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 Psychology,
#3151
A. Carlos León
#145406
Overall Influence
#3152
David C. Howell
#145428
Overall Influence
#3153
Ursula Hess
#129293
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Ursula Hess is a German psychologist who teaches at the Humboldt-University of Berlin as Professor of Social and Organizational Psychology at the Department of Psychology. Education Hess received a Diploma in psychology from the Justus-Liebig University in 1986 and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Dartmouth College in 1989.
Go to Profile#3154
Frank H. Farley
#145453
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Frank H. Farley is a humanistic psychologist and a past president of the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association . He teaches at Temple University and has been a fellow or a leader of several scholarly societies. He has published research on a wide range of topics, from risk-taking personalities to men who visit massage parlors.
Go to Profile#3155
Devon Polaschek
#131294
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Devon Leigh Logan Polaschek is a New Zealand professor of psychology and of Crime Science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand who studies high-risk violent offenders in prisons and on parole.
Go to Profile#3156
Saul M. Schanberg
#145463
Overall Influence
#3157
Christian Beste
#145474
Overall Influence
#3158
George Stricker
#145478
Overall Influence
#3159
Andreas Jochen Fallgatter
#145484
Overall Influence
#3160
Silvano Gallus
#145511
Overall Influence
#3161
Ronald P. Stolk
#145531
Overall Influence
#3162
Gary J. Blau
#145537
Overall Influence
#3163
Nira Liberman
#145539
Overall Influence
#3164
Matthias Kliegel
#145567
Overall Influence
#3165
Gudela Grote
#114758
Overall Influence
1960 - Present (66 years)
Gudela Grote is a German psychologist and academic. She was educated in Germany and the United States, and established her career in Switzerland. Early life Born in Wiesbaden, Hesse, Germany, Grote studied psychology at the University of Marburg and the Technical University in Berlin, and received her doctorate from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta in 1987 with a dissertation on the situational specificity and consistency of achievement motivation. She continued her research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich in 1988 and has held visiting positions at the Uni...
Go to Profile#3166
David C. Plaut
#145661
Overall Influence
#3167
John Raymond Smythies
#86310
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
John Raymond Smythies was a British neuropsychiatrist, neuroscientist and neurophilosopher. Biography Smythies was born on 30 November 1922 in Nainital, United Provinces, British India, where his father, Evelyn Arthur Smythies, a philatelist, was employed by the Department of Forests. His brother Bertram Evelyn Smythies became an ornithologist. His cousins on the Smythies side include Yorick Smythies, Richard Dawkins , Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood.
Go to Profile#3168
Nilanjana Dasgupta
#93509
Overall Influence
Nilanjana Dasgupta is a social psychologist whose work focuses on the effects of social contexts on implicit stereotypes - particularly on factors that insulate women in STEM fields from harmful stereotypes which suggest that females perform poorly in such areas. Dasgupta is a professor of Psychology and is the Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Go to Profile#3169
Duane M. Rumbaugh
#145721
Overall Influence
#3170
Hidenao Fukuyama
#145757
Overall Influence
#3171
Margaret Ann Neale
#145759
Overall Influence
#3172
Robert B. Cairns
#145775
Overall Influence
#3173
Michael Gerard Pratt
#145809
Overall Influence
#3174
Rainer Rupprecht
#145813
Overall Influence
#3175
Jo Ann M. Gora
#36733
Overall Influence
Jo Ann M. Gora is an American academic and college administrator. She was the 14th President of Ball State University. Before coming to Ball State she was a chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Boston, and, prior to that, the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
Go to Profile#3176
Timothy Smith
#104285
Overall Influence
Timothy Smith is an American psychologist, currently Distinguished Professor at University of Utah.
Go to Profile#3177
Puncky Paul Heppner
#145874
Overall Influence
#3178
Arthur Daniel Fisk
#145907
Overall Influence
#3179
Leo P. Crespi
#140644
Overall Influence
1916 - 2008 (92 years)
Leo P. Crespi was an American psychologist who directed public opinion research for the United States Information Agency. Crespi graduated from UCLA in 1937, and earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1942 in the field of comparative psychology. During his time as a graduate student, he discovered what has come to be known as the Crespi Effect: when the attractiveness of a reward is suddenly changed, this can temporarily influence performance more than one would expect from the size of the change in the reward.
