Search People Result | Academic Influence

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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School

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Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#51

Kai T. Erikson

#17696

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

Kai Theodor Erikson is an Austrian-born American sociologist, noted as an authority on the social consequences of catastrophic events. He served as the 76th president of the American Sociological Association.

#52

Steve Jobs

#18004

Overall Influence

1955 - 2011 (56 years)

Steven Paul Jobs was an American businessman, inventor, and investor best known as the co-founder of Apple. Jobs was also chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar, and the founder of NeXT. He was a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

#53

Stephen C. Stearns

#18157

Overall Influence

1946 - Present (78 years)

Stephen C. Stearns is an American biologist, and the Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Emeritus at Yale University. He is known for his work in life history theory and evolutionary medicine.

#54

James Russell

#18170

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (93 years)

James T. Russell is an American inventor. He earned a BA in physics from Reed College in Portland in 1953. He joined General Electric's nearby labs in Richland, Washington, where he initiated many types of experimental instrumentation. He designed and built the first electron beam welder.

#55

Katherine Dunn

#18184

Overall Influence

1945 - 2016 (71 years)

Katherine Karen Dunn was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love . She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

#56

Lee Blessing

#18988

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Lee Knowlton Blessing is an American playwright best known for his 1988 work, A Walk in the Woods. A lifelong Midwesterner, Blessing continued to work in regional theaters in and around his hometown of Minneapolis through his 40s before relocating to New York City.

#57

Neil Fligstein

#19015

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Neil Fligstein is an American sociologist and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is known for his work in economic sociology, political sociology, and organizational theory. He has produced both empirical and theoretical works.

#58

Eleanor Maccoby

#19187

Overall Influence

1917 - 2018 (101 years)

Eleanor Emmons Maccoby was an American psychologist who was most recognized for her research and scholarly contributions to the fields of gender studies and developmental psychology. Throughout her career she studied sex differences, gender development, gender differentiation, parent-child relations, child development, and social development from the child perspective.

#59

Mark Bedau

#19315

Overall Influence

1950 - Present (74 years)

Mark A. Bedau is an American philosopher who works in the field of artificial life. He is the son of the philosopher Hugo Bedau . Bedau teaches philosophy at Reed College. He is also the co-founder of the European Center for Living Technology and Visiting Professor, Ph.D. Program in Life Sciences: Foundations and Ethics, European School of Molecular Medicine. Bedau is also the editor of the Artificial Life Journal.

#60

Ry Cooder

#19969

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (77 years)

Ryland Peter Cooder is an American musician, songwriter, film score composer, record producer, and writer. He is a multi-instrumentalist but is best known for his slide guitar work, his interest in traditional music, and his collaborations with traditional musicians from many countries.

#61

James Kakalios

#20229

Overall Influence

1958 - Present (66 years)

James Kakalios is a physics professor at the University of Minnesota. Known within the scientific community for his work with amorphous semiconductors, granular materials, and 1/f noise, he is known to the general public as the author of the book The Physics of Superheroes, which considers comic book superheroes from the standpoint of fundamental physics.

#62

Daniel Bump

#20403

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Daniel Willis Bump is a mathematician who is a professor at Stanford University. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society since 2015, for "contributions to number theory, representation theory, combinatorics, and random matrix theory, as well as mathematical exposition".

#63

Victor Friedman

#20546

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (75 years)

Victor A. Friedman is an American linguist, Slavist. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities at the University of Chicago. He holds an appointment in the Department of Linguistics and an associate appointment in the Department of Anthropology. He has published numerous articles in English, Macedonian, and Albanian.

#64

Richard Crandall

#20684

Overall Influence

1947 - 2012 (65 years)

Richard E. Crandall was an American physicist and computer scientist who made contributions to computational number theory. Background Crandall was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent two years at Caltech before transferring to Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he graduated in physics and wrote his undergraduate thesis on randomness. He earned his Ph.D in theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

#65

Margaret Mitchell

#21315

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist who works on algorithmic bias and fairness in machine learning. She is most well known for her work on automatically removing undesired biases concerning demographic groups from machine learning models, as well as more transparent reporting of their intended use.

