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
#5151
Charles W. Misner
#5159
Overall Influence
1932 - 2023 (91 years)
Charles W. Misner was an American physicist and one of the authors of Gravitation. His specialties included general relativity and cosmology. His work has also provided early foundations for studies of quantum gravity and numerical relativity.
Go to Profile#5152
Richard Mattessich
#5160
Overall Influence
1922 - 2019 (97 years)
Richard Victor Alvarus Mattessich was an Austrian-Canadian business economist and Emeritus Professor of Accounting at the University of British Columbia, known for introducing the concept of electronic spreadsheets into the field of business accounting in 1961, as well as pioneering analytical and philosophical methods in accounting.
Go to Profile#5153
David Malouf
#5161
Overall Influence
1934 - Present (92 years)
David George Joseph Malouf AO is an Australian poet, novelist, short story writer, playwright and librettist. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008, Malouf has lectured at both the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney. He also delivered the 1998 Boyer Lectures.
Go to Profile#5154
Mou Zongsan
#5162
Overall Influence
1909 - 1995 (86 years)
Mou Zongsan was a Chinese philosopher and translator. He was born in Shandong province and graduated from Peking University. In 1949 he moved to Taiwan and later to Hong Kong, and he remained outside of mainland China for the rest of his life. His thought was heavily influenced by Immanuel Kant, whose three Critiques he translated from English, possibly first, into Chinese, and above all by Tiantai Buddhist philosophy.
Go to Profile#5155
Kathy Boudin
#5163
Overall Influence
1943 - 2022 (79 years)
Kathy Boudin was an American radical leftist who served 23 years in prison for felony murder based on her role in the 1981 Brink's robbery. Boudin was a founding member of the militant Weather Underground organization, which engaged in bombings of government buildings to express opposition to U.S. foreign policy and racism. The 1981 robbery resulted in the killing of two Nyack, New York, police officers and one security guard, and serious injury to another security guard; Boudin was arrested attempting to flee after the getaway vehicle she occupied was stopped by police. She was released on parole in 2003.
Go to Profile#5156
Richard S. Varga
#5164
Overall Influence
1928 - 2022 (94 years)
Richard Steven Varga was an American mathematician who specialized in numerical analysis and linear algebra. He was an Emeritus University Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Kent State University and an adjunct Professor at Case Western Reserve University. Varga was known for his contributions to many areas of mathematics, including matrix analysis, complex analysis, approximation theory, and scientific computation. He was the author of the classic textbook Matrix Iterative Analysis. Varga served as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis .
Go to Profile#5157
Michael Ghiselin
#5165
Overall Influence
1939 - Present (87 years)
Michael T. Ghiselin is an American biologist and philosopher as well as historian of biology, formerly at the California Academy of Sciences. He is known for his work concerning sea slugs, and for his criticism of the falsification of the history of Lamarckism in biology textbooks.
Go to Profile#5158
Igor Aleksander
#5166
Overall Influence
1937 - Present (89 years)
Igor Aleksander FREng is an emeritus professor of Neural Systems Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London. He worked in artificial intelligence and neural networks and designed the world's first neural pattern recognition system in the 1980s.
Go to Profile#5159
Newton N. Minow
#5167
Overall Influence
1926 - 2023 (97 years)
Newton Norman Minow was an American attorney who served as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. He is famous for his 1961 speech referring to television as a "vast wasteland". While still maintaining a law practice, Minow served as the Honorary Consul General of Singapore in Chicago, beginning in 2001.
Go to Profile#5160
Michael E. Krauss
#5168
Overall Influence
1934 - 2019 (85 years)
Michael E. Krauss was an American linguist, professor emeritus, founder and long-time head of the Alaska Native Language Center. He died on August 11, 2019, four days before his 85th birthday. The Alaska Native Language Archive is named after him.
Go to Profile#5161
Alex Graves
#5169
Overall Influence
1976 - Present (50 years)
Alex Graves is a computer scientist. Before working as a research scientist at DeepMind, he earned a BSc in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in artificial intelligence under Jürgen Schmidhuber at IDSIA. He was also a postdoc under Schmidhuber at the Technical University of Munich and under Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto.
Go to Profile#5162
Catherine Hall
#5170
Overall Influence
1946 - Present (80 years)
Catherine Hall is a British academic. She is Emerita Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London and chair of its digital scholarship project, the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. Her work as a feminist historian focuses on the 18th and 19th centuries, and the themes of gender, class, race and empire.
