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
#5001
Frances Spence
#5009
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
Frances V. Spence was one of the original programmers for the ENIAC . She is considered one of the first computer programmers in history. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik.
Go to Profile#5002
Alan Walters
#5010
Overall Influence
1926 - 2009 (83 years)
Sir Alan Arthur Walters was a British economist who was best known as the Chief Economic Adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1981 to 1983 and again for five months in 1989. Early life Walters was born in Leicester. His father was a Communist and a grocer who sold goods from a van. He failed his 11-Plus and attended Alderman Newton's School in Leicester, leaving at fifteen to work as a machine operator in a shoe factory. During World War II, he was called up and joined the British Army as a private.
Go to Profile#5003
Stanley Cohen
#5011
Overall Influence
1942 - 2013 (71 years)
Stanley Cohen was a sociologist and criminologist, Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics, known for breaking academic ground on "emotional management", including the mismanagement of emotions in the form of sentimentality, overreaction, and emotional denial. He had a lifelong concern with human rights violations, first growing up in South Africa, later studying imprisonment in England and finally in Palestine. He founded the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics.
Go to Profile#5004
Haïm Brezis
#5012
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Haïm Brezis is a French mathematician, who mainly works in functional analysis and partial differential equations. Biography Born in Riom-ès-Montagnes, Cantal, France. Brezis is the son of a Romanian immigrant father, who came to France in the 1930s, and a Jewish mother who fled from the Netherlands. His wife, Michal Govrin, a native Israeli, works as a novelist, poet, and theater director. Brezis received his Ph.D. from the University of Paris in 1972 under the supervision of Gustave Choquet. He is currently a professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a visiting distinguished professor at Rutgers University.
Go to Profile#5005
Logan Paul
#5013
Overall Influence
1995 - Present (31 years)
Logan Alexander Paul is an American influencer, professional wrestler, YouTuber, and actor. He is currently signed to WWE, where he is the current WWE United States Champion in his first reign. He has over 23 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, and has ranked on the Forbes list for the highest paid YouTube creators in 2017, 2018, and 2021. Paul has also run the Impaulsive podcast since November 2018, which has over 4 million YouTube subscribers.
Go to Profile#5006
John Hodgman
#5014
Overall Influence
1971 - Present (55 years)
John Kellogg Hodgman is an American author, actor, and humorist. In addition to his published written works, such as The Areas of My Expertise, More Information Than You Require, and That Is All, he is known for his personification of a PC in contrast to Justin Long's personification of a Mac in Apple's "Get a Mac" advertising campaign, and for his work as a contributor on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Go to Profile#5007
Kathleen Raine
#5015
Overall Influence
1908 - 2003 (95 years)
Kathleen Jessie Raine was a British poet, critic and scholar, writing in particular on William Blake, W. B. Yeats and Thomas Taylor. Known for her interest in various forms of spirituality, most prominently Platonism and Neoplatonism, she was a founding member of the Temenos Academy.
Go to Profile#5008
Mary Ann Glendon
#5016
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Mary Ann Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a former United States Ambassador to the Holy See. She teaches and writes on bioethics, comparative constitutional law, property, and human rights in international law. She supports government bans on abortion services and "writes forcefully against the expansion of abortion rights."
Go to Profile#5009
Edwin Thompson Jaynes
#5017
Overall Influence
1922 - 1998 (76 years)
Edwin Thompson Jaynes was the Wayman Crow Distinguished Professor of Physics at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote extensively on statistical mechanics and on foundations of probability and statistical inference, initiating in 1957 the maximum entropy interpretation of thermodynamics as being a particular application of more general Bayesian/information theory techniques . Jaynes strongly promoted the interpretation of probability theory as an extension of logic.
