
#191692
Overall Influence
Jacqueline Couti is the Laurence H. Favrot Associate Professor of French Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. Education Dr. Couti received her MA in 2004, and her PhD in 2008 from the University of Virginia in French Language and Literatures with a specialization in Francophone and New World Studies.
Go to Profile#13346
Kate van Orden
#177415
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Kate van Orden is an American musicologist and bassoonist, currently Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University. Biography Van Orden obtained a Ph.D. in Music History and Theory from the University of Chicago in 1996.
Go to Profile#13347
Dieter Härtwig
#131695
Overall Influence
1934 - 2022 (88 years)
Dieter Härtwig is a German dramaturge, musicologist and author of numerous writings on Dresden's music history and its personalities. After gaining his Abitur from Kreuzschule, Härtwig studied musicology and German literature at the University of Leipzig. He was awarded a doctorate in 1963 with a dissertation on Rudolf Wagner-Régeny.
Go to Profile#13348
Ian Ford
#119288
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Ian Ford [ FRSE FRCP is a professor of biostatistics and a director of the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics, and a former Dean of Faculty of Information and Mathematical Sciences, at the University of Glasgow.
Go to Profile#13349
Doris Hargrett Clack
#181867
Overall Influence
1928 - 1995 (67 years)
Doris Hargrett Clack was an African-American librarian and expert on cataloging and classification. She was a professor of library science at Florida State University for 23 years and did extensive scholarly work on the library classification of black studies and the second edition of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules .
Go to Profile#13350
Judith Estrin
#182373
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Judith "Judy" L. Estrin is an American entrepreneur, business executive, and philanthropist. She co-founded eight technology companies. Estrin worked with Vinton Cerf on the Transmission Control Protocol project at Stanford University in the 1970s. She was the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000. Since 2007, Estrin has been the CEO of JLABS, LLC, a privately held company focused on furthering innovation in business, government, and nonprofit organizations.
Go to Profile