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
#51
Ernst Mayr
#51
Overall Influence
1904 - 2005 (101 years)
Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, philosopher of biology, and historian of science. His work contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept.
Go to Profile#52
Martha Nussbaum
#52
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
#53
Stephen King
#53
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (77 years)
Stephen Edwin King is an American author of horror, supernatural fiction, suspense, crime, science-fiction, and fantasy novels. Called the "King of Horror", his books have sold more than 350 million copies , and many have been adapted into films, television series, miniseries, and comic books. He has also written approximately 200 short stories, most of which have been published in book collections. His debut, Carrie, was published in 1974, and was followed by 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand and The Dead Zone. Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas, was his first major departure from the horror genre.
Go to Profile#54
Edward O. Wilson
#54
Overall Influence
1929 - 2021 (92 years)
Areas of Specialization: Myrmecology, Biodiversity, Sociobiology Edward O. Wilson is the world’s leading expert on ants, a specialty known as myrmecology, but that’s not all. He is also considered the father of biodiversity and the father of sociobiology. He is the Pellegrino University Research Professor Emeritus of Entomology at the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University and a lecturer at Duke University. He earned his BS and MS in biology from the University of Alabama. He was named to the Harvard Society of Fellows, which enabled him to travel around the world studying ant species from Australia to Cuba.
Go to Profile#55
Billy Graham
#55
Overall Influence
1918 - 2018 (100 years)
William Franklin Graham Jr. was an American evangelist, an ordained Southern Baptist minister, and a civil rights advocate whose broadcast and live sermons became well known internationally in the mid-to-late 20th century. During a career spanning six decades, Graham was a prominent evangelical Christian figure in the United States.
Go to Profile#56
Tim Berners-Lee
#56
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
#57
Allen Newell
#57
Overall Influence
1927 - 1992 (65 years)
Allen Newell was an American researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology. He contributed to the Information Processing Language and two of the earliest AI programs, the Logic Theorist and the General Problem Solver . He was awarded the ACM's A.M. Turing Award along with Herbert A. Simon in 1975 for their contributions to artificial intelligence and the psychology of human cognition.
Go to Profile#58
Edward Witten
#58
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (73 years)
#59
André Weil
#59
Overall Influence
1906 - 1998 (92 years)
André Weil was a French mathematician, known for his foundational work in number theory and algebraic geometry. He was one of the most influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. His influence is due both to his original contributions to a remarkably broad spectrum of mathematical theories, and to the mark he left on mathematical practice and style, through some of his own works as well as through the Bourbaki group, of which he was one of the principal founders.
Go to Profile#60
Robert K. Merton
#60
Overall Influence
1910 - 2003 (93 years)
Robert King Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology, and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology. He served as the 47th president of the American Sociological Association. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor. In 1994 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.
Go to Profile#61
Bảo Đại
#61
Overall Influence
1913 - 1997 (84 years)
Bảo Đại , born Nguyễn Phúc/Phước Vĩnh Thụy , was the 13th and final emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling dynasty of Vietnam. From 1926 to 1945, he was emperor of Annam and de jure monarch of Tonkin, which were then protectorates in French Indochina, covering the present-day central and northern Vietnam. Bảo Đại ascended the throne in 1932.
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Isaac Asimov
#62
Overall Influence
1920 - 1992 (72 years)
Isaac Asimov was an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University. During his lifetime, Asimov was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. A prolific writer, he wrote or edited more than 500 books. He also wrote an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. Best known for his hard science fiction, Asimov also wrote mysteries and fantasy, as well as popular science and other non-fiction.
Go to Profile#63
John Kenneth Galbraith
#63
Overall Influence
1908 - 2006 (98 years)
John Kenneth Galbraith , also known as Ken Galbraith, was a Canadian American economist, diplomat, public official, and intellectual. His books on economic topics were bestsellers from the 1950s through the 2000s. As an economist, he leaned toward post-Keynesian economics from an institutionalist perspective.
Go to Profile#64
Anthony Giddens
#64
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.
Go to Profile#65
Freeman Dyson
#65
Overall Influence
1923 - 2020 (97 years)
Freeman John Dyson was a British-American theoretical physicist and mathematician known for his works in quantum field theory, astrophysics, random matrices, mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics, condensed matter physics, nuclear physics, and engineering. He was professor emeritus in the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Go to Profile#66
Peter Higgs
#66
Overall Influence
1929 - Present (95 years)
#67
Robert Solow
#67
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
#68
John McCarthy
#68
Overall Influence
1927 - 2011 (84 years)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He was one of the founders of the discipline of artificial intelligence. He co-authored the document that coined the term "artificial intelligence" , developed the programming language family Lisp, significantly influenced the design of the language ALGOL, popularized time-sharing, and invented garbage collection.
