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).
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List of the most influential people
#51
Robert Barro
#1921
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Robert Joseph Barro is an American macroeconomist and the Paul M. Warburg Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Barro is considered one of the founders of new classical macroeconomics, along with Robert Lucas Jr. and Thomas J. Sargent. He is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and co-editor of the influential Quarterly Journal of Economics.
Go to Profile#52
Joseph Polchinski
#1945
Overall Influence
1954 - 2018 (64 years)
Joseph Gerard Polchinski Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and string theorist. Biography Polchinski was born in White Plains, New York, the elder of two children to Joseph Gerard Polchinski Sr. , a financial consultant and manager, and Joan , an office worker and homemaker. Polchinski was primarily of Irish descent with his paternal grandfather being Polish.
Go to Profile#53
Ahmed Zewail
#1951
Overall Influence
1946 - 2016 (70 years)
Ahmed Hassan Zewail was an Egyptian and American chemist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian and Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field, and the second African to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, a professor of physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
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Narendra Karmarkar
#1971
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (68 years)
Narendra Krishna Karmarkar is an Indian mathematician. Karmarkar developed Karmarkar's algorithm. He is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher. He invented one of the first provably polynomial time algorithms for linear programming, which is generally referred to as an interior point method. The algorithm is a cornerstone in the field of linear programming. He published his famous result in 1984 while he was working for Bell Laboratories in New Jersey.
Go to Profile#55
John R. Pierce
#2063
Overall Influence
1910 - 2002 (92 years)
John Robinson Pierce , was an American engineer and author. He did extensive work concerning radio communication, microwave technology, computer music, psychoacoustics, and science fiction. Additionally to his professional career he wrote science fiction for many years using the names John Pierce, John R. Pierce, and J. J. Coupling. Born in Des Moines, Iowa, he earned his PhD from Caltech, and died in Sunnyvale, California, from complications of Parkinson's Disease.
Go to Profile#56
Charles H. Townes
#2086
Overall Influence
1915 - 2015 (100 years)
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman to Bill Clinton .
Go to Profile#57
Robert Freitas
#2124
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (73 years)
Robert A. Freitas Jr. is an American nanotechnologist. Early life and education Freitas was born in Camden, Maine. His father worked in agriculture and his mother was a homemaker. Freitas married Nancy, his childhood sweetheart in 1974.
Go to Profile#58
Andrew Benson
#2160
Overall Influence
1917 - 2015 (98 years)
Andrew Alm Benson was an American biologist and a professor of biology at the University of California, San Diego, until his retirement in 1989. He is known for his work in understanding the carbon cycle in plants.
Go to Profile#59
Barry Barish
#2198
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (89 years)
Barry Clark Barish is an American experimental physicist and Nobel Laureate. He is a Linde Professor of Physics, emeritus at California Institute of Technology and a leading expert on gravitational waves.
Go to Profile#60
Phillip Allen Sharp
#2221
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Phillip Allen Sharp is an American geneticist and molecular biologist who co-discovered RNA splicing. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Richard J. Roberts for "the discovery that genes in eukaryotes are not contiguous strings but contain introns, and that the splicing of messenger RNA to delete those introns can occur in different ways, yielding different proteins from the same DNA sequence". He has been selected to receive the 2015 Othmer Gold Medal.
Go to Profile#61
Bradley Efron
#2251
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (87 years)
Bradley Efron is an American statistician. Efron has been president of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics . He is a past editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, and he is the founding editor of the Annals of Applied Statistics. Efron is also the recipient of many awards .
Go to Profile#62
Robin Hanson
#2327
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Robin Dale Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point , and has conducted research on signalling.