Go to Profile#5163
Robert Klein
#5171
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Robert Klein is an American stand-up comedian, singer, and actor. He is known for his appearances on stage and screen. He has released four standup comedy specials: A Child of the 50s , Mind Over Matter , New Teeth , and Let's Not Make Love . The first two albums received Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album nominations. Klein hosted Saturday Night Live in its first season in 1975 and again in 1978. Klein made his Broadway debut in the 1966 production of The Apple Tree opposite Alan Alda. He earned a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical nomination for his performance in Neil Simon's musical c...
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Daniel I. Arnon
#5172
Overall Influence
1910 - 1994 (84 years)
Daniel Israel Arnon was a Polish-born American plant physiologist and National Medal of Science recipient whose research led to greater insights into the operation of photosynthesis and nutrition in plants.
Go to Profile#5165
Pascal Bruckner
#5173
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Pascal Bruckner is a French writer, one of the "New Philosophers" who came to prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Much of his work has been devoted to critiques of French society and culture. Biography Bruckner attended Jesuit schools in his youth.
Go to Profile#5166
Gad Barzilai
#5174
Overall Influence
1958 - 2023 (65 years)
Gad Barzilai was an Israeli professor of law, political science and international studies, famous for his work on the politics of law, comparative law and politics, human rights, and communities. Barzilai published 18 books and 173 articles in major academic refereed journals and publishing houses. He had been a full professor of law, societies and justice, and international studies at the University of Washington and the University of Haifa Faculty of Law. Gad Barzilai had served as the dean of the Faculty of Law at University of Haifa and was the vice provost of University of Haifa from 20...
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Gil Kalai
#5175
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
Gil Kalai is an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist. He is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, Professor of Computer Science at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, and adjunct Professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University, United States.
Go to Profile#5168
Richard Easterlin
#5176
Overall Influence
1926 - Present (100 years)
Richard Ainley Easterlin is a professor of economics at the University of Southern California. He is best known for the economic theory named after him, the Easterlin paradox. Another of his contributions is the Easterlin hypothesis about long waves of baby booms and busts.
Go to Profile#5169
W. Ann Reynolds
#5177
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
Wynetka Ann Reynolds is an American zoologist and university administrator who has served as provost of the Ohio State University , chancellor of the California State University system , chancellor of the City University of New York , and president of the University of Alabama at Birmingham . She is the only person to have headed two of the three largest systems of higher education in the United States. The universities she has led account for 6 of the top 10 U.S. schools in upward mobility for their students.
Go to Profile#5170
Alison Lurie
#5178
Overall Influence
1926 - 2020 (94 years)
Alison Stewart Lurie was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel Foreign Affairs. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction books and articles, particularly on children's literature and the semiotics of dress.
Go to Profile#5171
Brian Bolland
#5179
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Brian Bolland is a British comics artist. Best known in the United Kingdom as one of the Judge Dredd artists for British comics anthology 2000 AD, he spearheaded the 'British Invasion' of the American comics industry, and in 1982 produced the artwork alongside author Mike W. Barr on Camelot 3000, which was DC Comics' first 12-issue comicbook maxiseries created for the direct market.
Go to Profile#5172
William Lycan
#5180
Overall Influence
1945 - Present (81 years)
William G. Lycan is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was formerly the William Rand Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor. Since 2011, Lycan is also distinguished visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, where he continues to research, teach, and advise graduate students.
Go to Profile#5173
Axel A. Weber
#5181
Overall Influence
1957 - Present (69 years)
Axel Alfred Weber is a German economist, professor, and banker. He is currently a board member and chairman of Swiss investment bank and financial services company, UBS Group AG, and has announced his resignation effective 7 April 2022.
Go to Profile#5174
Edward Lazear
#5182
Overall Influence
1948 - 2020 (72 years)
Edward Paul Lazear was an American economist, the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Davies Family Professor of Economics at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Go to Profile#5175
John Chancellor
#5183
Overall Influence
1927 - 1996 (69 years)
John William Chancellor was an American journalist who spent most of his career with NBC News. He is considered a pioneer in television news. Chancellor served as anchor of the NBC Nightly News from 1970 to 1982 and continued to do editorials and commentaries for NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw until 1993.
Go to Profile#5176
Richard Flanagan
#5184
Overall Influence
1961 - Present (65 years)
Richard Miller Flanagan is an Australian writer, who has also worked as a film director and screenwriter. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Flanagan was described by the Washington Post as "one of our greatest living novelists".
Go to Profile#5177
Richard O. Duda
#5185
Overall Influence
1936 - Present (90 years)
Richard O. Duda is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University renowned for his work on sound localization and pattern recognition. He lives in Menlo Park, California. Education Duda received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958 and 1959, and the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962.