Go to Profile#69
Saul Kripke
#69
Overall Influence
1940 - 2022 (82 years)
#70
Timothy Leary
#70
Overall Influence
1920 - 1996 (76 years)
Timothy Francis Leary was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of American consciousness", and writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested 36 times; President Richard Nixon allegedly described him as "the most dangerous man in America".
Go to Profile#71
Richard Posner
#71
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
#72
Ben Bernanke
#72
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Ben Shalom Bernanke is an American economist who served as the 14th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014. After leaving the Federal Reserve, he was appointed a distinguished fellow at the Brookings Institution. During his tenure as chairman, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chairman, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the Department of Economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave.
Go to Profile#73
Robert Nozick
#73
Overall Influence
1938 - 2002 (64 years)
Robert Nozick was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University, and was president of the American Philosophical Association. He is best known for his books Anarchy, State, and Utopia , a libertarian answer to John Rawls' A Theory of Justice , in which Nozick also presented his own theory of utopia as one in which people can freely choose the rules of the society they enter into, and Philosophical Explanations , which included his counterfactual theory of knowledge. His other work involved ethics, decision theory, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology.
Go to Profile#74
Maurice Wilkins
#74
Overall Influence
1916 - 2004 (88 years)
Maurice Hugh Frederick Wilkins was a New Zealand-born British biophysicist and Nobel laureate whose research spanned multiple areas of physics and biophysics, contributing to the scientific understanding of phosphorescence, isotope separation, optical microscopy and X-ray diffraction, and to the development of radar. He is known for his work at King's College London on the structure of DNA.
Go to Profile#75
Abdus Salam
#75
Overall Influence
1926 - 1996 (70 years)
Mohammad Abdus Salam was a Pakistani theoretical physicist. He shared the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for his contribution to the electroweak unification theory. He was the first Pakistani and the first Muslim from an Islamic country to receive a Nobel Prize in science and the second from an Islamic country to receive any Nobel Prize, after Anwar Sadat of Egypt.
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Thomas Sowell
#76
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (94 years)
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, author and social commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Go to Profile#77
John Bardeen
#77
Overall Influence
1908 - 1991 (83 years)
John Bardeen was an American physicist and electrical engineer. He is the only person to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics twice: first in 1956 with William Shockley and Walter Brattain for the invention of the transistor; and again in 1972 with Leon N. Cooper and John Robert Schrieffer for a fundamental theory of conventional superconductivity known as the BCS theory.
Go to Profile#78
Ronald Dworkin
#78
Overall Influence
1931 - 2013 (82 years)
Ronald Myles Dworkin was an American legal philosopher, jurist, and scholar of United States constitutional law. At the time of his death, he was Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London. Dworkin had taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, where he was the Professor of Jurisprudence, successor to philosopher H.L.A. Hart.
Go to Profile#79
Arthur Miller
#79
Overall Influence
1915 - 2005 (90 years)
Arthur Asher Miller was an American playwright, essayist and screenwriter in the 20th-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , The Crucible , and A View from the Bridge . He wrote several screenplays, including The Misfits . The drama Death of a Salesman is considered one of the best American plays of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#80
Clarence Thomas
#80
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
Clarence Thomas is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. Since Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022, he is also the Court's oldest member.
Go to Profile#81
George Lakoff
#81
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
George Philip Lakoff is an American cognitive linguist and philosopher, best known for his thesis that people's lives are significantly influenced by the conceptual metaphors they use to explain complex phenomena.
Go to Profile#82
Seymour Papert
#82
Overall Influence
1928 - 2016 (88 years)
Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.
Go to Profile#83
Paulo Freire
#83
Overall Influence
1921 - 1997 (76 years)
Paulo Reglus Neves Freire was a Brazilian educator and marxist philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. His influential work Pedagogy of the Oppressed is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement, and was the third most cited book in the social sciences according to Google Scholar.
Go to Profile#84
Thomas Pynchon
#84
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Go to Profile#85
Norman Mailer
#85
Overall Influence
1923 - 2007 (84 years)
Nachem Malech Mailer , known by his pen name Norman Kingsley Mailer, was an American novelist, journalist, playwright, and filmmaker. In a career spanning over six decades, Mailer had 11 best-selling books, at least one in each of the seven decades after World War II.