Go to Profile#3180
M. Hassenzahl
#146133
Overall Influence
#3181
Christos Kyriacou
#146171
Overall Influence
#3182
Vlad Petre Glâveanu
#146187
Overall Influence
#3183
John Gibbon
#146202
Overall Influence
#3184
Bruce S. Rabin
#146219
Overall Influence
#3185
Daniel Michael Mungas
#146260
Overall Influence
#3186
Mark Steyvers
#146424
Overall Influence
#3187
Sara Mednick
#91720
Overall Influence
Sara C. Mednick is a sleep researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the relationship between napping and performance. She is the author of several papers and a mass market book, Take a Nap! Change Your Life. She graduated with her PhD in psychology from Harvard University studying under Ken Nakayama and Robert Stickgold.
Go to Profile#3188
Ken A. Paller
#98138
Overall Influence
Ken A. Paller is an American neuroscientist who is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. He holds the James Padilla Chair in Arts & Sciences and serves as Director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Program in the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences at Northwestern. He directs the Training Program in the Neuroscience of Human Cognition at Northwestern, with support from the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. His work in cognitive neuroscience focuses on human memory, consciousness, sleep, dreaming, and related topics.
Go to Profile#3189
Marc Pilisuk
#146485
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
Marc Pilisuk is a Peace and Conflict Studies scholar and Professor Emeritus of the University of California system, having taught at UC-Davis and UC-Berkeley. He currently teaches and supervises graduate students at Saybrook University. Pilisuk is the author of Hidden Structure of Violence: Who Benefits from Global Violence and War, a coauthor of The Triple Revolution, the author of Poor Americans: How the White Poor Live, a coauthor of The Healing Web: Social Networks and Human Survival, a coauthor of International Conflict and Social Policy, a co-editor of the three-volume anthology Peace M...
Go to Profile#3190
Caroline F. Rowland
#114817
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
Caroline F. Rowland is a British psychologist known for her work on child first language development, grammar acquisition, and the role of environment in child's language growth. Since 2016, she has been the Director of the Language Development Department at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds the position of Professor of First Language Acquisition by Special Appointment at Donders Centre for Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has also been an Honorary Research Associate in Psychological Sciences at University of Liverpool since 2018.
Go to Profile#3191
Russell Jago
#146516
Overall Influence
#3192
Ahmed Mohamed Abdel-khalek
#146559
Overall Influence
#3193
Harold D. Grotevant
#146573
Overall Influence
#3194
Diana Fleischman
#109286
Overall Influence
1981 - Present (45 years)
Diana Santos Fleischman is an American evolutionary psychologist. Her field of research includes the study of disgust, human sexuality, and hormones and behaviour. She is also involved in the effective altruism, animal welfare, and feminism movements.
Go to Profile#3195
Daniel Fessler
#86973
Overall Influence
Daniel Fessler is a professor of biological anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles, working in the fields of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary anthropology, and evolutionary medicine. He was an editor-in-chief of journal of Evolution and Human Behavior.
Go to Profile#3196
Yaron Niv
#146692
Overall Influence
#3197
Sergio M. Pellis
#146694
Overall Influence
#3198
Malcolm MacLachlan
#98584
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Malcolm "Mac" MacLachlan is Professor of Psychology and Social Inclusion at Maynooth University, Ireland. He has published over twenty books and three hundred academic papers and chapters and delivered over 30 Keynote presentations at international conferences and high-level meetings. His interests are in Social Inclusion, Disability, Assistive Technology, and Policy, Systems & Organisation Design. He also works in the areas of International Development, Humanitarian Work Psychology and Maritime Psychology.
Go to Profile#3199
Wendy Watson Nelson
#57084
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Wendy L. Watson Nelson is a Canadian-American marriage and family therapist, and professor. She worked with the Family Nursing Unit at the University of Calgary from 1983 to 1992, training graduate students to use family systems therapy with families of patients. Her academic work in articles and in the book Beliefs: The Heart of Healing in Families and Illness helped develop a practical and theoretical framework for family systems nursing. She is the wife of Russell M. Nelson, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints .
Go to Profile#3200
David L. Blustein
#146778
Overall Influence
