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
#501
Seymour Martin Lipset
#501
Overall Influence
1922 - 2006 (84 years)
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American sociologist and political scientist. He was the president of the American Political Science Association. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and the sociology of intellectual life. He also wrote extensively about the conditions for democracy in comparative perspective. A socialist in his early life, Lipset later moved to the right, and was considered to be one of the first neoconservatives.
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Michael Halliday
#502
Overall Influence
1925 - 2018 (93 years)
Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday was a British linguist who developed the internationally influential systemic functional linguistics model of language. His grammatical descriptions go by the name of systemic functional grammar. Halliday described language as a semiotic system, "not in the sense of a system of signs, but a systemic resource for meaning". For Halliday, language was a "meaning potential"; by extension, he defined linguistics as the study of "how people exchange meanings by 'languaging'". Halliday described himself as a generalist, meaning that he tried "to look at language ...
Go to Profile#503
Stephen Spender
#503
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965.
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Stanislav Grof
#504
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Stanislav "Stan" Grof is a Czech-born psychiatrist who has been living in the United States since the 1960s. Grof is one of the principal developers of transpersonal psychology and research into the use of non-ordinary states of consciousness for purposes of psychological healing, deep self-exploration, and obtaining growth and insights into the human psyche. In 1993, Grof received an Honorary Award from the Association for Transpersonal Psychology for major contributions to and development of the field of transpersonal psychology, given at the occasion of the 25th Anniversary Convocation held in Asilomar, California.
Go to Profile#505
Arthur C. Clarke
#505
Overall Influence
1917 - 2008 (91 years)
Sir Arthur Charles Clarke was an English science fiction writer, science writer, futurist, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host. He co-wrote the screenplay for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, widely regarded as one of the most influential films of all time. Clarke was a science fiction writer, an avid populariser of space travel, and a futurist of a distinguished ability. He wrote many books and many essays for popular magazines. In 1961, he received the Kalinga Prize, a UNESCO award for popularising science. Clarke's science and science fiction writings earned him the moniker "Prophet of the Space Age".
Go to Profile#506
László Lovász
#506
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (76 years)
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
Go to Profile#507
Jimmy Kimmel
#507
Overall Influence
1967 - Present (57 years)
James Christian Kimmel is an American television host, comedian, writer, producer, and political commentator. He is the host and executive producer of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a late-night talk show which premiered on ABC on January 26, 2003, at Hollywood Masonic Temple in Hollywood, California; and on April 1, 2019, at a secondary home, the Zappos Theater on the Las Vegas Strip. Kimmel hosted the Primetime Emmy Awards in 2012, 2016 and 2020. He also hosted the Academy Awards in 2017, 2018 and 2023.
Go to Profile#508
Thích Nhất Hạnh
#508
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Thích Nhất Hạnh was a Vietnamese Thiền Buddhist monk, peace activist, prolific author, poet and teacher, who founded the Plum Village Tradition, historically recognized as the main inspiration for engaged Buddhism. Known as the "father of mindfulness", Nhất Hạnh was a major influence on Western practices of Buddhism.
Go to Profile#509
Louis Pouzin
#509
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist. He designed a pioneering packet communications network, CYCLADES that was the first to implement the end-to-end principle, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.
Go to Profile#510
Lloyd Shapley
#510
Overall Influence
1923 - 2016 (93 years)
Lloyd Stowell Shapley was an American mathematician and Nobel Memorial Prize-winning economist. He contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory. Shapley is generally considered one of the most important contributors to the development of game theory since the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern. With Alvin E. Roth, Shapley won the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
Go to Profile#511
Gerald Edelman
#511
Overall Influence
1929 - 2014 (85 years)
Gerald Maurice Edelman was an American biologist who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work with Rodney Robert Porter on the immune system. Edelman's Nobel Prize-winning research concerned discovery of the structure of antibody molecules. In interviews, he has said that the way the components of the immune system evolve over the life of the individual is analogous to the way the components of the brain evolve in a lifetime. There is a continuity in this way between his work on the immune system, for which he won the Nobel Prize, and his later work in neuroscience and...
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John Finnis
#512
Overall Influence
1940 - Present (84 years)
#513
Adrienne Rich
#513
Overall Influence
1929 - 2012 (83 years)
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Go to Profile#514
Munir Ahmad Khan
#514
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Munir Ahmad Khan , , was a Pakistani nuclear reactor physicist who is credited, among others, with being the "father of the atomic bomb program" of Pakistan for their leading role in developing their nation's nuclear weapons during the successive years after the war with India in 1971.
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Terry Pratchett
#515
Overall Influence
1948 - 2015 (67 years)
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for his 41 comic fantasy novels set on the Discworld, and for the apocalyptic comedy novel Good Omens which he wrote with Neil Gaiman.