Go to Profile#63
Max Mathews
#2340
Overall Influence
1926 - 2011 (85 years)
Max Vernon Mathews was an American pioneer of computer music. Biography Max Vernon Mathews was born in Columbus, Nebraska, by two science schoolteachers. His father in particular taught physics, chemistry and biology in the Peru High School of Nebraska, where he was also the principal. His father allowed him to learn and play in the physics, biology and chemistry laboratories, where he enjoyed making lots of things from motors to mercury barometers. At the age of 9, when students are usually introduced to algebra, he started to study by himself the subject with few other students. That was ...
Go to Profile#64
Matthew Meselson
#2347
Overall Influence
1930 - Present (95 years)
Matthew Stanley Meselson is a geneticist and molecular biologist currently at Harvard University, known for his demonstration, with Franklin Stahl, of semi-conservative DNA replication. After completing his Ph.D. under Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology, Meselson became a Professor at Harvard University in 1960, where he has remained, today, as Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences.
Go to Profile#65
John Preskill
#2396
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (72 years)
John Phillip Preskill is an American theoretical physicist and the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he is also the director of the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter.
Go to Profile#66
Robert Bacher
#2398
Overall Influence
1905 - 2004 (99 years)
Robert Fox Bacher was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. Born in Loudonville, Ohio, Bacher obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, writing his 1930 doctoral thesis under the supervision of Samuel Goudsmit on the Zeeman effect of the hyperfine structure of atomic levels. After graduate work at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , he accepted a job at Columbia University. In 1935 he accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Go to Profile#67
James Hartle
#2413
Overall Influence
1939 - 2023 (84 years)
James Burkett Hartle was an American theoretical physicist. He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966, and was a member of the external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute. Hartle is known for his work in general relativity, astrophysics, and interpretation of quantum mechanics.
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Barry Simon
#2425
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (79 years)
Barry Martin Simon is an American mathematical physicist and was the IBM professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Caltech, known for his prolific contributions in spectral theory, functional analysis, and nonrelativistic quantum mechanics , including the connections to atomic and molecular physics. He has authored more than 400 publications on mathematics and physics.
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Roger Wolcott Sperry
#2439
Overall Influence
1913 - 1994 (81 years)
Roger Wolcott Sperry was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Sperry as the 44th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#70
David Brin
#2453
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (75 years)
Glen David Brin is an American science fiction author. He has won the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards. His novel The Postman was adapted into a 1997 feature film starring Kevin Costner. Early life and education Brin was born in Glendale, California, in 1950 to Selma and Herb Brin. He graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a Bachelor of Science in astronomy, in 1973. At the University of California, San Diego, he earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1978 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in astronomy in 1981.
Go to Profile#71
Matthew Sands
#2464
Overall Influence
1919 - 2014 (95 years)
Matthew Linzee Sands was an American physicist and educator best known as a co-author of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. A graduate of Rice University, Sands served with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
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Bruce Ames
#2499
Overall Influence
1928 - Present (97 years)
Bruce Nathan Ames is an American biochemist. He is a professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and was a senior scientist at Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute . He is the inventor of the Ames test, a system for easily and cheaply testing the mutagenicity of compounds.
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Fraser Stoddart
#2501
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
Sir James Fraser Stoddart is a British-American chemist who is Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry and head of the Stoddart Mechanostereochemistry Group in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University in the United States. He works in the area of supramolecular chemistry and nanotechnology. Stoddart has developed highly efficient syntheses of mechanically-interlocked molecular architectures such as molecular Borromean rings, catenanes and rotaxanes utilising molecular recognition and molecular self-assembly processes. He has demonstrated that these topologies can be employed as molecular switches.
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Rudolf Mössbauer
#2549
Overall Influence
1929 - 2011 (82 years)
Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer was a German physicist best known for his 1957 discovery of 'recoilless nuclear resonance fluorescence', for which he was awarded the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics. This effect, called the Mössbauer effect, is the basis for Mössbauer spectroscopy.