Go to Profile#5178
Andrew Feenberg
#5186
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Andrew Feenberg is an American philosopher. He holds the Canada Research Chair in the Philosophy of Technology in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. His main interests are philosophy of technology, continental philosophy, critique of technology and science and technology studies.
Go to Profile#5179
Clive Barnes
#5187
Overall Influence
1927 - 2008 (81 years)
Clive Alexander Barnes was an English writer and critic. From 1965 to 1977, he was the dance and theater critic for The New York Times, and, from 1978 until his death, the New York Post. Barnes had significant influence in reviewing new Broadway productions and evaluating the international dancers who often perform in New York City.
Go to Profile#5180
Cyndi Lauper
#5188
Overall Influence
1953 - Present (73 years)
Cynthia Ann Stephanie Lauper is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and activist. Her career has spanned over 40 years. Her album She's So Unusual was the first debut album by a female artist to achieve four top-five hits on the Billboard Hot 100—"Girls Just Want to Have Fun", "Time After Time", "She Bop", and "All Through the Night"—and earned Lauper the Best New Artist award at the 27th Annual Grammy Awards in 1985. Her success continued with the soundtrack for the motion picture The Goonies and her second record True Colors . This album included the number-one single "True Colors" and "Change of Heart", which peaked at number three.
Go to Profile#5181
Felix Browder
#5189
Overall Influence
1927 - 2016 (89 years)
Felix Earl Browder was an American mathematician known for his work in nonlinear functional analysis. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999 and was President of the American Mathematical Society until 2000. His two younger brothers also became notable mathematicians, William Browder and Andrew Browder .
Go to Profile#5182
Justin Wolfers
#5190
Overall Influence
1972 - Present (54 years)
Justin James Michael Wolfers, born in 1972, is an Australian economist and public policy scholar. He is professor of economics and public policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Go to Profile#5183
Dorothy Height
#5191
Overall Influence
1912 - 2010 (98 years)
Dorothy Irene Height was an African American civil rights and women's rights activist. She focused on the issues of African American women, including unemployment, illiteracy, and voter awareness. Height is credited as the first leader in the civil rights movement to recognize inequality for women and African Americans as problems that should be considered as a whole. She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for 40 years. Height's role in the "Big Six" civil rights movement was frequently ignored by the press due to sexism. In 1974, she was named to the National Commission...
Go to Profile#5184
John Chadwick
#5192
Overall Influence
1920 - 1998 (78 years)
John Chadwick, was an English linguist and classical scholar who was most notable for the decipherment, with Michael Ventris, of Linear B. Early life, education and wartime service John Chadwick was born at 18 Christ Church Road, Mortlake, Surrey, on 21 May 1920, the younger son of Margaret Pamela and Fred Chadwick, civil servant. He was educated at St Paul's School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Go to Profile#5185
Dennis W. Sciama
#5193
Overall Influence
1926 - 1999 (73 years)
Dennis William Siahou Sciama, was an English physicist who, through his own work and that of his students, played a major role in developing British physics after the Second World War. He was the PhD supervisor to many famous physicists and astrophysicists, including John D. Barrow, David Deutsch, George F. R. Ellis, Stephen Hawking, Adrian Melott and Martin Rees, among others; he is considered one of the fathers of modern cosmology.
Go to Profile#5186
Robert Moody
#5194
Overall Influence
1941 - Present (85 years)
Robert Vaughan Moody, is a Canadian mathematician. He is the co-discover of Kac–Moody algebra, a Lie algebra, usually infinite-dimensional, that can be defined through a generalized root system. "Almost simultaneously in 1967, Victor Kac in the USSR and Robert Moody in Canada developed what was to become Kac–Moody algebra. Kac and Moody noticed that if Wilhelm Killing's conditions were relaxed, it was still possible to associate to the Cartan matrix a Lie algebra which, necessarily, would be infinite dimensional." - A. J. Coleman
Go to Profile#5187
Rashid Khalidi
#5195
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Rashid Ismail Khalidi is a Palestinian-American historian of the Middle East and the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He served as editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies from 2002 until 2020, when he became co-editor with Sherene Seikaly.
Go to Profile#5188
David Aaker
#5196
Overall Influence
1938 - Present (88 years)
David Allen Aaker is an American organizational theorist, consultant and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business, a specialist in marketing with a focus on brand strategy. He serves as Vice Chairman of the San Francisco-based growth consulting company Prophet.
Go to Profile#5189
Ruth Millikan
#5197
Overall Influence
1933 - Present (93 years)
Ruth Garrett Millikan is a leading American philosopher of biology, psychology, and language. Millikan has spent most of her career at the University of Connecticut, where she is now Professor Emerita of Philosophy.
