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 …

See additional learning tools, study tips, features on campus life and much more at our Student Resources Headquarters.

Search Influential People

Person Name

School

Gender

Country

Discipline

Subdiscipline

Ranking

List of the most influential people

#5201

Michael Taussig

Michael Taussig

#5209

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Areas of Specialization: Medical Anthropology Michael Taussig is a professor at Columbia University. He earned a medical degree from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics. He has published research in the area of medical anthropology and is known for his work with the idea of commodity fetishism. In his book, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, he promotes the study of people living on the fringes of the economy, such as indigenous peoples, as a way of creating contrast with traditionally studied populations. Much of his work is filtered through the lens of the work of Walter Benjamin.

#5202

Jean-Baptiste Mondino

#5210

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Jean-Baptiste Mondino is a French fashion photographer and music video director. He has directed music videos for Madonna, David Bowie, Sting, Björk, Don Henley, Neneh Cherry, Axel Bauer and Les Rita Mitsouko. Mondino has also photographed the covers and album packaging for the Marianne Faithfull albums Before The Poison and Easy Come, Easy Go , Shakespear's Sister's Hormonally Yours , Alain Bashung's Osez Joséphine , Chatterton , Mylène Farmer's Désobéissance , J.'s We Are the Majority and Prince's Lovesexy . He also designed the titles for the Anglo-French TV music show Rapido.

#5203

Sven-Göran Eriksson

#5211

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Sven-Göran Eriksson is a Swedish football manager and former player. After an unassuming playing career as a right-back, Eriksson went on to experience major success in club management between 1977 and 2001, winning 18 trophies with a variety of league clubs in Sweden, Portugal, and Italy. In European competition, he won both the UEFA Cup and the European Cup Winners' Cup and reached the final of the European Cup.

#5204

Jeffrey Herf

#5212

Overall Influence

1947 - Present (79 years)

Jeffrey C. Herf is an American historian of modern Europe, particularly modern Germany. He is Distinguished University Professor of modern European at the University of Maryland, College Park. Biography He was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Herf's father escaped from Nazi Germany in 1937 and immigrated to the United States. His mother's parents left Ukraine to came to the United States before World War I. He grew up in a Reform Jewish family in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

#5205

Don Zagier

#5213

Overall Influence

1951 - Present (75 years)

Don Bernard Zagier is an American-German mathematician whose main area of work is number theory. He is currently one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. He was a professor at the Collège de France in Paris from 2006 to 2014. Since October 2014, he is also a Distinguished Staff Associate at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics .

#5206

Ann Curry

#5214

Overall Influence

1956 - Present (70 years)

Ann Curry is an American journalist and photojournalist, who has been a reporter for more than 45 years, focused on human suffering in war zones and natural disasters. Curry has reported from the wars in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Darfur, Congo, and the Central African Republic. Curry has covered numerous disasters, including the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, where her appeal via Twitter topped Twitter's 'most powerful' list, credited for helping speed the arrival of humanitarian planes.

#5207

Fons Trompenaars

#5215

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Alfonsus Trompenaars is a Dutch organizational theorist, management consultant, and author in the field of cross-cultural communication. known for the development of Trompenaars' model of national culture differences.

#5208

Bryan Adams

#5216

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Bryan Guy Adams is a Canadian musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, and photographer. He has been described as one of the best-selling music artists of all time, and is estimated to have sold between 75 million and more than 100 million recordss and singless worldwide. Adams has had 25 top-15 singles in Canada and a dozen or more in each of the US, UK, and Australia.

#5209

Scott Gottlieb

#5217

Overall Influence

1972 - Present (54 years)

Scott Gottlieb is an American physician and investor who served as the 23rd commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration from May 2017 until April 2019. He is presently a senior fellow at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute , a partner at the venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates , a member of the board of directors of drug maker Pfizer, Inc, a member of the board of directors of Illumina, Inc., a contributor to the cable financial news network CNBC, and a frequent guest on the CBS News program Face the Nation. An elected member of the National Academy ...