#66

Jenny Strauss Clay

#21333

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Jenny Strauss Clay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. After completing studies at Reed College and the University of Chicago, Strauss Clay completed her doctorate at the University of Washington. She taught at the University of California at Irvine and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently a member of the Nominating Committee of the Society for Classical Studies , until 2018.

#67

Chas S. Clifton

#22241

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Chas S. Clifton is an American academic, author and historian who specialises in the fields of English studies and Pagan studies. Clifton currently holds a teaching position in English at Colorado State University-Pueblo, prior to which he taught at Pueblo Community College.

#68

Jessica Litman

#22446

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (71 years)

Jessica Litman is a leading intellectual property scholar. She has been ranked as one of the most-cited U.S. law professors in the field of intellectual property/cyberlaw. Litman graduated from Reed College, received an MFA from Southern Methodist University, and received a JD from Columbia Law School. After law school, she served as a law clerk to Judge Betty Fletcher on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

#69

Jay Rosenberg

#22576

Overall Influence

1942 - 2008 (66 years)

Jay Frank Rosenberg was an American philosopher and historian of philosophy. He spent his teaching career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he joined the Department of Philosophy in 1966 and was appointed Taylor Grandy Professor of Philosophy in 1987. Rosenberg was a student of Wilfrid Sellars and established his reputation with ten books and over 80 articles in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of language, and the history of philosophy . His most commercially successful work, The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners, is a standard text in introduc...

#70

Peter Gordon

#22960

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

Peter Eli Gordon is a historian of philosophy, a critical theorist, and intellectual historian. The Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, Gordon focuses on continental philosophy and modern German and French thought, with particular emphasis on the German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger, critical theory, continental philosophy during the interwar crisis, and most recently, secularization and social thought in the 20th century.

#71

Robert Palladino

#23034

Overall Influence

1932 - 2016 (84 years)

Robert Joseph Palladino was an American Trappist monk, calligrapher, and academic. He was a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he taught Steve Jobs, and replaced Lloyd J. Reynolds as the head of the calligraphy program. Jobs credits Palladino's class with inspiring him to include multiple fonts on the original Mac. Despite his influence on Jobs, Palladino never owned a computer.

#72

Maurice Isserman

Maurice Isserman

#23562

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Maurice Isserman , formerly William R. Kenan and the James L. Ferguson chairs, is a Professor of History at Hamilton College. He has written about the Communist Party USA during the Popular Front period of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the emergence of the New Left and the 1960s. He co-authored a biography with Dorothy Ray Healey and authored a biography of Michael Harrington, both of whom were co-founders of Democratic Socialists of America. He has contributed editorials and book reviews to The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and The American Alpine Review.

#73

Michael Balls

#23934

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (86 years)

Michael Balls is a British zoologist and professor emeritus of medical cell biology at the University of Nottingham. He is best known for his work on laboratory animal welfare and alternatives to animal testing.

#74

Scott Atran

#25052

Overall Influence

1952 - Present (72 years)

Scott Atran is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, and cofounder of ARTIS International and of the Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University. He has studied and written about terrorism, violence, religion, indigenous environmental management and the cross-cultural foundations of biological classification; and he has done fieldwork with terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as political...

#75

Sacvan Bercovitch

#27846

Overall Influence

1933 - 2014 (81 years)

Sacvan Bercovitch was a Canadian literary and cultural critic who spent most of his life teaching and writing in the United States. During an academic career spanning five decades, he was considered to be one of the most influential and controversial figures of his generation in the emerging field of American studies.

#76

Dr. Demento

#28155

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Barret Eugene Hansen , known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and strange or unusual recordings dating from the early days of phonograph records to the present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at Pasadena, California station KPPC-FM. He played "Transfusion" by Nervous Norvus on the radio, and DJ "The Obscene" Steven Clean said that Hansen had to be "demented" to play it, and the name stuck. His weekly show went into syndication in 1974 and was syndicated by the Westwood One Radio Network from 1978 to 1992.

