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
Marcia Groszek
#54581
Overall Influence
Marcia Jean Groszek is an American mathematician whose research concerns mathematical logic, set theory, forcing, and recursion theory. She is a professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College. Education As a high school student, Groszek felt isolated for her interest in mathematics, but she found a sense of community through her participation in the Hampshire College Summer Mathematics Program, and she went on to earn her bachelor's degree at Hampshire College. She completed her Ph.D. in 1981 at Harvard University. Her dissertation, Iterated Perfect Set Forcing and Degrees of Constructibility, ...
Go to Profile#52
Barry Sonnenfeld
#54589
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Barry Sonnenfeld is an American filmmaker and television director. He originally worked as a cinematographer for the Coen brothers before directing films such as The Addams Family and its sequel Addams Family Values , Get Shorty , the Men in Black trilogy , and Wild Wild West .
Go to Profile#53
S. Bear Bergman
#56544
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
S. Bear Bergman is an American author, poet, playwright, and theater artist. He is a trans man, and his gender identity is a main focus of his artwork. Biography Bergman, who was educated at Concord Academy, was one of the founders of the first Gay–straight alliance and a member of the Governor of Massachusetts' Safe Schools Commission for LGBT youth. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Hampshire College in 1996.
Go to Profile#54
Xander Berkeley
#57926
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Alexander Harper Berkeley is an American actor. Since beginning his career in the early 1980s, he has appeared in over 200 film and television projects. His films include Terminator 2: Judgment Day , Candyman , Barb Wire , Air Force One , Gattaca , and Shanghai Noon . He also appeared in the crime drama Heat after being cast in L.A. Takedown , an earlier rendition of the film's script, although he played two different characters on the two different films. On television, he headlined the Citytv psychological thriller The Booth at the End and was a series regular on the Fox action drama 24 and The CW action thriller Nikita .
Go to Profile#55
William H. Warren
#58907
Overall Influence
William H. Warren Jr. is an American psychologist who is currently the Chancellor's Professor at Brown University, focusing on perception and action, visual control of locomotion, and spatial navigation.
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Charlie Clouser
#61589
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
Charles Alexander Clouser is an American keyboardist, composer, record producer, and remixer. He worked with Trent Reznor for Nine Inch Nails from 1994 to 2000, and is a composer for film and television; among his credits are the score for the Saw franchise and American Horror Story. Clouser was nominated for two Grammy Awards for Best Metal Performance in 1997.
Go to Profile#57
Margaret M. Robinson
#62925
Overall Influence
Margaret Maher Robinson is an American mathematician specializing in number theory and the theory of zeta functions. She is the Julia and Sarah Ann Adams Professor of Mathematics at Mount Holyoke College.
Go to Profile#58
Sean Hill
#63083
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (24 years)
Sean Lewis Hill is an American neuroscientist, Professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine, and inaugural Scientific Director of the Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics in Toronto, Canada. He is also co-director of the Blue Brain Project at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne located on the Campus Biotech in Geneva, Switzerland. He is known for the development of large-scale computational models of brain circuitry, neuroinformatics, and innovation in AI for mental health.
Go to Profile#59
John Reed
#64449
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (55 years)
John Reed is an American novelist. He is the author of four novels: A Still Small Voice , Snowball's Chance with a preface by Alexander Cockburn, The Whole , and All the World's a Grave: A New Play by William Shakespeare . His fifth book, Tales of Woe , is a collection of twenty-five stories, chronicling true stories of abject misery.
Go to Profile#60
Robin Coste Lewis
#67064
Overall Influence
1964 - Present (60 years)
Robin Coste Lewis is an American poet, artist, and scholar. She is known primarily for her debut poetry collection, Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2015––the first time a poetry debut by an African-American had ever won the prize in the National Book Foundation's history, and the first time any debut had won the award since 1974. Critics called the collection “A masterpiece…” “Surpassing imagination, maturity, and aesthetic dazzle…” “remarkable hopefulness…in the face of what would make most rage and/or collapse...” “formally polished,...
Go to Profile#61
Jessica Gordon Nembhard
#67501
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Jessica Gordon Nembhard is an American political economist. She has published books and articles in major economics journals. She is currently Professor of Community Justice and Social Economic Development in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College, City University of NY.
Go to Profile#62
Lynne Hanley
#73202
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Lynne Hanley is an American feminist author and literary critic. She is Professor Emerita of literature and writing at Hampshire College. Background Hanley received a B.A. in English from Cornell University, an M.A. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Hampshire, she taught at Princeton University, Douglass College and Mount Holyoke College.