#5210

Luc Boltanski

#5218

Overall Influence

1940 - Present (86 years)

Luc Boltanski is a French sociologist, Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, Paris, and founder of the Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale, known as the leading figure in the new "pragmatic" school of French sociology. His work has significantly influenced sociology, political economy and social history.

#5211

Peter Galison

#5219

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Peter Louis Galison is an American historian and philosopher of science. He is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in history of science and physics at Harvard University. Biography Galison received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., in both physics and history of science, at Harvard University. His publications include How Experiments End , Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics , and Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps . His most recent book, co-authored with Lorraine Daston, is titled Objectivity .

#5212

Claude Piron

#5220

Overall Influence

1931 - 2008 (77 years)

Claude Piron, also known by the pseudonym Johán Valano, was a Swiss psychologist, Esperantist, translator, and writer. He worked as a translator for the United Nations from 1956 to 1961 and then for the World Health Organization.

#5213

Colin Rowe

#5221

Overall Influence

1920 - 1999 (79 years)

Colin Rowe was a British-born, American-naturalised architectural historian, critic, theoretician and teacher. He is acknowledged to have been a major theoretical and critical influence in the second half of the twentieth century on world architecture and urbanism. During his life he taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin and, for one year, at the University of Cambridge in England. For most of his life he was a professor at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Many of Rowe’s students became important architects and extended his influence throughout the architecture and planning professions.

#5214

Jeremy Vine

#5222

Overall Influence

1965 - Present (61 years)

Jeremy Guy Vine is an English television and radio presenter, and journalist. He is best known as the host of his BBC Radio 2 lunchtime programme which presents news, views, interviews with live guests and popular music, taking over from long-serving host Jimmy Young in 2003.

#5215

Farnam Jahanian

Farnam Jahanian

#5223

Overall Influence

Farnam Jahanian is an Iranian-American computer scientist, entrepreneur, and higher education leader. He serves as the 10th president of Carnegie Mellon University. Early life and education Farnam Jahanian was born in Teheran, Iran in 1961. He emigrated to the United States in 1977 at the age of 16 and completed high school in San Antonio, Texas.

#5216

Carl Zimmer

#5224

Overall Influence

1966 - Present (60 years)

Carl Zimmer is a popular science writer, blogger, columnist, and journalist who specializes in the topics of evolution, parasites, and heredity. The author of many books, he contributes science essays to publications such as The New York Times, Discover, and National Geographic. He is a fellow at Yale University's Morse College and adjunct professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University. Zimmer also gives frequent lectures and has appeared on many radio shows, including National Public Radio's Radiolab, Fresh Air, and This American Life.

#5217

Timothy Morton

#5225

Overall Influence

1968 - Present (58 years)

Timothy Bloxam Morton is a professor and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. A member of the object-oriented philosophy movement, Morton's work explores the intersection of object-oriented thought and ecological studies. Morton's use of the term 'hyperobjects' was inspired by Björk's 1996 single 'Hyperballad', although the term 'Hyper-objects' has also been used in computer science since 1967. Morton uses the term to explain objects so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend localization, such as climate change and styrofoam. Their recent book Humankind: So...

#5218

Michel Onfray

#5226

Overall Influence

1959 - Present (67 years)

Michel Onfray is a French writer and philosopher with a hedonistic, epicurean and atheist worldview. A highly-prolific author on philosophy, he has written over 100 books. His philosophy is mainly influenced by such thinkers as Nietzsche, Epicurus, the Cynic and Cyrenaic schools, as well as French materialism. He has gained notoriety for writing such works as Traité d'athéologie: Physique de la métaphysique , Politique du rebelle: traité de résistance et d'insoumission, Physiologie de Georges Palante, portrait d'un nietzchéen de gauche, La puissance d'exister and La sculpture de soi for which...