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Robert H. Grubbs
#2562
Overall Influence
1942 - 2021 (79 years)
#76
Tom M. Apostol
#2574
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Tom Mike Apostol was an American analytic number theorist and professor at the California Institute of Technology, best known as the author of widely used mathematical textbooks. Life and career Apostol was born in Helper, Utah. His parents, Emmanouil Apostolopoulos and Efrosini Papathanasopoulos, were Greek immigrants. Apostolopoulos's name was shortened to Mike Apostol when he obtained his United States citizenship, and Tom Apostol inherited this Americanized surname.
Go to Profile#77
Michael E. Brown
#2634
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (60 years)
Michael E. Brown is an American astronomer, who has been professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology since 2003. His team has discovered many trans-Neptunian objects , including the dwarf planet Eris, which was originally thought to be bigger than Pluto, triggering a debate on the definition of a planet.
Go to Profile#78
Per Brinch Hansen
#2662
Overall Influence
1938 - 2007 (69 years)
Per Brinch Hansen was a Danish-American computer scientist known for his work in operating systems, concurrent programming and parallel and distributed computing. Biography Early life and education Per Brinch Hansen was born in Frederiksberg, an enclave surrounded by Copenhagen, Denmark. His father, Jørgen Brinch Hansen, worked as a civil engineer, becoming a leading expert in soil mechanics, and later accepting a professorship at Technical University of Denmark. His mother, Elsebeth Brinch Hansen , was the daughter of Danish composer Oluf Ring and worked as a hairdresser before marrying.
Go to Profile#79
Eugene Parker
#2684
Overall Influence
1927 - 2022 (95 years)
Eugene Newman Parker was an American solar and plasma physicist. In the 1950s he proposed the existence of the solar wind and that the magnetic field in the outer Solar System would be in the shape of a Parker spiral, predictions that were later confirmed by spacecraft measurements. In 1987, Parker proposed the existence of nanoflares, a leading candidate to explain the coronal heating problem.
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Ernst Fehr
#2749
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
Ernst Fehr is an Austrian-Swiss behavioral economist and neuroeconomist and a Professor of Microeconomics and Experimental Economic Research, as well as the vice chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. His research covers the areas of the evolution of human cooperation and sociality, in particular fairness, reciprocity and bounded rationality.
Go to Profile#81
Seymour Benzer
#2772
Overall Influence
1921 - 2007 (86 years)
Seymour Benzer was an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. His career began during the molecular biology revolution of the 1950s, and he eventually rose to prominence in the fields of molecular and behavioral genetics. He led a productive genetics research lab both at Purdue University and as the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, emeritus, at the California Institute of Technology.
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Wesley A. Clark
#2815
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Wesley Allison Clark was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.
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Juris Hartmanis
#2960
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Juris Hartmanis was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".
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Alexander Rich
#2994
Overall Influence
1924 - 2015 (91 years)
Alexander Rich was an American biologist and biophysicist. He was the William Thompson Sedgwick Professor of Biophysics at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Rich earned an A.B. and an M.D. from Harvard University. He was a post-doc of Linus Pauling. During this time he was a member of the RNA Tie Club, a social and discussion group which attacked the question of how DNA encodes proteins. He had over 600 publications to his name.
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Colin Camerer
#3013
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Colin Farrell Camerer is an American behavioral economist, and Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at the California Institute of Technology . Background A former child prodigy, Camerer received a B.A. in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1977 , followed by an M.B.A. in finance from the University of Chicago in 1979 and a Ph.D. in behavioral decision theory from that same institution in 1981 for thesis titled The Validity and Utility of Expert Judgment under the supervision of Hillel Einhorn and Robin Hogarth. Camerer worked at Kellogg, Wharton, an...
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Arati Prabhakar
#3020
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (66 years)
Arati Prabhakar is an American engineer and public official. Since October 3, 2022, she has served as the 12th director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Science Advisor to the President.
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John Clauser
#3023
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (83 years)
John Francis Clauser is an American theoretical and experimental physicist known for contributions to the foundations of quantum mechanics, in particular the Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. Clauser was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science".