Go to Profile#63
Nancy Grimm
#76829
Overall Influence
Nancy B. Grimm is an American ecosystem ecologist and professor at Arizona State University. Grimm's substantial contributions to the understanding of urban and arid ecosystem biogeochemistry are recognized in her numerous awards. Grimm is an elected Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, Ecological Society of America, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Go to Profile#64
Franklin Patterson
#77807
Overall Influence
1916 - 1994 (78 years)
Franklin Kessel Patterson was a professor and author, and the first president of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He was also, along with the other presidents of the Five Colleges, a co-author of the New College Plan.
Go to Profile#65
Sylvia Bashevkin
#78076
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Sylvia Beth Bashevkin, is Canadian academic and writer known for her research in the field of women and politics. Career Bashevkin is a professor in the Department of Political Science in the University of Toronto Faculty of Arts and Science. From 2005 to 2011, she was Principal of University College, Toronto. She is a senior fellow of Massey College, Toronto.
Go to Profile#66
Paul W. Sternberg
#83226
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Paul W. Sternberg is an American biologist. He does research for WormBase on C. elegans, a model organism. Early life and education Paul Sternberg grew up in Long Island, New York. He attended Hampshire College for undergrad in Amherst, Massachusetts where he got a B.A. in 1978. After that he went to MIT where he received his PhD in Biology for work on nematode development with Robert Horvitz. He went on to do postdoctoral research with Ira Herskowitz in yeast molecular development at the University of California San Francisco. He is currently working at the California Institute of Technology ...
Go to Profile#67
Robert Sanborn
#84191
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Robert Sanborn is a nationally known activist for education and children and is the President/CEO of Children At Risk in Houston, Texas. He has been president since 2005. Sanborn was born in Caribou, Maine and raised in Puerto Rico.
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E. Frances White
#86776
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (75 years)
E. Frances White is an American historian, author and academic serving as Professor Emerita of History and Black Studies at Gallatin School of Individualized Study. From 2005 to 2008 she served as Vice Provost of Faculty Affairs at New York University. Prior to that post, she was the Dean of New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study .
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Fred Melamed
#87337
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Fred Melamed is an American actor and writer. After spending most of his early career sporadically playing small roles in films, notably in seven films directed by Woody Allen, and primarily as a leading voice over artist for television, he established himself as a renowned character actor, starting with his role as Sy Ableman in the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man . Other notable film credits include In a World... , Hail, Caesar! , and Shiva Baby .
Go to Profile#70
Anson Rabinbach
#87456
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Anson Gilbert Rabinbach is a historian of modern Europe and the Philip and Beulah Rollins Professor of History, Emeritus at Princeton University. He is best known for his writings on labor, Nazi Germany, Austria, and European thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1973 he co-founded the journal New German Critique, which he continues to co-edit.
Go to Profile#71
Eugene Mirman
#89901
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (50 years)
Eugene Boris Mirman is a Russian-American actor, comedian, and writer, known for playing Yvgeny Mirminsky on Delocated and Gene Belcher on the animated comedy Bob's Burgers. Early life Mirman was born Evgeniy Borisovich Mirman on July 24, 1974, in Moscow, Russia, when the country was part of the Soviet Union, to Boris Mirman, Jewish Latvian, and Marina, Jewish Russian. His father was a civil engineer. His family immigrated to the United States when he was four years old, and settled in Lexington, Massachusetts, where Mirman attended William Diamond Middle School and Lexington High School. Af...
Go to Profile#72
George B. Johnson
#93841
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Dr George B. Johnson is a science educator who for many years has written a weekly column "On Science" in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. For over 30 years he was a biology professor at Washington University and a genetics professor at Washington University School of Medicine. He has authored 44 scientific papers and ten high school and college biology texts. Over 3 million students have learned biology from these texts.
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Sonya Sones
#100778
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Sonya Sones is an American poet and author. She has written seven young adult novels in verse and one novel in verse for adults. The American Library Association has named her one of the most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century.
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Eli Gottlieb
#101703
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Eli Gottlieb is an American author. His first novel, The Boy Who Went Away, was published by St. Martin's Press, in 1997. The novel debuted to widespread critical acclaim and earned Gottlieb the Rome Prize and the McKitterick Prize from the British Society of Authors in 1998.
Go to Profile#75
Kathryn Tucker
#102276
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (65 years)
Kathryn Tucker is an American attorney and the executive director of the End of Life Liberty Project, which she founded during her tenure as executive director of the Disability Rights Legal Center. This appointment to the DRLC was opposed by every other major disability rights group and has since been terminated. She graduated from Georgetown University Law Center in 1985 and Hampshire College in 1981. Tucker has been an adjunct law professor at Lewis and Clark School of Law, Seattle University the University of Washington, Loyola/LA and Hastings. Beginning in 1990, while an attorney at th...