#5219

J. E. R. Staddon

#5227

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

John Eric Rayner Staddon is a British-born American psychologist. He has been a critic of Skinnerian behaviorism and proposed a theoretically-based "New Behaviorism". John Staddon conducted theoretical behaviorism research in adaptive function, mechanisms of learning, and optimality theories. He completed his graduate work at the Skinner Lab in Harvard in the 1960s, with Richard Herrnstein.

#5220

Frank J. Fabozzi

#5228

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Frank J. Fabozzi is an American economist, educator, writer, and investor, currently Professor of Practice at The Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School and a Member of Edhec Risk Institute. He was previously a Professor of Finance at EDHEC Business School, Professor in the Practice of Finance and Becton Fellow in the Yale School of Management, and a Visiting Professor of Finance at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has authored and edited many books, three of which were coauthored with Nobel laureates, Franco Modigliani and Harry Markowitz.

#5221

Paul Boghossian

Paul Boghossian

#5229

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Paul Artin Boghossian is an American philosopher. He is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University, where he is chair of the department . His research interests include epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is also director of the New York Institute of Philosophy and Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham.

#5222

Saul Landau

#5230

Overall Influence

1936 - 2013 (77 years)

Saul Landau was an American journalist, filmmaker and commentator. He was also a professor emeritus at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught history and digital media. Education Landau was born in the Bronx, New York City. A graduate of Manhattan's Stuyvesant High School, he also earned bachelor's and master's degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

#5223

Ethan Zuckerman

Ethan Zuckerman

#5231

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.

#5224

Roland Omnès

#5232

Overall Influence

1931 - 2022 (91 years)

Roland Omnès is the author of several books which aim to give non-scientists the information required to understand quantum mechanics from an everyday standpoint. Biography Omnès is currently Professor Emeritus of Theoretical Physics in the Faculté des Sciences at Orsay, at the Université Paris-Sud XI. He has been instrumental in developing consistent histories and quantum decoherence approaches in quantum mechanics. In 1959 he received the Paul-Langevin Prize.

#5225

Hendrik Lenstra

Hendrik Lenstra

#5233

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Hendrik Willem Lenstra Jr. is a Dutch mathematician. Biography Lenstra received his doctorate from the University of Amsterdam in 1977 and became a professor there in 1978. In 1987, he was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley; starting in 1998, he divided his time between Berkeley and the University of Leiden, until 2003, when he retired from Berkeley to take a full-time position at Leiden.

#5226

Nick Launay

#5234

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Nicolas Launay is an English record producer, composer and recording engineer, currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. He is one of the most sought after record producers in the world due to his success with recent albums by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Anna Calvi, IDLES, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arcade Fire. Noted for his flamboyant style he is among the most successful producers of the post-punk era, helming records from pivotal acts including Public Image Ltd, Gang of Four, Killing Joke, The Birthday Party, and The Slits.

#5227

Bob Herbert

#5235

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

Robert Herbert is an American journalist and former op-ed columnist for The New York Times. His column was syndicated to other newspapers around the country. Herbert frequently writes on poverty, the Iraq War, racism and American political apathy towards racism. He is now a fellow at Demos and was elected to serve on the Common Cause National Governing Board in 2015.

#5228

Stephan Thernstrom

#5236

Overall Influence

1934 - Present (92 years)

Stephan Thernstrom is an American academic and historian who is the Winthrop Research Professor of History Emeritus at Harvard University. He is a specialist in ethnic and social history and was the editor of the Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups. He and his wife Abigail Thernstrom are prominent opponents of affirmative action in education and according to the New York Times, they "lead the conservative charge against racial preference in America."