Go to Profile#86
Albert Bandura
#86
Overall Influence
1925 - 2021 (96 years)
Albert Bandura was a Canadian-American psychologist. He was a professor of social science in psychology at Stanford University. Bandura was responsible for contributions to the field of education and to several fields of psychology, including social cognitive theory, therapy, and personality psychology, and was also of influence in the transition between behaviorism and cognitive psychology. He is known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. This Bobo doll experiment de...
Go to Profile#87
Shing-Tung Yau
#87
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
#88
Vladimir Putin
#88
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is a Russian politician and former intelligence officer who has been President of Russia since 2012. Putin has held continuous positions as president or prime minister since 1999: as prime minister from 1999 to 2000 and from 2008 to 2012, and as president from 2000 to 2008 and since 2012.
Go to Profile#89
Isaiah Berlin
#89
Overall Influence
1909 - 1997 (88 years)
Sir Isaiah Berlin was a Russian-British social and political theorist, philosopher, and historian of ideas. Although he became increasingly averse to writing for publication, his improvised lectures and talks were sometimes recorded and transcribed, and many of his spoken words were converted into published essays and books, both by himself and by others, especially his principal editor from 1974, Henry Hardy.
Go to Profile#90
Ken Thompson
#90
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.
Go to Profile#91
Neil Armstrong
#91
Overall Influence
1930 - 2012 (82 years)
Neil Alden Armstrong was an American astronaut and aeronautical engineer who in 1969 became the first person to walk on the Moon. He was also a naval aviator, test pilot, and university professor. Armstrong was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He entered Purdue University, studying aeronautical engineering, with the U.S. Navy paying his tuition under the Holloway Plan. He became a midshipman in 1949 and a naval aviator the following year. He saw action in the Korean War, flying the Grumman F9F Panther from the aircraft carrier . After the war, he completed his bachelor's degree at Purdue...
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Niklaus Wirth
#92
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (90 years)
Niklaus Emil Wirth is a Swiss computer scientist. He has designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages.
Go to Profile#93
Steven Pinker
#93
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Cognitive scientist, linguist, and author, Steven Pinker currently holds the title of Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Previously, Pinker taught at Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pinker earned his bachelor’s in psychology from McGill University in 1976, and his Ph.D. in experimental psychology in 1979 at Harvard. Pinker is recognized for his interdisciplinary work, combining psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics, and is a vocal proponent of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Though he has sev...
Go to Profile#94
Murray Gell-Mann
#94
Overall Influence
1929 - 2019 (90 years)
Murray Gell-Mann was an American physicist who played a preeminent role in the development of the theory of elementary particles. Gell-Mann introduced the concept of quarks as the fundamental building blocks of the strongly interacting particles, and the renormalization group as a foundational element of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics. He played key roles in developing the concept of chirality in the theory of the weak interactions and spontaneous chiral symmetry breaking in the strong interactions, which controls the physics of the light mesons. In the 1970s he was a co...
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Emmanuel Levinas
#95
Overall Influence
1906 - 1995 (89 years)
Emmanuel Levinas was a French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry who is known for his work within Jewish philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, focusing on the relationship of ethics to metaphysics and ontology.
Go to Profile#96
Edward Said
#96
Overall Influence
1935 - 2003 (68 years)
Edward Wadie Said was a Palestinian American academic, literary critic and political activist. A professor of literature at Columbia University, he was among the founders of postcolonial studies. Born in Mandatory Palestine, he was a citizen of the United States by way of his father, a U.S. Army veteran.
Go to Profile#97
Manuel Noriega
#97
Overall Influence
1934 - 2017 (83 years)
Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno was a Panamanian dictator, politician and military officer who was the de facto ruler of Panama from 1983 to 1989. An authoritarian ruler who amassed a personal fortune through drug trafficking operations, Noriega had longstanding ties with the United States intelligence agencies before the U.S. invasion of Panama removed him from power.
Go to Profile#98
Stephen Colbert
#98
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Stephen Tyrone Colbert is an American comedian, writer, producer, political commentator, actor, and television host. He is best known for hosting the satirical Comedy Central program The Colbert Report from 2005 to 2014 and the CBS talk program The Late Show with Stephen Colbert since September 2015.
Go to Profile#99
Alain Badiou
#99
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
#100
Oscar Niemeyer
#100
Overall Influence
1907 - 2012 (105 years)
Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida Niemeyer Soares Filho , known as Oscar Niemeyer , was a Brazilian architect considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
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