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Ronald J. Prokopy
#117755
Overall Influence
1935 - 2004 (69 years)
Ronald John Prokopy was an American entomologist who was a specialist on the behavior and biology of Rhagoletis flies and approaches to their management in apple orchards. Prokopy was born in Danbury, Connecticut where he grew up on a farm. He went to study at Cornell University obtaining a BS in agriculture in 1957 and a PhD in entomology working under advisor George Gyrisco. His thesis was on the alfalfa weevil. He began studies on tephritid flies at Connecticut from 1964 to 1968 followed by studies in Switzerland. He then joined the University of Texas examining the biology of Rhagoletis pomonella.
Go to Profile#77
Phyllis Coley
#119522
Overall Influence
Phyllis Dewing Coley is a Biology professor currently teaching at the University of Utah. In 1996 she received the University's Distinguished Research Award. She has been a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute since 1995. In 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Go to Profile#78
Marty Ehrlich
#120604
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
Marty Ehrlich is a multi-instrumentalist and is considered one of the leading figures in avant-garde jazz. Biography Though born in St. Paul, Minnesota, the portion of Ehrlich's youth spent in St. Louis, Missouri, was particularly important. As a high school student at University City High School in nearby University City, the teenager came into contact with the influential Black Artists' Group which was modelled after the AACM in Chicago.
Go to Profile#79
Lucy-Ann McFadden
#120623
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Lucy-Ann Adams McFadden is an American astronomer and planetary scientist. An employee of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, she also founded the Science, Discovery & the Universe Program within the University of Maryland, and the Explore-It-All Science Center, a children's science program.
Go to Profile#80
Concetta DiRusso
#123141
Overall Influence
Concetta DiRusso is an American scientist and Professor of Biochemistry. She is best known for her work on transcriptional regulation of fatty acid metabolism in bacteria. Biography DiRusso received her B.A. from Hampshire College, and in 1982 she completed her Ph.D. in cell and molecular biology from the University of Vermont. In 2015, she was invested with the George Holmes University Professorship in Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln DiRusso is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2014, she served as Jefferson Science Fellow in the Gl...
Go to Profile#81
Mark Dresser
#126527
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (72 years)
Mark Dresser is an American double bass player and composer. Career Dresser was born in Los Angeles, California, United States. In the 1970s, he was a member of Black Music Infinity led by Stanley Crouch and performed with the San Diego Symphony. During the next decade he moved to New York City and became a member of the Anthony Braxton quartet with Marilyn Crispell and Gerry Hemingway. He composed for the Arcado String Trio and Tambastics and for the film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
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Ellen Spiro
#127894
Overall Influence
1968 - Present (56 years)
Ellen Spiro is an American documentary filmmaker. She is a producer and director of a television documentary Are the Kids Alright?, which won an Emmy Award in 2005. She is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where she taught graduate and undergraduate courses in documentary, experimental film, and music film production in the Department of Radio-TV-Film. She is a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
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Patricia Klindienst
#142404
Overall Influence
Patricia Klindienst is an American writer, and independent scholar. She graduated from Stanford University, with a Ph.D. She taught at Yale University. Awards 2007 American Book Award2008 Phillip and Eric Heiner Endowed Fellowship, Virginia Center for Creative Arts
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Eric Schocket
#148711
Overall Influence
1966 - 2006 (40 years)
Eric Schocket was an associate professor of American literature at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. He wrote primarily on issues of class. In Vanishing Moments: Class and American Literature , Schocket examined the way in which class-conscious American literature confronted and addressed the typical American denial of issues of social stratification.
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Leonard M. Rieser
#150072
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Leonard Moos Rieser was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and later for nuclear disarmament. Rieser was a professor of physics and provost at Dartmouth College. Biography Rieser was born May 18, 1922 in Chicago. He studied at Dartmouth College from 1940 to 1942 before transferring to the University of Chicago and graduating with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1943. In 1942 he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps and after graduating from Chicago was assigned to work on the secret Manhattan Project, developing the atomic bomb. Rieser first worked at the Metallurgical La...
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Daniel Asia
#160583
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
Daniel Asia is an American composer. He was born in Seattle, Washington, in the United States of America. Biography He received a B.A. degree from Hampshire College and a M.M. from the Yale School of Music. His major teachers include Jacob Druckman, Stephen Albert, Gunther Schuller, and Isang Yun in composition, and Arthur Weisberg in conducting. Asia's works ranges from solo pieces to large-scale multi-movement works for orchestra, including five symphonies.
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Peter Hutton
#165395
Overall Influence
1944 - 2016 (72 years)
Peter Barrington Hutton was an American experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns, as well as cinematography for Lizzie Borden's "Born in Flames," Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman's "Committed," assorted films by artist Red Grooms and Albert Maysles' The Gates.