#5229

Eric Brown

#5237

Overall Influence

1919 - 2016 (97 years)

Captain Eric Melrose "Winkle" Brown, , Hon FRAeS was a British Royal Navy officer and test pilot who flew 487 types of aircraft, more than anyone else in history. Brown held the world record for the most aircraft carrier deck take-offs and landings performed and achieved several "firsts" in naval aviation, including the first landings on an aircraft carrier of a twin-engined aircraft, an aircraft with a tricycle undercarriage, a jet aircraft, and a rotary-wing aircraft.

#5230

Randolph M. Nesse

Randolph M. Nesse

#5238

Overall Influence

1948 - Present (78 years)

Randolph Martin Nesse is an American physician, scientist and author who is notable for his role as a founder of the field of evolutionary medicine and evolutionary psychiatry. Education and career Nesse studied at Carleton College from 1966 to 1970. He went on to receive his M.D. at the University of Michigan Medical School in 1974 and carried out his medical residency at the same place. Nesse became an instructor in psychiatry at the University of Michigan in 1977 and became an assistant professor there in psychiatry in 1979. He became associate professor in psychiatry in 1985 and professor...

#5231

Adolph Green

#5239

Overall Influence

1914 - 2002 (88 years)

Adolph Green was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved musicals on Broadway and in Hollywood. Although they were not a romantic couple, they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership. They received numerous accolades including four Tony Awards and nominations for two Academy Awards and a Grammy Award. Green was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980 and American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1981. Comden and Green re...

#5232

Mihalis Yannakakis

Mihalis Yannakakis

#5240

Overall Influence

1953 - Present (73 years)

Mihalis Yannakakis is professor of computer science at Columbia University. He is noted for his work in computational complexity, databases, and other related fields. He won the Donald E. Knuth Prize in 2005.

#5233

Stephen Stich

#5241

Overall Influence

1943 - Present (83 years)

Stephen P. Stich is an American academic who is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, as well as an Honorary Professor in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. Stich's main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral psychology. His 1983 book, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case Against Belief, received much attention as he argued for a form of eliminative materialism about the mind. He changed his mind, in later years, as indicated in his 1996 book Deconstructing the Mind.

#5234

Jonathan Rauch

#5242

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Jonathan Charles Rauch is an American author, journalist, and activist. After graduating from Yale University, Rauch worked at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina, for National Journal, and later for The Economist and as a freelance writer. He is currently a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a contributing editor of The Atlantic.

#5235

Paulo Guedes

#5243

Overall Influence

1949 - Present (77 years)

Paulo Roberto Nunes Guedes is a Brazilian economist and co-founder of the investment bank BTG Pactual. He is also a co-founder of the think-tank Instituto Millenium, and was the economic advisor for the campaign of President Jair Bolsonaro. Guedes served as the Minister of Economics of Brazil through the entirety of the Bolsonaro presidency, from 1 January 2019 to 1 January 2023.

#5236

Lawrence Weiner

Lawrence Weiner

#5244

Overall Influence

1942 - 2021 (79 years)

Lawrence Charles Weiner was an American conceptual artist. He was one of the central figures in the formation of conceptual art in the 1960s. His work often took the form of typographic texts, a form of word art.

#5237

Alex Katz

#5245

Overall Influence

1927 - Present (99 years)

Alex Katz is an American figurative artist known for his paintings, sculptures, and prints. Since 1951, Katz's work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He is well known for his large paintings, whose bold simplicity and heightened colors are considered as precursors to Pop Art.

#5238

Yves Robert

#5246

Overall Influence

1920 - 2002 (82 years)

Yves Robert was a French actor, screenwriter, director, and producer. Life and career Robert was born in Saumur, Maine-et-Loire, France. In his teens, he went to Paris to pursue a career in acting, starting with unpaid parts on stage in the city's various theatre workshops. From ages 12–20 he set type as a typographer, then studied mime in his early 20s. In 1948 he made his motion picture debut with one of the secondary roles in the film, Les Dieux du dimanche. Within a few years, Robert was writing scripts, directing, and producing.