Go to Profile#516
Northrop Frye
#516
Overall Influence
1912 - 1991 (79 years)
Herman Northrop Frye was a Canadian literary critic and literary theorist, considered one of the most influential of the 20th century. Frye gained international fame with his first book, Fearful Symmetry , which led to the reinterpretation of the poetry of William Blake. His lasting reputation rests principally on the theory of literary criticism that he developed in Anatomy of Criticism , one of the most important works of literary theory published in the twentieth century. The American critic Harold Bloom commented at the time of its publication that Anatomy established Frye as "the foremo...
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Robert Trivers
#517
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism , parental investment , facultative sex ratio determination , and parent–offspring conflict . He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy and discussing intragenomic conflict.
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Aaron Beck
#518
Overall Influence
1921 - 2021 (100 years)
Aaron Temkin Beck was an American psychiatrist who was a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He is regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy . His pioneering methods are widely used in the treatment of clinical depression and various anxiety disorders. Beck also developed self-report measures for depression and anxiety, notably the Beck Depression Inventory , which became one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. In 1994 he and his daughter, psychologist Judith S. Beck, founded ...
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James Gosling
#519
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (69 years)
James Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the conception and development of the architecture for the Java programming language and for contributions to window systems.
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Michael Spence
#520
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (81 years)
Andrew Michael Spence is a Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate. Spence is the William R. Berkley Professor in Economics and Business at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and the Philip H. Knight Professor of Management, Emeritus, and Dean, Emeritus, at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
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Dell Hymes
#521
Overall Influence
1927 - 2009 (82 years)
Dell Hathaway Hymes was a linguist, sociolinguist, anthropologist, and folklorist who established disciplinary foundations for the comparative, ethnographic study of language use. His research focused upon the languages of the Pacific Northwest. He was one of the first to call the fourth subfield of anthropology "linguistic anthropology" instead of "anthropological linguistics". The terminological shift draws attention to the field's grounding in anthropology rather than in what, by that time, had already become an autonomous discipline . In 1972 Hymes founded the journal Language in Society ...
Go to Profile#522
Audre Lorde
#522
Overall Influence
1934 - 1992 (58 years)
Audre Lorde was an American writer, professor, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet," who dedicated her life and talents to confronting all forms of injustice, as she believed there could be "no hierarchy of oppressions".
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Stephen Holden
#523
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (83 years)
Stephen Holden is an American writer, poet, and music and film critic. Biography Holden earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Yale University in 1963. He worked as a photo editor, staff writer, and eventually became an A&R executive for RCA Records before turning to writing pop music reviews and related articles for Rolling Stone magazine, Blender, The Village Voice, The Atlantic, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He first achieved prominence with his 1970s Rolling Stone work, where he tended to cover singer-songwriter and traditional pop artists. He joined the staff of Th...
Go to Profile#524
John McDowell
#524
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
John Henry McDowell, FBA is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and now university professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, nature, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, and is a Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the British Academy.
Go to Profile#525
Yusuf al-Qaradawi
#525
Overall Influence
1926 - 2022 (96 years)
Yusuf al-Qaradawi was an Egyptian Islamic scholar based in Doha, Qatar, and chairman of the International Union of Muslim Scholars. His influences included Ibn Taymiyya, Ibn Qayyim, Sayyid Rashid Rida, Hassan al-Banna, Abul Hasan Ali Hasani Nadwi, Abul A'la Maududi and Naeem Siddiqui. He was best known for his programme الشريعة والحياة, al-Sharīʿa wa al-Ḥayāh , broadcast on Al Jazeera, which had an estimated audience of 40–60 million worldwide. He was also known for IslamOnline, a website he helped to found in 1997 and for which he served as chief religious scholar.
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David Deutsch
#526
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (71 years)
#527
Deng Xiaoping
#527
Overall Influence
1904 - 1997 (93 years)
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese revolutionary and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from December 1978 to November 1989. After Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng gradually rose to supreme power and led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms earning him the reputation as the "Architect of Modern China".
Go to Profile#528
Jan Tinbergen
#528
Overall Influence
1903 - 1994 (91 years)
Jan Tinbergen was a Dutch economist who was awarded the first Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1969, which he shared with Ragnar Frisch for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes. He is widely considered to be one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of econometrics.
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Bruce Schneier
#529
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (61 years)
#530
Ted Nelson
#530
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
Theodor Holm Nelson is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia in 1963 and published them in 1965. According to a 1997 Forbes profile, Nelson "sees himself as a literary romantic, like a Cyrano de Bergerac, or 'the Orson Welles of software'."