#77

Lal Zimman

#28623

Overall Influence

Lal Zimman is a linguist who works on sociocultural linguistics, sociophonetics, language, gender and identity, and transgender linguistics. Education Zimman received his BA in Philosophy and MA in English with a Linguistics concentration from San Francisco State University. He received his PhD in linguistics from University of Colorado at Boulder in 2012 where he worked under Kira Hall. His dissertation, Voices in Transition: Testosterone, Transmasculinity, and the Gendered Voice among Female-to-Male Transgender People, used both ethnographic and sociophonetic methods to explore the effects ...

#78

Kenneth Singleton

#28864

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Kenneth Jan Singleton is an American economist. He is a leading figure in empirical financial economics, and a faculty member at Stanford University. As the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business, Singleton teaches a variety of degree courses in finance.

#79

Leslie Scalapino

#31360

Overall Influence

1944 - 2010 (66 years)

Leslie Scalapino was an American poet, experimental prose writer, playwright, essayist, and editor, sometimes grouped in with the Language poets, though she felt closely tied to the Beat poets. A longtime resident of California's Bay Area, she earned an M.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley. One of Scalapino's most critically well-received works is Way , a long poem which won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award.

#80

Jennifer Crocker

#31548

Overall Influence

2000 - Present (24 years)

Dr. Jennifer Crocker is a professor and Ohio Eminent Scholar in Social Psychology at Ohio State University. She is also a former president of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her publications are on the subject of self-esteem and the contingencies and interpersonal goals that individuals have that are a clear reflection of their level of self-esteem.

#81

Emilio Pucci

#31759

Overall Influence

1914 - 1992 (78 years)

Don Emilio Pucci, Marchese di Barsento was an Italian aristocrat, fashion designer and politician. He and his eponymous company are synonymous with geometric prints in a kaleidoscope of colors. Early life Pucci was born in Naples in 1914 to one of Florence's oldest noble families, and he lived and worked in the Pucci Palace in Florence for much of his life. He was a keen sportsman who swam, skied, fenced, played tennis and raced cars.

#82

Richard F. Thompson

#32017

Overall Influence

1930 - 2014 (84 years)

Richard Frederick Thompson was an American behavioral neuroscientist. He was the William M. Keck Professor of Psychology and Biological Sciences at the University of Southern California, with a parallel appointment as professor of neurology. Thompson was known for his work on learning and memory. His graduate student, David A. McCormick discovered that the cerebellum was critical in learning and performance in classical conditioning. During his career, he served as editor-in-chief of the scientific journals Physiological Psychology, Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology, and Be...

#83

Joan Bresnan

#32059

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (79 years)

Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar.

#84

Peter Shirley

#33111

Overall Influence

1963 - Present (61 years)

Peter Shirley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA and adjunct professor at the University of Utah in computer science. He has made extensive contributions to interactive photorealistic rendering. His textbook, Fundamentals of Computer Graphics, is considered one of the leading introductory texts on computer graphics and is currently in the fourth edition.

#85

David H. French

#33155

Overall Influence

1918 - 1994 (76 years)

David Heath French was an American anthropologist and linguist from Bend, Oregon. During his lifetime he was considered the foremost academic authority on the Chinookan people of the middle Columbia River, especially the Wasco-Wishram Chinooks of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon. His research focused on ethnobotany and language.

#86

Nancy Farmer

#33195

Overall Influence

1941 - Present (83 years)

Nancy Farmer is an American writer of children's and young adult books and science fiction. She has written three Newbery Honor Books and won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The House of the Scorpion, published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in 2002.

#87

Ken Raymond

#33515

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (82 years)

Kenneth Norman Raymond is a bioinorganic and coordination chemist. He is Chancellor's Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, Professor of the Graduate School, the Director of the Seaborg Center in the Chemical Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the President and Chairman of Lumiphore.