Go to Profile#5010
Arkady Ostashev
#5018
Overall Influence
1925 - 1998 (73 years)
Arkady Ilyich Ostashev , Soviet and Russian scientist, designer of rocket and space systems, mechanical engineer, participant in the launch of the first artificial satellite of the Earth and the first cosmonaut, Candidate of Technical Sciences, associate professor, laureate of the Lenin and State Prizes, one of the leading managers of work in the field of experimental development of rocket technology OKB-1, personal pensioner of republican significance, student and interpersonal relationship of Sergey Pavlovich Korolev.
Go to Profile#5011
Stephen J. Mellor
#5019
Overall Influence
1952 - Present (74 years)
Stephen J. Mellor is an American computer scientist, developer of the Ward–Mellor method for real-time computing, the Shlaer–Mellor method, and Executable UML, and signatory to the Agile Manifesto.
Go to Profile#5012
Bernd Lucke
#5020
Overall Influence
1962 - Present (64 years)
Bernd Lucke is a German economist and politician. Lucke was elected a Member of the European Parliament for the Alternative für Deutschland in 2014. He failed to win reelection in 2019. He is a professor of economics at the University of Hamburg, a co-founder of Wahlalternative 2013 , and a founder of the party Alternative for Germany . Lucke lost the leadership of the AfD to Frauke Petry in July 2015. Petry's election was considered a shift of the party to extremist positions; Lucke subsequently left the party. In July 2015 he and other former AfD members founded the political party Libera...
Go to Profile#5013
Michael Nielsen
#5021
Overall Influence
1974 - Present (52 years)
Michael Aaron Nielsen is a quantum physicist, science writer, and computer programming researcher living in San Francisco. Work In 1998, Nielsen received his PhD in physics from the University of New Mexico. In 2004, he was recognized as Australia's "youngest academic" and was awarded a Federation Fellowship at the University of Queensland. During this fellowship, he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Caltech, and at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Go to Profile#5014
Little Richard
#5022
Overall Influence
1932 - 2020 (88 years)
Richard Wayne Penniman , known professionally as Little Richard, was an American singer, pianist, and songwriter. He was an influential figure in popular music and culture for seven decades. Described as the "Architect of Rock and Roll", Richard's most celebrated work dates from the mid-1950s, when his charismatic showmanship and dynamic music, characterized by frenetic piano playing, pounding back beat and powerful raspy vocals, laid the foundation for rock and roll. Richard's innovative emotive vocalizations and uptempo rhythmic music played a key role in the formation of other popular music genres, including soul and funk.
Go to Profile#5015
Marilyn Manson
#5023
Overall Influence
1969 - Present (57 years)
Brian Hugh Warner , known professionally as Marilyn Manson, is an American rock musician. He came to prominence as the lead singer of the band that shares his name, of which he remains the only constant member since its formation in 1989. Known for his controversial stage personality, his stage name was formed by combining the names of two opposing American cultural icons: actress Marilyn Monroe and cult leader Charles Manson.
Go to Profile#5016
George J. Borjas
#5024
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
George Jesus Borjas is a Cuban-American economist and the Robert W. Scrivner Professor of Economics and Social Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been described as "America’s leading immigration economist" and "the leading sceptic of immigration among economists". Borjas has published a number of studies that conclude that low-skilled immigration adversely affects low-skilled natives , a proposition that is debated among economists.
Go to Profile#5017
Steven Gerrard
#5025
Overall Influence
1980 - Present (46 years)
Steven George Gerrard is an English professional football manager and former player, who manages Saudi Pro League club Al-Ettifaq. Described by pundits and fellow professionals as one of his generation's greatest players, one of Liverpool's greatest ever players as well as one of the best English players in the history of the sport, Gerrard spent the majority of his playing career as a central midfielder for Liverpool and the England national team, captaining both.
Go to Profile#5018
Rainer Mausfeld
#5026
Overall Influence
1949 - Present (77 years)
Rainer Mausfeld is a retired German professor of psychology at Kiel University. He did research on the psychology of perception, cognitive science, and the history of psychology. Since 2015, he has published on manipulation in media and politics and the transformation of representative democracy to neoliberal elite democracy.