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Eric W. Weisstein
#3034
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (56 years)
Eric Wolfgang Weisstein is an American mathematician and encyclopedist who created and maintains the encyclopedias MathWorld and ScienceWorld. In addition, he is the author of the CRC Concise Encyclopedia of Mathematics. He works for Wolfram Research.
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Arthur B. McDonald
#3096
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (82 years)
Arthur Bruce McDonald, P.Eng is a Canadian astrophysicist. McDonald is the director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration and held the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario from 2006 to 2013. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita.
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J Strother Moore
#3109
Overall Influence
1947 - Present (78 years)
J Strother Moore is a computer scientist. He is a co-developer of the Boyer–Moore string-search algorithm, Boyer–Moore majority vote algorithm, and the Boyer–Moore automated theorem prover, Nqthm. He made pioneering contributions to structure sharing including the piece table data structure and early logic programming. An example of the workings of the Boyer–Moore string search algorithm is given in Moore's website. Moore received his Bachelor of Science in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1970 and his Doctor of Philosophy in computational logic at the University of E...
Go to Profile#91
Fritz John
#3168
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Fritz John was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems. His early work was on the Radon transform and he is remembered for John's equation. He was a 1984 MacArthur Fellow.
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Sidney Coleman
#3174
Overall Influence
1937 - 2007 (70 years)
Sidney Richard Coleman was an American theoretical physicist noted for his research in high-energy theoretical physics. Life and work Sidney Coleman grew up on the Far North Side of Chicago. In 1957, he received his undergraduate degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology physics department.
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Jerrold E. Marsden
#3460
Overall Influence
1942 - 2010 (68 years)
Jerrold Eldon Marsden was a Canadian mathematician. He was the Carl F. Braun Professor of Engineering and Control & Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. Marsden is listed as an ISI highly cited researcher.
Go to Profile#94
Albert Hibbs
#3558
Overall Influence
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
Albert Roach Hibbs was an American mathematician and physicist affiliated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory . He was known as "The Voice of JPL" due to his gift for explaining advanced science in simple terms. He helped establish JPL's Space Science Division in 1960 and later served as its first chief. He was the systems designer for Explorer 1, the USA's first satellite, and helped establish the framework for exploration of the Solar System through the 1960s. Hibbs qualified as an astronaut in 1967 and was slated to be a crew member of Apollo 25, but he ultimately did not go to the Moon du...
Go to Profile#95
Frances Arnold
#3660
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (69 years)
#96
George M. Whitesides
#3663
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
George McClelland Whitesides is an American chemist and professor of chemistry at Harvard University. He is best known for his work in the areas of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, organometallic chemistry, molecular self-assembly, soft lithography, microfabrication, microfluidics, and nanotechnology. A prolific author and patent holder who has received many awards, he received the highest Hirsch index rating of all living chemists in 2011.
Go to Profile#97
Lloyd R. Welch
#3688
Overall Influence
1927 - Present (98 years)
Lloyd Richard Welch is an American information theorist and applied mathematician, and co-inventor of the Baum–Welch algorithm and the Berlekamp–Welch algorithm, also known as the Welch–Berlekamp algorithm.
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Richard P. Stanley
#3703
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (81 years)
Richard Peter Stanley is an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2000 to 2010, he was the Norman Levinson Professor of Applied Mathematics. He received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1971 under the supervision of Gian-Carlo Rota. He is an expert in the field of combinatorics and its applications to other mathematical disciplines.
Go to Profile#99
Leland H. Hartwell
#3740
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (86 years)
Leland Harrison Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells.
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John Henry Schwarz
#3770
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (84 years)
John Henry Schwarz is an American theoretical physicist. Along with Yoichiro Nambu, Holger Bech Nielsen, Joël Scherk, Gabriele Veneziano, Michael Green, and Leonard Susskind, he is regarded as one of the founders of string theory.
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