#88

George M. Foster

#34160

Overall Influence

1913 - 2006 (93 years)

George McClelland Foster Jr. was an American anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, best known for contributions on peasant societies and as one of the founders of medical anthropology. He served as president of the American Anthropological Association . And was elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He received the 1982 Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2005. A festschrift in his honor was published in 1979.

#89

Anya Schiffrin

#34490

Overall Influence

1962 - Present (62 years)

Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media, and Communications specialization at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs , and a lecturer at the School of International and Public Affairs.

#90

Laurel L. Wilkening

#34545

Overall Influence

1944 - 2019 (75 years)

Laurel L. Wilkening was an American planetary scientist and college professor. She was chancellor of the University of California, Irvine from 1993 to 1998. Early life Wilkening was born in Richland, Washington, and raised in Socorro, New Mexico. Her mother, Ruby Alma Barks Wilkening, was a teacher; her father, Marvin H. Wilkening, was an atomic scientist during World War II, and a physics professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. She earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Reed College in 1966. She completed doctoral studies in chemistry at the University of California, San Diego in 1970, under advisor Hans Suess.

#91

Lorenzo Cohen

#34589

Overall Influence

Lorenzo Cohen is a professor in the Department of General Oncology and Behavioral Science and the director of the Integrative Medicine Program at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also a distinguished clinical professor at the Fudan University Shanghai Cancer Center in Shanghai, China. Cohen is a founding member and past president of the Society for Integrative Oncology.

#92

Galen Cranz

#34605

Overall Influence

Galen Cranz is a Professor of the Graduate School, Architecture at the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley, who studies the social and cultural bases of architectural and urban design. She is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, a kinesthetic educational system, who founded the new field "Body Conscious Design."

#93

Katherine Verdery

#35368

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (76 years)

Katherine Verdery is an American anthropologist, author, and emeritus professor, following her tenure as the Julien J. Studley Faculty Scholar and Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York's Graduate Center.

#94

Irena Swanson

#36189

Overall Influence

Irena Swanson is an American mathematician specializing in commutative algebra. She is head of the Purdue University Department of Mathematics since 2020. She was a professor of mathematics at Reed College from 2005 to 2020.

#95

Georgia Warnke

#37007

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (73 years)

Georgia Warnke is a Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Center for Ideas & Society at the University of California, Riverside. She chaired the Department from 2002 to 2004. She also acted as the Associate Dean for Arts and Humanities, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UCR from 2006 to 2011.

#96

Kalman J. Cohen

#37574

Overall Influence

1932 - 2010 (78 years)

Kalman J. Cohen was an American economist and among the pioneers of studying market microstructure. Cohen was the Distinguished Bank Research Professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. He served at Duke since 1974. Prior to joining the Duke faculty, he was a tenured professor at Carnegie Mellon University and New York University. He also taught as a visiting professor in Sweden, Denmark, China, and Singapore.

#97

John Alroy

#38148

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (58 years)

John Alroy is a paleobiologist born in New York in 1966 and now residing in Sydney, Australia. Area of expertise Alroy specializes in diversity curves, speciation, and extinction of North American fossil mammals and Phanerozoic marine invertebrates, connecting regional and local diversity, taxonomic composition, body mass distributions, ecomorphology, and phylogenetic patterns to intrinsic diversity dynamics, evolutionary trends, mass extinctions, and the effects of global climate change.

#98

David B. Dusenbery

#38715

Overall Influence

David B. Dusenbery is a biophysicist with a central interest in how information influences the behavior of organisms. In later years, he also considered the physical constraints hydrodynamics imposes on microorganisms and gametes.

#99

Elana Dykewomon

#38992

Overall Influence

1949 - 2022 (73 years)

Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Early life and education Dykewomon was born Elana Michelle Nachman in Manhattan to middle class Jewish parents; her mother was a researcher and librarian, and her father was a lawyer. She was raised in a Zionist household, and her father fought in Israel's War of Independence. She and her family moved from Long Island, New York to Puerto Rico when she was eight.

#100

Mary K. Rothbart

#39378

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (84 years)

Mary Klevjord Rothbart is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She was a co-founder of Birth to Three, a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association.

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