Go to Profile#5019
Boris Akunin
#5027
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigori Chkhartishvili , a Russian-Georgian writer. He is best known as writer of detective and historical fiction. He is also an essayist and literary translator. Grigory Chkhartishvili has also written under pen names Anatoly Brusnikin, Anna Borisova, and Akunin-Chkhartishvili. His characters include Erast Fandorin, Nicholas Fandorin and Sister Pelagia.
Go to Profile#5020
Pope Shenouda III of Alexandria
#5028
Overall Influence
1923 - 2012 (89 years)
Pope Shenouda III was the 117th Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of the See of St. Mark. His papacy lasted 40 years, 4 months, and 4 days, from 14 November 1971 until his death. His official title was Pope of Alexandria and the Patriarch of All Africa on the Holy Apostolic Throne of Saint Mark the Evangelist, Father of fathers, Shepherd of shepherds, Successor of Saint Mark, thirteenth among the Apostles, Ecumenical Judge, Beloved of Christ. He was also the head of the Holy Synod of the Coptic Orthodox Church. He was known as a conservative figure within the church, and was respected within t...
Go to Profile#5021
Michael Sipser
#5029
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Fredric Sipser is an American theoretical computer scientist who has made early contributions to computational complexity theory. He is a professor of applied mathematics and was the Dean of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#5022
James Bassham
#5030
Overall Influence
1922 - 2012 (90 years)
James Alan Bassham was an American scientist known for his work on photosynthesis. He received a B.S. degree in chemistry in 1945 from the University of California, Berkeley, earning his Ph.D. degree from Berkeley in 1949. His graduate studies were on the subject of carbon reduction during photosynthesis, working with Melvin Calvin in the Bio-Organic Chemistry Group of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California. He discovered, with Melvin Calvin and Andrew Benson, the Calvin-Benson-Bassham cycle. He continued his work as Associate Director of this group.
Go to Profile#5023
Jon Fosse
#5031
Overall Influence
1959 - Present (67 years)
Jon Olav Fosse is a Norwegian author, translator, and playwright. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable." Fosse's work spans over seventy novels, poems, children's books, essays, and theatre plays, which have been translated into over fifty languages. The most performed Norwegian playwright after Henrik Ibsen, Fosse is currently—with productions presented on over a thousand stages worldwide—one of the most performed contemporary playwrights globally. His minimalist and deeply introspective plays, with langua...
Go to Profile#5024
David Hull
#5032
Overall Influence
1935 - 2010 (75 years)
David Lee Hull was an American philosopher who was most notable for founding the field philosophy of biology. Additionally, Hull is recognized within evolutionary culture studies as contributing heavily in early discussions of the conceptualization of memetics. In addition to his academic prominence, he was well known as a gay man who fought for the rights of other gay and lesbian philosophers. Hull was partnered with Richard "Dick" Wellman, a Chicago school teacher, until Wellman's passing during the drafting of Science as Process.
Go to Profile#5025
Philip Glass
#5033
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Philip Glass is an American composer and pianist. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential composers of the late 20th century. Glass's work has been associated with minimalism, being built up from repetitive phrases and shifting layers. Glass describes himself as a composer of "music with repetitive structures", which he has helped to evolve stylistically.
Go to Profile#5026
Robert Plant
#5034
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Robert Anthony Plant is an English singer and songwriter. He was the lead singer and lyricist of the rock band Led Zeppelin from its founding in 1968 until their breakup in 1980; since then he has had a successful solo career, sometimes collaborating with other artists such as Alison Krauss. Regarded by many as one of the greatest singers in rock music, he is known for his flamboyant persona and raw stage performances.
Go to Profile#5027
Howard Martin Temin
#5035
Overall Influence
1934 - 1994 (60 years)
Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.
Go to Profile#5028
Pippa Norris
#5036
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Pippa Norris is a British American political scientist specializing in comparative politics. She is the McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and she has served as the Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Director of the Electoral Integrity Project.