#5239

Peter Winn

#5247

Overall Influence

1942 - Present (84 years)

Peter Winn is a professor of history at Tufts University specializing in Latin America. He has written several books, including Americas, which he developed while serving as academic director for the 1993 PBS series of the same name.

#5240

Paul T. P. Wong

Paul T. P. Wong

#5248

Overall Influence

1937 - Present (89 years)

#5241

Daniel Amen

#5249

Overall Influence

1954 - Present (72 years)

Daniel Gregory Amen is an American celebrity doctor who practices as a psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist as director of the Amen Clinics. He is a five-time New York Times best-selling author as of 2012.

#5242

Elyn Saks

#5250

Overall Influence

1955 - Present (71 years)

Elyn R. Saks is associate dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law, and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold, published by Hyperion Books in 2007. She is also a cancer survivor.

#5243

David Blaine

#5251

Overall Influence

1973 - Present (53 years)

David Blaine is an American illusionist, endurance artist, and extreme performer. He is best known for his high-profile feats of endurance and has set and broken several world records. One of his talents is the ability to regurgitate water and small objects.

#5244

Ikuhiko Hata

#5252

Overall Influence

1932 - Present (94 years)

Ikuhiko Hata is a Japanese historian. He earned his PhD at the University of Tokyo and has taught history at several universities. He is the author of a number of influential and well-received scholarly works, particularly on topics related to Japan's role in the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.

#5245

George Smoot

#5253

Overall Influence

1945 - Present (81 years)

George Fitzgerald Smoot III is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, Nobel laureate, and the second contestant to win the $1 million prize on Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on the Cosmic Background Explorer with John C. Mather that led to the "discovery of the black body form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation".

#5246

Pierre Chambon

#5254

Overall Influence

1931 - Present (95 years)

Pierre Chambon was the founder of the in Strasbourg, France. He was one of the leading molecular biologists who utilized gene cloning and sequencing technology to first decipher the structure of eukaryotic genes and their modes of regulation. His major contributions to science include the identification of RNA polymerase II , the identification of transcriptional control elements, the cloning and dissection of nuclear hormone receptors, revealing their structure and showing how they contribute to human physiology. His group was also one of the first to demonstrate, biochemically and electron-microscopically, that the nucleosome is the smallest unit of chromatin .

#5247

Clinton Heylin

#5255

Overall Influence

1960 - Present (66 years)

Clinton Heylin is an English author. Heylin has written extensively about popular music, especially on the life and work of Bob Dylan. Education Heylin attended Manchester Grammar School. He studied history at Bedford College, University of London, followed by an MA in history at the University of Sussex.

#5248

Shalom H. Schwartz

Shalom H. Schwartz

#5256

Overall Influence

1936 - Present (90 years)

Shalom H. Schwartz is a social psychologist, cross-cultural researcher and creator of the Theory of Basic Human Values . He also contributed to the formulation of the values scale in the context of social learning theory and social cognitive theory.

#5249

Franz-Ulrich Hartl

#5257

Overall Influence

1957 - Present (69 years)

Franz-Ulrich Hartl is a German biochemist and the current Executive Director of the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry. He is known for his pioneering work in chaperone-mediated protein folding. Early life and education Hartl was born in Essen, West Germany in 1957 to an electrical engineer father and a home economics teacher mother. His family moved to a village in northern part of the Black Forest when he was four. He was intrigued with biology since a young age, thanks to his hobby microscopist grandfather and a family friend who was a biology teacher. Hartl specifically became intereste...

#5250

Robert M. Solovay

Robert M. Solovay

#5258

Overall Influence

1938 - Present (88 years)

Robert Martin Solovay is an American mathematician specializing in set theory. Biography Solovay earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1964 under the direction of Saunders Mac Lane, with a dissertation on A Functorial Form of the Differentiable Riemann–Roch theorem. Solovay has spent his career at the University of California at Berkeley, where his Ph.D. students include W. Hugh Woodin and Matthew Foreman.

« Previous Next »

Image Attributions