Go to Profile#5190
Rashid Sunyaev
#5198
Overall Influence
1943 - Present (83 years)
Rashid Alievich Sunyaev is a German, Soviet, and Russian astrophysicist of Tatar descent. He got his MS degree from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1966. He became a professor at MIPT in 1974. Sunyaev was the head of the High Energy Astrophysics Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been chief scientist of the Academy's Space Research Institute since 1992. He has also been a director of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany since 1996, and Maureen and John Hendricks Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Natural Sciences ...
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Stanislav Smirnov
#5199
Overall Influence
1970 - Present (56 years)
Stanislav Konstantinovich Smirnov is a Russian mathematician currently working as a professor at the University of Geneva. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2010. His research involves complex analysis, dynamical systems and probability theory.
Go to Profile#5192
John Ruggie
#5200
Overall Influence
1944 - 2021 (77 years)
John Gerard Ruggie was the Berthold Beitz Research Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University and an affiliated professor in international legal studies at Harvard Law School.
Go to Profile#5193
R. Edward Freeman
#5201
Overall Influence
1951 - Present (75 years)
Robert Edward Freeman is an American philosopher and professor of business administration at the Darden School of the University of Virginia, particularly known for his work on stakeholder theory and on business ethics.
Go to Profile#5194
Ulf Hannerz
#5202
Overall Influence
1942 - Present (84 years)
Areas of Specialization: Urban and Media Anthropology Ulf Hannerz is an emeritus professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University, which is where he also earned his Ph.D. As an anthropologist, he has focused his research on urban and media anthropology. His research has taken him to locations in the United States, the Caribbean, and West Africa. His current interests involve post-Cold War future facing scenarios with impacts on a global scale. He examines apocalyptic predictions as a product of culture and spread around the world by way of ubiquitous technology. He has written books s...
Go to Profile#5195
David Mirkin
#5203
Overall Influence
1955 - Present (71 years)
David Mirkin is an American feature film and television director, writer and producer. Mirkin grew up in Philadelphia and intended to become an electrical engineer, but abandoned this career path in favor of studying film at Loyola Marymount University. After graduating, he became a stand-up comedian, and then moved into television writing. He wrote for the sitcoms Three's Company, It's Garry Shandling's Show and The Larry Sanders Show and served as showrunner on the series Newhart. After an unsuccessful attempt to remake the British series The Young Ones, Mirkin created Get a Life in 1990. T...
Go to Profile#5196
Hilton Kramer
#5204
Overall Influence
1928 - 2012 (84 years)
Hilton Kramer was an American art critic and essayist. Biography Early life Kramer was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and was educated at Syracuse University, receiving a bachelor's degree in English; Columbia University; he studied literature and philosophy at Harvard University, Indiana University, and the New School for Social Research.
Go to Profile#5197
Michel Maffesoli
#5205
Overall Influence
1944 - Present (82 years)
Michel Maffesoli is a French sociologist. He is a former pupil of Gilbert Durand and Julien Freund, and an emeritus professor at Paris Descartes University. His work touches upon the issue of community links and the prevalence of "the imaginary" in the everyday life of contemporary societies, through which he contributes to the postmodern paradigm.
Go to Profile#5198
Noel Sharkey
#5206
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Noel Sharkey is a computer scientist born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is best known to the British public for his appearances on television as an expert on robotics; including the BBC Two television series Robot Wars and Techno Games, and co-hosting Bright Sparks for BBC Northern Ireland. He is emeritus professor of artificial intelligence and robotics at the University of Sheffield.
Go to Profile#5199
Lloyd P. Gerson
#5207
Overall Influence
1948 - Present (78 years)
Lloyd P. Gerson is an American-Canadian scholar of ancient philosophy, the history of philosophy, metaphysics, and Neoplatonism. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is best-known for his work on Plotinus, particularly his full-length translation of the Enneads that is based primarily on the Henry-Schwyzer editio minor Greek text.
Go to Profile#5200
Mike Pondsmith
#5208
Overall Influence
1954 - Present (72 years)
Michael Alyn Pondsmith is an American roleplaying, board, and video game designer. He is best known for founding the publisher R. Talsorian Games in 1982, where he developed a majority of the company's role-playing game lines. Pondsmith is the author of several RPG lines, including Mekton , Cyberpunk and Castle Falkenstein . He also contributed to the Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures lines of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game, worked in various capacities on video games, and authored or co-created several board games. Pondsmith also worked as an instructor at the DigiPen Instit...
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