Go to Profile#5029
Joseph Ellis
#5037
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Joseph John-Michael Ellis III is an American historian whose work focuses on the lives and times of the Founding Fathers of the United States. His book American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson won a National Book Award in 1997 and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for History. Both these books were bestsellers.
Go to Profile#5030
Lawrence J. Fogel
#5038
Overall Influence
1928 - 2007 (79 years)
Dr. Lawrence Jerome Fogel was a pioneer in evolutionary computation and human factors analysis. He is known as the inventor of active noise cancellation and the father of evolutionary programming. His scientific career spanned nearly six decades and included electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, communication theory, human factors research, information processing, cybernetics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and computer science.
Go to Profile#5031
Eric Topol
#5039
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Eric Jeffrey Topol is an American cardiologist, scientist, and author. He is the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, a professor of Molecular Medicine and Executive Vice-President at Scripps Research Institute, and a senior consultant at the Division of Cardiovascular Diseases at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California. He is editor-in-chief of Medscape and theheart.org. He has published three bestseller books on the future of medicine: The Creative Destruction of Medicine , The Patient Will See You Now , and Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again .
Go to Profile#5032
Anders Sandberg
#5040
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist and transhumanist. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University, and is currently a senior research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow at Reuben College.
Go to Profile#5033
Baruch Samuel Blumberg
#5041
Overall Influence
1925 - 2011 (86 years)
Baruch Samuel Blumberg , known as Barry Blumberg, was an American physician, geneticist, and co-recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine , for his work on the hepatitis B virus while an investigator at the NIH and at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. He was president of the American Philosophical Society from 2005 until his death.
Go to Profile#5034
Simon Sebag Montefiore
#5042
Overall Influence
1965 - Present (61 years)
Simon Jonathan Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, television presenter and author of popular history books and novels, including Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar , Jerusalem: The Biography , The Romanovs 1613–1918 , and The World: A Family History of Humanity , among others.
Go to Profile#5035
Anthony Mandler
#5043
Overall Influence
1973 - Present (53 years)
Anthony Mandler is an American film director, music video director, television commercial director and photographer. As a music video director, his most notable and frequent collaborator is Rihanna. The two have worked on sixteen music videos together throughout her career, beginning with "Unfaithful" in 2006 and most recently "Diamonds" in 2012.
Go to Profile#5036
Howard Jacobson
#5044
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Howard Eric Jacobson is a British novelist and journalist. He is known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner. Early life Jacobson was born in Manchester to parents of Russian-Jewish heritage . He has a brother. He was brought up in Prestwich, and educated at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, Greater Manchester before going on to study English at Downing College, Cambridge, under F. R. Leavis. He graduated with a 2:2.
Go to Profile#5037
George Meyer
#5045
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
George Meyer is an Americann producer and writer. Meyer is best known for his work on The Simpsons, where he served as a scriptwriter and gag writer and led the show's communal rewriting process for much of its earlier run. He has been publicly credited with "thoroughly shap[ing] ... the comedic sensibility" of the show.
Go to Profile#5038
Raymond Vernon
#5046
Overall Influence
1913 - 1999 (86 years)
Raymond Vernon was an American economist. He was a member of the group that developed the Marshall Plan after World War II and later played a role in the development of the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. He was the Clarence Dillon Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School, becoming emeritus on his retirement. His formulation of the Product life-cycle theory of US exports, first published in 1966, in turn influenced the behavior of companies.
Go to Profile#5039
Udi Manber
#5047
Overall Influence
Udi Manber is an Israeli computer scientist. He is one of the authors of agrep and GLIMPSE. After a career in engineering and management, he worked on medical research. Education He earned both his bachelor's degree in 1975 in mathematics and his master's degree in 1978 from the Technion in Israel. At the University of Washington, he earned another master's degree in 1981 and his PhD in computer science in 1982.
Go to Profile#5040
Julio Frenk
#5048
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Julio José Frenk Mora is president of the University of Miami and has served in this role since 2015. He is the University of Miami's first Hispanic and native Spanish-speaking president. At the University of Miami, he is also a professor of public health science at the university's Leonard M. Miller School of Medicine, professor of health sector management at the university's Herbert Business School, and professor of sociology at its College of Arts of Sciences.