Go to Profile#88
Laura Punnett
#165675
Overall Influence
#89
Jacqueline Hayden
#169171
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (74 years)
Jacqueline Hayden is an American feminist artist and professor emerita of film and photography at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. Biography In the 1980s, Hayden created a Sightings Natural History Series, in which "she has traveled to the four corners of the zoo, and to the very ends of the natural history museum" according to a review by Pamela Kessler in The Washington Post. In a review of work from her Dislocation/Relocation series, Jo Ann Lewis writes for The Washington Post that Hayden "composes her layered color photographs within the camera, often reusing the same film in two different cameras, one to establish background, another for foreground.
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Paige Fischer
#172656
Overall Influence
Paige Fischer is an environmental scientist from the Pacific Northwest whose research focuses mainly on the human dimensions of environmental changes. She is especially interested in forest ecology and conservation. She is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability, teaching upper level classes about analysis methods and social vulnerability to climate change.
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Kanishka Raja
#172983
Overall Influence
1970 - 2018 (48 years)
Kanisha Raja was born in Calcutta India, and later lived and worked in New York City. Raja was an artist who explored the intersections between art, craft, and technology, and the gaps that open up as information travels and is represented through images. He participated in numerous international solo exhibitions and was a lecturer at the Yale School of Art.
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Mary James
#174540
Overall Influence
Mary B. James is an American physicist and educator. She is the Dean for Institutional Diversity and the A. A. Knowlton Professor of Physics at Reed College. James specializes in particle physics and accelerators.
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Christopher Young
#177745
Overall Influence
1958 - Present (66 years)
Christopher Young is an American composer and orchestrator of film and television scores. Many of his compositions are for horror and thriller films, including Hellraiser, Species, Urban Legend, The Grudge, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Drag Me to Hell, Sinister, Deliver Us from Evil and Pet Sematary. Other works include Rapid Fire, Copycat, Set It Off, Entrapment, The Hurricane, Swordfish, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man 3 and The Shipping News, for which he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Go to Profile#94
Jeffrey Hollender
#180097
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (70 years)
Jeffrey Hollender is an American entrepreneur, author, and activist best known for founding Seventh Generation Inc. Early life Hollender grew up in New York City and attended The Town School, The Allen-Stevenson School, Riverdale Country Day School, Putney School, and Santa Barbara High School. He graduated high school from Baldwin School. Hollender attended Hampshire College for three semesters and did not graduate.
Go to Profile#95
G. Philip Robertson
#182274
Overall Influence
G. Philip Robertson is an American biologist who is currently the University Distinguished Professor of Ecosystem Science at Michigan State University.
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Kara Lynch
#184220
Overall Influence
Kara Lynch is an American artist who teaches at Hampshire College. Biography Kara Lynch has an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego. Work Lynch works in video and time-based media. Her projects include Black Russians, Mouhawala Oula, The Outing, and Xing Over. Lynch recorded her time working in Moscow through video and in "a series of handwritten books" during her artist's residency in 1994.
Go to Profile#97
Jules Rosskam
#190896
Overall Influence
1979 - Present (45 years)
Jules Rosskam is an American filmmaker, artist, and educator. His films, which include transparent , against a trans narrative , Thick Relations , and Paternal Rites , have helped shape the discussion around transgender narratives in 21st century film. Rosskam is also a noted fine artist, lecturer, and professor. He is currently assistant professor of visual arts at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Go to Profile#98
Ray Copeland
1926 - 1984 (58 years)
Ray Copeland was an American jazz trumpet player and teacher. Early life Copeland was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He studied at Boys High School in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. Career Copeland's active career spanned from the 1940s to the 1980s. Throughout his career he participated on many swing and hard bop dates, appearing on the well known Monk's Music by Thelonious Monk recorded in June 1957. Copeland played with a swinging, upbeat approach, but was undoubtedly overshadowed by other top trumpeters of the era such as Lee Morgan and Clifford Brown. He toured with Thelonious Monk in 1968, and appeared at the 1973 Newport Jazz Festival.
Go to Profile#99
Joseph Welles Henderson
1890 - 1957 (67 years)
Joseph Welles Henderson , born in Montgomery, Pennsylvania, was acting president of Bucknell University from 1953 to 1954. Education Henderson received his A.B. and master's degrees from Bucknell, and his law degree from Harvard Law School .
Go to Profile#100
Moshé Feldenkrais
1904 - 1984 (80 years)
Moshé Pinchas Feldenkrais was a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer and physicist, known as the founder of the Feldenkrais Method, a system of physical exercise that aims to improve human functioning by increasing self-awareness through movement.
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