Go to Profile#531
Anthony Kenny
#531
Overall Influence
1931 - Present (93 years)
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny is a British philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein of whose literary estate he is an executor. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas in the style of analytic philosophy. He is a former president of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#532
James Heckman
#532
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (80 years)
#533
Raymond Gosling
#533
Overall Influence
1926 - 2015 (89 years)
Raymond George Gosling was a British scientist. While a PhD student at King's College, London he worked under the supervision of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. The crystallographic experiments of Franklin and Gosling, together with others by Wilkins, produced data that helped James Watson and Francis Crick to infer the structure of DNA.
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Carl Hewitt
#534
Overall Influence
2000 - 2022 (22 years)
Carl Eddie Hewitt was an American computer scientist who designed the Planner programming language for automated planning and the actor model of concurrent computation, which have been influential in the development of logic, functional and object-oriented programming. Planner was the first programming language based on procedural plans invoked using pattern-directed invocation from assertions and goals. The actor model influenced the development of the Scheme programming language, the π-calculus, and served as an inspiration for several other programming languages.
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Geert Hofstede
#535
Overall Influence
1928 - 2020 (92 years)
Gerard Hendrik Hofstede was a Dutch social psychologist, IBM employee, and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Anthropology and International Management at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, well known for his pioneering research on cross-cultural groups and organizations.
Go to Profile#536
Kary Mullis
#536
Overall Influence
1944 - 2019 (75 years)
Kary Banks Mullis was an American biochemist. In recognition of his role in the invention of the polymerase chain reaction technique, he shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Michael Smith and was awarded the Japan Prize in the same year. PCR became a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology, described by The New York Times as "highly original and significant, virtually dividing biology into the two epochs of before PCR and after PCR."
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Robert Faurisson
#537
Overall Influence
1929 - 2018 (89 years)
Robert Faurisson was a British-born French academic who became best known for Holocaust denial. Faurisson generated much controversy with a number of articles published in the Journal of Historical Review and elsewhere, and by letters to French newspapers, especially Le Monde, which contradicted the history of the Holocaust by denying the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps, the systematic killing of European Jews using gas during the Second World War, and the authenticity of The Diary of Anne Frank. After the passing of the Gayssot Act against Holocaust denial in 1990, Faurisson wa...
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Jamie Dimon
#538
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
James Dimon is an American billionaire business executive and banker, who has been the chairman and chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase since 2005. He was previously on the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Dimon was included in Time magazine's 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2011 lists of the world's 100 most influential people. Forbes estimated his net worth at $1.6 billion as of June 2023. He serves on the board of directors of several non-profit institutions; including the Business Roundtable, the Bank Policy Institute, and the Harvard Business School. In the past he...
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Ian MacDonald
#539
Overall Influence
1948 - 2003 (55 years)
Ian MacCormick was an English music critic, journalist and author, best known for both Revolution in the Head, his critical history of the Beatles which borrowed techniques from art historians, and The New Shostakovich, a study of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich.
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Torsten Wiesel
#540
Overall Influence
1924 - Present (100 years)
Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. With David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres.
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Claes Oldenburg
#541
Overall Influence
1929 - 2022 (93 years)
Claes Oldenburg was a Swedish-born American sculptor best known for his public art installations, typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City.
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Leonard Adleman
#542
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (79 years)
Leonard Adleman is an American computer scientist. He is one of the creators of the RSA encryption algorithm, for which he received the 2002 Turing Award. He is also known for the creation of the field of DNA computing.
Go to Profile#543
Henry Mintzberg
#543
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (85 years)
Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968.
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Michael I. Jordan
#544
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (68 years)
Michael Irwin Jordan is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. Jordan was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning.
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Stephen Hawking
#545
Overall Influence
1942 - 2018 (76 years)
#546
David Hockney
#546
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (87 years)
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Go to Profile#547
Deirdre McCloskey
#547
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (82 years)
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is the distinguished professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago . She is also adjunct professor of philosophy and classics there, and for five years was a visiting professor of philosophy at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. Since October 2007 she has received six honorary doctoratess. In 2013, she received the Julian L. Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute for her work examining factors in history that led to advancement in human achievement and prosperity. Her main research interests i...
Go to Profile#548
Augusto Pinochet
#548
Overall Influence
1915 - 2006 (91 years)
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was a Chilean military officer and politician who served as Chile's head of state under various titles from 1973 to 1990, first as the leader of the Military Junta of Chile from 1973 to 1981, being declared President of the Republic by the junta in 1974 and becoming the de facto dictator of Chile, and from 1981 to 1990 as de jure president after a new constitution, which confirmed him in the office, was approved by a referendum in 1980. His rule remains the longest of any Chilean leader.
Go to Profile#549
Eleanor Rosch
#549
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (86 years)
#550
René Girard
#550
Overall Influence
1923 - 2015 (92 years)
René Noël Théophile Girard was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.
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