Go to Profile#5041
R. Nicholas Burns
#5049
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Robert Nicholas Burns is an American diplomat and academic who has served as the United States ambassador to China since 2022. Burns has had a 25-year career in the State Department, and served as United States Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. Appointed by President George W. Bush, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 17, 2005, and was sworn into office by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. As under secretary, he oversaw the bureaus responsible for U.S. policy in each region of the world and served in the senior career Foreign Service position at the department. He retired on April 30, 2008.
Go to Profile#5042
Dean Karlan
#5050
Overall Influence
2000 - Present (26 years)
Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action , a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Go to Profile#5043
Guillaume Faye
#5051
Overall Influence
1949 - 2019 (70 years)
Guillaume Faye was a French political theorist, journalist, writer, and leading member of the French New Right. Continuing the tradition of Giorgio Locchi, his various articles and books sought to posit Islam as a nemesis necessary to unite the white non-Muslim peoples of Europe and the former Soviet Union into an entity named "Eurosiberia". Faye considered regional and national grievances to be counterproductive to this goal and was supportive of European integration.
Go to Profile#5044
Dina Katabi
#5052
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Dina Katabi is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and the director of the MIT Wireless Center. Academic biography Katabi received a bachelor's degree from the University of Damascus in 1995 and M.S and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT in 1998 and 2003 respectively. In 2003, Katabi joined MIT, where she holds the title of Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She is the co-director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing and a principal investigator at MIT's Computer Science a...
Go to Profile#5045
Peter H. Salus
#5053
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Peter Henry Salus is a linguist, computer scientist, historian of technology, author in many fields, and an editor of books and journals. He has conducted research in germanistics, language acquisition, and computer languages.
Go to Profile#5046
Hamid Karzai
#5054
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Hamid Karzai is an Afghan politician who served as the fourth president of Afghanistan from July 2002 to September 2014, including as the first elected president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan from December 2004 to September 2014. He previously served as Chairman of the Afghan Interim Administration from December 2001 to July 2002. He is the chief of the Popalzai Durrani tribe of Pashtuns in Kandahar Province.
Go to Profile#5047
Branko Milanović
#5055
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Branko Milanović is a Serbian-American economist. He is most known for his work on income distribution and inequality. Since January 2014, he has been a visiting presidential professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and an affiliated senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study . He also teaches at the London School of Economics and the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. In 2019, he has been appointed the honorary Maddison Chair at the University of Groningen.
Go to Profile#5048
Bruce Prichard
#5056
Overall Influence
1963 - Present (63 years)
Bruce Prichard is an American professional wrestling executive, booker, and producer and a former manager, commentator, and occasional professional wrestler, currently signed to WWE, where he works as a member of the creative team. In addition to his corporate roles with WWE, Prichard has also appeared as an on-screen character under the ring name Brother Love. As Brother Love, Prichard was the original manager of The Undertaker, and hosted a talk show segment, The Brother Love Show.
Go to Profile#5049
Björn Borg
#5057
Overall Influence
1956 - Present (70 years)
Björn Rune Borg is a Swedish former world No. 1 tennis player. Between 1974 and 1981, he became the first man in the Open Era to win 11 Grand Slam singles titles with six at the French Open and five consecutively at Wimbledon.
Go to Profile#5050
Chris Crawford
#5058
Overall Influence
1950 - Present (76 years)
Christopher Crawford is an American video game designer and writer. Hired by Alan Kay to work at Atari, Inc., he wrote the computer wargame Eastern Front for the Atari 8-bit family which was sold through the Atari Program Exchange and later Atari's official product line. After leaving Atari, he wrote a string of games beginning with Balance of Power for Macintosh. Writing about the process of developing games, he became known among other creators in the nascent home computer game industry for his passionate advocacy of game design as an art form. He self-published The Journal of Computer Gam...
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